Grumble. I passed my 5 and got my Extra two months ago, after studying the code 2 nights a week for 6 weeks.
I had a feeling the FCC would be getting rid of the requirement as soon as I had passed it.
However, I still plan on practicing when I get my HF antenna set up, and when I can afford to get an HF rig I may very well do some CW just for grins.
Within the amateur community, there is a school of thought that having a barrier to entry will keep the cildrens' banders and other scum out. To them, I have a three word response:
seventy-five meters
Which, for those of you who are not hams, is roughly the equivalent of reading at -1 - there have been a lot of right assholes on that band who have done just about every "don't" in the book - transmitted music, cursed, jammed other stations, etc. And that band is only open to Morse qualified operators, and when the troublemakers have been tracked down, they were indeed Morse rated.
(and I *was* going to sign this with my call in Morse, but the stupid lameness filter won't let me.)
Peltiers are MUCH less efficient at moving heat than mechanical phase change coolers.
The electrical energy to drive the Peltiers will come from somewhere, namely the alternator.
The increased load on the alternator will in turn cause the alternator to place an increased load on the engine, reducing gas milage.
These kids didn't really test their system - as in, make measurements of fuel economy with the old system and with the new system in real conditions and see what the difference was. They just assumed that "If we get rid of the load from the compressor, we will save 10 HP that will save X amount of fuel" (ignoring the load from the alternator).
Now, if they had wanted to REALLY do something that would cool the vehicle without costing more gas, they would have mated an adsorption cooler to the exhaust manifold, and recovered the energy to run the cooling system from the waste heat discarded to the atmosphere.
When dealing with advertisers, never forget this one thing:
To advertisers, you are not a customer, a potential customer, or even a person: you are a consumer.
To an advertiser, a consumer is not a person: a consumer is a pair of eyeballs and ears to hear ads, a gullet to consume product, and an anus that craps cash.
You may notice the absence of a brain, taste, or discernment in that description.
You are not the customer for the media companies. You never were. You don't pay them squat. You may think you are paying a lot for that latest DVD or CD, but that is just gravy to the media companies - their real customers are the advertisers - advertisers pay the bulk of the money to the media companies.
So guess how the media companies view you - just like the advertisers.
And Tivo, DirecTV, and other distribution channels are the media companies bitches - if the media companies choose to do so, they can pull their content off those distributors and kill them.
Start with changing his wallpaper to a large font message saying "YOUR A DUMBASS! YOU CALL THIS SECURITY? SCREW YOU !"
And watch as the guy laughs his ass off because you don't even know the difference between "you're" (contraction: you are) and "your" (second person possessive).
Then watch, as the second time you do this, the feds sweep down upon you and "make an example" out of you as a "hacker".
With the PS3 + disk drive being a Linux machine, are we STILL going to be stuck with closed-source binary-only kernel modules, or will NVIDIA actually start to make good drivers.
People are dumb - so they shouldn't be expected to know that "disney.mobi" is for their phone, and "disney.com" is for their PC. The web server at disney.com should know where to send them, so the average person can simply thumb in "disney" and get what they want.
Making your site gracefully scale down for mobile devices based upon CSS, or
Making your site detect the mobile's User Agent and redirecting them to a section of your site designed for mobile use, or
Having a "lite" section of your site and letting the user select it.
All of which entail nothing more than some extra sections on your existing web server, ICANN would have you have to register a second domain, and either run virtual web services on your server or run multiple servers.
The idea that the Earth's RF emissions are detectable from any distance whatsoever is WRONG.
I've heard people say "But the Earth radiates as much RF as a star" - BULLSHIT. The Earth doesn't even radiate as much as Jupiter. The only thing is that the Earth's radiation is in narrower bandwidths and thus more detectable.
However, ignoring losses due to the inter-[planetary|stellar] medium, the signal strength of ANY signal goes down as the square of the distance (even highly collimated signals still diverge, and thus quadruple their area as distance doubles once you get out of the near-field effects).
Do the math: Assume a gigawatt transmitter. Assume that this transmitter is collimated to the point that at 100,000,000 kilometers the beam is 1 kilometer wide, and treat the transmitter as a point source. (BTW - that is an power density of just under 1.3 kilowatts per square meter - about the same as the total solar power at the Earth's surface).
At just ONE light-year the signal is just over nine billonths as strong - call it 10 microwatts to keep it to about 2 significant digits. At 4 light years, it is down to less than a microwatt per square meter. At 100 light years, it is one nanowatt per square meter.
And remember, we started with an INCREDIBLY collimated, INCREDIBLY powerful emission - normal transmissions are a thousandth this powerful, and a million times more diffuse.
The SETI project is NOT looking for alien TV or broadcast radio. SETI is looking for a Mount Arecibo class radio telescope transmitting a narrow bandwidth high power signal designed especially for a SETI system to see.
Unfortunately, the number of films that are really shot for OmniMAX vs. the number of films shot for IMAX is such that even OmniMAX domes usually run IMAX films with a special lens that *almost* gets the job done.
You make the assumption that Sony would just eat the BOM cost of the feature - a false assumption.
Sony would raise the ship cost of the box were this feature in place - so they would NOT be out the money.
However, if they determined that the overall cost of the feature - BOM plus service plus amortized NRE - is greater than the amout the sale price can be raised (greater than the customer utility function), then the feature is dropped.
Having larger than life moving pictures in front of me makes me really motion sick.
That is one of the things that displays like this are very GOOD for - they don't induce motion sickness as much as an IMAX would.
The problem with IMAX is that your entire visual field is filled with the movie - your eyes tell you "we are moving" and your inner ear says "bull! We are sitting still." This confusion of input overstimulates the vestibular system, and Ralf's your uncle.
With head mounted displays like this, you see the real world around you as well as the display - so your eyes no longer indicate you are moving, but report "This object in my view is moving - we are stationary." Your inner ear agrees, and you don't get sick.
This is also why people are advised in IMAX theaters to look at their feet if they get sick - this brings your eyes and inner ear into sync again. The problem is that too many people don't keep looking at their feet until they are fully resynced.
Five hours with your eyes focused at two inches away? No thanks.
It does not work that way. The optics adjust the needed eye relief such that the focus distance is a couple of feet - so this is no worse than looking at your monitor.
That's why these displays aren't just the LCOS display hanging in front of your eyes - you need the lenses to change the focus.
This decision is probably not driven by the Bill Of Material cost, but the service cost.
The BOM cost is the cost of the parts to build a gizmo - in this case the cost to have a couple of extra ports is going to be pretty small - on the close order of US$10. While for a device that is targeting US$500 or less that is not trivial, it is not a huge value either.
The service cost is the cost of all the consumers calling in saying "I cain't git this here thimagigitt to work!" Making this thing be a router while it plays games would increase the software complexity (basically, it would have to be running the Linux kernel all the time, and would have to NOT reboot between games - a paradigm shift for game designers).
So they probably decided that the router idea just wasn't worth the hassle.
Compiling with "-Os" (optimize for smaller code size) is not always at odds with speed, as is implied in the article.
While for some trivial benchmark code -O4 may generate faster code, for real-world applications keeping your code in cache is worth more than loop unrolling - so in real-world stuff often -Os is better than -O[2345].
Adding a Bittorrent client to a browser doesn't seem like a good fit to me - a BT client needs to run continuously in the background, downloading and uploading the files.
A browser's model is more one of "load the thing and show it" or "Stream the thing and show it". How does that map to BT, where you cannot even "stream" a thing (since you are getting the pieces out of order)?
Will we see people who's torrent clients only serve the file while it is being downloaded, and then stops?
Personally, I run Torrentflux - which is a PHP CGI app that allows me to download & serve torrents on my server - then I just point my browser at it to set things up.
Now, *if* the browser plug-in then communicated with a [daemon|service|external program] that did the torrent work, and all the plug-in did was send the command to the external entity to command the queuing of the download (and then open a window in the browser when the download is done)- then that might make sense.
...if Microsoft was able to guarantee a 24 hour patch for a vulnerability....
While we are wishing for the impossible, why do we not simply wish for Microsoft to guarantee no bugs?
NO vendor - not Microsoft, not IBM, not Sun, no one - can guarantee a "N" hour response time for 100% vulnerabilities (for 0 <=N<=1000, say).
There will ALWAYS be bugs for which it takes TIME to fix them - and the only way to deal with them until they are fixed is to shut the affected software down - and once again, that is not JUST Microsoft, but ANY software.
... only natural thing to do in a situation like this is to hack it.
Of course, because we simply CANNOT do without our toys - we cannot simply REFUSE to buy phones that are crippled, and if there are no service providers who will allow you to get a phone that is not crippled to simply DO WITHOUT.
Because it is a LAW OF NATURE that we must CONSUME whatever toys we are told to CONSUME.
We simply cannot refuse - so we must hack.
YOU HAVE NO CHOICE. SUBMIT. CONSUME, AND REPRODUCE.
Slashdot Mirror
You still missed a few:
(Q)(Q) - pasties/pierced
(@)(@) - clipped
(+)(+) - erect
(0)(0)(0) - Eccentrica Gallumbits
They were going to go with "Windows AYBABTU" but nobody could figure out how to pronounce it.
Grumble. I passed my 5 and got my Extra two months ago, after studying the code 2 nights a week for 6 weeks.
I had a feeling the FCC would be getting rid of the requirement as soon as I had passed it.
However, I still plan on practicing when I get my HF antenna set up, and when I can afford to get an HF rig I may very well do some CW just for grins.
Within the amateur community, there is a school of thought that having a barrier to entry will keep the cildrens' banders and other scum out. To them, I have a three word response:
seventy-five meters
Which, for those of you who are not hams, is roughly the equivalent of reading at -1 - there have been a lot of right assholes on that band who have done just about every "don't" in the book - transmitted music, cursed, jammed other stations, etc. And that band is only open to Morse qualified operators, and when the troublemakers have been tracked down, they were indeed Morse rated.
(and I *was* going to sign this with my call in Morse, but the stupid lameness filter won't let me.)
And yet, the Guardian and Slashdot both continue to run stories about this "scandal", fueling the fire.
Were all the news media outlets to ignore these tempests in teapots, they would blow over in seconds.
Instead, the media outlets do whatever they can to pump them up into full blown hurricanes.
These kids didn't really test their system - as in, make measurements of fuel economy with the old system and with the new system in real conditions and see what the difference was. They just assumed that "If we get rid of the load from the compressor, we will save 10 HP that will save X amount of fuel" (ignoring the load from the alternator).
Now, if they had wanted to REALLY do something that would cool the vehicle without costing more gas, they would have mated an adsorption cooler to the exhaust manifold, and recovered the energy to run the cooling system from the waste heat discarded to the atmosphere.
Joke
/\
O
| <- You
So, visit the link, and enlighten yourself.
Why ask perfect strangers this?
Ask his wife.
To an advertiser, a consumer is not a person: a consumer is a pair of eyeballs and ears to hear ads, a gullet to consume product, and an anus that craps cash.
You may notice the absence of a brain, taste, or discernment in that description.
You are not the customer for the media companies. You never were. You don't pay them squat. You may think you are paying a lot for that latest DVD or CD, but that is just gravy to the media companies - their real customers are the advertisers - advertisers pay the bulk of the money to the media companies.
So guess how the media companies view you - just like the advertisers.
And Tivo, DirecTV, and other distribution channels are the media companies bitches - if the media companies choose to do so, they can pull their content off those distributors and kill them.
So guess how Tivo et. al. view you.
And watch as the guy laughs his ass off because you don't even know the difference between "you're" (contraction: you are) and "your" (second person possessive).
Then watch, as the second time you do this, the feds sweep down upon you and "make an example" out of you as a "hacker".
With the PS3 + disk drive being a Linux machine, are we STILL going to be stuck with closed-source binary-only kernel modules, or will NVIDIA actually start to make good drivers.
(of course, I already know the answer.)
And what is it OID for object class troll?
In what schema is it defined?
Let me turn this around on you:
People are dumb - so they shouldn't be expected to know that "disney.mobi" is for their phone, and "disney.com" is for their PC. The web server at disney.com should know where to send them, so the average person can simply thumb in "disney" and get what they want.
All of which entail nothing more than some extra sections on your existing web server, ICANN would have you have to register a second domain, and either run virtual web services on your server or run multiple servers.
Yes, that makes sense.
The idea that the Earth's RF emissions are detectable from any distance whatsoever is WRONG.
I've heard people say "But the Earth radiates as much RF as a star" - BULLSHIT. The Earth doesn't even radiate as much as Jupiter. The only thing is that the Earth's radiation is in narrower bandwidths and thus more detectable.
However, ignoring losses due to the inter-[planetary|stellar] medium, the signal strength of ANY signal goes down as the square of the distance (even highly collimated signals still diverge, and thus quadruple their area as distance doubles once you get out of the near-field effects).
Do the math: Assume a gigawatt transmitter. Assume that this transmitter is collimated to the point that at 100,000,000 kilometers the beam is 1 kilometer wide, and treat the transmitter as a point source. (BTW - that is an power density of just under 1.3 kilowatts per square meter - about the same as the total solar power at the Earth's surface).
At just ONE light-year the signal is just over nine billonths as strong - call it 10 microwatts to keep it to about 2 significant digits. At 4 light years, it is down to less than a microwatt per square meter. At 100 light years, it is one nanowatt per square meter.
And remember, we started with an INCREDIBLY collimated, INCREDIBLY powerful emission - normal transmissions are a thousandth this powerful, and a million times more diffuse.
The SETI project is NOT looking for alien TV or broadcast radio. SETI is looking for a Mount Arecibo class radio telescope transmitting a narrow bandwidth high power signal designed especially for a SETI system to see.
Actually, the big square things *are* IMAX.
The domes are OmniMAX.
Unfortunately, the number of films that are really shot for OmniMAX vs. the number of films shot for IMAX is such that even OmniMAX domes usually run IMAX films with a special lens that *almost* gets the job done.
I wish we'd see more real OmniMAX films.
You make the assumption that Sony would just eat the BOM cost of the feature - a false assumption.
Sony would raise the ship cost of the box were this feature in place - so they would NOT be out the money.
However, if they determined that the overall cost of the feature - BOM plus service plus amortized NRE - is greater than the amout the sale price can be raised (greater than the customer utility function), then the feature is dropped.
That is one of the things that displays like this are very GOOD for - they don't induce motion sickness as much as an IMAX would.
The problem with IMAX is that your entire visual field is filled with the movie - your eyes tell you "we are moving" and your inner ear says "bull! We are sitting still." This confusion of input overstimulates the vestibular system, and Ralf's your uncle.
With head mounted displays like this, you see the real world around you as well as the display - so your eyes no longer indicate you are moving, but report "This object in my view is moving - we are stationary." Your inner ear agrees, and you don't get sick.
This is also why people are advised in IMAX theaters to look at their feet if they get sick - this brings your eyes and inner ear into sync again. The problem is that too many people don't keep looking at their feet until they are fully resynced.
It does not work that way. The optics adjust the needed eye relief such that the focus distance is a couple of feet - so this is no worse than looking at your monitor.
That's why these displays aren't just the LCOS display hanging in front of your eyes - you need the lenses to change the focus.
This decision is probably not driven by the Bill Of Material cost, but the service cost.
The BOM cost is the cost of the parts to build a gizmo - in this case the cost to have a couple of extra ports is going to be pretty small - on the close order of US$10. While for a device that is targeting US$500 or less that is not trivial, it is not a huge value either.
The service cost is the cost of all the consumers calling in saying "I cain't git this here thimagigitt to work!" Making this thing be a router while it plays games would increase the software complexity (basically, it would have to be running the Linux kernel all the time, and would have to NOT reboot between games - a paradigm shift for game designers).
So they probably decided that the router idea just wasn't worth the hassle.
Compiling with "-Os" (optimize for smaller code size) is not always at odds with speed, as is implied in the article.
While for some trivial benchmark code -O4 may generate faster code, for real-world applications keeping your code in cache is worth more than loop unrolling - so in real-world stuff often -Os is better than -O[2345].
The conclusion is left as an exercise for the student - do your own work, no peeking at anybody else's papers.
Adding a Bittorrent client to a browser doesn't seem like a good fit to me - a BT client needs to run continuously in the background, downloading and uploading the files.
A browser's model is more one of "load the thing and show it" or "Stream the thing and show it". How does that map to BT, where you cannot even "stream" a thing (since you are getting the pieces out of order)?
Will we see people who's torrent clients only serve the file while it is being downloaded, and then stops?
Personally, I run Torrentflux - which is a PHP CGI app that allows me to download & serve torrents on my server - then I just point my browser at it to set things up.
Now, *if* the browser plug-in then communicated with a [daemon|service|external program] that did the torrent work, and all the plug-in did was send the command to the external entity to command the queuing of the download (and then open a window in the browser when the download is done)- then that might make sense.
Great, so my data lasts until I work on something that chews up my hands.
Will this survive being GoJo'ed after I change my oil? Or being scraped up working in the yard?
What will the bit error rate be after I've painted the fence and scrubbed the paint off my hands?
So now I'll have to wear gloves anytime I do anything remotely physical? Better hope I don't break down and don't have my gloves with me.
While we are wishing for the impossible, why do we not simply wish for Microsoft to guarantee no bugs?
NO vendor - not Microsoft, not IBM, not Sun, no one - can guarantee a "N" hour response time for 100% vulnerabilities (for 0 <=N<=1000, say).
There will ALWAYS be bugs for which it takes TIME to fix them - and the only way to deal with them until they are fixed is to shut the affected software down - and once again, that is not JUST Microsoft, but ANY software.
Of course, because we simply CANNOT do without our toys - we cannot simply REFUSE to buy phones that are crippled, and if there are no service providers who will allow you to get a phone that is not crippled to simply DO WITHOUT.
Because it is a LAW OF NATURE that we must CONSUME whatever toys we are told to CONSUME.
We simply cannot refuse - so we must hack.
YOU HAVE NO CHOICE. SUBMIT. CONSUME, AND REPRODUCE.