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User: Technician

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  1. Re:American car companies... on Microsoft Considered Renaming Internet Explorer To Escape Its Reputation · · Score: 2

    I still look over parking lots to find cars with rust, peeling paint, etc as when I buy a car, I don't want it to look like a 10 year old junker in 5 years. I don't like the trend but some forigen cars are haveing American car paint jobs with peeling clear coat and badly oxidized paint. My 12 year old Toyota has better paint and is not garrage parked.

  2. Re:A few notes on the construction of the fuel on TEPCO: Nearly All Nuclear Fuel Melted At Fukushima No. 3 Reactor · · Score: 1

    The media had a hayday trying to cover an event in deep coverup. What they reported revealed volumes.

    They reported the Hydrogen Explosion. This was the first indicator to the public a major event happened. What the media does not know.

    1 The fuel pellets are held in rods made of Zirconium. This is because it is transparant to the reaction and does not slow the reaction so it can be controlled by control rods.

    2 Zirconium is flamable, even in water. It burns even better in water than in air. It breaks down water to use the Oxygen.

    3 There was a LOT of hydrogen produced in a short time to fill the containment building with an explosive Hydrogen air mix. There are other ways to generate Hydrogen, but not in huge quanities.

    When the Hydrogen explosion removed the containment, they were quick to point out this was not a Russian style steam explosion, but a Hydrogen explosion. I suspected at that time, they had burned the fuel rod structures in water. I suspected the fuel pellets were quite hot too.

  3. Re:Drivers not included. on Hack an Oscilloscope, Get a DMCA Take-Down Notice From Tektronix · · Score: 1

    I bought a communications module for it. I bought it to save screenshots. See the problem? The software package can remotely save and recall settings for automated testing, do FFT, etc. I don't need that. Would not like to have to by the Rolls to use a spare tire for my econnobox. Would you pay $400 for an app to save a screenshot from your scope that should have been shipped with the communications module? No thanks. I don't do automated testing. Not needed.

    Not realated to the scope, I bought a MP3 player. The software to transfer songs to it is NOT and add on package 4X the price of the player.

  4. Re:Now's a Good to monitor access on Alleged Massive Account and Password Seizure By Russian Group · · Score: 1

    Most people with Gmail accounts are not familiar with the "Last Activity" on the lower right. Clicking "Details" will bring up a list of the recent IP addresses that accessed the account. Unless someone logs in and changes your password, you can monitor for unauthorised account access by checking the location and address of recent logins. I monitor my account. Some people would have no clue someone is regularly logging in to capture info. It even shows when two are logged in at the same time. Try it. Log in at work, and lock the screen. Go home and log in again. It will show the two as logged in.

  5. Re:Drivers not included. on Hack an Oscilloscope, Get a DMCA Take-Down Notice From Tektronix · · Score: 1

    I would have been happy with a basic image capture from RS-232, but to get the funciton, you had to buy the software package at 4X the cost of the hardware module. I did not need all the other fancy functions in the software. It was a nice package but for electronics troubleshooting, I didn't need the functionality for the price. For the price of the software, I could buy some very nice Fluke DVMs instead.

  6. Drivers not included. on Hack an Oscilloscope, Get a DMCA Take-Down Notice From Tektronix · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This is unfortunately an old practice that has been going on for decades.

    I bought a US made digital scope over a decade ago the TDS220. With it I bought the communications module providing serial RS232, Parallel centronics, and HPGIB interfaces. With it I could connect an HP Laser printer, or Epson Dot Matrix printer and produce hard copies with a limited library of printers. Ths goal was to print to my PC. Then I found out that capibility was bundled in an expensive software package which was extra. Due to my low volume, I could not justify the expense, so to post documentation online, I used an HP 1100 laser printer and a Cannon flatbed scanner.

    Tecktronics did not offer a simple driver just to capture the image on a PC.

    Needless to say, that was the last Tektronics scope I purchased. Any future purchases would include a built in USB interface, with nessarry software as part of the TCO when shopping. I won't be burned twice by the batteries not included sales games.

    As a scope, the scope works fine as long as you don't want a screenshot directly transferred to a PC. For what I paid to obtain the communications module without any communicaitons software was a huge letdown. The printer module was only a little cheaper. Without the software, that is all this module can be used for. Let the buyer beware.

    If you want to buy Made in America, the Americans need to knock off selling cripple ware. It is a bad model and is a huge customer turn off.

  7. Re:This can not work with most video on Extracting Audio From Visual Information · · Score: 1

    This works with very high framerate video. Normal video has way too low of a frame rate to capture vibrations in the (phone company defined) band of 300 HZ to 3000 HZ. At normal vidoe rates of about 24-50 FPS, the sample rate is below the lower fundemental frequency of voice.

  8. Re:WebRTC, Asterisk/FreeSwitch and a JS SIP client on Ask Slashdot: Bulletproof Video Conferencing For Alzheimers Home? · · Score: 1

    If you don't want to set up and maintain Asterisk in house, there are many SIP servers with Free SIP accounts. Many include free voice mail. One example includes ippi.com. If the solution is in the US, Google Talk with Gmail works and includes video like Skype, but can be tied to Google Voice so clients can get a free phone number and place free calls to phones (voice only), SMS, and voice to text email for missed calls. If residents can log into their own Gmail account, this may be a solution.

  9. Re:clean drinking water on Harvesting Energy From Humidity · · Score: 1

    With electrolisis and a fuel cell, only the gas carried contaminates could possibly contaminate the drinking water. For quanity and qualityproduced, I'll take the solar solution. The distances traveled and the amount produced are both quite small. In the solar solution, the volume would be much greater and due to the recombining of gasses, much less likely to transport pathagens.

  10. Re:Is this news? on Insurance Claims Reveal Hidden Electronic Damage From Geomagnetic Storms · · Score: 1

    Charged particles are not magnetic. The electric current caused by the electric current creates a magnetic field. Basic electrical magnetic property. There is a magnetic field because there is an electric current traveling through the atmosphere which does impose an electric charge on suspended insulated objects in addition to the induced electric current in conductors on and in the ground.

    The amount of induced current is directly related to the rate of flux change producing an AC current provided one end of the conductor is grounded. At the low currents and large area of very long lines, this AC component is relatively low in relation to the DC current brought in at the poles seperated by our earth's magnetic field. A static magnetic field does not induce a current. A steady DC current does build high currents in long suspended conductors.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...

    Even high voltage transmission lines are now protected by adding a resistor to the center tap of a 3 phase transformer to ground to limit induced current. The transformers already MUST have a ground refrence already due to the DC charging of the lines that would happen if there were no ground. This is why transmission lines never use Delta transformer to Delta transformer. One or both ends of a transmission line have a substation with a Y connection with the center tap grounded.

    I know of one BPA line that is Delta to Delta, but in addition to this there is a 3 phase Y transformer to nowhere that only porvides the required ground for the line.

    Grounding both ends with a low impedance ground is good for lightning strike protection, but bad in a geomagnetic storm. Ungrounded is bad for line charging and lightning protection. UTP network cable is ungrounded at both ends and are subject to high voltage charging in short lengths.
    http://www.solarsystemcentral....

  11. Re:Is this news? on Insurance Claims Reveal Hidden Electronic Damage From Geomagnetic Storms · · Score: 2

    The elevated lines between buildings are rarely protected from a build up of a static charge as routers and bridges were not built with this in mind. On the physical layer, both ends of the wire are terminated into an isolation transformer with no discharge path to ground. This is an installation design fault against the guy that designed the installation. Lightning protection is often a gas discharge tube for a lower breakdown voltage. A high current discharge through a protection device can produce a relatively high ESD pulse through the transformer into the tranciever chip resulting in corrupt data to failures. A link between buildings must include a bleed discharge path to prevent the build up of voltage on the wire, or a shielded wire with grounded shield should be used.

    Engineers design systems. A good technician can make them work.

  12. Time to apply science on Insurance Claims Reveal Hidden Electronic Damage From Geomagnetic Storms · · Score: 4, Informative

    Time to apply science to the problem. What is known, what values are involved, and what breaks down.

    Long distance transmission lines have two problems when there is a relatively high atmospheric current. They are long conductors feeding transformers that are not designed to shunt large components of DC resulting in core saturation and high current. This is measurable. The first effect noticed was by the railroad when telegraph relays activated and sometimes burned out.

    The voltage induced current has two components. 1 Some current was due to the current directly into the long wire. 2 Some current was due to ground potential changing due to high current in the ground.

    How to protect? For ground potential issues, simple pairs of wires provide high common mode rejection. This is common with telephone circuits as protection from induced hum and noise from a noisy electrical environment. Overvoltage protection in the form of lightning arresters is the second protection. Most phone loops are relatively short reducing the ground voltage gradient problem to non existant levels. Long distance hops are by Microwave Relay or Fiber Optic, both providing protection from ground gradients and long pick up paths.

    Shrink the scale to inside a home by comparison. All internal house wireing is orders of magnatude shorter than transmission lines, CATV, and phone lines. Small DC capible antennas result in very low current if exposed. The home is generally protected by gutters on the eves, mildly conductive building materials such as wood, brick, etc that are not insulated to very low leakage at high voltages such as the insulatin on transmission lines. Net result is the very small currents are shunted by the building itself. Go up on the roof during a geo storm and see if you have any static electricity issues. Probably not.

    For homeowners, this is a non issue due to the lack of an effective gathering surface properly insulated to collect enough current to cause any damage. The collector is too small and the leakage path to ground is too high.

  13. Re:verizon, comcast? on Senator Al Franken Accuses AT&T of "Skirting" Net Neutrality Rules · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I was stuck on Comcast when I upgraded from Dialup. Due to the games with non working services, I jumped ship as soon as Qwest offered DSL. Skype, VOIP via SIP, Google Voice/Talk, etc all working fine. I feel for those without the option. Comcast has been trying to win me back, but I'll take the slower DSL speed for everything working properly anyday.

  14. Re:No. on Ode To Sound Blaster: Are Discrete Audio Cards Still Worth the Investment? · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Many of the earlier SB cards were known for a fixed clock, regardless of what the software was set for. This limited clock rate was the issue of many complaints of those looking for full 20-20K without artifacts. Once this reputation was cast, the line was considered as consumer grade and not better. Same applied to bit depth. The driver would accept many settings beyond the 16 bit DAC. Other cards had higher clocks and bits, and testing for the card performance showed the true limits.

    Link below shows some of the real testing on this card beyond just golden ears. Look at the frequency output of noise and note what is NOT reproduced. Then scroll down a look at the extended frequency response of the cards in the test. SB hit a wall way before the competition.

    http://www.clarisonus.com/Rese...

  15. D/A is good enoug, but.. on Ode To Sound Blaster: Are Discrete Audio Cards Still Worth the Investment? · · Score: 1

    Onboard D/A for WAV, MP3, Movies, etc are generally good enough if the noise level is low enough. The biggest difference is in the on board synth. Playing games uses MIDI and the sound card produces the sounds. There are 2 versions. Hardware and software.

    Hardware had an on board synth. It can be as simple as an 8 bit video game or as complex as full wavetable sampled sounds. An onboard hardware synth will sound the same on Linux or Windows. If the wavetable synth is XG compatible or similar, the sound is great. If a cheap synth is used it will sound like a casio entry level keyboard or 8 bit videogame.

    Some cards use soft synth's with soundfonts. These can be very good sounding with inexpensive hardware as the synth runs in the OS and just sends the bitstream to the card for repoduction. This uses some system resources and requires installing the proper driver to include the synth and soundfont. This can mean great game sound in WIndows, but no sound or missing sound in Linux for games, unless you load a soft synth on Linux, install a soundfont, and enable it through Jack. While the combo does sound great, it is a resource drain.

    Now, which is better? Mixed bag here. Some on board sound come in either variety. Same with add on boards.

  16. Re:Collision unlikely on Police Recording Confirms NYPD Flew At a Drone and Never Feared Crashing · · Score: 1

    A crash is almost not possible unless the drone is way above the chopper and gets pulled down in the wash. A chopper chasing a drone will catch it in the down draft and get tossed under it. The police chopper was in no real danger if they had a visual on it.

  17. Re: Land of the fee on TSA Prohibits Taking Discharged Electronic Devices Onto Planes · · Score: 1

    I second that on the courts. I had to drop off a document for a child case. I stopped at the metal detector and told security I was here to drop of a document, not visit offices, so I had not emptied my pockets. Please call the office of ... to come pick up the document. They objected. I said they can scan the manilla envelope. They complied. I made it clear I had no intention of wasting time for a drop off. It would be much faster for them to step out of the office and accept the delivery.

  18. Re:You know ... on Florida Man Faces $48k Fine For Jamming Drivers' Cellphones · · Score: 1

    The problem was jemming the cell tower. The regular denial of service was noticed and investigated. Towers service an area beyond the street.

  19. Re:Most qualified and motivated candidates? on Yahoo's Diversity Record Is Almost As Bad As Google's · · Score: 1

    In much of private industry, training and certifications do come first. I was recruited from my ISCET score by one company. They did not know my Age, Race, Gender, Faith, or Sexual Orientation. The knew I could be proficient in the position.

  20. Re:Lack of diversity on Yahoo's Diversity Record Is Almost As Bad As Google's · · Score: 1

    They would probably hire them if they could solve the router problem. Most parrots I've met have a better voice than some overseas call centers I've had on the phone, but theire technical knowlege seems to be a little limited. The good news is they would work for crackers.

  21. Re:Sensationalist summary on Yahoo's Diversity Record Is Almost As Bad As Google's · · Score: 1

    Due to Affirmative Action and trying to meet quotas, this reverse discrimination is common.

  22. Re:Most qualified and motivated candidates? on Yahoo's Diversity Record Is Almost As Bad As Google's · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Having been a victim of Affirmitive Action by the US Government, I have seen this first hand.

    In the 1980's, there were 2 parts to the BPA (Bonniville Power Administration) apprenticeship program.

    1 Testing. Skills, aptitude, physical, etc. Normal scoring
    2 Score adjustment on Protected Status. Counts for almost 30%

    In the 1980's, Millitary service was not a score booster. Scored top in #1. Scored 4th after step 2. Did not apply for any other government position due to chilling effects.

    Private industry scores on just #1 unless forced by government pressure for tax breaks or other reasons. Lately there has been lots of pressure by the US Government to "Make it Right"

    Due to my Race, Religiion, Gender, Sexual Orientation, & Age, I have a poor chance. Only recently Vetran status is the bright spot on my Resume. With the recent issues with BPA HR, I would have a chance at getting hired if in addition to Vetran status, I was a protected minority, femaie, gay, muslum, etc. In the meantime, I'm in the majority with slimming chances at economic recovery.

  23. Re:What the 500 Watts draw rating means on Cable Boxes Are the 2nd Biggest Energy Users In Many Homes · · Score: 5, Informative

    Most of the boxes that have a 500 Watt listing on the box is the maximum combined power of the box with a television plugged into it. Those boxes generally go into standby when the TV is turned off.

    This is the same way Light Dimmers are rated. A 600 Watt dimmer does not consume 600 Watts, but can handle a 600 Watt chandilier with 6 100 Watt bulbs.

    Check the back of the box. Does it include a place to plug in the TV?

  24. Re:My experience driving a Prius on Are US Hybrid Sales Peaking Already? · · Score: 1

    I second the stuck in traffic milage. Unless heat prevents it, turn off the AC, and rolld down windows. It will literally idle for an entire weekend.

    I know this because I put an inverter in mine and used it during an ice storm to power the fridge, TV, some lights, and the blower on the fireplace insert. The entire weekend used about 1/4 tank of gas.

    Prius owners are not the ones running out of gas on the freeway in a backup, unless they run the AC.

  25. Re:I can't buy one on Are US Hybrid Sales Peaking Already? · · Score: 2

    My 2002 had a pack replaced last fall at 170,000 miles. Two weeks later, a semi changed lanes into it. I kept the new battery and put it into a 2003 with 135,000 miles on it. Fully expect to get another 170K on it.

    What impressed me most was the reliability. At 170K miles the car still had over 50% of the original brake pads, all the original bulbs still work, etc. Changed the plugs at 120K Miles. Changed the 12 V battery 3 times. and regular oil and tire changes. Nothing broke on it in normal wear and tear.

    Never had a car with that longevity before.

    Saved on the Hybrid battery replacement by purchasing a new one online and changing it my self. Plenty of info online on chainging it, complete with safety info. If you change batteries in a 3-50KW UPS, you should have no problem changing out the pack.