However, you've solved that whole space problem, except that I might need to buy a hydraulic chair system so that I can see the monitors on the top row.
The top row is for when you lean back in your reclining chair and cackle like a James Bond villain. At a glance, like once an hour, you can see your security cam / weather radar / web cam / itunes music playlist, etc. Normally, you wouldn't stare at it, but its for stuff you "instantly" need to see at a glance.
The 3rd row at slightly below eye level is ideal for "real work" the bottom row is ideal for graphs, and the second from the top is ideal for scrolling log files. Ideal for scrolling log files because the "action" is mostly at the bottom of the screen, you don't have to crane your neck up unless you missed something. Similarly, the graphs on the bottom row should normally be out of sight low, but if something like CPU maxes out, it'll flash into your field of vision and you can actively glance down at it.
Yes, why yes I have worked in / around NOCs for well over a decade, yes. And my description is a somewhat heavily modified version of my favorite NOC layout.
One of the projector models at one of the NOCs had a plan to prevent that:
1) Integrated optics. The first lens was mounted in the lamp "module" and the module was sealed. you'd have to find a way to bust open the module without cracking the lens or screwing up its alignment.
2) ID chip, much like an ink jet cartridge. "Hmmmm. lamp serial number 98243804728531 has been operated for 1000 hours or whatever". Yes, on the control menu, where you'd do things like brightness/contrast, there was an option to display the serial number and hours used on the screen.
So there's some serious problems in the way, both optically and electronically.
Supposedly this was a "feature" as a detonating halogen bulb could destroy the optics. So, stop them from using one past its prime, and if it blows up and takes out the first lens, thats OK since every bulb module comes complete with a new lens. Also you can't touch the glass bulb if its inside a sealed module. As a side note it also made the projector very profitable for the manufacturer.
And there is a problem in that I've never seen a single point source white LED much above 6 watts or so. You can buy multiple LED modules that insert into a standard edison lightbulb socket, but thats not going to work. If you can buy a 100 watt single chip LED I'd be impressed to see it.
Are you willing to pay at an increase in price upwards of 300%?
Check out the amateur metalworking hobby/market. I'm talking about a current live market of sort of comparable products.
Sherline manufactures some great lathes and mills in California. Generally the Sherline stuff has a beautiful finish, works right out of the box exactly as specified, its "aerospace grade", like metalworking jewelry. I've never heard of breaking or wearing out under normal use. Nice stuff! Looks nice, works nice, lasts forever.
Similar Chinese lathes and mills are basically considered a parts kit, precision moving surfaces and ball bearings come with genuine Chinese sand at no extra cost, nothing works out of the box without some level of remanufacture, the products are generally larger, the paint job is applied with a spatula. Everyone has either broken, burned out, or worn out junky Chinese machine tools / parts / electric motors, or they know someone whom has done so. Its assumed you'll have to do a full teardown, cleaning, and reassembly after purchase and before use.
The standard slashdot car analogy is its very much like comparing a 1970's American car with a 1990's Japanese car, except in this case the american mill is the japanese car, which now completely confuses things.
The market seems to have stabilized, with comparable big ticket Chinese stuff being about 30% lower cost. None of this 300% increase daydreaming. Ultra small ticket stuff, at the other extreme, like the worlds cheapest chinese endmill manufactured out of zinc if not chrome plated plastic with about a 1 minute usable lifetime cost about 50% less than genuine american made endmills that'll run for days on end.
I have owned a Chinese 7x12 lathe and a CNC converted Sherline mill for a couple years. You never really stop buying accessories, so I keep close track of the market.
In conclusion, in a real live market, not daydreaming, the USA stuff runs about a third to about twice the cost, but you simply cannot buy similar quality product from China.
I have no idea why in one industry the Chinese cannot manufacture a decent machine tool but they can manufacture all the worlds SMD electronics.
Your basic copper displayport connection is only specced for a 15 meter run
I've had enough experience to know that historically most specs for non-cutting edge products are pretty bogus. I have run RS-232 for hundreds of feet at high speeds, done some things with Ethernet CAT-5 cable and wire nuts that I'm not entirely proud of, it works because the specs are designed so no matter how carelessly the cables are laid (wrapped around fluorescent fixtures, run thru the arc welding workshop, etc) the thing will work 99.99999% of the time to minimize product support calls. But I'm willing to "experiment" a bit, to push the envelope.
On the other hand it should be theoretically possible to design a port that will test cable capacitance or something and fail if it doesn't like it.
So, will displayport REALLY only work 15 M (which is, after all 45 feet!) or will it not? Maybe too new of a technology for anyone to really know.
Even if you toss 7 feet at each end of the cable for vertical runs (probably very pessimistic) a 15M cable could serve one floor on any wall of a square house that is 42 feet on a side, which is some 1764 square feet. If you're willing to limit yourself to the inside walls only, and assume McMansion style 20 foot rooms, that's a 9800 sq foot house... I'd hate to live in a place like that, but at least my displayport cables would work.
And every 500 hours (aka 20.8 days at 24x7) all the projectors will time out and refuse to display anything but "time to change the bulb!" and of course, taking a page from the inkjet manufacturers, the bulb unit will be roughly 1/4 to 1/2 the cost of the projector. And of course you didn't budget for monthly bulb replacements. Even better if "only one guy" can fix the projectors but don't worry he's on call, all the freaking time he's on call, oh is he ever.
Something similar to this has happened at all three NOCs I've worked at.
F those projector guys and the horse they rode in on, I'll never voluntarily buy a projector again as long as I live.
Because of that you'd save little, if any, money over cheap systems acting as thin clients
Good detailed technical analysis, but I can get an equally valid argument by working a different angle.
Unless you're doing something real weird/wrong, the cheapest part of a computer lab is the hard drive, video card, chassis, etc. Zero that out, and you've got something very unusual, rare, and complicated, yet remains at 99% of the total cost, that being mostly salary and indirect costs (health insurance, pension, etc) and stuff like HVAC, electric bill, fractional capital expense of the building, cost of electrical and LAN wiring and related hardware... If you want to save a whopping 1% of the total cost of ownership, the very superficial answer is just install 99 computers instead of 100.
If your 24 room school costs $12M to build, which seems believable, then your empty room cost $500K. You can pull your hair out to "save" $2500 worth of hard drives and $1250 worth of chassis/power supplies, but that's a false economy. And you'll never be able to piecewise upgrade.
Add in the laptop, a lamp, and the pictures of my cat and I could maybe fit one more monitor without having to buy another desk.
The picture of the cat goes on as a background image. 12 monitors emit enough light that you don't need a lamp, in fact, you'll probably need suntan oil.
How high's your ceiling? Sounds like you can go three across, so thats only four monitors tall. Given the current fad of that stupid extra wide HDTV form factor, four monitors probably stacks up to about four feet tall. Put the picture of the cat, a weather radar, and a pic of your significant other on the top row, and its all very manageable. With some custom desk work, which you can apparently afford, you can put one row somewhat below eye level, one at eye level, one somewhat above eye level and the very tippy toppy row holding the aforementioned cat picture, radar, family pixs, etc. You can blog about your cat on the lower nine monitors, top three just for show.
3 more desks would run me around $10000.
Holy crap. That's over $3K per desk. The slashdot stereotype is a dude with a $500 computer containing a $2000 video card but no money for furniture meaning he sits on an overturned 5 gallon bucket and uses a bare 60 watt incandescent bulb for light hanging from his moms basement ceiling. And I thought I was a little metro-whatever-ual because I have a $800 oak veneer armoire and a $400 chair. For $3K that desk must be made out of solid panels of pure sterling silver or be at least 400 years old.
Would this card drive one dozen monitors set up as digital picture frames?
I have a linux based file server in the basement that does not really do anything with its video output.
If I could hook up 12 picture frame monitors in various rooms of my house, that would be fun.
I don't want the extreme headache of manually updating 12 SDHC or CF cards. I don't want 12 individual stupid yearly subscriptions to some internet ripoff company that'll probably go out of business and make my investment obsolete the week after I buy them.
I just want to drop.jpgs into certain folders on my pre-existing file server and have the pictures randomly displayed thru the house, shuffling perhaps every 10 minutes. Also I'll have certain webcams periodically downloaded and added to the mix. And a cron job to display certain pictures at certain times, etc. A couple lines of perl, bash, and wget, thats what I'm talking about.
Well, I hate to respond with the weirdest ever combination of Social Darwinism, AA theory, and Buddhism, but either:
1) It's working for them, in which case that's nice for them, and nice for me as long as they stop trying to recruit me into their bizarre worldview.
2) Or life isn't working for them, its all eternally reoccurring suffering and slow death by their own bad choices, in which case you have to have faith they'll admit they have a problem, then find their way thru it, perhaps with our help, in order to join the rest of "us" whom are having fun with life.
So, I'd still stand by its "OK" as long as they shut up and leave me alone. And get off my lawn.
Published in 1970 -- based on a 1965 article -- and still timely today.
Toffler is pretty much obsolete. He never really understood the shifts the labor market.
Toffler's theory was the middle class would become rich by taking lower-upper class type jobs and educations, leading to the stress of how to spend all that money on things they don't really culturally understand. Kind of like watching folks flail around randomly during the housing bubble run-up when they suddenly got more money than they could handle, but on a larger scale. You could summarize his book to an analysis of the cultural stresses of an upwardly mobile society.
The way it turned out, is the jobs disappeared. Everyone but the extremely rich is poorer. Rather than stressing about which ipod to buy, and what that means culturally, for most people, the stress is the more traditional concerns but with more financial pressure, like how to pay the mortgage on a walmart greeter salary, or wouldn't it be nice to afford health care. You could summarize reality to being a stressed downwardly mobile society.
His "shattering stress and disorientation" turned out to be "I lost my job and there are no jobs in my field in this country anymore" rather than his idea of "how will I fit into the country club conspicuous consumption crowd". Or the "shattering stress and disorientation" of "we've downsized your five person department to... you, and you get to do all the work yourself. Now hurry up and meet the growth goals or there's four people in line to replace you"
They barely actually enjoy the event because it is instead spent telling everyone else about it. This is going to have a terrible impact long-term and already is.
How long have cameras been widely available to the public? There have been people with that character fault for at least a century and we're still mostly OK.
Your kid is playing soccer and you're watching instead of fiddling with your camera? Hell yeah I'm enjoying the game.
We're at (insert scenic outlook/cultural event) and you're looking instead of fiddling with your camera? Hell yeah I'm enjoying the view.
Despite the VERY LOUD claims by the smartphone'd / camera'd folks whom think their lifestyle is the ONLY outlook on life that could possibly exist, the rest of us disagree and we are absolutely loving life...
There should be strong laws preventing the leaking of sensitive materials. Obviously, this guy thought that his country's benefits of knowing this info was more important than the consequences he faced for leaking it.
I was in the US Army long ago. It was drilled into us that there are a hierarchy of priority of responsibilities, from the constitution at the top, defending the nation, following laws, following regs, following the general's orders, following the LTs orders, following the SGTs orders, and so forth, and finally there's you at the bottom. Its been a couple decades, but our three general orders fit into the list in some manner. (in summary, the guard your post till relieved, obey other orders in a military manner, and report violations to your commander)
Anyway, the systemic failure was the kids commanding officers creating a situation full of moral ambiguity where the poor kid kid needs a constitutional law scholar or a PHD in philosophy to figure out which of his responsibilities must be violated. Maybe he made the right call, or maybe not, what do you expect from some punk kid, but the folks that put him in that situation really big time screwed up.
Putting someone whom can think, in a situation where he helps cover up what looks like war crimes, is simply not going to turn out well for anyone involved.
Thank you for using that word. Your post seems to be operating under the assumption that is a respectable and honorable vocation. However, it is not. The responsibility for their eventual punishment, does not lie on the person whom revealed the truth, it lies with the person whom decided to collaborate with the enemy.
Its very much like this line of reasoning: Its bad for society when people are imprisoned. No one can disagree with that. Cops arrest people and send them to prison. No one can disagree with that. Therefore cops are bad. You sure about that?
Actually, in a way, its good that they have accurate data, because instead of chasing after and torturing possibly innocent people whom did nothing wrong, they can punish the actual collaborators. Assuming the data is any good, of course.
I used to be in the US army, decades ago. I feel like an ancient retired Wehrmacht soldier in the early 1940s, watching what the new kids are doing and asking myself, how did the new kids get so F'd Up, and what if anything can be done to fix it? We were not, as an overall organizational goal, war criminals, in my day. No, I am not deluding myself, we were not.
In the missing footage, we know that the helicopter pilots DID NOT fire TWICE when there were civilians/children in harms way.
Not exactly Matlock's moment of glory here. You honestly think OJ's best defense strategy would have been to find two women to testify that he had not (yet) chopped them up? Seriously, dude?
Lamo says he felt he had no choice but to turn in Manning, but that he's now concerned about the soldier's status and well-being.
Sure, Manning broke some security regulations. Naughty, but there are extenuating circumstances such as exposing a cover up of war crimes and multiple counts of second degree murder and multiple counts of attempted murder. Lamo admits he is cooperating with a conspiracy to commit murder and is apparently a supporter of war crime activities. But Lamo is worried about Manning's situation? I wonder about Lamo's judgment. Supporting murder and war crimes is perfectly OK if you're at a high level in the US Govt, in fact "we" expect that kind of behavior from our leaders, but Lamo is not at such a level, he's just a punk whom got busted. I'd think Lamo's in a much more precarious legal situation than Manning is in... One thing to violate some paper handling regulations, another to be a quisling.
Does it cost the telcos less to have all those radios and towers sitting around not doing anything
Most gear has surprisingly variable power draw based on utilization. However the cost of power is so low, relative to the other fixed expenses, that its basically a rounding error. Its right up there with paying the landscaping crew to mow the weeds down, the outside plant maintenance (paint crew), and the snowplowing contract. Many people confuse the rather high power density and total draw of a "big data center" with the rather low power density and total draw of a POP.
And yes it does cost them to have the gear sitting around doing nothing, because the interest on the bonds/loans accumulates no matter if they're selling or not.
The expense is enough to discourage me from participating, so I don't. They have made a calculated business decision that they simply don't want/need me. I don't see any point in feeling insulted/vindictive/cranky about it. Some folks, however, respond to it angrily like they're being made fun of by a girl whom won't date them. Its just business and theres plenty of fish in the sea, so chill...
VFR = visual flight rules. AKA "top gun" time. Keep your eyes out the window at all times. An instrument failure is irrelevant because you are not using your instruments. You know where you are because you keep your eyes out the window at all times. In practice you're going to glance at the altimeter on occasion.
VOR is a semi-ancient VHF navigation system sandwiched above the FM radio band and below the 2M ham band, public safety scanner band, and over the air TV channels 7-13. It gets interference about as often as your FM car radio, aka about never. Theres a beam antenna that spins around constantly like every second transmitting continuously, and a vertical omnidirectional antenna that transmits an itty bitty beep every time the rotating one swings by magnetic north (or was it geographic north?). Anyway it is no great electronic or mechanical accomplishment to figure out the "radial" you are currently located on. You have a handy dandy chart that shows where each VOR is located and it's frequency. So, draw a line outward from that one at 45 degrees, another line outward from this one at 270 degrees, and another one outward from that one at 90 degrees and the hopefully your airplane is inside the itty bitty little triangle formed by those lines. Innumerable "victor airways" exist between VORs... Fly a course of about 90 degrees outbound from "badger vor" on radial 90 and you'll intersect timmerman airport when you pass radial 0 from... I don't remember. Most planes have two sets to enable easy triangulation. Most (major) airports have a VOR on the premises.
So his argument is you do a visual inspection of aerial fiber or electric high voltage lines when... you can see the wires... so if the navigation instruments are interfered with, who really cares, because by definition the whole point of the flight was to be able to see where you're going... If you're doing a visual inspection by flying in the clouds or fog, you're doin it wrong.
Its another application where people don't understand the inverse square law, no matter how many times its explained, much like the bee vs cell phones article. And even my slowpoke Cessna 172 flew about 2 miles a minute.
The power level needed to knock out instruments for a minute is staggering, in theory. In practice, looking at the actual specs of air force ECM machinery, it is in practice staggering.
Turning the entire HV power line into a spark gap transmitter might screw stuff up for a couple hundred feet range, maybe.
I think it would take someone who is quite familiar with drugs to ask a question like "What happens when you put a snail on speed".
What's your judgment of the mental state of someone whom asks:
What happens if "I watched a snail crawl along the edge of a straight razor. That's my dream; that's my nightmare. Crawling, slithering, along the edge of a straight razor... and surviving. ", on speed.
...I'm building my own internet. Yeah. Using whatever I can find, spare copper, terminals, old POS systems, switches, whatever. I don't care that there already is one, and that it will be years behind in technology, I'm just going to do it.
Its not the internet without pr0n. And Goatse. Just saying you got your work cut out for you.
The "greenness" of a train doesn't come close to the "greenness" of a bike. It's not even within an order of magnitude... probably not even within two.
Iff you do not count the greenness of the road the bike rides on, but do count the tracks the train runs on.
Slashdot Mirror
However, you've solved that whole space problem, except that I might need to buy a hydraulic chair system so that I can see the monitors on the top row.
The top row is for when you lean back in your reclining chair and cackle like a James Bond villain. At a glance, like once an hour, you can see your security cam / weather radar / web cam / itunes music playlist, etc. Normally, you wouldn't stare at it, but its for stuff you "instantly" need to see at a glance.
The 3rd row at slightly below eye level is ideal for "real work" the bottom row is ideal for graphs, and the second from the top is ideal for scrolling log files. Ideal for scrolling log files because the "action" is mostly at the bottom of the screen, you don't have to crane your neck up unless you missed something. Similarly, the graphs on the bottom row should normally be out of sight low, but if something like CPU maxes out, it'll flash into your field of vision and you can actively glance down at it.
Yes, why yes I have worked in / around NOCs for well over a decade, yes. And my description is a somewhat heavily modified version of my favorite NOC layout.
One of the projector models at one of the NOCs had a plan to prevent that:
1) Integrated optics. The first lens was mounted in the lamp "module" and the module was sealed. you'd have to find a way to bust open the module without cracking the lens or screwing up its alignment.
2) ID chip, much like an ink jet cartridge. "Hmmmm. lamp serial number 98243804728531 has been operated for 1000 hours or whatever". Yes, on the control menu, where you'd do things like brightness/contrast, there was an option to display the serial number and hours used on the screen.
So there's some serious problems in the way, both optically and electronically.
Supposedly this was a "feature" as a detonating halogen bulb could destroy the optics. So, stop them from using one past its prime, and if it blows up and takes out the first lens, thats OK since every bulb module comes complete with a new lens. Also you can't touch the glass bulb if its inside a sealed module. As a side note it also made the projector very profitable for the manufacturer.
And there is a problem in that I've never seen a single point source white LED much above 6 watts or so. You can buy multiple LED modules that insert into a standard edison lightbulb socket, but thats not going to work. If you can buy a 100 watt single chip LED I'd be impressed to see it.
two girls one cup ... of printer ink?
Are you willing to pay at an increase in price upwards of 300%?
Check out the amateur metalworking hobby/market. I'm talking about a current live market of sort of comparable products.
Sherline manufactures some great lathes and mills in California. Generally the Sherline stuff has a beautiful finish, works right out of the box exactly as specified, its "aerospace grade", like metalworking jewelry. I've never heard of breaking or wearing out under normal use. Nice stuff! Looks nice, works nice, lasts forever.
Similar Chinese lathes and mills are basically considered a parts kit, precision moving surfaces and ball bearings come with genuine Chinese sand at no extra cost, nothing works out of the box without some level of remanufacture, the products are generally larger, the paint job is applied with a spatula. Everyone has either broken, burned out, or worn out junky Chinese machine tools / parts / electric motors, or they know someone whom has done so. Its assumed you'll have to do a full teardown, cleaning, and reassembly after purchase and before use.
The standard slashdot car analogy is its very much like comparing a 1970's American car with a 1990's Japanese car, except in this case the american mill is the japanese car, which now completely confuses things.
The market seems to have stabilized, with comparable big ticket Chinese stuff being about 30% lower cost. None of this 300% increase daydreaming. Ultra small ticket stuff, at the other extreme, like the worlds cheapest chinese endmill manufactured out of zinc if not chrome plated plastic with about a 1 minute usable lifetime cost about 50% less than genuine american made endmills that'll run for days on end.
I have owned a Chinese 7x12 lathe and a CNC converted Sherline mill for a couple years. You never really stop buying accessories, so I keep close track of the market.
In conclusion, in a real live market, not daydreaming, the USA stuff runs about a third to about twice the cost, but you simply cannot buy similar quality product from China.
I have no idea why in one industry the Chinese cannot manufacture a decent machine tool but they can manufacture all the worlds SMD electronics.
Never mind the corruption(making Chicago look saintly) and contempt for the US that still exists there.
So, you talking about Detroit, or whats left of it?
Your basic copper displayport connection is only specced for a 15 meter run
I've had enough experience to know that historically most specs for non-cutting edge products are pretty bogus. I have run RS-232 for hundreds of feet at high speeds, done some things with Ethernet CAT-5 cable and wire nuts that I'm not entirely proud of, it works because the specs are designed so no matter how carelessly the cables are laid (wrapped around fluorescent fixtures, run thru the arc welding workshop, etc) the thing will work 99.99999% of the time to minimize product support calls. But I'm willing to "experiment" a bit, to push the envelope.
On the other hand it should be theoretically possible to design a port that will test cable capacitance or something and fail if it doesn't like it.
So, will displayport REALLY only work 15 M (which is, after all 45 feet!) or will it not? Maybe too new of a technology for anyone to really know.
Even if you toss 7 feet at each end of the cable for vertical runs (probably very pessimistic) a 15M cable could serve one floor on any wall of a square house that is 42 feet on a side, which is some 1764 square feet. If you're willing to limit yourself to the inside walls only, and assume McMansion style 20 foot rooms, that's a 9800 sq foot house... I'd hate to live in a place like that, but at least my displayport cables would work.
Didn't even know those existed, googled, was surprised.
Being a cheap bastard I'd have problems paying twice as much for a 7 inch monitor as I currently pay for a 20 inch monitor.
And all the ads mention windoze/mac compatibility, the exact two OS choices that I would never use on my fileserver.
And every 500 hours (aka 20.8 days at 24x7) all the projectors will time out and refuse to display anything but "time to change the bulb!" and of course, taking a page from the inkjet manufacturers, the bulb unit will be roughly 1/4 to 1/2 the cost of the projector. And of course you didn't budget for monthly bulb replacements. Even better if "only one guy" can fix the projectors but don't worry he's on call, all the freaking time he's on call, oh is he ever.
Something similar to this has happened at all three NOCs I've worked at.
F those projector guys and the horse they rode in on, I'll never voluntarily buy a projector again as long as I live.
Because of that you'd save little, if any, money over cheap systems acting as thin clients
Good detailed technical analysis, but I can get an equally valid argument by working a different angle.
Unless you're doing something real weird/wrong, the cheapest part of a computer lab is the hard drive, video card, chassis, etc. Zero that out, and you've got something very unusual, rare, and complicated, yet remains at 99% of the total cost, that being mostly salary and indirect costs (health insurance, pension, etc) and stuff like HVAC, electric bill, fractional capital expense of the building, cost of electrical and LAN wiring and related hardware... If you want to save a whopping 1% of the total cost of ownership, the very superficial answer is just install 99 computers instead of 100.
If your 24 room school costs $12M to build, which seems believable, then your empty room cost $500K. You can pull your hair out to "save" $2500 worth of hard drives and $1250 worth of chassis/power supplies, but that's a false economy. And you'll never be able to piecewise upgrade.
Add in the laptop, a lamp, and the pictures of my cat and I could maybe fit one more monitor without having to buy another desk.
The picture of the cat goes on as a background image. 12 monitors emit enough light that you don't need a lamp, in fact, you'll probably need suntan oil.
How high's your ceiling? Sounds like you can go three across, so thats only four monitors tall. Given the current fad of that stupid extra wide HDTV form factor, four monitors probably stacks up to about four feet tall. Put the picture of the cat, a weather radar, and a pic of your significant other on the top row, and its all very manageable. With some custom desk work, which you can apparently afford, you can put one row somewhat below eye level, one at eye level, one somewhat above eye level and the very tippy toppy row holding the aforementioned cat picture, radar, family pixs, etc. You can blog about your cat on the lower nine monitors, top three just for show.
3 more desks would run me around $10000.
Holy crap. That's over $3K per desk. The slashdot stereotype is a dude with a $500 computer containing a $2000 video card but no money for furniture meaning he sits on an overturned 5 gallon bucket and uses a bare 60 watt incandescent bulb for light hanging from his moms basement ceiling. And I thought I was a little metro-whatever-ual because I have a $800 oak veneer armoire and a $400 chair. For $3K that desk must be made out of solid panels of pure sterling silver or be at least 400 years old.
Would this card drive one dozen monitors set up as digital picture frames?
I have a linux based file server in the basement that does not really do anything with its video output.
If I could hook up 12 picture frame monitors in various rooms of my house, that would be fun.
I don't want the extreme headache of manually updating 12 SDHC or CF cards. I don't want 12 individual stupid yearly subscriptions to some internet ripoff company that'll probably go out of business and make my investment obsolete the week after I buy them.
I just want to drop .jpgs into certain folders on my pre-existing file server and have the pictures randomly displayed thru the house, shuffling perhaps every 10 minutes. Also I'll have certain webcams periodically downloaded and added to the mix. And a cron job to display certain pictures at certain times, etc. A couple lines of perl, bash, and wget, thats what I'm talking about.
Well, I hate to respond with the weirdest ever combination of Social Darwinism, AA theory, and Buddhism, but either:
1) It's working for them, in which case that's nice for them, and nice for me as long as they stop trying to recruit me into their bizarre worldview.
2) Or life isn't working for them, its all eternally reoccurring suffering and slow death by their own bad choices, in which case you have to have faith they'll admit they have a problem, then find their way thru it, perhaps with our help, in order to join the rest of "us" whom are having fun with life.
So, I'd still stand by its "OK" as long as they shut up and leave me alone. And get off my lawn.
Published in 1970 -- based on a 1965 article -- and still timely today.
Toffler is pretty much obsolete. He never really understood the shifts the labor market.
Toffler's theory was the middle class would become rich by taking lower-upper class type jobs and educations, leading to the stress of how to spend all that money on things they don't really culturally understand. Kind of like watching folks flail around randomly during the housing bubble run-up when they suddenly got more money than they could handle, but on a larger scale. You could summarize his book to an analysis of the cultural stresses of an upwardly mobile society.
The way it turned out, is the jobs disappeared. Everyone but the extremely rich is poorer. Rather than stressing about which ipod to buy, and what that means culturally, for most people, the stress is the more traditional concerns but with more financial pressure, like how to pay the mortgage on a walmart greeter salary, or wouldn't it be nice to afford health care. You could summarize reality to being a stressed downwardly mobile society.
His "shattering stress and disorientation" turned out to be "I lost my job and there are no jobs in my field in this country anymore" rather than his idea of "how will I fit into the country club conspicuous consumption crowd". Or the "shattering stress and disorientation" of "we've downsized your five person department to ... you, and you get to do all the work yourself. Now hurry up and meet the growth goals or there's four people in line to replace you"
They barely actually enjoy the event because it is instead spent telling everyone else about it. This is going to have a terrible impact long-term and already is.
How long have cameras been widely available to the public? There have been people with that character fault for at least a century and we're still mostly OK.
Your kid is playing soccer and you're watching instead of fiddling with your camera? Hell yeah I'm enjoying the game.
We're at (insert scenic outlook/cultural event) and you're looking instead of fiddling with your camera? Hell yeah I'm enjoying the view.
Despite the VERY LOUD claims by the smartphone'd / camera'd folks whom think their lifestyle is the ONLY outlook on life that could possibly exist, the rest of us disagree and we are absolutely loving life...
There should be strong laws preventing the leaking of sensitive materials. Obviously, this guy thought that his country's benefits of knowing this info was more important than the consequences he faced for leaking it.
I was in the US Army long ago. It was drilled into us that there are a hierarchy of priority of responsibilities, from the constitution at the top, defending the nation, following laws, following regs, following the general's orders, following the LTs orders, following the SGTs orders, and so forth, and finally there's you at the bottom. Its been a couple decades, but our three general orders fit into the list in some manner. (in summary, the guard your post till relieved, obey other orders in a military manner, and report violations to your commander)
Anyway, the systemic failure was the kids commanding officers creating a situation full of moral ambiguity where the poor kid kid needs a constitutional law scholar or a PHD in philosophy to figure out which of his responsibilities must be violated. Maybe he made the right call, or maybe not, what do you expect from some punk kid, but the folks that put him in that situation really big time screwed up.
Putting someone whom can think, in a situation where he helps cover up what looks like war crimes, is simply not going to turn out well for anyone involved.
collaborator
Thank you for using that word.
Your post seems to be operating under the assumption that is a respectable and honorable vocation.
However, it is not.
The responsibility for their eventual punishment, does not lie on the person whom revealed the truth, it lies with the person whom decided to collaborate with the enemy.
Its very much like this line of reasoning:
Its bad for society when people are imprisoned. No one can disagree with that.
Cops arrest people and send them to prison. No one can disagree with that.
Therefore cops are bad. You sure about that?
Actually, in a way, its good that they have accurate data, because instead of chasing after and torturing possibly innocent people whom did nothing wrong, they can punish the actual collaborators. Assuming the data is any good, of course.
I used to be in the US army, decades ago. I feel like an ancient retired Wehrmacht soldier in the early 1940s, watching what the new kids are doing and asking myself, how did the new kids get so F'd Up, and what if anything can be done to fix it? We were not, as an overall organizational goal, war criminals, in my day. No, I am not deluding myself, we were not.
In the missing footage, we know that the helicopter pilots DID NOT fire TWICE when there were civilians/children in harms way.
Not exactly Matlock's moment of glory here. You honestly think OJ's best defense strategy would have been to find two women to testify that he had not (yet) chopped them up? Seriously, dude?
Lamo says he felt he had no choice but to turn in Manning, but that he's now concerned about the soldier's status and well-being.
Sure, Manning broke some security regulations. Naughty, but there are extenuating circumstances such as exposing a cover up of war crimes and multiple counts of second degree murder and multiple counts of attempted murder. Lamo admits he is cooperating with a conspiracy to commit murder and is apparently a supporter of war crime activities. But Lamo is worried about Manning's situation? I wonder about Lamo's judgment. Supporting murder and war crimes is perfectly OK if you're at a high level in the US Govt, in fact "we" expect that kind of behavior from our leaders, but Lamo is not at such a level, he's just a punk whom got busted. I'd think Lamo's in a much more precarious legal situation than Manning is in... One thing to violate some paper handling regulations, another to be a quisling.
Does it cost the telcos less to have all those radios and towers sitting around not doing anything
Most gear has surprisingly variable power draw based on utilization. However the cost of power is so low, relative to the other fixed expenses, that its basically a rounding error. Its right up there with paying the landscaping crew to mow the weeds down, the outside plant maintenance (paint crew), and the snowplowing contract. Many people confuse the rather high power density and total draw of a "big data center" with the rather low power density and total draw of a POP.
And yes it does cost them to have the gear sitting around doing nothing, because the interest on the bonds/loans accumulates no matter if they're selling or not.
The expense is enough to discourage me from participating, so I don't. They have made a calculated business decision that they simply don't want/need me. I don't see any point in feeling insulted/vindictive/cranky about it. Some folks, however, respond to it angrily like they're being made fun of by a girl whom won't date them. Its just business and theres plenty of fish in the sea, so chill...
VFR = visual flight rules. AKA "top gun" time. Keep your eyes out the window at all times. An instrument failure is irrelevant because you are not using your instruments. You know where you are because you keep your eyes out the window at all times. In practice you're going to glance at the altimeter on occasion.
VOR is a semi-ancient VHF navigation system sandwiched above the FM radio band and below the 2M ham band, public safety scanner band, and over the air TV channels 7-13. It gets interference about as often as your FM car radio, aka about never. Theres a beam antenna that spins around constantly like every second transmitting continuously, and a vertical omnidirectional antenna that transmits an itty bitty beep every time the rotating one swings by magnetic north (or was it geographic north?). Anyway it is no great electronic or mechanical accomplishment to figure out the "radial" you are currently located on. You have a handy dandy chart that shows where each VOR is located and it's frequency. So, draw a line outward from that one at 45 degrees, another line outward from this one at 270 degrees, and another one outward from that one at 90 degrees and the hopefully your airplane is inside the itty bitty little triangle formed by those lines. Innumerable "victor airways" exist between VORs... Fly a course of about 90 degrees outbound from "badger vor" on radial 90 and you'll intersect timmerman airport when you pass radial 0 from ... I don't remember. Most planes have two sets to enable easy triangulation. Most (major) airports have a VOR on the premises.
So his argument is you do a visual inspection of aerial fiber or electric high voltage lines when ... you can see the wires ... so if the navigation instruments are interfered with, who really cares, because by definition the whole point of the flight was to be able to see where you're going... If you're doing a visual inspection by flying in the clouds or fog, you're doin it wrong.
if VOR gets screwed up
And....... it doesn't.
Its another application where people don't understand the inverse square law, no matter how many times its explained, much like the bee vs cell phones article. And even my slowpoke Cessna 172 flew about 2 miles a minute.
The power level needed to knock out instruments for a minute is staggering, in theory. In practice, looking at the actual specs of air force ECM machinery, it is in practice staggering.
Turning the entire HV power line into a spark gap transmitter might screw stuff up for a couple hundred feet range, maybe.
I think it would take someone who is quite familiar with drugs to ask a question like "What happens when you put a snail on speed".
What's your judgment of the mental state of someone whom asks:
What happens if "I watched a snail crawl along the edge of a straight razor. That's my dream; that's my nightmare. Crawling, slithering, along the edge of a straight razor... and surviving. ", on speed.
you'd end up with maybe a hundred.
... a hundred really freaking boring people.
...I'm building my own internet. Yeah. Using whatever I can find, spare copper, terminals, old POS systems, switches, whatever. I don't care that there already is one, and that it will be years behind in technology, I'm just going to do it.
Its not the internet without pr0n. And Goatse. Just saying you got your work cut out for you.
The "greenness" of a train doesn't come close to the "greenness" of a bike. It's not even within an order of magnitude... probably not even within two.
Iff you do not count the greenness of the road the bike rides on, but do count the tracks the train runs on.