Trust me. I have relatives who use "free" services. They're pissed off by spam. Doubly so if they have to change their e-mails because of it. Not probably to the same extent I am, because I remember the days before spam, and I have several e-mail addresses I've used for years.
However, it's probably more frustrating for them, because they can't do much other than change e-mails. I at least have the option of filtering at my mailserver in conjunction with stuff like SpamAssassin (and that filter list is getting longer, and longer...)
Government noodling will never deliver a vehicle that will be mass produced, and without mass production, costs will NOT drop. The military already knows this, which is why a lot of new tech is assembled from off the shelf stuff. The only off the shelf stuff for launching humans into space is the Russian equipment - and why we aren't using their capabilities more is way beyond me.
Declare proceeds from space exploration and space exploitation free from taxes for 20 years (think land grants during the Westward expansion of the United States.) Everyone will throw money into space, some as a tax dodge, some as legit ventures now that they can drum up investment (a permanent presence in space needs infrastructure, which means many subcontractors and entrepreneurs.) Some of it might come back (orbital manufacturing, refining, and energy production), and with interest to boot.
The key thing is all this investment will drive a new economic boom, as people build stuff, take home paychecks, and spend their money. Eventually, these investments will pay off, or get written down, and EVERYONE benefits. At least this way, we don't need to blow up the items we're building (ie, million-dollar cruise missiles) in order to employ people. And, because it isn't a government program, with government pork, we don't have to spend tax money to do it - and decisions on where and how money is spent can be made on an economic, not a political basis.
It's weird. My list of latest comments shows my posts at a +1, but now my comments in context show a +2. And great, now that I've changed the Karma bonus to +2, my posts are showing as a +3. What's with all this relativism? I'm confused!!!
So if you don't have good karma, you start out at a 1 or a zero?!? Is there a difference between good karma and excellent karma, or are they the same now? Are new users starting out with a 0 score?
Not only that, but if you read Jim's rant, his main problem with the letter was that they could have just asked him nicely via e-mail. Instead they sent him a threat instead - this after helping support the PCI-SIG and the PCI standard for 5 years. I'd be pissed too.
Besides, I get the feeling that if they got an "official" database setup, it wouldn't be long before it was restricted to "registered members" only. After all it is a form of documentation, and how do these so-called standards boards get the funding to push their "standard"? Yeah, they charge up the wazoo for "official" specifications (ever try and get your hands on an official copy of the compactflash specs? NOT cheap...)
Also, I think it's probably the stupidest idea on earth to encourage millions of people to plug in these giant electricity suckers into an already-strained power grid that has rolling blackouts and numerous other problems.
While California does have a problem with meeting future capacities, there's a good case to be made that the runaway prices for electricity and rolling blackouts were the result of artificial scarcity due to manipulation in the power trading markets. Besides, peak times use are during the day - after a long day of driving, your car would be charging during the night, when more capacity would be available.
The biggest hurdle for an electric car is range - you don't want an electric car as your only vehicle if you want to run up to Big Bear for weekends during the winter. It's designed for city use, and works perfectly in that environment. It can be stretched into a long distance car, but you'll have to accomodate the charging times needed once you go beyond normal crusing ranges.
Of course, if you do need to say, go to Vegas, you can always rent a gas car... or you can get a hybrid. Too bad they won't let you upgrade the power packs, so you can get a little extra electrical power stored away - that way your car would behave more like an electric for more short distance drives before kicking the gas engine into gear. Remember, electric cars do nothing to solve traffic problems, they just reduce the amount of pollution and wasted fuel when sitting IN traffic.
Nice to see you bought GM's explanation. However, while technically true, there's one problem with it - EV-1s didn't sell well because, as far as I know, no EV-1 was ever sold, only leased. And there was a very, very, very long waiting list to get a lease, despite the hefty price tag (something on the order of a thousand or so per month.)
The cars were leased with charging stations which were still considered GM property. Also, there were no aftermarket replacement parts
Magnachargers (the inductive paddle charger) was a standard forced onto the industry by GM, who used the EV-1 as a club to bludgeon everyone into playing fair with them. Then they took their ball and went home, leaving many public access charging stations empty, which were paid for by state and local governments, and are definitely not GM property. Plus, you can buy magnachargers on the market, so even if GM took theirs back, you can get one from a 3rd party manufacturer.
BTW, if the EV-1s had been sold, wouldn't you think some enterprising soul would decide to support them? You get people building mods and add-ons for the tiniest of markets for both cars and computers now, I'd be surprised if someone didn't supply parts for the very wealthy people who drove those things.
B. GM lost money on it. Even with all the gov't grants and tax breaks, they still lost money.
Not surprising given the EV-1 was a prototype writ large. Of course, GM probably included the cost of the ready-to-install NiCad packs that were supposed to go into the rev. 2 EV-1s, a plan that was scrapped when the EV-1s themselves were recalled and scrapped. How's that for a return on your investment?
And most importantly, GM had millions, probably hundred of millions of dollars of development in these cars. That's why you had to lease one from GM, they didn't want Ford or Honda to buy one, steal all their ideas
The same technology (AC inverter drive) could have been purchased from AC Propulsion, for about $40k. I think even the parts and the drivetrains were identical to the EV1s at the time. No need to buy one from GM.
To date, the only major commercial car manufacturer to sell a pure electric car (and by car, I don't mean a souped up golf cart) is Toyota, with the RAV4 EV, which costs $40+k AFTER rebates, is sold ONLY in California (if there are any left), and requires a very expensive battery replacement after 5 years (nicad)...
Basically, don't trust GM, their concept cars are nothing more than industry vaporware, designed to make people think that they're ahead of the curve, instead of reacting to companies like Honda and Toyota, which actually have hybrids on the stree right now. Hopefully by this time next year, Ford will have joined that club. I don't see GM with a hybrid (which will be a very lame attempt at boosting gas milage with a slightly oversized starter motor) for at least another year or two, and no REAL hybrids for probably another 4 or 5.
I once scrounged an old Mac they had tossed into a Dumpster. The person in charge of the machine had disassembled the hard drive, bent the platters, scratched the platters, and broken the heads off. When powered, the drive platters would spin, jam on the arms (platters were bent WAY out of shape), spin, jam, etc. Good thing I had a spare SCSI drive, or else the machine would have been useless...
I'm surprised that the person hadn't decided to take a torch to the assembly and just sell it off to a metals dealer as slag...
WUGA (Athens, Georgia) - live.wuga.org/hi [prairie home companion, thistle and shamrock]
KCSN (Cal State Northridge, Los Angeles) - s072n114.csun.edu:8002 [the swingin years with chuck cecil]
And one in Alaska (64k mono, 44.1)
KCSM (california) - hifi.kcsm.org:8002 [riverwalk, live from the landing]
I've been assembling the Saturday schedule I used to be able to find on my local station, KUSC (which is now all classical all the time:P), with the exception of My Music/My Word. It's kind of a thrill when you donate and have them announce your donation from across the country (donations are a good way of convincing them to upgrade and maintain their high quality streaming mp3 connection.) You can find more stations and programs by going to:
which maintains a listing of public radio stations (mp3, real, winmedia, ogg, qt, etc.) across the world.
I really wish more stations would stream higher quality mp3s, although KCSM does offer a 128k ogg stream. Really, if you want to get pledge money, you need to provide a high quality stream in addition to your low-quality streams. You also need to know what you're doing - streaming a 64k 22khz stereo connection is a waste of bandwidth, use that extra 32k channel and stream a much better sounding 64k mono 22khz!
The above line creates an unattached screen running streamripper that runs for 110 minutes that starts up every week on Sunday just before 6pm (notice the fudge time, 3 min before, 7 min after). Why run it in screen? Well, it lets you call streamripper from a user's crontab file (crontab -e). Also, streamripper does not exit cleanly under linux (known problem under 1.32) and using screen gives you a way to reattach, check the status, and kill the process with a few well placed ctrl-cs.
A nice mod would be to have a followup script to change the name of the saved file (which ends up in the "incomplete" directory, when recording live streams.) Either that, or rewrite streamripper into more of a timeshifting program for live streams (user-specified name for the stream, turn off silence detection routines, turn off overwrite.) Streamshifter anybody?
No kidding. Here in California, Davis' spin doctors are downplaying the negative impact that his proposed taxes (including a internet sales tax) will have on the tax base. Who the hell is he kidding? What tax base? Who the hell wants to hang around and have their kids go to shitty schools, use poor infrastructure, and still pay a premium tax on everything?
If the politicians up in Sacramento are so concerned about the budget and the common man, why don't they voluntarily return half of their salaries for the year, and forgo staff perks? Spare me the bullshit about needing money to attract top talent, since it seems to attract the wrong kind of talent. If I were Davis, I would have announced that I was voluntarily forgoing my paycheck for the year, and urged that other state employees do the same. Obviously you wouldn't do that if you were a *real* employee, but plenty of politicos would have been pressured into focusing on fixing the problem.
What he has instead is a recipe for disaster. It's like watching the HP/Compaq merger all over again - a slow motion train wreck...
In a rational world, management would own up to their mistakes (whoops, Alpha IS better than Intel) and work to make things right. When I was in a business simulations class (we were grouped into teams, and our "yearly" decisions as to the mix of funds devoted to r&d, marketing, production amounts, pricing, etc. for each of our respective companies, were fed into a sim every week), my team made the mistake of trying to eliminate an existing product line in favor of a more profitable "premium" product.
While it was more profitable, the market was actually bigger in the more mature market - something that none of the teams had taken into account. However, because our team invested heavily into reducing production costs (retooling, R&D into improving production efficiency and unit quality, strategic partnership with suppliers) we were able to shift some of our capacity back into the "classic" product, price it lower than the competition, and royally kick ass in the simulated market in the following year.
What does this have to do with HP? Well, if you have a superior product, one that will dominate for a pretty good while, and you have the sole source for it, WTF would you want to sell an inferior, lower-margin commodity product in direct competition with a whole boatload of competitors? I mean, isn't that what is killing SGI? The fact that they're trying to compete in the commodity market, but without a superior selling point (either tech, or price), they're getting hammered.
Florina was death to HP. I'm going to miss their R&D and their printer line when they go under, and only can hope that HP's board members never sit on any other company's boards in the future. Well, any company except maybe Microsoft...
A Prairie Home Companion still does this (though it's more of a tongue-in-cheek thing) for products such as Power Milk Biscuits, and Raspberry Rhubarb Pie. Come to think of it though, isn't the Superbowl now just nothing but entertainment built around commercials?
I'm still waiting for someone to come up with a workable exo-skeleton for ground troops. Given all the crap infantry soldiers have to cart into the field these days, some way of augmenting their load capability would go a long way to extending operational range.
Remember, with 16 ingredients the maximum possible combinations is "only" 256 different kinds of drinks. In the real world, though, it's inevitable that certain ingredients won't go together very well, so the number of possible combinations comes down, and having 188 possible combinations is a fairly reasonable number.
Not true, given that different drinks can be mixed with the same ingredients, but in different proportions. Also, several of the "ingredients" are up for possible replacement (according to the website), so the available drinks could change. Lastly, they do mention that the machine has space for many more recipies, implying that 188 is merely a starting number of drink recipies, not an upper bound imposed by available ingredients.
My question is, why only have 1.7 liters of each beverage available? Wouldn't you run out of drinks rather quickly in a party situation?
There are plenty of idiot lawyers too, with no understanding of the industries they're supposed to be supporting. There are fewer of them in the dealmaking portion (dealmaking, not litigation) of the entertainment industry, for the simple fact that morons who don't know how the business is run can hold up projects over trivial details that NOBODY worries about in the real world. These people do not get work again.
Unfortunately, this isn't true in many other areas, where a legal staff works to expoloit ever more exotic interpretations of the law, and strategies to counter said interpretations.
Even worse are the ambulance-chasers, both literal and figurative, like those lawyers in Germany who decided to sue on Adobe's behalf (without asking Adobe) to kill KIllustrator. People like this should be instantly, and PERMANENTLY disbarred from every jurisdiction in the world, in addition to being labled as pariahs just as despicable as the accountants/tax lawyers behind the Enron and Worldcom book-cooking.
I've studied bits and pieces of contract and IP law, in order to protect myself (and yes, I do occasionally consult with someone who actually has a J.D.) Knowing a little bit of law is good - having to learn the intricacies in order to someday defend against a frivolous lawsuit is ridiculous. How long before people have to become lawyers just to defend themselves against these roving bands of legal malcontents?
There have been people calling for the government to protect us from drugs, violence, porn, and the internet. Where are the people calling for the government to protect us from the goddamn lawyers!?!?
Another reference that uses replication technology is "Psychohistorical Crisis", which builds on Asimov's psychohistory from the Foundation series. It takes place several centuries after the formation of the Second Empire, and everybody trades patterns for items, instead of items themselves. No point in transporting the mass of an object, if you can just recreate the object (clothes, tools, books, etc) on demand when you get to your destination. The tech is nanoassembler-based (I think) rather than the Star Trek energy-to-matter replicator.
Hmmm. Anyone want to trade plans for a railgun?
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How long before collections of open-source hardware starts circulating? Anyone want to design a reference railgun?:)
12-bit is a definite improvement over 8-bit, but is that 12-bit linear or 12-bit logarithmic? Keep in mind that for cinema work, they can get up to 14-bit linear, so there's still room for improvement if pro still cameras are capturing/storing 12-bit linear. (I know film and digital film, but I don't know whit about still photography.)
For people who are not photographers/cinematographers, the difference between linear and logrithmic refers to the light response curve. For film, it's a sort of an s-shape, where the middle is linear, and you have a toe and shoulder where the linearity breaks down and tapers off. This is how you get 7 stops of exposure with film - if you overexpose, you can still recover some of the info from the shoulder, if you underexpose, you can still get some from the toe. It's a sort of compression (squishing of the response curve) at the extremes. A perfectly linear response wouldn't compress the extreme brights and the extreme darks, and if the exposure range wasn't wide enough, you'd lose them.
To use a crude example, linear would be digitizing a sound file and getting stuff cut off when your levels are too high (and getting that harsh distortion as a result.) That's overexposure with a linear response for photography (this is just an analogy, remember that.) Logarithmic would be recording an overly loud input into an analog magnetic tape - you you'd still lose info, but it would be much more graceful, rather than so abrupt.
Anyone know if it is possible to call a Vonage box without going through Vonage? I don't mean call on a regular telephone and connect to the Vonage box, I mean call from a generic non-Vonage MTA to a Vonage-labled MTA. I'm envisoning a system where one person gets a Vonage MTA, and you put wi-fi extensions off of it (like a party line) and share that TCP/IP to regular POTS tunnel with an entire neighborhood (in the same way you would share broadband access.) People within the neighborhood would call each other for free, without each having to pay to subscribe to Vonage. If the MTA supported it, you might even be able to program one number, but have it forward to different extensions - a way of getting business service, without having to pay business prices.
It looks like the Vonage boxes have the direct dial number tied to the box. It's like a mobile phone in that respect, except the boxes hook onto a public infrastructure (TCP/IP), which means you can pay $40 to Vonage to have a phone number in the 310 area code (Los Angeles), even though you might physically be in some place like China (assuming you have broadband there.)
You could put together a DIY call center on the cheap - get a business number, have it set to forward to a set of 310 numbers, get a dozen Vonage boxes, put them in some place where labor and broadband are cheap (someplace in midwest Canada?), and there ya go! Local customer calls 310 number, local teleco forwards to the Vonage number, Vonage rings the box, which is NOT in LA, and there ya go!
Hmmm, even cooler. Take the box with you on vacation - as long as you can get TCP/IP, you won't have to mess with phone or message forwarding. Damn, this is one way to have a portable number, even if the local telco won't let you have one (even though by state law they're supposed to!!!)
My solar setup better last more than 15 years! I calculated even with a 50% rebate, it would take 30 years to reach payback, at $.07 per watt. (That's including panels, 4kw inverter, cables, permit, for a 1 kw system. If I add more panels, the overall cost per watt drops, up to 4kw, which is my inverter limit.)
Why do I have an inverter? To use utility intertie, so I don't have to maintain and replace a battery storage system - just feed the excess power to the utility during the day, and draw down on my credit during the night. Not everybody is willing to go DC (although I did think about it, for efficiency reasons.)
When it was clinton/gore presidency, everything was dumped into technology, the GM EV1 is a classic example of the innovations that occured under a goverment that supported research that would cut out our dependance on foriegn (read Iraq) oil.
Innovation my ass. The work the GM researchers did was excellent, and the GM EV1 v2 would have been even better. However, it doesn't change the fact that the EV1 program was all PR fluff, that was quickly flushed down the toilet once the cars started coming off lease (and this was before GWB was elected.) No EV1 was ever sold to my knowledge - because they were only leased, never sold. Now, how much innovation can you have when you take back the product that was supposed to be innovative? Toyota has done more for alternative fuels (RAV4 EV, which can be purchased, but only in California, and of course, the Prius) than GM's EV1 ever did.
IIRC Clinton even made it a law that all US automakers would have to have an electric vehicle on the market by 2008, and that these cars would have to be built along strict goverment guidelines.
That's news to me. Perhaps you were thinking about the California ZEV mandate instead?
I'm all for electric (I have a 1KW array I'm going to be putting up during spring break), but don't give credit where credit isn't due. After all, people started buying SUVs under the Clinton administration, and only now, are people turning against them (conservative christians and environmentalists alike now decry the excessive fuel consumption.) SUVs = terrorism is the new message. I never saw the Clinton-Gore people say that, probably because they were just as addicted to the oil/car industry as the Bush people are.
Spammers are already adapting. They're resorting to 1 or 2 sentence spams, pared down the the minimum, a 1 line pitch, a URL, and that's it. Still annoying as hell - actually more annoying, because they've fine tuned them to slip by many filters, by not giving the filters anything to work with.
The next step on my server is whitelisting with a challenge response.
Slashdot Mirror
Trust me. I have relatives who use "free" services. They're pissed off by spam. Doubly so if they have to change their e-mails because of it. Not probably to the same extent I am, because I remember the days before spam, and I have several e-mail addresses I've used for years.
However, it's probably more frustrating for them, because they can't do much other than change e-mails. I at least have the option of filtering at my mailserver in conjunction with stuff like SpamAssassin (and that filter list is getting longer, and longer...)
Government noodling will never deliver a vehicle that will be mass produced, and without mass production, costs will NOT drop. The military already knows this, which is why a lot of new tech is assembled from off the shelf stuff. The only off the shelf stuff for launching humans into space is the Russian equipment - and why we aren't using their capabilities more is way beyond me.
Declare proceeds from space exploration and space exploitation free from taxes for 20 years (think land grants during the Westward expansion of the United States.) Everyone will throw money into space, some as a tax dodge, some as legit ventures now that they can drum up investment (a permanent presence in space needs infrastructure, which means many subcontractors and entrepreneurs.) Some of it might come back (orbital manufacturing, refining, and energy production), and with interest to boot.
The key thing is all this investment will drive a new economic boom, as people build stuff, take home paychecks, and spend their money. Eventually, these investments will pay off, or get written down, and EVERYONE benefits. At least this way, we don't need to blow up the items we're building (ie, million-dollar cruise missiles) in order to employ people. And, because it isn't a government program, with government pork, we don't have to spend tax money to do it - and decisions on where and how money is spent can be made on an economic, not a political basis.
It's weird. My list of latest comments shows my posts at a +1, but now my comments in context show a +2. And great, now that I've changed the Karma bonus to +2, my posts are showing as a +3. What's with all this relativism? I'm confused!!!
So if you don't have good karma, you start out at a 1 or a zero?!? Is there a difference between good karma and excellent karma, or are they the same now? Are new users starting out with a 0 score?
It looks like anyone who had a +2 has been nuked back to a +1. A bug, or an attempt to mess with the status quo?
Not only that, but if you read Jim's rant, his main problem with the letter was that they could have just asked him nicely via e-mail. Instead they sent him a threat instead - this after helping support the PCI-SIG and the PCI standard for 5 years. I'd be pissed too.
Besides, I get the feeling that if they got an "official" database setup, it wouldn't be long before it was restricted to "registered members" only. After all it is a form of documentation, and how do these so-called standards boards get the funding to push their "standard"? Yeah, they charge up the wazoo for "official" specifications (ever try and get your hands on an official copy of the compactflash specs? NOT cheap...)
Also, I think it's probably the stupidest idea on earth to encourage millions of people to plug in these giant electricity suckers into an already-strained power grid that has rolling blackouts and numerous other problems.
While California does have a problem with meeting future capacities, there's a good case to be made that the runaway prices for electricity and rolling blackouts were the result of artificial scarcity due to manipulation in the power trading markets. Besides, peak times use are during the day - after a long day of driving, your car would be charging during the night, when more capacity would be available.
The biggest hurdle for an electric car is range - you don't want an electric car as your only vehicle if you want to run up to Big Bear for weekends during the winter. It's designed for city use, and works perfectly in that environment. It can be stretched into a long distance car, but you'll have to accomodate the charging times needed once you go beyond normal crusing ranges.
Of course, if you do need to say, go to Vegas, you can always rent a gas car... or you can get a hybrid. Too bad they won't let you upgrade the power packs, so you can get a little extra electrical power stored away - that way your car would behave more like an electric for more short distance drives before kicking the gas engine into gear. Remember, electric cars do nothing to solve traffic problems, they just reduce the amount of pollution and wasted fuel when sitting IN traffic.
A. Not that many people were buying them.
Nice to see you bought GM's explanation. However, while technically true, there's one problem with it - EV-1s didn't sell well because, as far as I know, no EV-1 was ever sold, only leased. And there was a very, very, very long waiting list to get a lease, despite the hefty price tag (something on the order of a thousand or so per month.)
The cars were leased with charging stations which were still considered GM property. Also, there were no aftermarket replacement parts
Magnachargers (the inductive paddle charger) was a standard forced onto the industry by GM, who used the EV-1 as a club to bludgeon everyone into playing fair with them. Then they took their ball and went home, leaving many public access charging stations empty, which were paid for by state and local governments, and are definitely not GM property. Plus, you can buy magnachargers on the market, so even if GM took theirs back, you can get one from a 3rd party manufacturer.
BTW, if the EV-1s had been sold, wouldn't you think some enterprising soul would decide to support them? You get people building mods and add-ons for the tiniest of markets for both cars and computers now, I'd be surprised if someone didn't supply parts for the very wealthy people who drove those things.
B. GM lost money on it. Even with all the gov't grants and tax breaks, they still lost money.
Not surprising given the EV-1 was a prototype writ large. Of course, GM probably included the cost of the ready-to-install NiCad packs that were supposed to go into the rev. 2 EV-1s, a plan that was scrapped when the EV-1s themselves were recalled and scrapped. How's that for a return on your investment?
And most importantly, GM had millions, probably hundred of millions of dollars of development in these cars. That's why you had to lease one from GM, they didn't want Ford or Honda to buy one, steal all their ideas
The same technology (AC inverter drive) could have been purchased from AC Propulsion, for about $40k. I think even the parts and the drivetrains were identical to the EV1s at the time. No need to buy one from GM.
To date, the only major commercial car manufacturer to sell a pure electric car (and by car, I don't mean a souped up golf cart) is Toyota, with the RAV4 EV, which costs $40+k AFTER rebates, is sold ONLY in California (if there are any left), and requires a very expensive battery replacement after 5 years (nicad)...
Basically, don't trust GM, their concept cars are nothing more than industry vaporware, designed to make people think that they're ahead of the curve, instead of reacting to companies like Honda and Toyota, which actually have hybrids on the stree right now. Hopefully by this time next year, Ford will have joined that club. I don't see GM with a hybrid (which will be a very lame attempt at boosting gas milage with a slightly oversized starter motor) for at least another year or two, and no REAL hybrids for probably another 4 or 5.
I once scrounged an old Mac they had tossed into a Dumpster. The person in charge of the machine had disassembled the hard drive, bent the platters, scratched the platters, and broken the heads off. When powered, the drive platters would spin, jam on the arms (platters were bent WAY out of shape), spin, jam, etc. Good thing I had a spare SCSI drive, or else the machine would have been useless...
I'm surprised that the person hadn't decided to take a torch to the assembly and just sell it off to a metals dealer as slag...
My preferred stations (128k stereo, 44.1) are:
:P), with the exception of My Music/My Word. It's kind of a thrill when you donate and have them announce your donation from across the country (donations are a good way of convincing them to upgrade and maintain their high quality streaming mp3 connection.) You can find more stations and programs by going to:
WUGA (Athens, Georgia) - live.wuga.org/hi [prairie home companion, thistle and shamrock]
KCSN (Cal State Northridge, Los Angeles) - s072n114.csun.edu:8002 [the swingin years with chuck cecil]
And one in Alaska (64k mono, 44.1)
KCSM (california) - hifi.kcsm.org:8002 [riverwalk, live from the landing]
I've been assembling the Saturday schedule I used to be able to find on my local station, KUSC (which is now all classical all the time
PublicRadioFan.com
which maintains a listing of public radio stations (mp3, real, winmedia, ogg, qt, etc.) across the world.
I really wish more stations would stream higher quality mp3s, although KCSM does offer a 128k ogg stream. Really, if you want to get pledge money, you need to provide a high quality stream in addition to your low-quality streams. You also need to know what you're doing - streaming a 64k 22khz stereo connection is a waste of bandwidth, use that extra 32k channel and stream a much better sounding 64k mono 22khz!
Here's a tip if you want to run streamripper with cron:
/usr/local/bin/streamripper thestationyouwanttorecord:stationsport -d /home/user/streams -l 4200
57 17 * * 0 screen -m -d
The above line creates an unattached screen running streamripper that runs for 110 minutes that starts up every week on Sunday just before 6pm (notice the fudge time, 3 min before, 7 min after). Why run it in screen? Well, it lets you call streamripper from a user's crontab file (crontab -e). Also, streamripper does not exit cleanly under linux (known problem under 1.32) and using screen gives you a way to reattach, check the status, and kill the process with a few well placed ctrl-cs.
A nice mod would be to have a followup script to change the name of the saved file (which ends up in the "incomplete" directory, when recording live streams.) Either that, or rewrite streamripper into more of a timeshifting program for live streams (user-specified name for the stream, turn off silence detection routines, turn off overwrite.) Streamshifter anybody?
No kidding. Here in California, Davis' spin doctors are downplaying the negative impact that his proposed taxes (including a internet sales tax) will have on the tax base. Who the hell is he kidding? What tax base? Who the hell wants to hang around and have their kids go to shitty schools, use poor infrastructure, and still pay a premium tax on everything?
If the politicians up in Sacramento are so concerned about the budget and the common man, why don't they voluntarily return half of their salaries for the year, and forgo staff perks? Spare me the bullshit about needing money to attract top talent, since it seems to attract the wrong kind of talent. If I were Davis, I would have announced that I was voluntarily forgoing my paycheck for the year, and urged that other state employees do the same. Obviously you wouldn't do that if you were a *real* employee, but plenty of politicos would have been pressured into focusing on fixing the problem.
What he has instead is a recipe for disaster. It's like watching the HP/Compaq merger all over again - a slow motion train wreck...
In a rational world, management would own up to their mistakes (whoops, Alpha IS better than Intel) and work to make things right. When I was in a business simulations class (we were grouped into teams, and our "yearly" decisions as to the mix of funds devoted to r&d, marketing, production amounts, pricing, etc. for each of our respective companies, were fed into a sim every week), my team made the mistake of trying to eliminate an existing product line in favor of a more profitable "premium" product.
While it was more profitable, the market was actually bigger in the more mature market - something that none of the teams had taken into account. However, because our team invested heavily into reducing production costs (retooling, R&D into improving production efficiency and unit quality, strategic partnership with suppliers) we were able to shift some of our capacity back into the "classic" product, price it lower than the competition, and royally kick ass in the simulated market in the following year.
What does this have to do with HP? Well, if you have a superior product, one that will dominate for a pretty good while, and you have the sole source for it, WTF would you want to sell an inferior, lower-margin commodity product in direct competition with a whole boatload of competitors? I mean, isn't that what is killing SGI? The fact that they're trying to compete in the commodity market, but without a superior selling point (either tech, or price), they're getting hammered.
Florina was death to HP. I'm going to miss their R&D and their printer line when they go under, and only can hope that HP's board members never sit on any other company's boards in the future. Well, any company except maybe Microsoft...
A Prairie Home Companion still does this (though it's more of a tongue-in-cheek thing) for products such as Power Milk Biscuits, and Raspberry Rhubarb Pie. Come to think of it though, isn't the Superbowl now just nothing but entertainment built around commercials?
I'm still waiting for someone to come up with a workable exo-skeleton for ground troops. Given all the crap infantry soldiers have to cart into the field these days, some way of augmenting their load capability would go a long way to extending operational range.
The 4th book (Hell's Faire) is coming out this May. I'm looking forward to seeing Bun Bun kick Posleen ass!
Remember, with 16 ingredients the maximum possible combinations is "only" 256 different kinds of drinks. In the real world, though, it's inevitable that certain ingredients won't go together very well, so the number of possible combinations comes down, and having 188 possible combinations is a fairly reasonable number.
Not true, given that different drinks can be mixed with the same ingredients, but in different proportions. Also, several of the "ingredients" are up for possible replacement (according to the website), so the available drinks could change. Lastly, they do mention that the machine has space for many more recipies, implying that 188 is merely a starting number of drink recipies, not an upper bound imposed by available ingredients.
My question is, why only have 1.7 liters of each beverage available? Wouldn't you run out of drinks rather quickly in a party situation?
There are plenty of idiot lawyers too, with no understanding of the industries they're supposed to be supporting. There are fewer of them in the dealmaking portion (dealmaking, not litigation) of the entertainment industry, for the simple fact that morons who don't know how the business is run can hold up projects over trivial details that NOBODY worries about in the real world. These people do not get work again.
Unfortunately, this isn't true in many other areas, where a legal staff works to expoloit ever more exotic interpretations of the law, and strategies to counter said interpretations.
Even worse are the ambulance-chasers, both literal and figurative, like those lawyers in Germany who decided to sue on Adobe's behalf (without asking Adobe) to kill KIllustrator. People like this should be instantly, and PERMANENTLY disbarred from every jurisdiction in the world, in addition to being labled as pariahs just as despicable as the accountants/tax lawyers behind the Enron and Worldcom book-cooking.
I've studied bits and pieces of contract and IP law, in order to protect myself (and yes, I do occasionally consult with someone who actually has a J.D.) Knowing a little bit of law is good - having to learn the intricacies in order to someday defend against a frivolous lawsuit is ridiculous. How long before people have to become lawyers just to defend themselves against these roving bands of legal malcontents?
There have been people calling for the government to protect us from drugs, violence, porn, and the internet. Where are the people calling for the government to protect us from the goddamn lawyers!?!?
Another reference that uses replication technology is "Psychohistorical Crisis", which builds on Asimov's psychohistory from the Foundation series. It takes place several centuries after the formation of the Second Empire, and everybody trades patterns for items, instead of items themselves. No point in transporting the mass of an object, if you can just recreate the object (clothes, tools, books, etc) on demand when you get to your destination. The tech is nanoassembler-based (I think) rather than the Star Trek energy-to-matter replicator.
How long before collections of open-source hardware starts circulating? Anyone want to design a reference railgun? :)
12-bit is a definite improvement over 8-bit, but is that 12-bit linear or 12-bit logarithmic? Keep in mind that for cinema work, they can get up to 14-bit linear, so there's still room for improvement if pro still cameras are capturing/storing 12-bit linear. (I know film and digital film, but I don't know whit about still photography.)
For people who are not photographers/cinematographers, the difference between linear and logrithmic refers to the light response curve. For film, it's a sort of an s-shape, where the middle is linear, and you have a toe and shoulder where the linearity breaks down and tapers off. This is how you get 7 stops of exposure with film - if you overexpose, you can still recover some of the info from the shoulder, if you underexpose, you can still get some from the toe. It's a sort of compression (squishing of the response curve) at the extremes. A perfectly linear response wouldn't compress the extreme brights and the extreme darks, and if the exposure range wasn't wide enough, you'd lose them.
To use a crude example, linear would be digitizing a sound file and getting stuff cut off when your levels are too high (and getting that harsh distortion as a result.) That's overexposure with a linear response for photography (this is just an analogy, remember that.) Logarithmic would be recording an overly loud input into an analog magnetic tape - you you'd still lose info, but it would be much more graceful, rather than so abrupt.
Anyone know if it is possible to call a Vonage box without going through Vonage? I don't mean call on a regular telephone and connect to the Vonage box, I mean call from a generic non-Vonage MTA to a Vonage-labled MTA. I'm envisoning a system where one person gets a Vonage MTA, and you put wi-fi extensions off of it (like a party line) and share that TCP/IP to regular POTS tunnel with an entire neighborhood (in the same way you would share broadband access.) People within the neighborhood would call each other for free, without each having to pay to subscribe to Vonage. If the MTA supported it, you might even be able to program one number, but have it forward to different extensions - a way of getting business service, without having to pay business prices.
It looks like the Vonage boxes have the direct dial number tied to the box. It's like a mobile phone in that respect, except the boxes hook onto a public infrastructure (TCP/IP), which means you can pay $40 to Vonage to have a phone number in the 310 area code (Los Angeles), even though you might physically be in some place like China (assuming you have broadband there.)
You could put together a DIY call center on the cheap - get a business number, have it set to forward to a set of 310 numbers, get a dozen Vonage boxes, put them in some place where labor and broadband are cheap (someplace in midwest Canada?), and there ya go! Local customer calls 310 number, local teleco forwards to the Vonage number, Vonage rings the box, which is NOT in LA, and there ya go!
Hmmm, even cooler. Take the box with you on vacation - as long as you can get TCP/IP, you won't have to mess with phone or message forwarding. Damn, this is one way to have a portable number, even if the local telco won't let you have one (even though by state law they're supposed to!!!)
My solar setup better last more than 15 years! I calculated even with a 50% rebate, it would take 30 years to reach payback, at $.07 per watt. (That's including panels, 4kw inverter, cables, permit, for a 1 kw system. If I add more panels, the overall cost per watt drops, up to 4kw, which is my inverter limit.)
Why do I have an inverter? To use utility intertie, so I don't have to maintain and replace a battery storage system - just feed the excess power to the utility during the day, and draw down on my credit during the night. Not everybody is willing to go DC (although I did think about it, for efficiency reasons.)
When it was clinton/gore presidency, everything was dumped into technology, the GM EV1 is a classic example of the innovations that occured under a goverment that supported research that would cut out our dependance on foriegn (read Iraq) oil.
Innovation my ass. The work the GM researchers did was excellent, and the GM EV1 v2 would have been even better. However, it doesn't change the fact that the EV1 program was all PR fluff, that was quickly flushed down the toilet once the cars started coming off lease (and this was before GWB was elected.) No EV1 was ever sold to my knowledge - because they were only leased, never sold. Now, how much innovation can you have when you take back the product that was supposed to be innovative? Toyota has done more for alternative fuels (RAV4 EV, which can be purchased, but only in California, and of course, the Prius) than GM's EV1 ever did.
IIRC Clinton even made it a law that all US automakers would have to have an electric vehicle on the market by 2008, and that these cars would have to be built along strict goverment guidelines.
That's news to me. Perhaps you were thinking about the California ZEV mandate instead?
I'm all for electric (I have a 1KW array I'm going to be putting up during spring break), but don't give credit where credit isn't due. After all, people started buying SUVs under the Clinton administration, and only now, are people turning against them (conservative christians and environmentalists alike now decry the excessive fuel consumption.) SUVs = terrorism is the new message. I never saw the Clinton-Gore people say that, probably because they were just as addicted to the oil/car industry as the Bush people are.
Spammers are already adapting. They're resorting to 1 or 2 sentence spams, pared down the the minimum, a 1 line pitch, a URL, and that's it. Still annoying as hell - actually more annoying, because they've fine tuned them to slip by many filters, by not giving the filters anything to work with.
The next step on my server is whitelisting with a challenge response.