All of which reminds me of a day out driving around in the Meade County South Dakota rolling plains. On a graveled road, running about 40 mph in an studebaker lark of 1961 vintage (good year btw), but then this was in the later 60's, so it was just another chair car then.
Anyway, I could see something sitting on a fencepost half a mile away, and as I drew nearer, I could see it was a good sized specimen of the American Golden Eagle that might have weighed 8 to 10 lbs.
As I drew near the post, the eagle spread its considerable wings (4.5 to 5 feet of them, very impressive to me) and literally fell off the post forward, catching itself with a couple of strokes of its wings. Rising up to the level of the open window on the passenger side, it flew alongside me for about half a mile, with its head turned to look me over most of the time, and looking as if it was considering me for lunch.
Eventually, I think it came to the conclusion that I was either too big to tackle, or in too small a space for it to fly into, and the wings, which had been beating about once every 1.5 seconds making the flight look very easy, missed a beat, then flaired out, along with the tail flicking this way and that as it steered into a stall about 2 inches above the next post top, and it settled in to watch the now new piece of real-estate in its view for anything that moved.
This birds flight noises were totally covered by the ambient sounds of doing 40 mph on a gravel road with the windows open, the well muffled motor itself not making a noticable contribution to the background noise. I could easily see this bird coming in from behind a prarie dog and picking him off his hole and the dog never knowing the bird was there till it was way too late if there was any sort of wind blowing to generate some masking sounds. And in that country, thats usually the case.
One of those memories from almost 40 years back up the log that one never forgets, to look an wild eagle in the eye from about 7 feet for a good piece of a minute.
In my opinion the http://folding.stanford.edu/ project is more important and perhaps more interesting than SETI. If you can help, I ask you to contribute with it.
First, they have not to my knowledge issued an update to the original program for linux. I installed that one about 3 years ago when it first came out, but it was such a cpu hog the machine simply wasn't usable when it was running. Seti is a nice kid, running at a nice of 19, meaning it only runs when nothing else needs the cpu. Sure, the cpu stays at 100%, and gets a bit warmer, but it isn't feelable in terms of how this machine runs. FoldingAThome needs to take a few lessons from Seti, not take over that machine, after all it is MY machine. Its entirely possible it might be able to do great work, and I think it will, but when it has to have 100% of the machine instead of 98%, screw em & the camel that rode in on them. Until they learn that lesson, its not going to be running here.
And yet the giant orange somethings in the sky won't register as a single bleep on these new shiny instruments...
Ahh, but they do. Each of those stars has a noise in the water hole frequency coming out of it, including our own sun, which has sufficient radio frequency power output that any satellite dish's rx signal meter is pegged while the dishes so called beam, crosses the sun. Every comm satellite we have out there suffers from this effect twice a year, for a few minutes each day for 5 to 10 days each spring and fall as the sun crosses the equatorial plane headed the other way. When the sun has many kilowatts of noise output, its a bit hard to pick out a 10 watt satellite signal trying to compete with that.
However, thats above the "water hole" by about 2.5GHZ. Because that frequency, near 1420MHZ is quite transparent, its a good place to listen, and most stars within 10000 light years will cause the noise level out of the receivers at Arecebo to rise, often with enough charactar to the noise that the star can be identified just from its noise signature.
There used to be a visualizer (ksetispy) for linux that could display that as the dish scanned across nearby stars, but it quit working with the 2.6 kernel advent.
I'm hoping we'll get a chance to handle some of the data coming from the Allen Array, and it sounds as if its going to be ready for "first light" before too much longer.
The lazer search is a bit more far-fetched, but then so was radio, in 1891. Each of these observation instruments we build will teach us how to do a better job with the next generation.
Its in the general area of the Pleiades above the constellation Taurus the Bull. The printout I made from one web site drawn by starrynight shows the tail extending out over the Pleiades. But I don't know if thats tonights position or sometime in the future.
Actually, he is an amature comet finder, and has 2 comets named after him these days. The kstars database has an entry for Machholz1 and 2 entries for Machholz2, apparently submitted twice about a minute apart.
These folks haven't bothered to note if this one is 1 or 2, so I can't tell if this one is a previous entry or not from looking in the kstars catalogs of visible objects. It could be yet another new one, and I suspect it is since its period is 119,000 years, makeing it unlikely this particular Don Machholz has found it before.
Kstars, thats a linux/kde program, and can even run your telescope for you, tracking any object you would like to have stay centered in the eyepiece. You see, windows doesn't have a patent on astronomy programs.
Yeah, well, here in the good ol Hew Ess Aye, West Virginia to be exact, its too damned overcast to see anything tonight.
Besides I wasn't gonna stand out there in my bvd's for very long, I've got a cold & miserable.
But, if it was clear, I'd sure have my 7x35's out to take a look, it seems that the huge majority of the so-called naked eye comets have coincided with mostly overcast skys for the last 20 years.
Its a crying shame when man can't see off the planet he was born on, and its man thats responsible for most of the dirt in the air. But I can remember when you could see forever almost everynight, back in the late 30's thru the early 50's. The milky way was blazingly bright against a black velvet sky covered with twinkling stars from horizon to horizon.
And then man moved to town and took up selling the real estate where the skys were truely clear, to some developer, putting up street lights and other crap to blind us all...
But don't blame me, I wasn't that man. I was busy learning how to fix this newfangled thing called TV back then.
Thanks. Sometimes I think I'm just trying to piss into the wind for all the good it does me. Or maybe I think that at 70, I've survived long enough to have some wisdom, but thats been debated here before, heartily at times. But I can't stand the sort of goings on that drove Gary Webb to suicide either, see the article about that on kuro5hin. Thats very sad that a good man was hounded into that as the ultimate solution for telling it like it was. To paraphrase another poster there, he managed to wake up that big dog on the porch, and paid the price.
Unfettering those companies from the legal blackmail being visited upon them by the leaches would probably help the economy, not hurt it.
Man I couldn't have said it any better.
I'm an old fart, and I can remember when we were doing innovative things at breakneck speeds.
Circa 1960 or so I was in So Cal, an ex Iowa farm boy who knew a bit about electronics and wanted a piece of the action. At one point I found myself working as a bench tech at Oceanographic Engineering in Sandy Eggo.
We were building a tv camera designed to be towed through sewers and such to check the condition of the plumbing. Targeted for about 3.5" in diameter and about 14" long in a case suitable for such duty, we were still at the breadboard stage, fine tuning the circuitry, and the only model we had was a rather large mass of parts sticking out of it here and there, so effectively it was about 5" in diameter at the time.
Late one morning the top engineers came out of the corner office and said to police the place a bit, we were gonna have company in about 15 minutes. Everybody grabbed a broom or a mop.
True to the clock, about 15 minutes later a lot of navy gold came thru the door and shook hands all around, then asked to see this little wonder toy work. So while they watched the monitor, we gently picked it up and set it back down in a bench drawer faceing the rear of the drawer after twisting the focus ring around for near focus, then closed the drawer on the piece of coax that was bringing out the picture, and sending in the 12 volts that ran it.
The automatic target system worked well enough that 2 seconds after the drawer was closed, the monitor had an excellent picture of the wood grain of the back drawer panel on it, all from the light leaking in around the cables slightly holding the drawer from closing tightly.
They talked amoung themselves for a minute or so, then asked if they could find a seat in the office & talk business. Our brass was more than helpfull, rounding up sufficient chairs and stools for everyone to sit on. Half an hour later they all left and I figured that was the end of that little dog & pony show.
Not quite, before the week was out, we had a contract to make 2 of them along with the cases & pan/tilts to the Navys specs. Looking at the case specs, our guys had to ask where these cameras were going as that was an unreal strong case they were spec'ing.
To make a long story a little shorter, they went on the Trieste, and were on it when it went down in the mohole, bringing back the first pictures ever from over 37,000 feet down in the pacific ocean.
Could that happen again today? No way Jose'! Before we ordered the parts, some fscking scumbag would have us up on patent violations for half the circuits in that camera, which at that time were 100% discrete parts, not an integrated curcuit in the whole thing. Not to mention the designs of the seals that surrounded the navy supplied quartz window in the front of the camera cases that didn't leak at an ambient pressure of something in excess of 18,000 psia. They worked, nuff said.
The patent system is broken by 2 things. One being that 99% of whats really patentable had been invented by 1965, and nearly everything since then is not much if nothing but a word re-arrangement to make it look new, or so damndably vague as to be un-enforceable in any court in the land where the judge has smarts enough to actually turn his own judicial bench lights on and off.
The other is the sheer mass of submissions being done today by everybody and all his con man kin, trying to get in on the perceived gold rush.
Between those two effects, I don't frankly care how much money you throw at the patent office trying to fix it, its not going to get fixed.
In the meantime we spend all our resources sueing some unlucky person who has a competing idea, and the only winner is the lawyers at the end of the day. He wins that is, IF he gets paid.
And that stands about the same chance of being true, as a snowball would have if it were suddenly teleported to a point nominally 50k miles beneath the visible surface of the sun. Aka, somewhere between 0.000000000excrement and zip.
What scares me though, is that some non-tecnical minded judge might actually believe the bovine excrement thats coming out of Lyndon UT.
Now thats SCARY
Cheers, Gene. Who hopes he is on duty beside Gabriel when they show up so he can really tell them where to go.
For those who tend to follow a favorite author as he wanders far afield from the SCi-Fi genra, Orson is one such writer that should be followed.
He has, over the last 2-3 years, embarked on a "Women of Genesis" series, starting first with Abrahams wife Sarah, and one on Rebecca which also takes place in Abrahams time.
If you see one or the other of those titles on the shelf, its well worth your bucks as both are a plumb enjoyable read.
While the bible (and many of the worlds religious tomes also do this) tends to treat its women as almost afterthoughts with a few exceptions, Orson attempts to fill in the human side of these women without doing anything but putting himself in their place and thinking what would I have done if that was me sort of a scenario. He puts an all too human face on Sarahs apparent infertility and suffering because of it, a thread that runs as an undercurrent through much of that book. I recommend them both, and am looking for the third, which hasn't (AFAIK) been named yet.
Would GWB authorize DDOS against non-Republican affiliated endeavors?
He already has, see a story earlier about DDOSing some of the democratic phone call centers just before the elections with bogus calls to tie up their lines.
There is also a small check that needs looked into, small, as in $29.6 million. That story, along with all the bank traceable numbers for that check, is being circulated on the net too.
Mainstream media is in bad need of a cluebat application IMO. Frankly I could give a s--t less what they do with Scott Peterson, there is other, much more important news they are ignoring in favor of weekly rag type reporting. I mean that girl in front of the modesto court house, doesn't she ever sit down to rest her feet, eat, sleep, or pee?
Insanity is hereditary, you get it from your kids.
I agree. I put some time in codeing for the Z-80, which was one of their better small cpu's, it only being half dain bramaged. It had a couple of features that were neat, when you could make them work, like the dual register set that could be swapped in and out, but it didn't always work in every chip, which made writing code for it a bit frustrating until you managed to get a good chip rounded up. When the Z-8000 came out, I managed to get a copy of the assembly nemonics (that was similar to pulling teeth w/o any novocain, they weren't then going directly to the dogs, but they sure had gone to the lawyers) and was amazed to see that some of the worst of the Z-80-isms had managed to survive.
There was no way in hell to write Position Independant Code for that cpu, or I was being blinded by my image of the Z-80, one of the two.
That chip was close to their last hurrah in the cpu business, and from the amount of stuff I've seen with one of them in it since (0 samples so far in the subsequent 20+ years) I think I was justified for looking elsewhere for the next projects cpu.
Funny thing though, it wasn't to Intel, but to Motorola, whose 6809 could do position independant code just fine. That was a cpu that made it a pleasure to write assembly code for, and I did many megabytes of it.
An interesting footnote in silicon history was all Zilog would ever be again. Which I think is a bit sad, because they did break some new ground here and there back in the 8 bit days.
Thats the most tastefull frosting I can put on the message I just sent them turkeys.
I'm amazed at the apparent attempts at sugar coating and makeing light of this I read in the first 10 messages here tonight, shame on those who have nothing better to do than laugh at someone elses mis-fortune. At risk of getting sued by Johnny Carson, may the bird of paradise fly up your nose...
I'd suggest you all follow the link and let your displeasure run rampant.
I compared it to stealing cable service, but I asked who do we arrest when they steal the phone service I'm paying about $107 a month for.
Or who is to blame when the frustration causes yet another person to "go postal"?
Seemed like some very good questions to me.
There, I feel better already.:) Now I can type my usual sig.
The estimates I saw just a day or so back were about 65%. This is NOT trivial. I'm reminded of the Mouse that Roared. I think its time we mice roared loud enough to be heard. Each one of us is a trivial squeek, but if 40 million did it, that would be a roar that no regulatory agency on the planet would dare touch with a 1000 foot pole.
If 10% of the planet jumped on this particular bandwagon, the problem would be self solveing within a week. Then we would have the net back until it got out of hand again, at which point we all bite the bullet of poor laggy service for a few days again. Wash, rinse, repeat until sufficient hell is raised to solve it 100% legally, even in N. Korea. If they (N. Korea) cannot pay the bandwidth bill and get disconnected, most of us would see an immediate 50% drop in spam. They have been rbl'd several times in the past, and you can feel the difference when this happens without being told.
Lame or not, I rather like the idea of bankrupting these turkeys with excess bandwidth charges.
That said, it seems to me that a wget session, in the recursive mode, output sent to/dev/null, from each of these places, say about once an hour but with a rand based sleep of up to an hour, via a script run by cron on the hour might just be a way to say "payback time turkey!"
Take that address out of your script when it times out with another rand based bypass time, wait for it to fail 3x in a row and then remove it, mission accomplished!
All thats left is for someone to write the script and compile a list of known spammer sites to "prime the pump".
Open sores hippies... Chuckle. While I don't claim to be a hippie (well not since the late 70's anyway, I haven't had a toke in 20 years, nor a regular cigarette in 15 & I sold my last motorcycle about 4 years back when I realized my reflexes weren't as sharp as they once were) I do find the image a bit amusing. And I'm well aware that dyed in the wool windows folks find us a bit tiresome. But, all those viri that self-replicate from M$ box to M$ box? I see them as mail attachements to be auto-sorted to the JunqueMail folder and deleted about once a day, before they fill up my/root partition.
Yes thanks, bought and paid for from a reputable supplier. Not all of us "winderz sheeple" steal stuff either.
Thats great. But the instances of the other side of the coin are at least as numerous as there are p2p users divided by 10. Or at least thats the impression one gets from copying the mail here on/.:-)
And now I'm catching it because dinner is ready... And if theres anything I hate worse than being called too late for supper...
Well, the last time I did the math, based on Oct 4th 1934 for a birthdate, thats what it said:-)
Born in my aunts house at 2518 Adams St, Des Moines IA, I spent a lot of time there over the first 15 years. Its where my seemingly natural bent for electronics started. My uncle used to fix radios for beer money, I was about 7 or so, and I asked him what was wrong with the part he was replacing, and I was hooked forever when he could not tell me what was wrong, only that it wasn't doing what it was supposed to. "I" wanted to know what was actualy wrong with it. Mother got me some books from the library, and I told him what was wrong with it half a year later. But alcoholism was set in by then and I'm not sure he understood what this child was trying to tell him.
1) That doesn't look right, the 'r' is the odd man out, and 2) theres no mention of their mp3 patents or encoders on either the US site or the German site.
So, I went googling, and the spelling is correct after all, but its the Fraunhofer Institute, at
Googling just for fraunhofer only gets you some laser company. Apparently not connected to the Institute.
Oh Fudge. Obviously. Chalk it up to typing while a bit pissed off. Of course I meant a 160 kilobit encoding, and unsaid also, but from the same, preferably live source. Or an audiodat of it maybe, one of my friends has a couple of those things. Ripping from a cd, as its only 16 bit, just doesn't cut it. The cd isn't always that good by the time the engineers get through 'adjusting' it.
Uh, some of us sit around broswing Slashdot while we're watching football. I have the WVU/Pitt game on right now.
That includes me, experimenting with Ingo's new RT linux kernel patch. Unforch, there enough over head that tvtime loses a frame several times a second, duly reported in the log of course, so now its thursday and I have a 58 megabyte/var/log/messages.
Yeah, even us old farts take a chance on bleeding edge occasionally.
OTOH, tvtime is running 10x smoother than it does without the patch. The box is stable, and snappier than I expected, and snappier than if it was running a normal kernel by quite a bit.
It wouldn't surprise me if someone could find a patent that covered the ogg work too.
Go ahead, bet the farm on it, and I'll cover a tenner of it, betting on ogg being clean. That gauntlet was thrown down 2+ years ago by the ogg/vorbis folks who after the mp3 camp claimed there had to be an infringement AIUI, mailed a copy of the code to the fahnhoffer (sp, please, I'm american and I couldn't spell that right if it was painted on the friggin wall) legal folks and dared them to find an infringment. 2 years later, there has been no further saber rattling by the fahnhoffer people.
Besides, if you'll take a 192 kilobit mp3, and compare it to an about 160 kilobyte variable rate ogg, about a g7 quality, I challenge you to an a/b test where you have no idea which is which. BUT, you'll very reliably pick the ogg as the best sounding of the two, and do it well over 95% of the time.
Hell, my ears are 70 years old and I wore out 3 rifle barrels before I ever bought any earmuffs, so they aren't cherry ears by any means (Carhart notches 120 db deep for instance), but I did that comparison and picked the ogg nearly 100% of the time.
Gawd I get tired of hearing winderz sheeple claim the linux camp is nothing but a bunch of thieves. Is your copy of winderz legal? More than likely its a bit of a grey market from some cloner. If I had any M$ on site, it would be 100% legal, but I've never owned an M$ product other than whats in the roms of some of my vintage computers, and I don't intend to expand that, ever... If I need dos for something, its drdos-7.03 that gets booted.
You may have intended that to be sarcasm, but it wasn't taken that way.
Pretty much an I don't care who it hurts as long as I can sell enough copies type.
This same indivdual would, 140 years ago, have been disposed of rather quickly I think.
It is a despicable attempt to profit from the death of a president, whom I voted for way back then, but only as a rebound from a rant by Nixon the night before. I went to the polling booth that day convinced we did not need such a childish mentality as Nixon's running the country for the next 4 years. Kennedy's action from Jan 20 to that fatefull day pretty much proves I was right, the only thing I disagreed with was his making his brother the AG.
No cheers on this one, Gene. PS: I hope the game miserably fails in the sales dept. sending a message throughout the gaming industry.
Having had some experience at the Clinic (Mayo that is) I highly recommend your physician make the required phone calls to get you in no later than tomorrow morning. I'd bet a cold one he could probably cut enough red tape to do it. We used to drive in from NE Nebraska and be seen on about an hours notice after walking in. Those guys are GOOD Patrick, so put the key in the switch, NOW.
I take umbrage at your off the cuff description of Fargo ND as being some Podunk IA thing. There is such a place FWIW.
But you'll often find extremely well qualified people in places you wouldn't expect to. One of my surprises when I lived in Rapid City SD back in the 60's was that the best neurosurgeon (reputation-wise) west of the mississippi river actually lived in Rapid City and used the local hospitals facilties for his operating arena. Saddly, he was home the night of June 9, 1972 when a 50 foot wall of water came down Rapid Creek and 272 souls never saw daylight again.
Saddly also I knew him from a professional meeting in 1968 over a pile of x-rays that said my wife was dead, but her body didn't quite know it yet, and was still breathing. A blood clot in the middle cerebral artery, something thats not operable even today in 2004 AFAIK. We talked at length then and he estimated it would be another 50 years before the tools to fix what we were seeing on the x-rays might be available. But the fix would only restore life to a vegetable since the damage would have been done in the first 10 minutes or less of the blockages existance. By the time I made the phone call to warn them I was comeing, and getting to a point where something might have been done at 5am when I came in from work and found her was around 35-40 minutes. In 1968, she had no chance.
Some of his patients came from halfway around the planet, thats how well the reputation of Dr. Roy Crowder went before him. I'm proud to have known him, his bedside manner was just as attentive as the stories you hear about the old time doctors that actually made house calls.
Why did he practice there, when he could have had and OR in any prestigious place on the planet? He was good, but also an outlaw of sorts, believeing he should be able to keep enough of his considerable income to live on.
Any medical types in well established practices reading this for the grins factor can vouch for the fact that everyone around them thinks they deserve to have at least 50% of his gross income as a tax, or insurance, whathaveyou.
Slashdot Mirror
All of which reminds me of a day out driving around in the Meade County South Dakota rolling plains. On a graveled road, running about 40 mph in an studebaker lark of 1961 vintage (good year btw), but then this was in the later 60's, so it was just another chair car then.
Anyway, I could see something sitting on a fencepost half a mile away, and as I drew nearer, I could see it was a good sized specimen of the American Golden Eagle that might have weighed 8 to 10 lbs.
As I drew near the post, the eagle spread its considerable wings (4.5 to 5 feet of them, very impressive to me) and literally fell off the post forward, catching itself with a couple of strokes of its wings. Rising up to the level of the open window on the passenger side, it flew alongside me for about half a mile, with its head turned to look me over most of the time, and looking as if it was considering me for lunch.
Eventually, I think it came to the conclusion that I was either too big to tackle, or in too small a space for it to fly into, and the wings, which had been beating about once every 1.5 seconds making the flight look very easy, missed a beat, then flaired out, along with the tail flicking this way and that as it steered into a stall about 2 inches above the next post top, and it settled in to watch the now new piece of real-estate in its view for anything that moved.
This birds flight noises were totally covered by the ambient sounds of doing 40 mph on a gravel road with the windows open, the well muffled motor itself not making a noticable contribution to the background noise. I could easily see this bird coming in from behind a prarie dog and picking him off his hole and the dog never knowing the bird was there till it was way too late if there was any sort of wind blowing to generate some masking sounds. And in that country, thats usually the case.
One of those memories from almost 40 years back up the log that one never forgets, to look an wild eagle in the eye from about 7 feet for a good piece of a minute.
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Cheers, Gene
In my opinion the http://folding.stanford.edu/ project is more important and perhaps more interesting than SETI. If you can help, I ask you to contribute with it.
First, they have not to my knowledge issued an update to the original program for linux. I installed that one about 3 years ago when it first came out, but it was such a cpu hog the machine simply wasn't usable when it was running. Seti is a nice kid, running at a nice of 19, meaning it only runs when nothing else needs the cpu. Sure, the cpu stays at 100%, and gets a bit warmer, but it isn't feelable in terms of how this machine runs. FoldingAThome needs to take a few lessons from Seti, not take over that machine, after all it is MY machine. Its entirely possible it might be able to do great work, and I think it will, but when it has to have 100% of the machine instead of 98%, screw em & the camel that rode in on them. Until they learn that lesson, its not going to be running here.
Cheers, Gene
And yet the giant orange somethings in the sky won't register as a single bleep on these new shiny instruments...
Ahh, but they do. Each of those stars has a noise in the water hole frequency coming out of it, including our own sun, which has sufficient radio frequency power output that any satellite dish's rx signal meter is pegged while the dishes so called beam, crosses the sun. Every comm satellite we have out there suffers from this effect twice a year, for a few minutes each day for 5 to 10 days each spring and fall as the sun crosses the equatorial plane headed the other way. When the sun has many kilowatts of noise output, its a bit hard to pick out a 10 watt satellite signal trying to compete with that.
However, thats above the "water hole" by about 2.5GHZ. Because that frequency, near 1420MHZ is quite transparent, its a good place to listen, and most stars within 10000 light years will cause the noise level out of the receivers at Arecebo to rise, often with enough charactar to the noise that the star can be identified just from its noise signature.
There used to be a visualizer (ksetispy) for linux that could display that as the dish scanned across nearby stars, but it quit working with the 2.6 kernel advent.
I'm hoping we'll get a chance to handle some of the data coming from the Allen Array, and it sounds as if its going to be ready for "first light" before too much longer.
The lazer search is a bit more far-fetched, but then so was radio, in 1891. Each of these observation instruments we build will teach us how to do a better job with the next generation.
Cheers, Gene
Its in the general area of the Pleiades above the constellation Taurus the Bull. The printout I made from one web site drawn by starrynight shows the tail extending out over the Pleiades. But I don't know if thats tonights position or sometime in the future.
Cheers, Gene
Actually, he is an amature comet finder, and has 2 comets named after him these days. The kstars database has an entry for Machholz1 and 2 entries for Machholz2, apparently submitted twice about a minute apart.
These folks haven't bothered to note if this one is 1 or 2, so I can't tell if this one is a previous entry or not from looking in the kstars catalogs of visible objects. It could be yet another new one, and I suspect it is since its period is 119,000 years, makeing it unlikely this particular Don Machholz has found it before.
Kstars, thats a linux/kde program, and can even run your telescope for you, tracking any object you would like to have stay centered in the eyepiece. You see, windows doesn't have a patent on astronomy programs.
Cheers, Gene
Yeah, well, here in the good ol Hew Ess Aye, West Virginia to be exact, its too damned overcast to see anything tonight.
Besides I wasn't gonna stand out there in my bvd's for very long, I've got a cold & miserable.
But, if it was clear, I'd sure have my 7x35's out to take a look, it seems that the huge majority of the so-called naked eye comets have coincided with mostly overcast skys for the last 20 years.
Its a crying shame when man can't see off the planet he was born on, and its man thats responsible for most of the dirt in the air. But I can remember when you could see forever almost everynight, back in the late 30's thru the early 50's. The milky way was blazingly bright against a black velvet sky covered with twinkling stars from horizon to horizon.
And then man moved to town and took up selling the real estate where the skys were truely clear, to some developer, putting up street lights and other crap to blind us all...
But don't blame me, I wasn't that man. I was busy learning how to fix this newfangled thing called TV back then.
Cheers & a better 2005 to all, Gene
Thanks. Sometimes I think I'm just trying to piss into the wind for all the good it does me. Or maybe I think that at 70, I've survived long enough to have some wisdom, but thats been debated here before, heartily at times. But I can't stand the sort of goings on that drove Gary Webb to suicide either, see the article about that on kuro5hin. Thats very sad that a good man was hounded into that as the ultimate solution for telling it like it was. To paraphrase another poster there, he managed to wake up that big dog on the porch, and paid the price.
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Cheers, Gene
Unfettering those companies from the legal blackmail being visited upon them by the leaches would probably help the economy, not hurt it.
Man I couldn't have said it any better.
I'm an old fart, and I can remember when we were doing innovative things at breakneck speeds.
Circa 1960 or so I was in So Cal, an ex Iowa farm boy who knew a bit about electronics and wanted a piece of the action. At one point I found myself working as a bench tech at Oceanographic Engineering in Sandy Eggo.
We were building a tv camera designed to be towed through sewers and such to check the condition of the plumbing. Targeted for about 3.5" in diameter and about 14" long in a case suitable for such duty, we were still at the breadboard stage, fine tuning the circuitry, and the only model we had was a rather large mass of parts sticking out of it here and there, so effectively it was about 5" in diameter at the time.
Late one morning the top engineers came out of the corner office and said to police the place a bit, we were gonna have company in about 15 minutes. Everybody grabbed a broom or a mop.
True to the clock, about 15 minutes later a lot of navy gold came thru the door and shook hands all around, then asked to see this little wonder toy work. So while they watched the monitor, we gently picked it up and set it back down in a bench drawer faceing the rear of the drawer after twisting the focus ring around for near focus, then closed the drawer on the piece of coax that was bringing out the picture, and sending in the 12 volts that ran it.
The automatic target system worked well enough that 2 seconds after the drawer was closed, the monitor had an excellent picture of the wood grain of the back drawer panel on it, all from the light leaking in around the cables slightly holding the drawer from closing tightly.
They talked amoung themselves for a minute or so, then asked if they could find a seat in the office & talk business. Our brass was more than helpfull, rounding up sufficient chairs and stools for everyone to sit on. Half an hour later they all left and I figured that was the end of that little dog & pony show.
Not quite, before the week was out, we had a contract to make 2 of them along with the cases & pan/tilts to the Navys specs. Looking at the case specs, our guys had to ask where these cameras were going as that was an unreal strong case they were spec'ing.
To make a long story a little shorter, they went on the Trieste, and were on it when it went down in the mohole, bringing back the first pictures ever from over 37,000 feet down in the pacific ocean.
Could that happen again today? No way Jose'! Before we ordered the parts, some fscking scumbag would have us up on patent violations for half the circuits in that camera, which at that time were 100% discrete parts, not an integrated curcuit in the whole thing. Not to mention the designs of the seals that surrounded the navy supplied quartz window in the front of the camera cases that didn't leak at an ambient pressure of something in excess of 18,000 psia. They worked, nuff said.
The patent system is broken by 2 things. One being that 99% of whats really patentable had been invented by 1965, and nearly everything since then is not much if nothing but a word re-arrangement to make it look new, or so damndably vague as to be un-enforceable in any court in the land where the judge has smarts enough to actually turn his own judicial bench lights on and off.
The other is the sheer mass of submissions being done today by everybody and all his con man kin, trying to get in on the perceived gold rush.
Between those two effects, I don't frankly care how much money you throw at the patent office trying to fix it, its not going to get fixed.
In the meantime we spend all our resources sueing some unlucky person who has a competing idea, and the only winner is the lawyers at the end of the day. He wins that is, IF he gets paid.
And that stands about the same chance of being true, as a snowball would have if it were suddenly teleported to a point nominally 50k miles beneath the visible surface of the sun. Aka, somewhere between 0.000000000excrement and zip.
What scares me though, is that some non-tecnical minded judge might actually believe the bovine excrement thats coming out of Lyndon UT.
Now thats SCARY
Cheers, Gene. Who hopes he is on duty beside Gabriel when they show up so he can really tell them where to go.
(2) Orson Scott Card
For those who tend to follow a favorite author as he wanders far afield from the SCi-Fi genra, Orson is one such writer that should be followed.
He has, over the last 2-3 years, embarked on a "Women of Genesis" series, starting first with Abrahams wife Sarah, and one on Rebecca which also takes place in Abrahams time.
If you see one or the other of those titles on the shelf, its well worth your bucks as both are a plumb enjoyable read.
While the bible (and many of the worlds religious tomes also do this) tends to treat its women as almost afterthoughts with a few exceptions, Orson attempts to fill in the human side of these women without doing anything but putting himself in their place and thinking what would I have done if that was me sort of a scenario. He puts an all too human face on Sarahs apparent infertility and suffering because of it, a thread that runs as an undercurrent through much of that book. I recommend them both, and am looking for the third, which hasn't (AFAIK) been named yet.
Cheers, Gene
Would GWB authorize DDOS against non-Republican affiliated endeavors?
He already has, see a story earlier about DDOSing some of the democratic phone call centers just before the elections with bogus calls to tie up their lines.
There is also a small check that needs looked into, small, as in $29.6 million. That story, along with all the bank traceable numbers for that check, is being circulated on the net too.
Mainstream media is in bad need of a cluebat application IMO. Frankly I could give a s--t less what they do with Scott Peterson, there is other, much more important news they are ignoring in favor of weekly rag type reporting. I mean that girl in front of the modesto court house, doesn't she ever sit down to rest her feet, eat, sleep, or pee?
Insanity is hereditary, you get it from your kids.
Cheers, Gene
Zilog? WTF?
I agree. I put some time in codeing for the Z-80, which was one of their better small cpu's, it only being half dain bramaged. It had a couple of features that were neat, when you could make them work, like the dual register set that could be swapped in and out, but it didn't always work in every chip, which made writing code for it a bit frustrating until you managed to get a good chip rounded up. When the Z-8000 came out, I managed to get a copy of the assembly nemonics (that was similar to pulling teeth w/o any novocain, they weren't then going directly to the dogs, but they sure had gone to the lawyers) and was amazed to see that some of the worst of the Z-80-isms had managed to survive.
There was no way in hell to write Position Independant Code for that cpu, or I was being blinded by my image of the Z-80, one of the two.
That chip was close to their last hurrah in the cpu business, and from the amount of stuff I've seen with one of them in it since (0 samples so far in the subsequent 20+ years) I think I was justified for looking elsewhere for the next projects cpu.
Funny thing though, it wasn't to Intel, but to Motorola, whose 6809 could do position independant code just fine. That was a cpu that made it a pleasure to write assembly code for, and I did many megabytes of it.
An interesting footnote in silicon history was all Zilog would ever be again. Which I think is a bit sad, because they did break some new ground here and there back in the 8 bit days.
Cheers, Gene
Thats the most tastefull frosting I can put on the message I just sent them turkeys.
:) Now I can type my usual sig.
I'm amazed at the apparent attempts at sugar coating and makeing light of this I read in the first 10 messages here tonight, shame on those who have nothing better to do than laugh at someone elses mis-fortune. At risk of getting sued by Johnny Carson, may the bird of paradise fly up your nose...
I'd suggest you all follow the link and let your displeasure run rampant.
I compared it to stealing cable service, but I asked who do we arrest when they steal the phone service I'm paying about $107 a month for.
Or who is to blame when the frustration causes yet another person to "go postal"?
Seemed like some very good questions to me.
There, I feel better already.
Cheers, gene
How much bandwidth is already taken up by spam?
The estimates I saw just a day or so back were about 65%. This is NOT trivial. I'm reminded of the Mouse that Roared. I think its time we mice roared loud enough to be heard. Each one of us is a trivial squeek, but if 40 million did it, that would be a roar that no regulatory agency on the planet would dare touch with a 1000 foot pole.
If 10% of the planet jumped on this particular bandwagon, the problem would be self solveing within a week. Then we would have the net back until it got out of hand again, at which point we all bite the bullet of poor laggy service for a few days again. Wash, rinse, repeat until sufficient hell is raised to solve it 100% legally, even in N. Korea. If they (N. Korea) cannot pay the bandwidth bill and get disconnected, most of us would see an immediate 50% drop in spam. They have been rbl'd several times in the past, and you can feel the difference when this happens without being told.
Cheers, Gene
Lame or not, I rather like the idea of bankrupting these turkeys with excess bandwidth charges.
/dev/null, from each of these places, say about once an hour but with a rand based sleep of up to an hour, via a script run by cron on the hour might just be a way to say "payback time turkey!"
That said, it seems to me that a wget session, in the recursive mode, output sent to
Take that address out of your script when it times out with another rand based bypass time, wait for it to fail 3x in a row and then remove it, mission accomplished!
All thats left is for someone to write the script and compile a list of known spammer sites to "prime the pump".
I love it.
Cheers, Gene
Open sores hippies... Chuckle. While I don't claim to be a hippie (well not since the late 70's anyway, I haven't had a toke in 20 years, nor a regular cigarette in 15 & I sold my last motorcycle about 4 years back when I realized my reflexes weren't as sharp as they once were) I do find the image a bit amusing. And I'm well aware that dyed in the wool windows folks find us a bit tiresome. But, all those viri that self-replicate from M$ box to M$ box? I see them as mail attachements to be auto-sorted to the JunqueMail folder and deleted about once a day, before they fill up my /root partition.
/. :-)
Yes thanks, bought and paid for from a reputable supplier. Not all of us "winderz sheeple" steal stuff either.
Thats great. But the instances of the other side of the coin are at least as numerous as there are p2p users divided by 10. Or at least thats the impression one gets from copying the mail here on
And now I'm catching it because dinner is ready... And if theres anything I hate worse than being called too late for supper...
Cheers, Gene
Well, the last time I did the math, based on Oct 4th 1934 for a birthdate, thats what it said :-)
Born in my aunts house at 2518 Adams St, Des Moines IA, I spent a lot of time there over the first 15 years. Its where my seemingly natural bent for electronics started. My uncle used to fix radios for beer money, I was about 7 or so, and I asked him what was wrong with the part he was replacing, and I was hooked forever when he could not tell me what was wrong, only that it wasn't doing what it was supposed to. "I" wanted to know what was actualy wrong with it. Mother got me some books from the library, and I told him what was wrong with it half a year later. But alcoholism was set in by then and I'm not sure he understood what this child was trying to tell him.
Cheers, Gene
1) That doesn't look right, the 'r' is the odd man out, and 2) theres no mention of their mp3 patents or encoders on either the US site or the German site.
So, I went googling, and the spelling is correct after all, but its the Fraunhofer Institute, at
Googling just for fraunhofer only gets you some laser company. Apparently not connected to the Institute.
Cheers, Gene
Oh Fudge. Obviously. Chalk it up to typing while a bit pissed off. Of course I meant a 160 kilobit encoding, and unsaid also, but from the same, preferably live source. Or an audiodat of it maybe, one of my friends has a couple of those things. Ripping from a cd, as its only 16 bit, just doesn't cut it. The cd isn't always that good by the time the engineers get through 'adjusting' it.
Cheers, Gene
Uh, some of us sit around broswing Slashdot while we're watching football. I have the WVU/Pitt game on right now.
/var/log/messages.
That includes me, experimenting with Ingo's new RT linux kernel patch. Unforch, there enough over head that tvtime loses a frame several times a second, duly reported in the log of course, so now its thursday and I have a 58 megabyte
Yeah, even us old farts take a chance on bleeding edge occasionally.
OTOH, tvtime is running 10x smoother than it does without the patch. The box is stable, and snappier than I expected, and snappier than if it was running a normal kernel by quite a bit.
Cheers, Gene
It wouldn't surprise me if someone could find a patent that covered the ogg work too.
Go ahead, bet the farm on it, and I'll cover a tenner of it, betting on ogg being clean. That gauntlet was thrown down 2+ years ago by the ogg/vorbis folks who after the mp3 camp claimed there had to be an infringement AIUI, mailed a copy of the code to the fahnhoffer (sp, please, I'm american and I couldn't spell that right if it was painted on the friggin wall) legal folks and dared them to find an infringment. 2 years later, there has been no further saber rattling by the fahnhoffer people.
Besides, if you'll take a 192 kilobit mp3, and compare it to an about 160 kilobyte variable rate ogg, about a g7 quality, I challenge you to an a/b test where you have no idea which is which. BUT, you'll very reliably pick the ogg as the best sounding of the two, and do it well over 95% of the time.
Hell, my ears are 70 years old and I wore out 3 rifle barrels before I ever bought any earmuffs, so they aren't cherry ears by any means (Carhart notches 120 db deep for instance), but I did that comparison and picked the ogg nearly 100% of the time.
Gawd I get tired of hearing winderz sheeple claim the linux camp is nothing but a bunch of thieves. Is your copy of winderz legal? More than likely its a bit of a grey market from some cloner. If I had any M$ on site, it would be 100% legal, but I've never owned an M$ product other than whats in the roms of some of my vintage computers, and I don't intend to expand that, ever... If I need dos for something, its drdos-7.03 that gets booted.
You may have intended that to be sarcasm, but it wasn't taken that way.
No Cheers, Gene
Pretty much an I don't care who it hurts as long as I can sell enough copies type.
This same indivdual would, 140 years ago, have been disposed of rather quickly I think.
It is a despicable attempt to profit from the death of a president, whom I voted for way back then, but only as a rebound from a rant by Nixon the night before. I went to the polling booth that day convinced we did not need such a childish mentality as Nixon's running the country for the next 4 years. Kennedy's action from Jan 20 to that fatefull day pretty much proves I was right, the only thing I disagreed with was his making his brother the AG.
No cheers on this one, Gene.
PS: I hope the game miserably fails in the sales dept. sending a message throughout the gaming industry.
Having had some experience at the Clinic (Mayo that is) I highly recommend your physician make the required phone calls to get you in no later than tomorrow morning. I'd bet a cold one he could probably cut enough red tape to do it. We used to drive in from NE Nebraska and be seen on about an hours notice after walking in. Those guys are GOOD Patrick, so put the key in the switch, NOW.
Good Luck & Cheers, Gene
Go read the fscking story, its all there.
Otherwise STFU until you can say something usefull.
Cheers, Gene
I take umbrage at your off the cuff description of Fargo ND as being some Podunk IA thing. There is such a place FWIW.
But you'll often find extremely well qualified people in places you wouldn't expect to. One of my surprises when I lived in Rapid City SD back in the 60's was that the best neurosurgeon (reputation-wise) west of the mississippi river actually lived in Rapid City and used the local hospitals facilties for his operating arena. Saddly, he was home the night of June 9, 1972 when a 50 foot wall of water came down Rapid Creek and 272 souls never saw daylight again.
Saddly also I knew him from a professional meeting in 1968 over a pile of x-rays that said my wife was dead, but her body didn't quite know it yet, and was still breathing. A blood clot in the middle cerebral artery, something thats not operable even today in 2004 AFAIK. We talked at length then and he estimated it would be another 50 years before the tools to fix what we were seeing on the x-rays might be available. But the fix would only restore life to a vegetable since the damage would have been done in the first 10 minutes or less of the blockages existance. By the time I made the phone call to warn them I was comeing, and getting to a point where something might have been done at 5am when I came in from work and found her was around 35-40 minutes. In 1968, she had no chance.
Some of his patients came from halfway around the planet, thats how well the reputation of Dr. Roy Crowder went before him. I'm proud to have known him, his bedside manner was just as attentive as the stories you hear about the old time doctors that actually made house calls.
Why did he practice there, when he could have had and OR in any prestigious place on the planet? He was good, but also an outlaw of sorts, believeing he should be able to keep enough of his considerable income to live on.
Any medical types in well established practices reading this for the grins factor can vouch for the fact that everyone around them thinks they deserve to have at least 50% of his gross income as a tax, or insurance, whathaveyou.
Do that 3 times and its a net loss in my book.
Cheers, Gene