I worked four summers as a field service tech, and I can promise you all manner of diifculty.
Consider for instance our main stadiun. It had a dozen or so intelligent lighting fixtures mounted on tomcat truss about 80 feet above the main pool. These fixtures have fairly large boards and processors in them, but also could not be sealed because of the need for ventilation.
Without ever coming into direct contact with the water these fixtures had troubles. The huunidity combined with micro-droplets of saltwater in the air was hell on the boards. Even the special ruggedized, sealed power cable connectors we used could only last a few seasons before needing replacement. DMX (signal for lighting) connectors failed even more frequently. Worse, the inner boards would accumulate enough salt deposits to cause them to short in some cases in just a few months of exposure to two whales splashing around. And these instruments are designed to be rugged, roadworthy fixtures for getting banged around on rock concert tours.
Our solution, 1) by the best connectors we could get our hands on. This was the number one point of failure. Not just water resistant, but submersible. Look in specialty electronics catalogues, we only bought AC and DMX connectors, but they had many types available. We then wrapped all connection in several layers of amalgamating tape (great stuff!!). 2) We had a frequent overhaul plan where instruments were brought down, thoroughly cleaned (dunked in deionized water, allowed to dry 100%, prayers before powering up again)3)Pay attention to where air intake is located..add filters and larger fans to accomdate the reduction in airflow they cause.
Basically, I'd invest in low cost equipment, keep a repair/replacement schedule, stay very vigilant about salt buildup.
The reason some student versions cost ridiculously low amounts is not because MS wants to cut poor students a break. And it is unlikely that it is because they want to build up large groups of students proficient in Office so that they use it later in the work force. They have that market anyways.
Instead, check out the terms of the contracts that universities have to agree to to be able to offer those prices. I'll bet you find that most of that "discount" software you buy is paid for down the line in your tuition.
I'll accept your argument, if you'll give me some hyperlinks to prove it. Even from what I remember of high school earth science, the last ice age was only 10,000 years ago, it hardly seems time for another one.
The article argues that it the changes in sound, rapid changes in images, fast cuts, etc. cause an instictive fight or flight alert response in the viewer which results in elevated levels of certain chemicals in the brain. Makes sense, in the wild, if you detected a sudden movement or change you would respond with heightened alertness. It seems television mimics this effect, and we can get hooked on the stimulation.
I know that tossing my TV was one of the best things I've ever done. No more mind-numbing hours in front of the tube soaking up ads from corporations I really don't like, no more seeing fake images of how I should like and behave and waste money. And best of all, spending more real *quality* time with my girlfriend, getting outside, even posting to slahdot.
Center for Devices and Radiological Health, a division of the US Food and Drug Administration. They regulate all lasers, medical, entertainment, scientific, even the laser diodes in you cd player, in the US.
This guy knows what he is talking about. Sure targetting with a single laser beam would be hard, but add a pair of galvonometers to scan a dense grid over the entire plane wouldn't be two hard, and even with the drop in exposure from scanning the beam, 1 or 2 watts would be more than enough to temporarily blind someone, even at a reasonable distance.
Assuming pilots do actually look out the window during final approach (seems somewhat likely) I could probably achieve this with $5k in parts..assuming I stole nothing and didn't already have most of that equipment already. Solid state laser and the whole device would be shoebox sized. Gas-ion laser, I'll probably need a van for a small gas generator for power.
All I want is electronic paper, color or black and white, that is cheap enough and has a good enough resolution that I can wall paper my room with geiss or another visualization. This would make me happy, and also probably quite dizzy.
Nope...every now and then those labels and the "this end up" labels aren't put on well. The guys at the distribution center see then, grab them, and keep them to replace any other shockwatch stickers they *accidentally* break. Seen it happen at least a dozen times a month in the busy recieving room of my old office. And most of the offending packages were international shipments via UPS Ground. Needless to say, they no longer receive our business.
For a mensa, you ought to realize that these are not basic rights, but basic necessities. Jefferson outlined basic rights as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Your three basic necessities would all fall under the first category of basic rights, necessities of life.
This "think of the starving children" line is getting stale. Is rice more of a priority for some than 'net access? Certainly. But one of my great hopes for the internet is that it starts to level the playing field between the rich and the poor. Instead of helping to rich to stay that way, like the current market structure, the Internet may allow the truly creative or industrious to suceed.
The barrier between now and this potential future is obviously the current rich and powerful, people who will strive to retain their power by controlling and limiting access to such a potentially destabilizing factor as the internet and unfettered access to knowledge.
Let's add something for the corporations like Monsanto, Dow, and most every coal operator in West Virginia....
If someone dies through your negligence, especially if you knew of the hazard, the highest up superior who knew of the problem does the jail time for manslaughter/murder.
Well, they make the freshman and low-level classes all buy HP 48s here . But these classes never even use the graphing functions- or much beyond what a low-end scientific would have.
In the upper-level classes where using the technology would be usefull, they usually forbid the calculators so students won't cheat.
Yeah, but it won't happen that way and we all know it. Yes, this will get cracked big time, but it won't cause Microsoft to go down in flames. The PR machine will kick in calling the cracking of Passport cyber-terrorism. Everyone will go "Oh poor Microsoft" and then we will proceed to pass more legislation removing even our most basic civil liberties. Say good bye to Linux and PGP and hello to a legally mandated MS operating system and ROT13 as your most powerfull legal encryption tool.
Hate to be pessimistic, but I'm losing a lot of hope here. I vote, I pay taxes, but every time I log into/. I see something else that makes me think about emigrating to a freer country. Anyone want to sponsor a bright, talented theatre designer with a background in entertainment lasers willing to work for next to nothing?
I've worked with some SoundTube products before. They were excellent. We used thew in several hanging locations and on the ground in theme parks, so they received a 70 volt distributed PA signal. They played a mix of classical and pop music all day. Sound quality was not excellent, but certainly very good. They were very power efficient and very durable. Bats, Birds, Bees, rain, manure, even lawnmovers attacked these things on a daily basis and they still worked great. One of the nicest outdoor PA speakers I ever worked with.
Actually, this is really just a test to see if they can increase sales among the rabid NSync fans. Just like in my halcyon teenage days when I bragged of having every Pearl Jam album and single on cd, cassette, and vinyl, now this next generation of fans can brag about having all of the different versions of the copy protected disc.
Read the article....
It is not a genetically modified crop. It is just a very obscure variant that seems to have its own natural resistance. And happens to be purple.
In fact, it is such a rare variant that (according to the article) it doesn't even have a name.
Re:Just remebered - Ford Prefect
on
Optical SETI
·
· Score: 1
Don't have my copy of The Guide to hand though, so I can't verify this I'm afraid - anyone else know?
What, you don't have your copy of The Guide an you??? And I suppose you don't have a towel either?
In high school I worked as a guide and steward on a 5,000 acre peat sphagnum bog in upstate New York. The sugars in the peat combined with the high acidity that the peat creates prevents just about anything from growing. Especially limited are the bacteria which cause normal decomposition, so the nosrmal succession of wet swamp land to damp meadow, to rich-soiled forest never occurs. You can dig for 60 feet and find undecayed peat that is virtually the same except compacted by the weight above it and brown from lack of chlorophyl.
The browm color of the water is related to the tannic acid leachates off of the sphagnum and other plants. *My* bog had a lot of leahterleaf, black spruce, and pitcher plants.
The old folk tale I used to hear was that a half cup of bog water will add five years to your life. If so I should live till about 140...but I don't recommend it unless you are strong of gut and strong of will...this ain't no cup of tea!! But maybe this study lends some credence to that old story.
Another interesting tidbit..in the civil war they discovered that wounds dressed with sphagnum moss were significantly less likely to become infected compared to those dressed with cotton bandages..again, the acids restricting bacterial growth I imagine.
Bogs are pretty crazy, cool ecosytems, but as you might have guessed, very rare and very fragile.
I'm gonna me too here:
Took me three tries to go from NetSol to gandi.net (12 euros=cheap). A little more than a month after dealing with all of the confirmation letters. And of course no response at all from the several e-mails sent to NetSol customer service.
Yes, laser projectors are hellishly expensive, one of the reasons there are so few in the US (that are any good). You try precisely moving a very small point of light around at incredible speeds with all sorts of sharp angles and see what sort of accuracy you get.
And that says nothing for the cost of the laser itself. Or just the amount of power and water most ion lasers need if you want to be able to have it bright enough to see outside. Plus all of the special crystals and optics needed for color changing, provided you can even afford a laser with multiple wavelengths.
Now, one reason the LCMax plug-in rocks is because it saves you some money on the production end. Just about every US laser company uses Pangolin software. Typically a show is created as traditional frame by frame animation and then hand traced on a digitizing tablet into Pangolin. Frame by Frame!!
Max changes all this by making it easy to create simple objects and rotates in laser light with out all of the time consuming digitizing. If you see the Hershey Park show or SeaWorld Orlando you will be able to pick out the parts where LC Max was doing the work. The images have a really clean, distinct look to them.
Laser light is absolutely incredible. There really is nothing else like it in color or intensity. And believe it or not 3D studio and LCmax are just drops in the bucket once you put a full power system together. Hopefully it will help laser companies get out of the rut they seem to be stuck in (at least stateside) and start pushing the boundaries of this amazing art form again. Because honestly, most US laser shows these days suck like a hoover.
Watch out for the skb cases. They are shallower than many other full size rack cases. This tends not to be problem with the full size 4U cases, but the 2U server cases are much deeper, so that back cover has to be permanently off. Also, because they don't use true threaded rack rail and the rail is aluminum, not steel, you are more likely to overload and bend the rail.
On the other hand, I love my SKB. A 4U ATX case from ebay, a rock solid power amp, EQ, processing, and power conditioner all in one neatly wired black cube. Snap both covers on and I can easily move the whole system anywhere.
Now if only I could find a cheap, ergonomic rack mountable monitor.
While I agree that nuclear power is cleaner than coal (though the lesser of two evils is still evil), all of the people who are saying that with Amercian engineering nuclear power (much less nuclear rockets) would be totally safe...
well this was an old summer camp song....
Oh, they built the ship Titanic, to sail the ocean blue.
For they thought it was a ship that water would never go through.
It was on its maiden trip, that an iceberg hit the ship.
It was sad when the great ship went down.
Chorus:
It was sad, so sad.
It was sad, so sad.
It was sad when the great ship went down (to the bottom of the....)
Uncles and aunts, little children lost their pants.
It was sad when the great ship went down.
Oh the moral of this story, the moral of this song,
Is that one shouldn't go where he does not belong.
For in the good Lord's eyes, you're as good as other guys,
It was sad when the great ship when down.
The other poster raises a good point...you don't want things swinging around like a mobile. But for just an exploded isometric or cabinet oblique look (and hey they still tech some off us a thing or two about hand drafting) you could probably just suspend your creation between maybe two heavy planks, that way youl would have two immobile points you could guy everything too.
Extender cables for most of the guts aren't too hard to find, but the pci devices migth be tough. I guess it depends on how far you explode the thing. What would be really cool would be having a set of matching drawings hung with it. I'm told you can starch vellum fairly stiff and it stays transparent at least until it starts to yellow.
~Jim
When I was working in the mountains we used what were called Indian Pumps. They mere a very low tech device, basically for spot checking forest fires.
Basically a five gallon tank strapped to your back with a simple pump attached to the end of a short hose. Pull back on the pump and you would get a short but high pressure stream of water. Not as good distance as a high powered supersoaker, but considrably higher volume per shot, and of course per tank.
Mobility was somewhat limited, but you could witha liitle skill get right up on your opponent and with a twist and heave empty the entire resevoir on their head. Filled with ice cold Adirondack lakewater. Prefer one of those beasts to a plastic toy any day.
Dvorak is a lovely level of added security. Wost of my passwords are from a dead language. I look for a word that is decently long, *memorable* translation, and preferably uses several easy to type (with Dvorak layout) keystrokes/letter combinations. Spice with numbers and punctuation to taste. And then remember that my passwords really aren't that important anyways.
Good Point!!!
While I work for neither DEC nor Compaq I,ve been pretty close to DEC for the past 21 years. DEC may have stumbled at the end but for a long time they were the only serious competition to the old evil empire, Big Blue itself. DEC had a great service reputation through it all, and with the news that Compaq is selling Alpha I'd say the only part of DEC that is still together at Compaq are their services people.
And on an incidental heads up, I've noticed a lot of DEC's old east coast service infrastructure, the people who were district and regional service and support chiefs a few years ago are all showing up with Houston addresses the past 18 months. I wiss the mill!!
Slashdot Mirror
Consider for instance our main stadiun. It had a dozen or so intelligent lighting fixtures mounted on tomcat truss about 80 feet above the main pool. These fixtures have fairly large boards and processors in them, but also could not be sealed because of the need for ventilation.
Without ever coming into direct contact with the water these fixtures had troubles. The huunidity combined with micro-droplets of saltwater in the air was hell on the boards. Even the special ruggedized, sealed power cable connectors we used could only last a few seasons before needing replacement. DMX (signal for lighting) connectors failed even more frequently. Worse, the inner boards would accumulate enough salt deposits to cause them to short in some cases in just a few months of exposure to two whales splashing around. And these instruments are designed to be rugged, roadworthy fixtures for getting banged around on rock concert tours.
Our solution, 1) by the best connectors we could get our hands on. This was the number one point of failure. Not just water resistant, but submersible. Look in specialty electronics catalogues, we only bought AC and DMX connectors, but they had many types available. We then wrapped all connection in several layers of amalgamating tape (great stuff!!). 2) We had a frequent overhaul plan where instruments were brought down, thoroughly cleaned (dunked in deionized water, allowed to dry 100%, prayers before powering up again)3)Pay attention to where air intake is located..add filters and larger fans to accomdate the reduction in airflow they cause.
Basically, I'd invest in low cost equipment, keep a repair/replacement schedule, stay very vigilant about salt buildup.
Instead, check out the terms of the contracts that universities have to agree to to be able to offer those prices. I'll bet you find that most of that "discount" software you buy is paid for down the line in your tuition.
But without some evidence, your post is looking like a rant. Oh, and. html The last decade of the 20th Century was the warmest in the entire global instrumental temperature record s f/web/climate?OpenDocument
http://www.climatehotmap.org/
http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/paleo/globalwarming/home
http://www4.nationalacademies.org/onpi/webextra.n
I know that tossing my TV was one of the best things I've ever done. No more mind-numbing hours in front of the tube soaking up ads from corporations I really don't like, no more seeing fake images of how I should like and behave and waste money. And best of all, spending more real *quality* time with my girlfriend, getting outside, even posting to slahdot.
This guy knows what he is talking about. Sure targetting with a single laser beam would be hard, but add a pair of galvonometers to scan a dense grid over the entire plane wouldn't be two hard, and even with the drop in exposure from scanning the beam, 1 or 2 watts would be more than enough to temporarily blind someone, even at a reasonable distance.
Assuming pilots do actually look out the window during final approach (seems somewhat likely) I could probably achieve this with $5k in parts..assuming I stole nothing and didn't already have most of that equipment already. Solid state laser and the whole device would be shoebox sized. Gas-ion laser, I'll probably need a van for a small gas generator for power.
All I want is electronic paper, color or black and white, that is cheap enough and has a good enough resolution that I can wall paper my room with geiss or another visualization. This would make me happy, and also probably quite dizzy.
Nope...every now and then those labels and the "this end up" labels aren't put on well. The guys at the distribution center see then, grab them, and keep them to replace any other shockwatch stickers they *accidentally* break. Seen it happen at least a dozen times a month in the busy recieving room of my old office. And most of the offending packages were international shipments via UPS Ground. Needless to say, they no longer receive our business.
Your three basic necessities would all fall under the first category of basic rights, necessities of life.
This "think of the starving children" line is getting stale. Is rice more of a priority for some than 'net access? Certainly. But one of my great hopes for the internet is that it starts to level the playing field between the rich and the poor. Instead of helping to rich to stay that way, like the current market structure, the Internet may allow the truly creative or industrious to suceed.
The barrier between now and this potential future is obviously the current rich and powerful, people who will strive to retain their power by controlling and limiting access to such a potentially destabilizing factor as the internet and unfettered access to knowledge.
If someone dies through your negligence, especially if you knew of the hazard, the highest up superior who knew of the problem does the jail time for manslaughter/murder.
If you think this is harsh... read here .
In the upper-level classes where using the technology would be usefull, they usually forbid the calculators so students won't cheat.
sighGetting ass-raped by the man yet again.
Hate to be pessimistic, but I'm losing a lot of hope here. I vote, I pay taxes, but every time I log into /. I see something else that makes me think about emigrating to a freer country. Anyone want to sponsor a bright, talented theatre designer with a background in entertainment lasers willing to work for next to nothing?
No, but we damn well need to de-suburbanize!
I've worked with some SoundTube products before. They were excellent. We used thew in several hanging locations and on the ground in theme parks, so they received a 70 volt distributed PA signal. They played a mix of classical and pop music all day. Sound quality was not excellent, but certainly very good. They were very power efficient and very durable. Bats, Birds, Bees, rain, manure, even lawnmovers attacked these things on a daily basis and they still worked great. One of the nicest outdoor PA speakers I ever worked with.
Actually, this is really just a test to see if they can increase sales among the rabid NSync fans. Just like in my halcyon teenage days when I bragged of having every Pearl Jam album and single on cd, cassette, and vinyl, now this next generation of fans can brag about having all of the different versions of the copy protected disc.
/sarcasm
Read the article....
It is not a genetically modified crop. It is just a very obscure variant that seems to have its own natural resistance. And happens to be purple.
In fact, it is such a rare variant that (according to the article) it doesn't even have a name.
What, you don't have your copy of The Guide an you??? And I suppose you don't have a towel either?
The browm color of the water is related to the tannic acid leachates off of the sphagnum and other plants. *My* bog had a lot of leahterleaf, black spruce, and pitcher plants.
The old folk tale I used to hear was that a half cup of bog water will add five years to your life. If so I should live till about 140...but I don't recommend it unless you are strong of gut and strong of will...this ain't no cup of tea!! But maybe this study lends some credence to that old story.
Another interesting tidbit..in the civil war they discovered that wounds dressed with sphagnum moss were significantly less likely to become infected compared to those dressed with cotton bandages..again, the acids restricting bacterial growth I imagine.
Bogs are pretty crazy, cool ecosytems, but as you might have guessed, very rare and very fragile.
I'm gonna me too here: Took me three tries to go from NetSol to gandi.net (12 euros=cheap). A little more than a month after dealing with all of the confirmation letters. And of course no response at all from the several e-mails sent to NetSol customer service.
Yes, laser projectors are hellishly expensive, one of the reasons there are so few in the US (that are any good). You try precisely moving a very small point of light around at incredible speeds with all sorts of sharp angles and see what sort of accuracy you get.
And that says nothing for the cost of the laser itself. Or just the amount of power and water most ion lasers need if you want to be able to have it bright enough to see outside. Plus all of the special crystals and optics needed for color changing, provided you can even afford a laser with multiple wavelengths.
Now, one reason the LCMax plug-in rocks is because it saves you some money on the production end. Just about every US laser company uses Pangolin software. Typically a show is created as traditional frame by frame animation and then hand traced on a digitizing tablet into Pangolin. Frame by Frame!!
Max changes all this by making it easy to create simple objects and rotates in laser light with out all of the time consuming digitizing. If you see the Hershey Park show or SeaWorld Orlando you will be able to pick out the parts where LC Max was doing the work. The images have a really clean, distinct look to them.
Laser light is absolutely incredible. There really is nothing else like it in color or intensity. And believe it or not 3D studio and LCmax are just drops in the bucket once you put a full power system together. Hopefully it will help laser companies get out of the rut they seem to be stuck in (at least stateside) and start pushing the boundaries of this amazing art form again. Because honestly, most US laser shows these days suck like a hoover.
On the other hand, I love my SKB. A 4U ATX case from ebay, a rock solid power amp, EQ, processing, and power conditioner all in one neatly wired black cube. Snap both covers on and I can easily move the whole system anywhere.
Now if only I could find a cheap, ergonomic rack mountable monitor.
well this was an old summer camp song....
Oh, they built the ship Titanic, to sail the ocean blue.
For they thought it was a ship that water would never go through.
It was on its maiden trip, that an iceberg hit the ship.
It was sad when the great ship went down.
Chorus:
It was sad, so sad.
It was sad, so sad.
It was sad when the great ship went down (to the bottom of the....)
Uncles and aunts, little children lost their pants.
It was sad when the great ship went down.
Oh the moral of this story, the moral of this song,
Is that one shouldn't go where he does not belong.
For in the good Lord's eyes, you're as good as other guys,
It was sad when the great ship when down.
Repeat chorus
Extender cables for most of the guts aren't too hard to find, but the pci devices migth be tough. I guess it depends on how far you explode the thing. What would be really cool would be having a set of matching drawings hung with it. I'm told you can starch vellum fairly stiff and it stays transparent at least until it starts to yellow. ~Jim
Basically a five gallon tank strapped to your back with a simple pump attached to the end of a short hose. Pull back on the pump and you would get a short but high pressure stream of water. Not as good distance as a high powered supersoaker, but considrably higher volume per shot, and of course per tank.
Mobility was somewhat limited, but you could witha liitle skill get right up on your opponent and with a twist and heave empty the entire resevoir on their head. Filled with ice cold Adirondack lakewater. Prefer one of those beasts to a plastic toy any day.
Dvorak is a lovely level of added security. Wost of my passwords are from a dead language. I look for a word that is decently long, *memorable* translation, and preferably uses several easy to type (with Dvorak layout) keystrokes/letter combinations. Spice with numbers and punctuation to taste. And then remember that my passwords really aren't that important anyways.
And on an incidental heads up, I've noticed a lot of DEC's old east coast service infrastructure, the people who were district and regional service and support chiefs a few years ago are all showing up with Houston addresses the past 18 months. I wiss the mill!!