As the now retired CE of a CBS affiliate, my memories of the PDP-11/23 were far less impressive.
CBS bought a few pallets of them, and wrote the control schedule program in pascal that had to be compiled each time it was re booted, for the main network dish, a 7 meter monster from Scientific Atlanta, that was on a turning post Az-Ell mount, used 5 HP Roland jackscrews to move it, very precise and expensive waveguide switches to swap polarities instantly and even had a motor to fine tune the polarity.
The compile requirement was because they could, over the closed caption facility (it has more data that just closed captions) download updated source code to it, and rebuilding it at boot time then installed the new version of the control program.
But it crashed, at first maybe once a week, and the missed satellite switches (no crash alarm so we, unless privy to the schedule) were airing the wrong commercials, pet food in place of toothpaste etc. When the logs showed that we aired the wrong commercial, we of course didn't get paid for that, costing us money.
So we called DEC, who had a couple of recipe followers in the Morgantown WV office and who could usually get around to servicing the maintenance contract in 3 or 4 days. We were precluded from doing anything but reboot it, and the contract said 12 hours, but it was interpreted as 12 business hours, not wall time.
DEC's people replaced everything in that PDP-11 except the frame rail carrying its serial number. Over about 2 years the crashes got worse until it was 4 to 6 times a day.
Our losses got to the point that I asked the guru at CBS if he had a test mule so he could also test hardware the stations sent in as some of it was made in Canada, and customs to ship it back and forth officially didn't have a quarter to call anybody that might give a shit that it was sitting in the border lockup because FEDEX or UPS or us, hadn't crossed a t correctly. 10 grand a day cost to us meant diddly to them. So most of us, who had to send something back for factory repairs, sent it through NYC and CBS, who apparently had the fine art of filling out the many pages of paperwork to get it through customs down pat.
So I called CBS & said this is bull shit, get me a PDP-11 that Just Works(TM). Hugo had DEC move my serial number to his place in NYC, and moved his serial number to us.
His machine did Just Work(TM). The only thing we didn't exchange was the hard drive, a 10 megabyte monster, which because of a paperwork snafu at install time, had a custom satellite location table that because CBS could phone it up, they had helpfully 'fixed'. The second time I called Hugo and got instructions as to how to make that file immutable. The only time I was ever in it as root. Each time was about 2 days putzing to find and mark the locations of all the satellites again because you had to do that sort of thing in off network time. Major PIMA.
But, Hugo then had no test mule as he couldn't even get it to fully boot before it crashed. DEC in NYC was no more help than my local DEC office was, so CBS had no choice but to replace all of them with IBM industrial rated machines, on their nickel at about 10G's a station by the time they'd had much more capable software written. And it, like most IBM stuff, only got rebooted after a power failure from then on.
DEC field engineering, just the phrase running through my mind makes me recall the totally incompetent people they had in their field offices, most doubled as sales force, were hired because they could sell. Totally clueless on a service call, they kept records of course, which is how we finally knew everything but that frame rail (and the outside slip on case) had been changed. But every time they left, saying it should be fixed, the time to crash was cut in half.
Miss DEC? Its like remembering broken bones, I'd druther not.
Anonymous my ass, this was planted by some government drone specifically to make the justifiably worried sheeple think its ok.
Well, this is one of those sheeple who doesn't think its ok. Not on this planet,not even in this universe.
When our, and other governments are carrying on such activities in the name of safety, go back to a traitor named Benjamin Franklin, who once said that those who would give up a little liberty for safety, will have neither. Ben wasn't exactly a dummy. As for the traitor part, I expect the King of England considered him a traitor, to be hung where ever he could be found. So were a lot of the other names on our Declaration of Independence.
We have already apparently given up, because it seemed convenient and less hassle to the sheeple to let it happen than to go find somebody (or be that somebody) who would actually do something about what has become in my lifetime, a nearly complete dictatorship simply because it was too much trouble to call the trouble makers out and remove them from public office by whatever means that reduced them to standing on the corner shouting about some subject they aren't qualified to pronounce. If they still sucked air enough to do that.
We now have all these 3 letter agencies that don't have to answer to anybody, not even the president, costing us untold billions, even trillions in productivity interference of the public at large, each justifying their existence on selling this magic thing called safety.
What has this so-called safety got us? Because we are disarmed for the most part (in the name of safety of course), we get the Columbines and Sandy Hook scenes simply because somebody who needed to be contained or stopped long before their thinking became that errant, wasn't stopped with a busted butt or nose when it would have done some good, but today some idiots can't be stopped until they actually DO something, at which point its too late.
I can imagine that 100 years ago, these similar personalities likely would have not made it past their first drink in a bar as they would have been 'educated' right then and there by somebody who did know the difference between right and wrong. But we can't do that today because we'd spend 20 to life in a lock-up for removing such a person from the gene pool before he/she went on a rampage, taking 10 + other lives before somebody decides its time to stop them by whatever means is hanging on the belt, or on the back window gun rack of the pick-up truck.
As for the terrorists, lets all agree that the 2nd amendment says exactly what it says. And let nature take its course, get the law the hell out of judging who's right or wrong in such cases. I'll help them meet those 72 Virginians they are so hell bent on meeting, its absolutely not a problem to me.
So lets hear it from those who do give a shit about freedoms. Pew Research indeed. Figures lie, and liars figure out the stats they way they want them to be, every time. And I think this is one of those times.
Yes, that is the generally accepted practice, diddled only by the endian-ness of the processor. Personally I have trouble with big endian hardware, but that's just me. There is no reason it can't work just as well as long as the compiler knows about it. But what little programming I do today is both on smaller cpu's, and in assembly. Or for stuff on this linux box, a bash script seems to work well too.
Where I am talking about the address of the data, which may actually live in any address the hardware can access. So you still aren't fully grokking the concept.
And I am sad because I can't seem to explain it any better.
Then it sounds like you don't understand the term "pointer" either. To summarize a bit, a pointer is usually of a size (number of bits) that is a native size for the hardware at hand, and could be as much as 256 bits in currently working hardware, but typically 64 bits in consumer hardware.
Secondly, it is considered to be (usually) a pointer, which if used as a memory address to be read, would result in the reading of the data at that address.
But there are nuances to what you do with that data, because its possible that the data you just read from that pointers address, is in fact a real address, the pointer, that the next stage of this 'indirection' will be read from.
Hardware is generally limited to just one of these indirections, but software is free to use as many as the programmer can keep track of, with some 'databases' being organized around doing just that for the programmer.
This is not a new concept by any means, it could be done on the early cpu's from 30 to 35 years, maybe even 40 years ago. The 1802 from rca could do it as an assembly macro, so could the dane bramaged Z-80's & 6502's, and the 6809, which could do it in hardware in addition to its Program Counter Relative addressing, made heavy use of that ability nearly 30 years ago. Even the TI-9900, which had only one internal register, used that register as an index into the structure of a register stack held in memory, so that changing context on the 9900 was a simple reload of this register with the master address of the register stack of the next process to be given some time to run. Simple, fast context switches, an architecture that should have had more industry support than it got. I think, because its speed limit was real time memory access, the simplicity of it got thrown out like the baby with the bath water but today's cache memory speeds, right on the die with the cpu, could make the concept workable again..2 nanosecond IRQ service anyone? But it would likely take several millions of dollars to bring a modern, 64 or 128 bit version of the 9900 to life.
About as tired as you would expect a 78 yo diabetic to be. I just changed the blades on my 30 yo rider, which I had to jack up on a set of ramps, then pickup the front end about 20 inches so I could get my 1/2" impact wrench on the spindle bolts, and it will be about 1/2 an hour before my burning legs will feel like forking it and actually doing some of the first mowing of the year.
Getting old is not for wimps, I don't recommend it at all.;-)
I'll agree with the comments about there being zip lights. I checked all the so-called space weather sites I could think of, and absolutely no one was even aware of it. Here in north central WV, DC is about 150 miles due east of me, I went out several times to check, and while the sky was clear enough I found Polaris instantly, the only skylight was the usual glow from a 50k pop city 20 miles north.
As one commenter above said, we got bupkiss.
I can remember back in about '50 or '51, when we were testing nukes at high altitudes, we had some truly glorious northern lights in the farm country west of Des Moines, but its generally been pretty slim pickins since. So this turned out to be someone's wishful thinking ANAICT.
The prosecution still has the files for the prosecution under a gag order. They are asking to extend this gag order and are using the excuse that their safety could be harmed if a judge lifted it. In reality, all they are trying to do is cover up their misconduct.
cover their sorry asses. There, I fixed it for you.
Obviously that place was dying before you ever walked in the door. We all have dreams of making things better, but the first time you were sold out should have been the day you 'went out for lunch' and interviewed for a better outfit. You will never get a good recommendation from a$$holes like that, so why waste your time when we're only allotted so much of it & the only way to stretch it is to go fishing? (I've been told repeatedly that time spent fishing is when that clock is unplugged)
I know, hindsight is usually 20-10 or better. You sound young enough and savvy enough to catch up though. I think I can look back on 50+ years working in electronics and say I've had a pretty good ride for a guy with a grammar school diploma and a GED.
I'd differ with that. I was fresh on the job, just 2 or 3 months, long enough to get the feeling I would be the scapegoat. The owner came in, and a deal the GM had made in a bar 2 weeks back hadn't worked out, and as the 3 of us were walking to the back of the garage to look at what we had, The GM tried to say it was all my idea.
Wrong, I skipped out in front, spun around and said this stops right here and now, I was just following orders. The owner looked at the GM, looked at me, gave a barely perceptible nod, and started walking again. I didn't get pushed to take the blame again, but I did get pushed in every other way it seemed.
Owners didn't get to be owners without a sense of who's right and who's wrong in boss/employee differences. Tell the truth even if you lose, because if you lose, that job was looking for somebody to do it when you walked in. I'd a hell of a lot prefer to stand my ground if I'm right, and admit it if I'm wrong, and I've done quite a bit of both in my 78 years. Honesty has paid off handsomely several times.
About 2 years later another situation came to a boil, and I was the first one called to the owners office when he arrived. He wanted to know what it would take to fix it. I said 2 things, the gear these people are using is just plain worn out, its been on the road non-stop for at least 5 years, I can't get parts because the parts bills aren't being paid. I need 10 grand in parts, and I can't get a P.O. for more than $200 a month, COD. Hell of a way to run a train. Besides that, the technology has moved on. Its time to upgrade.
His next question floored me, he wanted to know if he needed a new GM. I had to say it looked like he was, at the end of the day, the biggest roadblock to making things run smoothly. Then he had another dept head paged, 3 all told in the next 30 minutes. Years later he said they all agreed with me, so we had a new GM by the next morning. That and $150,000 in new gear put out the fire. That GM didn't work so well either after a couple years, but that's another story I am not directly involved in. The 3rd one is a pussy cat and we sometimes get into very noisy arguments even now, just to entertain the troops. He's a decent man, a motivated manager, but in a war of wits with me on technical stuff, he is unarmed and knows it very very well.
Bottom line to this story is that I had already proved my worth from the 1st day on the job because they had about half the gear packed up to go back to the factory shop, expected 2 to 3 grand each for repairs with a 2 week turnaround time. I canceled that, unpacked them and handed in parts orders at about 10% of that per machine. All were back in service inside of 10 days, half that waiting on FEDEX or UPS.
So it was a question of who was worth more to the person who owns the place. I stayed there 18+ years, have now been retired for 11 years, and the owner and I are still friends.
But I had to turn it on in.fetchmailrc & when I did, without the prescan by mailfilter, it worked, its sucking over 100 old mails dating back to March 1 now. So we wait and see if it will accept the next pull request. This gives me a list of lists whose subscriptions I need to move. lkml and mplayer for starters. Now I have re-enabled mailfilter too.
fetchmail's latest does have a new error message though, which for here make zero sense, not multidrop. everything goes to me although I do have a few/dev/null destinations in my procmailrc.
fetchmail: awakened at Tue Mar 12 11:46:52 2013 fetchmail: restarting fetchmail (/home/gene/.fetchmailrc changed) fetchmail: warning: multidrop for pop.gmail.com requires envelope option! fetchmail: warning: Do not ask for support if all mail goes to postmaster! fetchmail: starting fetchmail 6.3.9-rc2 daemon
And the docs for 6.3.9-rc2 do not appear to discuss this. In any event, if mailfilter doesn't nuke it on the server before fetchmail pulls it, its handed off to to procmail SA and clamav. I see what survives that.
Anyway after 12 days, its working again, until gmail gets another fart stuck crossways I guess. As to when that might be, I haven't the foggiest.
Tell that to google. I have no access by any method. End of discussion. I didn't even call them until after my username and passwd known to be good, was rejected trying to login via FF.
I don't use webmail. Ever. Its a solution promulgated because they can wrap it up in so damned much advertising that you sometimes can't find the frigging message. Why folks, mostly winders users I suppose, use it, and put up with the hassle of spending 5 minutes to log in using a browser, when that is an automatic function of fetchmail that takes less than 100 milliseconds when committed to a background script. If the login is successful, then that waiting mail is downloaded to my hard drive at 400kb/sec & 30 seconds later I'm gone. I hit the + key and read it.
Now, if they wanted to cull the accounts that are not seeing their advertising, that's fine by me, as I have access to other mail servers. But no, they can't be honest, they have to lie like a used car salesman, telling me my machine is infected. There are 2 or 3 mailing lists, one of them a 500 msgs/day list still being fed into it. But they'll probably not notice as they have probably and old message culler that kicks in when the mailbox is at 95%. And I have no clue how much space that is.
In short, but at length in this reply, it is googles problem. They can fix it. If they were changing something that required I change a fetchmail option, they could have issued a broadcast to all users message. They did not.
Damn, isn't there anybody here but me who has been locked out of their gmail account for about 2 weeks now? I have not changed a thing in my fetchmailrc or mailfilterrc's, and have been sucking my gmail account dry at 3 minute intervals with fetchmail for damned near 5 years.
2 weeks ago, both fetchmail and mailfilter started reporting password failures. It worked about 30 minutes a day for 5 or 6 days, but has not worked since the last week of February.
I call them up, get some yahoo whose command of English sucks dead toads through soda straws, he leaves to go get someone who speaks English, but the next guy isn't a hell of a lot better, and he finally speaks clear enough that he is telling me the account is blocked because my machine is compromised. I object, its a linux box, behind a router running DD-WRT. Doesn't make squat to him, my machine is compromised.
Seeing as how everything that comes in here has to run the clamav gauntlet, and that this is a linux machine which has not had java enabled anywhere near firefox in months, currently at V-19.0.2, AND that its behind a router running DD-WRT, AND neither chkrootkit nor rkhunter can find anything to complain about, I seriously doubt it has been compromised.
I had been gradually weaning my mailing list activities, moving them to other servers precisely because of their no dups policy, so that was all the impetus I needed to just move all my subs. I still scan them on schedule just in case they actually get someone who reads english wondering why a fetchmail instance is failing to login, telling fetchmail the password is toast when its the same pw I've been using for years, and its long enough John didn't get it in 6 hours of grinding on it when I last checked with john the ripper.
Until that happens, screw gmail, and the camel that rode in on them.
I'm a hobby microcontroller programmer. I've made stuff with PICs that runs flawlessly. Written in C and assembly. One is a fan controller (switches 5 different relays and shows the output on a 7-segment display), and it's been running for probably 8 years non stop (well, the fan stops but the controller never does). Another project was a simple "street block counter" for taxis, which I sold to a friend and he's made hundreds if not thousands of them (i should have asked more money!).
And tens of little projects that more or less work as supposed.
For all those projects, it's easy to validate all inputs and outputs, and follow all code. Since they're simple to understand. Right now my project is a weather station with ethernet and data logging. It's simple on the outside but it's so hard when you realize how much sanitizing you need for all values, and when you test it for different values of VDD and start getting weird readings, and when you deal with a memory chip which can (and will) be interrupted mid-write with a power outage and your data will be corrupted. It's really incredibly hard how you find more and more potential flaws after just a few hundred lines of code (and reasoning).
So while i understand your point, comparing java to a few small systems isn't really fair. Java is a huge monster with a target painted on its back. No system is really secure, and even Mac OS (which was claimed "secure") was proved to be as flawed as anything else. Mac OS used to be something no one cared about, but now that it's gaining a user base, it's being targeted more and more. It's the same with java. And it could be the same with any other language, tool (PDF), OS, SCADA, PLC, anything.
Any system that accepts uncontrolled (by the user) inputs is subject to exploiting.
I can't make a serious argument that disagrees with that. The major point being that the individual programmer is at the library's author(s) mercy, and in spite of his best efforts, 95% or more of his 10 megabyte masterpiece written in Java, will be spent, not in his code, but in the interpreter which he has no control over.
All they can do, after exercising due diligence, is go ahead and wear the Java T-shirt, the one with the target rings on the back. They have managed to have a working app in 25% of the time it would have taken it to be written in C, or perhaps 10% of the time it would have taken in HLA dialect for that cpu.
It just, to me, confirms that old saw about getting what you pay for, where time to market is the holy grail the payment is judged by.:)
Because that would cost (gasp) money, and Larry would have to put off buying the rest of Hawaii for another 3 weeks.
Seriously, from the vantage point of having first coded in assembly back in '78, (also my age now) on an RCA 1802 MPU, one of the things I learned early on was to write a small executable that called the program piece I was working on, feeding it data up to the size of the cpu's registers, and let it run long enough its all been tried, without any crashing or incorrect output.
You can't do that to the whole thing where its tied to machinery you might cause to break or injure people, but you can damned sure stick some leds on the output bus, both as an activity indicator, and as a correctness verification. That means the guy writing the code must also be capable of picking up a soldering iron and fabricating his own test tool hardware, and I don't believe for a millisecond that a coder can call himself a coder or programmer if he can't do that. The hands MUST fit the tools IOW.
Engineering at a tv station was my paycheck for 48 years, and I have played cowboys and electrons for a living since the tail end of the 40's, quitting school to go fix tv's for cigarette money at the end of the 8th grade & still do the hot soldering iron scene but more as an aid to my hobbies, one of which is cnc controlled machining tools.
Some of the code I wrote, to run on hardware I also built, has lasted as long as the technology that required it, in 2 cases in excess of a decade, and one of those 2, the decade was after I had gone on down the road to a greener pasture. Neither ever crashed except when the battery ran down because the power failure was longer than the battery's holdup time.
Yes, dependable code seems like its also secure, but that is achieved by testing that data for validity BEFORE using it to for something so mundane as detecting when someone has gotten up from the shitter and is putting himself back together, at which point you close a switch and effectively pull the flush handle.
What is so difficult about understanding that? Just because your prof in CS101 was a pompous ass and didn't do it, I mean how dare you question MY judgement?, didn't do it, what makes you think you don't need to? I have done things in a higher level language quite a few times, but AFAIAC, that higher level language just makes it that much easier to shoot your code in its one tenuous space connected to reality, aka its foot.
I wonder if that is why I found myself locked out of my gmail account as of about 3:38 am yesterday. Fetchmail reported a password problem. I called google on that number from fastsupport, and 2 different people, neither of whom spoke English well enough to talk to this old Iowa Farm boy, tell me that something was changed in my account that only my machine could have done, and accused my machine of being compromised. I'm running linux, and my whole home network is behind a dd-wrt router. I can see the traffic leds on both the switch and the router, and this machine isn't spewing anything.
I've run all the usual suspect tests for rootkits and such, and I am confident my machine is clean. The only thing that might be suspect is the "by country" logs from awffll. India shows up to a much larger extent than I would normally associate with running a repo for a nearly 30 year old computer originally sold by Radio Shack. 31% of the traffic, a grand total of 1.33Mbytes, (I said its a legacy machines repo), was to/from India. No PHP involved either.
So, since I have more than one 'isp' at my disposal, I spent a good part of the day yesterday re-subscribing to the mailing lists I am on from a different address that is not under google's ever so helpful umbrella.
I am quite tired of the 800 lb gorilla's in this "intertube" thing passing the f*cking buck when _they_ get a fart stuck crossways.
I guess you could say I was a nerd before the word was invented, but not quite as old as dirt. I quit school after the 8th grade in the late '40's, and went to work fixing electronics. Switching to broadcasting in '62, the sign plate on my office door has said Chief Engineer at a broadcast facility since 1977, much of that time, the only engineer, and less than 1% of the stuff was 'sent in' for factory service. My interests are 'eclectic', currently putting the finishing touches on a CNC conversion of a small metal working lathe, and my tabletop mill has been CNC'd for years. Unforch, health issues, like diabetes, are making the retirement years a bit of a PIMA. The alternative however...
FWIW, there are no windows machines here either, everything is running linux. Even the CNC stuff, linuxcnc, which is free for the downloading.
So I went to the NAB a couple months later and had a ball going around to the various transmitter makers showing that letter and asking for bids on a 4.78 watt transmitter.
Kewl. QRP commercial television station. Do you QSL?
Not that I know of. Used to be fun back in the late 40's when you could pick up a Miami FL station running an Indian Head test pattern at 3 in the afternoon in rural Iowa.:)
I think a lot of the "mountain area" VHF TV stations haven't been forced to digital is because, at least in Oregon, they are translators put up by a group of local residents so they could get ANY TV. Those groups are long gone and nobody has much money to buy new equipment, so the residents got their legislators to exempt them. I think.
Nice story. Thanks.
Humm, quote parent doesm't quote it all, come on/., get with it!
Actually, translator rules are under a different section in 47CFR, and I believe they can stay by getting one of those digital to analog boxes they gave out coupons for back in 2008 so we didn't force everyone to buy a new tv when the old one was still working. We are doing it too, putting the converted to analog signal on one of the low uhf channels, but it doesn't get very far on 10 watts, I am 16 miles away and I can see its on the air is about the best I can say about it. West of the river, I think the translator power limit is lower, but some of that stuff is pretty bad technically, so trying to get a digital signal thru them undamaged can be pretty frustrating. Power is measured differently too, for digital its average, the old analog rules were peak, so 100kw sync tip peak, took 26.3kw (IIRC) peak out of the tx, which actually measures 16.7 as heat in the dummy load. the 26.3kw to 100kw was the 4 bay antenna gain. That same power amplifier, when linearity corrected for the digital signal, can make about 4 or 5kw of usable digital power since it has to operate nominally 12 db below its peak ability in order to have room for the peaks of the digital signal. Which still generates 35kw worth of hot water or hot air, whatever the cooling method used.
Most of those translators are owned & licensed to the parent tv station they carry. Maintenance too is generally by the tv station engineering staff. Cost is justified by the additional eyeballs in the ratings.:)
There is not any living quarters other than what may be a dorm for interns doing research, that I know of "inside the bowl", but Davis (I think that's the name) is only 2 or 3 miles away, south on the blacktop, and there are farms all around it.
I don't live there obviously, but have been down to play tourist a couple times. At my age now, 78 & diabetic, the walking would get me down quickly as the hip joints are about shot, and the better half has COPD, so I expect we have been there for the last time. We stopped for a sandwich & cup in that town (maybe 300 on Saturday night) the last time, and with the relative quiet on the car radio, you got the impression you were transported back to a simpler, slower time, and one that I, after all the years in broadcasting, could easily enjoy the contrast. People there seem to actually talk to each other! The hills there aren't quite as 'in your face' as they are locally. Here, you leave by the same road that got you into this little cul-de-sac, or you rappel from tree to tree just to get to the top of the hill 100 yards away from my front deck.
If they really need to use the frequencies that a technologically developed society uses all the time, then they should build their instruments in a remote enough location that regular use of technology would not be likely to interfere with them, instead of building it near enough to a town or city that a school could reasonably pose a threat just by using wifi.
Well now, aren't we the social experts all of a sudden? The National Radio Astronomy Quiet Zone, aka the NRAQZ, was setup in the 1950's as someone has already pointed out, and it is a natural bowl with 3 to 5 miles of real estate that is shielded from a lot of earthy interference because of the surrounding hills.
In 1950, there may have been some daytime AM radio in the area, which is not much of a problem because they don't listen to much below 300 mhz, 300 times the frequency of a Ma & Pa radio station. Its (the ma & pa radio) still there too.
Interesting side effect was that distant tv stations were forced to either be low band vhf, or if high band, more limited in power output. WTDV, on channel 5, about 80 Mhz, built their original facility on Fisher Hill, which was actually about 2 miles inside this designated areas borders, and was put there by the FCC's rules & regs when it was built in the later 50's because it was the highest point, and could not be moved more than 2 or 3 miles from where it a was at without being short-spaced to some other station. But was allowed to use the full 100kw sync tip peak power that any low band vhf can us as a maximum ERP.
WBOY, 17 miles north in Clarksburg and assigned to channel 12, was not allowed the high band vhf's max power of 330 kw ERP. but was limited to 100kw because of the slightly above 200Mhz frequency.
So, in the run up to the digital conversion, they wanted to recover all the low band stuff for use by Law Enforcement & because their assignment program was written by an idiot that wasn't aware of the NRAQZ, and proceeded to assign both stations new channels in the 56-58 range. That's in the high middle of the 700Mhz range. So I called the enforcement/compliance officer at Green Bank and asked him how much noise I could make on channel 58. 58 don't mean nothing so I had to translate to the actual frequency, which he plugged into his program and which said that the maximum power I (WDTV, I was the C.E. at the time) could send from 270 degrees true to Green Bank was 4.78 watts. Anything more than that he would have us shut down. I said send me a letter to that effect, and he did.
So I went to the NAB a couple months later and had a ball going around to the various transmitter makers showing that letter and asking for bids on a 4.78 watt transmitter. IOW, I had a ball poking fun at the commishes obvious stupidity.
Eventually, along with some heavy duty prompting by our Washington legal people, they saw fit to let us stay on our low band frequency. Quite a few of the tv broadcasters in the more mountainous areas have also stayed on our original channels.
As for de-funding or de-protecting the area from interference from the broadcasters, no way. 90% of what we know about the radio universe around us, came from Green Back, and to a certain extent, Aricebo. But while Aricebo can hear farther, it isn't nearly so steerable, nor as sharply focused as Green Bank's big dish. The new dish they built to replace the 300 meter that fell from rust & corrosion way back when, is performing at a level the old dish only dreamed about. It can move faster too in the event of a gamma ray burst, it can slew and be looking at the source of that burst in just a couple minutes. That facility is IMO a national treasure. FWIW, you have to take the bus into the place is your car has spark plugs. So everything that moves in that valley moves in a diesel bus, or by muscle powered bicycles.
Like Paul Harvey would say, and that's the rest of the story.
Yes, and I have turned that name & number in to the DNC web site until my fingers are bleeding, fat damned lot of good its done. Now the wife is answering them playing like she is hard of hearing and going into hillbilly vernacular as soon as a human comes on the line. They hang up quickly but they keep calling backIt just encourages the bastards.
We have one of those call centers here. They made the mistake of doing a local call campaign, so I wrote it all down, and had smoke coming out of both ears when I walked into the office. Some red headed bitchj came to the counter & claimed it wasn't them, so I quoted the callerid I had written down, then quoted the number in the phone book for them. She reached under the counter as if to retrieve a weapon but found herself looking at my carry piece faster. I said, slowly and quietly, once, that if that number ever showed up on my callerid again, that I did know where there was about 50 sticks of very old Nobels, and that I knew how to use it. She took me serious. Took my phone number and purged it from the database.
That was nearly 20 years ago.
I was serious in case anybody cares.
Anything that raises their CODB gets my approval. Point is, its my telephone, and I pay the bill for it, so I should have control over what its used for. That part simply is not open for discussion. But I think Card services has changed their name, we are now being harassed at least daily by an outfit called SERVERS TDM, at 1-213-344-4839. Make of that what you will. What we really need is the home address of the owner of the scam.
Finally, somebody gets to the real reason for these jerks. Yes, I'd say they are probably the most hated group of people hiding behind a bible in the country.
But, they are also being supported by buying their groceries and paying the light, water & sewage bills with the proceeds of the civil lawsuits they leave a trail of behind every place they go. Its a way of life. Crazy? Yes, like a fox.
If the anonymous crew could find a P&L statement, I'd be pleased to see that I am telling the truth.
My sympathies go out to all of the present Sandy Hook victims.
Back in my Amiga computin days, (early 90's) there were a group of 4 college kids who claimed to be living in that house, and claimed the pipe was there but had been shut off at the brewery end next door. Being college kids, they would slip the nightwatch a few kronar and turn it on occasionally, but the next shift would note it and shut it off, so they always had a pint or 3 in the fridge.
Whether they were BSing the troops or not I've no clue, but it did make for good reading when they'd throw a party & 'talk' about it for a day.
I always considered that it was more than likely a game of mines bigger than yours. Measure in cm & claim its inches or something along those lines. Horny college kids IOW.
I'll have to plead guilty to associating any outfit labeled 'A'nything as somehow connected to the A7 people, who let dozens of small kitchen table folks design products around their bluetooth offerings, shipping a dozen or more of the finished product, only to have them lock the door, disconnect the phones and disappear forever without notice to anyone, leaving the producers of the finished product who had paid the one time costs for the PCB's etc hung out to dry. Some paid in advance, and are still due refunds or product.
Neither will ever happen, those A7 guys covered seem to have covered their exit tracks quite well.
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As the now retired CE of a CBS affiliate, my memories of the PDP-11/23 were far less impressive.
CBS bought a few pallets of them, and wrote the control schedule program in pascal that had to be compiled each time it was re booted, for the main network dish, a 7 meter monster from Scientific Atlanta, that was on a turning post Az-Ell mount, used 5 HP Roland jackscrews to move it, very precise and expensive waveguide switches to swap polarities instantly and even had a motor to fine tune the polarity.
The compile requirement was because they could, over the closed caption facility (it has more data that just closed captions) download updated source code to it, and rebuilding it at boot time then installed the new version of the control program.
But it crashed, at first maybe once a week, and the missed satellite switches (no crash alarm so we, unless privy to the schedule) were airing the wrong commercials, pet food in place of toothpaste etc. When the logs showed that we aired the wrong commercial, we of course didn't get paid for that, costing us money.
So we called DEC, who had a couple of recipe followers in the Morgantown WV office and who could usually get around to servicing the maintenance contract in 3 or 4 days. We were precluded from doing anything but reboot it, and the contract said 12 hours, but it was interpreted as 12 business hours, not wall time.
DEC's people replaced everything in that PDP-11 except the frame rail carrying its serial number. Over about 2 years the crashes got worse until it was 4 to 6 times a day.
Our losses got to the point that I asked the guru at CBS if he had a test mule so he could also test hardware the stations sent in as some of it was made in Canada, and customs to ship it back and forth officially didn't have a quarter to call anybody that might give a shit that it was sitting in the border lockup because FEDEX or UPS or us, hadn't crossed a t correctly. 10 grand a day cost to us meant diddly to them. So most of us, who had to send something back for factory repairs, sent it through NYC and CBS, who apparently had the fine art of filling out the many pages of paperwork to get it through customs down pat.
So I called CBS & said this is bull shit, get me a PDP-11 that Just Works(TM). Hugo had DEC move my serial number to his place in NYC, and moved his serial number to us.
His machine did Just Work(TM). The only thing we didn't exchange was the hard drive, a 10 megabyte monster, which because of a paperwork snafu at install time, had a custom satellite location table that because CBS could phone it up, they had helpfully 'fixed'. The second time I called Hugo and got instructions as to how to make that file immutable. The only time I was ever in it as root. Each time was about 2 days putzing to find and mark the locations of all the satellites again because you had to do that sort of thing in off network time. Major PIMA.
But, Hugo then had no test mule as he couldn't even get it to fully boot before it crashed. DEC in NYC was no more help than my local DEC office was, so CBS had no choice but to replace all of them with IBM industrial rated machines, on their nickel at about 10G's a station by the time they'd had much more capable software written. And it, like most IBM stuff, only got rebooted after a power failure from then on.
DEC field engineering, just the phrase running through my mind makes me recall the totally incompetent people they had in their field offices, most doubled as sales force, were hired because they could sell. Totally clueless on a service call, they kept records of course, which is how we finally knew everything but that frame rail (and the outside slip on case) had been changed. But every time they left, saying it should be fixed, the time to crash was cut in half.
Miss DEC? Its like remembering broken bones, I'd druther not.
No Cheers this time, Gene
Anonymous my ass, this was planted by some government drone specifically to make the justifiably worried sheeple think its ok.
Well, this is one of those sheeple who doesn't think its ok. Not on this planet,not even in this universe.
When our, and other governments are carrying on such activities in the name of safety, go back to a traitor named Benjamin Franklin, who once said that those who would give up a little liberty for safety, will have neither. Ben wasn't exactly a dummy. As for the traitor part, I expect the King of England considered him a traitor, to be hung where ever he could be found. So were a lot of the other names on our Declaration of Independence.
We have already apparently given up, because it seemed convenient and less hassle to the sheeple to let it happen than to go find somebody (or be that somebody) who would actually do something about what has become in my lifetime, a nearly complete dictatorship simply because it was too much trouble to call the trouble makers out and remove them from public office by whatever means that reduced them to standing on the corner shouting about some subject they aren't qualified to pronounce. If they still sucked air enough to do that.
We now have all these 3 letter agencies that don't have to answer to anybody, not even the president, costing us untold billions, even trillions in productivity interference of the public at large, each justifying their existence on selling this magic thing called safety.
What has this so-called safety got us? Because we are disarmed for the most part (in the name of safety of course), we get the Columbines and Sandy Hook scenes simply because somebody who needed to be contained or stopped long before their thinking became that errant, wasn't stopped with a busted butt or nose when it would have done some good, but today some idiots can't be stopped until they actually DO something, at which point its too late.
I can imagine that 100 years ago, these similar personalities likely would have not made it past their first drink in a bar as they would have been 'educated' right then and there by somebody who did know the difference between right and wrong. But we can't do that today because we'd spend 20 to life in a lock-up for removing such a person from the gene pool before he/she went on a rampage, taking 10 + other lives before somebody decides its time to stop them by whatever means is hanging on the belt, or on the back window gun rack of the pick-up truck.
As for the terrorists, lets all agree that the 2nd amendment says exactly what it says. And let nature take its course, get the law the hell out of judging who's right or wrong in such cases. I'll help them meet those 72 Virginians they are so hell bent on meeting, its absolutely not a problem to me.
So lets hear it from those who do give a shit about freedoms. Pew Research indeed. Figures lie, and liars figure out the stats they way they want them to be, every time. And I think this is one of those times.
That is also a possibility. A language barrier of sorts.
I am reminded of a phrase I saw years ago, that said England and America were two great countries, separated by a common language. ;-)
Cheers, Gene
Yes, that is the generally accepted practice, diddled only by the endian-ness of the processor.
Personally I have trouble with big endian hardware, but that's just me. There is no reason it can't work just as well as long as the compiler knows about it. But what little programming I do today is both on smaller cpu's, and in assembly. Or for stuff on this linux box, a bash script seems to work well too.
Cheers, Gene
Where I am talking about the address of the data, which may actually live in any address the hardware can access. So you still aren't fully grokking the concept.
And I am sad because I can't seem to explain it any better.
Cheers, Gene
Then it sounds like you don't understand the term "pointer" either. To summarize a bit, a pointer is usually of a size (number of bits) that is a native size for the hardware at hand, and could be as much as 256 bits in currently working hardware, but typically 64 bits in consumer hardware.
Secondly, it is considered to be (usually) a pointer, which if used as a memory address to be read, would result in the reading of the data at that address.
But there are nuances to what you do with that data, because its possible that the data you just read from that pointers address, is in fact a real address, the pointer, that the next stage of this 'indirection' will be read from.
Hardware is generally limited to just one of these indirections, but software is free to use as many as the programmer can keep track of, with some 'databases' being organized around doing just that for the programmer.
This is not a new concept by any means, it could be done on the early cpu's from 30 to 35 years, maybe even 40 years ago. The 1802 from rca could do it as an assembly macro, so could the dane bramaged Z-80's & 6502's, and the 6809, which could do it in hardware in addition to its Program Counter Relative addressing, made heavy use of that ability nearly 30 years ago. Even the TI-9900, which had only one internal register, used that register as an index into the structure of a register stack held in memory, so that changing context on the 9900 was a simple reload of this register with the master address of the register stack of the next process to be given some time to run. Simple, fast context switches, an architecture that should have had more industry support than it got. I think, because its speed limit was real time memory access, the simplicity of it got thrown out like the baby with the bath water but today's cache memory speeds, right on the die with the cpu, could make the concept workable again. .2 nanosecond IRQ service anyone? But it would likely take several millions of dollars to bring a modern, 64 or 128 bit version of the 9900 to life.
Cheers, Gene
About as tired as you would expect a 78 yo diabetic to be. I just changed the blades on my 30 yo rider, which I had to jack up on a set of ramps, then pickup the front end about 20 inches so I could get my 1/2" impact wrench on the spindle bolts, and it will be about 1/2 an hour before my burning legs will feel like forking it and actually doing some of the first mowing of the year.
Getting old is not for wimps, I don't recommend it at all. ;-)
Cheers, Gene,
I'll agree with the comments about there being zip lights. I checked all the so-called space weather sites I could think of, and absolutely no one was even aware of it. Here in north central WV, DC is about 150 miles due east of me, I went out several times to check, and while the sky was clear enough I found Polaris instantly, the only skylight was the usual glow from a 50k pop city 20 miles north.
As one commenter above said, we got bupkiss.
I can remember back in about '50 or '51, when we were testing nukes at high altitudes, we had some truly glorious northern lights in the farm country west of Des Moines, but its generally been pretty slim pickins since. So this turned out to be someone's wishful thinking ANAICT.
Cheers, Gene.
The prosecution still has the files for the prosecution under a gag order. They are asking to extend this gag order and are using the excuse that their safety could be harmed if a judge lifted it. In reality, all they are trying to do is cover up their misconduct.
cover their sorry asses. There, I fixed it for you.
Obviously that place was dying before you ever walked in the door. We all have dreams of making things better, but the first time you were sold out should have been the day you 'went out for lunch' and interviewed for a better outfit. You will never get a good recommendation from a$$holes like that, so why waste your time when we're only allotted so much of it & the only way to stretch it is to go fishing? (I've been told repeatedly that time spent fishing is when that clock is unplugged)
I know, hindsight is usually 20-10 or better. You sound young enough and savvy enough to catch up though. I think I can look back on 50+ years working in electronics and say I've had a pretty good ride for a guy with a grammar school diploma and a GED.
Cheers, Gene
I'd differ with that. I was fresh on the job, just 2 or 3 months, long enough to get the feeling I would be the scapegoat. The owner came in, and a deal the GM had made in a bar 2 weeks back hadn't worked out, and as the 3 of us were walking to the back of the garage to look at what we had, The GM tried to say it was all my idea.
Wrong, I skipped out in front, spun around and said this stops right here and now, I was just following orders. The owner looked at the GM, looked at me, gave a barely perceptible nod, and started walking again. I didn't get pushed to take the blame again, but I did get pushed in every other way it seemed.
Owners didn't get to be owners without a sense of who's right and who's wrong in boss/employee differences. Tell the truth even if you lose, because if you lose, that job was looking for somebody to do it when you walked in. I'd a hell of a lot prefer to stand my ground if I'm right, and admit it if I'm wrong, and I've done quite a bit of both in my 78 years. Honesty has paid off handsomely several times.
About 2 years later another situation came to a boil, and I was the first one called to the owners office when he arrived. He wanted to know what it would take to fix it. I said 2 things, the gear these people are using is just plain worn out, its been on the road non-stop for at least 5 years, I can't get parts because the parts bills aren't being paid. I need 10 grand in parts, and I can't get a P.O. for more than $200 a month, COD. Hell of a way to run a train. Besides that, the technology has moved on. Its time to upgrade.
His next question floored me, he wanted to know if he needed a new GM. I had to say it looked like he was, at the end of the day, the biggest roadblock to making things run smoothly. Then he had another dept head paged, 3 all told in the next 30 minutes. Years later he said they all agreed with me, so we had a new GM by the next morning. That and $150,000 in new gear put out the fire. That GM didn't work so well either after a couple years, but that's another story I am not directly involved in. The 3rd one is a pussy cat and we sometimes get into very noisy arguments even now, just to entertain the troops. He's a decent man, a motivated manager, but in a war of wits with me on technical stuff, he is unarmed and knows it very very well.
Bottom line to this story is that I had already proved my worth from the 1st day on the job because they had about half the gear packed up to go back to the factory shop, expected 2 to 3 grand each for repairs with a 2 week turnaround time. I canceled that, unpacked them and handed in parts orders at about 10% of that per machine. All were back in service inside of 10 days, half that waiting on FEDEX or UPS.
So it was a question of who was worth more to the person who owns the place. I stayed there 18+ years, have now been retired for 11 years, and the owner and I are still friends.
Cheers, Gene
Not from fetchmail:
But I had to turn it on in .fetchmailrc & when I did, without the prescan by mailfilter, it worked, its sucking over 100 old mails dating back to March 1 now. So we wait and see if it will accept the next pull request. This gives me a list of lists whose subscriptions I need to move. lkml and mplayer for starters. Now I have re-enabled mailfilter too.
fetchmail's latest does have a new error message though, which for here make zero sense, not multidrop. everything goes to me although I do have a few /dev/null destinations in my procmailrc.
fetchmail: awakened at Tue Mar 12 11:46:52 2013
fetchmail: restarting fetchmail (/home/gene/.fetchmailrc changed)
fetchmail: warning: multidrop for pop.gmail.com requires envelope option!
fetchmail: warning: Do not ask for support if all mail goes to postmaster!
fetchmail: starting fetchmail 6.3.9-rc2 daemon
And the docs for 6.3.9-rc2 do not appear to discuss this. In any event, if mailfilter doesn't nuke it on the server before fetchmail pulls it, its handed off to to procmail SA and clamav. I see what survives that.
Anyway after 12 days, its working again, until gmail gets another fart stuck crossways I guess. As to when that might be, I haven't the foggiest.
Cheers, Gene.
Tell that to google. I have no access by any method. End of discussion. I didn't even call them until after my username and passwd known to be good, was rejected trying to login via FF.
I don't use webmail. Ever. Its a solution promulgated because they can wrap it up in so damned much advertising that you sometimes can't find the frigging message. Why folks, mostly winders users I suppose, use it, and put up with the hassle of spending 5 minutes to log in using a browser, when that is an automatic function of fetchmail that takes less than 100 milliseconds when committed to a background script. If the login is successful, then that waiting mail is downloaded to my hard drive at 400kb/sec & 30 seconds later I'm gone. I hit the + key and read it.
Now, if they wanted to cull the accounts that are not seeing their advertising, that's fine by me, as I have access to other mail servers. But no, they can't be honest, they have to lie like a used car salesman, telling me my machine is infected. There are 2 or 3 mailing lists, one of them a 500 msgs/day list still being fed into it. But they'll probably not notice as they have probably and old message culler that kicks in when the mailbox is at 95%. And I have no clue how much space that is.
In short, but at length in this reply, it is googles problem. They can fix it. If they were changing something that required I change a fetchmail option, they could have issued a broadcast to all users message. They did not.
Cheers, Gene
Damn, isn't there anybody here but me who has been locked out of their gmail account for about 2 weeks now? I have not changed a thing in my fetchmailrc or mailfilterrc's, and have been sucking my gmail account dry at 3 minute intervals with fetchmail for damned near 5 years.
2 weeks ago, both fetchmail and mailfilter started reporting password failures. It worked about 30 minutes a day for 5 or 6 days, but has not worked since the last week of February.
I call them up, get some yahoo whose command of English sucks dead toads through soda straws, he leaves to go get someone who speaks English, but the next guy isn't a hell of a lot better, and he finally speaks clear enough that he is telling me the account is blocked because my machine is compromised. I object, its a linux box, behind a router running DD-WRT. Doesn't make squat to him, my machine is compromised.
Seeing as how everything that comes in here has to run the clamav gauntlet, and that this is a linux machine which has not had java enabled anywhere near firefox in months, currently at V-19.0.2, AND that its behind a router running DD-WRT, AND neither chkrootkit nor rkhunter can find anything to complain about, I seriously doubt it has been compromised.
I had been gradually weaning my mailing list activities, moving them to other servers precisely because of their no dups policy, so that was all the impetus I needed to just move all my subs. I still scan them on schedule just in case they actually get someone who reads english wondering why a fetchmail instance is failing to login, telling fetchmail the password is toast when its the same pw I've been using for years, and its long enough John didn't get it in 6 hours of grinding on it when I last checked with john the ripper.
Until that happens, screw gmail, and the camel that rode in on them.
Cheers, Gene
I'm a hobby microcontroller programmer. I've made stuff with PICs that runs flawlessly. Written in C and assembly. One is a fan controller (switches 5 different relays and shows the output on a 7-segment display), and it's been running for probably 8 years non stop (well, the fan stops but the controller never does).
Another project was a simple "street block counter" for taxis, which I sold to a friend and he's made hundreds if not thousands of them (i should have asked more money!).
And tens of little projects that more or less work as supposed.
For all those projects, it's easy to validate all inputs and outputs, and follow all code. Since they're simple to understand. Right now my project is a weather station with ethernet and data logging. It's simple on the outside but it's so hard when you realize how much sanitizing you need for all values, and when you test it for different values of VDD and start getting weird readings, and when you deal with a memory chip which can (and will) be interrupted mid-write with a power outage and your data will be corrupted. It's really incredibly hard how you find more and more potential flaws after just a few hundred lines of code (and reasoning).
So while i understand your point, comparing java to a few small systems isn't really fair. Java is a huge monster with a target painted on its back. No system is really secure, and even Mac OS (which was claimed "secure") was proved to be as flawed as anything else. Mac OS used to be something no one cared about, but now that it's gaining a user base, it's being targeted more and more. It's the same with java. And it could be the same with any other language, tool (PDF), OS, SCADA, PLC, anything.
Any system that accepts uncontrolled (by the user) inputs is subject to exploiting.
I can't make a serious argument that disagrees with that. The major point being that the individual programmer is at the library's author(s) mercy, and in spite of his best efforts, 95% or more of his 10 megabyte masterpiece written in Java, will be spent, not in his code, but in the interpreter which he has no control over.
All they can do, after exercising due diligence, is go ahead and wear the Java T-shirt, the one with the target rings on the back. They have managed to have a working app in 25% of the time it would have taken it to be written in C, or perhaps 10% of the time it would have taken in HLA dialect for that cpu.
It just, to me, confirms that old saw about getting what you pay for, where time to market is the holy grail the payment is judged by. :)
Cheers, Gene
Because that would cost (gasp) money, and Larry would have to put off buying the rest of Hawaii for another 3 weeks.
Seriously, from the vantage point of having first coded in assembly back in '78, (also my age now) on an RCA 1802 MPU, one of the things I learned early on was to write a small executable that called the program piece I was working on, feeding it data up to the size of the cpu's registers, and let it run long enough its all been tried, without any crashing or incorrect output.
You can't do that to the whole thing where its tied to machinery you might cause to break or injure people, but you can damned sure stick some leds on the output bus, both as an activity indicator, and as a correctness verification. That means the guy writing the code must also be capable of picking up a soldering iron and fabricating his own test tool hardware, and I don't believe for a millisecond that a coder can call himself a coder or programmer if he can't do that. The hands MUST fit the tools IOW.
Engineering at a tv station was my paycheck for 48 years, and I have played cowboys and electrons for a living since the tail end of the 40's, quitting school to go fix tv's for cigarette money at the end of the 8th grade & still do the hot soldering iron scene but more as an aid to my hobbies, one of which is cnc controlled machining tools.
Some of the code I wrote, to run on hardware I also built, has lasted as long as the technology that required it, in 2 cases in excess of a decade, and one of those 2, the decade was after I had gone on down the road to a greener pasture. Neither ever crashed except when the battery ran down because the power failure was longer than the battery's holdup time.
Yes, dependable code seems like its also secure, but that is achieved by testing that data for validity BEFORE using it to for something so mundane as detecting when someone has gotten up from the shitter and is putting himself back together, at which point you close a switch and effectively pull the flush handle.
What is so difficult about understanding that? Just because your prof in CS101 was a pompous ass and didn't do it, I mean how dare you question MY judgement?, didn't do it, what makes you think you don't need to? I have done things in a higher level language quite a few times, but AFAIAC, that higher level language just makes it that much easier to shoot your code in its one tenuous space connected to reality, aka its foot.
My 2 cents for today.
Cheers, Gene
I wonder if that is why I found myself locked out of my gmail account as of about 3:38 am yesterday. Fetchmail reported a password problem. I called google on that number from fastsupport, and 2 different people, neither of whom spoke English well enough to talk to this old Iowa Farm boy, tell me that something was changed in my account that only my machine could have done, and accused my machine of being compromised. I'm running linux, and my whole home network is behind a dd-wrt router. I can see the traffic leds on both the switch and the router, and this machine isn't spewing anything.
I've run all the usual suspect tests for rootkits and such, and I am confident my machine is clean. The only thing that might be suspect is the "by country" logs from awffll. India shows up to a much larger extent than I would normally associate with running a repo for a nearly 30 year old computer originally sold by Radio Shack. 31% of the traffic, a grand total of 1.33Mbytes, (I said its a legacy machines repo), was to/from India. No PHP involved either.
So, since I have more than one 'isp' at my disposal, I spent a good part of the day yesterday re-subscribing to the mailing lists I am on from a different address that is not under google's ever so helpful umbrella.
I am quite tired of the 800 lb gorilla's in this "intertube" thing passing the f*cking buck when _they_ get a fart stuck crossways.
Cheers, Gene
Many thanks for the flowers.
I guess you could say I was a nerd before the word was invented, but not quite as old as dirt. I quit school after the 8th grade in the late '40's, and went to work fixing electronics. Switching to broadcasting in '62, the sign plate on my office door has said Chief Engineer at a broadcast facility since 1977, much of that time, the only engineer, and less than 1% of the stuff was 'sent in' for factory service. My interests are 'eclectic', currently putting the finishing touches on a CNC conversion of a small metal working lathe, and my tabletop mill has been CNC'd for years. Unforch, health issues, like diabetes, are making the retirement years a bit of a PIMA. The alternative however...
FWIW, there are no windows machines here either, everything is running linux. Even the CNC stuff, linuxcnc, which is free for the downloading.
Cheers, Gene
So I went to the NAB a couple months later and had a ball going around to the various transmitter makers showing that letter and asking for bids on a 4.78 watt transmitter.
Kewl. QRP commercial television station. Do you QSL?
Not that I know of. Used to be fun back in the late 40's when you could pick up a Miami FL station running an Indian Head test pattern at 3 in the afternoon in rural Iowa. :)
I think a lot of the "mountain area" VHF TV stations haven't been forced to digital is because, at least in Oregon, they are translators put up by a group of local residents so they could get ANY TV. Those groups are long gone and nobody has much money to buy new equipment, so the residents got their legislators to exempt them. I think.
Nice story. Thanks.
Humm, quote parent doesm't quote it all, come on /., get with it!
Actually, translator rules are under a different section in 47CFR, and I believe they can stay by getting one of those digital to analog boxes they gave out coupons for back in 2008 so we didn't force everyone to buy a new tv when the old one was still working. We are doing it too, putting the converted to analog signal on one of the low uhf channels, but it doesn't get very far on 10 watts, I am 16 miles away and I can see its on the air is about the best I can say about it. West of the river, I think the translator power limit is lower, but some of that stuff is pretty bad technically, so trying to get a digital signal thru them undamaged can be pretty frustrating. Power is measured differently too, for digital its average, the old analog rules were peak, so 100kw sync tip peak, took 26.3kw (IIRC) peak out of the tx, which actually measures 16.7 as heat in the dummy load. the 26.3kw to 100kw was the 4 bay antenna gain. That same power amplifier, when linearity corrected for the digital signal, can make about 4 or 5kw of usable digital power since it has to operate nominally 12 db below its peak ability in order to have room for the peaks of the digital signal. Which still generates 35kw worth of hot water or hot air, whatever the cooling method used.
Most of those translators are owned & licensed to the parent tv station they carry. Maintenance too is generally by the tv station engineering staff. Cost is justified by the additional eyeballs in the ratings. :)
There is not any living quarters other than what may be a dorm for interns doing research, that I know of "inside the bowl", but Davis (I think that's the name) is only 2 or 3 miles away, south on the blacktop, and there are farms all around it.
I don't live there obviously, but have been down to play tourist a couple times. At my age now, 78 & diabetic, the walking would get me down quickly as the hip joints are about shot, and the better half has COPD, so I expect we have been there for the last time. We stopped for a sandwich & cup in that town (maybe 300 on Saturday night) the last time, and with the relative quiet on the car radio, you got the impression you were transported back to a simpler, slower time, and one that I, after all the years in broadcasting, could easily enjoy the contrast. People there seem to actually talk to each other! The hills there aren't quite as 'in your face' as they are locally. Here, you leave by the same road that got you into this little cul-de-sac, or you rappel from tree to tree just to get to the top of the hill 100 yards away from my front deck.
Cheers, Gene
If they really need to use the frequencies that a technologically developed society uses all the time, then they should build their instruments in a remote enough location that regular use of technology would not be likely to interfere with them, instead of building it near enough to a town or city that a school could reasonably pose a threat just by using wifi.
Well now, aren't we the social experts all of a sudden? The National Radio Astronomy Quiet Zone, aka the NRAQZ, was setup in the 1950's as someone has already pointed out, and it is a natural bowl with 3 to 5 miles of real estate that is shielded from a lot of earthy interference because of the surrounding hills.
In 1950, there may have been some daytime AM radio in the area, which is not much of a problem because they don't listen to much below 300 mhz, 300 times the frequency of a Ma & Pa radio station. Its (the ma & pa radio) still there too.
Interesting side effect was that distant tv stations were forced to either be low band vhf, or if high band, more limited in power output. WTDV, on channel 5, about 80 Mhz, built their original facility on Fisher Hill, which was actually about 2 miles inside this designated areas borders, and was put there by the FCC's rules & regs when it was built in the later 50's because it was the highest point, and could not be moved more than 2 or 3 miles from where it a was at without being short-spaced to some other station. But was allowed to use the full 100kw sync tip peak power that any low band vhf can us as a maximum ERP.
WBOY, 17 miles north in Clarksburg and assigned to channel 12, was not allowed the high band vhf's max power of 330 kw ERP. but was limited to 100kw because of the slightly above 200Mhz frequency.
So, in the run up to the digital conversion, they wanted to recover all the low band stuff for use by Law Enforcement & because their assignment program was written by an idiot that wasn't aware of the NRAQZ, and proceeded to assign both stations new channels in the 56-58 range. That's in the high middle of the 700Mhz range. So I called the enforcement/compliance officer at Green Bank and asked him how much noise I could make on channel 58. 58 don't mean nothing so I had to translate to the actual frequency, which he plugged into his program and which said that the maximum power I (WDTV, I was the C.E. at the time) could send from 270 degrees true to Green Bank was 4.78 watts. Anything more than that he would have us shut down. I said send me a letter to that effect, and he did.
So I went to the NAB a couple months later and had a ball going around to the various transmitter makers showing that letter and asking for bids on a 4.78 watt transmitter. IOW, I had a ball poking fun at the commishes obvious stupidity.
Eventually, along with some heavy duty prompting by our Washington legal people, they saw fit to let us stay on our low band frequency. Quite a few of the tv broadcasters in the more mountainous areas have also stayed on our original channels.
As for de-funding or de-protecting the area from interference from the broadcasters, no way. 90% of what we know about the radio universe around us, came from Green Back, and to a certain extent, Aricebo. But while Aricebo can hear farther, it isn't nearly so steerable, nor as sharply focused as Green Bank's big dish. The new dish they built to replace the 300 meter that fell from rust & corrosion way back when, is performing at a level the old dish only dreamed about. It can move faster too in the event of a gamma ray burst, it can slew and be looking at the source of that burst in just a couple minutes. That facility is IMO a national treasure. FWIW, you have to take the bus into the place is your car has spark plugs. So everything that moves in that valley moves in a diesel bus, or by muscle powered bicycles.
Like Paul Harvey would say, and that's the rest of the story.
Cheers, Gene
Yes, and I have turned that name & number in to the DNC web site until my fingers are bleeding, fat damned lot of good its done. Now the wife is answering them playing like she is hard of hearing and going into hillbilly vernacular as soon as a human comes on the line. They hang up quickly but they keep calling backIt just encourages the bastards.
We have one of those call centers here. They made the mistake of doing a local call campaign, so I wrote it all down, and had smoke coming out of both ears when I walked into the office. Some red headed bitchj came to the counter & claimed it wasn't them, so I quoted the callerid I had written down, then quoted the number in the phone book for them. She reached under the counter as if to retrieve a weapon but found herself looking at my carry piece faster. I said, slowly and quietly, once, that if that number ever showed up on my callerid again, that I did know where there was about 50 sticks of very old Nobels, and that I knew how to use it. She took me serious. Took my phone number and purged it from the database.
That was nearly 20 years ago.
I was serious in case anybody cares.
Anything that raises their CODB gets my approval. Point is, its my telephone, and I pay the bill for it, so I should have control over what its used for. That part simply is not open for discussion. But I think Card services has changed their name, we are now being harassed at least daily by an outfit called SERVERS TDM, at 1-213-344-4839. Make of that what you will. What we really need is the home address of the owner of the scam.
Finally, somebody gets to the real reason for these jerks. Yes, I'd say they are probably the most hated group of people hiding behind a bible in the country.
But, they are also being supported by buying their groceries and paying the light, water & sewage bills with the proceeds of the civil lawsuits they leave a trail of behind every place they go. Its a way of life. Crazy? Yes, like a fox.
If the anonymous crew could find a P&L statement, I'd be pleased to see that I am telling the truth.
My sympathies go out to all of the present Sandy Hook victims.
No Cheers tonight, Gene
Back in my Amiga computin days, (early 90's) there were a group of 4 college kids who claimed to be living in that house, and claimed the pipe was there but had been shut off at the brewery end next door. Being college kids, they would slip the nightwatch a few kronar and turn it on occasionally, but the next shift would note it and shut it off, so they always had a pint or 3 in the fridge.
Whether they were BSing the troops or not I've no clue, but it did make for good reading when they'd throw a party & 'talk' about it for a day.
I always considered that it was more than likely a game of mines bigger than yours. Measure in cm & claim its inches or something along those lines. Horny college kids IOW.
Cheers, Gene
I'll have to plead guilty to associating any outfit labeled 'A'nything as somehow connected to the A7 people, who let dozens of small kitchen table folks design products around their bluetooth offerings, shipping a dozen or more of the finished product, only to have them lock the door, disconnect the phones and disappear forever without notice to anyone, leaving the producers of the finished product who had paid the one time costs for the PCB's etc hung out to dry. Some paid in advance, and are still due refunds or product.
Neither will ever happen, those A7 guys covered seem to have covered their exit tracks quite well.
I believe the operative phrase is Caveat Emptor?
Cheers, Gene