Well, I didn't mean to come off sounding snobbish, it just seems that as of lately most electronic music is the same repetitive beat stuff that they ship in institutional size cans to raves. Actually, I'm a big fan of Kraftwerk ever since they first came out. You can thank Man Parrish for putting the Kraftwerk sound into more mainstream music. As far as NIN goes, my introduction to the modern techno scene came through collecting all the old Amiga MOD/MED files I could get my hands on. The guy down the hall had some NIN pumping on his stereo, and, thinking he had a new MOD I didn't have, I ran over... "Yo, dude, what's that you're playing?" and I have been hooked ever since. And I was delighted when the CSound book listed these bands as recommended listening. But people seem to forget about Raymond Scott, who gave the world electronic music in the first place, as well as the music for cartoons.
Forget all the techno/electronica/house/doof-doof/etc. stuff they call "electronic music" nowadays. Look into electroacoustic music, the kind of electronic music that university music professors and electrical engineers have been doing since the mid 1950's (racks of punch cards fed into mainframes). Good starting links are SEAMUS and CSounds.
More uses: Drying out silica gel and refreshing zeolites. Says so on the can.
More fun: Microwave grape racing. Steam builds up inside, and jets out the stem hole and the grapes scoot around inside the microwave. Ocasionally, the stem hole is too small/plugged with seeds/still has a piece of stem inside, in which case they explode on the starting line.
They're used quite extensively as backlights for industrial equipment, I know some of the newer Fluke multimeters use white LEDs to backlight the display for nighttime use. Also, Gameboy Advance has outboard white LEDs that you can plug in the link cable slot, and I'm pretty sure some geek case modder types have installed white LEDs in their GBA's.
Yeah, but you hit a salary cap at GS-12. That's it, you've reached the top, nowhere else to go, no more promotions, no more next level left to work towards. The salary of a GS-12 is the entry level salary of some private sector jobs.
It's not bad just on the IT side of the house, but other engineering disciplines, too. I graduated in December with a degree in "hard core" electrical engineering. You know, 65,000 volt three phase zapping, big motor turning, logic controller programming, microwave transmitting real engineering of the type where you have to take that grueling 8 hour motherfscker of a test at the end to prove you're worthy of an Engineer-in-Training certificate.
For four years, I was hearing where even the bottom of the class graduates were getting jobs at Motorola and Lockheed, and their hiring bonus was the company paying off their student loans in full. But guess what? It took me five years. I graduated a day late and a dollar short. All those big ticket engineering jobs vanished. I did manage to have a job waiting for me upon graduation, a "cushy" government job as a DoD civilian with the Air Force, but the entry level salary of $28,535 (GS-5) turned me off, as well as having to relocate to a base smack in the middle of Georgia. I turned it down in hopes that I could catch a bigger fish closer to home... EE-YONK! EE-YONK! is the sound of a disillusioned electrical engineer who feels like a jackass.
Sure, there's EE jobs available, but the requirements are so pointed and specific that it looks like they are trying to attract back the same people who got laid off (or jumped ship) when the economy tanked. "Wanted: B.S. Engineering EE, ME,or CE & PMI Certification preferred. Project Engineer in power Distribution Substation Dept. Plan, design, & assemble project staff for Engineering Programs. Responsible for development, implementation, & maintenance of projects. 10+ years experience with demonstrated work experience with distributed control system hardware and software, preferably Honeywell TDC/TPS platform, work experience in applying ANSI/ISA S84.01 to safety shutdown systems, ability to manage multiple projects over $3 million." Not hardly the type of experience someone who is still wet behind the ears out of college has. The best I've been able to do is whore myself out for temporary work.
So I scan or type in the ISBN, a perl script grabs the books information from the LOC(via z3950), and when I'm done, the system spits out a list of books in LOC order with the Title/Author next to it.
And what better to scan the ISBN with than a Cue Cat. My mother has about 400 paperback romance novels, and every time she goes to the bookstore, she can't figure out if she's read that book yet or not. She picks a book up, reads two pages, and says "I can't tell if I've read that one before or not." (Of course, I ask her how can she tell?) A Cue Cat and a CDDB style book database would allow me to scan the barcode and catalog every one of her books very quickly so she can bring a printout to the bookstore with her.
Umm, There is no such thing as *LIQUID* CO2. Gaseous CO2 freezes directly to dry ice and dry ice sublimates directly to its gaseous form.
My contribution to this OT thread: CO2 is in liquid form when kept in metal cylinders, such as CO2 fire extinguishers. When you release liquid CO2 that is kept under pressure, it cools off even further due to expansion and freezes solid (the rapidly evaporating "snow" you see coming from CO2 fire extinguishers). At ice houses, liquid CO2 is sprayed into a chamber to make this "snow", which is then packed into a pancake, then more is sprayed in and packed again a few more times until it is compressed into blocks of dry ice. But it does evaporate from solid directly to vapor. Which you can then crumble and put in a beaker of water to make fog to blow around inside your extra cool clear case.
A long time ago, a friend of mine got a digital wristwatch wet, and he had the idea of heating it in a microwave oven to dry it. It beeped for a couple seconds, then sparks shot out. It was a goner.
TV station logos planted on top of shows, opaque and animated so they can't be edited out. Video squished, bent, and overlayed to accomodate advertisements while the show is actually playing.
This is sorta reminiscent of the days when people used to tape their favorite songs off the radio, but the deejay would blabber on for a few seconds into the song and then start the next song just as the first one is about to fade out, thus spoiling the completeness of the song, with the idea that if you tape, that's one thing, but if you want to listen to the song "clean", you have to go out and buy the record or cassette. But then computers happened, and the rest is history...
The display operated by mechanically moving strips of black plastic or mylar in front of an incandescent lamp, the digit to be displayed was a translucent portion of the mylar. These displays were once widely used in government and military applications, and into the mid '80s were used in the video switching systems of the CBS-TV network.
You mean like the last of the old TV sets with knobs that you turn to change the channel? Rather than having the numbers on the knobs, there was a wheel with the numbers on it, and the channel you were on showed in a small window, illuminated from behind by an incandescent light. Now that I think of it, that might have been my first ever electronic personalization (analogous to a case mod), when the incandescent lamp went out, I found a green neon lamp to install in its place.
In the recent movie Ocean's Eleven, an electromagnetic pulse weapon called a "pinch" was used to knock out the lights of Las Vegas so they could rob the casino. I remembered reading about electromagnetic pulse weapons in either Popular Mechanics or Popular Science (I forget which) about a month or two prior to 9/11 The article said that the current state of these weapons could produce a pulse much stronger than that of an atomic bomb, that it would fry the electronics of anything within a 30 mile range, even if they were shielded inside a grounded Faraday cage, and would even cause house wiring to melt down. And the scary part is that they are easy to make in the cost range of not thousands, but hundreds. Imagine if a dozen or so of these were detonated inside a big city. All activities that are dependent on electricity or the use of electronic devices would halt, even today's cars with their computer controlled ignition. It would be like going back to the early 1800s.
Back in the late 70's - early 80's a number of pinball manufacturers used neon displays for the score, but they were flat and rectangular like vacuum fluorescents. Has anybody ever seen one with nixie tubes? That would look so cool.
In this article, I have seen atleast 15 people mention hydrogen. This system does not freaking use HYDROGEN. It uses Methanol, a very aboundant byproduct of wood, manufactured easily and cheaply. It's used for a number of things: decontamination, and general pourpose solvent being the 2 big ones.
Nope. Plastics and gasoline additives are the two big ones.
As far as it being a clean source of energy.. I'd hesitate on calling that shot. They use energy from (possibly not directly from) fossil fuels to get the stuff in the first place, and seeing as how wood is a major source of it, deforestation is a problem, isn't it?
In this article, I've seen at least 150 people mention wood. The majority of methanol is not made from freakin' WOOD. The annual production in the US is 35.7 million tons per year. If all this methanol was made of wood, the entire Earth would have been stripped bare of trees decades ago.
The majority of methanol used today comes from reforming natural gas (methane). Here is a paragraph from a major manufacturer of methanol:
Methanol is a primary liquid petrochemical made from renewable and non-renewable fossil fuels containing carbon and hydrogen. Also known as Methyl Alcohol (CH3OH), it is manufactured from synthesis gas, a combination of carbon oxides in hydrogen produced from natural gas. Methanol is then synthesized under pressure in a catalytic process and the crude methanol is purified to chemical grade by distillation. Natural gas is the feedstock used in most of the world's production of methanol and typically represents the most significant cost component. Methanol is a chemical building block used to produce formaldehyde, acetic acid and a variety of other chemical intermediates. A significant amount of methanol is also used to make MTBE (methyl tertiary butyl ether), an additive used in cleaner-burning gasoline.
If it can be re-engineered for 70% isopropyl alcohol, one needs to go no further than their corner grocery store, pharmacy or Wal-mart. But then again, Wal-mart sells quart cans of methanol in their paint department. No problem.
Score: -1, Loss of Credibility (for referring to anything by Noam Chomsky)
Actually, if you tune out the CNN carping, and read something intelligible about the region--I recommend Noam Chomsky--you would see that it is exactly oil that causes the hatred.
These people have been hating each other for millenia. The petrochemical industry and its associated economy is barely a century old.
If the world fuel "economy" switches to hydrogen, what happens to the countries which sole income is provided by oil and fossil fuels? Won't these places be absolutely devestated and ruined by the collapse of their energy-demand?
Not really. The cheapest way to make bulk hydrogen is to use a reformer with a petroleum based feedstock. If they could build a reformer into the fuel cell and use Coleman's lantern fuel, then they'd have the next Big Thing(tm). Coleman's lantern fuel is a highly purified white gasoline. Which is more expensive than motor gasoline. Coleman? Big oil? Ya listening?
Actually the dumbass used a match rather than flicking a bic, thank God. If the first thing everybody smelled was a burning fuse, it would've been too late.
Yeah, you can pretty much bet that any algorithm/key length that the US deems "approved for export" can be cracked by the intelligence community. As far as all the others go, I'm pretty sure whether or not they've been cracked is classified.
I feel for you, brother. I was in the Army for 6 years, got out, went to college, got a Bachelor's in Electrical Engineering (straight "hard core" EE with very little computer engineering above and beyond core requirements), and what was the first firm job offer I got? A DoD civilian job at an Air Force base just south of Macon, Ga. Guess what I did? I turned it down.
I had to decide... Do I really want to be a DoD Federal civil service employee with a GS pay grade and make exactly half what I would be making as an employee for a big private sector government contractor such as Lockheed Martin or Northrop Grumman? I decided to go for the DoD position for the sake of job security and lower stress (due to the very slow pace imposed by layers of bureaucracy) and better feelings about retirement (especially in light of the Enron fiasco).
But a week before the start date, with papers and travel orders in hand, I had to turn the job down because of a family hardship that having to relocate would have brought on, no matter whether I worked at a government or a private sector job.
Although I interviewed for Northrop Grumman, I was eventually turned down, so I'm stuck trying to get my foot in the door at all the local refineries, power plants, etc. (I live in a heavy industrialized area). It's looking more and more like me not getting any job is going to cause more hardship than me moving away from my family, I just hope I can re-apply for the DoD job if it comes to that.
I kinda halfway been waiting for a/. review of A Beautiful Mind, which has been out for three weeks now, but Orange County just came out this weekend and gets reviewed right away? Is everyone at/. smoking crack?
There are numerous emulators out there for TI calculators, I have an emulator for my TI-89. Of course, you have to own the calculator so you can transfer the ROM image to the emulator, but you can install it on a laptop and not have to carry both the laptop and calculator with you when you go somewhere.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I didn't mean to come off sounding snobbish, it just seems that as of lately most electronic music is the same repetitive beat stuff that they ship in institutional size cans to raves. Actually, I'm a big fan of Kraftwerk ever since they first came out. You can thank Man Parrish for putting the Kraftwerk sound into more mainstream music. As far as NIN goes, my introduction to the modern techno scene came through collecting all the old Amiga MOD/MED files I could get my hands on. The guy down the hall had some NIN pumping on his stereo, and, thinking he had a new MOD I didn't have, I ran over... "Yo, dude, what's that you're playing?" and I have been hooked ever since. And I was delighted when the CSound book listed these bands as recommended listening. But people seem to forget about Raymond Scott, who gave the world electronic music in the first place, as well as the music for cartoons.
Forget all the techno/electronica/house/doof-doof/etc. stuff they call "electronic music" nowadays. Look into electroacoustic music, the kind of electronic music that university music professors and electrical engineers have been doing since the mid 1950's (racks of punch cards fed into mainframes). Good starting links are SEAMUS and CSounds.
More uses: Drying out silica gel and refreshing zeolites. Says so on the can.
More fun: Microwave grape racing. Steam builds up inside, and jets out the stem hole and the grapes scoot around inside the microwave. Ocasionally, the stem hole is too small/plugged with seeds/still has a piece of stem inside, in which case they explode on the starting line.
They're used quite extensively as backlights for industrial equipment, I know some of the newer Fluke multimeters use white LEDs to backlight the display for nighttime use. Also, Gameboy Advance has outboard white LEDs that you can plug in the link cable slot, and I'm pretty sure some geek case modder types have installed white LEDs in their GBA's.
Yeah, but you hit a salary cap at GS-12. That's it, you've reached the top, nowhere else to go, no more promotions, no more next level left to work towards. The salary of a GS-12 is the entry level salary of some private sector jobs.
It's not bad just on the IT side of the house, but other engineering disciplines, too. I graduated in December with a degree in "hard core" electrical engineering. You know, 65,000 volt three phase zapping, big motor turning, logic controller programming, microwave transmitting real engineering of the type where you have to take that grueling 8 hour motherfscker of a test at the end to prove you're worthy of an Engineer-in-Training certificate.
For four years, I was hearing where even the bottom of the class graduates were getting jobs at Motorola and Lockheed, and their hiring bonus was the company paying off their student loans in full. But guess what? It took me five years. I graduated a day late and a dollar short. All those big ticket engineering jobs vanished. I did manage to have a job waiting for me upon graduation, a "cushy" government job as a DoD civilian with the Air Force, but the entry level salary of $28,535 (GS-5) turned me off, as well as having to relocate to a base smack in the middle of Georgia. I turned it down in hopes that I could catch a bigger fish closer to home... EE-YONK! EE-YONK! is the sound of a disillusioned electrical engineer who feels like a jackass.
Sure, there's EE jobs available, but the requirements are so pointed and specific that it looks like they are trying to attract back the same people who got laid off (or jumped ship) when the economy tanked. "Wanted: B.S. Engineering EE, ME,or CE & PMI Certification preferred. Project Engineer in power Distribution Substation Dept. Plan, design, & assemble project staff for Engineering Programs. Responsible for development, implementation, & maintenance of projects. 10+ years experience with demonstrated work experience with distributed control system hardware and software, preferably Honeywell TDC/TPS platform, work experience in applying ANSI/ISA S84.01 to safety shutdown systems, ability to manage multiple projects over $3 million." Not hardly the type of experience someone who is still wet behind the ears out of college has. The best I've been able to do is whore myself out for temporary work.
So I scan or type in the ISBN, a perl script grabs the books information from the LOC(via z3950), and when I'm done, the system spits out a list of books in LOC order with the Title/Author next to it.
And what better to scan the ISBN with than a Cue Cat. My mother has about 400 paperback romance novels, and every time she goes to the bookstore, she can't figure out if she's read that book yet or not. She picks a book up, reads two pages, and says "I can't tell if I've read that one before or not." (Of course, I ask her how can she tell?) A Cue Cat and a CDDB style book database would allow me to scan the barcode and catalog every one of her books very quickly so she can bring a printout to the bookstore with her.
Umm, There is no such thing as *LIQUID* CO2. Gaseous CO2 freezes directly to dry ice and dry ice sublimates directly to its gaseous form.
My contribution to this OT thread:
CO2 is in liquid form when kept in metal cylinders, such as CO2 fire extinguishers. When you release liquid CO2 that is kept under pressure, it cools off even further due to expansion and freezes solid (the rapidly evaporating "snow" you see coming from CO2 fire extinguishers). At ice houses, liquid CO2 is sprayed into a chamber to make this "snow", which is then packed into a pancake, then more is sprayed in and packed again a few more times until it is compressed into blocks of dry ice. But it does evaporate from solid directly to vapor. Which you can then crumble and put in a beaker of water to make fog to blow around inside your extra cool clear case.
A long time ago, a friend of mine got a digital wristwatch wet, and he had the idea of heating it in a microwave oven to dry it. It beeped for a couple seconds, then sparks shot out. It was a goner.
TV station logos planted on top of shows, opaque and animated so they can't be edited out. Video squished, bent, and overlayed to accomodate advertisements while the show is actually playing.
This is sorta reminiscent of the days when people used to tape their favorite songs off the radio, but the deejay would blabber on for a few seconds into the song and then start the next song just as the first one is about to fade out, thus spoiling the completeness of the song, with the idea that if you tape, that's one thing, but if you want to listen to the song "clean", you have to go out and buy the record or cassette. But then computers happened, and the rest is history...
Who said anything about being open? You have to pay for the software and it doesn't run on Linux!
The display operated by mechanically moving strips of black plastic or mylar in front of an incandescent lamp, the digit to be displayed was a translucent portion of the mylar. These displays were once widely used in government and military applications, and into the mid '80s were used in the video switching systems of the CBS-TV network.
You mean like the last of the old TV sets with knobs that you turn to change the channel? Rather than having the numbers on the knobs, there was a wheel with the numbers on it, and the channel you were on showed in a small window, illuminated from behind by an incandescent light. Now that I think of it, that might have been my first ever electronic personalization (analogous to a case mod), when the incandescent lamp went out, I found a green neon lamp to install in its place.
In the recent movie Ocean's Eleven, an electromagnetic pulse weapon called a "pinch" was used to knock out the lights of Las Vegas so they could rob the casino. I remembered reading about electromagnetic pulse weapons in either Popular Mechanics or Popular Science (I forget which) about a month or two prior to 9/11 The article said that the current state of these weapons could produce a pulse much stronger than that of an atomic bomb, that it would fry the electronics of anything within a 30 mile range, even if they were shielded inside a grounded Faraday cage, and would even cause house wiring to melt down. And the scary part is that they are easy to make in the cost range of not thousands, but hundreds. Imagine if a dozen or so of these were detonated inside a big city. All activities that are dependent on electricity or the use of electronic devices would halt, even today's cars with their computer controlled ignition. It would be like going back to the early 1800s.
Back in the late 70's - early 80's a number of pinball manufacturers used neon displays for the score, but they were flat and rectangular like vacuum fluorescents. Has anybody ever seen one with nixie tubes? That would look so cool.
In this article, I have seen atleast 15 people mention hydrogen. This system does not freaking use HYDROGEN. It uses Methanol, a very aboundant byproduct of wood, manufactured easily and cheaply. It's used for a number of things: decontamination, and general pourpose solvent being the 2 big ones.
Nope. Plastics and gasoline additives are the two big ones.
As far as it being a clean source of energy.. I'd hesitate on calling that shot. They use energy from (possibly not directly from) fossil fuels to get the stuff in the first place, and seeing as how wood is a major source of it, deforestation is a problem, isn't it?
In this article, I've seen at least 150 people mention wood. The majority of methanol is not made from freakin' WOOD. The annual production in the US is 35.7 million tons per year. If all this methanol was made of wood, the entire Earth would have been stripped bare of trees decades ago.
The majority of methanol used today comes from reforming natural gas (methane). Here is a paragraph from a major manufacturer of methanol:
Methanol is a primary liquid petrochemical made from renewable and non-renewable fossil fuels containing carbon and hydrogen. Also known as Methyl Alcohol (CH3OH), it is manufactured from synthesis gas, a combination of carbon oxides in hydrogen produced from natural gas. Methanol is then synthesized under pressure in a catalytic process and the crude methanol is purified to chemical grade by distillation. Natural gas is the feedstock used in most of the world's production of methanol and typically represents the most significant cost component. Methanol is a chemical building block used to produce formaldehyde, acetic acid and a variety of other chemical intermediates. A significant amount of methanol is also used to make MTBE (methyl tertiary butyl ether), an additive used in cleaner-burning gasoline.
RTFA again and then follow the link to the American Methanol Institute halfway through the article.
If it can be re-engineered for 70% isopropyl alcohol, one needs to go no further than their corner grocery store, pharmacy or Wal-mart. But then again, Wal-mart sells quart cans of methanol in their paint department. No problem.
I'd rather have a case made out of transparent aluminum.
Yep. Saw that one coming a light year away.
All they make anymore is slot machines. See www.wmsgaming.com
Score: -1, Loss of Credibility (for referring to anything by Noam Chomsky)
Actually, if you tune out the CNN carping, and read something intelligible about the region--I recommend Noam Chomsky--you would see that it is exactly oil that causes the hatred.
These people have been hating each other for millenia. The petrochemical industry and its associated economy is barely a century old.
If the world fuel "economy" switches to hydrogen, what happens to the countries which sole income is provided by oil and fossil fuels? Won't these places be absolutely devestated and ruined by the collapse of their energy-demand?
Not really. The cheapest way to make bulk hydrogen is to use a reformer with a petroleum based feedstock. If they could build a reformer into the fuel cell and use Coleman's lantern fuel, then they'd have the next Big Thing(tm). Coleman's lantern fuel is a highly purified white gasoline. Which is more expensive than motor gasoline. Coleman? Big oil? Ya listening?
Actually the dumbass used a match rather than flicking a bic, thank God. If the first thing everybody smelled was a burning fuse, it would've been too late.
Yeah, you can pretty much bet that any algorithm/key length that the US deems "approved for export" can be cracked by the intelligence community. As far as all the others go, I'm pretty sure whether or not they've been cracked is classified.
I feel for you, brother. I was in the Army for 6 years, got out, went to college, got a Bachelor's in Electrical Engineering (straight "hard core" EE with very little computer engineering above and beyond core requirements), and what was the first firm job offer I got? A DoD civilian job at an Air Force base just south of Macon, Ga. Guess what I did? I turned it down.
I had to decide... Do I really want to be a DoD Federal civil service employee with a GS pay grade and make exactly half what I would be making as an employee for a big private sector government contractor such as Lockheed Martin or Northrop Grumman? I decided to go for the DoD position for the sake of job security and lower stress (due to the very slow pace imposed by layers of bureaucracy) and better feelings about retirement (especially in light of the Enron fiasco).
But a week before the start date, with papers and travel orders in hand, I had to turn the job down because of a family hardship that having to relocate would have brought on, no matter whether I worked at a government or a private sector job.
Although I interviewed for Northrop Grumman, I was eventually turned down, so I'm stuck trying to get my foot in the door at all the local refineries, power plants, etc. (I live in a heavy industrialized area). It's looking more and more like me not getting any job is going to cause more hardship than me moving away from my family, I just hope I can re-apply for the DoD job if it comes to that.
I kinda halfway been waiting for a /. review of A Beautiful Mind, which has been out for three weeks now, but Orange County just came out this weekend and gets reviewed right away? Is everyone at /. smoking crack?
There are numerous emulators out there for TI calculators, I have an emulator for my TI-89. Of course, you have to own the calculator so you can transfer the ROM image to the emulator, but you can install it on a laptop and not have to carry both the laptop and calculator with you when you go somewhere.