It sounds like Rutan has found a new use for the Proteus plane he built for Raytheon for the "Angel Halo" system to supply high-speed, low latency bandwidth for a metropolitan area by flying in circles at 60,000 feet. From the Scaled Composites web page about it:
Proteus is a twin turbofan high altitude multi mission aircraft powered by Williams International FJ44-2E engines. It is designed to carry payloads in the 2000-pound class to altitudes above 60,000 feet and remain on station up to 14 hours.
The original plan proposed 3 aircraft on 8 hour shifts. There would be a large AWACS style dish underneath (payload up to one ton) with the jet engines supplying 14 KVA of electricity.
Sounds like they may still deploy the system, with a secondary revenue stream with a camera. The question for Slashdot readers is: would you be so freaked out if the city was going to use the same plane to supply free gigibit wireless?
The Junior High School I attended in the 1970s (Bingham Junior High in Kansas City, MO) had "modular scheduling" in 20 minute increments, some classes were 20 minutes, some 60 minutes...and some 40 minutes.
I could give a damn about a 3D game controller. But I would very much like to see cheap 3D input devices for animation and motion capture. Perhaps we'll first see this new Wii remote retrofitted to 3D software like Max. Can't happen soon enough!
I was walking through the mall connecting two Las Vegas hotels with my brother a few months ago when a someone asked if we have "a few minutes to watch a program". After signing up, we were in a room with two TV sets, holding a pair of buttons on cords - press the green one when you liked what you were seeing, the red one when you didn't. That red button got quite a work-out. After the sucking stopped (nearly an hour later!), we answered an electronic questionaire where we could explain why we thought it sucked, and in what ways. I took it as the opportunity to mention other non-dreadful SF programming like the new Doctor Who. In brief, I hated every character in this show and didn't much care for the actors playing the characters. If I ever see an episode of it again, it will be far too soon./pP
I did a web site for the PTA (Parents & Teachers Association). Microsoft has "charitably" given them a pile of software. This "charity" was like the 1950s image of the drug pusher - the first one's free. This "charity" did not include any support or upgrades. Given that the original cost of the software is generally the smallest portion of Total Cost of Ownership, Microsoft's "charity" was, at best, just "good business".
The PTA would have saved a huge amount of money by refusing Microsoft's "charity" and used open source software and spent the money that would have gone to support and upgrades on hiring skilled Open Source people to customize applications to their needs.
All of the subtle differences honestly claimed by audiophiles by changing cables, replacing knobs, putting m'pingo discs on the CD player, etc? They are all due to one simple fact - their heads were not in the exact same location as they were before they changed the cable, replaced the knob, etc. Ethan Winer has an excellent article about the effect of comb filtering. Borrowing from a summery in Mix Magazine:
Winer points out that in a typical room, moving one's head or listening position as little as four inches can result in huge changes in the frequency-response curves one is hearing. What could be a 10dB dip in one spot at one frequency could be a 6dB boost a couple of inches away. These wide variations are caused primarily by comb-filtering effects from the speakers and from the various reflections bouncing around the room, which are present no matter how well the room is acoustically treated. Winer blames this phenomenon for most of the unquantifiable differences people report hearing when they are testing high-end gear.
He writes, "I am convinced that comb filtering is at the root of people reporting a change in the sound of cables and electronics, even when no significant change is likely. If someone listens to their system using one pair of cables, then gets up and switches cables and sits down again, the frequency response heard is sure to be very different because it's impossible to sit down again in exactly the same place. So the sound really did change, but probably not because the cables sound different!"
All these well-meaning but misguided folks shoveling money into the coffers of snake-oil salesmen should spend it instead on improving the acoustics of their listening room. I've seen insanely expensive speakers sitting on hardwood floors in front of ceiling high glass windows...and the guy is hoping that putting the speakers on little cones will make them less harsh!
I build home theater systems. One was in a home with two toddlers with the destructive capacity of a cement mixer. So all speakers were installed in-wall. The LCD screen was also installed in a wall, and a model was chosen with controls on the top. And all the items with buttons and knobs were installed in a room in the basement. DVD playback is via a Mac Mini. The actual DVD unit is a USB DVD drive that can be disconnected and hidden away when not in use. Everything else is via an RF remote control.
The point of all this? Apple's Bluetooth mice and keyboards are CRAP! They can't reliably transmit 12 FEET, let alone 12 meters. The stupid things have to remake their connection constantly. I'm looking for a replacement keyboard and mouse for my client. Oh, and was Steve Job's mother frightened by a button while he was in her womb? I HATE their "few buttons as possible" concept. Are there hidden IR codes so I can open the stupid Frontrow launcher to a specific application?
This is the sort of thing that Anonymous does normally, though. Anonymous was not created for this anti-scientology crusade.
I know. It wouldn't make any sense to do something awful and attribute it to an enemy if the action is not plausible. But from what I understand, Anonymous' targets have been people who "offended" them in some way, or people so loathed by the general public that the majority will not object.
Anonymous attacking the "Church" of Scientology makes sense. Anonymous attacking random epileptics does not. Also, it's worth remembering that most epileptics are dependent on pharmacological treatment, and the "Church" claims that they can treat epilepsy without drugs. They are wrong, of course and have a body count to prove it.
Agreed. Anyone who doubts that they are capable of doing this needs to read about "Operation Freakout" a campaign to destroy the career and mental health of journalist Paulette Cooper. Scientology's goons stole her stationary and sent bomb threats. She was only cleared after voluntarily submitting to questioning by the FBI under sodium pentothal.
Not really. Edison was able to play his recordings, which this Frenchman apparently wasn't able to do.
Not unlike John Logie Baird, the Scotsman who invented television before Zworkin or Farnsworth. He invented video recording, but was never able to play his recordings back. But recently these recordings have been digitized and the time base has been corrected, and video is there.
I KNEW bootlegging would prove helpful to the artist/recording studios one day! Take THAT!...and that... and that..
Michelle Shocked owes her career to bootlegging. She was singing by a campfire at night at the Kerrville Folk Festival, and was recorded on a Walkman. She didn't know it was even released until she read about it in a Dutch music magazine and heard it on the attached "flexidisk".
Not only are politicians implementing a big brother state, they are also confusing and joining the government interests with those of large corporations.
A couple of quotes came to mind:
From Orsen Welles' brilliant film "Touch of Evil" (1958): "A policeman's job is only easy in a police state."...and, a from man who should know: "Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of State and corporate power." Benito Mussolini
I'll second this. It would be difficult to create a RAID 3/5 solution that would compete with this one. The unit is tiny and quiet. The hard drives are inserted and removed easily. The software is slick and solid.
In theory, most Slashdot readers could build a box that would do the same thing, but that box would produce a lot more noise and heat and would be larger. If your time has value, this device might well be cheaper as well.
Our honor roll is in tune with three remarkable nerds. Todd Rundgren ("Hello It's Me") is legendary for developing the Utopia Graphics System, one of the very first paint programs, and has remained profoundly engaged with technology throughout his recording and producing career.
...but his involvement with technology has been greater than any other person in that list.
He animated his own 3D music video "Change Myself" in Lightwave on a big pile of Amiga 2000s.
He wrote a massively popular screen saver, Flowfazer.
He created the first completely interactive album "No World Order", allowing the listener to control the tempo, mood and vocal mix from a capella to instrumental for the Philips CDi platform.
He may have been the first artist to sell music electronically, via downloads on Compu$erve.
Wrote a very early OO operating system called HyperCode
Tell the floor sales guys at Best Buy about this. Every single one of them will try to cash in with a "sales pitch".
That is because the three most profitable items in any stereo store are:
Extended Service Contracts
Cables
Speakers
You can tell the relative profit margins of the various items just from their booths. The yearly Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is huge. It covers all of the LV Convention Center and several additional hotels. The floor of the Center is concrete, and floor of almost all of the booths are covered with cheap carpeting laid directly on the concrete. It's hell on your feet; a twenty mile a day march. But the booths for extended service plans (basically insurance companies) have nice, thick pads and thick carpet. You'll stand there and listen to a sales pitch just to feel the softness under your feet.
Monster, for instance, every year hosts the biggest and best parties. Open bar, free food and top quality entertainment.
Oh, how nice for you! Please do not hesitate to let us know if you buy any additional consumer products in the future. I do like to keep track of what people own.
I mentioned it because it is tiny and difficult to type on. Had it not been, I would have answered a number of different threads. I'm now home and on my regular desktop and can post any number of responses.
Uh, bullshit. The reason it reduced your "noise floor" (actually level of 60Hz hum, it's not the same thing) is because you removed a ground loop somewhere. You can do the same exact thing by disconnecting the safety ground, inserting an isolation transformer in the audio path, using balanced connections, or plugging things into the same outlet.
I'm talking about use in recording studios, where every effort has already been made to eliminate all ground loops and providing an excellent ground. Moving to a balanced power system provided an additional 20 db reduction in noise with older, analog equipment.
Don't take my word for it. Equitech, one of a handful of non-bullshit companies in this field, has reports from a number of reliable sources, including the legendary recording engineer Roger Nichols and a radio observatory at Cal Tech.
What do I know anyway? I've only been doing audio for 30 years and built recording studios and FM radio stations.
There are a huge number of threads I could reply to on this topic, but I'm doing so via an iPod Touch in a McDonald's.
First, the three most profitable items we sold were:
1: Extended service contracts 2: Cables 3: Speakers
At the yearly Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Monster would put onthe best parties - open bar, great food and top entertainment.
Someone made the claim that HDMI "just either works or doesn't". I've had bad ones. But a broken one shows up as missing bit planes in the digital signal. Not a subtle difference.
99% of the power conditioning market is indeed bullshit. But 1% is not. In pro audio we use balanced power for some applications. 2 60 volt sources, 180 degrees different in phase to the normal "hot" and "neutral". The same system is used in submarines to reduce the electromagnetic signnature. This can reduce the noise floor of the connected equipment as much as 20 db. Measurable, not snake oil.
"Return to Oz" was a very enjoyable film on it's own merits, but the movie critics of the time were unable to judge it on those merits - and could only see it as the film that didn't have Judy Garland in it.
Which begs the question - if this hack unlocks it, does it also remove the sim lock? And if not, could it.
This hack doesn't do anything about the phone part of the iPhone. All he did was patch around the activation step and fool the rest of the iPhone into thinking it has already been activated. But I'm pretty sure that someone will take the software apart and figure out how to use it as a standard quad-band GSM phone via the SIM card. The question is if it will have web access via the carrier's data network...and if it would be any faster than AT&Ts EDGE system. The real tragedy would be losing the very cool "Visual Voice-mail". I wonder if Asterisk could be made to serve a Web 2.0 emulation of it?
Picking a fruit without damaging the fruit or the tree seems like a pretty complicated task from a robotics standpoint.
In what way? Assuming you know the exact location and size of an orange, and the orientation of the stem, it seems fairly straightforward to vacuum the orange off the tree. Grapes are more fragile, but again, if you have a plan and know where to cut the stem, it's not that complicated. I'd imagine the difficult part is handling the fruit after it is picked to avoid lossage and bruising. Virtually all the big problems in robotics these days are vision problems, and those will fall to cheap processing power.
Slashdot Mirror
It sounds like Rutan has found a new use for the Proteus plane he built for Raytheon for the "Angel Halo" system to supply high-speed, low latency bandwidth for a metropolitan area by flying in circles at 60,000 feet. From the Scaled Composites web page about it:
The original plan proposed 3 aircraft on 8 hour shifts. There would be a large AWACS style dish underneath (payload up to one ton) with the jet engines supplying 14 KVA of electricity.
Sounds like they may still deploy the system, with a secondary revenue stream with a camera. The question for Slashdot readers is: would you be so freaked out if the city was going to use the same plane to supply free gigibit wireless?
The Junior High School I attended in the 1970s (Bingham Junior High in Kansas City, MO) had "modular scheduling" in 20 minute increments, some classes were 20 minutes, some 60 minutes...and some 40 minutes.
...when he's emulated a Connection Machine.
I could give a damn about a 3D game controller. But I would very much like to see cheap 3D input devices for animation and motion capture. Perhaps we'll first see this new Wii remote retrofitted to 3D software like Max. Can't happen soon enough!
I was walking through the mall connecting two Las Vegas hotels with my brother a few months ago when a someone asked if we have "a few minutes to watch a program". After signing up, we were in a room with two TV sets, holding a pair of buttons on cords - press the green one when you liked what you were seeing, the red one when you didn't. That red button got quite a work-out. After the sucking stopped (nearly an hour later!), we answered an electronic questionaire where we could explain why we thought it sucked, and in what ways. I took it as the opportunity to mention other non-dreadful SF programming like the new Doctor Who. In brief, I hated every character in this show and didn't much care for the actors playing the characters. If I ever see an episode of it again, it will be far too soon./pP
I did a web site for the PTA (Parents & Teachers Association). Microsoft has "charitably" given them a pile of software. This "charity" was like the 1950s image of the drug pusher - the first one's free. This "charity" did not include any support or upgrades. Given that the original cost of the software is generally the smallest portion of Total Cost of Ownership, Microsoft's "charity" was, at best, just "good business".
The PTA would have saved a huge amount of money by refusing Microsoft's "charity" and used open source software and spent the money that would have gone to support and upgrades on hiring skilled Open Source people to customize applications to their needs.
All of the subtle differences honestly claimed by audiophiles by changing cables, replacing knobs, putting m'pingo discs on the CD player, etc? They are all due to one simple fact - their heads were not in the exact same location as they were before they changed the cable, replaced the knob, etc. Ethan Winer has an excellent article about the effect of comb filtering. Borrowing from a summery in Mix Magazine:
All these well-meaning but misguided folks shoveling money into the coffers of snake-oil salesmen should spend it instead on improving the acoustics of their listening room. I've seen insanely expensive speakers sitting on hardwood floors in front of ceiling high glass windows...and the guy is hoping that putting the speakers on little cones will make them less harsh!
I build home theater systems. One was in a home with two toddlers with the destructive capacity of a cement mixer. So all speakers were installed in-wall. The LCD screen was also installed in a wall, and a model was chosen with controls on the top. And all the items with buttons and knobs were installed in a room in the basement. DVD playback is via a Mac Mini. The actual DVD unit is a USB DVD drive that can be disconnected and hidden away when not in use. Everything else is via an RF remote control.
The point of all this? Apple's Bluetooth mice and keyboards are CRAP! They can't reliably transmit 12 FEET, let alone 12 meters. The stupid things have to remake their connection constantly. I'm looking for a replacement keyboard and mouse for my client. Oh, and was Steve Job's mother frightened by a button while he was in her womb? I HATE their "few buttons as possible" concept. Are there hidden IR codes so I can open the stupid Frontrow launcher to a specific application?
I know. It wouldn't make any sense to do something awful and attribute it to an enemy if the action is not plausible. But from what I understand, Anonymous' targets have been people who "offended" them in some way, or people so loathed by the general public that the majority will not object.
Anonymous attacking the "Church" of Scientology makes sense. Anonymous attacking random epileptics does not. Also, it's worth remembering that most epileptics are dependent on pharmacological treatment, and the "Church" claims that they can treat epilepsy without drugs. They are wrong, of course and have a body count to prove it.
Agreed. Anyone who doubts that they are capable of doing this needs to read about "Operation Freakout" a campaign to destroy the career and mental health of journalist Paulette Cooper. Scientology's goons stole her stationary and sent bomb threats. She was only cleared after voluntarily submitting to questioning by the FBI under sodium pentothal.
Not unlike John Logie Baird, the Scotsman who invented television before Zworkin or Farnsworth. He invented video recording, but was never able to play his recordings back. But recently these recordings have been digitized and the time base has been corrected, and video is there.
Michelle Shocked owes her career to bootlegging. She was singing by a campfire at night at the Kerrville Folk Festival, and was recorded on a Walkman. She didn't know it was even released until she read about it in a Dutch music magazine and heard it on the attached "flexidisk".
They are feeding nanotubes to mice to measure toxicity. There's another possible explanation.
I'll second this. It would be difficult to create a RAID 3/5 solution that would compete with this one. The unit is tiny and quiet. The hard drives are inserted and removed easily. The software is slick and solid.
In theory, most Slashdot readers could build a box that would do the same thing, but that box would produce a lot more noise and heat and would be larger. If your time has value, this device might well be cheaper as well.
Todd Rundgren only gets a single line:
...but his involvement with technology has been greater than any other person in that list.
Pretty damn geeky.
How retired can a man be if he's going to be doing 9 sold-out concerts in a single city in November?
That is because the three most profitable items in any stereo store are:
You can tell the relative profit margins of the various items just from their booths. The yearly Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is huge. It covers all of the LV Convention Center and several additional hotels. The floor of the Center is concrete, and floor of almost all of the booths are covered with cheap carpeting laid directly on the concrete. It's hell on your feet; a twenty mile a day march. But the booths for extended service plans (basically insurance companies) have nice, thick pads and thick carpet. You'll stand there and listen to a sales pitch just to feel the softness under your feet.
Monster, for instance, every year hosts the biggest and best parties. Open bar, free food and top quality entertainment.
I mentioned it because it is tiny and difficult to type on. Had it not been, I would have answered a number of different threads. I'm now home and on my regular desktop and can post any number of responses.
Bullshit on your bullshit.
I'm talking about use in recording studios, where every effort has already been made to eliminate all ground loops and providing an excellent ground. Moving to a balanced power system provided an additional 20 db reduction in noise with older, analog equipment.
Don't take my word for it. Equitech, one of a handful of non-bullshit companies in this field, has reports from a number of reliable sources, including the legendary recording engineer Roger Nichols and a radio observatory at Cal Tech.
What do I know anyway? I've only been doing audio for 30 years and built recording studios and FM radio stations.
There are a huge number of threads I could reply to on this topic, but I'm doing so via an iPod Touch in a McDonald's.
First, the three most profitable items we sold were:
1: Extended service contracts
2: Cables
3: Speakers
At the yearly Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Monster would put onthe best parties - open bar, great food and top entertainment.
Someone made the claim that HDMI "just either works or doesn't". I've had bad ones. But a broken one shows up as missing bit planes in the digital signal. Not a subtle difference.
99% of the power conditioning market is indeed bullshit. But 1% is not. In pro audio we use balanced power for some applications. 2 60 volt sources, 180 degrees different in phase to the normal "hot" and "neutral". The same system is used in submarines to reduce the electromagnetic signnature. This can reduce the noise floor of the connected equipment as much as 20 db. Measurable, not snake oil.
Here is a YouTube clip from a 1995 program called "The Internet Show" about the 1991 Soviet coup attempt, and the role the early Internet had as an information source.
"Return to Oz" was a very enjoyable film on it's own merits, but the movie critics of the time were unable to judge it on those merits - and could only see it as the film that didn't have Judy Garland in it.
This hack doesn't do anything about the phone part of the iPhone. All he did was patch around the activation step and fool the rest of the iPhone into thinking it has already been activated. But I'm pretty sure that someone will take the software apart and figure out how to use it as a standard quad-band GSM phone via the SIM card. The question is if it will have web access via the carrier's data network...and if it would be any faster than AT&Ts EDGE system. The real tragedy would be losing the very cool "Visual Voice-mail". I wonder if Asterisk could be made to serve a Web 2.0 emulation of it?
In what way? Assuming you know the exact location and size of an orange, and the orientation of the stem, it seems fairly straightforward to vacuum the orange off the tree. Grapes are more fragile, but again, if you have a plan and know where to cut the stem, it's not that complicated. I'd imagine the difficult part is handling the fruit after it is picked to avoid lossage and bruising. Virtually all the big problems in robotics these days are vision problems, and those will fall to cheap processing power.