I guess I'm jaded by having seen too many reworks over the years that are missing traces where someone has to go through the board and add jumper wires... those are just inexcusable.
We still only have three channels... with anything worth watching, anyway.;-) Plus hour long commercials (so-called "infomercials", the 24 hour animal sex channel, CNN, and ESPN.
(No MTV doesn't count as a channel anymore. They're just a longer informercial interrupted by boring RV-trip documentaries.)
Nice of you to call us a swing State. We certainly haven't been for the last 3 decades.
Would be entertaining to see us send Pete Coors (Republican beer-maker) to the Senate and have Kerry win the Presidential elections here...
But I'm not holding my breath on Kerry. Too many rich religious people in the Denver suburbs who think GWB is somehow furthering "God's plan" for the world by killing people, methinks.
Well that and Kerry has no platform... ahh, details details. I wish he did. Voting for the lesser of two evils is still voting for evil.
That would lead me to believe that possibly the next generation's lung-damage-based lawsuits could come from datacenter workers instead of construction workers?
I can see the cheesy lawyer commercials now... "Did you work in a raised floor datacenter environment from 1990 through 2010? Call the law offices of Dingleberry and Smith NOW...
Perhaps my imagination (and too much late night TV) is running away with me.
Note that this is only the Secretary of State's office, and the article also has interesting politics in it where they're using this as an excuse (I don't quite get this one) to move all of the State's webservers into the same facility.
Yeah, that makes sense. Put all the eggs in one basket. That'll help. Good Disaster Recovery planning, folks.
While Colorado has some great folks and brilliant IT minds, I wouldn't say I had ever heard of the Secretary of State's office as being one of the hotspots of IT activity here.
I'm sure there are a few sharp cookies there, but c'mon... (insert standard government worker joke here).
Zinc does grow whiskers. Ask anyone who's worked on a GE MASTR II radio (certain vintages) where the helical coils in the receiver front-end get shorted out over time by "dendrites" as they've been nicknamed in the radio world.
Walk over to the radio, give it a few solid whacks with your fist and the receiver gets a microvolt worth of additional sensitivity!
Interesting that NASA says they've seen these grow right back through their coatings they put on top of it. The "fix" for these radios is usually to remove the receiver casting and coils from the radio, clean thouroughly with whatever cleaner floats your boat, and then spray the inside of the receiver casting with clear spraypaint or shellac. Once that's done, the radio will operate correctly until the end of its service life.
1. Make rework much harder. The plastic coating has to be carefully scraped away to fix a soldering error. Even with cheap Chinese labor it would be expensive.
Or it would give positive reasons to design engineers to quit screwing up the board layouts or get fired... that wouldn't be so bad, really.
If board rework is required it should be a black mark on the design engineer's review... and his manager's for not having someone qualified double-check his/her work before it went to the board house.
Yes and all I'm saying about the maps is that in my experience in Colorado, Wyoming, Nebraska, Utah, and Nevada is that they're accurate on my provider's network (Verizon). So the problem must lie with either your provider (AT&T) or your phone.
Since I have to take your word for it that your phone works correctly (just because it's set in the right mode doesn't mean it ACTUALLY roams properly -- I've seen it in a test lab) then I'd say that AT&T's network sucks if they can't provide full-coverage on Interstate highways in the states listed above.
When you get out in the open prairie of eastern Colorado for example, you can SEE the cell sites every few miles, being that 900 MHz and up are "line-of-sight" frequencies for RF, this makes sense. So if you can visually see a cell tower and your phone has no service at that location -- you need to switch carriers.
Was your phone set to roam both the A-side and B-side analog networks? Most carriers don't set up their phones that way, but you can change it yourself. (Disclaimer: Roaming charges will eat you alive, but we're talking about coverage, not charges.)
You mention that you had a "no roaming" plan... that would definitely be a problem in the Western States where some rural areas are still serviced by what are almost small "mom and pop" cellular carriers on the analog bands.
Taking a look here, I don't see any gaps in AT&T's coverage on Interstate highways throughout North America on anything *but* their GSM map. There are huge holes on I-80 through Wyoming and Nebraska, for certain and holes in the Colorado mountains on I-70.
However, their TDMA map shows full coverage on all of the western states I looked at just now.
Proof-positive that AT&T is going to have problems for a long time to come getting their TDMA network fully migrated to GSM. It's gonna be a while.
Perhaps your phone was not roaming to/from analog correctly and also being GSM was on AT&T's worst network at the current time, and blocked from traditional analog roaming?
AT&T's in the process of transitioning from TDMA to GSM and they're spending a lot of money to do it, but it won't be fully completed in rural areas for a number of years.
I have a Verizon 3G CDMA phone with analog fallback and I can definitely say that on a trip from Denver, Colorado to Las Vegas, NV - I had zero coverage loss other than in the canyons right at the Nevada border on I-15, and even those were brief.
In two other locations I dropped out of digital coverage and into analog, but even in the rolling hills of Eastern Utah I had 1X CDMA coverage. (How I know is that I left the laptop logged in via their Quick2Net 14.4 service for most of the trip. I had a lot of extra minutes I could use that month and I was finding it funny that people were sending me instant messages while I was driving at *ahem* high rates of speed. No, I wasn't answering them.) As a side-note to one of your comments, I was *not* using an external antenna of any kind on this phone, but it was hanging from the passenger-side sun visor.
I'd say something was wrong with your phone's configuration if it couldn't find analog service on Interstates in Utah, Wyoming, Nevada and Nebraska. I can't speak for the coverage in South Dakota and it's been ten years since I drove to Iowa.
But to answer your point... yep, Colorado *is* special! (GRIN)
There's very few areas that are NOT covered in Colorado by analog service.
The trick is knowing which carriers have analog licenses (hint: there are only two in every major market) and in buying a phone that does decent analog mode as well as whatever that carrier's digital mode-du-jour is without killing the standard tiny batteries that most newer and supposedly more-desirable phones have these days.
Sorry if the doofuses in Wisconsin can't get their act together, but out here in one of the "sparse states West of the Mississippi" we're doing just fine for cellular coverage, thanks.
Re:Going the way of the dinosaurs
on
Field Day 2004
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Radio doesn't die, radio just is. Experimenters (hackers) for radio will always exist.
Ham radio's not dying, it's just constantly evolving. It all just depends on your definition of radio and whether or not you continue to experiment with it. Most newer Hams aren't experimenting, and if the "I buy my radios off the shelf and talk on them" aspect of the hobby dies off, I won't shed a tear. I'll still be experimenting with radio, with or without a license.
The "polling" plug-ins always crack me up -- in a corporate environment it's highly rare when a boss really wants to know the employee's opinions, and good bosses can tell just by the look on your face when they bring up a topic.
So polls would be set up between co-workers and peers for stuff that management wouldn't find even remotely useful, I suppose.
That's how I'd envision it anyway. Rarely are decisions made by consensus in the corporate world.
Sorry -- if you look at the other posts with the phrase "jury rig" in them in the threads you'll see that most folks were doing something stupid like putting their connections into the same side of the block. Sorry.
Oh I thought the losers posted as Anonymous Cowards. My bad.
It was a technically accurate statement.
The linux drivers for Haupauge cards have always been stable and work great.
I never use the cards under Windows, but from the threads here it appears there have been some problems with the Windows drivers they've provided.
But the original post said the cards were bad. They're not. The drivers for a particular OS may suck, but there's nothing functionally wrong at all with the cards. Learn to read.
The problem is that in Germany, you have people who will listen to reason. Over here you have wild sheeples who only listen to marketing hype.
This is of course why your government is starting to switch to SuSE and everyone over here who isn't a technical person still loves Microsoft products.;-)
Seriously though -- the hype surrounding how "wondeful" BPL will be is being paid for by someone... someone with a LOT of cash... on this side of the pond.
Your deployment trials sound a lot more sane than our headlong rush into badly engineered technology.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh, you should donate it to a local electronics school as an example of what happens when mistakes are made early in the design process! ;-)
Okay that I could understand.
I guess I'm jaded by having seen too many reworks over the years that are missing traces where someone has to go through the board and add jumper wires... those are just inexcusable.
Your examples, I totally understand.
We still only have three channels... with anything worth watching, anyway. ;-) Plus hour long commercials (so-called "infomercials", the 24 hour animal sex channel, CNN, and ESPN.
(No MTV doesn't count as a channel anymore. They're just a longer informercial interrupted by boring RV-trip documentaries.)
Have a dictionary you illiterate Stephen.
(The word is "clod".)
Nor the bloat.
Dump Greenspan and let Warren Buffet run the Fed. Now THAT would be interesting.
Nice of you to call us a swing State. We certainly haven't been for the last 3 decades.
Would be entertaining to see us send Pete Coors (Republican beer-maker) to the Senate and have Kerry win the Presidential elections here...
But I'm not holding my breath on Kerry. Too many rich religious people in the Denver suburbs who think GWB is somehow furthering "God's plan" for the world by killing people, methinks.
Well that and Kerry has no platform... ahh, details details. I wish he did. Voting for the lesser of two evils is still voting for evil.
Where've you been? IT Staffers *are* grunts. ;-)
Interesting.
That would lead me to believe that possibly the next generation's lung-damage-based lawsuits could come from datacenter workers instead of construction workers?
I can see the cheesy lawyer commercials now... "Did you work in a raised floor datacenter environment from 1990 through 2010? Call the law offices of Dingleberry and Smith NOW...
Perhaps my imagination (and too much late night TV) is running away with me.
Note that this is only the Secretary of State's office, and the article also has interesting politics in it where they're using this as an excuse (I don't quite get this one) to move all of the State's webservers into the same facility.
Yeah, that makes sense. Put all the eggs in one basket. That'll help. Good Disaster Recovery planning, folks.
While Colorado has some great folks and brilliant IT minds, I wouldn't say I had ever heard of the Secretary of State's office as being one of the hotspots of IT activity here.
I'm sure there are a few sharp cookies there, but c'mon... (insert standard government worker joke here).
Zinc does grow whiskers. Ask anyone who's worked on a GE MASTR II radio (certain vintages) where the helical coils in the receiver front-end get shorted out over time by "dendrites" as they've been nicknamed in the radio world.
Walk over to the radio, give it a few solid whacks with your fist and the receiver gets a microvolt worth of additional sensitivity!
Interesting that NASA says they've seen these grow right back through their coatings they put on top of it. The "fix" for these radios is usually to remove the receiver casting and coils from the radio, clean thouroughly with whatever cleaner floats your boat, and then spray the inside of the receiver casting with clear spraypaint or shellac. Once that's done, the radio will operate correctly until the end of its service life.
1. Make rework much harder. The plastic coating has to be carefully scraped away to fix a soldering error. Even with cheap Chinese labor it would be expensive.
Or it would give positive reasons to design engineers to quit screwing up the board layouts or get fired... that wouldn't be so bad, really.
If board rework is required it should be a black mark on the design engineer's review... and his manager's for not having someone qualified double-check his/her work before it went to the board house.
Yes and all I'm saying about the maps is that in my experience in Colorado, Wyoming, Nebraska, Utah, and Nevada is that they're accurate on my provider's network (Verizon). So the problem must lie with either your provider (AT&T) or your phone.
Since I have to take your word for it that your phone works correctly (just because it's set in the right mode doesn't mean it ACTUALLY roams properly -- I've seen it in a test lab) then I'd say that AT&T's network sucks if they can't provide full-coverage on Interstate highways in the states listed above.
When you get out in the open prairie of eastern Colorado for example, you can SEE the cell sites every few miles, being that 900 MHz and up are "line-of-sight" frequencies for RF, this makes sense. So if you can visually see a cell tower and your phone has no service at that location -- you need to switch carriers.
Don't forget robotic automated anal probes.
Was your phone set to roam both the A-side and B-side analog networks? Most carriers don't set up their phones that way, but you can change it yourself. (Disclaimer: Roaming charges will eat you alive, but we're talking about coverage, not charges.)
You mention that you had a "no roaming" plan... that would definitely be a problem in the Western States where some rural areas are still serviced by what are almost small "mom and pop" cellular carriers on the analog bands.
Taking a look here, I don't see any gaps in AT&T's coverage on Interstate highways throughout North America on anything *but* their GSM map. There are huge holes on I-80 through Wyoming and Nebraska, for certain and holes in the Colorado mountains on I-70.
However, their TDMA map shows full coverage on all of the western states I looked at just now.
Proof-positive that AT&T is going to have problems for a long time to come getting their TDMA network fully migrated to GSM. It's gonna be a while.
Perhaps your phone was not roaming to/from analog correctly and also being GSM was on AT&T's worst network at the current time, and blocked from traditional analog roaming?
AT&T's in the process of transitioning from TDMA to GSM and they're spending a lot of money to do it, but it won't be fully completed in rural areas for a number of years.
I have a Verizon 3G CDMA phone with analog fallback and I can definitely say that on a trip from Denver, Colorado to Las Vegas, NV - I had zero coverage loss other than in the canyons right at the Nevada border on I-15, and even those were brief.
In two other locations I dropped out of digital coverage and into analog, but even in the rolling hills of Eastern Utah I had 1X CDMA coverage. (How I know is that I left the laptop logged in via their Quick2Net 14.4 service for most of the trip. I had a lot of extra minutes I could use that month and I was finding it funny that people were sending me instant messages while I was driving at *ahem* high rates of speed. No, I wasn't answering them.) As a side-note to one of your comments, I was *not* using an external antenna of any kind on this phone, but it was hanging from the passenger-side sun visor.
I'd say something was wrong with your phone's configuration if it couldn't find analog service on Interstates in Utah, Wyoming, Nevada and Nebraska. I can't speak for the coverage in South Dakota and it's been ten years since I drove to Iowa.
But to answer your point... yep, Colorado *is* special! (GRIN)
There's very few areas that are NOT covered in Colorado by analog service.
The trick is knowing which carriers have analog licenses (hint: there are only two in every major market) and in buying a phone that does decent analog mode as well as whatever that carrier's digital mode-du-jour is without killing the standard tiny batteries that most newer and supposedly more-desirable phones have these days.
Sorry if the doofuses in Wisconsin can't get their act together, but out here in one of the "sparse states West of the Mississippi" we're doing just fine for cellular coverage, thanks.
Radio doesn't die, radio just is. Experimenters (hackers) for radio will always exist.
http://www.usbwifi.orcon.net.nz/
Case in point, above.
Ham radio's not dying, it's just constantly evolving. It all just depends on your definition of radio and whether or not you continue to experiment with it. Most newer Hams aren't experimenting, and if the "I buy my radios off the shelf and talk on them" aspect of the hobby dies off, I won't shed a tear. I'll still be experimenting with radio, with or without a license.
73 de WY0X
The "pure O2 thing" ended with Apollo 1 and the death of three astronauts.
The "polling" plug-ins always crack me up -- in a corporate environment it's highly rare when a boss really wants to know the employee's opinions, and good bosses can tell just by the look on your face when they bring up a topic.
So polls would be set up between co-workers and peers for stuff that management wouldn't find even remotely useful, I suppose.
That's how I'd envision it anyway. Rarely are decisions made by consensus in the corporate world.
Sorry -- if you look at the other posts with the phrase "jury rig" in them in the threads you'll see that most folks were doing something stupid like putting their connections into the same side of the block. Sorry.
Oh I thought the losers posted as Anonymous Cowards. My bad.
It was a technically accurate statement.
The linux drivers for Haupauge cards have always been stable and work great.
I never use the cards under Windows, but from the threads here it appears there have been some problems with the Windows drivers they've provided.
But the original post said the cards were bad. They're not. The drivers for a particular OS may suck, but there's nothing functionally wrong at all with the cards. Learn to read.
Yeah I would definitely agree. He's an entertainer.
And he's pretty good at it when you're driving across Utah in the middle of the night.
Did that trip recently, and was happy to find Art and Friends a couple of different places on the dial...
Amen. Mods the parent up up up.
You forgot the ever-present cigarette burning in the ashtray on the workbench. ;-)
The problem is that in Germany, you have people who will listen to reason. Over here you have wild sheeples who only listen to marketing hype.
;-)
This is of course why your government is starting to switch to SuSE and everyone over here who isn't a technical person still loves Microsoft products.
Seriously though -- the hype surrounding how "wondeful" BPL will be is being paid for by someone... someone with a LOT of cash... on this side of the pond.
Your deployment trials sound a lot more sane than our headlong rush into badly engineered technology.