Posts by Herby

All this talk of W8 reminds me...

Of my mother (94 this year!) telling me to eat my vegetables. My reply is: "but I don't like them", and life goes on. Sometimes my wife does the same thing and I respond (autotomically) "yes dear" and proceed to gulp them down with a glass of soda or milk.

W8 seems to be similar. We have all the sales people (or Microsoft) saying that it is going to be good for you, and people who actually USE their computers for productive purposes, saying "no thank you", or "yes dear" and doing it the old (W7/XP) way.

Unfortunately, at some time, the diet will only have the W8 vegetables and we will all need to subsist on them after the alternatives run out. My? I just grow my own food over here on this Linux tree that tastes just fine and keeps me alive quite well. Yum yum.

Life goes on (*SIGH*).

Ah, yes point contact transistors...

Back in my single digit age youth, I put together a single CK722 transistor driven code practice oscillator. It was a wonder to behold. My dad helped me assemble it on a 4" by 4" wood plank, and I plugged in headphones with glee. It wasn't until about 16 years later that I got my license, but I did electronics the entire time.

The CK722 was produced by Raytheon and was in a little blue package. Mid 50's.

Of course, this begs the question...

What happens to an iPhone if it is Tasered?

Is it covered by the warranty?

Of course, if a big burly policeman can't handle a diminutive Chinese "Lady", without the use of a Taser, what good is he? Probably scared of the lawsuit for bad (sexual?) behavior. Oh well...

But it DOES get complicated...

Here in the USA where there are basically three power grids (West, East, and Texas) the frequency doesn't change that much. That being said, the power companies make a special effort to have exactly 5,184,000 cycles of power each and every day (save leap seconds), so clocks won't accumulate errors. The power companies take considerable pride in their 60Hz they generate, and a sample every second or so is probably differentiated by the error in the sampling equipment, most likely due to the ambient noise.

The bigger trick would be to have a recording and try to determine when it was recorded, talk about a needle in a haystack. Who knows if it will be successful.

The other problem is when recordings are made "off grid", battery powered and away from the hum (out in the country?). Not going to get much power line grunge here. Compound that with an AC inverter run off a car battery which generates much better quality hash, and you won't be able to do much.

Now where are those yellow stripes that are on my laser/inkjet printer.........

Not slinky on stairs, but rather...

(As the commercial for an insurance company says) A slinky on an escalator.

The best part of the experiment should be to drop a ball at the same time as the slinky which would better show off the relations. Yes, this was suggested before.

World needs the ITU??

Not really. We need the IETF much more and have it OUT of government hands!

The UN (and the corruption it fosters) has outlived it usefulness. We would be better off without it! If people want to play in their sandbox, and make rules, let them do it on their own dime/half-crown.

USA Reference...

Go to your local record library and listen to MTA by the Kingston Trio.

"This could happen to you!"

What they SHOULD have done

Is change the price of crude oil. Moving it down a significant amount ($20/bbl or so) would have probably disrupted the market more than attempting to stop the export.

Of course, making it go down to under $40 a barrel would be even nicer, as I do like my petrol less than a buck a gallon.

It isn't like they need even more money for a totally dysfunctional family that runs the country (and treats the female of the species as a piece of property).

One small problem...

When you have portable FM radios (that work from 88-108 MHz), their local oscillator (if using high size injection at 10.7 MHz) can be in the nav aid band (108 MHz to 118 MHz). This is the most likely problem that crops up. You really don't want the VOR receiver in the airplane pointing back to the passenger compartment. True it is unlikely, but you never know.

This is why they have pacemaker warnings in front of microwave ovens.

It goes back to the fact that some manufacturers are lazy. They don't put adequate shielding in their devices and as such they are subject to interference. There are exceptions, but still there are lazy manufacturers. Unfortunately the users of the offending equipment are want to blame the generator of the (very slight) interfering signal so they "ban them all".

As for cell phones, there is another problem. If you are up in the air, you may light up a bunch more cell towers than you would if you were on the ground. Each tower that has to ignore you means that they can't use that frequency. That in turn lowers the capacity of the cell phone network for others using it. Not a good thing!

So as they say "Its complicated!" (*SIGH*)

Here (in the USA)?

A whole bunch of the manufacturing process is in the process of being automated, and the more you can automate means the less "labor" you put into the product. Now that labor is becoming more expensive over "there", it makes sense to invest some $$$ in improving automation here and "make" it here as well.

If this weren't the case, ALL automobiles would be made "overseas with American components" and brought back here. Of course, the labor that IS done here will most likely be done in right-to-work states (which is probably a "good thing").

Now when will AAPL go north of $700? Gotta love that stock!

Obviously forgot the first rule of SCIFs

Everything goes in, and nothing goes out!

Yes, that corner over there has lots of older drives, now considered doorstops.

I have a nephew that works with these things almost every day, and this is about all he will tell me, although he mentions in passing "Three letter agencies" in only those terms.

More "efficient" but...

How long will they last and at what cost?

Another truism is that while incandescent lights are not that efficient in the production of light, they have a side effect of this "inefficiency", that they DO produce heat. While some installations of lights do not need the heat, there are instances where is is necessary. One town in the northern climes here in the USA decided to replace its stoplights with "efficient" led versions. Then came winter and the blowing snow clogged up the shadow tubes used to make the lights more visible to the motorists. Without the heat that was produced from the lights being on, the snow didn't melt causing a blockage. OOOPs not so good.

Another example of using different tools to achieve results: One city here in the SF bay area turned on its lawn sprinklers in the middle of the day for watering during a drought. The common wisdom at the time was that it was more efficient to water at an early morning hour (better absorption, less evaporation, etc.). Nobody noticed the side effect of watering around noon: It kept people from sleeping on the grass in the middle of the day.

Me: I want my 100 watt lights back so my office doesn't need to be heated and I can see better!

Of course, there is ONE problem...

My wife doesn't understand the word "short". She insists on being a bit long on her texts, many a paragraph, most more.

Yes, she has an Jesus phone which she likes to use.

So much for SHORT message service (*SIGH*).

You know there is a site for things like this...

Go take a look at:

http://www.techtales.com/tftechs.html

Makes you wonder if users need a license to operate a computer, which includes a test of common sense (which it appears that many people are lacking).

Now where is that "any" key??

Sorry, but...

...the world has already ended. It did so on November 6th.

Then again, the Mayan calendar just needs another digit. Kinda like a Y1K problem when we went from three digit years to four digit years. We will get over it, simply because Christmas is a joyful holiday, which is close enough to the winter solstice (the reason for the holiday) for the church's purpose (why let a holiday go to waste!).

Be careful...

...In contract negotiations one must be very aware that the phrase "Be careful for what you ask for, you may just get it".

Or as I remember it, in cross examination, or negotiations never ask a question that you don't already know the answer!

Of course it goes without saying: Never really trust a lawyer!

Especially your wife's divorce lawyer!

Why bother?

I just (a couple of weeks ago) installed Fedora 17 on a nice new laptop that was imaged for Windows 7. You just answer a couple of questions like (paraphrasing) "Would you like to shrink your current windows partition down to a manageable size and install Linux on the rest of the disk?" and you say "Why certainly", and the installation continues without a hitch. You then go to Nvidia and get the proper drivers and away you go. What could be simpler? It works quite nicely for me, and if I ever (why?) need Windows 7, I go back to it (and start cursing and swearing like a sailor).

Yes, there is a built-in tax because that is what the company image does, but once you boot Linux, you never look back!

What about Mars?

Yes, us earthlings have monitored the "climate change" on Mars as well. Funny it seems that that planet is going through similar warming/cooling cycles like those we see here on this third planet from the sun. Of course, the change must be caused by the very probes we sent there, one being nuclear fueled and all, but that is a topic for future discussion.

Colossus in the movie...

Colossus as depicted in the movie was a bunch of IBM 1620 front panels that were scrapped by IBM. They had LOTS of blinkenlights and were wired up to do silly flashes. You can see the MAR selector switch on the right side of the consoles.

A shame that the IBM 1620's were scrapped. They were wonderful machines to program (BCD and all that).

3400032007013600032007024902402111963611300102

This just in...

I saw a nice policeman with a headset (it had a microphone too) on his motorcycle. Is this covered as well? The said headset was probably connected to his police radio, but that is a small detail.

Will the trolls sue the local gendarmes and take away their headsets? Now if I held the patent for traffic cameras, that would be another story (*SIGH*).

Everybody wants to be the best

Just ask a bunch of people (random sample) and see how many feel they are "above average". The number is almost always over 50%. So, to get "above average" people, you need some "below average" people, because that is how it works.

Life is like that. We can't all be above average, much as we try.

An exercise: Go look at job descriptions and see just how many want "rock star" or similar type people. Sorry, but the pool is limited, so you get what you are given. That's the way it works, good, or bad. Deal with it!

Now back to the end of year stuff.........

Other Anniversaries

If you really want to go back in time, look no further than ASCII. It was coded about 50 years ago and in some form or another is still going strong. EIA-232 (aka RS-232) in some form or another goes back even further and for simplicity is a real deal. Somewhere in my stash is a genuine Bell 103 modem, complete with attached telephone.

So, some standards DO pass the test of time, while others are just imitators. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine which are which.

Our consolation prize..

Most PC's after about 1988 or so started to have a PS/2 port for the keyboard, or mouse. Nice that there were 6 pins in the connector, and IBM only used 4 of them. They could have used the "other two" for the other device (mouse) and made the connectors not care about what was plugged into them. Oh, so close, but no cigar!

Life goes on, and now we have USB in its 3rd big version (after the 3 previous versions 1.0, 1.1, 2.0) and even greater speeds, where it might have been simplified by using a nicer keyboard/mouse interface like the Mac's ADB (which was meant for only low speed devices). Combine that with firewire (IEEE 1394) and it would have been a simpler universe.

Of course it all goes back to IBM's decision to use a X86 processor in the beginning. If they had chosen a proper chip (Motorola's 68000) instead, I suspect that Intel would be a bunch of silicon dust right now, and we would be using 68080's or better that run at GHz speeds.

Life goes on, and we are doomed by the compatibility with the past. (*SIGH*)

VCD

The formatting for VCD is easier to generate. Most VCD's will play on DVD players (they don't advertise it much). So, yes VCD is alive and well. It is just that not much COMMERCIAL content is generated, as that is where DVDs are being used.

The company I worked for had some VCD generating software/hardware at one time (long ago!)

Talk about editors...

Yes, there was EDLIN, and yes it was a bit primitive. Some of the alternatives in the day were TECO and an early version of EMACS. If you really want to be "primitive", you can go back just a few years and use IBM punch cards and a keypunch, which I have done (yes it was a while ago). Doing it primitive style does yield some positive results, as one is very careful when doing edits, checking things before making commitments.

As the saying goes: Nothing humbles you more than editing at 10 cps (an ASR 33 Teletype), or on a keypunch, although one can do "cut & paste" operations of full lines with punch cards quite quickly!

I wonder...

What would happen if a bunch (50 or more) students got together and jointly zapped their RFID tags. Then when replaced, did it again. Sounds like a good thing to organize a student protest about.

Kinda like Von Ryan's express: "Parade strip" (when they burned the rags they had for clothes).

Microsoft V. Google is like

(Sorry for invoking Godwin's Law) Hitler V. Stalin. You really want both of them to lose, so you don't know who to really root for.

The best possible outcome for this is to have "method patents" disallowed. Then we can all go home and worry about more pressing issues.

The eatery at the center of the Pentagon

Was called "ground zero". Now they will need to name the center of the Apple universe, where a nice red target will be placed (probably along with Steve Jobs ashes).

Sounds like...

...a franchise operation. Just go into a Mac Donald's (every town has one) and see how different they are from on another. Same menu, same drinks. The only thing you have going for you is the physical location, and there is no guarantee that they won't open another store next door.

Sure, it is a high margin business, but those margins go down if the cost of selling is too high.

Not a good business model in my book. Have you tried mail order?

Or...

We can all go back to token ring. Needs to be reliable, eh?

Bits at 10G speeds aren't far apart (little over an inch), and the circuitry to figure it all out isn't easy to get right. Given that, it may be easier to just have point to point links between things in your server farm, and forgo the switches entirely. So, your server may need a bunch (half dozen) of 10G ports, but the rest (to talk to the rest of the world can be a bit slower.

Decisions, decisions....

A billion here, a billion there...

...Pretty soon it adds up to real money.

Thanks, Ev. We miss you.

Just remember this...

If IBM had chosen the 68k over the 8088 for the original PC, Intel would probably be dust right now. They wouldn't be making CPU chips, but probably EPROMS, and DRAM chips like jellybeans.

Yes, I believe that the 68k is a much better processor, and might have cured several mistakes that were made back in 1981 for the original PC. Wishful thinking (*SIGH*).

"Method" patents:

BAD!

One of these days, they will (attempt to) patent a silly way to score a goal in soccer (football), or a touchdown in football (I don't know what the UK calls American football) and then when the Dallas Cowboys try to use said method, they get sued (of course in the eastern district of Texas) and maybe they will get some sense knocked into them (doubtful, but we can hope!).

Until then (*SIGH*)

As the saying goes...

Success has a zillion heroes.

Failure has a single scapegoat.

Unfortunately us IT types usually get stuck in the failure model until we can prove otherwise. As for being a hero, the IT guy rarely gets to be in that circle.

Life goes on. As the saying goes: Good, Fast, Cheap, pick (at most) two.

Or...

One can just download LibreOffice and use that. Works with 'docx' style files quite nicely. Price for the fully licensed version is quite attractive as well.

History has a view

Back in the XP days, there was a long time sticking to the operating system, and people got used to having some continuity for a while. There wasn't an upgrade to XP for quite some time. It took YEARS to get Vista in the pipeline, and users didn't want to budge from an nicely working XP ecosystem, which was humming along for many years. After a while, XP got a little tired, and the reviews for W7 were "ok" and with new hardware having it "built in" people came to accept it, slowly, but they accepted it. Now comes along W8, just two years after W7, and the populus just doesn't want to go through an upgrade cycle right now. They just got through migrating everything to W7 and there is no business reason to take the next leap into the unknown so quickly.

So, it is all a matter of timing. The lifetime of XP made users accustomed to a longer upgrade cycle, and with the recession, things just aren't looking that good. Keep the old kit and let it hum for a while. No need to upgrade just for the sake of upgrading, I can still do word processing the way I used to. Why bother. There is no real incentive.

Of course, when the next version of Office will only run on W8, everyone will yell and scream that the new file formats don't work on the old version of Office, but if you got tied products, and the government doesn't object, make their kit obsolete and worry not.

Windows 9 anyone?

Does it include noise suppression?

If it doesn't, everyone will be sniffing waiting for the inevitable result, which is probably just as bad. The best prevention is to be as silent as one can be, and ignore the "result".

On the other hand, methane is a major "greenhouse gas" if there ever was one (even more potent than CO2!). If this magic apparel reduces the methane by some magic means, will it be far behind (sorry) as being required to be work by every man, woman and child. Just sayin'

He could always use floppies

All 10+ thousand of them.

What is the cost of a 16 Gbyte SD card compared to the filing fee for this foolishness. Mind you the object of the insult is deserving of other fault finding, but I have seen SD cards going for around $1.00/GByte. So, $16 to get everything back. Probably wishing he never got the useless keyboard to edit his word documents. Oh, well. A fool and his money are soon parted.

One could always ask Doc Brown

He pronounced giga-watts as jigawatts which is the wrong way as well. Of course I sometimes call then giggle watts, or speeds of current processors as giggle hertz.

Maybe....

They will sell lots of the clicky keyboards that magically attach to the silly surface tablets running Windows 8. I mean that is what they advertize on the telly over here in the colonies. It seems that that is all the Surface tablets can do these days.

Sorry, one big problem

Hydrogen is difficult to store. Most containers just don't hold it and they leak. Add to that that hydrogen is pretty corrosive, and makes metal containers pretty brittle. Of course, as others have noted, you need to compress the gas a bunch to get it into a container to use it. Now after you have the stuff, you need to use it. Not easy to do, as it really isn't an easy to use fuel. Sure, there are fuel cells, but they are big to generate anything useful in the way of voltage at any current. It might be easier to use the hydrogen to combine with some of the ugly carbon to make methane.

All in all not easy to do. For me: I'll stick with what works and still fuel my vehicle (a nice bug SUV) with gasoline/petrol like all us ugly Americans do, much as our re-elected president doesn't like it.

The problem with Gnome is...

That silly cashew they keep using for a stupid logo.

I guess it goes downhill from there, but I'll leave it to others to decide.

Every user interface gets this way!

It seems that all user interfaces o from "simple to use" to more and more complex as time goes on. It isn't that KDE does this, it seems that all of them want to be fancier and fancier as time goes by. The original Mac interface has gotten more and more complex. They added such things as color and animations then stuck the app dock (yes you can even configure it as well). Windows suffers as well, with its latest incantation (TIFNAM) which is all about being flashy on phones. In the Linux world both Gnome and KDE suffer form this growing complexity/featureism which seems as a way to distinguish from one another (usually failing in the process).

It happens in other ways as well. Just look at automobiles. Have you tried to order one recently? There are options from A-Z and more after that. The game is to distinguish from one another and as long as there is competing ways, featurism and customization will be the norm.

Oh, well. One modem for everyone, as we are all different!

So, let me get this streight...

They want us to use text messages INSTEAD of voice because it takes up less bandwidth. This I understand. Now please tell me why voice calls are cheaper that text messages.

Different profit centers, I assume.

For the record, the voice part of a call takes about 64k bits per second (probably compressed by 1/2 but I'm not sure) in each direction for the call. Typical messages (tweet length) are 140 characters (double for overhead), making it around 4000 or so bits, which in my calculations is less than a tenth of a second of a voice call.

Begs the question: Why?

Explaination: Simple

It is all done with mirrors.