How do you know that they didn't show up because one of them is into RC models?
An over-reaction would have been arresting the guy and throwing him in the clink until they could figure out a way to interpret a law in such a way as to say he'd broken it. Simply going and having a look isn't an over-reaction. There are a lot of risks involved in flying model aircraft around a city, and even without "security theatre" it's probably worth checking out what's going on and making sure it's not some twat who's just bought a gigantic model aircraft off eBay and is trying to learn how to fly it in a crowded park;-)
I would have modded this up if mods weren't anonymous. Yes, Jerry Pournelle and Steve Ciarcia, and I didn't know who did the artwork but now I do.
Get it back to a hobbyist computing magazine like it was in the 70s and 80s and I'll buy several subscriptions - one for me and one for each of the volunteer-run techy groups I'm involved in.
Sounds great. I'm all for it. My ISP will filter the Conservative Party's website. No, even better, it will replace every image with one of Ed Vaizey with a huge jiggling cartoon cock sprouting from his forehead.
mission critical tech relies on *older* tech due to the cost of hardening circuitry
Exactly. It's not so much the speed of the part, it's the size of the transistors. A modern gate is about 1/15th the size of the ones in a 386. It's like comparing hitting a coffee cup with a tennis ball, and hitting a beer keg (although, the proton is much smaller than a tennis ball on that scale).
Well, what happens if you get hens that have been raised outside or in a fairly open hen run is that they will just wander around all over the place. The ex-deep-litter hens eventually wandered around all over, but still stuck together in a group.
If you leave them outside at night, hens will try to find something to perch on, a bit off the ground and with some cover overhead. During the day, they're not bothered about being out in the open normally, so in answer to another parent poster it's not that they're terrified of being in open spaces generally, it's just that *these* ones weren't used to it.
The big danger is that quite often they hide in bits of farm machinery, so it pays to have a quick look inside a baler or wuffler before you hook up the PTO shaft and run it up. Even the ones that weren't brought up in a deep-litter shed do this. I've no idea why, they just have this lemming-like urge to climb inside things that have spinning sharp blades.
That is actually somewhat true - we got a dozen hens from a deep-litter farm. Now, in a deep-litter environment the hens are allowed to wander around a big shed with nesting boxes in aisles and a deep layer of straw on the floor. They're fed, they've got room to move and crucially - unlike true "free-range" - they're unlikely to be ripped in half by foxes. It's a pretty good environment for them, really. If you take them out of a deep-litter farm (like when they start to get old, they lay eggs less frequently and become less cost-effective but perfectly okay if you're not looking for an egg every day from each hen) and chuck them into a big field - after you've carefully shot all the foxes, otherwise they won't be there in the morning - then they will instinctively huddle together even closer than they were in the shed. They're really kind of agoraphobic. If you build a small shed for them they'll run inside and won't leave until they get *really* hungry.
Strange, but true. At least, I think it's strange and you'll have to take my word for it that it's true.
HF radio works pretty well. If you're at the *top* of a mountain, VHF radio can take you a couple of hundred miles. Oh, and that's *before* you factor in LEO satellites with FM repeaters on them.
It probably failed on test and was sold as a "normal" one. That's why you could overclock CPU chips, too - they're tested then the whole batch is labelled with what they're capable of handling.
Weight-for-weight tomatoes probably sell for less than tobacco, thus are less profitable. Would you put the effort into protecting a more profitable crop, or less profitable?
BP? The company that used to be called "British Petroleum" before they were bought by an American parent company and thus could no longer be called "British"?
People have been drilling in deep water in the North Sea for decades, with admittedly a couple of nasty accidents, but so far things have gone pretty well. And do you know what? No-one had oil spill prediction software when they started. They relied on the skill and experience of the people operating the rigs.
Bear in mind that this is the UK, where we have far, far tighter safety regulations than the US for the oil industry. We know what we're doing. Oil companies in the US clearly don't, or don't care to do it properly.
AGWP: "ZOMG it's -12C outside in December and it's snowing really hard, this is global warming, it's climate change, it's really happening, we're all *DOOOOOOMED*!"
Rational person: "Uhm, no, it's winter, it gets about this cold around this time of year, and although we're getting a bit more snow than usual, a couple of years ago we got a bit less slow than usual. Not much in it though. It did this last year, and the year before, and so on back as far as I can remember."
But, if you try and point out the reality of the situation (weather is not the same thing as climate, and neither have changed much over the past couple of thousand years - well, excluding the Maunder Minimum) then you're a "denier". Just like when you're talking to particularly wooly-minded religious crazies, who will call you immoral and evil if you don't happen to follow their own flavour of magic.
Microwave "last-mile" stuff is cheap and effective, and works over the same sort of range we're talking about here. Bear in mind that the distances you can cover in a single hop are limited by the timing in the modem once you've got a good aerial up. Radio waves travel at the speed of light, which is surprisingly slow - about five microseconds to travel a mile. If you try to use conventional wifi cards you need to increase the timeout settings, because it takes so long for a packet to reach the far end and be replied to - in fact, Atheros cards have the facility to specify "timeout" in metres! From the distance given it calculates appropriate settings for various parameters, so it knows to expect long ack times. Think about it this way, if you live more than half an hour's drive from Pizza Hut, you're not going to get your delivery in half an hour.
Using a cheap crappy TV antenna and cheap crappy TV coax is a false economy. Rip it out and put proper stuff in.
Exactly. It's worth considering that Sky Television (UK satellite provider) will quite cheerfully rip out a six month old installation and put a new dish up if a house has a dish left by a previous customer? Why? Because you don't know what state it's in. The cost of just replacing it and doing a new install from scratch worth less than the risk of having a shitty half-broken dish, poor performance and a dissatisfied customer. After however many years on someone's chimney, how do you know what state the TV aerial and coax are in?
We do the same. I work for a company that does radio systems for businesses. Among that, we cover two large fleets of vehicles that include security guards, road gritters and school buses. Any time I install a radio into a vehicle I take the radio out of the old one, clean it up, align it to factory spec (usually rather better, smug git that I am) and test it before refitting it - with a new aerial. Experience is a great teacher, and it teaches that if you reuse an old aerial and feeder you'll end up going back to that job.
I've not been off sick for a couple of years. Of course, I'm not American and I don't live in the US, so my evil socialist healthcare system has no vested interest in keeping me sick so I keep paying for medicines I don't really need.
Now all I need to do is work out a way to take the 15 days holiday I have left off, when there are less than 15 working days left in the year...
Yep, and also they have shorter ranges, thus requiring more transmission power than UHF to go further.
Or a higher-gain antenna, which is easier to make and more compact at microwave frequencies than at UHF. You've also got the advantage that a high-gain antenna works just as well on receive as it does transmitting, so you can hear weaker signals as well as transmit further.
We do have these things called Radio Modems
I know. I design, build and install systems using them. They don't work with TV aerials or coax, and they (mostly) suck at UHF. They're slow (38400bps *if* you're prepared to pay about £1000 per year for a suitable licence, and *if* you can get a licence - it's called "broadband" for a reason, and huge chunks of spectrum cost). They suck.
Economy of scale dictates that 2.4 and 5.8GHz kit is cheaper than UHF. TV aerials aren't particularly high quality, and neither is the coax. You'd have to replace both before they were suitable for data.
And consequently, sales dropped due to the reports of significant issues with PCB printing
Funny how that doesn't seem to happen. It certainly didn't happen with AutoCAD. Anyone reporting problems with faint drawing just got told to go and buy a real one.
It's a case here of there's an antennae on the base station dedicated to you, another to your neighbour, both with the same bit of bandwidth but don't cross the streams. Well not quite but you get the idea.
Because having a UHF transmitter for each user is going to be amazingly cost-effective.
AutoCAD had a "bug" where the lines in drawings would become fainter and fainter with every save - *only* in cracked versions. Obviously the trick is to have a big obvious "NOP me out!" block of code that clearly deals with copy protection - and something sneaky tucked away out of sight.
...and that really is kind of offensive. I'm perfectly qualified to drive at night, thank you very much. Although driving at night on roads where there are no streetlights is kind of dangerous, and really no one should be doing it if it can be helped. Btw the road I'm talking about had "exactly zero lights".
That's most roads outside of cities. Guess what? Lots of people don't live in cities.
If you don't know how to operate your car's headlights, you probably shouldn't even be driving in daylight. I really hope you either learn to drive or get off the road, before you hurt someone.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, they showed up and he let them view the video through the goggles as he buzzed them. Seriously, they were actually cool about it.
Now, if they were smart they'd take a note of his phone number, just in case...
"Hey, you know that radio-controlled plane you have with the camera? Want to make a contribution to public safety, and a few dollars?"
Sounds like an awfully handy thing to be able to get your hands on, when you absolutely have to see over that wall *right now*...
How do you know that they didn't show up because one of them is into RC models?
An over-reaction would have been arresting the guy and throwing him in the clink until they could figure out a way to interpret a law in such a way as to say he'd broken it. Simply going and having a look isn't an over-reaction. There are a lot of risks involved in flying model aircraft around a city, and even without "security theatre" it's probably worth checking out what's going on and making sure it's not some twat who's just bought a gigantic model aircraft off eBay and is trying to learn how to fly it in a crowded park ;-)
I would have modded this up if mods weren't anonymous. Yes, Jerry Pournelle and Steve Ciarcia, and I didn't know who did the artwork but now I do.
Get it back to a hobbyist computing magazine like it was in the 70s and 80s and I'll buy several subscriptions - one for me and one for each of the volunteer-run techy groups I'm involved in.
Sounds great. I'm all for it. My ISP will filter the Conservative Party's website. No, even better, it will replace every image with one of Ed Vaizey with a huge jiggling cartoon cock sprouting from his forehead.
mission critical tech relies on *older* tech due to the cost of hardening circuitry
Exactly. It's not so much the speed of the part, it's the size of the transistors. A modern gate is about 1/15th the size of the ones in a 386. It's like comparing hitting a coffee cup with a tennis ball, and hitting a beer keg (although, the proton is much smaller than a tennis ball on that scale).
Well, what happens if you get hens that have been raised outside or in a fairly open hen run is that they will just wander around all over the place. The ex-deep-litter hens eventually wandered around all over, but still stuck together in a group.
If you leave them outside at night, hens will try to find something to perch on, a bit off the ground and with some cover overhead. During the day, they're not bothered about being out in the open normally, so in answer to another parent poster it's not that they're terrified of being in open spaces generally, it's just that *these* ones weren't used to it.
The big danger is that quite often they hide in bits of farm machinery, so it pays to have a quick look inside a baler or wuffler before you hook up the PTO shaft and run it up. Even the ones that weren't brought up in a deep-litter shed do this. I've no idea why, they just have this lemming-like urge to climb inside things that have spinning sharp blades.
That is actually somewhat true - we got a dozen hens from a deep-litter farm. Now, in a deep-litter environment the hens are allowed to wander around a big shed with nesting boxes in aisles and a deep layer of straw on the floor. They're fed, they've got room to move and crucially - unlike true "free-range" - they're unlikely to be ripped in half by foxes. It's a pretty good environment for them, really. If you take them out of a deep-litter farm (like when they start to get old, they lay eggs less frequently and become less cost-effective but perfectly okay if you're not looking for an egg every day from each hen) and chuck them into a big field - after you've carefully shot all the foxes, otherwise they won't be there in the morning - then they will instinctively huddle together even closer than they were in the shed. They're really kind of agoraphobic. If you build a small shed for them they'll run inside and won't leave until they get *really* hungry.
Strange, but true. At least, I think it's strange and you'll have to take my word for it that it's true.
What if you only send one fax?
If you're only going to send one fax, make it count. Fax them a box of green-bar paper.
HF radio works pretty well. If you're at the *top* of a mountain, VHF radio can take you a couple of hundred miles. Oh, and that's *before* you factor in LEO satellites with FM repeaters on them.
It probably failed on test and was sold as a "normal" one. That's why you could overclock CPU chips, too - they're tested then the whole batch is labelled with what they're capable of handling.
Weight-for-weight tomatoes probably sell for less than tobacco, thus are less profitable. Would you put the effort into protecting a more profitable crop, or less profitable?
BP? The company that used to be called "British Petroleum" before they were bought by an American parent company and thus could no longer be called "British"?
People have been drilling in deep water in the North Sea for decades, with admittedly a couple of nasty accidents, but so far things have gone pretty well. And do you know what? No-one had oil spill prediction software when they started. They relied on the skill and experience of the people operating the rigs.
Bear in mind that this is the UK, where we have far, far tighter safety regulations than the US for the oil industry. We know what we're doing. Oil companies in the US clearly don't, or don't care to do it properly.
the deniers already take *everything* as evidence for their views
It's worth noting that the AGW preachers do the same thing.
AGWP: "ZOMG it's 25C outside in *June*! This is global warming, it's climate change, it's really happening, we're all *DOOOOOOMED*!"
Rational person: "Uhm, no, it's summer, it gets about this warm. It did this last year, and the year before, and so on back as far as I can remember."
(wobbly lines dissolve, caption: "Six Months Later")
AGWP: "ZOMG it's -12C outside in December and it's snowing really hard, this is global warming, it's climate change, it's really happening, we're all *DOOOOOOMED*!"
Rational person: "Uhm, no, it's winter, it gets about this cold around this time of year, and although we're getting a bit more snow than usual, a couple of years ago we got a bit less slow than usual. Not much in it though. It did this last year, and the year before, and so on back as far as I can remember."
But, if you try and point out the reality of the situation (weather is not the same thing as climate, and neither have changed much over the past couple of thousand years - well, excluding the Maunder Minimum) then you're a "denier". Just like when you're talking to particularly wooly-minded religious crazies, who will call you immoral and evil if you don't happen to follow their own flavour of magic.
I was at one point thirdline for the uks x.400 mail system
It's quite possible I used to be your boss.
Microwave "last-mile" stuff is cheap and effective, and works over the same sort of range we're talking about here. Bear in mind that the distances you can cover in a single hop are limited by the timing in the modem once you've got a good aerial up. Radio waves travel at the speed of light, which is surprisingly slow - about five microseconds to travel a mile. If you try to use conventional wifi cards you need to increase the timeout settings, because it takes so long for a packet to reach the far end and be replied to - in fact, Atheros cards have the facility to specify "timeout" in metres! From the distance given it calculates appropriate settings for various parameters, so it knows to expect long ack times. Think about it this way, if you live more than half an hour's drive from Pizza Hut, you're not going to get your delivery in half an hour.
Using a cheap crappy TV antenna and cheap crappy TV coax is a false economy. Rip it out and put proper stuff in.
Exactly. It's worth considering that Sky Television (UK satellite provider) will quite cheerfully rip out a six month old installation and put a new dish up if a house has a dish left by a previous customer? Why? Because you don't know what state it's in. The cost of just replacing it and doing a new install from scratch worth less than the risk of having a shitty half-broken dish, poor performance and a dissatisfied customer. After however many years on someone's chimney, how do you know what state the TV aerial and coax are in?
We do the same. I work for a company that does radio systems for businesses. Among that, we cover two large fleets of vehicles that include security guards, road gritters and school buses. Any time I install a radio into a vehicle I take the radio out of the old one, clean it up, align it to factory spec (usually rather better, smug git that I am) and test it before refitting it - with a new aerial. Experience is a great teacher, and it teaches that if you reuse an old aerial and feeder you'll end up going back to that job.
I've not been off sick for a couple of years. Of course, I'm not American and I don't live in the US, so my evil socialist healthcare system has no vested interest in keeping me sick so I keep paying for medicines I don't really need.
Now all I need to do is work out a way to take the 15 days holiday I have left off, when there are less than 15 working days left in the year...
Yep, and also they have shorter ranges, thus requiring more transmission power than UHF to go further.
Or a higher-gain antenna, which is easier to make and more compact at microwave frequencies than at UHF. You've also got the advantage that a high-gain antenna works just as well on receive as it does transmitting, so you can hear weaker signals as well as transmit further.
We do have these things called Radio Modems
I know. I design, build and install systems using them. They don't work with TV aerials or coax, and they (mostly) suck at UHF. They're slow (38400bps *if* you're prepared to pay about £1000 per year for a suitable licence, and *if* you can get a licence - it's called "broadband" for a reason, and huge chunks of spectrum cost). They suck.
Get Ubiquiti microwave kit instead.
Economy of scale dictates that 2.4 and 5.8GHz kit is cheaper than UHF. TV aerials aren't particularly high quality, and neither is the coax. You'd have to replace both before they were suitable for data.
And consequently, sales dropped due to the reports of significant issues with PCB printing
Funny how that doesn't seem to happen. It certainly didn't happen with AutoCAD. Anyone reporting problems with faint drawing just got told to go and buy a real one.
It's a case here of there's an antennae on the base station dedicated to you, another to your neighbour, both with the same bit of bandwidth but don't cross the streams. Well not quite but you get the idea.
Because having a UHF transmitter for each user is going to be amazingly cost-effective.
AutoCAD had a "bug" where the lines in drawings would become fainter and fainter with every save - *only* in cracked versions. Obviously the trick is to have a big obvious "NOP me out!" block of code that clearly deals with copy protection - and something sneaky tucked away out of sight.
...and that really is kind of offensive. I'm perfectly qualified to drive at night, thank you very much. Although driving at night on roads where there are no streetlights is kind of dangerous, and really no one should be doing it if it can be helped. Btw the road I'm talking about had "exactly zero lights".
That's most roads outside of cities. Guess what? Lots of people don't live in cities.
If you don't know how to operate your car's headlights, you probably shouldn't even be driving in daylight. I really hope you either learn to drive or get off the road, before you hurt someone.
The will light only into the direction of travel, not the direction of the car,
The Citroën DS had that in the mid-1960s. Nothing new under the (lack of) sun.