That image of the quark star (arrow pointing to something tiny / invisible) is misleading.
I actually saw the video press release go out on NASA TV last week (woohoo, I get to watch NASA TV at work). They did a fade FROM that picture to another one done in the X-ray spectrum (Chandra) where that virtually invisible star turned into a shining beacon of quark.
Along with 3 or 4 other attempts to extend the capabilities of the CD audio format, none of which have succeeded, or ever will, because the old 1980 standard is perceived as Good Enough for 99% of the population.
This is the wild-and-wooly early days of digital projection. We will no doubt go through several rounds of standards changes and upgrades. I haven't seen 1920x1200 on a big screen--maybe it's really gorgous--but it is hard for me to imagine that this level of quality will still be in use 20 years from now.
I have three numbers for you, my friend:
44.1 kHz
16 bit
12 cm
All part of the CD digital audio standard defined in March 1980, 22 years ago. Audiophiles have been cringing ever since.
I'm just pointing out that standards often become very well entrenched and do not evolve. So whatever technology the market gathers around this year may define what we have to look at for many years (if not decades) to come.
2. WIRELESS! Yes, good old 802.11b. It allows you to be on the couch doing nerdly things, while you are in the same room with her. No more lost in your home office for hours and hours every night. This is definitely one of the best technologies for a married couple.
Another solution is to put your main computing location somewhere close to the main living spaces of the living room or the kitchen. In my case, our house is pretty small, and my station is actually in the corner of the kitchen. She cooks a lot (woohoo!) so we spend a lot of time in the same physical space that way.
If I lean over I can see the living room, and be face to face (20 feet away) with my S.O. who's reading or watching the boob tube or something.
So I can share her love/hate of beauty pageants without actually having to watch them:/
Resist the urge to put your computer in a separate room, and instead make it part of the central rooms of the household. It's worked great for me -- I'm online 4 hours every evening, but we're still in sight of each other and I can be right next to her in 5 seconds if necessary.
Wouldn't it be possible to build filters to absorb the "intermod" that's leaking on to adjacent frequencies?
Not really. Any filter at any frequency (even audio frequencies) is going to have tradeoffs in the passband where there will be some distortion. Normally things like phase distortion get severe when you're trying to do something this tight.
Think of it this way. Say your 802.11b carrier is 2 MHz wide (I have no idea if that's what it really is) and is centered at 2.400 GHz. If you want to filter out everything but that carrier, you want your filter to A) block every thing below 2.399 GHz, B) block everything above 2.401 GHz and C) pass everything in between. And you want the rolloff (think cliffs) at those edge frequencies to be steep. Well, guess what: that's really really hard to do -- it's like you're asking the RF circuitry to reach waaaaay out to 2.4 GHz and then pick out a little 2 MHz slot. That's strictly military-grade stuff:)
The real problem with the whole Linksys mod is that you're driving the power amp into saturation, and THAT's what causes all that intermod to poke up. All RF amps can push X watts going full blast, but you need to "back off" a certain amount in order to get a clean signal through and not produce intermod. Typical backoffs are in the range of 2-7 dB. So Linksys builds a 100mW amp but intends to only use 25mW of that, for a backoff of 6 dB.
New to this release is the fact that published APIs are now frozen. Mozilla has been really really annoying at changing their APIs, therefore breaking code from external developers because no backward compatibility and almost no turn around time was given from one release to another.... Developers will finally be able to release code which will work for more than 2 releases in a row? Great!
The APIs are *not* frozen yet -- that's precisely what 1.0 is for. They are attempting to freeze them now, but don't be surprised if there's a couple more changes in the last two months of pre-1.0 development.
According to mozilla.org's
Mozilla 1.0 Manifesto, there are three primary motives for 1.0, which basically are:
"1.0" is an important number
Freeze the APIs
Start a long-lived branch
If you read that manifesto, you'll see that these issues, as well as nearly everything else about the browser, have been given some very serious thought. In fact, this is one of the most fascinating things for me about the Mozilla project -- the bug tracking system is wide open (for example, the list of
most frequently reported bugs -- aka dupes). You can read how various decisions evolved based on everybody's input, study and debate. The evolution of every single feature is documented in that system -- so if there's something that annoys you about Moz, there's a 99% chance that there's already been a lot of handwringing over it, and either they've (we've!) decided not to "fix" the behavior, or it's being worked on.
I volunteer for a non-commercial radio station. Our Marantz wandered off so I'm in the market for one of these.
I just got off the phone with the U.S. distributor (Harris Broadcast) for Orban. The Sountainer (great name guys) will be available in April at an MSRP of $475. The distributor said that Orban is still tweaking the design.
This was developed by
Dialog4, which was purchased by Orban
last week.
Also, for the folks who are whining about bitrate, please note that the primary market for this is the broadcast industry, for field recording use. "Field recording" means a single mic pointed at someone's face or perhaps a stage performance, not a multi-mic studio mixdown. 128 kbps is more than adequate for this, especially when you consider that the broadcast medium (e.g. FM radio) usually ends up being the quality bottleneck (spectral bandwidth, stereo separation, etc.).
Wow, that's a new low even by Slashdot standards. I mean, I've learned to ignore the sheer tonnage of "seperately" and "definately" and the like, but this is scary.
And then people post Ask Slashdot's about the value of attending a Real College and getting a Real Degree...
The Post Office isn't some holy place, it's barely connected with the government
The post office is the sole official physical presence of the U.S. federal government countrywide.
Where do you go to "register" for the Selective Service (the draft)? The post office.
Where do you go to get federal tax forms? The post office is required to supply them.
Sure, some municipalities may have an FBI or ATF branch office, or even a Secret Service office, but the USPS is the main federal presence in EVERY town. It is the face of the US Government for most.
This is what I slog through Slashdot for -- the occasional insightful post among the sheer tonnage of videogame console stories, "funny" comments by 16-year-olds (modded up to 4 by 15-year-olds), and "we should" rhetoric from the butt-flattened masses.
That show was just about the only thing worth watching -- I've been taping every episode to archive tape just in case this happened. I haven't done that since the early 90's Simpsons episodes.
So, what can we do to try to reverse this decision? There are precedents for networks bringing back shows after a public outcry. Who do I write to? (politely, of course)
A real good little black comedy, as long as your tastes don't run towards Harry Potter, Nickelback and whatever other soylent green the corporate entertainment machine has manufactured for you today...
For those of you who doesn't remember the Commodore 64, it was a very popular home computer in the 80's and early 90's.
"Early 90's"? I don't think so. I ran a C-64 from 1982 to 1988. By 1988 you would pretty much get laughed at if you were still running a C-64 machine. Everyone had moved to PCs by then. Commodore tried updating the design with the Commodore 128 circa 1986, but that went nowhere.
Commodore launched the Amiga line in the late 80's, which WAS able to carry them into the early 90's, but still by 1993-1994 they had completely augered in.
Some technical details can be found in the
post that I made when the first item came out in June. At the time, I posted it a bit late, so it missed the usual early Informative modder-uppers and thus stayed in Score:1 oblivion.
I realize this will be modded down, but hopefully the sliMP3 guy(s) will eventually get around to reading all these comments, even the modded-down ones (I would if it were my product getting posted on Slashdot). I'm sure if I send this by email today it will get ignored (Slashdot email interest effect).
Looks like they have Slashdot Spelling and Grammar Dysfunction:
do a spell check (avialable, definately, etc.)
Doctor HTML does spell checks of web pages.
it's = "it is", as in "it is time that my
grammar evolved beyond that of a teenager".
its = possessive, as in "the sliMP3 uses a flouroluminescent panel as its display".
let's = let us, as in "let's improve our writing".
lets = form of the verb "to let", as in "keeping 802.11 out of the package lets me keep the price below $300".
"We have done this", "I plan to do that", which is it, "we" or "I"? Have a consistent voice. Look for other forms, too (my, mine, me, our, ours, us).
I'm not trying to be snotty -- I'm trying to help you write better and thus get your message across. These kinds of errors distract your more erudite readers from the content of the page.
The first step to fixing a problem is knowing you've got one.
there will come a time, probably within our lives (maybe 20 years), when a $200 hard drive will be able to hold every movie, song, and book ever created. How do you fill that one up?
By archiving reality.
Why should the data you store by limited to "properly" published materials? I currently have on my 2 GB hard drive every single email I've received or sent since 1998 (about 6,000), and it's my electronic memory. And it hardly makes a dent in the drive space.
So take all those cameras you bought (as instructed by the wonderful popup X10 ads:) and send the live video to be archived onto your hard drive. Months from now you can go look at any feed. So it's just like my email archive, only scaled up by a factor of 10^6 -- from 100 kB of emails a day to 100 GB of video per day (1 Mbps per camera, 10 cameras).
Still not enough? Consider the fact that video is just a tiny fraction of what you perceive as reality itself. Go for insane resolution, 360-degree field of view (or even better, 4-pi steradians:) , 5.1 surround sound, the other three senses, sixth and seventh senses...
Now you've archived your own perceived reality (of your own space), how about experiencing someone else's? Think movies, incuding porn:)
Every advance is storage capacity is immediately filled by increased appetite for storage.
And before you shit all over the idea of public service, recall that the airwaves are supposed to be public property, not to be whored out by the government to the biggest soft-money contributor.
The Telecom act of 1995 changed all that, and ClearChannel and their ilk are taking advantage of the situation faster than you can say "defanged FCC".
Wow, this is great news.
FAIR
(Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting)
did a big piece on NarcoNews and the Banamex
scandal recently. Unfortunately the story / interview doesn't seem to be up on the FAIR web site.
Search Google for the relevant keywords for more information, particularly since the Grey Lady
was also a target of Mr. Giordano's investigative talents, and thus they're not likely to give it the coverage it deserves...
Definately Disapointing
on
This is IT?
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
I really get disapointed when people who are smart in one are (ie fantastic engineering) think that they can easily solve all the problems (real or not) for the rest of us.
I really get disapointed when yet another reactionery and empty post from a 14-year-old who cant spell counts as "insightfull" on Slahsdot -- definately stirs my grits.
moves at walking speed
Sigh. Read the article, putz.
Mod this clown down so at least other people reading at level 4 or 5 don't waste their time even reading this (not to mention getting sucked into a reply like poor me). Now, the dude who pointed out the fact that this is totally not for US market was onto something...
The article mentions that some people just make an international call to a dialup ISP account to bypass the government filters. But the Saudi government has even this hole covered.
Fax and modem lines are registered and to be used only for that purpose. Conversely, regular voice lines may not be used for transmitting data -- violations are punishable law, and I'm sure most of you have heard of the kind of punishment meted out by the Saudi government, so that in itself is a serious deterrent.
Further, all phone calls are routed through central switching centers (just like anywhere else in the world) where they can be (and are) monitored. A data call can simply be tapped, demodulated and inspected for contraband traffic.
Any technology that bypasses these switching centers (such as satellite technology) undergoes very serious ministry scrutiny. I worked on satellite technology in Saudi, and all of the satellite equipment was squarely in the hands of the government or carefully proscribed private sector organizations (e.g Aramco).
Four years ago I remember a conversation with a friend about oppressive regimes, and East Timor and Saudi Arabia being two regions we were discussing. Indonesia's grip on East Timor was rapidly deteriorating at the time, and I remember my friend declaring that certainly the Saudi's would fall soon enough. But the Saudi's are "doing it right" -- they keep an extremely tight grip on all information flow into the country, and so the citizens don't get the information they need to organize themselves (or even know that they are missing out on information).
In this regard,
<covers head>
bin Laden actually has it right
</covers head> -- the Saudi people are oppressed by their own government, and the only way out is a revolution. But as long as the Saudi's continue to play their "information security" cards right, it's not going to happen.
Ls --- I'm not sure on this one, it seems to be some sort of Launch angle
OK, with that hint I was able to figure it out. It's Earth-Sun-Mars angle, or, effectively, how far Mars is from Earth:
Using a solar system simulator, I find that there is a Mars/Earth conjuction around 05-Nov-2005 (hmmm, 4 years from today) and around 25-Dec-2007 (hmmm, Christmas) -- those two dates are 2 years and 50 days apart, or 780 days.
During that period, these two planets will swing through 360 degrees of Earth-Sun-Mars angle.
Or, 180 degrees takes 390 days.
Now, looking at the plot, the 0 Ls mark is at about 22-Jan-2006, and the 180 Ls mark is at about 10-Feb-2007. That's 384 days.
Off by 1.5% just taking a guess and eyeballing the chart. Sounds like a confirmation to me:)
Slashdot Mirror
I actually saw the video press release go out on NASA TV last week (woohoo, I get to watch NASA TV at work). They did a fade FROM that picture to another one done in the X-ray spectrum (Chandra) where that virtually invisible star turned into a shining beacon of quark.
[there goes my karma]
I had to scan comments at threshold=1 to see his tip. [shudder]
Along with 3 or 4 other attempts to extend the capabilities of the CD audio format, none of which have succeeded, or ever will, because the old 1980 standard is perceived as Good Enough for 99% of the population.
I have three numbers for you, my friend:
- 44.1 kHz
- 16 bit
- 12 cm
All part of the CD digital audio standard defined in March 1980, 22 years ago. Audiophiles have been cringing ever since.I'm just pointing out that standards often become very well entrenched and do not evolve. So whatever technology the market gathers around this year may define what we have to look at for many years (if not decades) to come.
Another solution is to put your main computing location somewhere close to the main living spaces of the living room or the kitchen. In my case, our house is pretty small, and my station is actually in the corner of the kitchen. She cooks a lot (woohoo!) so we spend a lot of time in the same physical space that way.
If I lean over I can see the living room, and be face to face (20 feet away) with my S.O. who's reading or watching the boob tube or something.
So I can share her love/hate of beauty pageants without actually having to watch them :/
Resist the urge to put your computer in a separate room, and instead make it part of the central rooms of the household. It's worked great for me -- I'm online 4 hours every evening, but we're still in sight of each other and I can be right next to her in 5 seconds if necessary.
She cooked me filet mignon tonight ...
Three places in Atlanta that have the best movie selection (in general):
- Movies Worth Seeing
- VideoDrome
- Village Vidiot
Use the Yellow Pages to find them, they're listed. Just Say No to blockhead rental joints.- stinks
- embarrassing
- painfully, wantonly and hauntingly horrific
- cliche-riddled
- absurdities
- sappy, prefabricated, paint-by-numbers script
AhhhhhNot really. Any filter at any frequency (even audio frequencies) is going to have tradeoffs in the passband where there will be some distortion. Normally things like phase distortion get severe when you're trying to do something this tight.
Think of it this way. Say your 802.11b carrier is 2 MHz wide (I have no idea if that's what it really is) and is centered at 2.400 GHz. If you want to filter out everything but that carrier, you want your filter to A) block every thing below 2.399 GHz, B) block everything above 2.401 GHz and C) pass everything in between. And you want the rolloff (think cliffs) at those edge frequencies to be steep. Well, guess what: that's really really hard to do -- it's like you're asking the RF circuitry to reach waaaaay out to 2.4 GHz and then pick out a little 2 MHz slot. That's strictly military-grade stuff :)
The real problem with the whole Linksys mod is that you're driving the power amp into saturation, and THAT's what causes all that intermod to poke up. All RF amps can push X watts going full blast, but you need to "back off" a certain amount in order to get a clean signal through and not produce intermod. Typical backoffs are in the range of 2-7 dB. So Linksys builds a 100mW amp but intends to only use 25mW of that, for a backoff of 6 dB.
The APIs are *not* frozen yet -- that's precisely what 1.0 is for. They are attempting to freeze them now, but don't be surprised if there's a couple more changes in the last two months of pre-1.0 development.
According to mozilla.org's Mozilla 1.0 Manifesto, there are three primary motives for 1.0, which basically are:
If you read that manifesto, you'll see that these issues, as well as nearly everything else about the browser, have been given some very serious thought. In fact, this is one of the most fascinating things for me about the Mozilla project -- the bug tracking system is wide open (for example, the list of most frequently reported bugs -- aka dupes). You can read how various decisions evolved based on everybody's input, study and debate. The evolution of every single feature is documented in that system -- so if there's something that annoys you about Moz, there's a 99% chance that there's already been a lot of handwringing over it, and either they've (we've!) decided not to "fix" the behavior, or it's being worked on.
I just got off the phone with the U.S. distributor (Harris Broadcast) for Orban. The Sountainer (great name guys) will be available in April at an MSRP of $475. The distributor said that Orban is still tweaking the design.
This was developed by Dialog4, which was purchased by Orban last week.
Also, for the folks who are whining about bitrate, please note that the primary market for this is the broadcast industry, for field recording use. "Field recording" means a single mic pointed at someone's face or perhaps a stage performance, not a multi-mic studio mixdown. 128 kbps is more than adequate for this, especially when you consider that the broadcast medium (e.g. FM radio) usually ends up being the quality bottleneck (spectral bandwidth, stereo separation, etc.).
Wow, that's a new low even by Slashdot standards. I mean, I've learned to ignore the sheer tonnage of "seperately" and "definately" and the like, but this is scary.
And then people post Ask Slashdot's about the value of attending a Real College and getting a Real Degree ...
The post office is the sole official physical presence of the U.S. federal government countrywide.
Where do you go to "register" for the Selective Service (the draft)? The post office.
Where do you go to get federal tax forms? The post office is required to supply them.
Sure, some municipalities may have an FBI or ATF branch office, or even a Secret Service office, but the USPS is the main federal presence in EVERY town. It is the face of the US Government for most.
This is what I slog through Slashdot for -- the occasional insightful post among the sheer tonnage of videogame console stories, "funny" comments by 16-year-olds (modded up to 4 by 15-year-olds), and "we should" rhetoric from the butt-flattened masses.
That show was just about the only thing worth watching -- I've been taping every episode to archive tape just in case this happened. I haven't done that since the early 90's Simpsons episodes.
So, what can we do to try to reverse this decision? There are precedents for networks bringing back shows after a public outcry. Who do I write to? (politely, of course)
"Proof" is also a great 1991 movie out of Australia that starred Hugo Weaving (aka the future Agent Ssssmith) in one of his first movies.
A real good little black comedy, as long as your tastes don't run towards Harry Potter, Nickelback and whatever other soylent green the corporate entertainment machine has manufactured for you today ...
"Early 90's"? I don't think so. I ran a C-64 from 1982 to 1988. By 1988 you would pretty much get laughed at if you were still running a C-64 machine. Everyone had moved to PCs by then. Commodore tried updating the design with the Commodore 128 circa 1986, but that went nowhere.
Commodore launched the Amiga line in the late 80's, which WAS able to carry them into the early 90's, but still by 1993-1994 they had completely augered in.
Click here for a good Commodore VIC20/64/Amiga history
Click here for another
Some technical details can be found in the post that I made when the first item came out in June. At the time, I posted it a bit late, so it missed the usual early Informative modder-uppers and thus stayed in Score:1 oblivion.
Looks like they have Slashdot Spelling and Grammar Dysfunction:
- do a spell check (avialable, definately, etc.)
Doctor HTML does spell checks of web pages.
- it's = "it is", as in "it is time that my
grammar evolved beyond that of a teenager".
- its = possessive, as in "the sliMP3 uses a flouroluminescent panel as its display".
- let's = let us, as in "let's improve our writing".
- lets = form of the verb "to let", as in "keeping 802.11 out of the package lets me keep the price below $300".
- "We have done this", "I plan to do that", which is it, "we" or "I"? Have a consistent voice. Look for other forms, too (my, mine, me, our, ours, us).
I'm not trying to be snotty -- I'm trying to help you write better and thus get your message across. These kinds of errors distract your more erudite readers from the content of the page.The first step to fixing a problem is knowing you've got one.
By archiving reality.
Why should the data you store by limited to "properly" published materials? I currently have on my 2 GB hard drive every single email I've received or sent since 1998 (about 6,000), and it's my electronic memory. And it hardly makes a dent in the drive space.
So take all those cameras you bought (as instructed by the wonderful popup X10 ads :) and send the live video to be archived onto your hard drive. Months from now you can go look at any feed. So it's just like my email archive, only scaled up by a factor of 10^6 -- from 100 kB of emails a day to 100 GB of video per day (1 Mbps per camera, 10 cameras).
Still not enough? Consider the fact that video is just a tiny fraction of what you perceive as reality itself. Go for insane resolution, 360-degree field of view (or even better, 4-pi steradians :) , 5.1 surround sound, the other three senses, sixth and seventh senses ...
Now you've archived your own perceived reality (of your own space), how about experiencing someone else's? Think movies, incuding porn :)
Every advance is storage capacity is immediately filled by increased appetite for storage.
What is the bitrate of reality?
See:
-
Google cache of the NAB position
-
Washington Post article
-
further concerns about lack of "public service" programming
And before you shit all over the idea of public service, recall that the airwaves are supposed to be public property, not to be whored out by the government to the biggest soft-money contributor. The Telecom act of 1995 changed all that, and ClearChannel and their ilk are taking advantage of the situation faster than you can say "defanged FCC".Support your local non-comm radio station!
Search Google for the relevant keywords for more information, particularly since the Grey Lady was also a target of Mr. Giordano's investigative talents, and thus they're not likely to give it the coverage it deserves ...
I really get disapointed when yet another reactionery and empty post from a 14-year-old who cant spell counts as "insightfull" on Slahsdot -- definately stirs my grits.
moves at walking speed
Sigh. Read the article, putz.
Mod this clown down so at least other people reading at level 4 or 5 don't waste their time even reading this (not to mention getting sucked into a reply like poor me). Now, the dude who pointed out the fact that this is totally not for US market was onto something ...
Fax and modem lines are registered and to be used only for that purpose. Conversely, regular voice lines may not be used for transmitting data -- violations are punishable law, and I'm sure most of you have heard of the kind of punishment meted out by the Saudi government, so that in itself is a serious deterrent.
Further, all phone calls are routed through central switching centers (just like anywhere else in the world) where they can be (and are) monitored. A data call can simply be tapped, demodulated and inspected for contraband traffic.
Any technology that bypasses these switching centers (such as satellite technology) undergoes very serious ministry scrutiny. I worked on satellite technology in Saudi, and all of the satellite equipment was squarely in the hands of the government or carefully proscribed private sector organizations (e.g Aramco).
Four years ago I remember a conversation with a friend about oppressive regimes, and East Timor and Saudi Arabia being two regions we were discussing. Indonesia's grip on East Timor was rapidly deteriorating at the time, and I remember my friend declaring that certainly the Saudi's would fall soon enough. But the Saudi's are "doing it right" -- they keep an extremely tight grip on all information flow into the country, and so the citizens don't get the information they need to organize themselves (or even know that they are missing out on information).
In this regard, <covers head> bin Laden actually has it right </covers head> -- the Saudi people are oppressed by their own government, and the only way out is a revolution. But as long as the Saudi's continue to play their "information security" cards right, it's not going to happen.
Perfect! Thanks!
Ls --- I'm not sure on this one, it seems to be some sort of Launch angle
OK, with that hint I was able to figure it out. It's Earth-Sun-Mars angle, or, effectively, how far Mars is from Earth:
- Using a solar system simulator, I find that there is a Mars/Earth conjuction around 05-Nov-2005 (hmmm, 4 years from today) and around 25-Dec-2007 (hmmm, Christmas) -- those two dates are 2 years and 50 days apart, or 780 days.
- During that period, these two planets will swing through 360 degrees of Earth-Sun-Mars angle.
- Or, 180 degrees takes 390 days.
- Now, looking at the plot, the 0 Ls mark is at about 22-Jan-2006, and the 180 Ls mark is at about 10-Feb-2007. That's 384 days.
Off by 1.5% just taking a guess and eyeballing the chart. Sounds like a confirmation to meRight?