Unforch, thats a $1000 plane ticket for me since I'd have to take the missus too. We're in West Virginia, almost heaven according to most that live here:)
Like you, and being both a typical geek (even at my age of 70) I have a collection of older hardware that I'm sure someone, somewhere, could put to productive use.
Maybe it wouldn't keep them at my current 99.32% in the seti rankings, or even run windows cause lots of my stuff isn't your basic wintel box. But it was productive, and usefull in its time, not to mention very educational. But its sitting in the basement in boxes, high and dry, along with lots of documentation, and could find a usefull home someplace for not a heck of a lot more than the shipping to get it there.
Yup, I like that idea. Much as I'd like to claim I'm a packrat, its not doing me that much good sitting there in a box. TI-99/4a anybody? Atari ST with a small hard drive, 12" color monitor and at least a hundred pounds of docs, much of it musicly oriented? Packing and Shipping is all I want back for those.
No, no CoCo's or amigas included, I have plans for them yet, like any good packrat.
I guess Linux can only aspire to the greatness of Windows when it has such secure applications as Outlook and Internet Explorer. Historically those have been proven to be of a caliber all their own.
Damn, I had to take a break and go get something to settle my nerves after that one. Its too fscking hilarious for real life.
What the hell do these people smoke that write this stuff anyway? Its got to be some of the best stuff ever grown. And no, I don't want any, whatever that is, it takes them way too far from reality.
Is there a Darwin Award for such stupidity? If not, there should be, and of course we are assuming it was terminal else the Darwin Award doesn't apply.
Admittedly, the rapid rate with which we fix linux security holes seems to have made the hackers go elsewhere recently (read "to attacking winderz boxes") to find boxes to exploit, the last time I had to clean up a linux box was a RH6.2 box with the original, and known hackable, bind in it. That took one reboot when we realized someone was screwing around, with an instant change of root password, installing the new bind, then 3 days of surveying nearly every file on it to find the ones he fiddled with and replaceing those he had with the latest versions available, but we did not re-install, and that mail server is still up to this day. Maybe 3 more reboots in the ensueing 5-6 years, and a new motherboard due to e-caps problems, but I do not believe the os itself has been updated. No use fixing something that Just Works(tm), is there?
Now I need to go take some pain killers for the sore ribs and diaphram from laughing my head off and rolling on the floor.
I have to agree. The last time I found anything worth picking up, it was 5 bucks for a little black velvet bag, you fill it from the bins, in a tourist trap just west of Grand Junction CO on I-70 a year ago when I was last out in that neck of the woods doing a temporary Chief Engineers job for the KREX-tv complex in GJ. I was able to sort out a few pieces of tiger eye big enough for necklaces, earrings and pendants, but nothing big enough for a tie unforch. I did get some very nice amythyst though, and a couple of pieces of decent jade so I figure I got my 5 bucks worth.
But thats about it. The stuff you see in the jewelry stores, even out in that neck of the woods, seems to be getting ever smaller. A 2 cubic inch piece if tiger eye I'd pay a quick 50 for right now. I had a piece of about 1 cubic inch made into a tie about 35 years ago, and its recently been miss-laid, so my best tie now is a couple of ounces of silver and turquois a navaho friend made for me about 25 years ago. That, and some silver bic covers decorated in turquois & coral all came from the same gentleman, as a gift after I had done their musical group a favor when I was the CE at KIVA-TV in Farmington NM back in the late 70's. Yeah, I'm an old fart myself, 70 now, trying to retire (but they won't let me completely) and got a sugar problem coming on. No shots yet, but I expect that time is coming.
Yeah, I'd love to find something worth buying, but it seems to be getting to the point that they'll be selling it by the carat eventually.
McCrappy is really doing us a service, not that they know it. The more rediculous things whith are patented,the more obvious it becomes that the system is broken. IIRC MS patented boolean values a few months ago?
Yes, but from the way the courts work, and the way the patent office handles things, it just goes into the in hopper and will be handled in the order its postmarked as (supposedly). There is little or no attention paid to the fact that the inbox needs to be another room built onto the agency, then replaced with yet a bigger one a year later. This situation will only change when an outside authority actually surveys the situation, and orders congressional hearings to find the root cause. Even then, I have serious doubts that anything that could be considered sane will be done. I have hopes that at some point, the Supremes will get tired of all the set-aside petitions they receive, take one that looks really interesting just because the whole premise is as phony as a 3 dollar bill, and proceeds to undo the damage of the last 75 years thats been done to out patent system, and possibly even our copyright system, which is even more broken.
But that would mean you'd have to change the label I wear to "optimist", since I'm obviously very pessimistic that anything will be done in my remaining years, I'm 70 now.
Sigh, back to your regularly scheduled programming now folks, nothing to see here.
I've seen raw, uncut tiger eye for sale. Its is definitely a stone of petrified wood origin, and not that brightly golden colored in the raw. Many years ago at a rock show, I could have bought a hunk that was nearly a board foot if measured like wood. But I didn't have the required sheckles in the pocket at the time. The guy wanted about 200 1966 dollars for it. He got it before the day was over too. There is a limited supply, so I'd expect that except for the small pieces available today in the grab bags, a couple of CC's max volume now, there is not a heck of a lot of the uncut stuff left. If I could find a whole cubic inch of it, with good figure showing, I'd write a check for about 2 hundred right quick today.
You are thinking of the maple wood patterns often sold under similar names, such as birdseye, specky, fiddleback or curly etc. But I've never seen a hunk of fancy figured maple called tiger eye either, and I do a bit of woodworking when its warm enough in my shop myself. Yes, its pretty stuff, and I have a few board feet that I'm slowly making gunstocks out of, but that is not the same as the petrified wood normally called Tiger Eye when polished up to let the translucent grain really show itself well.
There are in fact some of those around. We're the ones who show up at some public doings in a bolo (string) tie, and the clip has a hunk of 'Tiger Eye' as the decorator. Tiger Eye is in fact petrified wood, with a semi-translucent grain pattern that changes drasticly with the light and viewing angle, usually a golden tan in general color. Rather highly prized by me, I grab a new piece everytime I get a chance. Its also made into rings, but its soft enough that it wears rather dull if not repolished frequently.
Bolo ties for such outings are one of my trademarks, either with a good sized piece of Tiger Eye, or an even bigger hunk of sterling silver and turquois crafted for me by some Navaho friends many years ago.
Ahh, but they do legislate from the bench, and have many times in the past, by declaring an action by the congress as un-constitutional.
This forces all these congress-critters to see if they find a new way for Disney to have his cake and eat it too. Otherwise Mickey mouse and friends would hav all passed into the public domain by now.
The only one I see benefiting from the recent changes in the law that may in fact deserve it is Stan Lee, who will not live to see the end of the appeals of the case he just won against Marvel Comics for the Spiderman genre. But even if they don't appeal and they do pay up, whats Stan going to do with it, his body is in its late 80's IIRC, and the medicine has yet to be invented that will give him a comfortable life, suitably rejuventated so he could truely enjoy the fruits of his earlier labors he was screwed out of. I can see the medical vultures gathering now, for a piece of that pie. And make no mistake, gather they will, and will pick the carcass clean of any available funds.
I've seen it happen right next door, where a sweet 66 year old widow lady who had maybe 150k in the bank was stripped to the poor house in about 8 months by a continuous series of operations removing this and removing that when the cancer had already metastasized when it was discovered and she would not have had more than 8 or 9 months if left untreated. When she ran out of money, they let her die. They did not prolong her life a bit, and possibly hastened her death, and certainly caused at least as much suffering with all their sawing and hacking, if not more, than just giving her morphine till the end. Fscking vultures.
What I'm saying is that the average linux user simply doesn't visit those sites that are so obviously "windows centric". There little or zero interest on my part as to what windows does as long as I can sort their friggin viri and such to a JunqueMail drawer. I get my daily dose of windows news from groklaw as M$ manipulates their puppet in Utah to make them look even sillier, and more insane than they probably are. Its amazing what a few million slipped under the table will do. Pocket change for Bill of course, he'll never miss it.
Other than that, Shrug.
-- Cheers, Gene Its a mind set I guess, and maybe I'm wrong in my assumptions, but thats how this old fart see's the overall picture.
Humm, I'm a mozilla and/or firefox user, running linux of course. And I'll let you guess how many times I've been recorded at any of those sites....
Exactly zero, no more, no less. And yet this box is running one or the other of those browsers in excess of 2 hours a day!
How can they expect to get a picture of browser popularity when they are only recording the browser useage of the "pretty people", and are ignoring the 90% of the users who wouldn't goto one of those sites out of anything but curiosity, certainly not to drop any card numbers on an unknown shtml site.
As a friend of mine was fond of saying many years ago, country boy dumb maybe, but not stupid. Thats me.
OTOH, to rely on data from a list of sites such as those, is IMNSHO, a builtin bias toward IE. It cannot be otherwise.
Thats the effect on the IQ of all that heavy metal. Athritics every one of them too I expect. But if you know you're a goner, why not have another beer and forget it even faster?
In other words you are saying thats its in the local water supply that people are also drinking? Good grief.
And any idiot, raving from thirst in the desert, and coming across a pool of water, knows that first, before you drink, make sure there are some bugs etc in the water, because if there isn't, its poisoned water.
How far downriver it it dead? All the way to the St. Lauwrance? (sp)
First, I have no idea who cominco smelter is, or where. As for teeth, I still have about 27 of mine, 3 of which are wisdom FWTW, and while my hair has never been thick and luxurious, and its getting a bit thinner in the middle as the years go by, but the hairline itself has not receeded and I still need a haircut about every 2-3 weeks as usual. Overdue right now in fact.
Granted, my heavy metals exposure would be far less than someone working in a poorly ventilated smelter would be, but the epa should be taking steps to make that a safer place to work over the last 40 years or the inspectors need to taken off the payola, one of the two.
But thats a bit like coal mining here in WV, it takes a major accident to bring out the mine inspectors, otherwise its business as usual.
Even better, we could mimic the properties of metals that we want, without their drawbacks. Lead is an extremely useful metal; if we could create something with it's beneficial properties and lose the whole poison thing, just think of the boost to industry.
I'm afraid I'd have to remain a bit wary of this, because of the connection between environmental alu and alzheimers. What man can put together, nature has already figured out a way to take it apart, in most cases, the pcb's being the monumental example of one of natures failures.
Also, in the case of lead, I'm 70, and have been downwind of a hot soldering iron for nearly 60 of those years in my life as an electronics service type, boy genuis turned old fart now. I can still drive a vehicle, tie my shoes and build new programs for this computer. Methinks the lead danger is overrated except perhaps in the paint on baby cribs.
I'm more worried about long term effects of alu on me than anything related to Pb. I've drunk my beer (2 a night) from glass bottles, not cans, for 20 years in the hopes that even that will make a difference in how well I can function right up to the event that takes me out. I don't drink canned pop for the same reason.
-- Cheers, Gene
Re:Alexandre Julliard said to join OSDL as fellow
on
Andrew Tridgell Joins OSDL
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· Score: 2, Interesting
to create Longhorn before Microsoft does
Chuckle... The thought positively boggles the mind. Particularly since longhorn seems to be turning into a Duke Nukem Forever or Half Life 2 all by itself. With the latest ship date still quite some time in the future, and prospects for even more delays looking pretty good, who actually knows?
However if the 3 of them can work together, I cannot see anything but public good come of it. I don't know a lot about Alexandre Julliard, but from the few messages I've had from Andrew (aka Tridg) over the years when I had samba questions for my amiga system long ago, I'm highly impressed. He has, I think, an outlook on computing thats much larger than just samba/cifs. That should mesh well with Linus.
I tend to agree with the leave it up there approach. The biggest problem is that the lubricants tend to go away in the vacuum of space, and the next time they need to use it, its frozen. So thats a problem that will require much more thought than a throwaway in the pacific would need.
OTOH, the giro's, steering reaction masses and such are sized to handle the weight of the hubble. I'd think adding an offcenter weight to that would make them have to rewrite all their aiming software to compensate, and would probably, depending on how much of a "lever arm" is left hanging off it, affected its ability to move quickly. One of the things its been made famous for is its ability to get on the source of a GRB and get a useable pix within a minute or so of getting orders from the controllers. 30 seconds there is an eternity in terms of spotting the optical equ of a GRB. Easier done in x-rays as that bird can move quick, but if its not on target in 20 seconds, its not going to get much.
Yeah, too damned bad those golden parachutes aren't on the friggin ballot. Talk about an issue going down in flames...
The ion thruster is to go on the hubble, to give it the orbital boost it probably needs by the time they get around "tuit". I doubt if the robotics and the upper stage, which will probably outweigh the hubble, could get enough delta-vee out of ion thrust to make the ISS, thats a whole orbital plane redirection, not just an orbital boost. However, given enough chemical boost once clear of the hubble, its probably doable with its own weight of propellant. That much weight however, seems to put the required booster into the Saturn class again.
And having that additional stuff available at the ISS could save a spacewalk or 10 in the long view. They would have to bring up the remote controls of course, hopefully before it arrived, so they could make it self snagging and get it anchored to something. The tankage of course would be nice additional room once vented to space and cleaned up. The darned thing looks like a tinkertoy kit now, whats one more arm and a pair of tanks? Heck, if it arrives there with enough fuel left for an orbit booster burn for the ISS, that would be a plus too.
They had better be good at ducking in that case, cause I wouldn't have any patience at all for that kind of tom-foolery at that stage of the game. Whatever was tossed, if I caught it, would come back on a very flat trajectory since my fuse would be all used up by then. I used to have a pretty decent arm for that.
That said, if they do this thing by telepesence, I hope they broadcast it, I'd love to watch & see how guys that have trained for that for months actually do it.
Question is, if they don't take a shuttle up to take the robotics to it, what are they going to use? I'd assume the robotics would be expensive enough they wouldn't really want them to be dumped into the pacific, what doesn't burn up that is. OTOH, they'll do what they have to do. If that means its throwaway, well...
And, what have we got in our spares arsenal that can re-ignite the steering rockets long enough to give the hubble another 15 to 30 mile boost in orbital height? I'm pretty sure it could use it again by now. They've given it a gentle push each time they've been there with a shuttle, for about 15 miles IIRC the last time. Without rolling up the solar panels, they have to be very gentle about that sort of thing. Not a damned thing that I'm aware of without resurrecting some of the moon hardware & thats manned. OTOH, I have no idea what may be hidden away at Vandenburg. The other possibility might be to attach a very small motor directly to it, I'm thinking of ion drive since it could push oz's for months/years on a hundred pound bottle of zenon, but that would take a lot of the hubbles solar power just to drive it. If that could be handled, it would otherwise be ideal, leaving virtually no exhaust products in the hubbles orbit to screw things up later. Plus, while the hubble probably wouldn't be available for observations while its running, it could be shut down and observation attitude obtained in a few minutes, and restarted again later.
Those things either are already worked out to their satisfaction, or somebody ought to be slapped upside the head with a 4 foot length of 2" water pipe to wake them up. Those of us who do think of such details wouldn't mind a bit more publicity as to how they are going to do this thing. At least try to convince us frogs to think they know what they are doing.:-)
Telepresence, with sufficient feedback would probably be ok, but what about the comm delays? Like listening to yourself on the radio when they are useing a profanity button delay I'd think. If the tele also had good vision, it might help but I'd think there would be a tendency to move the tool about as far as you estimate it needs to move, then stop and wait for the feedback. 4 hours of that, and I'd be stark raving loonie. The instant feedback to my hands has allowed me to take camera lenses apart, repair them, and reassemble to restore function after some reporter rams the lens into a door frame at the courthouse shortening the back focus cell by.020". Beats 4 or 5 grand for a new lens in most cases. Ditto for headwheels in a pro vcr. Without good touch feedback, you can junk an $1800 wheel just by picking it up out of its shipping carrier.
I once had a surgeon watch me while I was fixing his two-way radio, which made me a bit nervous, but when I was done he amazed me by saying that if he was in a wreck and bleeding to death, he would use whatever hand he had left to hand me the emergency bag with needle and thread to sew him up. If anyone can, you can, he said. Well, their getting a bit shakey now at 70, but when I need to, I can still do it 99% of the time.
I own a Meade DS-10, and unless the wind was blowing across the open end of the tube and setting up a noise such as you would get by blowing across the top of a gallon jug, I cannot see a vibration of that high a frequency in the mount itself. I don't normally haul mine out when its windy, but I have had the wind come out while I was up on a hilltop (I live in town, and if I really want to see, I take it to the tv transmitter site about 2150 feet high & fairly dark if we kill the yard lights), and don't recall ever hearing my tube do that. I think there is too much of an open gap around the mirror cell to ever allow such a resonant condition to develop. That isn't saying it couldn't, just that I've never been aware of it. Usually, by the time I'm seeing such in the eyepiece, its probably me shivering and its time to pack it up and go warm up my poor feet, now at 70, suffering a bit from the effects of a long term undiagnosed borderline diabetic condition.
With all due respect to all the theories being tossed otu as 'obvious facts', but which given the time frame cannot be, let me throw out another theory that fits the evidence a lot better than gearing errors in the scope mount or wind induced vibrations, considering that the meteor probably went across the field of view in 3 seconds or less.
How about if the meteor itself was spinning? Would this not tend to create the effect shown? These things are not always made out of uniform material, and aren't often nice and convieniently round.
Given the time frame of the observation, its the only thing that makes any sense to me.
The real deal is the administrators are covering their collective asses. No one wants to go down in the media shitstorm if a Shuttle is lost repairing hubble. Another casualty of our reactive media-wacko society.
I think that last sentence says it rather succinctly. And as far as fixing it with a robot, or remote teleoperators, and I like the latter much better than pure robotics, when it comes to getting it done expediciously because the man can adjust the angle of the screwdriver by feel much better than the robotic stuff can, or can back up and get a slightly better grip on the nut when he feels the nut starting to round, I can't see any way but a manned mission.
One capable of looking at the bolt he just removed and deciding if it can go back in, or does he need to rummage through the spare parts and find a new one that isn't all buggered up. That of course means a secure pocket/container to put the old ones, and probably a ready made plastic strip with the various styles of bolts screwed into it and suitably marked. Something that can be hung on yet another tether near where he is working. I mean whats he gonna to, rip it out of a plastic bag and throw away the friggin bag?
Story Musgrave did a hell of a lot of that stuff in earlier trips, maybe he could come out of retirement and either teach, or maybe even do it again. But his experience in doing that, something that should have been ample material for one hell of a book, seems to have been muffled for some reason.
Or did he publish a book and I missed it?
IMO, only a man on the job in real time can make that sort of decisions that make the difference between success and failure.
Given a rejuvinated shuttle thats obviously safer than it was for any launch and re-entry before, I see no reason for NASA to find they have no volunteers to do that job.
The work coming out of the hubble cannot be duplicated by the James Webb, they look at different portions of the spectrum entirely. So those that say we should let it die & wait till the Webb is up are literally throwing away a national treasure.
Their attachment of a de-orbiting rocket for when it is finished, is an admirable project, but lets first use such a device to raise its orbit another 30 miles, something the shuttle has been used (for a 15 mile raise IIRC) for previously, and which, if the giros & such are fixed, it will need this time in order to stay up till 2009 or so.
I think this push, and the fuel it uses to do that, means they couldn't get to the ISS from a hubble orbit. IAUI, getting to the ISS from a hubble orbit isn't really 100% doable anyway without quite a bit more fuel, booster burn for the hubble or not. In any event, the shuttle's not being required to do the additional burn should leave them with a lot more maneuvering fuel for the trip home. In terms of pounds to orbit, the smaller thruster mounted on the hubble makes a lot more sense than trying to raise, and then lower, all the tonnage of the shuttle for a little push.
We didn't get to where we are, anyplace in the sciences, without a casualty here and there, taken by people who knew the risks and were willing to take the chance at their 15 minutes of fame.
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Unforch, thats a $1000 plane ticket for me since I'd have to take the missus too. We're in West Virginia, almost heaven according to most that live here :)
--
Cheers, Gene
Personally, I think thats a hell of a great idea.
Like you, and being both a typical geek (even at my age of 70) I have a collection of older hardware that I'm sure someone, somewhere, could put to productive use.
Maybe it wouldn't keep them at my current 99.32% in the seti rankings, or even run windows cause lots of my stuff isn't your basic wintel box. But it was productive, and usefull in its time, not to mention very educational. But its sitting in the basement in boxes, high and dry, along with lots of documentation, and could find a usefull home someplace for not a heck of a lot more than the shipping to get it there.
Yup, I like that idea. Much as I'd like to claim I'm a packrat, its not doing me that much good sitting there in a box. TI-99/4a anybody? Atari ST with a small hard drive, 12" color monitor and at least a hundred pounds of docs, much of it musicly oriented? Packing and Shipping is all I want back for those.
No, no CoCo's or amigas included, I have plans for them yet, like any good packrat.
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Cheers, Gene
I guess Linux can only aspire to the greatness of Windows when it has such secure applications as Outlook and Internet Explorer. Historically those have been proven to be of a caliber all their own.
Damn, I had to take a break and go get something to settle my nerves after that one. Its too fscking hilarious for real life.
What the hell do these people smoke that write this stuff anyway? Its got to be some of the best stuff ever grown. And no, I don't want any, whatever that is, it takes them way too far from reality.
Is there a Darwin Award for such stupidity? If not, there should be, and of course we are assuming it was terminal else the Darwin Award doesn't apply.
Admittedly, the rapid rate with which we fix linux security holes seems to have made the hackers go elsewhere recently (read "to attacking winderz boxes") to find boxes to exploit, the last time I had to clean up a linux box was a RH6.2 box with the original, and known hackable, bind in it. That took one reboot when we realized someone was screwing around, with an instant change of root password, installing the new bind, then 3 days of surveying nearly every file on it to find the ones he fiddled with and replaceing those he had with the latest versions available, but we did not re-install, and that mail server is still up to this day. Maybe 3 more reboots in the ensueing 5-6 years, and a new motherboard due to e-caps problems, but I do not believe the os itself has been updated. No use fixing something that Just Works(tm), is there?
Now I need to go take some pain killers for the sore ribs and diaphram from laughing my head off and rolling on the floor.
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Cheers, Gene
I have to agree. The last time I found anything worth picking up, it was 5 bucks for a little black velvet bag, you fill it from the bins, in a tourist trap just west of Grand Junction CO on I-70 a year ago when I was last out in that neck of the woods doing a temporary Chief Engineers job for the KREX-tv complex in GJ. I was able to sort out a few pieces of tiger eye big enough for necklaces, earrings and pendants, but nothing big enough for a tie unforch. I did get some very nice amythyst though, and a couple of pieces of decent jade so I figure I got my 5 bucks worth.
But thats about it. The stuff you see in the jewelry stores, even out in that neck of the woods, seems to be getting ever smaller. A 2 cubic inch piece if tiger eye I'd pay a quick 50 for right now. I had a piece of about 1 cubic inch made into a tie about 35 years ago, and its recently been miss-laid, so my best tie now is a couple of ounces of silver and turquois a navaho friend made for me about 25 years ago. That, and some silver bic covers decorated in turquois & coral all came from the same gentleman, as a gift after I had done their musical group a favor when I was the CE at KIVA-TV in Farmington NM back in the late 70's. Yeah, I'm an old fart myself, 70 now, trying to retire (but they won't let me completely) and got a sugar problem coming on. No shots yet, but I expect that time is coming.
Yeah, I'd love to find something worth buying, but it seems to be getting to the point that they'll be selling it by the carat eventually.
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Cheers, Gene
Unforch, the link you quoted does not resolve.
And if its a quartz, why is it so soft?
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Cheers, Gene
McCrappy is really doing us a service, not that they know it. The more rediculous things whith are patented,the more obvious it becomes that the system is broken. IIRC MS patented boolean values a few months ago?
Yes, but from the way the courts work, and the way the patent office handles things, it just goes into the in hopper and will be handled in the order its postmarked as (supposedly). There is little or no attention paid to the fact that the inbox needs to be another room built onto the agency, then replaced with yet a bigger one a year later. This situation will only change when an outside authority actually surveys the situation, and orders congressional hearings to find the root cause. Even then, I have serious doubts that anything that could be considered sane will be done. I have hopes that at some point, the Supremes will get tired of all the set-aside petitions they receive, take one that looks really interesting just because the whole premise is as phony as a 3 dollar bill, and proceeds to undo the damage of the last 75 years thats been done to out patent system, and possibly even our copyright system, which is even more broken.
But that would mean you'd have to change the label I wear to "optimist", since I'm obviously very pessimistic that anything will be done in my remaining years, I'm 70 now.
Sigh, back to your regularly scheduled programming now folks, nothing to see here.
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Cheers, Gene
I've seen raw, uncut tiger eye for sale. Its is definitely a stone of petrified wood origin, and not that brightly golden colored in the raw. Many years ago at a rock show, I could have bought a hunk that was nearly a board foot if measured like wood. But I didn't have the required sheckles in the pocket at the time. The guy wanted about 200 1966 dollars for it. He got it before the day was over too. There is a limited supply, so I'd expect that except for the small pieces available today in the grab bags, a couple of CC's max volume now, there is not a heck of a lot of the uncut stuff left. If I could find a whole cubic inch of it, with good figure showing, I'd write a check for about 2 hundred right quick today.
You are thinking of the maple wood patterns often sold under similar names, such as birdseye, specky, fiddleback or curly etc. But I've never seen a hunk of fancy figured maple called tiger eye either, and I do a bit of woodworking when its warm enough in my shop myself. Yes, its pretty stuff, and I have a few board feet that I'm slowly making gunstocks out of, but that is not the same as the petrified wood normally called Tiger Eye when polished up to let the translucent grain really show itself well.
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Cheers, Gene
There are in fact some of those around. We're the ones who show up at some public doings in a bolo (string) tie, and the clip has a hunk of 'Tiger Eye' as the decorator. Tiger Eye is in fact petrified wood, with a semi-translucent grain pattern that changes drasticly with the light and viewing angle, usually a golden tan in general color. Rather highly prized by me, I grab a new piece everytime I get a chance. Its also made into rings, but its soft enough that it wears rather dull if not repolished frequently.
Bolo ties for such outings are one of my trademarks, either with a good sized piece of Tiger Eye, or an even bigger hunk of sterling silver and turquois crafted for me by some Navaho friends many years ago.
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Cheers, Gene
Ahh, but they do legislate from the bench, and have many times in the past, by declaring an action by the congress as un-constitutional.
This forces all these congress-critters to see if they find a new way for Disney to have his cake and eat it too. Otherwise Mickey mouse and friends would hav all passed into the public domain by now.
The only one I see benefiting from the recent changes in the law that may in fact deserve it is Stan Lee, who will not live to see the end of the appeals of the case he just won against Marvel Comics for the Spiderman genre. But even if they don't appeal and they do pay up, whats Stan going to do with it, his body is in its late 80's IIRC, and the medicine has yet to be invented that will give him a comfortable life, suitably rejuventated so he could truely enjoy the fruits of his earlier labors he was screwed out of. I can see the medical vultures gathering now, for a piece of that pie. And make no mistake, gather they will, and will pick the carcass clean of any available funds.
I've seen it happen right next door, where a sweet 66 year old widow lady who had maybe 150k in the bank was stripped to the poor house in about 8 months by a continuous series of operations removing this and removing that when the cancer had already metastasized when it was discovered and she would not have had more than 8 or 9 months if left untreated. When she ran out of money, they let her die. They did not prolong her life a bit, and possibly hastened her death, and certainly caused at least as much suffering with all their sawing and hacking, if not more, than just giving her morphine till the end. Fscking vultures.
Rate this rant off-topic, I dare you.
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No Cheers this time, Gene
What I'm saying is that the average linux user simply doesn't visit those sites that are so obviously "windows centric". There little or zero interest on my part as to what windows does as long as I can sort their friggin viri and such to a JunqueMail drawer. I get my daily dose of windows news from groklaw as M$ manipulates their puppet in Utah to make them look even sillier, and more insane than they probably are. Its amazing what a few million slipped under the table will do. Pocket change for Bill of course, he'll never miss it.
Other than that, Shrug.
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Cheers, Gene
Its a mind set I guess, and maybe I'm wrong in my assumptions, but thats how this old fart see's the overall picture.
Humm, I'm a mozilla and/or firefox user, running linux of course. And I'll let you guess how many times I've been recorded at any of those sites....
Exactly zero, no more, no less. And yet this box is running one or the other of those browsers in excess of 2 hours a day!
How can they expect to get a picture of browser popularity when they are only recording the browser useage of the "pretty people", and are ignoring the 90% of the users who wouldn't goto one of those sites out of anything but curiosity, certainly not to drop any card numbers on an unknown shtml site.
As a friend of mine was fond of saying many years ago, country boy dumb maybe, but not stupid. Thats me.
OTOH, to rely on data from a list of sites such as those, is IMNSHO, a builtin bias toward IE. It cannot be otherwise.
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Cheers, Gene
If its that bad, WTF are you running windows for?
Believe it or not, there ARE other operating systems.
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Cheers, Gene
My bad, wrong end of the country.
Thats the effect on the IQ of all that heavy metal. Athritics every one of them too I expect. But if you know you're a goner, why not have another beer and forget it even faster?
Sad but oh so true.
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No Cheers this time, Gene
In other words you are saying thats its in the local water supply that people are also drinking? Good grief.
And any idiot, raving from thirst in the desert, and coming across a pool of water, knows that first, before you drink, make sure there are some bugs etc in the water, because if there isn't, its poisoned water.
How far downriver it it dead? All the way to the St. Lauwrance? (sp)
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No cheers on this one, Gene
First, I have no idea who cominco smelter is, or where. As for teeth, I still have about 27 of mine, 3 of which are wisdom FWTW, and while my hair has never been thick and luxurious, and its getting a bit thinner in the middle as the years go by, but the hairline itself has not receeded and I still need a haircut about every 2-3 weeks as usual. Overdue right now in fact.
Granted, my heavy metals exposure would be far less than someone working in a poorly ventilated smelter would be, but the epa should be taking steps to make that a safer place to work over the last 40 years or the inspectors need to taken off the payola, one of the two.
But thats a bit like coal mining here in WV, it takes a major accident to bring out the mine inspectors, otherwise its business as usual.
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Cheers, Gene
Even better, we could mimic the properties of metals that we want, without their drawbacks. Lead is an extremely useful metal; if we could create something with it's beneficial properties and lose the whole poison thing, just think of the boost to industry.
I'm afraid I'd have to remain a bit wary of this, because of the connection between environmental alu and alzheimers. What man can put together, nature has already figured out a way to take it apart, in most cases, the pcb's being the monumental example of one of natures failures.
Also, in the case of lead, I'm 70, and have been downwind of a hot soldering iron for nearly 60 of those years in my life as an electronics service type, boy genuis turned old fart now. I can still drive a vehicle, tie my shoes and build new programs for this computer. Methinks the lead danger is overrated except perhaps in the paint on baby cribs.
I'm more worried about long term effects of alu on me than anything related to Pb. I've drunk my beer (2 a night) from glass bottles, not cans, for 20 years in the hopes that even that will make a difference in how well I can function right up to the event that takes me out. I don't drink canned pop for the same reason.
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Cheers, Gene
to create Longhorn before Microsoft does
Chuckle... The thought positively boggles the mind. Particularly since longhorn seems to be turning into a Duke Nukem Forever or Half Life 2 all by itself. With the latest ship date still quite some time in the future, and prospects for even more delays looking pretty good, who actually knows?
However if the 3 of them can work together, I cannot see anything but public good come of it. I don't know a lot about Alexandre Julliard, but from the few messages I've had from Andrew (aka Tridg) over the years when I had samba questions for my amiga system long ago, I'm highly impressed. He has, I think, an outlook on computing thats much larger than just samba/cifs. That should mesh well with Linus.
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Cheers, Gene
I tend to agree with the leave it up there approach. The biggest problem is that the lubricants tend to go away in the vacuum of space, and the next time they need to use it, its frozen. So thats a problem that will require much more thought than a throwaway in the pacific would need.
OTOH, the giro's, steering reaction masses and such are sized to handle the weight of the hubble. I'd think adding an offcenter weight to that would make them have to rewrite all their aiming software to compensate, and would probably, depending on how much of a "lever arm" is left hanging off it, affected its ability to move quickly. One of the things its been made famous for is its ability to get on the source of a GRB and get a useable pix within a minute or so of getting orders from the controllers. 30 seconds there is an eternity in terms of spotting the optical equ of a GRB. Easier done in x-rays as that bird can move quick, but if its not on target in 20 seconds, its not going to get much.
Yeah, too damned bad those golden parachutes aren't on the friggin ballot. Talk about an issue going down in flames...
Till next time.
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Cheers, Gene
The ion thruster is to go on the hubble, to give it the orbital boost it probably needs by the time they get around "tuit". I doubt if the robotics and the upper stage, which will probably outweigh the hubble, could get enough delta-vee out of ion thrust to make the ISS, thats a whole orbital plane redirection, not just an orbital boost. However, given enough chemical boost once clear of the hubble, its probably doable with its own weight of propellant. That much weight however, seems to put the required booster into the Saturn class again.
And having that additional stuff available at the ISS could save a spacewalk or 10 in the long view. They would have to bring up the remote controls of course, hopefully before it arrived, so they could make it self snagging and get it anchored to something. The tankage of course would be nice additional room once vented to space and cleaned up. The darned thing looks like a tinkertoy kit now, whats one more arm and a pair of tanks? Heck, if it arrives there with enough fuel left for an orbit booster burn for the ISS, that would be a plus too.
I wonder if they'll think that far ahead?
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Cheers, gene
They had better be good at ducking in that case, cause I wouldn't have any patience at all for that kind of tom-foolery at that stage of the game. Whatever was tossed, if I caught it, would come back on a very flat trajectory since my fuse would be all used up by then. I used to have a pretty decent arm for that.
:-)
That said, if they do this thing by telepesence, I hope they broadcast it, I'd love to watch & see how guys that have trained for that for months actually do it.
Question is, if they don't take a shuttle up to take the robotics to it, what are they going to use? I'd assume the robotics would be expensive enough they wouldn't really want them to be dumped into the pacific, what doesn't burn up that is. OTOH, they'll do what they have to do. If that means its throwaway, well...
And, what have we got in our spares arsenal that can re-ignite the steering rockets long enough to give the hubble another 15 to 30 mile boost in orbital height? I'm pretty sure it could use it again by now. They've given it a gentle push each time they've been there with a shuttle, for about 15 miles IIRC the last time. Without rolling up the solar panels, they have to be very gentle about that sort of thing. Not a damned thing that I'm aware of without resurrecting some of the moon hardware & thats manned. OTOH, I have no idea what may be hidden away at Vandenburg. The other possibility might be to attach a very small motor directly to it, I'm thinking of ion drive since it could push oz's for months/years on a hundred pound bottle of zenon, but that would take a lot of the hubbles solar power just to drive it. If that could be handled, it would otherwise be ideal, leaving virtually no exhaust products in the hubbles orbit to screw things up later. Plus, while the hubble probably wouldn't be available for observations while its running, it could be shut down and observation attitude obtained in a few minutes, and restarted again later.
Those things either are already worked out to their satisfaction, or somebody ought to be slapped upside the head with a 4 foot length of 2" water pipe to wake them up. Those of us who do think of such details wouldn't mind a bit more publicity as to how they are going to do this thing. At least try to convince us frogs to think they know what they are doing.
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Cheers, Gene
Telepresence, with sufficient feedback would probably be ok, but what about the comm delays? Like listening to yourself on the radio when they are useing a profanity button delay I'd think. If the tele also had good vision, it might help but I'd think there would be a tendency to move the tool about as far as you estimate it needs to move, then stop and wait for the feedback. 4 hours of that, and I'd be stark raving loonie. The instant feedback to my hands has allowed me to take camera lenses apart, repair them, and reassemble to restore function after some reporter rams the lens into a door frame at the courthouse shortening the back focus cell by .020". Beats 4 or 5 grand for a new lens in most cases. Ditto for headwheels in a pro vcr. Without good touch feedback, you can junk an $1800 wheel just by picking it up out of its shipping carrier.
I once had a surgeon watch me while I was fixing his two-way radio, which made me a bit nervous, but when I was done he amazed me by saying that if he was in a wreck and bleeding to death, he would use whatever hand he had left to hand me the emergency bag with needle and thread to sew him up. If anyone can, you can, he said. Well, their getting a bit shakey now at 70, but when I need to, I can still do it 99% of the time.
Do I want that job? Not no, but hell no!
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Cheers, Gene
Sorta makes you wonder how much pocket change that cost Bill.
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Cheers, Gene
I own a Meade DS-10, and unless the wind was blowing across the open end of the tube and setting up a noise such as you would get by blowing across the top of a gallon jug, I cannot see a vibration of that high a frequency in the mount itself. I don't normally haul mine out when its windy, but I have had the wind come out while I was up on a hilltop (I live in town, and if I really want to see, I take it to the tv transmitter site about 2150 feet high & fairly dark if we kill the yard lights), and don't recall ever hearing my tube do that. I think there is too much of an open gap around the mirror cell to ever allow such a resonant condition to develop. That isn't saying it couldn't, just that I've never been aware of it. Usually, by the time I'm seeing such in the eyepiece, its probably me shivering and its time to pack it up and go warm up my poor feet, now at 70, suffering a bit from the effects of a long term undiagnosed borderline diabetic condition.
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Cheers, Gene
With all due respect to all the theories being tossed otu as 'obvious facts', but which given the time frame cannot be, let me throw out another theory that fits the evidence a lot better than gearing errors in the scope mount or wind induced vibrations, considering that the meteor probably went across the field of view in 3 seconds or less.
How about if the meteor itself was spinning? Would this not tend to create the effect shown? These things are not always made out of uniform material, and aren't often nice and convieniently round.
Given the time frame of the observation, its the only thing that makes any sense to me.
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Cheers, Gene
The real deal is the administrators are covering their collective asses. No one wants to go down in the media shitstorm if a Shuttle is lost repairing hubble. Another casualty of our reactive media-wacko society.
I think that last sentence says it rather succinctly. And as far as fixing it with a robot, or remote teleoperators, and I like the latter much better than pure robotics, when it comes to getting it done expediciously because the man can adjust the angle of the screwdriver by feel much better than the robotic stuff can, or can back up and get a slightly better grip on the nut when he feels the nut starting to round, I can't see any way but a manned mission.
One capable of looking at the bolt he just removed and deciding if it can go back in, or does he need to rummage through the spare parts and find a new one that isn't all buggered up. That of course means a secure pocket/container to put the old ones, and probably a ready made plastic strip with the various styles of bolts screwed into it and suitably marked. Something that can be hung on yet another tether near where he is working. I mean whats he gonna to, rip it out of a plastic bag and throw away the friggin bag?
Story Musgrave did a hell of a lot of that stuff in earlier trips, maybe he could come out of retirement and either teach, or maybe even do it again. But his experience in doing that, something that should have been ample material for one hell of a book, seems to have been muffled for some reason.
Or did he publish a book and I missed it?
IMO, only a man on the job in real time can make that sort of decisions that make the difference between success and failure.
Given a rejuvinated shuttle thats obviously safer than it was for any launch and re-entry before, I see no reason for NASA to find they have no volunteers to do that job.
The work coming out of the hubble cannot be duplicated by the James Webb, they look at different portions of the spectrum entirely. So those that say we should let it die & wait till the Webb is up are literally throwing away a national treasure.
Their attachment of a de-orbiting rocket for when it is finished, is an admirable project, but lets first use such a device to raise its orbit another 30 miles, something the shuttle has been used (for a 15 mile raise IIRC) for previously, and which, if the giros & such are fixed, it will need this time in order to stay up till 2009 or so.
I think this push, and the fuel it uses to do that, means they couldn't get to the ISS from a hubble orbit. IAUI, getting to the ISS from a hubble orbit isn't really 100% doable anyway without quite a bit more fuel, booster burn for the hubble or not. In any event, the shuttle's not being required to do the additional burn should leave them with a lot more maneuvering fuel for the trip home. In terms of pounds to orbit, the smaller thruster mounted on the hubble makes a lot more sense than trying to raise, and then lower, all the tonnage of the shuttle for a little push.
We didn't get to where we are, anyplace in the sciences, without a casualty here and there, taken by people who knew the risks and were willing to take the chance at their 15 minutes of fame.
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Cheers, Gene