I'll be really surprised if Apple doesn't agree to simply make a deal with Psystar to manufacture clones for a licensing fee. It isn't that radical - Apple licensed Mac clones back in the late 80s - early 90s (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_clone#The_first_Macintosh_clones ).
From the Wikipedia article that you linked to:
Jobs claimed [...] that the Mac clone program was doomed to failure from the start, and since Apple made money primarily by selling computer hardware, it ought not engage in a licensing program that would reduce its hardware sales.
BTW, you're meant to drive on the road, not on the pavement.
In US English, "pavement" is the hard surface of a road or street (or any other paved surface for that matter). We use the word "sidewalk" for a paved pedestrian path along the the edge of a road.
Naturally, we frown upon driving on the sidewalk over here, just as you discourage driving on the pavement over there!:-)
I have one data point: My neighborhood had a series of copper telephone line thefts a few months ago. Over a period of about 3 weeks, the thieves cut down telephone lines with a scrap value of about $750, doing about $500,000 of damage in the process, and cutting off telephone access in our rural area repeatedly. The thieves were eventually caught. They were a bunch of meth-heads.
If the authorities could have issued hunting tags for the wire thieves, I can guarantee that they would have been caught much more quickly.;-)
I had to go through the same BS a couple of years ago when I canceled the subscription on a second radio that I didn't need any more. After going through all of that, they didn't even cancel the service, and I had to go through an even larger pile of BS later to get them to refund the money that they overcharged me.
As I wrote in other comments here, I plan to cancel my account very soon because of their recent programming changes. I'm not looking forward to the experience, and I fully expect to need to monitor my credit card statements very closely for the next several months to make sure that they don't continue charging me.
I'm an XM subscriber. I have been one for many years. With the recent XM/Sirius channel consolidation, the selection of music that I like has been drastically reduced. I expect that I'll be canceling my subscription within the next month. I couldn't care less about whether the subscriber base is growing or shrinking, the stock price, what XM/Sirius wrote off and when, or anything else as long as I can get the programming that I want at a reasonable price. Now that the programming that I like has gone away, there's no compelling reason for me to keep paying for the service. My opinion on this matter has nothing to do with the article at the top of the page. I had already reached my decision all by myself before I read this article, and I've seen several other people here making similar complaints. I wouldn't mind the merger at all if my favorite programming was still available, and I'd really like the merger if more new stuff was added to the programming that I like. However, as another commenter here wrote: "They looked at all their combined radio stations, separated the wheat from the chaff, and gave us the goddamn chaff."
if this article is any indication of the type of reporting this site does, I will not be back to comment again anyways. This is just another example of the crap reporting we are used to in this day and age. No research, no facts, just throw out some stuff and make an article you think will sell.
This site doesn't really provide any reporting; it mainly links to articles published elsewhere and lets people comment on them. It doesn't sell articles.
Anyway, if you have any connection with the folks who make programming decisions at XM/Sirius, please pass along some of the comments here. Maybe folks like me who feel cheated by the recent channel lineup change are in a minority and XM/Sirius won't miss our subscription revenue, but if we're not a minority, then XM/Sirius may have a really blue Christmas this year.
But it didn't take me too long to figure out that my old channels has just been both renamed and renumbered, and my unit wasn't smart enough to track a change in both. Sirius' "Big 80s" was replaced with "80s on 8." Sirius "Left of Center" was replaced with "Sirius-XM U." "Buzzsaw" was replaced with "Boneyard." In short, nothing whatsoever was actually LOST, I just had to do some digging.
Over on XM, we lost "Boneyard" and got "Hair Nation" in its place. We lost the best 75% of the music that the Boneyard played, and got the limited subset of old played-to-death pop hair metal that Hair Nation plays. I've complained to XM about it, and I expect that I'll cancel my subscription within the next month. It's nice to hear that Boneyard still lives on somewhere, but I'm not going to go to the trouble of buying a new radio to follow it over to Sirius. Instead, I'll just spend my subscription money on fleshing out my music collection.
If XM brings back the Boneyard's programming within the next month then they might just keep my subscription revenue. I don't care if whether they ditch Hair Nation or keep it in the XM lineup; I'd probably listen to it occasionally if it's there, but it just doesn't offer enough breadth to keep me paying. They could even just merge the two formats together and call it "Hairbone Nation" for all I care; I think there's enough in common between the two formats to make that work and keep most of the listeners from either of the old stations.
I've also had XM for years, and I'm also seriously considering dropping my subscription. With the XM/Sirius channel consolidation that happened a week or two ago, they dumped my favorite XM rock station and replaced it with (I assume) the nearest equivalent Sirius station. While that station does play music that I like, it covers a much narrower range of music than the XM station that it replaced.
One of the benefits of XM for me was that I'd be able to hear music that I like (whether new music or older stuff that I had forgotten about) that isn't already in my music library. With the new channel line-up, that's not too likely to happen any more, and some big chunks of what I like to listen to have simply vanished from their line-up. XM doesn't compete with my iPod/iPhone nearly as well now. I might as well just use an iPod in my truck, and redirect the money that I've been spending on XM to fleshing out my music collection.
Naturally, if I do cancel my subscription, I'll tell them why I did so. I might even complain prior to canceling, but I doubt that they would change things enough to keep me before I got tired of paying to hear stuff that's already on my iPod.
You choose to not have a case sensitive file system and complain about it. I'll leave understanding what I mean as an exercise for the reader. Hint: disk utility.
Just don't reformat the root partition as case-sensitive! I tried that, and it broke many things.
I now divide the hard drive on my MacBook Pro into two partitions. The root partition is case-insensitive, and the second partition is case-sensitive and mounted at/usr/local. My Time Machine backup drive is formatted as case-sensitive so that it'll be able to deal with the/usr/local stuff.
I have a Perforce server running on my machine. I learned the hard way that the Mac version of Perforce assumes it's on a case-sensitive volume, and things break if it's on a case-sensitive one. However, there's an undocumented option to force the Perforce daemon into case-sensitive mode. "p4 help undoc" displays the documentation for undocumented options, oddly enough.
Many common programs from Unix-land are most easily downloaded and compiled (if necessary, where binaries aren't available) with FinkCommander.
The storyline is also not applicable, as in the books the main characters are investigating why people are getting trapped in the virtual world and once they themselves become trapped attempting to work their way out of it.
Hmm, that part of the story line sounds applicable to me. A virtual world that is very difficult to log out from sounds like a dream come true for a paid-subscription gaming company!:-)
Oh, yeah! That sounds familiar now that you mention it. I don't remember how this was worked around with the Macintosh emulator on the Amiga back then, but I'm pretty sure that there was some way to read and write the Macintosh diskettes.
To be pedantic, the Amiga had a very flexible diskette drive controller. The drives themselves were essentially the same as drives used in PC clones, aside from having a diskette presence detect switch which was generally omitted in PC drives. As I recall, PC drives (even 5-1/4" ones) could be plugged into the Amiga and used, but the computer wouldn't automatically notice diskette insertions because of the missing switch. The Amiga used odd-ball 23-pin D-sub connectors for the disk drive, but they could be made out of DB-25 connectors with a Dremel tool.
The Amiga stored 880K (IIRC) on a 720K disk because it simply crammed more sectors on each track. The PC's controller would write a sector at a time, so its disk format required gaps between the sectors to allow it to write a sector without stomping on either of the adjacent sectors. The Amiga's diskette drive controller could write an entire track in one pass, so the Amiga format could dispense with both large inter-sector gaps and sector interleaving. The Amiga could also read and write PC disks (with appropriate software that bypassed the regular filesystem code), by simply programming the diskette controller to put fewer sectors on each track and place them farther apart.
Some folks liked to use nonstandard formats which crammed even more data on the diskette by using more than 80 tracks. Many diskette drives of the day were capable of stepping the head out beyond track 80, but how many tracks would vary from drive to drive. Thus, these nonstandard diskette formats weren't as portable as the normally-formatted ones, since hacker A might be able to write one or two more tracks on their diskette drive than hacker B's drive could handle.
Now, I think that the Macintosh drives of that era were physically different somehow, but I don't remember the details. I vaguely recall that there was a product that allowed the Amiga to emulate a Macintosh, and it had some sort of electronic doohickey that installed between the computer and the diskette drive to let the Amiga read/write Macintosh diskettes. Or maybe it required a completely different diskette drive... my memory is fuzzy.
This conversation does bring back memories, though! I remember having a flaky diskette drive and being too poor to either replace it or have it fixed by a pro, so I had to do a ham-fisted re-alignment by loosening the stepper motor and turning it by hand until it read some random disk semi-reliably! Hmm, I think I even did that in the snake-infested snow, uphill in both directions.:-)
I used to run my own mail server, but since I now live in a rural area with poor Internet connectivity options, I decided that I wanted to host my email elsewhere. I don't want advertisements inserted in my email, so that ruled out the free services. I wanted a a business-class provider providing IMAP service, with technical competence and the ability to serve non-WIndows users (I primarily used Linux at the time, but have since switched to using a Mac for most purposes). I've seen far too many companies with shiny web pages but no brains behind them. After doing some research, I picked out Tuffmail. They appeared to provide the services that I wanted at a price that I was willing to pay, and their web page was heavy on technical details and light on flashy clip art of people wearing nice clothes and phone headsets.
I've been happy with their service, and their spam filters seem to work well for me. They offer IMAP, POP, and a web mail interface. I have had no trouble using their IMAP server from Linux, Mac, Windows or my iPhone. Their Bayesian filter is easy to train by dropping mis-identified emails into appropriate folders, and they also have both blacklisting and whitelisting, accessible from a web page. I set up my account to automatically dump mailing list traffic into folders other than my main inbox.
I'd recommend them without hesitation to any other technically-savvy folks who need good email service. I also would happily use them for business email if I ever found myself starting up a small company and I didn't have a business need to host my own server(s).
I've had a few different folks who worked on GPS over the years try to explain how it worked and it never made sense to me until just now. Maybe it's just because I drank a margarita but that explanation seemed particularly lucid. Thanks!
I was drinking a beer when I wrote it. Maybe that was the key...:)
Yeah "log in" was sloppy wording on my part, and made me sound like a total GPS ignoramus. I meant until it "locks on" to the satellites rather than "log in".
:-) Yes, lock on is a better term.
I assume the requirement for 3 satellites for a 2D fix and 4 for a 3D fix has to do with the trig you need to do. To triangulate any point on a 2D map requires 2 points from which to measure distance to find where the 2 lines intersect. On a 3D map it'd be easy to show you need 3. Then for height you'd need to do it against the perpendicular axis[...]
Ok, somebody correct me if I'm wrong... I do GPS for a living, but I'm mostly a PCB designer and I don't understand the math/firmware/algorithms like the Smart Folks at my company.;-)
I think that the three points give you all three coordinates including altitude; that is, for a general triangulation problem, three well-chosen measurements to known locations gives you the full 3D solution. In other words, a system of three equations is needed to solve for three unknown variables. However, the range measurements in GPS are performed by making time-of-flight measurements, and the receiver doesn't know what time it is with enough precision. Thus, there's a fourth variable to be solved for (precise GPS time when the measurements were made), so a fourth equation is needed. Again, somebody please correct me if I have stated anything incorrectly here.
Now, it's still helpful for a GPS receiver to know the approximate time of day when it first starts trying to acquire satellites, particularly if has been turned off for a short period, so it still has recent data about the satellite constellation (ephemeris data), its clock hasn't had a chance to drift very far yet, and it can make a good guess about what satellites will be visible and where they will be in the sky. This lets the receiver conduct a much smaller search to find that first satellite, and then find a few more even more quickly. The satellites all transmit on the same frequency, but their apparent radio frequencies at the receiver are shifted quite a bit by the Doppler effect. Thus, the receiver is in effect only looking at one little slice of the sky when it's tuned to a particular frequency, and it scans across the sky by adjusting its receiver frequency. If it already knows that a particular satellite should be in a particular patch of sky, then it can look right around the corresponding Doppler-shifted frequency for that specific satellite. So, a GPS receiver that has been turned off for a short period of time (under four hours, if I'm not mistaken), knows about what time it is (generally from a low-power clock running off a battery and using a cheap 32kHz watch crystal as a timebase), correctly guesses that it's still located at about the same position where it was turned off, and has current ephemeris data, might go from power-on to a full 3D fix in a few seconds. At the other extreme, a receiver that doesn't know what time it is, doesn't know where it is, and doesn't have good ephemeris data will need to do a full-sky search for arbitrary satellites which may or may not be visible, and will take a much longer time to get its first fix. Then, that fix might not even be very accurate until the receiver can download the current satellite almanac, which takes 12.5 minutes minimum if I recall correctly.
Wow, I sure can ramble on. What was the topic, again?:-)
But so long as all the satellites are in sync with their atomic clocks showing the same time, does it matter??? Even without them being in sync, doesn't the GPS use time and rough location to locate the satellites (unitil it's logged on) and then isn't it the round trip time taken by signal that's being measured? Is there any dependancy on leap seconds?
GPS doesn't use UTC for its measurements; it uses its own system of GPS time for its measurements, and then calculates UTC using a correction value transmitted by the satellites in order to be able to display UTC (or any other UTC-derived time) for the user.
Also, it doesn't "log in" in any usual sense, as the communication is purely one-way, from the satellite broadcasts to the receiver. Thus, it also doesn't measure round trip time, because there is no round trip. What it does is to receive the signals from multiple satellites, each of which essentially transmits a signal saying "I'm satellite number A, my location is B, and the time is C", and then solve a system of equations to figure out what time it was when it received the signals from each satellite, and thus how long each one-way trip took. Then it can do the geometry to figure out where it must be. The actual mechanism of accomplishing this is a whole lot more complicated, but on a very simple level, that's what's being done.
The reason it takes at least four visible satellites to produce a 3D fix is because it needs to solve a system of at least four equations with four unknowns: X, Y and Z spatial coordinates, and time. More than four satellites are normally needed for good accuracy, since the each measurement is usually a lot more noisy and less precise than is desired. Additional measurements let the receiver do more math to try and filter out the noise.
Yes, I've done that, too! I've left my charger both at home and at work. My drive back home is 40 miles (64km). I once spent a couple hours driving around looking for a spare charger for my MacBook. Now I always buy a spare charger with a new laptop, and I keep it in my truck.
Lately, I've been telecommuting 3+ days per week. I have my boss trained so well, that sometimes he is surprised when I show up in the office!:-)
Let me put it a different way. I am an atheist. I believe that there are no divine beings, and that humans and the universe that we live in were not created by any sort of divine being, intelligence, etc. This is not just an absence of belief in divinity; it is a belief in the absence of divinity.
You may debate whether my atheism is a religion or not, but it is certainly based on faith. Faith is the strong belief in something without proof. I believe in the lack of divinity without any hint of doubt, even though there is no evidence that even suggests that my belief is correct, let alone supports or proves it.
I accept that scientific theories such as the theory of evolution make sense to me, yet these theories don't support my atheistic beliefs at all, since they have nothing to say either in support of or in opposition to the existence of divinity. My acceptance of scientific theories is not based on faith, because I demand proof in order to accept a scientific theory, and will discard the theory if and when convincing evidence shows up that refutes it.
However, my atheism is a matter of faith, since I believe it with absolute conviction, in the complete absence of supporting evidence, and without welcoming reasoned debate that I could be mistaken on that matter. If this is not faith, then what is? I find myself unable to imagine any blinder faith than this.
Atheism is not a religion. Religion requires faith and absence of faith is not faith. Insistence on evidence is the inverse of faith.
You appear to have atheism confused with agnosticism. Agnostics are the ones who neither believe nor disbelieve in divine being(s) because of the lack of evidence, while atheists believe that there are no divine beings with no more evidence than believers in any other religion have. In other words, atheists base their beliefs on faith, not evidence, since there is no accepted evidence that either proves or disproves the existence of divine beings.
Recovered soon after a crime. Problem is that it would be difficult to match cartridges which have been used several times, quite possibly in different guns.
True. The firing pin's imprint in the primer (which gets replaced with a new primer for each reload) would be valid, but things could be complicated by multiple sets of bolt face imprints on the case head.
Even though it's wrong target, you can still trace back to see to whom shop owner sold those cartridges.
Cartridges are not serialized. Even lot numbers are just marked on the carton, not on the cartridge, and any given production lot can end up being split between many, many sellers. With a shelf life measured in decades, a box of ammo might sit around on the shelf for a long, long time, and may change hands many, many times before being used. It's not even that unusual to use surplus ammo dating back to WW2 or before. A brass cartridge might have the year of manufacture stamped on the head (more likely for military ammo than for civilian ammo), and there are no markings at all applied to the projectile.
In general, it would be pretty hard to trace an arbitrary cartridge back to a particular seller or buyer without other evidence. About all that you can determine from a shell casing found at the scene of a crime would be the manufacturer, caliber, possibly the original year of manufacture (and that shell casing might have been reloaded numerous times after that), fingerprints of one or more persons who have handled it, and it may be possible to determine that it was fired in a particular firearm if (and only if) that firearm is recovered, and has not been modified, repaired, serviced, upgraded, or even fired a large number of times since that shell casing was fired in it.
You probably will not be able to trace a cartridge to a buyer or seller unless the box it came out of is also left at the scene with its credit card receipt taped to it, and even then it could be argued that a receipt indicating that particular brand and type of ammo (if the brand and type is even listed on the receipt) didn't correspond to that specific box of ammunition, and/or that the shell casing did not come from that specific box. It would be much like trying to match an individual paper napkin to a particular package, manufacturer, seller and buyer.
The FBI used to claim to be able to match a bullet to a specific manufacturing lot based on chemical analysis of the bullet's lead, but that technique has since been shown to be bogus.
It's a good idea. I was thinking about a wearable faraday cage like a jumpsuit and hood with an embedded grid of appropriate mesh size to filter out the radio signal.
Suits like that actually exist. I bought one at a military surplus store. The Navy used them to protect sailors who have to work close to shipboard radar systems. Naturally, they need to completely surround the body to work, so these one-piece suits have booties, gloves, and completely cover the head and face.
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I'll be really surprised if Apple doesn't agree to simply make a deal with Psystar to manufacture clones for a licensing fee. It isn't that radical - Apple licensed Mac clones back in the late 80s - early 90s (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_clone#The_first_Macintosh_clones ).
From the Wikipedia article that you linked to:
Jobs claimed [...] that the Mac clone program was doomed to failure from the start, and since Apple made money primarily by selling computer hardware, it ought not engage in a licensing program that would reduce its hardware sales.
Prepare to be really surprised. ;-)
BTW, you're meant to drive on the road, not on the pavement.
In US English, "pavement" is the hard surface of a road or street (or any other paved surface for that matter). We use the word "sidewalk" for a paved pedestrian path along the the edge of a road.
Naturally, we frown upon driving on the sidewalk over here, just as you discourage driving on the pavement over there! :-)
Naw, I think it was just meth-heads stealing the cables. Why, they did that right in my own neighborhood a few months ago!
One cent? It costs a lot more than that to send paper spam, yet my physical mailbox gets crammed full of the stuff nearly every day.
I have one data point: My neighborhood had a series of copper telephone line thefts a few months ago. Over a period of about 3 weeks, the thieves cut down telephone lines with a scrap value of about $750, doing about $500,000 of damage in the process, and cutting off telephone access in our rural area repeatedly. The thieves were eventually caught. They were a bunch of meth-heads.
If the authorities could have issued hunting tags for the wire thieves, I can guarantee that they would have been caught much more quickly. ;-)
I had to go through the same BS a couple of years ago when I canceled the subscription on a second radio that I didn't need any more. After going through all of that, they didn't even cancel the service, and I had to go through an even larger pile of BS later to get them to refund the money that they overcharged me.
As I wrote in other comments here, I plan to cancel my account very soon because of their recent programming changes. I'm not looking forward to the experience, and I fully expect to need to monitor my credit card statements very closely for the next several months to make sure that they don't continue charging me.
Hi, Newman, and welcome so Slashdot.
I'm an XM subscriber. I have been one for many years. With the recent XM/Sirius channel consolidation, the selection of music that I like has been drastically reduced. I expect that I'll be canceling my subscription within the next month. I couldn't care less about whether the subscriber base is growing or shrinking, the stock price, what XM/Sirius wrote off and when, or anything else as long as I can get the programming that I want at a reasonable price. Now that the programming that I like has gone away, there's no compelling reason for me to keep paying for the service. My opinion on this matter has nothing to do with the article at the top of the page. I had already reached my decision all by myself before I read this article, and I've seen several other people here making similar complaints. I wouldn't mind the merger at all if my favorite programming was still available, and I'd really like the merger if more new stuff was added to the programming that I like. However, as another commenter here wrote: "They looked at all their combined radio stations, separated the wheat from the chaff, and gave us the goddamn chaff."
if this article is any indication of the type of reporting this site does, I will not be back to comment again anyways. This is just another example of the crap reporting we are used to in this day and age. No research, no facts, just throw out some stuff and make an article you think will sell.
This site doesn't really provide any reporting; it mainly links to articles published elsewhere and lets people comment on them. It doesn't sell articles.
Anyway, if you have any connection with the folks who make programming decisions at XM/Sirius, please pass along some of the comments here. Maybe folks like me who feel cheated by the recent channel lineup change are in a minority and XM/Sirius won't miss our subscription revenue, but if we're not a minority, then XM/Sirius may have a really blue Christmas this year.
But it didn't take me too long to figure out that my old channels has just been both renamed and renumbered, and my unit wasn't smart enough to track a change in both. Sirius' "Big 80s" was replaced with "80s on 8." Sirius "Left of Center" was replaced with "Sirius-XM U." "Buzzsaw" was replaced with "Boneyard." In short, nothing whatsoever was actually LOST, I just had to do some digging.
Over on XM, we lost "Boneyard" and got "Hair Nation" in its place. We lost the best 75% of the music that the Boneyard played, and got the limited subset of old played-to-death pop hair metal that Hair Nation plays. I've complained to XM about it, and I expect that I'll cancel my subscription within the next month. It's nice to hear that Boneyard still lives on somewhere, but I'm not going to go to the trouble of buying a new radio to follow it over to Sirius. Instead, I'll just spend my subscription money on fleshing out my music collection.
If XM brings back the Boneyard's programming within the next month then they might just keep my subscription revenue. I don't care if whether they ditch Hair Nation or keep it in the XM lineup; I'd probably listen to it occasionally if it's there, but it just doesn't offer enough breadth to keep me paying. They could even just merge the two formats together and call it "Hairbone Nation" for all I care; I think there's enough in common between the two formats to make that work and keep most of the listeners from either of the old stations.
I've also had XM for years, and I'm also seriously considering dropping my subscription. With the XM/Sirius channel consolidation that happened a week or two ago, they dumped my favorite XM rock station and replaced it with (I assume) the nearest equivalent Sirius station. While that station does play music that I like, it covers a much narrower range of music than the XM station that it replaced.
One of the benefits of XM for me was that I'd be able to hear music that I like (whether new music or older stuff that I had forgotten about) that isn't already in my music library. With the new channel line-up, that's not too likely to happen any more, and some big chunks of what I like to listen to have simply vanished from their line-up. XM doesn't compete with my iPod/iPhone nearly as well now. I might as well just use an iPod in my truck, and redirect the money that I've been spending on XM to fleshing out my music collection.
Naturally, if I do cancel my subscription, I'll tell them why I did so. I might even complain prior to canceling, but I doubt that they would change things enough to keep me before I got tired of paying to hear stuff that's already on my iPod.
How about...
* Plants don't die when you eat them.
Rarely if ever is a plant consumed from top to root.
How about...
* Carrots, onions, radishes, potatoes, beets, turnips, rutabagas, ginger or yams? The entire plant gets dug up during harvest.
Or, how about...
* Lettuce, cabbage or celery? It's not very healthy for the roots when the entire above-ground portion of the plant is chopped off.
Pluck an ear of corn, and it'll grow back.
You haven't seen how crops like corn or wheat are harvested on a modern farm, have you?
P.S.: You are an idiot.
You choose to not have a case sensitive file system and complain about it. I'll leave understanding what I mean as an exercise for the reader. Hint: disk utility.
Just don't reformat the root partition as case-sensitive! I tried that, and it broke many things.
I now divide the hard drive on my MacBook Pro into two partitions. The root partition is case-insensitive, and the second partition is case-sensitive and mounted at /usr/local. My Time Machine backup drive is formatted as case-sensitive so that it'll be able to deal with the /usr/local stuff.
I have a Perforce server running on my machine. I learned the hard way that the Mac version of Perforce assumes it's on a case-sensitive volume, and things break if it's on a case-sensitive one. However, there's an undocumented option to force the Perforce daemon into case-sensitive mode. "p4 help undoc" displays the documentation for undocumented options, oddly enough.
Many common programs from Unix-land are most easily downloaded and compiled (if necessary, where binaries aren't available) with FinkCommander.
The storyline is also not applicable, as in the books the main characters are investigating why people are getting trapped in the virtual world and once they themselves become trapped attempting to work their way out of it.
Hmm, that part of the story line sounds applicable to me. A virtual world that is very difficult to log out from sounds like a dream come true for a paid-subscription gaming company! :-)
Oh, yeah! That sounds familiar now that you mention it. I don't remember how this was worked around with the Macintosh emulator on the Amiga back then, but I'm pretty sure that there was some way to read and write the Macintosh diskettes.
To be pedantic, the Amiga had a very flexible diskette drive controller. The drives themselves were essentially the same as drives used in PC clones, aside from having a diskette presence detect switch which was generally omitted in PC drives. As I recall, PC drives (even 5-1/4" ones) could be plugged into the Amiga and used, but the computer wouldn't automatically notice diskette insertions because of the missing switch. The Amiga used odd-ball 23-pin D-sub connectors for the disk drive, but they could be made out of DB-25 connectors with a Dremel tool.
The Amiga stored 880K (IIRC) on a 720K disk because it simply crammed more sectors on each track. The PC's controller would write a sector at a time, so its disk format required gaps between the sectors to allow it to write a sector without stomping on either of the adjacent sectors. The Amiga's diskette drive controller could write an entire track in one pass, so the Amiga format could dispense with both large inter-sector gaps and sector interleaving. The Amiga could also read and write PC disks (with appropriate software that bypassed the regular filesystem code), by simply programming the diskette controller to put fewer sectors on each track and place them farther apart.
Some folks liked to use nonstandard formats which crammed even more data on the diskette by using more than 80 tracks. Many diskette drives of the day were capable of stepping the head out beyond track 80, but how many tracks would vary from drive to drive. Thus, these nonstandard diskette formats weren't as portable as the normally-formatted ones, since hacker A might be able to write one or two more tracks on their diskette drive than hacker B's drive could handle.
Now, I think that the Macintosh drives of that era were physically different somehow, but I don't remember the details. I vaguely recall that there was a product that allowed the Amiga to emulate a Macintosh, and it had some sort of electronic doohickey that installed between the computer and the diskette drive to let the Amiga read/write Macintosh diskettes. Or maybe it required a completely different diskette drive... my memory is fuzzy.
This conversation does bring back memories, though! I remember having a flaky diskette drive and being too poor to either replace it or have it fixed by a pro, so I had to do a ham-fisted re-alignment by loosening the stepper motor and turning it by hand until it read some random disk semi-reliably! Hmm, I think I even did that in the snake-infested snow, uphill in both directions. :-)
That's a good summary for engineers, too. I'm an engineer, but I wasn't able to figure out what the complaint was about from TFA.
Please mod parent up.
I used to run my own mail server, but since I now live in a rural area with poor Internet connectivity options, I decided that I wanted to host my email elsewhere. I don't want advertisements inserted in my email, so that ruled out the free services. I wanted a a business-class provider providing IMAP service, with technical competence and the ability to serve non-WIndows users (I primarily used Linux at the time, but have since switched to using a Mac for most purposes). I've seen far too many companies with shiny web pages but no brains behind them. After doing some research, I picked out Tuffmail. They appeared to provide the services that I wanted at a price that I was willing to pay, and their web page was heavy on technical details and light on flashy clip art of people wearing nice clothes and phone headsets.
I've been happy with their service, and their spam filters seem to work well for me. They offer IMAP, POP, and a web mail interface. I have had no trouble using their IMAP server from Linux, Mac, Windows or my iPhone. Their Bayesian filter is easy to train by dropping mis-identified emails into appropriate folders, and they also have both blacklisting and whitelisting, accessible from a web page. I set up my account to automatically dump mailing list traffic into folders other than my main inbox.
I'd recommend them without hesitation to any other technically-savvy folks who need good email service. I also would happily use them for business email if I ever found myself starting up a small company and I didn't have a business need to host my own server(s).
I've had a few different folks who worked on GPS over the years try to explain how it worked and it never made sense to me until just now. Maybe it's just because I drank a margarita but that explanation seemed particularly lucid. Thanks!
I was drinking a beer when I wrote it. Maybe that was the key... :)
Yeah "log in" was sloppy wording on my part, and made me sound like a total GPS ignoramus. I meant until it "locks on" to the satellites rather than "log in".
:-) Yes, lock on is a better term.
I assume the requirement for 3 satellites for a 2D fix and 4 for a 3D fix has to do with the trig you need to do. To triangulate any point on a 2D map requires 2 points from which to measure distance to find where the 2 lines intersect. On a 3D map it'd be easy to show you need 3. Then for height you'd need to do it against the perpendicular axis[...]
Ok, somebody correct me if I'm wrong... I do GPS for a living, but I'm mostly a PCB designer and I don't understand the math/firmware/algorithms like the Smart Folks at my company. ;-)
I think that the three points give you all three coordinates including altitude; that is, for a general triangulation problem, three well-chosen measurements to known locations gives you the full 3D solution. In other words, a system of three equations is needed to solve for three unknown variables. However, the range measurements in GPS are performed by making time-of-flight measurements, and the receiver doesn't know what time it is with enough precision. Thus, there's a fourth variable to be solved for (precise GPS time when the measurements were made), so a fourth equation is needed. Again, somebody please correct me if I have stated anything incorrectly here.
Now, it's still helpful for a GPS receiver to know the approximate time of day when it first starts trying to acquire satellites, particularly if has been turned off for a short period, so it still has recent data about the satellite constellation (ephemeris data), its clock hasn't had a chance to drift very far yet, and it can make a good guess about what satellites will be visible and where they will be in the sky. This lets the receiver conduct a much smaller search to find that first satellite, and then find a few more even more quickly. The satellites all transmit on the same frequency, but their apparent radio frequencies at the receiver are shifted quite a bit by the Doppler effect. Thus, the receiver is in effect only looking at one little slice of the sky when it's tuned to a particular frequency, and it scans across the sky by adjusting its receiver frequency. If it already knows that a particular satellite should be in a particular patch of sky, then it can look right around the corresponding Doppler-shifted frequency for that specific satellite. So, a GPS receiver that has been turned off for a short period of time (under four hours, if I'm not mistaken), knows about what time it is (generally from a low-power clock running off a battery and using a cheap 32kHz watch crystal as a timebase), correctly guesses that it's still located at about the same position where it was turned off, and has current ephemeris data, might go from power-on to a full 3D fix in a few seconds. At the other extreme, a receiver that doesn't know what time it is, doesn't know where it is, and doesn't have good ephemeris data will need to do a full-sky search for arbitrary satellites which may or may not be visible, and will take a much longer time to get its first fix. Then, that fix might not even be very accurate until the receiver can download the current satellite almanac, which takes 12.5 minutes minimum if I recall correctly.
Wow, I sure can ramble on. What was the topic, again? :-)
Definitely your GPS. It cares about nanoseconds.
But so long as all the satellites are in sync with their atomic clocks showing the same time, does it matter??? Even without them being in sync, doesn't the GPS use time and rough location to locate the satellites (unitil it's logged on) and then isn't it the round trip time taken by signal that's being measured? Is there any dependancy on leap seconds?
GPS doesn't use UTC for its measurements; it uses its own system of GPS time for its measurements, and then calculates UTC using a correction value transmitted by the satellites in order to be able to display UTC (or any other UTC-derived time) for the user.
Also, it doesn't "log in" in any usual sense, as the communication is purely one-way, from the satellite broadcasts to the receiver. Thus, it also doesn't measure round trip time, because there is no round trip. What it does is to receive the signals from multiple satellites, each of which essentially transmits a signal saying "I'm satellite number A, my location is B, and the time is C", and then solve a system of equations to figure out what time it was when it received the signals from each satellite, and thus how long each one-way trip took. Then it can do the geometry to figure out where it must be. The actual mechanism of accomplishing this is a whole lot more complicated, but on a very simple level, that's what's being done.
The reason it takes at least four visible satellites to produce a 3D fix is because it needs to solve a system of at least four equations with four unknowns: X, Y and Z spatial coordinates, and time. More than four satellites are normally needed for good accuracy, since the each measurement is usually a lot more noisy and less precise than is desired. Additional measurements let the receiver do more math to try and filter out the noise.
Yes, I've done that, too! I've left my charger both at home and at work. My drive back home is 40 miles (64km). I once spent a couple hours driving around looking for a spare charger for my MacBook. Now I always buy a spare charger with a new laptop, and I keep it in my truck.
Lately, I've been telecommuting 3+ days per week. I have my boss trained so well, that sometimes he is surprised when I show up in the office! :-)
Let me put it a different way. I am an atheist. I believe that there are no divine beings, and that humans and the universe that we live in were not created by any sort of divine being, intelligence, etc. This is not just an absence of belief in divinity; it is a belief in the absence of divinity.
You may debate whether my atheism is a religion or not, but it is certainly based on faith. Faith is the strong belief in something without proof. I believe in the lack of divinity without any hint of doubt, even though there is no evidence that even suggests that my belief is correct, let alone supports or proves it.
I accept that scientific theories such as the theory of evolution make sense to me, yet these theories don't support my atheistic beliefs at all, since they have nothing to say either in support of or in opposition to the existence of divinity. My acceptance of scientific theories is not based on faith, because I demand proof in order to accept a scientific theory, and will discard the theory if and when convincing evidence shows up that refutes it.
However, my atheism is a matter of faith, since I believe it with absolute conviction, in the complete absence of supporting evidence, and without welcoming reasoned debate that I could be mistaken on that matter. If this is not faith, then what is? I find myself unable to imagine any blinder faith than this.
What was TFA about, again? :-)
Atheism is not a religion. Religion requires faith and absence of faith is not faith. Insistence on evidence is the inverse of faith.
You appear to have atheism confused with agnosticism. Agnostics are the ones who neither believe nor disbelieve in divine being(s) because of the lack of evidence, while atheists believe that there are no divine beings with no more evidence than believers in any other religion have. In other words, atheists base their beliefs on faith, not evidence, since there is no accepted evidence that either proves or disproves the existence of divine beings.
True. The firing pin's imprint in the primer (which gets replaced with a new primer for each reload) would be valid, but things could be complicated by multiple sets of bolt face imprints on the case head.
Cartridges are not serialized. Even lot numbers are just marked on the carton, not on the cartridge, and any given production lot can end up being split between many, many sellers. With a shelf life measured in decades, a box of ammo might sit around on the shelf for a long, long time, and may change hands many, many times before being used. It's not even that unusual to use surplus ammo dating back to WW2 or before. A brass cartridge might have the year of manufacture stamped on the head (more likely for military ammo than for civilian ammo), and there are no markings at all applied to the projectile.
In general, it would be pretty hard to trace an arbitrary cartridge back to a particular seller or buyer without other evidence. About all that you can determine from a shell casing found at the scene of a crime would be the manufacturer, caliber, possibly the original year of manufacture (and that shell casing might have been reloaded numerous times after that), fingerprints of one or more persons who have handled it, and it may be possible to determine that it was fired in a particular firearm if (and only if) that firearm is recovered, and has not been modified, repaired, serviced, upgraded, or even fired a large number of times since that shell casing was fired in it.
You probably will not be able to trace a cartridge to a buyer or seller unless the box it came out of is also left at the scene with its credit card receipt taped to it, and even then it could be argued that a receipt indicating that particular brand and type of ammo (if the brand and type is even listed on the receipt) didn't correspond to that specific box of ammunition, and/or that the shell casing did not come from that specific box. It would be much like trying to match an individual paper napkin to a particular package, manufacturer, seller and buyer.
The FBI used to claim to be able to match a bullet to a specific manufacturing lot based on chemical analysis of the bullet's lead, but that technique has since been shown to be bogus.
Suits like that actually exist. I bought one at a military surplus store. The Navy used them to protect sailors who have to work close to shipboard radar systems. Naturally, they need to completely surround the body to work, so these one-piece suits have booties, gloves, and completely cover the head and face.
US Navy Microwave Protective Clothing
Disclaimer: These WiFi-allergic people are idiots.