You and I must have different quality thresholds. There is lots of approx. 640x352 resolution downsampled HDTV out there in bittorrents. I find this stuff a perfectly acceptable alternative to my crappy analog cable TV feed.
In my freshman year CS 101 class the final exam was to code a simple program in class during the last regularly scheduled lecture and hand a copy over to the professor, then take your own copy of the code home, copy it into a computer, get it to work during finals week, and resubmit it. You would be partially graded on how much change you had to make to get it debugged.
The only trick was that there were two sessions of this class, at 1:00PM and 2:00PM, and the final exam programs for each were different. Supposedly, half of each class flunked the course because they resubmitted perfectly good, working examples of the other session's programming assignment.
Typically, a defense contractor (or at least Army contractor) doesn't build something and then sell it in the traditional sense of the word. It's closer to a work for hire situation. The contractor is first hired to do something and then performs according to the contract. The contractor would probably be expected to deliver binary and source code to the Army as part of the contract. Still not sure if this means it has been publicly distributed.
I think the GPL is not a problem, depending on how you define distribution. If the Army writes software that runs on top of and uses GPL'ed software, but never distributes it outside the Army, have they violated the GPL? The GPL, the way I read it, mostly deals with publicly distributed software.
PHP built from source Photoshop Elements 2 DarwinPorts Firefox jEdit MPlayer OS X 2 NeoOfficeJ (OpenOffice w/ Java GUI, usually looks better than X.11R6 based OpenOffice) SQLite Thoth UnRarX
There is no serious office package for Mac OS X except for MS Office -- but there is no way I am going to pay that much money, and I'm one of those old-fashioned people who things stealing is wrong.
Well, you could always buy the Student/Teacher version at $149.00. I think you more or less qualify for it if you have anyone in your family that is in school. I'm thinking about buying it if the price is still the same when the 2004 version comes out, and it fixes the file name limitations in Office for OS X 2003. Right now my Office itch is mostly scratched by NEoOffice/J, which works suprisingly well for me.
With all this deathly serious fantasy coming out, someone really needs to produce some good fantasy parody, and Terry Pratchett's Discworld series is just the thing if you ask me. Start with "The Color of Magic" perhaps. This one brings in the fine wizards of Unseen University, heroes, magic swords, trolls, dwarves and whatnot and makes a good introduction to the whole genre.
This is the only one I know of: Formac Studio TVR . It outputs a standard DV stream, but it may only work with Mac OS X for tuner control/channel selection.
This week the Air Force Chief of Staff was visiting Afghanistan and was embarrassed to discover that the A-10 was the only close air support plane in use there. It's the only one that can fly on the beat up airfields there.
Get a Laptop Desk. These are very handy for sitting in your easy chair with a laptop and mousepad for extended periods. Just using the laptop makes me force my knees together and this is no good after a while. Also, as others have mentioned a mouse does have advantages over a touchpad (ever played Quake with a touchpad?). They also double as a keyboard tilt/screen riser if you like that.
I get my home DSL through QWest. Their service for the DSL line has been good. I don't use them for my ISP and I'm glad that I don't have to. I think opening DSL lines to 3rd party ISPs is one of the best parts of US telecom regulations. My ISP is very good that the things an ISP is supposed to do, while Qwest from all accounts never was, and they ultimately outsourced their ISP customers to MSN, which is probably worse.
You'd think a DVD with no moving parts might be more rugged than a VHS tape but there's a problem with the packaging. Those stupid snapdown spindle hole things in DVD cases have already cost up us two DVDs. The kids will want to play them themselves at age 2 or so, but they won't have the finger strength/coordination to push down on the center and pull the edge of the DVD to pop it from the case properly. Instead the little darlings try to brute force the DVD out by yanking hard on the edge of the DVD, cracking it in the process. So use a dremel tool or equivalent to file down the snaps. The case is perfectly effective storage without them.
Another advantage of a real infant car seat is that they're usually designed so that you can carry the baby in it. This is the best way to bring an infant into a restaurant or out visiting/shopping.
I think this might be a good application for a simple Java application. Just put your encrypted data file(s) and Java binaries in a ".jar" file. Use something command line oriented or using pre-Swing (AWT?) APIs that'd work on a 1.1.x JVM and you'll have everything you need (aside from a JVM) with you. Maybe whip up a simple Applet so all you need is a Java capable Browser.
We've been using them for a year or so now. Some advantages:
Stored grocery lists. You can store your weekly shopping list, or several variations on it there, then just pull it up and make a few adjustments by just checking things off, and place the order in 10 minutes or so.
Search engine. Why wander the aisles of the grocery aimlessly looking for some obscure/hard to categorize item when you can just run a web search?
Good quality produce, meats, etc. This is something the online store has to excel at or the hands-on vegetable squeezers will shop elsewhere. SimonDelivers hasn't done us wrong yet.
You never have to walk the kids past the candy and junk food displays.
Cons:
Sometimes we just can't think of everything we need while sitting in front of the TV with a laptop, and need to wander the aisles of a real store to jog the memory a bit.
You gave yourself away as a clueless newbie at the start of your second sentence: "But I imagine...". Try getting some real world experience and report back. I've done my own (color) darkroom printing and I own a decent photo printer. And I'm here to tell you that film is not better and all the theoretical postulating about film resolution is bunk. Lenses are a major factor that drives image resolution and having the best film in the world won't do a thing for your lenses. And in case you didn't know it, medium and large format lenses are manufactured to less stringent standards and so the resolution of film in a medium format camera doesn't match the resolution of that same film in a good 35mm camera, no matter what you pay for that big piece of glass.
I can't wait for the day I can replace my ~$2500 dollar investment in film camera equipment with a decent digital camera. Right now I think I'd be pretty happy with a Canon G2, though the 5Mpx Nikons are looking good too.
If you know you will be presenting a proposal to an audience with some true PHBs, always put in a few obvious but minor flaws (e.g. spelling errors) for the Boss to catch. Some Type A PHBs just aren't satisfied with a good idea, they have to impose their will by forcing a change on you, even if trivial.
So give them something easy to find and easy to fix on your part, them smile and apply your fix.
VxWorks and Windows NT are in use in some ground combat systems (ie. tanks and stuff like them). Haven't heard of anyone using Linux on a tracked vehicle. LynxOS is the planned OS for some systems in development right now too. I did hear of a command & control system being ported from SCO Unix to Linux.
In fact, nothing is classified until someone with a lot of authority says it is classified. Therein lies the problem. Much that should or could be classified may be exposed to the world on the unclassified nets, but because no one has made a conscious decision that it IS classified it is out there for the taking. This is why foreign governments like to sift through unclassified DOD websites and publications.
In the DOD's first rush to put up websites 5 or more years ago a lot of sensitive information was thrown up on web pages to provide useful/interesting content for the web. I heard some real horror stories from some infosec people in the DOD about stuff they had found on open servers. In '97 or '98 the DOD suddenly woke up and tried to clamp down on their public servers.
Tivo is almost entirely dependent on the dialup connection to a service provider that gives it program information, correct? If Tivo fails in the marketplace (a la DIVX), doesn't this mean that all Tivo boxes become almost useless?
Is there any contingency planning in place for this possibility?
Why would you prefer a GUI mail client? After trying out various GUI client I wound up going back to PINE myself. One big advantage of the non-GUI is the ease of scrolling through text. Hitting the spacebar is a lot easier than keeping that pointer in the scrollbar area and dragging/clicking/wheeling up and down.
Plus I like the ease of archiving mail in Pine using Mbox format boxes and just BZipping them and moving them off-line as I see fit.
Meanwhile, the most popular OS's for networked C2 systems in the US Army are a couple of well supported Unix variants. But like you said, the details in the C2 certification/accreditation are substantial. You're C2 rated to run on X, Y and Z networks, A & B radio nets and only if you're in the proper shelter or tracked vehicle, with camoflage nets up and armed perimeter guards in place. And so on...
During a child development class my wife and I took before our daughter was born we were told a little bit about brain development. One measureable sign of brain development is the total number of neural connections that have been made in the brain. At birth a baby's brain will have 500 x 10^x neural connections (I forget the exponent value). At 1-2 years old this number will have grown to 1500 x 10^x. As an adult this number falls down to about 1000 - 1200 x 10^x.
Whether these connections represent memory storage or processing capacity is not well understood. Probably a little of both. Another thing about these connections is the complexity of the neural interfaces. At each connection (synapse) location messages can be passed or influenced by something like 20 different chemicals called neurotransmitters. Each neuron can have many different synaptic connections with other neurons. So brain processing is radically different from binary computers. The basic binary computer building block is a transistor that has one kind of signal to pass (electric activity) and two states (on and off). The basic brain building block (the neuron) branches in several different directions and can pass multiple neurotransmitter signals along any of these branches. Fundamentally different ways of doing business.
Film Scales Better Than Digital Photography
on
35mm Handbook
·
· Score: 1
One obvious area where film has digital photography beat is in scaling. This works in more than one way. If you need to shoot a lot of pictures (big wedding, vacation, whatever) you just buy lots of film. 40 rolls of film cost just 40 times more than 1 roll, or probably less. If you want to shoot lots of digital pictures you'll need to start off-loading them from the camera, and this means dragging a laptop and a pack of CDR drives or something to pile all the stuff onto, or buying lots of expensive PC cards and downloading pictures after the fact. Anyway you do it, it's a hassle and probably a lot of weight to lug around. Your 40 packs of film probably weigh 1/10 what you're facing with digital photography.
Also, film scales better in the resolution sense. If 35mm resolution doesn't cut it you have lots of options. The best pro market digital cameras still have a long way to go before they'll match big view cameras (8"x10" or bigger sheets of film).
I really don't know anything about secondary schools in Oz but let me describe what I see as a major problem in US high schools. Many teachers grow up in a suburban town, graduate from Anytown High, spend 4 years living at home with their parents and commuting to nearby Pleasantville State College, then come right back and start teaching at Anytown High. They never really get out and see the world and they never really break away from the stupid social cliquishness that permeates Anytown High School. But they come back as de facto members of the In Crowd. So the geeks at US high schools get little or no sympathy from many of their teachers or administrators. Does this happen as much in other countries?
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You and I must have different quality thresholds. There is lots of approx. 640x352 resolution downsampled HDTV out there in bittorrents. I find this stuff a perfectly acceptable alternative to my crappy analog cable TV feed.
In my freshman year CS 101 class the final exam was to code a simple program in class during the last regularly scheduled lecture and hand a copy over to the professor, then take your own copy of the code home, copy it into a computer, get it to work during finals week, and resubmit it. You would be partially graded on how much change you had to make to get it debugged.
The only trick was that there were two sessions of this class, at 1:00PM and 2:00PM, and the final exam programs for each were different. Supposedly, half of each class flunked the course because they resubmitted perfectly good, working examples of the other session's programming assignment.
Typically, a defense contractor (or at least Army contractor) doesn't build something and then sell it in the traditional sense of the word. It's closer to a work for hire situation. The contractor is first hired to do something and then performs according to the contract. The contractor would probably be expected to deliver binary and source code to the Army as part of the contract. Still not sure if this means it has been publicly distributed.
I think the GPL is not a problem, depending on how you define distribution. If the Army writes software that runs on top of and uses GPL'ed software, but never distributes it outside the Army, have they violated the GPL? The GPL, the way I read it, mostly deals with publicly distributed software.
PHP built from source
Photoshop Elements 2
DarwinPorts
Firefox
jEdit
MPlayer OS X 2
NeoOfficeJ (OpenOffice w/ Java GUI, usually looks better than X.11R6 based OpenOffice)
SQLite
Thoth
UnRarX
With all this deathly serious fantasy coming out, someone really needs to produce some good fantasy parody, and Terry Pratchett's Discworld series is just the thing if you ask me. Start with "The Color of Magic" perhaps. This one brings in the fine wizards of Unseen University, heroes, magic swords, trolls, dwarves and whatnot and makes a good introduction to the whole genre.
This is the only one I know of: Formac Studio TVR . It outputs a standard DV stream, but it may only work with Mac OS X for tuner control/channel selection.
This week the Air Force Chief of Staff was visiting Afghanistan and was embarrassed to discover that the A-10 was the only close air support plane in use there. It's the only one that can fly on the beat up airfields there.
Get a Laptop Desk. These are very handy for sitting in your easy chair with a laptop and mousepad for extended periods. Just using the laptop makes me force my knees together and this is no good after a while. Also, as others have mentioned a mouse does have advantages over a touchpad (ever played Quake with a touchpad?). They also double as a keyboard tilt/screen riser if you like that.
I get my home DSL through QWest. Their service for the DSL line has been good. I don't use them for my ISP and I'm glad that I don't have to. I think opening DSL lines to 3rd party ISPs is one of the best parts of US telecom regulations. My ISP is very good that the things an ISP is supposed to do, while Qwest from all accounts never was, and they ultimately outsourced their ISP customers to MSN, which is probably worse.
You'd think a DVD with no moving parts might be more rugged than a VHS tape but there's a problem with the packaging. Those stupid snapdown spindle hole things in DVD cases have already cost up us two DVDs. The kids will want to play them themselves at age 2 or so, but they won't have the finger strength/coordination to push down on the center and pull the edge of the DVD to pop it from the case properly. Instead the little darlings try to brute force the DVD out by yanking hard on the edge of the DVD, cracking it in the process. So use a dremel tool or equivalent to file down the snaps. The case is perfectly effective storage without them.
Another advantage of a real infant car seat is that they're usually designed so that you can carry the baby in it. This is the best way to bring an infant into a restaurant or out visiting/shopping.
I think this might be a good application for a simple Java application. Just put your encrypted data file(s) and Java binaries in a ".jar" file. Use something command line oriented or using pre-Swing (AWT?) APIs that'd work on a 1.1.x JVM and you'll have everything you need (aside from a JVM) with you. Maybe whip up a simple Applet so all you need is a Java capable Browser.
- Stored grocery lists. You can store your weekly shopping list, or several variations on it there, then just pull it up and make a few adjustments by just checking things off, and place the order in 10 minutes or so.
- Search engine. Why wander the aisles of the grocery aimlessly looking for some obscure/hard to categorize item when you can just run a web search?
- Good quality produce, meats, etc. This is something the online store has to excel at or the hands-on vegetable squeezers will shop elsewhere. SimonDelivers hasn't done us wrong yet.
- You never have to walk the kids past the candy and junk food displays.
Cons:You gave yourself away as a clueless newbie at the start of your second sentence: "But I imagine...". Try getting some real world experience and report back. I've done my own (color) darkroom printing and I own a decent photo printer. And I'm here to tell you that film is not better and all the theoretical postulating about film resolution is bunk. Lenses are a major factor that drives image resolution and having the best film in the world won't do a thing for your lenses. And in case you didn't know it, medium and large format lenses are manufactured to less stringent standards and so the resolution of film in a medium format camera doesn't match the resolution of that same film in a good 35mm camera, no matter what you pay for that big piece of glass.
I can't wait for the day I can replace my ~$2500 dollar investment in film camera equipment with a decent digital camera. Right now I think I'd be pretty happy with a Canon G2, though the 5Mpx Nikons are looking good too.
If you know you will be presenting a proposal to an audience with some true PHBs, always put in a few obvious but minor flaws (e.g. spelling errors) for the Boss to catch. Some Type A PHBs just aren't satisfied with a good idea, they have to impose their will by forcing a change on you, even if trivial.
So give them something easy to find and easy to fix on your part, them smile and apply your fix.
VxWorks and Windows NT are in use in some ground combat systems (ie. tanks and stuff like them). Haven't heard of anyone using Linux on a tracked vehicle. LynxOS is the planned OS for some systems in development right now too. I did hear of a command & control system being ported from SCO Unix to Linux.
In the DOD's first rush to put up websites 5 or more years ago a lot of sensitive information was thrown up on web pages to provide useful/interesting content for the web. I heard some real horror stories from some infosec people in the DOD about stuff they had found on open servers. In '97 or '98 the DOD suddenly woke up and tried to clamp down on their public servers.
Tivo is almost entirely dependent on the dialup connection to a service provider that gives it program information, correct? If Tivo fails in the marketplace (a la DIVX), doesn't this mean that all Tivo boxes become almost useless?
Is there any contingency planning in place for this possibility?
Why would you prefer a GUI mail client? After trying out various GUI client I wound up going back to PINE myself. One big advantage of the non-GUI is the ease of scrolling through text. Hitting the spacebar is a lot easier than keeping that pointer in the scrollbar area and dragging/clicking/wheeling up and down.
Plus I like the ease of archiving mail in Pine using Mbox format boxes and just BZipping them and moving them off-line as I see fit.
Meanwhile, the most popular OS's for networked C2 systems in the US Army are a couple of well supported Unix variants. But like you said, the details in the C2 certification/accreditation are substantial. You're C2 rated to run on X, Y and Z networks, A & B radio nets and only if you're in the proper shelter or tracked vehicle, with camoflage nets up and armed perimeter guards in place. And so on...
During a child development class my wife and I took before our daughter was born we were told a little bit about brain development. One measureable sign of brain development is the total number of neural connections that have been made in the brain. At birth a baby's brain will have 500 x 10^x neural connections (I forget the exponent value). At 1-2 years old this number will have grown to 1500 x 10^x. As an adult this number falls down to about 1000 - 1200 x 10^x.
Whether these connections represent memory storage or processing capacity is not well understood. Probably a little of both. Another thing about these connections is the complexity of the neural interfaces. At each connection (synapse) location messages can be passed or influenced by something like 20 different chemicals called neurotransmitters. Each neuron can have many different synaptic connections with other neurons. So brain processing is radically different from binary computers. The basic binary computer building block is a transistor that has one kind of signal to pass (electric activity) and two states (on and off). The basic brain building block (the neuron) branches in several different directions and can pass multiple neurotransmitter signals along any of these branches. Fundamentally different ways of doing business.
One obvious area where film has digital photography beat is in scaling. This works in more than one way. If you need to shoot a lot of pictures (big wedding, vacation, whatever) you just buy lots of film. 40 rolls of film cost just 40 times more than 1 roll, or probably less. If you want to shoot lots of digital pictures you'll need to start off-loading them from the camera, and this means dragging a laptop and a pack of CDR drives or something to pile all the stuff onto, or buying lots of expensive PC cards and downloading pictures after the fact. Anyway you do it, it's a hassle and probably a lot of weight to lug around. Your 40 packs of film probably weigh 1/10 what you're facing with digital photography.
Also, film scales better in the resolution sense. If 35mm resolution doesn't cut it you have lots of options. The best pro market digital cameras still have a long way to go before they'll match big view cameras (8"x10" or bigger sheets of film).
I really don't know anything about secondary schools in Oz but let me describe what I see as a major problem in US high schools. Many teachers grow up in a suburban town, graduate from Anytown High, spend 4 years living at home with their parents and commuting to nearby Pleasantville State College, then come right back and start teaching at Anytown High. They never really get out and see the world and they never really break away from the stupid social cliquishness that permeates Anytown High School. But they come back as de facto members of the In Crowd. So the geeks at US high schools get little or no sympathy from many of their teachers or administrators. Does this happen as much in other countries?