Slashdot Mirror


User: unitron

unitron's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
6,716
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 6,716

  1. Re:Why do people feel the need to hide porn? on Making Small Steps Against Censorship · · Score: 1

    You are correct that my point had nothing to do with high school (i.e. pubescent and post-pubescent) students, and even less to do with the difficulties you seem to be experiencing in trying to misuse your high school's resources.

  2. Re:If China was smart... on Making Small Steps Against Censorship · · Score: 1
    "In short, the truth could hide in plain sight among the static. The dissidents would be silenced, nonviolently, by the very system they rely on."

    You mean the moderators and meta-moderators wouldn't save the day? :-)

  3. Re:Why do people feel the need to hide porn? on Making Small Steps Against Censorship · · Score: 1
    "...but every kid is aware of and curious about sex..."

    If by kid you mean pre-pubescent then you are not entirely correct.

  4. Re:To celebrate - close down the FCC on 70th Anniversary FM Commemorative Broadcast · · Score: 1
    "Property is about things that have real natural limits in supply and demand..."

    And the FCC was created because the airwaves are subject to those limits and somebody had to decide how to share them. Spectrum is like land, they aren't making any more of it.

  5. Re:Lawrence Lessig wrote about Armstrong... on 70th Anniversary FM Commemorative Broadcast · · Score: 1
    If you can find a copy, the story is available in much greater detail in Lawrence Lessing's Man of High Fidelity: Edwin Howard Armstrong.

    Please note that Lawrence Lessing and Lawrence Lessig are not the same person, although in Free Culture Lessig apparently draws heavily on Lessing's book.

  6. Re:Seeing the mention of Marconi in his bio... on 70th Anniversary FM Commemorative Broadcast · · Score: 1

    Betamax was beaten down by the consumer market. VHS had longer tapes and there was more porn available sooner on VHS. It should be replaced on that list by Edwin Howard Armstrong.

  7. Re:AM v. FM on 70th Anniversary FM Commemorative Broadcast · · Score: 1
    Armstrong didn't exactly work for RCA, but they certainly worked against him.

    I highly recommend the book Man of High Fidelity: Edwin Howard Armstrong by Lawrence Lessing, if one is fortunate enough to find a copy. (I bought my Bantam Books paperback copy some 30 years ago.)

  8. Re:I never did understand... on FCC Speeds Up Digital TV Signal Deadlines · · Score: 1
    I was using the term block converter to keep things simple.

    Actually a block converter does no modulation. The already modulated signals come in and get hetrodyned to different center frequencies.

  9. Re:I never did understand... on FCC Speeds Up Digital TV Signal Deadlines · · Score: 1
    "What's really amazing is how digital uses less bandwidth and are cheaper for the cable company. But yet, switching to digital cable is always more expensive.. Guess they figure the consumers want it more. Sad..."

    Digital may be cheaper for the cable company because it uses less bandwidth. However, converting it to digital at the time of the creation of the content and then converting it back to analog at the receiver so that the consumer's eyes and ears can process it probably means greater expense at both ends even if it is cheaper in transit.

  10. Re:"off the air"? on FCC Speeds Up Digital TV Signal Deadlines · · Score: 1
    "I(n) networking we would call this out-of-band data, indicating that it's transmitted in parallel with the data, but not in the primary content."

    I think what they're talking about here is data inserted into one (or more) of the vertical blanking intervals, so it's not really parallel or out of band so much as it is "stuffed into the space between the pieces of content".

    To use the old black and white (pre-color) numbers, you have a field occurring every one/sixtieth of a second, but the part that gets on the screen doesn't take up the entire one/sixtieth of a second, just almost all of it. During that little small fraction of that one/sixtieth of a second the screen is blanked while the beam is moved from the bottom back up to the top of the screen, and in that time information other than video can be inserted at the transmitter and picked off by a separate circuit in the receiver.

    An illustration of out of band is the "Plain Old Telephone System". Your telephone set strips everything below 300 cycles per second (300 Hertz) and everything above 3,000 cycles, and the 2,700 Hz in between is the voice channel that actually goes down the wire to the phone company's central office. The phone company uses the bandwidth on either side of that 2,700 Hz block (the voice channel) for other things, which are the "out of (the voice)band" signals, including DSL, which is why you have to have good lines for DSL, so that the frequency response is high enough for the DSL signal not to get attenuated too much to be readable at the other end.

  11. Re:Cool! on PC Case Made Completely of Fans · · Score: 5, Funny

    He should have made it all intake except for the bottom and the bottom all exhaust. Custom case and hovercraft in one.

  12. Re:"off the air"? on FCC Speeds Up Digital TV Signal Deadlines · · Score: 1

    Perhaps "off of the air" would better express it, as in he gets the metadata off of the air instead of off of the telephone line or off of the newspaper page.

  13. Re:I never did understand... on FCC Speeds Up Digital TV Signal Deadlines · · Score: 1
    " The government long ago divided up the airwaves into categories and sold chunks of it to interested parties."

    What they did was license the use of those chunks for use in the public interest. The selling is a recent travesty.

  14. Re:I never did understand... on FCC Speeds Up Digital TV Signal Deadlines · · Score: 4, Interesting
    "What I'd like to see is a transverter box of some kind that I can hang off my antenna that will shift the frequencies received back into the normal TV band and convert from digital to analog (which would technically not make it a transverter, but you get my drift). Has anyone seen anything like this on the market?"

    What you're asking for is a block converter.

    In the earlier days of cable when many if not most TVs still had rotary tuners, the cable companies put channels other than 2-13 on other VHF frequencies. The cable boxes from the cable companies generally tuned one channel at a time and shifted it to VHF channel 2, 3, or 4 so that you could set your TV to that channel and then choose channels with the cable box.

    There were aftermarket devices which shifted the cable channels up to the UHF broadcast frequencies simultaneously so that you could tune them in with your television's UHF tuner. They were called block converters because they converted a block of channels up in frequency at the same time instead of one at a time. If you put a splitter on the output you could watch two different cable channels on two different televisions at the same time without needing a cable company cable box (or paying rent on it) for either set.

    It might be possible to come up with something like that for broadcast digital channels, but don't expect anything like that for cable and satellite channels. Satellite and cable companies, especially cable companies who see "cable ready" televisions and VCRs as having cost them a fortune in lost cable box rentals, aren't going to want to surrender even that much control. The cable companies can hardly wait to go completely digital and re-use a lot of the analog frequencies for other revenue opportunities.

    So whenever you hear about how great digital is going to be for the consumer what they really mean is how greater the number of opportunities for spending money the consumer will have.

  15. Re:Depends what the options are on Realistic Sysadmin Workload for a Company of 30? · · Score: 1
    1. The 1% figure is clearly rubbish...

    2. ...your company has new owners... (who do not understand #1.)

    3. ...you don't have any immediate reason to jump ship... I refer you back to #2. The new owner is obviously an escaped mental patient.

  16. Re:Weenies on Keyboards are Good; Mouses are Dumb · · Score: 1
    "If you are not entering raw assembly via a hex pad on a Cosmic Elf..."

    Surely you mean the COSMAC Elf.

  17. Re:What about.... on Voice Actors Vote on VG Strike · · Score: 1
    "Pac-Man didn't have Tom Cruise doing the voice acting..."

    Yes they did. That's what he sounded like before puberty.

  18. Re:Intel, it doesn't matter. on Intel Claims No DRM · · Score: 1
    " I dare them to lock down the POTS."

    You mean the system over which the government has regulatory control already?

  19. Simple solution on Developers Want Fatter Paychecks · · Score: 1
    Just do like Hollywood and the record biz. Anybody wants royalties, just give them a percentage of the net profits.

    And pay (out of the gross) your most creative people to do your accounting.

  20. Re:So what? on Developers Want Fatter Paychecks · · Score: 1
    take porches to work

    You aren't very bright, are you?

    Well, apparently those guys are making much better money than those of us who leave our porches at home attached to the house, so maybe we aren't as bright as we think ourselves to be.

  21. Re:I tried this!!! on Resurrecting Performers Via Computer Performance · · Score: 1

    On the off chance that you're not just going for a "funny" mod and this really did happen I'd like to hear more. Was it a tape of a different preacher? Did you try to make the sound source appear to be the pulpit area? Was this during a reagular service in the regular location? And so forth.

  22. Re:dupe on Resurrecting Performers Via Computer Performance · · Score: 1

    Wasn't the previous time a dupe as well?

  23. Re:It must stink to be that guy. on Whose Burden is it to Recycle Computers? · · Score: 1
    "...when suddenly your automated arm decides to pick up a trash can. :P"

    Yeah, we lose more Daleks that way.

  24. Re:No Doubt About It on The Ultimate Leatherman? · · Score: 1

    I'm going to leave that link unclicked and just assume that you're talking about some guy that's spent a lifetime overdoing the suntanning.

  25. Re:No Doubt About It on The Ultimate Leatherman? · · Score: 1

    No, Gary is the ultimate Leatherman. Lived in Alexander dorm at UNC back when.