You know, actually checking references is an excellent way to weed out those who are misrepresenting themselves.
Ah but you see our other clients who are not direct competitors of yours, they only speak Hindi, and they are very private and concerned about security, and your competitors would probably tell you anything to misdirect you anyway, so...
Ridiculous. What you call "communications problems" is really nothing more than some minor communications trouble.
Agreed. The original poster should have just rebooted her, and if that doesn't help, reinstall windows. I've never had a conversation with an Indian that didn't eventually devolve to that.
I can't answer that. I've never dealt with Canadian programmers. It certainly won't give the same langage problems as India though.
Hmm you might be surprised. I can't even figure out their food. "Jam busters" "Poutine". You can't even guess what that means based on the name. The biggest problem I have run into is cultural, you'd have better luck getting someone to work in Green Bay during a Packer game in the US, than you would during a hockey game in Canada. Also their sense of urgency is much more "American rural north" rather than "Manhattan" so there are occasional mismatches in expectations. Most of them seem to be drunk most of their "off" time so good luck with oncall. I blame it on their women, who are (all?) very distractingly beautiful.
Evidence: Paperclip usage audits, numerical tracking of bathroom visits, all the theatre done by the security dept, detailed reports of printer of photocopier use, detailed analysis and backbilling of cubical coffee machine expenses based on numerically integrated departmental floor area calculus problems...
That shows a failure of the American programmer, not a problem with Indian programmers. 1) Why can't an American lie? Liars expect people to lie, management, especially upper management, requires sociopath tendencies which equals lying, so, freaking lie about it to keep the boss happy. If a guy in India who just graduated school can claim 10 years C++ experience, why can't I claim 20 years? I have "CCIE-level" experience although not a CCIE. Actually, in the restricted arena of BGP I probably do, but I'm lost in switching. If I know its a BGP job, and the boss doesn't care if I lie, and the competition in India will lie... why not? Sure, boss, I'll be a CCIE. 2) The boss likes "needy" "unempowered" employees. So do it. Ask him dumb questions constantly to keep his tiny little ego boosted. Whats so hard about that? 3) Tell the boss it'll take longer, and F off more. Again, whats the problem, you worried you'll wear out the foosball table or what? 4) Don't worry about needing handholding or spending more time on rework than initial development. Just do it. The boss likes it; or he wouldn't be going to India where they do it all the time. 5) Leave for greener pastures as soon as possible, preferably before the project crashes and burns.
The price is "too low" for a american programmer because the boss is hiring incompetents in India. OK, the problem isn't the american can't get hired for an "incompetent" level job at $1/hr, the problem is the american is supposed to be applying for high paying high end architect and management jobs, which he can't do because he's only a programmer, but then again, the indians can't program, so its all kind of even in a way. And if thats they way the man wants it, thats the way the man gets it.
This all seems to be "programmer getting frustrated trying to make and enforce management decisions while not being in a position of management authority". Just zen up a bit and go with the flow of reality. If the boss wants incompetent liars, don't whine about it, either become the boss and demand something else, or become an incompetent liar, or work elsewhere. Its simple, really.
True and your facilities work is valuable, but, maybe the first part of a development cycle could be done cheaply with a "zap it and sniff for smoke" methodology at a small facility.
If your device can't survive a small scale tesla coil, no point hooking it up to a calibrated high power high expense facility like yours.
For example, several decades ago, I pulled cable for RS-232 cables for a specific model of VAX, which was famous (at least at our facility) for blowing out its rs232 line receivers if you touched the contacts. Not intense static zap, not nearby lightning strike, not direct lightning strike like you can simulate, but just casual contact, even in humid summer months while wearing cotton etc. There is space for a lot of R+D facilities and work between where that product was, and where your testing facility is; evidence of commercial lack of surge protection shows both are needed.
This is supposed to be the social networking era, where is my ability to cut out the useless middlemen and throw my money straight at the actual producers of film/television projects?
Google a guy named "Jason Scott" (his screen name) and "The BBS Documentary" and "Get Lamp" and some upcoming documentaries like "6502" and two others. If you've been to a hacker con you've probably had a chance to meet him, I can personally verify in real life he is pretty much like he is in movies and online.
I've sent him mid to high three digits of $ over the past decade or so, including a substantial donation to "6502" which is enough to get my name in the credits as a financial backer or whatever he's calling it. I think I am getting my monies worth because I am a rabid fan. I don't think it unusual or weird because there are guys who spend five digits on star wars products; those guys are unusual or weird.
This kind of stuff is out there... Maybe not common, but out there.
My "couple kilowatt" buzz box arc welder is a couple orders of magnitude lower peak power, arc length is a couple orders of magnitude lower, operating freq is 60 hz two orders of magnitude lower, and I can knock out all radio communication for quite a distance with it... The point being that specs won't save you, design will save you, since something much smaller is much worse. So the specific electrical engineering design elements of how you make a lightning generator make ten or so orders of magnitude less interference than a small arc welder would be an interesting technical question.
Some of the answer I donno about... each end of my ham radio dipole antenna is 180 degrees out of phase from each other and I have a whopping effective radiated power at distance... I don't think the details work quite the way you're describing. From a DC perspective, that is an accurate description. RF doesn't work like that.
I know they say only one question per post, whatever. If you're "near the dam" maybe you'll be accepting tourists? I only live 2000 miles away, but like most EE types I'd throw a couple bucks in the office coffee fund to see the sights of your new facility... sounds cool to me.
Because bookstores aren't build for going in with a list and finding exactly those titles. They are built for browsing by general catagory. I enjoy good bookstores when I don't know what I want to buy. Online when I do know.
No one goes to brick and mortar bookshops for themselves anymore, or at least its a very small percentage.
If you have a teen-ish daughter / cousin / niece / whatever, you simply go there, they point you at the "twilight" section, and you select one, all done. Or "my wife likes to (insert stereotypical female hobby here)", they point you at (stereotypical female hobby) section and you select one, all done.
If it were not for gift giving holidays and birthdays those stores would be completely out of business.
The original poster is getting it all wrong. The competitor for analog paper bookstores isn't digital bookstores, its stereotypical gift stores, like scrapbooking stores, the candle stores, the candy/chocolate stores, to a lesser extent clothes stores, places like that. I don't buy an analog book for my wife instead of a digital book for my wife. I buy an analog book for my wife instead of a gourmet chocolate bar (none of that Hershey's brown Crisco please), or instead of a really nice bottle of wine, or instead of craft supplies, etc.
It's been a while, but 5 or 6 years ago you could have them store your goods (e.g. spare parts) in their warehouses all over the country so that when a local need came up the delivery would be faster and cheaper than if you held them in a single location.
Tiger Direct is famous for this. If you order something popular and standard, like a mid size SATA harddrive, it'll almost certainly come direct from a local UPS warehouse, even though I live less than 100 miles from one of their corporate distribution centers... If even a local like me gets UPS logistics shipments, then I assume everyone in the country probably gets log shipments unless you literally live in the distro centers hometown.
The only news site I visit with consistently higher-quality user posts is The Economist's.
Economist is too "establishment". The podcast is beyond hilarious some days, like they're channeling CNBC but the british accent makes them more dignified. zerohedge is the real world. That and thehousingbubbleblog
Note that zerohedge is a bit of an old boys club, or locker room mentality. Its a rough room. Not as bad as 4chan, but... Probably not the right spot for my mom to visit. Also unlike/., they don't explain stuff. If you don't know what the "ECB" is, or how to do arbitrage in the bond market, they'll outright tell you to F off and read wikipedia, whereas on/. we'd at least give you a URL link to the correct wiki article.
The housingbubbleblog is made up of great people (other than my self) and is friendly. It is appropriate to send your mom. It operates at a much lower level and they provide great explanations.
So there's this holiday sales graph released. Regardless of what it looks like, The Economist will have a bunch of permabull paleoconservative toadies explain how it means glory days are here again and it just proves our glorious leaders are geniuses and it'll be 2007 again in no time. Not that its a complete waste of time, because they might be wrong but I've never seen such clear writing explaining their position. They might be foolish, but they do it with extraordinary style. The Zerohedge article will be the graph and maybe a terse source, and the articles will mostly be short twitter like posts of 4 letter words although a guy with an avatar of a gif animation of a well endowed woman's chest will post an equation, its derivative, and end it with something vaguely xkcd like, such as "austrian economics, it works bitchez". The housing bubble blog will either ignore it, or in the daily news blog some pulitzer prize winner (seriously) will write about a one page clearly written english explanation of what it means and how it all works. Ben does not even allow swearing on HBB or personal attacks, more or less, its quite a civilized environment compared to the others, or even compared to here. My local news paper would post a fluff perma-bull piece about the sales graph showing that "housing always goes up" and "its a great time to buy" and the comments would have about 100 posts from paid democratic astroturfer bloggers blaming the Rs and 100 posts from paid republican astroturfer bloggers blaming the Ds and absolutely no one reads the newspaper comments unless they're being paid to write slanted astroturf comments, so I don't bother with the newspaper at all. The CNBC TV presentation would pretty much be the permabull BS newspaper article, read over the air by a hottie in a tiny miniskirt and no comments. If you mute CNBC its kinda soft core porn some days, which I like. The local TV station, given the graph, would instead run a story about "american idle" having a casting call at some auditorium downtown. And thats how economic news gets reported.
Is that what this project is aiming for, because it seems strange that a person would have to use a crowd-funding model to fund research into a health and safety issue, that one would assume the likes of G.E. or Philips or some other multi-national would be able to do much more comprehensibly?
I donno, but I know these facilities are expensive, and imagine where electronics would be if only G.E. could afford to own a soldering iron... or a C compiler...
I should be able to click on the TV and watch any episode of the original Star Trek (for example) at any time...
TV should be at my control 'for my entertainment', not treat me as a passive audience for what ever is programmed at whatever time.
LOL you've just described my exact mythtv setup, why I have it, and how I use it. I am completely uninterested in sports so I haven't watched live TV in probably 6 years now.
I don't ever want to see a hunting/cooking/househunting show. But I do want to to watch hockey games/history/movies. You can't, the subscription model says you have to have both.
The industry model of the cableco owns the proprietary closed source settop box, says you have to see the Spanish channels, the home shopping channels, the sports channels, all that junk. I run a mythtv and I simply deleted the channels I never watch from mythtv channel editor and my schedulesdirect account. Bye bye univision, bye bye QVC, bye bye ESPN, bye bye HGTV, bye bye MTV, bye bye foxnews. I'm left with about 5 channels I often watch and about 20 I keep around just in case. But I don't have to scroll thru, past, click thru, or acknowledge the existence of channels I don't watch, etc. Its VERY convenient and enjoyable.
The subscription model means I have to pay for it, even if I've blocked it. I'm getting the same amount of entertainment, I just don't have to wade thru the trash, so I'm "ok" with it.
Advertising is one of the big things that is currently broken about TV. There's too much of "ads as content" as well as changing rules regarding how much of normal content can be mired in ads. This has led to a dichotomy between "prime time" content and reruns and the butchery of older works.
Want to vomit? Try watching old "twilight zone" reruns. The original 1/2 hour episodes were about 25 minutes in the old days. Recent hack jobs have that scarcely over 15 minutes now. With automatic hands free Mythtv commercial skipping, I can watch 4 "half hour" episodes in a bit more than an hour.
So much is edited out that some episodes don't make sense anymore. Entire scenes gone. Sometimes they chop out to an ad in the middle of dialog.
The original 25 minute episodes are still available via DVD and of course torrents. I'm pretty close to switching to that instead of watching the sad "broadcasts".
But nobody seems to be able to answer the big question: what exactly is so broken about TV anyway? The tech industry is filled with engineers and geeks. They naturally want to optimize the TV experience
If it was "our" fault, we would have HDTV back in the 80s. The reason for innovation is the housing bubble drove giant mcmansions which require giant TVs to be in proportion, so sales were great until 2007 or so. Since then... Well boss asks "what can we do to sell more crap, like the good ole days of the global credit bubble?" No one has any idea but the engineer, who suggests that its finally time to try all that 80s stuff, like faster refresh, prog scan, higher res, 3d, 5.1 sound, blah blah. Its not much, but its better than the marketing guy who said "uh, lets make more commercials with cheerleaders and football players har har har".
I've looked a bit this morning and can't find anymore info about the star itself. What its apparent magnitude it? What constellation its in? Etc. All I can figure out is its referred to as Kepler 22 which only makes sense in relation to the program. But I'd love to be able to try and see the star through a telescope.
Go to the exoplanet encyclopedia website instead of a place that headlines "Psychics and Missing Babies -- Dissecting the Blame Game" and "Top Tips from 2011 to Help Earth, Economy: Photos"
Son of a B, e.eu has got nothing. Simbad's got nothing. There is nothing at all other than it exists and there are press releases all over along with fluffy talk about the release. But even the "official record" has nothing. Give it time and it'll get populated. Heck by the time you read this, e.eu might have data.
This is what Kepler-16 looks like on simbad, someday we'll have this level of data for -22
I donno what a simbad is, a friend of mine went around calling it "sinbad" like the sailor for a while. Which is probably a cooler name, at least in the US.
.... maybe they combine IE and FF and it becomes Microsoft Firefox.
That's been my dream for years... a giant flushing sound as the loaf that is MSIE is flushed and replaced with FF.
Heck if Debian can/has to call FF "iceweasel" maybe MS could flush rotten MSIE down the drain and literally call FF "the new IE" or something like that.
Traditionally giant lightning generators are used to develop lightning protection. For power companies, radio companies, telcos, aircraft, etc.
1) Design and build a model or life size machine that you think will survive a lightning bolt
2) Zap the heck out of it with artificial lightning
3) Did blow up? If so, analyze how it failed and go back to step 1
4) Did not blow up? Profit !!!!
The hilarious part is watching IT guys, who never get credit for their work when IT stuff doesn't blow up, trash talk the work of lightning protection guys, who also never get credit for their work when stuff doesn't blow up. "Stuff still blows up sometimes anyway" "Its just a wasted expense" "Lightning never hits the same place twice / you never catch the same virus twice" blah blah blah. The ham radio guys are just as bad, ten thousand nearby strikes and no effect on system performance, one strike finally takes it out and "all that stuff is worthless no point even installing it, stuff just blows up anyway". Idiots.
Short format: Are you going for 47 C.F.R. 15 sub B class A or class B? Just kidding, sorta.
Long format: Whats your plans regarding radio interference? Like, are you making a whopping big faraday cage out of an abandoned condo building, or have a FCC exemption under some R+D rule, or... I'm just picturing armies of angry radio listeners storming your building with pitchforks...
Whats the high voltage high current switching scene like now a days? In ye olden days krytons and friends were thought to be cool, but expensive and export controlled. Now a days do you just import high voltage mosfets from China and call it good, or...
Slashdot Mirror
You know, actually checking references is an excellent way to weed out those who are misrepresenting themselves.
Ah but you see our other clients who are not direct competitors of yours, they only speak Hindi, and they are very private and concerned about security, and your competitors would probably tell you anything to misdirect you anyway, so...
Ridiculous. What you call "communications problems" is really nothing more than some minor communications trouble.
Agreed. The original poster should have just rebooted her, and if that doesn't help, reinstall windows. I've never had a conversation with an Indian that didn't eventually devolve to that.
I can't answer that. I've never dealt with Canadian programmers. It certainly won't give the same langage problems as India though.
Hmm you might be surprised. I can't even figure out their food. "Jam busters" "Poutine". You can't even guess what that means based on the name. The biggest problem I have run into is cultural, you'd have better luck getting someone to work in Green Bay during a Packer game in the US, than you would during a hockey game in Canada. Also their sense of urgency is much more "American rural north" rather than "Manhattan" so there are occasional mismatches in expectations. Most of them seem to be drunk most of their "off" time so good luck with oncall. I blame it on their women, who are (all?) very distractingly beautiful.
Evidence: Paperclip usage audits, numerical tracking of bathroom visits, all the theatre done by the security dept, detailed reports of printer of photocopier use, detailed analysis and backbilling of cubical coffee machine expenses based on numerically integrated departmental floor area calculus problems...
the local contractor subcontracted to, umm, a nameless Asian country (that is triangular, and a subcontinent - but nameless).
Bhutan?
Tasmania? I hear those guys are real devils. They're screwed. (come on, just say India)
That shows a failure of the American programmer, not a problem with Indian programmers. ... why not? Sure, boss, I'll be a CCIE.
1) Why can't an American lie? Liars expect people to lie, management, especially upper management, requires sociopath tendencies which equals lying, so, freaking lie about it to keep the boss happy. If a guy in India who just graduated school can claim 10 years C++ experience, why can't I claim 20 years? I have "CCIE-level" experience although not a CCIE. Actually, in the restricted arena of BGP I probably do, but I'm lost in switching. If I know its a BGP job, and the boss doesn't care if I lie, and the competition in India will lie
2) The boss likes "needy" "unempowered" employees. So do it. Ask him dumb questions constantly to keep his tiny little ego boosted. Whats so hard about that?
3) Tell the boss it'll take longer, and F off more. Again, whats the problem, you worried you'll wear out the foosball table or what?
4) Don't worry about needing handholding or spending more time on rework than initial development. Just do it. The boss likes it; or he wouldn't be going to India where they do it all the time.
5) Leave for greener pastures as soon as possible, preferably before the project crashes and burns.
The price is "too low" for a american programmer because the boss is hiring incompetents in India. OK, the problem isn't the american can't get hired for an "incompetent" level job at $1/hr, the problem is the american is supposed to be applying for high paying high end architect and management jobs, which he can't do because he's only a programmer, but then again, the indians can't program, so its all kind of even in a way. And if thats they way the man wants it, thats the way the man gets it.
This all seems to be "programmer getting frustrated trying to make and enforce management decisions while not being in a position of management authority". Just zen up a bit and go with the flow of reality. If the boss wants incompetent liars, don't whine about it, either become the boss and demand something else, or become an incompetent liar, or work elsewhere. Its simple, really.
Exactly. You should feel threatened, because quality frequently doesn't win out.
There are a lot more McDonalds than five star restaurants.
True and your facilities work is valuable, but, maybe the first part of a development cycle could be done cheaply with a "zap it and sniff for smoke" methodology at a small facility.
If your device can't survive a small scale tesla coil, no point hooking it up to a calibrated high power high expense facility like yours.
For example, several decades ago, I pulled cable for RS-232 cables for a specific model of VAX, which was famous (at least at our facility) for blowing out its rs232 line receivers if you touched the contacts. Not intense static zap, not nearby lightning strike, not direct lightning strike like you can simulate, but just casual contact, even in humid summer months while wearing cotton etc. There is space for a lot of R+D facilities and work between where that product was, and where your testing facility is; evidence of commercial lack of surge protection shows both are needed.
This is supposed to be the social networking era, where is my ability to cut out the useless middlemen and throw my money straight at the actual producers of film/television projects?
Google a guy named "Jason Scott" (his screen name) and "The BBS Documentary" and "Get Lamp" and some upcoming documentaries like "6502" and two others. If you've been to a hacker con you've probably had a chance to meet him, I can personally verify in real life he is pretty much like he is in movies and online.
I've sent him mid to high three digits of $ over the past decade or so, including a substantial donation to "6502" which is enough to get my name in the credits as a financial backer or whatever he's calling it. I think I am getting my monies worth because I am a rabid fan. I don't think it unusual or weird because there are guys who spend five digits on star wars products; those guys are unusual or weird.
This kind of stuff is out there... Maybe not common, but out there.
My "couple kilowatt" buzz box arc welder is a couple orders of magnitude lower peak power, arc length is a couple orders of magnitude lower, operating freq is 60 hz two orders of magnitude lower, and I can knock out all radio communication for quite a distance with it... The point being that specs won't save you, design will save you, since something much smaller is much worse. So the specific electrical engineering design elements of how you make a lightning generator make ten or so orders of magnitude less interference than a small arc welder would be an interesting technical question.
Some of the answer I donno about... each end of my ham radio dipole antenna is 180 degrees out of phase from each other and I have a whopping effective radiated power at distance... I don't think the details work quite the way you're describing. From a DC perspective, that is an accurate description. RF doesn't work like that.
I know they say only one question per post, whatever. If you're "near the dam" maybe you'll be accepting tourists? I only live 2000 miles away, but like most EE types I'd throw a couple bucks in the office coffee fund to see the sights of your new facility... sounds cool to me.
Yeah its called "the cell phone" or "the smartphone" or whatever. Also wifi, wireless ISPs, satellite TV, etc.
Because bookstores aren't build for going in with a list and finding exactly those titles. They are built for browsing by general catagory. I enjoy good bookstores when I don't know what I want to buy. Online when I do know.
No one goes to brick and mortar bookshops for themselves anymore, or at least its a very small percentage.
If you have a teen-ish daughter / cousin / niece / whatever, you simply go there, they point you at the "twilight" section, and you select one, all done. Or "my wife likes to (insert stereotypical female hobby here)", they point you at (stereotypical female hobby) section and you select one, all done.
If it were not for gift giving holidays and birthdays those stores would be completely out of business.
The original poster is getting it all wrong. The competitor for analog paper bookstores isn't digital bookstores, its stereotypical gift stores, like scrapbooking stores, the candle stores, the candy/chocolate stores, to a lesser extent clothes stores, places like that. I don't buy an analog book for my wife instead of a digital book for my wife. I buy an analog book for my wife instead of a gourmet chocolate bar (none of that Hershey's brown Crisco please), or instead of a really nice bottle of wine, or instead of craft supplies, etc.
It's been a while, but 5 or 6 years ago you could have them store your goods (e.g. spare parts) in their warehouses all over the country so that when a local need came up the delivery would be faster and cheaper than if you held them in a single location.
Tiger Direct is famous for this. If you order something popular and standard, like a mid size SATA harddrive, it'll almost certainly come direct from a local UPS warehouse, even though I live less than 100 miles from one of their corporate distribution centers... If even a local like me gets UPS logistics shipments, then I assume everyone in the country probably gets log shipments unless you literally live in the distro centers hometown.
The only news site I visit with consistently higher-quality user posts is The Economist's.
Economist is too "establishment". The podcast is beyond hilarious some days, like they're channeling CNBC but the british accent makes them more dignified. zerohedge is the real world. That and thehousingbubbleblog
Note that zerohedge is a bit of an old boys club, or locker room mentality. Its a rough room. Not as bad as 4chan, but... Probably not the right spot for my mom to visit. Also unlike /., they don't explain stuff. If you don't know what the "ECB" is, or how to do arbitrage in the bond market, they'll outright tell you to F off and read wikipedia, whereas on /. we'd at least give you a URL link to the correct wiki article.
The housingbubbleblog is made up of great people (other than my self) and is friendly. It is appropriate to send your mom. It operates at a much lower level and they provide great explanations.
So there's this holiday sales graph released. Regardless of what it looks like, The Economist will have a bunch of permabull paleoconservative toadies explain how it means glory days are here again and it just proves our glorious leaders are geniuses and it'll be 2007 again in no time. Not that its a complete waste of time, because they might be wrong but I've never seen such clear writing explaining their position. They might be foolish, but they do it with extraordinary style. The Zerohedge article will be the graph and maybe a terse source, and the articles will mostly be short twitter like posts of 4 letter words although a guy with an avatar of a gif animation of a well endowed woman's chest will post an equation, its derivative, and end it with something vaguely xkcd like, such as "austrian economics, it works bitchez". The housing bubble blog will either ignore it, or in the daily news blog some pulitzer prize winner (seriously) will write about a one page clearly written english explanation of what it means and how it all works. Ben does not even allow swearing on HBB or personal attacks, more or less, its quite a civilized environment compared to the others, or even compared to here. My local news paper would post a fluff perma-bull piece about the sales graph showing that "housing always goes up" and "its a great time to buy" and the comments would have about 100 posts from paid democratic astroturfer bloggers blaming the Rs and 100 posts from paid republican astroturfer bloggers blaming the Ds and absolutely no one reads the newspaper comments unless they're being paid to write slanted astroturf comments, so I don't bother with the newspaper at all. The CNBC TV presentation would pretty much be the permabull BS newspaper article, read over the air by a hottie in a tiny miniskirt and no comments. If you mute CNBC its kinda soft core porn some days, which I like. The local TV station, given the graph, would instead run a story about "american idle" having a casting call at some auditorium downtown. And thats how economic news gets reported.
Is that what this project is aiming for, because it seems strange that a person would have to use a crowd-funding model to fund research into a health and safety issue, that one would assume the likes of G.E. or Philips or some other multi-national would be able to do much more comprehensibly?
I donno, but I know these facilities are expensive, and imagine where electronics would be if only G.E. could afford to own a soldering iron... or a C compiler...
I should be able to click on the TV and watch any episode of the original Star Trek (for example) at any time ...
TV should be at my control 'for my entertainment', not treat me as a passive audience for what ever is programmed at whatever time.
LOL you've just described my exact mythtv setup, why I have it, and how I use it. I am completely uninterested in sports so I haven't watched live TV in probably 6 years now.
I don't ever want to see a hunting/cooking/househunting show. But I do want to to watch hockey games/history/movies. You can't, the subscription model says you have to have both.
The industry model of the cableco owns the proprietary closed source settop box, says you have to see the Spanish channels, the home shopping channels, the sports channels, all that junk. I run a mythtv and I simply deleted the channels I never watch from mythtv channel editor and my schedulesdirect account. Bye bye univision, bye bye QVC, bye bye ESPN, bye bye HGTV, bye bye MTV, bye bye foxnews. I'm left with about 5 channels I often watch and about 20 I keep around just in case. But I don't have to scroll thru, past, click thru, or acknowledge the existence of channels I don't watch, etc. Its VERY convenient and enjoyable.
The subscription model means I have to pay for it, even if I've blocked it. I'm getting the same amount of entertainment, I just don't have to wade thru the trash, so I'm "ok" with it.
Advertising is one of the big things that is currently broken about TV. There's too much of "ads as content" as well as changing rules regarding how much of normal content can be mired in ads. This has led to a dichotomy between "prime time" content and reruns and the butchery of older works.
Want to vomit? Try watching old "twilight zone" reruns. The original 1/2 hour episodes were about 25 minutes in the old days. Recent hack jobs have that scarcely over 15 minutes now. With automatic hands free Mythtv commercial skipping, I can watch 4 "half hour" episodes in a bit more than an hour.
So much is edited out that some episodes don't make sense anymore. Entire scenes gone. Sometimes they chop out to an ad in the middle of dialog.
The original 25 minute episodes are still available via DVD and of course torrents. I'm pretty close to switching to that instead of watching the sad "broadcasts".
What a load of "lets make fun of the nerds" BS
But nobody seems to be able to answer the big question: what exactly is so broken about TV anyway? The tech industry is filled with engineers and geeks. They naturally want to optimize the TV experience
If it was "our" fault, we would have HDTV back in the 80s. The reason for innovation is the housing bubble drove giant mcmansions which require giant TVs to be in proportion, so sales were great until 2007 or so. Since then... Well boss asks "what can we do to sell more crap, like the good ole days of the global credit bubble?" No one has any idea but the engineer, who suggests that its finally time to try all that 80s stuff, like faster refresh, prog scan, higher res, 3d, 5.1 sound, blah blah. Its not much, but its better than the marketing guy who said "uh, lets make more commercials with cheerleaders and football players har har har".
I've looked a bit this morning and can't find anymore info about the star itself. What its apparent magnitude it? What constellation its in? Etc.
All I can figure out is its referred to as Kepler 22 which only makes sense in relation to the program. But I'd love to be able to try and see the star through a telescope.
Go to the exoplanet encyclopedia website instead of a place that headlines "Psychics and Missing Babies -- Dissecting the Blame Game" and "Top Tips from 2011 to Help Earth, Economy: Photos"
http://exoplanet.eu/star.php?st=Kepler-22
Son of a B, e.eu has got nothing. Simbad's got nothing. There is nothing at all other than it exists and there are press releases all over along with fluffy talk about the release. But even the "official record" has nothing. Give it time and it'll get populated. Heck by the time you read this, e.eu might have data.
This is what Kepler-16 looks like on simbad, someday we'll have this level of data for -22
http://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/simbad/sim-id?Ident=Kepler-16
I donno what a simbad is, a friend of mine went around calling it "sinbad" like the sailor for a while. Which is probably a cooler name, at least in the US.
.... maybe they combine IE and FF and it becomes Microsoft Firefox.
That's been my dream for years... a giant flushing sound as the loaf that is MSIE is flushed and replaced with FF.
Heck if Debian can/has to call FF "iceweasel" maybe MS could flush rotten MSIE down the drain and literally call FF "the new IE" or something like that.
Traditionally giant lightning generators are used to develop lightning protection. For power companies, radio companies, telcos, aircraft, etc.
1) Design and build a model or life size machine that you think will survive a lightning bolt
2) Zap the heck out of it with artificial lightning
3) Did blow up? If so, analyze how it failed and go back to step 1
4) Did not blow up? Profit !!!!
The hilarious part is watching IT guys, who never get credit for their work when IT stuff doesn't blow up, trash talk the work of lightning protection guys, who also never get credit for their work when stuff doesn't blow up. "Stuff still blows up sometimes anyway" "Its just a wasted expense" "Lightning never hits the same place twice / you never catch the same virus twice" blah blah blah. The ham radio guys are just as bad, ten thousand nearby strikes and no effect on system performance, one strike finally takes it out and "all that stuff is worthless no point even installing it, stuff just blows up anyway". Idiots.
You can send a single pulse into a tesla coil at resonant freq, err resonant period anyway, no problemo. It certainly reduces the heating problem.
Short format: Are you going for 47 C.F.R. 15 sub B class A or class B? Just kidding, sorta.
Long format: Whats your plans regarding radio interference? Like, are you making a whopping big faraday cage out of an abandoned condo building, or have a FCC exemption under some R+D rule, or ... I'm just picturing armies of angry radio listeners storming your building with pitchforks...
Whats the high voltage high current switching scene like now a days? In ye olden days krytons and friends were thought to be cool, but expensive and export controlled. Now a days do you just import high voltage mosfets from China and call it good, or ...