Try Amateur Radio (aka Ham Radio) which has had 'licensed' geeks going since around 1905, and the pioneers years before that.
Try to resist the temptation to speak to communicate via a satellite with people using an antenna that you made yourself, find that elusive summer or winter atmospheric inversion that lets you speak across the continent, catch a meteor trail and send specks of data at a time, try to resist chopping into the roof of your new car to put a VHF antenna there while heaving out the AM/FM radio to put in the radio's control head, explain to the bank why you need to buy a rural block for your 120m tall tower, find that elusive vintage spark-gap transmitter and try to resist turning it on for just a few minutes, build yourself a valve power amplifier that requires two household power circuits to run - one each for the heaters and the high tension supply,etc, etc.
I'm not speaking personally, you understand! Well, only some of it!:-)
I have watched a large organisation go through "hell on a stick" trying to make a PeopleSoft staff support product actually work. Years down the track and the human resource system is still over-promising and under-delivering.
The number of work-arounds needed by the staffing practitioners is unbelievable. That is where the innovation lies.
I suppose that I should not blame PeopleSoft too much. I can't remember actually speaking to any of their developers. However, it was probably the case that the sales talk had been so successful that the internal front-line people implementing the system had believed the pitch and then over-promised.
What we practitioners saw was the basic PeopleSoft product having to be heavily reworked for months and then years to make it do the kind of thing our organisation needed to do, and know about itself.
I kept wondering whether PeopleSoft had actually analysed our information requirement before tendering: I'm sure that our organisation would have explained its information requirement in tender documents, because that's how we do things.
I saw the recent show about the Apollo moon landing hoax and I know that I could spoof those Titan photos myself, given a few hundred million dollars, a rocket, a launch site, a world-wide system of ground stations, hundreds of employees,....
I'll take a stab and ask whether one of your IT people is also an Amateur Radio operator.
Many teenagers involved in the Scouts and Guides will have heard of Jamboree On The Air (JOTA) or JOTI (I for Internet) so the recognition for Amateur Radio might be there.
Get some local Amateur Radio operators to bring in some modern equipment to demonstrate bouncing signals of the various satellites or the International Space Station.
Finally, someone in the popular science press have stated the H2 industry's "dirty little secret": It takes more energy to produce, store, transport, and consume H2 than if we consumed fossil fuels; and, if that energy comes from fossil fuels then there is almost certainly a negative impact on CO2 levels, too.
Now, I'm a fan of NOT using fossil fuels at an increasing rate until we've stuffed all the waste into our atmosphere.
So, let's instead look at some practical, short-term alternatives that will forestall the atmospheric waste issues, then also fix the long term.
Does this mean power from wind, tides, bio-gas (rotting waste from dumps, excrement, etc), solar collectors of various technologies, etc? Does this mean SIMPLIFYING our technological processes to use less energy to produce consumer goods? Does this mean actively refurbishing AND recycling things rather than simply throwing them away and consuming new things? Yes, all that and more!
The Kyoto accord makes sense; Making the planet uninhabitable long-term does not.
As the saying goes, "Think globally, act locally." Let's all "take a deep breath" on the glitzy science issues and look for the practical outcomes before we rush into things that actually don't work at the global level let alone the local level.
Australia has three major commercial networks (7, 9, and 10) and they discovered the trick of meddling with show timings about 18 months ago. Since then, we've also had the "un-intentioned over-runs" of various live shows (e.g. "Australian Idol" and "Big Brother" live shows that mysteriously go over by up to an hour.) It's got to the stage that I always add 10 minutes to any time I see in a published schedule, unless I see it advertised on TV earlier in which case I only add 5 minutes.
It's also apparent that viewer loyalty means very little, especially with the change-over of season shows to the current 'Summer Season' where many series have been run out with multiples in one week and at odd times, over the last few weeks. Of course, for UK or USA sourced shows, we're also getting them out of phase/season with their screening there.
I have just done training in ISO9001 and the process auditing that comes with it. What follows is my simple "take-away" explanation of the ISO 9001 quality system.
The whole point is that the organisation decides what quality standard(s) it is required to meet (for example under government regulations or industry standards), what extra measures it chooses to meet, and documents these and the processes involved. A system of documentating the outcomes of the processes plus internal audits, is overseen by external auditing that checks the organisation is doing what it has said needs to be done. That's ISO 9001.
You'll notice that the quality system is essentially self-managed.
Who's complaining... but this was the story that I had rejected on Friday October 08, @01:20PM. Well picked up.
Coconut oil as biodiesel, medicine, etc
on
A Viable Biofuel?
·
· Score: 1
I have a friend who is changing the micro-economies of tropical nations by helping them extract coconut oil.
"Kokonut Pacific" grew out of Dan Etherington seeing coconuts: (1) going to waste, or (2) being exported as copra and the oil and flesh imported at highly inflated prices.
Instead of coconuts and the dreams of local populations going to waste, the DME plants provide: work for a crew of people who would otherwise not be employed, a product that can be a direct replacement for imported diesel oil at a high proportion, a product that has many medicinal uses, economic benefit, hope, etc, etc.
Some of us Amateur Radio people in Australia are proposing to Prof. Karl Meinzer to establish a southern hemisphere ground station with a 10m or larger dish antenna. There are at least two sites we know of where such antennas are available; one would offer the ability to co-locate further antennas for effectively increasing the virtual dish using interferometry (signal addition).
Note: Analysis done already shows that a 3m dish should be large enough to received signals from Mars under normal circumstances. The 20m dish at Bochum, or the system as proposed for the southern hemisphere, is required for abnormal circumstances such as if the satellite points away from Earth.
My mobile phone is about 5-6 years old. It makes and receives calls!
I discovered recently that it CAN receive SMS messages, too, when I received a message meant for another number. It was my first SMS, and it said... nothing! (I've never sent an SMS message.)
Its button area is HUGH -- great for fat fingers. It's battery is HUGE -- bigger itself than most new phones -- but so is its on- and talk-time. The B&W two-line screen is easily read. In short, it's a PHONE!
Thanks, Nokia, but do you still make phones?
Documenting the Aftab/Tarbox/Penguin sites
on
The Saga of Katie.com
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Let's have a/. 'documention' exercise for the Penguin/Aftab/Tarbox sites, folks. Let's remember that Penguin is the publisher, Parry Aftab is the 'publicist', and KatieT was hard-done-by in the first place!
Something went wrong with my moderation and it became "Troll" when I meant "underrated". (I think that I rolled the mouse wheel while the moderating box was selected.)
I am part of a group seeking to establish a museum of electronics and radio in another, smaller Australian city. If all goes well, we might even have a quite exceptional site coming our way.
It's necessary not only to have a suitable "business case" but to make it work! The problem is that there still has to be a critical mass of people who are savvy about electronics -- or just interested -- who come through the door to make it viable. Repeat visits is the next issue.
I wish them good fortune, and I'll be bringing their plight to the attention of our group. Maybe we can assist "if it all turns to custard".
Here is the reasoned approach.
The Australian Communication Authority (ACA) [the Aussie version of the USA's Federal Communications Commission (FCC)] has spoken out against BPL systems, here (see "What Issues do these Systems Raise?" p7) and here.
A friend of mine in the USA lost the race on the "tenure track" to be a Professor at the university. Horror, shame, yuk, etc. Several years on, life looks sweet and there are roses to smell all over the place. It shows that a year in Australia (many years ago) might just have rubbed off, after all!
I can glance at my analogue watch and know 'the time'. I need to STUDY a digital watch to work out what it's telling me. Generally, people do not need to know to the second what the time is. ANY watch is always inacurate in any case, so it's kidding yourself to think that knowing it's 10:24:52 of 14:45:12 is any more accurate than "twenty five past 10" or "a quarter to 11".
There was some editing of my entry by the/. team before it was accepted for public viewing.:-( Some other details were changed, too. My original posting quoted directly from the scientist's information.:-)
He agreed to do two talks at an Amateur Radio conference OneTech'02 that I organised a year ago: one on BushLAN (actually delivered very ably by a graduate student, Ben Heslop) and another on "Using plasma to produce dynamically configurable antenna and lens structures". (i.e. turning what amounts to a flourescent light into an antenna)
I've met him several times since then at various meetings, and he is always approachable and very helpful with his knowledge.
Slashdot Mirror
Try Amateur Radio (aka Ham Radio) which has had 'licensed' geeks going since around 1905, and the pioneers years before that.
Try to resist the temptation to speak to communicate via a satellite with people using an antenna that you made yourself, find that elusive summer or winter atmospheric inversion that lets you speak across the continent, catch a meteor trail and send specks of data at a time, try to resist chopping into the roof of your new car to put a VHF antenna there while heaving out the AM/FM radio to put in the radio's control head, explain to the bank why you need to buy a rural block for your 120m tall tower, find that elusive vintage spark-gap transmitter and try to resist turning it on for just a few minutes, build yourself a valve power amplifier that requires two household power circuits to run - one each for the heaters and the high tension supply,etc, etc.
I'm not speaking personally, you understand! Well, only some of it! :-)
I'm white.
You are forgiven for not changing your colour, as Michael Jackson has done. In April, the forgiveness ceases. :-)
I have watched a large organisation go through "hell on a stick" trying to make a PeopleSoft staff support product actually work. Years down the track and the human resource system is still over-promising and under-delivering.
The number of work-arounds needed by the staffing practitioners is unbelievable. That is where the innovation lies.
I suppose that I should not blame PeopleSoft too much. I can't remember actually speaking to any of their developers. However, it was probably the case that the sales talk had been so successful that the internal front-line people implementing the system had believed the pitch and then over-promised.
What we practitioners saw was the basic PeopleSoft product having to be heavily reworked for months and then years to make it do the kind of thing our organisation needed to do, and know about itself.
I kept wondering whether PeopleSoft had actually analysed our information requirement before tendering: I'm sure that our organisation would have explained its information requirement in tender documents, because that's how we do things.
Winter in our city gets so cold, some days, that the lawyers have to put their hands in their own pockets.
Did you read the fine-print section of the Intelsat media release? In many ways this looks like a EULA.
No wonder lawyers and spin-doctors make big money.
Yes, it's my attempt at humour!
Okay, I may be "retro" but I'm not a Troll.
I'll take a stab and ask whether one of your IT people is also an Amateur Radio operator.
Many teenagers involved in the Scouts and Guides will have heard of Jamboree On The Air (JOTA) or JOTI (I for Internet) so the recognition for Amateur Radio might be there.
Get some local Amateur Radio operators to bring in some modern equipment to demonstrate bouncing signals of the various satellites or the International Space Station.
Alternatively, contact the ARRL (Rhode Island) folk, who are local to you.
Now, I'm a fan of NOT using fossil fuels at an increasing rate until we've stuffed all the waste into our atmosphere.
So, let's instead look at some practical, short-term alternatives that will forestall the atmospheric waste issues, then also fix the long term.
Does this mean power from wind, tides, bio-gas (rotting waste from dumps, excrement, etc), solar collectors of various technologies, etc? Does this mean SIMPLIFYING our technological processes to use less energy to produce consumer goods? Does this mean actively refurbishing AND recycling things rather than simply throwing them away and consuming new things? Yes, all that and more!
The Kyoto accord makes sense; Making the planet uninhabitable long-term does not.
As the saying goes, "Think globally, act locally." Let's all "take a deep breath" on the glitzy science issues and look for the practical outcomes before we rush into things that actually don't work at the global level let alone the local level.
It's also apparent that viewer loyalty means very little, especially with the change-over of season shows to the current 'Summer Season' where many series have been run out with multiples in one week and at odd times, over the last few weeks. Of course, for UK or USA sourced shows, we're also getting them out of phase/season with their screening there.
The whole point is that the organisation decides what quality standard(s) it is required to meet (for example under government regulations or industry standards), what extra measures it chooses to meet, and documents these and the processes involved. A system of documentating the outcomes of the processes plus internal audits, is overseen by external auditing that checks the organisation is doing what it has said needs to be done. That's ISO 9001.
You'll notice that the quality system is essentially self-managed.
Who's complaining... but this was the story that I had rejected on Friday October 08, @01:20PM. Well picked up.
"Kokonut Pacific" grew out of Dan Etherington seeing coconuts: (1) going to waste, or (2) being exported as copra and the oil and flesh imported at highly inflated prices.
Dan designed a process he calls Direct Micro-Expelling (DME)" and a device that is essentially an overgrown calking gun -- like a 4x4 jack on a track -- that squeezes the oil out of the coconut flesh in a way much like olive oil is extracted.
Instead of coconuts and the dreams of local populations going to waste, the DME plants provide: work for a crew of people who would otherwise not be employed, a product that can be a direct replacement for imported diesel oil at a high proportion, a product that has many medicinal uses, economic benefit, hope, etc, etc.
Some of us Amateur Radio people in Australia are proposing to Prof. Karl Meinzer to establish a southern hemisphere ground station with a 10m or larger dish antenna. There are at least two sites we know of where such antennas are available; one would offer the ability to co-locate further antennas for effectively increasing the virtual dish using interferometry (signal addition). Note: Analysis done already shows that a 3m dish should be large enough to received signals from Mars under normal circumstances. The 20m dish at Bochum, or the system as proposed for the southern hemisphere, is required for abnormal circumstances such as if the satellite points away from Earth.
There is still time, America... An electronic voting and counting system (EVACS) is alive and well in the Australian Capital Territory election on 16th October 2004. The source code for the Linux based system is available for anyone to check, and this is it's second outing: It was used in the election of 2001.
That's why I am an Amateur Radio perator (Links for USA, Australia UK).
Every little bit of Amateur education in radio and electronics helps interest people in the bigger science too, and there are some great techniques and articles produced by Amateurs, e.g. Ian Purdie VK2TIP on all sorts of subjects; spread-spectrum, digital signal processing, and packet radio; etc.
We did all see the projections on the stylised face 'statue' during the opening ceremony of the 2004 Summer Olympics, didn't we?
There was also the projections onto the three linked loops later in the ceremony.
My mobile phone is about 5-6 years old. It makes and receives calls!
I discovered recently that it CAN receive SMS messages, too, when I received a message meant for another number. It was my first SMS, and it said... nothing! (I've never sent an SMS message.)
Its button area is HUGH -- great for fat fingers. It's battery is HUGE -- bigger itself than most new phones -- but so is its on- and talk-time. The B&W two-line screen is easily read. In short, it's a PHONE!
Thanks, Nokia, but do you still make phones?
Okay, then. To start with:h tml?id=0452282535 or better yet, use the Search function on that site http://us.penguingroup.com/Search/QuickSearchFrame ?id=katie%21com
Penguin UK (returns a "Sorry...")
http://us.penguingroup.com/Book/BookFrame/0,,,00.
Penguin Putnam (USA) search...
http://www.aftab.com
http://ParryAftab.blogspot.com/;
http://www.KatieT.com noting the various translations of the book that have all used the same (incorrect) URL/name;
http://www.KatiesPlace.org/pages/1/index.htm;
http://www.wiredsafety.org/
Something went wrong with my moderation and it became "Troll" when I meant "underrated". (I think that I rolled the mouse wheel while the moderating box was selected.)
I am part of a group seeking to establish a museum of electronics and radio in another, smaller Australian city. If all goes well, we might even have a quite exceptional site coming our way.
It's necessary not only to have a suitable "business case" but to make it work! The problem is that there still has to be a critical mass of people who are savvy about electronics -- or just interested -- who come through the door to make it viable. Repeat visits is the next issue.
I wish them good fortune, and I'll be bringing their plight to the attention of our group. Maybe we can assist "if it all turns to custard".
Here is the reasoned approach. The Australian Communication Authority (ACA) [the Aussie version of the USA's Federal Communications Commission (FCC)] has spoken out against BPL systems, here (see "What Issues do these Systems Raise?" p7) and here.
A friend of mine in the USA lost the race on the "tenure track" to be a Professor at the university. Horror, shame, yuk, etc. Several years on, life looks sweet and there are roses to smell all over the place. It shows that a year in Australia (many years ago) might just have rubbed off, after all!
I can glance at my analogue watch and know 'the time'. I need to STUDY a digital watch to work out what it's telling me. Generally, people do not need to know to the second what the time is. ANY watch is always inacurate in any case, so it's kidding yourself to think that knowing it's 10:24:52 of 14:45:12 is any more accurate than "twenty five past 10" or "a quarter to 11".
There was some editing of my entry by the /. team before it was accepted for public viewing. :-( Some other details were changed, too. My original posting quoted directly from the scientist's information. :-)
Dr Gerard Bord is a beaut person. He's at the Plasma Research Laboratory (PRL) at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra.
He agreed to do two talks at an Amateur Radio conference OneTech'02 that I organised a year ago: one on BushLAN (actually delivered very ably by a graduate student, Ben Heslop) and another on "Using plasma to produce dynamically configurable antenna and lens structures". (i.e. turning what amounts to a flourescent light into an antenna)
I've met him several times since then at various meetings, and he is always approachable and very helpful with his knowledge.