Half-baked opinions, served lukewarm.
Just in case you are wondering what your computer does while you are away:
http://www.xs4all.nl/~jvdkuyp/flash/see.htm
(Note: sound effects, safe for work, but noisy.)
Just in case you are wondering what your computer does while you are away:
http://www.xs4all.nl/~jvdkuyp/flash/see.htm
(Note: sound effects, safe for work, but noisy.)
http://www.abc4.com/mediacenter/local.aspx?videoid=72570
John Voight discusses the upcoming movie September Dawn. I’m very interested in seeing this movie, though I have heard it’s simplistic in its portrayal of the motivations of the organizations and individuals installed. And I’ve been in WAY too many online debates regarding the culpability of certain individuals in the tragedy.
http://www.abc4.com/mediacenter/local.aspx?videoid=72570
John Voight discusses the upcoming movie September Dawn. I’m very interested in seeing this movie, though I have heard it’s simplistic in its portrayal of the motivations of the organizations and individuals installed. And I’ve been in WAY too many online debates regarding the culpability of certain individuals in the tragedy. I must remember the wisdom of arguing on the Internet…
Well, they figured out how to make invisibility cloaks (though it’s a long way off) in theory… now they turned their minds to levitation, and solved that, too. How long did we go from E=MC^2 to the atomic bomb? Yeah, about that long from practical levitation for very small devices.
(Yes, I understand the Casmir effect has a range in tens of nanometers. Still doesn’t mean it’s not cool though.)
Well, they figured out how to make invisibility cloaks (though it’s a long way off) in theory… now they turned their minds to levitation, and solved that, too. How long did we go from E=MC^2 to the atomic bomb? Yeah, about that long from practical levitation for very small devices.
(Yes, I understand the Casmir effect has a range in tens of nanometers. Still doesn’t mean it’s not cool though.)
One thing that gets very, very interesting to me is the presence of “virtual particles”, indicators that Nature relies on evolution to figure out the interaction of matter at even the most basic level. Very cool stuff. For a better description of the process involved, see http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~ulf/levitation.html .
All of you who wasted way too much time playing first-person shooters on your PC? Your Time Has Come. Yep, you can now go to Iraq and hunt down real-life enemies on an LCD screen, controlling a robotic soldiers which can be equipped with a wide variety of weapons. Of course, there are only 3 in service in this capacity right now, and I bet the support is a pain (short runtime from the batteries, recharge time, slow deployment, etc.).
All of you who wasted way too much time playing first-person shooters on your PC? Your Time Has Come. Yep, you can now go to Iraq and hunt down real-life enemies on an LCD screen, controlling a robotic soldiers which can be equipped with a wide variety of weapons. Of course, there are only 3 in service in this capacity right now, and I bet the support is a pain (short runtime from the batteries, recharge time, slow deployment, etc.).
I think there’s an ethical question here, though. One of the proposed uses — as demonstrated in the video — is hunting down a sniper. When you can deliver pinpoint-precision bursts of fire at 300 yards and feel removed from the act of killing by a video screen, I wonder how that affects how easy it is to kill? I feel no compunction at mowing down virtual opponents in video games. Would this be similar?
And then there are the technical issues. If the enemy can figure out what frequency you are using, it’s trivial to create a RF jammer with a range larger than 1000 yards. Of course, your average terrorist isn’t going to have one lying around his home and they take some time to make. That said, I’ve made one accidentally using an electric guitar and a malfunctioning distortion pedal. It was cool broadcasting my guitar through my radio 🙂
Obviously, they will be using some sort of encryption with key negotiation to prevent a takeover of the machine. Heck, I use that sort of technology when flying my model airplanes; the only way to “take over” my plane from me is to gain physical access to it, put a jumper on a pair of pins on the receive, and use a sequence to bind it to a new transmitter. I’ve seen enough R/C aircraft go down, though, to think that we need to be pretty cautious.
Pete Dunn is doing a retrospective this week on his trip down the Colorado River. He’s working so hard that I don’t want to. Here are the first few chapters:
Pete Dunn is doing a retrospective this week on his trip down the Colorado River. He’s working so hard that I don’t want to. Here are the first few chapters:
Hope you enjoy. I know I have, and he still has more to come!
As you may know, I’ve moved to a “new” (to me) home in Riverton, Utah. I now have at my disposal a 1000 square foot garage. Well, I’ll have it once I clean all the crap out of it, that is. We’re storing a ton of stuff out there, and I just can’t navigate the darn thing without tripping at the moment. Anyway, I want to build a new home recording studio in my huge garage, inexpensively, while preserving space for usual garage-ey things like fixing cars, building model airplanes, and the average noisy or smelly stuff.
As you may know, I’ve moved to a “new” (to me) home in Riverton, Utah. I now have at my disposal a 1000 square foot garage. Well, I’ll have it once I clean all the crap out of it, that is. We’re storing a ton of stuff out there, and I just can’t navigate the darn thing without tripping at the moment. Anyway, I want to build a new home recording studio in my huge garage, inexpensively, while preserving space for usual garage-ey things like fixing cars, building model airplanes, and the average noisy or smelly stuff.
I’ve made do for the past fifteen years in very tiny shared spaces where I couldn’t make much noise after hours. I couldn’t record without background noise and distractions during the day. This really limited my opportunities to record voice and other live instruments, so I restricted myself mostly to synthesizers and line-in guitar feeds. I did after-hours vocals on recordings, but my shouting in the basement aroused the ire and questions of my children more than once.
I now have the opportunity to build myself a great studio, within a rather limited budget of course. The garage is a huge two-story affair. The previous previous previous owner (yes, I meant to say that thrice) helpfully built a stable inside, which was then closed off by the next owner for storage. This stable is approximately a 10×10 room.
I like the possibilities. It’s indoors, I won’t disturb my family or my neighbors if I’m noisy (though playing the drums at 3AM, even on an acre of land, might elicit some unhappy phone calls), and I can start small using what’s already there without breaking the bank.
Here’s the preliminary to-do list. Ultimately, my goal is to have a professional-looking studio back there, a few hundred dollars at a time.
So what else would I need for a really nice budget studio in a brand-new space? Once I have a dedicated location to do my recording, where kids won’t get into it and I won’t have to fight to get a quiet space alone, I’ll be able to finally do as much recording as I like.
Addendum: I realized I was probably going to get a number of questions regarding my move from Windows XP and Cakewalk Sonar to Linux and Ardour. The simple fact is, the stuff works now and is much more flexible and stable than the Windows alternatives. The downside is, you have a smaller hardware compatibility list, so you can’t just buy random hardware X and expect it to do the job… you have to research first and choose one that’s supported. Low-latency audio has been around in Linux for years, and there are enough musicians using it on a regular basis for it to be a serious choice for the semi-professional musician.
It’s really not about the money. I won’t talk about how much money I’ve spent on audio recording stuff over the years because it’s depressing 🙂 It’s really about having a reliable, stable, flexible system that will get the job done competently. After losing a week of audio work last year due to a Windows XP file-handling glitch, I want to be done using it.
Another advantage of Linux is that I want to go 64-bit with a very large memory allotment for this workstation. If I can avoid hitting the hard disk at all for most of the audio streams and samples, I’ve eliminated a huge bottleneck and freed up a lot more CPU cycles which would have been consumed with I/O otherwise. With the extremely cheap cost of RAM, I could go for 16GB of RAM on my DAW when I build it later this year. Most of my existing projects are 16-bit 44.1 or 48KHz, and only occupy perhaps 2-10GB total for a given project. Moving to 24-bit at twice the sample rate means an increase to 6-30GB per project.
This week, one of my co-workers is taking vacation time while he relocates to California. Although he expects to resume work in a few days, I am really feeling the fact that he is not here at the moment. Unfortunately, because overtime is basically prohibited in my division, I’m not at liberty to put in extra time to deliver what people need… instead, I have to delay their projects for days or weeks because they are stuck in the queue behind more urgent issues.
This week, one of my co-workers is taking vacation time while he relocates to California. Although he expects to resume work in a few days, I am really feeling the fact that he is not here at the moment. Unfortunately, because overtime is basically prohibited in my division, I’m not at liberty to put in extra time to deliver what people need… instead, I have to delay their projects for days or weeks because they are stuck in the queue behind more urgent issues.
That creates three kinds of pain.
Now, the main problem with that last bit is that if I abide by the “no overtime” rule while this co-worker is out, when the time comes for blame on a late project, it’s going to trickle right down to me. I hate the blame game, but I know how it works.
The President will call together his Vice-Presidents and ask them to explain why the product is late. The Vice-Presidents quickly confer to decide who to blame among them, and solemnly intone, “Most of us aren’t to blame: it was Development’s fault.” The Senior Directors in Development are called together by the Vice President of Development to account for the delay; after a consultation with the members of their teams, they blame one of their Directors. That Director calls together his Managers, who confer and blame one of themselves. The Manager talks to his team members, and the team members confer and blame one of their own. The chosen team member protests, “I wasn’t allowed to work overtime!” to his manager. The manager tells the Director it was the Director’s policy against overtime which slowed down the project, the Director tells the Vice-President that it was his budget cuts which prevented overtime allowing timely delivery of the project, and the Vice-President says “I can’t tell the President that, it would mean my job!” so he fires the poor sop who did the work and blamed the lack of overtime, then the VP promises the President immense profitability gains by moving that worker’s job to India.
Luckily, the wheels of corporatocracies turn slowly. My way out is to hope that a co-worker leaves the company within the next year, then when the Fit hits the Shan several months down the road with product delays, I can blame the former co-worker. Thus the Vice-President will hear from his minions that the problem is already solved, and can claim dramatic efficiency improvements, including forcing out that unproductive worker in Cube 20286 at the data center who was responsible for this massive project delay.
This will fuel positive spin about the product that the delays are actually the result of improved processes and attention to detail. This will build buzz about the product, resulting in increased stock prices, then the product will be released and stock prices will fall.
At which point the President will call together his Vice-Presidents and ask them to explain why the stock price is falling. Ultimately some poor schmuck somewhere is going to be blamed, fired, and his job outsourced to India so that the Vice-President of Profiteering promise immense profitability gains by moving that worker’s job to India.
I love Corporate America.
It’s a story of an intern blamed for losing a large fraction of the entire state of Ohio’s personal information. I blame whoever the first real employee was in the line up from him. I don’t blame the contractors. I was a contractor, and your responsibilities are critically limited. The State of Ohio should have had an actual backup plan, not “haul this home in your station wagon”.
It’s a story of an intern blamed for losing a large fraction of the entire state of Ohio’s personal information. I blame whoever the first real employee was in the line up from him. I don’t blame the contractors. I was a contractor, and your responsibilities are critically limited. The State of Ohio should have had an actual backup plan, not “haul this home in your station wagon”.
Here’s an outline of how we treat this kind of data at UltraMegaCorp where I work:
1. The backup unit is inside a caged area of the data center, with a locked door. 2. The data center housing the backup storage unit requires entry through an oubliette with two locked, key-carded, handprint-scan-recognizing doors, separate for in and out. 3. The building housing the data center requires a keycard to get in, and has a guard 24/7. 4. The grounds have a keyed gate with plenty of surveillance.
So much for physical security of the backup system. Then when I handle the backups:
5. I am granted entry to the backup cage. 6. I hook up a laptop to eject the tapes to be shipped off-site. 7. I print out a list of tapes and the date they are sent. This list will be signed, dated, and included inside the container. 8. I fill out a form for the driver and retain a copy. 9. I put the tapes in the case and secure it with a lock. 10. The driver has to do all the same security checks, fills out his part of the form, and transports the tape case in a locked truck. 11. It’s stored at a facility with similar security precautions, totally separate from the other tapes nearby.
This may sound like overkill, but when you store the financial data for millions of people, it’s your fiduciary responsibility.
A point of pride for US Citizens are our political freedoms. While we may quibble about the value of one or two rights, as a whole we pride ourselves on our rights to write or say what we wish about whom we wish, defend ourselves, have a fair justice system, and support the underdog. I have some concerns about habitual restriction of some rights by our country, but I think that with enough public ridicule, lobbying, and voter support, we can keep our government from stomping all over us.
A point of pride for US Citizens are our political freedoms. While we may quibble about the value of one or two rights, as a whole we pride ourselves on our rights to write or say what we wish about whom we wish, defend ourselves, have a fair justice system, and support the underdog. I have some concerns about habitual restriction of some rights by our country, but I think that with enough public ridicule, lobbying, and voter support, we can keep our government from stomping all over us.
An acquaintance of mine, Sylvia Haegle (who happens to be a German citizen), once said that “The shackles of bondage are most often worn on the hands of those who forged them.” It is our failure to defend our liberties which leads to us becoming prisoners of our own policies.
With Sylvia’s quote in mind, I read of the effort of US politicians to devise a country-wide internet filtering program. This effort is being promoted under the legerdemain of “combating child pornography.”
Whenever any legislation is proposed “for the children”, my internal bulls–t meter begins ringing very loudly. This internal klaxon rings loudly when I hear of attempts to restrict computer games, too. Sure, the effort may actually be legit, but pushing it under the banner of “protecting children” is a sure-fire way to call for it to be examined very, very closely.
As an example, then, let’s look at how another country has used their ability to restrict the viewing habits of readers. The only country which has taken strong, pro-active moves in this direction — in part for the “protection of children” — is China. How have they used their internet filtering capabilities?
Based on the fruits of their effort, I’d say the main by-product of China’s attempt at nation-wide Internet filtering is squashing speech with which the powers-that-be disagree. I strongly suspect our own efforts at filtering would be no more successful than theirs: easily bypassed by those with the least bit of technical acumen. However, by bypassing it you are breaking the law, even if what you are doing is not otherwise illegal.
Papers, please?
Ran across an interesting Slashdot link the other day to computing companies that we miss. My mother worked for two of them!
Ran across an interesting Slashdot link the other day to computing companies that we miss. My mother worked for two of them!