Frankly, I don't care if it has a screensaver type output or not as most screensavers are nothing but a waste of cpu cycles that could be used for other, more productive work. I'e been running setiathome for about 2 weeks short of 5 years, ranking 99.23% in the world with my two rather puny by todays stds machines. All I really care about is if its running, which on this linux box as I sit here typeing, its getting 99% of the cpu without impinging on my ability to use the machine one bit.
Its a background process I start in rc.local, so its already running by the time I login at reboot time. I do have a util that can display its results, but frankly I haven't looked at it in a couple of months.
As far as eye candy, I have a couple of those really deep space shots from hubble, about 30 megs each, that I use as background on 2 of my 8 screens. That keeps me grounded by reminding me of just how little a piece of the universe this particular hominid specie we call important is.
I think you missed my point. That was, that even though I'm now retired and should be counting bucks, when I fill out my taxes, I would be more than happy to check off a box that said "give the first 50 bucks of any refund to NASA for hubble maintainance.
There doesn't seem to be any method presently setup by which I could make a direct, to be used only for hubble, donation to the fund.
Something like the Pittman-Robertson act might be setup, wherein users are charged a 10% surtax on related purchases might be a model. I would have purchased those two images, at a reasonable fee.
Any or all of a number of ways could be found to finance the hubble, but so far no one in a position to do so has appeared to give a damn, except those posting here on/. Its a sad commentary on our times IMO.
I've already voiced my opinion to my representatives, in unambiguous terms. IMO its criminal to allow a national treasure like that to die for lack of a few million to service it.
They've done it twice before, and I don't see any reason they couldn't do it again as long as the shuttle they use is equipt the same as the one they used twice before. That might take some extra funds doing the retrofit.
Tell ya how to take a vote folks, have the irs add a 50 dollar checkoff line to the 1040, where 50 bucks of your refund would go instead to nasa.
I'd bet nasa would hear a get off your butts and doit message loud and clear cause I know I'd sure do the checkmark.
I use 2 of its deep field images, totalling about 70 megs, as backgrounds for 2 of my 8 screens. Everytime I switch to one of those screens I'm reminded of just how usefull that the hubble has been even if it was in need of a set of glasses to clear it up. The last one, showing stuff as far out as 13 billion light years, is a truely impressive image since we are seeing the universe as it was when it was less than a billion years old when that light was sent on its way here.
Properly maintained, that scope can and will be making new discoveries, adding to our knowledge of the universe and physics in general, stuff that cannot be done thru the haze of our atmosphere here on the ground, a hundred years from now.
I'd like to see them add an RPG powered ion engine to it, not a very big one of course, just enough to give it a few ounces of push so that its orbit could be maintained over an extended period as one of the things the shuttle must do each time its there is to give it a push to correct for the decaying orbit. That pushing we are told, over-extends the shuttles available fuel, possibly endangering the ability to steer at landing time. The shuttle that goes there must have the robot arm, and it must be stripped a bit in order to lighten it to even reach the hubbles altitude which is about 50 miles above the design envelope of the shuttle.
But the point is, it CAN be done. Dangerous, maybe. But I don't recall that any of the crews who have been there regretted doing it.
To quote an example (I was a tv CE at the time, now sort of retired as I near the 70th year) we had a group of 8th grade students tour the tv station, and I was asked for a not more than two sylable explanation of how tv works speech. I blew about 10 minutes laying out the basic principles, then finished off with:
I'm the one who keeps all this working and in about 10 years, I'll be thinking of retireing, and I'd like for one of you to be nipping at my heels, trying to take my job away from me!
I was very disappointed that the class nearly busted a gut laughing at such a proposition.
That says a lot for our educational system when a bunch of 8th graders, who are still wide-eyed and wet behind the ears, have already been pre-taught that the "service" industry means picking up the trash from the curb once a week. Its a bullshit attitude, and I said so quietly to the teacher leading the group, who got all huffy that I was questioning their teaching methods.
Obviously thats the last time I did that. And none of them has come around and applied for a job at the tv station that I know of either. And its why I'm still considered to be almost retired, and will be till the day I fail to make roll call here. When push comes to shove, its my phone that still rings, asking me to come in and see what I can do, even though I passed on the keys to the office and toolbox 2+ years ago now.
By now, some of the failthfull here know that I've had quite a list of been there's and done that's in ny 55 years of working in electronics.
How did I do all that I've done in my life with only an 8th grade education? And been well paid while doing it? Interest and motivation, something thats sadly lacking today in the younger generation. I produce results, dependably. And thats what counts at the end of the day.
Really, I think the most lasting change the US gov. made was probably about 50 years ago now, and its been mostly downhill since. That change was in the tax laws, removeing the nearly 100% discounts that could be taken against the companies net for any monies spent on R&D. Prior to that one could pay tax, or pay a nearly equal amount to the R&D dept., and as long as you had records of supplies bought, and payrolls made, the IRS bought it.
Then (I think it was maybe in the 60's) the gov. decided to cap the percentage of net that could be used for R&D, and heavily discounted the deductions of that which was left, making R&D not nearly as free and fruitfull as it was. So you can guess where the money is spent now, much more on advertising and monopolistic trade practices trying to maintain market position with what is really an obsolete product since there aren't that many new ones to peddle.
To me, the whole situation is a sad commentary on todays us business environment. Those in the global picture we now must compete with often do not suffer as much from an end of the month report mentality like we've fallen into over the last 50 years.
An old farts 1934 $0.02, please adjust for inflation.
When i was young the sky was mostly brown and orange. Now it is mostly blue. A vast improvement in the air quality has really happened over the years, and it looks like things are going to continue to improve!
Hummph. Youngster Whippersnapper. I was here when they didn't need any improvement.
When I was young we had blue skys unless it was raining, and clear, dark skys at night, so dark and clear you could see the milky way from horizon to horizon. The "north star", Polaris, could be picked out of the crowd of bright, reach up and cut your hand on them, stars in about 1 second flat on the average night. Vega, which will be our north star in another 23,000 years, was just as easy to find.
This was in the early 1940's, before the beloved automobile shot its wad into our air, seemingly forever, although its getting better the last decade or so again.
So you want to see the milky way in all its glory? Easy, have Burt take you up in space ship 1, but you aren't gonna see it from ground level till we really, really clean up the air, and put some real dark skys laws into effect for nighttime lighting of parking lots etc.
That will put you back to reading by kerosene lamps, and listening to the radio on crystal sets, but with modern ccfl lighting, and solid state entertainment that doesn't need a 500 watt 5.1 surround sound and cannot destroy your ears, we wouldn't be far from cleaning up the air. Oh, and I forgot, you'd be riding old Nelly the mare to school, but since it was 2 miles to school, and the last decent barn to leave old Nelly in for the day in bad weather was only a mile away, you'd walk that last mile to school in bad weather.
Been there, done that. And I damned sure miss those clear, cold as hell skys we had back then.
Could you not have a profanity delay and drop to white noise/fault card in this kind of case.
That might be do-able if it weren't for the fact that most of the operators have other duties in between station breaks that can take them more than 10 seconds away from the button, possibly even in the back production bay looking up a commercial that the playback soft says is on the missing list in the hard drive queue. Some stations are so automated that a board op isn't required, the local break is actually triggered by signals from the network.
There are also legal enjoinders against this sort of thing in our network contracts, such conditions brought on by the popularity of the infamous 'time machine'. Which was in fact a heck of a good idea, but the networks got all bent when they found we were making room for another 30 to 60 seconds of commercial time in a 1 hour program by removing no motion frames and pregnant pauses from the program stream. We are monitored by external entities, and the networks get a summary the next day of delayed or missed commercials. So now they must be carried in real time per contract else we wouldn't be that nets affiliate for very long.
They should do it like those security tapes... very slow tape, with tape reuse after a reasonable period of time. Every quickmart does it, why not TV stations?
Mainly because those things give such a poor playback image as to be worthless, and they run them so slow that the audio is shut down. I know, I've tried to pull a perps face out of the mud lots of times because all the legal types think we've got better gear than the average joe sixpack. We do, even having a couple of $7000 dollar (new) S-vhs decks, but they don't go that slow by about 2 shifts of the gear stick & we wind up sticking it in a 100 dollar machine because they will at least give us a rapid motion image that can be stopped and frame searched.
But it somehow makes management types think they have a bulletproof id system in place. And they usually leave our business with a few prints we've brightened up in the gimp, or freeze-framed for 10 seconds tapes of the better frames, and a very long face. After a while that gets very educational to hot shot MBA's. Part of their "continueing education" that eventually makes human beings out of the robots the MBA schools turn out:-)
But I don't think one of our snapshots pulled out of the dark, out of focus fuzzy and noisy, black and white GoMart/7-11/QuickMart tape has ever been used to ID anybody around here. A clue maybe, but certainly not usable in court a of law by any prosecuting attorney worth his salary. The defense would probably ask permission to use it for target practice right there in the courtroom just for the chuckle factor.
Thats an enticing thought. But with utility vcr's still available (BTW, this past years production of vhs machines was announced over a year ago as being the last run ever) I'm afraid price would win out over a potentially incompatible meduim. We should maybe buy a 12 pack of them so that we still have spares when the rest of the world has used theirs up:)
Re: your sig. I don't have a lot of faith in the ACLU generally speaking, but you are definitely "preaching to the choir" about the rest of it.
If you have done nothing wrong, why not keep a record of what you have done? You only destroy evidence when you are guilty, right?
I think that this line of argument for forced recording of material is just like the old argument about hiding stuff: it is an attempt to impose more restrictions on innocent people.
I violently agree. I am a bc engineer, mostly retired.
Makeing us, the small market window on your home town here in the markets rated as 100+, responsible for what the networks feed us in the form of making us keep an aircheck tape of a 24/7/365 operation, at $20 an hour for the tape and another $10/hour or more for machine maintainance, will gain no real benefits to society at large, and will reduce our already too narrow operating margin by a considerable percentage. Its an expense smaller market stations cannot afford as it doesn't scale to the market size, but rather is a fixed expense regardless of the market ranking of the station.
For locally produced stuff, like our 5 times daily newscasts & morning cut-ins, yes, we do tape those, but asking us to save every tape for 60-90 days will multiply our tape costs by however many weeks that would be since like most, that tape has served its "review our own perfomance" duty at the end of the week, so tuesdays tape for the 12:00 noon cast is then re-written the next tuesday at 12.
These aren't $2.00 walmart vhs tapes folks.
From another viewpoint, we are simply incapable of responding in real time to bleep out a embargoed word when carrying what the networks feed us, or of recognizing and setting up an overlay fuzzball in real time of such goings on as the "wardrobe malfunction" during the superbowl. Our operators were as wide-eyed as the rest of the world at that instance.
Such regulatory actions rightfully should be directed to the source of the program, and not the 1700 something broadcast tv stations under the commissions purview.
As it is, we spend around 60 man hours a week scanning the syndicated and one time stuff that comes in on tape before we air it, and often wind up editing out a word or 3, but since we cannot do that to the syndi's tape, its their copyrighted property, that means we have to make yet another dub on our own tape.
Just because you were allowed to do it doesn't make it a right - that's a common problem with a lot of people who post on Slashdot - they can't tell the difference between a right and a privilege.
Yeah, well now there's an economic fact that these yahoos haven't kenned yet. By locking up my ability to time shift my enjoyment of their product, just as I can do now for a purchased book, they will have lost a quite noticable count of their audience because regardless of how great and good it is, there are those of us who will not give up that personal freedom. No smancy movie, treated as such, deserves to make its dvd/tape production costs back if it cannot be backed up in the event the original is destroyed, worn out, or playback equipment upgrades rendering it impossible to play the older format on the newer machinery.
I feel that I bought a copy of that work, in perpetueum, its now my property to do with as I please as long as I don't make a copy, and pass it on, while I retain the original. That I'd interpret as a copyright violation, as would any court in the land.
Personally, I see absolutely no difference in my buying the book, and my buying a copy of the work in *any* other format as far as my rights to enjoy that work are concerned. There isn't anybody standing there with a shotgun to my head telling me I cannot read that book again without paying for the "priviledge" again. In neither case am I about to drop it on a copy machine (of any kind) so I can pass it on to someone else, and I will argue that point at length that their treating me like a common music pie-rat when I have personally bought the cd's for at least 95% of the music I have. The rest is even older, and I have in most cases the original tapes unless they've been destroyed by player malfunctions. In an elementary schoolroom environment, that does happen.
in other words, they've lost me as an audience forever when that takes place. I'm not a rabid tv viewer anyway, and probably don't actually watch more than 2-3 hours a week, usually news. Its been at least 2 years since I walked into a movie too.
Jack Valanti and his just named successor, take note please, shoot too close to the target and you get powder burns or worse from the ricochet. The diff is that the powder burns will be on your shoulders (or lower) at the board meetings, occuring while discussing the money that never gets to your wallet because lots of us will simply 'opt out'. Your so-called per-perfomance rights are no big deal to me.
Hell, when I go to the movies, the ticket price usually isn't a huge deterent, but we all know the ticket is priced at a narrow profit margin per seat for the theater owner since he often charges as much for a 10 cent bag of Orville R.'s Finest as they do for the ticket price and thats his profit motive, not your overblown movie. Its just a draw to sell popcorn at a 1,000% profit. Hell Jack, you've been in the wrong business for 50 years!
I may have something fubared in my install, but I just put it in, and where glxgears ran 180 or so fps using the nv driver in kernel-2.6.7-mm3, now it breaks a sweat to get past 90fps.
I'm still investigating why the glx stuff seems to not be answering the roll call at startx time.
tuxracer, which ran but at a glacial pace using nv, taking a minute or so to even find the quit button and exit it, now damages part of the screen and crashes, requireing a hardware reset and fsck'ing of about 120 GB of disks (can you say watching varnish dry for half an hour?) to recover.
How about the rest of you users, any war stories that may help me?
You missed the point friend. The point is that smallpox was declared by the WHO to be gone forever in the general area of 1970, and no one has been routinely vacinated since.
And we don't at this time, have enough vacine to treat more than 1 or 2% of the population, and thats very old stuff sitting in liquid nitrogen someplace. Add into that, that its not all that effective after the fact, but takes a couple of weeks to build up the immunity to worthwhile protection levels.
Now, having said that, ISTR smallpox is somewhat like anthrax in that explosive bomb delivery methods pretty well destroy it, but I could be mistaken.
I had my last refresher scratch in about 1947 or so, so its probably moot by now. When was yours? What, you never have been vacinated? Sorry, its been good to know you if that ever happens. I doubt that either one of us will be around a month later. But I've had pretty close to 70 years here and I'm just coasting along till then anyway.
Piss poor? Well, in fact it was just a 272 cid v8, the one made on the old 254-272-292-312 block family. Box stock (2 barrel carb) for a 57 ford station wagon. It wasn't exactly cherry, the back floor was sagged about 5 or 6 inches in the middle because my place didn't have a well, so 100+ gallons of water went into the cystern every day courtesy a pair of 55 gallon drums welded up end to end that laid on that floor about half the time it went to town. 900+ lbs rolling around back there could make things "interesting" for the driver, me. Times were tough, that accident was 2 weeks after I'd buried my first wife, and I had 3 kids (a boy 6, two girls 8 & 9) to raise as best I could. And I blew it big time by picking the wrong woman as my next wife. I fixed that eventually, but not nearly quick enough in retrospect.
But thats yet another story so I won't bore you further.
There needs to be a friggin' autocross course located behind each and every DMV, IMHO, and if you can't get the provided car (or your own, possibly) though the course in the prescribed time without running over some cones, then you can't navigate the streets adequately and therefore can't have a license. *That* would reduce the number of accidents, and would probably save more money than it'd cost. It'd also get some politicians voted out of office by the old and/or incompetent, and therefore won't happen.:(
Man, you've hit that nail square!!!
I am coming up on my 70th birthday, and the most fun, most educational time of my life was back in the 60's running a class c gokart, where you can make a mistake on the average short track, learn how you made it and how to recover from it, usually with no more than a skinned elbow or similar. And still do 135mph on a back country blacktop road when nobody is looking by tipping the alcohol can a little higher.
I recently wrecked our van by swinging wide left to square up a right turn, and some idiot tried to pass on the right! About 3 grand to put our 97 caravan back on the road. I didn't have the signals on so I wore the citation & lost $125.
I still drive fairly aggressively often enough to 'keep a hand in' because absolutely nothing beats practice, practice, practice.
That was the first 'call the insurance company' accident I've had since July 1968, when I was sitting at a stop sign and was headoned by a girl in a 66 mustang who was, in retrospect, probably blinded by my headlights.
So I think the practice has been good:)
FWIW, they totalled my 57 ford station wagon, but what really fried my beans was that the horse drove home afterwards with both headlights still burning. Them damned mustangs are tough...
Since the engine was still in fine shape, I bought it back for $35, and put that engine & C4 tranny in a 52 Ford pickup to hunt and fish with, my "concealed weapon" according to someone who got creamed in the stoplight grand prix by it a year later. The sign on the side of the hood still said it was an I6:-)
I realize that is the issue just fine. But the commishes ruling throws any chance of an early adoption of inter-company co-ordination on spectrum usage out the window. Methinks the window should have been closed, so that the sound of breaking glass might have awakened somebody with a clue.
Does this mean colleges can't prevent their students from setting up their own wireless networks?
I think by extension the same theory applies, and that the students can setup their own systems if they wish.
However...
IMNSHO, the commission essentially blew it, big time, with this rule makeing. Now there will be huge amounts of interference from so many radios all running in the 802.11 bands. The users are essentially being told to suck it up and tolerate it. But at airports in particular, national security may depend on that (and thats piss poor management, security stuff should be hard wired, end of discussion) and that could have bad effects, plus in their efforts to achieve a reliable path, they will get into a pissing match just like the CB'ers of yesteryear, each one having a bigger (and just as illegal) linear amplifier.
This, it seems to me, should be approached more as a regulatory matter ala the telco's, where the amount charged, while representing a profitable exercise, may not be exhorbitant. I think this may be the current situation wherein the airport authorities are looking at this as a cash cow that is to be milked for all its worth just because its newer than a WECO 500 field phones still use in the maintainance hangers out in Podunk Junction.
If and when nothing can be transmitted timely and reliably due to the congestion, then and only then will the various businesses finally get together and decide the pissing match approach is the wrong one. I see nothing wrong with each airline having their own system, but it should be open for relay usage by the other airlines on either side of them, becoming basicly a repeater system that all co-operates to move the data.
The various airport authorities involved should set the specs for any installed stuff within their area such that this is automaticly achieved. But, the ability to set such specs runs against this ruling, so it won't work until such a gentlemens agreement is hammered out for the good of all.
What I envision as a working project will take a bit more than a bunch of $40 pci cards though as to be bandwidth economical they'll need to have some switches so the guys on the far end of concourse D 3/4ths of a mile away aren't seeing all the traffic meant for concourse A.
However, since nothing is ever truely free, you can bet that if Barry has to pay 20% of his gross back to the NWS/NOAA, he will attempt to recover his "losses" by doubleing the rate he charges the tv stations for his service. TANSTAAFL
In my mind, since the NWS is a taxpayer funded government entity, we are already payng for it.
As for accuweather et all, these people DO furnish a nicely value added service in that much of the flashy graphics we tv people show you every night are supplied by these services. In terms of time and labor required to produce those flashy gfx sequences, its money well spent to pay a service like accuweather a 4 digit fee per month and get them ready made in a quite timely manner, based on data less than an hour old when that cast goes to air.
But since I as a taxpayer paid for it in the first place, any artificial restrictions put in place so that the likes of companies and servicers like accuweather have exclusive access, are IMO both illegal and counterproductive to public safety.
The fact that I just took a trip down I64 in Indiana, once each way, made a very strong impression on me.
1. While the interstate was being repaired here and there, there were places that had they been here in West Virginia, would have been broken out and replaced 2 years ago.
2. With the rest stops being the exception, I saw no evidence that the State of Indiana owns any right of way mowers, the medians and shoulders of the interstate were as overgrown and wild as they would be if a mower hadn't touched them yet this year.
3. Finding something fit to eat was quite an effort, there being maybe 1/3rd the number of Burger Kings et all within driving distance of the interstate that one normally expects. I even stopped at a grocery store intending to do my own, but their choices in snacks weren't fit for a diabetic, and the lunch meat products hanging on the back wall of the display cooler were all up to room tempurature if they were above belt buckle height, indicating very poorly maintained coolers that our board of health here in WV wouldn't tolerate for any longer than enough time to walk to the front of the store and nail a closed sign across it.
Indiana needs to get their taxpayer funded projects operating with a sensible priority, or do like has been proposed for Iowa, build a bridge over it so we can go on by without disturbing the natives. They haven't yet built a bridge over Ohio, so I bypass that traffic hell-hole if at all possible.
Yes, they could either do that, knowing full well the jerk is gonna have their ass in court because the broken finger didn't heal straight and they want evidence they did it according to accepted procedure, or simply refuse to service him. Either way, he/she is a liability they simply cannot afford.
That day is coming, the medical profession really has no alternative. Most of them have no problem with the real part of the damages if they screw up, but the awarding of punitives that are often 100x the real, or more, by a court system that thinks medicine should be absolutely infallible, all neatly defined etc etc, is the real shame of our american justice system.
Medicine, and its diagnosis and delivery are still more art, prior experience and instinct than hard fact, a situation thats slowly changeing with the ever less instrusive methods of seeing whats wrong inside the body coming online, but those methods generally cost money, lots of it. And they have to be paid for. If you are outputting 75% of the gross income in malpractice insurance, thats just that much less to spend on keeping uptodate, so its a self-defeating spiral.
If refusing service to a lawyer saves the potential of having the rates raised by another $100k next year, thats $100k that could be used as a downpayment on a cat scanner or similar gear. It makes perfect sense to me.
Slashdot Mirror
Frankly, I don't care if it has a screensaver type output or not as most screensavers are nothing but a waste of cpu cycles that could be used for other, more productive work. I'e been running setiathome for about 2 weeks short of 5 years, ranking 99.23% in the world with my two rather puny by todays stds machines. All I really care about is if its running, which on this linux box as I sit here typeing, its getting 99% of the cpu without impinging on my ability to use the machine one bit.
Its a background process I start in rc.local, so its already running by the time I login at reboot time. I do have a util that can display its results, but frankly I haven't looked at it in a couple of months.
As far as eye candy, I have a couple of those really deep space shots from hubble, about 30 megs each, that I use as background on 2 of my 8 screens. That keeps me grounded by reminding me of just how little a piece of the universe this particular hominid specie we call important is.
Cheers, Gene
Yeah, I was going to make a similar reply, it just took that link above about 3 minutes to fully load, and it was only 1/4 of my screen!
I take it NBC has already bought all the bandwidth to there thats faster than two V8 juice cans and a length of dacron string?
Cheers (or Jeers as the situation requires), Gene
Ok, got LDW851FP.EXE unpacked, but taking a look at it with less, I find it contains strings indicating that its for the win32 api only.
I've never been able to make wine work here (no real motivation) but it appears I may have to try again.
Cheers, Gene
Thanks a bunch;
r ar
I (just for grins) ran "apt-get install unrar" and 10 seconds later it was installed.
Now to see if it will work. I grabbed two different files from the site in a message above in this thread,
451S.GSB6-GSB7.patched-rs.rar
LDW851FP.
Which one should I attempt to put in my 451S, which signs on in dmesg as:
hdc: LITE-ON DVDRW LDW-451S, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
I think its the latter one, but whats the first one do?
Cheers, Gene
I own one of the 451S drives, but this is a non-windows house (well, I have some, but they are made of regular flat glass).
.rar format, and I'd assume that if I can unpack them, a quick session with dd would feed them to the drive.
I've got the patches, in
Does anyone know of a unix/linux x86 version of unrar?
Cheers, Gene
You sound like one of my users ;)
/. Its a sad commentary on our times IMO.
I think you missed my point. That was, that even though I'm now retired and should be counting bucks, when I fill out my taxes, I would be more than happy to check off a box that said "give the first 50 bucks of any refund to NASA for hubble maintainance.
There doesn't seem to be any method presently setup by which I could make a direct, to be used only for hubble, donation to the fund.
Something like the Pittman-Robertson act might be setup, wherein users are charged a 10% surtax on related purchases might be a model. I would have purchased those two images, at a reasonable fee.
Any or all of a number of ways could be found to finance the hubble, but so far no one in a position to do so has appeared to give a damn, except those posting here on
Cheers, Gene
I've already voiced my opinion to my representatives, in unambiguous terms. IMO its criminal to allow a national treasure like that to die for lack of a few million to service it.
They've done it twice before, and I don't see any reason they couldn't do it again as long as the shuttle they use is equipt the same as the one they used twice before. That might take some extra funds doing the retrofit.
Tell ya how to take a vote folks, have the irs add a 50 dollar checkoff line to the 1040, where 50 bucks of your refund would go instead to nasa.
I'd bet nasa would hear a get off your butts and doit message loud and clear cause I know I'd sure do the checkmark.
I use 2 of its deep field images, totalling about 70 megs, as backgrounds for 2 of my 8 screens. Everytime I switch to one of those screens I'm reminded of just how usefull that the hubble has been even if it was in need of a set of glasses to clear it up. The last one, showing stuff as far out as 13 billion light years, is a truely impressive image since we are seeing the universe as it was when it was less than a billion years old when that light was sent on its way here.
Properly maintained, that scope can and will be making new discoveries, adding to our knowledge of the universe and physics in general, stuff that cannot be done thru the haze of our atmosphere here on the ground, a hundred years from now.
I'd like to see them add an RPG powered ion engine to it, not a very big one of course, just enough to give it a few ounces of push so that its orbit could be maintained over an extended period as one of the things the shuttle must do each time its there is to give it a push to correct for the decaying orbit. That pushing we are told, over-extends the shuttles available fuel, possibly endangering the ability to steer at landing time. The shuttle that goes there must have the robot arm, and it must be stripped a bit in order to lighten it to even reach the hubbles altitude which is about 50 miles above the design envelope of the shuttle.
But the point is, it CAN be done. Dangerous, maybe. But I don't recall that any of the crews who have been there regretted doing it.
Cheers, Gene
And what took you so long to say it? C'mon man spit it out!
Amen to that!
To quote an example (I was a tv CE at the time, now sort of retired as I near the 70th year) we had a group of 8th grade students tour the tv station, and I was asked for a not more than two sylable explanation of how tv works speech. I blew about 10 minutes laying out the basic principles, then finished off with:
I'm the one who keeps all this working and in about 10 years, I'll be thinking of retireing, and I'd like for one of you to be nipping at my heels, trying to take my job away from me!
I was very disappointed that the class nearly busted a gut laughing at such a proposition.
That says a lot for our educational system when a bunch of 8th graders, who are still wide-eyed and wet behind the ears, have already been pre-taught that the "service" industry means picking up the trash from the curb once a week. Its a bullshit attitude, and I said so quietly to the teacher leading the group, who got all huffy that I was questioning their teaching methods.
Obviously thats the last time I did that. And none of them has come around and applied for a job at the tv station that I know of either. And its why I'm still considered to be almost retired, and will be till the day I fail to make roll call here. When push comes to shove, its my phone that still rings, asking me to come in and see what I can do, even though I passed on the keys to the office and toolbox 2+ years ago now.
By now, some of the failthfull here know that I've had quite a list of been there's and done that's in ny 55 years of working in electronics.
How did I do all that I've done in my life with only an 8th grade education? And been well paid while doing it? Interest and motivation, something thats sadly lacking today in the younger generation. I produce results, dependably. And thats what counts at the end of the day.
Really, I think the most lasting change the US gov. made was probably about 50 years ago now, and its been mostly downhill since. That change was in the tax laws, removeing the nearly 100% discounts that could be taken against the companies net for any monies spent on R&D. Prior to that one could pay tax, or pay a nearly equal amount to the R&D dept., and as long as you had records of supplies bought, and payrolls made, the IRS bought it.
Then (I think it was maybe in the 60's) the gov. decided to cap the percentage of net that could be used for R&D, and heavily discounted the deductions of that which was left, making R&D not nearly as free and fruitfull as it was. So you can guess where the money is spent now, much more on advertising and monopolistic trade practices trying to maintain market position with what is really an obsolete product since there aren't that many new ones to peddle.
To me, the whole situation is a sad commentary on todays us business environment. Those in the global picture we now must compete with often do not suffer as much from an end of the month report mentality like we've fallen into over the last 50 years.
An old farts 1934 $0.02, please adjust for inflation.
--
Cheers, Gene
When i was young the sky was mostly brown and orange. Now it is mostly blue. A vast improvement in the air quality has really happened over the years, and it looks like things are going to continue to improve!
Hummph. Youngster Whippersnapper. I was here when they didn't need any improvement.
When I was young we had blue skys unless it was raining, and clear, dark skys at night, so dark and clear you could see the milky way from horizon to horizon. The "north star", Polaris, could be picked out of the crowd of bright, reach up and cut your hand on them, stars in about 1 second flat on the average night. Vega, which will be our north star in another 23,000 years, was just as easy to find.
This was in the early 1940's, before the beloved automobile shot its wad into our air, seemingly forever, although its getting better the last decade or so again.
So you want to see the milky way in all its glory? Easy, have Burt take you up in space ship 1, but you aren't gonna see it from ground level till we really, really clean up the air, and put some real dark skys laws into effect for nighttime lighting of parking lots etc.
That will put you back to reading by kerosene lamps, and listening to the radio on crystal sets, but with modern ccfl lighting, and solid state entertainment that doesn't need a 500 watt 5.1 surround sound and cannot destroy your ears, we wouldn't be far from cleaning up the air. Oh, and I forgot, you'd be riding old Nelly the mare to school, but since it was 2 miles to school, and the last decent barn to leave old Nelly in for the day in bad weather was only a mile away, you'd walk that last mile to school in bad weather.
Been there, done that. And I damned sure miss those clear, cold as hell skys we had back then.
Cheers, Gene
Could you not have a profanity delay and drop to white noise/fault card in this kind of case.
That might be do-able if it weren't for the fact that most of the operators have other duties in between station breaks that can take them more than 10 seconds away from the button, possibly even in the back production bay looking up a commercial that the playback soft says is on the missing list in the hard drive queue. Some stations are so automated that a board op isn't required, the local break is actually triggered by signals from the network.
There are also legal enjoinders against this sort of thing in our network contracts, such conditions brought on by the popularity of the infamous 'time machine'. Which was in fact a heck of a good idea, but the networks got all bent when they found we were making room for another 30 to 60 seconds of commercial time in a 1 hour program by removing no motion frames and pregnant pauses from the program stream. We are monitored by external entities, and the networks get a summary the next day of delayed or missed commercials. So now they must be carried in real time per contract else we wouldn't be that nets affiliate for very long.
Cheers, Gene
They should do it like those security tapes... very slow tape, with tape reuse after a reasonable period of time. Every quickmart does it, why not TV stations?
:-)
Mainly because those things give such a poor playback image as to be worthless, and they run them so slow that the audio is shut down. I know, I've tried to pull a perps face out of the mud lots of times because all the legal types think we've got better gear than the average joe sixpack. We do, even having a couple of $7000 dollar (new) S-vhs decks, but they don't go that slow by about 2 shifts of the gear stick & we wind up sticking it in a 100 dollar machine because they will at least give us a rapid motion image that can be stopped and frame searched.
But it somehow makes management types think they have a bulletproof id system in place. And they usually leave our business with a few prints we've brightened up in the gimp, or freeze-framed for 10 seconds tapes of the better frames, and a very long face. After a while that gets very educational to hot shot MBA's. Part of their "continueing education" that eventually makes human beings out of the robots the MBA schools turn out
But I don't think one of our snapshots pulled out of the dark, out of focus fuzzy and noisy, black and white GoMart/7-11/QuickMart tape has ever been used to ID anybody around here. A clue maybe, but certainly not usable in court a of law by any prosecuting attorney worth his salary. The defense would probably ask permission to use it for target practice right there in the courtroom just for the chuckle factor.
Cheers, Gene
Thats an enticing thought. But with utility vcr's still available (BTW, this past years production of vhs machines was announced over a year ago as being the last run ever) I'm afraid price would win out over a potentially incompatible meduim. We should maybe buy a 12 pack of them so that we still have spares when the rest of the world has used theirs up :)
Re: your sig. I don't have a lot of faith in the ACLU generally speaking, but you are definitely "preaching to the choir" about the rest of it.
Cheers, Gene
If you have done nothing wrong, why not keep a record of what you have done? You only destroy evidence when you are guilty, right?
I think that this line of argument for forced recording of material is just like the old argument about hiding stuff: it is an attempt to impose more restrictions on innocent people.
I violently agree. I am a bc engineer, mostly retired.
Makeing us, the small market window on your home town here in the markets rated as 100+, responsible for what the networks feed us in the form of making us keep an aircheck tape of a 24/7/365 operation, at $20 an hour for the tape and another $10/hour or more for machine maintainance, will gain no real benefits to society at large, and will reduce our already too narrow operating margin by a considerable percentage. Its an expense smaller market stations cannot afford as it doesn't scale to the market size, but rather is a fixed expense regardless of the market ranking of the station.
For locally produced stuff, like our 5 times daily newscasts & morning cut-ins, yes, we do tape those, but asking us to save every tape for 60-90 days will multiply our tape costs by however many weeks that would be since like most, that tape has served its "review our own perfomance" duty at the end of the week, so tuesdays tape for the 12:00 noon cast is then re-written the next tuesday at 12.
These aren't $2.00 walmart vhs tapes folks.
From another viewpoint, we are simply incapable of responding in real time to bleep out a embargoed word when carrying what the networks feed us, or of recognizing and setting up an overlay fuzzball in real time of such goings on as the "wardrobe malfunction" during the superbowl. Our operators were as wide-eyed as the rest of the world at that instance.
Such regulatory actions rightfully should be directed to the source of the program, and not the 1700 something broadcast tv stations under the commissions purview.
As it is, we spend around 60 man hours a week scanning the syndicated and one time stuff that comes in on tape before we air it, and often wind up editing out a word or 3, but since we cannot do that to the syndi's tape, its their copyrighted property, that means we have to make yet another dub on our own tape.
This is an ill-conceived idea, really.
Cheers, Gene
Just because you were allowed to do it doesn't make it a right - that's a common problem with a lot of people who post on Slashdot - they can't tell the difference between a right and a privilege.
Yeah, well now there's an economic fact that these yahoos haven't kenned yet. By locking up my ability to time shift my enjoyment of their product, just as I can do now for a purchased book, they will have lost a quite noticable count of their audience because regardless of how great and good it is, there are those of us who will not give up that personal freedom. No smancy movie, treated as such, deserves to make its dvd/tape production costs back if it cannot be backed up in the event the original is destroyed, worn out, or playback equipment upgrades rendering it impossible to play the older format on the newer machinery.
I feel that I bought a copy of that work, in perpetueum, its now my property to do with as I please as long as I don't make a copy, and pass it on, while I retain the original. That I'd interpret as a copyright violation, as would any court in the land.
Personally, I see absolutely no difference in my buying the book, and my buying a copy of the work in *any* other format as far as my rights to enjoy that work are concerned. There isn't anybody standing there with a shotgun to my head telling me I cannot read that book again without paying for the "priviledge" again. In neither case am I about to drop it on a copy machine (of any kind) so I can pass it on to someone else, and I will argue that point at length that their treating me like a common music pie-rat when I have personally bought the cd's for at least 95% of the music I have. The rest is even older, and I have in most cases the original tapes unless they've been destroyed by player malfunctions. In an elementary schoolroom environment, that does happen.
in other words, they've lost me as an audience forever when that takes place. I'm not a rabid tv viewer anyway, and probably don't actually watch more than 2-3 hours a week, usually news. Its been at least 2 years since I walked into a movie too.
Jack Valanti and his just named successor, take note please, shoot too close to the target and you get powder burns or worse from the ricochet. The diff is that the powder burns will be on your shoulders (or lower) at the board meetings, occuring while discussing the money that never gets to your wallet because lots of us will simply 'opt out'. Your so-called per-perfomance rights are no big deal to me.
Hell, when I go to the movies, the ticket price usually isn't a huge deterent, but we all know the ticket is priced at a narrow profit margin per seat for the theater owner since he often charges as much for a 10 cent bag of Orville R.'s Finest as they do for the ticket price and thats his profit motive, not your overblown movie. Its just a draw to sell popcorn at a 1,000% profit. Hell Jack, you've been in the wrong business for 50 years!
Cheers, Gene
I may have something fubared in my install, but I just put it in, and where glxgears ran 180 or so fps using the nv driver in kernel-2.6.7-mm3, now it breaks a sweat to get past 90fps.
I'm still investigating why the glx stuff seems to not be answering the roll call at startx time.
tuxracer, which ran but at a glacial pace using nv, taking a minute or so to even find the quit button and exit it, now damages part of the screen and crashes, requireing a hardware reset and fsck'ing of about 120 GB of disks (can you say watching varnish dry for half an hour?) to recover.
How about the rest of you users, any war stories that may help me?
Cheers, Gene
You missed the point friend. The point is that smallpox was declared by the WHO to be gone forever in the general area of 1970, and no one has been routinely vacinated since.
And we don't at this time, have enough vacine to treat more than 1 or 2% of the population, and thats very old stuff sitting in liquid nitrogen someplace. Add into that, that its not all that effective after the fact, but takes a couple of weeks to build up the immunity to worthwhile protection levels.
Now, having said that, ISTR smallpox is somewhat like anthrax in that explosive bomb delivery methods pretty well destroy it, but I could be mistaken.
I had my last refresher scratch in about 1947 or so, so its probably moot by now. When was yours? What, you never have been vacinated? Sorry, its been good to know you if that ever happens. I doubt that either one of us will be around a month later. But I've had pretty close to 70 years here and I'm just coasting along till then anyway.
Cheers, Gene
Piss poor? Well, in fact it was just a 272 cid v8, the one made on the old 254-272-292-312 block family. Box stock (2 barrel carb) for a 57 ford station wagon. It wasn't exactly cherry, the back floor was sagged about 5 or 6 inches in the middle because my place didn't have a well, so 100+ gallons of water went into the cystern every day courtesy a pair of 55 gallon drums welded up end to end that laid on that floor about half the time it went to town. 900+ lbs rolling around back there could make things "interesting" for the driver, me. Times were tough, that accident was 2 weeks after I'd buried my first wife, and I had 3 kids (a boy 6, two girls 8 & 9) to raise as best I could. And I blew it big time by picking the wrong woman as my next wife. I fixed that eventually, but not nearly quick enough in retrospect.
But thats yet another story so I won't bore you further.
Cheers, Gene
There needs to be a friggin' autocross course located behind each and every DMV, IMHO, and if you can't get the provided car (or your own, possibly) though the course in the prescribed time without running over some cones, then you can't navigate the streets adequately and therefore can't have a license. *That* would reduce the number of accidents, and would probably save more money than it'd cost. It'd also get some politicians voted out of office by the old and/or incompetent, and therefore won't happen. :(
:)
:-)
Man, you've hit that nail square!!!
I am coming up on my 70th birthday, and the most fun, most educational time of my life was back in the 60's running a class c gokart, where you can make a mistake on the average short track, learn how you made it and how to recover from it, usually with no more than a skinned elbow or similar. And still do 135mph on a back country blacktop road when nobody is looking by tipping the alcohol can a little higher.
I recently wrecked our van by swinging wide left to square up a right turn, and some idiot tried to pass on the right! About 3 grand to put our 97 caravan back on the road. I didn't have the signals on so I wore the citation & lost $125.
I still drive fairly aggressively often enough to 'keep a hand in' because absolutely nothing beats practice, practice, practice.
That was the first 'call the insurance company' accident I've had since July 1968, when I was sitting at a stop sign and was headoned by a girl in a 66 mustang who was, in retrospect, probably blinded by my headlights.
So I think the practice has been good
FWIW, they totalled my 57 ford station wagon, but what really fried my beans was that the horse drove home afterwards with both headlights still burning. Them damned mustangs are tough...
Since the engine was still in fine shape, I bought it back for $35, and put that engine & C4 tranny in a 52 Ford pickup to hunt and fish with, my "concealed weapon" according to someone who got creamed in the stoplight grand prix by it a year later. The sign on the side of the hood still said it was an I6
Cheers, Gene
I realize that is the issue just fine. But the commishes ruling throws any chance of an early adoption of inter-company co-ordination on spectrum usage out the window. Methinks the window should have been closed, so that the sound of breaking glass might have awakened somebody with a clue.
Cheers, Gene
Does this mean colleges can't prevent their students from setting up their own wireless networks?
I think by extension the same theory applies, and that the students can setup their own systems if they wish.
However...
IMNSHO, the commission essentially blew it, big time, with this rule makeing. Now there will be huge amounts of interference from so many radios all running in the 802.11 bands. The users are essentially being told to suck it up and tolerate it. But at airports in particular, national security may depend on that (and thats piss poor management, security stuff should be hard wired, end of discussion) and that could have bad effects, plus in their efforts to achieve a reliable path, they will get into a pissing match just like the CB'ers of yesteryear, each one having a bigger (and just as illegal) linear amplifier.
This, it seems to me, should be approached more as a regulatory matter ala the telco's, where the amount charged, while representing a profitable exercise, may not be exhorbitant. I think this may be the current situation wherein the airport authorities are looking at this as a cash cow that is to be milked for all its worth just because its newer than a WECO 500 field phones still use in the maintainance hangers out in Podunk Junction.
If and when nothing can be transmitted timely and reliably due to the congestion, then and only then will the various businesses finally get together and decide the pissing match approach is the wrong one. I see nothing wrong with each airline having their own system, but it should be open for relay usage by the other airlines on either side of them, becoming basicly a repeater system that all co-operates to move the data.
The various airport authorities involved should set the specs for any installed stuff within their area such that this is automaticly achieved. But, the ability to set such specs runs against this ruling, so it won't work until such a gentlemens agreement is hammered out for the good of all.
What I envision as a working project will take a bit more than a bunch of $40 pci cards though as to be bandwidth economical they'll need to have some switches so the guys on the far end of concourse D 3/4ths of a mile away aren't seeing all the traffic meant for concourse A.
Cheers, Gene
And its a good one too!
However, since nothing is ever truely free, you can bet that if Barry has to pay 20% of his gross back to the NWS/NOAA, he will attempt to recover his "losses" by doubleing the rate he charges the tv stations for his service. TANSTAAFL
Cheers, Gene
In my mind, since the NWS is a taxpayer funded government entity, we are already payng for it.
As for accuweather et all, these people DO furnish a nicely value added service in that much of the flashy graphics we tv people show you every night are supplied by these services. In terms of time and labor required to produce those flashy gfx sequences, its money well spent to pay a service like accuweather a 4 digit fee per month and get them ready made in a quite timely manner, based on data less than an hour old when that cast goes to air.
But since I as a taxpayer paid for it in the first place, any artificial restrictions put in place so that the likes of companies and servicers like accuweather have exclusive access, are IMO both illegal and counterproductive to public safety.
Cheers, Gene
The fact that I just took a trip down I64 in Indiana, once each way, made a very strong impression on me.
1. While the interstate was being repaired here and there, there were places that had they been here in West Virginia, would have been broken out and replaced 2 years ago.
2. With the rest stops being the exception, I saw no evidence that the State of Indiana owns any right of way mowers, the medians and shoulders of the interstate were as overgrown and wild as they would be if a mower hadn't touched them yet this year.
3. Finding something fit to eat was quite an effort, there being maybe 1/3rd the number of Burger Kings et all within driving distance of the interstate that one normally expects. I even stopped at a grocery store intending to do my own, but their choices in snacks weren't fit for a diabetic, and the lunch meat products hanging on the back wall of the display cooler were all up to room tempurature if they were above belt buckle height, indicating very poorly maintained coolers that our board of health here in WV wouldn't tolerate for any longer than enough time to walk to the front of the store and nail a closed sign across it.
Indiana needs to get their taxpayer funded projects operating with a sensible priority, or do like has been proposed for Iowa, build a bridge over it so we can go on by without disturbing the natives. They haven't yet built a bridge over Ohio, so I bypass that traffic hell-hole if at all possible.
Cheers, Gene
Yes, they could either do that, knowing full well the jerk is gonna have their ass in court because the broken finger didn't heal straight and they want evidence they did it according to accepted procedure, or simply refuse to service him. Either way, he/she is a liability they simply cannot afford.
That day is coming, the medical profession really has no alternative. Most of them have no problem with the real part of the damages if they screw up, but the awarding of punitives that are often 100x the real, or more, by a court system that thinks medicine should be absolutely infallible, all neatly defined etc etc, is the real shame of our american justice system.
Medicine, and its diagnosis and delivery are still more art, prior experience and instinct than hard fact, a situation thats slowly changeing with the ever less instrusive methods of seeing whats wrong inside the body coming online, but those methods generally cost money, lots of it. And they have to be paid for. If you are outputting 75% of the gross income in malpractice insurance, thats just that much less to spend on keeping uptodate, so its a self-defeating spiral.
If refusing service to a lawyer saves the potential of having the rates raised by another $100k next year, thats $100k that could be used as a downpayment on a cat scanner or similar gear. It makes perfect sense to me.
Cheers, Gene