Exactly. Relatively few hams ever touch 420-440MHz. I've been a ham for 15 years, Extra class, done disaster relief, done SSTV, PSK, etc. and have never once transmitted or received there. Not saying it wouldn't be missed, but it's not a hobby-ending apocalypse.
I've carried a VHF/UHF HT on a couple backpacking trips in the Smokies. Even having every repeater in the area programmed in (including all the non-ham ones I could find), I was usually out of coverage of everything. I could sometimes "kerchunk" one on a ridge, but any emergency use would probably require a lot of hiking and trial and error. (Now that's with a decent "rubber duck" antenna. A good directional antenna could help with that to some extent, especially if you know the bearing to the repeater, but can't cut through a mountain.)
I would seriously consider just renting a decent PLB and learning how to best prevent small emergencies from becoming large ones.
A 5-watt HF rig just doesn't cut it for reliable SSB (voice) communications, especially with portable / compromise antennas. There are some good semi-portable 100-watt rigs, but they're not anything I would want to take backpacking. The best solution seems to be some smaller 20-watt or so commercial HF radios like the Vertex VX-1210 that could work, but they're not cheap. You could combine a 5-watt radio like the FT-817 with the HFPacker amp to get 35 or 100 watts, but the combined package isn't terribly rugged. The ideal place to research a lot of portable HF options is the "HF Pack" website / email list (hfpack.com).
Even if you did get a decent HF setup that you're comfortable carrying, there's a learning curve to operating. You'd want to understand what bands work best at different times of the day, what nets are available when, and how to work a net. That's assuming that there's a net in that area like Southcars that could serve as a good point of contact if you had an emergency. Calling CQ or breaking in on random hams could get you help in an emergency, but having dozens to hundreds of scattered receivers and ears listening at once gives you a lot better chance of making contact.
Of course all of this is assuming that any emergency would still leave you capable of operating the radio. Dialing a sat phone or setting off an EPIRB / PLB is a lot easier than setting up a portable HF station and making a contact even if you have two arms and all your brainpower intact. Imagine doing it with a broken arm or leg, concussion, hyper/hypothermia, etc.
For sports, you can try ESPN 360. My ISP doesn't carry it, but my neighbor's does. Justin.tv carries a lot of sports coverage and ESPN and others don't seem to mind enough to take down the streams.
Absolutely what I was thinking. If they beef up the encryption and can break the pirate cards, it's worth it to Nintendo. They just need enough of a carrot to get people to upgrade and I don't think a little-used camera and MP3 player are enough.
One of the IS guys at work came by, checked the number on my ethernet port, then asked if I was the f*cker that changed my MAC address to DE:AD:BE:EF:CA:FE. Yes I was. B00B1E5.
I participated in this same debate at two different universities.
So what's different now? Everything.
This isn't just one university. This will soon be most major ISPs. If most U.S. ISPs drop alt.*, the posters will just hammer big 8 groups. With NZB files, the actual group things are posted to doesn't matter very much. Issuing cancels will be a full time job for the few that care to fight the flood.
What's sad is that this really threatens the argument that ISPs are common carriers and aren't responsible for filtering content. Sure, I understand the different between filtering and not providing groups on your NNTP server, but people that wear suits and robes for a living don't. If alt.* falls what's next? All of Usenet.
Usenet is an unusual asynchronous, disconnected, communication model and in a way, is an almost priceless anonymizer. There is (almost) no link between the sender and receiver of a message. I've always wondered how we've let an almost untraceable communication system survive.
Linux, home of the monolithic kernel? Any modern Linux (or BSD) user could jump onto a Sys V machine from 25 years ago or any number of 20 year old boxes running X and more or less feel at home. OSX is the latest iteration of 20 year old NextStep. For all it's warts, the current Windows NT kernel has the youngest design.
+1 for Damn Small Linux. I keep an old laptop on my desk at work running DSL. It does 90% of what I need all the time with a P2-266, no hard drive, 256 megs of memory, and a 32 meg thumb drive. It's amazing to see what can still be done without Gnome, KDE,.Net, Java, etc.
It's not just Wal-Mart that's switching from Red Hat to SUSE. IBM switching to SUSE was a big driver in the enterprise market. Three years ago we had a handful of customers playing with Linux, all Red Hat. Today we've got dozens playing with Linux and two or three with firm serious plans to roll it out. Almost every one of them is running SUSE.
Some of my coolest builds were model rockets. One of my homebrew designs left it's fins scattered around the launch pad and spiraled into a parked car. Then in college all the engineering student organizations would compete in a longest flight contest. My winning entry was essentially an Estes Wizard with an almost four foot diameter parachute build from a very thin drycleaning bag and fine thread. When everyone finally lost sight of it, it'd already won by more than one minute and it probably had another 3 minutes or more to go. I tried a repeat the next year but apparently melted the chute.
If you're getting 5-6 hours of productive work done on most days, you're about maxed out. It's a rare day that I can actually write productive code for 8 hours. You need to fill the rest of the day with reading, writing doc, building test environments, etc. Or meetings.
I went to grad school (for a PhD that I didn't finish) for a few reasons.
The job market sucked when I finished my BS in Computer Science. Delaying my job hunt by 3 years helped that a lot.
My undergrad track record wasn't great. I think I finished with a 3.1 GPA. Going to grad school let me reset my GPA meter and get a fresh start.
And the number one reason I went to grad school? It's also the reason I left. I thought it was what I wanted. I thought that getting a PhD and a tenure-track teaching position was what I wanted to do. It took me three years to realize that I didn't want that at all. Don't get me wrong. I loved teaching. I loved learning. I loved doing research. I enjoyed writing up significant pieces of work. What I hated was constantly being pushed to publish any piece of crap that I could, just to get my publication count up. I saw what crap publications other students in our research group cranked out. I mean, the work was usually solid, but the same research would get published six times just by shuffling the results into different contexts. You can see this if you look at most professors' publication lists. You'll see essentially the same titles and the same core authors, just with different journals or conferences and some different sub-authors.
I really wouldn't recommend that anyone undertake a PhD unless they really understand what they're going to do with it. Teaching at a private non-research university that focuses on actually educating undergrads might have been a great position for me. It was really frowned upon by my big-wig research professors though.
A master's degree is marginally useful. I believe larger companies give more value to a master's than small companies. I generally see no difference between my co-workers that have a BS in computer science and those that have a MS. I couldn't tell you one relevant thing they learned that's made a difference.
I work with a guy that dropped out after nearly completing a BS and I almost finished my PhD (at the same school) and there really isn't that much difference between what we can apply from school. He's been working almost four years longer than I have. We essentially have the same position and pay.
The only real difference is that he's debt-free and I have $70,000 in student loans.
Used N64 and 10 games: $50 TV for the kids to play N64 on: $100 Lock for the kid's room: $20 Gamecube: $70 Three decent adult Gamecube games: $100 Beer and chips: $60 Earrings to shut the wife up: $200
Slashdot Mirror
Wait, which "National Science Foundation" gave them a grant for this? The U.S. one? Anyone else a little confused by that?
Exactly. Relatively few hams ever touch 420-440MHz. I've been a ham for 15 years, Extra class, done disaster relief, done SSTV, PSK, etc. and have never once transmitted or received there. Not saying it wouldn't be missed, but it's not a hobby-ending apocalypse.
My translation: "China's new supercomputer work won't make any money for IBM."
I've carried a VHF/UHF HT on a couple backpacking trips in the Smokies. Even having every repeater in the area programmed in (including all the non-ham ones I could find), I was usually out of coverage of everything. I could sometimes "kerchunk" one on a ridge, but any emergency use would probably require a lot of hiking and trial and error. (Now that's with a decent "rubber duck" antenna. A good directional antenna could help with that to some extent, especially if you know the bearing to the repeater, but can't cut through a mountain.)
I would seriously consider just renting a decent PLB and learning how to best prevent small emergencies from becoming large ones.
A 5-watt HF rig just doesn't cut it for reliable SSB (voice) communications, especially with portable / compromise antennas. There are some good semi-portable 100-watt rigs, but they're not anything I would want to take backpacking. The best solution seems to be some smaller 20-watt or so commercial HF radios like the Vertex VX-1210 that could work, but they're not cheap. You could combine a 5-watt radio like the FT-817 with the HFPacker amp to get 35 or 100 watts, but the combined package isn't terribly rugged. The ideal place to research a lot of portable HF options is the "HF Pack" website / email list (hfpack.com).
Even if you did get a decent HF setup that you're comfortable carrying, there's a learning curve to operating. You'd want to understand what bands work best at different times of the day, what nets are available when, and how to work a net. That's assuming that there's a net in that area like Southcars that could serve as a good point of contact if you had an emergency. Calling CQ or breaking in on random hams could get you help in an emergency, but having dozens to hundreds of scattered receivers and ears listening at once gives you a lot better chance of making contact.
Of course all of this is assuming that any emergency would still leave you capable of operating the radio. Dialing a sat phone or setting off an EPIRB / PLB is a lot easier than setting up a portable HF station and making a contact even if you have two arms and all your brainpower intact. Imagine doing it with a broken arm or leg, concussion, hyper/hypothermia, etc.
For sports, you can try ESPN 360. My ISP doesn't carry it, but my neighbor's does. Justin.tv carries a lot of sports coverage and ESPN and others don't seem to mind enough to take down the streams.
Absolutely what I was thinking. If they beef up the encryption and can break the pirate cards, it's worth it to Nintendo. They just need enough of a carrot to get people to upgrade and I don't think a little-used camera and MP3 player are enough.
One of the IS guys at work came by, checked the number on my ethernet port, then asked if I was the f*cker that changed my MAC address to DE:AD:BE:EF:CA:FE. Yes I was. B00B1E5.
Brilliant. I wish I had some mod points right now. Can someone else mod that up?
What we really need is a new Linux distro that's just Rickrolls, goatse and 2 Girls One Cup. "Wait, officer! Don't forget these DVDs here."
I participated in this same debate at two different universities.
So what's different now? Everything.
This isn't just one university. This will soon be most major ISPs. If most U.S. ISPs drop alt.*, the posters will just hammer big 8 groups. With NZB files, the actual group things are posted to doesn't matter very much. Issuing cancels will be a full time job for the few that care to fight the flood.
What's sad is that this really threatens the argument that ISPs are common carriers and aren't responsible for filtering content. Sure, I understand the different between filtering and not providing groups on your NNTP server, but people that wear suits and robes for a living don't. If alt.* falls what's next? All of Usenet.
Usenet is an unusual asynchronous, disconnected, communication model and in a way, is an almost priceless anonymizer. There is (almost) no link between the sender and receiver of a message. I've always wondered how we've let an almost untraceable communication system survive.
So what is a new concept?
Linux, home of the monolithic kernel? Any modern Linux (or BSD) user could jump onto a Sys V machine from 25 years ago or any number of 20 year old boxes running X and more or less feel at home. OSX is the latest iteration of 20 year old NextStep. For all it's warts, the current Windows NT kernel has the youngest design.
10 print "Apple SUCKS!"
20 goto 10
Take it home.
Have your neighbor sign it as Mickey Mouse.
Return it.
Yeah, this is getting ridiculous. I bought Borat at Best Buy and even it was a DVD-R copy!
+1 for Damn Small Linux. I keep an old laptop on my desk at work running DSL. It does 90% of what I need all the time with a P2-266, no hard drive, 256 megs of memory, and a 32 meg thumb drive. It's amazing to see what can still be done without Gnome, KDE, .Net, Java, etc.
You had dice? All we had were paper cups full of chits we had to cut out ourselves.
Tell me about it. I've got a shelf full of EGA monitors and AT keyboards that I'm never going to be able to use again!
It's not just Wal-Mart that's switching from Red Hat to SUSE. IBM switching to SUSE was a big driver in the enterprise market. Three years ago we had a handful of customers playing with Linux, all Red Hat. Today we've got dozens playing with Linux and two or three with firm serious plans to roll it out. Almost every one of them is running SUSE.
Some of my coolest builds were model rockets. One of my homebrew designs left it's fins scattered around the launch pad and spiraled into a parked car. Then in college all the engineering student organizations would compete in a longest flight contest. My winning entry was essentially an Estes Wizard with an almost four foot diameter parachute build from a very thin drycleaning bag and fine thread. When everyone finally lost sight of it, it'd already won by more than one minute and it probably had another 3 minutes or more to go. I tried a repeat the next year but apparently melted the chute.
$100m buys a lot of killer trees.
Wait, is this Apple, the record company, or Apple, the computer company that infringed on the record company's name? I'm so confused.
If you're getting 5-6 hours of productive work done on most days, you're about maxed out. It's a rare day that I can actually write productive code for 8 hours. You need to fill the rest of the day with reading, writing doc, building test environments, etc. Or meetings.
I went to grad school (for a PhD that I didn't finish) for a few reasons.
The job market sucked when I finished my BS in Computer Science. Delaying my job hunt by 3 years helped that a lot.
My undergrad track record wasn't great. I think I finished with a 3.1 GPA. Going to grad school let me reset my GPA meter and get a fresh start.
And the number one reason I went to grad school? It's also the reason I left. I thought it was what I wanted. I thought that getting a PhD and a tenure-track teaching position was what I wanted to do. It took me three years to realize that I didn't want that at all. Don't get me wrong. I loved teaching. I loved learning. I loved doing research. I enjoyed writing up significant pieces of work. What I hated was constantly being pushed to publish any piece of crap that I could, just to get my publication count up. I saw what crap publications other students in our research group cranked out. I mean, the work was usually solid, but the same research would get published six times just by shuffling the results into different contexts. You can see this if you look at most professors' publication lists. You'll see essentially the same titles and the same core authors, just with different journals or conferences and some different sub-authors.
I really wouldn't recommend that anyone undertake a PhD unless they really understand what they're going to do with it. Teaching at a private non-research university that focuses on actually educating undergrads might have been a great position for me. It was really frowned upon by my big-wig research professors though.
A master's degree is marginally useful. I believe larger companies give more value to a master's than small companies. I generally see no difference between my co-workers that have a BS in computer science and those that have a MS. I couldn't tell you one relevant thing they learned that's made a difference.
I work with a guy that dropped out after nearly completing a BS and I almost finished my PhD (at the same school) and there really isn't that much difference between what we can apply from school. He's been working almost four years longer than I have. We essentially have the same position and pay.
The only real difference is that he's debt-free and I have $70,000 in student loans.
Used N64 and 10 games: $50
TV for the kids to play N64 on: $100
Lock for the kid's room: $20
Gamecube: $70
Three decent adult Gamecube games: $100
Beer and chips: $60
Earrings to shut the wife up: $200