Everybody talks about building this kind of thing, but nobody talks about what it might take to MANTAIN it.
Structures of any type do not survive any signifigant length of time without maintenance. Large projects in particular often require more resources in maintanence than in construction, and if the construction takes any length of time at all, then maintenance costs start on the parts of the structure that are complete.
Worse yet, this would be a structure that you would have to maintain. Consider what would happen if this puppy precessed a little and fell over (excuse me, deorbited...) I wouldn't want to be anywhere near it, and in this case "near" is a pretty big place.
Yeah, but how do you leave it on the sidewalk?
on
The Ultimate Bike
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· Score: 1
"Palm Pilot = geek stuff = pawnable = another day I can get my ass lit, and the rest of this stuff has to be worth something..." I can hear it running through their heads right now.
How do you chain this stuff up, or does it remove and go with you? I'd be scared to leave this puppy locked in front of the building. It has enough cool looking stuff on it, they would probably take bike rack and all.
I've a bottle of high-grade silicone oil down in the lab. Provided I can get a macroscopic quantity of nanotubes without spending a month's rent, I propose to mix them together and try it out as a heatsink paste.
I wonder though, since the energy is carried as a vibration, whether there will be any net gain in heat transfer with the tubes in a random orientation. Maybe I should make a regular carbon control at the same time.
Very interesting. When I was involved last, the intel community was moaning about all the ways speech recognition could be fooled by simple microprocessor-based electronics. I wonder if there is a way around this now?
The location data is always there, you have a high labor factor on that at the current time (you have to have a person go looking for that ESN in the logs...) but I have no doubts that this is already being automated. I suspect the next step is automation and presentation of triangulation data. The information is all there, and required by cell systems to work handoff, so it's just a matter of time.
and a Kotex is something you found in your mother's purse when you were little.
Okay, so the thing originally shows up as a Quicktime plug-in. As long as the source is open we can fix that. I suspect the media player version will be released a day later.
K-mart, Wall-mart, Fred Meyers, who gives a rip? If you had any smarts, you'd be shopping elsewhere anyways.
Let large chain stores cater to the "Marketingly Correct"(tm). These businesses are just scared that they will be lawyered into a large settlement, or that they might miss a 0.25 percent upswing in market share.
I buy things from my friends. Not all of them are small companies or individuals, either. I make a concious effort to buy as much of my goods and services as possible from people who live where I do. I want my money to go into the pockets of people around me, and I want them to know that I am where it came from. I buy groceries from stores that use local distribution companies. I buy clothes from locally owned shops. I buy petrol from the corner station.
This is not absolute, and never will be. For example, Visa has me over a barrel, and on and on. But I try. Not only that, but there is a huge advantage to it as well: Since I started this my quality of life has gone up measurably. People know my name, remember me for giving them business, and most importantly, what I buy and live with is no longer rock bottom crap. You have no idea how much better items and services are, even when they are just a little above the worst.
Let anybody who can get here stay here. Give them a social security number, and start collecting taxes from them. You are only eligible for welfare after you have been here for three years. Eliminate minimum wage laws. Let competition rule.
I don't care where they came from. I want them all to be Americans. I want the bright ones. I want the dumb ones. I want them all to look at people better than themselves, and think "I can get there..."
This situation holds no anxiety for me. I might have to learn a different language, get used to co-workers who have a different culture. None of this changes the fact that if I am good at what I do then I will be employed. If I am not, then I won't be.
Oh, well, sorry for the fantasy, folks. I have a touch of the Reganomics. I will take my Prozac now...
The question is this: Do you believe everything you read on the internet? Does law enforcement?
Police and prosecutors are perhaps not the best judges of what goes on on-line, and without training law enforcement may not have a clue.
I suppose a number of folks could entertain themselves by giving the authorities exactly what they want. Whether this information is true or not is entirely up to the individuals making the traffic. Think of it as the world's biggest fire alarm system, but with lots more possibilities, and you can pull the annunciator on the far side of town from the comfort of your home.
I also predict the market for fake cards will go through the roof, and Internet cafe owners will make a good "second story" income by collecting to ensure that they mispell "Bjorn" as "Sven".
I think that they will find out about anonymous cell phones as well. Every criminal knows that all cell phones are anonymous. After all, nobody saw you take it out of that woman's purse.
In private business, we would call this a "request for proposal", essentially "name your own bounty". In the public model, various government agencies (ARPA? DARPA? Is "Defense" in or out of fashion?) make "technology transfer requests", usually with a not-to-exceed amount. They don't mind if you take the whole bounty, but they might want to deal with someone who would do it for less.
The secrecy thing is handled in various ways, although the gov wants to know who knows their secrets (can't say I blame them), and private industry usually limits the distribution of the RFP to their friends.
What I really want to see is a bounty on users. We can bring back the ears...
As mentioned elsewhere, ASCII text files are the best way of dealing with long term storage of email.
The other necessary item is the fastest file content search utility you can lay hands on.
Indices, tables of contents, folders, catagories, catalogs, and directories will always have misfiles after a certain period of time, and besides, who wants to categorise all that mail anyway? Dump it into a few (time-based?) directories and simply search for things when you need them.
Pirates do not care. Somebody will whip the snot out of this, somehow. It doesn't matter that they are much brighter than the average bear, because the average bear is bright enough to copy what the pirate does. After which, of course, the book contents are copied to offline storage (CD-ROM) and stored on the bookshelf next to "Napster's Greatest Hits", volumes one through fifty-six.
When are the content producers going to learn? Publishers take them for a financial ride every bleeding day, and they have to sit there and take it. Or do they?
What if a bunch of geek types (like maybe open source folks?) make it a point to create new compensation methods for the content providers (writers, artists, etc.) and then educate them on the advantages (less publishing lead time, more money) and disadvantages (more risk, distribution blocking, etc.) of these methods?
Publishers might scream and rant. Most certainly they would blockade distribution through regular channels. They would probably even pay someone to crack whatever compensation scheme was being used, at least for the first few times, just to be able to say "see, it doesn't work..."
The above may be overcome with sufficient work. Sooner or later, the content providers will realise that they deserve a larger piece of the pie, and rightfully so.
on the traffic analysis possibilities. Folks walking around with transmitters that have pre-encoded numbers, and freely broadcast them. If this ever gets popular, I can see a number of products that suggest themselves.
Of course, once you start using Bluetooth on a regular basis then your usage patterns can be established, and simply turning all the transmitters off can be viewed as a suspicious act, pinpointing times and locations that bear further investigation. To this end, I figure there might be some use for a Bluetooth emulator, complete with changable ID numbers, that sits around your office and makes traffic for you while you are out;-).
I figure these are going to be expensive, and I will make sure they arrive in a plain brown wrapper.
I understand entirely. But getting those initial positions, times, and accelerations must be quite a task.
I have spent much time aiming and sweeping microwaves and lasers, and trying to whack a four inch spot four hundred plus miles away doesn't sound easy. It's hard enough to nail a stationary two meter dish fifty miles away.
I suppose that you could use almost stationary tracking near the equator, and then just wait for it to come around again. Signal and signature extraction must be a real pain.
"The U.S. Space Command is tracking about 9,000 orbiting manufactured objects four inches across or larger." {italics mine -jb}
Uhm, if this is true, exactly how do they do this? LEO is four hundred miles away, and Clarke orbit much higher up. Granted, you won't have much in the way of atmospheric fade (maybe fifty miles worth including both ways) whatever the media (RADAR, LIDAR, etc.) and the background is somewhat predictable, but this has got to be some kind of record.
I wonder if there are any spares for Iriduim lying around. Given the unique nature of the beast, there must be some parts that will never be used again. They could go on the wall next to the retrieved tank...
Enough support has come up locally that I will be having a party on Sunday (Anchorage, AK, sorry...)and giving away as many tomes as possible. The list will be posted after that.
Fear not, there are not a lot of techies here, and the list is fairly obtuse (biomed. engineering, electronics, medical, information/computer science, mathematics, engineering, alternative structure/energy).
The first time I saw that Indian Jones movie, it took me back to a hole-in-the-road village in the midwest, on the day the good townspeople decided to "purify" the school and library bookshelves. That was 1971.
"Objects in mirror are closer than they appear..."
The bleeding bookstores (three different owners) in my neck of the woods will not take textbooks (deals with the local U) or technical books of any kind. The answer I get is that they just don't move, and turnover is what makes bookstore owners liquid.
When I gave them the list (750 books long) the bookstore droids all had the same lament: "You don't have any fiction? No self-help?" One of them has relabeled ALL of thier non-fiction section as "Health and Arts"
My available space is now needed for people, so storage is no longer an option. I have given away as many as I can (not a lot of geeks here). I suppose I will shudder when I toss my volumes of Knuth into the woodstove.
I turned a four meter solid aluminum (it came split in quarters) Sat dish into a gazebo roof. Looked pretty good, and the hole for the feedhorn just fit the vent decoration.
I gave another one (three meter) away to a friend, who sunk it face-up in the back yard, filled it with water, installed a pump and made a fountain out of it.
Smaller dishes set on concrete blocks make pretty good livestock feeders
As far as the log thing goes, exactly so, although when figuring some types of search time the factor of log 2 vs. log 10 is a constant offset. It was the understanding of the logarithm idea that was missing from most of those applying.
The point though, is that you read the book, got instructed, THOUGHT ABOUT IT, and remembered it.
You have no idea how many of your concurrent CS students will never even recognize "Dijkstra" as a person's name, rather than random characters.
The difference, in my opinion, is not so much the school, but the individual. Schools only provide an opportunity to think and learn. Some people take advantage of them, and some people don't.
Math, logic, writing. Art classes help, not only from a "other forms of information" perspective, but also stress relief. Check the history of what you are studying. You've never felt doomed until you've just repeated a mistake that was nailed down fifty years ago.
That said, I cannot count the number of resumes that I have seen from "computer science" majors. Most of them cannot reason, very few of them can write or do basic research, almost none of them understand the relevant math behind the technology they pretend to study.
Right about now, a bunch of you out there are getting geared up for "short X-ray temperature flame mode". Please, hear me out. I have no degree in any subject, yet I found it necessary to learn the math, and do the reasoning simply in order to be able to do a good job.
Here's an example: I once asked a bunch of job candidates this question: If it takes two seconds to find an entry in a sorted array, how long will it take if the list is ten times the size it presently is? Out of fifty-six, one of them got it right. Most of them didn't even know what log(n) means. The most common answers were "ten times as long" and "the same". Close third was "does it matter, just get a faster computer..." Mind you, this is from people who claim to have degrees in this stuff.
As a consultant and engineer, I have the onus to make sure that whatever I recommend or build will work, safely and to the customer's satisfaction. This is just plain business. Just one good hit on your E&O insurance can wipe you out but good.
The industry is full of folks who would otherwise be used car salesman or shoe clerks attempting to cash in on the "technology boom" that USA Today keeps telling them about.
"Computer science is to science as plumbing is to hydrodynamics". I am not sure who first put this forward, but it is most certainly true. There is science in computing, but the main body of knowledge is really engineering. Either way, engineering or science, to qualify as either one requires a firm grasp of the math. If you can't qauntify it, it's an opinion. Working in this field is more than just sorting through a stack of vendor's lit. and going to management lunches. Some of us actually have to make the damn things go.
In the future I will be wearing a long duster coat and sitting at the back table of Roscoe's cafe, drinking coffee all night long, waiting for those dinks who need textbooks to walk in and pay the man.
And while I'm at it, since I don't have to be restricted by those niceties of business law and all of that, I might decide to take aim at the competition. I'm probably not going to do it with the yellow pages. After all, this is my turf, and that's my money they're raking in...
Geographic information systems are all pretty much based on a gui/graphics front end (most of which were X), a middle ware, and a relational database. ESRI's ARC/INFO, and the open source GRASS come to mind. Both established in the late eighties, and indeed, were not considered terribly high tech.
Slashdot Mirror
Or possibly a car wash. NASA execs could stand on the corner holding signs...
Structures of any type do not survive any signifigant length of time without maintenance. Large projects in particular often require more resources in maintanence than in construction, and if the construction takes any length of time at all, then maintenance costs start on the parts of the structure that are complete.
Worse yet, this would be a structure that you would have to maintain. Consider what would happen if this puppy precessed a little and fell over (excuse me, deorbited...) I wouldn't want to be anywhere near it, and in this case "near" is a pretty big place.
How do you chain this stuff up, or does it remove and go with you? I'd be scared to leave this puppy locked in front of the building. It has enough cool looking stuff on it, they would probably take bike rack and all.
I wonder though, since the energy is carried as a vibration, whether there will be any net gain in heat transfer with the tubes in a random orientation. Maybe I should make a regular carbon control at the same time.
The location data is always there, you have a high labor factor on that at the current time (you have to have a person go looking for that ESN in the logs...) but I have no doubts that this is already being automated. I suspect the next step is automation and presentation of triangulation data. The information is all there, and required by cell systems to work handoff, so it's just a matter of time.
Okay, so the thing originally shows up as a Quicktime plug-in. As long as the source is open we can fix that. I suspect the media player version will be released a day later.
Let large chain stores cater to the "Marketingly Correct"(tm). These businesses are just scared that they will be lawyered into a large settlement, or that they might miss a 0.25 percent upswing in market share.
I buy things from my friends. Not all of them are small companies or individuals, either. I make a concious effort to buy as much of my goods and services as possible from people who live where I do. I want my money to go into the pockets of people around me, and I want them to know that I am where it came from. I buy groceries from stores that use local distribution companies. I buy clothes from locally owned shops. I buy petrol from the corner station.
This is not absolute, and never will be. For example, Visa has me over a barrel, and on and on. But I try. Not only that, but there is a huge advantage to it as well: Since I started this my quality of life has gone up measurably. People know my name, remember me for giving them business, and most importantly, what I buy and live with is no longer rock bottom crap. You have no idea how much better items and services are, even when they are just a little above the worst.
I wonder what they are going to use the old accelerator structure for?
Let anybody who can get here stay here. Give them a social security number, and start collecting taxes from them. You are only eligible for welfare after you have been here for three years. Eliminate minimum wage laws. Let competition rule.
I don't care where they came from. I want them all to be Americans. I want the bright ones. I want the dumb ones. I want them all to look at people better than themselves, and think "I can get there..."
This situation holds no anxiety for me. I might have to learn a different language, get used to co-workers who have a different culture. None of this changes the fact that if I am good at what I do then I will be employed. If I am not, then I won't be.
Oh, well, sorry for the fantasy, folks. I have a touch of the Reganomics. I will take my Prozac now...
The question is this: Do you believe everything you read on the internet? Does law enforcement?
Police and prosecutors are perhaps not the best judges of what goes on on-line, and without training law enforcement may not have a clue.
I suppose a number of folks could entertain themselves by giving the authorities exactly what they want. Whether this information is true or not is entirely up to the individuals making the traffic. Think of it as the world's biggest fire alarm system, but with lots more possibilities, and you can pull the annunciator on the far side of town from the comfort of your home.
I also predict the market for fake cards will go through the roof, and Internet cafe owners will make a good "second story" income by collecting to ensure that they mispell "Bjorn" as "Sven".
I think that they will find out about anonymous cell phones as well. Every criminal knows that all cell phones are anonymous. After all, nobody saw you take it out of that woman's purse.
In private business, we would call this a "request for proposal", essentially "name your own bounty". In the public model, various government agencies (ARPA? DARPA? Is "Defense" in or out of fashion?) make "technology transfer requests", usually with a not-to-exceed amount. They don't mind if you take the whole bounty, but they might want to deal with someone who would do it for less.
The secrecy thing is handled in various ways, although the gov wants to know who knows their secrets (can't say I blame them), and private industry usually limits the distribution of the RFP to their friends.
What I really want to see is a bounty on users. We can bring back the ears...
The other necessary item is the fastest file content search utility you can lay hands on.
Indices, tables of contents, folders, catagories, catalogs, and directories will always have misfiles after a certain period of time, and besides, who wants to categorise all that mail anyway? Dump it into a few (time-based?) directories and simply search for things when you need them.
Pirates do not care. Somebody will whip the snot out of this, somehow. It doesn't matter that they are much brighter than the average bear, because the average bear is bright enough to copy what the pirate does. After which, of course, the book contents are copied to offline storage (CD-ROM) and stored on the bookshelf next to "Napster's Greatest Hits", volumes one through fifty-six.
When are the content producers going to learn? Publishers take them for a financial ride every bleeding day, and they have to sit there and take it. Or do they?
What if a bunch of geek types (like maybe open source folks?) make it a point to create new compensation methods for the content providers (writers, artists, etc.) and then educate them on the advantages (less publishing lead time, more money) and disadvantages (more risk, distribution blocking, etc.) of these methods?
Publishers might scream and rant. Most certainly they would blockade distribution through regular channels. They would probably even pay someone to crack whatever compensation scheme was being used, at least for the first few times, just to be able to say "see, it doesn't work..."
The above may be overcome with sufficient work. Sooner or later, the content providers will realise that they deserve a larger piece of the pie, and rightfully so.
Of course, once you start using Bluetooth on a regular basis then your usage patterns can be established, and simply turning all the transmitters off can be viewed as a suspicious act, pinpointing times and locations that bear further investigation. To this end, I figure there might be some use for a Bluetooth emulator, complete with changable ID numbers, that sits around your office and makes traffic for you while you are out ;-).
I figure these are going to be expensive, and I will make sure they arrive in a plain brown wrapper.
I have spent much time aiming and sweeping microwaves and lasers, and trying to whack a four inch spot four hundred plus miles away doesn't sound easy. It's hard enough to nail a stationary two meter dish fifty miles away.
I suppose that you could use almost stationary tracking near the equator, and then just wait for it to come around again. Signal and signature extraction must be a real pain.
Uhm, if this is true, exactly how do they do this? LEO is four hundred miles away, and Clarke orbit much higher up. Granted, you won't have much in the way of atmospheric fade (maybe fifty miles worth including both ways) whatever the media (RADAR, LIDAR, etc.) and the background is somewhat predictable, but this has got to be some kind of record.
I wonder if there are any spares for Iriduim lying around. Given the unique nature of the beast, there must be some parts that will never be used again. They could go on the wall next to the retrieved tank...
Fear not, there are not a lot of techies here, and the list is fairly obtuse (biomed. engineering, electronics, medical, information/computer science, mathematics, engineering, alternative structure/energy).
The first time I saw that Indian Jones movie, it took me back to a hole-in-the-road village in the midwest, on the day the good townspeople decided to "purify" the school and library bookshelves. That was 1971.
"Objects in mirror are closer than they appear..."
When I gave them the list (750 books long) the bookstore droids all had the same lament: "You don't have any fiction? No self-help?" One of them has relabeled ALL of thier non-fiction section as "Health and Arts"
My available space is now needed for people, so storage is no longer an option. I have given away as many as I can (not a lot of geeks here). I suppose I will shudder when I toss my volumes of Knuth into the woodstove.
I gave another one (three meter) away to a friend, who sunk it face-up in the back yard, filled it with water, installed a pump and made a fountain out of it.
Smaller dishes set on concrete blocks make pretty good livestock feeders
As far as the log thing goes, exactly so, although when figuring some types of search time the factor of log 2 vs. log 10 is a constant offset. It was the understanding of the logarithm idea that was missing from most of those applying.
The point though, is that you read the book, got instructed, THOUGHT ABOUT IT, and remembered it.
You have no idea how many of your concurrent CS students will never even recognize "Dijkstra" as a person's name, rather than random characters.
The difference, in my opinion, is not so much the school, but the individual. Schools only provide an opportunity to think and learn. Some people take advantage of them, and some people don't.
I agree, and that's the sort of answer I was hoping to get out of the folks being interviewed. It was not to be, however.
That said, I cannot count the number of resumes that I have seen from "computer science" majors. Most of them cannot reason, very few of them can write or do basic research, almost none of them understand the relevant math behind the technology they pretend to study.
Right about now, a bunch of you out there are getting geared up for "short X-ray temperature flame mode". Please, hear me out. I have no degree in any subject, yet I found it necessary to learn the math, and do the reasoning simply in order to be able to do a good job.
Here's an example: I once asked a bunch of job candidates this question: If it takes two seconds to find an entry in a sorted array, how long will it take if the list is ten times the size it presently is? Out of fifty-six, one of them got it right. Most of them didn't even know what log(n) means. The most common answers were "ten times as long" and "the same". Close third was "does it matter, just get a faster computer..." Mind you, this is from people who claim to have degrees in this stuff.
As a consultant and engineer, I have the onus to make sure that whatever I recommend or build will work, safely and to the customer's satisfaction. This is just plain business. Just one good hit on your E&O insurance can wipe you out but good.
The industry is full of folks who would otherwise be used car salesman or shoe clerks attempting to cash in on the "technology boom" that USA Today keeps telling them about.
"Computer science is to science as plumbing is to hydrodynamics". I am not sure who first put this forward, but it is most certainly true. There is science in computing, but the main body of knowledge is really engineering. Either way, engineering or science, to qualify as either one requires a firm grasp of the math. If you can't qauntify it, it's an opinion. Working in this field is more than just sorting through a stack of vendor's lit. and going to management lunches. Some of us actually have to make the damn things go.
And while I'm at it, since I don't have to be restricted by those niceties of business law and all of that, I might decide to take aim at the competition. I'm probably not going to do it with the yellow pages. After all, this is my turf, and that's my money they're raking in...
Be sure to post the comments back where we can all get them.
IMHO, code documentors are just as important to the cause as the folks who come up with the stuff, and need to be lauded about the same.
Geographic information systems are all pretty much based on a gui/graphics front end (most of which were X), a middle ware, and a relational database. ESRI's ARC/INFO, and the open source GRASS come to mind. Both established in the late eighties, and indeed, were not considered terribly high tech.