After looking at this one, I printed it, then outlined the revelant parts. This seems to be pretty un-assailable proof that monsanto has swept it under the rug again.
They, to this planets agriculture, compare to M$ and this planets computers. When, the question is, can we call a halt to such "we're bigger than you and can prove it in court" shenanigans. I believe its time we, as a planet, re-wrote our incorporation legal framework such that we CAN HOLD ACCOUNTABLE, those in the corporate decision making process that allow such actions to now go unpunished.
-- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) Quit worrying about your health. It'll go away.
-- Robert Orben
Humm, how about the stuff M$ foists off on the unsuspecting public. OTOH, they are suspecting these days, hence the ground that linux is gaining on the desktop.
I wonder how much noise would have been made the last time the N.A.B. held their annual get together in the Dallas/FW environs circa the late 80's or early 90's, had they gone around and arrested every person whose business card said Broadcast (or) Chief Engineer? I can guarantee that this texas law would have been re-written in the next few months when they got the legal bill for arresting 40,000+ engineers in one swell foop. Within our field, we ARE engineers in every sense of the word, analyzing tall towers to determnine their strength and wind load capabilities is just one of the minor disciplines we follow. Regardless of PE status, we all must live by the laws of this physical universe, the punishment for dis-obeying if indeed it can be dis-obeyed (gravity anyone?) are at best cadidates for the Darwin Award.
Lets face it, the PE designation says you are supposed to know about stationary steam boiler heating systems, mechanical design of such as bridges & buildings, and possibly a working knowledge of how to look something electrical distribution related up in the NEC, hoping your copy is sufficiently uptodate so as to represent current practice. It has absolutely zero to do with designing the shape of the aircrafts wing profile, or the warfare systems it carries.
But what in hell makes these Professional "Union" only reps think they know squat about digital logic, computers and computer programming in general? That is arrogance beyond comprehension, professional jealousy at its worst because they are afraid someone will find out just how little they actually know.
I once was asked, about 20 years ago, to address a meeting of PE's, and at a loss to find a subject that may have some common ground, I picked up a cable transformer, one of those little 50 to 300 ohm gismo's you had to use to hook your games up to the tv with 25 years ago when they all has 300 ohm twin lead inputs screw terminals on the back. I made up some scenarios where it was improperly installed, and all the side effects on the picture that missuse of it caused. But I made the mistake of using VSWR as one of the artifacts, and even though I carefully explained what that was, I could see I had lost the whole group by the middle of the 2nd sentence. I soldiered on, boring them for about another 15 minutes before I had the good sense to shut up. Among that group of PE's, it was obvious to me that there was no comprehension of what I was talking about, and it was nothing but the common cable transformer we've used forever, till tv's finally came out of the dark ages and graduated to 50 ohm inputs using the F59 connector. Now of course they are antiques.
So please, deliver me from the presence of PE's like that group, in the meantime I have some real engineering to do yet, I'm only 72. Retire? Nah, I tried that in 2001 but you see these lucrative job offers just seem to keep coming in. Those of us that are good, tend to retire just a few weeks at a time till we finally fall over. And we regret that while we can afford the hobbies we all dreamed about in past decades, finding the time to enjoy them is STILL a problem.
-- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author)
As another poster on a different mailing list told me the other day, "Get your own toys".
If you look at the voting records, when something comes up that would endanger our right of free speech, you will generally find it was defeated, if it was (sometimes it's not, more often dies in committee as it should have), by the same block of votes that have protected the right to keep and bear arms. These senators and representatives that tend to want us not to infringe on the bill of rights, are both a national treasure, and on a list of names that doesn't significantly change according to which of the ammendments that would be infringed are under discussion. Generally these people are either from "west of the river" (except of course the independent country of California), or the northeastern states such as New Hampshire, Maine & Vermont. But that list more often than not includes our Senator Bird, whom we love, while at the same time thinking the country cannot afford his pork. Rockefeller OTOH, gets an F on all such grades of his voting record, but no one has been able to draw even 10% of the votes to unseat him at the polls here. And thats something I flat don't understand considering the derogatory conversations I hear on the streets when his name comes up. This inability to change what should be changed may be, and probably is, related to the party rules for primary elections here, where registered independants are dis-enfranchised from voting in the demo primaries IIRC. Based on the theory that one should be able to vote for the best man overall but the party machinery won't let him get past the primaries, I've thought of sueing to get that set aside, but its a suit I am not in a position to finance, darnit. There are 'vested interests' in seeing to it that the status quo is maintained, and do not see those rules as undemocratic and they can field some very expensive legal help.
-- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Please go and read the Bill of Rights, the 2nd one in particular. Without it, you wouldn't have the ability to write that, because that is supposedly guaranteed by the first. But without the 2nd, we would not now have the first, it would have been nibbled to death by ducks.
-- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author)
And where the hell is the smiley? Methinks you forgot that little detail.
Where the hell does/. find these folks anyway. Inquiring minds would like to know.
Or are you just new here?
-- Cheers, Gene & this time I'll paste my usual sig in. Enjoy. "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Well, TBT, not no, but HELL NO! It should have been laughed out of court in the first place, 13 years ago. Now I'm serious, this was a miss-carriage if there ever was one. And if it weren't for the adverse publicity, I believe he should have plenty of grounds for a civil action for damages.
But thats just me, an honest old fart & cynic that still thinks whats right is whats right, and whats wrong should be quickly punished, a bit like Willy N. and "Whiskey for my men, beer for my horses" song. Sometimes that tall oak tree, a length of rope and spooky horse are a very sensible solution & saves the county the expense of a long trial to boot.
Unforch, that whole attitude belongs back in the time when a mans handshake was an honest mans word, a contract if you will. Today, its whatever you can do that you don't get caught at. My trouble is that I'm too damned good at calling such people out for my own good. I've worn a beating or 3 in my time, but I've also been the last man standing enough times to be damned proud of it. I was born 50 years too late for this society's rules I think. I would still feel at home with a 6-gun hanging on my hip, but these days its much smaller than the 44 and inside, along with a carry permit. But since I got the permit, I've not been forced to expose it but if I am, it WILL get used if the perp is similarly armed and isn't convinced by seeing it, and with no regrets. But one must make that "show it" call very deliberately. Its ALL a matter of responsibility for ones own actions at the end of the trip.
Thanks for the link, there is some stuff there I hadn't seen before. In particular, that vertical tunnel access port/hatch. I wasn't present when our stuff was installed in it, (so I never personally saw the gondola) which they actually did on a weekend right on the dock that was about 75 feet from our (Oceanographic Engineering) buildings back door. At the time, all the Navy brought over was an LST with the gondola pieces hanging from its crane. They set it down on the dock, the engineers installed their stuff and this story replay made me think there wasn't a hatch. After the top and been set in place, at one point there was an ensign walking around it, tapeing up the equatorial joint with a roll of rubber tape, and our engineer asked what that was for? The Ensign replied with a very straight face, "why it leaks, Sir" and kept on walking. There was at that point two guys in it, and when the tape had been applied and all the cables connected to a rack of batteries on the LST had been double checked, then the LST picked it up and backed away from the dock about 20 feet and set it down on the bottom of Mission Bay in about 12 feet of water and stood by, teathered to it to pick it up again when signaled. Our people stood around, and when it was brought back up, everybody came out with ear to ear grins and our prople could breath again. It was quite the talk of the shop monday morning and I regret not being there for the show. But I was trying to raise a handicapped child and family matters intervened.
Well, one thing that's always bothered me a bit, has to do with their later 're-adjustment' of the depth of the mohole, back up to the 35,800 foot area.
This, AIUI, was done with echo-sounding, and I've always wondered if the measurements would have been skewed in that direction by the effect of the rising pressure with depth, on the speed of sound in water. Its faster than in air of course, but wouldn't the density increase be reflected in a speed of sound reading that increased in some proportion if not a direct density tracking change? It makes sense to me, so I've not been too bashfull about using the 37+k feet figure that was I believe, derived from the actual crush of the gondola, measured inside it at the time.
Jacques Piccard, we all know, survived ok, and went on to make all those other ocean related docudrama's. But I've never heard of the other fellow again, so I've always wondered if maybe he had some of the same problems our one survivor of the Sago mine explosion has. He'll need help doing 2*2 problems the rest of his life. That BTW, is only about 20 miles from here so it's pretty close to home.
All those pix they brought back were taken with (we were told) smallish leica rangefinder cameras with closeup tubes fitted, right off the screens of the two 8" monitors, because there was no video recording technology then that wasn't 5x the size of the whole gondola they were in. So the only way to bring back a pix was on film. And yes, it did leak some. Between the sweating walls because deep sea water is so cold, and a few drops that worked their way in through the packing seals around the wiring access, there was I'm told, about 2 feet of water in it when they got it opened back up. In 34F water, that would give you a whole new definition of cold feet. A real leak though would have been quite dangerous as a stream of water only.005" thick would have been so powerfull that just swinging an arm through it would have sliced the arm off far cleaner than you could have done with a modern chop saw.
Anyway, 2 cents from one who was a very small part of that particular piece of history, as he remembers it 47 years later. I didn't really understand then that what I was working on would be involved in something so exclusive as the only trip into the mohole that man has ever done. What we were really trying to do was build a camera that could be pulled through sewers to inspect them and the business model was to lease them out by the week. To say that we were surpised when a bunch of Navy Gold (nothing brass about those guys, all gold, all over) walked in the door and wanted to see what we had at the time is an understatement. The best demo we did was probably when we picked up the breadboard, with parts hanging out of it in all directions, and gently put it in a bench drawer and closed the drawer on the piece of rg59 that was running it. 2 seconds later we were watching (the auto target was a bit slow) the wood grain of the back panel of the drawer. They were sold, and gave us specs for the houseing and they would furnish the quartz windows the lenses would look through. We made the housings by drilling a 2 3/4" hole through the middle of a 6" round bronze rod about 2 feet long, which gave us room so the bronze could crush 1/4" internally before the cameras pcbs were crushed. It worked. They built or had built, similar housings for the lights since that's 33k feet deeper than light ever gets. Bring your own light in other words.
I better shut up before I really start rambling...
The oceans are indeed a mystery. We haven't studied them near as well as we have the land above, mainly becuase we humans are quite puny in comparison, and absolutely must have a ready supply of breathable air. Preferably at an ambient pressure of less than 100psi.
The deepest we've ever been, and two guys lived through it, is actually deeper than Everest is tall, 37,800 feet to the bottom of the Marianas Trench off the Phillipines. The iron ball, 6 feet in diameter that they were in, suspended from the kerosene ballast tanks of the Navy's Trieste, was squeezed by the nominally 18kpsi pressure, enough to warp the frames of the equipment braces holding the controls and monitors for the tv cameras that I actually helped build back in about 1960. The Treiste ran everything in it and on it from big racks of Sears Die-Hard batteries, each of which had a heavy balloon with half a pint or so of battery acid in them, snapped over the neck of the cell, with a wire cage to keep them from being dislodged by water currents. They brought back a lot of pix of blind, eyeless fish from down there, and they turned the cameras around to look at the batteries once and found that all of the balloons had been driven into the batteries. So don't ever let anybody tell you that water is incompressible, it is at 18,000 psi. So is oil, we had filled the pan & tilt drives with motor oil, and layed a neoprene rubber gasket on the top, then drilled some holes in the cover to let the pressure in. There was about an inch of clearance to the closest gear. One gasket was cut thru, the other was damaged by the turning gears slicing into it but held.
But the guys weren't in very good shape by the time it had surfaced and the gondola opened to let/get them out, so thats a trip they never repeated, and they were using state of the art air recycling gear. If something better has been invented now for that, I'm not aware of it. The danger of it imploding was very real, this was about 2x deeper than Alvin or its successor ilk have ever been. But then Alvin and company have access holes that can be opened, this ball didn't due to the pressure calcs saying they couldn't support it, so it was cut in half, and the seams epoxied together after the guys were inside, and it had to be removed somehow to get them back out. The Navy never said how they opened it once the epoxy was set.
But, man being the curious thing that he is, if better tools can be made, I expect there will be ready volunteers to occupy the viewports for yet another trip into that abyss.
Do you feel lucky? I think I'l stay up here, thank you...
You miss the point of how this business is constructed entirely. When the company goes under, and barring heavy intervention from the federal rebates, it's a pyramid scheme so it will, so all the end users and middle men will be screwed. Sure they'll prosecute the Ken Lays at the top maybe, but what did they recover for the poor folks he starved at the end of the day? Yeah, fucking zip, they never made any attempt to recover the money he stole that I'm aware of. It was all about the criminal charges, what was morally right was never considered. Lets just say that what I would have done to attempt to collect some justice for his hungry victims, and what was done to Ken Lay, are two entirely different scenarios. If ever a vigilante action was warranted, that was it.
After they go under, then who is to handle the worthless contract that lets you suck the excess you use from the local power grid? That's right folks, it will all be up to you to negotiate a new deal with Mr. Reddy Kilowatt, and dear old Mr Reddy Kilowatt has you by the short hairs and decides to charge you an extra 5 cents a kwh as a transport fee, just what are you going to do? Short of a lengthy court battle and numerous hearings at your local PUC, not a damned thing that will be profitable to YOU.
The only thing you can do is go off-grid, and live within what you can pull from the roof. Then the furnace will pull the batteries down in a long grey cold snap and where are you? Scrambling around to setup a wood stove for the rest of the winter, and planning to add a few kwh worth of wind power come construction season. Yeah, you CAN make it work, but it WILL change your lifestyle AND it will cost quite a few hay wagon sized loads of cash.
Rottsa ruck as they have been known to say in Tokyo.
I used to have a brother-in-law who lived in a small town in Northern Minn. Common transport IS a snowmobile up there from late Oct to early April.
The town cop got hisself a new radar gun for Christmas about 25 years ago, and stepped out of the front door to try it out. The upshot was that my bro-in-law wore a cite for doing 85mph down the middle of main street. He said later he wasn't anywhere near wide open, a freshly rebuilt and tuned for racing John Deer 660cc, probably good for around 110 mph on smooth lake ice... That thing won him lots of cases of beer when somebody thought they had a hot one. Hell, with a normal sized person on it, you coulda added another 20mph. He only came in one size, XXXXL including his custom made size 22 Red Wing Boots. That snowmobile had its work cut out for it when he stepped aboard.
Yup, life experiences. The amiga programs referenced were EzCron and EzHome, with EzCron being the cron that aos never had, and ezhome being a programmable interface to all the x10 toys you may have scattered around the place to turn lights etc on and off on schedule.
We wrote the cron in what was basicly self defense. We needed to have lengthy rendering projects running in the off hours in the middle of the night after the machines job of doing the news graphics was over, and that allowed us to get an additional 8 to 12 hours worth of animation rendering time out of a pair of 040 and 060 equipt 4000's + one 040 equipt 2000. EzCron also fired off the scripts that put our news stories on the stations web page, something we were doing several months ahead of ANY other tv station in the country. We must have done something right, 2 months after we started that our web page was up to over 100,000 hits a week in a 75 thousand market and has never been below a million a month that I know of since 2000. We wrote the srcs in ARexx for all that, and eventually I bought a copy of the RexxPlus compiler which made them even faster.
EzHome came into being because someone tried to port the very early heyu to the amiga, running it through a blender set on high in the process, which was fatal as near as we could tell, so we found a copy of the x10 specs and wrote that puppy from scratch. At the end it was pretty good, but there were a lot of iterations to get it to that point.
ARexx, FWIW, was a huge superset of Rexx/Regina, having all sorts of os specific stuff that Rexx never had and never will. Similar enough in structure that one could have called it an interpreted C, and loop constructs could be pretty much modeled on my previous C experience. The only downside was its typeless data, every statement dealing with it had to contain the instructions to make it the type of data you wanted it to spit out. All told though, it was one hell of a langauge, for the amiga, when the amiga was king. Too bad that William Hawes never got a penny from commie for writing it.
But, time marches on, but as Stephan Hawking says, only forward.
I disagree on the idea that two coders arn't as good as one
This is a point I've come to also after 72 years, the last 35 or so of it coding this and that although not much recently as I seem to be fadeing into the dim sunset of SS mentally.
When working in assembly, then it may be that one person is the optimum number of coders as I've done some never before been done stuff in assembly several times in the early years, sometimes with hand assembly (on an 1802 board) where you look up the nemonic and enter the hex equ in a hex monitor. It took me about 6 months to fine tune about 3k of code, but it was still running 12 years later when I last checked in at that station. And still saving the station 2-3 man hours a day and giving them a better air product at the same time.
But for a higher level language, I think 2 can be more productive, particularly when one knows what he wants to do, and the other knows how to do it once its properly outlined. Many times the coder himself is simply too close to the code to see the job it has to do, but the partner in turn has a good idea of what its got to do. The genesis of at least 2 fairly well known amiga programs were from the mind of a younger man in another dept at the tv station, and he would hack up what he thought might work but didn't, but once I knew the requirements, the final code more than likely came from my keyboard. He had the imagination that I lacked, possibly due to my advanceing age, and was in turn concentrating on his job's duties which I wasn't always aware (I had other responsibilities too) were being done at less than optimal methods. We sure made a good combo crew though.
I have NDI how many man-years in in vista right now, but I dare say it is a substantial investment in both time and programmer salaries. I'd also wager that at least 75% of any one programmers day was spent conferring with other programmers as to the best way to do it, and get it done within the generally immutable confines of the.h header files. This is NOT to me, best use of the programmers time, so the what does it do, and how it does that, really ought to be seperated in any large project.
As for re-using known good code ideas, or a 150 line snippet here and there, it is to be encouraged at every staff meeting, re-inventing the wheel is not good use of his time and as others have said, only serve to intro new bugs that then have to be run down and fixed. Programmers really should get over the attitude that I can write it quicker, and spend more time reviewing older code to see if it can be recycled. There is much knowledge in 10 year old code thats still in use everyday.
Will my little treatise make any difference at the end of the week? Donbesilly, This is after all,/.:-)
What you predict will require that those who have only over the air reception now, goto extreme lengths that are very expensive, most of which will never be able to afford it. So they are stuck with a dish (if they can afford its monthly charges, lots of folks on SS can't you know), which if they don't go sweep it out when it collects 1/2" of snow, is out of business.
Yes, this country is somewhere between 75 and 80% wired, and many that don't have a cable connection will have a dish. As far as the broadcaster being a middle man, our compensation from the networks for carrying that $550,000 30 second spot during the super bowl has been restricted to the top 25 or so markets for several years.
We may well go away, and the FCC, who has to do what congress says, is gradually taking away our bandwidth just to give the LA police some clear air space for their walkie talkies. So in that regard you may well be correct. The FCC does care, but they have to take their marching orders from Capital Hill.
However, if you think that verizon et all will be the future cable tv supplier for 100% of the peoples entertainment needs, or even 95%, I submit that is damned fine stuff you are smoking and if I still smoked (I quite cold turkey 18 years ago) I'd sure like to at least have a sample of it. Yes, rural folks have telephones, but even in 2007, if it hadn't been for the gov's regulatory push 60+ years ago, only 80% would have a telephone today because there is simply no profit for vz in stringing a wire 7000 yards over a hill & up the creek to get to that last 20%.
And yet you seem to want to dis-enfranchise these folks, and apparently would have no bad dreams about it whatsoever. I don't believe that fits with the principles the founding fathers had in mind, so I for one hope that scenario never happens.
However, since its all about the money these days baby, take it to the bank that it will. Maybe by then I'll be gone, because if it happens before, they will have to grease me well so I can spin in my coffin without starting a fire in the hearse when I do go.
I'm an almost retired broadcast engineer with over 40 years in the field.
For most of these years, our biggest expense after payroll and related expenses is the power bill. We have, by way of charging the seller to advertise his product, called a commercial, been able to survive, and even pay our better employees fairly well.
To bring enough bandwidth into being to do this for all the broadcasters, and there are around 800 of us, sufficient bandwidth buildout will be a major expense, and will of course be charged for accordingly.
Our power bills range from say $5k/mo for a vhf operation, going up to maybe $10k for a full power digital running in parallel, and back to maybe $7k/mo once ntsc is turned off in 2009. For UHF broadcasters, multiply those figures by about 3x.
We would need up to 30MB/sec per channel transmitted this way in full HD, and at todays charges for bandwidth, would make our power bill look like pocket change. That of course is a CODB.
Now, while its going to be technically feasable at some point in the future, I detest people who are only passing fans of a dog in this fight, with little of their own money invested yet, making predictions as to when this will happen.
There are all sorts of regulatory hurdles to contend with, starting with the market access exclusivity that the designated ADM's the FCC has setup, preventing to a large degree, access to our local market by outside stations. I personally am a bit ambiguous about that, but it goes a long way toward keeping our broadcast material flavored with the local area culture, and this is a Good Thing(TM), while at the same time effectively keeping ABC/CBS/NBC/FOX/WTBS/KTLA's time peddlers from walking the streets in our market and effectively stealing our income.
OTOH, folks would like to be able to grab the network signals without all those local commercials and the clamor for exactly that is being heard about the land and in our governments reactions to that in the form of the SHVA acts. But, stop and think about the downside to that too if there were no SHVA. If CBS, whom we are an affiliate of, were to be allowed free access to 'our' market, a couple of things would happen, one because of their networks construction, they would have the power to hit several differnt locales around the country with commercials taylored to that locale and they do that right now, sending a dog food commercial to the deep south and a toothpaste commercial to the west coast, etc etc. They would have to do that because there is not enough time to do all of what they could sell if they used our rate card unless they could resell that time slot several times. They'll have to use our rate card or lose the sale as in this market there is no one that could afford a:30 in a bowl game at their current rates. And inevitably, the ratio of editorial to commercial time would become even more commercial at the expense of editorial allthough this is supposed to be regulated by the FCC. Insert laugh track here...
The other thing is that because we could not realisticly compete in that un-limited access scenario, we would have no choice but to fold our tents and go away, leaving maybe 10 super powerfull 'stations', all of which will be at the governments mercy and be fed pablum for news and we would then be no better off than the russian people were at the height of Stalins power. You could be summarily shot if found in possession of a radio capale of picking up the VOA broadcasts.
Because there are now many of us, maybe as much as a third with full time 10 or more employee news departments, supporting in our own case over 3 hours of local news a day, we can shine a lot of sunshine on things that aren't always as they seem, and we make it a point to do just that. If one of our reporters is denied access to a city council meeting, its on the 11 oclock news because its a blatant violation of the sunshine laws here in WV. Yes, that local news is a cash cow to us, but still, where would this co
Based on the 2001 date of the M$ patent, it does look as if M$ has covered their butts, at least for the expiration date considerations. But rather than protecting the data, they would destroy the volatile copy in memory.
But this is a pretty good test of the patent system too, because Alan has probably some very similar methods claimed. The end result will probably be granted, but then disallowed on prior art grounds when it makes it to court. And while it may be to us, prima faci evidence of a broken system, but you can bet the farm it will be claimed by M$ as proof that the system works when they win. So we're (speaking as the public at large here) damned if we do, and damned if we don't.
OTOH, we need to give Red Hat and Alan a great big hand for making the effort and spending the $ to apply. We do certainly live in interesting times it seems. This I'll bet, will be at least as well followed in the FOSS world as the current scenario of making SCO go slowly broke paying the legals, or losing the scrap with Novell who has asked that all assets be frozen while there still is some left to pay the unpaid royalties. In that event the electricity will be off in parts of Linden UT the next day.
As for SCO, that must be some great stuff they grow in Utah if they thought for even a second that they could get a free ride and survive to fight another day. I want some of that. OTOH, I wouldn't be surprised if the court decides to liquidate all properties gained by officers of the corporation since the royalty payments went into arrears in an attempt to recover something for the plaintiff, Novel. That would certainly be fair, but I've NDI if its possible under corporate law, which usually insulates the people from the corporation monetarily.
-- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author)
I agree wholeheartedly. Yes CA folks pay special tax on blanks, and unless there is some pretty creative bookkeeping going on up north of the border, I'd be willing to bet a beer or 6 that the annual check to the **AA mafia rather handily exceeds the royalties actually lost from any so-called piracy.
I look at you all as a beacon of common sense in the wilderness, a thorn in their side if you will. As I'm equally sure the **AA legals are telling their bosses that daily in an attempt to justify their bloated retainer.
So please CA folks, do stand up and be counted, else this will be just another gun grab story and we have all seen the expense vs public good that by now close to a billion dollar program has done for you. Other than making criminals out of deer hunters, I've seen NO benefits whatsoever from that program, social or economically. Even the PM admits it was a lost cause from the git-go, but guess what, its still on the books and anybody who runs afoul of it will spend their life savings on legals and still lose some sunshine time in the government hotel, and it ain't Club Med from what I hear.
-- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author)
I note with a certain amount of scientific curiosity and indeed scepticism that nowhere in the article is the effective red shift for this one billion light year distance noted. This seems like a designed in effort to get some ink with no real hard data to prove that claim because its the red shift times the hubble that is the usual astronomical yardstick for measuring such distances.
I don't know how to convert from hubble constant, eg red shift, to distances, but we do have a couple of spots on the images here and there whose red shifts have approached if not exceeded 5.0. Meaning they are so far away that a given line in their spectrum has been red shifted until it is now 5 times its original wavelength. Considering that the visible universe has now been calculated at 13.7 billion light years, the age of the universe in other words, and we cannot see beyond because it would be effectively looking back before the big bang. When we do look back that far, what we see is the afterglow of the big bang in the nominally 2.7 degree Kelvin radiation that permeates the universe we can see.
Someone more versed in the math should tell us what the red shift is at 1 billion years, but I have serious, really serious doubts that its much more than 1.9 or so. If thats true, then this claim should be treated for what it is, another grant money grab. Someone throwing out big numbers because the real red shift numbers aren't that big.
Now, somebody do the math and correct me if I'm grossly wrong.
Well, you were right on one point, you don't know anything about ntsc.
1: sdtv is 480 lines. But those lines are measured as fine vertical lines. Or dots per horizontal scan line. But, the fact that ntsc is also interlaced is also in this context, irrevelant. That only becomes revelant when talking about how many scan lines there are horizontally. Thats in the next kettle of fish.
2: There are 525 of those scan lines in ntsc, but only the odd lines are refreshed, then the even ones, in any two vertical scans. In ntsc we lose about 22 lines for vertical synch and hidden data, like closed captioning yadda yadda.
3: By the time the video is filtered well enough to keep it in its assigned ntsc channel, we have only about 330 dots per scan line left, nothing higher gets through else the Friendly Candy Company comes calling with a citation in hand for adjacent channel interference. Done well, this is still subjectively sharper than your old vhs vcr could ever do, which was in the 240 line range.
4: So sdtv winds up being about 480x400, interlaced. This ain't hdtv by any means, but because theres no analog noise, and no analog ringing artifacts or color 'dot crawl' it does look better to the unwashed. ntsc, the best we can put on your scren, is about 330 vertical lines by about 500 horizontal scan lines, which, with the 3 line comb filters we use to enhance the sharpness of horizontal lines in the image, loks subjectively sharper but is in fact the equ of about 200 real horizontal lines. Those filters are why you occasionally see some very slight slanted line in the pix literally snap from one line to the next on your screen. This of course requires matching filters in the viewers set, which only the top of the line stuffs have.
5: 1080i, which I've seen quite a bit of, is much sharper. But I can recall, long before we had an ATSC stds body to codify this stuff, seeing a Zenith demo at the N.A.B. show, a demo tape playing from a specially modified type C 1" machine with the tape moveing at about 30 ips and the drum whining similar to the old 2" quadruplex machines, of about 10 minutes of Stars on Ice, with Red Buttons, all that 1 hour tape could hold.
The stars all had their names embroidered on their tee shirts, and with the camera at max wide angle to show the whole floor, Red stopped and took a bow from center ice. You could read his t-shirt when he straightened back up. On a projection screen 4 foot high and 8 feet wide he was maybe 6" tall in that image. That was a 2x1 aspect ratio pix and I'd estimate the real, working resolution of that setup was at least 10,000x5000.
The image compression wasn't quite as good as mpeg2 (it was still under development itself) then and was done in hardware both ways. The data rate from that modified type C was in the 500 megbytes/second area. In other words, that single picture would have occupied more than all the bandwidth available in a 120 channel cable system. Not terribly practical in the real world.
As an exersize in what could be done, I've seen it, so even 1080i today is just a wannabe to me. OTOH, it (1080i) is far far better than anything I've seen in my 40+ years as a broadcast engineer watching our own on the air ntsc signals through a $5,600 fcc standard receiver. We haven't nick-named it Never Twice Same Color without reason.:-)
All of which are intended to enforce the captive customer mentality that emanates from Redmond like a damned virus. Too bad we don't have a viable vaccine for it...
But the article was wrong on one point, he claims it cost M$, when in the case of that machine, its did not, he still had to buy all those licenses etc even if they were destined not to work, so M$ at least got paid for that wasted copy of XP.
AFAIK, no one has ever seen a damned dime from M$ for something that when bought, or were forced to buy because it doesn't come without it, then either wasn't used or didn't work. And in the case of didn't work, then I'd say there should be grounds for an action to recover the money, and paid for the time spent trying to make it work. But, knowing M$ just well enough to guess, my guess is that the EULA precludes that course of action. That and the lawyers will want 1000x the potential winnings for prosecuting a lose/lose case.
Where they lost money was probably on the other machines being contemplated. At the end of the day, some of those might also be running unbuntu, but 99.9999999% of them shipped with a paid for copy of windows on them so its no loss to M$ if its never run, he got his blood anyway. But thats only paper money, not the kind that will buy BG another 747 or whatever until you take it times the machines sold in a year.
And to think it will be till Jan 20 2009 before we can wake up justice & see if they'll dust off what they were doing in 2000 before doubleya shut them down.
-- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Thanks, I've been playing with the install.conf trying to make it make sense but still put the executables in/opt. But I haven't gotten it to build just yet.
In fact, I have it here on an FC6 system, and I've now installed about 10 more -dev packages, but still cannot make it compile. If anyone knows the correct syntax of what to launch to build it, and has a list of perl stuff it needs, I'd appreciate a hand.
Slashdot Mirror
After looking at this one, I printed it, then outlined the revelant parts. This seems to be pretty un-assailable proof that monsanto has swept it under the rug again.
They, to this planets agriculture, compare to M$ and this planets computers. When, the question is, can we call a halt to such "we're bigger than you and can prove it in court" shenanigans. I believe its time we, as a planet, re-wrote our incorporation legal framework such that we CAN HOLD ACCOUNTABLE, those in the corporate decision making process that allow such actions to now go unpunished.
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Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Quit worrying about your health. It'll go away.
-- Robert Orben
It sure would be nice if just one of the above links actually worked. But its apparently all /.ed.
Humm, how about the stuff M$ foists off on the unsuspecting public. OTOH, they are suspecting these days, hence the ground that linux is gaining on the desktop.
I wonder how much noise would have been made the last time the N.A.B. held their annual get together in the Dallas/FW environs circa the late 80's or early 90's, had they gone around and arrested every person whose business card said Broadcast (or) Chief Engineer? I can guarantee that this texas law would have been re-written in the next few months when they got the legal bill for arresting 40,000+ engineers in one swell foop. Within our field, we ARE engineers in every sense of the word, analyzing tall towers to determnine their strength and wind load capabilities is just one of the minor disciplines we follow. Regardless of PE status, we all must live by the laws of this physical universe, the punishment for dis-obeying if indeed it can be dis-obeyed (gravity anyone?) are at best cadidates for the Darwin Award.
Lets face it, the PE designation says you are supposed to know about stationary steam boiler heating systems, mechanical design of such as bridges & buildings, and possibly a working knowledge of how to look something electrical distribution related up in the NEC, hoping your copy is sufficiently uptodate so as to represent current practice. It has absolutely zero to do with designing the shape of the aircrafts wing profile, or the warfare systems it carries.
But what in hell makes these Professional "Union" only reps think they know squat about digital logic, computers and computer programming in general? That is arrogance beyond comprehension, professional jealousy at its worst because they are afraid someone will find out just how little they actually know.
I once was asked, about 20 years ago, to address a meeting of PE's, and at a loss to find a subject that may have some common ground, I picked up a cable transformer, one of those little 50 to 300 ohm gismo's you had to use to hook your games up to the tv with 25 years ago when they all has 300 ohm twin lead inputs screw terminals on the back. I made up some scenarios where it was improperly installed, and all the side effects on the picture that missuse of it caused. But I made the mistake of using VSWR as one of the artifacts, and even though I carefully explained what that was, I could see I had lost the whole group by the middle of the 2nd sentence. I soldiered on, boring them for about another 15 minutes before I had the good sense to shut up. Among that group of PE's, it was obvious to me that there was no comprehension of what I was talking about, and it was nothing but the common cable transformer we've used forever, till tv's finally came out of the dark ages and graduated to 50 ohm inputs using the F59 connector. Now of course they are antiques.
So please, deliver me from the presence of PE's like that group, in the meantime I have some real engineering to do yet, I'm only 72. Retire? Nah, I tried that in 2001 but you see these lucrative job offers just seem to keep coming in. Those of us that are good, tend to retire just a few weeks at a time till we finally fall over. And we regret that while we can afford the hobbies we all dreamed about in past decades, finding the time to enjoy them is STILL a problem.
--
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
As another poster on a different mailing list told me the other day, "Get your own toys".
If you look at the voting records, when something comes up that would endanger our right of free speech, you will generally find it was defeated, if it was (sometimes it's not, more often dies in committee as it should have), by the same block of votes that have protected the right to keep and bear arms. These senators and representatives that tend to want us not to infringe on the bill of rights, are both a national treasure, and on a list of names that doesn't significantly change according to which of the ammendments that would be infringed are under discussion. Generally these people are either from "west of the river" (except of course the independent country of California), or the northeastern states such as New Hampshire, Maine & Vermont. But that list more often than not includes our Senator Bird, whom we love, while at the same time thinking the country cannot afford his pork. Rockefeller OTOH, gets an F on all such grades of his voting record, but no one has been able to draw even 10% of the votes to unseat him at the polls here. And thats something I flat don't understand considering the derogatory conversations I hear on the streets when his name comes up. This inability to change what should be changed may be, and probably is, related to the party rules for primary elections here, where registered independants are dis-enfranchised from voting in the demo primaries IIRC. Based on the theory that one should be able to vote for the best man overall but the party machinery won't let him get past the primaries, I've thought of sueing to get that set aside, but its a suit I am not in a position to finance, darnit. There are 'vested interests' in seeing to it that the status quo is maintained, and do not see those rules as undemocratic and they can field some very expensive legal help.
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Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Please go and read the Bill of Rights, the 2nd one in particular. Without it, you wouldn't have the ability to write that, because that is supposedly guaranteed by the first. But without the 2nd, we would not now have the first, it would have been nibbled to death by ducks.
--
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
And where the hell is the smiley? Methinks you forgot that little detail.
/. find these folks anyway. Inquiring minds would like to know.
Where the hell does
Or are you just new here?
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Cheers, Gene & this time I'll paste my usual sig in. Enjoy.
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Well, TBT, not no, but HELL NO! It should have been laughed out of court in the first place, 13 years ago. Now I'm serious, this was a miss-carriage if there ever was one. And if it weren't for the adverse publicity, I believe he should have plenty of grounds for a civil action for damages.
But thats just me, an honest old fart & cynic that still thinks whats right is whats right, and whats wrong should be quickly punished, a bit like Willy N. and "Whiskey for my men, beer for my horses" song. Sometimes that tall oak tree, a length of rope and spooky horse are a very sensible solution & saves the county the expense of a long trial to boot.
Unforch, that whole attitude belongs back in the time when a mans handshake was an honest mans word, a contract if you will. Today, its whatever you can do that you don't get caught at. My trouble is that I'm too damned good at calling such people out for my own good. I've worn a beating or 3 in my time, but I've also been the last man standing enough times to be damned proud of it. I was born 50 years too late for this society's rules I think. I would still feel at home with a 6-gun hanging on my hip, but these days its much smaller than the 44 and inside, along with a carry permit. But since I got the permit, I've not been forced to expose it but if I am, it WILL get used if the perp is similarly armed and isn't convinced by seeing it, and with no regrets. But one must make that "show it" call very deliberately. Its ALL a matter of responsibility for ones own actions at the end of the trip.
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Cheers, Gene
Congratulations Randall, its great news to hear that the legal system actually works once in a while.
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Cheers Gene
Thanks for the link, there is some stuff there I hadn't seen before. In particular, that vertical tunnel access port/hatch. I wasn't present when our stuff was installed in it, (so I never personally saw the gondola) which they actually did on a weekend right on the dock that was about 75 feet from our (Oceanographic Engineering) buildings back door. At the time, all the Navy brought over was an LST with the gondola pieces hanging from its crane. They set it down on the dock, the engineers installed their stuff and this story replay made me think there wasn't a hatch. After the top and been set in place, at one point there was an ensign walking around it, tapeing up the equatorial joint with a roll of rubber tape, and our engineer asked what that was for? The Ensign replied with a very straight face, "why it leaks, Sir" and kept on walking. There was at that point two guys in it, and when the tape had been applied and all the cables connected to a rack of batteries on the LST had been double checked, then the LST picked it up and backed away from the dock about 20 feet and set it down on the bottom of Mission Bay in about 12 feet of water and stood by, teathered to it to pick it up again when signaled. Our people stood around, and when it was brought back up, everybody came out with ear to ear grins and our prople could breath again. It was quite the talk of the shop monday morning and I regret not being there for the show. But I was trying to raise a handicapped child and family matters intervened.
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Cheers, Gene
Well, one thing that's always bothered me a bit, has to do with their later 're-adjustment' of the depth of the mohole, back up to the 35,800 foot area.
.005" thick would have been so powerfull that just swinging an arm through it would have sliced the arm off far cleaner than you could have done with a modern chop saw.
This, AIUI, was done with echo-sounding, and I've always wondered if the measurements would have been skewed in that direction by the effect of the rising pressure with depth, on the speed of sound in water. Its faster than in air of course, but wouldn't the density increase be reflected in a speed of sound reading that increased in some proportion if not a direct density tracking change? It makes sense to me, so I've not been too bashfull about using the 37+k feet figure that was I believe, derived from the actual crush of the gondola, measured inside it at the time.
Jacques Piccard, we all know, survived ok, and went on to make all those other ocean related docudrama's. But I've never heard of the other fellow again, so I've always wondered if maybe he had some of the same problems our one survivor of the Sago mine explosion has. He'll need help doing 2*2 problems the rest of his life. That BTW, is only about 20 miles from here so it's pretty close to home.
All those pix they brought back were taken with (we were told) smallish leica rangefinder cameras with closeup tubes fitted, right off the screens of the two 8" monitors, because there was no video recording technology then that wasn't 5x the size of the whole gondola they were in. So the only way to bring back a pix was on film. And yes, it did leak some. Between the sweating walls because deep sea water is so cold, and a few drops that worked their way in through the packing seals around the wiring access, there was I'm told, about 2 feet of water in it when they got it opened back up. In 34F water, that would give you a whole new definition of cold feet. A real leak though would have been quite dangerous as a stream of water only
Anyway, 2 cents from one who was a very small part of that particular piece of history, as he remembers it 47 years later. I didn't really understand then that what I was working on would be involved in something so exclusive as the only trip into the mohole that man has ever done. What we were really trying to do was build a camera that could be pulled through sewers to inspect them and the business model was to lease them out by the week. To say that we were surpised when a bunch of Navy Gold (nothing brass about those guys, all gold, all over) walked in the door and wanted to see what we had at the time is an understatement. The best demo we did was probably when we picked up the breadboard, with parts hanging out of it in all directions, and gently put it in a bench drawer and closed the drawer on the piece of rg59 that was running it. 2 seconds later we were watching (the auto target was a bit slow) the wood grain of the back panel of the drawer. They were sold, and gave us specs for the houseing and they would furnish the quartz windows the lenses would look through. We made the housings by drilling a 2 3/4" hole through the middle of a 6" round bronze rod about 2 feet long, which gave us room so the bronze could crush 1/4" internally before the cameras pcbs were crushed. It worked. They built or had built, similar housings for the lights since that's 33k feet deeper than light ever gets. Bring your own light in other words.
I better shut up before I really start rambling...
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Cheers, Gene
The oceans are indeed a mystery. We haven't studied them near as well as we have the land above, mainly becuase we humans are quite puny in comparison, and absolutely must have a ready supply of breathable air. Preferably at an ambient pressure of less than 100psi.
The deepest we've ever been, and two guys lived through it, is actually deeper than Everest is tall, 37,800 feet to the bottom of the Marianas Trench off the Phillipines. The iron ball, 6 feet in diameter that they were in, suspended from the kerosene ballast tanks of the Navy's Trieste, was squeezed by the nominally 18kpsi pressure, enough to warp the frames of the equipment braces holding the controls and monitors for the tv cameras that I actually helped build back in about 1960. The Treiste ran everything in it and on it from big racks of Sears Die-Hard batteries, each of which had a heavy balloon with half a pint or so of battery acid in them, snapped over the neck of the cell, with a wire cage to keep them from being dislodged by water currents. They brought back a lot of pix of blind, eyeless fish from down there, and they turned the cameras around to look at the batteries once and found that all of the balloons had been driven into the batteries. So don't ever let anybody tell you that water is incompressible, it is at 18,000 psi. So is oil, we had filled the pan & tilt drives with motor oil, and layed a neoprene rubber gasket on the top, then drilled some holes in the cover to let the pressure in. There was about an inch of clearance to the closest gear. One gasket was cut thru, the other was damaged by the turning gears slicing into it but held.
But the guys weren't in very good shape by the time it had surfaced and the gondola opened to let/get them out, so thats a trip they never repeated, and they were using state of the art air recycling gear. If something better has been invented now for that, I'm not aware of it. The danger of it imploding was very real, this was about 2x deeper than Alvin or its successor ilk have ever been. But then Alvin and company have access holes that can be opened, this ball didn't due to the pressure calcs saying they couldn't support it, so it was cut in half, and the seams epoxied together after the guys were inside, and it had to be removed somehow to get them back out. The Navy never said how they opened it once the epoxy was set.
But, man being the curious thing that he is, if better tools can be made, I expect there will be ready volunteers to occupy the viewports for yet another trip into that abyss.
Do you feel lucky? I think I'l stay up here, thank you...
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Cheers, gene
You miss the point of how this business is constructed entirely. When the company goes under, and barring heavy intervention from the federal rebates, it's a pyramid scheme so it will, so all the end users and middle men will be screwed. Sure they'll prosecute the Ken Lays at the top maybe, but what did they recover for the poor folks he starved at the end of the day? Yeah, fucking zip, they never made any attempt to recover the money he stole that I'm aware of. It was all about the criminal charges, what was morally right was never considered. Lets just say that what I would have done to attempt to collect some justice for his hungry victims, and what was done to Ken Lay, are two entirely different scenarios. If ever a vigilante action was warranted, that was it.
After they go under, then who is to handle the worthless contract that lets you suck the excess you use from the local power grid? That's right folks, it will all be up to you to negotiate a new deal with Mr. Reddy Kilowatt, and dear old Mr Reddy Kilowatt has you by the short hairs and decides to charge you an extra 5 cents a kwh as a transport fee, just what are you going to do? Short of a lengthy court battle and numerous hearings at your local PUC, not a damned thing that will be profitable to YOU.
The only thing you can do is go off-grid, and live within what you can pull from the roof. Then the furnace will pull the batteries down in a long grey cold snap and where are you? Scrambling around to setup a wood stove for the rest of the winter, and planning to add a few kwh worth of wind power come construction season. Yeah, you CAN make it work, but it WILL change your lifestyle AND it will cost quite a few hay wagon sized loads of cash.
Rottsa ruck as they have been known to say in Tokyo.
--
Cheers, Gene
Chuckle, you guys slay me at times.
I used to have a brother-in-law who lived in a small town in Northern Minn. Common transport IS a snowmobile up there from late Oct to early April.
The town cop got hisself a new radar gun for Christmas about 25 years ago, and stepped out of the front door to try it out. The upshot was that my bro-in-law wore a cite for doing 85mph down the middle of main street. He said later he wasn't anywhere near wide open, a freshly rebuilt and tuned for racing John Deer 660cc, probably good for around 110 mph on smooth lake ice... That thing won him lots of cases of beer when somebody thought they had a hot one. Hell, with a normal sized person on it, you coulda added another 20mph. He only came in one size, XXXXL including his custom made size 22 Red Wing Boots. That snowmobile had its work cut out for it when he stepped aboard.
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Cheers, Gene
Yup, life experiences. The amiga programs referenced were EzCron and EzHome, with EzCron being the cron that aos never had, and ezhome being a programmable interface to all the x10 toys you may have scattered around the place to turn lights etc on and off on schedule.
We wrote the cron in what was basicly self defense. We needed to have lengthy rendering projects running in the off hours in the middle of the night after the machines job of doing the news graphics was over, and that allowed us to get an additional 8 to 12 hours worth of animation rendering time out of a pair of 040 and 060 equipt 4000's + one 040 equipt 2000. EzCron also fired off the scripts that put our news stories on the stations web page, something we were doing several months ahead of ANY other tv station in the country. We must have done something right, 2 months after we started that our web page was up to over 100,000 hits a week in a 75 thousand market and has never been below a million a month that I know of since 2000. We wrote the srcs in ARexx for all that, and eventually I bought a copy of the RexxPlus compiler which made them even faster.
EzHome came into being because someone tried to port the very early heyu to the amiga, running it through a blender set on high in the process, which was fatal as near as we could tell, so we found a copy of the x10 specs and wrote that puppy from scratch. At the end it was pretty good, but there were a lot of iterations to get it to that point.
ARexx, FWIW, was a huge superset of Rexx/Regina, having all sorts of os specific stuff that Rexx never had and never will. Similar enough in structure that one could have called it an interpreted C, and loop constructs could be pretty much modeled on my previous C experience. The only downside was its typeless data, every statement dealing with it had to contain the instructions to make it the type of data you wanted it to spit out. All told though, it was one hell of a langauge, for the amiga, when the amiga was king. Too bad that William Hawes never got a penny from commie for writing it.
But, time marches on, but as Stephan Hawking says, only forward.
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Cheers, Gene
I disagree on the idea that two coders arn't as good as one
.h header files. This is NOT to me, best use of the programmers time, so the what does it do, and how it does that, really ought to be seperated in any large project.
/. :-)
This is a point I've come to also after 72 years, the last 35 or so of it coding this and that although not much recently as I seem to be fadeing into the dim sunset of SS mentally.
When working in assembly, then it may be that one person is the optimum number of coders as I've done some never before been done stuff in assembly several times in the early years, sometimes with hand assembly (on an 1802 board) where you look up the nemonic and enter the hex equ in a hex monitor. It took me about 6 months to fine tune about 3k of code, but it was still running 12 years later when I last checked in at that station. And still saving the station 2-3 man hours a day and giving them a better air product at the same time.
But for a higher level language, I think 2 can be more productive, particularly when one knows what he wants to do, and the other knows how to do it once its properly outlined. Many times the coder himself is simply too close to the code to see the job it has to do, but the partner in turn has a good idea of what its got to do. The genesis of at least 2 fairly well known amiga programs were from the mind of a younger man in another dept at the tv station, and he would hack up what he thought might work but didn't, but once I knew the requirements, the final code more than likely came from my keyboard. He had the imagination that I lacked, possibly due to my advanceing age, and was in turn concentrating on his job's duties which I wasn't always aware (I had other responsibilities too) were being done at less than optimal methods. We sure made a good combo crew though.
I have NDI how many man-years in in vista right now, but I dare say it is a substantial investment in both time and programmer salaries. I'd also wager that at least 75% of any one programmers day was spent conferring with other programmers as to the best way to do it, and get it done within the generally immutable confines of the
As for re-using known good code ideas, or a 150 line snippet here and there, it is to be encouraged at every staff meeting, re-inventing the wheel is not good use of his time and as others have said, only serve to intro new bugs that then have to be run down and fixed. Programmers really should get over the attitude that I can write it quicker, and spend more time reviewing older code to see if it can be recycled. There is much knowledge in 10 year old code thats still in use everyday.
Will my little treatise make any difference at the end of the week? Donbesilly, This is after all,
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Cheers, Gene
What you predict will require that those who have only over the air reception now, goto extreme lengths that are very expensive, most of which will never be able to afford it. So they are stuck with a dish (if they can afford its monthly charges, lots of folks on SS can't you know), which if they don't go sweep it out when it collects 1/2" of snow, is out of business.
Yes, this country is somewhere between 75 and 80% wired, and many that don't have a cable connection will have a dish. As far as the broadcaster being a middle man, our compensation from the networks for carrying that $550,000 30 second spot during the super bowl has been restricted to the top 25 or so markets for several years.
We may well go away, and the FCC, who has to do what congress says, is gradually taking away our bandwidth just to give the LA police some clear air space for their walkie talkies. So in that regard you may well be correct. The FCC does care, but they have to take their marching orders from Capital Hill.
However, if you think that verizon et all will be the future cable tv supplier for 100% of the peoples entertainment needs, or even 95%, I submit that is damned fine stuff you are smoking and if I still smoked (I quite cold turkey 18 years ago) I'd sure like to at least have a sample of it. Yes, rural folks have telephones, but even in 2007, if it hadn't been for the gov's regulatory push 60+ years ago, only 80% would have a telephone today because there is simply no profit for vz in stringing a wire 7000 yards over a hill & up the creek to get to that last 20%.
And yet you seem to want to dis-enfranchise these folks, and apparently would have no bad dreams about it whatsoever. I don't believe that fits with the principles the founding fathers had in mind, so I for one hope that scenario never happens.
However, since its all about the money these days baby, take it to the bank that it will. Maybe by then I'll be gone, because if it happens before, they will have to grease me well so I can spin in my coffin without starting a fire in the hearse when I do go.
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Cheers, Gene
At least thats what the want adds will read when M$ discovers that gaping, bleeding hole in their foot.
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Cheers, Gene
I'm an almost retired broadcast engineer with over 40 years in the field.
:30 in a bowl game at their current rates. And inevitably, the ratio of editorial to commercial time would become even more commercial at the expense of editorial allthough this is supposed to be regulated by the FCC. Insert laugh track here...
For most of these years, our biggest expense after payroll and related expenses is the power bill. We have, by way of charging the seller to advertise his product, called a commercial, been able to survive, and even pay our better employees fairly well.
To bring enough bandwidth into being to do this for all the broadcasters, and there are around 800 of us, sufficient bandwidth buildout will be a major expense, and will of course be charged for accordingly.
Our power bills range from say $5k/mo for a vhf operation, going up to maybe $10k for a full power digital running in parallel, and back to maybe $7k/mo once ntsc is turned off in 2009. For UHF broadcasters, multiply those figures by about 3x.
We would need up to 30MB/sec per channel transmitted this way in full HD, and at todays charges for bandwidth, would make our power bill look like pocket change. That of course is a CODB.
Now, while its going to be technically feasable at some point in the future, I detest people who are only passing fans of a dog in this fight, with little of their own money invested yet, making predictions as to when this will happen.
There are all sorts of regulatory hurdles to contend with, starting with the market access exclusivity that the designated ADM's the FCC has setup, preventing to a large degree, access to our local market by outside stations. I personally am a bit ambiguous about that, but it goes a long way toward keeping our broadcast material flavored with the local area culture, and this is a Good Thing(TM), while at the same time effectively keeping ABC/CBS/NBC/FOX/WTBS/KTLA's time peddlers from walking the streets in our market and effectively stealing our income.
OTOH, folks would like to be able to grab the network signals without all those local commercials and the clamor for exactly that is being heard about the land and in our governments reactions to that in the form of the SHVA acts. But, stop and think about the downside to that too if there were no SHVA. If CBS, whom we are an affiliate of, were to be allowed free access to 'our' market, a couple of things would happen, one because of their networks construction, they would have the power to hit several differnt locales around the country with commercials taylored to that locale and they do that right now, sending a dog food commercial to the deep south and a toothpaste commercial to the west coast, etc etc. They would have to do that because there is not enough time to do all of what they could sell if they used our rate card unless they could resell that time slot several times. They'll have to use our rate card or lose the sale as in this market there is no one that could afford a
The other thing is that because we could not realisticly compete in that un-limited access scenario, we would have no choice but to fold our tents and go away, leaving maybe 10 super powerfull 'stations', all of which will be at the governments mercy and be fed pablum for news and we would then be no better off than the russian people were at the height of Stalins power. You could be summarily shot if found in possession of a radio capale of picking up the VOA broadcasts.
Because there are now many of us, maybe as much as a third with full time 10 or more employee news departments, supporting in our own case over 3 hours of local news a day, we can shine a lot of sunshine on things that aren't always as they seem, and we make it a point to do just that. If one of our reporters is denied access to a city council meeting, its on the 11 oclock news because its a blatant violation of the sunshine laws here in WV. Yes, that local news is a cash cow to us, but still, where would this co
Based on the 2001 date of the M$ patent, it does look as if M$ has covered their butts, at least for the expiration date considerations. But rather than protecting the data, they would destroy the volatile copy in memory.
But this is a pretty good test of the patent system too, because Alan has probably some very similar methods claimed. The end result will probably be granted, but then disallowed on prior art grounds when it makes it to court. And while it may be to us, prima faci evidence of a broken system, but you can bet the farm it will be claimed by M$ as proof that the system works when they win. So we're (speaking as the public at large here) damned if we do, and damned if we don't.
OTOH, we need to give Red Hat and Alan a great big hand for making the effort and spending the $ to apply. We do certainly live in interesting times it seems. This I'll bet, will be at least as well followed in the FOSS world as the current scenario of making SCO go slowly broke paying the legals, or losing the scrap with Novell who has asked that all assets be frozen while there still is some left to pay the unpaid royalties. In that event the electricity will be off in parts of Linden UT the next day.
As for SCO, that must be some great stuff they grow in Utah if they thought for even a second that they could get a free ride and survive to fight another day. I want some of that. OTOH, I wouldn't be surprised if the court decides to liquidate all properties gained by officers of the corporation since the royalty payments went into arrears in an attempt to recover something for the plaintiff, Novel. That would certainly be fair, but I've NDI if its possible under corporate law, which usually insulates the people from the corporation monetarily.
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Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
I agree wholeheartedly. Yes CA folks pay special tax on blanks, and unless there is some pretty creative bookkeeping going on up north of the border, I'd be willing to bet a beer or 6 that the annual check to the **AA mafia rather handily exceeds the royalties actually lost from any so-called piracy.
I look at you all as a beacon of common sense in the wilderness, a thorn in their side if you will. As I'm equally sure the **AA legals are telling their bosses that daily in an attempt to justify their bloated retainer.
So please CA folks, do stand up and be counted, else this will be just another gun grab story and we have all seen the expense vs public good that by now close to a billion dollar program has done for you. Other than making criminals out of deer hunters, I've seen NO benefits whatsoever from that program, social or economically. Even the PM admits it was a lost cause from the git-go, but guess what, its still on the books and anybody who runs afoul of it will spend their life savings on legals and still lose some sunshine time in the government hotel, and it ain't Club Med from what I hear.
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Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
I note with a certain amount of scientific curiosity and indeed scepticism that nowhere in the article is the effective red shift for this one billion light year distance noted. This seems like a designed in effort to get some ink with no real hard data to prove that claim because its the red shift times the hubble that is the usual astronomical yardstick for measuring such distances.
I don't know how to convert from hubble constant, eg red shift, to distances, but we do have a couple of spots on the images here and there whose red shifts have approached if not exceeded 5.0. Meaning they are so far away that a given line in their spectrum has been red shifted until it is now 5 times its original wavelength. Considering that the visible universe has now been calculated at 13.7 billion light years, the age of the universe in other words, and we cannot see beyond because it would be effectively looking back before the big bang. When we do look back that far, what we see is the afterglow of the big bang in the nominally 2.7 degree Kelvin radiation that permeates the universe we can see.
Someone more versed in the math should tell us what the red shift is at 1 billion years, but I have serious, really serious doubts that its much more than 1.9 or so. If thats true, then this claim should be treated for what it is, another grant money grab. Someone throwing out big numbers because the real red shift numbers aren't that big.
Now, somebody do the math and correct me if I'm grossly wrong.
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Cheers, Gene
Well, you were right on one point, you don't know anything about ntsc.
:-)
1: sdtv is 480 lines. But those lines are measured as fine vertical lines. Or dots per horizontal scan line.
But, the fact that ntsc is also interlaced is also in this context, irrevelant. That only becomes revelant when talking about how many scan lines there are horizontally. Thats in the next kettle of fish.
2: There are 525 of those scan lines in ntsc, but only the odd lines are refreshed, then the even ones, in any two vertical scans. In ntsc we lose about 22 lines for vertical synch and hidden data, like closed captioning yadda yadda.
3: By the time the video is filtered well enough to keep it in its assigned ntsc channel, we have only about 330 dots per scan line left, nothing higher gets through else the Friendly Candy Company comes calling with a citation in hand for adjacent channel interference. Done well, this is still subjectively sharper than your old vhs vcr could ever do, which was in the 240 line range.
4: So sdtv winds up being about 480x400, interlaced. This ain't hdtv by any means, but because theres no analog noise, and no analog ringing artifacts or color 'dot crawl' it does look better to the unwashed. ntsc, the best we can put on your scren, is about 330 vertical lines by about 500 horizontal scan lines, which, with the 3 line comb filters we use to enhance the sharpness of horizontal lines in the image, loks subjectively sharper but is in fact the equ of about 200 real horizontal lines. Those filters are why you occasionally see some very slight slanted line in the pix literally snap from one line to the next on your screen. This of course requires matching filters in the viewers set, which only the top of the line stuffs have.
5: 1080i, which I've seen quite a bit of, is much sharper. But I can recall, long before we had an ATSC stds body to codify this stuff, seeing a Zenith demo at the N.A.B. show, a demo tape playing from a specially modified type C 1" machine with the tape moveing at about 30 ips and the drum whining similar to the old 2" quadruplex machines, of about 10 minutes of Stars on Ice, with Red Buttons, all that 1 hour tape could hold.
The stars all had their names embroidered on their tee shirts, and with the camera at max wide angle to show the whole floor, Red stopped and took a bow from center ice. You could read his t-shirt when he straightened back up. On a projection screen 4 foot high and 8 feet wide he was maybe 6" tall in that image. That was a 2x1 aspect ratio pix and I'd estimate the real, working resolution of that setup was at least 10,000x5000.
The image compression wasn't quite as good as mpeg2 (it was still under development itself) then and was done in hardware both ways. The data rate from that modified type C was in the 500 megbytes/second area. In other words, that single picture would have occupied more than all the bandwidth available in a 120 channel cable system. Not terribly practical in the real world.
As an exersize in what could be done, I've seen it, so even 1080i today is just a wannabe to me. OTOH, it (1080i) is far far better than anything I've seen in my 40+ years as a broadcast engineer watching our own on the air ntsc signals through a $5,600 fcc standard receiver. We haven't nick-named it Never Twice Same Color without reason.
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Cheers, Gene
All of which are intended to enforce the captive customer mentality that emanates from Redmond like a damned virus. Too bad we don't have a viable vaccine for it...
But the article was wrong on one point, he claims it cost M$, when in the case of that machine, its did not, he still had to buy all those licenses etc even if they were destined not to work, so M$ at least got paid for that wasted copy of XP.
AFAIK, no one has ever seen a damned dime from M$ for something that when bought, or were forced to buy because it doesn't come without it, then either wasn't used or didn't work. And in the case of didn't work, then I'd say there should be grounds for an action to recover the money, and paid for the time spent trying to make it work. But, knowing M$ just well enough to guess, my guess is that the EULA precludes that course of action. That and the lawyers will want 1000x the potential winnings for prosecuting a lose/lose case.
Where they lost money was probably on the other machines being contemplated. At the end of the day, some of those might also be running unbuntu, but 99.9999999% of them shipped with a paid for copy of windows on them so its no loss to M$ if its never run, he got his blood anyway. But thats only paper money, not the kind that will buy BG another 747 or whatever until you take it times the machines sold in a year.
And to think it will be till Jan 20 2009 before we can wake up justice & see if they'll dust off what they were doing in 2000 before doubleya shut them down.
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Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Thanks, I've been playing with the install.conf trying to make it make sense but still put the executables in /opt. But I haven't gotten it to build just yet.
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Cheers, gene
In fact, I have it here on an FC6 system, and I've now installed about 10 more -dev packages, but still cannot make it compile. If anyone knows the correct syntax of what to launch to build it, and has a list of perl stuff it needs, I'd appreciate a hand.
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Cheers, Gene