Most of the weather websites are delayed enough that they are worthless at times. When they're telling me a storm is approaching, it's already passed. Plus in many rural areas, getting a web connection is next to impossible.
The local TV stations broadcast a live feed of the weather radar and cover a wide area with their signal.
Personally, I'd rather have a digital TV in my phone. Several of the local stations broadcast weather radar and alerts on one of their sub channels. It would be very useful when out and about.
The magnets don't move and they aren't exectly hidden but TZ is a fun game. If you want to talk about taunting your dreams, try repairing one of them, that will give you fits. TZ is one of the hardest machines to keep running. Medeival Madness and Addams family run a close second and third.
But I find it interesting that two of the three games in the final round are from a company no longer making pinball games. Truly the era of pinball is coming to a close.
That's pretty funny, you used the words, 'work' and 'government job' in the same sentence.
Years ago, a friend of mine got a civie job at a heavily secured military base. The pay was good, (better than mine) and he had full benefits. He had to pass a background check, drug check and a lie detector just to get the required security clearance. He bragged to me, "Man this is some intense (stuff) I'm getting into" and I'll admit I was a bit envious.
Once he got there he found out what the job entailed:
At 0800 he went to the motor pool and requisitioned a hand cart, which he pushed to the supply depot. There, he signed for 3 boxes of white, 5000 page, continuous form, tractor-feed printer paper, which he carted to secured building 'A'.
At the door, his clearance was checked, the boxes inspected to ensure they actually contained paper, and then he was escorted to a heaviliy secured, windowless room by two Marines; one wearing a sidearm, the other brandishing an M-16. (I should mention that none of the marines had any rank insignia.)
The guards at the door let them in and he proceeded to replace the paper in the three printers in the room. After each change, he was required to press the button to print a single test page (ABCDEF...12345... etc.) and pass it to the sidearm-wearing Marine.
The Marine would inspect the page, apparently checking that the margins hadn't been messed with and then the page was shredded on the spot.
He did this for each printer and when finished, he was escorted back to the entrance, where he was signed out of the building.
At this point, he was supposed to take the three (unused, mind you) boxes of paper he had just replaced to the secure document destruction building, dump them down a chute, and go pick up three new boxes of paper to be taken to building 'B', where the same proccess was followed. And then do the same for buildings 'C' and 'D'.
That was his entire morning shift and his afternoon shift was exactly the same. Changing printer paper, five days a week.
He soon figured out that none of these printers ever printed anything except the test pages. He marked the edge of the top page with his thumbnail when he installed the paper and the next time he went in to replace it, there was the mark, right where he had left it.
No one at the supply depot was cleared to know what he was doing so they had no idea how many boxes of paper he was supposed to be getting each day, only that if he asked for paper, they were to give it to him.
So he started taking the 'used' boxes of paper from building 'A' and installing them in building 'B', 'B' to 'C', 'C' to 'D' and then he'd stop over at the commisary for coffee and a snack and watch TV. As well as chat with other civie contractors, flirt with the gals behind the counter, shoot some pool or play video games (all free) and then have lunch.
At 1300, (he wasn't allowed to start earlier) he'd take his cart of 'used' paper from building 'D' to building 'A' to start the whole process over again.
After he finished with the second paper change at 'D' he'd take the three practically unused boxes to the shredder building, return the cart to the motor pool and go home, at least 2 hours early every day!
He did this for nearly eight years and ended up buying a Corvette with all the money he made. But his IT skills were nearly useless by the time he left there and he had to go back to school to get back up to speed before he could get another job.
When I read this article I was thinking along the same lines: that many people who would be bright enough to be a asset are also bright enough to know that they would have dificulty passing a background check, a drug check, complying with a strict dress code, regular hours,...
I don't know what the solution is but I wonder if in this case, the military is it's own worst enemy -- deliberately disuading from service the very types of people they need to court: the open-minded, free-thinking, sociatal-challanged oddballs who look at problems differently from everyone else.
(And before someone jumps all over me, yeah, I probably fit in there somewhere.)
Back when I used Delorme Street Atlas to navigate (Version 5 at the time, I think) it once told me to take a sharp right down a boat ramp and drive across the Mississippi to the other side. Fortunately it was daylight when it happened; I wondered at the time what might have happened if it was nighttime and foggy.
Street Atlas for years had a bad habit of directing me in rural areas to take abandoned (or dismantled) bridges and Level 3 service roads (think cow path with less maintenance.) I don't know if it ever got better or even if it's still around, I gave up on it some years back.
I live a block off a divided 4-lane road... according to Google, Garmin, Magellan and TomTom. It's not. If you try to navigate to my house they tell you to drive several blocks past my place, make a U-turn and come back on the other side. And if you actually try to follow those GPS instructions, you come to intersections that are clearly marked 'No U Turns'. Brilliant!
But for over ten years, Google, MS and Delorme all listed a street two blocks to the East of me as 'PUD Drive'. Some published maps did as well. The street didn't even exist until just a couple of years ago. It was on the city plan as 'Planned Urban Development', abbreviated P.U.D.
Yes, Make had a lot of promise but it squandered it on flashy-blinky, useless junk projects. Now it's filled with pictures of stuff other people have built with no instructions (or even a hint) on how they did it. They should rename the magazine MADE:, as in "Look what I MADE, but won't tell you how I MADE it."
Another vote here for Toughbooks. Where I work, we've given Toughbooks to all the field personnel and have no regrets. Our crews work outside in difficult environments and while I've seen HDs fail, broken keyboards and a couple of smashed screens (hit by something while open), for the most part they're almost indestructible.
Last fall we had a field engineer set a CF-30 on a backhoe and walk over to his truck to look for a drawing. When he came back, the backhoe had moved and his Toughbook was apparently somewhere in a trench that had been filled in.
I went out to the site that afternoon with another tech and an access point configured with a SSID that we knew the missing CF-30 would try to connect to. We slowly drove along the trench with a directional antenna pointed at it until the AP indicated that the missing laptop had tried to connect. We had the backhoe driver gently dig out several feet of trench before we found it. Disassembled, cleaned and reassembled it, it's still in service.
Techman83 writes "...AVG and Avast have been quite good, but are starting to bloat out in size..."
Um, in case you haven't noticed, more viruses, exploits and malware are coming out all the time. I'd be very surprised if ANY antivirus software got smaller.
Actually, Autostitch probably won't work for this application.
From the FAQ:
Q: Does AutoStitch support planar stitching, such as flatbed scans or aerial photographs?
A:The demo version of AutoStitch assumes that the camera is rotating about a point, so distortions will be visible when stitching multiple views of a planar surface. We hope to add planar stitching functionality in the future.
I'm surprised Woz hasn't pulled the chips, disassembled the code, written a patch (with comments) and uploaded it to the Internet already using nothing more than a bent pocket screwdriver and a wire-tie.
When I was a kid, there was a fabric/clothing store in town that had a system of cables and baskets that served the same function. I was always fascinated how the clerks would drop the money and receipt into a metal box attached to the basket, yank a cord and send the basket on a wire up to the high ceiling where the basket would be picked up by a continuously moving chain and sent to the back of the store. A minute later, the basket would return with the change and be dropped off at the counter, sliding down a wire to the clerk. By the time I was old enough to be able to figure out how it worked, it had been removed and the ceiling lowered to save energy.
I was a charter subscriber to OMNI. Actually, it wasn't OMNI I subscribed to, it was called NOVA at the time. There was apparently was a fuss made by WGBH and their NOVA TV series so the magazine's name was changed to OMNI before the first issue was published.
In the beginning it was quite good but in the later years it veered into pseudo-science and other nonsense and I lost interest and let my subscription lapse.
Slashdot Mirror
There's more than just autoplay and malware to worry about.
How long before some jerk sets one of these up that's not connected to a hidden USB drive, but to the AC power lines?
*POOF* No more laptop.
To find a conservative gene, they'd have to look at the other end.
I used a spade on one I found in my garage last month.
Most of the weather websites are delayed enough that they are worthless at times. When they're telling me a storm is approaching, it's already passed. Plus in many rural areas, getting a web connection is next to impossible.
The local TV stations broadcast a live feed of the weather radar and cover a wide area with their signal.
Don't forget the horseshoe lobby!
Personally, I'd rather have a digital TV in my phone. Several of the local stations broadcast weather radar and alerts on one of their sub channels. It would be very useful when out and about.
The magnets don't move and they aren't exectly hidden but TZ is a fun game. If you want to talk about taunting your dreams, try repairing one of them, that will give you fits. TZ is one of the hardest machines to keep running. Medeival Madness and Addams family run a close second and third.
But I find it interesting that two of the three games in the final round are from a company no longer making pinball games. Truly the era of pinball is coming to a close.
I wonder what all the AOL subscribers will do when AOL goes under?
I guess they'll have to switch over to Prodigy or Compuserve.
Perhaps he could use an Android phone with a ham sat tracking app.
I see there's one called HamSatDroid but I haven't tried it myself.
That's pretty funny, you used the words, 'work' and 'government job' in the same sentence.
Years ago, a friend of mine got a civie job at a heavily secured military base. The pay was good, (better than mine) and he had full benefits. He had to pass a background check, drug check and a lie detector just to get the required security clearance. He bragged to me, "Man this is some intense (stuff) I'm getting into" and I'll admit I was a bit envious.
Once he got there he found out what the job entailed:
At 0800 he went to the motor pool and requisitioned a hand cart, which he pushed to the supply depot. There, he signed for 3 boxes of white, 5000 page, continuous form, tractor-feed printer paper, which he carted to secured building 'A'.
At the door, his clearance was checked, the boxes inspected to ensure they actually contained paper, and then he was escorted to a heaviliy secured, windowless room by two Marines; one wearing a sidearm, the other brandishing an M-16. (I should mention that none of the marines had any rank insignia.)
The guards at the door let them in and he proceeded to replace the paper in the three printers in the room. After each change, he was required to press the button to print a single test page (ABCDEF...12345... etc.) and pass it to the sidearm-wearing Marine.
The Marine would inspect the page, apparently checking that the margins hadn't been messed with and then the page was shredded on the spot.
He did this for each printer and when finished, he was escorted back to the entrance, where he was signed out of the building.
At this point, he was supposed to take the three (unused, mind you) boxes of paper he had just replaced to the secure document destruction building, dump them down a chute, and go pick up three new boxes of paper to be taken to building 'B', where the same proccess was followed. And then do the same for buildings 'C' and 'D'.
That was his entire morning shift and his afternoon shift was exactly the same. Changing printer paper, five days a week.
He soon figured out that none of these printers ever printed anything except the test pages. He marked the edge of the top page with his thumbnail when he installed the paper and the next time he went in to replace it, there was the mark, right where he had left it.
No one at the supply depot was cleared to know what he was doing so they had no idea how many boxes of paper he was supposed to be getting each day, only that if he asked for paper, they were to give it to him.
So he started taking the 'used' boxes of paper from building 'A' and installing them in building 'B', 'B' to 'C', 'C' to 'D' and then he'd stop over at the commisary for coffee and a snack and watch TV. As well as chat with other civie contractors, flirt with the gals behind the counter, shoot some pool or play video games (all free) and then have lunch.
At 1300, (he wasn't allowed to start earlier) he'd take his cart of 'used' paper from building 'D' to building 'A' to start the whole process over again.
After he finished with the second paper change at 'D' he'd take the three practically unused boxes to the shredder building, return the cart to the motor pool and go home, at least 2 hours early every day!
He did this for nearly eight years and ended up buying a Corvette with all the money he made. But his IT skills were nearly useless by the time he left there and he had to go back to school to get back up to speed before he could get another job.
Your military tax dollars at work.
When I read this article I was thinking along the same lines: that many people who would be bright enough to be a asset are also bright enough to know that they would have dificulty passing a background check, a drug check, complying with a strict dress code, regular hours, ...
I don't know what the solution is but I wonder if in this case, the military is it's own worst enemy -- deliberately disuading from service the very types of people they need to court: the open-minded, free-thinking, sociatal-challanged oddballs who look at problems differently from everyone else.
(And before someone jumps all over me, yeah, I probably fit in there somewhere.)
Back when I used Delorme Street Atlas to navigate (Version 5 at the time, I think) it once told me to take a sharp right down a boat ramp and drive across the Mississippi to the other side. Fortunately it was daylight when it happened; I wondered at the time what might have happened if it was nighttime and foggy.
Street Atlas for years had a bad habit of directing me in rural areas to take abandoned (or dismantled) bridges and Level 3 service roads (think cow path with less maintenance.) I don't know if it ever got better or even if it's still around, I gave up on it some years back.
I live a block off a divided 4-lane road... according to Google, Garmin, Magellan and TomTom. It's not. If you try to navigate to my house they tell you to drive several blocks past my place, make a U-turn and come back on the other side. And if you actually try to follow those GPS instructions, you come to intersections that are clearly marked 'No U Turns'. Brilliant!
But for over ten years, Google, MS and Delorme all listed a street two blocks to the East of me as 'PUD Drive'. Some published maps did as well. The street didn't even exist until just a couple of years ago. It was on the city plan as 'Planned Urban Development', abbreviated P.U.D.
Yes, Make had a lot of promise but it squandered it on flashy-blinky, useless junk projects. Now it's filled with pictures of stuff other people have built with no instructions (or even a hint) on how they did it. They should rename the magazine MADE:, as in "Look what I MADE, but won't tell you how I MADE it."
I was intending to watch it but then I got a tweet from my bff and had to update my Facebook page and status on Foursquare.
Another vote here for Toughbooks. Where I work, we've given Toughbooks to all the field personnel and have no regrets. Our crews work outside in difficult environments and while I've seen HDs fail, broken keyboards and a couple of smashed screens (hit by something while open), for the most part they're almost indestructible.
Last fall we had a field engineer set a CF-30 on a backhoe and walk over to his truck to look for a drawing. When he came back, the backhoe had moved and his Toughbook was apparently somewhere in a trench that had been filled in.
I went out to the site that afternoon with another tech and an access point configured with a SSID that we knew the missing CF-30 would try to connect to. We slowly drove along the trench with a directional antenna pointed at it until the AP indicated that the missing laptop had tried to connect. We had the backhoe driver gently dig out several feet of trench before we found it. Disassembled, cleaned and reassembled it, it's still in service.
You made this comment just so you could use abici in a sentence, didn't you? ;-)
Techman83 writes "...AVG and Avast have been quite good, but are starting to bloat out in size..."
Um, in case you haven't noticed, more viruses, exploits and malware are coming out all the time.
I'd be very surprised if ANY antivirus software got smaller.
In fact, I'd be highly suspicious.
Actually, Autostitch probably won't work for this application.
From the FAQ:
Q: Does AutoStitch support planar stitching, such as flatbed scans or aerial photographs?
A:The demo version of AutoStitch assumes that the camera is rotating about a point, so distortions will be visible when stitching multiple views of a planar surface. We hope to add planar stitching functionality in the future.
If your microwave popcorn starts to pop before you turn the microwave on, it's probably not safe.
I'm surprised Woz hasn't pulled the chips, disassembled the code, written a patch (with comments) and uploaded it to the Internet already using nothing more than a bent pocket screwdriver and a wire-tie.
I mean, let's face it, the man's a God...
That's true, we are.
THEY. I mean THEY are... THEY are...
When I was a kid, there was a fabric/clothing store in town that had a system of cables and baskets that served the same function. I was always fascinated how the clerks would drop the money and receipt into a metal box attached to the basket, yank a cord and send the basket on a wire up to the high ceiling where the basket would be picked up by a continuously moving chain and sent to the back of the store. A minute later, the basket would return with the change and be dropped off at the counter, sliding down a wire to the clerk. By the time I was old enough to be able to figure out how it worked, it had been removed and the ceiling lowered to save energy.
I was a charter subscriber to OMNI. Actually, it wasn't OMNI I subscribed to, it was called NOVA at the time. There was apparently was a fuss made by WGBH and their NOVA TV series so the magazine's name was changed to OMNI before the first issue was published.
In the beginning it was quite good but in the later years it veered into pseudo-science and other nonsense and I lost interest and let my subscription lapse.
Petulance is far too abundant to be a rare element like #115.
It's more likely to be something extremely rare like peace, reason or sarcasm-detection.