It's not just the expense, B&W cameras produce a sharper image than color cameras due to the way they work. In addition to the DigiView, I have this Polaroid image capture device that works the other way - you feed in an RGB or NTSC signal and inside the box is a B&W CRT - no shadow mask for monochrome video - gives it a nice, crisp image. There is a motorized color wheel in front of the CRT and a camera bolted on in front of that (I have both the instant camera and the 35mm camera for it). You preview the scene on a monitor, hit "print" and the circuits inside display each color component of the image on the CRT, move the color wheel and snap the shutter. It advances the film after the film has been exposed to all four color seps.
I used it to produce some title slides for a presentation I gave at a science-fiction convention. The unit cost me $40 at the Hamvention, film and processing is less than $8 for 35mm slide film. It was cheaper than paying for one set of slides to be cut by a service bureau.
Yeah, but I still haven't stopped laughing. I read it the funny way first and it took me a second to reparse the sentence. The image of monkey-filled white noise drove my ability to read English right out the window.
Thanks for the best laugh I've had in days. It was quite a vivid image!
Ozone depletion research corresponds nicely with the expiration of the patent on Freon. Anyone with any knowledge of chemistry realizes that when a cosmic ray hits O2 it form 03 (ozone). In other words, depleting ozone just makes the atmosphere produce more ozone.
Having personally launched and tracked balloons (with scientists from the University of Wyoming) to sample the ozone layer over Antarctica and worked with NASA scientists on the retrieval and processing of the data from TOMS-EP (a satellite that uses reflected sunlight to indirectly measure column ozone over any lit spot on the earth), I think can respond to this.
Ozone is created and destroyed constantly all over the earth. It's how we are protected from UV radiation from the Sun. What occurs over Antarctica, the "Ozone Hole", is a case where under certain conditions, more ozone is destroyed than created, disrupting the equilbrium.
You need three things in proximity to shift the balance - temperatures around -80C at about 100km altitude (30,000 ft.), a depletion agent (chlorine, bromine, etc.) and sunlight (energy). If you don't have the right temperatures, ice particles of the proper size can't form, eliminating the site where depletion happens. If you have no agent, there's nothing to catalyze the reaction. If you have no energy, there is no way to sever the O3 bonds.
All winter long, ozone forms over the South Pole as the air gets colder and colder due to radiation cooling in the absence of sunlight. The cold air can't mix with warmer air from temperate latitudes because of the circumpolar winds which corral-in the air over the polar plateau (which is two miles tall, exascerbating the heat loss). By the time the first rays of sunlight hit in late August, the ozone concentration at 100km is at its annual peak. Over the next few days, the concentration of ozone plummets dramatically. By the first week of October, the air has warmed up enough that there are no ice crystals of the appropriate size for further loss to occur. There's still chlorine and energy, but no site for depletion to take place. A few weeks later, the upper atmosphere, now heated 24/7, is energetic enough to disrupt the circumpolar current and ozone poor air from above Antarctica mixes with ordinary air from the South Pacific and South Atlantic, diluting the concentration of ozone over the entire Southern Hemisphere.
Perhaps you have missed the warnings issued to southern Chile over the past couple of years about particularly dilute patches passing overhead and the risk of skin and eye damage from as little as 15 minutes exposure if unprotected? New Zealand (occupying from approximately 43 degrees S to 48 degrees S) is at similar risk.
Yes, depleting ozone just makes the atmosphere make more ozone, but it's not a uniform process. It's a seasonal process. This detail does not often make it into the popular press because it's a) not sensational enough and b) too complicated to fit into a sound bite. What scientists currently study is not the percentage of ozone in the stratosphere (at the right altitudes to form the right kind of ice crystals, it's 0% by the start of Summer), it's not the physical size of the hole (which is determined by the shape of Antarctica and the circumpolar current), it's how fast the hole appears as compared to the winter-time minimum and the spring-time maximum extent.
As to the impact of human activity, the documented trends are that chlorine at 100km parallels (with a 18-month lag) the amount of release at ground level, and the more chlorine that's up there, the higher the rate of formation of the hole. It's not a straight uphill line; it has its minor variations up and down like a stock market graph. The overall trend, from decade to decade is up and up and up.
Because Solaris 8 requires a sun4m architecture or newer machine. I just moved out most of my sun4c machines in favor of a handful of SPARCClassics (bottom-end sun4m). If you are willing to stick with Solaris 7, SPARC2s and the like are OK. If you want an evolving OS and you have an older SPARC (especially one with 64Mb), that's where *BSD and Linux come into play.
I've been in and out of contracting since 1982, both with W-2 terms and 1099 terms. What I've seen is that if you have in-demand skills, you can push for as much as 2/3 of the billing rate to go into your pocket, depending on a few factors. With one contracting house, I was explictly told that if I wanted the rate I was asking for, I would have to meet the 1099 criteria, otherwise, they'd pay me 12% less to cover FICA, workman's comp, etc. They only paid national holidays and no vacation. For the 12%, I decided to go 1099 because there would be deductions that I could legally claim that I would not be entitled to as a W-2 worker.
I've seen college kids get about 50% of the billable rate because their skills weren't that rare, they had no job experience and they weren't shrewd negotiators. In my own rate haggling, I've gotten a feel for how much the market will bear and wait for them to start squirming when I try to press a little bit harder. If they give in right away, you are probably selling yourself short.
I am currently an employee again, not because I became disillusioned with the contractor racket, but because a decent offer came down the pipe when I was between contracts. I'll probably go back to the 1099 circuit in a couple of years when the current market conditions blow over
OK... we've already beaten to death the dime vs. quarter and the fact that the camera, et al., are planned and not presently implemented. My beef is that I was sorely disappointed when I read the article based on the promise from the/. abstract.
There is a major difference between "one quarter cubic inch" and "one quarter inch cubed".
Put into mathematical terms,
1/4"^3 does *not* equal 1"^3 x 1/4. It's 1/64 cu in. That would have been/will be most impressive.
OK... Let's go out and arrest (harass) 1 in 10 adults in a bar because one of them _might_ get behind the wheel drunk and kill your child. Mind you, these adult bar patrons haven't actually done anything more provocative than assemble in a place that legally sells intoxicating beverages, but we have statistics that show that some people _do_ drink and drive. Let's just start harassing people who drink because those are the ones that will kill our kids on the roads.
Now does it make more sense?
Re:Been there, done that
on
Antarctica
·
· Score: 1
Let me just add to Xenon's comment that Stan *does* capture the essence of life on the Ice, so much so that while I was reading it, I realized that people who have never been there might be put off by the depths to which he goes. I was working in McMurdo when Stan was there; he went to the trouble of learning to live there, not just flit in and flit out as a casual observer.
Stan is right about Antarctica grabbing you and not letting go. I've been trying to arrange a return for several seasons, unsuccessfully for several reasons. While I missed the snowmobile incident (it happened right before I arrived), my favorite anecdotal part of the book was the description of the dance. I didn't realize he was *at* that dance. .
ObShamelessSelfPromotion: read about Stan's visit and life on the Ice at Penguin Central. -ethan
What stunned me about this patent wasn't how outrageous it is, but that it's further proof that our patent examiners are asleep at the switch. There are numerous references to this sort of technology in literature from the 1950's onward. IIRC, THX-1138, George Lucas' first film, has this sort of ID in use to track its citizens. A friend of mine had his SSN converted to one of the more popular types of bar code (Type 37?) and tatooed on his arm.
All I can figure is that the patentabilty rests on intent - commerce. It could be argued that the references from science fiction describe a use like a passport or green card, and my friend could have gotten his tattoo as self-expression or as social protest, not for the sake of commerce.
Remember, just because there is a patent doesn't mean that the patent could withstand a legal challenge. One aspect that I hadn't considered before reading this forum was that someone patented this process for the purpose of keeping someone *else* from using it for 17 years.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not just the expense, B&W cameras produce a sharper image than color cameras due to the way they work. In addition to the DigiView, I have this Polaroid image capture device that works the other way - you feed in an RGB or NTSC signal and inside the box is a B&W CRT - no shadow mask for monochrome video - gives it a nice, crisp image. There is a motorized color wheel in front of the CRT and a camera bolted on in front of that (I have both the instant camera and the 35mm camera for it). You preview the scene on a monitor, hit "print" and the circuits inside display each color component of the image on the CRT, move the color wheel and snap the shutter. It advances the film after the film has been exposed to all four color seps.
I used it to produce some title slides for a presentation I gave at a science-fiction convention. The unit cost me $40 at the Hamvention, film and processing is less than $8 for 35mm slide film. It was cheaper than paying for one set of slides to be cut by a service bureau.
My reaction too, but which is older, The DigiView or the guy with the "first color pictures in the world from a GameBoy camera"?
History was easier to learn when we were kids - there was so much less of it.
Yeah, but I still haven't stopped laughing. I read it the funny way first and it took me a second to reparse the sentence. The image of monkey-filled white noise drove my ability to read English right out the window.
Thanks for the best laugh I've had in days. It was quite a vivid image!
-ethan
Having personally launched and tracked balloons (with scientists from the University of Wyoming) to sample the ozone layer over Antarctica and worked with NASA scientists on the retrieval and processing of the data from TOMS-EP (a satellite that uses reflected sunlight to indirectly measure column ozone over any lit spot on the earth), I think can respond to this.
Ozone is created and destroyed constantly all over the earth. It's how we are protected from UV radiation from the Sun. What occurs over Antarctica, the "Ozone Hole", is a case where under certain conditions, more ozone is destroyed than created, disrupting the equilbrium. You need three things in proximity to shift the balance - temperatures around -80C at about 100km altitude (30,000 ft.), a depletion agent (chlorine, bromine, etc.) and sunlight (energy). If you don't have the right temperatures, ice particles of the proper size can't form, eliminating the site where depletion happens. If you have no agent, there's nothing to catalyze the reaction. If you have no energy, there is no way to sever the O3 bonds.
All winter long, ozone forms over the South Pole as the air gets colder and colder due to radiation cooling in the absence of sunlight. The cold air can't mix with warmer air from temperate latitudes because of the circumpolar winds which corral-in the air over the polar plateau (which is two miles tall, exascerbating the heat loss). By the time the first rays of sunlight hit in late August, the ozone concentration at 100km is at its annual peak. Over the next few days, the concentration of ozone plummets dramatically. By the first week of October, the air has warmed up enough that there are no ice crystals of the appropriate size for further loss to occur. There's still chlorine and energy, but no site for depletion to take place. A few weeks later, the upper atmosphere, now heated 24/7, is energetic enough to disrupt the circumpolar current and ozone poor air from above Antarctica mixes with ordinary air from the South Pacific and South Atlantic, diluting the concentration of ozone over the entire Southern Hemisphere.
Perhaps you have missed the warnings issued to southern Chile over the past couple of years about particularly dilute patches passing overhead and the risk of skin and eye damage from as little as 15 minutes exposure if unprotected? New Zealand (occupying from approximately 43 degrees S to 48 degrees S) is at similar risk.
Yes, depleting ozone just makes the atmosphere make more ozone, but it's not a uniform process. It's a seasonal process. This detail does not often make it into the popular press because it's a) not sensational enough and b) too complicated to fit into a sound bite. What scientists currently study is not the percentage of ozone in the stratosphere (at the right altitudes to form the right kind of ice crystals, it's 0% by the start of Summer), it's not the physical size of the hole (which is determined by the shape of Antarctica and the circumpolar current), it's how fast the hole appears as compared to the winter-time minimum and the spring-time maximum extent.
As to the impact of human activity, the documented trends are that chlorine at 100km parallels (with a 18-month lag) the amount of release at ground level, and the more chlorine that's up there, the higher the rate of formation of the hole. It's not a straight uphill line; it has its minor variations up and down like a stock market graph. The overall trend, from decade to decade is up and up and up.
-ethan
http://penguincentral.com/ozone.html
Because Solaris 8 requires a sun4m architecture or newer machine. I just moved out most of my sun4c machines in favor of a handful of SPARCClassics (bottom-end sun4m). If you are willing to stick with Solaris 7, SPARC2s and the like are OK. If you want an evolving OS and you have an older SPARC (especially one with 64Mb), that's where *BSD and Linux come into play.
I've been in and out of contracting since 1982, both with W-2 terms and 1099 terms. What I've seen is that if you have in-demand skills, you can push for as much as 2/3 of the billing rate to go into your pocket, depending on a few factors. With one contracting house, I was explictly told that if I wanted the rate I was asking for, I would have to meet the 1099 criteria, otherwise, they'd pay me 12% less to cover FICA, workman's comp, etc. They only paid national holidays and no vacation. For the 12%, I decided to go 1099 because there would be deductions that I could legally claim that I would not be entitled to as a W-2 worker.
I've seen college kids get about 50% of the billable rate because their skills weren't that rare, they had no job experience and they weren't shrewd negotiators. In my own rate haggling, I've gotten a feel for how much the market will bear and wait for them to start squirming when I try to press a little bit harder. If they give in right away, you are probably selling yourself short.
I am currently an employee again, not because I became disillusioned with the contractor racket, but because a decent offer came down the pipe when I was between contracts. I'll probably go back to the 1099 circuit in a couple of years when the current market conditions blow over
OK... we've already beaten to death the dime vs. quarter and the fact that the camera, et al., are planned and not presently implemented. My beef is that I was sorely disappointed when I read the article based on the promise from the /. abstract.
There is a major difference between "one quarter cubic inch" and "one quarter inch cubed".
Put into mathematical terms,
1/4"^3 does *not* equal 1"^3 x 1/4. It's 1/64 cu in. That would have been/will be most impressive.
OK... Let's go out and arrest (harass) 1 in 10 adults in a bar because one of them _might_ get behind the wheel drunk and kill your child. Mind you, these adult bar patrons haven't actually done anything more provocative than assemble in a place that legally sells intoxicating beverages, but we have statistics that show that some people _do_ drink and drive. Let's just start harassing people who drink because those are the ones that will kill our kids on the roads.
Now does it make more sense?
Stan is right about Antarctica grabbing you and not letting go. I've been trying to arrange a return for several seasons, unsuccessfully for several reasons. While I missed the snowmobile incident (it happened right before I arrived), my favorite anecdotal part of the book was the description of the dance. I didn't realize he was *at* that dance. .
ObShamelessSelfPromotion: read about Stan's visit and life on the Ice at Penguin Central. -ethan
What stunned me about this patent wasn't how outrageous it is, but that it's further proof that our patent examiners are asleep at the switch. There are numerous references to this sort of technology in literature from the 1950's onward. IIRC, THX-1138, George Lucas' first film, has this sort of ID in use to track its citizens. A friend of mine had his SSN converted to one of the more popular types of bar code (Type 37?) and tatooed on his arm.
All I can figure is that the patentabilty rests on intent - commerce. It could be argued that the references from science fiction describe a use like a passport or green card, and my friend could have gotten his tattoo as self-expression or as social protest, not for the sake of commerce.
Remember, just because there is a patent doesn't mean that the patent could withstand a legal challenge. One aspect that I hadn't considered before reading this forum was that someone patented this process for the purpose of keeping someone *else* from using it for 17 years.
I have an Ethernet card for SE (with the
backpanel, internal cable and all). Make a
reasonable offer.