First, I will admit that I didn't RTFA yet, so let's get that out of the way. Mod me down if you don't like it.
That said, I would say that the US is unlikely to adapt a standard just because the rest of the world has. Witness:
Metric system - we still stand by our archaic and inexcusable system
DVB - we developed ATSC instead of adopting DVB for broadcast, requiring folks using DVB satellite or cable systems to ALSO get ATSC receivers for over-the-air
GSM - finally gaining a foothold but only after we developed THREE other formats (though I do feel that CDMA is superior).
Frequency allocation for mobile phones including GSM - we use 800 and 1900MHz while everyone else is using 900 and 1800MHz (except Canada who joined us on this one)
It is an interesting project, but, I fear, taps into the hydrogen-mania that seems to have gripped the world lately.
I don't believe there is a major reason to be concerned about the safety of the hydrogen. I don't believe it is actually much, if any, more dangerous than other things that we live with every day (methane, gasoline, diesel, batteries) for reasons that vary by what particular thing we are comparing it to.
I would wonder, though, if by powering the house from a fuel cell run from a hydrolizer, are they doing seriously better than if they had used a battery bank? For the hot water and the air conditioner, they might be doing better by running them directly from hydrogen, but what about the household electrical supply?
Also, might better efficiency be realized by uniting the DC bus of the solar panels with that of the fuel cell, at least unidirectionally? What I'm saying is, doesn't it make sense to send electricity straight to the house from the solar panels when it is available, rather than sucking H2 into the fuel cell to get it? Yes, H2 production would drop according to household load, but H2 consumption would drop further.
Night vision goggles use either near infrared, or phosphor amplification, right?
Can't do much about the phosphor amplification, so we'll just discount those and concentrate on the near infrared.
So what you do is put a bunch of high-intensity near infrared LED's and a battery pack together and shine back at them.
These will not disturb anyone else in the theatre because the light output is invisible to the naked eye.
If you want to be more creative, you can arrange the LED's into a marquee that reads, "F*** the MPAA"
As a bonus, you can also do this outside of the theatre. Security cameras are going to be mostly based on CCD's, which will pick up the near infrared to some extent. Don't believe me? Point a remote control at your digital camera and push a button on the remote while watching the viewfinder of the camera.
Almost right. The part you were closest on was 30fps (actually 29.97), which is close enough. The X resolution varies, but in most circumstances is somewhere around 300, so you are right there, too. The Y resolution is 480, which is double what you were saying.
The X resolution depends on what your transmission medium is. Basic, composit NTSC requires that all of the luma information be lower in frequency than the 3.58MHz Croma subcarrier. This subcarrier is going to have a content bandwidth of about 1/2 the Luma data, and therefore a physical bandwidth equal to the luma data. Half that bandwidth will be below the subcarrier, the other half above, so we can assume that the space below the 3.58 carrier is 1/3 croma, 2/3 luma.
Since luma defines the basic resolution, this puts our dot clock at a maximum of about 2.4MHz. Not a lot, granted. If we keep it simple, and divide this by the 262 lines per field (remember, this is an interlaced image) and 59.94 fields per second, we get only about 152 waves per line, or 305 pixels.
There are special cases, however, that need to be noted.
If the signal is sent such that the luma and croma data don't intermingle (S-Video), then the X resoltion can go very high indeed. In fact, there is no real limit here. A 720x480 image is not at all out of the question, with the simple understanding that the croma resolution is going to be only 150 pixels or so, because the croma data are still carried on a 3.58MHz subcarrier (although all of the bandwidth is available, not necessarily constrained by the need not to collide with the luma or audio carriers.... whether or not it is used is another matter). DTV at standard definition, digital cable, digital satellite and DVD all bring us this.
Lastly, component video takes the gloves off. Since we are no longer modulating our croma data, instead sending it as its original two components (Pb and Pr), they, too, can be run at any resolution. Fact is, they are usually run at 1/2 to 1/4 the resolution of the Luma (Y) data, but they don't necessarily need to be. The reason they usually are is that DV and MPEG don't record the croma data at full resolution.
Of course, component video has the additional advantage of being able to support other resolutions. Composite and S-video can not do this because they depend on a fixed-frequency croma carrier.
We can, actually, do better. Not long ago, there was this article. It spoke of a cluster of 12 mini-ITX motherboards that, collectively, consumed only 200W, while exhibiting the collective computational power of a 4- to 6-way cluster of 2.4GHZ machines, which, I would estimate, would consume two to three times as much energy.
This is actually the reason I would like to build such a cluster. I like power, but I like to be able to pay my energy bill, too.
If we can do this in that environment, can we make this sort of advance in laptops? Why not?
Lastly, does your laptop really need to be 2.4GHZ or faster? Why?
The price was right in that if you purchased the channels a la carte, you would rack up a much higher bill than purchasing packages. This encouraged the purchase of packages.
For example, the the bottom package was the top 50 (now top 60 since they did away with Pix). 50 Channels at $1.50 apiece would be $75, but the top 50/60 package was, IIRC, about $20. If you could really pick out 13 specific channels you wanted, and only those 13, then you could make out better with Dish Pix, especially if some of those channels were in higher tiers.
The part that became costly for Dish Network, though, and something that all of the supplemental TV services will have to address, is not the technology, but keeping customers from spending long lengths of time on the phone with customer service hemming and hawing about what channels they want. This is the reason why Dish discontinued this service, from what I understand.
The move to all-digital on cable would be a boost. This will free up some 420 MHz of bandwidth used for analogue channels from our local system, for example, which could then be turned around into one or more of: (a) better bitrate, ergo better picture, (b) more channels or (c) higher throughput for cable modem users. As I am a cable modem user, but not a cable TV viewer (I get my TV from Dish Network), option C would be my choice, but, as I said, these three are not mutually exclusive.
Yep, as soon as you said "Dial Comm" and used the prefix 8*, you said enough for me to confirm that that is indeed the same company. Thanks for the info on how they fixed it. I haven't worked for them since 1997.
I had visited one facility of theirs where the line was a pots line and had DialComm set up as the LD carrier. To call LD, it was 1-NPA-NXX-XXXX, to call local, it was NXX-XXXX, and to call interoffice, it was 1-700-NXX-XXXX.
This reminds me of a situation at a former workplace.
This workplace (a major U.S. corporation) has its own telephone network. Dialing local phone calls from the PBX was done by dialing 9-NXX-XXXX. Long distance was 8-NPA-NXX-XXXX, but calling a different facility in the corporation is 8-NXX-XXXX, where NXX in the latter case was a 3-digit code assigned by the company (ours was 639+extension, but to call from the normal phone network was 518-454+extension).
Anyway, the corporate network took advantage of the fact that the area codes always have 0 or 1 in the middle digit, and used this to tell the two apart.
In 1995 or so, NANPA started issuing area codes with non-0-or-1 middle digits. This hosed everything up. As I no longer work for that particular corporation, I don't know what they did about this, but while I was working there (c. 1996), a few of the exchanges became valid area codes, and had to be changed.
I have done this.
We have a departmental system that contains a cache of a portion of a database. The source db is maintained by IT, the cache is maintained in our department by me, at the time of this incident (there have been three others hired to assist since then).
One day, it was discovered that the data feed had barfed in that data for one particular hour got completely omitted every single day going back about a year or so (specifically, someone had coded the end time as 23:00:00 instead of 23:59:59).
There was someone in the IT department (who is one of the three working with me now) who could fix the query and re-run it for all of the broken history. This would have taken her about 30 minutes of actual attention time, and then backgrounded.
There exists a tool for extracting data from the database. This tool allows you to select columns, set conditions and go. It does not let you join tables, nor does it let you change the default format, nor does it let you pull more than 10,000 rows, nore does it let you do anything else with your computer while it is running a query. It is, in short, useless.
What I did was write an email (I still have a copy of it hanging up, and I show it to people once in a while as a demo of how to get things done right). In this email, I took then through this step by step, 23 steps in all, demonstrating why this was the wrong solution. In short, I had calculated that it would have one full man-month to do the job the "official" way, not counting the time i would then spend reformatting and reimporting the data, or 30 man-minutes (or woman-minutes as the case was) to do it the "unofficial" way.
It was then done the "unofficial" way, within the next 24 hours.
Re:What kind of idiot legislature...
on
USB Swiss Army Knife
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· Score: 2, Funny
Better yet-- Jaywalking and running with scissors!
Parent demonstrating geographical ignorance.
on
USB Swiss Army Knife
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· Score: 1
Last I checked, New South Wales was in Australia, not Europe....
A DOSoid [n]curses based interface leads to the same "Everything happens at once" syndrome as a GUI does. It really is just a GUI without graphics. Info is kind of like this.
I would instead advocate a VMS or CP/M style help utility (stop groaning and look at it). Typing help command would bring you a page of info on that command, and prompt you for subtopics, in case you wanted more info on some aspect of the command. Typing simply 'help' would bring you a list of topics.
Under VMS, HELP kept track of where you were and interpreted your new input as requesting a subtopic. There was something you could type, I think it was just a dot, that would go back one page. CP/M did pretty close to the same thing, instead requiring you to put a dot in front fo the subtopic, otherwise your input was interpreted as a request for a new topic.
Man doesn't even come close! When I was introduced to UNIX in 1991, after two years of using VMS, my first reaction was that the help facility sucked.
We had a sysadmin when I was in college who had written a brief script called 'help.' It catted out a here document that read, "UNIX helps those who help themselves. Try 'man' insetead of 'help'."
A possible retaiatory stance that could be taken by Dish would be to run the extra channels that Viacom wants run, but to do so at the minimum possible bandwidth (probably around 1Mb/s) which would become available by removing some bandwidth from Viacom's other channels.
For crying out loud, Spike TV is already running at 240p half the time, anyway. It'll probably be that last little bit to make watching any of Viacom's channels intolerable.
Note that the dot clock is only 74.25 MHz, the hsync is only 33.75kHz and the vrefresh is 60Hz. That is easily within reach of most monitors these days.
On the other hand, you should keep in mind that this is an interlaced mode, and, as such, is as good at rendering headaches as it is at rendering graphics.
I agree that 720p mode is probably nicer for a computer monitor, but I have not been able to make it work with mine.... yet.
I bet, if you look at your farenheit-based thermostat in your home, that you will find the markings on it to be in 2 degree increments. Why is this so? Because 69 degrees is imperceptibly warmer than 68 and imperceptibly cooler than 70. 68 and 70, on the other hand, are noticeably cooler/warmer than each other.
For this reason, I would challenge your assertion that this finer degree of gradation is needed
As for your assertion of naturalilty, upon what is the Farenheit scale based? I'll answer that, because it's a rhetorical question. It is based on two temperatures that could, at a time in the 19th century, be reliably reproduced in the lab. That makes it, ipso facto artificial. Centigrade, on the other hand, is based on the differential between two very specific natural phenomena--the boiling and melting points of the most common substance on the planet's surface.
what is a dot in Morse code? You know - loser@aol[.]com. For that matter, what about things like _ and / or \? How would you know that the username is big.loser and not big_loser @aol.com.
The symbol for dot is.-.-.-
Slash is -..-. which is funny, because if you are operating a mobile station, you can sign/M on the end of your callsign (e.g. KC2IDF/M instead of KC2IDF in my case if I am operating from my car) and the "/M" sounds like "Shave and a haircut two bits"
The usual notation is to put the letters AR with a bar over them for the end of message symbol, and SK with a bar over it for the end of contact symbol.
Odd thing, I could only understand this by di-dahing quietly under my breath.
Yes, I had to do the same thing. Morse code is not intended to be written. It isn't supposed to have an X and a Y axis, but a T an V (Time and Voltage) axis. As such, a written representation has to be sounded out in order to be legible to anyone who actually uses the code....
Slashdot Mirror
First, I will admit that I didn't RTFA yet, so let's get that out of the way. Mod me down if you don't like it.
That said, I would say that the US is unlikely to adapt a standard just because the rest of the world has. Witness:
It is an interesting project, but, I fear, taps into the hydrogen-mania that seems to have gripped the world lately.
I don't believe there is a major reason to be concerned about the safety of the hydrogen. I don't believe it is actually much, if any, more dangerous than other things that we live with every day (methane, gasoline, diesel, batteries) for reasons that vary by what particular thing we are comparing it to.
I would wonder, though, if by powering the house from a fuel cell run from a hydrolizer, are they doing seriously better than if they had used a battery bank? For the hot water and the air conditioner, they might be doing better by running them directly from hydrogen, but what about the household electrical supply?
Also, might better efficiency be realized by uniting the DC bus of the solar panels with that of the fuel cell, at least unidirectionally? What I'm saying is, doesn't it make sense to send electricity straight to the house from the solar panels when it is available, rather than sucking H2 into the fuel cell to get it? Yes, H2 production would drop according to household load, but H2 consumption would drop further.
Just a few random thoughts.
Night vision goggles use either near infrared, or phosphor amplification, right?
Can't do much about the phosphor amplification, so we'll just discount those and concentrate on the near infrared.
So what you do is put a bunch of high-intensity near infrared LED's and a battery pack together and shine back at them.
These will not disturb anyone else in the theatre because the light output is invisible to the naked eye.
If you want to be more creative, you can arrange the LED's into a marquee that reads, "F*** the MPAA"
As a bonus, you can also do this outside of the theatre. Security cameras are going to be mostly based on CCD's, which will pick up the near infrared to some extent. Don't believe me? Point a remote control at your digital camera and push a button on the remote while watching the viewfinder of the camera.
NTSC is the equiv of 320x240 at 30fps
Almost right. The part you were closest on was 30fps (actually 29.97), which is close enough. The X resolution varies, but in most circumstances is somewhere around 300, so you are right there, too. The Y resolution is 480, which is double what you were saying.
The X resolution depends on what your transmission medium is. Basic, composit NTSC requires that all of the luma information be lower in frequency than the 3.58MHz Croma subcarrier. This subcarrier is going to have a content bandwidth of about 1/2 the Luma data, and therefore a physical bandwidth equal to the luma data. Half that bandwidth will be below the subcarrier, the other half above, so we can assume that the space below the 3.58 carrier is 1/3 croma, 2/3 luma.
Since luma defines the basic resolution, this puts our dot clock at a maximum of about 2.4MHz. Not a lot, granted. If we keep it simple, and divide this by the 262 lines per field (remember, this is an interlaced image) and 59.94 fields per second, we get only about 152 waves per line, or 305 pixels.
There are special cases, however, that need to be noted.
If the signal is sent such that the luma and croma data don't intermingle (S-Video), then the X resoltion can go very high indeed. In fact, there is no real limit here. A 720x480 image is not at all out of the question, with the simple understanding that the croma resolution is going to be only 150 pixels or so, because the croma data are still carried on a 3.58MHz subcarrier (although all of the bandwidth is available, not necessarily constrained by the need not to collide with the luma or audio carriers.... whether or not it is used is another matter). DTV at standard definition, digital cable, digital satellite and DVD all bring us this.
Lastly, component video takes the gloves off. Since we are no longer modulating our croma data, instead sending it as its original two components (Pb and Pr), they, too, can be run at any resolution. Fact is, they are usually run at 1/2 to 1/4 the resolution of the Luma (Y) data, but they don't necessarily need to be. The reason they usually are is that DV and MPEG don't record the croma data at full resolution.
Of course, component video has the additional advantage of being able to support other resolutions. Composite and S-video can not do this because they depend on a fixed-frequency croma carrier.
What's your point, eh?
I would say that qualifies you as a special case. Mine does, too, for precicely the same reason.
We can, actually, do better. Not long ago, there was this article. It spoke of a cluster of 12 mini-ITX motherboards that, collectively, consumed only 200W, while exhibiting the collective computational power of a 4- to 6-way cluster of 2.4GHZ machines, which, I would estimate, would consume two to three times as much energy.
This is actually the reason I would like to build such a cluster. I like power, but I like to be able to pay my energy bill, too.
If we can do this in that environment, can we make this sort of advance in laptops? Why not?
Lastly, does your laptop really need to be 2.4GHZ or faster? Why?
Dish Pix was $1.50/channel, $5.00 minimum.
The price was right in that if you purchased the channels a la carte, you would rack up a much higher bill than purchasing packages. This encouraged the purchase of packages.
For example, the the bottom package was the top 50 (now top 60 since they did away with Pix). 50 Channels at $1.50 apiece would be $75, but the top 50/60 package was, IIRC, about $20. If you could really pick out 13 specific channels you wanted, and only those 13, then you could make out better with Dish Pix, especially if some of those channels were in higher tiers.
The part that became costly for Dish Network, though, and something that all of the supplemental TV services will have to address, is not the technology, but keeping customers from spending long lengths of time on the phone with customer service hemming and hawing about what channels they want. This is the reason why Dish discontinued this service, from what I understand.
The move to all-digital on cable would be a boost. This will free up some 420 MHz of bandwidth used for analogue channels from our local system, for example, which could then be turned around into one or more of: (a) better bitrate, ergo better picture, (b) more channels or (c) higher throughput for cable modem users. As I am a cable modem user, but not a cable TV viewer (I get my TV from Dish Network), option C would be my choice, but, as I said, these three are not mutually exclusive.
Yep, as soon as you said "Dial Comm" and used the prefix 8*, you said enough for me to confirm that that is indeed the same company. Thanks for the info on how they fixed it. I haven't worked for them since 1997.
I had visited one facility of theirs where the line was a pots line and had DialComm set up as the LD carrier. To call LD, it was 1-NPA-NXX-XXXX, to call local, it was NXX-XXXX, and to call interoffice, it was 1-700-NXX-XXXX.
This reminds me of a situation at a former workplace.
This workplace (a major U.S. corporation) has its own telephone network. Dialing local phone calls from the PBX was done by dialing 9-NXX-XXXX. Long distance was 8-NPA-NXX-XXXX, but calling a different facility in the corporation is 8-NXX-XXXX, where NXX in the latter case was a 3-digit code assigned by the company (ours was 639+extension, but to call from the normal phone network was 518-454+extension).
Anyway, the corporate network took advantage of the fact that the area codes always have 0 or 1 in the middle digit, and used this to tell the two apart.
In 1995 or so, NANPA started issuing area codes with non-0-or-1 middle digits. This hosed everything up. As I no longer work for that particular corporation, I don't know what they did about this, but while I was working there (c. 1996), a few of the exchanges became valid area codes, and had to be changed.
Strikes me as the same basic problem.
enterprise ready
You missed a pun opportunity, too.
I have done this. We have a departmental system that contains a cache of a portion of a database. The source db is maintained by IT, the cache is maintained in our department by me, at the time of this incident (there have been three others hired to assist since then). One day, it was discovered that the data feed had barfed in that data for one particular hour got completely omitted every single day going back about a year or so (specifically, someone had coded the end time as 23:00:00 instead of 23:59:59). There was someone in the IT department (who is one of the three working with me now) who could fix the query and re-run it for all of the broken history. This would have taken her about 30 minutes of actual attention time, and then backgrounded. There exists a tool for extracting data from the database. This tool allows you to select columns, set conditions and go. It does not let you join tables, nor does it let you change the default format, nor does it let you pull more than 10,000 rows, nore does it let you do anything else with your computer while it is running a query. It is, in short, useless. What I did was write an email (I still have a copy of it hanging up, and I show it to people once in a while as a demo of how to get things done right). In this email, I took then through this step by step, 23 steps in all, demonstrating why this was the wrong solution. In short, I had calculated that it would have one full man-month to do the job the "official" way, not counting the time i would then spend reformatting and reimporting the data, or 30 man-minutes (or woman-minutes as the case was) to do it the "unofficial" way. It was then done the "unofficial" way, within the next 24 hours.
Better yet-- Jaywalking and running with scissors!
Last I checked, New South Wales was in Australia, not Europe....
A DOSoid [n]curses based interface leads to the same "Everything happens at once" syndrome as a GUI does. It really is just a GUI without graphics. Info is kind of like this.
I would instead advocate a VMS or CP/M style help utility (stop groaning and look at it). Typing help command would bring you a page of info on that command, and prompt you for subtopics, in case you wanted more info on some aspect of the command. Typing simply 'help' would bring you a list of topics.
Under VMS, HELP kept track of where you were and interpreted your new input as requesting a subtopic. There was something you could type, I think it was just a dot, that would go back one page. CP/M did pretty close to the same thing, instead requiring you to put a dot in front fo the subtopic, otherwise your input was interpreted as a request for a new topic.
Man doesn't even come close! When I was introduced to UNIX in 1991, after two years of using VMS, my first reaction was that the help facility sucked.
We had a sysadmin when I was in college who had written a brief script called 'help.' It catted out a here document that read, "UNIX helps those who help themselves. Try 'man' insetead of 'help'."
A possible retaiatory stance that could be taken by Dish would be to run the extra channels that Viacom wants run, but to do so at the minimum possible bandwidth (probably around 1Mb/s) which would become available by removing some bandwidth from Viacom's other channels.
For crying out loud, Spike TV is already running at 240p half the time, anyway. It'll probably be that last little bit to make watching any of Viacom's channels intolerable.
It is meltdown-proof.
The Titanic was sink-proof, too. It sunk, none the less, due to carelessness. You can't make anything foolproof becaus fools can be so engenius.
How about one that looks like this?
I can get my 15" no-name monitor to do 1920x1080x60 interlaced very readily. XFree86 users can use this modeline to get it:
Modeline "1080i" 74.250 1920 2008 2048 2200 1080 1084 1094 1125 interlace +hsync +vsync
USE AT YOUR OWN RISK!!!
Note that the dot clock is only 74.25 MHz, the hsync is only 33.75kHz and the vrefresh is 60Hz. That is easily within reach of most monitors these days.
On the other hand, you should keep in mind that this is an interlaced mode, and, as such, is as good at rendering headaches as it is at rendering graphics.
I agree that 720p mode is probably nicer for a computer monitor, but I have not been able to make it work with mine.... yet.
I bet, if you look at your farenheit-based thermostat in your home, that you will find the markings on it to be in 2 degree increments. Why is this so? Because 69 degrees is imperceptibly warmer than 68 and imperceptibly cooler than 70. 68 and 70, on the other hand, are noticeably cooler/warmer than each other.
For this reason, I would challenge your assertion that this finer degree of gradation is needed
As for your assertion of naturalilty, upon what is the Farenheit scale based? I'll answer that, because it's a rhetorical question. It is based on two temperatures that could, at a time in the 19th century, be reliably reproduced in the lab. That makes it, ipso facto artificial. Centigrade, on the other hand, is based on the differential between two very specific natural phenomena--the boiling and melting points of the most common substance on the planet's surface.
what is a dot in Morse code? You know - loser@aol[.]com. For that matter, what about things like _ and / or \? How would you know that the username is big.loser and not big_loser @aol.com.
The symbol for dot is .-.-.-
Slash is -..-. which is funny, because if you are operating a mobile station, you can sign /M on the end of your callsign (e.g. KC2IDF/M instead of KC2IDF in my case if I am operating from my car) and the "/M" sounds like "Shave and a haircut two bits"
Question mark is ..--..
No symbol for backward slash, AFAIK
Underscore is ..--.-
You can find the whole set (minus @) here.
The usual notation is to put the letters AR with a bar over them for the end of message symbol, and SK with a bar over it for the end of contact symbol.
Odd thing, I could only understand this by di-dahing quietly under my breath.
Yes, I had to do the same thing. Morse code is not intended to be written. It isn't supposed to have an X and a Y axis, but a T an V (Time and Voltage) axis. As such, a written representation has to be sounded out in order to be legible to anyone who actually uses the code....
73 DE KC2IDF
Okay, so Slashdot does not support Unicode. In that case, I think you meant to say, "Cxu Openoffice parolas esperante?"