I used to work at a VoIP added-services provider. Received wisdom was that packet telephony was definitely the future, but 50-50 on whether or not IP was the right protocol for packet voice networks. One thing for sure is, in H.323 there's no point in using G.711 for voice -- a decent 10-12kbps codec will sound fine compared to the 64kbps that G.711 uses. I think that H.323 is sensitive to all kinds of parameters like comfort noise and silence suppression, you need to tune it to your network. In practice, it looks like well-tuned VoIP does take more bandwidth that good ol' PSTN, but the difference is not significant enough to justify running two kinds of networks.
However I worked at the software end, not VoIP network operations -- what do I know?
A non-citizen can't just come waltzing in to the US to take a job, they need to go through the H1B process. It costs money, it takes time, and there's a limit on how many. How do you know India doesn't have a similar law? This guy is steamed because he thought paperwork shouldn't apply to him?
On a more serious note, however, the labels "left" and "right" only tell part of the story. There is a second dimension of political philosophy that measures the degree of individualism supported by that philosophy. There are individualists and anti-individualists on both sides of the left-right spectrum.
I agree completely. The same way of thinking (some might call it regression to the mean) could be applied to any attribute if large numbers of people are on both sides.
The corporations that control the media are not intrinsicly left or right. Corporations act in their self interest and tend to support either the left or the right depending on where that self interest lay in that particular issue. Corporations are, however, anti-individualist.
I of course think it bitter and ironic that these same corporations are now assuming the rights only individuals used to have: freedom of speech, freedom to influence politics....
Lean to the left? Bogus! If there's one thing we can be said to lean towards, it's love of sensationalism, esp. regarding RIAA/MPAA, SCO, latest gaping wide open Microsoft hole, etc. I myself lean to the left, which means most of the people are to the right of me. Therefore I will think X is slanted to the right, where X is any large group. So if you think Slashdot leans to the left, that just means you lean to the right. The more you think that X leans left, the more to the right you are. Voila!
I can see at least a hint of validity in the claim "I download to try the song out, and if I like it I buy the album". But 1,000+ songs in one go? Nope, that's just plain piracy
There are no ships involved; this is not piracy. It's copyright violation. (Write it out a hundred times on the blackboard!)
You say downloading to "try before buy" is OK. But where does one download from? Someone who has a large collection who has put it up somewhere/somehow. Besides, where did you get this "1,000+ songs in one go", and what does this "one go" mean? Remember that the RIAA is going for the sharers, not the downloaders.
If you do the crime; you should be willing to do the time.
Bullshit!
Where's the crime? This is copyright violation, not a crime. It's a civil offense, not criminal (since even the RIAA hasn't found a way to invoke the criminal parts of the DMCA). Since it's a civil law violoation, you cannot go to jail. It's not piracy (no ships are involved) and not theft. Words have meanings, you know, and legal words have very precise meanings.
how many folks go to a record store to pick up CD-Rs for data? Sure, it's possible, but I'm thinking that most folks go to a store that sells computers, etc, for their CD-Rs.
Nonsense. In the Bay Area you might have the luxury of a neighborhood computer store, but for a huge number of people the local drugstore is where you get your CD-Rs.
The article doesn't have any details of the mini-gyroscope... any links that prove it's not just a tilt switch, instead of a full-fledged gyro?
If it's a gyro, then the killer application would be as an inertial reference for aircraft navigation. The AH (artificial horizon) in light airplanes is usually a vacuum-powered mechanical device, which is expensive (precision mechanical device, no way you can get a new one for around a hundred dollars) and fragile/inconvenient (needs vacuum source, filtered air etc.) Electric gyros are available, but even more expensive. A no-moving-parts attitude reference -- like the ring laser "gyro" systems that airliners use, but cheap -- is the holy grail.
"Eigen" in german means "essence of", "characteristic", "similar" etc. The term comes from linear algebra, not quantum mechanics. If x is a vector and A is an operator, and Ax (A applied to x) has the same direction as x, then x is an eigenvector of A. For example, if the operation is "reflect in the xy plane", then any vector parallel to the z-axis is an eigenvector of the operator. The scalar that x gets scaled by is called its eigenvalue. For the reflection operator, -1 is the eigenvalue for any eigenvector. QM extended this concept to other objects like states.
So the term eigenmusic could be used to describe the underlying defining characteristic of a music. You could say that all Britney Spears' music has the same eigenmusic.
I think the real disservice NASA managers have done is convincing this country that the Shuttle is just like an airline flight, safe as houses. Teachers and tourists fly on them! Scheduled flights every month! Whee! Utter crap.
But try as I might, I can't lay 100% of the blame on them: they see the budget for aero and space research being cut (more tax-cuts for the wealthy!!!) and they know they need to get public opinion behind them. That means the Shuttle must fly, and it must be a media spectacle.
The truth of the matter is:
much of the "research" that is done on Shuttle flights could be done just as well by unmanned missions; and
"reusable spacecraft" is an oxymoron at the current state of technology (even ignoring pork boondoggles like Morton Thiokol in Utah).
Time to ax the Shuttle program. Give NASA some real money. Move the little experiments to the various LEO launches on small vehicles. Use heavy lift rockets like Energiya and Ariane while NASA designs and contracts out a US design, perhaps an updated SaturnV or something. To hell with jingoistic crap like "giving up the space race to the Russians and Europeans" -- let's not cut off our noses to spite our faces.
And let's not forget that space travel for humans is still very much an experimental thing. "There be dragons -- expect to die!" There still will be no dearth of volunteers for astronaut positions.
The unit "baud" is named for Emile Baudot, old-time telegraph dude. Credit for the first use of digital transmission is usually given to him. I don't know how the Russians would spell "Baudot" but in a different alphabet it's not surprising... as I remember it, cyrillic doesn't have a "u"; so "bod" -- looks like lower-case b, o, delta -- sounds plausible.
Not every company is willing to open source all their software and make it free.
So? This isn't about software, but hardware. Hardware manufacturers are in the business of selling hardware; device drivers are just something they write so customers can use the hardware. The only write Windows drivers simply because of plain ol' "market share". It's when they refuse to release programming information for the cards -- that's just stupid. They're admitting either that they don't want to to sell more product, or that they're incapable of designing hardware with reasonable interfaces that don't give away trade secrets. I know; I work for a hardware manufacturer.
I have a PhD in computer science -- in user interfaces (so I wrote a lot of code), at a department that's one of the earliest Unix installations, and I also worked as a sysadmin part of the time I was in grad school. I think that's probably a best-case scenario... when I decided to bail on the tenure track, finding a job was not easy, it took me about three months -- and I had to find the time to do it in. Starting assistant professors don't have a lot of spare time. If my research had been in a non-saleable area (like theory, which was what I used to be in), I imagine things would have been much worse.
With my strong programming experience I did OK, and found a job that paid $75,000 (this was in 1995). However, there was this guy who was in grad school with me. He left after an MS since he couldn't get in to the PhD program... he'd been working for the five additional years I was in school, making good money and getting raises, so in '95 he was also making the same amount of money. And he had lots of vested stock options that were actually worth money.
The only reason to get a PhD is because you think it would be cool and fun and you don't really want to do anything else. That was all true for me, and I had a blast doing it and would definitely do it again, and recommend it to others. But don't do it for money: if you think you'll be more succesful financially as a result, you're deluded. It will be a waste of time.
So the thing that interested me most about this Sony was it's Carl Zeiss lens 28 - 200 mm equiv. F2.0 - F2.8 aperture.
Zeiss is famous for quality, and 105 mm lens, at f 2.8 is a beautiful combination for selective focus portraits.
Only problem is that background blur (a.k.a. bokeh) depends on the sensor size. This camera has a minuscule 8.8mm x 6.6mm sensor, compared with the 36mm x 24mm image you get from 35mm. My favourite portrait lens is my EF 100/2.0 USM which is beautiful with 35mm film. However my G1 (digital) at the 35mm equivalent of 105mm and f/2.8 is totally disappointing, at least for background blur.
Sure, the EOS-10D looks good... if you can live with the 1.6x focal-length multiplication factor. (This means that a super-wide 18mm lens would have the angle of view of a 28mm lens. Another way to think about it is: if you need a moderately wide angle i.e. around 24mm, you need to buy a $1800 EF 14/2.8. The EF 24/1.4 is $1100 -- i.e. you need to spend $700 more and get two stops less aperture!)
However, if I had the money, I would get a Canon EOS 1D.(DROOL) It has a full size 35mm sensor...
You mean the EOS-1Ds, right? The 1D is 1.3x and costs $4,000 against the $8,000 you'll need for the 1Ds. (I've been saving my pennies ever since the 1Ds was announced.)
There's also a practical reason to learn morse, for some people at least. If you're a pilot, before you start using a radio navigation system of some sort, you're supposed to verify that you're using the correct radio station. Each such station -- VOR, NDB, DME, ILS -- continuously broadcasts its callsign in morse. Each callsign is two, three, or four letters, and all pilots know those. It's common to say things like "I'm going direct OSI, so I'd better tune it in; and on the second radio I want SFO to make sure I don't bust the airspace." If you don't know morse, you have to correlate the beeping dahs and dits with the dots and dashes in the symbols box in your map, which is tedious and error-prone; and SAU and PYE in standby.
(Of course even if you don't know morse you'll soon learn the cadences of the particular callsigns in your area; but go on a long cross-country, where encountering new and exotic-sounding VORs, maybe under exciting situations like icing and turbulence on an approach....)
But even OpenBSD has had one exploit now and they play some real funny games to get it down to only one. Bind, fr example, isn't counted because the minimal install doesn't include it.
Not the minimal install; the default install. This means "clueless newbies" are safe. If they learn enough about things that they want to run a nameserver, they should know what they're doing. There simply isn't a need for most people -- even those with websites on home DSL machines -- to run BIND.
That is the most heinous sin of Micros**t's: you just can't do crap like turn on IIS for any random person that owns a computer.
I don't know if RedHat installs and turns on BIND by default -- if they don't, they shouldn't have to fall on their swords when a BIND vulnerability is found. For OpenBSD, since BIND is part of "the system" i.e. it's not in "the ports", it's audited and any bugs in it will get fixed by the OpenBSD developers if necessary. That is why until 3.3 (released a couple of months ago), BIND4 was the nameserver daemon that came with it. (3.3 comes with BIND 9.2.2.)
A small business CANNOT afford to employ a full time UNIX administrator.
How small is this "small"?
Unix administrators aren't expensive because Unix is somehow magical. It's because becoming one entails a certain amount of training. If you're a web-oriented company (as in, you run a web-app that is the main source of your revenue) and hire a cheap admin because any monkey can point and click that Windows interface,... I wouldn't want my business dependent on untrained MSCEs. And your "not terribly computer literate" friend should not be running a commercial web site so it doesn't matter what "makes him crazy." Competent system administration is not cheap, and that doesn't change with the OS.
But if you just need to handle a little info web site and email for five people, sure, your cheap part-time Windows sysadmin may be fine for that.
Christ, this MS SQL Server/.NET seems to be a dog. We can run 500-600 instances per $1000 box running Apache and Tomcat talking to Solaris8 on a back-end Sun -- E250 I think. (That E250 talks to about 10 or so front-end servers.) Fairly typical medium-weight web app over the database, with switching of image stream data around between connections and per-stream bandwidth control. Stock Sun JVM, we haven't even started tuning VM parameters yet.
the hardening of avionics systems is going to be non-optional as soon as this weakness is exploited by the bad guys.
Scare tactics. The probability of anyone getting blown up by terrorists is minuscule. Sure, it makes big news; but in the sense of actual numbers -- 3,000 in one year is microscopic. I'm just being coldly calculating: the odds of being killed by not wearing a seatbelt are ridiculously higher than the odds of being killed by a terrorist. Which means that high-tech solutions like "hardening" are just PR campaigns. Expensive flash, glitter, and media blitzes with no real effect on the risks of everyday people's lives.
Inventiveness
on
SOHO Is Back
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Sure, there's a lot of complaining about all the stupid things they do, with their quaint imperial vs. metric problems, astigmatism, etc. etc. But there's also creative and cool things they do with malfunctioning remote probes. Fault tolerance on the other side of millions-of-miles distances working with milliwatts of energy and absurdly low bandwidths, that's what I call cool. More tinkerers and less bureaucrats (and less obsession with a manned Shuttle program) is what NASA needs.
The only real solution is to harden the avionics against RF interference.
And paying for this would be... ?
What if it entailed flying becoming a luxury? Put on your suit and tie, just like in the 50s and 60s. Or expensive like space tourism today.
You have no idea what that would cost, would you? Think about hardening against a hundred random attackers, all enclosed with you inside a nice metal tube.
... it could help with movie theatres and other similar situations.
Heh! Yup, and a few other situations -- like in the vicinity of enterprising people who don't care for cell-phones. I'd be sorely tempted to buy or make such a transponder.
If it can't, the plane should be grounded until it can be hardened to handle the RF. RF hardening is a science that the military industrial complex is quite apt at. "That's expensive, why don't we BAN USE OF the devices," cry the economically minded.
Because banning the use is cheap, and it reassures the people that Something Is Being Done about the problem.
However, that's too cynical: the truth is that if the airplanes had to have all the safety features we want, flying would be expensive just like in the 60's: an expensive luxury, where you put on a suit and tie before you board. (And in that situation, the people who complain on the net will not be the economic stratum that flies, so it would be irrelevant to them anyway!) Hardening is expensive. It's not something you can just retrofit cheaply, think of the miles of wiring in a typical airliner. It means completely replacing all the avionics and control systems. Engines and avionics are the expensive bits of the airplane!
The truth is that we make a whole bunch of decisions based on cost vs. safety. Did you buy the safest car available, even though it was expensive and a gas-guzzler? Do you upgrade to new cars with the newer safety features every year? "But that's expensive!" you cry.
So all of you outraged people, think about whether or not you might just be whining.
Slashdot Mirror
However I worked at the software end, not VoIP network operations -- what do I know?
A non-citizen can't just come waltzing in to the US to take a job, they need to go through the H1B process. It costs money, it takes time, and there's a limit on how many. How do you know India doesn't have a similar law? This guy is steamed because he thought paperwork shouldn't apply to him?
Lean to the left? Bogus! If there's one thing we can be said to lean towards, it's love of sensationalism, esp. regarding RIAA/MPAA, SCO, latest gaping wide open Microsoft hole, etc. I myself lean to the left, which means most of the people are to the right of me. Therefore I will think X is slanted to the right, where X is any large group. So if you think Slashdot leans to the left, that just means you lean to the right. The more you think that X leans left, the more to the right you are. Voila!
You say downloading to "try before buy" is OK. But where does one download from? Someone who has a large collection who has put it up somewhere/somehow. Besides, where did you get this "1,000+ songs in one go", and what does this "one go" mean? Remember that the RIAA is going for the sharers, not the downloaders.
Where's the crime? This is copyright violation, not a crime. It's a civil offense, not criminal (since even the RIAA hasn't found a way to invoke the criminal parts of the DMCA). Since it's a civil law violoation, you cannot go to jail. It's not piracy (no ships are involved) and not theft. Words have meanings, you know, and legal words have very precise meanings.
If it's a gyro, then the killer application would be as an inertial reference for aircraft navigation. The AH (artificial horizon) in light airplanes is usually a vacuum-powered mechanical device, which is expensive (precision mechanical device, no way you can get a new one for around a hundred dollars) and fragile/inconvenient (needs vacuum source, filtered air etc.) Electric gyros are available, but even more expensive. A no-moving-parts attitude reference -- like the ring laser "gyro" systems that airliners use, but cheap -- is the holy grail.
So the term eigenmusic could be used to describe the underlying defining characteristic of a music. You could say that all Britney Spears' music has the same eigenmusic.
But try as I might, I can't lay 100% of the blame on them: they see the budget for aero and space research being cut (more tax-cuts for the wealthy!!!) and they know they need to get public opinion behind them. That means the Shuttle must fly, and it must be a media spectacle.
The truth of the matter is:
- much of the "research" that is done on Shuttle flights could be done just as well by unmanned missions; and
- "reusable spacecraft" is an oxymoron at the current state of technology (even ignoring pork boondoggles like Morton Thiokol in Utah)
.
Time to ax the Shuttle program. Give NASA some real money. Move the little experiments to the various LEO launches on small vehicles. Use heavy lift rockets like Energiya and Ariane while NASA designs and contracts out a US design, perhaps an updated SaturnV or something. To hell with jingoistic crap like "giving up the space race to the Russians and Europeans" -- let's not cut off our noses to spite our faces.And let's not forget that space travel for humans is still very much an experimental thing. "There be dragons -- expect to die!" There still will be no dearth of volunteers for astronaut positions.
(Insightful? Sheesh!)
With my strong programming experience I did OK, and found a job that paid $75,000 (this was in 1995). However, there was this guy who was in grad school with me. He left after an MS since he couldn't get in to the PhD program... he'd been working for the five additional years I was in school, making good money and getting raises, so in '95 he was also making the same amount of money. And he had lots of vested stock options that were actually worth money.
The only reason to get a PhD is because you think it would be cool and fun and you don't really want to do anything else. That was all true for me, and I had a blast doing it and would definitely do it again, and recommend it to others. But don't do it for money: if you think you'll be more succesful financially as a result, you're deluded. It will be a waste of time.
(Of course even if you don't know morse you'll soon learn the cadences of the particular callsigns in your area; but go on a long cross-country, where encountering new and exotic-sounding VORs, maybe under exciting situations like icing and turbulence on an approach....)
That is the most heinous sin of Micros**t's: you just can't do crap like turn on IIS for any random person that owns a computer.
I don't know if RedHat installs and turns on BIND by default -- if they don't, they shouldn't have to fall on their swords when a BIND vulnerability is found. For OpenBSD, since BIND is part of "the system" i.e. it's not in "the ports", it's audited and any bugs in it will get fixed by the OpenBSD developers if necessary. That is why until 3.3 (released a couple of months ago), BIND4 was the nameserver daemon that came with it. (3.3 comes with BIND 9.2.2.)
Unix administrators aren't expensive because Unix is somehow magical. It's because becoming one entails a certain amount of training. If you're a web-oriented company (as in, you run a web-app that is the main source of your revenue) and hire a cheap admin because any monkey can point and click that Windows interface, ... I wouldn't want my business dependent on untrained MSCEs. And your "not terribly computer literate" friend should not be running a commercial web site so it doesn't matter what "makes him crazy." Competent system administration is not cheap, and that doesn't change with the OS.
But if you just need to handle a little info web site and email for five people, sure, your cheap part-time Windows sysadmin may be fine for that.
Sure, there's a lot of complaining about all the stupid things they do, with their quaint imperial vs. metric problems, astigmatism, etc. etc. But there's also creative and cool things they do with malfunctioning remote probes. Fault tolerance on the other side of millions-of-miles distances working with milliwatts of energy and absurdly low bandwidths, that's what I call cool. More tinkerers and less bureaucrats (and less obsession with a manned Shuttle program) is what NASA needs.
What if it entailed flying becoming a luxury? Put on your suit and tie, just like in the 50s and 60s. Or expensive like space tourism today.
You have no idea what that would cost, would you? Think about hardening against a hundred random attackers, all enclosed with you inside a nice metal tube.
However, that's too cynical: the truth is that if the airplanes had to have all the safety features we want, flying would be expensive just like in the 60's: an expensive luxury, where you put on a suit and tie before you board. (And in that situation, the people who complain on the net will not be the economic stratum that flies, so it would be irrelevant to them anyway!) Hardening is expensive. It's not something you can just retrofit cheaply, think of the miles of wiring in a typical airliner. It means completely replacing all the avionics and control systems. Engines and avionics are the expensive bits of the airplane!
The truth is that we make a whole bunch of decisions based on cost vs. safety. Did you buy the safest car available, even though it was expensive and a gas-guzzler? Do you upgrade to new cars with the newer safety features every year? "But that's expensive!" you cry.
So all of you outraged people, think about whether or not you might just be whining.