Yeah, Ogg (er, actually Vorbis), is generally better at encoding wideband sounds for me (like "s" sounds and cymbal crashes). Vorbis encoding artifacts sound different. But some people just have crappy encoders, yet another way to end up comparing apples and oranges.
I'm not sure if the trend is continuing, but one thing that has been noted in the past several years is that listenership to public radio has been booming. The decline in commercial radio listeners is probably more than 4%, though I couldn't say how much more. When you see that many commercial music stations only have 300 songs in their playlists but run more than 20 minutes of ads each hour (especially during drivetime), it's hard to be surprised that people are looking elsewhere.
Some people have already mentioned "Jack FM" and other similar formats. "Like an iPod on shuffle" they say. Sure, they bump up the playlist to 1200 songs instead of 300, but you're still stuck in the '80s for the most part. They completely do away with DJs for many of these stations, so if there's a new song, you'll never know who sings it. It's not conducive to learning about new music.
I like to hear new music. All the time. Not just one or two new songs dribbled in each week. Most radio companies seem to believe that very few people are interested in hearing new music nearly as much as I am. Maybe that's true, but I can't say for certain. Apparently at least 50 million people think that they aren't getting enough stuff over-the-air (though obviously some folks are listening to talk, or are using the cleaner online stream rather than a fuzzy AM/FM signal).
Here in the Twin Cities, people had been getting fed up with radio. You might remember that the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis even did a "Radio Re-Volt" last year. Sure, there have been a handful of livable or even excellent options in the dozens of stations in the area. The top two cited were usually KFAI and 770 Radio K. Both had problems, though, primarily with weak signals. KFAI adds up to about 250 watts. Radio K is 5 kW, but on AM, and only during the daytime. They both stream online, which mitigates the problem a bit, but you can't trail an Ethernet cable along as you drive in your car.
Minnesota Public Radio launched a new 'eclectic' music service called "The Current" on KCMP 89.3 FM back in January on a big 100 kW transmitter they'd bought a few months earlier for $10 million. Most of my friends listen to it (and even support it), so I think it has a good chance of surviving. No, I don't like all of the songs they play, quality varies from DJ to DJ, the DJs sometimes make mistakes, and CDs sometimes skip. But they actually have DJs, CDs, and even vinyl, and hope to eventually build a library of 50,000 albums. They have a hefty concert calendar and bring musicians in for very-nearly-live performances every day or so. Local music is in frequent rotation, and the DJs have the freedom to go talking about all sorts of random things. Yeah, there are some people who hate it (and The Morning Show is still an oddball;-)
Online streaming provides a bunch of great options, but it's nice to have something with a local flavor that you can talk to your friends about, and have them know about it and understand. While there are some big notable exceptions, terrestrial radio is meant to be a community affair (well, here in the U.S. where there aren't big national networks). XM can't have that, and it's fairly rare for streaming audio. Admittedly, MPR is a pretty big beast itself and has taken over a
I always wonder how well this would work for us up here in the land where the two main seasons are winter and road construction. I've seen too many places where lines cross and signs are messed up for me to think that computers can do a very good job. Well, I suppose that doesn't mean that they can't try...
Yeah, this really isn't the right way to mount a fan. Hard drive specs (which nobody gets, but whatever) say that you should have air moving across the drive, as though it is a column in a tube or something, not straight at one of the big faces. This is definitely not the recommended practice, since the air doesn't really have anywhere to go.
I really like the Apple G5 design where they had somewhere around 8 fans, yet the system was super-quiet because they were all big and ran at a low speed. There were no CPU fans per se, though the heatsinks were pretty monster. The airflow was obvious -- straight through the machine.
Anyway, PC cases induce nightmares when thinking about airflow. I wish they were as simple as the Apple design.
Another thing: I got scared a while back when I had to move my computer into a new case. I neglected to put in a fan in the mounting bracket in front of my hard drives, and they got to be very toasty. Simply adding an 80mm fan to the place where it was supposed to go helped a lot.
Well, I think things are slightly better these days, as computer power supply fans are usually designed to pull air in rather than push it out. Things got to be pretty bad when dust would get sucked in through the CD drive. Even when closed, little gaps around the edges can allow a fair amount of dust in. PCs still have really awful airflow, though, and nobody puts filters in anywhere (really, they should be a standard item).
I once tried a CD cleaner disc with a little brush on it when an old CD drive went bad. It didn't work, though -- in fact, when I disassembled the drive a while later, I discovered that the brush didn't come anywhere near the laser!. I suppose I just needed to grease up the mechanism, but I ended up getting a new drive, if I recall.
Cool. Heh, maybe it's just me, but this reminded me a lot of the episode of TNG when Geordi got infected and became an invisible man. There was a scene where they reconstructed something on the holodeck, much like this.
I suppose using zoom on the camera could cause trouble, but maybe specialized cameras could be used where the zoom is encoded within the video (wouldn't be hard with modern digital stuff -- I'm sure some do it already).
Neat to see this automated, though certain aspects of this have been possible for a long time (as others have pointed out). I mostly think of topographical maps as an example, where aerial photographs have often been used to determine geography. However, such maps normally don't incorporate the actual colors like this does.
Well, I don't know about Firefox 1.0 specifically, but I know that the Mozilla framework stuff that comes on Debian testing has been getting pretty bad as of late. I use Galeon for most of my browsing, and generally have to kill it once a day or so now. Back two weeks ago when I had a job, I ran Firefox 1.0PR on a RedHat 9 box and seemed to have similar trouble, but I don't think I got around to upgrading that to 1.0 to see if there was any improvement.
The problem seems to be that a page or two with mangled HTML will cause some sort of memory leak or similar thing to happen, and within a few moments, a well-functioning browser suddenly starts taking 30-60 seconds to render a simple page. A while back, I figured my browser was going nuts because of the Macromedia Flash plugin, but I disabled that and ended up still having problems.
My Debian packages show Mozilla 1.7.3-5 and Firefox 1.0-2.
In theory, the cars would communicate with each other and have integrated radar systems for detecting obstacles or "dead" vehicles that are no longer talking to the rest of the system. The speeds at which these cars will move might make safety difficult. The designs don't include seat belts, so considerations have to be made about how fast a car can slow down or stop without dislodging the occupants from their seats. Some people say that this would require a considerable distance between the vehicles, which would greatly reduce the efficiency of the system at carrying passengers (otherwise, lots of people think that PRT systems like this are the holy grail of public transit).
Another that some people worry about is the possibility of cars getting stuck going around in loops in the system because traffic on the lines precludes anyone from getting in or out of congested sections.
Unfortunately, there isn't much way to know as of yet whether these will turn out to be real problems or not, since no systems have been built yet (a few sites with similar ideas using vehicles with 8-10 passengers are in use, though).
Yeah, I really don't understand why someone would register as a Democrat but vote Republican -- or at least why this would be a consistent practice among rural Floridians. One theory is that these folks are "old Democrats" from when the Dems were a much more conservative party. But when was that? The 1930s?
I guess there was the "Dixiecrat" stuff going into the '60s or so, but even with that, enough people would have moved since then that the voter registration numbers would have shifted to the Republican side (I'd think). How many people do you know who have had the same address since 1968?
I've been really bugged by this story, and about the only refutation of it that I can find is basically what you mentioned -- Republicans might be registering as Democrats so they can participate in Democratic primaries.
Eh?
What seems most likely is that the registration data somehow got flipped around in these rural counties, though that would mean that the Florida Secretary of State has been making the same error for years.
However, the other possibility would be that votes from these rural regions have been getting flipped for at least a decade (the pattern seems to hold at least back to 1996). And if that were true, it would have major implications -- in theory, it would mean that rural counties all across the country are actually more Democratic than we think. That's got to be well within tin-foil hat territory, though.
I haven't read all of the comments in detail, but I think one thing that people are often forgetting is that a standard PCI bus has a theoretical maximum bandwidth of 133 MB/s, a level you'll probably never see in real life, especially when there's a fair amount of chatter on the bus from different devices (and you'd get a lot of that with 8 drives plus networking plus who knows what else). Of course, PCI bus layouts vary considerably between simple motherboards and high-end ones.
I don't know if anyone makes PCI-X ATA-133 controllers (non-RAID), so in the final analysis it might be best to get a 3ware card with a 64bit connector and plop it in a long slot. Of course, you need a pretty nice motherboard for that. I guess I haven't gone shopping recently, but they weren't that common the last I checked (and everyone is going to head for PCI-Express shortly anyway).
Of course, it all depends on what you'll use the machine for. If it's just file serving over a 100Mbit network, there's no need to worry that much about speed. It's only a big deal if you're concerned about doing things really fast. I believe good 3ware RAID cards can read data off a big array at 150-200 MB/s (maybe better). My local LUG put a ~1TB array together for an FTP mirror with 12 disks (using 120GB and 160GB drives, if I remember right) about 2 years ago, and testing produced read rates of about 120 MB/s on a regular PCI box (I think.. my memory is a bit flaky on that). Of course, I don't think anything was being done with the data (wasn't going out over the network interface, to my knowledge, just being read in by bonnie++ I suspect).
Wow. The title of this article (er, the Slashdot blurb) says "trademark," and the body says "copyright" as well as "patent." I think we're just dealing with a patent here. These are fairly distinct things, with wildly different rules...
Being a Minneapolitan, I'm skeptical that this could achieve much in a practical sense, though it's an interesting idea from an artistic standpoint. It could work on a larger scale, but that would require a significant percentage of the city population to help out.
If my browser ever manages to load the main page without barfing on the Flash, I might try to do something, but it's hard to say. Still, I've played with milliwatt radio transmitters before, and you're often lucky to hear anything even in the next room. But, considering the lack of quality in the big stations that currently exist in the Twin Cities, a lot of people would be interested in doing something to overcome that situation.
Heh. I was browsing around Target's electronics department and an ad for the new Star Wars DVD set came on. Mr. Movie Voice said "The ultimate series in the ultimate format." But I knew it was only the penultimate format at best. We'll see how long it takes the HD DVDs to come out now.
I'm not a rocket scientist, but I wonder if this is one of the effects of passing through the heliopause. It sounds like Pioneer 10 and 11 are too weak to send any actual data these days, so they can't really report if they're coming in contact with the expected particles, for instance.
Then again, it appears that this effect has been noted since at least 1998, so it's hard to say what's really going on. I will note that the two spacecraft are spin-stabilized, so maybe there's some weird frame-dragging-esque effect going on. I guess the effect hasn't been as noticeable on three-axis stabilized craft, though that's kind of expected since they would more frequently be using thrusters to change orientation (which would probably slightly affect trajectory too).
A lot of the Linux jobs out there (especially on Dice) are predicated on the idea that people know some of the big-name packages like Oracle and Veritas. There aren't a great many lower-level positions, at least in my region of the country. I did find a low-paying (well, for IT -- about double minimum wage) job about a month ago involving Linux. It might or might not be a steady job. 80% stuff out there is consulting/contract work, but I suppose that's not a Linux-specific problem (er, I personally see that as a problem because it takes me forever to get comfortable in new environments, and I just don't like dealing with the uncertainty -- some people thrive on stuff like that).
A lot of places have had similar experiences. The University of Minnesota (which has one of the largest campuses in the country, though the overall statewide system isn't extraordinary) began switching over to a PeopleSoft system back around 1997. I'm not sure if it is complete yet, but I guess I haven't heard much about it for a few years (but then, I graduated a year and a half ago).
Looks like these guys are focusing on turning diesels into diesel-electric. Delivery vehicles often run on diesel and the London Taxis use it as well. Not really surprising that a company has been trying out that technology, since people have been using it in trains since the 1930s or so (of course, most diesel-electric trains don't incorporate batteries to store extra energy, as far as I know).
Well, the diesel-electric train is the series hybrid type, where the engine isn't directly connected to the wheels. I imagine this company had to do a fair amount of work on the parallel hybrid type where both the engine and electric motor connect to the wheels. My understanding is that, theoretically, series hybrids are more efficient. If true, it confuses me why most hybrids we're seeing these days use the parallel style (or a variation on it) instead. I guess I've heard that, with the Prius for example, the electric motor balances out the power curve of the engine. Electric motors have extremely high torque at low RPMs, but apparently become less efficient at higher RPMs where gasoline engines are better. Of course, diesel engines have a different power curve than gasoline engines, with more torque and horsepower appearing at low RPM (probably one reason why semis have like 15 gears;-)
Anyway, GM has their Electro-Motive Division (EMD) that has been producing diesel-electric trains for decades. I'm curious why nobody there has (at least publicly) demonstrated some diesel-electric trucks/vans/etc.
Having grown up a fair distance from most of the TV channels (probably no towers were less than 50 miles from us except maybe one), yet being able to view 15-20 channels with a large yagi antenna, I am concerned about this. Well, heck, I'm concerned about HDTV reception too.
I grew up in southeast Minnesota, near Rochester (where the Mayo Clinic is), though the town I was in was one of the highest regions of land in the area. My family mostly pointed our antenna northward at the Twin Cities, from which we could receive eight major channels (well, except when the weather was bad): 2 (PBS), 4 (CBS), 5 (ABC), 9 (was UPN, now Fox), 11 (NBC), 17 (PBS), 23 (now WB, and the infamous originator of MST3K), 29 (was Fox, now UPN). As the PAX network started up, we could sometimes see 41 from St. Cloud.
When the weather was bad, or annoying things like late-running baseball games took up a Cities channel, various other options were available by turning the antenna. CBS stations were also available from Iowa and Wisconsin. There was an ABC affiliate near the Minnesota/Iowa border, and the local NBC affiliate's tower was not far from the border either. Several PBS stations were able to be picked up to the east, west, and south.
Recently, I experimented with receiving HDTV signals with a Linux-compatible pcHDTV card. I was really annoyed to see that we had to directly point our antenna at the transmission tower to have any hope of picking up a signal. In the analog days, it was at least possible to get the gist of what was happening on most channels, even if they weren't aimed at directly by the antenna. Channel surfing at my parents' place is going to get a lot more dull (it wasn't great to begin with;-)
HDTV transmitters (at the moment, at least) put out significantly less power than their analog counterparts. Theoretically, the same coverage is available with this lower power, but as I described, I think the FCC has a different idea of what reception and coverage actually are compared to what I think they are.
Then again, the pcHDTV card probably has a relatively poor tuner, but I definitely worry about it.
I think Michael Powell has said a few times that he things that "Free TV" (over-the-air broadcasts) are going the way of the dodo. Certainly, many people have been more interested in cable and satellite, but there is a loss of local flavor in that arrangement. I certainly credit a lot of my education and interest in science and technology to the availability of several PBS channels in my area. Even now, I live in Minneapolis, where I cringe when I think that only two PBS stations are available (well, you can say that more are available when the HDTV sub-channels are considered, but the programming on those doesn't really interest me at the moment).
Anyway, I just feel that the FCC probably won't properly answer this question. Maybe they will, but I have significant doubts.
Nope. All hemp is dope in the eyes of the law (in the U.S.).
It gets confusing listening to the hemp advocates in this country. A lot of people are genuinely interested in the utilitarian value of hemp (it was grown in mass quantities back during WWII, for instance, to make rope and other materials). However, enough people who are more interested in the, shall we say, "entertainment value" of certain varieties of hemp get mixed in with the groups and confuse the issue.
It is legal to import the non-narcotic products of hemp into the U.S. from other countries.
Heh. I think that even the McLaren F1 gets a SULEV rating;-) (but my memory might be messed up)
It's just a factor of how fully the gasoline is burned. The engine puts out a lot more CO2 and H2O, but a lot less CO and not-fully-burned fuel bits.
Still, if you believe in global warming, pumping out more CO2 isn't the best thing. (Well, unless you're fueling up with pure bioethanol or something, where the carbon put out is balanced out by carbon taken in by plant life.)
Actually, the Lupo 3L gets that mileage without being a hybrid. Of course, the car is so lightweight, I wonder if trying to turn it into a hybrid would just make things worse;-)
I remember there were two or three engines available when my mom got her car (one or two 4-cyl versions and a V6 if I remember right), and, of course, two transmission options. The smallest engine plus a manual transmission was peppy enough for my family, though I'm sure many people instantly gravitated toward the more power-hungry options.
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If I was Clear Channel, I'd be looking at getting out of radio and into monopolizing something like billboards or concert venues. Just a thought.
Uh, yeah, they've tried that (eh, maybe my sarcasm detector is faulty today). Though they're apparently selling off the concert unit now.
Yeah, Ogg (er, actually Vorbis), is generally better at encoding wideband sounds for me (like "s" sounds and cymbal crashes). Vorbis encoding artifacts sound different. But some people just have crappy encoders, yet another way to end up comparing apples and oranges.
I'm not sure if the trend is continuing, but one thing that has been noted in the past several years is that listenership to public radio has been booming. The decline in commercial radio listeners is probably more than 4%, though I couldn't say how much more. When you see that many commercial music stations only have 300 songs in their playlists but run more than 20 minutes of ads each hour (especially during drivetime), it's hard to be surprised that people are looking elsewhere.
;-)
Some people have already mentioned "Jack FM" and other similar formats. "Like an iPod on shuffle" they say. Sure, they bump up the playlist to 1200 songs instead of 300, but you're still stuck in the '80s for the most part. They completely do away with DJs for many of these stations, so if there's a new song, you'll never know who sings it. It's not conducive to learning about new music.
I like to hear new music. All the time. Not just one or two new songs dribbled in each week. Most radio companies seem to believe that very few people are interested in hearing new music nearly as much as I am. Maybe that's true, but I can't say for certain. Apparently at least 50 million people think that they aren't getting enough stuff over-the-air (though obviously some folks are listening to talk, or are using the cleaner online stream rather than a fuzzy AM/FM signal).
Here in the Twin Cities, people had been getting fed up with radio. You might remember that the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis even did a "Radio Re-Volt" last year. Sure, there have been a handful of livable or even excellent options in the dozens of stations in the area. The top two cited were usually KFAI and 770 Radio K. Both had problems, though, primarily with weak signals. KFAI adds up to about 250 watts. Radio K is 5 kW, but on AM, and only during the daytime. They both stream online, which mitigates the problem a bit, but you can't trail an Ethernet cable along as you drive in your car.
Minnesota Public Radio launched a new 'eclectic' music service called "The Current" on KCMP 89.3 FM back in January on a big 100 kW transmitter they'd bought a few months earlier for $10 million. Most of my friends listen to it (and even support it), so I think it has a good chance of surviving. No, I don't like all of the songs they play, quality varies from DJ to DJ, the DJs sometimes make mistakes, and CDs sometimes skip. But they actually have DJs, CDs, and even vinyl, and hope to eventually build a library of 50,000 albums. They have a hefty concert calendar and bring musicians in for very-nearly-live performances every day or so. Local music is in frequent rotation, and the DJs have the freedom to go talking about all sorts of random things. Yeah, there are some people who hate it (and The Morning Show is still an oddball
Online streaming provides a bunch of great options, but it's nice to have something with a local flavor that you can talk to your friends about, and have them know about it and understand. While there are some big notable exceptions, terrestrial radio is meant to be a community affair (well, here in the U.S. where there aren't big national networks). XM can't have that, and it's fairly rare for streaming audio. Admittedly, MPR is a pretty big beast itself and has taken over a
I always wonder how well this would work for us up here in the land where the two main seasons are winter and road construction. I've seen too many places where lines cross and signs are messed up for me to think that computers can do a very good job. Well, I suppose that doesn't mean that they can't try...
Yeah, this really isn't the right way to mount a fan. Hard drive specs (which nobody gets, but whatever) say that you should have air moving across the drive, as though it is a column in a tube or something, not straight at one of the big faces. This is definitely not the recommended practice, since the air doesn't really have anywhere to go.
I really like the Apple G5 design where they had somewhere around 8 fans, yet the system was super-quiet because they were all big and ran at a low speed. There were no CPU fans per se, though the heatsinks were pretty monster. The airflow was obvious -- straight through the machine.
Anyway, PC cases induce nightmares when thinking about airflow. I wish they were as simple as the Apple design.
Another thing: I got scared a while back when I had to move my computer into a new case. I neglected to put in a fan in the mounting bracket in front of my hard drives, and they got to be very toasty. Simply adding an 80mm fan to the place where it was supposed to go helped a lot.
Well, I think things are slightly better these days, as computer power supply fans are usually designed to pull air in rather than push it out. Things got to be pretty bad when dust would get sucked in through the CD drive. Even when closed, little gaps around the edges can allow a fair amount of dust in. PCs still have really awful airflow, though, and nobody puts filters in anywhere (really, they should be a standard item).
I once tried a CD cleaner disc with a little brush on it when an old CD drive went bad. It didn't work, though -- in fact, when I disassembled the drive a while later, I discovered that the brush didn't come anywhere near the laser!. I suppose I just needed to grease up the mechanism, but I ended up getting a new drive, if I recall.
Feh. It's not hard to change the timezone setup (on Linux, at least). /etc/zoneinfo just has to have the right settings, and you're good to go.
Cool. Heh, maybe it's just me, but this reminded me a lot of the episode of TNG when Geordi got infected and became an invisible man. There was a scene where they reconstructed something on the holodeck, much like this.
I suppose using zoom on the camera could cause trouble, but maybe specialized cameras could be used where the zoom is encoded within the video (wouldn't be hard with modern digital stuff -- I'm sure some do it already).
Neat to see this automated, though certain aspects of this have been possible for a long time (as others have pointed out). I mostly think of topographical maps as an example, where aerial photographs have often been used to determine geography. However, such maps normally don't incorporate the actual colors like this does.
Well, I don't know about Firefox 1.0 specifically, but I know that the Mozilla framework stuff that comes on Debian testing has been getting pretty bad as of late. I use Galeon for most of my browsing, and generally have to kill it once a day or so now. Back two weeks ago when I had a job, I ran Firefox 1.0PR on a RedHat 9 box and seemed to have similar trouble, but I don't think I got around to upgrading that to 1.0 to see if there was any improvement.
The problem seems to be that a page or two with mangled HTML will cause some sort of memory leak or similar thing to happen, and within a few moments, a well-functioning browser suddenly starts taking 30-60 seconds to render a simple page. A while back, I figured my browser was going nuts because of the Macromedia Flash plugin, but I disabled that and ended up still having problems.
My Debian packages show Mozilla 1.7.3-5 and Firefox 1.0-2.
In theory, the cars would communicate with each other and have integrated radar systems for detecting obstacles or "dead" vehicles that are no longer talking to the rest of the system. The speeds at which these cars will move might make safety difficult. The designs don't include seat belts, so considerations have to be made about how fast a car can slow down or stop without dislodging the occupants from their seats. Some people say that this would require a considerable distance between the vehicles, which would greatly reduce the efficiency of the system at carrying passengers (otherwise, lots of people think that PRT systems like this are the holy grail of public transit).
Another that some people worry about is the possibility of cars getting stuck going around in loops in the system because traffic on the lines precludes anyone from getting in or out of congested sections.
Unfortunately, there isn't much way to know as of yet whether these will turn out to be real problems or not, since no systems have been built yet (a few sites with similar ideas using vehicles with 8-10 passengers are in use, though).
Yeah, I really don't understand why someone would register as a Democrat but vote Republican -- or at least why this would be a consistent practice among rural Floridians. One theory is that these folks are "old Democrats" from when the Dems were a much more conservative party. But when was that? The 1930s?
I guess there was the "Dixiecrat" stuff going into the '60s or so, but even with that, enough people would have moved since then that the voter registration numbers would have shifted to the Republican side (I'd think). How many people do you know who have had the same address since 1968?
I've been really bugged by this story, and about the only refutation of it that I can find is basically what you mentioned -- Republicans might be registering as Democrats so they can participate in Democratic primaries.
Eh?
What seems most likely is that the registration data somehow got flipped around in these rural counties, though that would mean that the Florida Secretary of State has been making the same error for years.
However, the other possibility would be that votes from these rural regions have been getting flipped for at least a decade (the pattern seems to hold at least back to 1996). And if that were true, it would have major implications -- in theory, it would mean that rural counties all across the country are actually more Democratic than we think. That's got to be well within tin-foil hat territory, though.
Right?
I haven't read all of the comments in detail, but I think one thing that people are often forgetting is that a standard PCI bus has a theoretical maximum bandwidth of 133 MB/s, a level you'll probably never see in real life, especially when there's a fair amount of chatter on the bus from different devices (and you'd get a lot of that with 8 drives plus networking plus who knows what else). Of course, PCI bus layouts vary considerably between simple motherboards and high-end ones.
I don't know if anyone makes PCI-X ATA-133 controllers (non-RAID), so in the final analysis it might be best to get a 3ware card with a 64bit connector and plop it in a long slot. Of course, you need a pretty nice motherboard for that. I guess I haven't gone shopping recently, but they weren't that common the last I checked (and everyone is going to head for PCI-Express shortly anyway).
Of course, it all depends on what you'll use the machine for. If it's just file serving over a 100Mbit network, there's no need to worry that much about speed. It's only a big deal if you're concerned about doing things really fast. I believe good 3ware RAID cards can read data off a big array at 150-200 MB/s (maybe better). My local LUG put a ~1TB array together for an FTP mirror with 12 disks (using 120GB and 160GB drives, if I remember right) about 2 years ago, and testing produced read rates of about 120 MB/s on a regular PCI box (I think.. my memory is a bit flaky on that). Of course, I don't think anything was being done with the data (wasn't going out over the network interface, to my knowledge, just being read in by bonnie++ I suspect).
Wow. The title of this article (er, the Slashdot blurb) says "trademark," and the body says "copyright" as well as "patent." I think we're just dealing with a patent here. These are fairly distinct things, with wildly different rules...
Being a Minneapolitan, I'm skeptical that this could achieve much in a practical sense, though it's an interesting idea from an artistic standpoint. It could work on a larger scale, but that would require a significant percentage of the city population to help out.
If my browser ever manages to load the main page without barfing on the Flash, I might try to do something, but it's hard to say. Still, I've played with milliwatt radio transmitters before, and you're often lucky to hear anything even in the next room. But, considering the lack of quality in the big stations that currently exist in the Twin Cities, a lot of people would be interested in doing something to overcome that situation.
Heh. I was browsing around Target's electronics department and an ad for the new Star Wars DVD set came on. Mr. Movie Voice said "The ultimate series in the ultimate format." But I knew it was only the penultimate format at best. We'll see how long it takes the HD DVDs to come out now.
I'm not a rocket scientist, but I wonder if this is one of the effects of passing through the heliopause. It sounds like Pioneer 10 and 11 are too weak to send any actual data these days, so they can't really report if they're coming in contact with the expected particles, for instance.
Then again, it appears that this effect has been noted since at least 1998, so it's hard to say what's really going on. I will note that the two spacecraft are spin-stabilized, so maybe there's some weird frame-dragging-esque effect going on. I guess the effect hasn't been as noticeable on three-axis stabilized craft, though that's kind of expected since they would more frequently be using thrusters to change orientation (which would probably slightly affect trajectory too).
A lot of the Linux jobs out there (especially on Dice) are predicated on the idea that people know some of the big-name packages like Oracle and Veritas. There aren't a great many lower-level positions, at least in my region of the country. I did find a low-paying (well, for IT -- about double minimum wage) job about a month ago involving Linux. It might or might not be a steady job. 80% stuff out there is consulting/contract work, but I suppose that's not a Linux-specific problem (er, I personally see that as a problem because it takes me forever to get comfortable in new environments, and I just don't like dealing with the uncertainty -- some people thrive on stuff like that).
A lot of places have had similar experiences. The University of Minnesota (which has one of the largest campuses in the country, though the overall statewide system isn't extraordinary) began switching over to a PeopleSoft system back around 1997. I'm not sure if it is complete yet, but I guess I haven't heard much about it for a few years (but then, I graduated a year and a half ago).
Looks like these guys are focusing on turning diesels into diesel-electric. Delivery vehicles often run on diesel and the London Taxis use it as well. Not really surprising that a company has been trying out that technology, since people have been using it in trains since the 1930s or so (of course, most diesel-electric trains don't incorporate batteries to store extra energy, as far as I know).
;-)
Well, the diesel-electric train is the series hybrid type, where the engine isn't directly connected to the wheels. I imagine this company had to do a fair amount of work on the parallel hybrid type where both the engine and electric motor connect to the wheels. My understanding is that, theoretically, series hybrids are more efficient. If true, it confuses me why most hybrids we're seeing these days use the parallel style (or a variation on it) instead. I guess I've heard that, with the Prius for example, the electric motor balances out the power curve of the engine. Electric motors have extremely high torque at low RPMs, but apparently become less efficient at higher RPMs where gasoline engines are better. Of course, diesel engines have a different power curve than gasoline engines, with more torque and horsepower appearing at low RPM (probably one reason why semis have like 15 gears
Anyway, GM has their Electro-Motive Division (EMD) that has been producing diesel-electric trains for decades. I'm curious why nobody there has (at least publicly) demonstrated some diesel-electric trucks/vans/etc.
Hmm.
;-)
Having grown up a fair distance from most of the TV channels (probably no towers were less than 50 miles from us except maybe one), yet being able to view 15-20 channels with a large yagi antenna, I am concerned about this. Well, heck, I'm concerned about HDTV reception too.
I grew up in southeast Minnesota, near Rochester (where the Mayo Clinic is), though the town I was in was one of the highest regions of land in the area. My family mostly pointed our antenna northward at the Twin Cities, from which we could receive eight major channels (well, except when the weather was bad): 2 (PBS), 4 (CBS), 5 (ABC), 9 (was UPN, now Fox), 11 (NBC), 17 (PBS), 23 (now WB, and the infamous originator of MST3K), 29 (was Fox, now UPN). As the PAX network started up, we could sometimes see 41 from St. Cloud.
When the weather was bad, or annoying things like late-running baseball games took up a Cities channel, various other options were available by turning the antenna. CBS stations were also available from Iowa and Wisconsin. There was an ABC affiliate near the Minnesota/Iowa border, and the local NBC affiliate's tower was not far from the border either. Several PBS stations were able to be picked up to the east, west, and south.
Recently, I experimented with receiving HDTV signals with a Linux-compatible pcHDTV card. I was really annoyed to see that we had to directly point our antenna at the transmission tower to have any hope of picking up a signal. In the analog days, it was at least possible to get the gist of what was happening on most channels, even if they weren't aimed at directly by the antenna. Channel surfing at my parents' place is going to get a lot more dull (it wasn't great to begin with
HDTV transmitters (at the moment, at least) put out significantly less power than their analog counterparts. Theoretically, the same coverage is available with this lower power, but as I described, I think the FCC has a different idea of what reception and coverage actually are compared to what I think they are.
Then again, the pcHDTV card probably has a relatively poor tuner, but I definitely worry about it.
I think Michael Powell has said a few times that he things that "Free TV" (over-the-air broadcasts) are going the way of the dodo. Certainly, many people have been more interested in cable and satellite, but there is a loss of local flavor in that arrangement. I certainly credit a lot of my education and interest in science and technology to the availability of several PBS channels in my area. Even now, I live in Minneapolis, where I cringe when I think that only two PBS stations are available (well, you can say that more are available when the HDTV sub-channels are considered, but the programming on those doesn't really interest me at the moment).
Anyway, I just feel that the FCC probably won't properly answer this question. Maybe they will, but I have significant doubts.
Nope. All hemp is dope in the eyes of the law (in the U.S.).
It gets confusing listening to the hemp advocates in this country. A lot of people are genuinely interested in the utilitarian value of hemp (it was grown in mass quantities back during WWII, for instance, to make rope and other materials). However, enough people who are more interested in the, shall we say, "entertainment value" of certain varieties of hemp get mixed in with the groups and confuse the issue.
It is legal to import the non-narcotic products of hemp into the U.S. from other countries.
Heh. I think that even the McLaren F1 gets a SULEV rating ;-) (but my memory might be messed up)
It's just a factor of how fully the gasoline is burned. The engine puts out a lot more CO2 and H2O, but a lot less CO and not-fully-burned fuel bits.
Still, if you believe in global warming, pumping out more CO2 isn't the best thing. (Well, unless you're fueling up with pure bioethanol or something, where the carbon put out is balanced out by carbon taken in by plant life.)
Actually, the Lupo 3L gets that mileage without being a hybrid. Of course, the car is so lightweight, I wonder if trying to turn it into a hybrid would just make things worse ;-)
I remember there were two or three engines available when my mom got her car (one or two 4-cyl versions and a V6 if I remember right), and, of course, two transmission options. The smallest engine plus a manual transmission was peppy enough for my family, though I'm sure many people instantly gravitated toward the more power-hungry options.