There's a lot of American roots music that involves chickens or other poultry, from Turkey in the Straw to Aunt Rhodie to the Chicken Pie song ("Chicken crows at midnight..."). It never ends well for the bird...
Our Corporate IT Overlords haven't been willing to jump to IE8 yet, though apparently on some laptop brands we're running IE7 at least. Needless to say I run Firefox to do actual work unless I'm using an IE-only website, and even most of those aren't really stuck at IE6.
I had the same reaction, given the slashdot summary, but if you read the actual web page it's 20ms samples. You still have the problem of how to wrap it in IP packets, if you're going to do that, which gets much more annoying on low bit rate codecs. Take your 51-bit sample, pad it to 7 bytes, add 20 bytes of UDP RTP headers, 20 bytes of IP headers, maybe some IPSEC for fun, etc., maybe some Ethernet headers.... Obviously if you're actually trying to run over a slow transmission system, you're more likely to just run it as raw bits, or at least raw bytes, and maybe use CSLIP or something.
They were a lumber company down in the Southeast US with a railroad that connected their forests to their sawmills, and they ran some data lines along it, and where they had railroad bridges the lines were exposed under the bridge. Every year during hunting season they'd have problems with Bubba* shooting at the lines, or shooting at birds sitting on the lines, or whatever.
* Bubba's day job was driving backhoes, where he'd also be trashing buried fiber-optic cables...
At my website, 127.0.0.1:80, also doing business as Localhost Industries, we sell an extensive line of famous Ann Dewees Allen products - we've got sugar replacements, L-Arginine used for sexual potency, Nitric Oxide products used for entertainment and research only, and our famous Anne deWees Allen Nigerian Herbal Formula.
Remember, if you can't get it at Localhost, it's Just No Fun!
Definitely - if you've put down 30% of the price in cash and the title insurance only covers the mortgaged part, you're still hosed, so you need to cover yourself too.
Here in the US, it's normal for a home buyer to buy title insurance (and for mortgage companies to require it if they're lending money) which insures that the buyer doesn't lose (much) money if the title is bad. There are all sorts of reasons this can happen - deliberate forgery isn't the only one, though it's not unpopular, as are "selling the same house to multiple buyers", etc.
The Wikipedia article on Torrens Title looks like the state provides the title insurance in case they've allowed fraudulent transactions to occur.
Yes, the information's out there - but it's not in a conveniently accessible indexed format that anybody can get to without problems. (Of course, if you want official copies, it's become worse since the Patriot Act - try getting a driver's license reissued if you don't have an official copy of your birth certificate, and try getting an official copy of your birth certificate if you can't show your driver's license...)
Many years ago, we got my brother-in-law a kilo of Colombian. It was from a coffee store, and California sinsemilla was probably replacing Colombian as the stuff the cool kids wanted to smoke, but he'd only recently started drinking coffee.
Butter by weight vs. volume in the US
on
Cooking For Geeks
·
· Score: 1
Butter is sold by weight here in the US, normally in 1-pound packages which contain four 1/4-pound sticks, which are 1/2 cup by volume.
In the East, the sticks are usually long and thin, while in the West they're short and fat, so the shapes of the 1-pound packages are different...
You're probably measuring weight, not mass:-) But still, you really measure liquids by weight, not volume? Weird.
And yes, most illegal drugs over here are sold by weight, not volume (except LSD, which is usually blotter paper, and nobody's really sure how big a dose they're selling.) Cannabis is usually sold retail in ounces (1/8 or multiples), as are mushrooms, but wholesale is kilos, and the other drugs are generally in grams.
Most dry cooking spices are sold by weight, but used by volume.
The VOIP world has spent a lot of time arguing about codecs, and is a MOS score less than 3.9 adequate for toll quality, and the IP PBX business was having to convince customers that 8kbps G.729 codecs were good enough for business, you didn't need full 64kbps G.711 uncompressed voice. Fortunately, cell phones became universal a few years back, so customers got used to low-bandwidth sound, compression, and cheap little microphones with road noise and passing trucks in the background, and somehow the MOS scores just stopped mattering so much. At least most of us don't have passing trucks to deal with when we're at our desks, though the rack of routers behind me is annoyingly loud. The real problem has become how to avoid multiple rounds of codecs on calls between people on separately managed VOIP systems, especially if one's a mobile phone using GSM codecs and the other is a PBX using G.729 codecs, which do different kinds of damage to the voice signal.
However, Mr. AC, unless you're in China, my guess is that your third-world country is using GSM, so at best you'd be using one of the AMR codecs, which still start off by sampling the voice at 8k samples/sec, and are therefore limited to 4KHz audio, just like telco phones running on T1 or E1 lines. They may be using the better flavors of GSM codec at 12.2kbps, as opposed to 6.7kbps or 5.9 or whatever, but that's how much damage they've done to the sound after it was already digitized.
I got email from my friend that I had free iPad spam on my Facebook. Arrrgh. Went and deleted it, dropped notes to the couple of friends who had commented that my account had probably been hacked, changed my password (which had been too short, back when I wasn't expecting Facebook to have any real information in it.) I tried to play with the pictures, but if I understand FB's tools correctly (I don't use them much), I didn't have permissions to change the iPad picture they'd put on my Wall Album into a can of Spam, and it was harder to delete than it should have been.
Glad to hear they were doing something other than password hacking here, but it's still an example of why I don't want my Facebook login used as the login for everything else on the Internet.
Facebook is set to show your birthday by default, and show who your friends are. My mom's never going to be on Facebook, so nobody's going to get her maiden name that way, and my birthday's set to "January 1, Random Year", so it's not showing the quasi-passwords to half the information in the world, but arrgh.
What's worse is Ancestry.com, where if you're using it to share genealogy research, it typically *is* going to show your birthday and mother's maiden name... On the other hand, they're not trying to become the shared login system for everything in the world.
Back in the 90s we got my mother-in-law a computer and an AOL account. It was around the time she retired, she wasn't very active physically and didn't get out much except to get groceries. Once she figured out that the celebrity gossip news was coming from the outside world, not inside the box (guess we should have left the modem sound on:-), and that she could talk to other people, she started to be much more social, which she'd missed since she no longer ran into people in real life, and made some good friends that way.
I got on MySpace so I could see my nephews' heavy metal band. They were actually pretty good for teenagers in a garage, and one of them's a serious musician. MySpace was way too garish to actually spend any time on, of course...
I'd done the Orkut thing, which was fun for six months but that's about it, so I had no interest in getting onto Facebook, but my sister dragged me onto it as a way of keeping track of various relatives, so I can see what her kids are up to and where the various cousins are, as well as comments from various friends. It's not something I spend much time on, but it can be useful for staying connected.
And I really hate that Facebook is trying to stay relevant by making itself the login system for anything online that'll take it. I'm sorry, my ranting on political discussion websites doesn't need to be connected to my family or the LA Times or GMail/Yahoo/Flickr/YouTube. And it was kind of creepy that Facebook suggested "You may already know ____ - want to send her a Friend invitation?" - Yes, I know her, she's a cousin, and she died last week, so just because lots of other people I know were writing on her wall doesn't mean that's a good algorithm for building more connections...
A couple of decades ago, I got to work on the AT&T NOC in New Jersey. One of the important things they had there was a pair of large television screens, which initially both played CNN, and eventually (when the local cable TV network got it) the Weather Channel. When you're running a world-wide network, or even a US-wide network, it really helps to know what's happening out in the real world that might affect you. Hurricanes and blizzards were the most relevant, but if something bit happened that got lots of people to make phone calls to a given geographical area, that could be important because it made a big impact on our calling patterns.
A couple of decades ago, I worked on the bottom right-hand screen in that NOC, which you can't see from the angle that picture was taken at, and later on a couple of desktop systems. When we were developing the applications that ran on the desktops, they weren't yet production systems, they were data collectors running in a lab where they had easy access to lots of internal databases and we could reconfigure them easily, because it was really a system designed to give the network planning whatever network data they needed . When we first deployed them on the NOC floor, because some of them had found our data to be useful, we still used the departmental system as the data collector. Which was fine until the day somebody plugged in *two* coffee pots for a party, and the system informed us that our lab didn't really have a production-quality electrical system:-) (Then we got to go buy some new servers and have people run long cables for us.)
Mainframes are designed to do huge amounts of I/O supporting lots of processing in parallel and running big databases with whatever the current generation's definition of huge quantities of disk storage is. That's not the kind of computer you put on top of your desk, either in a workstation or a laptop. It's the kind of computer you put in a big air-conditioned sound-proofed room down the hall. If you want to run graphics-oriented applications using it to do the data processing, that's fine - do your graphics on a graphics-oriented workstation on your desk, and crunch the data on the mainframe, using some appropriate protocol to connect the two.
Sure, before we do much large-scale exploration or exploitation of other planets, the asteroid belts are probably a much more useful place to go first. There's less problem with gravity wells, some possibility of mining materials that are useful on Earth, and more possibility of mining materials that are useful for space exploration and may be more practical to mine there than hauling them up Earth's gravity well.
But the real job that we have is protecting life on Earth. Near-Earth satellites are useful for that, because we can get a lot of information about what's going on on our planet, and about things going on in our neighborhood that could adversely affect us, like killer asteroids or whatever. By the time the next dinosaur-killer shows up, it'd be nice if we've got some fraction of our civilization moved off the planet, and before the Sun burns out, it'd be nice if we've moved somewhere else, but realistically those are problems for the next million years, not the next 20 years.
The real risks to human life are environmental damage and war. Before 2001, it looked like we were starting to get a handle on war, but oh, well, situation normal, and at least we're starting to make some progress on preventing Global Thermonuclear War. We're not going to be able to get enough of humanity off the planet to avoid stifling ourselves environmentally any time in the near future, so we're going to have to use science, economics, and politics to protect this place the hard way. Any scientist who's doing stuff in outer space is a scientist who's not working on more efficient cars and trucks, and probably isn't working on more efficient solar power systems or large-scale nuclear power systems, and NASA needs to justify diverting their attention. (On the other hand, any scientist or engineer working on robots is making NASA's future jobs easier.)
One of the really hard problems we have to solve if humans are going to spend any significant time in outer space is understanding closed ecosystems for spaceships and asteroid/planetary colonies. Near-Earth Orbit systems like the ISS can get by with occasional resupply packages from home, but until recently they weren't even recycling their drinking water, and they've got weird mold problems they don't know how to solve. Anything past the Moon is going to need to be really self-sufficient. Empty space is the hardest problem (except that you don't have a gravity well keeping you from turning around and going home); asteroids give you some resources (if you can find carbon and water), and Mars or some moon like Titan may be the other possibilities. But so far, we've only tried working on one major ecosystem, and we're botching the job badly - we need to get good at keeping it running before we're likely to know enough to keep others running. So far we've not only been messing up the planet, we haven't even been able to get little terrariums like Biosphere to be stable.
Yes, if you're trying to steer an asteroid that may be made out of wimpy material away from hitting Earth, they could be useful, and if they're not, you turn them around and push the asteroid the old-fashioned way. But the two problems we're trying to solve here are
1 - Hauling asteroids back near the Earth for convenience - Gravity tractors are much less energy-efficient because you're hauling your big heavy tractor as well as the much lighter asteroid.
2 - Getting refined material from the asteroid from orbit down to Earth surface, which isn't a problem they're trying to solve.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a lot of American roots music that involves chickens or other poultry, from Turkey in the Straw to Aunt Rhodie to the Chicken Pie song ("Chicken crows at midnight...").
It never ends well for the bird...
Our Corporate IT Overlords haven't been willing to jump to IE8 yet, though apparently on some laptop brands we're running IE7 at least.
Needless to say I run Firefox to do actual work unless I'm using an IE-only website, and even most of those aren't really stuck at IE6.
I don't wanna ask a mad scientist, Y'all got frikkin sharks...
20ms samples, 51 bits, 2550 bits/sec. Are you sure about the 40 frames/sec vs. 50? Maybe he's doing that to get it under 2400 bps?
I had the same reaction, given the slashdot summary, but if you read the actual web page it's 20ms samples. You still have the problem of how to wrap it in IP packets, if you're going to do that, which gets much more annoying on low bit rate codecs. Take your 51-bit sample, pad it to 7 bytes, add 20 bytes of UDP RTP headers, 20 bytes of IP headers, maybe some IPSEC for fun, etc., maybe some Ethernet headers.... Obviously if you're actually trying to run over a slow transmission system, you're more likely to just run it as raw bits, or at least raw bytes, and maybe use CSLIP or something.
They were a lumber company down in the Southeast US with a railroad that connected their forests to their sawmills, and they ran some data lines along it, and where they had railroad bridges the lines were exposed under the bridge. Every year during hunting season they'd have problems with Bubba* shooting at the lines, or shooting at birds sitting on the lines, or whatever.
* Bubba's day job was driving backhoes, where he'd also be trashing buried fiber-optic cables...
At my website, 127.0.0.1:80, also doing business as Localhost Industries, we sell an extensive line of famous Ann Dewees Allen products - we've got sugar replacements, L-Arginine used for sexual potency, Nitric Oxide products used for entertainment and research only, and our famous Anne deWees Allen Nigerian Herbal Formula.
Remember, if you can't get it at Localhost, it's Just No Fun!
Definitely - if you've put down 30% of the price in cash and the title insurance only covers the mortgaged part, you're still hosed, so you need to cover yourself too.
Here in the US, it's normal for a home buyer to buy title insurance (and for mortgage companies to require it if they're lending money) which insures that the buyer doesn't lose (much) money if the title is bad. There are all sorts of reasons this can happen - deliberate forgery isn't the only one, though it's not unpopular, as are "selling the same house to multiple buyers", etc.
The Wikipedia article on Torrens Title looks like the state provides the title insurance in case they've allowed fraudulent transactions to occur.
Bedminster NJ.
Yes, the information's out there - but it's not in a conveniently accessible indexed format that anybody can get to without problems. (Of course, if you want official copies, it's become worse since the Patriot Act - try getting a driver's license reissued if you don't have an official copy of your birth certificate, and try getting an official copy of your birth certificate if you can't show your driver's license...)
You did know that one of Slashdot's founders was really Richard Stallman in disguise, didn't you?
Many years ago, we got my brother-in-law a kilo of Colombian.
It was from a coffee store, and California sinsemilla was probably replacing Colombian as the stuff the cool kids wanted to smoke, but he'd only recently started drinking coffee.
Butter is sold by weight here in the US, normally in 1-pound packages which contain four 1/4-pound sticks, which are 1/2 cup by volume.
In the East, the sticks are usually long and thin, while in the West they're short and fat, so the shapes of the 1-pound packages are different...
You're probably measuring weight, not mass :-) But still, you really measure liquids by weight, not volume? Weird.
And yes, most illegal drugs over here are sold by weight, not volume (except LSD, which is usually blotter paper, and nobody's really sure how big a dose they're selling.) Cannabis is usually sold retail in ounces (1/8 or multiples), as are mushrooms, but wholesale is kilos, and the other drugs are generally in grams.
Most dry cooking spices are sold by weight, but used by volume.
The VOIP world has spent a lot of time arguing about codecs, and is a MOS score less than 3.9 adequate for toll quality, and the IP PBX business was having to convince customers that 8kbps G.729 codecs were good enough for business, you didn't need full 64kbps G.711 uncompressed voice. Fortunately, cell phones became universal a few years back, so customers got used to low-bandwidth sound, compression, and cheap little microphones with road noise and passing trucks in the background, and somehow the MOS scores just stopped mattering so much. At least most of us don't have passing trucks to deal with when we're at our desks, though the rack of routers behind me is annoyingly loud. The real problem has become how to avoid multiple rounds of codecs on calls between people on separately managed VOIP systems, especially if one's a mobile phone using GSM codecs and the other is a PBX using G.729 codecs, which do different kinds of damage to the voice signal.
However, Mr. AC, unless you're in China, my guess is that your third-world country is using GSM, so at best you'd be using one of the AMR codecs, which still start off by sampling the voice at 8k samples/sec, and are therefore limited to 4KHz audio, just like telco phones running on T1 or E1 lines. They may be using the better flavors of GSM codec at 12.2kbps, as opposed to 6.7kbps or 5.9 or whatever, but that's how much damage they've done to the sound after it was already digitized.
I got email from my friend that I had free iPad spam on my Facebook. Arrrgh. Went and deleted it, dropped notes to the couple of friends who had commented that my account had probably been hacked, changed my password (which had been too short, back when I wasn't expecting Facebook to have any real information in it.) I tried to play with the pictures, but if I understand FB's tools correctly (I don't use them much), I didn't have permissions to change the iPad picture they'd put on my Wall Album into a can of Spam, and it was harder to delete than it should have been.
Glad to hear they were doing something other than password hacking here, but it's still an example of why I don't want my Facebook login used as the login for everything else on the Internet.
Facebook is set to show your birthday by default, and show who your friends are. My mom's never going to be on Facebook, so nobody's going to get her maiden name that way, and my birthday's set to "January 1, Random Year", so it's not showing the quasi-passwords to half the information in the world, but arrgh.
What's worse is Ancestry.com, where if you're using it to share genealogy research, it typically *is* going to show your birthday and mother's maiden name... On the other hand, they're not trying to become the shared login system for everything in the world.
Back in the 90s we got my mother-in-law a computer and an AOL account. It was around the time she retired, she wasn't very active physically and didn't get out much except to get groceries. Once she figured out that the celebrity gossip news was coming from the outside world, not inside the box (guess we should have left the modem sound on :-), and that she could talk to other people, she started to be much more social, which she'd missed since she no longer ran into people in real life, and made some good friends that way.
I got on MySpace so I could see my nephews' heavy metal band. They were actually pretty good for teenagers in a garage, and one of them's a serious musician. MySpace was way too garish to actually spend any time on, of course...
I'd done the Orkut thing, which was fun for six months but that's about it, so I had no interest in getting onto Facebook, but my sister dragged me onto it as a way of keeping track of various relatives, so I can see what her kids are up to and where the various cousins are, as well as comments from various friends. It's not something I spend much time on, but it can be useful for staying connected.
And I really hate that Facebook is trying to stay relevant by making itself the login system for anything online that'll take it. I'm sorry, my ranting on political discussion websites doesn't need to be connected to my family or the LA Times or GMail/Yahoo/Flickr/YouTube. And it was kind of creepy that Facebook suggested "You may already know ____ - want to send her a Friend invitation?" - Yes, I know her, she's a cousin, and she died last week, so just because lots of other people I know were writing on her wall doesn't mean that's a good algorithm for building more connections...
A couple of decades ago, I got to work on the AT&T NOC in New Jersey. One of the important things they had there was a pair of large television screens, which initially both played CNN, and eventually (when the local cable TV network got it) the Weather Channel. When you're running a world-wide network, or even a US-wide network, it really helps to know what's happening out in the real world that might affect you. Hurricanes and blizzards were the most relevant, but if something bit happened that got lots of people to make phone calls to a given geographical area, that could be important because it made a big impact on our calling patterns.
Yeah. People need to be able to sit comfortably, and need to be able to see whatever screens they need to see without eyestrain or neck strain.
A couple of decades ago, I worked on the bottom right-hand screen in that NOC, which you can't see from the angle that picture was taken at, and later on a couple of desktop systems. When we were developing the applications that ran on the desktops, they weren't yet production systems, they were data collectors running in a lab where they had easy access to lots of internal databases and we could reconfigure them easily, because it was really a system designed to give the network planning whatever network data they needed . When we first deployed them on the NOC floor, because some of them had found our data to be useful, we still used the departmental system as the data collector. Which was fine until the day somebody plugged in *two* coffee pots for a party, and the system informed us that our lab didn't really have a production-quality electrical system :-) (Then we got to go buy some new servers and have people run long cables for us.)
Mainframes are designed to do huge amounts of I/O supporting lots of processing in parallel and running big databases with whatever the current generation's definition of huge quantities of disk storage is. That's not the kind of computer you put on top of your desk, either in a workstation or a laptop. It's the kind of computer you put in a big air-conditioned sound-proofed room down the hall. If you want to run graphics-oriented applications using it to do the data processing, that's fine - do your graphics on a graphics-oriented workstation on your desk, and crunch the data on the mainframe, using some appropriate protocol to connect the two.
Sure, before we do much large-scale exploration or exploitation of other planets, the asteroid belts are probably a much more useful place to go first. There's less problem with gravity wells, some possibility of mining materials that are useful on Earth, and more possibility of mining materials that are useful for space exploration and may be more practical to mine there than hauling them up Earth's gravity well.
But the real job that we have is protecting life on Earth. Near-Earth satellites are useful for that, because we can get a lot of information about what's going on on our planet, and about things going on in our neighborhood that could adversely affect us, like killer asteroids or whatever. By the time the next dinosaur-killer shows up, it'd be nice if we've got some fraction of our civilization moved off the planet, and before the Sun burns out, it'd be nice if we've moved somewhere else, but realistically those are problems for the next million years, not the next 20 years.
The real risks to human life are environmental damage and war. Before 2001, it looked like we were starting to get a handle on war, but oh, well, situation normal, and at least we're starting to make some progress on preventing Global Thermonuclear War. We're not going to be able to get enough of humanity off the planet to avoid stifling ourselves environmentally any time in the near future, so we're going to have to use science, economics, and politics to protect this place the hard way. Any scientist who's doing stuff in outer space is a scientist who's not working on more efficient cars and trucks, and probably isn't working on more efficient solar power systems or large-scale nuclear power systems, and NASA needs to justify diverting their attention. (On the other hand, any scientist or engineer working on robots is making NASA's future jobs easier.)
One of the really hard problems we have to solve if humans are going to spend any significant time in outer space is understanding closed ecosystems for spaceships and asteroid/planetary colonies. Near-Earth Orbit systems like the ISS can get by with occasional resupply packages from home, but until recently they weren't even recycling their drinking water, and they've got weird mold problems they don't know how to solve. Anything past the Moon is going to need to be really self-sufficient. Empty space is the hardest problem (except that you don't have a gravity well keeping you from turning around and going home); asteroids give you some resources (if you can find carbon and water), and Mars or some moon like Titan may be the other possibilities. But so far, we've only tried working on one major ecosystem, and we're botching the job badly - we need to get good at keeping it running before we're likely to know enough to keep others running. So far we've not only been messing up the planet, we haven't even been able to get little terrariums like Biosphere to be stable.
Yes, if you're trying to steer an asteroid that may be made out of wimpy material away from hitting Earth, they could be useful, and if they're not, you turn them around and push the asteroid the old-fashioned way. But the two problems we're trying to solve here are