Based on numbers of Internet users I've worked with before (based on about 10 million users), UTC-5 is largest, followed by UTC-8. After that, it was UTC+0, UTC+1, UTC+10, UTC+8, and then UTC+5, in that order. It was an English speaking site, just like this one, so I'd suspect the numbers would follow. If I remember right, it dwindled from there, but just about every time zone was covered, except for maybe some of those very watery ones.:)
Don't tell someone in California that the East coast is larger. They won't believe you. Likewise, don't tell someone in Europe that their English speaking site gets more traffic from the US. It seems a lot of people think very highly of where they are (or are from), and refuse to look at facts to verify or disprove it.
It's a shame Slashdot doesn't have a good visual method to show it's readers. I've become fond of ClustrMaps and Feedjit.
Well, remember the other night, when I was over at your house, and you came into your moms room and saw us wrestling naked? I wasn't on the clock, and we weren't just wrestling.:)
If you don't remember clearly, I have the video online, if you want to see it.
Don't forget the other benefits of working from home. You can crawl out of bed, and sit at the computer in your pajamas. No shower, no morning commute. No "good morning" chatter from your coworkers.
By going to the office, the scenario looks something like this. You start at 6am, you take 30min to shower, and 1.5 hrs to drive to work. The good morning chatter takes another 30 minutes, and the morning meeting takes another hour. So, by 9:30am, you can sit down at your desk. Persistent questions about "can you help me with... it'll only take a second" tie up your day until about noon. So half your day has been wasted by not accomplishing the desired task. You go to lunch, come back, and from 1pm to 5pm, you get almost 3 hours worth of work in.
In contrast, working at home, you can start an hour later (7am), work solid until noon (+5hr), grab something from the fridge to eat, and return to your computer while you munch on it. (-0 lunch). You then continue your work, and can run through 6pm without disturbances (+6hr), and you're still stopping work earlier than you'd normally arrive home due to traffic.
So.. 3 hrs productive work vs. 11 hrs productive work. In a 5 day work week, you can either get 15 hours of productive stuff done at the office, or 55 hours worth done at home. And managers still don't get it. Even if you take a couple hours per day slacking on Slashdot, that still puts you way ahead on the work accomplished. It's really clear why you can accomplish a weeks worth of work in one day. Not only are you more productive, you've saved the cost of gas, purchased lunch, and wear and tear on your car.
I usually shifted my schedule to my natural patterns. Undisturbed, I'd start work at about 11am, and finish around 3am. That's 16 hours of productive work. 80 hours/wk of productive work is much better than 15 hours of productive work, no matter how you look at it.
It all depends on your environment. I have a pack of 8 HID cards (badges). They were all used for different places. There were weeks I never went to my "office". I'd work from home, drive to a datacenter, fly to another datacenter, etc, etc. Sometimes they couldn't get me on the phone, depending on the datacenter. I could have lied and been asleep at home, but said "I was down in the datacenter doing work. The phone doesn't work in there." Then again, all my work was always done, and done right, so there was never a need to question me, and I really worked at least 60 hrs/wk.
Since I didn't grace you with a response, I'll just give you this...
I'm not fat. Nor bearded. But, you got the guy part right.
I'm the guy who when you see me walk into a store, you're not sure if I'm shopping, I'm going to rob the place at gunpoint, I'm a cop or a fed. I've been asked each more than once. I'm just your average guy. Not fat. Not anorexic skinny. I don't live in mom's basement, and I have a job which allows me to purchase things, rather than having the wiry homeless look where you wonder if I'm going to be shoplifting as I walk out. I blend in almost anywhere. Unfortunately, that puts me in line for most police calls. "white male, mid 20's to early 30's, average height, average weight, no distinguishing marks." Maybe I should go into a life of crime, I'd be impossible to find. With that description any witness would only be able to identify a few hundred thousand people.:) well, until I start talking. Anyone who knows their stuff, especially with technology or cars (had to include the car analogy), can hold a conversation with me for hours. In retail computer stores, since I look like I know what I'm doing there, they start asking me questions over the sales staff.
And since you found it necessary to profile me, I'll do the same to you. Since people frequently project their insecurities on others, I believe you've described yourself very well. You're short, fat, bearded and balding, probably in your late 30's or early 40's. You don't know much about technology other than being an operator of Windows computers that you've had for a whopping 5 years. You feel slighted by anyone who anyone and everyone who knows more than you do, rather than listening to what they have to say and learning from it. You live in South Florida with your parents, but like to believe you are doing financially well. You like to think about living in other places, probably Asia somewhere, but it will never happen. Most importantly, you take offense to anything people say about you online, and if you aren't crying too much, you'll try to argue everything I said about you. Feel free. We all believe you. Honest.
Honestly, I don't remember much about the cameras, other than my dad carried around both infrared and regular film. The photos were definitely long infrared. Before he retired, his work for the DoD was based on nondestructive testing of materials. What I do remember is quite a bit of infrared tire testing for aircraft. You could see if layers of rubber in a tire were separating based on thermal imaging, rather than waiting to see a bubble form, which may happen upon landing rather than seeing a bubble when it's on the ground. I just googled around a little, and found references to his work in relation to testing bonds in armor plating also. I'm guessing by the fact that we had posters of jet engine designs, that he worked on other stuff, or at very least he was given neat posters when he visited sites.:)
Yes, his equipment was cooled with either liquid nitrogen or dry ice (or a combination). Both were around on occasion. I was real young, so I don't know how it all went together. I do remember seeing the cameras, but since they were up on tripods, they were taller than me then.:) I couldn't begin to guess if they were silicon glass or germanium lenses.
I'm guessing there was some sort of up conversion of the spectrum. My mom was just telling me (after writing that post) that she thinks the infrared film he used was in a polaroid type camera. I thought it was Kodak film, but I'm probably wrong. She has a bunch of his old 35mm slides, but I don't know if those were made directly, or reproductions for the symposiums that he spoke at.
I do remember seeing quite a few of the pictures. He had one of a girl in a bikini, which was interesting to say the least.:) The bikini hid the naughty bits, but I'm sure that went over well during his lectures. He did show me a handprint picture, and said it was shot a couple minutes after the wall was touched. Definitely thermal imaging.:)
Unfortunately, all the equipment belonged to the DoD, so it all stayed at work when he retired. Not that I'd really want to have to explain why I'm buying liquid nitrogen to run something that needed to sit in the bed of a pickup truck to transport.:)
I did get my hands on a near infrared eyepiece, which I've had fun with. It's more along the lines of what most people think of as "infrared", where you could modify a camera to use with it. It's for night vision use, so it's a light intensifier and short infrared sensor. It has an IR emitter on it, but isn't necessary to see with if the unit is powered up. I really want to get my hands on a thermal imaging eyepiece though. They're slowly coming down in price, but until they really hit the regular consumer market, they'll remain unaffordable. I can't drop $5k on something I'll only use occasionally. I do use the short infrared eyepiece occasionally though. It's good for looking in shadows behind houses, and finding pets hiding.:) They'll always look directly at you when they're hiding, and the IR light reflects off their eyes and makes them really stand out.
I would have liked to see more side-by-side comparisons, but I already knew the outcome before I started reading.
Once someone gets a good grasp of what real thermal imagery looks like, they won't confuse the two. Of course, I started looking at them them I was little, and saw nonexistant windows in buildings. This picture does not apply to that statement, although it does show a thermal image of a building. In the picture I was referencing, which isn't available online (or I can't find a copy), it showed an old government building. Several upstairs windows had been bricked over years ago, and the facade showed no hints that there had ever been windows. No insulation had ever been installed where the window was. In a photo shot mid winter, the old window shapes were shown as hot as the existing windows. It was a major thermal leak for the building.
Thermal imaging can can show thermal residue, like a handprint on a wall can last for a while. It can also show you the fluid level in a tank (scroll down the above link).
Hopefully this will help people understand what real thermal imaging is. I guess I should mention that not all are in color. The colors are simulated anyways, they really shoot grayscale, but it helps us to see the difference better. People like colors.:)
Wow. That'd be a lot of work, and very slow. I guess it would work, but you'd have to take every sample and convert the viewed temperature to a color (or grayscale) value. a 320x240 image would require 76,800 samples. I pulled up the spec on the Craftsman model (Sears Item# 03450466000), and it requires 1 second to acquire a sample. Lets assume that you can request a sample to be taken, and acquire the result in that 1 second. You could acquire a single frame in only 21.3 hours. That kind of reminds me of waiting for a download in the good ol' BBS days.
You can (or could) get infrared film. My dad used it, along with his other research. I just asked my mom about it, since I was only 5 when he stopped doing it. He used a special camera made by Barnes Engineering in Connecticut. I did some digging around, and Barnes Engineering was acquired by Infrared Systems Development in 1997.
Outside of that, I don't know much of it, other than it was special.:) If you're really interested in old thermal imaging, you could ask them, and see if anyone there remembers what they were offering in the late 1960's and early 1970's. Well, assuming it's not classified.:) I kinda doubt it is, since my dads work with it was published and available to the public (but printed by the DoD).
The new "cheap" ones I mentioned don't require that kind of cooling. Some of the larger industrial ones do. Now I find it a little strange that we had liquid nitrogen and dry ice at the house when I was a little kid. My dad would toss the left over dry ice in a tub of water to let us watch it sublimate.
There is short wavelength infrared, which is just below what the eye can detect. That is what your digital camera can pick up without it's IR filter. It is also the cheap "night vision" solution, commonly available on security cameras, and video cameras.
What we're discussing here in long wavelength infrared. It is the light emitted by heat. Anything above 0 degrees kelvin puts off heat. That heat is visible as light, but only when it becomes hot enough for the wave to come into our visible range. So, that's where you see something get "red hot". The useful part for thermal imaging is way below what we can see.:)
There are also other defined ranges of "infrared", but for our purposes, you only need to know about the two above.
Lawyers argue. They're usually aware of the science. If they're smart, they find out. Then they'll argue their side, reinforcing their side of the truth until they win. A $2k tool can arguably be common place. The comparison to the $100 toy was just wrong. They can extend the argument, to show that some cars now come with thermal imaging cameras. They aren't terribly common, but they are available. I know it's come on a few Cadillac's. I had read it was to be an option on the Corvette, but I don't know if that ever made it to production or not. Those were Raytheon units. I don't know what other cars have them factory installed. It seems Mercedes, BMW, and Lexus also have options for this too. That would clearly put it into the "general use" category, rather than "specialized equipment".
I was anxious when I saw this story come up. Ooohh, thermal imaging for $100!
Ya, the linked device is just a thermometer. They've had these for a while. Sears has been selling these for a while, marketed towards automotive and industrial uses. There are several options on the market, like the FLIR PathFindIR ($2,500), Fluke 5YE66 ($2,500) and Fluke Ti10 ($5,000). My dad did work with this in the 60's and 70's, and his equipment was outrageously expensive, and only available through the gov't. They required dry ice and/or liquid nitrogen. He received a prototype in the 70's (at a cost of about $5,000) of what is now the $100 IR thermometer.
I have a project I want to do someday involving this kind of stuff, but it will either require that I have too much money to burn, or the prices come way down.
Thank you. I actually didn't mean to imply any smugness. I buy what I need, when I need it. Someone, like my mom, is best suited for a Windows machine, because she does a lot of work with a specialty program which simply doesn't exist for Linux (yet). It's specialty enough that there aren't even a lot of Windows options, and as far as I know, no Apple options (yet).
Somehow, I always get suckered into going to the store. Mostly because I can walk up and down the aisles, and find the best deal there, or veto the shopping trip entirely, and cut through the upsell BS without hesitation. So, when someone's buying a computer, I'm there. While I do love Linux, and use it as much as possible (which is an awful lot), I do recognize that there is always the proper tool for the job.
Half (or more) of that bloat comes from the default installs. On new machines, I find it easier to blow away everything they have and start fresh. A nice clean OS install is always wonderful.:)
I haven't bought a new machine from BestBuy in years, but even then it was a machine to install Linux on. They tried a variety of upsells on me, and couldn't quite grasp my answer. "No, I'm wiping out everything and putting Linux on".
At another store, they were very insistent on selling me an antivirus suite. I asked "So, does it run under Linux". Their answer was "Oh, I'm sure it does." I had them spinning for about 10 minutes and finally broke the bad news to them. Come on, you're selling computers. You should have a clue what Linux is, even if it's just enough to know, a Linux person wouldn't want anything packaged for Windows.
A friend of mine called me the other day about antiviruses for Win7. A friend of hers just bought a new computer for Christmas, and they upsold him on an antivirus suite. Unfortunately, it wouldn't install on Win7. They were going to return it for a refund, and I warned them that since the box had been opened, that'll probably be next to impossible. I haven't heard what finally happened with that.
If they could, they'd upsell a karma suite. "You'll have good computer karma, you won't get any viruses, and not much will break anytime soon.":)
Actually, there's a tech way to handle driveway snow. Google for "driveway snowmelt system". A heated driveway will take care of all that pesky snow, and help ensure global warming for the rest of the planet with the wasted energy.:)
Actually, Wikipedia says that automatic systems are fairly efficient, only running while snow is falling at your driveway.
I don't know how long they've been available, or how good they are. I don't live in snow country. Gimme a robot that'll clean up after a hurricane, and I'd be happy. Hmmm, the car is upside down in the neighbors yard, but his roof is in mine. Fair trade.
Re:A sentence is missing from the beginning...
on
Monty Wants To Save MySQL
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· Score: 4, Insightful
You have to provide references before saying something like that.:)
It was $1B in total considerations, which most likely wasn't all cash. I'm sure all of it didn't go in Monty's pocket, but I'm sure he did walk away with a pretty nice sum.
There's a thing about business though. Most places want to grow a business from nothing, to the point where it's a viable product to sell. Then they sell it. All of it. There's no looking back. It was yours, now it's not. So sorry, move on.
If I made something, and it sold for $1B, I'd be a pretty happy camper. Hell, Sabeer Bhatia sold Hotmail in 1997 for $400M, and he was happy. Now (in a 2007 article I read), is funding new startups with the hope of making the next killer app that will be bigger than Hotmail.
I have a few things that I've done, and if someone offered me even $1M to give one up, I'd take it. I wouldn't look back. I'd smile the whole way to the bank.:)
If he wants MySQL back, tough. If Sun decides to gut it, and make the MySQL site into a porn link farm web site, and the database engine into a shell script that greps a flat file, so be it. It's theirs, and it's their decision. They could sell to Oracle, or Microsoft, or anyone they'd like.
If he *really* wants it back, he should put his effort into his new database, and don't give it up next time, even for $1B.
That's more of an exception rather than a rule. I'd guess that your school not only NATed you, but also blocked specific ports and/or other content filtering, so you *couldn't* do what you are complaining about. This isn't unique to a NAT environment at a school. It's made enough recent news, where providers have been speed limiting or blocking bittorrent. I've seen the same happen for SMTP on some providers, both ISP and location (like hotels), or even HTTP, where they force you through their proxy that doesn't always behave properly. Proxy and redirected services based on ports are not equal to NAT.
I use P2P applications like file sharing, and multiplayer games through a NAT. Heck, most users do the same. When just about any provider puts in cable or FiOS, their "router" provides NAT, and you don't have to log into the router and provide port forwarding, nor move your machine to the DMZ.
One of the things that won't work would be direct connections for desktop sharing. That is easily mitigated with a public reflector. I use my own, so my server (in a datacenter) handles requests from both the client being viewed, and my admin client. There are pay services that do the same thing, like GoToMyPC. They don't care if there is a NAT on either end (or both ends).
Much like the need for passive mode FTP, it's been corrected over the years, and now just works out of the box.
I'll just wait for the story about the blackhole sucking up the Earth to show up here. Ok, it'll take a while, but we'll be on the even horizon of it for an awful long time. Oh ya, time dilation. We wouldn't know if it had already started.:)
I'm really surprised that I haven't seen more ISP's NAT their networks. I think it was Nextel's original wireless network card, that always issued me a 10.0.0.0/8 IP. Home users don't generally need a static IP. I know, in this crowd we like them, but for the other 99% of the users, they'd be fine NATed. And for those who think that's nuts, yes you can have a NAT behind a NAT, without breaking anything. As an example, I ran 3 devices in a hotel room for a while. They'd only let me have 1 NAT IP, so I ran my own NAT behind it.:) I was working out of town, so I had a desktop, laptop, and my Vonage box. Everything worked fine.
What would happen to the available pool, if every residential provider did this, and only provided a public IP upon request?
I don't think any company I've worked for was charged for their IP's. Most got/24's with no charge. A friend got a/25 on a business FiOS line, and that did cost. We could have gotten a/24, but it wasn't necessary for that setup.
I honestly wouldn't be surprised if home appliances were subsidized pretty soon. I know it's a joke for now, but I'm sure a few executives have been drooling over the idea of pushing targeted ads into the homes, and being able to "remind" customers to restock particular items. From what I've seen, most grocery store items are not RFID tagged quite yet, but I'm sure they will be soon enough.
If I remember right, it's been less than a year since the last "the IP sky is falling" story here. Even then, we were numbered in months, not years. I know the deadline was in 2009.:) I have a lot of faith in it's failure though. It'll fall apart, and we're going to all die, or at least not be able to twitter quite as much.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Based on numbers of Internet users I've worked with before (based on about 10 million users), UTC-5 is largest, followed by UTC-8. After that, it was UTC+0, UTC+1, UTC+10, UTC+8, and then UTC+5, in that order. It was an English speaking site, just like this one, so I'd suspect the numbers would follow. If I remember right, it dwindled from there, but just about every time zone was covered, except for maybe some of those very watery ones. :)
Don't tell someone in California that the East coast is larger. They won't believe you. Likewise, don't tell someone in Europe that their English speaking site gets more traffic from the US. It seems a lot of people think very highly of where they are (or are from), and refuse to look at facts to verify or disprove it.
It's a shame Slashdot doesn't have a good visual method to show it's readers. I've become fond of ClustrMaps and Feedjit.
Well, remember the other night, when I was over at your house, and you came into your moms room and saw us wrestling naked? I wasn't on the clock, and we weren't just wrestling. :)
If you don't remember clearly, I have the video online, if you want to see it.
Don't forget the other benefits of working from home. You can crawl out of bed, and sit at the computer in your pajamas. No shower, no morning commute. No "good morning" chatter from your coworkers.
By going to the office, the scenario looks something like this. You start at 6am, you take 30min to shower, and 1.5 hrs to drive to work. The good morning chatter takes another 30 minutes, and the morning meeting takes another hour. So, by 9:30am, you can sit down at your desk. Persistent questions about "can you help me with... it'll only take a second" tie up your day until about noon. So half your day has been wasted by not accomplishing the desired task. You go to lunch, come back, and from 1pm to 5pm, you get almost 3 hours worth of work in.
In contrast, working at home, you can start an hour later (7am), work solid until noon (+5hr), grab something from the fridge to eat, and return to your computer while you munch on it. (-0 lunch). You then continue your work, and can run through 6pm without disturbances (+6hr), and you're still stopping work earlier than you'd normally arrive home due to traffic.
So.. 3 hrs productive work vs. 11 hrs productive work. In a 5 day work week, you can either get 15 hours of productive stuff done at the office, or 55 hours worth done at home. And managers still don't get it. Even if you take a couple hours per day slacking on Slashdot, that still puts you way ahead on the work accomplished. It's really clear why you can accomplish a weeks worth of work in one day. Not only are you more productive, you've saved the cost of gas, purchased lunch, and wear and tear on your car.
I usually shifted my schedule to my natural patterns. Undisturbed, I'd start work at about 11am, and finish around 3am. That's 16 hours of productive work. 80 hours/wk of productive work is much better than 15 hours of productive work, no matter how you look at it.
But, I already know I'm preaching to the choir. :)
It all depends on your environment. I have a pack of 8 HID cards (badges). They were all used for different places. There were weeks I never went to my "office". I'd work from home, drive to a datacenter, fly to another datacenter, etc, etc. Sometimes they couldn't get me on the phone, depending on the datacenter. I could have lied and been asleep at home, but said "I was down in the datacenter doing work. The phone doesn't work in there." Then again, all my work was always done, and done right, so there was never a need to question me, and I really worked at least 60 hrs/wk.
Hate to break it to you. There are no seeds, just peers all waiting for more content. You'll never get the rest of it. :)
Since I didn't grace you with a response, I'll just give you this...
I'm not fat. Nor bearded. But, you got the guy part right.
I'm the guy who when you see me walk into a store, you're not sure if I'm shopping, I'm going to rob the place at gunpoint, I'm a cop or a fed. I've been asked each more than once. I'm just your average guy. Not fat. Not anorexic skinny. I don't live in mom's basement, and I have a job which allows me to purchase things, rather than having the wiry homeless look where you wonder if I'm going to be shoplifting as I walk out. I blend in almost anywhere. Unfortunately, that puts me in line for most police calls. "white male, mid 20's to early 30's, average height, average weight, no distinguishing marks." Maybe I should go into a life of crime, I'd be impossible to find. With that description any witness would only be able to identify a few hundred thousand people. :) well, until I start talking. Anyone who knows their stuff, especially with technology or cars (had to include the car analogy), can hold a conversation with me for hours. In retail computer stores, since I look like I know what I'm doing there, they start asking me questions over the sales staff.
And since you found it necessary to profile me, I'll do the same to you. Since people frequently project their insecurities on others, I believe you've described yourself very well. You're short, fat, bearded and balding, probably in your late 30's or early 40's. You don't know much about technology other than being an operator of Windows computers that you've had for a whopping 5 years. You feel slighted by anyone who anyone and everyone who knows more than you do, rather than listening to what they have to say and learning from it. You live in South Florida with your parents, but like to believe you are doing financially well. You like to think about living in other places, probably Asia somewhere, but it will never happen. Most importantly, you take offense to anything people say about you online, and if you aren't crying too much, you'll try to argue everything I said about you. Feel free. We all believe you. Honest.
Honestly, I don't remember much about the cameras, other than my dad carried around both infrared and regular film. The photos were definitely long infrared. Before he retired, his work for the DoD was based on nondestructive testing of materials. What I do remember is quite a bit of infrared tire testing for aircraft. You could see if layers of rubber in a tire were separating based on thermal imaging, rather than waiting to see a bubble form, which may happen upon landing rather than seeing a bubble when it's on the ground. I just googled around a little, and found references to his work in relation to testing bonds in armor plating also. I'm guessing by the fact that we had posters of jet engine designs, that he worked on other stuff, or at very least he was given neat posters when he visited sites. :)
Yes, his equipment was cooled with either liquid nitrogen or dry ice (or a combination). Both were around on occasion. I was real young, so I don't know how it all went together. I do remember seeing the cameras, but since they were up on tripods, they were taller than me then. :) I couldn't begin to guess if they were silicon glass or germanium lenses.
I'm guessing there was some sort of up conversion of the spectrum. My mom was just telling me (after writing that post) that she thinks the infrared film he used was in a polaroid type camera. I thought it was Kodak film, but I'm probably wrong. She has a bunch of his old 35mm slides, but I don't know if those were made directly, or reproductions for the symposiums that he spoke at.
I do remember seeing quite a few of the pictures. He had one of a girl in a bikini, which was interesting to say the least. :) The bikini hid the naughty bits, but I'm sure that went over well during his lectures. He did show me a handprint picture, and said it was shot a couple minutes after the wall was touched. Definitely thermal imaging. :)
Unfortunately, all the equipment belonged to the DoD, so it all stayed at work when he retired. Not that I'd really want to have to explain why I'm buying liquid nitrogen to run something that needed to sit in the bed of a pickup truck to transport. :)
I did get my hands on a near infrared eyepiece, which I've had fun with. It's more along the lines of what most people think of as "infrared", where you could modify a camera to use with it. It's for night vision use, so it's a light intensifier and short infrared sensor. It has an IR emitter on it, but isn't necessary to see with if the unit is powered up. I really want to get my hands on a thermal imaging eyepiece though. They're slowly coming down in price, but until they really hit the regular consumer market, they'll remain unaffordable. I can't drop $5k on something I'll only use occasionally. I do use the short infrared eyepiece occasionally though. It's good for looking in shadows behind houses, and finding pets hiding. :) They'll always look directly at you when they're hiding, and the IR light reflects off their eyes and makes them really stand out.
That was a good article.
I would have liked to see more side-by-side comparisons, but I already knew the outcome before I started reading.
Once someone gets a good grasp of what real thermal imagery looks like, they won't confuse the two. Of course, I started looking at them them I was little, and saw nonexistant windows in buildings. This picture does not apply to that statement, although it does show a thermal image of a building. In the picture I was referencing, which isn't available online (or I can't find a copy), it showed an old government building. Several upstairs windows had been bricked over years ago, and the facade showed no hints that there had ever been windows. No insulation had ever been installed where the window was. In a photo shot mid winter, the old window shapes were shown as hot as the existing windows. It was a major thermal leak for the building.
Thermal imaging can can show thermal residue, like a handprint on a wall can last for a while. It can also show you the fluid level in a tank (scroll down the above link).
The most noticeable is how a person looks. Or something more interesting to the /. crowd.
Hopefully this will help people understand what real thermal imaging is. I guess I should mention that not all are in color. The colors are simulated anyways, they really shoot grayscale, but it helps us to see the difference better. People like colors. :)
Wow. That'd be a lot of work, and very slow. I guess it would work, but you'd have to take every sample and convert the viewed temperature to a color (or grayscale) value. a 320x240 image would require 76,800 samples. I pulled up the spec on the Craftsman model (Sears Item# 03450466000), and it requires 1 second to acquire a sample. Lets assume that you can request a sample to be taken, and acquire the result in that 1 second. You could acquire a single frame in only 21.3 hours. That kind of reminds me of waiting for a download in the good ol' BBS days.
You can (or could) get infrared film. My dad used it, along with his other research. I just asked my mom about it, since I was only 5 when he stopped doing it. He used a special camera made by Barnes Engineering in Connecticut. I did some digging around, and Barnes Engineering was acquired by Infrared Systems Development in 1997.
Outside of that, I don't know much of it, other than it was special. :) If you're really interested in old thermal imaging, you could ask them, and see if anyone there remembers what they were offering in the late 1960's and early 1970's. Well, assuming it's not classified. :) I kinda doubt it is, since my dads work with it was published and available to the public (but printed by the DoD).
The new "cheap" ones I mentioned don't require that kind of cooling. Some of the larger industrial ones do. Now I find it a little strange that we had liquid nitrogen and dry ice at the house when I was a little kid. My dad would toss the left over dry ice in a tub of water to let us watch it sublimate.
Wrong definition of infrared.
There is short wavelength infrared, which is just below what the eye can detect. That is what your digital camera can pick up without it's IR filter. It is also the cheap "night vision" solution, commonly available on security cameras, and video cameras.
What we're discussing here in long wavelength infrared. It is the light emitted by heat. Anything above 0 degrees kelvin puts off heat. That heat is visible as light, but only when it becomes hot enough for the wave to come into our visible range. So, that's where you see something get "red hot". The useful part for thermal imaging is way below what we can see. :)
There are also other defined ranges of "infrared", but for our purposes, you only need to know about the two above.
Lawyers argue. They're usually aware of the science. If they're smart, they find out. Then they'll argue their side, reinforcing their side of the truth until they win. A $2k tool can arguably be common place. The comparison to the $100 toy was just wrong. They can extend the argument, to show that some cars now come with thermal imaging cameras. They aren't terribly common, but they are available. I know it's come on a few Cadillac's. I had read it was to be an option on the Corvette, but I don't know if that ever made it to production or not. Those were Raytheon units. I don't know what other cars have them factory installed. It seems Mercedes, BMW, and Lexus also have options for this too. That would clearly put it into the "general use" category, rather than "specialized equipment".
I was anxious when I saw this story come up. Ooohh, thermal imaging for $100!
Ya, the linked device is just a thermometer. They've had these for a while. Sears has been selling these for a while, marketed towards automotive and industrial uses. There are several options on the market, like the FLIR PathFindIR ($2,500), Fluke 5YE66 ($2,500) and Fluke Ti10 ($5,000). My dad did work with this in the 60's and 70's, and his equipment was outrageously expensive, and only available through the gov't. They required dry ice and/or liquid nitrogen. He received a prototype in the 70's (at a cost of about $5,000) of what is now the $100 IR thermometer.
I have a project I want to do someday involving this kind of stuff, but it will either require that I have too much money to burn, or the prices come way down.
Thank you. I actually didn't mean to imply any smugness. I buy what I need, when I need it. Someone, like my mom, is best suited for a Windows machine, because she does a lot of work with a specialty program which simply doesn't exist for Linux (yet). It's specialty enough that there aren't even a lot of Windows options, and as far as I know, no Apple options (yet).
Somehow, I always get suckered into going to the store. Mostly because I can walk up and down the aisles, and find the best deal there, or veto the shopping trip entirely, and cut through the upsell BS without hesitation. So, when someone's buying a computer, I'm there. While I do love Linux, and use it as much as possible (which is an awful lot), I do recognize that there is always the proper tool for the job.
Half (or more) of that bloat comes from the default installs. On new machines, I find it easier to blow away everything they have and start fresh. A nice clean OS install is always wonderful. :)
I haven't bought a new machine from BestBuy in years, but even then it was a machine to install Linux on. They tried a variety of upsells on me, and couldn't quite grasp my answer. "No, I'm wiping out everything and putting Linux on".
At another store, they were very insistent on selling me an antivirus suite. I asked "So, does it run under Linux". Their answer was "Oh, I'm sure it does." I had them spinning for about 10 minutes and finally broke the bad news to them. Come on, you're selling computers. You should have a clue what Linux is, even if it's just enough to know, a Linux person wouldn't want anything packaged for Windows.
A friend of mine called me the other day about antiviruses for Win7. A friend of hers just bought a new computer for Christmas, and they upsold him on an antivirus suite. Unfortunately, it wouldn't install on Win7. They were going to return it for a refund, and I warned them that since the box had been opened, that'll probably be next to impossible. I haven't heard what finally happened with that.
If they could, they'd upsell a karma suite. "You'll have good computer karma, you won't get any viruses, and not much will break anytime soon." :)
Actually, there's a tech way to handle driveway snow. Google for "driveway snowmelt system". A heated driveway will take care of all that pesky snow, and help ensure global warming for the rest of the planet with the wasted energy. :)
Actually, Wikipedia says that automatic systems are fairly efficient, only running while snow is falling at your driveway.
I don't know how long they've been available, or how good they are. I don't live in snow country. Gimme a robot that'll clean up after a hurricane, and I'd be happy. Hmmm, the car is upside down in the neighbors yard, but his roof is in mine. Fair trade.
You have to provide references before saying something like that. :)
It was $1B in total considerations, which most likely wasn't all cash. I'm sure all of it didn't go in Monty's pocket, but I'm sure he did walk away with a pretty nice sum.
There's a thing about business though. Most places want to grow a business from nothing, to the point where it's a viable product to sell. Then they sell it. All of it. There's no looking back. It was yours, now it's not. So sorry, move on.
If I made something, and it sold for $1B, I'd be a pretty happy camper. Hell, Sabeer Bhatia sold Hotmail in 1997 for $400M, and he was happy. Now (in a 2007 article I read), is funding new startups with the hope of making the next killer app that will be bigger than Hotmail.
I have a few things that I've done, and if someone offered me even $1M to give one up, I'd take it. I wouldn't look back. I'd smile the whole way to the bank. :)
If he wants MySQL back, tough. If Sun decides to gut it, and make the MySQL site into a porn link farm web site, and the database engine into a shell script that greps a flat file, so be it. It's theirs, and it's their decision. They could sell to Oracle, or Microsoft, or anyone they'd like.
If he *really* wants it back, he should put his effort into his new database, and don't give it up next time, even for $1B.
That's more of an exception rather than a rule. I'd guess that your school not only NATed you, but also blocked specific ports and/or other content filtering, so you *couldn't* do what you are complaining about. This isn't unique to a NAT environment at a school. It's made enough recent news, where providers have been speed limiting or blocking bittorrent. I've seen the same happen for SMTP on some providers, both ISP and location (like hotels), or even HTTP, where they force you through their proxy that doesn't always behave properly. Proxy and redirected services based on ports are not equal to NAT.
For all the noise you're making, everyone knows you're happily tucked away behind a NAT at your house, and all of your applications are working fine.
I don't quite see what you're saying.
I use P2P applications like file sharing, and multiplayer games through a NAT. Heck, most users do the same. When just about any provider puts in cable or FiOS, their "router" provides NAT, and you don't have to log into the router and provide port forwarding, nor move your machine to the DMZ.
One of the things that won't work would be direct connections for desktop sharing. That is easily mitigated with a public reflector. I use my own, so my server (in a datacenter) handles requests from both the client being viewed, and my admin client. There are pay services that do the same thing, like GoToMyPC. They don't care if there is a NAT on either end (or both ends).
Much like the need for passive mode FTP, it's been corrected over the years, and now just works out of the box.
I'll just wait for the story about the blackhole sucking up the Earth to show up here. Ok, it'll take a while, but we'll be on the even horizon of it for an awful long time. Oh ya, time dilation. We wouldn't know if it had already started. :)
I'm really surprised that I haven't seen more ISP's NAT their networks. I think it was Nextel's original wireless network card, that always issued me a 10.0.0.0/8 IP. Home users don't generally need a static IP. I know, in this crowd we like them, but for the other 99% of the users, they'd be fine NATed. And for those who think that's nuts, yes you can have a NAT behind a NAT, without breaking anything. As an example, I ran 3 devices in a hotel room for a while. They'd only let me have 1 NAT IP, so I ran my own NAT behind it. :) I was working out of town, so I had a desktop, laptop, and my Vonage box. Everything worked fine.
What would happen to the available pool, if every residential provider did this, and only provided a public IP upon request?
I don't think any company I've worked for was charged for their IP's. Most got /24's with no charge. A friend got a /25 on a business FiOS line, and that did cost. We could have gotten a /24, but it wasn't necessary for that setup.
I honestly wouldn't be surprised if home appliances were subsidized pretty soon. I know it's a joke for now, but I'm sure a few executives have been drooling over the idea of pushing targeted ads into the homes, and being able to "remind" customers to restock particular items. From what I've seen, most grocery store items are not RFID tagged quite yet, but I'm sure they will be soon enough.
If I remember right, it's been less than a year since the last "the IP sky is falling" story here. Even then, we were numbered in months, not years. I know the deadline was in 2009. :) I have a lot of faith in it's failure though. It'll fall apart, and we're going to all die, or at least not be able to twitter quite as much. :)