Get a camera with three CCD chips (one for each color) instead of just one. That's what separates the men from the boys. The rest is just fluffy feature checklist wankery.
Three chip cameras are dropping in price, like everything else these days (except oil). However, I'm not sure if any three-chip models have fallen below the $1000 threshold yet. The standard bearer in the cheap *pro* DV market is the Canon XL1, which is a steal at $5000. Check the fan sites that others have posted here for news about three-chip deals.
What is missing from this discussion is that NASA is still keeping with their plans to bring Hubble back down from orbit as per an international treaty regarding space debris above a specific size. This entails heavily modifying one of the shuttles as Colombia was the only one large enough to fit the HST inside its cargo bay.
Yeah, except the shuttle mission is not required. You're assuming you want to bring it down intact. They just want to do a controlled deorbit, a la Mir in 2001. So they'll just send up an unmanned (read: cheaper) vehicle to grab the telescope and yank it down.
Now, I certainly agree with your larger point: not continuing Hubble's mission considering the dollars involved ($200M already spent, only $40 to go, as you reported) is just bad science. It's just sad. Call your congressmen, I guess.
Oh yeah, and the war. Everytime you hear about some funding shortfall somewhere, say to yourself "87 billion dollars" over and over... and compare that to the numbers we're all arguing about...
I operate a site that streams audio. We link to several stream players including Real's, but in the text around the link, we used to make some disparaging remarks about having to hunt down the free player, as many people have observed here.
Well, a few months ago, someone from Real contacted me and told me that I could just use the above link to go straight to the free player. Note that just "http://www.real.com/freeplayer/" doesn't work; you have to have the referrer code "?rppr=wrek" after it -- "wrek" being my organization and presumably replaced by other strings in other cases. If you leave it off you get thrown into the regular obfuscation queue.
I'd have to agree with those that say that Real appears to genuinely be trying to be better about all this.
So I have to get the internet feed. Well it worked just fine up until they first thought it had landed and then then it died and I couldn't reconnect for about 15 minutes.
I stuck with one of the two alternate feeds (that is, not the "primary" one linked on http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/countdown/vide o ) and it never went below 45 kbps, which is OK. It had to rebuffer many times, but I never lost more than 15 seconds.
If it's going to be a big night, try to stay a step ahead of everyone else and go straight to the alternates.
I'd love to report what this software does, but my hard drive has been thrashing nonstop for 20 minutes and I've seen little more than gray windows where content should be.
The article states that 75% of users use non-browser applications to access the internet.
It DOES NOT say that 75% of the connections are made by non-browser applications.
Further, the synopsis equates "net" and "web". Those are not the same thing and until I RTFA I thought it was saying that 75% of *WEB* connections were made by non-browsers -- like by search engine spiders, automated scripts, etc.
A web connection is a type of net connection, but not every net connection is a web connection. Every poodle is a dog, but not every dog is a poodle.
What most people need, and would find far more useful, is RadioTivo. A product which could record your favorite shows when they're on and let you play them back at your discretion.
Eeeeyup. The biggest problem is that most people (note the word "most") listen to radio very differently than they watch TV -- they're not tuning in at specific times. The programming model of radio has thus differentiated itself from that of TV quite a bit.
This is why the concept of an audio VCR (tape based) never caught on. Yes, it was tried, several times.
A columnist at RadioWorld mag covered this in two columns just last month:
378 comments on this story and not a single one mentioning that you can't jam CDMA, which is what SprintPCS and Verizon are. TDMA systems like GSM and AT&T and Cingular? Sure they can be jammed, but not CDMA, and not any of the 3G systems, which are ALL CDMA based.
CDMA was originally researched and refined by the military for precisely this reason. Because it uses a spread spectrum, a single carrier (or several) can't jam it. You'd need to jam the entire BAND, at a high enough power level, and that is physically impossible. Well, it might be possible with military grade gear, but we're talking huge amounts of power here. You'd need an entire destroyer to carry and power it.
In your preferences, you can apply a personal "minus" value to any type of moderation. So, for example, all Funny posts get knocked down by 2. This works great for me because it keeps the supposedly funny posts out of the +5 level (really now, Slashdot joke posters are not at all funny if you're out of high school) but still lets me see the best ones if I'm bored and cruising at +3.
Besides blocking the juvenile funny boys (and their like-minded moderators, apparently), the other bonus effect is that when you're expecting to have to read 20 +5 comments, you click on it and it actually gives you 12 or 15 or so because all the supposedly funny ones have been filtered out by your pref.
About a month ago, Yahoo Maps started exhibiting "broken" behavior regarding the use of the Back button. If you're zooming into a map, going Back does not zoom you back out, it takes you waaaay back to where you started. This is in Mozilla 1.2-1.4 -- and if a web site stops working in Mozilla, it is usually due to bad, IE-centric code in the web site, not a problem with Mozilla.
So, I use MapQuest now, works great. Yahoo (and any portal) would be well advised to check their site in a few minority browsers, especially
the best one, if they want to maximize ad revenue.
Everything on the market meets only two of those requirements. Kyocera 7135? Jesus, it's huge. Treo 600? Not a flip.
... until about two months ago, when the
Samsung i500 was launched (also on Sprint). I have mine and I looooove it. Can't play mp3's (yet), got no expansion slots, no Bluetooth, no speakerphone, no keyboard...
But I don't care, because it's got Palm (so I can load and run all my Palm apps, which do nearly everything possible), it's a flip phone so the screen is protected and it strikes a low profile on my belt, and IT'S REALLY FREAKING SMALL. Size matters.
The
Samsung i500
is a new CDMA cell phone that operates on the SprintPCS network. It has an integrated Palm PDA. Big deal, right? Yeah, except it's the smallest yet (way smaller than the Kyocera 7135 brick, or any Windows "smart" phone for that matter) and it's a flip (unlike the Samsung i300 and i330). Oh, and unmetered 3G data blah blah blah.
I'm surprised that nobody's posted this yet (or that that comment hasn't made it up above +2).
This only works if you can stop the mechanism by which the microwaves are scattered around to make for even heating. If you have a turntable in the bottom of your microwave, then removed it might do the trick, but most microwave ovens have a rotating metal "fan" that is enclosed in the upper surface over the cooking cavity, and that metal fan spins to scatter the waves around -- think of it like a flashlight and a mirrored pinwheel. Hence no turntable is required.
I'm not aware of any way of disabling that "fan", although I suppose you could drill a tiny hole in the shroud and poke in something to stop the spin, a la stopping a grinding PC fan. But I personally am not terribly interested in poking a drill into a microwave oven...
We have a Primestar dish on an elevated pole aimed at a mountaintop 12 miles away.
How the heck do you sight something like this in? You have to be accurate within a few seconds, don't you? A search pattern would take forever with that narrow of a beam, wouldn't it?
The beam isn't that narrow. Let's do a quick mental calculation. A typical direct-to-home Ku-band dish is going to have a beamwidth of about 1 degree (2 degrees, whatever) in order to be able to isolate the right satellite on the arc. That's at Ku-down, which is about 11 GHz. A given antenna will get "wider" as you go down in frequency, so the beam width at 2.4 GHz for this same antenna is much wider. I believe the beam width and frequency scale inversely, so if you go down in frequency by about a factor of 5 (11/2.4) then your beamwidth (however you want to measure it) goes up by the same factor.
So your beamwidth at 2.4 GHz is going to be something like 5-10 degrees. And it's not a super sharp rolloff, so you'll find that signal easy.
Another way of expressing all of the above is to say that an antenna with a certain gain at a high frequency (like Ku band) is going to have a lower gain at a lower frequency, and the corollary of that gain reduction is lobe spreading.
Hey, maybe someone here can point us to a visualization tool for this -- looking at an antenna pattern for a given antenna, crank down the frequency and watch the lobes spread out and drop.
This is an IDE RAID card that connects to the IDE port on your motherboard and then to TWO hard drives. Your motherboard (and thus OS) thinks it's talking to one drive (via the IDE cable), when it's actually mirroring to two.
Lots of alarming features, really everything you'd want, even background resyncing of new hard drives. The only problem is that they only have that background capability in Windows and Linux app forms, and some of my machines run other things, like QNX. No big deal, I just have to schedule a 30 minute outage to install a new hard drive and sync it up.
Of course if you want high-end performance and features, go with a hot swap SCSI cage. But for the rest of us, who just want to spend a couple hundred bucks securing our desktop data against [R-A-] I-nexpensive D-rive failure, DupliDisk is great.
I've posted about this product twice before, each time there was a RAID thread, but it was a while ago and I don't know how to dig up my old Slashdot comments.
Let me guess: you either work for the government or the utility power industry. Or you don't get much done at your job and you're about to get laid off.
Just make a simple list, and keep it in order. The PalmOS ToDo app works fine for this, or even just a flat text file (memo in Palm).
Even a whiteboard works, but that's hard to edit/resequence and hard to communicate to others (i.e. "come down to my office and stand in front of my white board" versus "here's my current priority list [via email], you decide").
I like the Palm approach because then it's always with me. You never know where you'll be (e.g. walking down the hall) when you get blindsided by some half-wit idea to soak up more of your time.
While Sendmail runs half the mail servers in the world
According to
http://cr.yp.to/surveys/sendmail.html
and
http://cr.yp.to/surveys/smtpsoftware6.txt,
Sendmail has long been trending towards less and less hosts running it. As of his last survey two years ago, it was at 42%. And if you look only at "serious" MTAs, those for sites that have heavy mail volumes, you'll probably see even less Sendmail.
Slash has a user preference that you can set to mod "Funny" down. So if you're tired of seeing the adolescent humor that the Slashdot crowd thinks is "Funny", just apply a -2 or -3 to all "Funny" posts.
The biggest benefit is that it cuts WAY down on the number of +5 posts, so you can get straight to the key comments if that's all you want. It's cool when the home page says "24 of 215 comments" but when you click in the Funny modifier filters half of them out and you end up only having to plow through 12:)
Slashdot Mirror
Three chip cameras are dropping in price, like everything else these days (except oil). However, I'm not sure if any three-chip models have fallen below the $1000 threshold yet. The standard bearer in the cheap *pro* DV market is the Canon XL1, which is a steal at $5000. Check the fan sites that others have posted here for news about three-chip deals.
Yeah, except the shuttle mission is not required. You're assuming you want to bring it down intact. They just want to do a controlled deorbit, a la Mir in 2001. So they'll just send up an unmanned (read: cheaper) vehicle to grab the telescope and yank it down.
Now, I certainly agree with your larger point: not continuing Hubble's mission considering the dollars involved ($200M already spent, only $40 to go, as you reported) is just bad science. It's just sad. Call your congressmen, I guess.
Oh yeah, and the war. Everytime you hear about some funding shortfall somewhere, say to yourself "87 billion dollars" over and over ... and compare that to the numbers we're all arguing about ...
Well, a few months ago, someone from Real contacted me and told me that I could just use the above link to go straight to the free player. Note that just "http://www.real.com/freeplayer/" doesn't work; you have to have the referrer code "?rppr=wrek" after it -- "wrek" being my organization and presumably replaced by other strings in other cases. If you leave it off you get thrown into the regular obfuscation queue.
I'd have to agree with those that say that Real appears to genuinely be trying to be better about all this.
I stuck with one of the two alternate feeds (that is, not the "primary" one linked on http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/countdown/vide o ) and it never went below 45 kbps, which is OK. It had to rebuffer many times, but I never lost more than 15 seconds.
If it's going to be a big night, try to stay a step ahead of everyone else and go straight to the alternates.
2 GHz laptop with lots of RAM and HD.
http://www.spaceflightnow.com/mars/mera/images/031 231edl.jpg
The "L" in that graphic is the landing time.
Further, the synopsis equates "net" and "web". Those are not the same thing and until I RTFA I thought it was saying that 75% of *WEB* connections were made by non-browsers -- like by search engine spiders, automated scripts, etc.
A web connection is a type of net connection, but not every net connection is a web connection. Every poodle is a dog, but not every dog is a poodle.
Eeeeyup. The biggest problem is that most people (note the word "most") listen to radio very differently than they watch TV -- they're not tuning in at specific times. The programming model of radio has thus differentiated itself from that of TV quite a bit. This is why the concept of an audio VCR (tape based) never caught on. Yes, it was tried, several times. A columnist at RadioWorld mag covered this in two columns just last month:
I bought a Neuros thinking that it would do this for me, perhaps in a forthcoming firmware upgrade, but it doesn't seem likely now.
CDMA was originally researched and refined by the military for precisely this reason. Because it uses a spread spectrum, a single carrier (or several) can't jam it. You'd need to jam the entire BAND, at a high enough power level, and that is physically impossible. Well, it might be possible with military grade gear, but we're talking huge amounts of power here. You'd need an entire destroyer to carry and power it.
Neo: Who?
Oracle: Not too bright, though.
Besides blocking the juvenile funny boys (and their like-minded moderators, apparently), the other bonus effect is that when you're expecting to have to read 20 +5 comments, you click on it and it actually gives you 12 or 15 or so because all the supposedly funny ones have been filtered out by your pref.
That reminds me of a bumper sticker I saw last week:
Mod parent up please. It deserves to be +5 just like the grandparent.
Not a strong point, but I believe that's what theirs is.
So, I use MapQuest now, works great. Yahoo (and any portal) would be well advised to check their site in a few minority browsers, especially the best one, if they want to maximize ad revenue.
Palm, small, flip.
Everything on the market meets only two of those requirements. Kyocera 7135? Jesus, it's huge. Treo 600? Not a flip.
But I don't care, because it's got Palm (so I can load and run all my Palm apps, which do nearly everything possible), it's a flip phone so the screen is protected and it strikes a low profile on my belt, and IT'S REALLY FREAKING SMALL. Size matters.
Palm, small, flip.
An interesting post, and me with no mod points ...
This thing is seriously sexy. Size matters.
This only works if you can stop the mechanism by which the microwaves are scattered around to make for even heating. If you have a turntable in the bottom of your microwave, then removed it might do the trick, but most microwave ovens have a rotating metal "fan" that is enclosed in the upper surface over the cooking cavity, and that metal fan spins to scatter the waves around -- think of it like a flashlight and a mirrored pinwheel. Hence no turntable is required.
I'm not aware of any way of disabling that "fan", although I suppose you could drill a tiny hole in the shroud and poke in something to stop the spin, a la stopping a grinding PC fan. But I personally am not terribly interested in poking a drill into a microwave oven ...
How the heck do you sight something like this in? You have to be accurate within a few seconds, don't you? A search pattern would take forever with that narrow of a beam, wouldn't it?
The beam isn't that narrow. Let's do a quick mental calculation. A typical direct-to-home Ku-band dish is going to have a beamwidth of about 1 degree (2 degrees, whatever) in order to be able to isolate the right satellite on the arc. That's at Ku-down, which is about 11 GHz. A given antenna will get "wider" as you go down in frequency, so the beam width at 2.4 GHz for this same antenna is much wider. I believe the beam width and frequency scale inversely, so if you go down in frequency by about a factor of 5 (11/2.4) then your beamwidth (however you want to measure it) goes up by the same factor.
So your beamwidth at 2.4 GHz is going to be something like 5-10 degrees. And it's not a super sharp rolloff, so you'll find that signal easy.
Another way of expressing all of the above is to say that an antenna with a certain gain at a high frequency (like Ku band) is going to have a lower gain at a lower frequency, and the corollary of that gain reduction is lobe spreading.
Hey, maybe someone here can point us to a visualization tool for this -- looking at an antenna pattern for a given antenna, crank down the frequency and watch the lobes spread out and drop.
Virtual folders have been in Evolution for years. Mod parent up please!
This is an IDE RAID card that connects to the IDE port on your motherboard and then to TWO hard drives. Your motherboard (and thus OS) thinks it's talking to one drive (via the IDE cable), when it's actually mirroring to two.
Lots of alarming features, really everything you'd want, even background resyncing of new hard drives. The only problem is that they only have that background capability in Windows and Linux app forms, and some of my machines run other things, like QNX. No big deal, I just have to schedule a 30 minute outage to install a new hard drive and sync it up.
Of course if you want high-end performance and features, go with a hot swap SCSI cage. But for the rest of us, who just want to spend a couple hundred bucks securing our desktop data against [R-A-] I-nexpensive D-rive failure, DupliDisk is great.
I've posted about this product twice before, each time there was a RAID thread, but it was a while ago and I don't know how to dig up my old Slashdot comments.
Just make a simple list, and keep it in order. The PalmOS ToDo app works fine for this, or even just a flat text file (memo in Palm).
Even a whiteboard works, but that's hard to edit/resequence and hard to communicate to others (i.e. "come down to my office and stand in front of my white board" versus "here's my current priority list [via email], you decide").
I like the Palm approach because then it's always with me. You never know where you'll be (e.g. walking down the hall) when you get blindsided by some half-wit idea to soak up more of your time.
According to http://cr.yp.to/surveys/sendmail.html and http://cr.yp.to/surveys/smtpsoftware6.txt, Sendmail has long been trending towards less and less hosts running it. As of his last survey two years ago, it was at 42%. And if you look only at "serious" MTAs, those for sites that have heavy mail volumes, you'll probably see even less Sendmail.
The biggest benefit is that it cuts WAY down on the number of +5 posts, so you can get straight to the key comments if that's all you want. It's cool when the home page says "24 of 215 comments" but when you click in the Funny modifier filters half of them out and you end up only having to plow through 12 :)