NPR Science Friday discussed this back in early August: http://www.npr.org/rundowns/rundown.php?p rgId=5&pr gDate=8-Aug-2003
Also it's been discussed in many journals and periodicals going back several years.
Personally I think we ought to keep Hubble going until there's another VISIBLE LIGHT optical scope in operation in orbit, or until earth-bound adaptive optics catch up.
There's another scope due up in 2010, but it'll doubtless be pushed back, and it's an IR scope so it won't do the same kind of science that Hubble does.
Adaptive optics are already able to make the best earth-bound scopes do better than the Hubble did before its first servicing mission (when they corrected its mirror) - if you remember, at the time even with the misfigured mirror it was better than earth-bound scopes.
Um, that would all be very nice if it were possible to use the scope with an eyepiece. It wasn't designed for such. In fact, AFAIK no research grade telescope built in probably the last 20 years even has the ability to plug an eyepiece into it. Human eyes are just nowhere near as sensitive as CCDs.
Plus, you'd have to remove an instrumentation pack and let people crawl inside it. This would not only endanger surrounding equipment greatly, it would require at least a couple of days of downtime afterwards to recalibrate the inertial guidance.
You could probably see your house as a speck, but you wouldn't be able to resolve it. The Hubble is only a 2.4 meter telescope after all.
death ray... yeah... OK, obviously no grasp of optics here. I'm starting to think this article should be moderated "Funny" but I've already responded, so no moderating for me.
Hubble is a very upkeep-intensive device. Only very good engineering lets it last the length of time that it does between servicing missions. Even if you don't upgrade the equipment, there is servicing that needs to be done. The biggest problem in the past has been the reaction wheels; they have spares but they DO fail. At one time they were one failure away from not being able to control the scope.
If you ARE going to go up and replace a few reaction wheels though, you might as well cart along an extra new instrument or two; no point in boosting to orbit and not bringing along new toys.
Why would you bother keeping a credit card with a zero balance on it?
This is a strange question. A card with a zero balance is the PREFERRED situation.
I know many people who put EVERYTHING on their cards, and pay them off every month. Some use Discover and get a few hundred bucks at the end of the year. Some get tons of airline miles.
It's very useful to have a card for various reasons; renting cars, hotel rooms, etc. That doesn't mean you have to carry a balance and pay their interest rates.
The computer my 11 year old daughter uses is connected to the net through a linux box running Squid, set up to log accesses. It also has VNC server on it. She knows that I have a history that she can't erase, and that I can look at her screen at any time from any computer at home or work without her knowing I'm doing it.
OK, this is the sort of stuff that we chafe when our employers do it to us. But I've found that it works well for us.
I've never really liked RedHat anyway. Our company uses it for all our servers; I use it but I'd rather have other distros. Maybe I can get them to look at something else now.
I think there was an article on slashdot a couple of months ago, saying that there is an unpatched microsoft bug database online. The point of the article was that the database had been taken offline, but I have talked to people who know more about it than I, and they say yes, there are vulnerabilities that are well known, have been known for months, and Microsoft won't acknowledge them.
From the time that they acknowledge a bug until it's patched is VERY FAST.
The problem is that they won't acknowledge a bug until they already have a fix for it. Often bugs are known about by the world for months, and MS says there's no such bug. When they do acknowlege it, then yeah, there's a fix out within hours or a day or two at most.
So, apples and oranges. If Linux takes 4 days to patch a bug as soon as it's known, and Windows takes 4 months to acknowlege a bug's existance, then 2 days to patch, which is better?
Price out storage for an EMC box sometime. We pay about $15,000 for a single 18GB SCSI LVD drive. I guess $14,600 of that is the cool plastic rails they bolt on, the testing, and having some drone come out, plug it in and configure it (we're not allowed to actually touch it).
That doesn't actually get us 18GB of space. We have to buy TWO of them for every 18GB we want. Plus, we're in a split site failover configuration, so it's actually four.
So, besides paying about a quarter million for the chassis and six digits a year for support, we pay about $60,000 US for every 18GB of space.
Happily, our company is dumping EMC. There are plenty of storage companies out there that are as good for way less money.
Screw that, I'm not buying another Belkin product, period. I don't care if it's just a cable. I've got a couple hundred bucks worth of their cables, but I'm done giving money to them.
Unfortunately, their cables are about all that the big box stores carry for some types of cables, like firewire and VGA/serial, etc.
Dude, (assuming you're the grandparent poster) why not apply your own rule?
If you want to buy commercial software, buy commercial software. If you want to use freeware, use freeware. If you don't like shareware, don't use shareware.
It's each person's decision how to run their business. It's your choice whether to do business with them or not. It's not your decision that "I don't like his business model, so I get to steal his stuff." You're free to not use it, of course.
Are they just going along with it because it's their job, rather than actually trying to make a quality product?
ding ding ding. Once a company gets to a certain size, big company mentality starts taking over. Benefits get reduced, frequent changes filter down from on high with no apparent reason other than cost cutting, etc. After a while, most people get ground down to where they just try to do what they're told as well as possible, rather than trying to innovate or argue.
This is one reason why, for instance, most really new ideas come from small companies or startups (or even individuals) and then are bought by large companies, rather than being invented there.
You're right, but I have no way to gauge that. The Canon heads are built on the same tech as Epsons (piezo actuators) and I've had Epsons last many dozens of refills.
Also I've recently picked up a couple of Canon BJC-600's and 610s from rummage sales that obviously hadn't been used in years; you'd have thought the ink nozzles were pretty much clogged permanently. 1 hour of soaking on a damp paper towel, a little ink squirted into the empty tanks, and they were printing like a champ.
Of course, those nozzles are bigger and probably easier to clear than the new ones, but I have no way to judge printhead lifetime, therefore can't reasonably figure it into the price.
My statement was more to the effect of "so what if they have G5's; why wouldn't they?" Everyone buys and trys out stuff from the competition. Places I have worked for go so far as to set up dummy firms to "buy" and "use" the product, and to call and evaluate the quality/response time/etc of their customer service. We also knew that our competition was doing it to us. It's part of the game. Nobody should be surprised at this.
But really the whole point of the article was the even more silly "took a picture of the campus, revealed where something was" reason for dismissal.
Here is the relevant section: "Tie-In Sales" Provisions Generally, tie-in sales provisions are not allowed. Such a provision would require a purchaser of the warranted product to buy an item or service from a particular company to use with the warranted product in order to be eligible to receive a remedy under the warranty.... later... Although tie-in sales provisions generally are not allowed, you can include such a provision in your warranty if you can demonstrate to the satisfaction of the FTC that your product will not work properly without a specified item or service.
if you use third party consumables, you void your warranty
I'm sure you know what you're talking about, but maybe this has just never been challenged in court.
Unless I'm mistaken (IANAL), this practice is known as PRODUCT TYING - and it's an illegal, monopolistic practice. This is like Ford saying you must use Motorcraft filters, oil, and gasoline or your warranty is void.
It's encumbant on the warranty provider to prove, on a CASE BY CASE BASIS, that harm was caused by the use of non-recommended consumables.
The plus side is that HPs are much less vulnerable to ink clogs; you can always just switch the cartridge if your print head stuffs up
The minus side is, the other vendors have pretty much solved the ink clog problem anyway (Canon's print head is a removable cartridge into which all the ink tanks plug in, so you get the best of both worlds). I just retired an Epson 870 that I refilled the tanks on about 45 times total, and never had an ink clog.
HP's resistive ink bubble system is pretty much DESIGNED to fail. You can only get a handful of refills out of them before nozzles start to just not work anymore. When I had my HP970, I never got more than 4 refills before needing a new cart.
Sure, you CAN replace the printhead easily; the downside is that you MUST replace the printhead; it just isn't designed to last much longer than the amount of ink it ships with.
Epson, Canon, etc you can refill as many times as you like, though on the Epsons the sponge in the cart tends to get gnarly and won't soak up ink very well after 5 to 8 refills. Canon uses a fabric sponge, and their tanks are largely big open boxes, so they refill numerous times easily.
Canon doesn't support free software very well, but if you're running Windows, Canon is still in the old school for ink; their ink carts are translucent plastic boxes with ink in them. Trivial to refill. I just last week bought an i960, and I love it. The ink boxes hold 15ml of ink per color, which lasts forever it seems, and it looks like refilling is as simple as "pop a hole in the top, squirt in ink, reseal." Each color has its own ink box so you only replace what's empty. They have an optical low ink sensor so it tells you when the ink is REALLY LOW, not "the counter says you should be out of ink, so I'm not printing anymore."
The i960 prints photos very fast, as well, and the 4x6 drop-down tray is very cool if you're using the printer to print photos and regular stuff every day. The photo quality is excellent.
They do charge $200 for the printer; if it was from Lexmark I think it would be $100, but they'd be selling you locked-in ink carts for $30 each.
I had an Epson before, and between bottom fill refilling leaking ink onto my hands, sponges that got air-saturated so you couldn't get them full anymore after a few fills, chips that you had to buy reprogrammers for to reset them, etc, etc, I was fed up.
I can't believe that there's anyone that doesn't think that an organization of Microsoft's size wouldn't own a little of everything. Certainly they have G5's. I'm sure they have some Suns in their organization somewhere too. I'm sure they have linux boxes, if only to study. Every company of any size has people who get paid to use the competition's products, to compare them to their own.
However, what he was really fired for was divulging info about what's in which building. This seems way over the top, but I guess MS can set whatever security rules they want.
Though, as you know, the filter is there because the lenses are not designed to focus IR to the same point as visible light. It's hard enough to get a lens to focus red through blue light close to the same points; even there it fails and that's called "chromatic aberration".
If the IR was not blocked, you'd get a very fuzzy picture due to the IR image being focussed to a slightly different place than the visible light image.
The "X-Ray" effect is real but very weak. Many fabric dyes and printing inks are practically transparent in the IR. Because of this, printed patterns, particularly on synthetic materials, may not show up if you've viewing in pure IR light.
In order to see the effect, you not only need to remove the IR block filter, you need to install an IR pass filter, which blocks VISIBLE light and lets through only IR. They're freaky filters, I have one. They appear completely black but the camcorder can see through them. They're pretty expensive filters, because they're only really used in industry or by pro photographers; a smallish filter that a camcorder might use will run $50 or more.
You also need to have a VERY strong IR source; basically, you must be shooting outside in direct sunlight.
With all this in place, you can kinda, sorta, see through clothes, a little. It looks maybe almost as good as a wet t-shirt contest, at absolute best, but not really quite that good. Also everything is monochrome, and the Sonys that people were using for some reason tint the scene green; I guess they thought that green looked like night vision equipment and people would think that was cool. Really, it's just kinda stupid; I would have rather had B&W.
All in all, it's a hell of a lot of money and effort for practically no result.
Several companies already have these: http://www.delkin.com/news/press/Picturevi sion.htm http://www.steves-digicams.com/2003_reviews/sand is k_dpv.html etc.
These don't have HDTV outputs, but that shouldn't run the price from $80 to $500.
Yup, then everyone would hack their senders to broadcast "ambulance".
Now, you can just say "if you have a sender, it's illegal" and simply ticket anyone who's got an IR emitter in their car. Trivial to detect. If you made them legal but required the proper code, then you have to have a device that can decode the flashes to tell whether they're breaking the law or not, and even then, they might have a switch to kick back and forth, so you may not always be able to nail them.
Slashdot Mirror
NPR Science Friday discussed this back in early August:p rgId=5&pr gDate=8-Aug-2003
http://www.npr.org/rundowns/rundown.php?
Also it's been discussed in many journals and periodicals going back several years.
Personally I think we ought to keep Hubble going until there's another VISIBLE LIGHT optical scope in operation in orbit, or until earth-bound adaptive optics catch up.
There's another scope due up in 2010, but it'll doubtless be pushed back, and it's an IR scope so it won't do the same kind of science that Hubble does.
Adaptive optics are already able to make the best earth-bound scopes do better than the Hubble did before its first servicing mission (when they corrected its mirror) - if you remember, at the time even with the misfigured mirror it was better than earth-bound scopes.
Um, that would all be very nice if it were possible to use the scope with an eyepiece. It wasn't designed for such. In fact, AFAIK no research grade telescope built in probably the last 20 years even has the ability to plug an eyepiece into it. Human eyes are just nowhere near as sensitive as CCDs.
Plus, you'd have to remove an instrumentation pack and let people crawl inside it. This would not only endanger surrounding equipment greatly, it would require at least a couple of days of downtime afterwards to recalibrate the inertial guidance.
You could probably see your house as a speck, but you wouldn't be able to resolve it. The Hubble is only a 2.4 meter telescope after all.
death ray... yeah... OK, obviously no grasp of optics here. I'm starting to think this article should be moderated "Funny" but I've already responded, so no moderating for me.
Hubble is a very upkeep-intensive device. Only very good engineering lets it last the length of time that it does between servicing missions.
Even if you don't upgrade the equipment, there is servicing that needs to be done. The biggest problem in the past has been the reaction wheels; they have spares but they DO fail. At one time they were one failure away from not being able to control the scope.
If you ARE going to go up and replace a few reaction wheels though, you might as well cart along an extra new instrument or two; no point in boosting to orbit and not bringing along new toys.
Why would you bother keeping a credit card with a zero balance on it?
This is a strange question. A card with a zero balance is the PREFERRED situation.
I know many people who put EVERYTHING on their cards, and pay them off every month. Some use Discover and get a few hundred bucks at the end of the year. Some get tons of airline miles.
It's very useful to have a card for various reasons; renting cars, hotel rooms, etc. That doesn't mean you have to carry a balance and pay their interest rates.
The computer my 11 year old daughter uses is connected to the net through a linux box running Squid, set up to log accesses. It also has VNC server on it. She knows that I have a history that she can't erase, and that I can look at her screen at any time from any computer at home or work without her knowing I'm doing it.
OK, this is the sort of stuff that we chafe when our employers do it to us. But I've found that it works well for us.
I've never really liked RedHat anyway. Our company uses it for all our servers; I use it but I'd rather have other distros. Maybe I can get them to look at something else now.
We're very happy with our new NetApp server as well. The EMC contract runs out Dec 2, and we'll have the chassis on a pallet the 3rd.
I think there was an article on slashdot a couple of months ago, saying that there is an unpatched microsoft bug database online. The point of the article was that the database had been taken offline, but I have talked to people who know more about it than I, and they say yes, there are vulnerabilities that are well known, have been known for months, and Microsoft won't acknowledge them.
Maybe someone will point us to the site.
From the time that they acknowledge a bug until it's patched is VERY FAST.
The problem is that they won't acknowledge a bug until they already have a fix for it. Often bugs are known about by the world for months, and MS says there's no such bug. When they do acknowlege it, then yeah, there's a fix out within hours or a day or two at most.
So, apples and oranges. If Linux takes 4 days to patch a bug as soon as it's known, and Windows takes 4 months to acknowlege a bug's existance, then 2 days to patch, which is better?
Price out storage for an EMC box sometime. We pay about $15,000 for a single 18GB SCSI LVD drive. I guess $14,600 of that is the cool plastic rails they bolt on, the testing, and having some drone come out, plug it in and configure it (we're not allowed to actually touch it).
That doesn't actually get us 18GB of space. We have to buy TWO of them for every 18GB we want. Plus, we're in a split site failover configuration, so it's actually four.
So, besides paying about a quarter million for the chassis and six digits a year for support, we pay about $60,000 US for every 18GB of space.
Happily, our company is dumping EMC. There are plenty of storage companies out there that are as good for way less money.
Screw that, I'm not buying another Belkin product, period. I don't care if it's just a cable. I've got a couple hundred bucks worth of their cables, but I'm done giving money to them.
Unfortunately, their cables are about all that the big box stores carry for some types of cables, like firewire and VGA/serial, etc.
Apparently this definition of cool is:
cool (Ke'wl): F'ing moron who thinks reeking like a barroom rug is a good thing. SEE ALSO: delusional.
Honestly, last time I inadvertently walked too close to someone who had been smoking, I lost my appetite.
Well, nobody except me and most of the people that I know that are running Windows based web servers.
The thing Windows ships with can only be called a web server if you're being very generous.
Dude, (assuming you're the grandparent poster) why not apply your own rule?
If you want to buy commercial software, buy commercial software. If you want to use freeware, use freeware. If you don't like shareware, don't use shareware.
It's each person's decision how to run their business. It's your choice whether to do business with them or not. It's not your decision that "I don't like his business model, so I get to steal his stuff." You're free to not use it, of course.
Are they just going along with it because it's their job, rather than actually trying to make a quality product?
ding ding ding.
Once a company gets to a certain size, big company mentality starts taking over. Benefits get reduced, frequent changes filter down from on high with no apparent reason other than cost cutting, etc. After a while, most people get ground down to where they just try to do what they're told as well as possible, rather than trying to innovate or argue.
This is one reason why, for instance, most really new ideas come from small companies or startups (or even individuals) and then are bought by large companies, rather than being invented there.
You're right, but I have no way to gauge that. The Canon heads are built on the same tech as Epsons (piezo actuators) and I've had Epsons last many dozens of refills.
Also I've recently picked up a couple of Canon BJC-600's and 610s from rummage sales that obviously hadn't been used in years; you'd have thought the ink nozzles were pretty much clogged permanently. 1 hour of soaking on a damp paper towel, a little ink squirted into the empty tanks, and they were printing like a champ.
Of course, those nozzles are bigger and probably easier to clear than the new ones, but I have no way to judge printhead lifetime, therefore can't reasonably figure it into the price.
My statement was more to the effect of "so what if they have G5's; why wouldn't they?" Everyone buys and trys out stuff from the competition. Places I have worked for go so far as to set up dummy firms to "buy" and "use" the product, and to call and evaluate the quality/response time/etc of their customer service. We also knew that our competition was doing it to us. It's part of the game. Nobody should be surprised at this.
But really the whole point of the article was the even more silly "took a picture of the campus, revealed where something was" reason for dismissal.
OK, here's the citation. The law that makes this ILLEGAL is the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act.
... later...
Here is an overview.
Here is the relevant section:
"Tie-In Sales" Provisions
Generally, tie-in sales provisions are not allowed. Such a provision would require a purchaser of the warranted product to buy an item or service from a particular company to use with the warranted product in order to be eligible to receive a remedy under the warranty.
Although tie-in sales provisions generally are not allowed, you can include such a provision in your warranty if you can demonstrate to the satisfaction of the FTC that your product will not work properly without a specified item or service.
if you use third party consumables, you void your warranty
I'm sure you know what you're talking about, but maybe this has just never been challenged in court.
Unless I'm mistaken (IANAL), this practice is known as PRODUCT TYING - and it's an illegal, monopolistic practice. This is like Ford saying you must use Motorcraft filters, oil, and gasoline or your warranty is void.
It's encumbant on the warranty provider to prove, on a CASE BY CASE BASIS, that harm was caused by the use of non-recommended consumables.
The plus side is that HPs are much less vulnerable to ink clogs; you can always just switch the cartridge if your print head stuffs up
The minus side is, the other vendors have pretty much solved the ink clog problem anyway (Canon's print head is a removable cartridge into which all the ink tanks plug in, so you get the best of both worlds). I just retired an Epson 870 that I refilled the tanks on about 45 times total, and never had an ink clog.
HP's resistive ink bubble system is pretty much DESIGNED to fail. You can only get a handful of refills out of them before nozzles start to just not work anymore. When I had my HP970, I never got more than 4 refills before needing a new cart.
Sure, you CAN replace the printhead easily; the downside is that you MUST replace the printhead; it just isn't designed to last much longer than the amount of ink it ships with.
Epson, Canon, etc you can refill as many times as you like, though on the Epsons the sponge in the cart tends to get gnarly and won't soak up ink very well after 5 to 8 refills. Canon uses a fabric sponge, and their tanks are largely big open boxes, so they refill numerous times easily.
Canon doesn't support free software very well, but if you're running Windows, Canon is still in the old school for ink; their ink carts are translucent plastic boxes with ink in them. Trivial to refill. I just last week bought an i960, and I love it. The ink boxes hold 15ml of ink per color, which lasts forever it seems, and it looks like refilling is as simple as "pop a hole in the top, squirt in ink, reseal." Each color has its own ink box so you only replace what's empty. They have an optical low ink sensor so it tells you when the ink is REALLY LOW, not "the counter says you should be out of ink, so I'm not printing anymore."
The i960 prints photos very fast, as well, and the 4x6 drop-down tray is very cool if you're using the printer to print photos and regular stuff every day. The photo quality is excellent.
They do charge $200 for the printer; if it was from Lexmark I think it would be $100, but they'd be selling you locked-in ink carts for $30 each.
I had an Epson before, and between bottom fill refilling leaking ink onto my hands, sponges that got air-saturated so you couldn't get them full anymore after a few fills, chips that you had to buy reprogrammers for to reset them, etc, etc, I was fed up.
I can't believe that there's anyone that doesn't think that an organization of Microsoft's size wouldn't own a little of everything. Certainly they have G5's. I'm sure they have some Suns in their organization somewhere too. I'm sure they have linux boxes, if only to study. Every company of any size has people who get paid to use the competition's products, to compare them to their own.
However, what he was really fired for was divulging info about what's in which building. This seems way over the top, but I guess MS can set whatever security rules they want.
Though, as you know, the filter is there because the lenses are not designed to focus IR to the same point as visible light. It's hard enough to get a lens to focus red through blue light close to the same points; even there it fails and that's called "chromatic aberration".
If the IR was not blocked, you'd get a very fuzzy picture due to the IR image being focussed to a slightly different place than the visible light image.
The "X-Ray" effect is real but very weak. Many fabric dyes and printing inks are practically transparent in the IR. Because of this, printed patterns, particularly on synthetic materials, may not show up if you've viewing in pure IR light.
In order to see the effect, you not only need to remove the IR block filter, you need to install an IR pass filter, which blocks VISIBLE light and lets through only IR. They're freaky filters, I have one. They appear completely black but the camcorder can see through them. They're pretty expensive filters, because they're only really used in industry or by pro photographers; a smallish filter that a camcorder might use will run $50 or more.
You also need to have a VERY strong IR source; basically, you must be shooting outside in direct sunlight.
With all this in place, you can kinda, sorta, see through clothes, a little. It looks maybe almost as good as a wet t-shirt contest, at absolute best, but not really quite that good. Also everything is monochrome, and the Sonys that people were using for some reason tint the scene green; I guess they thought that green looked like night vision equipment and people would think that was cool. Really, it's just kinda stupid; I would have rather had B&W.
All in all, it's a hell of a lot of money and effort for practically no result.
Several companies already have these:i sion.htm d is k_dpv.html
http://www.delkin.com/news/press/Picturev
http://www.steves-digicams.com/2003_reviews/san
etc.
These don't have HDTV outputs, but that shouldn't run the price from $80 to $500.
Yup, then everyone would hack their senders to broadcast "ambulance".
Now, you can just say "if you have a sender, it's illegal" and simply ticket anyone who's got an IR emitter in their car. Trivial to detect. If you made them legal but required the proper code, then you have to have a device that can decode the flashes to tell whether they're breaking the law or not, and even then, they might have a switch to kick back and forth, so you may not always be able to nail them.