Building String Instruments with No Strings?

sansglitch asks: "Well, as the end of the academic year rolls around, I come before the Slashdot community to ask for a little help on a research project thats hopefully going to allow me to leave my sleepy suburban high school with a bang. Inspired by a 6th grader's science textbook, I have undergone construction on a Laser Harp (that is, a harp of sorts in which I've replaced the strings w/ beams of light). For the brain of this small midi-producing gadget, I've opted for a PIC micro-controller. I was hoping that someone with experience in dealing with this kind of chip setup might help with the finer points of integrating it into this monster. Do people still code for PIC's these days?" Now that is actually a cool idea for a project. Good luck with it, sansglitch!

Comments

Re:Dear Jamie,

[cookd]

Although this comment may not have been couched in the gentlest of terms, I wouldn't have modded it as a troll. He's not looking to tempt people into a fake argument -- this is an actual issue. And apparently other forums haven't worked well.

It *was* probably offtopic, except that now the page is actually widened, making it an actual issue for this discussion.

I, for one, am somewhat annoyed by the page widening bug. It has been a known issue for a long time, and it really screws up the forum for a lot of readers.

So what if it is a bug in IE? There are much more significant rendering flaws in Netscape 4.x, yet I have to work around them when I design web pages to make sure that the pages are readable. This is exactly what gets decried daily about Microsoft -- I see everybody ripping on them because their products don't always interoperate properly with other products. But Microsoft fixed its websites to work with non-IE browsers once the issue was raised. Slashdot, on the other hand, doesn't seem to care about interoperating with the evil browser that accounts for most web surfing done nowadays.

I guess you have to decide: do you support IE or not? If not, that's fine -- everybody who uses IE will either find another browser just to read Slashdot, or more likely just go away. At that point, the breadth of discussion will probably drop dramatically, and the Slashdot community will fit the one-sided elitist Linux zealot stereotype even better (diversity of opinion is the lifeblood of any forum). So I think it is wise to support IE.

So if you support IE, please work around the known issues that cause significant problems. You know what they are. They can be fixed. So fix them!

Thanks. I look forward to a fix soon. Slashdot is (usually) awesome. And there is nothing wrong with Linux zealots -- Linux is a great OS, it deserves to have zealots standing up for it, and I run it on my personal laptop. (I still hold the opinion that Microsoft is not inherently evil, but that is a discussion for another time...)

Re:Dear Jamie,

[Kraft]

I'll risk a point of two on this one,
because this bug really annoys me.

However, Reverand, I have no idea whos
fault this is, what Jamie has said and
who is responsible for fixing such a bug.

So I will mod you up in the future, but you
will have to add some quotes (with links) to convince that someone is actually refusing to
fix the bug.