I'm the other way around, I know radio but nothing about space. For me, with signals like FM, usually if you can hear the carrier you can lock onto it and decode the modulation. That's what phase-locked-loops and tuned circuits are for. I've dealt with many cases of extremely noisy and low signal FM and still been able to get some modulation out of it when I couldn't even hear the carrier on sideband. I'm just very surprised they couldn't get any data out of such a strong carrier.
Sounds like a dead carrier, with the expected doppler shifts. The carrier is certainly strong enough to get data off from it if there were any. Probably just his bad luck that it wasn't actually uplinking any data during his short window of opportunity to record it.
I'd imagine a lot of that window was simply reliant on getting the aim for the antenna right and holding it on target. He was using a star tracker I assume?
it's not newegg's fault, but it IS their responsibility. In other words they probably got shafted themselves, but are going to have to make good to their customers. Then it's up to them to track down who cheated them and deal with them directly. And that's really how it's supposed to work. Since the customer has no control over someone defrauding newegg, they should not be made to bear any of the burdens from when it happens.
it's probable you would have gotten just as much trouble with the Levitons. And you can't just throw a rug over that like you usually can with a cable, the couplers are a major weak spot. "multiple failure points" and all that too. And then you have antisocials unplugging things. Just the time and duct tape you spend trying to shore up the Levitons will break you even on cost while still dropping your reliability.
Getting a pisspile of 250's would have been a very good idea. Don't buy from anything anywhere near retail, the markup on cables is absolutely outrageous. (350% at the minimum) Once you find a reasonable source for cables, any (pre-molded) solution besides having a big box full of 250's becomes more expensive.
Technically, the most cost effective way to go is buy bulk cat, a good cable tester, (volunteers,) and precut your cables yourself. Get several boxes of 2gal ziplocs and precut cables in 50, 100, 150, 200, 300 ft lengths. (one cable per bag in case you were asking) Mark the bags for length with a marker on masking tape. Get your cable arsenal precut and pretested. Have one or two absurdly long cables (500) because sometimes they come in really handy. Ideally you should never need to crimp a cable once onsite. Anything 10ft or less is always a waste to DIY, for those go premolded only. Besides, they're the more likely to get abused anyway, particularly the 6/10ft'ers, so you really don't want a hand-crimp on them.
mac the ripper is still available and updated. it copies off the disc to a video_ts folder with the encryption and noops removed. (and region coding if necessary)
Since the transcoding process takes awhile, I usually MTR all the discs in a box at once to hard drive, and queue them all up in handbrake. Let that run 2-3 days on its own with out having to feed it a disc every hour or so and it's done. (requires a fair chunk of free HD space for all those video_ts folders)
why didn't they just pop down to the local RadioShack
Our rat shack here anyway doesn't carry that. Home Depot oddly enough is the best place in town in these parts for networking hardware (as in crimpers, ends, cable, testers, not for routers)
and the boss's son won't pitch a fit? Part of his problem is his solution has to keep the kid happy. OR has to make him unhappy in a way that can't be traced back to YOU.
but maybe he could tell the ethernet port to kick it down to 100bt and claim ignorance of why his file io was now dog slow. if they're tech stupid enough not to recognize the impact issue, I doubt they can find the actual cause of such a slowdown. Then step in and be the jesus savior that comes up with a solution that speeds up tommyboy's indesign by setting up a dedicated fileserver like it's supposed to be. slowly migrate everyone in the office to use it instead of local storage, simplify backups, and everyone wins. (and you have tommyboy to thank!)
I think you could make a very good argument for there being more money to be made on the average for a smart but lazy person in being a criminal rather than being honest.
Know what's more fun? I know two people that own a crimping tool and are color blind. lol... "Does this look ok to you?". *shakes head* "cuss* *cuss* *snip*. *grumble* *grumble*
And the other tech here is also color blind. There sure is a lot of that going around...
Perhaps. But I have yet to work for a place that stocks both kinds of cables and ends.
I doubt the flex properties of stranded has much of a net benefit for use in a patch panel... the RJ45 ends are going to wear out long before solid cable. And I've never seen solid get kinked in a patch panel. (contrary to seeing numerous examples of a long run getting kinked)
The other thing I was wondering about is the use of stranded or non stranded cat5, and the associated ends you need to use. Last major crimping I had to do, I was provided with solid core cat5 and ends for stranded. (with spades in the ends) You can imagine how that goes, makes for incredibly unreliable crimps trying to use stranded ends on a solid cable. (I don't expect vice-versa to be much better)
Have they settled on a standard yet? Solid I hope. It's been a few yrs for me.
Saves the worry, AND saves the fingers. Mine start cramping at about the 25th end when I'm in a hurry.
I can't believe that they seriously planned to crimp things by hand. I can understand for the occasional single long haul runs, but they made it sound like they were doing many dozens of crimps, and that's just plain silly. The money you save in not paying for molded cables you lose in time and hassle created by bad crimps.
Did you catch the other hilarious minor detail? they only had one crimping tool! That's how to turn fail into epic fail. And they PLANNED it this way... wow.
is that most of them are stupid. There are a few smart ones out there, and they're the ones that are honestly dangerous. But the vast majority of them make themselves really easy to catch.
If you're stupid, being a criminal is, well, a stupid idea. OTOH, if you're smart, there's a lot of money to be made. But then they're probably too stupid to realize they're stupid, and therein lies their problem.
I suppose she could have taken a picture of the teen and gone to the local high schools, see if they knew her, and see if the schools were willing to contact the teen's parents.
And that's an escalation of ignorance. The school has no more right to get involved with the behavior of a citizen off grounds than the police do. You just don't get this whole "freedom of speech" thing do you? Just because one man's efforts to stop free speech fail, does not mean it's time to go looking for someone else that can try to stomp it.
It's not the police officer's business about how someone expresses their freedom of speech. It's not the school's business about how someone expresses their freedom of speech. And it's not yours either. You sound like the teacher's prize tattle tale in school. Stay out of other people's business.
Seriously. There's no point to expecting or attempting to educate, bribe, trick, or otherwise coerce users into remembering much less reading error messages. Save everything to a log file. Make it a running log file, not a "last error" log file, so when you do remote in after they've determined it's finally time to call you, you can see all the problems they've had recently and can fix their current issue, as well as all the other little problems they've been having and have failed to mention to you.
If your circumstances support it, have the errors automatically emailed to you, with as much relevant information as possible.
I like the "puppy error" idea though... sometimes you get a user that's not technical but is actually willing to be a part of the solution instead of wallowing in the problem, and you may be able to teach them a few tricks (haha) based on memorable icons. Like "when you see a red stop sign, you need to press the switch on the power strip and then press it again", or "the atomic cloud means you need to call me right away" or "when you see the briefcase you need to call your manager to come take a look" etc.
Every time I see that in this thread, my eyes substitute "Clue Bat" and it totally changes meaning of the post while still making some degree of sense, making it hard to filter out.
The base problem here is going overlooked. There isn't one kind of edit they're trying to combat, there's several. And each requires a different approach because they are incompatible.
1- Spam (monte pithon kind) : ok that's easy for the bots to get rid of. even very loose definitions are easy to code with a good catch/FP rate.
2- Armchair Quarterback : good luck here. It's very easy for someone to change a fact by altering a word, a name, or a date, and probably the most reliable method to identify these is going by a reputation model, either a bit like slashdot does, or by comparing number of edits that acct has made that have not been reverted. These are edits that introduce mistakes by virtue of a sincere person trying to make a "good edit" but polluting the wiki as a result. of their poor memory or misunderstanding of the subject.
3- Malicious : these are deliberate variations of (2) above, and are no easier for a bot to spot. The only difference a bot has in comparing them is that these are much more likely to occur on high profile targets (political or charged issue pages, the ones wiki protects from editing by random ppl as it is) whereas (2) will tend to occur on topics with a more obscure nature or on pages where you are fleshing out very picky details like a football player's stats back in the 90's. Syntactic scanning for specific grammatical changes (like changing the assertion by adding a "not") would help here because those are the easiest malicious edits to make that would survive a cursory glance.
Bots only really have a chance dealing with (1) effectively. The best they can do for (2) and (3) is to simply have a high FP rate and cause real humans to have to take a look at them. IMHO a bot that identifies a probable 2/3 should NOT revert it, but instead should flag it for specific attention by a real editor. This will help take some of the load off the editors that normally task themselves with looking at any edits, rather than just the suspicious ones.
This shows an interesting sliding window of sorts as to where the cutoff between allowed and not-allowed tools come into mathematics.
Day used to be when we had to look up values in a Log table and be able to find roots by hand etc. Using a calculator for that back then would clearly have been cheating. Nowadays that's exactly why we have the calculators on a test, so we're not bogged down doing grindy math and can get to the task of computing derivatives and solving for x, and that has become the banned feature.
I suppose ten years from now we'll have moved on and be working on more advanced mathematics, having left all of algebra to our calculators on the test...
WHY do they do that? I could see if they had either some expensive dev tool you had to use to make your own powerful apps, or if they were selling a much more expensive calculator that had all the programming options unlocked, but in this case I don't see any profit in it for TI to not let people program them?
If my 15 yr old wants some spending cash you bet they can get their butt out on a paper route or babysitting or neighborhood yard work. I have no problem with "child labor" as a concept, it's a great idea on multiple fronts, teaching responsibility, the value of money, the benefits of being employed, etc.
The problem is it's so incredibly easy for big business to abuse, that it has to be outlawed for the most part. The idea is good, the practice is bad. Things like paper routes and babysitting tend to be self-limiting (due to the narrow window of time per day you can actually do them) so they're not really abusable. Manufacturing plants that can run 24/7 naturally are where the problems crop up.
And why is the vendor/shop innocent? They choose to disallow returns.
The vendors disallow returns because they can't get a dime back from the manufacturer, which also does not allow returns. (from the vendor) So they would have to eat the return cost and lose money. It's not their product that's defective, why should you hold them monetarily responsible? It's not like they can buy from anywhere else, they have no choice, if you want it in stock that's their one and only option.
They choose to stock defective merchandise. They are part of the problem.
Then your only option becomes buying directly from the manufacturer. I suppose that's fine if you don't mind all your local shops closing up and buying online, with the costs and delays of shipping that you don't get from the local vendors. And you think you're going to be able to return it to the manufacturer anyway? You haven't helped the situation in the slightest, other than costing yourself more money, delaying your purchase, and closing a local business. Congratulations!
why the FUCK do people whine about having to put the disc in the drive?
1. it's unnecessary 2. it lowers battery life 3. it makes the whole computer vibrate while you're playing 4. it lowers the life of the drive (slot load drives aren't too hearty) 5. it heats up the computer, specifically the keyboard and palmrests where your hands are during the game, VERY uncomfortable 6. even after you've installed the software, if you lose the disc you're screwed. (just try to get a replacement) 7. this scheme also requires the disc be copy protected, so you can't easily back it up 8. the audible hum of the optical drive going while gaming is distracting to play
My personal peeves are #5 and to a lesser extent #3. But you shouldn't have to read past point #1 to be able to say knock it off
(before I got the nocdk for UT, I had to place a small fan blowing on my keyboard because my hands were starting to sweat from the heat)
Slashdot Mirror
and lets you resume from that spot on whichever platform you happen to pick
My take was a little different. "oh, so they finally got it to work the way it's expected to work? Congrats.
1) use the same save game format
2) use the same controller layout
3) be network gaming compatible
is this soooo much to ask?
so I don't know squat about the demodulation.
I'm the other way around, I know radio but nothing about space. For me, with signals like FM, usually if you can hear the carrier you can lock onto it and decode the modulation. That's what phase-locked-loops and tuned circuits are for. I've dealt with many cases of extremely noisy and low signal FM and still been able to get some modulation out of it when I couldn't even hear the carrier on sideband. I'm just very surprised they couldn't get any data out of such a strong carrier.
Sounds like a dead carrier, with the expected doppler shifts. The carrier is certainly strong enough to get data off from it if there were any. Probably just his bad luck that it wasn't actually uplinking any data during his short window of opportunity to record it.
I'd imagine a lot of that window was simply reliant on getting the aim for the antenna right and holding it on target. He was using a star tracker I assume?
it's not newegg's fault, but it IS their responsibility. In other words they probably got shafted themselves, but are going to have to make good to their customers. Then it's up to them to track down who cheated them and deal with them directly. And that's really how it's supposed to work. Since the customer has no control over someone defrauding newegg, they should not be made to bear any of the burdens from when it happens.
it's probable you would have gotten just as much trouble with the Levitons. And you can't just throw a rug over that like you usually can with a cable, the couplers are a major weak spot. "multiple failure points" and all that too. And then you have antisocials unplugging things. Just the time and duct tape you spend trying to shore up the Levitons will break you even on cost while still dropping your reliability.
Getting a pisspile of 250's would have been a very good idea. Don't buy from anything anywhere near retail, the markup on cables is absolutely outrageous. (350% at the minimum) Once you find a reasonable source for cables, any (pre-molded) solution besides having a big box full of 250's becomes more expensive.
Technically, the most cost effective way to go is buy bulk cat, a good cable tester, (volunteers,) and precut your cables yourself. Get several boxes of 2gal ziplocs and precut cables in 50, 100, 150, 200, 300 ft lengths. (one cable per bag in case you were asking) Mark the bags for length with a marker on masking tape. Get your cable arsenal precut and pretested. Have one or two absurdly long cables (500) because sometimes they come in really handy. Ideally you should never need to crimp a cable once onsite. Anything 10ft or less is always a waste to DIY, for those go premolded only. Besides, they're the more likely to get abused anyway, particularly the 6/10ft'ers, so you really don't want a hand-crimp on them.
mac the ripper is still available and updated. it copies off the disc to a video_ts folder with the encryption and noops removed. (and region coding if necessary)
Since the transcoding process takes awhile, I usually MTR all the discs in a box at once to hard drive, and queue them all up in handbrake. Let that run 2-3 days on its own with out having to feed it a disc every hour or so and it's done. (requires a fair chunk of free HD space for all those video_ts folders)
why didn't they just pop down to the local RadioShack
Our rat shack here anyway doesn't carry that. Home Depot oddly enough is the best place in town in these parts for networking hardware (as in crimpers, ends, cable, testers, not for routers)
and the boss's son won't pitch a fit? Part of his problem is his solution has to keep the kid happy. OR has to make him unhappy in a way that can't be traced back to YOU.
but maybe he could tell the ethernet port to kick it down to 100bt and claim ignorance of why his file io was now dog slow. if they're tech stupid enough not to recognize the impact issue, I doubt they can find the actual cause of such a slowdown. Then step in and be the jesus savior that comes up with a solution that speeds up tommyboy's indesign by setting up a dedicated fileserver like it's supposed to be. slowly migrate everyone in the office to use it instead of local storage, simplify backups, and everyone wins. (and you have tommyboy to thank!)
I think you could make a very good argument for there being more money to be made on the average for a smart but lazy person in being a criminal rather than being honest.
I don't own a crimping tool on principal.
Know what's more fun? I know two people that own a crimping tool and are color blind. lol... "Does this look ok to you?". *shakes head* "cuss* *cuss* *snip*. *grumble* *grumble*
And the other tech here is also color blind. There sure is a lot of that going around...
As it's always been.
Perhaps. But I have yet to work for a place that stocks both kinds of cables and ends.
I doubt the flex properties of stranded has much of a net benefit for use in a patch panel... the RJ45 ends are going to wear out long before solid cable. And I've never seen solid get kinked in a patch panel. (contrary to seeing numerous examples of a long run getting kinked)
The other thing I was wondering about is the use of stranded or non stranded cat5, and the associated ends you need to use. Last major crimping I had to do, I was provided with solid core cat5 and ends for stranded. (with spades in the ends) You can imagine how that goes, makes for incredibly unreliable crimps trying to use stranded ends on a solid cable. (I don't expect vice-versa to be much better)
Have they settled on a standard yet? Solid I hope. It's been a few yrs for me.
Saves the worry, AND saves the fingers. Mine start cramping at about the 25th end when I'm in a hurry.
I can't believe that they seriously planned to crimp things by hand. I can understand for the occasional single long haul runs, but they made it sound like they were doing many dozens of crimps, and that's just plain silly. The money you save in not paying for molded cables you lose in time and hassle created by bad crimps.
Did you catch the other hilarious minor detail? they only had one crimping tool! That's how to turn fail into epic fail. And they PLANNED it this way... wow.
is that most of them are stupid. There are a few smart ones out there, and they're the ones that are honestly dangerous. But the vast majority of them make themselves really easy to catch.
If you're stupid, being a criminal is, well, a stupid idea. OTOH, if you're smart, there's a lot of money to be made. But then they're probably too stupid to realize they're stupid, and therein lies their problem.
I will get out of military prison before christmas...
Everytime I hear about these I can't help but think of Moya's DRD's...
I suppose she could have taken a picture of the teen and gone to the local high schools, see if they knew her, and see if the schools were willing to contact the teen's parents.
And that's an escalation of ignorance. The school has no more right to get involved with the behavior of a citizen off grounds than the police do. You just don't get this whole "freedom of speech" thing do you? Just because one man's efforts to stop free speech fail, does not mean it's time to go looking for someone else that can try to stomp it.
It's not the police officer's business about how someone expresses their freedom of speech. It's not the school's business about how someone expresses their freedom of speech. And it's not yours either. You sound like the teacher's prize tattle tale in school. Stay out of other people's business.
Seriously. There's no point to expecting or attempting to educate, bribe, trick, or otherwise coerce users into remembering much less reading error messages. Save everything to a log file. Make it a running log file, not a "last error" log file, so when you do remote in after they've determined it's finally time to call you, you can see all the problems they've had recently and can fix their current issue, as well as all the other little problems they've been having and have failed to mention to you.
If your circumstances support it, have the errors automatically emailed to you, with as much relevant information as possible.
I like the "puppy error" idea though... sometimes you get a user that's not technical but is actually willing to be a part of the solution instead of wallowing in the problem, and you may be able to teach them a few tricks (haha) based on memorable icons. Like "when you see a red stop sign, you need to press the switch on the power strip and then press it again", or "the atomic cloud means you need to call me right away" or "when you see the briefcase you need to call your manager to come take a look" etc.
A Clue Bot, eh?
Every time I see that in this thread, my eyes substitute "Clue Bat" and it totally changes meaning of the post while still making some degree of sense, making it hard to filter out.
The base problem here is going overlooked. There isn't one kind of edit they're trying to combat, there's several. And each requires a different approach because they are incompatible.
1- Spam (monte pithon kind) : ok that's easy for the bots to get rid of. even very loose definitions are easy to code with a good catch/FP rate.
2- Armchair Quarterback : good luck here. It's very easy for someone to change a fact by altering a word, a name, or a date, and probably the most reliable method to identify these is going by a reputation model, either a bit like slashdot does, or by comparing number of edits that acct has made that have not been reverted. These are edits that introduce mistakes by virtue of a sincere person trying to make a "good edit" but polluting the wiki as a result. of their poor memory or misunderstanding of the subject.
3- Malicious : these are deliberate variations of (2) above, and are no easier for a bot to spot. The only difference a bot has in comparing them is that these are much more likely to occur on high profile targets (political or charged issue pages, the ones wiki protects from editing by random ppl as it is) whereas (2) will tend to occur on topics with a more obscure nature or on pages where you are fleshing out very picky details like a football player's stats back in the 90's. Syntactic scanning for specific grammatical changes (like changing the assertion by adding a "not") would help here because those are the easiest malicious edits to make that would survive a cursory glance.
Bots only really have a chance dealing with (1) effectively. The best they can do for (2) and (3) is to simply have a high FP rate and cause real humans to have to take a look at them. IMHO a bot that identifies a probable 2/3 should NOT revert it, but instead should flag it for specific attention by a real editor. This will help take some of the load off the editors that normally task themselves with looking at any edits, rather than just the suspicious ones.
This shows an interesting sliding window of sorts as to where the cutoff between allowed and not-allowed tools come into mathematics.
Day used to be when we had to look up values in a Log table and be able to find roots by hand etc. Using a calculator for that back then would clearly have been cheating. Nowadays that's exactly why we have the calculators on a test, so we're not bogged down doing grindy math and can get to the task of computing derivatives and solving for x, and that has become the banned feature.
I suppose ten years from now we'll have moved on and be working on more advanced mathematics, having left all of algebra to our calculators on the test...
WHY do they do that? I could see if they had either some expensive dev tool you had to use to make your own powerful apps, or if they were selling a much more expensive calculator that had all the programming options unlocked, but in this case I don't see any profit in it for TI to not let people program them?
If my 15 yr old wants some spending cash you bet they can get their butt out on a paper route or babysitting or neighborhood yard work. I have no problem with "child labor" as a concept, it's a great idea on multiple fronts, teaching responsibility, the value of money, the benefits of being employed, etc.
The problem is it's so incredibly easy for big business to abuse, that it has to be outlawed for the most part. The idea is good, the practice is bad. Things like paper routes and babysitting tend to be self-limiting (due to the narrow window of time per day you can actually do them) so they're not really abusable. Manufacturing plants that can run 24/7 naturally are where the problems crop up.
And why is the vendor/shop innocent? They choose to disallow returns.
The vendors disallow returns because they can't get a dime back from the manufacturer, which also does not allow returns. (from the vendor) So they would have to eat the return cost and lose money. It's not their product that's defective, why should you hold them monetarily responsible? It's not like they can buy from anywhere else, they have no choice, if you want it in stock that's their one and only option.
They choose to stock defective merchandise. They are part of the problem.
Then your only option becomes buying directly from the manufacturer. I suppose that's fine if you don't mind all your local shops closing up and buying online, with the costs and delays of shipping that you don't get from the local vendors. And you think you're going to be able to return it to the manufacturer anyway? You haven't helped the situation in the slightest, other than costing yourself more money, delaying your purchase, and closing a local business. Congratulations!
sorry almost forgot a big one,
9. the disc is at much greater risk of damage because you are constantly loading/unloading it (see pts 6 and 7)
why the FUCK do people whine about having to put the disc in the drive?
1. it's unnecessary
2. it lowers battery life
3. it makes the whole computer vibrate while you're playing
4. it lowers the life of the drive (slot load drives aren't too hearty)
5. it heats up the computer, specifically the keyboard and palmrests where your hands are during the game, VERY uncomfortable
6. even after you've installed the software, if you lose the disc you're screwed. (just try to get a replacement)
7. this scheme also requires the disc be copy protected, so you can't easily back it up
8. the audible hum of the optical drive going while gaming is distracting to play
My personal peeves are #5 and to a lesser extent #3. But you shouldn't have to read past point #1 to be able to say knock it off
(before I got the nocdk for UT, I had to place a small fan blowing on my keyboard because my hands were starting to sweat from the heat)