Damn, and here I thought I was the only one to notice that. There goes my karma for the day, right in the toilet.
Cheers, Gene
Re:The replacement is already here
on
United Linux Dead
·
· Score: 1
Possibly Bruce, but in the meantime don't you think the throwing to the wolves of the userbase that made them as popular as they (redhat) are will have a longer term debilitating effect on their sales? If they don't have us little millions of us home "download it for free" bunch using their stuff and promoting it all over the place, where would they be today?
Certainly I think I can guarantee that they wouldn't have that present market share without us, whom they've now relegated to be alpha testers. 'scuse me?
Personally, I think the next time I lose a boot drive and have to re-install, it will be something like mepis, just so I can promote and support the home town folks, he's only about 50 miles up the interstate from me.
The place didn't have any fire extinguishers. One uses what one has at hand, as the fire was started by the drippings of the electrical arc, and not connected directly to it, I, as A CET, never gave the shock potential any traction in my mind. The fire at that point was maybe 5" in diameter under the meter panel, having started right at the hole in the sideing where the entrance cable went into the back of the meterhead.
I didn't smell the smoke, but heard the arcing, something that as an electrical type, always gets my attention even in a sound sleep. It woke me up as that closet was my bedroom closet & only 8 or so feet from where I was sleeping. There was an offset sideways between the meterhead on the outside of the wall, and the service on the inside wall of about a foot, giving me access to tossing water directly on it once I'd planted a boot into the wall right beside the service box, an el-cheapo 100 amp model. The only alu wireing was the piece of what looked like cookstove romex from the meterhead to the top of the service. Might have been 6 gauge, but looked like 8 gauge to me. One side of the 220 feed and the bunched up shielding jacket used as the neutral had burned off in the meterhead, which is what started the party so I grabbed a flashlight and was able to make sufficient slack to get it all back together in the meterhead once the meter was on the ground in the snow. Either that or possibly freeze to death (all 8 of us) by morning as it was about -24F that night.
The bottom line is that a country boy will survive, and has many times since. That was back in the early 70's.
But age does take its toll, and as I near 70 I'm no longer the man I once was, not even once.:)
Aluminum is a good conductor when compared against equal weights of the heavier metals like copper, eg an equal weight of alu is as good as copper. But an equal weight is a far cry from an equal cross section.
Also for alu to conduct, you first have to punch thru the alu oxide on its surface, which if well aged can have a perfect insulator standoff requireing 400+ volts to punch a hole in the oxide and actually make contact with the metalic alu inside, and this is under the end of a well tightened terminal screw in your electrical service entrace box.
It is this effect that can burn your house down & why I won't consider buying any house with alu wire visible in the service entrance box. I once had to rip open a closet wall in the middle of the night and put out the fire. Had I went to wake and get the 6 kids on the second floor out, I would not have succeeded. Old lathe and plaster burns fast. A quickly booted foot thru it, and a bucket of water tossed in with a small pan was the right move. Followed by snipping the meter seal and tightening up the frying connections in the meter socket. Thats a felony, but I just called Ron and told him to come by in the morning and put another seal on it.
Its a good conductor for the money, but its an even better firestarter IMO. Usefull and safe only if you are willing to go thru the house and tighten every connection at 6 month intervals. Screw it.
I don't know what format does that, but the old standby RCA TP-66 projector used by tv stations for that had a different shutter, and did the pulldowns during the dark time of a single shutter blade.
At 16mm it wasn't too hard on the film but scaled up to 35mm it got a bit rough, the film had to be accelerated to about 70mph for that 1" of motion, and brought to a stable halt before the shutter blade let very much light thru. That got noisy.
The shutter blades had 5 "blades" on them and one frame was flashed twice and the next frame 3 times. That way you got 60 flashes per second which was quite close to the tv scan rates for Never Twice the Same Color. The lag in the camera tubes filled in the rest of any leftover flicker (most of the time). It was when the mechanism got out of time with itself or was miss-threaded that you saw the vertical smearing of the images.
The pulldown claw assembly had to project itself out into the holes in the film each time it moved the film, and if in good shape, had 10 saphire jewels mounted, 5 on each edge of the film to fit five sprocket holes on each edge. Cheaper home projectors normally had only 3 or 4 pins, probably steel that wore down quickly, on one side of the film only, and ripped out sprocket holes were the order of the day if the film wasn't fresh or the pins had hooks worn in them.
Vertical jitter (without the smearing)of the image is one sign of badly worn pulldown claws if the film is fresh, or evidence of someone elses worn claws eating at the edges of the sprocket holes if it was a rental film.
Your trivia fact about broadcasting for the day from a semi-retired engineer.
BTW, the last 35mm or 70mm theater projector I saw has a rotating prism and no shutter! The film never stops and the prisms rotation is what stops the motion of the image on the screen. Neat as hell IMO.
How many do you want, I can scratch up at least 2 100% working systems, disk drives and all, of course the price will go up a wee bit if I include the drive controllers and a pair of floppies.
Humm, that doesn't show a lot of thought now does it.
The supernova only 5 light years away that emits the gamma rays that sterilize this planet in short order, really isn't something you'd want to occur. Here we have some bit of atmosphere, with an ozone layer at the top, and which protects us from the more damaging UV output of the sun. Its my understanding that a nearby burst will wipe the ozone out, leaving the effects of the sun to do a pretty fair job of sterilizing the landscape. Sea life, generally, would survive.
Unforch, on mars, there is no such ozone layer, and not only would the gamma rays be more effectively lethal, the increased distance from the sun would not be an effective deterent to the suns UV output, which will still be considerably stronger there than on earth due to the thin atmosphere.
Theres no water to hide under there either, so an un-educated guess is that the gamma ray burst from that nearly supernova, would be many times more effective at sterilizing mars than earth, where perhaps some deep water life might survive, at least until the gas shell expelled from the supernova got here a few years later. You think northern lights are pretty? Multiply the brightness by 100,000 and say that as our atmosphere is carried away into deep space.
This sounds about like several years ago when some newly formed outfit got a patent on the US Broadcast EAS methods. Several months after the newer methods became the law of the land via an FCC edict, we all got letters informing us we were in violation of their patents and would we please remit a check for a 4 digit amount for each years use as royalties.
Since there was plenty of prior art, some of it 3 decades old, we ignored it. I guess they hassled the makers too, and eventually the patent was rescinded. I do not know who paid the attornies that worked on it, just that someone did, possibly the Harris Corp, who sold the industry the majority of the gear we needed to comply...
Our attitude as broadcasters was that we were damned if we were going to pay blackmail for conforming to a governing body edict.
I say we tell them politely to go get screwed, possibly by the camel that rode in on them.
My own "prior art" extends back to the 1991-2 area. I went online, useing that form of address shortly after I got my first amiga. MPL, in Buchannon WV was my first isp.
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Asking her for advice is asking a serial murderer about conflict resolution skills. Check your sources. Read the literature. Consider the science. Then decide for yourself. Yes there are those who want to treat cancer with human urine extract, but when scientifically tested, it turns out that human urine extract really doesn't kill tumors very well. Go figure.
Kargis Strong, MD (pseudonym) Diplomate, American Board of Pediatrics
Yeah, well, now we've all heard the official A.M.A. line from an honest to God MD! Big deal. I'm less than impressed. No reflection on you personally, you can't help feeling superior, after all your are an MD. So what, I'm a C.E.T. That and a buck will get me a cup of coffee here in small town USA.
This is the same trade that almost killed me once, by prescribing beta-pen for a strept throat, after having been told I was extremely allergic to anything related to penicilin (sp) in the same office visit. To make a long story a little shorter, my wife kept me going when I heart started fibrillating, by litterally beating me on the chest to reestablish a rythm. Broke a rib doing it, but I made it somehow to morning, looking like a piece of peperoni without the skin. I itched, had a rash inside and out. And I still had the strep. My wife managed to beg some erythromycin from another MD that knew me and my history, enough to get me well again. When the rib was healed, I went to see that Dr., one more time and it wasn't to pay the bill. It wasn't pleasant, but he took the hell I gave him because his alternative was a well deserved malpractice suit.
So no, all your pretentious title quoteing should be used as the fertilizer is probably is.
I have it (ADD) to some extent. I don't think I was all that disruptive in class back then, but I was damned sure bored out of my skull most of the time. My grades reflected that too. But, FWIW, I made a 147 on the Iowa test in the 8th grade.
I knew by the time I was in the 4th grade, that I wanted to do something in the physical world, preferably to do with electricity. By freshman in high school (as far as I got BTW) I was sitting into the senior physics classes but that didn't last very long when I saw how little the teacher knew about his subject. He completely blew the explanation of Newtons 3rd Law, and I got tossed out of class for trying to correct him. At that point, I figured I had learned about as much about things as I was going to do there, and went out to fix a few tv's for a living.
55 years later, I'm now semi-retired after spending the last 18+ years keeping a television station on the air, single-handedly about half the time. And still doing it one night a week because no one else still alive knows that transmitter like I do, its as close to being a dynasaur(sp) as I am at 69.
Along the way it has been an interesting ride, did the space program thing in the 60's, a bit of camera R&D too. Those pictures of the eyeless fish brought back from the Trieste's one dive into the bottom of the mohole, 37 thousand feet deep? Taken with tv cameras I helped build. No hard drives in those days, or vcr's either, so the pix you saw were actually shot on film with a leica, from the 8" B&W monitor the camera was hooked to.
I don't think I could have done half of what I've done if they had drugged me up to "make me conform".
Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
For all those out there thinking that its got to be a very expen$ive watch, consider this.
1. The average mechanical watch today costs way more than a cheap quartz module from hong kong. It might cost as much as 4 HK dollars!
2. The actual conversion of either to mars time is trivial.
For a quartz model, just replace the crystal with a slower one, but this gets into qty pricing nightmares as that wouldn't be the same crystal used by the billions in most watches.
For the mechanical model, the better ones probably have enough range in the trimming screws in the edge of the balance wheel to achieve this, and the cheaper ones would need a little fatter wheel, or weaker clock spring, take your pick.
Bear in mind the length of this mission limits the effective expected lifetime, and the average far eastern mechanical movement, at 3 or 4 dollars hong kong, could be hacked up with a drop of solder, then trimmed to get the right speed, and the major expense for the hourologist doing the work is the time it will take, and the expense of coverting an old watchmaster to the different standard, and even that would require a more modern stable timebase version, and about 20 minutes per movement to get the required accuracy level for a short term project such as this.
In short, if he wanted to sell as many as he made, I'd think the maker could do it at $50 a watch and make lots of margin.
But, you can bet your ass that someplace in this little charade, the taxpayer will be offing a couple of grand per watch in subsidies from some unmarked fund. Isn't there a Murphys Law corolary regarding that?
It might be an interesting story, particularly if the details can be obtained with a FOI request. I mean, this sounds like the classical 600 dollar hammer all over again to me.
Yeah, I'd forgotten about that, hell, I was just looking at the balance of trade, which indicates the china is selling us a hell of a lot more than they are buying. Either way, you're right, we are paying for it.
I wonder if dubya will reassign that money to the space program? It should be an interesting "read between the lines" if and when he makes an announcement.
We are, I think, living in those interesting times the old chinese proverb mentions.
Finally, someone is thinking about the chinese! I don't have any doubts that they will cheerfully make heavy use of the profits from selling the USA shoes and such to make themselves the leading space power of the 21st century.
There may be hard core communists still running things, but they damned well have learned to compete in a capitalistic world environment, and do it quite well. Just check the balance of trade figures if you don't think they learn quick.
As for their russion made rockets, how long have you been hiding in a closet with your tinfoil hat shoved squarely down over your ears? IIRC, the so-called Long March heavy lifter can outlift our old Saturn by a factor or two or more in terms of weight to a geosync orbit. And its been around in commercial use for what, 15 years now?
Bet on it, they WILL go to the moon. And if that works, I don't think it will get dropped like the Apollo did once it had done what JFK wanted to do, which was show the russians who was boss. They will have a plan that will make a profit on it once established.
I see going back to the moon, and beyond, as being competitive.
But what some aren't seeing is that maybe we can bring in all those "raw materials", but whose going to remedy the environmental damage the processing here will no doubt cause?
Somebody else back up the page here said we should goto the oceans and exploit them better. We have, and we've screwed them up to the point we are exterminating whole species of fish, like the North Atlantic Cod, which the last I read were at less than.1% of their numbers from 100 years ago.
Between the blatant overfishing, and the sewage being dumped by our shoreside cities, the most important areas of the ocean, the continental shelves, are being decimated of their normal fish populations. The oceans need our help alright, but the help is to stay the hell out of them, both with our fishing boats, and our sewage. Even the whales, which we've almost quit hunting, are not going to recover anytime soon to even half their numbers in the 1800's because we're killing their food supplies all the way from plankton for the Baleen whale to the deep ocean squid favored by the big blues, all with our man made pollution.
No, we don't need to exploit the oceans any more, but less, far far less. This planet can only support maybe 1/3rd of its present population and do it in a fully sustainable way. Thats another lesson the chinese learned a couple of decades back when they instituted the one child per couple edict, they knew there were too many to feed and do it well. Now, it might be starting to pay off for them in a riseing standard of living for the masses.
That said, I sure as hell didn't help, I've made 6 kids with 2 different wives, so I'm "part of the problem". I can see that now, but obviously didn't 40 years ago when I was making those kids. We are spoiled, and the religious zealots on both sides of the present war are doing their darnest to correct the over-population. They are of course failing miserably as aids and ebola are doing far more in terms of population control than a 10 pack of condoms a week, free, will ever do. IMO the disease method is seriously flawed, although it and starvation are reasonably effective. Its just that we think it should be the "other people" who get sick or starve, but bring it home and you can't get any sleep at all for the bellering of TPTB in politics. All the while of course carefully not doing anything to really fix the problem.
I guess its time to shut the hell up, this is after all, just/.
So they spread production around to Grumman, Raytheon, Boeing, Lockheed, Alliant Techsystems, Alcoa...and you've got major systems being built and tested in Florida, New York, New Jersey, California, Washington, Mississippi, Virginia, Maryland and a host of other states.
Yup, and when they put it all together it looks like a chorus of the late J. Cash's 49-50-51-52-53-54 Cadillac.:)
Which may be true, but I really don't agree about the cartridge box.
Yeah, well, the founding fathers had in mind that at some time in the future, government might once again get too onerous in its rules and regs designed to perpetuate its existence without regard to the general well being of the populous. Homeland security's recent undercover law passing being a case in point.
Why else do you think they rather quickly passed the first 10 amendments to our constitution?
Get a copy, and read them very carefully. Its very educational. Each of them is very carefully crafted to control a runaway government.
The reference to the cartridge box of course is implicite in the 2nd amendment.
You may not agree with it, but if push comes to shove, and you are the one on the end of the gangplank being shoved, and it wasn't the jury box containing 12 of your peers that put you there, what would you do?
Well, they are claiming ownership of the "DNA" of Linux (their word, not mine), and they've already stated that they would not be OK with the code just being removed.
I don't think that arguement can hold a lot of water, mainly because there is a "POSIX" document around that pretty much specifies the "DNA" if you will, meaning that the original code, modeled after a minix system at the time, has been edited prior to the claim dates SCO has given, to bring it into compliance with this POSIX standard. Linus and company have managed to run to earth several copies of the src codes that predate the SCO claims, some of which have never been updated to this date.
Some of the discussions over this on the lkml have been very enlightening. It points to the prior art of a goodly number of those named files being a heck of lot older than SCO's presence at the scene.
This POSIX standard is AFAIK public domain. In other words, you want any sort of interchange, you conform to this industry agreed upon format.
I'm with the group that thinks this is one of the more egregarious(sp) pump and dump schemes we've seen, and I've been watching stuff like this for about 45 of my nearly 70 years.
The thing that bothers me the most is that the SEC, when questioned about it, said that SCO is such a small fish that it will not effect the overall market either way. To me, thats a classic case of selective law enforcement, and needs to be addressed by the congress, stiffening up the criteria that the SEC can use to decide which case to pursue.
If it was me that walked away from the parking meter without plugging it, I'd fully expect to come back 2 hours later and find a 10 dollar ticket under the wiper. What the fsck makes SCO so damned special that they apparently aren't going to be ticketed?
Before everybody starts a whine about the billion they expect the OWL to build and operate for 20 years, bear in mind we spent about that amount just for airconditioned storage of the hubbel before it was finally put up due to delays in shceduling the launch after 1987's disaster.
OTOH, look at what its found for us. Much of that information is new, some of it has had cosmology shaking results, and all of it is extremely pretty to look at. As an american taxpayer, we have gotten our money back in scientific information many tmes over.
I hope the OWL becomes a reality in my remaining lifetime.
Some things are priceless, for everything else there is always MasterCard:)
In the time to read this, you could have been reviewing the Top 75 security tools and seeing where they fit in your environment, even if your environment is your house.
Yeah, I used to do that when I was on a dialup and logging 10 or more taps on the door a day with portsentry.
Then I installed iptables and things got real quiet. Then I got dsl, with a linksys router/switch. Now its sensory deprivation.
-- Cheers & best wishes for 2004, Gene A mostly retired old fart
I'll tell you what: I'll even give you the IP address of my Minix box. It's running Straight Minix 2.0 from the CD on the back cover of Tannenbaum's book so it should be trivial to hack it. You go ahead and have fun, 'kay?
The IP Address is: 192.168.0.25
What a strange co-inkidence, I'm in the same C block:-)
Of course thats not my verizon assigned dhcp though, any more than yours is. Theres at least one layer of NAT between me and the DSL world. Not to mention iptables is running the gateway, and portsentry standing by ready to log it if anything comes in that wasn't requested. All that of course on the machine thats between this one and the linksys router/switch that handles the PPPoE details of keeping a westell modem connected.
Oh, I suppose some would call that cheating wouldn't they?
All's fair in love and war, and connected to the net is WAR. Humm, just saw the headline go by, 2.6.1 is out, time to warm up the compiler again.
The rest of the world shall have fun looking for us, exactly what we intended them to do. Keep them out of the bars and off the streets for a while...
I just saw the announce that 2.6.1 is out, time to take the compiler for walk again.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Damned idiot, what a way to promote the human equ of mad cow disease, the one I can't spell but its just as lethal. Shortened to C-J IIRC.
Those spammers all have it already but just don't know it. I think its what makes them spammers in the first place.
No Cheers, just jeers, Gene
Damn, and here I thought I was the only one to notice that. There goes my karma for the day, right in the toilet.
Cheers, Gene
Possibly Bruce, but in the meantime don't you think the throwing to the wolves of the userbase that made them as popular as they (redhat) are will have a longer term debilitating effect on their sales? If they don't have us little millions of us home "download it for free" bunch using their stuff and promoting it all over the place, where would they be today?
Certainly I think I can guarantee that they wouldn't have that present market share without us, whom they've now relegated to be alpha testers. 'scuse me?
Personally, I think the next time I lose a boot drive and have to re-install, it will be something like mepis, just so I can promote and support the home town folks, he's only about 50 miles up the interstate from me.
Cheers, Gene
The place didn't have any fire extinguishers. One uses what one has at hand, as the fire was started by the drippings of the electrical arc, and not connected directly to it, I, as A CET, never gave the shock potential any traction in my mind. The fire at that point was maybe 5" in diameter under the meter panel, having started right at the hole in the sideing where the entrance cable went into the back of the meterhead.
:)
I didn't smell the smoke, but heard the arcing, something that as an electrical type, always gets my attention even in a sound sleep. It woke me up as that closet was my bedroom closet & only 8 or so feet from where I was sleeping. There was an offset sideways between the meterhead on the outside of the wall, and the service on the inside wall of about a foot, giving me access to tossing water directly on it once I'd planted a boot into the wall right beside the service box, an el-cheapo 100 amp model. The only alu wireing was the piece of what looked like cookstove romex from the meterhead to the top of the service. Might have been 6 gauge, but looked like 8 gauge to me. One side of the 220 feed and the bunched up shielding jacket used as the neutral had burned off in the meterhead, which is what started the party so I grabbed a flashlight and was able to make sufficient slack to get it all back together in the meterhead once the meter was on the ground in the snow. Either that or possibly freeze to death (all 8 of us) by morning as it was about -24F that night.
The bottom line is that a country boy will survive, and has many times since. That was back in the early 70's.
But age does take its toll, and as I near 70 I'm no longer the man I once was, not even once.
Cheers, Gene
Aluminum is a good conductor when compared against equal weights of the heavier metals like copper, eg an equal weight of alu is as good as copper. But an equal weight is a far cry from an equal cross section.
Also for alu to conduct, you first have to punch thru the alu oxide on its surface, which if well aged can have a perfect insulator standoff requireing 400+ volts to punch a hole in the oxide and actually make contact with the metalic alu inside, and this is under the end of a well tightened terminal screw in your electrical service entrace box.
It is this effect that can burn your house down & why I won't consider buying any house with alu wire visible in the service entrance box. I once had to rip open a closet wall in the middle of the night and put out the fire. Had I went to wake and get the 6 kids on the second floor out, I would not have succeeded. Old lathe and plaster burns fast. A quickly booted foot thru it, and a bucket of water tossed in with a small pan was the right move. Followed by snipping the meter seal and tightening up the frying connections in the meter socket. Thats a felony, but I just called Ron and told him to come by in the morning and put another seal on it.
Its a good conductor for the money, but its an even better firestarter IMO. Usefull and safe only if you are willing to go thru the house and tighten every connection at 6 month intervals. Screw it.
Cheers, Gene
Maybe it needs changed and laundered? :)
I don't know what format does that, but the old standby RCA TP-66 projector used by tv stations for that had a different shutter, and did the pulldowns during the dark time of a single shutter blade.
At 16mm it wasn't too hard on the film but scaled up to 35mm it got a bit rough, the film had to be accelerated to about 70mph for that 1" of motion, and brought to a stable halt before the shutter blade let very much light thru. That got noisy.
The shutter blades had 5 "blades" on them and one frame was flashed twice and the next frame 3 times. That way you got 60 flashes per second which was quite close to the tv scan rates for Never Twice the Same Color. The lag in the camera tubes filled in the rest of any leftover flicker (most of the time). It was when the mechanism got out of time with itself or was miss-threaded that you saw the vertical smearing of the images.
The pulldown claw assembly had to project itself out into the holes in the film each time it moved the film, and if in good shape, had 10 saphire jewels mounted, 5 on each edge of the film to fit five sprocket holes on each edge. Cheaper home projectors normally had only 3 or 4 pins, probably steel that wore down quickly, on one side of the film only, and ripped out sprocket holes were the order of the day if the film wasn't fresh or the pins had hooks worn in them.
Vertical jitter (without the smearing)of the image is one sign of badly worn pulldown claws if the film is fresh, or evidence of someone elses worn claws eating at the edges of the sprocket holes if it was a rental film.
Your trivia fact about broadcasting for the day from a semi-retired engineer.
BTW, the last 35mm or 70mm theater projector I saw has a rotating prism and no shutter! The film never stops and the prisms rotation is what stops the motion of the image on the screen. Neat as hell IMO.
Cheers, Gene
How many do you want, I can scratch up at least 2 100% working systems, disk drives and all, of course the price will go up a wee bit if I include the drive controllers and a pair of floppies.
Cheers, Gene
Somebody can't count, that should have been 192.168.0.0 to 192.168.255.255, or about 65536 addresses missing.
Also, how about the 10.x.x.x block, which I believe is in that same category 256 times more.
Just thought I'd ask. I mean it does seem like they've missed a whole ocean there with their fishing expedition.
--
Cheers, Gene
or a deep-space gamma-ray burst
Humm, that doesn't show a lot of thought now does it.
The supernova only 5 light years away that emits the gamma rays that sterilize this planet in short order, really isn't something you'd want to occur.
Here we have some bit of atmosphere, with an ozone layer at the top, and which protects us from the more damaging UV output of the sun. Its my understanding that a nearby burst will wipe the ozone out, leaving the effects of the sun to do a pretty fair job of sterilizing the landscape. Sea life, generally, would survive.
Unforch, on mars, there is no such ozone layer, and not only would the gamma rays be more effectively lethal, the increased distance from the sun would not be an effective deterent to the suns UV output, which will still be considerably stronger there than on earth due to the thin atmosphere.
Theres no water to hide under there either, so an un-educated guess is that the gamma ray burst from that nearly supernova, would be many times more effective at sterilizing mars than earth, where perhaps some deep water life might survive, at least until the gas shell expelled from the supernova got here a few years later. You think northern lights are pretty? Multiply the brightness by 100,000 and say that as our atmosphere is carried away into deep space.
Not a pretty thought IMO.
Cheers, Gene
This sounds about like several years ago when some newly formed outfit got a patent on the US Broadcast EAS methods. Several months after the newer methods became the law of the land via an FCC edict, we all got letters informing us we were in violation of their patents and would we please remit a check for a 4 digit amount for each years use as royalties.
Since there was plenty of prior art, some of it 3 decades old, we ignored it. I guess they hassled the makers too, and eventually the patent was rescinded. I do not know who paid the attornies that worked on it, just that someone did, possibly the Harris Corp, who sold the industry the majority of the gear we needed to comply...
Our attitude as broadcasters was that we were damned if we were going to pay blackmail for conforming to a governing body edict.
I say we tell them politely to go get screwed, possibly by the camel that rode in on them.
My own "prior art" extends back to the 1991-2 area. I went online, useing that form of address shortly after I got my first amiga. MPL, in Buchannon WV was my first isp.
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap,
ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Asking her for advice is asking a serial murderer about conflict resolution skills. Check your sources. Read the literature. Consider the science. Then decide for yourself. Yes there are those who want to treat cancer with human urine extract, but when scientifically tested, it turns out that human urine extract really doesn't kill tumors very well. Go figure.
Kargis Strong, MD
(pseudonym)
Diplomate, American Board of Pediatrics
Yeah, well, now we've all heard the official A.M.A. line from an honest to God MD! Big deal. I'm less than impressed. No reflection on you personally, you can't help feeling superior, after all your are an MD. So what, I'm a C.E.T. That and a buck will get me a cup of coffee here in small town USA.
This is the same trade that almost killed me once, by prescribing beta-pen for a strept throat, after having been told I was extremely allergic to anything related to penicilin (sp) in the same office visit. To make a long story a little shorter, my wife kept me going when I heart started fibrillating, by litterally beating me on the chest to reestablish a rythm. Broke a rib doing it, but I made it somehow to morning, looking like a piece of peperoni without the skin. I itched, had a rash inside and out. And I still had the strep. My wife managed to beg some erythromycin from another MD that knew me and my history, enough to get me well again. When the rib was healed, I went to see that Dr., one more time and it wasn't to pay the bill. It wasn't pleasant, but he took the hell I gave him because his alternative was a well deserved malpractice suit.
So no, all your pretentious title quoteing should be used as the fertilizer is probably is.
I have it (ADD) to some extent. I don't think I was all that disruptive in class back then, but I was damned sure bored out of my skull most of the time. My grades reflected that too. But, FWIW, I made a 147 on the Iowa test in the 8th grade.
I knew by the time I was in the 4th grade, that I wanted to do something in the physical world, preferably to do with electricity. By freshman in high school (as far as I got BTW) I was sitting into the senior physics classes but that didn't last very long when I saw how little the teacher knew about his subject. He completely blew the explanation of Newtons 3rd Law, and I got tossed out of class for trying to correct him. At that point, I figured I had learned about as much about things as I was going to do there, and went out to fix a few tv's for a living.
55 years later, I'm now semi-retired after spending the last 18+ years keeping a television station on the air, single-handedly about half the time. And still doing it one night a week because no one else still alive knows that transmitter like I do, its as close to being a dynasaur(sp) as I am at 69.
Along the way it has been an interesting ride, did the space program thing in the 60's, a bit of camera R&D too. Those pictures of the eyeless fish brought back from the Trieste's one dive into the bottom of the mohole, 37 thousand feet deep? Taken with tv cameras I helped build. No hard drives in those days, or vcr's either, so the pix you saw were actually shot on film with a leica, from the 8" B&W monitor the camera was hooked to.
I don't think I could have done half of what I've done if they had drugged me up to "make me conform".
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
For all those out there thinking that its got to be a very expen$ive watch, consider this.
1. The average mechanical watch today costs way more than a cheap quartz module from hong kong.
It might cost as much as 4 HK dollars!
2. The actual conversion of either to mars time is trivial.
For a quartz model, just replace the crystal with a slower one, but this gets into qty pricing nightmares as that wouldn't be the same crystal used by the billions in most watches.
For the mechanical model, the better ones probably have enough range in the trimming screws in the edge of the balance wheel to achieve this, and the cheaper ones would need a little fatter wheel, or weaker clock spring, take your pick.
Bear in mind the length of this mission limits the effective expected lifetime, and the average far eastern mechanical movement, at 3 or 4 dollars hong kong, could be hacked up with a drop of solder, then trimmed to get the right speed, and the major expense for the hourologist doing the work is the time it will take, and the expense of coverting an old watchmaster to the different standard, and even that would require a more modern stable timebase version, and about 20 minutes per movement to get the required accuracy level for a short term project such as this.
In short, if he wanted to sell as many as he made, I'd think the maker could do it at $50 a watch and make lots of margin.
But, you can bet your ass that someplace in this little charade, the taxpayer will be offing a couple of grand per watch in subsidies from some unmarked fund. Isn't there a Murphys Law corolary regarding that?
It might be an interesting story, particularly if the details can be obtained with a FOI request. I mean, this sounds like the classical 600 dollar hammer all over again to me.
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Cheers, Gene
Yup, so did I, running mozilla 1.6
Heck of a way to run a business when you're so married to the lord that it really looks as if its to windows ASP.
I can steer them some business, but not if I cannot see the product on a browser of MY choice.
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Cheers, Gene
I think that whole thing just got added to my .sig file. Thanks a bunch.
Cheers, Gene
"Use them in the order listed."
Was not included in the tagline I was plagerizing from a rec.guns message. I'll remember that in the future I hope.
Do you know who originally penned that so the real credit can be given?
Many thanks, that does complete the picture very nicely.
Cheers, Gene
A mostly retired old coot running linux.
Yeah, I'd forgotten about that, hell, I was just looking at the balance of trade, which indicates the china is selling us a hell of a lot more than they are buying. Either way, you're right, we are paying for it.
I wonder if dubya will reassign that money to the space program? It should be an interesting "read between the lines" if and when he makes an announcement.
We are, I think, living in those interesting times the old chinese proverb mentions.
Cheers, Gene
Finally, someone is thinking about the chinese! I don't have any doubts that they will cheerfully make heavy use of the profits from selling the USA shoes and such to make themselves the leading space power of the 21st century.
.1% of their numbers from 100 years ago.
/.
There may be hard core communists still running things, but they damned well have learned to compete in a capitalistic world environment, and do it quite well. Just check the balance of trade figures if you don't think they learn quick.
As for their russion made rockets, how long have you been hiding in a closet with your tinfoil hat shoved squarely down over your ears? IIRC, the so-called Long March heavy lifter can outlift our old Saturn by a factor or two or more in terms of weight to a geosync orbit. And its been around in commercial use for what, 15 years now?
Bet on it, they WILL go to the moon. And if that works, I don't think it will get dropped like the Apollo did once it had done what JFK wanted to do, which was show the russians who was boss. They will have a plan that will make a profit on it once established.
I see going back to the moon, and beyond, as being competitive.
But what some aren't seeing is that maybe we can bring in all those "raw materials", but whose going to remedy the environmental damage the processing here will no doubt cause?
Somebody else back up the page here said we should goto the oceans and exploit them better. We have, and we've screwed them up to the point we are exterminating whole species of fish, like the North Atlantic Cod, which the last I read were at less than
Between the blatant overfishing, and the sewage being dumped by our shoreside cities, the most important areas of the ocean, the continental shelves, are being decimated of their normal fish populations. The oceans need our help alright, but the help is to stay the hell out of them, both with our fishing boats, and our sewage. Even the whales, which we've almost quit hunting, are not going to recover anytime soon to even half their numbers in the 1800's because we're killing their food supplies all the way from plankton for the Baleen whale to the deep ocean squid favored by the big blues, all with our man made pollution.
No, we don't need to exploit the oceans any more, but less, far far less. This planet can only support maybe 1/3rd of its present population and do it in a fully sustainable way. Thats another lesson the chinese learned a couple of decades back when they instituted the one child per couple edict, they knew there were too many to feed and do it well. Now, it might be starting to pay off for them in a riseing standard of living for the masses.
That said, I sure as hell didn't help, I've made 6 kids with 2 different wives, so I'm "part of the problem". I can see that now, but obviously didn't 40 years ago when I was making those kids.
We are spoiled, and the religious zealots on both sides of the present war are doing their darnest to correct the over-population. They are of course failing miserably as aids and ebola are doing far more in terms of population control than a 10 pack of condoms a week, free, will ever do. IMO the disease method is seriously flawed, although it and starvation are reasonably effective. Its just that we think it should be the "other people" who get sick or starve, but bring it home and you can't get any sleep at all for the bellering of TPTB in politics. All the while of course carefully not doing anything to really fix the problem.
I guess its time to shut the hell up, this is after all, just
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Cheers, Gene
A mostly retired old coot.
So they spread production around to Grumman, Raytheon, Boeing, Lockheed, Alliant Techsystems, Alcoa...and you've got major systems being built and tested in Florida, New York, New Jersey, California, Washington, Mississippi, Virginia, Maryland and a host of other states.
:)
Yup, and when they put it all together it looks like a chorus of the late J. Cash's 49-50-51-52-53-54 Cadillac.
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Cheers, Gene
A mostly retired old coot
Which may be true, but I really don't agree about the cartridge box.
Yeah, well, the founding fathers had in mind that at some time in the future, government might once again get too onerous in its rules and regs designed to perpetuate its existence without regard to the general well being of the populous. Homeland security's recent undercover law passing being a case in point.
Why else do you think they rather quickly passed the first 10 amendments to our constitution?
Get a copy, and read them very carefully. Its very educational. Each of them is very carefully crafted to control a runaway government.
The reference to the cartridge box of course is implicite in the 2nd amendment.
You may not agree with it, but if push comes to shove, and you are the one on the end of the gangplank being shoved, and it wasn't the jury box containing 12 of your peers that put you there, what would you do?
I thought so...
I rest my case.
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Cheers, Gene
A mostly retired old fart.
Everytime something like this comes up, I tend to want to plagerize an unknown pair of authors as follows:
Politicians and diapers need changed from time to time, for the same reason.
Freedom depends on four boxes.
The soapbox.
The ballot box.
The jury box.
The cartridge box.
Cheers, Gene
Well, they are claiming ownership of the "DNA" of Linux (their word, not mine), and they've already stated that they would not be OK with the code just being removed.
I don't think that arguement can hold a lot of water, mainly because there is a "POSIX" document around that pretty much specifies the "DNA" if you will, meaning that the original code, modeled after a minix system at the time, has been edited prior to the claim dates SCO has given, to bring it into compliance with this POSIX standard. Linus and company have managed to run to earth several copies of the src codes that predate the SCO claims, some of which have never been updated to this date.
Some of the discussions over this on the lkml have been very enlightening. It points to the prior art of a goodly number of those named files being a heck of lot older than SCO's presence at the scene.
This POSIX standard is AFAIK public domain. In other words, you want any sort of interchange, you conform to this industry agreed upon format.
I'm with the group that thinks this is one of the more egregarious(sp) pump and dump schemes we've seen, and I've been watching stuff like this for about 45 of my nearly 70 years.
The thing that bothers me the most is that the SEC, when questioned about it, said that SCO is such a small fish that it will not effect the overall market either way. To me, thats a classic case of selective law enforcement, and needs to be addressed by the congress, stiffening up the criteria that the SEC can use to decide which case to pursue.
If it was me that walked away from the parking meter without plugging it, I'd fully expect to come back 2 hours later and find a 10 dollar ticket under the wiper. What the fsck makes SCO so damned special that they apparently aren't going to be ticketed?
Inquireing minds want to know.
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Cheers, gene
A mostly retired old fart.
Before everybody starts a whine about the billion they expect the OWL to build and operate for 20 years, bear in mind we spent about that amount just for airconditioned storage of the hubbel before it was finally put up due to delays in shceduling the launch after 1987's disaster.
:)
OTOH, look at what its found for us. Much of that information is new, some of it has had cosmology shaking results, and all of it is extremely pretty to look at. As an american taxpayer, we have gotten our money back in scientific information many tmes over.
I hope the OWL becomes a reality in my remaining lifetime.
Some things are priceless, for everything else there is always MasterCard
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Cheers, Gene
In the time to read this, you could have been reviewing the Top 75 security tools and seeing where they fit in your environment, even if your environment is your house.
Yeah, I used to do that when I was on a dialup and logging 10 or more taps on the door a day with portsentry.
Then I installed iptables and things got real quiet. Then I got dsl, with a linksys router/switch. Now its sensory deprivation.
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Cheers & best wishes for 2004, Gene
A mostly retired old fart
I'll tell you what: I'll even give you the IP address of my Minix box. It's running Straight Minix 2.0 from the CD on the back cover of Tannenbaum's book so it should be trivial to hack it. You go ahead and have fun, 'kay?
:-)
:-)
The IP Address is: 192.168.0.25
What a strange co-inkidence, I'm in the same C block
Of course thats not my verizon assigned dhcp though, any more than yours is. Theres at least one layer of NAT between me and the DSL world. Not to mention iptables is running the gateway, and portsentry standing by ready to log it if anything comes in that wasn't requested. All that of course on the machine thats between this one and the linksys router/switch that handles the PPPoE details of keeping a westell modem connected.
Oh, I suppose some would call that cheating wouldn't they?
All's fair in love and war, and connected to the net is WAR. Humm, just saw the headline go by, 2.6.1 is out, time to warm up the compiler again.
The rest of the world shall have fun looking for us, exactly what we intended them to do. Keep them out of the bars and off the streets for a while...
I just saw the announce that 2.6.1 is out, time to take the compiler for walk again.
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Cheers, & best wishes for 2004 to all, Gene