While "shortwave" includes the ham bands, "shortwave hobbiests" are unlicensed listeners and most of the time focus on the shortwave broadcasters. Hams are licensed to transmit on a number of allocated bands, at power levels up to 1.5 kilowatts with no ERP limits in most cases. (i.e. you can have as much antenna gain as you want.)
Amateur operation isn't limited to HF. (The world below 30 MHz) Hams operate on VHF, UHF, and even microwave. (10 GHz and 24 GHz are popular thanks to the abundance of surplus Gunn diode sources at those bands - Supermarket motion detectors can be retuned to the amateur bands and made into a transmitter.)
There are quite a few amateur-operated satellites. http://www.amsat.org/ is a great resource for these units. (Almost all are registered with AMSAT.) "shortwave" has nothing do do with these sats, almost NONE of them operate in the HF bands. (A small handful have downlinks on 28 MHz, none have HF uplinks because the ionosphere woudl block the signal.) The most common bands used by ham sats are 2 meters (144-148 MHz) and 70 centimeters (440 MHz), although they go up to the microwave region. AO-40 (aka Phase IIID) was slated to run on 6-7 different bands, including a band adjacent to the 2.4 GHz ISM band. Unfortunately only 2-3 transponders are operational - During assembly, someone screwed up and connected the fuel lines to the orbit adjustment engine wrong and it exploded when they tried to execute their first engine burn. It's amazing how much of that sat they've been able to get operational despite the explosion.
Government and communications sats? I don't think so. These are all going to be encrypted. The exception are some scientific satellites, which have data downlinks in the clear. (Best example of this are the NOAA orbiters - Yes, you can receive weather satellite data at home, both from polar orbiters and the geostationary NOAA sats. I believe the non-weather earth-imaging Landsats use the same modulation scheme as the NOAA orbiters.)
I don't know about other countries, but the Register's dire prediction has been reality for many years, but only for 10 minutes after takeoff/before landing. This is when small navigational errors make a huge difference.
I don't mind it, as long as it's not a full-flight ban, which I don't foresee. Airlines are trying their best to accomodate laptop users, including Boeing actually working on *installing 802.11 in aircraft*. If there's anyone more conservative about safety than the airlines, it's the Boeing engineers. If they are willing to put 802.11 on planes, it's safe. (Now Airbus is a different story... After hearing some details about how their design practices differ from Boeings, I'm going to be nervous on Airbuses from now on.)
For one, believe it or not, but the human brain isn't clocked that fast. Nothing higher-frequency than the kilohertz range up there. (We just happen to be massively parallel.:)
For another, there are plenty of examples of people who are exposed to RF levels significantly higher than those around a cell tower with no adverse effects. My coworkers and I are probably exposed to more RF in one month than you would be if your house were 100 feet from the base of a tower. (Where I work we build power amplifiers for base stations. Trust me, there's plenty of leakage from amps with their covers off and imperfections in dummy loads/cabling.) Some of my coworkers have been in the business for two decades and are perfectly healthy. NO ONE has had any adverse health effects from their occupation. (Other than the occasional RF burn from direct contact with a circuit trace.) The only damage RF can do is heating, but unless you're a few feet from a basestation antenna, heating from cell systems is insignificant.
I don't believe there have been many (if any) cases of cell phones causing problems with the plane itself.
In the past with analog cell systems, they were known to cause SEVERE problems at the towers and with the provider's billing system. Being quadruple-billed for a call made from a plane (or worse) was possible and happened often.
Even with modern systems that prevent multiple simultaneous tower associations, a cell phone transmitting from high altitude raises the noise floor on tens or hundreds of towers, reducing capacity at every tower in range on its frequency. THAT problem can't be designed around.
I think the actual rules are that anything is permitted as long as it doesn't interfere with the operation of the airplane. This is pilot's/owner's discretion.
The exception is the FCC cellphone ban - The implied license for cellphone use does not allow usage at high altitude because of the multiple tower issues.
That said, major airlines are conservative for liability reasons about what they allow to operate. 99.9% chance that you can't really interfere with the plane's operation if whatever you're using is functioning properly, but airlines can't take that.1% chance. It's more practical for a private pilot or pilot with very few passengers to evaluate the effects of a device on their systems. i.e. it's easy for a pilot of a plane with 4 passengers to say, "somethings screwing with my electronics, can you turn things off" or have the passengers turn devices on one at a time than it is for a pilot of a plane with 200 passengers.
This is why it's common for hams to operate on HF airborne at 100 watts plus - They can tell in seconds whether or not their transceiver interferes with the system. On the other hand, if someone transmits at 5 watts from a seat on an airliner, the pilot can't track it down that easily.
"Cellular systems are supposed to negotiate connections between cells and phones and do roaming anyway. The system associates you with the cell with the strongest signal that has open channels, yes? So why would being able to associate with more represent a huge problem for the network. I don't buy this argument since it's always sold as a safety issue for aircraft."
To some degree. Each cell has a given frequency band assigned to it. Frequencies are assigned to each cell in a manner that means that a handset should never hear two signals on the same frequency with equivalent signal strengths.
The moment you go up into the air, this all changes. Even if the issue of multiple billing is resolved, a cell phone transmitting from 20,000 feet is going to raise the noise floor on hundreds of towers in addition to the one it's actually communicating with.
Those older airframes will need less shielding since a) The controls are primarily hydraulic/mechanical b) As far as radio equipment itself - They don't make em' like they used to. In many cases older radio equipment is far more resistant to both physical damage and to electronic damage than newer stuff. Miniaturization and integration = easier to screw with.
Airplanes are designed to accept lots more electronic abuse than any consumer device can put out... A properly designed airliner can have a lightning strike pass through it without damage.
As to the original issue of antennas having patterns that reject elevated signals - They do, but only to a certain degree. This rejection is offset by the fact that once you're up in a plane you have INCREDIBLE LOS to towers for hundreds of miles, esp. ones somewhat farther away (i.e. where the angle isn't that steep.)
It's not too difficult to go a long way with low power if you have good LOS. A 2-3 watt NBFM signal routed through moderate gain (not much more than a vertical whip) will go hundreds of miles. (I've done it before to UO-14, one of the amateur a.k.a. ham satellites.)
Polarization and directivity have nothing to do with each other, although certain polarization/directivity combos are easier than others.
For example, it's difficult to have an omnidirectional pattern in the horizontal plane with horizontal polarization.
On the other hand, omnidirectional in the horizontal plane but reduced gain with vertical angle changes is easy with vertical polarization. This is what a standard quarter-wave whip will do, and almost any omni antenna.
Most cell sector antennas happen to have a very narrow vertical beamwidth. This allows them to have higher gain without reducting sector size. (e.g. from 120 to 90 degrees.)
For flashlights, where incandescents typically have very low bulb life and you often are VERY screwed if the bulb pops - LEDs are king, and unless you want the equivalent of the largest of SureFires, they're more than bright enough thanks to Lumileds Luxeon line (Mentioned a few posts up, they make 1 watt and 5 watt LEDs.) I have a MiniMag that has had the bulb assembly replaced with a 1W Luxeon and DC/DC current-regulated stepup converter, it ROCKS. It can tangle with a 2D Mag in brightness, and handily beats said Mag once the Mag's batteries have been used for 20-30 minutes. The BB400 pill lasts 2 hours on 2 AAs, and it's constant brightness the whole time.
www.candlepowerforums.com has LOTS of great info on LED flashlights.
LEDs also make sense in many automotive applications. The more inaccessible the light, the more an LED makes sense. (Dash lights, etc.) Taillights make sense because LEDs don't have the warmup time of incandescents - In addition to looking cool and not burning out, the faster turnon time is equivalent to nearly a full car length at highway speeds. LEDs also make for great "courtesy lights" in cars.
For home use - Flourescents win in most cases.
In short, LEDs are king for compact applications where large amounts of light are not needed, or where the beam needs to be focused (flashlights). Fluorescents win for applications where they can fit and collimation isn't necessary. (Fluorescents aren't anywhere close to a point source.)
LEDs won in the traffig light area long ago - They don't actually save that much power (As others have said, LEDs are less efficient than large fluors/incandescents, it just happens that they ARE more efficient in smaller lights and handle variations in supply voltage more gracefully if the circuit is designed correctly, namely because they only dim instead of dimming AND changing color.), but they DO save a large amount on bulb replacement costs. (Traffic light bulbs cost $$$$$ to replace, and even with equal power consumption LED lights pay for themselves in only 2-3 years just on bulb replacement labor costs.)
A VERY significant percentage of my spam (90% plus) actually comes from legit addresses from various "opt-in" companies. Like Azoogle.
Having a fake return address means that you can't verify the existence of the destination address.
I do domain-based blocking on 4-5 different header fields. It's pretty effective, but I average 4-5 new spammer domains per week. Once a new one crops up, I'll see many messages from the same domain until I block it.
I'm positive that NV could run the cores in the high MHz range, not KHz. Modern FPGAs can run at up to 200-300 MHz IIRC.
But in large volumes (like the ones NVidia operates with), FPGAs are MUCH more expensive than ASICs. For low volumes, the NRE (nonrecurring expense) of an ASIC makes its per-unit price higher, but over a certain number, the ASIC gets cheaper. NV could probably release an FPGA-based video accelerator nearly as fast as the current units, but it would cost $2000 instead of $200.
I don't have one and I wouldn't reccommend one, they're WAY too expensive for what they do/contain.
As someone mentioned, the lack of a fan reduces their efficiency quite a bit.
But the idea of electrostatic air filtering is sound.
My father and I both suffer from pretty nasty allergies. As a result, long ago we installed two electrostatic air filters in our house. The units we have were from Sears (probably OEMed from Honeywell or another one of the major HVAC companies), and install in the furnace ducts after the mechanical air filter. (Ours required the ducts to be cut out to fit the unit. A pain but worth the money and effort.) It's a miracle during allergy season.
You should try to find some sort of electrostatic filter that includes a fan... You can get whole-house furnace filters for less than the $500 of the IB, and they work very well, there are probably intermediate versions good for a single room.
The patent system has a concept of "broad" and "narrow" patents. Broad ones can cover a wide range of different applications of the patented technology. They range from there to a narrowness where aspects of a specific product design that will likely never be infringed upon unless a competitor makes an identical ripoff of a product are patented.
For example, John Doe invents a "wheel" and patents it.
Henry Ford invents a "car" which uses four "wheels" in its design. Henry can patent his new invention.
Later, Lee Iacocca invents a "car" which has "wheels" that are 78.321 inches from center to center lengthwise and 48.92 inches from edge to edge on the axle. Also patentable (Well, maybe not in this specific case, but you get the idea as far as narrow vs. broad patents.)
The original patent on the "wheel" can expire, but the subsequent patents will still remain valid.
This is one of the good things we have here at work. They've even called "War Rooms" on paper signs. They're dotted throughout the building.
Also, getting access to one of our conference rooms (we have lots considering the company size, I've NEVER seen all of them in use at once.) is pretty easy. These are in addition to the war rooms.
Speakerphones are (of course) necessary in the isolated rooms, esp. if your company is multi-location. (The team I'm on has almost daily meetings each morning in a conf room, with a speakerphone to one of our other locations. Yes, our product is developed in two places and it's worked out quite well.)
High walls are a must. All cube walls here are above head height when standing for most people. (A few MIGHT have their eyes above cube level, but these are the excessively tall ones.) High cube walls helps in soundproofing. Sound from more than 2-3 cubicles away is almost completely deadened, and from closer in is still reasonable. Good sound absorption is critical in a cube environment - Don't skimp on this or you'll pay in the long run.
An interesting thing about our layout was that the original CEO of the company had a policy of mixing people throughout the building - Engineers would sit next to supply chain management, etc. It would sometimes be a little less convenient (you'd have to get up and walk to find someone), but it helps people get a little exercise. The fact that most of the engineers are constantly shuttling between their desks and labs means that even if people were seated together (an increasing trend since we merged with another company), they'd STILL have to get up.
Make sure the cubicles are sized well. Mine is monstrous and I was assigned it when I was just an intern. Keep them all the same size so no one feels inferior. Do NOT put more than one person per cubicle!
If management wants easy communication between adjacent cubes - Keep the high walls. People can get up and walk next door, or stand on their desks. (Yes, a few people do this where I work. It works quite well, and often provides a small amount of amusement for anyone walking nearby.) Needless to say, sturdy desktops are important.
And I have no problem using the middle button for alt fire in UT and Q3A mods that have altfire weapons. (Or otherwise for zooming).
Just get a GOOD scrollwheel that has good click action in the wheel (i.e. it's hard to accidentally scroll it.)
Any optical with a wheel made by MS or Logitech usually has a pretty good scrollwheel. I've used both brands (IM Explorer, classic IMs, and a cheapo Logitech non-MX optical), and all of them have good scrollwheels.
While it would be nice if AOL CDs were CD-RWs, there are more ways to reuse an AOL CD than simply trashing it or rewriting it a la the old AOL floppies (if they were rewritable, which they unfortunately aren't.)
While the CDs aren't rewritable, they have a lot more other uses than the old floppies did. Have some creativity.
2 AOL CDs + string + superglue = free Christmas tree ornament. (If you celebrate Christmas - If you don't, this is a starting point, I'm sure you can come up with something.) For added effect, add a microwave to that equation. The label side of AOL CDs may be ugly, but the data side is nice and shiny and has a built-in diffraction grating.:)
Even if your connection is flatrate
on
AOL Sues Spammers
·
· Score: 1
You're screwed. The cost is just being hidden from you as a part of your flatrate connection fee.
If it weren't for spam, people would likely be paying less per month for flatrate (for those who have flatrate connections.)
In the end, whether you can directly see it (metered connection) or not (flatrate connection), you're paying for the spam you receive.
From the first/. article (March 30, linked to from this one), the poster mentions, "Apparently you can even build this memorycard yourself using a standard USB memstick.", regarding Xbox memory cards that are accessible from a PC.
Where can I find more info on doing this? I can't find anything about memory card mods on xboxhacker or xbox-scene so far.
Use two-pass encoding. This way you know that your rate control variables are always at their optimal setting. Highest quality for any bitrate is this way, at the expense of 50-75% longer encode times. (The second pass goes quicker on more recent DivX versions that allow you to save the motion vectors to a file, the second time around the codec doesn't need to do motion estimation a second time.)
In the end it's faster, since you don't have to constantly tweak the RC settings depending on source material via trial and error.
There are a LOT of schools in the 128/8 block from what I remember. Cornell is in there with 128.253/16 and one or two others, and IIRC both CMU and Univ. of Buffalo are 128s.
People have already pointed out the issues with this... Too expensive for a device that's too fragile.
Has anyone released a portable MP3 DVD player yet?
DVD-R - $230 for a 4x recorder ($150 if you wait for a really good sale like the one OfficeMax had on the CenDyne rebadged Pioneer DVR-105s a month ago. Yes, I got a 105 for $150), $1.10/4.7GB disc for good Ritek media.
(Yes, I DO use a few CD sandwiches on the tree each year, they compliment the old family silicon wafers... Which are actually a lot nicer than you'd expect. They were rejects from a testing facility that had a tendency to oxidize the wafers in really colorful patterns. My family started using them just after my parents got married and they were both working in IC process development and didn't have anything else to put on the tree.)
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It's amateur radio (ham) operators that do this.
While "shortwave" includes the ham bands, "shortwave hobbiests" are unlicensed listeners and most of the time focus on the shortwave broadcasters. Hams are licensed to transmit on a number of allocated bands, at power levels up to 1.5 kilowatts with no ERP limits in most cases. (i.e. you can have as much antenna gain as you want.)
Amateur operation isn't limited to HF. (The world below 30 MHz) Hams operate on VHF, UHF, and even microwave. (10 GHz and 24 GHz are popular thanks to the abundance of surplus Gunn diode sources at those bands - Supermarket motion detectors can be retuned to the amateur bands and made into a transmitter.)
There are quite a few amateur-operated satellites. http://www.amsat.org/ is a great resource for these units. (Almost all are registered with AMSAT.) "shortwave" has nothing do do with these sats, almost NONE of them operate in the HF bands. (A small handful have downlinks on 28 MHz, none have HF uplinks because the ionosphere woudl block the signal.) The most common bands used by ham sats are 2 meters (144-148 MHz) and 70 centimeters (440 MHz), although they go up to the microwave region. AO-40 (aka Phase IIID) was slated to run on 6-7 different bands, including a band adjacent to the 2.4 GHz ISM band. Unfortunately only 2-3 transponders are operational - During assembly, someone screwed up and connected the fuel lines to the orbit adjustment engine wrong and it exploded when they tried to execute their first engine burn. It's amazing how much of that sat they've been able to get operational despite the explosion.
Government and communications sats? I don't think so. These are all going to be encrypted. The exception are some scientific satellites, which have data downlinks in the clear. (Best example of this are the NOAA orbiters - Yes, you can receive weather satellite data at home, both from polar orbiters and the geostationary NOAA sats. I believe the non-weather earth-imaging Landsats use the same modulation scheme as the NOAA orbiters.)
There's one reason I keep my WineX subscription, and it's not the packages:
It's having a say in the monthly polls. Nothing else.
I don't know about other countries, but the Register's dire prediction has been reality for many years, but only for 10 minutes after takeoff/before landing. This is when small navigational errors make a huge difference.
I don't mind it, as long as it's not a full-flight ban, which I don't foresee. Airlines are trying their best to accomodate laptop users, including Boeing actually working on *installing 802.11 in aircraft*. If there's anyone more conservative about safety than the airlines, it's the Boeing engineers. If they are willing to put 802.11 on planes, it's safe. (Now Airbus is a different story... After hearing some details about how their design practices differ from Boeings, I'm going to be nervous on Airbuses from now on.)
That's a bunch of unsubstantiated paranoia.
:)
For one, believe it or not, but the human brain isn't clocked that fast. Nothing higher-frequency than the kilohertz range up there. (We just happen to be massively parallel.
For another, there are plenty of examples of people who are exposed to RF levels significantly higher than those around a cell tower with no adverse effects. My coworkers and I are probably exposed to more RF in one month than you would be if your house were 100 feet from the base of a tower. (Where I work we build power amplifiers for base stations. Trust me, there's plenty of leakage from amps with their covers off and imperfections in dummy loads/cabling.) Some of my coworkers have been in the business for two decades and are perfectly healthy. NO ONE has had any adverse health effects from their occupation. (Other than the occasional RF burn from direct contact with a circuit trace.) The only damage RF can do is heating, but unless you're a few feet from a basestation antenna, heating from cell systems is insignificant.
I don't believe there have been many (if any) cases of cell phones causing problems with the plane itself.
In the past with analog cell systems, they were known to cause SEVERE problems at the towers and with the provider's billing system. Being quadruple-billed for a call made from a plane (or worse) was possible and happened often.
Even with modern systems that prevent multiple simultaneous tower associations, a cell phone transmitting from high altitude raises the noise floor on tens or hundreds of towers, reducing capacity at every tower in range on its frequency. THAT problem can't be designed around.
I believe you are allowed to check a gun as checked baggage, if:
It's registered and you have documentation.
It's in a locked gun case designed for safe transportation of firearms.
You declare it.
I think the actual rules are that anything is permitted as long as it doesn't interfere with the operation of the airplane. This is pilot's/owner's discretion.
.1% chance. It's more practical for a private pilot or pilot with very few passengers to evaluate the effects of a device on their systems. i.e. it's easy for a pilot of a plane with 4 passengers to say, "somethings screwing with my electronics, can you turn things off" or have the passengers turn devices on one at a time than it is for a pilot of a plane with 200 passengers.
The exception is the FCC cellphone ban - The implied license for cellphone use does not allow usage at high altitude because of the multiple tower issues.
That said, major airlines are conservative for liability reasons about what they allow to operate. 99.9% chance that you can't really interfere with the plane's operation if whatever you're using is functioning properly, but airlines can't take that
This is why it's common for hams to operate on HF airborne at 100 watts plus - They can tell in seconds whether or not their transceiver interferes with the system. On the other hand, if someone transmits at 5 watts from a seat on an airliner, the pilot can't track it down that easily.
"Cellular systems are supposed to negotiate connections between cells and phones and do roaming anyway. The system associates you with the cell with the strongest signal that has open channels, yes? So why would being able to associate with more represent a huge problem for the network. I don't buy this argument since it's always sold as a safety issue for aircraft."
To some degree. Each cell has a given frequency band assigned to it. Frequencies are assigned to each cell in a manner that means that a handset should never hear two signals on the same frequency with equivalent signal strengths.
The moment you go up into the air, this all changes. Even if the issue of multiple billing is resolved, a cell phone transmitting from 20,000 feet is going to raise the noise floor on hundreds of towers in addition to the one it's actually communicating with.
Those older airframes will need less shielding since
a) The controls are primarily hydraulic/mechanical
b) As far as radio equipment itself - They don't make em' like they used to. In many cases older radio equipment is far more resistant to both physical damage and to electronic damage than newer stuff. Miniaturization and integration = easier to screw with.
Airplanes are designed to accept lots more electronic abuse than any consumer device can put out... A properly designed airliner can have a lightning strike pass through it without damage.
As to the original issue of antennas having patterns that reject elevated signals - They do, but only to a certain degree. This rejection is offset by the fact that once you're up in a plane you have INCREDIBLE LOS to towers for hundreds of miles, esp. ones somewhat farther away (i.e. where the angle isn't that steep.)
It's not too difficult to go a long way with low power if you have good LOS. A 2-3 watt NBFM signal routed through moderate gain (not much more than a vertical whip) will go hundreds of miles. (I've done it before to UO-14, one of the amateur a.k.a. ham satellites.)
Polarization and directivity have nothing to do with each other, although certain polarization/directivity combos are easier than others.
For example, it's difficult to have an omnidirectional pattern in the horizontal plane with horizontal polarization.
On the other hand, omnidirectional in the horizontal plane but reduced gain with vertical angle changes is easy with vertical polarization. This is what a standard quarter-wave whip will do, and almost any omni antenna.
Most cell sector antennas happen to have a very narrow vertical beamwidth. This allows them to have higher gain without reducting sector size. (e.g. from 120 to 90 degrees.)
For flashlights, where incandescents typically have very low bulb life and you often are VERY screwed if the bulb pops - LEDs are king, and unless you want the equivalent of the largest of SureFires, they're more than bright enough thanks to Lumileds Luxeon line (Mentioned a few posts up, they make 1 watt and 5 watt LEDs.) I have a MiniMag that has had the bulb assembly replaced with a 1W Luxeon and DC/DC current-regulated stepup converter, it ROCKS. It can tangle with a 2D Mag in brightness, and handily beats said Mag once the Mag's batteries have been used for 20-30 minutes. The BB400 pill lasts 2 hours on 2 AAs, and it's constant brightness the whole time.
www.candlepowerforums.com has LOTS of great info on LED flashlights.
LEDs also make sense in many automotive applications. The more inaccessible the light, the more an LED makes sense. (Dash lights, etc.) Taillights make sense because LEDs don't have the warmup time of incandescents - In addition to looking cool and not burning out, the faster turnon time is equivalent to nearly a full car length at highway speeds. LEDs also make for great "courtesy lights" in cars.
For home use - Flourescents win in most cases.
In short, LEDs are king for compact applications where large amounts of light are not needed, or where the beam needs to be focused (flashlights). Fluorescents win for applications where they can fit and collimation isn't necessary. (Fluorescents aren't anywhere close to a point source.)
LEDs won in the traffig light area long ago - They don't actually save that much power (As others have said, LEDs are less efficient than large fluors/incandescents, it just happens that they ARE more efficient in smaller lights and handle variations in supply voltage more gracefully if the circuit is designed correctly, namely because they only dim instead of dimming AND changing color.), but they DO save a large amount on bulb replacement costs. (Traffic light bulbs cost $$$$$ to replace, and even with equal power consumption LED lights pay for themselves in only 2-3 years just on bulb replacement labor costs.)
A VERY significant percentage of my spam (90% plus) actually comes from legit addresses from various "opt-in" companies. Like Azoogle.
Having a fake return address means that you can't verify the existence of the destination address.
I do domain-based blocking on 4-5 different header fields. It's pretty effective, but I average 4-5 new spammer domains per week. Once a new one crops up, I'll see many messages from the same domain until I block it.
I'm positive that NV could run the cores in the high MHz range, not KHz. Modern FPGAs can run at up to 200-300 MHz IIRC.
But in large volumes (like the ones NVidia operates with), FPGAs are MUCH more expensive than ASICs. For low volumes, the NRE (nonrecurring expense) of an ASIC makes its per-unit price higher, but over a certain number, the ASIC gets cheaper. NV could probably release an FPGA-based video accelerator nearly as fast as the current units, but it would cost $2000 instead of $200.
I don't have one and I wouldn't reccommend one, they're WAY too expensive for what they do/contain.
As someone mentioned, the lack of a fan reduces their efficiency quite a bit.
But the idea of electrostatic air filtering is sound.
My father and I both suffer from pretty nasty allergies. As a result, long ago we installed two electrostatic air filters in our house. The units we have were from Sears (probably OEMed from Honeywell or another one of the major HVAC companies), and install in the furnace ducts after the mechanical air filter. (Ours required the ducts to be cut out to fit the unit. A pain but worth the money and effort.) It's a miracle during allergy season.
You should try to find some sort of electrostatic filter that includes a fan... You can get whole-house furnace filters for less than the $500 of the IB, and they work very well, there are probably intermediate versions good for a single room.
The patent system has a concept of "broad" and "narrow" patents. Broad ones can cover a wide range of different applications of the patented technology. They range from there to a narrowness where aspects of a specific product design that will likely never be infringed upon unless a competitor makes an identical ripoff of a product are patented.
For example, John Doe invents a "wheel" and patents it.
Henry Ford invents a "car" which uses four "wheels" in its design. Henry can patent his new invention.
Later, Lee Iacocca invents a "car" which has "wheels" that are 78.321 inches from center to center lengthwise and 48.92 inches from edge to edge on the axle. Also patentable (Well, maybe not in this specific case, but you get the idea as far as narrow vs. broad patents.)
The original patent on the "wheel" can expire, but the subsequent patents will still remain valid.
This is one of the good things we have here at work. They've even called "War Rooms" on paper signs. They're dotted throughout the building.
Also, getting access to one of our conference rooms (we have lots considering the company size, I've NEVER seen all of them in use at once.) is pretty easy. These are in addition to the war rooms.
Speakerphones are (of course) necessary in the isolated rooms, esp. if your company is multi-location. (The team I'm on has almost daily meetings each morning in a conf room, with a speakerphone to one of our other locations. Yes, our product is developed in two places and it's worked out quite well.)
High walls are a must. All cube walls here are above head height when standing for most people. (A few MIGHT have their eyes above cube level, but these are the excessively tall ones.) High cube walls helps in soundproofing. Sound from more than 2-3 cubicles away is almost completely deadened, and from closer in is still reasonable. Good sound absorption is critical in a cube environment - Don't skimp on this or you'll pay in the long run.
An interesting thing about our layout was that the original CEO of the company had a policy of mixing people throughout the building - Engineers would sit next to supply chain management, etc. It would sometimes be a little less convenient (you'd have to get up and walk to find someone), but it helps people get a little exercise. The fact that most of the engineers are constantly shuttling between their desks and labs means that even if people were seated together (an increasing trend since we merged with another company), they'd STILL have to get up.
Make sure the cubicles are sized well. Mine is monstrous and I was assigned it when I was just an intern. Keep them all the same size so no one feels inferior. Do NOT put more than one person per cubicle!
If management wants easy communication between adjacent cubes - Keep the high walls. People can get up and walk next door, or stand on their desks. (Yes, a few people do this where I work. It works quite well, and often provides a small amount of amusement for anyone walking nearby.) Needless to say, sturdy desktops are important.
oh god the painful thoughts...
Next weapon - mwheelup
Prev weapon - mwheeldown
And I have no problem using the middle button for alt fire in UT and Q3A mods that have altfire weapons. (Or otherwise for zooming).
Just get a GOOD scrollwheel that has good click action in the wheel (i.e. it's hard to accidentally scroll it.)
Any optical with a wheel made by MS or Logitech usually has a pretty good scrollwheel. I've used both brands (IM Explorer, classic IMs, and a cheapo Logitech non-MX optical), and all of them have good scrollwheels.
While it would be nice if AOL CDs were CD-RWs, there are more ways to reuse an AOL CD than simply trashing it or rewriting it a la the old AOL floppies (if they were rewritable, which they unfortunately aren't.)
:)
While the CDs aren't rewritable, they have a lot more other uses than the old floppies did. Have some creativity.
2 AOL CDs + string + superglue = free Christmas tree ornament. (If you celebrate Christmas - If you don't, this is a starting point, I'm sure you can come up with something.) For added effect, add a microwave to that equation. The label side of AOL CDs may be ugly, but the data side is nice and shiny and has a built-in diffraction grating.
You're screwed. The cost is just being hidden from you as a part of your flatrate connection fee.
If it weren't for spam, people would likely be paying less per month for flatrate (for those who have flatrate connections.)
In the end, whether you can directly see it (metered connection) or not (flatrate connection), you're paying for the spam you receive.
From the first /. article (March 30, linked to from this one), the poster mentions, "Apparently you can even build this memorycard yourself using a standard USB memstick.", regarding Xbox memory cards that are accessible from a PC.
Where can I find more info on doing this? I can't find anything about memory card mods on xboxhacker or xbox-scene so far.
Use two-pass encoding. This way you know that your rate control variables are always at their optimal setting. Highest quality for any bitrate is this way, at the expense of 50-75% longer encode times. (The second pass goes quicker on more recent DivX versions that allow you to save the motion vectors to a file, the second time around the codec doesn't need to do motion estimation a second time.)
In the end it's faster, since you don't have to constantly tweak the RC settings depending on source material via trial and error.
There are a LOT of schools in the 128/8 block from what I remember. Cornell is in there with 128.253/16 and one or two others, and IIRC both CMU and Univ. of Buffalo are 128s.
People have already pointed out the issues with this... Too expensive for a device that's too fragile.
Has anyone released a portable MP3 DVD player yet?
DVD-R - $230 for a 4x recorder ($150 if you wait for a really good sale like the one OfficeMax had on the CenDyne rebadged Pioneer DVR-105s a month ago. Yes, I got a 105 for $150), $1.10/4.7GB disc for good Ritek media.
Great Christmas tree decorations. mmm shiny...
(Yes, I DO use a few CD sandwiches on the tree each year, they compliment the old family silicon wafers... Which are actually a lot nicer than you'd expect. They were rejects from a testing facility that had a tendency to oxidize the wafers in really colorful patterns. My family started using them just after my parents got married and they were both working in IC process development and didn't have anything else to put on the tree.)