They're all skills, and if little Timmy joins the Merchant Marine or is transported back to 1860 it might even be a useful skill.
No. As someone whom does genealogy, trust me that "CWV" era folks, like your 1860s comment, may have been born into cursive, but by middle age-ish all their relevant genealogical documents were typed. That is the transitional generation, where learning cursive for business purposes became obsolete and transitioned into learning typing for business purposes. I have reams and reams of genealogically important paperwork from that generation, this isn't just idle speculation...
Cursive was obsolete by late 19th century. Try going back to revolutionary war veterans, those guys documents were all cursive...
There must be something more useful that he could be taught in that time.
No, not really, with the possible exception of arithmetic tests. All that matters is MBA number crunching of metrics. Now what is an easier metric for grading a teacher/schools performance, determining no child left behind (or get ahead) goals, hiring / firing / layoff decisions, etc:
1) 90% of kids will form 90% of their letters according to district-wide standard cookie cutter rules/diagrams at a minimum rate of 10 words per minute.
Or
2) Kids will learn and display effective written communication skills.
Trust me, no MBA type principal will choose option #2 when option #1 is available.
Another thing brick and mortar schools do is allow for some extremely basic filtering of students...students must be able to attend a classroom with other people, work collectively in some cases, and have some basic competition in general, without being too disruptive.
Judging by some "educated" folks I've worked with in the past, this filtering must be "extremely basic" indeed. So minimal as to reach the "why bother" stage.
Sometimes the physics lab doesn't work the way it says in the book.
Good point, we run the risk of raising a generation of scientists whom will not have the experience of "massaging the data" until it matches the predetermined answer... Obviously unacceptable...
We still have brand new TVs which draw almost as much power "off" as they do turned on with the sound blazing...
You could buy TV sets like that... in the 1960s...
Transistorized sets are the only technology that turns on "instantly". Vacuum tube gear takes a minute or two to warm the cathode heaters. Solution : Never turn off the cathode heaters, if its plugged in, its on. Bonus : Sell many times more tubes as they obviously burn out faster. You can also leave plate voltage on the oscillators... That will make them run at constant temperature, thus constant frequency, thus no drift as the set "warms up" because its already warmed up. I had a Collins R-390 receiver that could switch that feature on and off...
Interestingly, modern gear has gone back to its vacuum tube roots and now requires very long boot times, on the order of five minutes, for my cable settop box. The marketers used to believe instant on technology was an important feature, but no longer.
This is the myth that will never die. Never. Five hundred years from now, people whom know nothing about electronics will be complaining their star trek holodeck draws nine kiloquads of antimatter no matter if its on or off, all because of a vacuum tube TV set built in the 1960s to compete with transistorized sets.
What good are 300 baud and 1200 baud transmissions
If it ran multinational corporations a few decades ago, it'll run a web store or whatever today. Even 31 baud PSK31 is somewhat faster than ZERO.
cheap alternatives to pay services (like Sailmail).
Probably his best solution is a sorcerers apprentice / trainee drone and Sailmail, or something like it, to keep in daily contact with said sorcerers apprentice. Live near a college town? I would guess a junior year business major would be just about right, old enough to not be a total idiot, and young enough to really need the experience for the resume... Heck, write the kid an excellent reference letter, might get the kid to work for free as an "intern".
As I use SSH for my livelihood, low latency is extremely important.
Depends how you're using ssh. If you ssh into something to run vi (vim, whatever) there is a much lower latency solution.
VPN in and NFS mount the directory... then run vi locally. Yes each file save will still take 1600 ms longer or whatever, but local typing and such will be regular speed.
Then there is always rsync and friends, such as bidirectional "unison".
If speed and latency aren't priorities and you can deal with unencrypted transmission, I'd recommend getting an amateur radio license and operating a packet radio [wikipedia.org].
Close to the correct answer...
The actual answer is to get your license, and get some knowledge and experience about operating in the 1296 MHz band, which is close enough to cell bands. (don't bother learning about the 1.8 to 2.0 MHz band, at least w/ regard to solving this problem). Basically become a 1296 MHz rover for radio contests. A successful 1296 contest rover will have a pretty good idea how to get cell service from far away. RF is RF.
The SSB microwave contesters easily work several hundred miles... Yes I know shannons law applies and you wont get that with 3G, power levels, bandwidth, modulation schemes, etc. However you will learn how to optimize your system in those microwave bands, and that's the part that matters.
In order of priority:
1) Patience. Sometimes weather conditions will not permit. Try again in a few hours.
2) Average terrain height. Parked in a valley? Forget it. Mountain climbing works better. You may get better connectivity at the top of a hill with bare laptop than at the bottom of the hill with all kinds of gadgets.
3) Antenna height about average terrain. This means an antenna on a portable tower or mast. The range difference between 3 feet off the ground and 50 feet off the ground is pretty spectacular. Most mobile masts seem to involve a L shaped foot that the vehicles is parked upon, plus some guy wires.
4) Directional antennas pointing at civilization, or at least toward a cellphone tower. Antenna rotator? Maybe.
5) Ultra low loss feedline between antenna and radio. Figure at least a buck a foot. No point in buying a very expensive high powered amp, if all it does is heat up the feedline. This will also provide an interesting education in connector installation and locating adapters via google.
6) Amplifiers. Probably technically illegal for cell phone use, but they'll help, assuming you don't over or under drive the amp.
The cheapest solution is to simply research the problem, and always keep a step or two ahead. For example, the campsite my family visits on an irregular basis has perfectly good WiFi. If you can't use google, now would be a good time to learn, rather than while out on the road. If that really nice campsite has no wifi, I'm not certain, but I think the solution is not to go there.
That is odd I use my boat for recreation but it doesn't qualify as a RV. I use my off road rigs for recreation too. Someone care to explain?
Its disambiguation.
From the wikipedia "The earliest caravans were used for practical purposes rather than recreation, such as providing shelter and accommodation for people travelling in search of an audience for their art, or to offer their services to distant employers, or to reach a new place of abode." (Yes the misspelling is wikipedia's not mine)
So, if people originally used boats for purely commercial purposes, and recently started using a slightly different style boat for purely recreational purposes, its possible that recreational (non-commercial) boat would be called a recreational vehicle or RV, as opposed to the commercial boats we all have experienced.
Step 1: look up magnetic declination for your location (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/68/IGRF_2000_magnetic_declination.gif [wikimedia.org]
With only 8 transducers, thats 45 degree resolution, and per the map there are very few people living where the declination error approaches 45 degrees, or even within an area exceeding 22.5 degrees. If you somehow could detect even a 12.25 degree error, most of the worlds population would only be at most one "digit" off.
Or you could just fit two LED's back to back they are after all diodes.
diodes... with ridiculously low peak inverse voltage ratings, not a whole heck of a lot higher than their typical forward voltage drop. With a simple series current limiting resistor, a minor momentary voltage surge (distant lightning storm, mechanically switch an inductive load, whatever) will cause a minor momentary increase in forward current for a conducting LED so who cares, but it'll blow the reverse biased non-conducting LED wide open. Thats how LEDs die...
Now stick an 1N4000 series in line with each LED string, maybe they'll survive, maybe.
The main problem with these LED lights is that I'm scared of seeing them directly even out of my peripheral vision because they all seem to have warnings of blindness written on them.
No more dangerous than halogens. About two decades ago I got "snow blindness" off a walmart Chinese made halogen lamp that had a perfectly good UV filter at the output, but the bulb "cage" was made out of wire screen for cooling... UV flowed out of the screened area. Itchy eyes every time I used it for a half day or so, thought it was just stinky overheated insulation or plain old coincidence, eventually figured it out, and threw out the lamp, problem solved.
same here, been using this desktop keyboard for about seven years, only rebooting for new kernels, num lock always on, just put caps lock on and they are the same brightness.
Because your LEDs are pure plain red or green, and his are "white" phosphor based and the phosphor wears out. Or he works in an areas of high ionizing radiation. No, more likely its just phosphor degradation.
I'd just add an RFID-blocking cage to my car interior (think tin foil). They could probably still trace me if they really wanted too, but it would stop the reporting to the roadside stations.
Then your GPS mileage won't match your odometer mileage. Simple open and shut felony tax evasion charge, or, maybe they'll just bill you the difference at twice the highest rate as a penalty.
The amazing thing is that nobody ever tried it or at least never succeeded.
I wouldn't worry about a small terrorist conspiracy, or even the best efforts of a lone wolf.
Believe it or not, a company-sized army of kamikaze terrorist squirrels and at least a division-sized army of terrorist trees has been trying to do this for literally over a century, and have won only minor short term battles and the nations EE-army has rapidly regained the lost territory.
Add in all the drunk drivers crashing thru the fences, cropduster airplanes that fail to avoid the lines, it just seems unlikely.
My favorite part of all these "terrorists will destroy our infrastructure" stories is how the true enemy of america (our own govt employees) claim the attackers will use crazy hollywood style plots, when everyone knows you just buy some hardware store chain, tie one end to the fence post, the other to a brick, and throw the brick over the station. Or crash a stolen truck thru the fence and into the station.
Speaking of which, that might not be a bad idea: Kibbles and Bits for humans. If you eat the measured amount of this per day, and nothing else, and drink nothing but water then you will get very decent nutrition given the current state of medical knowledge
I believe you have just described a liquid product called "ensure" mfg by abbott labs.
Shit I see a business brewing here
Yeah, Abbott labs had about $29B in revenue...
I have no interest in Abbott or their products, just thought it funny you'd never heard of them. They have stacks of that stuff at my local food store.
I'm sure doctors world-wide will be very happy to give a cancer patient as many blood transfusions as he needs after this treatment
Sounds like a big-pharma solution, turn the patient into a permanent revenue stream. It seems like a bone marrow transplantation would be a more appropriate and permanent solution.
Exactly, a netbook is not a cheap laptop, it was never intended to be. If you buy one expecting it to be, you're gonna be disappointed.
Why disappointed? I certainly was not disappointed by my cheap laptop. I expected a cheap laptop and I got it. I certainly couldn't care less what some marketing department jackhole "intended", so violating his "intentions" was no problem for me.
I could have bought an old used laptop which would probably break pretty soon, have a nearly worn out battery, nearly worn out hard drive, very heavy and bulky. Or a EOL'd closeout clearance freakish heavy giant of an out of date laptop.
Instead I bought a nice little netbook with about the same specs, but new hardware, a brand new battery, new SSD drive, light and tiny.
I installed what software I wanted, it works great, sounds good to me!
Slashdot Mirror
I'm also distantly related to Wittgenstein - how do I make money off of that?
Lets find some quotes and apply them to daily life, or at least daily life for a slashdotter.
Any internet post of ".jpg or it didn't happen" owes you license fees (note I'm old enough to remember when it was "gif or it didn't happen")
A picture is a fact.
The mentally deranged architect whom designed the building I work in probably owes royalties to Wittgenstein
"A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push."
And I have worked for several bosses whom stole this management aphorism from Wittgenstein.
I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.
No, the added melamine is very filling
They're all skills, and if little Timmy joins the Merchant Marine or is transported back to 1860 it might even be a useful skill.
No. As someone whom does genealogy, trust me that "CWV" era folks, like your 1860s comment, may have been born into cursive, but by middle age-ish all their relevant genealogical documents were typed. That is the transitional generation, where learning cursive for business purposes became obsolete and transitioned into learning typing for business purposes. I have reams and reams of genealogically important paperwork from that generation, this isn't just idle speculation...
Cursive was obsolete by late 19th century. Try going back to revolutionary war veterans, those guys documents were all cursive...
There must be something more useful that he could be taught in that time.
No, not really, with the possible exception of arithmetic tests. All that matters is MBA number crunching of metrics. Now what is an easier metric for grading a teacher/schools performance, determining no child left behind (or get ahead) goals, hiring / firing / layoff decisions, etc:
1) 90% of kids will form 90% of their letters according to district-wide standard cookie cutter rules/diagrams at a minimum rate of 10 words per minute.
Or
2) Kids will learn and display effective written communication skills.
Trust me, no MBA type principal will choose option #2 when option #1 is available.
Another thing brick and mortar schools do is allow for some extremely basic filtering of students...students must be able to attend a classroom with other people, work collectively in some cases, and have some basic competition in general, without being too disruptive.
Judging by some "educated" folks I've worked with in the past, this filtering must be "extremely basic" indeed. So minimal as to reach the "why bother" stage.
Sometimes the physics lab doesn't work the way it says in the book.
Good point, we run the risk of raising a generation of scientists whom will not have the experience of "massaging the data" until it matches the predetermined answer... Obviously unacceptable...
We still have brand new TVs which draw almost as much power "off" as they do turned on with the sound blazing...
You could buy TV sets like that... in the 1960s...
Transistorized sets are the only technology that turns on "instantly". Vacuum tube gear takes a minute or two to warm the cathode heaters. Solution : Never turn off the cathode heaters, if its plugged in, its on. Bonus : Sell many times more tubes as they obviously burn out faster. You can also leave plate voltage on the oscillators... That will make them run at constant temperature, thus constant frequency, thus no drift as the set "warms up" because its already warmed up. I had a Collins R-390 receiver that could switch that feature on and off...
Interestingly, modern gear has gone back to its vacuum tube roots and now requires very long boot times, on the order of five minutes, for my cable settop box. The marketers used to believe instant on technology was an important feature, but no longer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant_on
This is the myth that will never die. Never. Five hundred years from now, people whom know nothing about electronics will be complaining their star trek holodeck draws nine kiloquads of antimatter no matter if its on or off, all because of a vacuum tube TV set built in the 1960s to compete with transistorized sets.
What good are 300 baud and 1200 baud transmissions
If it ran multinational corporations a few decades ago, it'll run a web store or whatever today. Even 31 baud PSK31 is somewhat faster than ZERO.
cheap alternatives to pay services (like Sailmail).
Probably his best solution is a sorcerers apprentice / trainee drone and Sailmail, or something like it, to keep in daily contact with said sorcerers apprentice. Live near a college town? I would guess a junior year business major would be just about right, old enough to not be a total idiot, and young enough to really need the experience for the resume... Heck, write the kid an excellent reference letter, might get the kid to work for free as an "intern".
As I use SSH for my livelihood, low latency is extremely important.
Depends how you're using ssh. If you ssh into something to run vi (vim, whatever) there is a much lower latency solution.
VPN in and NFS mount the directory... then run vi locally. Yes each file save will still take 1600 ms longer or whatever, but local typing and such will be regular speed.
Then there is always rsync and friends, such as bidirectional "unison".
If speed and latency aren't priorities and you can deal with unencrypted transmission, I'd recommend getting an amateur radio license and operating a packet radio [wikipedia.org].
Close to the correct answer...
The actual answer is to get your license, and get some knowledge and experience about operating in the 1296 MHz band, which is close enough to cell bands. (don't bother learning about the 1.8 to 2.0 MHz band, at least w/ regard to solving this problem). Basically become a 1296 MHz rover for radio contests. A successful 1296 contest rover will have a pretty good idea how to get cell service from far away. RF is RF.
The SSB microwave contesters easily work several hundred miles ... Yes I know shannons law applies and you wont get that with 3G, power levels, bandwidth, modulation schemes, etc. However you will learn how to optimize your system in those microwave bands, and that's the part that matters.
In order of priority:
1) Patience. Sometimes weather conditions will not permit. Try again in a few hours.
2) Average terrain height. Parked in a valley? Forget it. Mountain climbing works better. You may get better connectivity at the top of a hill with bare laptop than at the bottom of the hill with all kinds of gadgets.
3) Antenna height about average terrain. This means an antenna on a portable tower or mast. The range difference between 3 feet off the ground and 50 feet off the ground is pretty spectacular. Most mobile masts seem to involve a L shaped foot that the vehicles is parked upon, plus some guy wires.
4) Directional antennas pointing at civilization, or at least toward a cellphone tower. Antenna rotator? Maybe.
5) Ultra low loss feedline between antenna and radio. Figure at least a buck a foot. No point in buying a very expensive high powered amp, if all it does is heat up the feedline. This will also provide an interesting education in connector installation and locating adapters via google.
6) Amplifiers. Probably technically illegal for cell phone use, but they'll help, assuming you don't over or under drive the amp.
The cheapest solution is to simply research the problem, and always keep a step or two ahead. For example, the campsite my family visits on an irregular basis has perfectly good WiFi. If you can't use google, now would be a good time to learn, rather than while out on the road. If that really nice campsite has no wifi, I'm not certain, but I think the solution is not to go there.
That is odd I use my boat for recreation but it doesn't qualify as a RV. I use my off road rigs for recreation too. Someone care to explain?
Its disambiguation.
From the wikipedia "The earliest caravans were used for practical purposes rather than recreation, such as providing shelter and accommodation for people travelling in search of an audience for their art, or to offer their services to distant employers, or to reach a new place of abode." (Yes the misspelling is wikipedia's not mine)
So, if people originally used boats for purely commercial purposes, and recently started using a slightly different style boat for purely recreational purposes, its possible that recreational (non-commercial) boat would be called a recreational vehicle or RV, as opposed to the commercial boats we all have experienced.
I personally like paper bills... It helps me keep track of when I've PAID those bills...
That is why they dislike them... they love when you have to pay a late fee
You could try superglue for a temporary test.
Latex gloves, even more temporary.
Step 1: look up magnetic declination for your location (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/68/IGRF_2000_magnetic_declination.gif [wikimedia.org]
With only 8 transducers, thats 45 degree resolution, and per the map there are very few people living where the declination error approaches 45 degrees, or even within an area exceeding 22.5 degrees. If you somehow could detect even a 12.25 degree error, most of the worlds population would only be at most one "digit" off.
Depends alot on your definition of laptop.
Chris Fenton, living in NYC, made his own laptop, based on a picaxe microcontroller.
http://chrisfenton.com/diy-laptop-v2/
Picaxe controllers are sold by a firm in Bath, UK
http://www.rev-ed.co.uk/
I'm guessing a picaxe is a pic controller with some proprietary firmware on top.
pic controllers are made by Microchip out of Arizona. Their environmental health and safety page implies they might be involved in Thailand, maybe.
Now, I have no idea where the copper wire was made, where the LCD screen was made, batteries, etc. Theres alot more than just the microcontroller.
how much does data weigh? I'm sure the 1's are heavier than the 0's....
In the punchcard / papertape era, it was obviously the other way around, 0s are heavier, 1s (punched out) are lighter.
Or you could just fit two LED's back to back they are after all diodes.
diodes ... with ridiculously low peak inverse voltage ratings, not a whole heck of a lot higher than their typical forward voltage drop. With a simple series current limiting resistor, a minor momentary voltage surge (distant lightning storm, mechanically switch an inductive load, whatever) will cause a minor momentary increase in forward current for a conducting LED so who cares, but it'll blow the reverse biased non-conducting LED wide open. Thats how LEDs die...
Now stick an 1N4000 series in line with each LED string, maybe they'll survive, maybe.
The main problem with these LED lights is that I'm scared of seeing them directly even out of my peripheral vision because they all seem to have warnings of blindness written on them.
No more dangerous than halogens. About two decades ago I got "snow blindness" off a walmart Chinese made halogen lamp that had a perfectly good UV filter at the output, but the bulb "cage" was made out of wire screen for cooling... UV flowed out of the screened area. Itchy eyes every time I used it for a half day or so, thought it was just stinky overheated insulation or plain old coincidence, eventually figured it out, and threw out the lamp, problem solved.
same here, been using this desktop keyboard for about seven years, only rebooting for new kernels, num lock always on, just put caps lock on and they are the same brightness.
Because your LEDs are pure plain red or green, and his are "white" phosphor based and the phosphor wears out. Or he works in an areas of high ionizing radiation. No, more likely its just phosphor degradation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_LED_failure_modes
Brands don't seem to matter.
If decades have mottos, that should be the motto of the "00s".
Since everything comes from the same factory in China, brands no longer matter.
I'd just add an RFID-blocking cage to my car interior (think tin foil). They could probably still trace me if they really wanted too, but it would stop the reporting to the roadside stations.
Then your GPS mileage won't match your odometer mileage. Simple open and shut felony tax evasion charge, or, maybe they'll just bill you the difference at twice the highest rate as a penalty.
Tax per mile, based on the axle loading of the vehicle, to account for road wear
Wouldn't it be a whole heck of a lot simpler to have a sales tax for tires?
The amazing thing is that nobody ever tried it or at least never succeeded.
I wouldn't worry about a small terrorist conspiracy, or even the best efforts of a lone wolf.
Believe it or not, a company-sized army of kamikaze terrorist squirrels and at least a division-sized army of terrorist trees has been trying to do this for literally over a century, and have won only minor short term battles and the nations EE-army has rapidly regained the lost territory.
Add in all the drunk drivers crashing thru the fences, cropduster airplanes that fail to avoid the lines, it just seems unlikely.
My favorite part of all these "terrorists will destroy our infrastructure" stories is how the true enemy of america (our own govt employees) claim the attackers will use crazy hollywood style plots, when everyone knows you just buy some hardware store chain, tie one end to the fence post, the other to a brick, and throw the brick over the station. Or crash a stolen truck thru the fence and into the station.
Speaking of which, that might not be a bad idea: Kibbles and Bits for humans. If you eat the measured amount of this per day, and nothing else, and drink nothing but water then you will get very decent nutrition given the current state of medical knowledge
I believe you have just described a liquid product called "ensure" mfg by abbott labs.
Shit I see a business brewing here
Yeah, Abbott labs had about $29B in revenue...
I have no interest in Abbott or their products, just thought it funny you'd never heard of them. They have stacks of that stuff at my local food store.
I'm sure doctors world-wide will be very happy to give a cancer patient as many blood transfusions as he needs after this treatment
Sounds like a big-pharma solution, turn the patient into a permanent revenue stream. It seems like a bone marrow transplantation would be a more appropriate and permanent solution.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hematopoietic_stem_cell_transplantation
Exactly, a netbook is not a cheap laptop, it was never intended to be. If you buy one expecting it to be, you're gonna be disappointed.
Why disappointed? I certainly was not disappointed by my cheap laptop. I expected a cheap laptop and I got it. I certainly couldn't care less what some marketing department jackhole "intended", so violating his "intentions" was no problem for me.
I could have bought an old used laptop which would probably break pretty soon, have a nearly worn out battery, nearly worn out hard drive, very heavy and bulky. Or a EOL'd closeout clearance freakish heavy giant of an out of date laptop.
Instead I bought a nice little netbook with about the same specs, but new hardware, a brand new battery, new SSD drive, light and tiny.
I installed what software I wanted, it works great, sounds good to me!