I have no good app-suggestions for you. But I am eager to pick up the few good suggestion that may emerge here.
And don't mind all the ignorant trolls flaming you about letting your kid play with the tablet. They're either ignorant or not parents themselves (and hence not in a very good position to lecture you on parenting).
They just don't understand that letting your child play with a phone/tablet is not in any way an indication of you spending too little time with the kid.
Letting kids play with technology is no different than letting them play with their normal toys (and I am sure some of your "normal" toys use batteries and makes sounds/lights already). They will learn just as much from that as they will pressing physical buttons on a chunk of plastic labeled "Fisher Price".
And off course the kid is interested in the tablet. Not only because it makes sounds and shows images but because the grownups use it. Observing you doing things, and wanting to the exact same things, is an important part of a childs natural evolution. Don't let the single-geeks with no children lecture you.
Our oldest boy is now just over 3 years old. He has operated iPhones and an iPad since he was five months old. He hasn't turned into a green monster yet nor is he showing any signs of problematic behaviour. We limit hos time with the devices off course and we make sure he accepts breaks lasting several days. But the time he has spent with these things has tought him a lot of good stuff. In spite if his young age (3) he recites the entire alphabet in two languages (or own 100% and English about 80% correct). He knows shapes, colors and objects better than most of his peers in kindergarten.
It's a great toy. Just limit the time with the device and make sure it is a supplement to the normal quality time you would have spent with him/her anyway.
Letting your kid interact with a modern toy makes you a better parent. Not a worse one. Take it from someone with many years of first-hand experience.:-)
My thought was that the transfer of energy to/from magnetic fields (in the coil) would even out the noise and make it less distinct, to the point were it wouldn't be recognizable anymore. But it sounds like that isn't the case.
What if you run the audio through a 50 Hz (60Hz in America) band reject filter and then add some hum from another time? Then the recording has a different time fingerprint.
Agreed.
The potential for fraud is a troubling thought. And while intelligent criminals (hmmm, ok, I see the problem allready) may be able to do this, odds are the only real player with the resources to do fraud in this area are the authorities themselves - which is actually grounds for real concern...:-S
The battery is irrelevant. The EM radiation is picked up by portable devices as well, and variances are recorded.
The sound signature is generated by the ambient frequency variance generated by the power grid EMR. And while you are correct that local noise may disrupt it, odds are there will be plenty of timeslots in a recording where no noise is present - or where the extra noise can be filtered.
I find the whole idea pretty elegant. The only way to get by this is probably to actively filter the involved frequency ranges in the recording.
And then offcourse there is the problem of fraud... it wouldn't be too hard for intelligent criminals (ok, wait, i see a problem allready...) to fake this by falsifying the noise in a recording. Simply swapping recorded noise from a different time may be sufficient to fool investigators...
I am not an Electrical Engineer (hmmmm, "IANAEE"?) but won't the captured frequency variations be changed by de-centralized power transformers?
A normal power-grid is full of distributed power transformers which change the voltage for different needs during the distribution net. They come in vrious sizes ranging from large transformer-stations to the small local power transformer down the block from your home. Won't all these big transformers even out the slight changes in frequency?
And what happens with an area being served with power from a different powerplant? Won't that have a completely diferent signature?
I read TFA but it was extremely thin on the technical details.
lol. you don't seem to know jack shit about buddhism. fix that.
lol.... mysticism...
There seems to be a lot of that going around...
A widely accepted definition of Mysticism is:
Mysticism; from the Greek , mystikos, meaning 'an initiate') is the knowledge of, and especially the personal experience of, states of consciousness, or levels of being, or aspects of reality, beyond normal human perception, sometimes including experience of and communion with a supreme being.
Buddhism fits the definition of Mysticism in that it:
- deals with aspects of reality "beyond normal human perception"
While you may personally believe that Buddhism is not in the category of "Mysticism" facts at hand (and the language involved) seem to suggest otherwise
Give MS a call, and tell them you found a critical security bug in Windows that you need fixed. Then tell them it's a DEC Alpha with WinNT 4.0 Server. Make sure you record it, I want to hear the laughter.:)
I never said they should pay the same as they would have, had they used commercial software.
I simply said they got away cheap, and that in the grand scheme of things 100K was a very small sum from a commercial perspective.
But in case i had said anything like that - which I didn't - then I believe the answer would be: an amount equal to the value of the continued support they are getting plus 1/4 of the amount a commercial alternative would have charged for software maintenance.
In reality probably between 8-12% of a commercial alternative. Per year.
Considering the role Perl (and the other software products they use) has in their business, it seems like a very small sum of money.
Had they purchased commercial software from Oracle, IBM, Microsoft etc. to solve this task the price would have been a two-digit million-dollar figure. And probably a bunch of additional millions on top of that, for more iron to run it on.
We should praise them for this step, but at the same time be aware that they got away REALLY CHEAP by this action. Hell, the marketing buzz it generates is probably worth half that amount by itself!
Right. So we should all believe that Oracle now wants a world of good for us.
Meanwhile the legal rampage against free and open source software continues. The war against Android - once the pride of Sun's success with Java - is raging.
Oh, and don't even get me started on the crapware Ask-Toolbar they started pushing with the Java update/installer, with the "Yes put crapware on my system" option pre-selected for me...
Yes, Oracle is certainly doing a lot of things for Java. Like killing it... and pissing the entire customer base off.
This has nothing to do with software freedom. It's not a question of whether Mint should have the right to do it, but whether they are jerks or not by doing it.
Perhaps, but my original comment still stands in that case.
In my book nobody is a "jerk" if the amount involved is 3,41 USD - unless children under the age of 7 are involved.
I saw something similar demonstrated at CeBit in 2008. It was made by a Chinese company, and they applied it to a bunch of HDTVs on the scene, and let us operated it minutes after applying it (using Vista's tablet features).
Perhaps they didn't use nanotechnology, but it worked fine, so who cares what the underlying tech is?
And it was certainly not "milimeters" thick. More like 1/4 of a milimeter.
I think cable ties are a great way to reduce the chaos in a pile of spaghetti-style cables.
Some people dislike them, but I think they are just not accustomed to using them. Proper use of cable ties means you are not afraid to use a LOT of them, and also not afraid of cutting them open when you need to change someting. I keep a cheap diagonal cutter and a bag of assorted cable ties in every desk drawer in my house (3 "kits" in total).
Its easy to work with, extremely flexible, and best of all: cheaper than most of the fancy "solutions" you can buy.
Just stop being afraid of cutting them open when you need to!
Is the poster and TFA seriously proposing we can use the newspeak-marketing-BS from a sales brochure to evaluate the ethically values of a large multinational corporation?
Would it make a difference if the same marketing-BS-brochure stated that freebee end users were the customers?
Trusting hot air marketing text = fail! No matter what you conclusion is.
Throwing a stupidly expensive cable at it is a massive waste of money if you're already getting good signal through a cheap cable
Well, as you perhaps missed in my original post before you went ahead and made jokes, not getting a good signal was my precise example...?
I agree with you in principle, that 120 USD cables are a load of BS, but what does that have to do with my post? I never defended such cables. I simply stated that saying there is NO difference is plain wrong, and I gave a real-life example to support that claim.
Your point seems to be that as long as the signal is within specifications, the data throughput will be at 100%. You have repeated that view once again - which is great, as I totally agree. But that was not the case I described. In my case there is clearly a noise/data loss issue which results in loss of data. The viewable result on my Samsung Series 8 screen is a few lost frames every 2-3 minutes, white blinks on rare occasions (perhaps 2-3 times an hour), and errors when negotiating DRM handshake information between devices (typically a PS3 playing BD media).
So clearly the data transmitted through a HDMI cable can not be rated as either 0% or 100% throughput as you are arguing. If that were the case there would be no point in implementing error correction etc. in the transfer protocols, because there would be a guarantee that all transmitted data was always received flawlessly. And in case of failure it would be like flipping a switch, and everything would just go dark - which again is not the case.
I fail to understand what exactly it is you are trying to say?:-) If, for example, the signal is -100dB in a -8 to -80 dB setting, there would be no data loss at all. Hence no error correction. I explained a scenario where noise is introduced - quite possibly by an iron core entangled in copper wire and connected to a 240 V mains supply (eg. power adapter for a Squeezebox Duet). A totally different setting, where my point was that a proper shielded quality cable might fare better than my cheap-ass 8 USD cable. Your productive and intelligent comments on that topic are most welcome.
While I like your humor, you're totally off base here.
As with any other digital signal, a HDMI stream may be interrupted. No different from the noise you see in an Ethernet network if its wired with cheap, unshielded CAT 5 cables running right next to power cables. Why do you think the guys making the physical cabling do extensive testing with specialised tools?
A digital transfer is based on a network protocol sending packets in one form or another. If packets become corrupted or even missing, the protocol will have fallback procedures, like resending the package or skipping it.
What on earth makes you think HDMI is any different? Do you think the sending devices just throws a whole bunch of ones and zeroes into a cable, and the receiving device magically just knows what the hell to do with that stream? Or do you think someone actually made a ton of work on standards, handshakes, packet flow control, states, key exchange, key validation, hashing, and error correction?
Slashdot Mirror
I have no good app-suggestions for you. But I am eager to pick up the few good suggestion that may emerge here.
And don't mind all the ignorant trolls flaming you about letting your kid play with the tablet. They're either ignorant or not parents themselves (and hence not in a very good position to lecture you on parenting).
They just don't understand that letting your child play with a phone/tablet is not in any way an indication of you spending too little time with the kid.
Letting kids play with technology is no different than letting them play with their normal toys
(and I am sure some of your "normal" toys use batteries and makes sounds/lights already). They will learn just as much from that as they will pressing physical buttons on a chunk of plastic labeled "Fisher Price".
And off course the kid is interested in the tablet. Not only because it makes sounds and shows images but because the grownups use it. Observing you doing things, and wanting to the exact same things, is an important part of a childs natural evolution. Don't let the single-geeks with no children lecture you.
Our oldest boy is now just over 3 years old. He has operated iPhones and an iPad since he was five months old. He hasn't turned into a green monster yet nor is he showing any signs of problematic behaviour. We limit hos time with the devices off course and we make sure he accepts breaks lasting several days. But the time he has spent with these things has tought him a lot of good stuff. In spite if his young age (3) he recites the entire alphabet in two languages (or own 100% and English about 80% correct). He knows shapes, colors and objects better than most of his peers in kindergarten.
It's a great toy. Just limit the time with the device and make sure it is a supplement to the normal quality time you would have spent with him/her anyway.
Letting your kid interact with a modern toy makes you a better parent. Not a worse one. Take it from someone with many years of first-hand experience. :-)
- Jesper
Thanks for answering.
My thought was that the transfer of energy to/from magnetic fields (in the coil) would even out the noise and make it less distinct, to the point were it wouldn't be recognizable anymore. But it sounds like that isn't the case.
- Jesper
While I am no physicist I am pretty sure the EMR involved here is insufficient to influence the capture of photons in a digital camera ...
- Jesper
What if you run the audio through a 50 Hz (60Hz in America) band reject filter and then add some hum from another time? Then the recording has a different time fingerprint.
Agreed.
... :-S
The potential for fraud is a troubling thought. And while intelligent criminals (hmmm, ok, I see the problem allready) may be able to do this, odds are the only real player with the resources to do fraud in this area are the authorities themselves - which is actually grounds for real concern
- Jesper
The battery is irrelevant. The EM radiation is picked up by portable devices as well, and variances are recorded.
... it wouldn't be too hard for intelligent criminals (ok, wait, i see a problem allready ...) to fake this by falsifying the noise in a recording. Simply swapping recorded noise from a different time may be sufficient to fool investigators...
The sound signature is generated by the ambient frequency variance generated by the power grid EMR. And while you are correct that local noise may disrupt it, odds are there will be plenty of timeslots in a recording where no noise is present - or where the extra noise can be filtered.
I find the whole idea pretty elegant. The only way to get by this is probably to actively filter the involved frequency ranges in the recording.
And then offcourse there is the problem of fraud
- Jesper
I am not an Electrical Engineer (hmmmm, "IANAEE"?) but won't the captured frequency variations be changed by de-centralized power transformers?
A normal power-grid is full of distributed power transformers which change the voltage for different needs during the distribution net. They come in vrious sizes ranging from large transformer-stations to the small local power transformer down the block from your home. Won't all these big transformers even out the slight changes in frequency?
And what happens with an area being served with power from a different powerplant? Won't that have a completely diferent signature?
I read TFA but it was extremely thin on the technical details.
- Jesper
Since the waste energy is converted to heat (which may increase the noise or temperature of the machine) it may well be worth the extra cash anyway.
Saving a few bucks on electricity is hardly the only reason to buy a more efficient power supply.
- Jesper
lol. you don't seem to know jack shit about buddhism. fix that.
lol.... mysticism...
There seems to be a lot of that going around ...
A widely accepted definition of Mysticism is:
Mysticism; from the Greek , mystikos, meaning 'an initiate') is the knowledge of, and especially the personal experience of, states of consciousness, or levels of being, or aspects of reality, beyond normal human perception, sometimes including experience of and communion with a supreme being.
Buddhism fits the definition of Mysticism in that it:
While you may personally believe that Buddhism is not in the category of "Mysticism" facts at hand (and the language involved) seem to suggest otherwise
- Jesper
This article was brought to you by the Department of Redundancy Department.
Enjoy.
Give MS a call, and tell them you found a critical security bug in Windows that you need fixed. Then tell them it's a DEC Alpha with WinNT 4.0 Server. Make sure you record it, I want to hear the laughter. :)
I am still on NT 3.5.1 you insensitive clod!
I never said they should pay the same as they would have, had they used commercial software.
I simply said they got away cheap, and that in the grand scheme of things 100K was a very small sum from a commercial perspective.
But in case i had said anything like that - which I didn't - then I believe the answer would be: an amount equal to the value of the continued support they are getting plus 1/4 of the amount a commercial alternative would have charged for software maintenance.
In reality probably between 8-12% of a commercial alternative. Per year.
- Jesper
Considering the role Perl (and the other software products they use) has in their business, it seems like a very small sum of money.
Had they purchased commercial software from Oracle, IBM, Microsoft etc. to solve this task the price would have been a two-digit million-dollar figure. And probably a bunch of additional millions on top of that, for more iron to run it on.
We should praise them for this step, but at the same time be aware that they got away REALLY CHEAP by this action. Hell, the marketing buzz it generates is probably worth half that amount by itself!
- Jesper
Right. So we should all believe that Oracle now wants a world of good for us.
... and pissing the entire customer base off.
Meanwhile the legal rampage against free and open source software continues. The war against Android - once the pride of Sun's success with Java - is raging.
Oh, and don't even get me started on the crapware Ask-Toolbar they started pushing with the Java update/installer, with the "Yes put crapware on my system" option pre-selected for me...
Yes, Oracle is certainly doing a lot of things for Java. Like killing it
- Jesper
This has nothing to do with software freedom. It's not a question of whether Mint should have the right to do it, but whether they are jerks or not by doing it.
Perhaps, but my original comment still stands in that case.
In my book nobody is a "jerk" if the amount involved is 3,41 USD - unless children under the age of 7 are involved.
- Jesper
Though a trivial amount of money ($3.41 in November 2011)
Trivial? No shit!
Seriously: find a better case for this discussion. Arguing over less than 4 bucks is going to make everyone involved seem petty and small-minded.
- Jesper
I'm from Europe. What is AOL again? And what is its/their significance in 2011/2012 anyway?
- Jesper
...I'll need 26,000 floppies to get a copy of Rage for my current existing Windows version :-(
Ah, yes, you upgraded to high Density discs recently, right?
/360K format you would need more than 72.000 discs...
Good thing you moved on. That saves you a ton of disks! If you were still on the normal 5.25"
- Jesper
Gaming press interprets tech demo as game, responds accordingly.
Are you serious?
... just to make sure nobody gets confused about the situation?
May I politely point out they're charging full price for it? In fact it is the exact same price as Battlefield 3 which is due in 4 weeks...
The US price for RAGE is 59,99 USD (sity bucks)
The EU price for RAGE is 49,99 EUR (approx 66,62 USD)
Can we call it a full-price tech demo then? Or perhaps a "full-price-cross-platform-tech-demo"?
You know
- Jesper
I saw something similar demonstrated at CeBit in 2008. It was made by a Chinese company, and they applied it to a bunch of HDTVs on the scene, and let us operated it minutes after applying it (using Vista's tablet features).
Perhaps they didn't use nanotechnology, but it worked fine, so who cares what the underlying tech is?
And it was certainly not "milimeters" thick. More like 1/4 of a milimeter.
- Jesper
I am not sure why you think this is a major problem. I never cut my hands on cable ties.
Perhaps you just need a new diagonal cutter or another brand of cable ties?
- Jesper
I think cable ties are a great way to reduce the chaos in a pile of spaghetti-style cables.
Some people dislike them, but I think they are just not accustomed to using them. Proper use of cable ties means you are not afraid to use a LOT of them, and also not afraid of cutting them open when you need to change someting. I keep a cheap diagonal cutter and a bag of assorted cable ties in every desk drawer in my house (3 "kits" in total).
Its easy to work with, extremely flexible, and best of all: cheaper than most of the fancy "solutions" you can buy.
Just stop being afraid of cutting them open when you need to!
- Jesper
'I'm unaware of any company that feels responsible to their product.
First of all that says more about him than Google. Most companies are.proud of their products.
The end users are not the product. The product is "exposure" - page views if you will - and the end users are the suppliers of that product.
Google, just like any other company, can't screw its suppliers without consequence.
- Jesper
Is the poster and TFA seriously proposing we can use the newspeak-marketing-BS from a sales brochure to evaluate the ethically values of a large multinational corporation?
Would it make a difference if the same marketing-BS-brochure stated that freebee end users were the customers?
Trusting hot air marketing text = fail! No matter what you conclusion is.
- Jesper
Throwing a stupidly expensive cable at it is a massive waste of money if you're already getting good signal through a cheap cable
Well, as you perhaps missed in my original post before you went ahead and made jokes, not getting a good signal was my precise example...?
:-) If, for example, the signal is -100dB in a -8 to -80 dB setting, there would be no data loss at all. Hence no error correction. I explained a scenario where noise is introduced - quite possibly by an iron core entangled in copper wire and connected to a 240 V mains supply (eg. power adapter for a Squeezebox Duet). A totally different setting, where my point was that a proper shielded quality cable might fare better than my cheap-ass 8 USD cable. Your productive and intelligent comments on that topic are most welcome.
:-)
I agree with you in principle, that 120 USD cables are a load of BS, but what does that have to do with my post? I never defended such cables. I simply stated that saying there is NO difference is plain wrong, and I gave a real-life example to support that claim.
Your point seems to be that as long as the signal is within specifications, the data throughput will be at 100%. You have repeated that view once again - which is great, as I totally agree. But that was not the case I described. In my case there is clearly a noise/data loss issue which results in loss of data. The viewable result on my Samsung Series 8 screen is a few lost frames every 2-3 minutes, white blinks on rare occasions (perhaps 2-3 times an hour), and errors when negotiating DRM handshake information between devices (typically a PS3 playing BD media).
So clearly the data transmitted through a HDMI cable can not be rated as either 0% or 100% throughput as you are arguing. If that were the case there would be no point in implementing error correction etc. in the transfer protocols, because there would be a guarantee that all transmitted data was always received flawlessly. And in case of failure it would be like flipping a switch, and everything would just go dark - which again is not the case.
I fail to understand what exactly it is you are trying to say?
- Jesper
While I like your humor, you're totally off base here.
As with any other digital signal, a HDMI stream may be interrupted. No different from the noise you see in an Ethernet network if its wired with cheap, unshielded CAT 5 cables running right next to power cables. Why do you think the guys making the physical cabling do extensive testing with specialised tools?
A digital transfer is based on a network protocol sending packets in one form or another. If packets become corrupted or even missing, the protocol will have fallback procedures, like resending the package or skipping it.
What on earth makes you think HDMI is any different? Do you think the sending devices just throws a whole bunch of ones and zeroes into a cable, and the receiving device magically just knows what the hell to do with that stream? Or do you think someone actually made a ton of work on standards, handshakes, packet flow control, states, key exchange, key validation, hashing, and error correction?
- Jesper