The bread is indeed some of the best I've had. I used to rate the bread 9 out of 10 on their online surveys, back when you could get a buck off your next sandwich if you completed the survey (although the code number they gave you at the end was easy to figure out). Only Zingerman's rates a 10 in my book.
The Sony store that opened a couple months ago in Somerset Mall^H^H^H^HCollection in the northern Detroit suburbs is about the same. Lots of products, roaming salespeople but it's not easy to find someone who has a clue about what you want to know. And if you ask for product information, they print out pages from their web site. They do get a lot of customers, but mostly browsers who are at the mall anyway.
At least the Sony outlet store at Birch Run has stacks of things at decent prices, if they work when you get them home.
We used to have a Sony repair shop here too, which stocked little stuff like microphones and accessories, but they closed a couple years back. That was handy for when my various Sony items would break - I could get them fixed under warranty a short drive from my house. Now I have to pack them up and ship 'em to Itasca or somewhere.
Around here (and I'm sure in most big cities) you can buy decent off-lease computers that are only a couple years old for cheap cheap cheap (like under $200), without an OS (well, they sometimes give you Freedos or something with it).
M$ undoubtedly suspects that those machines are targets for pirated copies of Windows, and most likely they are largely right about that. At least in my case, I have installed FC2, but I'm sure I'm in the minority.
The point remains that with hardware so cheap, the cost of the OS can easily be more than the computer itself, if you go with a commercial OS.
But if you broke each of those stacked half-wavelength radiators in the center and fed them in phase, you'd see about 3dB "gain" in the horizontal plane. (We are beginning to describe a typical FM broadcast antenna here.)
a 200' antenna on top of a 200' tower would be awful - and if you used the lower 200' as your ground plane, you'd get no radiation whatsoever (you'd get a positive wave from the top 200' at the same time as you'd get a negative wave from the lower 200' and they would cancel
Actually they wouldn't. Assuming 200 feet is a quarter wavelength at the frequency of interest (actually, a bit less than a quarter wavelength due to end effect), a vertical structure of 400 feet, insulated at the base, sectionalized at 200 feet and fed at the center, forms a very nice vertical dipole, electrically no different than a horizontal half-wave dipole except that it's standing on one end. Of course, you'll get some ground reflections which will point the lobe upwards (and make the antenna less than useful for groundwave propagation), but it will work. These are actually quite common for HF but the mechanics of feeding it at the center would make it unwieldly at AM broadcast frequencies.
What you'd rather do with this nice structure, however, is install a good ground system, don't sectionalize it at 200 feet, and you have a half-wave element, which has much better efficiency in the horizontal plane than a quarter-wave (380 mV/m/kw @ 1 km vs. 306 mV/m/kw). You have to be careful with the antenna tuning network because the end of a half-wave element is a high-voltage point, but it's done at dozens of AM stations, especially the Class I stations.
Nobody can create a search engine based on current technology that takes plain speech user input and magically transforms it into accurate search results.
Enco are also doing speech-recognition closed captioning (103k pdf, cache) with the same engine. Admittedly this depends on being fed a copy of the script to be 100% accurate, but they claim between 50%-85% accuracy on unscripted speech, and it improves the more it "learns" about a particular voice. They could probably come up with a voice-activated search engine using the same technology.
BTW the Silversides is a diesel-powered ship, not a nuclear ship, and you never forget that if you've ever been inside one.
And there is an amateur radio station on board the Silversides (as is the case with many museum ships). It's on the air many weekends, including October 2 when I plan to be operating from the ship.
Unless your company won't reimburse you for what it considers such "frills". My company won't pay for minibar usage or in-room movies, and they probably won't pay for inflight net access either.
I used to tape concerts on my DAT with stealth mics all the time, but there's nothing like a good soundboard
Actually, if you have decent microphone(s), you would probably get a better-balanced recording than if you recorded off the venue's mixing desk, assuming, of course, that you strategically place yourself near the mixer. This is because the front-of-house mix (what the audience hears) is usually designed to augment the acoustic sounds coming from the stage. The audience hears both the instruments and the speaker stacks. If you record off the board, you'll only get the speaker feed and might miss out on some of the drums or piano, for instance.
Of course you'll also get the drunken louts obstreperously yapping away next to you, or the nearby drama queens trying to sing along.
Get this - I was on the train the other day with my 2-meter HT, scanning around on the simplex frequencies, and I heard a carrier come up with a blast of data around 146.60 just as the cell phone of the passenger in the next row started to ring. I thought that was weird, since cellphones use frequencies in the 800MHz range, but it must have been intermod between his phone and someone else's phone, or his phone and his Bluetooth. Never quite figured it out.
Don't forget to figure in the $1000 for buying 1000 songs off the Apple iTunes store!
You don't have to buy the music from Apple to listen to it on your iPod. I have 3+ days of music in my iPod and I've never bought a single track from the iTunes store. Everything I have on the iPod, I've ripped from my CD collection.
According to the article it takes one buyer out of 15,000 e-mails sent in order to break even. If more people would buy from spam, they'd have to send out fewer e-mails to break even, right?
...cos if SCO is successful in doing away with Linux with M$'s money, what's to say that M$ won't just turn around and use similar tactics to do away with SCO?
If it wasn't for the existence of amateur radio and the perseverance of hams through the years, we would not even know about the usefulness of HF frequencies (3-30 MHz). In the early days of radio, wavelengths of shorter than 200 meters (1500 kHz) were considered useless, but hams discovered that they can be used for worldwide communication with modest power and antennas. Eventually, government, broadcasting and commercial users moved in, but it was the hams who blazed the trail. And incidentally, HF radio plays an important role in international broadcasting, aircract communications, military and homeland security, all of whom have gone on record opposing broadband data on power lines - so it's not just hams who would lose.
Hams have also been on the forefront of other technologies, such as single sideband, FM, television, software-defined radios, and digital transmission, to name a few. To quote the IARU:
Radio amateurs are the leading developers of new digital techniques for high-frequency (HF) data and text communication. For example, PacTOR combines the strengths of packet radio and the mode known commercially as SITOR to offer reliable and essentially error-free data communication. Disaster relief agencies have adopted it for use from remote locations where no telecommunications infrastructure is available.
BPL (Broadband over power lines, or PLC as it's known elsewhere in the world) is nothing more than a spectrum grab by the big utilities who want to use unlicensed, uncoordinated systems to cash in on the Internet craze, without considering the importance of the incumbent duly-licensed users of those frequencies. It's akin to buying a ticket to attend the theater, and having the dialogue drowned out by the person sitting next to you talking loudly. You wouldn't let anyone who wants one buy a big ugly army vehicle and drive around intimidating other drivers as though he or she owns the road, would you? Oh, wait...
And I'll say it again - "ham" is not an abbreviation or acronym, so don't capitalize it!
Actually the article does say the data is put on the medium-voltage distribution grid, which is the transmission medium between their fibre backbone (presumably at the substations) and the WAPs mounted on hydro poles in neighbourhoods. They're just not running it on the 240v drop to the customer as in some implementations.
Archaic as it is, the 5-level Baudot code is still very much in use by Amateur Radio operators worldwide. Now we use computers and sound cards instead of klanky old TTYs and TD units with the crossed-pulse oscilloscopes.
What's needed is to combine a spelling checker with a syntax checker. That would get rid of strings like 'peephole clockwise tachometer nocturne hodges jest prolix' that would pass the spelling checker unscathed.
Slashdot Mirror
The bread is indeed some of the best I've had. I used to rate the bread 9 out of 10 on their online surveys, back when you could get a buck off your next sandwich if you completed the survey (although the code number they gave you at the end was easy to figure out). Only Zingerman's rates a 10 in my book.
the response to this disaster by governments has been more about public opinion than the welfare of the people involved
In the case of the US, true. France, that country we in the US were all expected to despise a couple years ago, was the first with the most aid.
I've worked India from the US with 100 watts and a wire in the backyard, and so have countless other US hams.
The Sony store that opened a couple months ago in Somerset Mall^H^H^H^HCollection in the northern Detroit suburbs is about the same. Lots of products, roaming salespeople but it's not easy to find someone who has a clue about what you want to know. And if you ask for product information, they print out pages from their web site. They do get a lot of customers, but mostly browsers who are at the mall anyway.
At least the Sony outlet store at Birch Run has stacks of things at decent prices, if they work when you get them home.
We used to have a Sony repair shop here too, which stocked little stuff like microphones and accessories, but they closed a couple years back. That was handy for when my various Sony items would break - I could get them fixed under warranty a short drive from my house. Now I have to pack them up and ship 'em to Itasca or somewhere.
Around here (and I'm sure in most big cities) you can buy decent off-lease computers that are only a couple years old for cheap cheap cheap (like under $200), without an OS (well, they sometimes give you Freedos or something with it).
M$ undoubtedly suspects that those machines are targets for pirated copies of Windows, and most likely they are largely right about that. At least in my case, I have installed FC2, but I'm sure I'm in the minority.
The point remains that with hardware so cheap, the cost of the OS can easily be more than the computer itself, if you go with a commercial OS.
How about:
But if you broke each of those stacked half-wavelength radiators in the center and fed them in phase, you'd see about 3dB "gain" in the horizontal plane. (We are beginning to describe a typical FM broadcast antenna here.)
a 200' antenna on top of a 200' tower would be awful - and if you used the lower 200' as your ground plane, you'd get no radiation whatsoever (you'd get a positive wave from the top 200' at the same time as you'd get a negative wave from the lower 200' and they would cancel
Actually they wouldn't. Assuming 200 feet is a quarter wavelength at the frequency of interest (actually, a bit less than a quarter wavelength due to end effect), a vertical structure of 400 feet, insulated at the base, sectionalized at 200 feet and fed at the center, forms a very nice vertical dipole, electrically no different than a horizontal half-wave dipole except that it's standing on one end. Of course, you'll get some ground reflections which will point the lobe upwards (and make the antenna less than useful for groundwave propagation), but it will work. These are actually quite common for HF but the mechanics of feeding it at the center would make it unwieldly at AM broadcast frequencies.
What you'd rather do with this nice structure, however, is install a good ground system, don't sectionalize it at 200 feet, and you have a half-wave element, which has much better efficiency in the horizontal plane than a quarter-wave (380 mV/m/kw @ 1 km vs. 306 mV/m/kw). You have to be careful with the antenna tuning network because the end of a half-wave element is a high-voltage point, but it's done at dozens of AM stations, especially the Class I stations.
Nobody can create a search engine based on current technology that takes plain speech user input and magically transforms it into accurate search results.
How about the other way around? (179k pdf, Google's html cache)
Enco are also doing speech-recognition closed captioning (103k pdf, cache) with the same engine. Admittedly this depends on being fed a copy of the script to be 100% accurate, but they claim between 50%-85% accuracy on unscripted speech, and it improves the more it "learns" about a particular voice. They could probably come up with a voice-activated search engine using the same technology.
Actually, we usually do eat pizza when we stay overnight on the Silversides. The galley is compact but functional, and actually big enough to perform an appendectomy. Though today the galley's functionality is mainly to make coffee.
BTW the Silversides is a diesel-powered ship, not a nuclear ship, and you never forget that if you've ever been inside one.
And there is an amateur radio station on board the Silversides (as is the case with many museum ships). It's on the air many weekends, including October 2 when I plan to be operating from the ship.
30 bucks is negligible for business travellers.
Unless your company won't reimburse you for what it considers such "frills". My company won't pay for minibar usage or in-room movies, and they probably won't pay for inflight net access either.
I used to tape concerts on my DAT with stealth mics all the time, but there's nothing like a good soundboard
Actually, if you have decent microphone(s), you would probably get a better-balanced recording than if you recorded off the venue's mixing desk, assuming, of course, that you strategically place yourself near the mixer. This is because the front-of-house mix (what the audience hears) is usually designed to augment the acoustic sounds coming from the stage. The audience hears both the instruments and the speaker stacks. If you record off the board, you'll only get the speaker feed and might miss out on some of the drums or piano, for instance.
Of course you'll also get the drunken louts obstreperously yapping away next to you, or the nearby drama queens trying to sing along.
Get this - I was on the train the other day with my 2-meter HT, scanning around on the simplex frequencies, and I heard a carrier come up with a blast of data around 146.60 just as the cell phone of the passenger in the next row started to ring. I thought that was weird, since cellphones use frequencies in the 800MHz range, but it must have been intermod between his phone and someone else's phone, or his phone and his Bluetooth. Never quite figured it out.
Don't forget to figure in the $1000 for buying 1000 songs off the Apple iTunes store!
You don't have to buy the music from Apple to listen to it on your iPod. I have 3+ days of music in my iPod and I've never bought a single track from the iTunes store. Everything I have on the iPod, I've ripped from my CD collection.
Oops, one per 10,000 e-mails. Sorry
According to the article it takes one buyer out of 15,000 e-mails sent in order to break even. If more people would buy from spam, they'd have to send out fewer e-mails to break even, right?
...cos if SCO is successful in doing away with Linux with M$'s money, what's to say that M$ won't just turn around and use similar tactics to do away with SCO?
Contrary to popular belief, airport security personnel aren't exactly smart.
You've got that right.
Hams have also been on the forefront of other technologies, such as single sideband, FM, television, software-defined radios, and digital transmission, to name a few. To quote the IARU:
BPL (Broadband over power lines, or PLC as it's known elsewhere in the world) is nothing more than a spectrum grab by the big utilities who want to use unlicensed, uncoordinated systems to cash in on the Internet craze, without considering the importance of the incumbent duly-licensed users of those frequencies. It's akin to buying a ticket to attend the theater, and having the dialogue drowned out by the person sitting next to you talking loudly. You wouldn't let anyone who wants one buy a big ugly army vehicle and drive around intimidating other drivers as though he or she owns the road, would you? Oh, wait...
And I'll say it again - "ham" is not an abbreviation or acronym, so don't capitalize it!
We've talked about this before. Broadband over power lines is not only a threat to Amateur Radio but to other communication services including government and homeland security. Plus, it's highly susceptible to ingress interference from licensed radio stations as well.
Actually the article does say the data is put on the medium-voltage distribution grid, which is the transmission medium between their fibre backbone (presumably at the substations) and the WAPs mounted on hydro poles in neighbourhoods. They're just not running it on the 240v drop to the customer as in some implementations.
Archaic as it is, the 5-level Baudot code is still very much in use by Amateur Radio operators worldwide. Now we use computers and sound cards instead of klanky old TTYs and TD units with the crossed-pulse oscilloscopes.
Actually hooked one of these up to my Trash-80.
Just examine this line of Base64 code in the payload:
D do yVobDC1+8KKEltlL7rG06Evfk4
NHmh3Bpbj+Ywbc0gds8rivxRuSSS/////wN37mjlZehul4O
What's needed is to combine a spelling checker with a syntax checker. That would get rid of strings like 'peephole clockwise tachometer nocturne hodges jest prolix' that would pass the spelling checker unscathed.