If he is a licenced ham radio operator, I doubt the amplifier is using is in any way "illegal".
I'm not sure what the maximum power output is in the United States, but here in Sweden, a licenced radio amateur operator can put out up to 1 kW or so without any additional license.
And, being a ham radio operator, you don't actually have to use equiment certified by anyone. Part of the reason you have to take an exam to become a ham radio operator, is to demonstrate they you know what you're doing. Amateur radio is the only service I'm aware of (other than possibly the military) that doesn't require its users to use type approved equiment.
Now CB radio however, that's a completely different story. Any idiot can go to his local electronics store and buy himself a CB rig capable of putting out 5 W of power with a microphone and jabber into it.
Now if he is a CB radio operator -- if he's using any amplifier at all, it's probably very illegal -- and usually of poor quality with lots of nice harmonics.
So how can you tell if your friendly neighbour with the amplifier is a licenced radio amateur running QRO on HF, or if he's an illegal CB operator?
Well. One way to tell is by the way he talks on the radio. You said that you have equipment capable of receiving his transmissions (your computer speakers:-)
According to regulations, all amateur radio stations must identify with their callsign and the callsign of the other party on a regular basis in their contacts. Listen for callsigns -- usually 5-6 characters long with one or more numbers in it -- my callsign is SM0YUF, somebody in the US would probably have a callsign starting with A, N or W, or maybe some other letter that escapes me at the moment. You can look up who owns a certain callsign on http://www.qrz.com/.
If the transmissions contain no callsigns whatsoever, chances are that he's in fact an illegal CB operator, in which case, in theory, you could contact the FCC using the magic word "CB" rather than "ham radio", and hopefully you might make some progress.
Hope this helps. Oh, and do look into those papers with toroids and ferrites. If he is in fact a licenced radio amateur, he is well within his rights, and your equiment is shoddy. Sorry.
There's nothing more annoying than forms that require you to enter your address in a specific way that doesn't fit for that particular company. If you're shipping to only one country, that's fine, but otherwise:
What's wrong with just letting the user enter the address in a freeform text field? The user probably knows what his own address is, and can write it in a form that the local post office can deliver to. Just include a dropdown box for the country, and that should be all there's to it.
Except uControl uses a modifier key to change between scrolling and non-scrolling, allowing you to use the entire trackpad for that purpose, and SideTrack wants you to scroll using the edges of the touchpad, which is prone to misactivation and gives you less freedom.
Or does SideTrack have a uControl like mode for that now? I don't know. It didn't last time I checked the program out.
Scrolling itself is the same I guess, but the actual UI is different.
That doesn't help if you want to use shortcuts like Win+D, Win+E and Win+R. (Show desktop, open Windows Explorer and the Run... dialogue, respectively.)
Oh, by the way. I just re-read your post. Seems you DO want a windows key on there after all. In that case you might want to consider the EnduraPro which is basically the same model, but with a 104/105-key layout.
Does anybody know where I could find a standard layout keyboard with a touchpoint?
Yes. I know where to find one!:-)...
What's that? I'm overdoing the smartassitude?
Bah. Okay.
I'll be nice.:-P
Unicomp sells a keyboard called "On the Stick", which is a 101-keyboard with trackpoint goodness. Here's a link to the catalogue page.
As an added bonus, it will give you buckling spring goodness, as previously seen on keyboards like the IBM Model M.
I haven't tried the keyboard myself (I hate trackpoints, I'm a touchpad person myself), nor have I tried their specific implementation of the buckling spring mechanism, but my PC does have an IBM Model M keyboard connected to it. Type hard or go home!;-)
Yeah, and I still haven't heard of smooth (as opposed to notched) mouse wheels *searches Google to make sure*
Actually, these exist. I distinctly remember buying a crappy PS/2 mouse at Clas Ohlsonwhich featured a notchless scroll wheel like you describe. I'm not 100%, but I think it was manufactured by A4Tech.
It was pretty annoying though. It wouldn't let you scroll pixel by pixel. The "notches" were still there, but implemented by software.
Not to mention, I prefer a mouse that doesn't scroll just because I look at it the wrong way. It'd be way too easy to scroll by mistake.
Another idea I've seen, is a mouse (also made by a cheap company, Typhoon. It used a trackball for 2-d scrolling. God, that was annoying! It was rather uncomfortable to get that scrolling straight and not jumping left and right all the time. Also notchless, and thus way too easy to trip.
My conclusion? Notchless is a bad idea if you want to implement a scroll wheel. The notches are there for a reason. Actually, I'm pretty much sure that you could modify several popular scroll mice to make them notchless, as the few I've opened actually was using optical sensors to detect motion rather than switches, anyway, and the notches are only there to prevent spurious scrolling.
The best scrolling mechanism I've used is on my iBook. I use a third-party tool called uControl to enable scrolling using my touchpad. Unlike SideTrack or similar Windows drivers, uControl will let you use your trackpad for mostly stepless 2D scrolling, when depressing the Fn modifier key (or other modifier key of choice.) Very handy.
Assuming you're trying using the good old "add the digits" method, I think it's worth noting that this number has between 7.2 and 10 million digits, making that method effectively useless, especially with a "quick glance."
Heh. You understood the punchline and yet completely failed to get the joke at the same time. Congratulations.
Oh, by the way. If you want to connect a *lot* of storage (as in a few terabytes) to your Mac, what Apple suggests you do is to get an Xserve RAID and a PowerMac G5 with a fibre channel card.:-)
(Granted, I know nothing about Fibre channel and how fast it is. Way out of my price range anyway.)
Heh. Actually, I think the limit for how many Firewire devices you can put on a single bus is 63.
So if USB is crap, Firewire is a steaming mound of bovine excrement.
Then again, you'll probably run in to other problems than addressing concerns when adding that many hard drives on a Firewire bus anyway. Like all of the drives sharing a single 400 Mbit/s connection?...
I haven't mentioned Firewire 800 here, since the iMac G3 doesn't have FW 800, iirc.
(Oh, btw. I love Firewire. I'm on an iBook G3, and Firewire definitely is better than USB 1.0 for connecting a hard drive... but if I had a newer Mac, I probably wouldn't really care if I connected it via Firewire or USB2 anyway...)
I'm sorry, I'm not so skilled in the ways of HTML. But can the proper javascripts or HTTP headers tell a browser to fake a referrer header?
Or do you mean that the CGI script goes to fetch it, and then relays it to the user? That could work, but the bboard software would be retarded not to cache it in that case.
So you can tell wget to lie to the web server when raiding your favorite web page for images.
That's not what the person asking the question asked for. He wants to stop sites from deep-linking his jpegs, not protect his nuclear launch code CGI to be used only from his own home page.
A simple filter which would require the referer to be on his web site would pretty much stop his problems anyway. The people deep-linking to his web site write their web pages for browsers with <img src> tags, and as far as I know, you can't in HTML tell the web browser to fake a referer header. Then again, I'm not a HTML-head...
And it's not really practical to tell your user to use wget to download your web site either.:-) At that rate, it's probably easier to mirror the image. Problem solved.
That said, the patent itself isn't regarding a Help Icon. It is the function where you first click on the help icon/button, and then on the particular function you need help with.
That sounds a lot like that [?] button in the toolbar in certain Microsoft programs and dialog boxes in Windows. It's pretty rare -- the feature didn't really seem to take off -- but it does exist here and there. When clicked, the mouse cursor gets a '?' next to it, and clicking a widget will pop up a tooltip-like description of what the widget does. I haven't used Windows for several years, so I can't be more specific or give any details. Maybe someone else knows more?
I should probably add that you can get quite a distance at 100 mW. You'd be surprised how many 2 m / 70 cm amateur radio repeaters you can use semi-comfortably with one of those "tiny" FM handhelds.
Then again 144 MHz and 430 MHz aren't quite 900 MHz, 1800 MHz or 2400 MHz, but still...
Assuming for a moment that cell phones cause cancer -- something of which I'm sceptical to say the least.
I think the maximum legal output is somewhere around +15 to +20 dBm in the 2.4 GHz ISM band which is somewhere around 30 to 100 mW.
Which is a little lower than the maximum power of 2 W (IIRC another figured pulled from my ass here, but I think it's pretty accurate) which a GSM phone can put out legally.
Now, in the city, most GSM phones will cut back on the power anyway to save the battery. But 2000 mW is still a lot of power compared to 30 mW or so.
I haven't read about the Cisco phones, but they're priced even higher -- unreasonably high compared to a simple DECT phone and a Quicknet Internet PhoneJack card. Although I haven't tried this either, but it looks pretty sweet.
The idea of a Zyxel Prestige 2000W was pretty cool though, and I wish it were good. The idea is cool, and I actually considered it instead of a DECT cordless myself. But that review pretty much put me off.
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Congratulations. Excellent troll. If this is original, well, sir, you definitely have talent.
If he is a licenced ham radio operator, I doubt the amplifier is using is in any way "illegal".
:-)
I'm not sure what the maximum power output is in the United States, but here in Sweden, a licenced radio amateur operator can put out up to 1 kW or so without any additional license.
And, being a ham radio operator, you don't actually have to use equiment certified by anyone. Part of the reason you have to take an exam to become a ham radio operator, is to demonstrate they you know what you're doing. Amateur radio is the only service I'm aware of (other than possibly the military) that doesn't require its users to use type approved equiment.
Now CB radio however, that's a completely different story. Any idiot can go to his local electronics store and buy himself a CB rig capable of putting out 5 W of power with a microphone and jabber into it.
Now if he is a CB radio operator -- if he's using any amplifier at all, it's probably very illegal -- and usually of poor quality with lots of nice harmonics.
So how can you tell if your friendly neighbour with the amplifier is a licenced radio amateur running QRO on HF, or if he's an illegal CB operator?
Well. One way to tell is by the way he talks on the radio. You said that you have equipment capable of receiving his transmissions (your computer speakers
According to regulations, all amateur radio stations must identify with their callsign and the callsign of the other party on a regular basis in their contacts. Listen for callsigns -- usually 5-6 characters long with one or more numbers in it -- my callsign is SM0YUF, somebody in the US would probably have a callsign starting with A, N or W, or maybe some other letter that escapes me at the moment. You can look up who owns a certain callsign on http://www.qrz.com/.
If the transmissions contain no callsigns whatsoever, chances are that he's in fact an illegal CB operator, in which case, in theory, you could contact the FCC using the magic word "CB" rather than "ham radio", and hopefully you might make some progress.
Hope this helps. Oh, and do look into those papers with toroids and ferrites. If he is in fact a licenced radio amateur, he is well within his rights, and your equiment is shoddy. Sorry.
73 de SM0YUF
There's nothing more annoying than forms that require you to enter your address in a specific way that doesn't fit for that particular company. If you're shipping to only one country, that's fine, but otherwise:
What's wrong with just letting the user enter the address in a freeform text field? The user probably knows what his own address is, and can write it in a form that the local post office can deliver to. Just include a dropdown box for the country, and that should be all there's to it.
Except uControl uses a modifier key to change between scrolling and non-scrolling, allowing you to use the entire trackpad for that purpose, and SideTrack wants you to scroll using the edges of the touchpad, which is prone to misactivation and gives you less freedom.
Or does SideTrack have a uControl like mode for that now? I don't know. It didn't last time I checked the program out.
Scrolling itself is the same I guess, but the actual UI is different.
That doesn't help if you want to use shortcuts like Win+D, Win+E and Win+R. (Show desktop, open Windows Explorer and the Run... dialogue, respectively.)
Oh, by the way. I just re-read your post. Seems you DO want a windows key on there after all. In that case you might want to consider the EnduraPro which is basically the same model, but with a 104/105-key layout.
:-)
Hope this helps even more.
Does anybody know where I could find a standard layout keyboard with a touchpoint?
:-) ...
:-P
;-)
Yes. I know where to find one!
What's that? I'm overdoing the smartassitude?
Bah. Okay.
I'll be nice.
Unicomp sells a keyboard called "On the Stick", which is a 101-keyboard with trackpoint goodness. Here's a link to the catalogue page.
As an added bonus, it will give you buckling spring goodness, as previously seen on keyboards like the IBM Model M.
I haven't tried the keyboard myself (I hate trackpoints, I'm a touchpad person myself), nor have I tried their specific implementation of the buckling spring mechanism, but my PC does have an IBM Model M keyboard connected to it. Type hard or go home!
Hope this helps.
Yeah, and I still haven't heard of smooth (as opposed to notched) mouse wheels *searches Google to make sure*
:-)
Actually, these exist. I distinctly remember buying a crappy PS/2 mouse at Clas Ohlsonwhich featured a notchless scroll wheel like you describe. I'm not 100%, but I think it was manufactured by A4Tech.
It was pretty annoying though. It wouldn't let you scroll pixel by pixel. The "notches" were still there, but implemented by software.
Not to mention, I prefer a mouse that doesn't scroll just because I look at it the wrong way. It'd be way too easy to scroll by mistake.
Another idea I've seen, is a mouse (also made by a cheap company, Typhoon. It used a trackball for 2-d scrolling. God, that was annoying! It was rather uncomfortable to get that scrolling straight and not jumping left and right all the time. Also notchless, and thus way too easy to trip.
My conclusion? Notchless is a bad idea if you want to implement a scroll wheel. The notches are there for a reason. Actually, I'm pretty much sure that you could modify several popular scroll mice to make them notchless, as the few I've opened actually was using optical sensors to detect motion rather than switches, anyway, and the notches are only there to prevent spurious scrolling.
The best scrolling mechanism I've used is on my iBook. I use a third-party tool called uControl to enable scrolling using my touchpad. Unlike SideTrack or similar Windows drivers, uControl will let you use your trackpad for mostly stepless 2D scrolling, when depressing the Fn modifier key (or other modifier key of choice.) Very handy.
Hope this helps!
Does anybody make a (standard layout) desktop keyboard with one?
Yes.
You know of any underwear that doesn't consist of atoms?
Unless you meant...
Oh. I see. Don't even go there.
Assuming you're trying using the good old "add the digits" method, I think it's worth noting that this number has between 7.2 and 10 million digits, making that method effectively useless, especially with a "quick glance."
Heh. You understood the punchline and yet completely failed to get the joke at the same time. Congratulations.
Actually, a quick glance at the listing of the prime number clearly showed that the number is divisible by 3.
Oh well. At least the world won't be destroyed now.
Write-only tape?
How then are you supposed to read it in case an incident happens?
Oh, by the way. If you want to connect a *lot* of storage (as in a few terabytes) to your Mac, what Apple suggests you do is to get an Xserve RAID and a PowerMac G5 with a fibre channel card. :-)
(Granted, I know nothing about Fibre channel and how fast it is. Way out of my price range anyway.)
Heh. Actually, I think the limit for how many Firewire devices you can put on a single bus is 63.
...
So if USB is crap, Firewire is a steaming mound of bovine excrement.
Then again, you'll probably run in to other problems than addressing concerns when adding that many hard drives on a Firewire bus anyway. Like all of the drives sharing a single 400 Mbit/s connection?
I haven't mentioned Firewire 800 here, since the iMac G3 doesn't have FW 800, iirc.
(Oh, btw. I love Firewire. I'm on an iBook G3, and Firewire definitely is better than USB 1.0 for connecting a hard drive... but if I had a newer Mac, I probably wouldn't really care if I connected it via Firewire or USB2 anyway...)
I'm sorry, I'm not so skilled in the ways of HTML. But can the proper javascripts or HTTP headers tell a browser to fake a referrer header?
Or do you mean that the CGI script goes to fetch it, and then relays it to the user? That could work, but the bboard software would be retarded not to cache it in that case.
So you can tell wget to lie to the web server when raiding your favorite web page for images.
:-) At that rate, it's probably easier to mirror the image. Problem solved.
That's not what the person asking the question asked for. He wants to stop sites from deep-linking his jpegs, not protect his nuclear launch code CGI to be used only from his own home page.
A simple filter which would require the referer to be on his web site would pretty much stop his problems anyway. The people deep-linking to his web site write their web pages for browsers with <img src> tags, and as far as I know, you can't in HTML tell the web browser to fake a referer header. Then again, I'm not a HTML-head...
And it's not really practical to tell your user to use wget to download your web site either.
That said, the patent itself isn't regarding a Help Icon. It is the function where you first click on the help icon/button, and then on the particular function you need help with.
That sounds a lot like that [?] button in the toolbar in certain Microsoft programs and dialog boxes in Windows. It's pretty rare -- the feature didn't really seem to take off -- but it does exist here and there. When clicked, the mouse cursor gets a '?' next to it, and clicking a widget will pop up a tooltip-like description of what the widget does. I haven't used Windows for several years, so I can't be more specific or give any details. Maybe someone else knows more?
An American or a British trillion?
An American trillion is equal to a British billion, or 1e+12.
Yes. This is messed up.
I wouldn't call Stargate "gospel". But I would call it pretty damn good.
Now, Babylon 5 on the other hand...
[It] will make you think seriously about more serious astrology (you'd be surprised how much can be done with under $1000 of equipment!)
Astrology? Or astronomy? There's a difference you know.
Bad idea.
The asteroid will turn out to be rich in Nadquada and would cause a much bigger "boom" than expected.
Although you could always just extend the hyperspace field of the Goa'uld cargo ship... just for a few seconds...
I should probably add that you can get quite a distance at 100 mW. You'd be surprised how many 2 m / 70 cm amateur radio repeaters you can use semi-comfortably with one of those "tiny" FM handhelds.
Then again 144 MHz and 430 MHz aren't quite 900 MHz, 1800 MHz or 2400 MHz, but still...
Assuming for a moment that cell phones cause cancer -- something of which I'm sceptical to say the least.
I think the maximum legal output is somewhere around +15 to +20 dBm in the 2.4 GHz ISM band which is somewhere around 30 to 100 mW.
Which is a little lower than the maximum power of 2 W (IIRC another figured pulled from my ass here, but I think it's pretty accurate) which a GSM phone can put out legally.
Now, in the city, most GSM phones will cut back on the power anyway to save the battery. But 2000 mW is still a lot of power compared to 30 mW or so.
Because the Zyxel Prestige 2000W appears to suck.
I haven't read about the Cisco phones, but they're priced even higher -- unreasonably high compared to a simple DECT phone and a Quicknet Internet PhoneJack card. Although I haven't tried this either, but it looks pretty sweet.
The idea of a Zyxel Prestige 2000W was pretty cool though, and I wish it were good. The idea is cool, and I actually considered it instead of a DECT cordless myself. But that review pretty much put me off.