This blog is owned by Bryan Price aka bytehead located in Jacksonville, FL.
I am not the pitching coach for the Diamondbacks, nor the pitcher formerly from Rice.
Even if I am used to be more famous than him them. At least according to Google. I'm now down to fifth place when I used to be #1.
Blogger's about me: Your usual fat computer geek. Currently looking for work in the Jacksonville area and in Columbus. Network Administrator for hire! Go here for my Blogger profile
"A sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - 3rd law of Arthur C. Clarke "Let the magic show begin!" - me
"The meek shall inherit the earth. The rest of us are getting the hell off this rock!" - me
"The meek shall inherit the earth in little 6 by 3 plots" - Robert A. Heinlein (Lazarus Long?)
"186,000 miles/second. It's the law!" - Anonymous (Einstein?)
"You're #1 in my book, too!" - The_Rose
"A good friend will bail you out of jail. A best friend will be sitting next to you saying 'Dude, that was awesome!'" - pshwd
"Conservatism: The search for a moral justification of selfishness." - Dean Booth
"We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another." - Jonathan Swift
for my 3 MPs (no, not my MP3s...)
Blogroll has moved to a new page. It was just too huge (close to 1000 blogs in Bloglines) and helps the page load time tremendously. Blogrolling.com just sucks, and Bloglines has too much. Oh, and I have updated Blogrolling.
Have a nice day!
Russia's energy giant Gazprom has signed a $2.5bn (£1.53bn) deal with Nigeria's state operated NNPC, to invest in a new joint venture.
The new firm, to be called Nigaz, is set to build refineries, pipelines and gas power stations in Nigeria.
Highlighting me.
I understand that's not the way they are going to pronounce that word, but I would definitely be looking at a different word, personally.
Relevant LinkPermanent link posted by bytehead @ 6/30/2009 12:39:00 AM
0 commentsLinks to this post
Thursday, June 18
Printer go Poof! New printer zing.
My old Epson R300 stopped printing black today. In the middle of a document. After doing several head cleanings, and black not even showing up (but the ink was going somewhere during a cleaning), and figuring it's not worth it, I went shopping for another printer. It was important that I keep the ability to print on CDs and DVDs, so I stayed with Epson (Rosie was thinking about Kodak because of the ink cost, but I'm seeing very bad reviews, so I passed this time). and ended up with an Epson Artisan 800. It's wireless via 802.11B/G (the panel talks about BlueTooth, but I couldn't get that working), and prints CDs and DVDs. Printing envelopes will probably be a little harder, but oh well. Won't install on my Windows 7 computer, but I can't say that I'm surprised either. I'll have to go to the website and see what they have to say. At this point, I'm ready for bed. Good night!
Update:
It installed as a generic Epson printer. Now I don't get the fancy icon about ink levels and such. Oh well. I did get it working as a scanner though (which I find out, but hey!). I had to set it up manually, scanning didn't work (which is why I think it didn't install, but I turned the idiot fire wall off. Who knows!). When I used Windows 7 to install, it scanned and found it.
A woman on the radio talks about revolution when it's already passed her by Bob Dylan didn't have this to sing about, you know it feels good to be alive
I was alive and I waited, waited I was alive and I waited for this Right here, right now There is no other place I want to be Right here, right now Watching the world wake up from history
I saw the decade in, when it seemed the world could change at the blink of an eye And if anything, then there's your sign of the times
I was alive and I waited, waited I was alive and I waited for this Right here, right now
I was alive and I waited, waited I was alive and I waited for this Right here, right now There is no other place I want to be Right here, right now Watching the world wake up from history Right here, right now There is no other place I want to be Right here, right now Watching the world wake up from history Right here, right now There is no other place I want to be Right here, right now Watching the world wake up
My eyes are open wide, by the way
I made it through the day
I watch the world outside, by the way
I'm leaving out today
I just saw Halley's Comet, she waved
Said, "Why are you always running in place?
Even the man in the moon disappeared
somewhere in the stratosphere"
Tell my mother, tell my father
I've done the best I can
To make them realize this is my life
I hope they understand
I'm not angry, I'm just saying
Sometimes goodbye is a second chance
Please don't cry one tear for me
I'm not afraid of what I have to say
This is my one and only voice
so listen close, it's only for today
I just saw Halley's Comet, she waved
Said, "Why are you always running in place?
Even the man in the moon disappeared
somewhere in the stratosphere"
Tell my mother, tell my father
I've done the best I can
To make them realize this is my life
I hope they understand
I'm not angry, I'm just saying
Sometimes goodbye is a second chance
Here is my chance
This is my chance!
Tell my mother, tell my father
I've done the best I can
To make them realize this is my life
I hope they understand
I'm not angry, I'm just saying
Sometimes goodbye is a second chance
Sometimes goodbye is a second chance
Sometimes goodbye is a second chance.
Permanent link posted by bytehead @ 6/07/2009 08:00:00 AM
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Wednesday, June 3
What season do I fee like
You Feel Like Summer
Right now, you are filled with energy and excitement. You feel like you are finally living the life you've always wanted... and you can barely believe it.
You are thriving and making progress. You feel like you can take on any challenge. You are extremely happy and upbeat. You enjoy every part of your day, and you love the adventure of life.
Then there is the technology I've harped on over the past five or six years: the HHD, or the hybrid hard disk. When the idea for the HHD was hatched, it was intended to solve all sorts of problems. Half spinning platter and half flash memory, an HHD would increase throughput and make the hard disk more powerful than ever…somehow. I actually sat through a day of presentations outlining how this device would revolutionize the mass-storage industry. It was all ready to go and, as one guy put it, make Vista so hot that people would flock to it. You see, Vista was optimized for this new drive. How soon they forget.
My thought of how a true hybrid hard drive was a little different.
You have a large RAM drive to act as a buffer. Next would be the standard hard drive, which would at least in the beginning, save everything to it. Stuff that was read often, but not changed much would then be gradually moved to the flash memory, because of the finite number of writes that it has. The RAM would be used for speed purposes. Defragmentation and stuff like that would actually be done on the drive itself, and not relegated to the operating system.
People may not always love you, but that's totally fine. You're happy with who you are, and you don't really crave outside approval.
You love yourself, and that's the most important thing. You have high self esteem. And because you don't care what other people think, they tend to like you a lot!
You may not have found the meaning of life, but you try to approach it with as much optimism as possible. You are always enthusiastic and grateful for every day you have.
You are cheerful and energetic. You are a do-gooder who likes to keep busy. You are outgoing and carefree. You embrace life to the fullest.
SETI - The Search for ExtraTerrestial Intelligence
A futile search?
What is SETI?
The 140 foot radio telescope at Green Bank, West Virginia.
SETI is the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence. The primary (and maybe only) search method currently being used is scanning the sky for radio waves that show some type of pattern that may indicate the source is coming from an intelligent source. This would then start the process that could possibly prove that we are not alone in this great big universe. For more information than I'm going to cover please visit the SETI Institute site. There is also a publication about this subject, SETIQuest that I have found on the web for this subject as well as Astrobiology(!).
Now what has gotten into Bryan's brain?
I have been thinking much lately about encryption and compression and how it will affect society down the road. I have been doing this mainly as research for a novel I hope to one day finish. This has had me thinking in idle moments about such things. One of the thoughts I had was that pretty soon, most of the radio traffic on this planet will be either compressed and/or encrypted. Maybe in the next 25 years, maybe as long as 100 years from now. I then saw this trend as a problem as it relates to the SETI (the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence) Project.
Background? And keep it simple!
Allow me to do a little background explanation here. Currently most of what we are broadcasting out into space is analog signal. Think of an analog signal this way, like a telephone. A magnet in a coil vibrates from the air vibrations (sound) and makes an electric signal. This signal travels through wires to a speaker, which is a magnet in a coil similar to what we started with, but now, the signal makes the magnet move in the coil, recreating the original sound. This is pretty simplified, but I think you see the point. The signal is analog, as the signal can take on any necessary properties that make the sound. The signal can be any rated value. One of the issues with analog signals is that they can become weak or damaged, and data loss can occur.
Now a digital signal is one that uses certain levels to mark either 0 or 1, off or on. The letter A in 8-bit ASCII (a standard computer depiction for letters) is 01100001, which comes out to the decimal number 65. The number 9 in 8-bit EBCDIC (another standard depiction) is 11111001, which comes out to the decimal number 249. More and more signals are turning into digital signals. The United States has just passed a standard for High Definition TV (HDTV) that uses digital signals. One of the positive attributes to digital signals is that, since they are nothing but numbers, certain numeric functions can be done to ensure that the data being carried in that signal are exactly what the origin specified them to be. This is known as error detection and error correction. This is a seperate issue from the compression and encryption I will be talking about. Computers can understand digital signals a whole lot better than analog signals.
Now what about compression and encryption?
Compression is the process of taking an amount of information, and then reducing the information through various ways and reducing the space that this information takes up, in a computer's RAM or hard drive, or beaming it via electricty through copper wires, via photons through fiber optics, or via radio waves through just about everything. If I record a 30 second sound, I can compress it down to much shorter than 30 seconds. Of course, to make it understandable I have to be able to decompress it. Compression is usually lumped into two kinds, lossless (you get an exact copy of what you compressed when you decompress it) and lossy (you get a copy of what you compressed, but it certainly won't be an exact copy). In everyday WWW surfing, you run into both kinds. Files in .GIF format are lossless, and files in .JPG format are lossy.
Lossless? Lossy?
It's probably not important, but I'll describe the differences between the two ways of compression. A .GIF file is a standard graphics format that Compuserve started that has a limit of 256 colors per image. The kind of compression that they decided to use ensures that the the image you get out of the file is exactly the same as what you started with.
A .JPG or JPEG file format is another standard graphic file format that allows up to 16 million different colors in an image. The raw uncompressed image of a .JPG is 3 times the size that of a .GIF of the same resolution. Surprising as it may seem, a .JPG is usually much smaller than a .GIF file, as .JPG uses lossy compression that looses some of the details when it compresses an image. An uncompressed image will not be the same as the original image. This is alright, as long as not too much detail is lost, and the eye will not miss it. Follow the above links for more information.
OK, now what's encryption?
Encryption is a more of a process of creating a copy of information that is secure, such that only the intended recipient(s) can read the information. This usually entails compression at some stage as well. There are various ways of doing encryption, from single key (You have a key that both locks the information and unlocks it) such as DES encryption, to double key (one key locks the information, the other key unlocks it) such as RSA public/private key systems. There are probably others that I don't know as well.
One more thing about both of these technologies. Good compression or good encryption result in output (what you have to decompress/decrypt) that looks like pure random junk, just like tuning a radio or TV to a non-existent station. What is usually called "white noise". You might be able to make out the beginning and end, then again maybe not.
What are we using compression and encryption on and why?
Let's look at radio, which is what the SETI project is essentially about. They are trying to find a pattern that can be recognized as intelligent. Radio is a very controlled resource, especially here in the United States. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) controls most of the radio spectrum for the United States, with very few "open" bandwidths left for use. In fact, some of these bandwidths are reserved for listening. Since this is a limited resource, compression for these finite resources makes a whole lot of sense. Encryption will also be used in some form to keep those people from receiving information they shouldn't be because they have to pay for it, or other reasons. Satellite broadcasts are encrypted for this reason.
Radio is just a little over 100 years old now, since Marconi made his first 2.4 kilometer transmission. Now let's suppose that it's another hundred years before all radio broadcasts are compressed/encrypted. We'll have a span of about 200 years of radio history for others to listen for. After that?
What's the consequence of doing that?
If whoever is listening doesn't know how to decompress the broadcasts and how to decrypt them or doesn't have the keys to the encryption, what are they going to see? White noise. No discernable pattern, Earth just becomes another "natural" object pushing radio waves into the universe. Maybe it will stick out in power, then again, it may not.
This means that extraterrestrials have a two hundred year window (at best!) to find us, if they are doing the same kind of search that we are. That is, if they can figure out just what the devil we are spewing out to the universe. Are they going to be able to discern the difference between an audio signal and a video signal? And what about current digital signals, which may or may not already be compressed/encrypted? Frequency modulation or amplitude modulation? And what about spread spectrum broadcasting that was patented by HedyLamarr? The problems are far from trivial.
OK, so we may turn invisible, so what?
Now let's flip flop it. If we assume that other extraterrestrial civilizations are developing at the same rate we are, we have a 200 year window in their history to find them. Maybe more, maybe less. Let's assume for argument that they are an order of magnitude slower than us. We get a two millenia window. Sure that sounds like a lot of time. But in the total time frame of the universe, that's less than an eye blink. We have to be looking in the right direction at the right frequency at the right time. Once we do have a fix, then we need some way of transforming what we receive into something. Hopefully we'll catch them soon enough to figure out how their early TV's work and be able to get actual images of what they look like. But a two thousand year window out of potentially hundreds of millions of years is nothing. And I think that is being truly optimistic.
Will there by any "plain traffic" sent out in the future? The problem may be such that some benevolent person or country sets up a transmitter to broadcast an unencrypted and uncompressed signal for others to pick up. If we can think of it, maybe the aliens out there have thought about the situation too, if I can allow myself a little anthropomorphism. The problems are there for both sides, but they can be overcome.
Originally published July, 1997. Minor modifications done, original at the related link.
I'm now down to fifth place when I used to be #1.
Blogger's about me: Your usual fat computer geek. Currently looking for work in the Jacksonville area and in Columbus. Network Administrator for hire!
♥ Sparx
♥ wookiemp164 aka Garfield116(x)
current weather for Garfield/WookieMP 
A Softer World: 454 
