Yeh, there will probably be a lot of really nifty high technology cars out there by 2010.
Remember though that California Law exempts cars over 30 years old from the smog tests. My take is that although these older antiques will still be legal to use on the road, the owner will be required to at least maintain the vehicle to such an extent that it doesn't make one helluva mess wherever it goes.
I'm sure you've seen em.. just one car fogging up the entire area.. you would swear the guy is probably burning motor oil for fuel. It looks like this is what they are after.
There are so many variables involved that they would have to set the devices to trap the really gross polluters so they don't get a lot of false positives. But then, what do we do if a new style of exhaust pipes come out.. dressing them up the side of the vehicle like on Diesel trucks, where the sensors won't see em?
Side note... ever noted how much crap a large diesel truck emits when trying to accelerate, yet they are relatively clean once they are no longer straining for acceleration? My guess is that the truck pollutes about the same for a mile of transport, or to recover from one stop. Now, if we could get those babies up to 40 mph or so, and sync to them, we would all have a lot less diesel smoke to breathe.
( Finally! Somebody else out there who is probably puzzled beyond imagination over the number 137, and why it keeps popping up all over the place when studying physical parameters of the Universe. 137. Exactly 137. Not the tiniest bit more or less. Just a naked dimensionless 137.)
As an old fogey whose spent a lot of his life in this field, one thing I have noted is that things are getting very complex, but at the same time schedules are getting compressed. When I was coming online, Gene Kranz ( "Failure is NOT an option" ) was the guy I formed a role model to. We were getting one chance at the moon, and it had to be a good one. A helluva lot of good guys worked and worked on that one, and we did it. Now that it had been done, we had to shift gears to a new paradigm... Dan Goldin's "Faster, Better, Cheaper". Yeh, that is definitely something to strive for.. but the problem is that it does take time to consider all the design variables.
In the "Star Trek Universe", very sophisticated design problems surface and have the solutions implemented by the next scene. Great for TV, but I will tell you there is no way I could do that. It takes me time to study the problem, try to make some models to simulate on, make a few prototypes, debug, make some more prototypes, debug, and maybe go through this several times before I think I have a workable thing, and why it works - and what its weak points are. Its not a five-minute task.
I don't care what those One-Minute Manager books harp on... I am still running God's NeuralNet WetWare version 1.0 ( first release ). The more things I have to consider, the more time I need to mull things over. Yes, you can use Management techniques on me to "improve my productivity", just like you can yank a welder's work out from under him before he's done or yank a meal from a chef before its ready for the table.
One of the saddest things I note about this whole affair is that the people who seemed most dedicated to their work were the first to be dismissed from their jobs for not kowtowing to management pressure. The most knowledgeable guys were under the most pressure, as they knew the inevitable results of a poor design and felt responsible. The most successful guys had a far more businesslike approach and were much more sensitive to the political end of the business.
Things are going to get interesting with China starting their space program up, while both US and USSR are experiencing economic problems. The exporting of a lot of US tech jobs is killing a lot of incentive for the younger generation to choose technical fields. Maybe I am just looking for sour grapes, but at a local college I am attending, I am taking a course in Copyright, Trademark, and Patent Law. There is a full house in the classroom. About 50 students. Down the hall, there is a Data Structures class which is in the core curriculum for Computer Science students. It had six students in it when I passed by. Hmmm. 6 students learning to do something, 50 students learning to bicker over what those six students are going to do. Does anybody else see something wrong here?
"Their entire business
is based on the assumption that users and companies don't realize that they have a choice."
Hehe.. he kinda reminds me of the little guy in the booth running the big talking head on "Wizard of Oz".
But then, look at religion, and how so many people can be asked to sacrifice so much in the hopes it will do them some good. We do have a feature in our own biological OS that gives us an inferiority complex over things we don't understand, and we have hopes that someone else understands it better than us, and we willingly follow them in the hopes their judgement is better than our own.
Many people have seen through this, and have studied our behaviour and belief systems trying to figure out how the core algorithms work. You might wanna call them cerebral hackers, but the more common name is psychologist. Just as many of us may know how to plant code in some system so it will do a desired thing, psychologists study ways of planting a suggestion to someone so they will do a desired thing. Want a good example? Ask any parent whose children are exposed to television commercials aimed at kids. But then, these same elements of suggestion are present at all levels of human interaction - their effectiveness varies with the skill on which they are implemented, as well as the gullibility ( ignorance ) of the target.
Personally, I kinda chuckle at the businesstypes who are always pining for support. They obviously don't know what they are playing with. Computers are not all that complex as long as you have the information on their construction and programming. When I was a kid, I used to go down to the local radio-TV service shop after school to fix a few TV's for them. You know, those sets were pretty much all alike... just pick up your oscilloscope probe, first see if you have proper power across the main B+ capacitors, then start chasing down the signal path to find where you lost it. If it wasn't a bad tube, it was always something like some resistor that drifted way off value, usually way too high, or some capacitor that started leaking and let plate voltage from the preceding amplifier drive the next tube into saturation. Once in a while, it was a transformer that had some shorted turns or some resonating capacitor or timing resistor that was drifty. Those took more time cause I had to wait for them to act up.
Whats this thing about "support"? The only "support" I needed was to know how my stuff works. The rest is child's play.
Business seems so determined to own stuff they do not understand how it works, then try to force someone under contract to do it for them. They are leaving themselves wide open to being raped.
Business is so determined to save money by outsourcing everything and doing just the stuff that makes them money. I wonder if someone came to them with the offer of $10,000 for their kidneys, and a limited-time contract to do resulting dialysis for them for only $100 per visit, if they would accept? Keep in mind the answer may take one of two forms depending on whether or not it is their own personal body parts thats being sold off for immediate profit at the expense of long term survivability. (i.e. taking personal responsibility for their decisions - literally )
I've seen this before, especially in large corporations, where an overabundance of cash availability resulted in the hiring of management types, which subsequently laid off engineering and tech-support for immediate savings as they transitioned to outsourced methods. Things looked really good for a few months, until the company no longer had the capacity to do anything - then the traps closed. There was little else the company could do but spin the best letters they could to the stockholders explaining why the company can no longer do what it used to do.
Personally, if I don't know exactly what it is I have, and how to fix it if I have to, then I really question whether or not I need this thing. I have e
"Someone should sue X10 for using an X in their name..."
Actually, X10 might stand to make a little money themselves. Do you think Microsoft would stand by if a businesses advertised a line of MS* products or McDonalds allow others to sell McFries or whatever? They may be able to get some money out of the X-box or XP, only because of the 'X' trade prefix. IANAL, but I have seen a lot of bickering here on/. over a helluva lot less.
hehe.. lemme tell you the washing machine eats socks and lingerie too.
They will do one of two things: wedge themselves between the tub and basket, so that agitation is labored and the spin is piss-poor - and you would swear its a loose belt, or they will go wedge themselves in the water pump impeller and bring the whole show to a screeching halt.
Its a little aggravating to try to recycle a washer motor. They are about 1/2 horsepower, the one I recycled was capacitor-start, reversible, and had two speeds. Problem is that its some sort of induction motor, and it didn't take well to SCR / TRIAC type speed controls. It worked, but not well. It might work a little better if I worked out some scheme to replace the capacitor and centrifugal starting switch with a little microprocessor to time the energy and phase angles delivered to the old motor's start and run windings, but for one old Frigidaire washer motor I recovered, it's just not quite worth the research effort for me to do so. But it does look do-able.
I did recover one helluva nice 1 inch hardened-steel shaft from the machine ( agitator drive shaft ), pulleys, water valves, and assorted mounting hardware. The switches are so special-purpose that they are darned near useless, and I suppose you could rewire the timer so that it would cycle endlessly, doing something like turning lights on and off in a room to give the illusion someone's home. Rube Goldbergian, but at least the price is right.
Don't overlook the old steel frame. Just turn it around, take the back completely off ( or saw it off with one of those metal-cutting skilsaw blades ) and you have a very sturdy steel workbench. Just make a nice wood top for it and it makes a nice addition to the workshop. Hint: put it on casters so you can roll it around to the job. The one I had was really made to take being jostled around - all I had to do was mount shelves in it and it really came out nice.
For now, I will be quite content to hold the motor in the attic as replacement in the event my table-saw, grinder/buffer, attic fan, or drill press motor fails.
Or is it you do not understand what we get all giddy about?
We all have things which rock our boat. To some its going really fast. To others its going places no one has gone before.
This is about performance of a system, solely designed and implemented by an individual, on a field of play called the internet. We have an individual here, Sander, who has crafted a system that has withstood a synchonized torrent of information transfer requests from around the globe and serviced them. Its the geek equivalent of a touchdown. The system worked. It did not go down in flames. It stood there and did what it was designed to do.
A lot of people get their jollies off watching football, and whether or not the guy makes it through organized attempts to drag him down. And we cheer when he made it anyway.
That's a really neat box, Sander. I'm quite impressed.
By now, I have seen the 'slashdot effect' wipe out scores of machines. I run Steve Gibson's ID Serve on my Windows box when trying to connect to sites ( usually business sites ) and have problems connecting or get unreadable pages back. The results of my impromptu studies of poorly performing websites out there has convinced me that if I were running a business for the purpose of communication to sell a product, a setup like yours is definitely the way to go. Something lean and mean, with no frilly stuff to get in the way and cause problems.
I was quite pleased that when I connected to the site during the storm, when I got my stuff back, you sent the text first, the later the pictures came in.. slow, but they did come in. But, I did have something to read while they crossed over.
I hope a lot of you guys are working with Slashdot to synchronize story release so you can make use of the slashdot effect - as it would make for a good test situation if you knew when it was coming and had all your bottleneck-analysis tools in place to monitor the inevitable flood. This kinda stuff is what we need to hone our tools and make our computational infrastructures even more robust.
Yeh, I hear ya. I thought the AC reply was a bit brash too; his communication skills could use a bit more honing. But then, all of us were young and went through break-in of our social skills. I would just chalk it up as social training. At least these forums do provide some proper examples of professional etiquette, as well as examples of not-so-proper etiquette for comparison. They gotta learn somewhere.
I think the guys running Slashdot are aware of this too.
I have noted over the past several weeks, I have not been asked to moderate, or meta-moderate nearly as frequently as in the past.
I get the idea that the gurus of Slashdot are using the supply of moderation points distributed much like the FED ( US Central Bank ) plays around with the money supply to adjust inflation.
We have had a helluva lot of inflation of crappy posts here, just as you noted. So much so that it seems it takes several sections of read on a trivial matter to get a few dozen gems.
I can't help but think moderation points available have been reduced in an effort to remove the incentive for posting rather trivial comments.
Incidentally, I consider what I have just typed here to be yet another crappy post. It has nothing to do with the topic. Its just my observation and agreement on Fantastic Lad's assessment. Please use the modpoints to point out to the rest of us where you found a gem.
I can't get to the article right now.. it seems to be inaccessable, but the article intro looked kinda cool.
My trick was I found some old optical card scanners which would read the bar-codes printed onto credit-card sized plastic cards. Then I found the local gamery in the mall was using compatible cards, each coded with a different 24-digit number, being passed around to enable the various games as long as there was sufficient funds on account to the number of the card. Neat! I picked several "spent" cards out of the trash can, and went home and read them on my system, then programmed a few little AVR chips to recognize those specific cards. I keep one in my wallet to control the secure/access mode to my house alarm system and car. If it gets lost, its not obvious at all that the card has an alternate use. In the event I want some more cards, add or delete which cards work with the AVR, its not hard to put them back in the programmer and reflash their ROM with the new code list.
Actually, on mine, I never decoded the bar-code digits, I only kept track of whether it was a fat/narrow stripe and fat/narrow space by examining a counter interrupted on each rising and falling edge, and storing the counter state in an array. Upon scan completion, I examine the array and reduce it to 64 bits worth of fat/narrow of the first 32 stripes / spaces I encounter. There is a little start pattern at the beginning that helps a lot to align the data field so you are not shifted a bit or two off. To be on the side of possible error, I allow 8 bits to be bad before I declare the card invalid. This was from trial and error, as I could generate bad reads by not moving the card just right through the reader. I usually got at least one bit that wasn't right every time I scanned. I never did get it working absolutely perfectly. But then I did not really try that much on it after I had it working good enough. I think it was something to do with some focusing, and I could have used the analog side and some DSP to clean it up, I'm sure, but then I would have probably spent a good six months on it.
The only problem is I wish I had bought several dozen of those little optical slot readers when I had the chance. Anybody seen any out there ( dirt cheap ones, I mean - you know those surplus ditties they sell for a buck )? I am looking for some that just have the raw serial bar-code sensor out because I feed it right into the AVR.
Well, this is a hypersonic plane... There's bound to be a helluva lot of air turbulence in its wake that would disperse the water vapor in all sorts of chaotic patterns.
Yeh, I have been noting that for a long time. HTML is such a neat little language, but it does take knowledge and time for humans to code in it. Usually one codes in it when they are trying to take the extra time to make a presentation out of it.
For my email, since its inception, I have only used it for quickie person-to-person communications. If I had any prepared presentations to reference, I would simply link to it by just using the standard URL protocol - you know like http://www.slashdot.org . Most browsers are intelligent enough to recognize the standard URL protocol and link to it, without me having to do the href tag thing.
No person I have ever really wanted to deal with would take the time to try to gussy the email up with HTML before sending it. But people who are trying to influence me through snazzy presentations ( or trace their email readership through their server logs of transfers of HTML referenced images and the like ) would do such a thing given the chance.
There are very few people I wanted to talk to that use HTML on me for emails... and those that did never got their email read. Damn near everybody I do not want to read does send me HTML.
Its like when I am overwhelmed with mail, its the simple hand-written stuff - even a jot on a piece of scrap paper, that get read first, mail from recognized senders get read next, but all that colorful glossy stuff full of images goes in the round tuit file. ( i.e I'll read it when I get "around to it", which rarely occurs before trash pickup ).
Wanna put HTML in my email? This is the kind of thing I would expect from a postman who wants to get back at me for having a dog that peed on his truck.. so he slips my important mail in the midst of those unwanted sales flyer packets.
Male stereotypes. I don't think this is genetics, rather its purely societal/psychological.
This kind of stuff messes up both genders. Women are pressured into anorexic behaviour, and not making use of the talents they have - or often restrained in their endeavors due to pure sexism, as well as the guys which are coaxed into glorification by providing violent entertainment for the masses - i.e. contact sports and the glorification of reckless driving by the media.
I think we are evolving to see beyond this, even though a lot of conservatives sure whine a lot about it. I know the religious cults sure have a lot to say over how people are supposed to be constrained to social functions by which sex they are, irregardless of what capabilities or psychological bent for fulfillment of happiness an individual has.
A lot of guys seem bred from birth to be aggressive, leading to all sorts of diseases resulting from it, whereas a lot of women seem bred from birth to endure a life of servitude and boredom.
But guess what? We are seeing this for what it is. Now, due to mass communication channels opening up out of control of those who use dominance of religion or whatever to control the populace, we see this behaviour for what it is, and have the choice whether or not to follow it.
Often, not following in the norm can be difficult, as you are seen as contentious and not a team player - and often ostracized - when enough people see it, things change. They always have, they always will.
No, but I do have an old IMSAI 8080. Same model as was in the movie "War Games".
Reading this article makes me wanna go dig out my old designs and whip up an EIDE interface for it and code in a little OS to support it... just to show how fast even an old 500KHz (effective clock rate to the processor ) and 48K of 500nS memory ( real 2102 1Kx1 RAM chips! That was primo stuff back then ) can be. And how powerful a "monitor" OS ( BIOS ) can be put into like 8K of EPROM (2764). On my old CP/M, the system was waiting for command input by the time the CRT filament warmed up. A 'dir' command flew by so fast we were back up to 486 level before I saw anything that fast again.
Of course, the machine is darned totally incapable of any graphics, but for what I used it for ( numerical analyses ) it worked pretty good, albeit there were a few things I would set it doing and leave it over the weekend to chew on it, as it read number arrays from one disk, ran it through some DSP stuff, then wrote the results onto the other disk. Those were fun times. I really felt "at one" with the machine. It was darned near an intimate relationship, a feeling I don't seem to have anymore with the newer machines which I am not privy to every circuit in them, and every instruction down to the microcode array.
I guess thats the reason I migrated onto the embedded stuff, where I still mostly design and code for really cost-constrained stuff - like for 32 bit stuff ( real-time motion control stuff ) I like the Motorola 68000 - like on the order of five dollars each. Or for the simpler stuff, I am nuts over ATMEL's 8-bit AVR processors.
The old stuff didn't go away, it just changed clothes. It now looks like a toaster, or damned near any other appliance. And is several orders of magnitude cheaper and power conservative than the IMSAI of decades past. And a helluva lot easier to work with too. ATMEL easily puts the equivalent of my total wired IMSAI system, which is about double the volume of the old desktop PC, into one chip which will run months on a battery. Well, I guess the only thing not on the ATMEL chip are my four 1K pages of VideoRam, as I used to hang 4 CRT monitors off the IMSAI so I could keep the queues in videoram and watch to see if anything fished up during the run.
I guess art appreciation is in the eye of the beholder.
There are some which can see beauty in the folding forms of a pile of dog excreta.
Others will just see a pile of dogshit.
I like the ironwork, but being in my economic level, I can not justify anywhere near its going price. But I do know there are those with economic levels orders of magnitude above me.
So, I just create my own art as I see fit, although some of my neighbors may call it an eyesore. Things like making birdbaths and planters from discarded appliance parts.
I happen to think the curvaceous shapes of old washing machine agitators make nice planters when inverted, filled with soil, and growing something. Same with a couple of old wheelbarrows the neighbors threw out because they were no longer functional. The rustier they get, the more attractive they seem to become. I guess its my way of saying my days of toting wheelbarrows are over. They, like me, are out to pasture.
The Watts Towers in Southern California is a classic example of what some call art, another calls eyesore.
Remember a lot of us have a lot of unusued free long distance calling minutes at the end of the month on these cellphone and carrier plans.
This might be a good use for them.. slip one of those post-it notes in your phone case to remind you to call these guys up when youre bored and talk to someone that is truely concerned with the joys of receiving unsolicited phone calls. Shame to let those minutes go to waste. One of us won't make much difference, but I can see the joy right now if even 1 percent of those out there receiving unwanted calls started calling back at all hours of the day and night ( thanks to the rotation of the Earth ), to discuss the joy of telemarketing with those who really care about it. Home phone numbers would be especially useful for this. Hell, even if they get answering machines, you could enhance their market research by leaving five free minutes worth of what your comments are on the subject.
Do note though, on the toll-free numbers, your caller-ID blocks don't work, as the phone company feels that if the toll-free number holder is paying for the call, he has a right to know who is calling. OK. But if the call is on your nickel, the callerID number should show up as private if you have it configured as such.
Just leave it near the TV. They yap constantly. There is always a lot of energy in the vocal bands - so they have to listen to it awhile to see if its real or not.
Kinda like those tricks they play on the telephone when they put you on hold - with music - then periodically interrupt the music to switch to yet another recording of a voice telling you they are still busy ( as if you have not figured that out yet ), and it fools you into perking up because you think a human finally got on the line.
Dontcha just love it when those advertisers put really common doorbell sounds or phone rings in their commercials? God knows how many times I have answered the phone or door because I thoughtlessly left a TV or radio on in the house. Fake emergency vehicle sounds are the primary reason I no longer have a radio in the car. There are enough distractors when driving already. I highly resent attempts to fool me while driving, sending signals that indicate an emergency in progress. To me thats the equivalent of yelling fire in a theatre to get everyone's attention. Clever marketing ploy, but plain stupid.
The government is doing the same thing the people are doing, but not with music, but with money. And has been getting away with it. For years.
Consider every person in America that works for wages. By the end of the year, they effectively receive a pay cut of about 4% or so. Consider all the people who are trying to put away a little savings to live on when they are no longer able to work.
Government consistently does NOT balance the books and floods the economy with more and more dollars every year, resulting in an "inflation" scenario where we have more dollars than goods, forcing each good to equal more and more dollars.
( Yeah, there are a few exceptions like things based on technology that drop in price, but I am considering mostly things there is a fixed amount of to compare the dollar to, like real property - i.e. housing. )
Ok, the RIAA has convinced government that duplication of songs is considered THEFT, because
they claim it ROBS ARTISTS of their due for work performed, because of the dilution resulting from copies of work unauthorized by the artist.
By the same token, I claim that any entity introducing unearned dollars into the economy, thereby diluting the purchasing power of the dollars already in the economy, is also guilty of THERT, because they ROB THE PEOPLE of their due for the work they performed by the very same mechanism. I worked for my dollar, and I certainly didn't authorize duplication of that which I worked for - said duplicate copies competing against my earned dollar in the market.
A figure of $150,000 per download per song is being bandied about as what's considered fair, so it seems good to me to fine any Congressman passing a budget which includes dilution of our money supply at $150,000 per dollar introduced.
The RIAA has done their work to protect their interests. Its high time we do our work too.
I can see the big display now... all our Congressmen on TV, with a little oval in the lower right corner showing his hand on his voting switch... Ok the votes on - Do we pass this unbalanced budget? Then see which ones of those little bobbing heads that promised so much to "fight for us" in the last election flip their switch.
It looks like we are preparing to clean house over here in California to replace a governor who pandies to Big Money and has let the State economic system go to pot. Its high time we people, like the RIAA, protect OUR interests and get representatives of the PEOPLE in our government, and get these people who pander to power out of control so they can't do any more damage.
"I cannot overemphasize how important this is to each state and each community in America," Rep. Ernest Istook, an Oklahoma
Republican and sponsor of the bill,..."[emphasis mine]
If you think any particular party is gonna stand up for the little guy, they only say that before an election... not now.
When elections come up, all the bobbing heads say how hard they are gonna "fight" for us. NOW is the time to see this and note whether that bobbing head should see another term, or be replaced by someone else who WILL.
"Next week on slashdot: Homemade doppler radar using only an old microwave..."
You may be onto it. With mass production the way it is, I saw microwave ovens at Wal-Mart the other day, I think it was $39.95 or something like that. Now, these things have a 600 watt or more 2.45GHz magnetron and associated 3KV power supply in them. At that price? I don't know how they did it. But nevertheless, it shows the price points achievable with mass production.
Now, you drive that maggie with a spread-spectrum code and you have the basis for a damn good radar. Because each radar can transmit with a different code, you will be able to pull out any particular emitter you are interested in for its phase delay observations, which contain the distance-to-reflector information you are seeking.
This whole thing looks very do-able to me.
I don't think they are using this technique though because the article seems to describe a higher frequency and use of beamforming techniques to do some phased-array stuff. Its gonna be interesting to see how they do it. I betcha it will spawn off a lot of related technologies for shorter range radar applications.
If you want an example of one working, just connect rabbit ears to your TV. Tune in a local station, and walk around the room. Note your presence and location in the room has an effect on the image on the screen, and by standing in certain locations, you can often disrupt the beam so badly the set barely receives a usable signal at all.
I have seen this same technique used for detecting the presence of people in stores after closing. The thing worked by looking at the frame sync pulses of a local TV station, and correlating the video signal against itself to detect the presence of "alternate paths" resulting from signal bounce from other sources. These delayed signals, ( commonly observed as "ghosts" on a display ) gave us a clue as to what reflective surfaces (RF) existed in the vicinity, but more importantly, if any of them were moving around.
A little bit of signal processing and it became clear as blazes if anything was moving arond in the store.
Unfortunately, other things, such as airplanes flying overhead, could spoof it. So, an array of sensors using multiple detection technologies was used, so it took a consensus of sensor reports to trip off an alert to the investigative authorities.
Slashdot Mirror
Remember though that California Law exempts cars over 30 years old from the smog tests. My take is that although these older antiques will still be legal to use on the road, the owner will be required to at least maintain the vehicle to such an extent that it doesn't make one helluva mess wherever it goes.
I'm sure you've seen em.. just one car fogging up the entire area.. you would swear the guy is probably burning motor oil for fuel. It looks like this is what they are after.
There are so many variables involved that they would have to set the devices to trap the really gross polluters so they don't get a lot of false positives. But then, what do we do if a new style of exhaust pipes come out.. dressing them up the side of the vehicle like on Diesel trucks, where the sensors won't see em?
Side note... ever noted how much crap a large diesel truck emits when trying to accelerate, yet they are relatively clean once they are no longer straining for acceleration? My guess is that the truck pollutes about the same for a mile of transport, or to recover from one stop. Now, if we could get those babies up to 40 mph or so, and sync to them, we would all have a lot less diesel smoke to breathe.
The rest of us 'uns call that thar stuff 'snow'!
His comment alone made this collection worth reading.
While I have his link still in my cut and paste buffer, I'll go ahead and throw a href tag on it : http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA01496 .
( Finally! Somebody else out there who is probably puzzled beyond imagination over the number 137, and why it keeps popping up all over the place when studying physical parameters of the Universe. 137. Exactly 137. Not the tiniest bit more or less. Just a naked dimensionless 137.)
In the "Star Trek Universe", very sophisticated design problems surface and have the solutions implemented by the next scene. Great for TV, but I will tell you there is no way I could do that. It takes me time to study the problem, try to make some models to simulate on, make a few prototypes, debug, make some more prototypes, debug, and maybe go through this several times before I think I have a workable thing, and why it works - and what its weak points are. Its not a five-minute task.
I don't care what those One-Minute Manager books harp on... I am still running God's NeuralNet WetWare version 1.0 ( first release ). The more things I have to consider, the more time I need to mull things over. Yes, you can use Management techniques on me to "improve my productivity", just like you can yank a welder's work out from under him before he's done or yank a meal from a chef before its ready for the table.
One of the saddest things I note about this whole affair is that the people who seemed most dedicated to their work were the first to be dismissed from their jobs for not kowtowing to management pressure. The most knowledgeable guys were under the most pressure, as they knew the inevitable results of a poor design and felt responsible. The most successful guys had a far more businesslike approach and were much more sensitive to the political end of the business.
Things are going to get interesting with China starting their space program up, while both US and USSR are experiencing economic problems. The exporting of a lot of US tech jobs is killing a lot of incentive for the younger generation to choose technical fields. Maybe I am just looking for sour grapes, but at a local college I am attending, I am taking a course in Copyright, Trademark, and Patent Law. There is a full house in the classroom. About 50 students. Down the hall, there is a Data Structures class which is in the core curriculum for Computer Science students. It had six students in it when I passed by. Hmmm. 6 students learning to do something, 50 students learning to bicker over what those six students are going to do. Does anybody else see something wrong here?
Hehe.. he kinda reminds me of the little guy in the booth running the big talking head on "Wizard of Oz".
But then, look at religion, and how so many people can be asked to sacrifice so much in the hopes it will do them some good. We do have a feature in our own biological OS that gives us an inferiority complex over things we don't understand, and we have hopes that someone else understands it better than us, and we willingly follow them in the hopes their judgement is better than our own.
Many people have seen through this, and have studied our behaviour and belief systems trying to figure out how the core algorithms work. You might wanna call them cerebral hackers, but the more common name is psychologist. Just as many of us may know how to plant code in some system so it will do a desired thing, psychologists study ways of planting a suggestion to someone so they will do a desired thing. Want a good example? Ask any parent whose children are exposed to television commercials aimed at kids. But then, these same elements of suggestion are present at all levels of human interaction - their effectiveness varies with the skill on which they are implemented, as well as the gullibility ( ignorance ) of the target.
Personally, I kinda chuckle at the businesstypes who are always pining for support. They obviously don't know what they are playing with. Computers are not all that complex as long as you have the information on their construction and programming. When I was a kid, I used to go down to the local radio-TV service shop after school to fix a few TV's for them. You know, those sets were pretty much all alike... just pick up your oscilloscope probe, first see if you have proper power across the main B+ capacitors, then start chasing down the signal path to find where you lost it. If it wasn't a bad tube, it was always something like some resistor that drifted way off value, usually way too high, or some capacitor that started leaking and let plate voltage from the preceding amplifier drive the next tube into saturation. Once in a while, it was a transformer that had some shorted turns or some resonating capacitor or timing resistor that was drifty. Those took more time cause I had to wait for them to act up.
Whats this thing about "support"? The only "support" I needed was to know how my stuff works. The rest is child's play.
Business seems so determined to own stuff they do not understand how it works, then try to force someone under contract to do it for them. They are leaving themselves wide open to being raped. Business is so determined to save money by outsourcing everything and doing just the stuff that makes them money. I wonder if someone came to them with the offer of $10,000 for their kidneys, and a limited-time contract to do resulting dialysis for them for only $100 per visit, if they would accept? Keep in mind the answer may take one of two forms depending on whether or not it is their own personal body parts thats being sold off for immediate profit at the expense of long term survivability. (i.e. taking personal responsibility for their decisions - literally )
I've seen this before, especially in large corporations, where an overabundance of cash availability resulted in the hiring of management types, which subsequently laid off engineering and tech-support for immediate savings as they transitioned to outsourced methods. Things looked really good for a few months, until the company no longer had the capacity to do anything - then the traps closed. There was little else the company could do but spin the best letters they could to the stockholders explaining why the company can no longer do what it used to do.
Personally, if I don't know exactly what it is I have, and how to fix it if I have to, then I really question whether or not I need this thing. I have e
They will do one of two things: wedge themselves between the tub and basket, so that agitation is labored and the spin is piss-poor - and you would swear its a loose belt, or they will go wedge themselves in the water pump impeller and bring the whole show to a screeching halt.
Its a little aggravating to try to recycle a washer motor. They are about 1/2 horsepower, the one I recycled was capacitor-start, reversible, and had two speeds. Problem is that its some sort of induction motor, and it didn't take well to SCR / TRIAC type speed controls. It worked, but not well. It might work a little better if I worked out some scheme to replace the capacitor and centrifugal starting switch with a little microprocessor to time the energy and phase angles delivered to the old motor's start and run windings, but for one old Frigidaire washer motor I recovered, it's just not quite worth the research effort for me to do so. But it does look do-able.
I did recover one helluva nice 1 inch hardened-steel shaft from the machine ( agitator drive shaft ), pulleys, water valves, and assorted mounting hardware. The switches are so special-purpose that they are darned near useless, and I suppose you could rewire the timer so that it would cycle endlessly, doing something like turning lights on and off in a room to give the illusion someone's home. Rube Goldbergian, but at least the price is right.
Don't overlook the old steel frame. Just turn it around, take the back completely off ( or saw it off with one of those metal-cutting skilsaw blades ) and you have a very sturdy steel workbench. Just make a nice wood top for it and it makes a nice addition to the workshop. Hint: put it on casters so you can roll it around to the job. The one I had was really made to take being jostled around - all I had to do was mount shelves in it and it really came out nice.
For now, I will be quite content to hold the motor in the attic as replacement in the event my table-saw, grinder/buffer, attic fan, or drill press motor fails.
Or is it you do not understand what we get all giddy about?
We all have things which rock our boat. To some its going really fast. To others its going places no one has gone before.
This is about performance of a system, solely designed and implemented by an individual, on a field of play called the internet. We have an individual here, Sander, who has crafted a system that has withstood a synchonized torrent of information transfer requests from around the globe and serviced them. Its the geek equivalent of a touchdown. The system worked. It did not go down in flames. It stood there and did what it was designed to do.
A lot of people get their jollies off watching football, and whether or not the guy makes it through organized attempts to drag him down. And we cheer when he made it anyway.
Well, we are cheering.
Sander scored a touchdown.
By now, I have seen the 'slashdot effect' wipe out scores of machines. I run Steve Gibson's ID Serve on my Windows box when trying to connect to sites ( usually business sites ) and have problems connecting or get unreadable pages back. The results of my impromptu studies of poorly performing websites out there has convinced me that if I were running a business for the purpose of communication to sell a product, a setup like yours is definitely the way to go. Something lean and mean, with no frilly stuff to get in the way and cause problems.
I was quite pleased that when I connected to the site during the storm, when I got my stuff back, you sent the text first, the later the pictures came in.. slow, but they did come in. But, I did have something to read while they crossed over.
I hope a lot of you guys are working with Slashdot to synchronize story release so you can make use of the slashdot effect - as it would make for a good test situation if you knew when it was coming and had all your bottleneck-analysis tools in place to monitor the inevitable flood. This kinda stuff is what we need to hone our tools and make our computational infrastructures even more robust.
When I tried to access it, this is what I get:
I have noted over the past several weeks, I have not been asked to moderate, or meta-moderate nearly as frequently as in the past.
I get the idea that the gurus of Slashdot are using the supply of moderation points distributed much like the FED ( US Central Bank ) plays around with the money supply to adjust inflation.
We have had a helluva lot of inflation of crappy posts here, just as you noted. So much so that it seems it takes several sections of read on a trivial matter to get a few dozen gems.
I can't help but think moderation points available have been reduced in an effort to remove the incentive for posting rather trivial comments.
Incidentally, I consider what I have just typed here to be yet another crappy post. It has nothing to do with the topic. Its just my observation and agreement on Fantastic Lad's assessment. Please use the modpoints to point out to the rest of us where you found a gem.
An amount in US dollars was specified.
An exchange rate noting the ratio of US dollars to UK pounds was specified.
No mention of what a 'quid' was.
So, from reading the posts, I must assume that a 'quid' is a synonym for 'UK pound'.
In international forums such as this, you may be surprised how many people in one land may be unaware of what is common knowledge in another land.
My trick was I found some old optical card scanners which would read the bar-codes printed onto credit-card sized plastic cards. Then I found the local gamery in the mall was using compatible cards, each coded with a different 24-digit number, being passed around to enable the various games as long as there was sufficient funds on account to the number of the card. Neat! I picked several "spent" cards out of the trash can, and went home and read them on my system, then programmed a few little AVR chips to recognize those specific cards. I keep one in my wallet to control the secure/access mode to my house alarm system and car. If it gets lost, its not obvious at all that the card has an alternate use. In the event I want some more cards, add or delete which cards work with the AVR, its not hard to put them back in the programmer and reflash their ROM with the new code list.
Actually, on mine, I never decoded the bar-code digits, I only kept track of whether it was a fat/narrow stripe and fat/narrow space by examining a counter interrupted on each rising and falling edge, and storing the counter state in an array. Upon scan completion, I examine the array and reduce it to 64 bits worth of fat/narrow of the first 32 stripes / spaces I encounter. There is a little start pattern at the beginning that helps a lot to align the data field so you are not shifted a bit or two off. To be on the side of possible error, I allow 8 bits to be bad before I declare the card invalid. This was from trial and error, as I could generate bad reads by not moving the card just right through the reader. I usually got at least one bit that wasn't right every time I scanned. I never did get it working absolutely perfectly. But then I did not really try that much on it after I had it working good enough. I think it was something to do with some focusing, and I could have used the analog side and some DSP to clean it up, I'm sure, but then I would have probably spent a good six months on it.
The only problem is I wish I had bought several dozen of those little optical slot readers when I had the chance. Anybody seen any out there ( dirt cheap ones, I mean - you know those surplus ditties they sell for a buck )? I am looking for some that just have the raw serial bar-code sensor out because I feed it right into the AVR.
That is what it looks like to me.
For my email, since its inception, I have only used it for quickie person-to-person communications. If I had any prepared presentations to reference, I would simply link to it by just using the standard URL protocol - you know like http://www.slashdot.org . Most browsers are intelligent enough to recognize the standard URL protocol and link to it, without me having to do the href tag thing.
No person I have ever really wanted to deal with would take the time to try to gussy the email up with HTML before sending it. But people who are trying to influence me through snazzy presentations ( or trace their email readership through their server logs of transfers of HTML referenced images and the like ) would do such a thing given the chance.
There are very few people I wanted to talk to that use HTML on me for emails... and those that did never got their email read. Damn near everybody I do not want to read does send me HTML.
Its like when I am overwhelmed with mail, its the simple hand-written stuff - even a jot on a piece of scrap paper, that get read first, mail from recognized senders get read next, but all that colorful glossy stuff full of images goes in the round tuit file. ( i.e I'll read it when I get "around to it", which rarely occurs before trash pickup ).
Wanna put HTML in my email? This is the kind of thing I would expect from a postman who wants to get back at me for having a dog that peed on his truck.. so he slips my important mail in the midst of those unwanted sales flyer packets.
Male stereotypes. I don't think this is genetics, rather its purely societal/psychological.
This kind of stuff messes up both genders. Women are pressured into anorexic behaviour, and not making use of the talents they have - or often restrained in their endeavors due to pure sexism, as well as the guys which are coaxed into glorification by providing violent entertainment for the masses - i.e. contact sports and the glorification of reckless driving by the media.
I think we are evolving to see beyond this, even though a lot of conservatives sure whine a lot about it. I know the religious cults sure have a lot to say over how people are supposed to be constrained to social functions by which sex they are, irregardless of what capabilities or psychological bent for fulfillment of happiness an individual has.
A lot of guys seem bred from birth to be aggressive, leading to all sorts of diseases resulting from it, whereas a lot of women seem bred from birth to endure a life of servitude and boredom.
But guess what? We are seeing this for what it is. Now, due to mass communication channels opening up out of control of those who use dominance of religion or whatever to control the populace, we see this behaviour for what it is, and have the choice whether or not to follow it.
Often, not following in the norm can be difficult, as you are seen as contentious and not a team player - and often ostracized - when enough people see it, things change. They always have, they always will.
Reading this article makes me wanna go dig out my old designs and whip up an EIDE interface for it and code in a little OS to support it... just to show how fast even an old 500KHz (effective clock rate to the processor ) and 48K of 500nS memory ( real 2102 1Kx1 RAM chips! That was primo stuff back then ) can be. And how powerful a "monitor" OS ( BIOS ) can be put into like 8K of EPROM (2764). On my old CP/M, the system was waiting for command input by the time the CRT filament warmed up. A 'dir' command flew by so fast we were back up to 486 level before I saw anything that fast again.
Of course, the machine is darned totally incapable of any graphics, but for what I used it for ( numerical analyses ) it worked pretty good, albeit there were a few things I would set it doing and leave it over the weekend to chew on it, as it read number arrays from one disk, ran it through some DSP stuff, then wrote the results onto the other disk. Those were fun times. I really felt "at one" with the machine. It was darned near an intimate relationship, a feeling I don't seem to have anymore with the newer machines which I am not privy to every circuit in them, and every instruction down to the microcode array.
I guess thats the reason I migrated onto the embedded stuff, where I still mostly design and code for really cost-constrained stuff - like for 32 bit stuff ( real-time motion control stuff ) I like the Motorola 68000 - like on the order of five dollars each. Or for the simpler stuff, I am nuts over ATMEL's 8-bit AVR processors.
The old stuff didn't go away, it just changed clothes. It now looks like a toaster, or damned near any other appliance. And is several orders of magnitude cheaper and power conservative than the IMSAI of decades past. And a helluva lot easier to work with too. ATMEL easily puts the equivalent of my total wired IMSAI system, which is about double the volume of the old desktop PC, into one chip which will run months on a battery. Well, I guess the only thing not on the ATMEL chip are my four 1K pages of VideoRam, as I used to hang 4 CRT monitors off the IMSAI so I could keep the queues in videoram and watch to see if anything fished up during the run.
There are some which can see beauty in the folding forms of a pile of dog excreta.
Others will just see a pile of dogshit.
I like the ironwork, but being in my economic level, I can not justify anywhere near its going price. But I do know there are those with economic levels orders of magnitude above me.
So, I just create my own art as I see fit, although some of my neighbors may call it an eyesore. Things like making birdbaths and planters from discarded appliance parts.
I happen to think the curvaceous shapes of old washing machine agitators make nice planters when inverted, filled with soil, and growing something. Same with a couple of old wheelbarrows the neighbors threw out because they were no longer functional. The rustier they get, the more attractive they seem to become. I guess its my way of saying my days of toting wheelbarrows are over. They, like me, are out to pasture.
The Watts Towers in Southern California is a classic example of what some call art, another calls eyesore.
Damm, art is sure subjective, isn't it?
This might be a good use for them.. slip one of those post-it notes in your phone case to remind you to call these guys up when youre bored and talk to someone that is truely concerned with the joys of receiving unsolicited phone calls. Shame to let those minutes go to waste. One of us won't make much difference, but I can see the joy right now if even 1 percent of those out there receiving unwanted calls started calling back at all hours of the day and night ( thanks to the rotation of the Earth ), to discuss the joy of telemarketing with those who really care about it. Home phone numbers would be especially useful for this. Hell, even if they get answering machines, you could enhance their market research by leaving five free minutes worth of what your comments are on the subject.
Do note though, on the toll-free numbers, your caller-ID blocks don't work, as the phone company feels that if the toll-free number holder is paying for the call, he has a right to know who is calling. OK. But if the call is on your nickel, the callerID number should show up as private if you have it configured as such.
Can anyone confirm this?
Kinda like those tricks they play on the telephone when they put you on hold - with music - then periodically interrupt the music to switch to yet another recording of a voice telling you they are still busy ( as if you have not figured that out yet ), and it fools you into perking up because you think a human finally got on the line.
Dontcha just love it when those advertisers put really common doorbell sounds or phone rings in their commercials? God knows how many times I have answered the phone or door because I thoughtlessly left a TV or radio on in the house. Fake emergency vehicle sounds are the primary reason I no longer have a radio in the car. There are enough distractors when driving already. I highly resent attempts to fool me while driving, sending signals that indicate an emergency in progress. To me thats the equivalent of yelling fire in a theatre to get everyone's attention. Clever marketing ploy, but plain stupid.
The government is doing the same thing the people are doing, but not with music, but with money. And has been getting away with it. For years.
Consider every person in America that works for wages. By the end of the year, they effectively receive a pay cut of about 4% or so. Consider all the people who are trying to put away a little savings to live on when they are no longer able to work.
Government consistently does NOT balance the books and floods the economy with more and more dollars every year, resulting in an "inflation" scenario where we have more dollars than goods, forcing each good to equal more and more dollars.
( Yeah, there are a few exceptions like things based on technology that drop in price, but I am considering mostly things there is a fixed amount of to compare the dollar to, like real property - i.e. housing. )
Ok, the RIAA has convinced government that duplication of songs is considered THEFT, because they claim it ROBS ARTISTS of their due for work performed, because of the dilution resulting from copies of work unauthorized by the artist.
By the same token, I claim that any entity introducing unearned dollars into the economy, thereby diluting the purchasing power of the dollars already in the economy, is also guilty of THERT, because they ROB THE PEOPLE of their due for the work they performed by the very same mechanism. I worked for my dollar, and I certainly didn't authorize duplication of that which I worked for - said duplicate copies competing against my earned dollar in the market.
A figure of $150,000 per download per song is being bandied about as what's considered fair, so it seems good to me to fine any Congressman passing a budget which includes dilution of our money supply at $150,000 per dollar introduced.
The RIAA has done their work to protect their interests. Its high time we do our work too.
I can see the big display now... all our Congressmen on TV, with a little oval in the lower right corner showing his hand on his voting switch... Ok the votes on - Do we pass this unbalanced budget? Then see which ones of those little bobbing heads that promised so much to "fight for us" in the last election flip their switch.
It looks like we are preparing to clean house over here in California to replace a governor who pandies to Big Money and has let the State economic system go to pot. Its high time we people, like the RIAA, protect OUR interests and get representatives of the PEOPLE in our government, and get these people who pander to power out of control so they can't do any more damage.
When elections come up, all the bobbing heads say how hard they are gonna "fight" for us. NOW is the time to see this and note whether that bobbing head should see another term, or be replaced by someone else who WILL.
Now, you drive that maggie with a spread-spectrum code and you have the basis for a damn good radar. Because each radar can transmit with a different code, you will be able to pull out any particular emitter you are interested in for its phase delay observations, which contain the distance-to-reflector information you are seeking.
This whole thing looks very do-able to me.
I don't think they are using this technique though because the article seems to describe a higher frequency and use of beamforming techniques to do some phased-array stuff. Its gonna be interesting to see how they do it. I betcha it will spawn off a lot of related technologies for shorter range radar applications.
Completely covert.
If you want an example of one working, just connect rabbit ears to your TV. Tune in a local station, and walk around the room. Note your presence and location in the room has an effect on the image on the screen, and by standing in certain locations, you can often disrupt the beam so badly the set barely receives a usable signal at all.
I have seen this same technique used for detecting the presence of people in stores after closing. The thing worked by looking at the frame sync pulses of a local TV station, and correlating the video signal against itself to detect the presence of "alternate paths" resulting from signal bounce from other sources. These delayed signals, ( commonly observed as "ghosts" on a display ) gave us a clue as to what reflective surfaces (RF) existed in the vicinity, but more importantly, if any of them were moving around.
A little bit of signal processing and it became clear as blazes if anything was moving arond in the store.
Unfortunately, other things, such as airplanes flying overhead, could spoof it. So, an array of sensors using multiple detection technologies was used, so it took a consensus of sensor reports to trip off an alert to the investigative authorities.