I think it has more to do with the fact more Amiga's used Chinon floppy drives which are noisy as it is, but also most amigas don't have that sringly door flap on them - which just makes them noisier.
What I don't like about this attitude is that its a Mac - you buy a Mac because according to the ads its supposed to be the end all to ease of use. And if computers intimidate you - you should buy a mac (no I don't fully believe this, but this is Apple's message)
You're honestly going to tell me a person that has a hard time turning the machine on and off is going to know how to push the mouse button while booting. Well then you're going to have to describe to some users when the computer is actually booting or not.
I have experience with Mac's and Mac users (at least brand new mac users) - there great machines, but back when I was servicing these things we used to get imac's in that wouldn't boot - they wouldn't load the finder and a friendly message popped up saying "try loading the finder without extensions (left shift)" - where upon doing so would give you the same error. The solution was to reset the pram, but that was no-where in the flimsy manual - it was even buried in the actual service manual. And some people really had no concept of pusing ctrl+apple+3 (or something like that - it was a while ago) and brought the machine in for us to look at.
One thing I found suprising after skimming the article was the difference between the amount of commerical operators licensed and the amount of amateur radio operators licensed. There's more of us then there are of them.
Being a ham - this was interesting to me when you consider the slivers of bandwidth we are fighting to keep right now.
When I first saw this I was very suprised - ham radio is just a sliver in the ocean of spectrum.
Personally I think its pretty well managed - the FCC is very responsive to needs of people (you can call them up and often talk to a real human in seconds). I don't like the fact that the head of the FCC (currently the son of Colin Powell) is appointed by the bush administration - I think there's definately a conflict of interest between the head of the FCC and the presidents men and the powers of the FCC.
sigh - I guess if you watched the clip you'd notice the planes are shipping pictures back to a satellite uplink.
Definately not sattelite photo's - problem with sattelite photo's is the exposure time to get a nice colour picture like that... most sattelite close ups I've seen are black and white.
You assume that what provides airplanes with content is the same phase 4 sattelite. I suspect that it isn't because its only 24 channels. GPS services, navcom etc - are all services that are acessable from airplanes as well, but they rely on low earth orbit satellites.
Look - I've worked with satellites - uplinked to them, downlinked from them. I know a little bit about signal falloff from objects 25,000 miles away from earth. I garentee you that the signal coming from all of the dbs birds up there now is so weak that you would have to have some high gain antenna.
An awful lot of mobile satellite services rely on low earth orbit sattelites - I did my research you don't get xm radio from the satellite directly - you get them from many localized broadcast systems. Sirius uses a series of polar orbiting sattelites in low earth orbit.
I know - its expensive, proprietary etc - but you can install the backup client on just about any computer you can think of (they even make clients for netapp filers). I've sucessfully installed it on Windows 98, NT, 2000, XP, Tru64, Solaris, Linux (debian and redhat) and BSD.
What happens is the Tivoli server (it has a raid array, and a robot based tape drive) backs up the clients automatically and if you need a file you can restore it automatically without even going to the users desk. And its actually relatively quick.
I'll bet money this really isn't how it works. I've never heard of a phase 4 sattelite that can heard from a mobile earth station. Even those high powered dbs satellites only work with a fixed station.
I'm sure it works the same way as cell phone networks do - sattelite earth station downloads data (and the part thats like cell networks) relays it via high speed truck lines to broadcast towers along side the road via fixed, trucked or spread spectrum channels or something.
But while temping at Intel I got the impression that AMD was no good, not even in giving Intel employees huge discounts on P3's (which at the time was their flagship product) - I even got into an argument with a technician who couldn't understand how AMD chips reduced the prices on Intel chips.
Not to mention such discussions were met with violent disagreement. If you said you had an AMD system in an interview you could kiss that job good bye.
I also got the impression talking to people that if Intel executives had this master button that said "get rid of amd" that no-one would even hesitate to push it. Despite the fact that AMD pushes Intel to move faster (and visa versa). Just compare all the time between the P90 (which I recall coming out in 92 and costing over 900$), PPro, and P2.
Why the worry?
There are geeks like me who have been screwed by intel's buggy processors (somewhere around here I have a 500$ P90 that has an fdiv bug in it - after much haggeling on the phone I never did get it replaced), and their high prices. But I still have Intel systems floating around here, as well as a few sparc, and a few amd machines.
AMD is the underdog - they made X86 compatible CPU's without reverse-engineering (yes its true! do the research), they made intel's cpu's for a very long time and I for one think its kinda neet that a company like AMD despite all the flack Intel has given them has made chips that perform comparibly with Intel's chips - which is probably why slashdotians favor them in discussion boards.
The reason why the 3 meter broadcast band seems like its everywhere is because a lot of stations are running out like 27,000 watts (or much more in some cases) - it would be interesting to see what path the signal takes to get to your radio. If broadcast companies used lower powers I'm sure you'd notice a big difference in propagation. Here in Oregon its hard to hear most Portland stations after you drive west on sunset highway over the Cascade Range. Anyhoo - I've seen line of sight make a big difference on all the vhf/uhf/shf bands. 70cm band for instance seems highly reflective to trees, rain, hills etc. The 2m band seems to be less prone to that sort of thing, but trust me it still exists.
Also vhf/uhf ducting is a pretty rare occurance - I only seem to hear it happening a few times a year - like when you get the chance to talk on a repeater thats way up in Canada (done that) when you normally can't.
and repremanded - he was a IT tech as well, and one night one of his supervisors came by and noticed the games were "of a violent nature" and basically shut down that program - much to the dismay of many parents - since it was a alcohol, and drug free place for their young geeks to hang out.
Nah - powering tubes with 12 volts dc is pretty simple.
In the laser club we used to build power supplies to do this all the time. Convert the DC to AC, then have a few (small - maybe 1" by 1")transformers to step up the voltage to 10,000 or 25,000 volts. One thing to remember - to power a tube you don't need a lot of amps. I think the biggest problem was keeping the heat down on the voltage regulator.
The same way the BBC and NHK can tell if you are not paying the license fee, but are watching the BBC or NHK anyhow.
Detecting the frequency a TV is tuned to is relatively simple - all one needs is a frequency counter and a very high gain and highly tuned antenna.
it doesn't work here :( (Beaverton Oregon)
on
What Free Cable?
·
· Score: 2
I just tried it - wired it into my vcr (and switched it from antenna to cable mode) - I get a few scrambled channels around channel 72 - on channel 86 I get this nice spectrum analyzer display.
But other then that no free tv. And I pay the extra 10$ for the cable modem.
Today I might have to agree (I bought this ipaq 2 years ago) - but like I said earlier - when I bought the Ipaq it was around the same price at my brother's Palm V.
It's also cool because when I bought the pcmcia sleeve I dropped a 802.11 wavelan card into and was able to use the company network with my handheld. Honestly - this was a palm oriented company - everyone had a palm handheld except me. There wasn't a person I'd show this too that wasn't really impressed/blown away. Only in the last few months has a few 802.11 solutions come out for palm platform.
About music - I like the ipaq for music because if I'm traveling by bus, car or whatever I can just whip it out and listen to a few tunes - I also have some goon show episodes on it (british comedy show in the 50's and 60's) which actually take up less power to play - even on the micro drive.
Ultimately I guess when I went out and bought a PDA I was kinda disapointed in the Palm line because they were very very very expensive, and they had little features - and I'm a geek - I like gadgets with features. My next handheld will probably be that Sharp Zarus.
And I do use this for keeping track of appointments (it has an audible alarm and a blinking led), addresses, writing e-mail, etc. I'd honestly say if you used it just for that you could probably use it for weeks on end without charging it.
Sure - but one could easily argue that its main purpose is to keep pirates from running unauthorized (copied) programs on it
and to keep developers from building their own executables without real dev kits (and depriving ms of royalties)
and it keeps game hack systems out - like the gameshark and the codebreaker like devices from running.
And before you bitch and moan about MS being a bunch of bastards - almost every game system that ever came along has had some system to keep developers, hackers, and users from explointing the technology inside. Even Atari was that way - mostly through Atari not releasing all the specs for programming it so their games could look better in comparision - and they sued the first company who dared defy them (I think it was sierra).
For an ordinary person looking for a PDA but not interested in shelling out $3-600 for an all singing all dancing 8 hour battery life Windows CE wonder
Fun - well I have a compaq ipaq - and when I bought it the Palm V was 499$ for a monochrome 8 meg pda. The Ipaq was 599$ for a 32 meg color display. So I bought it. 8 hours doesn't sound like a lot, but then you think about how often you use a pda constantly for 8 hours. In normal use the Ipaq seems to be perfectly fine for about 3 weeks. If you listen to mp3's on it on your way to work (like on the bus or something) like I do - and you use a solid state CF card (not the micro drive), and you know how to set up a hotkey in windows media player to turn off the screen the ipaq is actually good for about 4-5 days. Only reason I know this is because I've been working temp jobs lately where I haven't had the chance/time to charge it.
But back when I had steady work I used to just drop it in the sync cradle and it charges all the way up in 10-30 minutes.
And finally - I had a co-worker who had a color handspring visor (I forget the model) - it seemed to have about the same battery life as the ipaq - actually I thought it was worse since it seemed to have a little bit less conservative backlight management. Not to mention the actual display looked worse too.
Keeping in mind that there's no real actual clear definition in the spread spectrum rules in Part 15. It does give a statement that monitor input may not exceed 6db.
I do have an amateur radio license so I'm not an RF idiot - and they do require you to calculate erp in the extra class exam (which I passed). Your right - feedline loss, antenna db, and transmitter power make a big difference in erp - especially feedline. For 2.4 ghz I'd never use anything less then something with an aluminum jacket.
you get faster I/O at the cost of greater instability, a tradeoff most sysadmins are quick to take.
I want whatever you are smoking. Personally I rather have a computer system that may run "slow", but I never have to mess with ever.
Seriously - managing a system is all about finding out what user performance requirements are and finding a solution that meets and exceeds those requirements and does so reliably.
Sounds like you don't mind support nightmares though - so keep at it.
Note that holy books from weirdo relgions probably work just as well
I started thinking about this - I have a load of scientology books - mostly for the comic value - its a wierdo religion, but I'd hate for anyone to think I belonged to it.
Slashdot Mirror
You're talking about the gronk noise - its got its own entry in the jargon file.
gronk
I think it has more to do with the fact more Amiga's used Chinon floppy drives which are noisy as it is, but also most amigas don't have that sringly door flap on them - which just makes them noisier.
What I don't like about this attitude is that its a Mac - you buy a Mac because according to the ads its supposed to be the end all to ease of use. And if computers intimidate you - you should buy a mac (no I don't fully believe this, but this is Apple's message)
You're honestly going to tell me a person that has a hard time turning the machine on and off is going to know how to push the mouse button while booting. Well then you're going to have to describe to some users when the computer is actually booting or not.
I have experience with Mac's and Mac users (at least brand new mac users) - there great machines, but back when I was servicing these things we used to get imac's in that wouldn't boot - they wouldn't load the finder and a friendly message popped up saying "try loading the finder without extensions (left shift)" - where upon doing so would give you the same error. The solution was to reset the pram, but that was no-where in the flimsy manual - it was even buried in the actual service manual. And some people really had no concept of pusing ctrl+apple+3 (or something like that - it was a while ago) and brought the machine in for us to look at.
One thing I found suprising after skimming the article was the difference between the amount of commerical operators licensed and the amount of amateur radio operators licensed. There's more of us then there are of them.
Being a ham - this was interesting to me when you consider the slivers of bandwidth we are fighting to keep right now.
When I first saw this I was very suprised - ham radio is just a sliver in the ocean of spectrum.
Personally I think its pretty well managed - the FCC is very responsive to needs of people (you can call them up and often talk to a real human in seconds). I don't like the fact that the head of the FCC (currently the son of Colin Powell) is appointed by the bush administration - I think there's definately a conflict of interest between the head of the FCC and the presidents men and the powers of the FCC.
And apex makes the only dvd player (mine's a 660A) thats I've had to reboot.
sigh - I guess if you watched the clip you'd notice the planes are shipping pictures back to a satellite uplink.
Definately not sattelite photo's - problem with sattelite photo's is the exposure time to get a nice colour picture like that... most sattelite close ups I've seen are black and white.
You assume that what provides airplanes with content is the same phase 4 sattelite. I suspect that it isn't because its only 24 channels. GPS services, navcom etc - are all services that are acessable from airplanes as well, but they rely on low earth orbit satellites.
Look - I've worked with satellites - uplinked to them, downlinked from them. I know a little bit about signal falloff from objects 25,000 miles away from earth. I garentee you that the signal coming from all of the dbs birds up there now is so weak that you would have to have some high gain antenna.
An awful lot of mobile satellite services rely on low earth orbit sattelites - I did my research you don't get xm radio from the satellite directly - you get them from many localized broadcast systems. Sirius uses a series of polar orbiting sattelites in low earth orbit.
I know - its expensive, proprietary etc - but you can install the backup client on just about any computer you can think of (they even make clients for netapp filers). I've sucessfully installed it on Windows 98, NT, 2000, XP, Tru64, Solaris, Linux (debian and redhat) and BSD.
What happens is the Tivoli server (it has a raid array, and a robot based tape drive) backs up the clients automatically and if you need a file you can restore it automatically without even going to the users desk. And its actually relatively quick.
I'll bet money this really isn't how it works. I've never heard of a phase 4 sattelite that can heard from a mobile earth station. Even those high powered dbs satellites only work with a fixed station.
I'm sure it works the same way as cell phone networks do - sattelite earth station downloads data (and the part thats like cell networks) relays it via high speed truck lines to broadcast towers along side the road via fixed, trucked or spread spectrum channels or something.
The first company to add voice recognition to a PDA to allow hands free operation
IBM has a voice command application that comes with the Ipaq 3800 series for Pocket PC.
What about people like me who have been accused as cheaters, but were just good?
But while temping at Intel I got the impression that AMD was no good, not even in giving Intel employees huge discounts on P3's (which at the time was their flagship product) - I even got into an argument with a technician who couldn't understand how AMD chips reduced the prices on Intel chips.
Not to mention such discussions were met with violent disagreement. If you said you had an AMD system in an interview you could kiss that job good bye.
I also got the impression talking to people that if Intel executives had this master button that said "get rid of amd" that no-one would even hesitate to push it. Despite the fact that AMD pushes Intel to move faster (and visa versa). Just compare all the time between the P90 (which I recall coming out in 92 and costing over 900$), PPro, and P2.
Why the worry?
There are geeks like me who have been screwed by intel's buggy processors (somewhere around here I have a 500$ P90 that has an fdiv bug in it - after much haggeling on the phone I never did get it replaced), and their high prices. But I still have Intel systems floating around here, as well as a few sparc, and a few amd machines.
AMD is the underdog - they made X86 compatible CPU's without reverse-engineering (yes its true! do the research), they made intel's cpu's for a very long time and I for one think its kinda neet that a company like AMD despite all the flack Intel has given them has made chips that perform comparibly with Intel's chips - which is probably why slashdotians favor them in discussion boards.
and to get the level of Ham radio license I have you need to know it along with almost everytinhg [sic] about radio
:).
Fine by me - if it weren't for the fact I'm extra class already
The reason why the 3 meter broadcast band seems like its everywhere is because a lot of stations are running out like 27,000 watts (or much more in some cases) - it would be interesting to see what path the signal takes to get to your radio. If broadcast companies used lower powers I'm sure you'd notice a big difference in propagation. Here in Oregon its hard to hear most Portland stations after you drive west on sunset highway over the Cascade Range. Anyhoo - I've seen line of sight make a big difference on all the vhf/uhf/shf bands. 70cm band for instance seems highly reflective to trees, rain, hills etc. The 2m band seems to be less prone to that sort of thing, but trust me it still exists.
Also vhf/uhf ducting is a pretty rare occurance - I only seem to hear it happening a few times a year - like when you get the chance to talk on a repeater thats way up in Canada (done that) when you normally can't.
and repremanded - he was a IT tech as well, and one night one of his supervisors came by and noticed the games were "of a violent nature" and basically shut down that program - much to the dismay of many parents - since it was a alcohol, and drug free place for their young geeks to hang out.
Nah - powering tubes with 12 volts dc is pretty simple.
In the laser club we used to build power supplies to do this all the time. Convert the DC to AC, then have a few (small - maybe 1" by 1")transformers to step up the voltage to 10,000 or 25,000 volts. One thing to remember - to power a tube you don't need a lot of amps. I think the biggest problem was keeping the heat down on the voltage regulator.
The same way the BBC and NHK can tell if you are not paying the license fee, but are watching the BBC or NHK anyhow.
Detecting the frequency a TV is tuned to is relatively simple - all one needs is a frequency counter and a very high gain and highly tuned antenna.
I just tried it - wired it into my vcr (and switched it from antenna to cable mode) - I get a few scrambled channels around channel 72 - on channel 86 I get this nice spectrum analyzer display.
But other then that no free tv. And I pay the extra 10$ for the cable modem.
Today I might have to agree (I bought this ipaq 2 years ago) - but like I said earlier - when I bought the Ipaq it was around the same price at my brother's Palm V.
It's also cool because when I bought the pcmcia sleeve I dropped a 802.11 wavelan card into and was able to use the company network with my handheld. Honestly - this was a palm oriented company - everyone had a palm handheld except me. There wasn't a person I'd show this too that wasn't really impressed/blown away. Only in the last few months has a few 802.11 solutions come out for palm platform.
About music - I like the ipaq for music because if I'm traveling by bus, car or whatever I can just whip it out and listen to a few tunes - I also have some goon show episodes on it (british comedy show in the 50's and 60's) which actually take up less power to play - even on the micro drive.
Ultimately I guess when I went out and bought a PDA I was kinda disapointed in the Palm line because they were very very very expensive, and they had little features - and I'm a geek - I like gadgets with features. My next handheld will probably be that Sharp Zarus.
And I do use this for keeping track of appointments (it has an audible alarm and a blinking led), addresses, writing e-mail, etc. I'd honestly say if you used it just for that you could probably use it for weeks on end without charging it.
Sure - but one could easily argue that its main purpose is to keep pirates from running unauthorized (copied) programs on it
and to keep developers from building their own executables without real dev kits (and depriving ms of royalties)
and it keeps game hack systems out - like the gameshark and the codebreaker like devices from running.
And before you bitch and moan about MS being a bunch of bastards - almost every game system that ever came along has had some system to keep developers, hackers, and users from explointing the technology inside. Even Atari was that way - mostly through Atari not releasing all the specs for programming it so their games could look better in comparision - and they sued the first company who dared defy them (I think it was sierra).
For an ordinary person looking for a PDA but not interested in shelling out $3-600 for an all singing all dancing 8 hour battery life Windows CE wonder
Fun - well I have a compaq ipaq - and when I bought it the Palm V was 499$ for a monochrome 8 meg pda. The Ipaq was 599$ for a 32 meg color display. So I bought it. 8 hours doesn't sound like a lot, but then you think about how often you use a pda constantly for 8 hours. In normal use the Ipaq seems to be perfectly fine for about 3 weeks. If you listen to mp3's on it on your way to work (like on the bus or something) like I do - and you use a solid state CF card (not the micro drive), and you know how to set up a hotkey in windows media player to turn off the screen the ipaq is actually good for about 4-5 days. Only reason I know this is because I've been working temp jobs lately where I haven't had the chance/time to charge it.
But back when I had steady work I used to just drop it in the sync cradle and it charges all the way up in 10-30 minutes.
And finally - I had a co-worker who had a color handspring visor (I forget the model) - it seemed to have about the same battery life as the ipaq - actually I thought it was worse since it seemed to have a little bit less conservative backlight management. Not to mention the actual display looked worse too.
So nyahh
Well its odd - because when I first replied to the original message was moderated "insightful".
:).
So go back to being a good netcop and leave me alone
6dB? Where does it say that?
Right here
Keeping in mind that there's no real actual clear definition in the spread spectrum rules in Part 15. It does give a statement that monitor input may not exceed 6db.
I do have an amateur radio license so I'm not an RF idiot - and they do require you to calculate erp in the extra class exam (which I passed). Your right - feedline loss, antenna db, and transmitter power make a big difference in erp - especially feedline. For 2.4 ghz I'd never use anything less then something with an aluminum jacket.
you get faster I/O at the cost of greater instability, a tradeoff most sysadmins are quick to take.
I want whatever you are smoking. Personally I rather have a computer system that may run "slow", but I never have to mess with ever.
Seriously - managing a system is all about finding out what user performance requirements are and finding a solution that meets and exceeds those requirements and does so reliably.
Sounds like you don't mind support nightmares though - so keep at it.
Under part 15 you're only allowed 6db of gain - this guy is running two 24db grid style parabolic dishes.
Note that holy books from weirdo relgions probably work just as well
:).
I started thinking about this - I have a load of scientology books - mostly for the comic value - its a wierdo religion, but I'd hate for anyone to think I belonged to it.
Stick to the latex chaps