I dunno how bad a tower would be, but my cell phone causes a lot of interference on my car radio. Setting my cell phone down near my computer also results in an occasional squeaking or beeping from my computer speakers.
Would a tower somewhere on your property be better or worse? Dunno. Maybe you should take your car and some gear to someone else's cell tower and see if it causes interference.
What I really wanted to try was to open a web browser inside second life, and use a remote PC applet to log onto another computer and log in to second life again. So you could be playing second life inside a browser inside second life. Or you could even do real work in the browser using workspot.
The question is, would other users be able to read and see what's on your screen?
I tried to join second life, but apparently US military members overseas are forbidden to join. The US military has used the same mail system for decades, yet second life insists on using a billing verification system that apparently does not allow APO/FPO billing addresses or non-US phone numbers. Almost every other retailer in the world knows how to bill and ship to an overseas APO/FPO address and online credit card verification is a fairly mature technology, so it is very strange that their system is completely unable to handle my credit card.
Ironically, the only other online retailer I've ever had this problem with was the "Motley Fool" investment advice service, which was equally strange. The 2 services that use billing and address verification systems that refuse to allow US overseas military members to join, are a "global" virtual world service, and a major financial advice service. You'd think they'd know...
Yes the Air Force has heard of headphones, but they also choose not to waste resources. Not everyone has their own computers and it's sort of tough to get an office with 5 people to watch/listen to a broadcast on their office computer using headphones.
The USAF requires all current and new computers to have speakers because of a push towards computer based training products replacing classroom academics for certain initial and recurring training that everyone must receive. It's a hell of a lot easier to tell 5000 people at an airbase to view a CBT module and take an online test than it is to schedule all 5000 of them through classes 30 at a time.
Some of that stuff is absolutely crucial to military expertise, but it's not really tough enough to require hands-on classroom or field training. So a video lecture and test is the way to go, and now we can quit replacing those VCRs and 32" TV that were never used for anything but training videos. It's also possible now for a commander to broadcast a live or pre-recorded message to every desktop so people don't have to stop work for more than half an hour to go to an auditorium just to listen to a 15 minute briefing or message.
But of course the military is a curious business...
I've already got a piece of hardware that consumes a lot less power and can be reconfigured to solve ANY provably solvable problem. It also unfortunately relies on software "under development".
It's called a PENCIL.
Next week, I plan on holding a press conference when I announce my future-proof technology update, called PAPER. Existing PENCIL software will be fully compatible with PAPER, however document transfer from the previously used TABLETOP and CLAY-TABLET will require third-party software known as a SCRIBE, SECRETARY or the current politically correct term, "EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT".
I only need a few million more before I start production and change the world, so serious investors only please inquire.
A sticker in the window "iTrip 89.9 FM" and anyone with a radio can listen to my mix. Not that I want someone riding my bumper on the highway just to keep listening, but it's small enough that they can't read it except in bumper to bumper city traffic anyhow.
Hack an iTrip with an additional watt or so of transmit power and a simple wire antenna, and you're good for a couple hundred feet.
You forget that the Jedi preach that they must give up their ties to loved ones because those bonds can make them weak and susceptable to the lure of the dark side. Anakin is told in ep 3 that although he fears for Padme's life, he must let go of his fear and embrace nature's cycle otherwise he risks a step towards the dark side by putting his fear ahead of his trust in the force.
So see, it all does make sense! Actually, I thought it was pretty stupid they didn't throw a bake sale and go buy his Mom out of slavery or something. But then they'd have had to invent and kill off another g-friend or childhood buddy or something, and the fear over losing that bond wouldn't have been as believable.
Anakin didn't turn because of love, he turned because of fear. Watch episode 1 and 2 again. Anakin is almost continually motivated by fear. He wants to become a great jedi, but at his core is fear. At first it's fear of failure, but he also fears he will lose his mother. The first visions he consciously has are of his mother's death, and when he cannot save her, his fear gives in to anger and hatred, exactly as Yoda said it would. Sidious sees this inside Anakin and feeds that fear like a pet. A little suspicion here, a false hope there, and the fear grows. When it comes time to make his choice, Anakin choses entirely out of fear of losing another person he loves, not for the love itself.
And of course in the end, that fear betrays even his love. It's so much more powerful and ironic that Sidious is able use that failure to more tightly bind Vader to him.
And of course, in the "real world", we've all see what happens when you make powerful people and nations afraid. Scare a powerful group enough and everyone within reach gets crapped on, but of course some people just can't resist poking the tigers with a stick. When that happens, it may be better to stay out of the tigers way for a while. Lucas knows this...
I thought the Catholic church tried this shortly after the printing press was invented. Are we to suffer another inquisition? A separation of the techno-elite from the techno-ostrich? It has all the social markings of a state sponsored holy war, except it's the pure sharing of ALL information instead of a religious text that is at stake.
Have you considered a 2-stage approach? Stuff it to disk, and process/index it separately? A fast stream of data would let it all get recorded without loss, and then you could use whatever resources are necessary to index and search without impacting the data dump.
Cost... Are you going to go for local storage or NAS? Need SCSI and RAID or a less expensive hardware setup? Do you think gigabit ethernet will be sufficient for the transfer from the data dump hardware to the processing/indexing/search machines?
Sounds like you might want to run a test case using commodity hardware first.
Why not just use a cheap and effective red "C" (for Chester the molester) tattoed on the forehead?
Ok, YOU pick the letter then. I vote for C but I'm not stuck on it or anything. I just don't want my taxes going to pay to track a bunch of sexual predators around town. Snip or tattoo them and be done with it. Better yet, do both. I want kids someday and I don't see any ethical or moral obligation towards the welfare of those types of people. They cause actual HARM, and it makes no sense to treat them the same way we treat Martha Stewart during her house arrest (for example.)
So, if convicted can he transfer his real world experience points to any online games? Does he get a +5 hit bonus when he uses a virtual knife from now on?
32 meg ram? What luxury! My first xwindows system used 2 meg ram and a 40 meg hard drive, using a 16 mhz 386. Later I added another 3 meg using ISA slot memory cards (yea, remember those? ugh) and a second 40 meg hard drive, and X windows ran like a champ. I think I was using slackware at the time, and routinely opened a tcp-ip tunnel over a 14.4 baud telnet session just so I could run apps on our school's sun lab from home. 800x600 xwindows over an effective 9600 baud, with 80 meg total hd space, a cirrus logic "windows accelerator" card that maxed out at 1024x768x16bit, and that 16 mhz 386 cpu. I did add a 387 co-pro but even without that it worked just fine and was completely usable.
I think it's the swing of the pendulum after a huge push to get women into the marketplace. Many of those women, just like my wife, are starting to realize the magnitude of the personal sacrifice they have made by going into the workplace. Family life suffers. It's tougher to have children and spend the time with them that they'd like. Yes it's different for each person, but many dual income families do not NEED a second income and they're realizing that they're in their mid-30s and still don't have children. So faced with these realities during a market and jobs downturn, is it really that strange that women may choose different careers or even choose to stay at home and raise their children?
Only 6 or so years ago, Gen (ret) Chuck Yeager said that all further aviation research was a dead end and that we should focus on other things. Higher, Faster, and Farther were already achieved and there was nothing more to be gained by further aviation research, according to the General.
I sure wish I could remember where that essay was published, but I think it was an editorial in Aviation Week and Space Technology. In any case, as a recent military pilot training graduate I thought it was a pretty dumb thing to say. The last few years have seen numerous valuable research projects come to fruition. From exotic hypersonic research to more efficient engines or winglets for airliners so your ticket prices don't skyrocket, there still seems to be a lot of valuable aeronautical research yet to be done. I'm glad we're not leaving it up to NASA anymore, and in another decade or two maybe we'll all realize what a true debt we owe to Burt Rutan, his fellow researchers and co-workers, and his visionary investors.
That's probably the same watch Richie Rich's dad had when his plane crashed, but he still had to rebuild it using parts taken from random junk in his luggage.
What he really needs is a spotlight with a batman cutout on it, but it's too late now.
The date is June 4 1998. This is not the day of the first content on his site, and he had already been creating content for BYTE magazine for many years before this, but it's a sample of his archive.
And all bloggers ought to thank Jerry Pournelle for starting the original blog, although back then he called it a daybook. His site still has his original content going back many many years.
Imagine if all that effort was spent enabling people do do things instead of trying to keep people from doing something that they'll just do anyhow. If all the money wasted on DRM had been spent on enabling technologies for micropayments or new business paradigms, we'd all be better off and even the MPAA/RIAA would pocket some extra money. It might be too optimistic to think that the associations would use enabling technologies to help artists get compensation for their work, but maybe even that would occur.
Instead, it's all about prevention, disabling, protection against use, and blocking the people who pay out the money for these products from using them. Dinosaur stew anyone?
A more likely explanation is that the only people still watching quality programming like "the salon" on BBC (a reality show where you get to watch the minute by minute workings of an actual hair salon, sometimes shown simultaneously on TWO CHANNELS!) are both too cheap to sign up for sky, and too ignorant to know how to even order broadband, let alone use it. It's another bifurcation of society, those with the intelligence and desire to use the internet, and those who are content to be fed by the continuing flood of mindless blabbering from the telly.
Of course, the new "techno elite" fit conventional print and broadcast media into their daily routines right along with a newfound reliance on portable computing, wireless communication, and high speed internet, but keeping up in any useful fashion with all that is somewhat expensive in both time and money. There is an awful lot of noise to filter through so even the most techno savvy and modern info-geek has to be quite specific in how he spends his time and attention, or he'll get trapped in the clutter and wonder why he's missing all the important things. Like having a life to go with the gadgets and data pipes.
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I dunno how bad a tower would be, but my cell phone causes a lot of interference on my car radio. Setting my cell phone down near my computer also results in an occasional squeaking or beeping from my computer speakers.
Would a tower somewhere on your property be better or worse? Dunno. Maybe you should take your car and some gear to someone else's cell tower and see if it causes interference.
What I really wanted to try was to open a web browser inside second life, and use a remote PC applet to log onto another computer and log in to second life again. So you could be playing second life inside a browser inside second life. Or you could even do real work in the browser using workspot.
The question is, would other users be able to read and see what's on your screen?
I tried to join second life, but apparently US military members overseas are forbidden to join. The US military has used the same mail system for decades, yet second life insists on using a billing verification system that apparently does not allow APO/FPO billing addresses or non-US phone numbers. Almost every other retailer in the world knows how to bill and ship to an overseas APO/FPO address and online credit card verification is a fairly mature technology, so it is very strange that their system is completely unable to handle my credit card.
Ironically, the only other online retailer I've ever had this problem with was the "Motley Fool" investment advice service, which was equally strange. The 2 services that use billing and address verification systems that refuse to allow US overseas military members to join, are a "global" virtual world service, and a major financial advice service. You'd think they'd know...
Yes the Air Force has heard of headphones, but they also choose not to waste resources. Not everyone has their own computers and it's sort of tough to get an office with 5 people to watch/listen to a broadcast on their office computer using headphones.
The USAF requires all current and new computers to have speakers because of a push towards computer based training products replacing classroom academics for certain initial and recurring training that everyone must receive. It's a hell of a lot easier to tell 5000 people at an airbase to view a CBT module and take an online test than it is to schedule all 5000 of them through classes 30 at a time.
Some of that stuff is absolutely crucial to military expertise, but it's not really tough enough to require hands-on classroom or field training. So a video lecture and test is the way to go, and now we can quit replacing those VCRs and 32" TV that were never used for anything but training videos. It's also possible now for a commander to broadcast a live or pre-recorded message to every desktop so people don't have to stop work for more than half an hour to go to an auditorium just to listen to a 15 minute briefing or message.
But of course the military is a curious business...
I've already got a piece of hardware that consumes a lot less power and can be reconfigured to solve ANY provably solvable problem. It also unfortunately relies on software "under development".
It's called a PENCIL.
Next week, I plan on holding a press conference when I announce my future-proof technology update, called PAPER. Existing PENCIL software will be fully compatible with PAPER, however document transfer from the previously used TABLETOP and CLAY-TABLET will require third-party software known as a SCRIBE, SECRETARY or the current politically correct term, "EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT".
I only need a few million more before I start production and change the world, so serious investors only please inquire.
I'm already doing this...
A sticker in the window "iTrip 89.9 FM" and anyone with a radio can listen to my mix. Not that I want someone riding my bumper on the highway just to keep listening, but it's small enough that they can't read it except in bumper to bumper city traffic anyhow.
Hack an iTrip with an additional watt or so of transmit power and a simple wire antenna, and you're good for a couple hundred feet.
You forget that the Jedi preach that they must give up their ties to loved ones because those bonds can make them weak and susceptable to the lure of the dark side. Anakin is told in ep 3 that although he fears for Padme's life, he must let go of his fear and embrace nature's cycle otherwise he risks a step towards the dark side by putting his fear ahead of his trust in the force.
So see, it all does make sense! Actually, I thought it was pretty stupid they didn't throw a bake sale and go buy his Mom out of slavery or something. But then they'd have had to invent and kill off another g-friend or childhood buddy or something, and the fear over losing that bond wouldn't have been as believable.
Anakin didn't turn because of love, he turned because of fear. Watch episode 1 and 2 again. Anakin is almost continually motivated by fear. He wants to become a great jedi, but at his core is fear. At first it's fear of failure, but he also fears he will lose his mother. The first visions he consciously has are of his mother's death, and when he cannot save her, his fear gives in to anger and hatred, exactly as Yoda said it would. Sidious sees this inside Anakin and feeds that fear like a pet. A little suspicion here, a false hope there, and the fear grows. When it comes time to make his choice, Anakin choses entirely out of fear of losing another person he loves, not for the love itself.
And of course in the end, that fear betrays even his love. It's so much more powerful and ironic that Sidious is able use that failure to more tightly bind Vader to him.
And of course, in the "real world", we've all see what happens when you make powerful people and nations afraid. Scare a powerful group enough and everyone within reach gets crapped on, but of course some people just can't resist poking the tigers with a stick. When that happens, it may be better to stay out of the tigers way for a while. Lucas knows this...
John Williams...
I think sometimes he forgets which movie he's composing for. At times I found myself waiting for the camera to turn and reveal a giant dinosaur.
Episode 1 through 3 felt that way to me.
I thought the Catholic church tried this shortly after the printing press was invented. Are we to suffer another inquisition? A separation of the techno-elite from the techno-ostrich? It has all the social markings of a state sponsored holy war, except it's the pure sharing of ALL information instead of a religious text that is at stake.
Have you considered a 2-stage approach? Stuff it to disk, and process/index it separately? A fast stream of data would let it all get recorded without loss, and then you could use whatever resources are necessary to index and search without impacting the data dump.
Cost... Are you going to go for local storage or NAS? Need SCSI and RAID or a less expensive hardware setup? Do you think gigabit ethernet will be sufficient for the transfer from the data dump hardware to the processing/indexing/search machines?
Sounds like you might want to run a test case using commodity hardware first.
Why not just use a cheap and effective red "C" (for Chester the molester) tattoed on the forehead?
Ok, YOU pick the letter then. I vote for C but I'm not stuck on it or anything. I just don't want my taxes going to pay to track a bunch of sexual predators around town. Snip or tattoo them and be done with it. Better yet, do both. I want kids someday and I don't see any ethical or moral obligation towards the welfare of those types of people. They cause actual HARM, and it makes no sense to treat them the same way we treat Martha Stewart during her house arrest (for example.)
So, if convicted can he transfer his real world experience points to any online games? Does he get a +5 hit bonus when he uses a virtual knife from now on?
32 meg ram? What luxury! My first xwindows system used 2 meg ram and a 40 meg hard drive, using a 16 mhz 386. Later I added another 3 meg using ISA slot memory cards (yea, remember those? ugh) and a second 40 meg hard drive, and X windows ran like a champ. I think I was using slackware at the time, and routinely opened a tcp-ip tunnel over a 14.4 baud telnet session just so I could run apps on our school's sun lab from home. 800x600 xwindows over an effective 9600 baud, with 80 meg total hd space, a cirrus logic "windows accelerator" card that maxed out at 1024x768x16bit, and that 16 mhz 386 cpu. I did add a 387 co-pro but even without that it worked just fine and was completely usable.
I think it's the swing of the pendulum after a huge push to get women into the marketplace. Many of those women, just like my wife, are starting to realize the magnitude of the personal sacrifice they have made by going into the workplace. Family life suffers. It's tougher to have children and spend the time with them that they'd like. Yes it's different for each person, but many dual income families do not NEED a second income and they're realizing that they're in their mid-30s and still don't have children. So faced with these realities during a market and jobs downturn, is it really that strange that women may choose different careers or even choose to stay at home and raise their children?
Only 6 or so years ago, Gen (ret) Chuck Yeager said that all further aviation research was a dead end and that we should focus on other things. Higher, Faster, and Farther were already achieved and there was nothing more to be gained by further aviation research, according to the General.
I sure wish I could remember where that essay was published, but I think it was an editorial in Aviation Week and Space Technology. In any case, as a recent military pilot training graduate I thought it was a pretty dumb thing to say. The last few years have seen numerous valuable research projects come to fruition. From exotic hypersonic research to more efficient engines or winglets for airliners so your ticket prices don't skyrocket, there still seems to be a lot of valuable aeronautical research yet to be done. I'm glad we're not leaving it up to NASA anymore, and in another decade or two maybe we'll all realize what a true debt we owe to Burt Rutan, his fellow researchers and co-workers, and his visionary investors.
That's probably the same watch Richie Rich's dad had when his plane crashed, but he still had to rebuild it using parts taken from random junk in his luggage.
What he really needs is a spotlight with a batman cutout on it, but it's too late now.
The coolest part is that their rocket ship will be nuclear powered and turns into a really big robot when attacked or befriended by a child.
I'm still waiting for realtime global weather prediction. The weather people still can't predict 8 hours out, let alone 12, 24, or 48 hours.
Lets finish one, or at least get reasonably close, before going nutso on new challenges eh?
Another link, to one of his first site entries:
e w/view1.html
http://www.jerrypournelle.com/archives/archivesvi
The date is June 4 1998. This is not the day of the first content on his site, and he had already been creating content for BYTE magazine for many years before this, but it's a sample of his archive.
He also has reader mail from back then.
http://www.jerrypournelle.com/ancient/mail1.htm
And all bloggers ought to thank Jerry Pournelle for starting the original blog, although back then he called it a daybook. His site still has his original content going back many many years.
http://www.jerrypournelle.com/#blog
Imagine if all that effort was spent enabling people do do things instead of trying to keep people from doing something that they'll just do anyhow. If all the money wasted on DRM had been spent on enabling technologies for micropayments or new business paradigms, we'd all be better off and even the MPAA/RIAA would pocket some extra money. It might be too optimistic to think that the associations would use enabling technologies to help artists get compensation for their work, but maybe even that would occur.
Instead, it's all about prevention, disabling, protection against use, and blocking the people who pay out the money for these products from using them. Dinosaur stew anyone?
Try a lightweight tablet pc and microsoft onenote. Add on google's search utility and you'd have it all.
A more likely explanation is that the only people still watching quality programming like "the salon" on BBC (a reality show where you get to watch the minute by minute workings of an actual hair salon, sometimes shown simultaneously on TWO CHANNELS!) are both too cheap to sign up for sky, and too ignorant to know how to even order broadband, let alone use it. It's another bifurcation of society, those with the intelligence and desire to use the internet, and those who are content to be fed by the continuing flood of mindless blabbering from the telly.
Of course, the new "techno elite" fit conventional print and broadcast media into their daily routines right along with a newfound reliance on portable computing, wireless communication, and high speed internet, but keeping up in any useful fashion with all that is somewhat expensive in both time and money. There is an awful lot of noise to filter through so even the most techno savvy and modern info-geek has to be quite specific in how he spends his time and attention, or he'll get trapped in the clutter and wonder why he's missing all the important things. Like having a life to go with the gadgets and data pipes.