Posts by David D. Hagood
1107 posts • joined Wednesday 21st May 2008 17:09 GMT
No need for lots of base stations - leaky coax
Providing RF comms underground doesn't have to have lots of base stations. Google "leaky coax".
You run a length of coaxial cable down the line. At intervals on the coax the shield is removed, allowing signals in and out. Voila - service all along the length of the cable.
Posted in McAfee seeks asylum in Guatemala
Re: His dog
The dog came down with Sudden Acquired Chunky Lead Poisoning.
Halogens don't like dimmers
If you are running a halogen at anything other than full tilt boogie, you are shortening its life.
The whole idea of the halogen is that the envelope has to get HOT. The tungsten evaporates from the filament, and reacts with the halogen gas filling the bulb to form a tungsten halide. If the envelope is hot, the halide won't deposit on it, and the interior of the bulb will reach an equilibrium wherein just as fast as the tungsten evaporates from the filament, it will be redeposited by the tungsten halide decomposing from the heat of the filament.
If the envelope is not hot enough, that tungsten halide will deposit out on the envelope, the interior won't reach equilibrium, and eventually enough tungsten will evaporate from part of the filament to make it break.
Contact your carrier
Contact your carrier, and put a block on all SMS to your phone - I did (on Verizon). They don't like to admit its an option, they will try to wiggle out of it and sell you their premium "filtering" options or a (more expensive) plan with unlimited SMS, but just say
"I want a total block on all SMS - no sending, no receiving, no exceptions, no fooling. Either give that to me or I will terminate the contract."
At least on Verizon, it's free.
(I have a smart phone and unlimited data - I use IM so that it not only goes to the phone but to my computers as well.)
An Appropriate Apple Appellation (Alliteration Always Absolutely Acceptable!)
I'll name my child (the one with the rounded corners)
iGor!
(walk this way...)
First...
@Petrea Mitchell
"So, is Curiosity its first or last name?"
First.
It's full name is
Curiosity Patience Rodriguez.
Re: Quote from Benjamin Franklyn
Right! Up against the wall, Magister! Quoting a known terrorist like that! With them, treated like them, I say! Against the Crown, the whole lot of ye!
(considering that, from the Crown's perspective of the time, Dr. Franklin was indeed a traitor, and would doubtless be branded a TERRRRRRRROOOOORRRRIIIISTT<fnord!> in today's world, by quoting him you would be proving yourself to be a "Person Of Interest" yourself.)
And many of you wonder why we Americans are so mistrusting of Government....
Re: Why Bother?@AceRimmer
Also, Google Nav doesn't do multiple waypoints in a route. Try navigating Route 66 for example: there is no way to put in all the needed waypoints to correctly follow the route. You can specify Chicago and Santa Monica, and it will happily route you on the interstates. Oh, you wanted to go to Peach Springs and Oatman? Well, you should have set up a route for part of the trip, driven it, stopped (you DO stop when fiddling with your sat-nav, don't you?), set the next segment up, lather/rinse/repeat.
,Apatosaurus not Brontosaurus.
Apatosaurus, not Brontosaurus. "Brontosaurus" refers to the incorrectly assembled skeleton (wrong head on the body).
Bad timing...
And as all this state level legalization occurs,
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/11/16/hostess-brands-says-it-will-liquidate/
"What is it, Stoner-wan?"
"II felt a great disturbance in the Weed, as if millions of Twinkies suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened."
(not to speak of the negative impact on parapsychologies everywhere, as they are left without a proper reference for PKE levels.)
Re: Praising British trains?
Hey, at least the British HAVE TRAINS.
Hell, Amtrak is considering re-routing the Southwest Chief because BNSF won't maintain the damn track in western Kansas and eastern Colorado, and they can't run the train fast enough to keep up with the schedule - and THAT'S saying something (namely, that they cannot even run the train at 60MPH).
I'm guessing all the towns that will be losing service will now insist that the government give them air service.
Send this tweet to friends*
* By giving us any email, you give us authorization to spam the bajeezus out of that email, no matter what the owner of that email wants.
Twitter not responsible for lost friendships or bodily injury due to us spamming any email you give us.
-------------------
Makes me want to create a bunch of Sneakemail addresses, print them out on perforated paper, and keep in my billfold - "Oh, you want my email address? [rip] - here you go [/me scribbles their name on stub]."
Re: blast the devil with your laser canons!
Laser cannons? Gee, all I every had was Rocket Launchers. And the BGF, of course.
(I loved the fundies getting excited about Doom - YOU ARE KILLING THE DEMONS YOU TWITS!)
Re: No fair
As I understand it, UK power sockets are wired in a loop, with both ends of the loop terminating at the breaker panel. This was done to save copper - each outlet is, in effect, fed by 2 sets of wires, and so you have double the copper free of charge (no pun intended). However, that means that opening a fuse on one end of the loop will NOT disconnect the rest of the loop - only the breaker popping will do that.
Also, the decision to use 220V rather than 110V was for the same reason - reduce copper usage by reducing the current needed to provide the same power levels. Of course, the higher voltage being more dangerous was the reason all the outlets needed their own fuses and switches.
But I could be wrong, as I am not an electrician, and especially I am not a UK electrician.
Elop is not a "Trojan Horse"...
... he is a Trojan Jackass, so technically his answer was truthful.
As for Sinofsky - I think we need the perspective of history on this one: either he's bailing because he's seen the seawater in the bilge and knows Win8 is going to be a shipwreck, or he's been kicked out because MonkeyBoy thinks he is a threat, or he is being fitted for his own Wooden Equine Armor of Infiltration.
That's what building codes are for
"Architects who don't seem to want to cater for anyone actually using their creation. We used one who flatly refused to have ugly power sockets ruining the smooth flow of his walls,[....]"
Here in the US we'd just say "well, sorry, but building codes require an outlet every 6ft on any wall larger than 6ft. If we do it your way, the nice building inspector will not issue a certificate of occupancy and all your nice work will be for naught."
"Put the minis in the bag, and nobody gets hurt"
"And NO SEQUENTIAL MAC ADDRESSES!"
Seriously - do they have a way to track the MACs on this devices? If so, they can look for them in the wild, and work backwards from the person holding them, and find the fence.
Also, were Apple to just announce "Sucks for you, those minis will self destruct the first time they talk to the app store" that would sort-of take the shine off them, wouldn't it?
Computer Security - It's Not Rocket Science!
Computer Security - It's Not Rocket Science!
How about
.dot
.dash
.slash
.space
to really confuse people?
As the Harley owners say...
"Loud Pipes Save Lives."
Did I miss the price? and Freeview....
Did I blind spot the price on this beast, or perhaps does the price only show on the non-print version (Sorry Reg, when I see a multipage article I go straight to the Print version - STOP MAKING ME SCREW AROUND WITH MULTI PAGE ARTICLES).
And as for Freeview - since this has USB master capability, in theory somebody could just write an app to talk to a USB Freeview tuner (at least Freeview is MPEG4 IIRC, and will thus be something this can do hardware decode. Unfortunately, ATSC is MPEG2 and I have yet to see an Android device with hardware accel for MPEG2).
Celestia...
Oh look, they've webified Celestia - http://www.shatters.net/celestia/
except for that bit of
a) working locally
b) having a much larger database
Re: Wow! I'm more important than I thought
I've started adding whole Chinese IP blocks to my personal firewall's blacklist - because I, too, feel the Chinese seem to be "overrepresented" in my intrusion lists.
Posted in Israel declares war on Hamas via Twitter
WWII as an RTS
Is anybody else reminded of:
http://www.strategypage.com/humor/articles/military_jokes_20057151.asp
Excuse me, I must...
Excuse me, I must go outside and fart upwind. It will have more impact upon the world than these petitions do.
The whole "We The People" petition program is a gigantic waste of time. It's only purpose is to allow the administration a chance to practice being on message for every one of the petitions raised. There is more chance that the after-effects of that last burrito I had will have a measurable impact on the administration policy than any of those petitions ever will - the administration has shown that over and over again.
Moreover, those petitions SHOULD NOT have any impact. Online petitions are too easy - there is too much chance for people to support something while being spectacularly ignorant of the cost (so long as that cost is born by somebody else).
When the people of those various stated go forth, collect the needed signatures of registered voters, put the issue on a public ballot in their states, get the public to vote for its acceptance, and put that to the Federal government will I give more than a puff of methane in the breeze.
I hear...
I hear Hans Reiser is looking for a roomie....
What else from my childhood....
... can Hollywood rape?
Star Trek - now with "younger, edgier" characters (and more plot holes than a colander), plus the abominations that were the last season of the last TV show.
Star Wars - that taun-taun has already been beaten to death on this forum.
Tron - It might have been nice if the person who did the sequel had maybe seen the first movie? and if the motivations of the main characters had made a bit more sense? and could it hurt to have some actual in-jokes for computer nerds, like the first movie?
Starship Troopers - couldn't have been any more antithetical to the books if they'd tried.
Speed Racer.... no. just no.
I suppose I should be thankful that Hollywood has not yet gone after Space:1999, Salvage 1, or Wizards.
Yet.
FTFY
"You carry a weapon *and assume merely carrying it acts as some magical force field, and are unwilling to use it when the time comes, and are unpracticed in its use*, and theres more chance of it being used against you rather than the attacker"
IMDB to the rescue....
I don't know who you are. I don't know what you want. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills; skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you stand up, admit what you did, and resign, that'll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don't, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you.
It's a conspiracy, I tell you!
"Worried dad" my left genital - This is an Agent Of The Government, out to Oppress Us ALL! By making cell phones into a weapon, now when The JackBooted THUGS see us trying to film their TOTALITARIAN CRIMES against the 99%, The MAN can use the excuse "I thought they were pulling a pepper spray can, so I shot them - and the phone, too, because it was a weapon!"
(how did I do? Did I capture the tinfoil-chapeau brigade correctly?)
Re: Not that readily
"Obviously, if you're too much of a shy little wallflower (like wot I am), then going up to the pretty young pharmacist and bellowing "DO YOU HAVE ANY BIGGER CONDOMS?" is.. mortifying. "
You are an imposter - NO man would have a problem with that announcement; indeed, most would be happy to grab the PA microphone and say "Pharmacy, we need larger condoms for the stud on checkout 3!"
This being LOHAN...
What about
Control Rocket Altitude Confirming Kosher (CRACK)
Mission Electronics Trimming Hazard (METH)
Deploy Rocket Under Good Situations (DRUGS)
But does he have
But does he have
1) An arm for microelectronics work
2) An arm for polite company
3) An arm for fighting
Bah - I'd rather have an imaginary 3rd arm...
(the one with The Moon is a Harsh Mistress in one pocket and The Long ARM of Gil Hamilton in the other).
This is just so the mice can play
This is just so the mice can play....
The one with "The Mouse and the Motorcycle" in the pocket.
Why not make yourselves heros, Egypt?
Why not make yourselves heros, Egypt, and ban death, illness, and poverty?
You have as much likelihood of making that happen.
Posted in Angry Birds Star Wars game review
I'm holding out for
Angry Birds Lego Star Wars Kingdom Hearts MLP.
Re: "Grout" might be more applicable still
""Grout" might be more applicable still, given its mechanical sealing properties as opposed to largely cosmetic ones."
Funny, but given this is Macrobe we are talking about, I'd have argued the exact opposite - largely cosmetic, not structural.
Considering the behavior on most online forums
Considering the behavior on most online forums - the screaming, the feces-throwing, the blind groupthink - I wonder if perhaps this has already happened and I just missed it....
Re: Chimpanzees are not monkeys
Insensitive bastard, making fun of his speech impediment....
Posted in WTF is... RF-MEMS?
I do SDR for a living.
I do SDR for a living, and you are wrong. There are 3 things that prevent your idea from working:
1) Not enough bits on the converters. To have an SDR in which the antenna dumps into the converters, you need very fast converters - to cover all the bands a phone might need you'd be looking at gigasamples per second - hundreds of gigasamples per second to do 60GHz. The best gigasample converters are around 12 bits. The dynamic range just isn't there - a strong signal in the FM band will swamp the converter and prevent it from hearing that weak signal in the cellular band. Yes, you get some processing gain as you band-limit the signal in the digital domain, but if the desired signal is too small, you still won't be able to resolve it.
2) not enough processing power. Even if you ignore the above, it takes a lot of processing power to handle a gigasample/second signal. Your phone will last just long enough to open the socket before draining the battery.
3) Noise. Sorry, we live at about 280K - and the noise floor is such that a wideband converter will see so much thermal energy that it will be swamped no matter what. Remember point 1? You don't even need a strong FM signal in the area, just the thermal noise from the phone will be enough. Unless you want your phone's 500 kg batter (remember point 2?) to be even heavier to run the cryopumps to keep your phone's front end at 2K.
Even the best SDR on the market has a few analog IF stages to bring the signal down in frequency to something more reasonable, and to band limit it to bring the noise floor down, and to decimate the sample rate to something that can be processed reasonably.
tl;dr: - you still need to have a tunable antenna, SDR isn't a panacea.
US Civics 101
OK, since many of you quite logically have not had US Civics 101, since you don't live here, let me give you a quick run down on the issues around voting here.
1) Voting is regulated largely state by state. Remember that the design concept of the US is a bunch of more-or-less sovereign states, sort of like what the EU is trying to be. So just as Germany cannot tell England how to conduct their votes, Maine cannot tell Kansas how to conduct its votes. Before you suggest we change that, I would suggest you ask yourself if you WANT Germany to be able to tell you how to conduct your votes.
2) Voting isn't just for the President. There are a host of other items on the ballot - Federal level senators and representatives, state level representatives and senators, local issues, and various other locally elected officials - so we cannot have one ballot for everywhere.
3) Voting may be different for different locales. Depending upon precisely WHERE in the district I live, I may have a different ballot, even from somebody else voting at the same voting location.
4) One of the design concerns we have in our system is preventing the following scenario: I work for Dr. Evil. Dr. Evil issues a memo: "You WILL vote for MiniMe for judge. You WILL bring me proof of this. If you don't, you WILL feed the alligators in the pit." In order to prevent that, we do not allow anybody to have any form of receipt that could be used to prove how they voted - you aren't even allowed to use your cell phone, so you cannot take a picture of your ballot. Hence, there is no way I can provide Dr. Evil with proof of how I voted, so I am free to say "Sure, I voted for MiniMe". All of these "let me have a receipt so I can check if my vote was counted right" need to work in a way that Dr. Evil cannot put the thumbscrews on me to insure I voted "correctly".
Now, I will admit: one of the driving factors for e-voting is the mindset of "WE WANT TO KNOW WHO WON - NOW!!!!!!!". If we could just get everybody to be willing to wait a few days we could do hand counted ballots, but this "we must know for the 6'oclock news (and so what if the Hawaiians are still voting - screw them!)" would not allow the time for hand counting.
Here's how to think of frame rates
OK, here's how to think of frame rates.
The speed limit on the highway is 60 MPH (your monitor is 60 Hz).
Assume strict law enforcement (sync to vertical refresh on).
Consider a Yugo (low powered system) and a Jaguar (high powered system).
On flat ground and no headwind (simple scene, minimal polygons and textures) both are the same speed - 60 MPH.
Now, we hit the Rockies, and get up to 10000 feet, on a 15% grade (complex scene with lots of polygons and textures). The Yugo is making 20 MPH, the Jag is still running 60.
Now, what if you don't happen to live by the Rockies, but you want to compare the two cars? You find a nearby stretch of road with no speed limit or no enforcement (sync to refresh OFF), and you see how fast you can go. The Yugo goes 60, the Jag goes 160.
But the important question is
But the important question is, "does it have a beeper?"
It simply MUST have a beeper that beeps when armed.
A count-down display is also essential.
And of course, a red and a blue wire.
Re: This! Yahoo! exclamation! mark! thing!
Just Shatnerize the post in your mind.
It! Makes! It! Somewhat! Moreberable!
Other reservations?
Will Microsoft have any other reservations in their tablets?
* Reserving half the CPU for DRM, Genuine Advantage, and virus scans
* Reserving half the display for ads
* Reserving half the network bandwidth for updates
I know I have MY reservations....
And will the Japanese make up some new superstitions?
And will the Japanese make up some new superstitions around meaningless genetic variation, as they have around blood types?
(For those that don't know: for some reason the Japanese have decided that the types of sugar molecules on your red blood cell directly correlates to personality types. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_types_in_Japanese_culture)
Re: Come back <blink>, all is forgiven.
"Before you know it, there will be <marquee> tags everywhere, Closely followed by flying toasters and dancing jesuses."
And embedded MIDI files. Don't forget embedded MIDI files.
I know I haven't forgotten.
No matter how I've tried.
Re: If you want to do OO, use an OO language.
@Christian Berger - *I* never said Java was a good example of OO - quite the contrary. I inferred the AC preferred Java over C++ due to his comment, and challenged him to perform 2 OO tasks in Java.
Is C++ the ultimate OO language - NO. Due to it's C heritage, there are many things about C++ that are fugly. And while templates are very powerful, having yet a third programming paradigm (structured programming, OO, and then template metaprogramming) is IMHO not the way. Having to go to all the lengths to have templates work in the face of variant parameters (e.g. SFINAE) rather than having as simple "if typename has a member named Ptr that is convertable to/from T*, instantiate this function" makes templates far more difficult to deal with. (and while concepts would be nice, they still are a) not a part of the language standard and b) are still fugly to set up).
However, I have yet to see anybody propose a better OO language that will run at any kind of speed (Smalltalk and Ruby get disqualified here).
Re: If you want to do OO, use an OO language.
@AC: Ah, let me guess, you like Java. Go implement RAII in Java, and come back when you have done so. Go implement an object type that handles complex rational numbers, with error bar tracking and unit analysis, and make it possible to do a simple "a = b + c" without manually calling member functions, and come back.
Several issues
I've said it before and I shall say it again: the Gnome development team needs an adult, somebody to say "You can't have any pudding if you don't eat your meat", or rather, "No, you cannot work on 'teh new shinee features' until you get the basic system working.", things like:
* get ATSC working again. When they decided to create dvb-daemon (which, itself, is largely a reimplementation of much of what MythTV does, not that reimplementing MythTV in a cleaner fashion isn't a good idea), they ripped out all the code in the Gnome codebase that spoke ATSC. And they've never put it back. So Gnome now cannot do broadcast TV in the third most populous nation on the planet.
* stop screwing around in C. I had evaluated both GTK and Qt professionally, and initially I was leaning to GTK because it was C, not C++. However, when you start looking at GTK, you see that it really is trying to implement an object oriented pattern, but because they are using C, it is error prone, requires a great deal of donkey work from the programmer, and difficult. If you want to do OO, use an OO language.
* Stop screwing around in Vala. So, having noticed the issues with C, rather than moving to C++, the Gnome team decide to implement their own OO language. Of course, it won't be as widely supported as C++, won't have the libraries C++ has, won't have the experience base C++ has, but hey! It will be at least 20% cooler, right?
* Stop conflating "user friendly" with "user stupid" - allow for some degree of customization, because not all users are the same. Not everybody needs 20 gears in their vehicle, but a tractor/trailer driver cannot use an automatic!
* Stop using the Registry^W^W GConf as an excuse to not provide user interfaces for configuration. Again, when the Gnome developers are grudgingly forced to acknowledge that some users do need to configure advanced features, the standard response is "Go into Gconf-editor and tweak this key." That's just being lazy - stupid lazy.
* Stop needlessly cross-linking things. OK, you want to allow Evolution to sync with PDAs, great! But don't FORCE me to install the Palm Pilot crap if I want to install Evolution - do your damn job as a software engineer and design a proper interface between Evo and ANY PDA, and allow the implementations of that interface to be installed, or not, and let Evo discover them at run time.
* And while on the subject of Evolution - Either fix it so it doesn't lock up and have to be restarted on a regular basis, or kill it. And if you don't kill it, how about NOT slavishly aping the UI of Outlook, This idea of not being able to directly launch a mail window, or a calendar window, or a contacts window, but rather opening a new window that is a clone of the current window, THEN switching the role of that window SUCKS.
* Stop reinventing CORBA badly. CORBA had strong checking of the interfaces, while I cannot count the number of times I have seen big parts of Gnome break because somebody changed a DBus message format without telling anybody. Plus with CORBA they really could start doing software as a service - you want to access the cloud, just access the name server for it, get your object instance, and rock on like it was local.
* Building on that: network transparency is important, stop pretending it isn't. X, PulseAudio, and CORBA all allow any program to run on my local display, even if it is located halfway around the world. Microsoft ignored that, and had to restore it with things like RDP (and third parties like Citrix had to work on it as well). Being able to SSH to a server and run, well, damn near anything greatly simplifies things like VM appliances.
If the Gnome team wants to work on "teh shinee", why not do things like a proper OO environment, where I can drag something to a printer icon to print it, or to an editor icon to edit it, or to a mail icon to forward it, or to an Stereo Litho icon to make it into plastic, and the "something" I am dragging can work out what the appropriate response it? How about using 3D on the desktop to meaningfully convey more information to me, rather than just making my windows look like they are gelatin.
