Smaller transformers are the main benefit of higher-frequency AC, you're right. But the 400Hz power system is found plenty of places besides airplanes. I'm not millitary, but I've heard that most shipboard power is 400Hz, and they also do something weird with phases and ground, but I don't recall the specifics.
I understand that old mainframes used 400Hz because the power converters were smaller and made less heat. The easiest way to make 400Hz power at the time was through "rotary converters", a motor-generator pair that takes in whatever power is available locally (50 or 60? One lump or two?) and spits out 400Hz.
You should look into the Anderson Powerpole plugs. They're made for DC, and can be assembled in a few ways to prevent accidental mixing of voltages. They've become a standard in amateur radio and emergency communications circles, for moving 12v around without the problems of large busbars or cigarette lighter sockets.
The world could use a set of powerpole orientation and color standards. Hmm.
True, the effect is called "galvanic corrosion". That's why the entire telco network is negative with respect to ground. It's been that way since the days of Western Union. Already solved, sorry.
2) Lower voltage means bigger current for the same power. This would require thicker, more expensive cables
True. But low voltage (under 50vDC nominal) doesn't require licensed electricians to run it. Clearly the extra buck for thicker copper outweighs the cost of paying an electrician for 8 hours to come extend a power feed. You've obviously never had to deal with licensed electricians.
3) DC-DC voltage conversion is, somewhat less efficient...
How so? AC-DC switchmode power supplies start by rectifying the AC into a high DC voltage, and then perform internal DC-DC conversion to produce the output voltages. Even the ones that work straight from the AC are no more efficient once you include power factor correction.
4) No insulation between systems. That way, systems get more prone to ground loops...
Not true. Remember I said the telco power system is -48vDC with respect to ground? All the logic levels (12, 5, and 3.3v) in the cards are positive just like you're used to. The DC-DC converters are isolating; all they stipulate is that there be less than a 300v total differential between the inputs and the outputs. You're free to reference any part to ground, or leave it floating if your heart desires.
Telco grounding is insane anyway. Most places have #6AWG from each rack to a 1/0 aisle ground cable, and all the aisle grounds meet on a 750KCMil that runs the length of the building, over to the "office principal ground point". Track down a copy of TP76200MP and read up.
I've been saying this for years -- outfits that already have a DC infrastructure are natural candidates for photovoltaic augmentation. Slap a few panels on the roof, the rest of the system is already in place. Why not?
I'm not going to suggest that a telco CO could run entirely from rooftop solar -- far from it! But they'd see a much faster return on investment, compared to residential systems, because they wouldn't have to buy inverters, charge controllers, or any of that crap. (One advantage of an undersized array is that you never have to worry about overcharging, so you don't need a charge controller. Maybe MPPT would help efficiency anyway.)
However, it does provide a few significant advantages.
Telcos use DC because it's easy to battery-back. Since all your gear is already running from the DC supply, there's no guesswork about whether your UPS will be able to handle the load. Each piece includes its own converters, so all you have to do is size the battery bank. Since most telcos aim for 8-hour runtimes on battery (long enough to discover and fix a generator problem), overkill is the order of the day.
There's also the point that you can run several small generators, instead of one large one. In an AC world, keeping multiple generators syncrhonized is nearly impossible on a small scale, so you just run one big one. If your setup grows, you rip out the old generator and replace it with a larger one. In DC, since all your generators feed the same battery bank, you can just tack on more capacity without trashing your original investment.
Using multiple generators provides cheaper redundancy too. In an AC setup if you wanted to be protected against a generator failure, you'd need two identical gensets, each large enough to run the whole load. With DC, say you had 5 generators but 4 could power the load. You still have no single point of failure, and you don't have to buy *double* the generating capacity.
Oh, and if a second generator fails, say you're down to 3, you're below the break-even point, but you're still limping along, with the operating generators assisting the batteries, extending your battery runtime long enough that you can probably fix one of the failed gensets. Oh, you found a spare generator at the rental place down the street? Switch a few rectifiers onto it and watch your charge status come back into the green. You just don't have that sort of versatility with AC.
DC is easier to noise-filter than AC. Keeping the high-frequency noise from switching converters off the AC input is something of a black art, and is hard to do effectively. You also have Power Factor (PF) issues when running large numbers of computers (or anything that uses switch-mode power supplies) from AC. Hence, your supplies have to be PF-corrected, which adds bulk and complexity, and reduces efficiency.
A DC-DC converter suffers none of those problems, going from your 48v battery bank down to the 12, 5, and 3.3 levels in your servers. It's easy to filter the switching noise because the input is DC, a big L-C filter works quite well. There's no such thing as power factor on DC, so the converters themselves are simpler and smaller, and run cooler.
One other huge benefit is that 48 volts is "low voltage" according to the NEC, so you can wire it yourself. You'll never have to let pole-climbers into your server room again.:)
Another advantage is that most DC-input equipment has a telco heritage, and supports dual inputs. Everything in telco has an "a-side" and a "b-side" power supply. It's only relatively recently that high-end datacomm gear has started to support multiple AC power inputs. History and experience are on your side with DC.
I hear you on the cost-per-meg of laptop drives. Consider using ONE laptop drive, it need not be huge, to keep the machine's "every-day" stuff on. OS, logs, swap, and all your personal "junk", like your notes-file, your schedule, your central bookmark store, et cetera.
You're going to fall victim to feature creep just like the rest of us. That machine will end up as your personal web server, VoIP gateway, weather station, power system monitor, and more. It'll be running that little drive when you least expect it. But since laptop drives are designed to spin up quickly, and to endure lots of start/stop cycles, that's not a problem. Keep the frequently accessed files on that drive.
Put the bulk storage on some big 3.5" drives like you've been planning. But make sure they're not spinning unless you're actually working with the video files on them. (Or for the daily 2.5"--->3.5" backup.) If they're only on for an hour or two a day, the power draw of the larger spindles shouldn't be an issue.
Also consider the power draw of RAM. Keep an eye on your server's CPU load, and underclock it if possible. DRAM refresh cycles eat up a ton of power, I don't know if you've noticed the RAM heatsinks on the market these days. A file server doesn't need aggressive memory timings either, and if you can relax those too, do so. (I'm not as much of a hardware geek as I used to be, I don't know if anyone's implemented automatic memory underclocking for power savings, but they should.)
If you somehow managed to intercept data sent down from a satellite, you should be able to do anything you want with it, at least according to (US) copyright law; you may be breaking other laws that I do not know about, though.
Suppose the satellite was ROT13ing its transmissions though. Would the DMCA kick in? (Or could you just say they were being transmitted with an alternate code page, which you figured out?)
That's not a bad idea, but unless I'm mistaken, a shunt-wound alternator can be electrically controlled to do essentially the same thing -- vary its mechanical load to work efficiently at various speeds.
Power goes up with the cube of the wind speed, so there's not much point in keeping the thing turning in very slow winds. That gives you a lower boundary to work with. There's also only so much power that a given alternator can put out before its windings overheat due to internal resistance, so that gives you an upper limit.
The ratio between those two limits would determine whether a mechanical transmission, or electrically controlled alternator, would be better suited.
Either way, if you're going HAWT, take a look at Mercotac instead of slip-rings, for getting the power down the tower. They offer lower resistance, longer lifespan, and no RF noise as the mechanism yaws around. (I'm not affiliated with Mercotac in any way, I just saw their products on the web a while ago and thought they'd be a perfect fit for wind turbine applications.)
It's a giant leap backward in communications. Half-duplex means there's no way to interrupt a rag-chewer. You know the old comedian's line "stop me if you've heard this one"? Sabotaged by PTT!
I hate not being able to hear the listener's reactions as I'm talking. No sigh, no laugh, no "what?", leaves me without crucial tidbits of information that are so essential to human communication.
Furthermore, PTT doesn't include a way to leave a message if the victim doesn't answer. Most implementations even use a separate numbering space, so knowing someone's phone number doesn't tell you their PTT number, and vice versa.
What's ironic is that the original motivation behind PTT (the benefits of statistical multiplexing) doesn't even hold true anymore, because cellphone codecs are so good at compressing the quiet side of a conversation, you get almost the same efficiency with a full-duplex call as you do with the horrible PTT.
The typical implementation of PTT as speakerphone is just poor etiquette on the seller's part. It works the same with the regular earpiece instead of the loudspeaker, but holding the phone is infinitely more awkward because you have to press the damn button.
Do both! There's no reason you can't split the signal and encode to every popular format at once. If someone has trouble getting their favorite client working, they can try another one.
My favorite radio station webcasts in Real, WMA, and two bitrates of MP3 simultaneously. You'd do well to follow that lead.
When "Dear Friends: Music from Final Fantasy" came to Detroit, tickets sold like hotcakes. Four friends and I made it down for the second night of the engagement, and there wasn't an empty seat in orchestra hall.
While buying tickets at the box office a week before the show, there were no 5-seat blocks left in the cheap section, we had to bump up a grade if we wanted to sit together. The clerk said the cheap seats had gone "like hotcakes" as soon as news of the show broke, and the other sections were going "pretty fast".
Tell me again how gamers have no interest in getting out of the house, symphony music, or live performances in general?
Just remember: If you can telecommute 100% of the time, so can some dude in Mumbai. (Not that there's anything wrong with that, from a whole-humanity perspective, but it's just something to keep in mind.)
...is that all of my itches are horrible, complicated ones. Like I want to run win9x on some old hardware, and write some little utilities to work around some of its problems, specifically:
A virtual serial port driver, to make a local or networked gpsd appear as a locally connected GPS device. Except that, even under NT, hardware virtualization is third-year stuff. Under 9x, it's the blackest of arcane voodoo.
Or, since changes to a network adapter's IP don't take effect until it's removed and reinserted, but the OS supports DHCP, I'd like to write a little local DHCP server that simply takes the place of the network properties box, so I can change addresses at will without wearing out my PCMCIA socket. Except that network programming is also not considered good starting material for a beginning programmer.
All the "hello world"-grade programs have already been done a million times. Go ahead, just search for "file synchronization software" and see how a large number of monkeys have solved that problem with weird interfaces, incomplete functionality, and a total inability to build off each other's successes.
So with the low-hanging fruit being picked already, there's nothing appealing as a "first programming project". And I'm not likely to apply myself to an exercise just for its own sake -- it has to be really needed for me to even bother trying to program it. Does this make sense?
If someone's willing to pay for a higher search ranking, the spammer can pay humans to beat the CAPTCHAs. I can see it now, a sweatshop in a low-wage country with hundreds of workers monotonously typing in the text from the skewed and scrambled images.
I wish I could go attend this! I hope they produce a DVD "best-of" release or something. Because downloading and installing and tweaking all the drivers to render it locally would be a pain in the ass.
Anyway, folks who're into novel uses of existing technology should take a look at Notacon, a yearly tech gathering in Ohio. You know you want to enter the Anything But Ethernet contest!
If there's interest from the Machinima community, I'm sure some projector time could be arranged. If some experienced animators would like to submit a presentation, the Call For Proposals is open! I'd love to see a public screening of a few films, and maybe an intro-and-how-to.
This also marks the first time that a student and prof got equal billing when their research was announced. That's a more significant step than the sensor itself!
You should take a look at OKCupid.com if the idea intrigues you. They've got a set of eerily accurate personality tests, and some interesting math behind them. It's all free, run for fun by the same people who brought us TheSpark and SparkMatch, if you remember those.
Amen! There's actually a modern reinterpretation of the Cinderella story that has some hilariously modern female roles. I can't think of the name right now, some friends rented it for a laugh a few months ago.
Not only is Buttercup a useless little wimp, but the whole relationship between her and Westley is pretty dysfunctional. Twue wuv is all well and good, but I don't see their previous dealings as any indicator of a stable relationship in the future.
Now, Miracle Max and Valerie, *they* had a good thing going. Look at the chemistry between them, watch how they relate, you can tell they've been finishing each other's sentences for many many years. Billy Crystal totally brought that role to life.
It's hardly a chick flick. Who gives a rat's ass about Buttercup anyway? She was Westley's motivation, sure, but Inigo was my favorite character. Revenge is cooler than romance any day. Especially for a movie I first saw when I was 12 or something.
If you're so convinced it's "a kissing book", I suppose you felt no swell of outrage when Inigo Montoya related the story of his father's death? No grin when Westley revealed that he was not left-handed either? No, you weren't paying attention, because there was a girl in the beginning of the story. While the rest of us were waiting for Vizzini to keel over from the poison, or laughing at Miracle Max's antics, you were terrified of getting cooties from the girl who hadn't even been on screen for the last dozen scenes or so.
When Inigo delivered the line he'd waited his lifetime to say, and he finally had Count Rugen cornered, and the rest of us teetered on the edges of our seats waiting for the denouement, and we bit our lips and took deep breaths and tasted the sweetness of revenge as he declared "I want my father back, you son of a bitch", we cheered and sighed and thanked the universe that sometimes things do work out in the end, but you were wisely avoiding all of that, content to ignore the movie because paying attention might mean you were enjoying a "chick flick".
Dear parent poster, I regret to inform you that you're tragically misinformed about what "chick flick" means. In a chick flick, all the male characters, save for maybe one, are abusive, neglectful, or ignorant. Tune into Oxygen sometime and you'll see plenty of them. The general point of such movies is to reassure the audience that you can only be a decent human being if you have a uterus. Female characters in such movies are universally noble, smart, and caring, though somehow they always end up being the victims of male characters, whose motives are always shallow and whose actions are always vicious. If Slashdot ever posts about one of those, please let us know. But until then, don't try to assert that the Princess Bride falls into that category, because I assure you, it does not.
Get your facts straight before bashing a movie revered by the overwhelming majority of Slashdotters, not to mention the general population. For starters, try watching it.
I don't watch a lot of movies myself, but I try to refrain from commenting about the ones I haven't seen.
It sems to me that one route to greater understanding in this situation is a giant off-topic thread about nerd, geek, and hacker movies.
I was introduced to The Princess Bride, along with Monty Python and the Evil Dead series and Noises Off and several others, in high school. Whoever decided to place me in the drama teacher's homeroom did me quite a favor; those kids were some of the most interesting people I could've ever hoped to know.
Getting "in" jokes is a big part of belonging to a community. It's easy, reading this thread, to tell who's seen the movie, and who's judging it by its name alone. In the spirit of openness, and off-topicness, I'd like to suggest a big off-topic thread where Slashdotters suggest movies and books that you really should see or read, even if they're not four-star classics, because they'll help explain some common references and in-jokes of our culture.
To my high-school list above, I'd like to add:
Sneakers - "And give him head whenever he wants"
Ferris Beuller's Day Off - "Abe Froman, the sausage king of Chicago?"
2001: A Space Odyssey - "I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that."
Spaceballs - "I knew it! I'm surrounded by assholes!"
WarGames - "Oh it's alright, I've planned ahead. We're just 3 miles from a primary target."
E.T. - "Can't they just beam him up or something?" "This is reality, Greg."
Dr. Strangelove - "Shoot, a fella' could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff."
Real Genius - "It's just that I didn't want you guys to think I was stuffy. You know, no fun. All brain no penis."
Labyrinth - "You have no power over me!"
Airplane - "I am serious. And don't call me Shirley."
It's no more anti-male than Indiana Jones is anti-history. If you grew your entire opinion about the subject from one movie, you might end up a little warped. For those of us capable of appreciating a movie that contains certain departures from everyday life (which make it more *interesting* than everyday life), it's thoroughly enjoyable to watch.
The worst thing about the movie is its title. It could've just as well been called The Swordsman's Accomplices, or Adventures of the Dread Pirate Roberts. In that way, it's sort of like the Cowboy Junkies, whose music has nothing to do with cowboys or junkies, or even junk. If you can get past the name, there's treasure to be had.
Slashdot Mirror
Smaller transformers are the main benefit of higher-frequency AC, you're right. But the 400Hz power system is found plenty of places besides airplanes. I'm not millitary, but I've heard that most shipboard power is 400Hz, and they also do something weird with phases and ground, but I don't recall the specifics.
I understand that old mainframes used 400Hz because the power converters were smaller and made less heat. The easiest way to make 400Hz power at the time was through "rotary converters", a motor-generator pair that takes in whatever power is available locally (50 or 60? One lump or two?) and spits out 400Hz.
You should look into the Anderson Powerpole plugs. They're made for DC, and can be assembled in a few ways to prevent accidental mixing of voltages. They've become a standard in amateur radio and emergency communications circles, for moving 12v around without the problems of large busbars or cigarette lighter sockets.
The world could use a set of powerpole orientation and color standards. Hmm.
True. But low voltage (under 50vDC nominal) doesn't require licensed electricians to run it. Clearly the extra buck for thicker copper outweighs the cost of paying an electrician for 8 hours to come extend a power feed. You've obviously never had to deal with licensed electricians.
How so? AC-DC switchmode power supplies start by rectifying the AC into a high DC voltage, and then perform internal DC-DC conversion to produce the output voltages. Even the ones that work straight from the AC are no more efficient once you include power factor correction.
Not true. Remember I said the telco power system is -48vDC with respect to ground? All the logic levels (12, 5, and 3.3v) in the cards are positive just like you're used to. The DC-DC converters are isolating; all they stipulate is that there be less than a 300v total differential between the inputs and the outputs. You're free to reference any part to ground, or leave it floating if your heart desires.
Telco grounding is insane anyway. Most places have #6AWG from each rack to a 1/0 aisle ground cable, and all the aisle grounds meet on a 750KCMil that runs the length of the building, over to the "office principal ground point". Track down a copy of TP76200MP and read up.
I've been saying this for years -- outfits that already have a DC infrastructure are natural candidates for photovoltaic augmentation. Slap a few panels on the roof, the rest of the system is already in place. Why not?
I'm not going to suggest that a telco CO could run entirely from rooftop solar -- far from it! But they'd see a much faster return on investment, compared to residential systems, because they wouldn't have to buy inverters, charge controllers, or any of that crap. (One advantage of an undersized array is that you never have to worry about overcharging, so you don't need a charge controller. Maybe MPPT would help efficiency anyway.)
...this may or may not save a step.
:)
However, it does provide a few significant advantages.
Telcos use DC because it's easy to battery-back. Since all your gear is already running from the DC supply, there's no guesswork about whether your UPS will be able to handle the load. Each piece includes its own converters, so all you have to do is size the battery bank. Since most telcos aim for 8-hour runtimes on battery (long enough to discover and fix a generator problem), overkill is the order of the day.
There's also the point that you can run several small generators, instead of one large one. In an AC world, keeping multiple generators syncrhonized is nearly impossible on a small scale, so you just run one big one. If your setup grows, you rip out the old generator and replace it with a larger one. In DC, since all your generators feed the same battery bank, you can just tack on more capacity without trashing your original investment.
Using multiple generators provides cheaper redundancy too. In an AC setup if you wanted to be protected against a generator failure, you'd need two identical gensets, each large enough to run the whole load. With DC, say you had 5 generators but 4 could power the load. You still have no single point of failure, and you don't have to buy *double* the generating capacity.
Oh, and if a second generator fails, say you're down to 3, you're below the break-even point, but you're still limping along, with the operating generators assisting the batteries, extending your battery runtime long enough that you can probably fix one of the failed gensets. Oh, you found a spare generator at the rental place down the street? Switch a few rectifiers onto it and watch your charge status come back into the green. You just don't have that sort of versatility with AC.
DC is easier to noise-filter than AC. Keeping the high-frequency noise from switching converters off the AC input is something of a black art, and is hard to do effectively. You also have Power Factor (PF) issues when running large numbers of computers (or anything that uses switch-mode power supplies) from AC. Hence, your supplies have to be PF-corrected, which adds bulk and complexity, and reduces efficiency.
A DC-DC converter suffers none of those problems, going from your 48v battery bank down to the 12, 5, and 3.3 levels in your servers. It's easy to filter the switching noise because the input is DC, a big L-C filter works quite well. There's no such thing as power factor on DC, so the converters themselves are simpler and smaller, and run cooler.
One other huge benefit is that 48 volts is "low voltage" according to the NEC, so you can wire it yourself. You'll never have to let pole-climbers into your server room again.
Another advantage is that most DC-input equipment has a telco heritage, and supports dual inputs. Everything in telco has an "a-side" and a "b-side" power supply. It's only relatively recently that high-end datacomm gear has started to support multiple AC power inputs. History and experience are on your side with DC.
Possibly, but you can bet Worldwind will have the images, and do something sensible with them.
I hear you on the cost-per-meg of laptop drives. Consider using ONE laptop drive, it need not be huge, to keep the machine's "every-day" stuff on. OS, logs, swap, and all your personal "junk", like your notes-file, your schedule, your central bookmark store, et cetera.
You're going to fall victim to feature creep just like the rest of us. That machine will end up as your personal web server, VoIP gateway, weather station, power system monitor, and more. It'll be running that little drive when you least expect it. But since laptop drives are designed to spin up quickly, and to endure lots of start/stop cycles, that's not a problem. Keep the frequently accessed files on that drive.
Put the bulk storage on some big 3.5" drives like you've been planning. But make sure they're not spinning unless you're actually working with the video files on them. (Or for the daily 2.5"--->3.5" backup.) If they're only on for an hour or two a day, the power draw of the larger spindles shouldn't be an issue.
Also consider the power draw of RAM. Keep an eye on your server's CPU load, and underclock it if possible. DRAM refresh cycles eat up a ton of power, I don't know if you've noticed the RAM heatsinks on the market these days. A file server doesn't need aggressive memory timings either, and if you can relax those too, do so. (I'm not as much of a hardware geek as I used to be, I don't know if anyone's implemented automatic memory underclocking for power savings, but they should.)
Good luck, and let us know how it goes!
Suppose the satellite was ROT13ing its transmissions though. Would the DMCA kick in? (Or could you just say they were being transmitted with an alternate code page, which you figured out?)
That's not a bad idea, but unless I'm mistaken, a shunt-wound alternator can be electrically controlled to do essentially the same thing -- vary its mechanical load to work efficiently at various speeds.
Power goes up with the cube of the wind speed, so there's not much point in keeping the thing turning in very slow winds. That gives you a lower boundary to work with. There's also only so much power that a given alternator can put out before its windings overheat due to internal resistance, so that gives you an upper limit.
The ratio between those two limits would determine whether a mechanical transmission, or electrically controlled alternator, would be better suited.
Either way, if you're going HAWT, take a look at Mercotac instead of slip-rings, for getting the power down the tower. They offer lower resistance, longer lifespan, and no RF noise as the mechanism yaws around. (I'm not affiliated with Mercotac in any way, I just saw their products on the web a while ago and thought they'd be a perfect fit for wind turbine applications.)
There was a way to do this on the Commodore PET.
It's a giant leap backward in communications. Half-duplex means there's no way to interrupt a rag-chewer. You know the old comedian's line "stop me if you've heard this one"? Sabotaged by PTT!
I hate not being able to hear the listener's reactions as I'm talking. No sigh, no laugh, no "what?", leaves me without crucial tidbits of information that are so essential to human communication.
Furthermore, PTT doesn't include a way to leave a message if the victim doesn't answer. Most implementations even use a separate numbering space, so knowing someone's phone number doesn't tell you their PTT number, and vice versa.
What's ironic is that the original motivation behind PTT (the benefits of statistical multiplexing) doesn't even hold true anymore, because cellphone codecs are so good at compressing the quiet side of a conversation, you get almost the same efficiency with a full-duplex call as you do with the horrible PTT.
The typical implementation of PTT as speakerphone is just poor etiquette on the seller's part. It works the same with the regular earpiece instead of the loudspeaker, but holding the phone is infinitely more awkward because you have to press the damn button.
Do both! There's no reason you can't split the signal and encode to every popular format at once. If someone has trouble getting their favorite client working, they can try another one.
My favorite radio station webcasts in Real, WMA, and two bitrates of MP3 simultaneously. You'd do well to follow that lead.
When "Dear Friends: Music from Final Fantasy" came to Detroit, tickets sold like hotcakes. Four friends and I made it down for the second night of the engagement, and there wasn't an empty seat in orchestra hall.
While buying tickets at the box office a week before the show, there were no 5-seat blocks left in the cheap section, we had to bump up a grade if we wanted to sit together. The clerk said the cheap seats had gone "like hotcakes" as soon as news of the show broke, and the other sections were going "pretty fast".
Tell me again how gamers have no interest in getting out of the house, symphony music, or live performances in general?
Just remember: If you can telecommute 100% of the time, so can some dude in Mumbai. (Not that there's anything wrong with that, from a whole-humanity perspective, but it's just something to keep in mind.)
...is that all of my itches are horrible, complicated ones. Like I want to run win9x on some old hardware, and write some little utilities to work around some of its problems, specifically:
A virtual serial port driver, to make a local or networked gpsd appear as a locally connected GPS device. Except that, even under NT, hardware virtualization is third-year stuff. Under 9x, it's the blackest of arcane voodoo.
Or, since changes to a network adapter's IP don't take effect until it's removed and reinserted, but the OS supports DHCP, I'd like to write a little local DHCP server that simply takes the place of the network properties box, so I can change addresses at will without wearing out my PCMCIA socket. Except that network programming is also not considered good starting material for a beginning programmer.
All the "hello world"-grade programs have already been done a million times. Go ahead, just search for "file synchronization software" and see how a large number of monkeys have solved that problem with weird interfaces, incomplete functionality, and a total inability to build off each other's successes.
So with the low-hanging fruit being picked already, there's nothing appealing as a "first programming project". And I'm not likely to apply myself to an exercise just for its own sake -- it has to be really needed for me to even bother trying to program it. Does this make sense?
If someone's willing to pay for a higher search ranking, the spammer can pay humans to beat the CAPTCHAs. I can see it now, a sweatshop in a low-wage country with hundreds of workers monotonously typing in the text from the skewed and scrambled images.
There's also PWNTcha, a CAPTCHA decoder. (Previously slashdotted.)
I wish I could go attend this! I hope they produce a DVD "best-of" release or something. Because downloading and installing and tweaking all the drivers to render it locally would be a pain in the ass.
Anyway, folks who're into novel uses of existing technology should take a look at Notacon, a yearly tech gathering in Ohio. You know you want to enter the Anything But Ethernet contest!
If there's interest from the Machinima community, I'm sure some projector time could be arranged. If some experienced animators would like to submit a presentation, the Call For Proposals is open! I'd love to see a public screening of a few films, and maybe an intro-and-how-to.
This also marks the first time that a student and prof got equal billing when their research was announced. That's a more significant step than the sensor itself!
Gah! Seed the blocks you have, I've got 2 peers and 0 blocks.
Vinyl and tape are NOT analog. They're just very fine-grained digital where the noise floor overwhelms the signal at a certain level.
I'm sick and tired of hearing audiophiles make it abundantly clear they never attended even high school physics.
You should take a look at OKCupid.com if the idea intrigues you. They've got a set of eerily accurate personality tests, and some interesting math behind them. It's all free, run for fun by the same people who brought us TheSpark and SparkMatch, if you remember those.
Amen! There's actually a modern reinterpretation of the Cinderella story that has some hilariously modern female roles. I can't think of the name right now, some friends rented it for a laugh a few months ago.
Not only is Buttercup a useless little wimp, but the whole relationship between her and Westley is pretty dysfunctional. Twue wuv is all well and good, but I don't see their previous dealings as any indicator of a stable relationship in the future.
Now, Miracle Max and Valerie, *they* had a good thing going. Look at the chemistry between them, watch how they relate, you can tell they've been finishing each other's sentences for many many years. Billy Crystal totally brought that role to life.
It's hardly a chick flick. Who gives a rat's ass about Buttercup anyway? She was Westley's motivation, sure, but Inigo was my favorite character. Revenge is cooler than romance any day. Especially for a movie I first saw when I was 12 or something.
If you're so convinced it's "a kissing book", I suppose you felt no swell of outrage when Inigo Montoya related the story of his father's death? No grin when Westley revealed that he was not left-handed either? No, you weren't paying attention, because there was a girl in the beginning of the story. While the rest of us were waiting for Vizzini to keel over from the poison, or laughing at Miracle Max's antics, you were terrified of getting cooties from the girl who hadn't even been on screen for the last dozen scenes or so.
When Inigo delivered the line he'd waited his lifetime to say, and he finally had Count Rugen cornered, and the rest of us teetered on the edges of our seats waiting for the denouement, and we bit our lips and took deep breaths and tasted the sweetness of revenge as he declared "I want my father back, you son of a bitch", we cheered and sighed and thanked the universe that sometimes things do work out in the end, but you were wisely avoiding all of that, content to ignore the movie because paying attention might mean you were enjoying a "chick flick".
Dear parent poster, I regret to inform you that you're tragically misinformed about what "chick flick" means. In a chick flick, all the male characters, save for maybe one, are abusive, neglectful, or ignorant. Tune into Oxygen sometime and you'll see plenty of them. The general point of such movies is to reassure the audience that you can only be a decent human being if you have a uterus. Female characters in such movies are universally noble, smart, and caring, though somehow they always end up being the victims of male characters, whose motives are always shallow and whose actions are always vicious. If Slashdot ever posts about one of those, please let us know. But until then, don't try to assert that the Princess Bride falls into that category, because I assure you, it does not.
Get your facts straight before bashing a movie revered by the overwhelming majority of Slashdotters, not to mention the general population. For starters, try watching it.
It sems to me that one route to greater understanding in this situation is a giant off-topic thread about nerd, geek, and hacker movies.
I was introduced to The Princess Bride, along with Monty Python and the Evil Dead series and Noises Off and several others, in high school. Whoever decided to place me in the drama teacher's homeroom did me quite a favor; those kids were some of the most interesting people I could've ever hoped to know.
Getting "in" jokes is a big part of belonging to a community. It's easy, reading this thread, to tell who's seen the movie, and who's judging it by its name alone. In the spirit of openness, and off-topicness, I'd like to suggest a big off-topic thread where Slashdotters suggest movies and books that you really should see or read, even if they're not four-star classics, because they'll help explain some common references and in-jokes of our culture.
To my high-school list above, I'd like to add:
Let the off-topicness commence!
It's no more anti-male than Indiana Jones is anti-history. If you grew your entire opinion about the subject from one movie, you might end up a little warped. For those of us capable of appreciating a movie that contains certain departures from everyday life (which make it more *interesting* than everyday life), it's thoroughly enjoyable to watch.
The worst thing about the movie is its title. It could've just as well been called The Swordsman's Accomplices, or Adventures of the Dread Pirate Roberts. In that way, it's sort of like the Cowboy Junkies, whose music has nothing to do with cowboys or junkies, or even junk. If you can get past the name, there's treasure to be had.