Well, gee whiz, I was one of those isolated cases two months ago... delivering medical personnel to hospital, with ham 2-way radio my sole reliable link of communication as to who to get and when to get them, as those 'pocket radios' you mention overload when as few as 3% of all their users try to use them.
Cellular's the first thing to crash in an emergency, and landline phone is the second, as a former telephone switchman (United of Florida), I can assure you that phone systems do overload and crash when a very small fraction of all the landlines try to get dial tone.
Want to wait an hour for a dial tone? Well, go ahead.
Oh, yes, BTW, it's dial tone which connects you to 911. That, or the ham down your block who trains up, knows how to talk to the hospitals and fire stations, and how to get a message through when all else fails.
Our infrastructure is tremendously fragile, and folks who don't work in telecom are blissfully unaware of how quickly it will fail them.
Sorry, no. As Scotty says, 'ye canna change tha laws o' physics.'
1. AM. FM, PCM, all irrelevant: The modulation method is _irrelevant_ to the issue. What's relevant is *frequency* and its inverse, the *wavelength*.
2. Yes, the HF wavelengths used by commerical broadcasters modulating amplitude will travel further via groundwave than the VHF wavelengths used by broadcasters modulating frequency.
3. However, neither is relevant, because the HF ('shortwave', so named when longer waves were used) wavelenghts are valuable because they bound off the ionosphere, allowing 'bank shots' to points of the earth you will never reach by LOS or groundwave. The F and F2 layers are the friend of long-range radio, whether amateur, aviation, nautical or military, because you can bounce a 5w signal off the insider of the ionosphere and communicate all over the planet... until BPL jams those wavelengths.
May I suggest you visit the web site of the Radio Society of Great Britain http://www.rsgb.org/emc/pltnew.htm
and review their findings? After that, there's FEMA http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/36294
and NTIA http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/31543
reports to read.
And. the FCC is not doing any of the 'hard work' here. It's the Enron-inspired power companies vs. three-quarters of a million US hams, the vast majority of which have never even met a lobbyist much less hired them by the dozen.
http://www.wesync.com had a Web i/f prepared; but the droids 'in charge' of Palm, pre-split, buried it, just like they buried the PalmOS5 version of WeSync (which, BTW, WORKS GREAT!).
WeSync syncs up to fourteen calendars, and has a Windows desktop component so you can see what's going on without a Palm. Wireless syncs work just dandy, have ever since I got my first wireless Palm.
It also does address book syncs for shared contacts. It is the Killer App for married Palm users. Really. And, it's free.
Sure would be nice if WeSync got a breath of life from the New PalmSource folks.. hint-hint / wink-wink / say no more / aye
Hams object, not because it's a good and valid method of delivering bits, but because it interferes with emergency communications.
There's lots of ways to get good Internet feeds to folks; just look at what Robert X. Cringely has done with 802.11b. Look in the archives of his columns at www.pbs.org and see there are untapped alternatives.
To understand why we're concerned, go switch your hi-fi to AM, tune to a vacant spot between stations, and turn up the volume about half way. Then, try to have a phone conversation over a bad cellular connection with your ear six inches from the speakers, and you will still have an easier time communicating than hams will when we experience the 16 db over S9 interference already demonstrated by BPL.
I will make a small wager with you, shaka999. If you live within North America, I'll wager your state's or province's emergency plan counts on hams. So does your county's emergency plan, and your city's.
You see, hams _practice_ at getting data through emergency conditions. We do it at our expense, with equipment we buy, build and maintain ourselves, without government funds.
There's even a subsection of every national ham organization dedicated to emergency services. Yeah, I belong to one, and was out in the last ice storm, two months ago, delivering nurses to the local hospital because the roads were otherwise impassible, and the locals had already overloaded the cellular network to the point where a fast busy tone or "All Circuits Busy" signal was as likely as dial tone.
BPL threatens the entire ability to function on the frequencies needed the most for long-range communications, the HF bands. If this interfered with TV (VHF and UHF), well, everyone would kvetch, but instead the power companies have designed these systems to use HF (aka shortwave) frequencies.
Long range radio relies on HF, because it takes those lower frequencies to effectively bounce off the inner layer(s) of the ionosphere. Higher frequencies (VHF, UHF, SHF, microwave) just zip right through the F, F1 & F2 layers, so we can't do bank shots to get a signal from Earthquakestan to Resourceland to let them know how many units of Type A to send.
Satellite? Well, gee, that presumes the ground stations survived that quake/tornado/hurricane/typhoon, that the power didn't fail, and the phone lines to the earth station still work. Oh, yeah, and IF there's a free satellite channel for us, which NASA's problems have not made any easier.
Now, America's three-quarters of a million hams are not alone here, as you make it seem. The NTIA (National Telecommunications and Information Administration), who you'd expect to be gung-ho over more bandwidth to previously underserved areas, and also FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency), have gone on record to object. They document that BPL was a complete disaster, interference-wise, when tried in Japan. The Austrian trials are on hold because the power companies there were not able to rein in the interference.
But, it's Politics with a Capital P; who is beholden to whom, and who bought whom.
Now, you might say, 'well, if there's a disater, the power's down, right'? Not necessarily. BPL can cause interference for miles and miles, but if a hospital needs to call for blood, what's the power company supposed to do, shut down the entire grid?
Besides, remember that hams buy their own gear to practice and learn with. If we can't use HF, well, no one will buy new HF gear, no one will learn the tricks of HF (which is _very_ different than the skills needed for the garden-variety, talk-around-town two meter and 70 cm band users), and no one will bother to keep the automated packet netowrks in service, the digital backbones of the ham world which move the vast majority of message traffic.
Sometimes, _nothing_ but Morse ("the original digital") will get through, but with BPL jamming the HF spectrum, morse will become a dead letter.
I mean, man, you can put a bra on Michael Powell, and yuk it up all you want (see URL) but, damnit, these changes will *kill* people. http://www.wweek.com/story.php?story=4858
Submitted yesterday to Slashdot at 1200 PST, filed in a locked cabinet in the basement lavatory with a sign stating "BEWARE OF THE LEOPARD" was this posting: http://groups.google.com/groups?&selm=40 27ef9a.155 09562%40news.individual.de
AL Digital http://www.aldigital.co.uk/ announced Nokia 6310, 8910 and 8910i mobiles were found to be at greatest risk to having their data copied without the owner's consent with a crack attack over Bluetooth.
The security papers (links, below) suggest keeping some other models of Bluetooth-capable mobiles 'invisible' to other devices may prevent data within the phone from being copied with a 'SNARF attack.' At worst, ony the data within the phone itself could be abducted, so if you don't keep data in it, and instead keep data within a PDA or notebook, the risk to you is low.
Yeah, welcome to the 21st century.
However, the authors apparantly got the brush from Sony-Ericsson, Nokia and the Bluetooth standards body when they raised the issue, so further attention seems merited.
http://www.commsdesign.com/showArticle.jhtml?art ic leID=17601809 http://www.bluestumbler.org/
The latter URL has a number of references and leads to web pages for the cracking software cited, and it looks like AL Digital may have done their homework.
The 5mm hex socket not only comes with three double-ended bits in a swing-out holder, but is perfect for hext nuts on posts on PC cases.
http://froogle.google.com/froogle?price1=30&pric e2 =&btnP=Go&q=Victorinox+Swiss+Army+Cybertool&scorin g=p&price=between shows several vendors under $40.
Add to that many of the other excellent suggestions, and you're still under budget.
Read Que's HIGH TECH TOYS FOR YOUR TV for some more info on systems.
Went to EchoStar (DISH Network) four years ago, and despite paying $10 for cable modem service from Comcast because I don't get TV from them, will not go back. Had rain fade during really bad hail storms (Portland OR), and when choppers were overhead, but this is *very* rare. All satellite systems have 'equinox fade' for hour at the sping and fall equinoxes, as the sun goes behind the satellites. However, my cable goes down far more often than the DISH systems do.
Both DISH and DirecTV have *integrated* PVRs, which are much more hassle free than an off-the-shelf TiVo or ReplayTV controlling the cable box via the IR blaster.
The TiVo software in the DirecTiVo is much more sophisticated than the software in the DISH PVRs, and if you don't mind that TiVo phones home everything you watch (oh, we will just aggregate the data for marketers, Mr. Ashcroft will never see it....), then, go ahead, go DirecTiVo. My ancestors did not trust King George, and neither do I, so I use DISH, despite the extra features (e.g., 'Season Pass') which make TiVo nicer.
Program guides for DISH are downloaded from the birds along with the rest of the data stream. I have a weekly ritual where I grab the TV section from the Sunday paper, find everything I want to watch, program those in, and then search the channels which don't show up in the TV section for jewels like GUNS AND AMMO TELEVISION, and THE SURGERY CHANNEL from the Univ. of Washington, scrolling through just a portion of the on-screen program guide. Scolling through everything would result in MEGO (Mine Eyes Glazeth Over) as the $33/mo package has about 60 usable channels (subtracting GodSquad & other informercial stations as well as the digital music channels).
These Yahoo Groups will be informative: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/dishmo d?yguid=211070 63 http://groups.yahoo.com/group/DishPlayer_Explo rer? yguid=21107063 http://groups.yahoo.com/group/dish rip?yguid=211070 63 as will USENET groups: rec.video.satellite.dbs alt.dbs.echostar alt.dbs.echostar.hack
DISH allows you 'superstations'; I can get WB and UPN feeds from LA, NJ & Boston. Handy when there's counter-programming going on (like NBC pitting 'West Wing' against 'Angel'); I just record the WB programming from the east coast and get the NBC show from the west coast. LA local news is also a hoot, and NJ news (99% NYC news) is useful.
Oh, yes, both DISH and DirecTV offer 'locals'. Local station bandwidth is not as great as movie channel bandwidth, and if that vexes you, both have HDTV channels. However, should you tell DISH your kid moved to an area without Grade "B" coverage (i.e., Big Spring, TX), but you want to keep paying for the service, they will change the 'service' address and will allow those registered receivers to instead get major network stations on the east coast (NYC) or west coast (LA, IIRC). Bills still go to the 'billing address'.
Gee, would I rather watch LA news or Podunk IA news, esp. if I have decent off-air reception for when I want local news? Hmmm.
Having a service address in Cincinnatti and other specific areas is bad news, as you will not have access to the really good gynecological training films. Know what you will get in your 'service address' before signing.
Self-install is easy. Drill three holes in the south wall, attach the mount, get the mount post VERY, VERY VERTICAL, attach the pizza-pie dish, ratchet the dish around to the right angles, attach the coax and string it over to the receivers. Multiple receivers can require a special splitter available from multiple sources. Multiple dishes, each pointed at a specific bird with signals joined with a combiner ('multi-switch'), yield better reception than one 'does everything' dish.
Lastly, if you live near the Great White North and have friends en Canada, they can bring down the Bel
My wife's business had them, for just about as long as it took the owner to actually touch a terminal. Drove everyone in her office stark raving. Not only latency but the "now you're up, now you're down", the DNS failures, on and on and nobody gave a hoot at Direc*.
The heavy caching was problematic, as was web surfing; it actually behaved somewhat well when doing larg file downloads, but the bazillions of little files and requests attendant to modern web surfing was sloooooooooooooww.
My favorite curmudgeon, Jerry Pournelle, also had their service. He had rather unkind things to say about them on multiple occasions. http://www.jerrypournelle.com/cgi-bin/perlfect/sea rch/search.pl?p=1&lang=en&include=&exclude=&penalt y=0&mode=all&q=DirecPC
Robert X. Cringely surveyed the competition, and also found them wanting: http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpi t20010201. html http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit200 10125. html
The bottom line is, ya canna' change the laws o' physics, as a wise Scot once said. Perhaps you could instead consider some guerilla wireless?
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit2001062 8. html http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit200 10712. html http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit200 40115. html
May I be so bold as to refer you to some good sources for WIFi wireless antenna making?
Or, Ham Radio Outlet allows you to buy ready-made high-gain WiFi sticks. http://hamradio.com/
Of course, you could face technical difficulties, either from hams (like me) with *licenses* to put kilowatts on 2.4gHz, or this kinda problem: http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpi t20010823. html
Maybe you could get a 'dry pair' from Telco and roll your own: http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit200 10823. html
However, hams are reasonable guys, and lighting using WiFi never really caught on, so I think guerilla WiFi is a safe bet, and cheap, too. If there is a stong emitter in your 'hood, just shift to 802.11a on 5gHz and carry on. Visit these guys http://www.personaltelco.net/static/index.ht ml for more info and lots of enthusiastic help for the esteemed Cmdr. Taco, really.
As Dear Captain (Miles' Vorkosigan's mother) once said when asked about putting principles vs. people first, she replied "People.. because souls are eternal." This the importance of the rule of honor.
If you like FIREFLY, you probably also like Lois McMaster Bujold's books. Start with BARRARYAR, and don't shop until the shopping expedition's over.
Hams often end up working under extreme conditions with less-than-ideal siting and antennas, and with emergency power only, which necessitates low power operation.
So, let's pretend; you're out in the boonies with a whole 5 watts of power, trying to support firefighters whose primary radio links are down (true fact, boys and girls; happened this summer, lots).
Half a county away, Enron (no joke) is pushing how many megawatts? Over how tall an antenna?
It does not take much power to drown out a ham in the field, and Enron, et al., have lots of it.
Niven & Pournelle (Pournelle being a rocket scientist and experienced with large aerospace project management) expected in FOOTFALL http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/flex-s ign-in/ref =cm_custrec_f_glance/002-2617440-6432013 we could build and launch an ORION in a year if regulatory restraints were abandoned. Our treaty with SovUnion about atmospheric detonations is effectively kaput, anyway, and given the circumstances, I'd find it appropriate without regard to treaty.
ORION would use specially designed, lo-lo fallout nukes surrounded by plastic, designed to make plasma (not fallout) to push a huge mf-ing pusher plate (which also shields the occupants from the small amount of prompt radiation). The ride on the battleship-sized ship above (attached by huge shock absorbers) would be jerky, but if you gotta go, you gotta go.
BBC Four did a programme on ORION last week, and Dyson's book PROJECT ORION is authoritative, as well as a good read. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0805 072845/qid=1069269558/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_1/002-261744 0-6432013?v=glance&n=507846
I could live with one person of our five billion dying of cancer to save civilisation (or our current facsimile theoreof). I'd even volunteer for the honour, were it selectable (it ain't).
Driving on the I-5 is far more dangerous, yet I manage to accept the risk to go buy milk a couple of days a week.
PowerQuest's DRIVE IMAGE PRO has a bug in later versions, 4 & 5 (AKA DeployCenter). Even though an NT machine was partitioned once (4GB HD) with FDISK and no other partitioning software was used, I still get "Error 128" which self-identfies as being caused by OnTrack or other partitioning software.
PowerQuest TS was useless, but comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage led me to salvation. Praise USENET!
I'd be pleased to see PLAYBOY, PENTHOUSE LETTERS and even HUSTLER right next to POPULAR MECHANICS, not to mention THE ETHICAL SLUT. Sorry, but I do want my kids, and the kids they will play with when I'm not there to supervise, to have access to the best information available.
I remember PLAYBOY providing quite a few clues about reality when I was a kid, things you and your ilk were too afraid to teach me. Thank the Great Maker I also knew a few adults (including my MD) who would tell the truth.
I'd be afraid to send a kid to public school in these days of political correctness. That's why there's home schooling, and why teacher's unions fight for job security for senionr teachers above all else, for they can see the writing of parental discontent on the wall.
With all due respect, Reagan had some good moments, but anyone who spent as much as he did on social matters and military intervention could be _no_ means be a true conservative.
AuH2O was the last true conservative in the GOP. Since that bedammed Nixon created the 'Southern Strategy', the party has Gone To Hell.
Neil Stephenson discussed Quicksilver, his newest novel and the first book of his Baroque Cycle and associated matters, on the evening of 24 Sept at the First Congregational Church on SW Park in Puddletown.
The Baroque Cycle deals w/ the ancestors of characters in Cryptonomicon. Two more volumes of the BC have been mostly written. He decided to write the BC during Cryptonomicon, and started in 1997.
He writes and does the first edits in longhand w/ a fountain pen. Text written this way is "frozen" for a long time and is better for it.
He believes there's a mental buffer which holds the next thought. The text in that buffer is plastic and easily improved, but once the words on paper, much more difficult to revise. The quality of his first drafts are better because they are in the buffer longer.
Writing is a craft, more than an intellectual activity, and the motions used to write influence the result. No great literature will ever be written by someone with a jack in their head.
Once the Baroque Cycle is complete, he has no plan for what's next, but he finds he likes historical writing better. It's also safer than wr1ting the future.
(More notes from his talk, including commentary on vi vs EMACS, and the infamous DENTAL EXTRQACTON SCENE, will be posted in the October 2003 issue of The Pulsar, the monthly journal of the Portland (Oregon) Science Fiction Society http://www.porsfis.org
Canadian libraries also reimburse authors for every time their books are checked out, and musicians every time their CDs are checked out.
Seems like Canada ("A loft apartment over a really great party" - Robin Williams, 2002) has a much better idea about how to keep authors and musicians performing and creating.
Slashdot Mirror
Would you care to name a few?
Japan just completely rejected it. Funny, doesn't Japan lead the electronics industry?
Austria just put their trial on hold because of their interference problems.
Where else, eh?
Well, gee whiz, I was one of those isolated cases two months ago... delivering medical personnel to hospital, with ham 2-way radio my sole reliable link of communication as to who to get and when to get them, as those 'pocket radios' you mention overload when as few as 3% of all their users try to use them.
Cellular's the first thing to crash in an emergency, and landline phone is the second, as a former telephone switchman (United of Florida), I can assure you that phone systems do overload and crash when a very small fraction of all the landlines try to get dial tone.
Want to wait an hour for a dial tone? Well, go ahead.
Oh, yes, BTW, it's dial tone which connects you to 911. That, or the ham down your block who trains up, knows how to talk to the hospitals and fire stations, and how to get a message through when all else fails.
Our infrastructure is tremendously fragile, and folks who don't work in telecom are blissfully unaware of how quickly it will fail them.
Sorry, no. As Scotty says, 'ye canna change tha laws o' physics.'
1. AM. FM, PCM, all irrelevant: The modulation method is _irrelevant_ to the issue. What's relevant is *frequency* and its inverse, the *wavelength*.
2. Yes, the HF wavelengths used by commerical broadcasters modulating amplitude will travel further via groundwave than the VHF wavelengths used by broadcasters modulating frequency.
3. However, neither is relevant, because the HF ('shortwave', so named when longer waves were used) wavelenghts are valuable because they bound off the ionosphere, allowing 'bank shots' to points of the earth you will never reach by LOS or groundwave. The F and F2 layers are the friend of long-range radio, whether amateur, aviation, nautical or military, because you can bounce a 5w signal off the insider of the ionosphere and communicate all over the planet... until BPL jams those wavelengths.
May I suggest you visit the web site of the Radio Society of Great Britain
http://www.rsgb.org/emc/pltnew.htm
and review their findings? After that, there's FEMA
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/36294
and NTIA
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/31543
reports to read.
And. the FCC is not doing any of the 'hard work' here. It's the Enron-inspired power companies vs. three-quarters of a million US hams, the vast majority of which have never even met a lobbyist much less hired them by the dozen.
http://www.wesync.com
had a Web i/f prepared; but the droids 'in charge' of Palm, pre-split, buried it, just like they buried the PalmOS5 version of WeSync (which, BTW, WORKS GREAT!).
WeSync syncs up to fourteen calendars, and has a Windows desktop component so you can see what's going on without a Palm. Wireless syncs work just dandy, have ever since I got my first wireless Palm.
It also does address book syncs for shared contacts. It is the Killer App for married Palm users. Really. And, it's free.
Sure would be nice if WeSync got a breath of life from the New PalmSource folks.. hint-hint / wink-wink / say no more / aye
Hams object, not because it's a good and valid method of delivering bits, but because it interferes with emergency communications.
8
There's lots of ways to get good Internet feeds to folks; just look at what Robert X. Cringely has done with 802.11b. Look in the archives of his columns at www.pbs.org and see there are untapped alternatives.
To understand why we're concerned, go switch your hi-fi to AM, tune to a vacant spot between stations, and turn up the volume about half way. Then, try to have a phone conversation over a bad cellular connection with your ear six inches from the speakers, and you will still have an easier time communicating than hams will when we experience the 16 db over S9 interference already demonstrated by BPL.
I will make a small wager with you, shaka999. If you live within North America, I'll wager your state's or province's emergency plan counts on hams. So does your county's emergency plan, and your city's.
You see, hams _practice_ at getting data through emergency conditions. We do it at our expense, with equipment we buy, build and maintain ourselves, without government funds.
There's even a subsection of every national ham organization dedicated to emergency services. Yeah, I belong to one, and was out in the last ice storm, two months ago, delivering nurses to the local hospital because the roads were otherwise impassible, and the locals had already overloaded the cellular network to the point where a fast busy tone or "All Circuits Busy" signal was as likely as dial tone.
BPL threatens the entire ability to function on the frequencies needed the most for long-range communications, the HF bands. If this interfered with TV (VHF and UHF), well, everyone would kvetch, but instead the power companies have designed these systems to use HF (aka shortwave) frequencies.
Long range radio relies on HF, because it takes those lower frequencies to effectively bounce off the inner layer(s) of the ionosphere. Higher frequencies (VHF, UHF, SHF, microwave) just zip right through the F, F1 & F2 layers, so we can't do bank shots to get a signal from Earthquakestan to Resourceland to let them know how many units of Type A to send.
Satellite? Well, gee, that presumes the ground stations survived that quake/tornado/hurricane/typhoon, that the power didn't fail, and the phone lines to the earth station still work. Oh, yeah, and IF there's a free satellite channel for us, which NASA's problems have not made any easier.
Now, America's three-quarters of a million hams are not alone here, as you make it seem. The NTIA (National Telecommunications and Information Administration), who you'd expect to be gung-ho over more bandwidth to previously underserved areas, and also FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency), have gone on record to object. They document that BPL was a complete disaster, interference-wise, when tried in Japan. The Austrian trials are on hold because the power companies there were not able to rein in the interference.
But, it's Politics with a Capital P; who is beholden to whom, and who bought whom.
Now, you might say, 'well, if there's a disater, the power's down, right'? Not necessarily. BPL can cause interference for miles and miles, but if a hospital needs to call for blood, what's the power company supposed to do, shut down the entire grid?
Besides, remember that hams buy their own gear to practice and learn with. If we can't use HF, well, no one will buy new HF gear, no one will learn the tricks of HF (which is _very_ different than the skills needed for the garden-variety, talk-around-town two meter and 70 cm band users), and no one will bother to keep the automated packet netowrks in service, the digital backbones of the ham world which move the vast majority of message traffic.
Sometimes, _nothing_ but Morse ("the original digital") will get through, but with BPL jamming the HF spectrum, morse will become a dead letter.
I mean, man, you can put a bra on Michael Powell, and yuk it up all you want (see URL) but, damnit, these changes will *kill* people.
http://www.wweek.com/story.php?story=485
Submitted yesterday to Slashdot at 1200 PST, filed in a locked cabinet in the basement lavatory with a sign stating "BEWARE OF THE LEOPARD" was this posting:0 27ef9a.155 09562%40news.individual.de
t ic leID=17601809
http://groups.google.com/groups?&selm=4
AL Digital
http://www.aldigital.co.uk/
announced Nokia 6310, 8910 and 8910i mobiles were found to be at greatest risk to having their data copied without the owner's consent with a crack attack over Bluetooth.
The security papers (links, below) suggest keeping some other models of Bluetooth-capable mobiles 'invisible' to other devices may prevent data within the phone from being copied with a 'SNARF attack.' At worst, ony the data within the phone itself could be abducted, so if you don't keep data in it, and instead keep data within a PDA or notebook, the risk to you is low.
Yeah, welcome to the 21st century.
However, the authors apparantly got the brush from Sony-Ericsson, Nokia and the Bluetooth standards body when they raised the issue, so further
attention seems merited.
http://www.commsdesign.com/showArticle.jhtml?ar
http://www.bluestumbler.org/
The latter URL has a number of references and leads to web pages for the cracking software cited, and it looks like AL Digital may have done their homework.
The 5mm hex socket not only comes with three double-ended bits in a swing-out holder, but is perfect for hext nuts on posts on PC cases.
c e2 =&btnP=Go&q=Victorinox+Swiss+Army+Cybertool&scorin g=p&price=between
http://froogle.google.com/froogle?price1=30&pri
shows several vendors under $40.
Add to that many of the other excellent suggestions, and you're still under budget.
Read Que's HIGH TECH TOYS FOR YOUR TV for some more info on systems.
Went to EchoStar (DISH Network) four years ago, and despite paying $10 for cable modem service from Comcast because I don't get TV from them, will not go back. Had rain fade during really bad hail storms (Portland OR), and when choppers were overhead, but this is *very* rare. All satellite systems have 'equinox fade' for hour at the sping and fall equinoxes, as the sun goes behind the satellites. However, my cable goes down far more often than the DISH systems do.
Both DISH and DirecTV have *integrated* PVRs, which are much more hassle free than an off-the-shelf TiVo or ReplayTV controlling the cable box via the IR blaster.
The TiVo software in the DirecTiVo is much more sophisticated than the software in the DISH PVRs, and if you don't mind that TiVo phones home everything you watch (oh, we will just aggregate the data for marketers, Mr. Ashcroft will never see it....), then, go ahead, go DirecTiVo. My ancestors did not trust King George, and neither do I, so I use DISH, despite the extra features (e.g., 'Season Pass') which make TiVo nicer.
Program guides for DISH are downloaded from the birds along with the rest of the data stream. I have a weekly ritual where I grab the TV section from the Sunday paper, find everything I want to watch, program those in, and then search the channels which don't show up in the TV section for jewels like GUNS AND AMMO TELEVISION, and THE SURGERY CHANNEL from the Univ. of Washington, scrolling through just a portion of the on-screen program guide. Scolling through everything would result in MEGO (Mine Eyes Glazeth Over) as the $33/mo package has about 60 usable channels (subtracting GodSquad & other informercial stations as well as the digital music channels).
These Yahoo Groups will be informative:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/dishmo d?yguid=211070 63
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/DishPlayer_Explo rer? yguid=21107063
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/dish rip?yguid=211070 63
as will USENET groups:
rec.video.satellite.dbs
alt.dbs.echostar
alt.dbs.echostar.hack
DISH allows you 'superstations'; I can get WB and UPN feeds from LA, NJ & Boston. Handy when there's counter-programming going on (like NBC pitting 'West Wing' against 'Angel'); I just record the WB programming from the east coast and get the NBC show from the west coast. LA local news is also a hoot, and NJ news (99% NYC news) is useful.
Oh, yes, both DISH and DirecTV offer 'locals'. Local station bandwidth is not as great as movie channel bandwidth, and if that vexes you, both have HDTV channels. However, should you tell DISH your kid moved to an area without Grade "B" coverage (i.e., Big Spring, TX), but you want to keep paying for the service, they will change the 'service' address and will allow those registered receivers to instead get major network stations on the east coast (NYC) or west coast (LA, IIRC). Bills still go to the 'billing address'.
Gee, would I rather watch LA news or Podunk IA news, esp. if I have decent off-air reception for when I want local news? Hmmm.
Having a service address in Cincinnatti and other specific areas is bad news, as you will not have access to the really good gynecological training films. Know what you will get in your 'service address' before signing.
Self-install is easy. Drill three holes in the south wall, attach the mount, get the mount post VERY, VERY VERTICAL, attach the pizza-pie dish, ratchet the dish around to the right angles, attach the coax and string it over to the receivers. Multiple receivers can require a special splitter available from multiple sources. Multiple dishes, each pointed at a specific bird with signals joined with a combiner ('multi-switch'), yield better reception than one 'does everything' dish.
Lastly, if you live near the Great White North and have friends en Canada, they can bring down the Bel
My wife's business had them, for just about as long as it took the owner to actually touch a terminal. Drove everyone in her office stark raving. Not only latency but the "now you're up, now you're down", the DNS failures, on and on and nobody gave a hoot at Direc*.
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The heavy caching was problematic, as was web surfing; it actually behaved somewhat well when doing larg file downloads, but the bazillions of little files and requests attendant to modern web surfing was sloooooooooooooww.
My favorite curmudgeon, Jerry Pournelle, also had their service. He had rather unkind things to say about them on multiple occasions. http://www.jerrypournelle.com/cgi-bin/perlfect/se
Robert X. Cringely surveyed the competition, and also found them wanting:
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulp
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20
The bottom line is, ya canna' change the laws o' physics, as a wise Scot once said. Perhaps you could instead consider some guerilla wireless?
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit200106
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20
May I be so bold as to refer you to some good sources for WIFi wireless antenna making?
http://www.trevormarshall.com/biquad.htm
http:
http://www.tr
Or, Ham Radio Outlet allows you to buy ready-made high-gain WiFi sticks.
http://hamradio.com/
Of course, you could face technical difficulties, either from hams (like me) with *licenses* to put kilowatts on 2.4gHz, or this kinda problem:
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulp
Maybe you could get a 'dry pair' from Telco and roll your own:
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20
However, hams are reasonable guys, and lighting using WiFi never really caught on, so I think guerilla WiFi is a safe bet, and cheap, too. If there is a stong emitter in your 'hood, just shift to 802.11a on 5gHz and carry on. Visit these guys
http://www.personaltelco.net/static/index.h
for more info and lots of enthusiastic help for the esteemed Cmdr. Taco, really.
73s and best regards,,
K7AAY, PDX
As Dear Captain (Miles' Vorkosigan's mother) once said when asked about putting principles vs. people first, she replied "People.. because souls are eternal." This the importance of the rule of honor.
If you like FIREFLY, you probably also like Lois McMaster Bujold's books. Start with BARRARYAR, and don't shop until the shopping expedition's over.
Hams often end up working under extreme conditions with less-than-ideal siting and antennas, and with emergency power only, which necessitates low power operation.
So, let's pretend; you're out in the boonies with a whole 5 watts of power, trying to support firefighters whose primary radio links are down (true fact, boys and girls; happened this summer, lots).
Half a county away, Enron (no joke) is pushing how many megawatts? Over how tall an antenna?
It does not take much power to drown out a ham in the field, and Enron, et al., have lots of it.
Niven & Pournelle (Pournelle being a rocket scientist and experienced with large aerospace project management) expected in FOOTFALLs ign-in/ref =cm_custrec_f_glance/002-2617440-6432013
5 072845/qid=1069269558/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_1/002-261744 0-6432013?v=glance&n=507846
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/flex-
we could build and launch an ORION in a year if regulatory restraints were abandoned. Our treaty with SovUnion about atmospheric detonations is effectively kaput, anyway, and given the circumstances, I'd find it appropriate without regard to treaty.
ORION would use specially designed, lo-lo fallout nukes surrounded by plastic, designed to make plasma (not fallout) to push a huge mf-ing pusher plate (which also shields the occupants from the small amount of prompt radiation). The ride on the battleship-sized ship above (attached by huge shock absorbers) would be jerky, but if you gotta go, you gotta go.
BBC Four did a programme on ORION last week, and Dyson's book PROJECT ORION is authoritative, as well as a good read. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/080
I could live with one person of our five billion dying of cancer to save civilisation (or our current facsimile theoreof). I'd even volunteer for the honour, were it selectable (it ain't).
Driving on the I-5 is far more dangerous, yet I manage to accept the risk to go buy milk a couple of days a week.
Powered unicycles were written into both REVOLT IN 2100 and THE ROADS MUST ROLL. Well, all we need now is Neahmiah Scudder.
PowerQuest's DRIVE IMAGE PRO has a bug in later versions, 4 & 5 (AKA DeployCenter). Even though an NT machine was partitioned once (4GB HD) with FDISK and no other partitioning software was used, I still get "Error 128" which self-identfies as being caused by OnTrack or other partitioning software.
PowerQuest TS was useless, but comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage led me to salvation. Praise USENET!
Solution? Use Drive Image 2. Works every time.
I have a failed TDK right here. I can see files, but they checksum out and can't be retreived.
I have many which failed after having been stored in a ring-binder designed for CDs. The plastic gets clowdy, and the discs are completely unreadable.
Would be happy to provide samples of failed disks to reputable industry researcher.
John Bartley
johnbartley at email daht com
Nonlethal to whom?
The diabetic who relies on refrigerated insulin?
The CPAP user who must have electronically-regulated pressurized air to sleep, otherwise they stroke out?
The preemie in the hospital, who lives only if their incubator works?
Nonlethal to soldiers, maybe, but veyr lethal to civilians.
The cover story of POPULAR SCIENCE several issues back was how to build a nukeless EMP bomb.
Gee, let's hope the French don't read POPULAR SCIENCE, and deliver EMP bombs to the Iraqis, North Koreans, et al.
I'd be pleased to see PLAYBOY, PENTHOUSE LETTERS and even HUSTLER right next to POPULAR MECHANICS, not to mention THE ETHICAL SLUT. Sorry, but I do want my kids, and the kids they will play with when I'm not there to supervise, to have access to the best information available.
I remember PLAYBOY providing quite a few clues about reality when I was a kid, things you and your ilk were too afraid to teach me. Thank the Great Maker I also knew a few adults (including my MD) who would tell the truth.
I'd be afraid to send a kid to public school in these days of political correctness. That's why there's home schooling, and why teacher's unions fight for job security for senionr teachers above all else, for they can see the writing of parental discontent on the wall.
With all due respect, Reagan had some good moments, but anyone who spent as much as he did on social matters and military intervention could be _no_ means be a true conservative.
AuH2O was the last true conservative in the GOP. Since that bedammed Nixon created the 'Southern Strategy', the party has Gone To Hell.
"..Nae model A, B, C o' bludy D, tha original Enterprise."
--
Scotty.
Old news - read Robert A Heinlein's YEAR OF THE JACKPOT. But then, what _didn't_ Heinlein write about in the 40s?
Neil Stephenson discussed Quicksilver, his newest novel and the first book of his Baroque Cycle and associated matters, on the evening of 24 Sept at the First Congregational Church on SW Park in Puddletown.
The Baroque Cycle deals w/ the ancestors of characters in Cryptonomicon. Two more volumes of the BC have been mostly written. He decided to write the BC during Cryptonomicon, and started in 1997.
He writes and does the first edits in longhand w/ a fountain pen. Text written this way is "frozen" for a long time and is better for it.
He believes there's a mental buffer which holds the next thought. The text in that buffer is plastic and easily improved, but once the words on paper, much more difficult to revise. The quality of his first drafts are better because they are in the buffer longer.
Writing is a craft, more than an intellectual activity, and the motions used to write influence the result. No great literature will ever be written by someone with a jack in their head.
Once the Baroque Cycle is complete, he has no plan for what's next, but he finds he likes historical writing better. It's also safer than wr1ting the future.
(More notes from his talk, including commentary on vi vs EMACS, and the infamous DENTAL EXTRQACTON SCENE, will be posted in the October 2003 issue of The Pulsar, the monthly journal of the Portland (Oregon) Science Fiction Society
http://www.porsfis.org
Canadian libraries also reimburse authors for every time their books are checked out, and musicians every time their CDs are checked out.
Seems like Canada ("A loft apartment over a really great party" - Robin Williams, 2002) has a much better idea about how to keep authors and musicians performing and creating.
Eh?
I'd like to see someone land an AirBus in as bad shape as the MacDac DC-10 at Sioux City.
t y. htmlt 232.ht ml
http://yarchive.net/air/airliners/dc10_sioux_ci
http://www.airodyssey.net/articles/movie-fl