What do you need the toaster oven for? Just have the laser printer run at 1 page per min rather than 25, and the fuser will take care of shrinking the sugstrate...
And they don't wait until the release to allow you to order the phone. Witn 1.5 million pre-orders, I would suspect that the vast majority of the people who might line up at the store doors had the option of ordering it ahead of time.
Of course the fact that no one has bothered to look for a crash in the area where the id and possible clothing were found, because everyone focused on an area more than 50 miles away, has no impact on your claim that this is a hoax.
Lifeforce series from Pournel Most of Allen Dean Fosters Flinx series Allen Dean Fosters Hichi stories Niven's N-Space Heinlein's Expanded Universe and Juvies Asimov's "I Robot" and Foundation series.
- for that matter just about everything Asimov works. Card's Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow (most of the rest of each series is later in life for the main characters, but Shadow of the Hegemon may work also. Arthur C. Clark's short stories. Starbridge series by A. C. Crispin A lot of the fantasy by Mercedes Lackey
Tip on this, start by reading the first two chapters at bed time with the allowance that they may continue from there as long as they are reading they may stay up. (If they stop reading to play games, throw things, etc. time for the foot to go down and them to get to sleep.)
I've only had a passing encounter with powershell, but if command line searches are all you need for searching, and something like 'echo $newrecord >> flatfile.txt' will work for adding records, then you probably have everything you need already on the computer. If you need searches to return 'ranes' of records, for example 'all APs within 200 yards with public access' you probably will need something more complex, and a db platform like sqlite is probably what you want to start looking at.
Wondering how long it will be before there are 1500 tags showing up all with the same ID that point to a record for someone in the database that didn't register...
Tell the advertisers for those program that you're really currious about their support NBC in using the broadcast flag. Not only did you get the opportunity to miss that program, but you didn't get to see any of the ads for their company promoting their products, sales, events, or anything else they were interested in letting you know about.
Believe me, word will get back to NBC that it's not to their advantage to follow such tactics.
I'm not sure how available some of the books listed above are. Hopefully you'll find them, and find them useful.
Some other books to look at are over on the ARRL.org website. Their primary focus of course is radio electronics, but they also have books on basic circuit boarding, robotics, and a few other electronic projects, as well as a few kits if you are interested in them.
I would note that it is up to the FCC to determine if Internet service over Cable is a mature technology to the point that it should be opened to providers other than the company that owns the cable plant. If the FCC decides that it is, then Comcast, Time Warner, and other cable companies will be required to open their plant to third party internet service providers, just as Qwest, Verizon and AT&T do for DSL service.
Comcast's monopoly techniques and customer complaints to the FCC are likely to result in a review of their decision a few years back that allowed them to get to the position they are in at this time. I tend to suspect that there is a significant percentage of the Comcast subscriber base who would consider an ISP connection cost of $20 a month across their cable plant to be a significant improvement over the current $100+ a month fees. (Sure Internet service is only a $50 part of that bill, unless you decide not to have cable TV service in which case it becomes a $75 a month charge.)
I.e. there's a 250% mark up compared to DSL with possibly double the bandwidth potentially available, and the opportunity to have your P2P sessions interfered with.
A reminder, the reason Comcast has been interfering with P2P sessions is that they have not built the capacity in their plant to handle the volume of customer traffic. They may be really happy to announce that they are now looking at rolling out DOCIS 3 with it's 100 meg to the customer bandwidth, but it appears they have not built the backbone to allow customers to make use of it. Lots of luck there.
It took this long for anyone to mention the communications satellite, which is very likely the most accurate prediction that has ever come out of Science Fiction. Granted in his story we only needed 3 to provide universal coverage, but that was from a time before we started thinking about giving every individual their own channels to watch. (What else would you call the '500 channel tv?')
actually, TV stations usually get a list of the shows that will be provided, and a schedule of when local commercial breaks are available. It's up to them to insert their own commercials in those breaks. In some cases they also get windows where they can replace the national commercial if the people that bought the time for that commercial didn't require the local to redistribute it as part of the network contract. (That's why you sometimes see the end of a local car dealer's commercial end up with a close clip of either a time life music type commercial, or one of the many other companies that are looking to get some add time on when a local might not be able to sell a time slot. (some of the bed commercials, and commercials for products that often have full blown infomercials as well.
The technology to provide schedule information to consumers is there. EIT is fully capable of telling your system that a show is re-scheduled, or is being preempted, etc. Whether the local carrier or national distributer elects to make use of that feature is part of the resulting issue. Another part is whether your equipment can handle the information. I.e. did you build the logic for your PVR such that when TBS preempts 'The Time Machine' for the Braves game that's running a bit longer than scheduled, and switches to 'The Time Machine' already in progress, that the PVR will recognize the issue, ignore that episode and look for a different showing? Granted this presumes that the local Cable provider passes such information on, but hopefully one of these days that sort of stuff will start happening. (Skepticism says 'dream on')
I kind of think you have two options then. Since you know the protocols involved in doing a formal evaluation, you can either start doing one, and report back once it is done, or you can complain about some factor that is preventing you from doing such an evaluation. As some potential starting points for your complaints, there is 'I can't get the funding.' presumably because you haven't applied, 'I don't have the time.' as if someone else has more than you do, 'I'm waiting on approval for the project.' which presumes that you think someone really does think it's your job, and 'It's not my job.' but you do think it's your job to be critical of how someone else went about evaluating the possibilities.
I'm not saying that you're wrong in calling the people who described this as a 'formal operating system evaluation.' From a strictly semantic perspective, I think you're correct. However this begs the question as to who will do a 'formal operating system evaluation?' If it must be done in accordance with specific standards for such an evaluation, I strongly suspect that you are going to have a long career of being critical of people's reports. I say that not because I don't agree that such an evaluation is warranted, but because such an evaluation requires that someone spend money on the evaluation. People willing to make an investment in capital for such an evaluation are very likely to see the results as being something that gives them a competitive advantage. Things that give such people a competitive advantage tend to end up with very limited distribution.
The alternative is to have such an evaluation performed either by an educational entity under a research grant, which many people would declare as not of significant interest to them, or by a supposedly independent company to do that research, at which point the results will be criticized by anyone as favoring the company that funded the research, or potentially swept under the rug by the people who fund the research.
That's not to say that I think Ubuntu or even Windows will suffer in such an evaluation. I don't know. However CIO and Halamka have presented the results of the evaluation Halamka did perform. And until a formal evaluation is presented, with the models or proofs presented, I suspect that we won't see anything 'better' for a long time to come.
Looking at the article, I have a problem with the starting point. The starting point is that businesses are reportedly having a hard time finding scientists and engineers coming out of our educational system. I would like a bit of clarification noted on this. First of all, there seems to be no real shortage of startups in highly technical fields finding the people they need to get started. Startups failing because they can't figure out how to turn a profit? Sure, no shortage of those either, but that is rarely because they didn't have any scientists.
In almost every case what we are actually hearing reported is that 'big' businesses are having problems finding qualified candidates for their postings. Or more specifically they are having problems getting people to apply for the postings they submit. So the question is why are They having this problem? I think it boils down to two factors.
First of all people applying for work are not fascinated with any posting that reads "Salary commensurate with experience.", "Competitive salary", "pay by industry standard guidelines" or the like. We want to know what you are willing to offer someone who meets the minimum requirements to be hired, and what the top end of the scale for a new hire with you is. We can then look at the job requirements, determine where we fit in the scale, and decide for ourselves if you are offering a wage that matches those claims or not. I certainly don't want to waste your time as a hiring manager if I am not going to be satisfied with my wages, and not telling me what you think they should be is telling me you aren't interested in attracting my attention.
Next up is the fact that a really large number of 'Big' companies do all of their posting and searching through their own tools. There is no interface with Monster. Or Dice. Or any of the other job search sites in existence. So far as I can tell, these companies seem to think that every prospective candidate will spend every free moment of their life looking through every possible businesses web site for job postings. Most of them do not have a way for you to set up a notice to you when a posting that may be of interest to you shows up.
There are many good reasons for both of the situations above. I am not saying that there are not. All I am saying is that electing to use those two tactics for searching for new employees is a pretty sure way to get the sort of results that seem to be showing up with some regularity. I. e. the only people that seem to apply are people who know someone already in the company. It makes it 'look' like there is no one qualified available, which feeds into the impression that you have to start looking internationally.
Equipment costs are variable. I picked up a 240 wat multiband multiprotocol transmitter at ahamfest for $300. I may not be the newest radio on the block, but it can get me on the air once I have my general or extra ticket. (granted I need an antenna tuner and some sort of antenna, but one step at a time.
I have seen shack in a box rigs go on e-bay for under $800.
Dual band (VHF/UHF) HTs are available for under $100 used, and under $150 new.
At the same time you can break the bank with acessories or radios. A functioning SDR setup is going to run about $1000. Some of the more impressive contesting rigs are upwards of $15,000. So if you are interested in getting all the bells and whistles, it can get as expensive as you want.
As to the international requirement in 1938, I would suspect that at least part of the idea was to allow amatuer operators to communicate with ships at sea that were in trouble. At the time, ships RTOs consistently used CW to communicate with the ports they were approaching. Due to the nature of the Q codes ships RTOs used, as well as the general numeric nature of much of the information that would be sent, it was reasonable to presume that an Amatuer operator who knew International Morse Code, could communicate with a ship at sea which was in trouble.
Likewise operators who were going to go into a disaster area at the time would generaly be taking equipment they felt they could work people outside of the affected area with, that was also reasonably portable. I suggest that most people would agree that a portable unit or setup that could send and receive CW in the 30's was significantly smaller and lighter than a similar setup capable of sending and receiving AM. Having some requirement that these operators demonstrate a specific competency with code at some speed was potentially useful in screening who would be operating within a disaster area.
Not directly related to the above, but it comes up often enough as a question is 'why the three code speed tests? 5, 15 and 20 wpm.'
Studies over time demonstrated that the student of Morse Code ends up going through three apparent phases in learning code. First is the association of the dits and dahs to the letter. If people associate the sound with an image, or something else pointing at the letter, it takes long enough to dereference the pointers getting back to the letter, that you can not effectively copy code at more than 3 or 4 wpm. So if you set the threshold at 5 wpm, you are ensuring that the operator does at least know what the letter sound association is beyond counting dits/dahs, or other associations.
There are other stumbling blocks at about 13 wpm, and 18 wpm. Setting test rates at 15 and 20 wpm, allows th operator todemonstrate that they have gotten past those rates.
Why would the FCC have considered it OK to only use the 5 wpm rate then? Because a good operator will adjust their transmit speed to reflect the remote operator's transmission speed. So if the only operator you can talk to is stuck at 10 wpm, a good operator can still work with them.
Now that the international body that was requiring code for hf bands has pulled that requirement, countries are modifying their own requirements, and the US is just the most recent country to follow suit.
kc0vcu - no code tech, Still interested in knowing and using code.
I think we will see code being picked up by more people who want to learn it to use it for some other reason. We will nearly always have operators who will find no need for the skill, and I suspect we will find operators looking for every edge they can get in a contest. (* like double the points just for each code contact you make.) And others who will be looking for ccdx awards in each band, and each mode. Likewise dxpeditions will end up at some grid square that no one has operated from in over 40 years, who will only operate in CW. You want the QSO for some reason, well they ain't listening in the phone bands.
I also think that as a result we will find a lot of people even more willing to teach these operators code, because they are watching people learn a skill they want to use, not something they are going to throw away the moment they get their ticket. Architects happen to use computers to do almost everything they do these days. When I was in high school, the architectural drawing class used t-squares, 45 and 30/60 triangles, tri-rules in various scales, French curves, elliptical templates, and a metal shield for erasing lines that went beyond where you planned for them to end up. It took skill to use these tools properly. It's a skill that high school students today are not learning, because using the computer drafting tools is the marketable skill for the industry in general. There will still be architects who choose to learn the skills of old, because they find those skills interesting, and occasionally useful for their own purposes.
By finding people who decided that learning Morse Code was worth the effort for some reason other than that it was a license requirement that they never used again?
How much of that periodic table does the scientist down the hall from you know? All 132 elements? (or is it 137 this week?) Is it the table that includes the atomic weight, mass, count of electrons in each shell, normal shell state levels, excited state electron shell levels? Full description of the organization of protons and neutrons? What other elements each element will build a valent or covalent bond with? What color a reducing electron shell move generates as a photon?
Is it helping him in his job of analyzing and describing the observations of the cosmos? Is it helping her explain how quantum electro dynamics is demonstrating a flaw with the concept of causality? Was there some test they took that demonstrated they knew all the minutia of the periodic table by heart?
I think you will find that you can easily find scientists who do not know every possible detail of the current periodic table by heart. Just as you will likely find a few hams that can't tell you how Ohms law is affected by a change from DC to AC.
Morse is a very useful language to know. In some cases far more useful than people who know it expected at one time or another. But that doesn't mean that every radio operator is going to use it for every activity they do on the radio. It can be fun to work with, but that doesn't make it worthy of being a requirement to know or be tested on.
One of the reasons that hams do not use the max allowed power all the time is that hams are supposed to use the least power they can to communicate. Not that they always do. Two hams a block or two apart may be chatting with each other through a wide area repeater transmitting at 50 or 90 watts, when they could be communicating simplex at less than a quarter watt.
Also transmitting at x watts uses x plus some variable depending on the equipment in use power that has to come from some place. Commercial power, batteries, generators, solar cells, windmills all cost money or significant effort to put a signal on the air.
Lastly, as odd as it seems to some people, we do not want to cause interference with other services or non-radio equipment. It actually bothers us when neighbors report that they are hearing our signals on their TV, computer speakers, or stoves. It means that energy we want to be broadcast for reception by other hams is being picked up by equipment not designed to receive the signal. Either energy that we want to be in the frequency spectrum we are transmitting on is in another spectrum, or the consumer equipment our neighbors are using has been designed poorly or the like.
There are also big challenges to seeing how far we can communicate with very little power. There are a lot of hams that contest and communicate around the world on less than 5 watts. You know, the amount of energy that an incandescent night light draws.
Depending upon the initialcondition of the pumpkin, you may not even be throwing chunks when it leaves the launcher. More like Mush. At those velocities, I would be curious to see if there was anything but seeds making any sort of distance.
I suppose that an alternative that would give you the centripital acceleration would be to put a bucket on the end of a set of wire ropes attached to an axle that is driven by a compressed air turbine to get the bucket up to speed, then figure out some way to release whatever is left in the bucket in a trajectory that gives you a reasonable chance of getting some distance. Getting the angle right would involve either setting the axel at that angle and letting go of the contents as the bucket passes the horizontal plane passing through it's plane of rotation, or setting the axel horizontally, spinning the bucket in a vertical direction, then letting fly as the bucket passes the tangent that matches the desired launch angle.
In either case you are going to have to wait till the bucket is at whatever speed gives you the desired centriptal acceleration with no further tortional acceleration so that the cables holding the bucket are extended and no longer wrapped around the axel. The release mechanism should probably be mounted on the axel to reduce the effect of impacting the triger at the edge of the circle the bucket is describing. Perhaps an air brake attached to a pin locked ring such that releasing the pin causes the air brake to pull the bottom of the bucket towards the axel releasing the payload. Tuning the release timing would be interesting. Perhaps a protective ring beyond the circle described by the bucket at points you don't want the contents heading off in would be a good idea.
Hey sounds like an idea, wonder if anyone has tried it already...
Yes and no. Yes crosstalk can become a problem. For most people this means migrating from one type of cable to another as the speed of your network increases. As an example, copper gig-e pretty much requires a properly wired Cat-5E cable, However if you are going to be setting up several runs in close paralel, (50' of station cable from the patch pannel to a quad of cubicals for exammple) it makes sense to move up to Cat-6, or better yet set up remote patch panels at the cube quad and run the appropriate cable for that configuration.
In most cable plants, copper is used for 'local' connections, and most high capacity trunking is done via fibre. That can almost eliminate any concern regarding crosstalk. Granted if you like to roll your own fiber bundles, and don't properly insulate and run your fiber, you are going to encounter problems, but mos people don't do that with fiber ayway.
I agree strongly with the note a couple up from here. If you wrap your bundles in such a way that every last cable has to be disconnected from any hardware that is going to be replaced, without building in enough slack to move that equipment when it fails, you are the one who is at fault for any resulting long term outage as the techs performing the swap attempt to get everything back where it belongs. If you have to replace a 6913, that is fully populated with 96 port blades. It's nice to have the ability to stick a label on each blade, identifying what slot it goes into, have enough slack available to remove it from the chassi, extract the chassi from the rack, rack up the new chassi, and re-insert the blades. Likewise replacing a single blade when you can simply hang the old blade in front of the new blade, and simply transfer the cables individually or in pairs will make the replacement go significantly faster. Also make sure you leave enough slack so that if a tech suspects that either a port, or set of ports on a card is bad, the cable can be connected to a different port for diagnostic purposes. If the port is determined to be bad, the cable should go back into the original spot on the replacement component, but do you want to get the blame for the device being down for an extended period because the user couldn't be moved to another port a blade or two away? Or would you rather come back and re-wrap all those bundles later on?
Just my thoughts. I'm sure that lots of people can come up with other thoughts and opinions. Their probably right too.
Building an OGM script as a matter of fact. It's getting entirely too long.
"Hi, You've reached [#phonenumber#]. If you would like me to call you back, make it interesing, and give me the information I need to reach you at home. Firstnames with an 800 number and extention are not interesting. I don't care how sexy your voice is. If you're calling from a business I don't take solicitation calls, but if it is something else, include who you are working for, the purpose of your call, and your home number. Wait for the beep."
That averages about 30 seconds there. That seems to me to be a bit long. but maybe it's just me.
The legal problem is especially tricky for those distributions that are attempting to be free/gratis, as well as free/libre.
Free/libre prevents you from using tools that have restrictions on their distribution. Specifically things like w32 codecs that Microsoft may very well feel comfortable giving away to anyone who can use them, but may not modify them in any way. There are often other issues, such as the software is freely available to anyone who has some other specific licence as well. None of that would be acceptable under the Free/libre distributions.
Free/gratis (free beer) has other issues. An example would be the Unisis GIF pattent restrictions that prevented people from distributing software that could create, and by some people's interpretation view, GIF images, unless a per-seat fee was paid. When you offer a Free/gratis distribution, how exactly are you supposed to pay for those per-seat fees?
None of this prevents any company who wants to go through the negotiations, pay the fees, and collect sales revenu from users, from doing so, and offering a distribution that includes everything you can imagine. Whether they would ever make enough money on the distribution to stay in business is questionable, but they can make the effort.
There are a number of people who would advise people not to purchase or use such a distribution, on the grounds that it violates some of their own lofty ideas regarding how software should be distributed. Whether any specific individual would be influenced by those arguments or not, would be up to each individual.
In any case, if you would like to try a distribution that works something like that, i.e. pretty much everything you would consider including, either is, or is a click or two away from being installed, you may be comfortable with Linspire. Just understand that the CNR service does come with a fee.
Because you have not provided a budget, yet feel that an additional server to act as a firewall/virus blocker is too expensive, it's hard to offer a good recomendation.
In any case there are a few options using Linux. If you are looking to capture/collect snapshots over time, you could do anything from ip based webcams with a backend on Linux using wget to collect snapshots from each camera. Those get hosted on the Linux box as a web page for each location. On each of those pages, display the last 6 or so snapshots gathered. (one everry five minutes? whatever sort of schedule you want.) then include a link to the webcam itself for live video. Possibly proxied through the linux box to reduce the number of addresses that the webcams themselves are directly feeding.
Another option would be a Linux box at each location with a video capture card like a Hauppauge WinTVGo, or other bt484 card with a camcorder attached to video in. The big downside of this is likely to be the bandwidth for upstream transfers of video. Many Broadband providers restrict upload speeds from the site to 128kbps, which isn't much for video. At the same time you could use memcorder to capture to one video format in blocks of an hour or something, then downconvert that to divx, or mpeg-4. Then use something like wput to copy the compressed video to some other location with better bandwidth for downloads. Obviously there will be some delay built into this in that you will have to wait for the converstion to compressed video to happen before it can be made available. Optionally if you have a camera or capture directly to mpeg4 or divx you may get faster response. One downside of that is that you may have artifacts in the resulting video that may make the captured video useless as a security system. In that case something like 'motion' as mentioned earlier may be useful.
You may have other concerns as well. None of what I have described above have anything built into them that support tilt-pan-zoom features that may be of interest to you. Considering that most broadband connections in residential areas are using something like dhcp, meaning you are never entirely sure what IP address the site will have the next time you want to access it, you very possibly already use something like dyndns or perhaps some other system to keep track of the current IP address for each location.
One concern may be the expense of the equipment you put on site, and the prospect of that equipment being stolen. A reasonably good video camera still has value, even if you have to spend time hacking it to make it useful for your own purposes. Likewise a computer that can do the video transcoding mentioned above has some value as well. Obviously if you can hide the camera in something that looks like it has no value, or is part of the structure, it will be less likely to be pilfered. If the Linux computer making things available is a Linksys 54g wap, with a hard drive attached to a USB port, and the camera is a wireless cam, you would have additional flexibility in instalation, however processing power would be reduced. It may be enough, though you might be better with a box that looks like a utilities box next to the utilites entry point of the house. It would be a custom build of course, but that may be the best long term solution. You could even build it with it's own internal backup batteries. Include a cable modem, or dsl adapter as necessary and you can possibly have limited access to what is happening if local power is interupted. The wireless wifi camera could be located anywhere that power would be available to it. Whether you would want to provide it with backup power or not would be up to you.
As far as securing the box, I would recommend using some sort of vpn to provide a connection between the box on site, and some server located elsewhere that provides a web server, or other solution for your users to keep track of each property. Along the way you may want to determine how restrictive you want to be about access to the imagry collect
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What do you need the toaster oven for? Just have the laser printer run at 1 page per min rather than 25, and the fuser will take care of shrinking the sugstrate...
And they don't wait until the release to allow you to order the phone. Witn 1.5 million pre-orders, I would suspect that the vast majority of the people who might line up at the store doors had the option of ordering it ahead of time.
Of course the fact that no one has bothered to look for a crash in the area where the id and possible clothing were found, because everyone focused on an area more than 50 miles away, has no impact on your claim that this is a hoax.
Lifeforce series from Pournel
Most of Allen Dean Fosters Flinx series
Allen Dean Fosters Hichi stories
Niven's N-Space
Heinlein's Expanded Universe and Juvies
Asimov's "I Robot" and Foundation series.
- for that matter just about everything Asimov works.
Card's Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow (most of the rest of each series is later in life for the main characters, but Shadow of the Hegemon may work also.
Arthur C. Clark's short stories.
Starbridge series by A. C. Crispin
A lot of the fantasy by Mercedes Lackey
Tip on this, start by reading the first two chapters at bed time with the allowance that they may continue from there as long as they are reading they may stay up. (If they stop reading to play games, throw things, etc. time for the foot to go down and them to get to sleep.)
And have fun with the stories and your kids.
I've only had a passing encounter with powershell, but if command line searches are all you need for searching, and something like 'echo $newrecord >> flatfile.txt' will work for adding records, then you probably have everything you need already on the computer. If you need searches to return 'ranes' of records, for example 'all APs within 200 yards with public access' you probably will need something more complex, and a db platform like sqlite is probably what you want to start looking at.
Wondering how long it will be before there are 1500 tags showing up all with the same ID that point to a record for someone in the database that didn't register...
Tell the advertisers for those program that you're really currious about their support NBC in using the broadcast flag. Not only did you get the opportunity to miss that program, but you didn't get to see any of the ads for their company promoting their products, sales, events, or anything else they were interested in letting you know about.
Believe me, word will get back to NBC that it's not to their advantage to follow such tactics.
I'm not sure how available some of the books listed above are. Hopefully you'll find them, and find them useful.
Some other books to look at are over on the ARRL.org website. Their primary focus of course is radio electronics, but they also have books on basic circuit boarding, robotics, and a few other electronic projects, as well as a few kits if you are interested in them.
Hope that's of some help. Have fun.
I would note that it is up to the FCC to determine if Internet service over Cable is a mature technology to the point that it should be opened to providers other than the company that owns the cable plant. If the FCC decides that it is, then Comcast, Time Warner, and other cable companies will be required to open their plant to third party internet service providers, just as Qwest, Verizon and AT&T do for DSL service.
Comcast's monopoly techniques and customer complaints to the FCC are likely to result in a review of their decision a few years back that allowed them to get to the position they are in at this time. I tend to suspect that there is a significant percentage of the Comcast subscriber base who would consider an ISP connection cost of $20 a month across their cable plant to be a significant improvement over the current $100+ a month fees. (Sure Internet service is only a $50 part of that bill, unless you decide not to have cable TV service in which case it becomes a $75 a month charge.)
I.e. there's a 250% mark up compared to DSL with possibly double the bandwidth potentially available, and the opportunity to have your P2P sessions interfered with.
A reminder, the reason Comcast has been interfering with P2P sessions is that they have not built the capacity in their plant to handle the volume of customer traffic. They may be really happy to announce that they are now looking at rolling out DOCIS 3 with it's 100 meg to the customer bandwidth, but it appears they have not built the backbone to allow customers to make use of it. Lots of luck there.
It took this long for anyone to mention the communications satellite, which is very likely the most accurate prediction that has ever come out of Science Fiction. Granted in his story we only needed 3 to provide universal coverage, but that was from a time before we started thinking about giving every individual their own channels to watch. (What else would you call the '500 channel tv?')
actually, TV stations usually get a list of the shows that will be provided, and a schedule of when local commercial breaks are available. It's up to them to insert their own commercials in those breaks. In some cases they also get windows where they can replace the national commercial if the people that bought the time for that commercial didn't require the local to redistribute it as part of the network contract. (That's why you sometimes see the end of a local car dealer's commercial end up with a close clip of either a time life music type commercial, or one of the many other companies that are looking to get some add time on when a local might not be able to sell a time slot. (some of the bed commercials, and commercials for products that often have full blown infomercials as well.
The technology to provide schedule information to consumers is there. EIT is fully capable of telling your system that a show is re-scheduled, or is being preempted, etc. Whether the local carrier or national distributer elects to make use of that feature is part of the resulting issue. Another part is whether your equipment can handle the information. I.e. did you build the logic for your PVR such that when TBS preempts 'The Time Machine' for the Braves game that's running a bit longer than scheduled, and switches to 'The Time Machine' already in progress, that the PVR will recognize the issue, ignore that episode and look for a different showing? Granted this presumes that the local Cable provider passes such information on, but hopefully one of these days that sort of stuff will start happening. (Skepticism says 'dream on')
I kind of think you have two options then. Since you know the protocols involved in doing a formal evaluation, you can either start doing one, and report back once it is done, or you can complain about some factor that is preventing you from doing such an evaluation. As some potential starting points for your complaints, there is 'I can't get the funding.' presumably because you haven't applied, 'I don't have the time.' as if someone else has more than you do, 'I'm waiting on approval for the project.' which presumes that you think someone really does think it's your job, and 'It's not my job.' but you do think it's your job to be critical of how someone else went about evaluating the possibilities.
I'm not saying that you're wrong in calling the people who described this as a 'formal operating system evaluation.' From a strictly semantic perspective, I think you're correct. However this begs the question as to who will do a 'formal operating system evaluation?' If it must be done in accordance with specific standards for such an evaluation, I strongly suspect that you are going to have a long career of being critical of people's reports. I say that not because I don't agree that such an evaluation is warranted, but because such an evaluation requires that someone spend money on the evaluation. People willing to make an investment in capital for such an evaluation are very likely to see the results as being something that gives them a competitive advantage. Things that give such people a competitive advantage tend to end up with very limited distribution.
The alternative is to have such an evaluation performed either by an educational entity under a research grant, which many people would declare as not of significant interest to them, or by a supposedly independent company to do that research, at which point the results will be criticized by anyone as favoring the company that funded the research, or potentially swept under the rug by the people who fund the research.
That's not to say that I think Ubuntu or even Windows will suffer in such an evaluation. I don't know. However CIO and Halamka have presented the results of the evaluation Halamka did perform. And until a formal evaluation is presented, with the models or proofs presented, I suspect that we won't see anything 'better' for a long time to come.
Are you presuming that all resnet connections are wifi? That would be pretty stupid. Site bandwidth would Suck.
Looking at the article, I have a problem with the starting point. The starting point is that businesses are reportedly having a hard time finding scientists and engineers coming out of our educational system. I would like a bit of clarification noted on this. First of all, there seems to be no real shortage of startups in highly technical fields finding the people they need to get started. Startups failing because they can't figure out how to turn a profit? Sure, no shortage of those either, but that is rarely because they didn't have any scientists.
In almost every case what we are actually hearing reported is that 'big' businesses are having problems finding qualified candidates for their postings. Or more specifically they are having problems getting people to apply for the postings they submit. So the question is why are They having this problem? I think it boils down to two factors.
First of all people applying for work are not fascinated with any posting that reads "Salary commensurate with experience.", "Competitive salary", "pay by industry standard guidelines" or the like. We want to know what you are willing to offer someone who meets the minimum requirements to be hired, and what the top end of the scale for a new hire with you is. We can then look at the job requirements, determine where we fit in the scale, and decide for ourselves if you are offering a wage that matches those claims or not. I certainly don't want to waste your time as a hiring manager if I am not going to be satisfied with my wages, and not telling me what you think they should be is telling me you aren't interested in attracting my attention.
Next up is the fact that a really large number of 'Big' companies do all of their posting and searching through their own tools. There is no interface with Monster. Or Dice. Or any of the other job search sites in existence. So far as I can tell, these companies seem to think that every prospective candidate will spend every free moment of their life looking through every possible businesses web site for job postings. Most of them do not have a way for you to set up a notice to you when a posting that may be of interest to you shows up.
There are many good reasons for both of the situations above. I am not saying that there are not. All I am saying is that electing to use those two tactics for searching for new employees is a pretty sure way to get the sort of results that seem to be showing up with some regularity. I. e. the only people that seem to apply are people who know someone already in the company. It makes it 'look' like there is no one qualified available, which feeds into the impression that you have to start looking internationally.
Equipment costs are variable. I picked up a 240 wat multiband multiprotocol transmitter at ahamfest for $300. I may not be the newest radio on the block, but it can get me on the air once I have my general or extra ticket. (granted I need an antenna tuner and some sort of antenna, but one step at a time.
I have seen shack in a box rigs go on e-bay for under $800.
Dual band (VHF/UHF) HTs are available for under $100 used, and under $150 new.
At the same time you can break the bank with acessories or radios. A functioning SDR setup is going to run about $1000. Some of the more impressive contesting rigs are upwards of $15,000. So if you are interested in getting all the bells and whistles, it can get as expensive as you want.
-Rusty - kc0vcu
As to the international requirement in 1938, I would suspect that at least part of the idea was to allow amatuer operators to communicate with ships at sea that were in trouble. At the time, ships RTOs consistently used CW to communicate with the ports they were approaching. Due to the nature of the Q codes ships RTOs used, as well as the general numeric nature of much of the information that would be sent, it was reasonable to presume that an Amatuer operator who knew International Morse Code, could communicate with a ship at sea which was in trouble.
Likewise operators who were going to go into a disaster area at the time would generaly be taking equipment they felt they could work people outside of the affected area with, that was also reasonably portable. I suggest that most people would agree that a portable unit or setup that could send and receive CW in the 30's was significantly smaller and lighter than a similar setup capable of sending and receiving AM. Having some requirement that these operators demonstrate a specific competency with code at some speed was potentially useful in screening who would be operating within a disaster area.
Not directly related to the above, but it comes up often enough as a question is 'why the three code speed tests? 5, 15 and 20 wpm.'
Studies over time demonstrated that the student of Morse Code ends up going through three apparent phases in learning code. First is the association of the dits and dahs to the letter. If people associate the sound with an image, or something else pointing at the letter, it takes long enough to dereference the pointers getting back to the letter, that you can not effectively copy code at more than 3 or 4 wpm. So if you set the threshold at 5 wpm, you are ensuring that the operator does at least know what the letter sound association is beyond counting dits/dahs, or other associations.
There are other stumbling blocks at about 13 wpm, and 18 wpm. Setting test rates at 15 and 20 wpm, allows th operator todemonstrate that they have gotten past those rates.
Why would the FCC have considered it OK to only use the 5 wpm rate then? Because a good operator will adjust their transmit speed to reflect the remote operator's transmission speed. So if the only operator you can talk to is stuck at 10 wpm, a good operator can still work with them.
Now that the international body that was requiring code for hf bands has pulled that requirement, countries are modifying their own requirements, and the US is just the most recent country to follow suit.
kc0vcu - no code tech, Still interested in knowing and using code.
I think we will see code being picked up by more people who want to learn it to use it for some other reason. We will nearly always have operators who will find no need for the skill, and I suspect we will find operators looking for every edge they can get in a contest. (* like double the points just for each code contact you make.) And others who will be looking for ccdx awards in each band, and each mode. Likewise dxpeditions will end up at some grid square that no one has operated from in over 40 years, who will only operate in CW. You want the QSO for some reason, well they ain't listening in the phone bands.
I also think that as a result we will find a lot of people even more willing to teach these operators code, because they are watching people learn a skill they want to use, not something they are going to throw away the moment they get their ticket. Architects happen to use computers to do almost everything they do these days. When I was in high school, the architectural drawing class used t-squares, 45 and 30/60 triangles, tri-rules in various scales, French curves, elliptical templates, and a metal shield for erasing lines that went beyond where you planned for them to end up. It took skill to use these tools properly. It's a skill that high school students today are not learning, because using the computer drafting tools is the marketable skill for the industry in general. There will still be architects who choose to learn the skills of old, because they find those skills interesting, and occasionally useful for their own purposes.
-Rusty - kc0vcu
By finding people who decided that learning Morse Code was worth the effort for some reason other than that it was a license requirement that they never used again?
How much of that periodic table does the scientist down the hall from you know? All 132 elements? (or is it 137 this week?) Is it the table that includes the atomic weight, mass, count of electrons in each shell, normal shell state levels, excited state electron shell levels? Full description of the organization of protons and neutrons? What other elements each element will build a valent or covalent bond with? What color a reducing electron shell move generates as a photon?
Is it helping him in his job of analyzing and describing the observations of the cosmos? Is it helping her explain how quantum electro dynamics is demonstrating a flaw with the concept of causality? Was there some test they took that demonstrated they knew all the minutia of the periodic table by heart?
I think you will find that you can easily find scientists who do not know every possible detail of the current periodic table by heart. Just as you will likely find a few hams that can't tell you how Ohms law is affected by a change from DC to AC.
Morse is a very useful language to know. In some cases far more useful than people who know it expected at one time or another. But that doesn't mean that every radio operator is going to use it for every activity they do on the radio. It can be fun to work with, but that doesn't make it worthy of being a requirement to know or be tested on.
One of the reasons that hams do not use the max allowed power all the time is that hams are supposed to use the least power they can to communicate. Not that they always do. Two hams a block or two apart may be chatting with each other through a wide area repeater transmitting at 50 or 90 watts, when they could be communicating simplex at less than a quarter watt.
Also transmitting at x watts uses x plus some variable depending on the equipment in use power that has to come from some place. Commercial power, batteries, generators, solar cells, windmills all cost money or significant effort to put a signal on the air.
Lastly, as odd as it seems to some people, we do not want to cause interference with other services or non-radio equipment. It actually bothers us when neighbors report that they are hearing our signals on their TV, computer speakers, or stoves. It means that energy we want to be broadcast for reception by other hams is being picked up by equipment not designed to receive the signal. Either energy that we want to be in the frequency spectrum we are transmitting on is in another spectrum, or the consumer equipment our neighbors are using has been designed poorly or the like.
There are also big challenges to seeing how far we can communicate with very little power. There are a lot of hams that contest and communicate around the world on less than 5 watts. You know, the amount of energy that an incandescent night light draws.
Depending upon the initialcondition of the pumpkin, you may not even be throwing chunks when it leaves the launcher. More like Mush. At those velocities, I would be curious to see if there was anything but seeds making any sort of distance.
I suppose that an alternative that would give you the centripital acceleration would be to put a bucket on the end of a set of wire ropes attached to an axle that is driven by a compressed air turbine to get the bucket up to speed, then figure out some way to release whatever is left in the bucket in a trajectory that gives you a reasonable chance of getting some distance. Getting the angle right would involve either setting the axel at that angle and letting go of the contents as the bucket passes the horizontal plane passing through it's plane of rotation, or setting the axel horizontally, spinning the bucket in a vertical direction, then letting fly as the bucket passes the tangent that matches the desired launch angle.
In either case you are going to have to wait till the bucket is at whatever speed gives you the desired centriptal acceleration with no further tortional acceleration so that the cables holding the bucket are extended and no longer wrapped around the axel. The release mechanism should probably be mounted on the axel to reduce the effect of impacting the triger at the edge of the circle the bucket is describing. Perhaps an air brake attached to a pin locked ring such that releasing the pin causes the air brake to pull the bottom of the bucket towards the axel releasing the payload. Tuning the release timing would be interesting. Perhaps a protective ring beyond the circle described by the bucket at points you don't want the contents heading off in would be a good idea.
Hey sounds like an idea, wonder if anyone has tried it already...
-Rusty
Yes and no. Yes crosstalk can become a problem. For most people this means migrating from one type of cable to another as the speed of your network increases. As an example, copper gig-e pretty much requires a properly wired Cat-5E cable, However if you are going to be setting up several runs in close paralel, (50' of station cable from the patch pannel to a quad of cubicals for exammple) it makes sense to move up to Cat-6, or better yet set up remote patch panels at the cube quad and run the appropriate cable for that configuration.
In most cable plants, copper is used for 'local' connections, and most high capacity trunking is done via fibre. That can almost eliminate any concern regarding crosstalk. Granted if you like to roll your own fiber bundles, and don't properly insulate and run your fiber, you are going to encounter problems, but mos people don't do that with fiber ayway.
I agree strongly with the note a couple up from here. If you wrap your bundles in such a way that every last cable has to be disconnected from any hardware that is going to be replaced, without building in enough slack to move that equipment when it fails, you are the one who is at fault for any resulting long term outage as the techs performing the swap attempt to get everything back where it belongs. If you have to replace a 6913, that is fully populated with 96 port blades. It's nice to have the ability to stick a label on each blade, identifying what slot it goes into, have enough slack available to remove it from the chassi, extract the chassi from the rack, rack up the new chassi, and re-insert the blades. Likewise replacing a single blade when you can simply hang the old blade in front of the new blade, and simply transfer the cables individually or in pairs will make the replacement go significantly faster. Also make sure you leave enough slack so that if a tech suspects that either a port, or set of ports on a card is bad, the cable can be connected to a different port for diagnostic purposes. If the port is determined to be bad, the cable should go back into the original spot on the replacement component, but do you want to get the blame for the device being down for an extended period because the user couldn't be moved to another port a blade or two away? Or would you rather come back and re-wrap all those bundles later on?
Just my thoughts. I'm sure that lots of people can come up with other thoughts and opinions. Their probably right too.
-Rusty
Building an OGM script as a matter of fact. It's getting entirely too long.
"Hi, You've reached [#phonenumber#]. If you would like me to call you back, make it interesing, and give me the information I need to reach you at home. Firstnames with an 800 number and extention are not interesting. I don't care how sexy your voice is. If you're calling from a business I don't take solicitation calls, but if it is something else, include who you are working for, the purpose of your call, and your home number. Wait for the beep."
That averages about 30 seconds there. That seems to me to be a bit long. but maybe it's just me.
-Rusty
The legal problem is especially tricky for those distributions that are attempting to be free/gratis, as well as free/libre.
Free/libre prevents you from using tools that have restrictions on their distribution. Specifically things like w32 codecs that Microsoft may very well feel comfortable giving away to anyone who can use them, but may not modify them in any way. There are often other issues, such as the software is freely available to anyone who has some other specific licence as well. None of that would be acceptable under the Free/libre distributions.
Free/gratis (free beer) has other issues. An example would be the Unisis GIF pattent restrictions that prevented people from distributing software that could create, and by some people's interpretation view, GIF images, unless a per-seat fee was paid. When you offer a Free/gratis distribution, how exactly are you supposed to pay for those per-seat fees?
None of this prevents any company who wants to go through the negotiations, pay the fees, and collect sales revenu from users, from doing so, and offering a distribution that includes everything you can imagine. Whether they would ever make enough money on the distribution to stay in business is questionable, but they can make the effort.
There are a number of people who would advise people not to purchase or use such a distribution, on the grounds that it violates some of their own lofty ideas regarding how software should be distributed. Whether any specific individual would be influenced by those arguments or not, would be up to each individual.
In any case, if you would like to try a distribution that works something like that, i.e. pretty much everything you would consider including, either is, or is a click or two away from being installed, you may be comfortable with Linspire. Just understand that the CNR service does come with a fee.
-Rusty
Because you have not provided a budget, yet feel that an additional server to act as a firewall/virus blocker is too expensive, it's hard to offer a good recomendation.
In any case there are a few options using Linux. If you are looking to capture/collect snapshots over time, you could do anything from ip based webcams with a backend on Linux using wget to collect snapshots from each camera. Those get hosted on the Linux box as a web page for each location. On each of those pages, display the last 6 or so snapshots gathered. (one everry five minutes? whatever sort of schedule you want.) then include a link to the webcam itself for live video. Possibly proxied through the linux box to reduce the number of addresses that the webcams themselves are directly feeding.
Another option would be a Linux box at each location with a video capture card like a Hauppauge WinTVGo, or other bt484 card with a camcorder attached to video in. The big downside of this is likely to be the bandwidth for upstream transfers of video. Many Broadband providers restrict upload speeds from the site to 128kbps, which isn't much for video. At the same time you could use memcorder to capture to one video format in blocks of an hour or something, then downconvert that to divx, or mpeg-4. Then use something like wput to copy the compressed video to some other location with better bandwidth for downloads. Obviously there will be some delay built into this in that you will have to wait for the converstion to compressed video to happen before it can be made available. Optionally if you have a camera or capture directly to mpeg4 or divx you may get faster response. One downside of that is that you may have artifacts in the resulting video that may make the captured video useless as a security system. In that case something like 'motion' as mentioned earlier may be useful.
You may have other concerns as well. None of what I have described above have anything built into them that support tilt-pan-zoom features that may be of interest to you. Considering that most broadband connections in residential areas are using something like dhcp, meaning you are never entirely sure what IP address the site will have the next time you want to access it, you very possibly already use something like dyndns or perhaps some other system to keep track of the current IP address for each location.
One concern may be the expense of the equipment you put on site, and the prospect of that equipment being stolen. A reasonably good video camera still has value, even if you have to spend time hacking it to make it useful for your own purposes. Likewise a computer that can do the video transcoding mentioned above has some value as well. Obviously if you can hide the camera in something that looks like it has no value, or is part of the structure, it will be less likely to be pilfered. If the Linux computer making things available is a Linksys 54g wap, with a hard drive attached to a USB port, and the camera is a wireless cam, you would have additional flexibility in instalation, however processing power would be reduced. It may be enough, though you might be better with a box that looks like a utilities box next to the utilites entry point of the house. It would be a custom build of course, but that may be the best long term solution. You could even build it with it's own internal backup batteries. Include a cable modem, or dsl adapter as necessary and you can possibly have limited access to what is happening if local power is interupted. The wireless wifi camera could be located anywhere that power would be available to it. Whether you would want to provide it with backup power or not would be up to you.
As far as securing the box, I would recommend using some sort of vpn to provide a connection between the box on site, and some server located elsewhere that provides a web server, or other solution for your users to keep track of each property. Along the way you may want to determine how restrictive you want to be about access to the imagry collect