I'm about to receive a MS from NTU. The entire degree program at NTU is distance learning. (Mainly MPEG sat-tv,but moving into web streaming as well.) I have never met one of my profs face-to-face.
Based on my experience, I would say one of the most important things you could setup would be a web based discussion forum. The need to easily interact with the rest of the class during non-class hours is something I have really missed. An important thing to allow (I think) would be anonymous posting. Since the distance students are kind of "disconnected" from the rest of the class (if there is a live class at all) it can be hard to get a feel as to where the rest of the class is at in comprehending the material. It would be good to allow people to post questions without their names on them to avoid looking like a complete dumbass. This may sound stupid, but its a lot more common than you may think.
The next most important thing I would say you should think about is applicable to live classes only. (A lot of NTU feeds are on taped delay.) This would be some way for the distance learning people to interrupt the teacher in real-time. There have been several times when I would have really liked to have been able to ask a question. I would say it would be OK not to have a AV feed from the student back to the teacher (Umm, can you say OVERKILL!), but SOMETHING (like ICQ maybe) is needed to allow the distance people to break in.
My final advice would be to train the hell out of the camera operators. It is ANNOYING to have some schmuck on the camera that thinks panning and zooming around all of the time is cool. Just leave the thing in one spot for crying out loud! Make sure the instructors are up to speed on the equipment as well. It can be annoying to watch them spend 5 minutes trying to figure out how to get their PC screen to go out on the feed.
THIS is why the ISS is so cool. You now have a spot where you can hot stage this stuff in orbit. You can put engines that would be harmful to the earth's atmosphere (or not operate at all) into orbit before you light them off and leave.
There is no longer any need to do a "moonshot" style mars mission where everything needed goes up at once.
Granted, in-orbit assembly will mean that us ground bound types will have more work to do designing/building the vehicle, but talk about a pay off! We could possibly have a reusable, interplanetary capable, spacecraft in fulltime service. (Hmmm this sounds like a great excuse to get me into space... "Ummm... the software engineer is needed on site for final integration testing..." yeah! or not.)
If you know anything about avionics systems, digital flight controls systems and other technology used for ucavs you see that this a stupid really fast.
You dont NEED that much CPU power for the actual vehicle. To sim the vehicle it will help you out, but is not truly REQUIRED.
For the flight controls, look at the cpus that drive the FLCS on many current jets -- the MIL-STD-1750A. This is a 16bit architechure that can run at up to (the fastest I've seen anyway) a whopping 22.5mhz. It's memory capability sucks. BUT it's fine for a flight controls system. These run stores managemnent systems as well.
Now, things like LIDAR and terrain anaylsis will require more horsepower, but an off the shelf DSP (that I'm sure you could easily get in iraq) would be a much better solution.
Sure clarke is a great author. (Although strangely I don't think 2001 is his best stuff. (not that it isn't really damn good...) Check out A fall of Moondust and The Deep Range for a slightly different style) But is your statement really true?
I think most of the folks who read Slashdot know enough about Clarke to know that without him the communication age we live in now would not exist.
Think about it... if he had never existed would the change anything? I doubt it. The so called communication age is more of a by-product of world war two and the following cold war than anything having to do with clarke. I guess I think of it as military interest in certain areas giving the buisiness sector a slight push in one direction... and that push was enough to start a self sustaining cycle of progress. Yeah, that sounds good...:-)
Does anyone know anything about the amounts of radiation coming off of some older (large) CRTs?
I sit in front of an old VAXstation with a 20" on it that's probably as old as I am -- we have rumors going around that these things kick out some large amount of rads.
What are they going to do, go out and retreive it???? That would be just a tad bit expensive.
That said, I would LOVE to be a part of that kind of project... designing an autonomous probe to track, close on and capture another object in solar orbit, then break solar orbit and return to near earth to be captured by the shuttle or something. It would be a very challenging design. Probably be a decent test bed for some NMD technology too.
Certainly not looking for legal advice or anything like that! Upon finding out that the actual act of disclosing classified information isn't inherantly illegal I'm just interested in what IS.
Thanks for taking the time to provide additional info. I really appreciate it. You cleared up the a lot of the things I didn't get.
I had no idea that half of this stuff was even online!
They have posters and stuff ALL over where I'm working talking about how you are going to serve hard time if you "share" information.
That may be espionage only though... i'm not sure where they draw that line. For black projects probably wherever the hell they want is what i'm guessing. I'm not gonna try and find out...
Certainly an interesting point that bears more looking into, cause it sounds like you know a lot more about it than I do... and I think i may "need to know." sorry.:-)
I used to build internal only LANs and WANs for banks in conjunction with companies like fiserv, EDS, online financial, etc. Their security sucks. Most were pushing hard towards all NT shops when I left, with RAS setups all over to allow people to dial in from home and from customers sites. (they liked their mortgage people to dial in and work from clients homes.) The people running the admin were clueless. I tried. My company tried. But in general we were ignored. In general bankers must be some the of the most stubborn and dense people I have ever met. And the cheapest; they just popped for a several hunderd thousand LAN or WAN setup and wouldn't spend an extra thousand or two to secure it properly with. Of course the sales people on our end were usually no help and wouldn't quote the recomended gear to try and undercut on bids...
All that said, the actual online services that most smallish banks use (again places like eds and fiserv) tend to be secure as hell. Still run mainframes. ibm and unisys heavy iron at most as I recall. So even if an attacker go into a branch, they would probably not get to move any money.
Peoples records on the other hand would probably be easy pickings. Some of these places stored a LOT of scanned stuff on optical jukebox type setups that required no authentication to access. Shocked the hell out of my the first time I had to field service one.
thus endeth my rant, back to counting electoral vote totals...:-)
I got some groundbreaking news for you... when you get brief in to obtain a security clearance to receive classified data you end up siging paper that says exactly that. When you get debriefed you sign the same thing again. In DoD land anyway. Politicians and their staffs (who tend to leak like cheap coffee filters) may not have to do this... I dono.
I may be missing something but reading the legislation I don't see anything in there that isn't already being done actually, besides intel agency budget and tasking items.
BTW: Next summer I'm planning a trip to Meigs Field (the default starting place on MS Flight Simulator) just to prove it can be done. It's also going to be saying goodbye to a very nice airfield before that scumbag Richard Daley closes it for good.
Hear hear!
Of course if you do come in a little long/short you're not gonna be very happy... and may wreck some guys yacht as he's coming out of burnham.
Seriously, it is a nice field. I can remember the night they shut it down for the first time. I was up in a rented 172rg with my father... all of the pilots out there that night were drawing straws as the deadline came up to see who would be the last plane out. It was something else.
I put down ink on an agreement with my current employer (large! company) that says anything I do while I work for them and up to six months after I quit is theirs, and I agree to help them patent it to the best of my ability, promptly, etc, etc.
So getting fired isn't an issue with a lot of these contracts... getting sued is.
is that the source code and the database contents are available for FTP. This means I can setup a server on my local net to avoid slow disc IDs at work (due to overloaded links) and to avoid having to go online at home. (of course i guess this is only a problem for us poor schmucks who still only have dialup access...:)
Don't get me wrong, I completely understand where you are coming from, but I think this could set off another god awful precedent for ISPs.
ISPs are already touchy as hell about yanking peoples accounts over http stuff, and there is not much in they way of law here. Again, though I can understand this since it's a low margin biz, I don't like it.
It would just make another easy thing to cause someones acccount to get pulled. And pave the way for even more fines on ISPs for customer behavior. See the tobaco firm lawsuits to find out how this could end up...
And no, I don't have anything do do with any ISP.:-)
go get appleseed. ghost in the shell is cool, but appleseed is far far cooler. `course the actual animation is not the same (or as good as IMHO) as the printed version, but I'm sure you spend too much time absorbing radiation from CRTs anyway.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Based on my experience, I would say one of the most important things you could setup would be a web based discussion forum. The need to easily interact with the rest of the class during non-class hours is something I have really missed. An important thing to allow (I think) would be anonymous posting. Since the distance students are kind of "disconnected" from the rest of the class (if there is a live class at all) it can be hard to get a feel as to where the rest of the class is at in comprehending the material. It would be good to allow people to post questions without their names on them to avoid looking like a complete dumbass. This may sound stupid, but its a lot more common than you may think.
The next most important thing I would say you should think about is applicable to live classes only. (A lot of NTU feeds are on taped delay.) This would be some way for the distance learning people to interrupt the teacher in real-time. There have been several times when I would have really liked to have been able to ask a question. I would say it would be OK not to have a AV feed from the student back to the teacher (Umm, can you say OVERKILL!), but SOMETHING (like ICQ maybe) is needed to allow the distance people to break in.
My final advice would be to train the hell out of the camera operators. It is ANNOYING to have some schmuck on the camera that thinks panning and zooming around all of the time is cool. Just leave the thing in one spot for crying out loud! Make sure the instructors are up to speed on the equipment as well. It can be annoying to watch them spend 5 minutes trying to figure out how to get their PC screen to go out on the feed.
Just my 2 cents. dv
That's why you print it at WORK silly. :-)
look at LZO.
http://wildsau.idv.uni-linz.ac.at/mfx/lzo.html
I've used it in an embedded app to decompress/overlay main applications from rom to ram and can vouch for it's decompression speed.
THIS is why the ISS is so cool. You now have a spot where you can hot stage this stuff in orbit. You can put engines that would be harmful to the earth's atmosphere (or not operate at all) into orbit before you light them off and leave.
... "Ummm ... the software engineer is needed on site for final integration testing ..." yeah! or not.)
There is no longer any need to do a "moonshot" style mars mission where everything needed goes up at once.
Granted, in-orbit assembly will mean that us ground bound types will have more work to do designing/building the vehicle, but talk about a pay off! We could possibly have a reusable, interplanetary capable, spacecraft in fulltime service. (Hmmm this sounds like a great excuse to get me into space
If you know anything about avionics systems, digital flight controls systems and other technology used for ucavs you see that this a stupid really fast.
You dont NEED that much CPU power for the actual vehicle. To sim the vehicle it will help you out, but is not truly REQUIRED.
For the flight controls, look at the cpus that drive the FLCS on many current jets -- the MIL-STD-1750A. This is a 16bit architechure that can run at up to (the fastest I've seen anyway) a whopping 22.5mhz. It's memory capability sucks. BUT it's fine for a flight controls system. These run stores managemnent systems as well.
Now, things like LIDAR and terrain anaylsis will require more horsepower, but an off the shelf DSP (that I'm sure you could easily get in iraq) would be a much better solution.
Once again this is a crock.
Sure clarke is a great author. (Although strangely I don't think 2001 is his best stuff. (not that it isn't really damn good ...) Check out A fall of Moondust and The Deep Range for a slightly different style) But is your statement really true?
I think most of the folks who read Slashdot know enough about Clarke to know that without him the communication age we live in now would not exist.
Think about it ... if he had never existed would the change anything? I doubt it. The so called communication age is more of a by-product of world war two and the following cold war than anything having to do with clarke. I guess I think of it as military interest in certain areas giving the buisiness sector a slight push in one direction ... and that push was enough to start a self sustaining cycle of progress. Yeah, that sounds good ... :-)
I sit in front of an old VAXstation with a 20" on it that's probably as old as I am -- we have rumors going around that these things kick out some large amount of rads.
What, if any, effect does this have on eyeballs?
Anyone?
That said, I would LOVE to be a part of that kind of project ... designing an autonomous probe to track, close on and capture another object in solar orbit, then break solar orbit and return to near earth to be captured by the shuttle or something. It would be a very challenging design. Probably be a decent test bed for some NMD technology too.
It looks like it also shows objects that have decayed (i.e. toasty!) and their orbit at that time.
I think it was more like all of andover.
Certainly not looking for legal advice or anything like that! Upon finding out that the actual act of disclosing classified information isn't inherantly illegal I'm just interested in what IS.
Thanks for taking the time to provide additional info. I really appreciate it. You cleared up the a lot of the things I didn't get.
I had no idea that half of this stuff was even online!
They have posters and stuff ALL over where I'm working talking about how you are going to serve hard time if you "share" information.
That may be espionage only though ... i'm not sure where they draw that line. For black projects probably wherever the hell they want is what i'm guessing. I'm not gonna try and find out ...
Certainly an interesting point that bears more looking into, cause it sounds like you know a lot more about it than I do ... and I think i may "need to know." sorry. :-)
dv
I used to build internal only LANs and WANs for banks in conjunction with companies like fiserv, EDS, online financial, etc. Their security sucks. Most were pushing hard towards all NT shops when I left, with RAS setups all over to allow people to dial in from home and from customers sites. (they liked their mortgage people to dial in and work from clients homes.) The people running the admin were clueless. I tried. My company tried. But in general we were ignored. In general bankers must be some the of the most stubborn and dense people I have ever met. And the cheapest; they just popped for a several hunderd thousand LAN or WAN setup and wouldn't spend an extra thousand or two to secure it properly with. Of course the sales people on our end were usually no help and wouldn't quote the recomended gear to try and undercut on bids ...
... :-)
All that said, the actual online services that most smallish banks use (again places like eds and fiserv) tend to be secure as hell. Still run mainframes. ibm and unisys heavy iron at most as I recall. So even if an attacker go into a branch, they would probably not get to move any money.
Peoples records on the other hand would probably be easy pickings. Some of these places stored a LOT of scanned stuff on optical jukebox type setups that required no authentication to access. Shocked the hell out of my the first time I had to field service one.
thus endeth my rant, back to counting electoral vote totals
dv
I got some groundbreaking news for you ... when you get brief in to obtain a security clearance to receive classified data you end up siging paper that says exactly that. When you get debriefed you sign the same thing again. In DoD land anyway. Politicians and their staffs (who tend to leak like cheap coffee filters) may not have to do this ... I dono.
I may be missing something but reading the legislation I don't see anything in there that isn't already being done actually, besides intel agency budget and tasking items.
Now THAT is a cool sig!
Hear hear!
Of course if you do come in a little long/short you're not gonna be very happy ... and may wreck some guys yacht as he's coming out of burnham.
Seriously, it is a nice field. I can remember the night they shut it down for the first time. I was up in a rented 172rg with my father ... all of the pilots out there that night were drawing straws as the deadline came up to see who would be the last plane out. It was something else.
I put down ink on an agreement with my current employer (large! company) that says anything I do while I work for them and up to six months after I quit is theirs, and I agree to help them patent it to the best of my ability, promptly, etc, etc.
... getting sued is.
So getting fired isn't an issue with a lot of these contracts
dv
is that the source code and the database contents are available for FTP. This means I can setup a server on my local net to avoid slow disc IDs at work (due to overloaded links) and to avoid having to go online at home. (of course i guess this is only a problem for us poor schmucks who still only have dialup access ... :)
dv
dr. dopler's strange effect works for waves in general, not just the audio band.
I donno man ... in this arena 900kb is HUGE! Linux is a great OS, but I can't ever see myself using it on a product with a controller this small.
You seriously think that nasa just puts a shuttle up there and crosses their fingers?
They track everything. last I checked (a while ago I admit) they had radars (like millimeter band or something) dedicated to this task.
I agree with you that space junk is gonna be a problem, but we aren't just putting stuff up there and playing routlette.
dv
This is what you want. dv
Don't get me wrong, I completely understand where you are coming from, but I think this could set off another god awful precedent for ISPs.
...
:-)
...
ISPs are already touchy as hell about yanking peoples accounts over http stuff, and there is not much in they way of law here. Again, though I can understand this since it's a low margin biz, I don't like it.
It would just make another easy thing to cause someones acccount to get pulled. And pave the way for even more fines on ISPs for customer behavior.
See the tobaco firm lawsuits to find out how this could end up
And no, I don't have anything do do with any ISP.
dv, who needs to go do some work now
go get appleseed. :-)
ghost in the shell is cool, but appleseed is far far cooler. `course the actual animation is not the same (or as good as IMHO) as the printed version, but I'm sure you spend too much time absorbing radiation from CRTs anyway.
dv
This would be hard to regulate wouldn't it? I mean a peer to peer network that uses air as a communication medium? Without using RF? No FCC.
Or am I totally off base here?
dv