S.T.R.I.P. is a little tempermental (as far as how to actually enter data - it's not as user-friendly as one would hope) but it is very useful for storing all kinds of information in a secure but easy to get to location.
The article was talking about "over the air" broadcasts. Which are generally analog but can also be digital.
I'm not exactly clear on your point so forgive me if I'm telling you something you already know. There exist, as you mentioned both digital and analog broadcasts over the air. The FCC's desire since, oh, maybe the mid-90s or so, has been to phase our analog broadcasts and bring everyone over to DTV. That's why a lot of stations advertise that they're on two channels - one being a digital channel that they're (usually) simulcasting on. However, DTV consists of a lot more bandwidth than the analog channels used (to allow one HD-quality broadcast per station), so stations are able to carry up to four standard-def digital over-the-air channels at once. One of the local stations uses this during the day to carry a weather map on one channel and the simulcast of their analog channel. However in the evening, they switch over to HD and use that bandwidth to broadcast the one high-def signal.
So anyway, what the FCC wants to do is get rid of analog broadcasts. here's some more info. They don't care (at least as far as this decision goes) what cable systems do, although in the interest of appealing to as many customers as possible, they're currently serving both analog and digital signals and charging extra for the digital box that's needed to decode the signals.
So anyway, I guess my point is that when you say "the article was refering to over the air broadcasts" you're mistaken, the FCC only desires to phase out analog over-the-air broadcasts and replace it with the digital DTV signals. This has been their plan for nearly ten years now, although their timetable keeps getting pushed back. This isn't new to most of us...I suppose it's just that consumers are starting to notice that they may need to buy new sets (or converters) soon.
Or consider my parents -- the only reason they don't have cable TV is because they live too far away from the cable line. The problem is two-fold -- first, they live about 3/4th mile away from the road. They'd have to pay the installation costs to install that 3/4 mile worth of cable. Secondly, the line isn't even on that road, it stops at a community a little over a mile up the road. And the cable company sees no need to bring it that much closer.
Sure, they'll probably eventually upgrade to a digital set, but they're still using the old TV we got ten years ago. It works fine, why should the upgrade?
Wow, I didn't realize there's a community right next to the pyramids...how weird would that be to live within walking distance of them...cool. Great find, thanks for the link...something I wouldn't have thought of looking for but definetly worth a look.
No, it doesn't suck! I managed to find your band on mp3.com back in the day and got a few songs that we still enjoy, but sadly it was right at the end of the mp3.com era and so I wasn't able to listen to much music and kind of forgot about you guys. Now you've re-introduced me to your web presence and I'll have to check out some more of the music and you know...undergo therapy for it or something. Anyway, love the band and greetings from Pennsylvania, USA.
Oh yeah, I forgot about that...for my first few years, all one had to do was disable the proxy and traffic would go our just fine. They eventually fixed that, much to the disappointment of students and faculty everywhere. I never bothered to try a different proxy server, that's an interesting idea. Have a good one
And let me just say that Bess is completely annoying. I went to ELCO (which is another 20 minutes away from Kutztown past the parent's alma mater of Conrad Weiser) and then did a little computer work there (at ELCO) for a few years and Bess was always a step ahead of actual genuine student research. Valid sites were blocked, while some porn sites were not. Very frustrating, even to the teachers in whose classes we were doing the reports (because we'd show them this useful and informative page located on a reputable server that was blocked). Hopefully it's improved since then.
By the way, looking at porn while one is at school is just stupid. Unlocking a computer that you've been given for nine months...not so stupid. What's it matter to the school district, it's not like they had sensative files on the laptops...sure, keep the network secure, but if getting admin access to a laptop equals admin network access, they've got more problems. But yes, hacking the network and doing illegal things on the school network is dumb.
By the way, I'm a Kutztown University grad, not that it's really relevant to the story, but I did spend four years in town...it's weird to see such a small place make national news again. For the geeks: Kutztown Borough was the first community in PA to have fiber to the house. linky, another link, and Google Search.
[huge grin] -- I remember NetBunny. That was the best extension around...we used it all of the time in the labs at my high school. There is nothing like knowing you've unleashed the power of the Energizer rabbit boom-boom-booming across 20 computers.
Then it kind of went away for a few years and we added a new tech person who'd never seen it before. We had fun with that.
I was one of the students who helped run the labs, so I had to help eradicate the bunny whenever it would crop up, but it saddened me to see it go every single time.
If I may, and I'm just thinking out loud here, I suspect the difference is that the network switch you refer to was owned by the same company that lost the few million dollars, so the $25,000 investment may have been worth it because a one time cost $25,000 is much better than the at least one-time cost of a new switch ($25,000) plus the service/support charge to have a tech drive from another state plus the lost revenue ($1,000,000). The losses greatly exceeded the amount of money needed to provide a backup.
On the other hand, the New Zealand telco isn't directly out of all the money that was lost in failed business transactions. They're pretty much out the money required to repair the lines. They didn't directly loose millions (billions?) of dollars, they just had their link go down and had to restore it. So investing however much money in additional lines and hardware may not make financial sense to them. Since they didn't loose much money, the losses did not exceed the amount of money redundancy would cost.
remember you are always balancing ease of development and ease of maintenance.
and
quickly becomes a nightmare in maintenance...
These are very good points -- When you have a minor change in text, you've got to worry about getting it translated in to every language you support. Who's going to do the translations? Maybe I'm missing something obvious by not working at a huge corporation (like "we just send it to our Bejing and Madrid offices and they do the translations in to their local languages"), but it seems to me that this is going to be a ton of work on top of the initial redesign. Of course, you probably already realize that.
In an effort to stay on-topic, how I would implement this depends on exactly what your company does and how extensive your web site is. It could be as simple as putting a bunch of languages in the database, keeping track of the user's choice based on a session variable (and maybe even guessing the initial choice based on their IP...just a thought). Then pulling the correct information out of the database should be rather easy -- instead of finding, say, article 12 or with title 'foo' (depending on how your site's written), just pull id=2&lang=en or foo.py&lang=de and let the database handle the rest.
Since no one else has responded I'll take a stab although I haven't actually *used* these tags (nor CVS, to be honest) but I think I 'get it'.
To my understanding, you can assign a tag to a specific revision and then always get that tag rather than have to worry about specific revision numbers. If you start working on a new revision to a file, the tag stays with the old working version until you're satisfied with a new revision and move your tag to the new revision. That way you can always pull the tag on to (as the poster is doing) main server (with a cron script) and never have to log on to the server to manually pull in changes.
It's easy with tags because you just tell the server to pull in anything that's tagged; with subversion there doesn't exist that sort of tag functionality so you have to deal with version numbers and that breaks the cron script because it relies on manual input.
I actually don't print much so this is just a question, not trying to start a flamewar or anything...but doesn't Windows just ship with the basic print driver and if you want to clean the heads of an inkjet, for instance, you'd need to install the official programs? Sure, for laser printers it probably doesn't matter but for home users with inkjets and a need to align heads, clean heads, etc; you need to install the programs, no? Or am I mistaken?
Cool, I drive past the Linden Hall School every now and then; nice to meet someone from a similar geographic location.
In an effort to stay on-topic, though, just as a thought I wonder how much less open a public school would be compared to your private school example. I know at my alma mater (I worked there part time for a bit as well) they were pretty much locked in to Apple as much because the IU (a conglomeration of schools grouped together by county which provides training and support to the 'member' districts) was (AFAIK) all Mac as well. That started to change a few years ago when they got a single PC lab, since then they've added two more but those are primarily for learning Office and learning to type; all important research and typing is still done on the Macs. Anyway, my point being that there were other external factors keeping them on Mac (all their support at the next level was Mac based, their software was all Mac and the costs were shared, all their old documents were ClarisWorks format...things have been changing, but at that point it would have been hard to jump to Windows without any of that)...I wonder if there's a difference between private and public schools in the regard of choosing OOo/Office. There *shouldn't* be, but I've been removed from the scene for a few years so I don't know what's been going on lately. And obviously a platform jump would have been much harder than a jump from Office to OOo.
For those who haven't seen: Despair.com (and check out the rest of their products!)
I've always wanted to buy a couple of these posters, hang them around the office (replacing exisiting nonsensical motivators), and wait to see if anyone notices.
You're right, Panasonic is working on (or has, it was showcased at NAB last year but I don't know whether it's been released or not yet) an SD memory based PCMCIA camera. The PCMCIA card holds four SD cards in it. Their current design (as far as I'm aware it's still current) has 4 gigs of storage which would hold about 18 minutes of video. Because the SD cards are hooked up in parallel they can get high speed transfers off.
There's also the JVC hard drive recorder, Hitachi DVD-RAM camcorder, Ikegami has their FieldPak2 hard drive system too...and don't forget about Sony's blue laser disc recorder, which does 23.3 GB per disc (for 75 or 90 minute recordings). I think Thompson Grass Valley's working on a hard drive based camera also but can't find information on it.
I see. You make a good point with your original post.
A flywheel is a good idea too, but no matter what you do I can't see this doing anything but sucking a lot of power. Two opposing gyros is something I hadn't thought about, I wonder how practical something like that would be.
Either way I agree, it's not likely to work; I'm thinking it would either be too heavy or too power-hungry to work. And then there's the issue that a Steadicam doesn't just balance and only point in one direction, it has to be able to move around in a way that a gyroscopic device wouldn't allow (say, to rotate and walk around an actor who is standing still), if you follow my point. Anyway, an interesting idea. Cheers...
I doubt you'll find a 512 SODIMM in PC100 cheap...Crucial has a stick of 256 for $112 (they don't even have a 512 listed, but from their prices I'd guess a 512 stick would go for $150 or $200. Good luck, though.
I'd just like to point out that the stabilization that goes in to a helicopter gyro is different from even the more expensive steadicam rigs(1) that you need for a heafty camera. Most helicopter gyros that I'm aware of run 6 figures, mount to the helicopter itself, and use gryoscopes rather than counterweights and springs (disclaimer: I don't actually work with helicopter mounts so I may be in error with regards to common technique. I can only repeat what I've heard from a reputable source). So yes, what you've said here is correct, but I believe you're comparing two different technologies.
I have a friend with a Steadicam (I think his was around $20,000, but I forget the exact number) and he can work magic with it...I really love the look of something that's been shot on one, but there's a trend now to over-use them in a lot of situations where it's not needed:-/
And finally, I like your idea of trying a couple of gyroscopes to balance it out. Many of us have tried that experiement with the rotating bicycle tire; I'm guessing it wouldn't take nearly that much effort to keep a smallish camcorder steady...you could shrink down the diameter a bit and speeding it up gains you even more; so I imagine something like you propose is very viable...maybe a good weekend project.
(1) I can't find the link right now but I think spending about $60,000 on a Steadicam rig will get a "decent" one for a heavy camera. But what do I know, I work in TV, not film.
...component video...i recommend true coax, with the proper resistance bnc terminated ends (52 ohm i believe). for rca component video, 75 ohm coax terminated in rca plugs
You've written an informative and worthwhile post, I just want to nitpick a tiny bit -- BNC component video should also be at 75 ohms. I imagine the 52 ohm cable you're thinking of is the 50 ohm type used in ham radio. The type of connector (BNC, RCA, etc) doesn't mean the cable resistance changes; video should be 75 through the system. I'm not sure about what resistance you'd use for modulated RF signals, but weren't not talking about that anyway;-)
Your analogy breaks down, though, because a newspaper has an assignment editor (or editor-in-chief or *someone*, not sure what the correct title would be), who is very responsible for making sure there aren't two people writing the same story and that two similar stories don't appear two days in a row. So while two people at the paper may not know about the contents of the entire paper, I'm sure there's someone who is responsible for the content of the paper. Slashdot seems to have no such overseer (which is a mixed thing: it makes duplicates easier but allows much faster posting of articles, imagine the backlog if we had to wait for one person to approve *every* submission.)
Hmm, I suppose that would be a useful feature for a hospital* to have.
*at least, that's what I see there when I look at the map...;-)
To try to keep this on-topic, I seem to remember something about a proposed system (I think I read about it here) to come up with a decent coordinat-based world-wide grid system for addresses. But I completely forget any details of it other than that it was supposed to be rather precise and short (I think two groups of three charachters, something like A3B FD4 or something along those lines).
Unfortunatly no, but neither does CEP 2.1. CEP has a ball bouncing game (which is kind of lame, especially compared to pong) and Audition supposedly has that included but I haven't been able to find it yet. Not that I've looked *too* hard, though.
Slashdot Mirror
S.T.R.I.P. is a little tempermental (as far as how to actually enter data - it's not as user-friendly as one would hope) but it is very useful for storing all kinds of information in a secure but easy to get to location.
If you keep a Palm close by, look in to it!
So anyway, what the FCC wants to do is get rid of analog broadcasts. here's some more info. They don't care (at least as far as this decision goes) what cable systems do, although in the interest of appealing to as many customers as possible, they're currently serving both analog and digital signals and charging extra for the digital box that's needed to decode the signals.
So anyway, I guess my point is that when you say "the article was refering to over the air broadcasts" you're mistaken, the FCC only desires to phase out analog over-the-air broadcasts and replace it with the digital DTV signals. This has been their plan for nearly ten years now, although their timetable keeps getting pushed back. This isn't new to most of us...I suppose it's just that consumers are starting to notice that they may need to buy new sets (or converters) soon.
Or consider my parents -- the only reason they don't have cable TV is because they live too far away from the cable line. The problem is two-fold -- first, they live about 3/4th mile away from the road. They'd have to pay the installation costs to install that 3/4 mile worth of cable. Secondly, the line isn't even on that road, it stops at a community a little over a mile up the road. And the cable company sees no need to bring it that much closer.
Sure, they'll probably eventually upgrade to a digital set, but they're still using the old TV we got ten years ago. It works fine, why should the upgrade?
Funny you should ask, I was just thinking of this as I read through the comments. I learned about this on slashdot a year or two ago:
DV Backup Open Source at SF.net
I just found this link also (mac only, $50 share- or cripple- ware)
Wow, I didn't realize there's a community right next to the pyramids...how weird would that be to live within walking distance of them...cool. Great find, thanks for the link...something I wouldn't have thought of looking for but definetly worth a look.
No, it doesn't suck! I managed to find your band on mp3.com back in the day and got a few songs that we still enjoy, but sadly it was right at the end of the mp3.com era and so I wasn't able to listen to much music and kind of forgot about you guys. Now you've re-introduced me to your web presence and I'll have to check out some more of the music and you know...undergo therapy for it or something. Anyway, love the band and greetings from Pennsylvania, USA.
Cheers!
Oh yeah, I forgot about that...for my first few years, all one had to do was disable the proxy and traffic would go our just fine. They eventually fixed that, much to the disappointment of students and faculty everywhere. I never bothered to try a different proxy server, that's an interesting idea. Have a good one
And let me just say that Bess is completely annoying. I went to ELCO (which is another 20 minutes away from Kutztown past the parent's alma mater of Conrad Weiser) and then did a little computer work there (at ELCO) for a few years and Bess was always a step ahead of actual genuine student research. Valid sites were blocked, while some porn sites were not. Very frustrating, even to the teachers in whose classes we were doing the reports (because we'd show them this useful and informative page located on a reputable server that was blocked). Hopefully it's improved since then.
Here's a Reading-Eagle article about this.
By the way, looking at porn while one is at school is just stupid. Unlocking a computer that you've been given for nine months...not so stupid. What's it matter to the school district, it's not like they had sensative files on the laptops...sure, keep the network secure, but if getting admin access to a laptop equals admin network access, they've got more problems. But yes, hacking the network and doing illegal things on the school network is dumb.
By the way, I'm a Kutztown University grad, not that it's really relevant to the story, but I did spend four years in town...it's weird to see such a small place make national news again. For the geeks: Kutztown Borough was the first community in PA to have fiber to the house. linky, another link, and Google Search.
[huge grin] -- I remember NetBunny. That was the best extension around...we used it all of the time in the labs at my high school. There is nothing like knowing you've unleashed the power of the Energizer rabbit boom-boom-booming across 20 computers.
:-D
Then it kind of went away for a few years and we added a new tech person who'd never seen it before. We had fun with that.
I was one of the students who helped run the labs, so I had to help eradicate the bunny whenever it would crop up, but it saddened me to see it go every single time.
thanks for the memories
Er, that should be "Kutztown" in the article title. Located in beautiful east-central Pennsylvania.
If I may, and I'm just thinking out loud here, I suspect the difference is that the network switch you refer to was owned by the same company that lost the few million dollars, so the $25,000 investment may have been worth it because a one time cost $25,000 is much better than the at least one-time cost of a new switch ($25,000) plus the service/support charge to have a tech drive from another state plus the lost revenue ($1,000,000). The losses greatly exceeded the amount of money needed to provide a backup.
On the other hand, the New Zealand telco isn't directly out of all the money that was lost in failed business transactions. They're pretty much out the money required to repair the lines. They didn't directly loose millions (billions?) of dollars, they just had their link go down and had to restore it. So investing however much money in additional lines and hardware may not make financial sense to them. Since they didn't loose much money, the losses did not exceed the amount of money redundancy would cost.
Sure it's dumb, but who'd expect anything else?
In an effort to stay on-topic, how I would implement this depends on exactly what your company does and how extensive your web site is. It could be as simple as putting a bunch of languages in the database, keeping track of the user's choice based on a session variable (and maybe even guessing the initial choice based on their IP...just a thought). Then pulling the correct information out of the database should be rather easy -- instead of finding, say, article 12 or with title 'foo' (depending on how your site's written), just pull id=2&lang=en or foo.py&lang=de and let the database handle the rest.
Since no one else has responded I'll take a stab although I haven't actually *used* these tags (nor CVS, to be honest) but I think I 'get it'.
To my understanding, you can assign a tag to a specific revision and then always get that tag rather than have to worry about specific revision numbers. If you start working on a new revision to a file, the tag stays with the old working version until you're satisfied with a new revision and move your tag to the new revision. That way you can always pull the tag on to (as the poster is doing) main server (with a cron script) and never have to log on to the server to manually pull in changes.
It's easy with tags because you just tell the server to pull in anything that's tagged; with subversion there doesn't exist that sort of tag functionality so you have to deal with version numbers and that breaks the cron script because it relies on manual input.
Apple Quicktime if you're on Windows or Apple, as the other poster mentioned MPlayer for Linux should be able to also.
I actually don't print much so this is just a question, not trying to start a flamewar or anything...but doesn't Windows just ship with the basic print driver and if you want to clean the heads of an inkjet, for instance, you'd need to install the official programs? Sure, for laser printers it probably doesn't matter but for home users with inkjets and a need to align heads, clean heads, etc; you need to install the programs, no? Or am I mistaken?
Cool, I drive past the Linden Hall School every now and then; nice to meet someone from a similar geographic location.
In an effort to stay on-topic, though, just as a thought I wonder how much less open a public school would be compared to your private school example. I know at my alma mater (I worked there part time for a bit as well) they were pretty much locked in to Apple as much because the IU (a conglomeration of schools grouped together by county which provides training and support to the 'member' districts) was (AFAIK) all Mac as well. That started to change a few years ago when they got a single PC lab, since then they've added two more but those are primarily for learning Office and learning to type; all important research and typing is still done on the Macs. Anyway, my point being that there were other external factors keeping them on Mac (all their support at the next level was Mac based, their software was all Mac and the costs were shared, all their old documents were ClarisWorks format...things have been changing, but at that point it would have been hard to jump to Windows without any of that)...I wonder if there's a difference between private and public schools in the regard of choosing OOo/Office. There *shouldn't* be, but I've been removed from the scene for a few years so I don't know what's been going on lately. And obviously a platform jump would have been much harder than a jump from Office to OOo.
Cheers!
For those who haven't seen: Despair.com (and check out the rest of their products!)
I've always wanted to buy a couple of these posters, hang them around the office (replacing exisiting nonsensical motivators), and wait to see if anyone notices.
You're right, Panasonic is working on (or has, it was showcased at NAB last year but I don't know whether it's been released or not yet) an SD memory based PCMCIA camera. The PCMCIA card holds four SD cards in it. Their current design (as far as I'm aware it's still current) has 4 gigs of storage which would hold about 18 minutes of video. Because the SD cards are hooked up in parallel they can get high speed transfers off.
There's also the JVC hard drive recorder, Hitachi DVD-RAM camcorder, Ikegami has their FieldPak2 hard drive system too...and don't forget about Sony's blue laser disc recorder, which does 23.3 GB per disc (for 75 or 90 minute recordings). I think Thompson Grass Valley's working on a hard drive based camera also but can't find information on it.
I see. You make a good point with your original post.
A flywheel is a good idea too, but no matter what you do I can't see this doing anything but sucking a lot of power. Two opposing gyros is something I hadn't thought about, I wonder how practical something like that would be.
Either way I agree, it's not likely to work; I'm thinking it would either be too heavy or too power-hungry to work. And then there's the issue that a Steadicam doesn't just balance and only point in one direction, it has to be able to move around in a way that a gyroscopic device wouldn't allow (say, to rotate and walk around an actor who is standing still), if you follow my point. Anyway, an interesting idea. Cheers...
I doubt you'll find a 512 SODIMM in PC100 cheap...Crucial has a stick of 256 for $112 (they don't even have a 512 listed, but from their prices I'd guess a 512 stick would go for $150 or $200. Good luck, though.
I'd just like to point out that the stabilization that goes in to a helicopter gyro is different from even the more expensive steadicam rigs(1) that you need for a heafty camera. Most helicopter gyros that I'm aware of run 6 figures, mount to the helicopter itself, and use gryoscopes rather than counterweights and springs (disclaimer: I don't actually work with helicopter mounts so I may be in error with regards to common technique. I can only repeat what I've heard from a reputable source). So yes, what you've said here is correct, but I believe you're comparing two different technologies.
:-/
I have a friend with a Steadicam (I think his was around $20,000, but I forget the exact number) and he can work magic with it...I really love the look of something that's been shot on one, but there's a trend now to over-use them in a lot of situations where it's not needed
And finally, I like your idea of trying a couple of gyroscopes to balance it out. Many of us have tried that experiement with the rotating bicycle tire; I'm guessing it wouldn't take nearly that much effort to keep a smallish camcorder steady...you could shrink down the diameter a bit and speeding it up gains you even more; so I imagine something like you propose is very viable...maybe a good weekend project.
(1) I can't find the link right now but I think spending about $60,000 on a Steadicam rig will get a "decent" one for a heavy camera. But what do I know, I work in TV, not film.
Your analogy breaks down, though, because a newspaper has an assignment editor (or editor-in-chief or *someone*, not sure what the correct title would be), who is very responsible for making sure there aren't two people writing the same story and that two similar stories don't appear two days in a row. So while two people at the paper may not know about the contents of the entire paper, I'm sure there's someone who is responsible for the content of the paper. Slashdot seems to have no such overseer (which is a mixed thing: it makes duplicates easier but allows much faster posting of articles, imagine the backlog if we had to wait for one person to approve *every* submission.)
*at least, that's what I see there when I look at the map...
To try to keep this on-topic, I seem to remember something about a proposed system (I think I read about it here) to come up with a decent coordinat-based world-wide grid system for addresses. But I completely forget any details of it other than that it was supposed to be rather precise and short (I think two groups of three charachters, something like A3B FD4 or something along those lines).
Unfortunatly no, but neither does CEP 2.1. CEP has a ball bouncing game (which is kind of lame, especially compared to pong) and Audition supposedly has that included but I haven't been able to find it yet. Not that I've looked *too* hard, though.