Posts by Jon Bar 14 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Jun 2011
Sounds like the original programmers were working down at the BIOS level to intercept the keystrokes for the password before they were converted to ASCII. In which case, you'd better not make any typos when typing the login no matter what the keyboard layout or language installed were.
Well, Marco RubiNO conveniently forgets that back in 1974, during the Oil Embargo, the US tried year-round DST. Lasted 2 years before that naff idea got deep-sixed. If he really wanted to make a useful suggestion (Oops, I forgot who it was, sorry!) he'd suggest year-round Standard Time. I was just getting to leave for work in some semblance of light; now I'm back leaving in the dark - and I was VERY LUCKY to see the genius in a dark coat and slacks running across the middle of a 4-lane road before I hit her. I'd suggest that we shift the US time zones to start with Atlantic (GMT-4) so we get daylight more of the morning hours. Hawaii isn't connected physically to any other part of the US, so they can do as they please.
When I was in grad school in geology back in the mid-'70s one of the professors in the department had NASA funding to study earth-analogues of Martian fluvial features. The features of interest were predominantly fluvio-glacial (jokulhlaups) in origin, so much the type of processes this article's ascribing the features to.
As far as I'm concerned, any HP computer newer than the Omnibook 800 is "Not Fit For Purpose". I have pretty much the same view of Acer. Just finished dealing (via remote control) with my sister's dead HP, which she told me she (her husband) was going to try to resurrect with a new HDD and the recovery USB from her previous Acer. Why don't they ever listen?
My father was a design engineer for Boeing Vertol. He used to get my mother (a social worker) to proof the operators' manuals for the helicopters for much the same reason.
Or, as my classic debugging maxim has always been (can't remember if I owe it to SKB or GLS) "It takes two people to debug any program, only one of which needs to know what it's doing."
My wife used to handle computer support for a large consulting firm (which has since been absorbed, and shredded, by a misguided management of what used to be a good computer manufacturer). One time when she was called to solve the luser's problem everything worked fine for her, and continued to. The user, of course, asked what she did, to which she replied "It knows Mommy's here."
US routes maintain their identity even when they cross state boundaries; for example US 1 runs from Maine to Florida with a consistent designator. You don't need to worry about following (arbitrary numbers for purposes of the example) PA (Pennsylvania) 234 and discovering you're on MD (Maryland) 345, or worse, an unnumbered, named street when you cross a boundary. Maintenance for state, US and US Interstate routes is largely handled by the individual states, with varying degrees of federal (US) funding.
I moderate on several forums and I use "whois" to track down spammers (in order to ban their sorry arses) and to find out banned members who are trying to sneak back in. Both of those instances are certianly violations of the ISP's Terms & Conditions; that should be something ICANN should encourage people to use. Or maybe they want the cash pool of people registering new bogus domains so they can spam more freely.
DOD was one of the earliest objectors to LightSquared. The full details of their tests are, naturally, classified.
LightSquared wants to use, for terrestrial purposes, a band that is internationally set aside for satellite use only (at substantially lower power levels than LightSquared wants to use on the ground).
The precision GPS users (military, aerial navigation, precision agriculture, civil engineering to name a few) are the worst-impacted, and they're using multi-thousand-dollar receivers, usually many of them.
Glonass and Galileo are affected too, as they use the same part of the spectrum that the American NavStar GPS uses. And if LightSquared manages to pull this off, count on them, or competitors, to want to go world-wide with this, so don't pretend that an ocean makes you safe from this.
LightSquared is most analogous to light pollution. You may not notice that you can't see as many stars when that street light goes up nearby, but when they build a brightly-lit shopping mall there, you'll start to see. And the astronomers would have noticed the street light. Precision GPS is the astronomers in this case. Give LightSquared what they want and you'll start to see the problems yourself. Tests to date haven't used the full spectrum LightSquared wants to use, haven't used their signal at full power, and have only used a single tower, not the forest they want to build. And they're still showing massive disruption to the adjoining frequencies.
There's a series of tests being run, which LightSquared is a party to. And LightSquared's test tower is interfering with precision GPS systems over ranges of miles, not yards. That's interfering with as in "rendering completely useless", not as in "causing a couple of meters inaccuracy". And these results are why LightSquared's under attack. Currently there are no other systems of comparable power output anywhere near the frequencies used by GPS (be it NavStar, the US system, Glonass, the Russian system, or Galileo, the European system).
LightSquared has consistently, since the new management came on board, misrepresented its plans. The original proposal in 2003 was for a satellite-based system with a few land-based low power towers, using power levels that were on the order of those used by NavStar, Galileo and Glonass GPS satellites. Only last November did they formally propose to to the FCC that they change their operating mode to a land-based system with very high power levels. The initial tests showed significant interference to precision satellite navigation equipment and also revealed that the LightSquared towers that were used in those tests weren't even using the full power or frequency range that LightSquared now wants to deploy. For more: http://www.gpsworld.com/
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
