Pretty informative, from a guy who used the *blink* tag on his web page.
Great, huh?
The only good thing which can be said about MSIE is that it ignores blink tags.
MSIE users are less likely to care about Linux and the open source situation than Mozilla/Netscape/Opera/blinking browsers.
I wanted my little diatribe on the Linux desktop situation to be read by open-source proponents, and allow the mindless MSIE borgs to overlook it, since it doesn't pain the Linux desktop sitch in a favorable light. I don't want to give the Borg propaganda.
So, I could have written a little script which changes the content to emphasize it for non-MSIE users... or, I could have used the blink tag.
I think my solution qualifies under the definition of "elegant simplicity"...
...which is about the only way one can describe a blink tag as elegant.
The output voltage of a microwave oven transformer (MOT) is more in the range of 2KV than 6 KV. Just as lethal (500mA) but a bit cheaper to manufacture. Otherwise BigBlockMopar told a good story.
I think I was talking about the A/K potential applied to a magnetron, not the output of the transformer itself. And indeed, that is in the range of 6kV.
How?
First off, notice that the diode and capacitor in most microwave ovens are not set up as a typical half-wave rectifier? They're actually configured as a voltage doubler. It's cheap and it depends on the diode action of the magnetron to work, but indeed, Vout = 2*Vin.
Now, remember also that we're rectifying AC, which is almost universally measured as RMS. Vdc = Vacrms * sqrt(2).
Therefore, an expression for our magnetron's anode voltage is closer to Vmag = 2 * Vtrans * sqrt(2), which we can simplify to Vmag = 2.828 * Vtrans.
Which, with a 2kV transformer, is 5.6kV. Near enough to 6kV.
In actual practice, I've seen microwave oven transformers rated for everything from 1800V to about 4000V. The 4kV one was in a Litton commercial microwave oven... very nice.
Wait, that's only a thousand watts at a half amp. That's not particularly dangerous. A refrigerator compressor is easily 12amps at 110 and we used to have a refrigerator with a bad short in college that we'd let shock us all the time. No big deal. People overhype the danger of electricity all the time.
Uhhh... Yeah.
Consider that an ordinary North American outlet delivers enough power to power a microwave oven or a table saw or a small MIG welder. That's enough energy to be destructive.
Your statement would be like me saying that I don't have to be careful around the fanbelt in a Honda Civic, since it's not powerful enough to take off my fingers the way the engine in a real car would.
Anyway, I'll try an experiment for you. When I connect my ohmmeter between the iron ring on my right pinky finger and the stainless steel band of my 20-year-old Cardinal digital watch, I find that the resistance between these two points - and therefore through my skin and chest cavity - is around 20,000 ohms.
Now, in your comparison, the current drawn by the compressor has nothing to do with the shock that your fridge would give you; all that 12 amp figure says is that under normal conditions, your power supply can sink that much power. Indeed, if you were using an ordinary wall socket, you can sink 15A. 15A @ 120V = 1800W.
Anyway, it's 120V, with enough current behind it. "Enough" being an arbitrary value meaning "could kill you".
How? I = E / R = 120V / 20,000ohms = 6 mA. 6 mA at 120V = 0.72W.
With my hands wet, my resistance drops down to about 5,000 ohms. I = 120 / 5000 = 24mA. 24mA at 120V = 2.88W.
Neither case is one which I would voluntarily test, let me put it to you that way.
Now, at 6kV which is typical of what is applied to a magnetron in a microwave oven (note that the diode and the capacitor in a microwave form a voltage doubler, and then you have to convert the rated output of the transformer from RMS to peak when you rectify it), I = E / R = 6000 / 20000 = 300mA. You're dead. In practice, if the transformer were only rated to about 800W, it might only be able to sink about 133mA into you. You're still dead.
I re-wire household receptacles without even turning off the circuits and some of them are over 20 amp circuits.
That's stupid.
If you were to get a shock, it's likely that your hands would involuntarily contract. Maybe stabbing yourself with rough edges or sharp ends of whatever pieces of metal are live. What is going to happen to your body's resistance - and therefore the current through the circuit - when you're introducing a potential difference subcutaneously? I haven't tried it, but I'd imagine that if I stuck ohmmeter probes into a cut on one hand and a stab on the other hand, it would probably be a lot less than 5000 ohms from end to end...
In the States, if you're not doing new home construction or industrial work you're not dealing with dangerous current.
Okay. Quantities of energy in any form can be dangerous if released in an uncontrolled fashion.
Can a horse be dangerous?
A horse is generally considered to be capable of 746W of power. Hence the arcane measurement, "horsepower". 1 hp = 746W.
1 North American Outlet = 1800W = 2.4 horsepower.
If a horse can produce enough power to kill you, then so can an outlet, by a factor of 2.4.
Stop being an idiot.
And consumer electronics capacitors. . . no sorry they can scare you and maybe hurt an infant of small animal, but not an adult.
U = (C*V*V)/2; q = CV. Think about a microwave oven capacitor (consumer electronics!) and do some math.
Magnetrons are the main component of microwave ovens. Beware -- unshielded units are dangerous. You can end up sterile, or dead... or both.
Oh my god.
Before the dot-com meltdown, I used to design radar equipment for a major defense contractor. Radar systems use microwave energy - which is just radio waves within an arbitrary range that we call "microwave", like we call some radio waves "VHF" and others "UHF".
A microwave oven is simply a ~500W unmodulated carrier wave at ~2.4GHz. Neither the power nor the frequency is terribly precise.
A magnetron is a vacuum tube used to generate microwave-frequency RF. It's a special kind of directly-heated diode surrounded by a very strong magnet, hence the term "magnetron".
It is utterly and completely harmless (except to magnetic media and the magnetic stripe on your security pass, from personal experience) until you apply power. Typically, a microwave oven magnetron wants about 6V to light the filament and about 6kV anode; in pulsed navigational radar, it's usually 6V to light the filament and about 10kV to pulse the magnetron in 25kW 12GHz pulses at 3kHz (think of AM modulation).
If you take a direct blast from a radar, it's unlikely to make you sterile, or to cause cancer. Those are caused by ionizing radiation (ie. nuclear and X-Ray). This is non-ionizing; essentially just a radio wave. In the S and X band radar ranges - and presumably everything in between - the primary damage would be to the corneas of the eyes. And it burns - I got it to my torso once, no permanent damage, just like a bad sunburn.
In other words, don't operate your microwave oven with the door open, and don't look into the waveguide.
Oh, and don't play with the power supply which runs the magnetron. Anything capable of supplying enough current to make 500W at 6kV (ie. power supply of a home microwave oven) is capable of setting fire to your skin. And the capacitors in a microwave oven hold a charge for a while - don't play with them.
Of course, due to digital TV, the station where I work has dumped Betacam for DVC Pro. Tried and tested? We'll see in 5 years.
Yeah. There's gotta be a pretty big glut of used Betacam stuff on the market right now.:) I smell an opportunity to get a cheap Betacam.
I suspect that early formats like DVC Pro might not survive for too long. Why? Because there are too many of them, the market will cull them and the relentless pace of cutting-edge technology will replace them with more mature systems. But we'll see. I wouldn't want to be station engineer these days, having to make that decision. Flip a coin, hope you don't get fired in three years.
We too had plenty of reels and such lying around that are just fine. So why the change? The government got on some stupid bandwagon that noone has taken up.
HDTV is a good thing overall. I have no problem with that. I don't really like the fact that the government felt the need to push it on the market, but then again, most people are perfectly happy with VHS. Have you ever noticed how most non-computer people react when you watch a DVD on your computer monitor? They don't care about resolution or picture quality, all they want is a big screen. NTSC currently offers that. I think part of the FCC push is to help reduce TVI complaints...
Remember that NTSC was designed in the late 1940s, and it was cutting-edge at that time. Every ordinary TV set out there is working within the limits set in the 1940s. Color itself wasn't grafted onto NTSC until the 1950s; something we see as that basic was tacked on as an afterthought (if you want a scary thought, Google for the Columbia/CBS color TV system. It used a spinning wheel in front of a black and white TV set. We were almost stuck with that - only marginally worse than the eye-straining 625 lines at 50Hz 1960s flickervision that Europeans have to tolerate). NTSC has done very well, but its time is up.
What works for a studio does not work for everybody else (not to mention that the way television studios currently work, with all of the details mentioned above, is incredibly antiquated.)
Heh. Last time I drew a paycheck from a TV show was 5 years ago; last time I did it from a TV network was 10 years ago. Yeah, a lot has changed since then, but the archives are still tape.
This is a situation perpetuated by seasoned producers who can still edit a mean tape-to-tape session but have no clue what to do with a non-linear editor. I respect their ability, and the necessity for something that works reliably every time five minutes ago, but that's when your job depends on it.
I do run a mean A/B roll myself... [grin] Actually, when I was working, I tried out a prototype Night Suite, which was one of the first non-linear editors. I did like it.
And yeah, it's not just the job, it's the reputation in that city. I got out of it because I was tired of being relatively poorly paid for the same pressure and on-the-job stress as a pediatric neurologist.
It also requires a fraction of the physical storage space and is far more attractive to look at.
Yes, this is the one really big flaw with tape storage.
To summarize: DVD sky-rocketed because it filled a void. You're far more likely to find a DVD player with backwards compatibility than you are a VCR. Also, a lot more can go wrong with a video tape stored properly than a DVD stored properly.
True.
But 8-Track skyrocketed because it filled a need - cheap media and fit comfortably in a dashboard. DVDs are pretty similar... hell, they even fit well in car entertainment systems. I'm not saying that DVD will go the way of the 8-Track - only time will tell - but it's a relatively new format based on a very fast-moving technology.
The place where I disagree is that tape is a time-tested technology, and it's also a mature technology so it's relatively stable. My biggest worry, actually, isn't even UV or spontaneous degradation of the dyes on the disc or anything like that - it's the inability to play the video because of a format change or an then-obsolete codec. (Will DivX be around when the 'net moves onto the next big thing? You can save a codec - or better still the source - but are you gonna have to port it Windows Media Player 62.1? At least we can probably bet that C will still be around.)
A Betamax videotape library will probably be pretty tough to play twenty years from now, but I don't think VHS will be, nor do I think 3/4" will be. I'd also have recommended Betacam or Betacam SP if I thought he had lots of coin to throw at this!
For about 5 years, *everyone* had an 8-track. They were designed originally for cars, but lots of people had them in their houses. Like movies are now available on DVD and VHS, most music was available only on LP (33RPM record) or 8-track.
Smaller, more dubious record companies (K-Tel, Time-Life Records, etc) would advertise in TV commercials as recently as the mid-80s, "Available on LP, cassette or 8-track! Order now!". (In the mid-80s, there were still lots of 8-track equipped cars driving around.)
I can't give you exact statistics, but I can tell you that the machines and cartridges were everywhere. Now? Well, 8-track tapes were endless loop, and they tended to split at the splice. Not to mention the lubricated tape shedding due to poor binding, and the integal pinch rollers jamming or failing... the cartridges almost all got pitched, but the machines can still be found in many thrift shops and old cars.
The format was bad, too... in the middle of a song it would fade out, the machine would click (and knock its heads right out of alignment) and the song would fade back in. Signal to noise ratio, print-through, wow and flutter and frequency response were all atrocious.
This explains why so many older shows look like horse shit compared to the quality they originally aired at.
Uhhh... Well, you can't expect *no* degredation. But a well-stored tape running on a properly aligned Quad or 3/4" machine will perform pretty close to the picture quality limits of NTSC. These things were built for TV stations, not for Joe Sixpack.
I think you might be confusing a few things.
1. Kinescope. This was before the popularization of videotape. A film was exposed from a video feed on a picture tube. A similar technique ("flying spot kinescope") was used to scan film for showing on television. This is the way that I Love Lucy and The Honeymooners were done, for example.
2. Image Orthicon camera tubes. These produced the black halos around performers. They were low-light cameras in their day, making them preferable to the absolutely punitive surface-of-the-sun lighting used to make a good image from an early plumbicon or vidicon camera tube.
3. Poor film. In the early days, there were no re-runs and most stuff was live; the only reason to film or videotape a TV show was for the producers to do a "debriefing" after the performance.
4. Poor TV. Are you remembering stuff you saw on a 1950s TV set and wondering why it looks so crappy on your new TV set? We look back with rose-colored glasses, you know. With my collection of restored 1950s TV sets, I can assure you that even with all new capacitors, good tubes and properly aligned, TV sets were cutting edge technology in the 1950s, and they were pretty bad compared to the picture quality from even a cheap modern TV.
5. Are you comparing video to still photos? Keep in mind that those still photos probably aren't frame grabs; the technology to do that in video certainly didn't exist, and with film mostly being for analysis rather than archive, they were probably using studio photographers for publicity stills.
6. Re-runs of more recent stuff. The original air of a sitcom, for example, will leave the network head-end by satellite and be run from that feed by all affiliates in the time zone. The tape playing will be some uber-quality format; as recently as 10 years ago it was some offshoot of Quad. When stations later syndicate that same episode, it's often provided in the format of the station's choice. Any station with syndication rights can order a broadcast quality copy of Seinfeld on 3/4", Betacam, Quad, hell - even Betamax and SVHS are still covered by some syndicates. Of course, all of these copies are several generations old.
Hollywood is currently in a panic because so many older films are falling apart. Compare how Vertigo looked before and after restoration to see just how much they have degraded.
Most people are suggesting stupid solutions with Video cards and Video editing software
I agree.
Okay. I used to work in a TV station.
DVD is the big thing right now, but history has proven that formats with meteoric rises (as in, DVD went from nowhere to everywhere in four years) is that they have meteoric falls. Case in point: 8-Track tape.
Every day, someone builds a shorter wavelength blue laser, and someone else builds a better compression algorithm, or even a better copy-prevention scheme. How long until the DVD format is revamped or replaced? Will the new players play the old discs?
VHS was introduced in about 1977, and home VCRs didn't achieve anywhere near the market penetration of the DVD player for 15 years. CD players took almost 10 years to achieve ubiquity.
Here's what's done at TV stations. We store the tape carefully. That's it, that's all. Now, TV stations buy good tape and use good video formats (ie. no crap like VHS with its ridiculous tape wear). The average VTR in a TV station is in the range of $10,000.
The video is saved in a tape format which will be around in 20 years. You can still find an Ampex Quad machine to play nearly 50 year old tape; almost every large city will have at least one in a video production house or tape archive.
Local stations tend to run Betacam SP or Digital Betacam. The investment in video formats is huge, most TV stations will stick with whatever format they chose for years after it became obsolete.
As recently as 1993, I was carrying around an Ikegami camera and a 40 pound Sony BVU-110 3/4" VTR handing off my shoulder. The battery belt for the VTR and the sun gun was another 20 pounds. Meanwhile, the bigger stations in my area were all running around with single-piece Sony Betacam ENG setups.
Interestingly, there's one video format that you can take anywhere in the world, and any TV station or production house can use it: 3/4". Razor sharp analog pictures, very little generational loss, good and fast tape speed. It's Beta's big brother, but it's old now, so the tape and the machines can be found used all over the place.
Why not pick up a 3/4" deck? You don't need anything fancy, just make sure it will take the full-size (not just portable) 3/4" cassettes. The tape is cheap enough, the machine will last forever, and you won't be able to visibly see any image degredation from VHS. Hell, if the stuff was recorded 20 years ago, the VTRs at the TV station you were recording were probably 3/4". Look for a 25-year-old "U-Matic" machine, preferably from Sony (popular enough to be easy to service), top-loading is fine. Record a couple of DVDs to it - if it's working properly, most people could never tell the difference. Newer U-Matic SP machines are even better. Watch out for the machines which are player-only, and for the ENG machines which only take the small cassettes. (3/4" cassettes come in two physical sizes, but the full-size machines will play both sizes.)
Tape storage - this applies for all formats, including the lowly VHS:
Note that tape != cassette; tape is the stuff inside the cassette.
Wind the tape from one reel to the other every year. Don't rewind it back if you come to the end of the tape, just leave it like that until next year's winding. You want to ensure the tape is evenly packed and doesn't stick together, but don't wear it unnecessarily. If it's VHS, use an old machine which doesn't thread the tape around the heads for fast-forward or rewind (ie. less wear). When you're done watching something from your archive, wind it *all the way* forward, then rewind it *all the way* with no interruptions for a smooth packing.
Store the cassettes on their edge, not flat! If you store it flat, the edges of the tape will rest on the reel; if you store it on edge, the tape will hang on the reel. Flat-stored tape will often develop rippled edges, leading to problems reading linear audio, control and timecode tracks.
I'm a avid reader of Slashdot, I'm a Linux guru, I'm a BOFH, I'm a geek, Why the hell would I want this f#@#ng software?
Heh... Yeah, I liked that, too.
Actually, I think XPde goes a long way toward getting Linux ready for mass adoption on the desktops of the corporate world.
Microsoft has spent millions of dollars on focus groups to have ordinary Joes and Janes sit down and play with Windows, telling them what's good and bad, from a user's perspective.
The open source desktop metaphors don't have that resource - but Windows XP - ugly and inefficient as it may be to most Slashdot readers - does represent a lot of UI design experience.
XPde goes the right way to adopting and trying to learn from the expertise of Microsoft and Apple.
Having a Linux distro ship KDE with fluorescent pink menus and background wallpaper that looks like it was designed by a 14-year-old Run Lola Run fan from East Berlin does very little to encourage IT buyers that they can take the risk and leave Microsoft's comfortable if expensive and unreliable embrace.
XPde also works to try to migrate casual users who don't have very specific or great requirements. There's one in every office: the 66-year-old executive to whom Outlook *is* e-mail, and who gets confused when you present another program with exactly the same features and operations but different icons. Just as there's no way to explain to this user that the Send button still sends e-mail and have him confidently understand it, there's also no reason for that person to run Windows with its vulnerabilities to mailbox Klez and Nimbda attacks.
I can think of a few desktops which I'm going to migrate from XP to XPde.
And I won't tell them they're running Linux until they've been using it for a couple of weeks.
At a penny a hit, your script nets the spammer an extra $20.
I guess that's true, and for a second, I thought it was a big flaw in my they-asked-me-to-fill-their-weblogs-with-crap-by -sending-e-mail-to-my-domain plan. But either way, it doesn't matter. Why?
Let's say this fly-by-night pharmacy (www.pharmacyfun.biz) is paying the spammer to produce exposure. If they're paying the spammer per hit, then they're spending the $20 to advertise to/dev/null on one of my boxes.
Fine, it might make more money for the spammer, but it would end up costing the advertiser big money if enough people were doing it. And, let's face it, no matter how much you try to ban spamming, if there's money to be made in it, people will continue to do it. If the advertiser ends up spending $$ to advertise by spam because they got 2,000 extra hits, he's going to see that his sales per hit decreases, meaning that spamvertising services end up costing him more money.
Treat this like a contract killing. If you were to call a hit man to kill someone you don't like, both you and the hit man can be charged with first degree murder in most jurisdictions.
The spammer and the advertiser are one and the same.
If anything, this technique would undermine the validity of any pay per hit schemes. Filtering out the random hits could also be very difficult - make lynx report itself as some variant of MSIE, request the page exactly as it's provided in the URL, random interval between hits - those things together might be very difficult for the spamvertiser to separate a real hits from the bogus ones for billing's sake.
o you'll inevitably get spam, and that spam will contain URL's. Could this be a way to legally DoS a spammer?
I've often considered that, including automatically checking the message headers and providing a free stress-testing service for the originating machine. (Using the last header, written by my mail server, to provide the IP address for the stress-test.) Stress-testing a spammer's Windows 98 machine with an SMTP engine built into the e-mail blaster, or stress-testing a irresponsibly administered open mail relay, it doesn't really matter. One way or another, it's causing a hassle to the people who facilitate all the penis enlargement advertisements in my mailbox.
Of course, if they're spamming from offshore because of loose laws, there's nothing to stop one setting up an account on some unscrupulous ISP like Beijing Telecom...
If I were a religious person, I would pray that Alan Ralsky's wife and children get cancer. Any religious Slashdotters are invited to do so.
The only point you managed to make with your post is that you are an ignorant (racist) fool. If you made at least the slightest effort to curb some of your "character" one might actually be able to see through the crap and moderate the value in it, up a few points.
Why?
You're gonna tell me that places like Malaysia, China and United Arab Emerates aren't third-world shitholes?
Definition: "third world shithole" - noun; place from which I receive spam.
China is a particular problem. A Chinese-born friend told me the reason for it: "it's bad luck not to accept someone's business card".
If you don't want your country on the list, start beating your spammers in the face with rusty camshafts. Otherwise, I have no use for you or your country.
More to the point, what are American laws going to do to stop the spam I get?
Most of the spam is sent from open relays in shitholes like Brazil and Japan. Most of it points to websites on hosting providers in China and Korea.
You're not gonna tell me that some ulgy fuck like Alan Ralsky isn't gonna go and simply register a company offshore?
His spamming organization can work offshore and hire another company to fulfill the orders in the USA. That way, the spammer is offshore (immune to US laws), and the company delivering the product to the gullible consumer is not doing any spamming.
My tactic is to refuse any SMTP from any third-world country. I don't know anyone in China or Korea. I accept e-mail from only USA, Canada, UK and Israel. Anything else is a third-world country. This tactic cut my spam over 50%.
Finally! The Evil Empire has thought of something truly helpful to do with the 1 trillion dollars of cash.;-)
Well, enough spammers seem to use IIS... Maybe they could "extend" the HTTP protocol to detect whether the referring website URL was received in a spam, and use it to disable the server...:)
Until then, my little script works well enough:
#!/bin/bash
COUNT=0
while [ $COUNT -lt 2000 ]; do
lynx -dump $1?YOU_FILL_MY_MAILBOX_WITH_UNSOLICITED_CRAP_AND_I _WILL_DO_THE_SAME_TO_YOUR_WEBLOGS
let COUNT=COUNT+1
echo $COUNT
done
Note that my website includes a warning about what happens to unsolicited e-mail. Apparently, the "Order Viagra, Diet Pills & more with NO PRESCRIPTION!" people wanted to stress-test their IIS server at Beijing Telecom.
284
The page cannot be displayed
There are too many people accessing the Web site at this time.
Please try the following:
* Click the [1]Refresh button, or try again later.
* Open the home page, and then look for links to the information you want.
HTTP 403.9 - Access Forbidden: Too many users are connected
Internet Information Services
Technical Information (for support personnel)
* Background:
This error can occur if the Web server is busy and cannot process
your request due to heavy traffic.
* More information:
[2]Microsoft Support
References
1. javascript:location.reload()
2. http://www.microsoft.com/ContentRedirec
Poor spammer. But then again, I'm only fulfilling his wish...
Re:I'm an asshole, and I'm proud of it.
on
Run Your Car on Grease
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· Score: -1, Offtopic
My friend, I come from a 3rd world country and I am probably 10 years older than you. I responded to you because out of the blue, for no reason you included a stupid, ignorant political statement where it had no reason for being.
Absolutely it did. I was touching on the reason why vegetable oil isn't being used in cars. One of the reasons is the "feed people, not cars" nutjobs.
As for you being ten years older than me, well... I dunno. Let me put it to you this way: There is a sliderule sitting on my desk. It's a nice Pickett N3T.
And with a former job, I did travel a little.
The problem of starvation is not a problem of farming, it's a problem of economics. Lots of countries have crappy farmland, but aren't starving, take any mid-east oil producer as an example. The 3rd world economy isn't ruined by too many people; it's ruined by civil wars, and unstable government.
With the wonderfully stable governments and highly rational people of the middle east - with Israel as the one lone island of sanity stuck in the middle of that hell - I can't imagine that the picture you paint will be at all rosy the moment the oil runs out.
How much wealth or sustainability will Saudi Arabia have when the oil money runs out? Kuwait? Jordan? Iraq has farmland in the valley, but I doubt enough to feed their people.
They could have an excellent tourism industry, if there weren't so many fanatics running around blowing up innocent civilians in the name of Allah. But since I don't see that happening before the oil runs out, I don't think they'll be building new Marriotts in Tehran anytime soon.
With no GDP and no farmland, how long will the problem last?
You should have used Japan as your example of little arable land supporting a massive population. Japan built itself up after World Wars I and II. They don't use the land, and they have no natural resources like oil to sell. Instead, they studied hard, worked hard, and built an economy. Of course, you can't do that in the Middle East, because too many people are brainwashed by religion and will run around screaming that "The new cellphone factory is only 300 miles from the Sacred Mosque of Karim! The infidels!".
(Note that I have no problem with Islam. I have a problem with *any* religious fanaticism.)
It must be nice to think you're mature and superior because you don't care about the value of human lives lost thousands of miles away, and like to point it out for no reason whatsoever.
There was a point. Maybe you should view parent.
BTW Darwinism doesn't apply in this case (since the people born in bad conditions are disadvantaged, not inferior), and you make yourself look like a jerk by bringing it up.
I think Darwinism does apply here.
If a seed is carried by the wind from its native climate to elsewhere and that seed happens to be especially hardy, the plant will grow. Maybe even flourish enough for the plant and its progeny to suck 95% of nutrients out of the soil. When the plants die out in that new location, isn't it Darwin at work?
Isn't this the same thing? Oh wait. No. We can't objectify human beings, after all, we're not just an animal which happens to have technology.
People in war ravaged countries aren't starving because they continue to have children in spite of their present conditions, they're starving because the children ALREADY EXISTED before the latest war/famine started. It is the biggest bunch of BS when people say that the problem comes from having too many kids.
Sure. Even without wars, Somalia is overpopulated. The famine exists because the land isn't arable with their prehistoric techniques and arguable not even with the modern techniques like field rotation which they have judiciously decided to ignore despite it being common knowledge in the civilized world.
Ergo, you have famine. The famine exists because the population is too great for the land to support it. This problem didn't appear overnight.
If _you_ have a time machine and see that your job is going to be destroyed in a civil war in 7 years you can choose not to have a child, but people without the time machine can't retroactivly not have kids once the unforseen political/economic disaster happens.
Okay. So, Somalia has been starving for at least 15 years that I can remember. How about the three year olds?
No one ever said that Darwin was pretty.
To summarize: you are being an asshole, and don't understand what you're talking about.
Must be nice to be 16 years old. The World Is A Special And Wonderful Place. My Parents Are Wrong For Telling Me The I Need To Do My Calculus Homework, Because I'm Going To Be An NBA-Champion Basketball Player, Home-Boy Rap "Artist" And Anime Cartoonist And I'll Fix All The Broken People In Somalia By Hosting Infomercials About The Problem!
Next you're gonna tell me to feel sorry for the people of Bangladesh... yuppers, there's a good place for your future charity to rebuild. The whole country is no more than about 30 feet about sea level, built on the mouth of the mighty and oh-so-beautiful Ganges River. (What's the Ganges River? Two words: India's Sewer.) Why don't you see too many anthills on the beach? Well, the tide comes in every so often...
Nature is ugly. This is just nature taking its course. Grow up.
Go ahead. Mod me down. I can afford it.
on
Run Your Car on Grease
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
What does an individual Somialian do if he/she doesn't want to starve? Start killing kids?
Work hard. Get a visa. Come here.
It's like the whole philosophy there is "I can't feed my 5 children, so I'll have another!"
It's not my fault they live in an unarable shithole, it's not my fault they haven't learned any farming or contraceptive techniques from the developed world, and it's not my fault they haven't overthrown their corrupt rulers yet. Hell, it's not even my fault if their religion bans the use of contraceptives.
The smart ones come here. The rest of them can starve with only their own ineptitude to blame. The children? Well, no one ever said that Darwin was pretty.
Sorry, but I've got enough troubles here in the developed "paradise".
Re:How long before McDonalds takes advantage of th
on
Run Your Car on Grease
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· Score: 1
McDonalds: Smiles starting at just $.50 per gallon.
Not gonna happen. They don't produce enough waste oil per restaurant to make it worthwhile.
You might start to see a waste hauler become enterprising, invest in some filtration equipment and start selling it, but I think the road tax issues might become too complicated to make it worthwhile for him. In Ontario, Canada, gas is going for about $0.70/L right now; about $0.40/L of that is taxes to pay for silly things like the Canadian Recording Artists Association and the new monument to King Jean Poutine in Shawinigan. (Once upon a time, gas taxes were high but used exclusively to build and maintain roads. It was truly a user-pay system, and Ontario had the best highway system in the world. Then we had a socialist (NDP) government who ran up the debts and decided that it was more important to support dubious lowest-common-denominator causes rather than the infrastructure which made our economy boom.)
Besides, there really aren't all that many diesel cars out there, certainly not up north here. Not only do car buyers usually avoid diesel cars because of noise, vibration and (usually) slow performance, but up here they're a bitch to start in the winter - and that's before you start to add less-than-optimal fuels into the system.
People have been making "Biodesiel" for years now. This is nothing new. A little lye and some vegetable oil is all it takes.
That's not even necessary.
I worked at a McDonalds in high school (about 1991), and one of the maintenance guys had an old (even then!) mid-1970s VW Rabbi (someone chiselled off the T for the fun of it) which was running on used shortening.
Actually, the guy was bright and knew a lot about cars, though he had no formal education. He built a system into an old gas can which rested on a "hot plate" heated by engine coolant. McDonalds filters their oil every day, and on those days on the schedule when it was being replaced, he'd just run it through the McDonalds filtration pump and into the gas cans.
The shortening would thicken, but when he was driving, he'd wait until the engine was warm and the oil was liquid, then throw the valve over to run it off the shortening. The fuel line was a copper tube taped against the lengths of copper plumbing pipe carring the hot coolant to the "hot plate" in the cargo area of the hatchback. Running out of fuel was no big deal - when the engine started to sputter, he'd flip the valve back to diesel off his regular tank, then at the next stop, he'd swap the gas can sitting on the hot plate. The pickup tube was hacked into the cap of a gas can, so the car sucked the oil right out of the gas can.
Riding in that car with him from Ottawa to Toronto (for a Ramones concert) in the dead of winter, I found only two small problems. One, the interior of the car was damned hot because of the hot plate. Two... the car - and I mean *the whole car*, from interior to exhaust - smelled like Chicken McNuggets. Sometimes, Filet-O-Fish.
On the other hand, the fuel was free, it was filtered with McDonalds specially-designed oil-filtation equipment and never seemed to cause him a problem with fuel filters, and my 340-4bbl Duster was getting about 8 miles per gallon... so I envied the utility but declined his offer to trade for my Duster.
What is interesting is that it is still cheaper to buy real desiel than vegetable oil. Where biodesiel has an advantage is in recycling used vegetable oil that is no longer food quality but is with a little work good enough to burn in your car/airplane. Unfortunatly there is not enough of this to make a real dent in the American desiel usage.
This is true. Actually, the cost advantage isn't so great, when you figure that your time is worth something. Rather than scouting out restaurant dumpsters (which are pretty unpleasant places), you could be doing something more fun like getting fellatio or posting to Slashdot.
In his case, though, it was win-win since he was already gonna smell like McNuggets at the end of the day.
On the other hand, virgin vegetable oil could be a highly viable fuel. But the problem is that the very same people who jump up and down and scream about how nasty petroleum is, also jump up and down and scream about how nasty genetically modified corn and soy (which is the only way to make this economically viable) is. The best line I've ever heard came from a Greenpeace activist driving a sick little moped (blue clouds of poorly-tuned two-stroke, measurably more noxious than the exhaust from any well-tuned land-yacht SUV that he also complained about) screaming about how we can't feed cars while people are starving in Somalia. (If Somalis don't want to starve, they should have less children. Sorry, but it's not my problem.)
Why hit the URL's when they're sent? Set it up to hit all of them at a specific time in the day. Set up the script on many machines. Impulse functions are funny.
Well, if someone who is a better programmer than me can write a program to allow a distributed log-filling, we could set up a website where one merely complains about a spam, then thousands of machines go to work on filling that site's logs with crap.
Of course, to have an account to be able to use such a service, one would have to be running the client and therefore participating in the system.
The biggest problem would remain the possibility that someone might enter an URL belonging to a non-spammer's website.
As for the spammers themselves... well, they'd have to be warned any place where e-mail addresses participating in such a system are published. If they cannot read, that's our problem.
Essentially the high voltage of the ESD (ESD like when you shock yourself on a doorknob is very high voltage, it's just very low current) is destructive to the transistor junctions, but it usually doesn't cause immediate complete failure. A few days, months, or even years down the road, the junction will prematurely break down, having had a shortened lifespan because of the ESD damage.
Indeed.
Memory chips - and most other components within any computer less than fifteen years old - use CMOS logic. CMOS stands for "Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor", which essentially means that they're full of MOSFETs ("Metal Oxide Semiconductor Field Effect Transistor"). This includes almost all processors, support logic, etc. In fact, the only exception which comes to mind is the really old computers which had the big banks of 74xx-series TTL logic all over the place, like in an XT. But keep in mind that the processor itself - and many other components - will be CMOS.
The neat thing about Field Effect Transistors is that the electric field created by applying a gate voltage turns on the source-drain circuit. There is essentially no current required to drive the gate. The fact that there is theoretically no gate current means that you can do things like power 20 million transistors off a single 200W AT power supply, or build a wristwatch which runs for 5 years off the same tiny little battery.
The "field effect" is governed by the inverse square law. As you double the distance, you need 4 times the voltage to achieve the same field inside the source-drain junction. Naturally, in order to be able to work at the low voltages inside a computer, the distance therefore must be tiny.
This tiny distance is filled with a layer of what is, essentially, glass. And it's so thin that it can have a hole blasted through it by 30 volts.
Now, air doesn't ionize until about 3kV per millimeter. That means, to jump a 1mm gap, you need about 3,000 volts, which you perceive as a tiny static electric spark.
You will never see, nor feel, a 30V static electric charge. You can build it up just by sitting in your chair. And that's enough to blow a MOSFET transistor.
If a RAM chip has a million MOSFETs (modern ones have a lot more!) and you blow one of them, your chip is still well over 99.999% fine... until you try to read back data from the address with the blown MOSFET. And then you get one bit of garbage.
The data in RAM is corrupt. What if it's executable? Does the machine crash? Probably. What if it's a JPG? Maybe one pixel on that 1024x768 pr0n image you downloaded is one shade of skin-tone different than it should be.
A lot of ESD failures show up as intermittent crashes and other software problems. Before you reinstall your operating system because it's getting crufty, consider your hardware... well, unless you're running Windows.
ALWAYS wear a wrist strap. It's a bummer, but them's the dice.
I like to have fun with this one. Make sure that you take out any "serial numbers" which might be embedded in the link. Call as many dynamic scripts on the page as you can.
#!/bin/bash
COUNT=0
while [ $COUNT -lt 2000 ]; do
lynx -dump $1?YOU_FILL_MY_MAILBOX_WITH_UNSOLICITED_CRAP_AND_I _WILL_DO_THE_SAME_TO_YOUR_WEBLOGS
let COUNT=COUNT+1
echo $COUNT
done
Okay, it's ugly. And who knows if they actually check their weblogs? But it makes me feel better.
Besides, they were warned on my webpage, which outlines all the policies with regard to sending e-mail to my domain.
A really neat extension would be to have a script which parses the e-mail for links, de-fluffs them (to remove redirects through Yahoo and obfuscators like that) and automatically hits each and every one of the URLs given... but I haven't gotten around to it yet.
Lame Canadian radio is based mostly on gov't regs
on
Time to Face the Music
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Explode on contact?
Indeed!
And this article talks about how Canadian radio is lame. Why is it lame?
Canadian radio is lame because the Canadian government has protectionist policies which force Canadian radio and TV stations to air 40% Canadian content. This is, of course, because we don't want to lose Canadian music because of all those evil American musicians brainwashing our kids...
Unless I'm blind and missed it, the article didn't even mention Canadian content laws.
The problem is that there simply aren't enough musicians in Canada who are capable of going head to head with the products of a very similar culture, 10x the size, next door.
The net effect is that, to achieve their Canadian content requirements, Canadian broadcasters have to play the same songs over and over and over. And then there are the marginal acts which really aren't good enough for the prime time but are being played anyway... The Tragically Hip are a good example.
If any American wonders what radio sounds like when you start letting pseudo-socialists control your airwaves, hit Kazaa and grab the Tragically Hip's Bobcaygeon. I'm a classic rock fan. The classic rock station in Toronto, Q107, wants to play Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix. And that's what I want to listen to. But they're forced to play Bobcaygeon because of draconian laws which try to make me like bad music.
Canadian artists can sink or swim on their own. Alanis Morrissette, Burton Cummings and the Guess Who, Celine Dion, Shania Twain have all made it big in the US. Why? Because of Canadian government protectionism? No... because they're talented.
Beyond that and without protectionism (not to mention record company pressure, but we'll leave that for another time), radio stations should be playing what the broadest cross-sections of their audiences like. Of course that will result in more listeners and therefore more ad revenues. It's in the stations' interests.
The Tragically Hip should be working at the Wendys on Division Street in Kingston. The fact that my government has cost broadcasters their audiences weakens the music industry on a whole, disgusted consumers, and wasted billions of tax dollars rescuing struggling "artists" from the hell of working day-jobs in fast food while honing their skills playing bars at night.
"Paying your dues" is apparently too inhumane for the Canadian government to allow. Paying my taxes makes me want to see my government overthrown.
Of course, computers only entered the picture around about 1977 when the earliest personal computers started to appear in offices... but before that, there was plenty of other hardware hacking. Photocopiers, cars, airplane engines, perpetual motion machines...
Slashdot Mirror
Pretty informative, from a guy who used the *blink* tag on his web page.
Great, huh?
The only good thing which can be said about MSIE is that it ignores blink tags.
MSIE users are less likely to care about Linux and the open source situation than Mozilla/Netscape/Opera/blinking browsers.
I wanted my little diatribe on the Linux desktop situation to be read by open-source proponents, and allow the mindless MSIE borgs to overlook it, since it doesn't pain the Linux desktop sitch in a favorable light. I don't want to give the Borg propaganda.
So, I could have written a little script which changes the content to emphasize it for non-MSIE users... or, I could have used the blink tag.
I think my solution qualifies under the definition of "elegant simplicity"...
...which is about the only way one can describe a blink tag as elegant.
The output voltage of a microwave oven transformer (MOT) is more in the range of 2KV than 6 KV. Just as lethal (500mA) but a bit cheaper to manufacture. Otherwise BigBlockMopar told a good story.
I think I was talking about the A/K potential applied to a magnetron, not the output of the transformer itself. And indeed, that is in the range of 6kV.
How?
First off, notice that the diode and capacitor in most microwave ovens are not set up as a typical half-wave rectifier? They're actually configured as a voltage doubler. It's cheap and it depends on the diode action of the magnetron to work, but indeed, Vout = 2*Vin.
Now, remember also that we're rectifying AC, which is almost universally measured as RMS. Vdc = Vacrms * sqrt(2).
Therefore, an expression for our magnetron's anode voltage is closer to Vmag = 2 * Vtrans * sqrt(2), which we can simplify to Vmag = 2.828 * Vtrans.
Which, with a 2kV transformer, is 5.6kV. Near enough to 6kV.
In actual practice, I've seen microwave oven transformers rated for everything from 1800V to about 4000V. The 4kV one was in a Litton commercial microwave oven... very nice.
Wait, that's only a thousand watts at a half amp. That's not particularly dangerous. A refrigerator compressor is easily 12amps at 110 and we used to have a refrigerator with a bad short in college that we'd let shock us all the time. No big deal. People overhype the danger of electricity all the time.
Uhhh... Yeah.
Consider that an ordinary North American outlet delivers enough power to power a microwave oven or a table saw or a small MIG welder. That's enough energy to be destructive.
Your statement would be like me saying that I don't have to be careful around the fanbelt in a Honda Civic, since it's not powerful enough to take off my fingers the way the engine in a real car would.
Anyway, I'll try an experiment for you. When I connect my ohmmeter between the iron ring on my right pinky finger and the stainless steel band of my 20-year-old Cardinal digital watch, I find that the resistance between these two points - and therefore through my skin and chest cavity - is around 20,000 ohms.
Now, in your comparison, the current drawn by the compressor has nothing to do with the shock that your fridge would give you; all that 12 amp figure says is that under normal conditions, your power supply can sink that much power. Indeed, if you were using an ordinary wall socket, you can sink 15A. 15A @ 120V = 1800W.
Anyway, it's 120V, with enough current behind it. "Enough" being an arbitrary value meaning "could kill you".
How? I = E / R = 120V / 20,000ohms = 6 mA. 6 mA at 120V = 0.72W.
With my hands wet, my resistance drops down to about 5,000 ohms. I = 120 / 5000 = 24mA. 24mA at 120V = 2.88W.
Neither case is one which I would voluntarily test, let me put it to you that way.
Now, at 6kV which is typical of what is applied to a magnetron in a microwave oven (note that the diode and the capacitor in a microwave form a voltage doubler, and then you have to convert the rated output of the transformer from RMS to peak when you rectify it), I = E / R = 6000 / 20000 = 300mA. You're dead. In practice, if the transformer were only rated to about 800W, it might only be able to sink about 133mA into you. You're still dead.
I re-wire household receptacles without even turning off the circuits and some of them are over 20 amp circuits.That's stupid.
If you were to get a shock, it's likely that your hands would involuntarily contract. Maybe stabbing yourself with rough edges or sharp ends of whatever pieces of metal are live. What is going to happen to your body's resistance - and therefore the current through the circuit - when you're introducing a potential difference subcutaneously? I haven't tried it, but I'd imagine that if I stuck ohmmeter probes into a cut on one hand and a stab on the other hand, it would probably be a lot less than 5000 ohms from end to end...
In the States, if you're not doing new home construction or industrial work you're not dealing with dangerous current.Okay. Quantities of energy in any form can be dangerous if released in an uncontrolled fashion.
Can a horse be dangerous?
A horse is generally considered to be capable of 746W of power. Hence the arcane measurement, "horsepower". 1 hp = 746W.
1 North American Outlet = 1800W = 2.4 horsepower.
If a horse can produce enough power to kill you, then so can an outlet, by a factor of 2.4.
Stop being an idiot.
And consumer electronics capacitors. . . no sorry they can scare you and maybe hurt an infant of small animal, but not an adult.U = (C*V*V)/2; q = CV. Think about a microwave oven capacitor (consumer electronics!) and do some math.
Yes, it *can* kill you. And your little dog, too.
Magnetrons are the main component of microwave ovens. Beware -- unshielded units are dangerous. You can end up sterile, or dead... or both.
Oh my god.
Before the dot-com meltdown, I used to design radar equipment for a major defense contractor. Radar systems use microwave energy - which is just radio waves within an arbitrary range that we call "microwave", like we call some radio waves "VHF" and others "UHF".
A microwave oven is simply a ~500W unmodulated carrier wave at ~2.4GHz. Neither the power nor the frequency is terribly precise.
A magnetron is a vacuum tube used to generate microwave-frequency RF. It's a special kind of directly-heated diode surrounded by a very strong magnet, hence the term "magnetron".
It is utterly and completely harmless (except to magnetic media and the magnetic stripe on your security pass, from personal experience) until you apply power. Typically, a microwave oven magnetron wants about 6V to light the filament and about 6kV anode; in pulsed navigational radar, it's usually 6V to light the filament and about 10kV to pulse the magnetron in 25kW 12GHz pulses at 3kHz (think of AM modulation).
If you take a direct blast from a radar, it's unlikely to make you sterile, or to cause cancer. Those are caused by ionizing radiation (ie. nuclear and X-Ray). This is non-ionizing; essentially just a radio wave. In the S and X band radar ranges - and presumably everything in between - the primary damage would be to the corneas of the eyes. And it burns - I got it to my torso once, no permanent damage, just like a bad sunburn.
In other words, don't operate your microwave oven with the door open, and don't look into the waveguide.
Oh, and don't play with the power supply which runs the magnetron. Anything capable of supplying enough current to make 500W at 6kV (ie. power supply of a home microwave oven) is capable of setting fire to your skin. And the capacitors in a microwave oven hold a charge for a while - don't play with them.
Of course, due to digital TV, the station where I work has dumped Betacam for DVC Pro. Tried and tested? We'll see in 5 years.
Yeah. There's gotta be a pretty big glut of used Betacam stuff on the market right now. :) I smell an opportunity to get a cheap Betacam.
I suspect that early formats like DVC Pro might not survive for too long. Why? Because there are too many of them, the market will cull them and the relentless pace of cutting-edge technology will replace them with more mature systems. But we'll see. I wouldn't want to be station engineer these days, having to make that decision. Flip a coin, hope you don't get fired in three years.
We too had plenty of reels and such lying around that are just fine. So why the change? The government got on some stupid bandwagon that noone has taken up.HDTV is a good thing overall. I have no problem with that. I don't really like the fact that the government felt the need to push it on the market, but then again, most people are perfectly happy with VHS. Have you ever noticed how most non-computer people react when you watch a DVD on your computer monitor? They don't care about resolution or picture quality, all they want is a big screen. NTSC currently offers that. I think part of the FCC push is to help reduce TVI complaints...
Remember that NTSC was designed in the late 1940s, and it was cutting-edge at that time. Every ordinary TV set out there is working within the limits set in the 1940s. Color itself wasn't grafted onto NTSC until the 1950s; something we see as that basic was tacked on as an afterthought (if you want a scary thought, Google for the Columbia/CBS color TV system. It used a spinning wheel in front of a black and white TV set. We were almost stuck with that - only marginally worse than the eye-straining 625 lines at 50Hz 1960s flickervision that Europeans have to tolerate). NTSC has done very well, but its time is up.
What works for a studio does not work for everybody else (not to mention that the way television studios currently work, with all of the details mentioned above, is incredibly antiquated.)
Heh. Last time I drew a paycheck from a TV show was 5 years ago; last time I did it from a TV network was 10 years ago. Yeah, a lot has changed since then, but the archives are still tape.
This is a situation perpetuated by seasoned producers who can still edit a mean tape-to-tape session but have no clue what to do with a non-linear editor. I respect their ability, and the necessity for something that works reliably every time five minutes ago, but that's when your job depends on it.I do run a mean A/B roll myself... [grin] Actually, when I was working, I tried out a prototype Night Suite, which was one of the first non-linear editors. I did like it.
And yeah, it's not just the job, it's the reputation in that city. I got out of it because I was tired of being relatively poorly paid for the same pressure and on-the-job stress as a pediatric neurologist.
It also requires a fraction of the physical storage space and is far more attractive to look at.Yes, this is the one really big flaw with tape storage.
To summarize: DVD sky-rocketed because it filled a void. You're far more likely to find a DVD player with backwards compatibility than you are a VCR. Also, a lot more can go wrong with a video tape stored properly than a DVD stored properly.True.
But 8-Track skyrocketed because it filled a need - cheap media and fit comfortably in a dashboard. DVDs are pretty similar... hell, they even fit well in car entertainment systems. I'm not saying that DVD will go the way of the 8-Track - only time will tell - but it's a relatively new format based on a very fast-moving technology.
The place where I disagree is that tape is a time-tested technology, and it's also a mature technology so it's relatively stable. My biggest worry, actually, isn't even UV or spontaneous degradation of the dyes on the disc or anything like that - it's the inability to play the video because of a format change or an then-obsolete codec. (Will DivX be around when the 'net moves onto the next big thing? You can save a codec - or better still the source - but are you gonna have to port it Windows Media Player 62.1? At least we can probably bet that C will still be around.)
A Betamax videotape library will probably be pretty tough to play twenty years from now, but I don't think VHS will be, nor do I think 3/4" will be. I'd also have recommended Betacam or Betacam SP if I thought he had lots of coin to throw at this!
Umm... 8-Track never caught on.
You're kidding, right?
For about 5 years, *everyone* had an 8-track. They were designed originally for cars, but lots of people had them in their houses. Like movies are now available on DVD and VHS, most music was available only on LP (33RPM record) or 8-track.
Smaller, more dubious record companies (K-Tel, Time-Life Records, etc) would advertise in TV commercials as recently as the mid-80s, "Available on LP, cassette or 8-track! Order now!". (In the mid-80s, there were still lots of 8-track equipped cars driving around.)
I can't give you exact statistics, but I can tell you that the machines and cartridges were everywhere. Now? Well, 8-track tapes were endless loop, and they tended to split at the splice. Not to mention the lubricated tape shedding due to poor binding, and the integal pinch rollers jamming or failing... the cartridges almost all got pitched, but the machines can still be found in many thrift shops and old cars.
The format was bad, too... in the middle of a song it would fade out, the machine would click (and knock its heads right out of alignment) and the song would fade back in. Signal to noise ratio, print-through, wow and flutter and frequency response were all atrocious.
This explains why so many older shows look like horse shit compared to the quality they originally aired at.
Uhhh... Well, you can't expect *no* degredation. But a well-stored tape running on a properly aligned Quad or 3/4" machine will perform pretty close to the picture quality limits of NTSC. These things were built for TV stations, not for Joe Sixpack.
I think you might be confusing a few things.
1. Kinescope. This was before the popularization of videotape. A film was exposed from a video feed on a picture tube. A similar technique ("flying spot kinescope") was used to scan film for showing on television. This is the way that I Love Lucy and The Honeymooners were done, for example.
2. Image Orthicon camera tubes. These produced the black halos around performers. They were low-light cameras in their day, making them preferable to the absolutely punitive surface-of-the-sun lighting used to make a good image from an early plumbicon or vidicon camera tube.
3. Poor film. In the early days, there were no re-runs and most stuff was live; the only reason to film or videotape a TV show was for the producers to do a "debriefing" after the performance.
4. Poor TV. Are you remembering stuff you saw on a 1950s TV set and wondering why it looks so crappy on your new TV set? We look back with rose-colored glasses, you know. With my collection of restored 1950s TV sets, I can assure you that even with all new capacitors, good tubes and properly aligned, TV sets were cutting edge technology in the 1950s, and they were pretty bad compared to the picture quality from even a cheap modern TV.
5. Are you comparing video to still photos? Keep in mind that those still photos probably aren't frame grabs; the technology to do that in video certainly didn't exist, and with film mostly being for analysis rather than archive, they were probably using studio photographers for publicity stills.
6. Re-runs of more recent stuff. The original air of a sitcom, for example, will leave the network head-end by satellite and be run from that feed by all affiliates in the time zone. The tape playing will be some uber-quality format; as recently as 10 years ago it was some offshoot of Quad. When stations later syndicate that same episode, it's often provided in the format of the station's choice. Any station with syndication rights can order a broadcast quality copy of Seinfeld on 3/4", Betacam, Quad, hell - even Betamax and SVHS are still covered by some syndicates. Of course, all of these copies are several generations old.
Hollywood is currently in a panic because so many older films are falling apart. Compare how Vertigo looked before and after restoration to see just how much they have degraded.
This is true, but
Most people are suggesting stupid solutions with Video cards and Video editing software
I agree.
Okay. I used to work in a TV station.
DVD is the big thing right now, but history has proven that formats with meteoric rises (as in, DVD went from nowhere to everywhere in four years) is that they have meteoric falls. Case in point: 8-Track tape.
Every day, someone builds a shorter wavelength blue laser, and someone else builds a better compression algorithm, or even a better copy-prevention scheme. How long until the DVD format is revamped or replaced? Will the new players play the old discs?
VHS was introduced in about 1977, and home VCRs didn't achieve anywhere near the market penetration of the DVD player for 15 years. CD players took almost 10 years to achieve ubiquity.
Here's what's done at TV stations. We store the tape carefully. That's it, that's all. Now, TV stations buy good tape and use good video formats (ie. no crap like VHS with its ridiculous tape wear). The average VTR in a TV station is in the range of $10,000.
The video is saved in a tape format which will be around in 20 years. You can still find an Ampex Quad machine to play nearly 50 year old tape; almost every large city will have at least one in a video production house or tape archive.
Local stations tend to run Betacam SP or Digital Betacam. The investment in video formats is huge, most TV stations will stick with whatever format they chose for years after it became obsolete.
As recently as 1993, I was carrying around an Ikegami camera and a 40 pound Sony BVU-110 3/4" VTR handing off my shoulder. The battery belt for the VTR and the sun gun was another 20 pounds. Meanwhile, the bigger stations in my area were all running around with single-piece Sony Betacam ENG setups.
Interestingly, there's one video format that you can take anywhere in the world, and any TV station or production house can use it: 3/4". Razor sharp analog pictures, very little generational loss, good and fast tape speed. It's Beta's big brother, but it's old now, so the tape and the machines can be found used all over the place.
Why not pick up a 3/4" deck? You don't need anything fancy, just make sure it will take the full-size (not just portable) 3/4" cassettes. The tape is cheap enough, the machine will last forever, and you won't be able to visibly see any image degredation from VHS. Hell, if the stuff was recorded 20 years ago, the VTRs at the TV station you were recording were probably 3/4". Look for a 25-year-old "U-Matic" machine, preferably from Sony (popular enough to be easy to service), top-loading is fine. Record a couple of DVDs to it - if it's working properly, most people could never tell the difference. Newer U-Matic SP machines are even better. Watch out for the machines which are player-only, and for the ENG machines which only take the small cassettes. (3/4" cassettes come in two physical sizes, but the full-size machines will play both sizes.)
Tape storage - this applies for all formats, including the lowly VHS:
I'm a avid reader of Slashdot, I'm a Linux guru, I'm a BOFH, I'm a geek, Why the hell would I want this f#@#ng software?
Heh... Yeah, I liked that, too.
Actually, I think XPde goes a long way toward getting Linux ready for mass adoption on the desktops of the corporate world.
Microsoft has spent millions of dollars on focus groups to have ordinary Joes and Janes sit down and play with Windows, telling them what's good and bad, from a user's perspective.
The open source desktop metaphors don't have that resource - but Windows XP - ugly and inefficient as it may be to most Slashdot readers - does represent a lot of UI design experience.
XPde goes the right way to adopting and trying to learn from the expertise of Microsoft and Apple.
Having a Linux distro ship KDE with fluorescent pink menus and background wallpaper that looks like it was designed by a 14-year-old Run Lola Run fan from East Berlin does very little to encourage IT buyers that they can take the risk and leave Microsoft's comfortable if expensive and unreliable embrace.
XPde also works to try to migrate casual users who don't have very specific or great requirements. There's one in every office: the 66-year-old executive to whom Outlook *is* e-mail, and who gets confused when you present another program with exactly the same features and operations but different icons. Just as there's no way to explain to this user that the Send button still sends e-mail and have him confidently understand it, there's also no reason for that person to run Windows with its vulnerabilities to mailbox Klez and Nimbda attacks.
I can think of a few desktops which I'm going to migrate from XP to XPde.
And I won't tell them they're running Linux until they've been using it for a couple of weeks.
At a penny a hit, your script nets the spammer an extra $20.
I guess that's true, and for a second, I thought it was a big flaw in myy -sending-e-mail-to-my-domain plan. But either way, it doesn't matter. Why?
they-asked-me-to-fill-their-weblogs-with-crap-b
Let's say this fly-by-night pharmacy (www.pharmacyfun.biz) is paying the spammer to produce exposure. If they're paying the spammer per hit, then they're spending the $20 to advertise to /dev/null on one of my boxes.
Fine, it might make more money for the spammer, but it would end up costing the advertiser big money if enough people were doing it. And, let's face it, no matter how much you try to ban spamming, if there's money to be made in it, people will continue to do it. If the advertiser ends up spending $$ to advertise by spam because they got 2,000 extra hits, he's going to see that his sales per hit decreases, meaning that spamvertising services end up costing him more money.
Treat this like a contract killing. If you were to call a hit man to kill someone you don't like, both you and the hit man can be charged with first degree murder in most jurisdictions.
The spammer and the advertiser are one and the same.
If anything, this technique would undermine the validity of any pay per hit schemes. Filtering out the random hits could also be very difficult - make lynx report itself as some variant of MSIE, request the page exactly as it's provided in the URL, random interval between hits - those things together might be very difficult for the spamvertiser to separate a real hits from the bogus ones for billing's sake.
o you'll inevitably get spam, and that spam will contain URL's. Could this be a way to legally DoS a spammer?
I've often considered that, including automatically checking the message headers and providing a free stress-testing service for the originating machine. (Using the last header, written by my mail server, to provide the IP address for the stress-test.) Stress-testing a spammer's Windows 98 machine with an SMTP engine built into the e-mail blaster, or stress-testing a irresponsibly administered open mail relay, it doesn't really matter. One way or another, it's causing a hassle to the people who facilitate all the penis enlargement advertisements in my mailbox.
Of course, if they're spamming from offshore because of loose laws, there's nothing to stop one setting up an account on some unscrupulous ISP like Beijing Telecom...
If I were a religious person, I would pray that Alan Ralsky's wife and children get cancer. Any religious Slashdotters are invited to do so.
The only point you managed to make with your post is that you are an ignorant (racist) fool. If you made at least the slightest effort to curb some of your "character" one might actually be able to see through the crap and moderate the value in it, up a few points.
Why?
You're gonna tell me that places like Malaysia, China and United Arab Emerates aren't third-world shitholes?
Definition: "third world shithole" - noun; place from which I receive spam.
China is a particular problem. A Chinese-born friend told me the reason for it: "it's bad luck not to accept someone's business card".
If you don't want your country on the list, start beating your spammers in the face with rusty camshafts. Otherwise, I have no use for you or your country.
Have an adequate life.
I feel better already.
More to the point, what are American laws going to do to stop the spam I get?
Most of the spam is sent from open relays in shitholes like Brazil and Japan. Most of it points to websites on hosting providers in China and Korea.
You're not gonna tell me that some ulgy fuck like Alan Ralsky isn't gonna go and simply register a company offshore?
His spamming organization can work offshore and hire another company to fulfill the orders in the USA. That way, the spammer is offshore (immune to US laws), and the company delivering the product to the gullible consumer is not doing any spamming.
My tactic is to refuse any SMTP from any third-world country. I don't know anyone in China or Korea. I accept e-mail from only USA, Canada, UK and Israel. Anything else is a third-world country. This tactic cut my spam over 50%.
Finally! The Evil Empire has thought of something truly helpful to do with the 1 trillion dollars of cash.
Well, enough spammers seem to use IIS... Maybe they could "extend" the HTTP protocol to detect whether the referring website URL was received in a spam, and use it to disable the server... :)
Until then, my little script works well enough:
#!/bin/bashI _WILL_DO_THE_SAME_TO_YOUR_WEBLOGS
COUNT=0
while [ $COUNT -lt 2000 ]; do
lynx -dump $1?YOU_FILL_MY_MAILBOX_WITH_UNSOLICITED_CRAP_AND_
let COUNT=COUNT+1
echo $COUNT
done
Note that my website includes a warning about what happens to unsolicited e-mail. Apparently, the "Order Viagra, Diet Pills & more with NO PRESCRIPTION!" people wanted to stress-test their IIS server at Beijing Telecom.
284
Please try the following:The page cannot be displayed
There are too many people accessing the Web site at this time.
* Click the [1]Refresh button, or try again later.
* Open the home page, and then look for links to the information you want.
HTTP 403.9 - Access Forbidden: Too many users are connected
Internet Information Services
Technical Information (for support personnel)
* Background:
This error can occur if the Web server is busy and cannot process your request due to heavy traffic.
* More information:
[2]Microsoft Support
References
1. javascript:location.reload()
2. http://www.microsoft.com/ContentRedirec
Poor spammer. But then again, I'm only fulfilling his wish...
My friend, I come from a 3rd world country and I am probably 10 years older than you. I responded to you because out of the blue, for no reason you included a stupid, ignorant political statement where it had no reason for being.
Absolutely it did. I was touching on the reason why vegetable oil isn't being used in cars. One of the reasons is the "feed people, not cars" nutjobs.
As for you being ten years older than me, well... I dunno. Let me put it to you this way: There is a sliderule sitting on my desk. It's a nice Pickett N3T.
And with a former job, I did travel a little.
The problem of starvation is not a problem of farming, it's a problem of economics. Lots of countries have crappy farmland, but aren't starving, take any mid-east oil producer as an example. The 3rd world economy isn't ruined by too many people; it's ruined by civil wars, and unstable government.With the wonderfully stable governments and highly rational people of the middle east - with Israel as the one lone island of sanity stuck in the middle of that hell - I can't imagine that the picture you paint will be at all rosy the moment the oil runs out.
How much wealth or sustainability will Saudi Arabia have when the oil money runs out? Kuwait? Jordan? Iraq has farmland in the valley, but I doubt enough to feed their people.
They could have an excellent tourism industry, if there weren't so many fanatics running around blowing up innocent civilians in the name of Allah. But since I don't see that happening before the oil runs out, I don't think they'll be building new Marriotts in Tehran anytime soon.
With no GDP and no farmland, how long will the problem last?
You should have used Japan as your example of little arable land supporting a massive population. Japan built itself up after World Wars I and II. They don't use the land, and they have no natural resources like oil to sell. Instead, they studied hard, worked hard, and built an economy. Of course, you can't do that in the Middle East, because too many people are brainwashed by religion and will run around screaming that "The new cellphone factory is only 300 miles from the Sacred Mosque of Karim! The infidels!".
(Note that I have no problem with Islam. I have a problem with *any* religious fanaticism.)
It must be nice to think you're mature and superior because you don't care about the value of human lives lost thousands of miles away, and like to point it out for no reason whatsoever.There was a point. Maybe you should view parent.
BTW Darwinism doesn't apply in this case (since the people born in bad conditions are disadvantaged, not inferior), and you make yourself look like a jerk by bringing it up.I think Darwinism does apply here.
If a seed is carried by the wind from its native climate to elsewhere and that seed happens to be especially hardy, the plant will grow. Maybe even flourish enough for the plant and its progeny to suck 95% of nutrients out of the soil. When the plants die out in that new location, isn't it Darwin at work?
Isn't this the same thing? Oh wait. No. We can't objectify human beings, after all, we're not just an animal which happens to have technology.
People in war ravaged countries aren't starving because they continue to have children in spite of their present conditions, they're starving because the children ALREADY EXISTED before the latest war/famine started. It is the biggest bunch of BS when people say that the problem comes from having too many kids.
Sure. Even without wars, Somalia is overpopulated. The famine exists because the land isn't arable with their prehistoric techniques and arguable not even with the modern techniques like field rotation which they have judiciously decided to ignore despite it being common knowledge in the civilized world.
Ergo, you have famine. The famine exists because the population is too great for the land to support it. This problem didn't appear overnight.
If _you_ have a time machine and see that your job is going to be destroyed in a civil war in 7 years you can choose not to have a child, but people without the time machine can't retroactivly not have kids once the unforseen political/economic disaster happens.Okay. So, Somalia has been starving for at least 15 years that I can remember. How about the three year olds?
No one ever said that Darwin was pretty.
To summarize: you are being an asshole, and don't understand what you're talking about.Must be nice to be 16 years old. The World Is A Special And Wonderful Place. My Parents Are Wrong For Telling Me The I Need To Do My Calculus Homework, Because I'm Going To Be An NBA-Champion Basketball Player, Home-Boy Rap "Artist" And Anime Cartoonist And I'll Fix All The Broken People In Somalia By Hosting Infomercials About The Problem!
Next you're gonna tell me to feel sorry for the people of Bangladesh... yuppers, there's a good place for your future charity to rebuild. The whole country is no more than about 30 feet about sea level, built on the mouth of the mighty and oh-so-beautiful Ganges River. (What's the Ganges River? Two words: India's Sewer.) Why don't you see too many anthills on the beach? Well, the tide comes in every so often...
Nature is ugly. This is just nature taking its course. Grow up.
What does an individual Somialian do if he/she doesn't want to starve? Start killing kids?
Work hard. Get a visa. Come here.
It's like the whole philosophy there is "I can't feed my 5 children, so I'll have another!"
It's not my fault they live in an unarable shithole, it's not my fault they haven't learned any farming or contraceptive techniques from the developed world, and it's not my fault they haven't overthrown their corrupt rulers yet. Hell, it's not even my fault if their religion bans the use of contraceptives.
The smart ones come here. The rest of them can starve with only their own ineptitude to blame. The children? Well, no one ever said that Darwin was pretty.
Sorry, but I've got enough troubles here in the developed "paradise".
McDonalds: Smiles starting at just $.50 per gallon.
Not gonna happen. They don't produce enough waste oil per restaurant to make it worthwhile.
You might start to see a waste hauler become enterprising, invest in some filtration equipment and start selling it, but I think the road tax issues might become too complicated to make it worthwhile for him. In Ontario, Canada, gas is going for about $0.70/L right now; about $0.40/L of that is taxes to pay for silly things like the Canadian Recording Artists Association and the new monument to King Jean Poutine in Shawinigan. (Once upon a time, gas taxes were high but used exclusively to build and maintain roads. It was truly a user-pay system, and Ontario had the best highway system in the world. Then we had a socialist (NDP) government who ran up the debts and decided that it was more important to support dubious lowest-common-denominator causes rather than the infrastructure which made our economy boom.)
Besides, there really aren't all that many diesel cars out there, certainly not up north here. Not only do car buyers usually avoid diesel cars because of noise, vibration and (usually) slow performance, but up here they're a bitch to start in the winter - and that's before you start to add less-than-optimal fuels into the system.
People have been making "Biodesiel" for years now. This is nothing new. A little lye and some vegetable oil is all it takes.
That's not even necessary.
I worked at a McDonalds in high school (about 1991), and one of the maintenance guys had an old (even then!) mid-1970s VW Rabbi (someone chiselled off the T for the fun of it) which was running on used shortening.
Actually, the guy was bright and knew a lot about cars, though he had no formal education. He built a system into an old gas can which rested on a "hot plate" heated by engine coolant. McDonalds filters their oil every day, and on those days on the schedule when it was being replaced, he'd just run it through the McDonalds filtration pump and into the gas cans.
The shortening would thicken, but when he was driving, he'd wait until the engine was warm and the oil was liquid, then throw the valve over to run it off the shortening. The fuel line was a copper tube taped against the lengths of copper plumbing pipe carring the hot coolant to the "hot plate" in the cargo area of the hatchback. Running out of fuel was no big deal - when the engine started to sputter, he'd flip the valve back to diesel off his regular tank, then at the next stop, he'd swap the gas can sitting on the hot plate. The pickup tube was hacked into the cap of a gas can, so the car sucked the oil right out of the gas can.
Riding in that car with him from Ottawa to Toronto (for a Ramones concert) in the dead of winter, I found only two small problems. One, the interior of the car was damned hot because of the hot plate. Two... the car - and I mean *the whole car*, from interior to exhaust - smelled like Chicken McNuggets. Sometimes, Filet-O-Fish.
On the other hand, the fuel was free, it was filtered with McDonalds specially-designed oil-filtation equipment and never seemed to cause him a problem with fuel filters, and my 340-4bbl Duster was getting about 8 miles per gallon... so I envied the utility but declined his offer to trade for my Duster.
What is interesting is that it is still cheaper to buy real desiel than vegetable oil. Where biodesiel has an advantage is in recycling used vegetable oil that is no longer food quality but is with a little work good enough to burn in your car/airplane. Unfortunatly there is not enough of this to make a real dent in the American desiel usage.This is true. Actually, the cost advantage isn't so great, when you figure that your time is worth something. Rather than scouting out restaurant dumpsters (which are pretty unpleasant places), you could be doing something more fun like getting fellatio or posting to Slashdot.
In his case, though, it was win-win since he was already gonna smell like McNuggets at the end of the day.
On the other hand, virgin vegetable oil could be a highly viable fuel. But the problem is that the very same people who jump up and down and scream about how nasty petroleum is, also jump up and down and scream about how nasty genetically modified corn and soy (which is the only way to make this economically viable) is. The best line I've ever heard came from a Greenpeace activist driving a sick little moped (blue clouds of poorly-tuned two-stroke, measurably more noxious than the exhaust from any well-tuned land-yacht SUV that he also complained about) screaming about how we can't feed cars while people are starving in Somalia. (If Somalis don't want to starve, they should have less children. Sorry, but it's not my problem.)
Why hit the URL's when they're sent? Set it up to hit all of them at a specific time in the day. Set up the script on many machines. Impulse functions are funny.
Well, if someone who is a better programmer than me can write a program to allow a distributed log-filling, we could set up a website where one merely complains about a spam, then thousands of machines go to work on filling that site's logs with crap.
Of course, to have an account to be able to use such a service, one would have to be running the client and therefore participating in the system.
The biggest problem would remain the possibility that someone might enter an URL belonging to a non-spammer's website.
As for the spammers themselves... well, they'd have to be warned any place where e-mail addresses participating in such a system are published. If they cannot read, that's our problem.
Essentially the high voltage of the ESD (ESD like when you shock yourself on a doorknob is very high voltage, it's just very low current) is destructive to the transistor junctions, but it usually doesn't cause immediate complete failure. A few days, months, or even years down the road, the junction will prematurely break down, having had a shortened lifespan because of the ESD damage.
Indeed.
Memory chips - and most other components within any computer less than fifteen years old - use CMOS logic. CMOS stands for "Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor", which essentially means that they're full of MOSFETs ("Metal Oxide Semiconductor Field Effect Transistor"). This includes almost all processors, support logic, etc. In fact, the only exception which comes to mind is the really old computers which had the big banks of 74xx-series TTL logic all over the place, like in an XT. But keep in mind that the processor itself - and many other components - will be CMOS.
The neat thing about Field Effect Transistors is that the electric field created by applying a gate voltage turns on the source-drain circuit. There is essentially no current required to drive the gate. The fact that there is theoretically no gate current means that you can do things like power 20 million transistors off a single 200W AT power supply, or build a wristwatch which runs for 5 years off the same tiny little battery.
The "field effect" is governed by the inverse square law. As you double the distance, you need 4 times the voltage to achieve the same field inside the source-drain junction. Naturally, in order to be able to work at the low voltages inside a computer, the distance therefore must be tiny.
This tiny distance is filled with a layer of what is, essentially, glass. And it's so thin that it can have a hole blasted through it by 30 volts.
Now, air doesn't ionize until about 3kV per millimeter. That means, to jump a 1mm gap, you need about 3,000 volts, which you perceive as a tiny static electric spark.
You will never see, nor feel, a 30V static electric charge. You can build it up just by sitting in your chair. And that's enough to blow a MOSFET transistor.
If a RAM chip has a million MOSFETs (modern ones have a lot more!) and you blow one of them, your chip is still well over 99.999% fine... until you try to read back data from the address with the blown MOSFET. And then you get one bit of garbage.
The data in RAM is corrupt. What if it's executable? Does the machine crash? Probably. What if it's a JPG? Maybe one pixel on that 1024x768 pr0n image you downloaded is one shade of skin-tone different than it should be.
A lot of ESD failures show up as intermittent crashes and other software problems. Before you reinstall your operating system because it's getting crufty, consider your hardware... well, unless you're running Windows.
ALWAYS wear a wrist strap. It's a bummer, but them's the dice.
I like to have fun with this one. Make sure that you take out any "serial numbers" which might be embedded in the link. Call as many dynamic scripts on the page as you can.
#!/bin/bashCOUNT=0
while [ $COUNT -lt 2000 ]; do
lynx -dump $1?YOU_FILL_MY_MAILBOX_WITH_UNSOLICITED_CRAP_AND_
let COUNT=COUNT+1
echo $COUNT
done
Okay, it's ugly. And who knows if they actually check their weblogs? But it makes me feel better.
Besides, they were warned on my webpage, which outlines all the policies with regard to sending e-mail to my domain.
A really neat extension would be to have a script which parses the e-mail for links, de-fluffs them (to remove redirects through Yahoo and obfuscators like that) and automatically hits each and every one of the URLs given... but I haven't gotten around to it yet.
Explode on contact?
Indeed!
And this article talks about how Canadian radio is lame. Why is it lame?
Canadian radio is lame because the Canadian government has protectionist policies which force Canadian radio and TV stations to air 40% Canadian content. This is, of course, because we don't want to lose Canadian music because of all those evil American musicians brainwashing our kids...
Unless I'm blind and missed it, the article didn't even mention Canadian content laws.
The problem is that there simply aren't enough musicians in Canada who are capable of going head to head with the products of a very similar culture, 10x the size, next door.
The net effect is that, to achieve their Canadian content requirements, Canadian broadcasters have to play the same songs over and over and over. And then there are the marginal acts which really aren't good enough for the prime time but are being played anyway... The Tragically Hip are a good example.
If any American wonders what radio sounds like when you start letting pseudo-socialists control your airwaves, hit Kazaa and grab the Tragically Hip's Bobcaygeon. I'm a classic rock fan. The classic rock station in Toronto, Q107, wants to play Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix. And that's what I want to listen to. But they're forced to play Bobcaygeon because of draconian laws which try to make me like bad music.
Canadian artists can sink or swim on their own. Alanis Morrissette, Burton Cummings and the Guess Who, Celine Dion, Shania Twain have all made it big in the US. Why? Because of Canadian government protectionism? No... because they're talented.
Beyond that and without protectionism (not to mention record company pressure, but we'll leave that for another time), radio stations should be playing what the broadest cross-sections of their audiences like. Of course that will result in more listeners and therefore more ad revenues. It's in the stations' interests.
The Tragically Hip should be working at the Wendys on Division Street in Kingston. The fact that my government has cost broadcasters their audiences weakens the music industry on a whole, disgusted consumers, and wasted billions of tax dollars rescuing struggling "artists" from the hell of working day-jobs in fast food while honing their skills playing bars at night.
"Paying your dues" is apparently too inhumane for the Canadian government to allow. Paying my taxes makes me want to see my government overthrown.
Pressing the Submit button never got a response, so I was getting frustrated. Sorry everyone.
That would have been right around 2 years before my birth...
How about Gaston Lagaffe (sample comic strip included) which premiered in 1957?
Of course, computers only entered the picture around about 1977 when the earliest personal computers started to appear in offices... but before that, there was plenty of other hardware hacking. Photocopiers, cars, airplane engines, perpetual motion machines...