Also there is the mushroom farm aspect, mentioned in several stories. So I'm grinding optics. Why? Well because my boss told me to. Whats the focal length and lens geometry? Sorry, classified, hey btw could I get your name for the FBI... um I mean for HR, in case a job opens up, its uh, just a policy we have to always report, uh, future employment candidates? Where does the lens go that you're making? In a storage box. Oh, OK, cool.
People at/. are good at systems analysis and assume everyone else is, and they can just look at systems and processes and understand how it ALL works and interacts. General public, not so much, and they often have no idea what they're "really" doing at work. I would not be surprised if many of the former employees still haven't figured out they were building this big ole satellite, even after the declassification and news reports.
Interesting, good pointer, thanks. I might subscribe. I looked at some back issues and the "Computing Science" column reminds me strongly of the S.A. "Computer Recreations" columns of the olden days. Now, where is the modern version of the old S.A. "Amateur Scientist" column? Is that "Make magazine" or Elektor or what?
Photocopy the schematic, trash it all up with soldering iron burns in the basement lab... Photocopy the parts list and haul it around with me everywhere until I acquire all the parts I need from fests and whatever? Scribble notes and equations all over the printout as I modify as necessary and see fit. Scribble notes on the schematic as I build (so, the analog ground is the green wire, and the optoisolated digital side ground is the black wire, vs the RF ground that is balun xfrmr isolated to the leftmost toroid core...)
Most electronic distributions historically seem paranoid nuts about allowing purchasers to copy or print out articles, completely missing the point that if I didn't find at least one article in the mag worth printing out and hacking up, I wouldn't buy the %^&! magazine to begin with. Either you let me fire up ye olde laser printer or you go bye bye.
If geek does not equate to EE anymore, does that mean I'm one of the cool kids now? Wait; don't answer that, I know I am.
QST QEX Elektor nuts-and-volts monitoring-times if these titles mean nothing to you then turn in your soldering iron.
If you get the "proceedings of the whateverconf from 20-whatever" from the ham radio guys that is pretty good reading. "Proceedings of Microwave Update Conference 2011" was just released a week or two ago and you can get it from Lulu POD for about $20. I personally recommend the article about the 3 GHz 1 watt amplifier, and the waveguide-horn EME antenna article was a fun read. Yes there is only one "Microwave Update Conf" per year, but there are a couple conf proceedings that I purchase annually, so that every couple months I get a proceedings of the digital conf, proceedings of the various VHF conf, etc, you get the idea. Its.. kind of an expensive habit, but then again, its a heck of a lot cheaper than actually attending the conf, so...
I would not count MAKE, its cool and I read it and like it, but I don't think of it as a "magazine" anymore. MAKE is more like a short story non-fiction anthology that happens to be published on a very regular schedule. Then again "best science fiction of year X" seems to be published on a schedule too, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that, and I don't know why people don't call it a "annual magazine". On the magazine side of the argument, MAKE does have regular columnists, but I counter that "best scifi of 20--" also have certain author names that seem to show up every year. Also I forgive them for having columnists simply because I enjoy reading Doctorow's column. Maybe its because I read and toss out magazines, but I have kept every single issue of MAKE on my bookshelf as a source of project ideas, just like I keep books. A complete set of MAKE is about 20 lineal inchs at this moment, I'd estimate just under two feet. Two feet of bookcase well spent.
snapshots of an organism caught in the act of reproducing.
So its half a billion year old kiddie pr0n. nsfw. its a trap. I'm not clicking that link, not my thing at all. I remember when/. was more wholesome and family oriented and you just had to worry about goatse links.
Anyone have actual news about this? The linked article was fluffy-lite. I'm curious if they were using a trunking system, if so, which one, or just classical repeater and remote RX site design. Seems odd they wouldn't mention brand names in the story. Motorola trunking? LTR? Maybe the cartel is the first really successful OpenSky trunking deployment? I've often thought the only way to get OpenSky to Really work successfully would involve pointing automatic rifles at the vendors heads, or perhaps reviving the roman era decimation procedure in full detail, both areas of expertise for the cartels. Maybe no trunking and just a bunch of old linked repeaters?
It sounds from the fluffy article like all commercial gear, like you could buy off ebay for your tow truck company, not.mil FHSS and satellite stuff.
If you want to listen to technology like this without becoming an amateur pharmaceuticals supplier you can buy a modern trunking scanner. Or if you want to work on similar gear as an operator, again, without becoming an amateur pharmaceuticals supplier, you can get your ham radio license.
I'm curious if it was a business hit vs the cartels own stuff. Right now in the USA you can talk to your local trunking radio provider and purchase more or less identical service for your small business. Its possible the only small business purchasing from some trunking provider in.mx was the cartel. Theoretically they've got common carrier protection, but I could see them getting siezed if their main/only customer was criminal. That would suck to go out of business because your main customer was crooks, but I guess thats life in.mx
I'm mostly with you on that one. Latching-vs-nonlatching relays are a big trade-off. You can get SPDT non-latching relays, or even DPDT ones, for less than a dollar in large quantity. But any significant quantity of them will need busbars for power distribution...
Ah for a non-latching design, about half the coils will be drawing power all the time, and you need to size for all the coils energized all the time, which gets kind of expensive. An eighth amp here and an eighth amp there, no big deal, but 8000 memory cell relays adds up to a cool KiloAmp, at 12 volts thats 12 kilowatts of heat in the coils. A big problem.
But a latching design inherently does not require the memory cell coils to be energized all the time, just a pulse at write cycle time, thats the whole point of latching. So the average current draw of a 8K memory unit with latching relays is almost entirely in the address decode, and with my sneakyness I think I could get that down to a couple amps at most.
So a latching design uses "lamp cord" size wiring, but a non-latching design would very much resemble the power system from one of Ma Bell's central offices.
It seems likely to me that namecheep does in fact rock.
Its kind of like whenever we talk about simple web hosting and ipv6, like fifty people come out of the woodwork to say he.net rocks. Or whenever we talk about colo virtual servers, again, like fifty people come out of the woodwork to say linode.com rocks. Based on personal experience as customer, its not a conspiracy or advertising, its simply that they're absolute best of breed and they do in fact rock. So I would be inclined to believe the/. groupthink and tend to think this namecheep place does in fact rock in the world of DNS service.
What I don't get, is that "gandi" or whatever place in like France or someplace used to get all the/. mindshare as being the "best". What happened to them? I recall it was "hard" to use if you lived in the USA, something about sending them money, but thats all I remember about ghandi or gandi or whatever they were.
All things considered, I'd have to believe Namecheap over GoDaddy, regardless of how hot Danica Patrick is.
Yeah regarding her, that is just weird. In the specific area that godaddy operates in, that being wanna be models who also have a promotional accessory line of domain registration, are there any other hotties out there with a DNS registrar as a marketing gimmic who I could transfer my domains to? I think having her own domain registrar is much trendier than the traditional model accessory line of clothes and perfumes and small dogs in purses and adopted foreign babies and such. The netsol CEO guy just isn't doing it for me, I'm sure he's a nice guy but I'm looking for someone more, uh, female. I'm pretty close to posting a personals ad in the local newspaper "distinguished older engineer seeks hottie for domain registration services, please send pix of router and/or firewall".
Caucuses are a bad idea to begin with. They value a better organized/paid for campaign over a better candidate. Also, why are Iowa and New Hampshire so special that they get to vote first and eliminate candidtes that may do better in other areas? The first primaries should be done on a rotating basis.
Really bad idea. Its a "balance of power thing". Those states serve almost no other purpose in American politics.
There would be incredible outcry if a politically large state got to go first and make the little states even less relevant, like CA or PA or NY or FL.
PA / CA / FL get to shine on election day. Caucus day is when NH and IA get to shine. Only fair.
The other problem is the candidates pander exclusively to their donors wishes, so it doesn't really matter which stuffed suit, from either party "wins", all of us who are not multinational corporations will "lose". Neither the primaries nor the elections will have any real effect on American politics, the average american is in no way represented by the american government.
Iowa has electricity and computers? You really can make anything out of corn.
LOL you're more correct that you know. Oldest trick in the book is subsidized growers turn 10 barrels of diesel into a big pile of unneeded corn, they you gotta do "something" with it lest the state be buried under corncobs, so you burn it to get the energy equivalent of burning 2 barrels of oil worth of steam to generate electricity. Along with environmental degradation due to topsoil loss, pesticide and fertilizer overapplication, etc. Its amazing how one industry simultaneously wastes both tax money, crude oil, and edible food.
You can also turn corn oil into biodiesel. I like cooking with corn oil, smells OK and frys up tastily. Good enough smoke point too.
Computers are mostly by weight plastic, and at least some plastics are made from corn byproducts, so theoretically some of your computer is probably corn.
Then a little off topic but not too far, lots of corn gets turned into corn syrup, which gets turned into energy drinks, which combined with electricity is turned into computer software using carbon based/. reading bioreactors.
Corn is really a very versatile feedstock for chemical engineers. You'd be surprised, pretty much if you can make it out of crude oil, given an infinite supply of free subsidized corn and an infinite supply of energy from burning free subsidized corn, you can make the same product out of corn.
Does this notion sound a lot like the paperless office to anyone?
That's a popular meme to laugh about, but this being the end of the year, I realized I haven't printed anything at work, for work purposes, in 2011. I suppose there's a few days left...
Kind of like the death of FAX machines. I had to sign and fax a medical receipt a couple months ago, and I realized I hadn't used a FAX for business purposes since sometime in the early 00s.
I did personally ship something via UPS and printed out my own shipping label back in '08. That's the last thing I printed for work?
This type of course cannot be properly delivered via 10" screens. Nothing can replace that face to face human touch.
Could you expand upon this, like maybe a "why"? People who already agree with you will see it as preaching to the choir, people who don't, like myself, are mystified.
Is it a resolution thing like you cannot read the blackboard for video lectures? Language barrier?
Note I took discrete math a decade or so ago from a genuine professor (not a TA) and I also enjoyed it greatly, but I can't understand what mysterious force would intercede were a camera and TV placed in my line of sight.
It sounds like the biological concept of vitalism, or perhaps the catholic concept of bishops laying on hands down thru the ages when a new priest is made. I don't subscribe to magickal thought that merely placing silicon and glass in my line of sight would have ruined my experience.
Javascript?? In order to get anything done in javascript,
Note, we're comparing javascript to BASIC, not ruby. We're not trying to get anything done in javascript.
No one does modern enterprise development in BASIC. And thats OK. No one will do modern enterprise development in javascript. And thats OK too.
As a learning language "make a program that prints your name" "make a loop that counts from 1 to 10 and displays it" both js and basic are pretty good...
It has "tolerable" control flow. It gets the structure in the head of "decide what to do, edit the file of text, then run it and see what happens, then debug, repeat" which believe it or not, non-programmers simply don't understand. It has the concept of "a variable". Most importantly it has limitations, and most of being a programmer is figuring out how to work around limitations, and thankfully they're simple enough that a noob can run into them and start thinking, and the limitations are simultaneously complicated enough that a total noob can still do "something" before colliding with an immovable object. Its available pretty much everywhere on every machine and is more or less cross platform.
It is very hard to outdo javascript as an intro language. Perhaps tryruby.org which has a completely different approach and requires reasonably fast internet access?
I should follow up, that there is a time and place for twenty five cent parts. Like kids noisy toys. Or repairing circuit designs from 1980 with identical parts. Thats why you're seeing, basically, ancient junk, being sold by otherwise respectable resellers at those prices. But don't think that ancient junk is appropriate for new designs.
Mmm not really. For example most of the low end machine shops are gone, jobs outsourced to China. You can't buy a part with a bad surface finish because the only shops still in business in the US have fast, high HP / high torque spindles... Like if you wanted a wavy surface finish with cutting tool marks that are like 1/64 inch wide, you pretty much have to CAD/CAM that into the design in the US.
Similar, the fancier stuff gets the more the DOD and export laws apply. Can you buy milspec from China? Well the locals won't let you use it in contracts to our own guys (wisely, in my opinion) so there's almost no import demand, and the Chinese won't let themselves export it because they need milspec for their own milspec projects (they have satellites and missiles and stuff of their own, just not made by the same guys who make stuff for Walmart)
So its not quite as simple as "just ask for the not junk version"
Yup thats the problem with trying to replicate what amounts to a 1980 KIM-1 in relays. The ancients ran in to the same dilema and their solution was wide word sizes like 60 bits. Thus you end up with simpler shorter programs and more calculation per cycle and less memory size required. An 8 bit machine with a K of ram is what you get when memory and CPU are fast and space is cheap. What I'm used to, basically. The ancients idea of large word length makes sense if memory is expensive. Also lots of CPU registers make sense if you're not going to multi-process or interrupt process anyway. Thats why my ratios of relays in the CPU vs memory is so far off from historical record of real historical relay computers.
What you're not seeing is I'm talking about primary storage, you're talking about bulk secondary storage. If I have all day I can use papertape or punch cards for bulk storage. There is no way to process ten times faster than storage, unless you mean "bulk storage" like hard drive space. I'm talking about a limit very much like cache memory. You can't out process your cache, at some fundamental level the output of an adder (or whatever) needs to be stuck "somewhere" no matter how fast it can add...
Bear in mind that even consistently-good, moderately priced steel wasn't available until the 1880s. That's why fine machinery was made of brass until the 20th century.
As an amateur machinist guy I can assure you that fine machinery was made of brass because steel/iron/etc was a nightmare to machine with the tools of the day, but brass is OK, not so labor intensive.
Bulk steel was actually pretty cheap. Not cheap enough to make a bridge out of it, but cheap enough to fill the world with rifles and swords. Before 1880 steel was too expensive to make a steel bridge over every river, or a steel locomotive rail thru every little two horse town, or a steel computer in every house, or a steel computer based internet, which is just as well because they didn't have the proper carbides and HSS to machine it anyway at any affordable rate.
Brass was, is, and probably always will be terribly expensive but it machines and wears (self lubricates, to an extent) like a dream. And the finish is quite attractive and simple, unlike steel or aluminum finishes. To this day, the amateur machinist guys make homemade steam engines out of brass, not steel, if they can afford it, anyway. I certainly prefer to work with brass. There are some issues with the cutting angles on lathe tools etc but its all really no big deal.
Brass is much closer in cost to being a precious metal than it is to being a structural metal. Always has been. This explains the fascination brass holds with the local meth user population, a little pocket sized outside water hose fitting is worth darn near as much as a small iron sewer/drain grate at the recycler.
Naah, they were more expensive. The problem is cultural, in that the leaders came more or less directly from military success, both against barbarians and in civil war. Military success implies capture of slaves. Coming up with a technological "solution" that expressly does not require the leaders most important product, is not gonna fly.
Its like trying to sell electric cars to Americans, no matter how much better they are than gas powered cars its culturally unacceptable. Must wait for the culture to slowly change, or suddenly die off, or be absorbed by a bigger more important culture, or otherwise be replaced from within, in both scenarios.
Imagine a housing solution for human beings that didn't involve big new york banks getting bigger. Possible? I think not. The technology doesn't prevent it, the culture does.
Similarly I don't know if victorian era england would really have found a wide ranging use for a mechanical computer given the culture of the time. If you need to add two numbers, don't you just hire a member of the lower classes? If you have to add a lot of them, for accounting purposes, you hire a lot of them... Its only when that starts to fail to scale decades later that you need a "solution"
Some of those questions are worth considering because they were single point sources. Presumably there existed one rat and one dead dude on a probably italian sailing ship who brought the plague to Europe... If a cat killed that rat with the flea holding the mutated virus, life would be quite different.
Some of those questions are kind of pointless, like the fall of rome. Rome was getting the giant flushing sound because of centuries of bad decisions and cultural failings, there is no "the" fall of rome. Read your Gibbon it arguably took 400 years of decay until arbitrarily you pick a fall date (all provinces abandoned in the west? no longer militarily relevant in the greater world? first sack of the city? no longer politically in charge of themselves? last distinctly roman leader killed and replaced by an outsider? this is like a hundred years range or more). Chinese and gunpowder, yeah that'll go really well, just replace most of Chinese cultural attitudes at that time and social mores, no big deal, just like brainwashing an entire empire simultaneously, how hard could that be?
The christianity thing was also seemingly inevitable in a "fall of rome" scenario, again, read your Gibbon without civil war and rebellion you're not getting a leader to convert.
Historically computing has never been a processing problem, but a storage problem. Or all computing, from embedded stuff to supercomputers, pretty much seems to revolve around turning a computation bound problem into a storage bound problem, and waiting for storage to improve so you can roll out faster processors to make use of it.
Try it yourself, if you have the skills. I had a pretty decent bitslice ALU design for a relay CPU down a total of 20 relays per bit slice, not just a wimpy bare adder but a pretty full featured design complete with comparator and roller/shifter unit. An 8 bit processor is well within my entertainment budget at a couple bucks per relay, and if I package each bitslice into something the size of a ream of paper, which is probably pretty pessimistic, the entire 8 bit CPU is only about the size of a box of bulk laserprinter paper. I figured for about $500 total all costs of all parts I can get a decent reliable relay based 8 bit CPU operational.
But a couple hundred bytes of relay based ram to run some "real programs" is way outside my budget, both financial, storage, and power. Even tradeoffs don't work, like using latching relays saves me considerable (cheap) power at a cost of roughly twice as much per bit. Inevitably you get into weird dynamic electrolytic capacitor designs, strange attempts at homemade core memory... Cheating and using modern sram isn't cool. Hundreds of latching relays at lets say $5 per bit isn't gonna fly if I "need" a K or so of memory to have fun, that would be $40K just of storage relays to say nothing of the address decode logic etc. Also that would be well in excess of 8000 relays for a K of memory, vs a mere 160 relays for the processor. About 80 times bigger. So that goes from a small box sized CPU to basically a room of my house.
This has interesting MTBF implications, in that any "non-trivial" relay computer is going to mostly fight memory breakdowns, not processor failures.
To an amateur, calculating is the hard part. To a pro, storage is where the real problem lies.
I'm related to a couple elementary school teachers and there are some universal problem with i-devices:
They come out of fed-grant or state-grant or capital budget to get the physical boxes. If you're extremely lucky you Might get grant / capital funds to buy tough cases and/or charging cradles. The kids will eventually destroy the charging cables by shoving them in upside down. Spend the money now, or later, your choice. The political types get more "points" by a press release that you have purchased 100 devices, than you have purchased 50 devices and all the wasteful accessories which are the only thing that make them useful, so you're not getting cradles or tough cases or spare charger cables. So soon you won't be using them at all.
Then you have no wifi inet access in the classroom. If you had wifi inet access the kids would spend most of their time surfing around aimlessly, even theoretically the "cool" ed sites like starfall are or at least were flash-based only, or they want a subscription, for which of course you have no money. You could probably afford website subscriptions if you didn't buy ipads, that is how the suppliers set their supply/demand curves. So you probably won't be doing "internet" stuff with the ipads.
Assuming you shake the parents down for itunes gift cards like you shake them down for other school supplies at the start of the year, you still have to find a freaking app. There are like 75 cruddy rote addition apps, then half that for subtraction, then half that for multiplication, pretty soon to do anything specific you end up with nothing. So you either have dozens of shovelware, or nothing at all. The teachers grapevine helps a little for the stuff in between, but pretty much there's nothing out there. Then you get to fight the local IT people about software installation onto school property, or cave into them and wait six months for them to hire an intern to enter the gift cards and do it on ITMS for you, to "save your valuable teacher time". Meanwhile the ipads sit in the box.
The final killer, in all honesty, at elementary levels, you'd like to think the kids spend three hours a day doing calculus but realistically the majority of the school day has no purpose for an ipad. Could you use an ipad for 30 minutes one time using an electronic instrument synth app? Yeah. Once. For 30 minutes in music class. The rest of music class is spent singing and learning about other physical music instruments. Not sure what you'll be axing from the district mandated curriculum to fit the ipad in.. All that is not compulsory is forbidden and all that is not forbidden is compulsory is the motto no a days. Ditto gym class, art class.
The academic classes have strict no child left behind curriculums decided mostly at the district level. In this district on day #34 we will watch Bill Nye Volcano episode and discuss. Where does the ipad fit into the district curriculum that is only updated every decade or so? It doesn't. In 10 years, instead of the curriculum containing mandatory 20 year old VCR videos, it'll contain mandatory 20 year old technology requirements (so you must run Oregon Trail on a genuine original Apple II to meet our NCLB goals...). The 20 year old tech at that time, is currently 10 years old, so in about 10 years you can expect intense demand for Palm Pilot III models on ebay, sony clie era palm pilot clones, etc.
Its just a reflection of our fascist culture. It shows up well in policies for control of electronic devices; more so than, say, a pool lifeguard or a bartender, but its in there, if it could only break thru its shelf and get out like it does for IT managers.
I can verify that some machine tool parts I have recent received were stamped as made in India. No punchline, none of that. For real.
Quality, fit, finish, were all about the same as Chinese, in other words, technically meets the bare minimum, but not much more.
Specifically some brazed carbide metal lathe cutting tools, and I believe a quick change toolpost for a lathe. I've heard they're starting to import Indian endmills (the thing that looks like a drill bit used in a milling machine).
Indian manufacturing is apparently coming soon to a walmart near you? They do have the advantage of at least theoretically knowing English, and China is beginning its first real industrial slowdown/crisis, so it'll be interesting to see if India ascends.
I remember, heck, I have stuff in my basement, from when imported machine tool components mean Polish as in Poland. Just after the berlin wall fell era, early 90s you couldn't buy an imported endmill that wasn't from Poland, or so it seemed at the time. Eastern Europe may yet rise again, possibly.
Ground the shield not float it? Assuming you have a neg ground amp or at least a floating output?
If you don't want to risk it, some ferrites would probably make quick work out of it, although beware that some ferrite mixes have a granular size and suited to LF like your AM radio app and some suited better for VHF. I know it sounds like audiophool line, but read some ferrite mfgrs databooks (amidon had a good one a long time ago, like in the 80s) and it'll all be explained.
Your best bet is to make nice with your local ham radio guy, who probably knows quite a bit about keeping RF out of his own audio gear... your problem should be easy in comparison.
Slashdot Mirror
Also there is the mushroom farm aspect, mentioned in several stories. So I'm grinding optics. Why? Well because my boss told me to. Whats the focal length and lens geometry? Sorry, classified, hey btw could I get your name for the FBI... um I mean for HR, in case a job opens up, its uh, just a policy we have to always report, uh, future employment candidates? Where does the lens go that you're making? In a storage box. Oh, OK, cool.
People at /. are good at systems analysis and assume everyone else is, and they can just look at systems and processes and understand how it ALL works and interacts. General public, not so much, and they often have no idea what they're "really" doing at work. I would not be surprised if many of the former employees still haven't figured out they were building this big ole satellite, even after the declassification and news reports.
Interesting, good pointer, thanks. I might subscribe. I looked at some back issues and the "Computing Science" column reminds me strongly of the S.A. "Computer Recreations" columns of the olden days. Now, where is the modern version of the old S.A. "Amateur Scientist" column? Is that "Make magazine" or Elektor or what?
Photocopy the schematic, trash it all up with soldering iron burns in the basement lab... Photocopy the parts list and haul it around with me everywhere until I acquire all the parts I need from fests and whatever? Scribble notes and equations all over the printout as I modify as necessary and see fit. Scribble notes on the schematic as I build (so, the analog ground is the green wire, and the optoisolated digital side ground is the black wire, vs the RF ground that is balun xfrmr isolated to the leftmost toroid core...)
Most electronic distributions historically seem paranoid nuts about allowing purchasers to copy or print out articles, completely missing the point that if I didn't find at least one article in the mag worth printing out and hacking up, I wouldn't buy the %^&! magazine to begin with. Either you let me fire up ye olde laser printer or you go bye bye.
If geek does not equate to EE anymore, does that mean I'm one of the cool kids now? Wait; don't answer that, I know I am.
QST QEX Elektor nuts-and-volts monitoring-times if these titles mean nothing to you then turn in your soldering iron.
If you get the "proceedings of the whateverconf from 20-whatever" from the ham radio guys that is pretty good reading. "Proceedings of Microwave Update Conference 2011" was just released a week or two ago and you can get it from Lulu POD for about $20. I personally recommend the article about the 3 GHz 1 watt amplifier, and the waveguide-horn EME antenna article was a fun read. Yes there is only one "Microwave Update Conf" per year, but there are a couple conf proceedings that I purchase annually, so that every couple months I get a proceedings of the digital conf, proceedings of the various VHF conf, etc, you get the idea. Its.. kind of an expensive habit, but then again, its a heck of a lot cheaper than actually attending the conf, so...
I would not count MAKE, its cool and I read it and like it, but I don't think of it as a "magazine" anymore. MAKE is more like a short story non-fiction anthology that happens to be published on a very regular schedule. Then again "best science fiction of year X" seems to be published on a schedule too, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that, and I don't know why people don't call it a "annual magazine". On the magazine side of the argument, MAKE does have regular columnists, but I counter that "best scifi of 20--" also have certain author names that seem to show up every year. Also I forgive them for having columnists simply because I enjoy reading Doctorow's column. Maybe its because I read and toss out magazines, but I have kept every single issue of MAKE on my bookshelf as a source of project ideas, just like I keep books. A complete set of MAKE is about 20 lineal inchs at this moment, I'd estimate just under two feet. Two feet of bookcase well spent.
snapshots of an organism caught in the act of reproducing.
So its half a billion year old kiddie pr0n. nsfw. its a trap. I'm not clicking that link, not my thing at all. I remember when /. was more wholesome and family oriented and you just had to worry about goatse links.
Anyone have actual news about this? The linked article was fluffy-lite. I'm curious if they were using a trunking system, if so, which one, or just classical repeater and remote RX site design. Seems odd they wouldn't mention brand names in the story. Motorola trunking? LTR? Maybe the cartel is the first really successful OpenSky trunking deployment? I've often thought the only way to get OpenSky to Really work successfully would involve pointing automatic rifles at the vendors heads, or perhaps reviving the roman era decimation procedure in full detail, both areas of expertise for the cartels. Maybe no trunking and just a bunch of old linked repeaters?
It sounds from the fluffy article like all commercial gear, like you could buy off ebay for your tow truck company, not .mil FHSS and satellite stuff.
If you want to listen to technology like this without becoming an amateur pharmaceuticals supplier you can buy a modern trunking scanner. Or if you want to work on similar gear as an operator, again, without becoming an amateur pharmaceuticals supplier, you can get your ham radio license.
I'm curious if it was a business hit vs the cartels own stuff. Right now in the USA you can talk to your local trunking radio provider and purchase more or less identical service for your small business. Its possible the only small business purchasing from some trunking provider in .mx was the cartel. Theoretically they've got common carrier protection, but I could see them getting siezed if their main/only customer was criminal. That would suck to go out of business because your main customer was crooks, but I guess thats life in .mx
I'm mostly with you on that one. Latching-vs-nonlatching relays are a big trade-off. You can get SPDT non-latching relays, or even DPDT ones, for less than a dollar in large quantity. But any significant quantity of them will need busbars for power distribution...
Ah for a non-latching design, about half the coils will be drawing power all the time, and you need to size for all the coils energized all the time, which gets kind of expensive. An eighth amp here and an eighth amp there, no big deal, but 8000 memory cell relays adds up to a cool KiloAmp, at 12 volts thats 12 kilowatts of heat in the coils. A big problem.
But a latching design inherently does not require the memory cell coils to be energized all the time, just a pulse at write cycle time, thats the whole point of latching. So the average current draw of a 8K memory unit with latching relays is almost entirely in the address decode, and with my sneakyness I think I could get that down to a couple amps at most.
So a latching design uses "lamp cord" size wiring, but a non-latching design would very much resemble the power system from one of Ma Bell's central offices.
I did some research and astroturfing seems unlikely in this individual situation.
First of all there's not dozens of "pro-namecheep" fanboy posts. There's like three. So I clicked on them to check out their posting history
InterestingFella (2537066) seems "real"
SJHillman (1966756) seems "real"
andydread (758754) seems "real"
It seems likely to me that namecheep does in fact rock.
Its kind of like whenever we talk about simple web hosting and ipv6, like fifty people come out of the woodwork to say he.net rocks. Or whenever we talk about colo virtual servers, again, like fifty people come out of the woodwork to say linode.com rocks. Based on personal experience as customer, its not a conspiracy or advertising, its simply that they're absolute best of breed and they do in fact rock. So I would be inclined to believe the /. groupthink and tend to think this namecheep place does in fact rock in the world of DNS service.
What I don't get, is that "gandi" or whatever place in like France or someplace used to get all the /. mindshare as being the "best". What happened to them? I recall it was "hard" to use if you lived in the USA, something about sending them money, but thats all I remember about ghandi or gandi or whatever they were.
All things considered, I'd have to believe Namecheap over GoDaddy, regardless of how hot Danica Patrick is.
Yeah regarding her, that is just weird. In the specific area that godaddy operates in, that being wanna be models who also have a promotional accessory line of domain registration, are there any other hotties out there with a DNS registrar as a marketing gimmic who I could transfer my domains to? I think having her own domain registrar is much trendier than the traditional model accessory line of clothes and perfumes and small dogs in purses and adopted foreign babies and such. The netsol CEO guy just isn't doing it for me, I'm sure he's a nice guy but I'm looking for someone more, uh, female. I'm pretty close to posting a personals ad in the local newspaper "distinguished older engineer seeks hottie for domain registration services, please send pix of router and/or firewall".
Caucuses are a bad idea to begin with. They value a better organized/paid for campaign over a better candidate. Also, why are Iowa and New Hampshire so special that they get to vote first and eliminate candidtes that may do better in other areas? The first primaries should be done on a rotating basis.
Really bad idea. Its a "balance of power thing". Those states serve almost no other purpose in American politics.
There would be incredible outcry if a politically large state got to go first and make the little states even less relevant, like CA or PA or NY or FL.
PA / CA / FL get to shine on election day. Caucus day is when NH and IA get to shine. Only fair.
The other problem is the candidates pander exclusively to their donors wishes, so it doesn't really matter which stuffed suit, from either party "wins", all of us who are not multinational corporations will "lose". Neither the primaries nor the elections will have any real effect on American politics, the average american is in no way represented by the american government.
Iowa has electricity and computers? You really can make anything out of corn.
LOL you're more correct that you know. Oldest trick in the book is subsidized growers turn 10 barrels of diesel into a big pile of unneeded corn, they you gotta do "something" with it lest the state be buried under corncobs, so you burn it to get the energy equivalent of burning 2 barrels of oil worth of steam to generate electricity. Along with environmental degradation due to topsoil loss, pesticide and fertilizer overapplication, etc. Its amazing how one industry simultaneously wastes both tax money, crude oil, and edible food.
You can also turn corn oil into biodiesel. I like cooking with corn oil, smells OK and frys up tastily. Good enough smoke point too.
Computers are mostly by weight plastic, and at least some plastics are made from corn byproducts, so theoretically some of your computer is probably corn.
Then a little off topic but not too far, lots of corn gets turned into corn syrup, which gets turned into energy drinks, which combined with electricity is turned into computer software using carbon based /. reading bioreactors.
Corn is really a very versatile feedstock for chemical engineers. You'd be surprised, pretty much if you can make it out of crude oil, given an infinite supply of free subsidized corn and an infinite supply of energy from burning free subsidized corn, you can make the same product out of corn.
Does this notion sound a lot like the paperless office to anyone?
That's a popular meme to laugh about, but this being the end of the year, I realized I haven't printed anything at work, for work purposes, in 2011. I suppose there's a few days left...
Kind of like the death of FAX machines. I had to sign and fax a medical receipt a couple months ago, and I realized I hadn't used a FAX for business purposes since sometime in the early 00s.
I did personally ship something via UPS and printed out my own shipping label back in '08. That's the last thing I printed for work?
This type of course cannot be properly delivered via 10" screens. Nothing can replace that face to face human touch.
Could you expand upon this, like maybe a "why"? People who already agree with you will see it as preaching to the choir, people who don't, like myself, are mystified.
Is it a resolution thing like you cannot read the blackboard for video lectures? Language barrier?
Note I took discrete math a decade or so ago from a genuine professor (not a TA) and I also enjoyed it greatly, but I can't understand what mysterious force would intercede were a camera and TV placed in my line of sight.
It sounds like the biological concept of vitalism, or perhaps the catholic concept of bishops laying on hands down thru the ages when a new priest is made. I don't subscribe to magickal thought that merely placing silicon and glass in my line of sight would have ruined my experience.
Javascript?? In order to get anything done in javascript,
Note, we're comparing javascript to BASIC, not ruby. We're not trying to get anything done in javascript.
No one does modern enterprise development in BASIC. And thats OK. No one will do modern enterprise development in javascript. And thats OK too.
As a learning language "make a program that prints your name" "make a loop that counts from 1 to 10 and displays it" both js and basic are pretty good...
It has "tolerable" control flow. It gets the structure in the head of "decide what to do, edit the file of text, then run it and see what happens, then debug, repeat" which believe it or not, non-programmers simply don't understand. It has the concept of "a variable". Most importantly it has limitations, and most of being a programmer is figuring out how to work around limitations, and thankfully they're simple enough that a noob can run into them and start thinking, and the limitations are simultaneously complicated enough that a total noob can still do "something" before colliding with an immovable object. Its available pretty much everywhere on every machine and is more or less cross platform.
It is very hard to outdo javascript as an intro language. Perhaps tryruby.org which has a completely different approach and requires reasonably fast internet access?
I should follow up, that there is a time and place for twenty five cent parts. Like kids noisy toys. Or repairing circuit designs from 1980 with identical parts.
Thats why you're seeing, basically, ancient junk, being sold by otherwise respectable resellers at those prices.
But don't think that ancient junk is appropriate for new designs.
Mmm not really. For example most of the low end machine shops are gone, jobs outsourced to China. You can't buy a part with a bad surface finish because the only shops still in business in the US have fast, high HP / high torque spindles... Like if you wanted a wavy surface finish with cutting tool marks that are like 1/64 inch wide, you pretty much have to CAD/CAM that into the design in the US.
Similar, the fancier stuff gets the more the DOD and export laws apply. Can you buy milspec from China? Well the locals won't let you use it in contracts to our own guys (wisely, in my opinion) so there's almost no import demand, and the Chinese won't let themselves export it because they need milspec for their own milspec projects (they have satellites and missiles and stuff of their own, just not made by the same guys who make stuff for Walmart)
So its not quite as simple as "just ask for the not junk version"
Yup thats the problem with trying to replicate what amounts to a 1980 KIM-1 in relays.
The ancients ran in to the same dilema and their solution was wide word sizes like 60 bits. Thus you end up with simpler shorter programs and more calculation per cycle and less memory size required.
An 8 bit machine with a K of ram is what you get when memory and CPU are fast and space is cheap. What I'm used to, basically.
The ancients idea of large word length makes sense if memory is expensive. Also lots of CPU registers make sense if you're not going to multi-process or interrupt process anyway. Thats why my ratios of relays in the CPU vs memory is so far off from historical record of real historical relay computers.
What you're not seeing is I'm talking about primary storage, you're talking about bulk secondary storage. If I have all day I can use papertape or punch cards for bulk storage. There is no way to process ten times faster than storage, unless you mean "bulk storage" like hard drive space. I'm talking about a limit very much like cache memory. You can't out process your cache, at some fundamental level the output of an adder (or whatever) needs to be stuck "somewhere" no matter how fast it can add...
Bear in mind that even consistently-good, moderately priced steel wasn't available until the 1880s. That's why fine machinery was made of brass until the 20th century.
As an amateur machinist guy I can assure you that fine machinery was made of brass because steel/iron/etc was a nightmare to machine with the tools of the day, but brass is OK, not so labor intensive.
Bulk steel was actually pretty cheap. Not cheap enough to make a bridge out of it, but cheap enough to fill the world with rifles and swords. Before 1880 steel was too expensive to make a steel bridge over every river, or a steel locomotive rail thru every little two horse town, or a steel computer in every house, or a steel computer based internet, which is just as well because they didn't have the proper carbides and HSS to machine it anyway at any affordable rate.
Brass was, is, and probably always will be terribly expensive but it machines and wears (self lubricates, to an extent) like a dream. And the finish is quite attractive and simple, unlike steel or aluminum finishes. To this day, the amateur machinist guys make homemade steam engines out of brass, not steel, if they can afford it, anyway. I certainly prefer to work with brass. There are some issues with the cutting angles on lathe tools etc but its all really no big deal.
Brass is much closer in cost to being a precious metal than it is to being a structural metal. Always has been. This explains the fascination brass holds with the local meth user population, a little pocket sized outside water hose fitting is worth darn near as much as a small iron sewer/drain grate at the recycler.
Naah, they were more expensive. The problem is cultural, in that the leaders came more or less directly from military success, both against barbarians and in civil war. Military success implies capture of slaves. Coming up with a technological "solution" that expressly does not require the leaders most important product, is not gonna fly.
Its like trying to sell electric cars to Americans, no matter how much better they are than gas powered cars its culturally unacceptable. Must wait for the culture to slowly change, or suddenly die off, or be absorbed by a bigger more important culture, or otherwise be replaced from within, in both scenarios.
Imagine a housing solution for human beings that didn't involve big new york banks getting bigger. Possible? I think not. The technology doesn't prevent it, the culture does.
Similarly I don't know if victorian era england would really have found a wide ranging use for a mechanical computer given the culture of the time. If you need to add two numbers, don't you just hire a member of the lower classes? If you have to add a lot of them, for accounting purposes, you hire a lot of them... Its only when that starts to fail to scale decades later that you need a "solution"
Some of those questions are worth considering because they were single point sources. Presumably there existed one rat and one dead dude on a probably italian sailing ship who brought the plague to Europe... If a cat killed that rat with the flea holding the mutated virus, life would be quite different.
Some of those questions are kind of pointless, like the fall of rome. Rome was getting the giant flushing sound because of centuries of bad decisions and cultural failings, there is no "the" fall of rome. Read your Gibbon it arguably took 400 years of decay until arbitrarily you pick a fall date (all provinces abandoned in the west? no longer militarily relevant in the greater world? first sack of the city? no longer politically in charge of themselves? last distinctly roman leader killed and replaced by an outsider? this is like a hundred years range or more). Chinese and gunpowder, yeah that'll go really well, just replace most of Chinese cultural attitudes at that time and social mores, no big deal, just like brainwashing an entire empire simultaneously, how hard could that be?
The christianity thing was also seemingly inevitable in a "fall of rome" scenario, again, read your Gibbon without civil war and rebellion you're not getting a leader to convert.
Historically computing has never been a processing problem, but a storage problem. Or all computing, from embedded stuff to supercomputers, pretty much seems to revolve around turning a computation bound problem into a storage bound problem, and waiting for storage to improve so you can roll out faster processors to make use of it.
Try it yourself, if you have the skills. I had a pretty decent bitslice ALU design for a relay CPU down a total of 20 relays per bit slice, not just a wimpy bare adder but a pretty full featured design complete with comparator and roller/shifter unit. An 8 bit processor is well within my entertainment budget at a couple bucks per relay, and if I package each bitslice into something the size of a ream of paper, which is probably pretty pessimistic, the entire 8 bit CPU is only about the size of a box of bulk laserprinter paper. I figured for about $500 total all costs of all parts I can get a decent reliable relay based 8 bit CPU operational.
But a couple hundred bytes of relay based ram to run some "real programs" is way outside my budget, both financial, storage, and power. Even tradeoffs don't work, like using latching relays saves me considerable (cheap) power at a cost of roughly twice as much per bit. Inevitably you get into weird dynamic electrolytic capacitor designs, strange attempts at homemade core memory... Cheating and using modern sram isn't cool. Hundreds of latching relays at lets say $5 per bit isn't gonna fly if I "need" a K or so of memory to have fun, that would be $40K just of storage relays to say nothing of the address decode logic etc. Also that would be well in excess of 8000 relays for a K of memory, vs a mere 160 relays for the processor. About 80 times bigger. So that goes from a small box sized CPU to basically a room of my house.
This has interesting MTBF implications, in that any "non-trivial" relay computer is going to mostly fight memory breakdowns, not processor failures.
To an amateur, calculating is the hard part. To a pro, storage is where the real problem lies.
I'm related to a couple elementary school teachers and there are some universal problem with i-devices:
They come out of fed-grant or state-grant or capital budget to get the physical boxes. If you're extremely lucky you Might get grant / capital funds to buy tough cases and/or charging cradles. The kids will eventually destroy the charging cables by shoving them in upside down. Spend the money now, or later, your choice. The political types get more "points" by a press release that you have purchased 100 devices, than you have purchased 50 devices and all the wasteful accessories which are the only thing that make them useful, so you're not getting cradles or tough cases or spare charger cables. So soon you won't be using them at all.
Then you have no wifi inet access in the classroom. If you had wifi inet access the kids would spend most of their time surfing around aimlessly, even theoretically the "cool" ed sites like starfall are or at least were flash-based only, or they want a subscription, for which of course you have no money. You could probably afford website subscriptions if you didn't buy ipads, that is how the suppliers set their supply/demand curves. So you probably won't be doing "internet" stuff with the ipads.
Assuming you shake the parents down for itunes gift cards like you shake them down for other school supplies at the start of the year, you still have to find a freaking app. There are like 75 cruddy rote addition apps, then half that for subtraction, then half that for multiplication, pretty soon to do anything specific you end up with nothing. So you either have dozens of shovelware, or nothing at all. The teachers grapevine helps a little for the stuff in between, but pretty much there's nothing out there. Then you get to fight the local IT people about software installation onto school property, or cave into them and wait six months for them to hire an intern to enter the gift cards and do it on ITMS for you, to "save your valuable teacher time". Meanwhile the ipads sit in the box.
The final killer, in all honesty, at elementary levels, you'd like to think the kids spend three hours a day doing calculus but realistically the majority of the school day has no purpose for an ipad. Could you use an ipad for 30 minutes one time using an electronic instrument synth app? Yeah. Once. For 30 minutes in music class. The rest of music class is spent singing and learning about other physical music instruments. Not sure what you'll be axing from the district mandated curriculum to fit the ipad in.. All that is not compulsory is forbidden and all that is not forbidden is compulsory is the motto no a days. Ditto gym class, art class.
The academic classes have strict no child left behind curriculums decided mostly at the district level. In this district on day #34 we will watch Bill Nye Volcano episode and discuss. Where does the ipad fit into the district curriculum that is only updated every decade or so? It doesn't. In 10 years, instead of the curriculum containing mandatory 20 year old VCR videos, it'll contain mandatory 20 year old technology requirements (so you must run Oregon Trail on a genuine original Apple II to meet our NCLB goals...). The 20 year old tech at that time, is currently 10 years old, so in about 10 years you can expect intense demand for Palm Pilot III models on ebay, sony clie era palm pilot clones, etc.
So... paperweights?
How come every I.T. manager turns into a fascist?
Its just a reflection of our fascist culture. It shows up well in policies for control of electronic devices; more so than, say, a pool lifeguard or a bartender, but its in there, if it could only break thru its shelf and get out like it does for IT managers.
Soon only India will be left as cheap labor.
I can verify that some machine tool parts I have recent received were stamped as made in India. No punchline, none of that. For real.
Quality, fit, finish, were all about the same as Chinese, in other words, technically meets the bare minimum, but not much more.
Specifically some brazed carbide metal lathe cutting tools, and I believe a quick change toolpost for a lathe. I've heard they're starting to import Indian endmills (the thing that looks like a drill bit used in a milling machine).
Indian manufacturing is apparently coming soon to a walmart near you? They do have the advantage of at least theoretically knowing English, and China is beginning its first real industrial slowdown/crisis, so it'll be interesting to see if India ascends.
I remember, heck, I have stuff in my basement, from when imported machine tool components mean Polish as in Poland. Just after the berlin wall fell era, early 90s you couldn't buy an imported endmill that wasn't from Poland, or so it seemed at the time. Eastern Europe may yet rise again, possibly.
Ground the shield not float it? Assuming you have a neg ground amp or at least a floating output?
If you don't want to risk it, some ferrites would probably make quick work out of it, although beware that some ferrite mixes have a granular size and suited to LF like your AM radio app and some suited better for VHF. I know it sounds like audiophool line, but read some ferrite mfgrs databooks (amidon had a good one a long time ago, like in the 80s) and it'll all be explained.
Your best bet is to make nice with your local ham radio guy, who probably knows quite a bit about keeping RF out of his own audio gear... your problem should be easy in comparison.