if you're just tossing numbers about, then a spreadsheet like excel might work. But it's going to require some bending to get some jobs done, and bending it will make it brittle...
I've really come to value Python. Once you learn it, it's easy to write code in, and it's relatively easy to read other people's code. But I wonder, though, if it's really good enough for some high-caliber applications. It would be embarrassing to do some scientific work that later falls down under peer review because of faulty programming. That why I wonder if Ada/Spark wouldn't be better in many applications. Because it's so explicit, you can learn a lot just by reading the code. You can extend the work that others have done, people who you never even get to talk to about their code. But I have to admit I haven't learned Spark yet, but it fascinates me. Maybe it would be too painful for a lot of physics students to learn, but the pain might end up being worth it in the long run, when it comes time actually putting that physics to real world applications. Real world applications of physics these days are often very expensive places to make mistakes, so quality code is a must. And, nothing says quality like Ada/Spark.
I also believe that 'whatever floats your boat' is the wrong answer. Trying to make various code that students and researchers have written in a variety of different language is a nightmare, especially when the programmers have moved on to other projects and different institutions.
Yes, these are amazing devices for little money. The problem is, they're hard to find in stock at the moment, because they're so popular. But a new batch is due in a couple of weeks.
These things are almost overkill for 500 meters.
If there's too much noise on 2.4 ghz, there's also the ns5 for 802.11a. But then, you have to be more line-of-sight.
It's obviously Naquadah. It's basically not found in nature on earth, but is plentiful in other places. We've got a huge sized asteroid of it somewhere not too far away, though. I just hope they don't try to make naquadria.
Some wierd stuff...web browsing seems to work fine, but when trying to get stuff from the repository...it seems to lag. Not dns, as that lookup completes pretty fast, and once the connection starts it seems to go well, but there's a lag. I tries switching from US to CA servers to see if that would help, it didn't. Are other people seeing this? Is this just load because of the new release? I am wondering if they've got dns lookup turned on for connecting clients on their servers, because that's the only time I've seen this behavior.
I downloaded xubuntu-alternate via bittorrent (finding a site which had a working seed was a problem...finally found it in the UK). After burning the CD, I booted up and installed over my old (broken) 7.10. It seemed to take a long time to install. Even with 784mb of ram 9I know it's not huge these dats0 on my Celeron M @ 1.7ghz, it seemed to be spinning its wheels a lot..times when there was no disk access (either cd or hd). I remember it took a particularly long time configuring the modules. I also had a problem getting DHCP info from my AP, but that very well could be the retarded dhcp servers that many of these APs use. after giving myself a static ip, it went just fine.
I had been worried that I'd have to do wierd tinkering to get the uncommon screen dimensions on my dell Inspiron 700m to work properly. But no, it worked right from the start.
Let me say that it's quite fast! snappy browser and desktop performance, much better than my older ubuntu 7.x and much faster than windows XP on the same system. That's even before I move from the generic kernel to a 686 one.
Comments like this make me realize the importance of nuclear war. We have to come to do something about overpopulation. AIDS isn't spreading fast enough.
This is disturbing on many levels. Firstly, it subsidizes an organization which does not represent the entirety of the industry it purports to - pratically none of the Artists I listen to are in the RIAA. Secondly, such a tax does not appear to make downloading of these songs, currently labeled illegal by RIAA and associates, legal. Thirdly, it does nothing to protect the rights of users to utilize the full range of IP transport protocols without hindrance. I am talking about the Comcast's of the world trying to block P2P.
Hi, I live in Somerville, and have been around Boston for a long time so i have a bit of credibility in stating that DEC was hugE in the 80s, only to get really beaten by Sun and Microsoft in the 90s. They made rock solid and expensive equipment. A Microvax was sort of like a 1985 Mercedes - and almost as expensive.
Anyhow, this city has spawned some of the most significant scientific and technological revolutions, and some of the largest companies. But they all move on. Why? Well, part of it is taxes, but part of it also has to do with the cost of real estate. Some of this is caused by corruption, but there are other factors at work as well. Simply put: the land here is too hard to build on, because it's mostly filled in swamp. That's why The Big Dig was/is such a disaster. It gets better out in the suburbs, but that's a different story.
Biotech is the Next Big Thing, or so at least MIT thinks. That's the way Cambridge is going lately. I think biotech may have been oversold, but who listens to me?
I can see why people find jobs in other places, and move away. I like Seattle, and might move there some day. But there's something special to Boston that I'd miss.
I've been working with some people trying to come up with a cheap solar mesh router. now this guy comes along and says it can be done for $35, so no one is going to pay more. he obviously has no idea of what is involved in making a solar mesh router that is the least bit reliable. but people aren't going to know that. They're just going to have heard this magic price of $35, and not be willing to pay more.
olpc was supposed to be an open-source laptop for $100. yea, whatever happened to that? closed wifi hardware, microsoft involved, screwed around by intel, the price still high, the computer not available.
you're just salting the earth so nothing else can grow. We had been hoping to create a mesh router that could be sold for $100, but we can't even get the components for that cost. I don't believe you'll ever see a $35 solar mesh router. Now, since you've damaged our already struggling project, you'll likely never see a $100 one, either.
There are so many reasons to doubt the claims of this 'ZPM'. Starting with the name itself. Other than the Stargate reference. How is it supposed to be 'zero pollution' when the car is internal-combustion-assisted? Furthermore, where does the energy needed to compress the air come from? Yes, there are several 'zero pollution' sources of electricity, but that's really the province of the electric power producers, and NOT the auto designer. It would be more reasonable to call an all-electric auto 'zero pollution' than this so-called ZPM! The safety of compressed air is another factor. It may not be as dangerous as compressed hydrogen, but think that it will also be present with a liquid fuel in this hybrid vehicle - so there will be plenty of fuel and oxidizer for any fire.
I also have doubts about the efficiency of pneumatic engines. But I am no expert in that field.
First of all, Linux is technically a Kernel, not an entire operating system. Operating systems, such as Debian, OpenWRT, Red Hat, etc. are said to be Linux operating systems, because they are based upon the Linux Kernel (and that's not always true of Debian). FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Windows XP, are entire operating systems to themselves. People who don't understand this differentiation should not be writing articles on Operating Systems.
Linus is right - the job of a kernel is the mechanics, not the presentation. But he even forgets this himself at times, when he tries to ignore the purposeful ignorance of the media and cheer on the home team. It's not a good idea.
NetApp has their head up their collective asses. Linux based operating systems certainly have more than.67% of the operating system market. Very strong in servers, present and growing in the embedded (OpenWRT, for instance) and Desktop markets (Ubuntu is becoming VERY popular on the desktop, and let's not forget XO (that is if we can keep Microsoft from sabotaging the OLPC)).
In short, just another ignorant journalist. CNET goes down a notch. Linus should be more careful of who he lets interview him.
"...he research project at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, in the US..." - I am very glad that the poster clarified which Pittsburgh CMU was in. The uninformed person, who might not have known where CMU was located and would therefore have to reason out whether this was a Pittsburgh in the USA, the one in Japan, in Mali, or the one in Germany (The German city is a suburb of Cheeseburgh)
The question is, which Pittsburgh is it located in, in the US?
Back when I was involved with FO the industry was still run (for better or for worse) by 'phone guys', who were using fan, balding white guys with poor interpersonal skills. But their dogma had a strong believe in designing for reliability.
Data centers were designed with FO carefully coming in rom different streets on different ends of the building, and there were carefully worded legal agreements which would prevent their upstream carriers from doing anything that would threaten the data center's redundancy.
Now, as far as R.O.W. - it's the OCEAN! It's not like you have a lot of buildings and property lines cluttering up the ocean floor. Sure, once they make landfall that's a problem but it's a whole different ball of wax. Now, perhaps some stupid engineers out there just don't get it or don't think it's important, but things like train derailments, fires, floods, ship anchors, earthquakes, war, vandalism, etc were all very real design constraints with to professionals I worked with. Maybe all these guys got rich and retired, or the bad food and tobacco finally took its toll, and new 'engineers' came in without any clue and ripped up all the old design constraints, but somehow I doubt it.
Nah, it's sabotage. Could be someone playing the futures market, like I said before, or a plain old extortion / protection racket.
One ship cutting one cable is plausible, but unlikely. One ship cutting two cables, is odd and barely explicable, but possible if the cable engineers were really, really stoopid. One ship cutting 3 cables? Ah, no, we're not that gullible...this is a planned attack. For what reasons, I can only guess, but since the EnRon days bandwidth has been a commodity and so I'd guess it's someone playing nasty with the commodities market -- just like they do with energy futures. I say this is more likely than some attempt to censor, because there's still traffic flowing...it just costs a lot more, due to the laws of supply and demand.
Yes, I do have professional knowledge of fibre optics and Internet connectivity. No, it isn't recent, but about six years old. Make of it what you will.
Why is graphite used as an anode material? What does it offer ? I was just reading some cool articles on how to make electricity from sewage ( http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/MicrobialFuelCells/ ) and thinking this. I read articles where they similarly talk about little 'whiskers' or cilia that bacteria have in relation to this sewage-to-voltage idea and wonder if it's all related somehow.
Yea, I am starting to turn into a biochemistry hacker. Just imagine what my basement will smell like now...ha ha ha
All of this looking into deep space and distant past is fine and all but I am much more interested in looking at stars here in the Milky Way to find out more about their planets. The reasons for this are that we will colonize space, and we need to figure out which star systems are worth sending probes to in search of terraformable planets. It will take a very long time for these probes to arrive, and almost as long for a colonization ship to arrive and start the terraformation. We need to launch these probes now, and continue to work on technologies which make interstellar travel and terraformation possible while these probes are on their long journeys. Can Hubble make the observations we need?
Anticypher: Hey good to know that phreaking lives on. I know it's possible to fake caller ID, but I guess the rest of that SS7 hackery has passed me by.
Oh, to the fellow who suggest Asterisk - you're wrong on so many counts. First of all, you need to know that DTMF is not MF. Second of all, it was the BUGS in the ole' phone system which made it interesting, and these aren't going to be duplicated in Asterix. We'd have to re-implement them, and that is a lot of DSP work. It's not just about building a phone system, it's about replicating the old one.
I used to regularly phreak calls to Joe in the mid 80s. I remember he had a phone number that ended in either 0000 or 9999, I can't remember which. Anyhow, this guy was cool. He just loved phones, and talking about phones. I remember he used to be able to tell what kind of switch a phone was on by calling it and listening to it ring. He used to be able to do pretty much everything with the phone system, but was against the people like Steve Jobs who made and sold blue boxes for a profit. We used to call Joe on Alliance Teleconferences (us being $LOD$ and friends) and we had a lot of fun. But then, some cranks (I think it might have been MOD) got his number and started harassing him. He went underground to avoid them and I lost all touch with him.
He was a great guy. I don't know how well he fared once the phone system went digital, but he was someone who made the best out of what life took from him, and what life gave him. That is, his sight was taken but his tone sensitivity was extreme.
Phone phreaking is a lost art -- an analog art, made of electronics and geeky passion. It was damaged by criminals out for nothing more than free calls, but ultimately destroyed by SS7.
I've had the idea to use all this wondrous DSP technology and massive amounts of CPU power and storage to recreate the phone network circa 1982 - a phreaker's version, as close to the real thing as possible, where you'd use a blue box to get around, and find loops, etc. Think of it as an audio adventure game. I don't have the DSP talent to make it happen though. But if I ever could get it done, I would dedicate it to the memory of Joe Engressia.
It amazes me how little people know about solar power here on Slashdot, yet they continue to post. So, here's a few tidbits of information that may illuminate some of you.
1) So far, Nanosolar has been vapourware. I've been waiting five years for thee cells to hit the market. I am excited that they're actually shipping some, but I don't know how long it will take before cells become available for the claimed $1/Watt
2) Nanosolar is not the only company in the thin-film, non-silicon photovoltaic business. You can already get CIS cells. They are pretty good, and not too expensive. But they are around $4/Watt. I expect that's the price point at which the nanosolar cells will make their debut.
3) A solar cell is not a solar panel. Other components of a solar panel are a frame to hold it, a covering glass, mounting materials, a charge controller, a battery charger, and maybe some sort of sun tracker. The cost of these 'accessories' can often be more than the cost of the cells themselves.
4) Photovoltaic cells perform better (namely: they provide more voltage) in cold weather. Therefore, while Alaska may not have as many hours of sun as southern latitudes, those hours will provide more power. Also, I am not sure of the climate of Alaska, but some areas can have many days of bright blue skies in the middle of winter. These combined can really help the cost-effectiveness of solar power at such latitudes. Though I am still not sure of the eventual cost equation.
5) Battery technology is still a problem. There are many different technologies and inventions in the field, but capital cost, self-discharge rates, expected lifetime, efficiency, weight, and environment hazards are trade-offs which much be made, and there is not happy answer. And please don't say "Hydrogen!"
6) It's an exciting time to be involved in the alternative energy field. Exciting also means volatile. There's great amounts of money to be made...and lost.
AC won out of DC because of Stanley's invention of the transformer, which enabled changing high current, low voltage electricity into high voltage, low current electricity. It's not the AC or DC which effects transmission efficiency over distance, it is the voltage (Electromotive Force). It's just easier to raise the voltage of an AC current.
In addition to the math/maths/mathematics issue, American 'English' has a good collection of other atrocities. I've converted a few of the ones I find odd/amusing to British English :
check = cheque (as in money) tire = tyre </i> OK now both of those are true <i> sulfur = sulphur seeing eye dog = guide dog </i> I've seen these both used in many places in the US. <i> thru = through </i> 'thru' is only used by retards and those who have to pay by the letter <i> gasoline = petrol pissed (angry) = pissed (drunk) </i> Yeah.... <i> pavement = road sidewalk = pavement <i> What the fuck are you talking about? those equivalancies make no sense. Maybe you are thinking 'tarmac'? <i> chips = crisps french fries = chips (sort of...) </i> I'll give you those... <i> quarter of 5 = quarter past 5 </i> not at all.....unless you are making a joke about punctuality. I have noticed no difference in punctuality between the US and UK, but I haven't spent much time in the UK. <i> pedestrian crossing = somewhere cars line up to run people over,
especially when turning right on red light whilst making a phone call...
(I was injured last week by an SUV under exactly these circumstances) </i> Which country were you in? But yes, I have had a similar experience...except that a driver went around another car who had stopped to let me cross, and hit me. <i> Not to mention dates with month and day the wrong way round (MM/DD/YYYY) and words with 's' replaced by 'z', color/colour etc. </i> But you did mention them. The whole date order thing is traumatic. It is true that the American order is illogical. To make dates clear, I format them in a way which the day referred to is obvious, i.e. "15 DEC 2007"
So, I am posting this as 'Extrans' because Slashdot's lameness filter is lame. Attempting to post as html was rejected wit "Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted! Reason: Please use fewer 'junk' characters."
Slashdot Mirror
if you're just tossing numbers about, then a spreadsheet like excel might work. But it's going to require some bending to get some jobs done, and bending it will make it brittle...
I've really come to value Python. Once you learn it, it's easy to write code in, and it's relatively easy to read other people's code. But I wonder, though, if it's really good enough for some high-caliber applications. It would be embarrassing to do some scientific work that later falls down under peer review because of faulty programming. That why I wonder if Ada/Spark wouldn't be better in many applications. Because it's so explicit, you can learn a lot just by reading the code. You can extend the work that others have done, people who you never even get to talk to about their code. But I have to admit I haven't learned Spark yet, but it fascinates me. Maybe it would be too painful for a lot of physics students to learn, but the pain might end up being worth it in the long run, when it comes time actually putting that physics to real world applications. Real world applications of physics these days are often very expensive places to make mistakes, so quality code is a must. And, nothing says quality like Ada/Spark.
I also believe that 'whatever floats your boat' is the wrong answer. Trying to make various code that students and researchers have written in a variety of different language is a nightmare, especially when the programmers have moved on to other projects and different institutions.
Windows 2000 was the best they ever did. Well, besides msdos5.
Yes, these are amazing devices for little money. The problem is, they're hard to find in stock at the moment, because they're so popular. But a new batch is due in a couple of weeks.
These things are almost overkill for 500 meters.
If there's too much noise on 2.4 ghz, there's also the ns5 for 802.11a. But then, you have to be more line-of-sight.
It's obviously Naquadah. It's basically not found in nature on earth, but is plentiful in other places. We've got a huge sized asteroid of it somewhere not too far away, though. I just hope they don't try to make naquadria.
Some wierd stuff...web browsing seems to work fine, but when trying to get stuff from the repository...it seems to lag. Not dns, as that lookup completes pretty fast, and once the connection starts it seems to go well, but there's a lag. I tries switching from US to CA servers to see if that would help, it didn't. Are other people seeing this? Is this just load because of the new release? I am wondering if they've got dns lookup turned on for connecting clients on their servers, because that's the only time I've seen this behavior.
I downloaded xubuntu-alternate via bittorrent (finding a site which had a working seed was a problem...finally found it in the UK). After burning the CD, I booted up and installed over my old (broken) 7.10. It seemed to take a long time to install. Even with 784mb of ram 9I know it's not huge these dats0 on my Celeron M @ 1.7ghz, it seemed to be spinning its wheels a lot..times when there was no disk access (either cd or hd). I remember it took a particularly long time configuring the modules. I also had a problem getting DHCP info from my AP, but that very well could be the retarded dhcp servers that many of these APs use. after giving myself a static ip, it went just fine.
I had been worried that I'd have to do wierd tinkering to get the uncommon screen dimensions on my dell Inspiron 700m to work properly. But no, it worked right from the start.
Let me say that it's quite fast! snappy browser and desktop performance, much better than my older ubuntu 7.x and much faster than windows XP on the same system. That's even before I move from the generic kernel to a 686 one.
now, let me see how well everything else works.
Comments like this make me realize the importance of nuclear war. We have to come to do something about overpopulation. AIDS isn't spreading fast enough.
Bernstein put the orchestra under immense pressure.
This is disturbing on many levels. Firstly, it subsidizes an organization which does not represent the entirety of the industry it purports to - pratically none of the Artists I listen to are in the RIAA. Secondly, such a tax does not appear to make downloading of these songs, currently labeled illegal by RIAA and associates, legal. Thirdly, it does nothing to protect the rights of users to utilize the full range of IP transport protocols without hindrance. I am talking about the Comcast's of the world trying to block P2P.
Hi, I live in Somerville, and have been around Boston for a long time so i have a bit of credibility in stating that DEC was hugE in the 80s, only to get really beaten by Sun and Microsoft in the 90s. They made rock solid and expensive equipment. A Microvax was sort of like a 1985 Mercedes - and almost as expensive.
Anyhow, this city has spawned some of the most significant scientific and technological revolutions, and some of the largest companies. But they all move on. Why? Well, part of it is taxes, but part of it also has to do with the cost of real estate. Some of this is caused by corruption, but there are other factors at work as well. Simply put: the land here is too hard to build on, because it's mostly filled in swamp. That's why The Big Dig was/is such a disaster. It gets better out in the suburbs, but that's a different story.
Biotech is the Next Big Thing, or so at least MIT thinks. That's the way Cambridge is going lately. I think biotech may have been oversold, but who listens to me?
I can see why people find jobs in other places, and move away. I like Seattle, and might move there some day. But there's something special to Boston that I'd miss.
I've been working with some people trying to come up with a cheap solar mesh router. now this guy comes along and says it can be done for $35, so no one is going to pay more. he obviously has no idea of what is involved in making a solar mesh router that is the least bit reliable. but people aren't going to know that. They're just going to have heard this magic price of $35, and not be willing to pay more.
olpc was supposed to be an open-source laptop for $100. yea, whatever happened to that? closed wifi hardware, microsoft involved, screwed around by intel, the price still high, the computer not available.
you're just salting the earth so nothing else can grow. We had been hoping to create a mesh router that could be sold for $100, but we can't even get the components for that cost. I don't believe you'll ever see a $35 solar mesh router. Now, since you've damaged our already struggling project, you'll likely never see a $100 one, either.
There are so many reasons to doubt the claims of this 'ZPM'. Starting with the name itself. Other than the Stargate reference. How is it supposed to be 'zero pollution' when the car is internal-combustion-assisted? Furthermore, where does the energy needed to compress the air come from? Yes, there are several 'zero pollution' sources of electricity, but that's really the province of the electric power producers, and NOT the auto designer. It would be more reasonable to call an all-electric auto 'zero pollution' than this so-called ZPM! The safety of compressed air is another factor. It may not be as dangerous as compressed hydrogen, but think that it will also be present with a liquid fuel in this hybrid vehicle - so there will be plenty of fuel and oxidizer for any fire.
I also have doubts about the efficiency of pneumatic engines. But I am no expert in that field.
First of all, Linux is technically a Kernel, not an entire operating system. Operating systems, such as Debian, OpenWRT, Red Hat, etc. are said to be Linux operating systems, because they are based upon the Linux Kernel (and that's not always true of Debian). FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Windows XP, are entire operating systems to themselves. People who don't understand this differentiation should not be writing articles on Operating Systems.
.67% of the operating system market. Very strong in servers, present and growing in the embedded (OpenWRT, for instance) and Desktop markets (Ubuntu is becoming VERY popular on the desktop, and let's not forget XO (that is if we can keep Microsoft from sabotaging the OLPC)).
Linus is right - the job of a kernel is the mechanics, not the presentation. But he even forgets this himself at times, when he tries to ignore the purposeful ignorance of the media and cheer on the home team. It's not a good idea.
NetApp has their head up their collective asses. Linux based operating systems certainly have more than
In short, just another ignorant journalist. CNET goes down a notch. Linus should be more careful of who he lets interview him.
"...he research project at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, in the US..." - I am very glad that the poster clarified which Pittsburgh CMU was in. The uninformed person, who might not have known where CMU was located and would therefore have to reason out whether this was a Pittsburgh in the USA, the one in Japan, in Mali, or the one in Germany (The German city is a suburb of Cheeseburgh)
The question is, which Pittsburgh is it located in, in the US?
Back when I was involved with FO the industry was still run (for better or for worse) by 'phone guys', who were using fan, balding white guys with poor interpersonal skills. But their dogma had a strong believe in designing for reliability.
Data centers were designed with FO carefully coming in rom different streets on different ends of the building, and there were carefully worded legal agreements which would prevent their upstream carriers from doing anything that would threaten the data center's redundancy.
Now, as far as R.O.W. - it's the OCEAN! It's not like you have a lot of buildings and property lines cluttering up the ocean floor. Sure, once they make landfall that's a problem but it's a whole different ball of wax. Now, perhaps some stupid engineers out there just don't get it or don't think it's important, but things like train derailments, fires, floods, ship anchors, earthquakes, war, vandalism, etc were all very real design constraints with to professionals I worked with. Maybe all these guys got rich and retired, or the bad food and tobacco finally took its toll, and new 'engineers' came in without any clue and ripped up all the old design constraints, but somehow I doubt it.
Nah, it's sabotage. Could be someone playing the futures market, like I said before, or a plain old extortion / protection racket.
One ship cutting one cable is plausible, but unlikely. One ship cutting two cables, is odd and barely explicable, but possible if the cable engineers were really, really stoopid. One ship cutting 3 cables? Ah, no, we're not that gullible...this is a planned attack. For what reasons, I can only guess, but since the EnRon days bandwidth has been a commodity and so I'd guess it's someone playing nasty with the commodities market -- just like they do with energy futures. I say this is more likely than some attempt to censor, because there's still traffic flowing...it just costs a lot more, due to the laws of supply and demand.
Yes, I do have professional knowledge of fibre optics and Internet connectivity. No, it isn't recent, but about six years old. Make of it what you will.
Why is graphite used as an anode material? What does it offer ? I was just reading some cool articles on how to make electricity from sewage ( http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/MicrobialFuelCells/ ) and thinking this. I read articles where they similarly talk about little 'whiskers' or cilia that bacteria have in relation to this sewage-to-voltage idea and wonder if it's all related somehow.
Yea, I am starting to turn into a biochemistry hacker. Just imagine what my basement will smell like now...ha ha ha
Thanks dfroula! I'll be sure to give it a try! (but I don't have .net)
All of this looking into deep space and distant past is fine and all but I am much more interested in looking at stars here in the Milky Way to find out more about their planets. The reasons for this are that we will colonize space, and we need to figure out which star systems are worth sending probes to in search of terraformable planets. It will take a very long time for these probes to arrive, and almost as long for a colonization ship to arrive and start the terraformation. We need to launch these probes now, and continue to work on technologies which make interstellar travel and terraformation possible while these probes are on their long journeys. Can Hubble make the observations we need?
Anticypher: Hey good to know that phreaking lives on. I know it's possible to fake caller ID, but I guess the rest of that SS7 hackery has passed me by.
Oh, to the fellow who suggest Asterisk - you're wrong on so many counts. First of all, you need to know that DTMF is not MF. Second of all, it was the BUGS in the ole' phone system which made it interesting, and these aren't going to be duplicated in Asterix. We'd have to re-implement them, and that is a lot of DSP work. It's not just about building a phone system, it's about replicating the old one.
I used to regularly phreak calls to Joe in the mid 80s. I remember he had a phone number that ended in either 0000 or 9999, I can't remember which. Anyhow, this guy was cool. He just loved phones, and talking about phones. I remember he used to be able to tell what kind of switch a phone was on by calling it and listening to it ring. He used to be able to do pretty much everything with the phone system, but was against the people like Steve Jobs who made and sold blue boxes for a profit. We used to call Joe on Alliance Teleconferences (us being $LOD$ and friends) and we had a lot of fun. But then, some cranks (I think it might have been MOD) got his number and started harassing him. He went underground to avoid them and I lost all touch with him.
He was a great guy. I don't know how well he fared once the phone system went digital, but he was someone who made the best out of what life took from him, and what life gave him. That is, his sight was taken but his tone sensitivity was extreme.
Phone phreaking is a lost art -- an analog art, made of electronics and geeky passion. It was damaged by criminals out for nothing more than free calls, but ultimately destroyed by SS7.
I've had the idea to use all this wondrous DSP technology and massive amounts of CPU power and storage to recreate the phone network circa 1982 - a phreaker's version, as close to the real thing as possible, where you'd use a blue box to get around, and find loops, etc. Think of it as an audio adventure game. I don't have the DSP talent to make it happen though. But if I ever could get it done, I would dedicate it to the memory of Joe Engressia.
It amazes me how little people know about solar power here on Slashdot, yet they continue to post. So, here's a few tidbits of information that may illuminate some of you.
1) So far, Nanosolar has been vapourware. I've been waiting five years for thee cells to hit the market. I am excited that they're actually shipping some, but I don't know how long it will take before cells become available for the claimed $1/Watt
2) Nanosolar is not the only company in the thin-film, non-silicon photovoltaic business. You can already get CIS cells. They are pretty good, and not too expensive. But they are around $4/Watt. I expect that's the price point at which the nanosolar cells will make their debut.
3) A solar cell is not a solar panel. Other components of a solar panel are a frame to hold it, a covering glass, mounting materials, a charge controller, a battery charger, and maybe some sort of sun tracker. The cost of these 'accessories' can often be more than the cost of the cells themselves.
4) Photovoltaic cells perform better (namely: they provide more voltage) in cold weather. Therefore, while Alaska may not have as many hours of sun as southern latitudes, those hours will provide more power. Also, I am not sure of the climate of Alaska, but some areas can have many days of bright blue skies in the middle of winter. These combined can really help the cost-effectiveness of solar power at such latitudes. Though I am still not sure of the eventual cost equation.
5) Battery technology is still a problem. There are many different technologies and inventions in the field, but capital cost, self-discharge rates, expected lifetime, efficiency, weight, and environment hazards are trade-offs which much be made, and there is not happy answer. And please don't say "Hydrogen!"
6) It's an exciting time to be involved in the alternative energy field. Exciting also means volatile. There's great amounts of money to be made...and lost.
AC won out of DC because of Stanley's invention of the transformer, which enabled changing high current, low voltage electricity into high voltage, low current electricity. It's not the AC or DC which effects transmission efficiency over distance, it is the voltage (Electromotive Force). It's just easier to raise the voltage of an AC current.
In addition to the math/maths/mathematics issue, American 'English' has a good collection of other atrocities. I've converted a few of the ones I find odd/amusing to British English :
check = cheque (as in money)
tire = tyre
</i> OK now both of those are true
<i>
sulfur = sulphur
seeing eye dog = guide dog
</i>
I've seen these both used in many places in the US.
<i>
thru = through
</i>
'thru' is only used by retards and those who have to pay by the letter
<i>
gasoline = petrol
pissed (angry) = pissed (drunk)
</i>
Yeah....
<i>
pavement = road
sidewalk = pavement
<i>
What the fuck are you talking about? those equivalancies make no sense. Maybe you are thinking 'tarmac'?
<i>
chips = crisps
french fries = chips (sort of...)
</i>
I'll give you those...
<i>
quarter of 5 = quarter past 5
</i> not at all.....unless you are making a joke about punctuality. I have noticed no difference in punctuality between the US and UK, but I haven't spent much time in the UK.
<i>
pedestrian crossing = somewhere cars line up to run people over,
especially when turning right on red light whilst making a phone call...
(I was injured last week by an SUV under exactly these circumstances)
</i>
Which country were you in?
But yes, I have had a similar experience...except that a driver went around another car who had stopped to let me cross, and hit me.
<i>
Not to mention dates with month and day the wrong way round (MM/DD/YYYY) and words with 's' replaced by 'z', color/colour etc.
</i>
But you did mention them. The whole date order thing is traumatic. It is true that the American order is illogical. To make dates clear, I format them in a way which the day referred to is obvious, i.e. "15 DEC 2007"
So, I am posting this as 'Extrans' because Slashdot's lameness filter is lame. Attempting to post as html was rejected wit
"Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
Reason: Please use fewer 'junk' characters."
In America, you'd be being pedantic
In UKOGBANI, you'd be being pendatics
In Slashdot, it's pedantix
But it's all really the same soup.