Agreed. Disney has a long track record of betting on the wrong horse in format wars. They were one of the last studios to release their films on DVD, and they were one of the first to sign on for Circuit City's Divx format.
If the same bad judgement still prevails at Buena Vista, this is actually good news for the HD-DVD format.
-------------- You need to understand that you do NOT have permission to alter any portion of the text, including email addresses, of the Usenet postings you archive. It is not even remotely OK for you to do this. Under US law, these posts are copyrighted by their authors and may (by longstanding precedent) be archived and distributed in their entirety without alteration or misrepresentation. Usenet posters have always understood that their posts may be reproduced and archived based on the very nature of the medium they're posting to, but there has never been any implied permission for third parties to alter the content or headers of those posts without authorization.
I've included my (spam-proofed) email address in ten years of Usenet posts for a very good reason. NNTP servers do not retain data indefinitely, and making sure that readers can communicate with me with regard to dormant or expired threads is a vital part of the content of my posts. It is nothing short of outrageous that you are censoring this content without my permission.
Please disable your new email-masking "feature" at once. It is of absolutely no use against spammers (who, in case it didn't occur to you, don't exactly use Google for their Usenet harvest feeds) and it is extremely detrimental to the value of the Usenet archive as a whole. As the sole inheritors of the Deja archive, you have a responsibility ("don't be evil") to maintain the integrity and accessibility of that archive. --------------
I'd encourage those with similar views to my own to express them, politely but firmly, to the Google Groups support address. It's unlikely to hurt.
The Amateur Scientist volume actually had a small linear accelerator, not a cyclotron. A van de Graaf generator was coupled to a homebrew vacuum tube of the same height, with a filament in the base and a sample platform at the top.
What these guys did is a whole different kettle of fish. As cool as the Amateur Scientist accelerator article was, this cyclotron project is about 100x more complex and 1000x niftier. I wish I had the time, space, cash, and electricity to duplicate it!
You can't re-install it on a new computer or even the same one without the blessing the of the company. That is incredibly intrusive and harmful to the point that the software is useless garbarge.
For a non-mission-critical app like a game, that's better than tying it to a piece of physical media IMHO. For most users who aren't super-careful with their discs, the odds of losing or damaging a CD over a few years are greater than the odds of Valve going under.
If Valve had announced a sunset date for the activation policy, would that have made any difference in your opinion? I'm assuming that they'll release a no-activation patch after HL2 is no longer a big player on the retail shelves, just as game companies commonly disable their own CD checks on older products.
I'm not all that offended by the need to activate a game. It does offer advantages to the consumer over current copy-protection practices, and cutting out the bloodsucking retail distribution network can only be a good thing in the end. The idea is a lot less problematic than Microsoft's addition of an intentional point of failure to its OS. Windows Product Activation brought zero benefits to the consumer, but the user base still lapped it up like antifreeze.
The problem is, few users cared enough about WPA to bother complaining about it, much less boycotting it. Thanks to XP's success, the whole damned camel is in the tent. It's sleeping on your cot, using my toothbrush, and knocking the cookstove over with its hump. We can expect almost all big-name PC games to require online activation in the future, because (a) too many people think it's cool to play games they didn't purchase; and (b) only a tiny, tinfoil-wearing minority (which includes myself) has expressed any concern at all about online activation's potential for failure and abuse.
I have no problem with the former (though it seems silly to force legitimate users to go to the extra trouble), but I would never buy any software with product activation.
A PC game company decides to replace a cumbersome and much-disliked CD copy protection mechanism with an unobtrusive, relatively-harmless one-time online activation system designed to discourage piracy of their single-player game. Without pausing for a breath or a second thought, the Slashbot crowd lights up their torches, grabs their pitchforks, and spills into the streets, howling at the top of their lungs. Liberté - Egalité - Fraternité!
Meanwhile, 70% of those indignant twits are running Windows XP, an operating system that tethers their entire PC and every application running on it to an activation server in Redmond, Washington.
Methinks the crowd doth protest too much... and way the fuck too late.
This is a smart move. The Itanium was built for a niche market.
Yeah, and the Mars rovers were only supposed to last 6 weeks.
Intel is the master at sandbagging their own products. If a new chip or architecture turns out to be a turkey, then it was a "niche" product. If it takes off, then the whole company will cheerfully turn around and follow it to the bank.
80486 chips were never supposed to be used in anything but high-end CAD workstations, if you'll remember.:)
Out of those 17, only 7 of them count for this comparison: the Challenger crew. The others died doing things that don't apply to Rutan's efforts (unescapable ground fire in launch vehicle, failed reentry from orbit).
And where in the world did I say anything about luck? I don't have to disrespect Scaled Composites in order to respect NASA, and my point is that the opposite is also true. When Rutan puts a nuclear-powered spacecraft in orbit around Saturn, drives across the surface of Mars, and, hell, makes it to LEO and back in one piece, then we can compare his success rate with NASA's. Right now, they aren't even playing the same ball game.
Honestly, NASA hasn't blown the fuck out of that many people, when you get right down to it. Three on Apollo 1, seven on Challenger, and seven on Columbia. Seventeen deaths in over thirty years. BFD. I'll bet more NASA employees than that have keeled over during their morning coffee/cigarette breaks.
If we want manned space exploration to happen, we'll have to grow a (collective) pair and make the necessary sacrifices that pioneers have always made.
Now, I'm as happy for Rutan as anyone, but when you stand on the shoulders of giants, as he does, it's just plain rude to wear cleats. All of his NASA-bashing talk will sound a lot more credible when he radios in his "neener-neener-neener" comments from Earth orbit.
Nine out of ten "answers" being modded up in this thread are pointless or worse. ("Get a bigger antenna to reduce interference from phones" -> +4 Insightful?!)
Allocating channels properly (1,6,11) is one of the few suggestions that will actually help.
For noise immunity, I'd sample at 1/4, 1/2, and 3/4 bit time and use a weighted average to determine the bit value.
Makes sense. Even with a series of alternating phase reversals you still have one "real" zero crossing per bit cell, at least with traditional BPSK. It could be detected reliably, I guess, but I'd still be tempted to use a tracking filter centered in the baseband spectrum to regenerate a sampling clock. That being said, I'm sort of talking out of my ass since I've never built a BPSK codec.:-P For all I know, some bit patterns might generate a big honking Bessel null right where I want to lock my PLL.
But then again, I design test equipment, so I am always designing my decoders to deal with severely broken encoders.
Yeah, I've seen enough of those in MP3-land to do me for awhile...
Well, no, they don't, not really. When a phase transition happens, there is no zero crossing. The waveform hits zero, then flips its first derivative and heads back where it came from.
If you look for those events in the amplitude domain with a simple trigger circuit, you will have no noise immunity to speak of.
Right; I didn't phrase that very well. The zero crossings contain the signal information, but you don't want to rely solely on them to regenerate the clock you use to sample at the bit-cell centers.
If you try to detect zero crossings and derive any timing information from them, then you're going to have to discriminate against false triggering at the phase transitions themselves. A frequency-domain solution, as opposed to a time-domain one, won't have that problem. (I'll admit to not knowing how it's done commercially, though.)
And again, why did they not design the slicer to resync on zero crossings
It's a BPSK receiver, so the zero crossings are the data. I would think the decoder would look like a fast PLL whose center frequency corresponds to the nominal data rate, with enough locking range to handle Doppler-induced variations. Guess there was little or no locking range after all.
They are essentially worthless (at $20, I couldn't resist the chance to try one). They are unable to put enough current through an object to heat it to solder-melting temperature, unless the object is very small and delicate (read: a solid-state component that would be easy to damage by using a soldering iron that deliberately passes current through the connection being made). It is tough to solder anything larger than or equal to the size of a 1/8-watt resistor lead with this iron, and you can forget doing antenna work or anything else that requires serious heat delivery.
It might have worked a bit better if they had dropped their series R and required lithium AA cells. As things stand, the miniature butane iron sold by Radio Shack at about the same price is a much better deal.
Usually, the successful phisher will create only one or two auctions offering something pricy (cars, boats, expensive electronic gear...) with a solicitation to "Contact seller for payment information." Photographs and text are typically lifted from previous successful auctions of the same item. When you contact the seller, he spins an elaborate story about being based in the UK but temporarily visiting some Eastern European hellhole (and therefore unreachable by any means other than email). He then requests a Western Union transfer to sell the item immediately at a "bargain" price.
If you express skepticism, he offers to send the item first and provide you with a tracking number.
This just happened to an acquaintance in Hong Kong. He paid $6,000 for a high-end Agilent signal generator that was listed on eBay by an account with lots of positive feedback... and received a package containing three pieces of wood.
The two defenses against these scams are (1) escrow services -- legitimate ones like escrow.com, not bogus ones set up by the scammer; and (2) looking at the seller's last few auctions. If they sold Beanie Babies last week, they are probably not really selling microwave spectrum analyzers today.
... the fast 8-bit AtMEGA chips (AtMEGA128) actually do very well running 32-bit C++ code generated by AVR-GCC.
I recently ported a 3600 bps FSK modem, or at least the demodulator half of it, from Win32 (MSVC) to a 16 MHz AtMEGA128. I had very low expectations, but to my surprised the code was compiling under AVR-GCC in an afternoon and worked great with almost no tinkering needed. A native 32-bit controller would be even better, but many users would be surprised at just how well the 8-bit Atmel parts handle 32-bit code today.
Some people seem to miss the point that without patents there'd be fewer publically available designs.
No, most people realize it wouldn't matter.
The originators of the patent system thought it might spur innovation by establishing a public record of the workings of existing inventions. However, in reality, the only reason anyone carries out patent searches today is to scout out potential infringement claims, for either offensive or defensive purposes.
That is why the system is broken. The USPTO should be throwing out any patent whose description is obvious enough that it's likely to be reinvented without a patent search. Otherwise, the patent system really does benefit nobody but the lawyers (and lucky 'inventors' of soon-to-be-obvious concepts).
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed. Disney has a long track record of betting on the wrong horse in format wars. They were one of the last studios to release their films on DVD, and they were one of the first to sign on for Circuit City's Divx format.
If the same bad judgement still prevails at Buena Vista, this is actually good news for the HD-DVD format.
at http://groups-beta.google.com/support/bin/request. py :
--------------
You need to understand that you do NOT have permission to alter any portion of the text, including email addresses, of the Usenet postings you archive. It is not even remotely OK for you to do this. Under US law, these posts are copyrighted by their authors and may (by longstanding precedent) be archived and distributed in their entirety without alteration or misrepresentation. Usenet posters have always understood that their posts may be reproduced and archived based on the very nature of the medium they're posting to, but there has never been any implied permission for third parties to alter the content or headers of those posts without authorization.
I've included my (spam-proofed) email address in ten years of Usenet posts for a very good reason. NNTP servers do not retain data indefinitely, and making sure that readers can communicate with me with regard to dormant or expired threads is a vital part of the content of my posts. It is nothing short of outrageous that you are censoring this content without my permission.
Please disable your new email-masking "feature" at once. It is of absolutely no use against spammers (who, in case it didn't occur to you, don't exactly use Google for their Usenet harvest feeds) and it is extremely detrimental to the value of the Usenet archive as a whole. As the sole inheritors of the Deja archive, you have a responsibility ("don't be evil") to maintain the integrity and accessibility of that archive.
--------------
I'd encourage those with similar views to my own to express them, politely but firmly, to the Google Groups support address. It's unlikely to hurt.
... unlike the other products reviewed, doesn't advertise on ZDNet.
A co-worker bought one of these awhile back, and I was impressed with it. Not a bad choice for a bright 12-year-old.
Seriously? It wasn't in the original anthology of the columns that I have, then. I'll have to surf eBay for that issue.
The Amateur Scientist volume actually had a small linear accelerator, not a cyclotron. A van de Graaf generator was coupled to a homebrew vacuum tube of the same height, with a filament in the base and a sample platform at the top.
What these guys did is a whole different kettle of fish. As cool as the Amateur Scientist accelerator article was, this cyclotron project is about 100x more complex and 1000x niftier. I wish I had the time, space, cash, and electricity to duplicate it!
You can't re-install it on a new computer or even the same one without the blessing the of the company. That is incredibly intrusive and harmful to the point that the software is useless garbarge.
For a non-mission-critical app like a game, that's better than tying it to a piece of physical media IMHO. For most users who aren't super-careful with their discs, the odds of losing or damaging a CD over a few years are greater than the odds of Valve going under.
If Valve had announced a sunset date for the activation policy, would that have made any difference in your opinion? I'm assuming that they'll release a no-activation patch after HL2 is no longer a big player on the retail shelves, just as game companies commonly disable their own CD checks on older products.
I'm not all that offended by the need to activate a game. It does offer advantages to the consumer over current copy-protection practices, and cutting out the bloodsucking retail distribution network can only be a good thing in the end. The idea is a lot less problematic than Microsoft's addition of an intentional point of failure to its OS. Windows Product Activation brought zero benefits to the consumer, but the user base still lapped it up like antifreeze.
The problem is, few users cared enough about WPA to bother complaining about it, much less boycotting it. Thanks to XP's success, the whole damned camel is in the tent. It's sleeping on your cot, using my toothbrush, and knocking the cookstove over with its hump. We can expect almost all big-name PC games to require online activation in the future, because (a) too many people think it's cool to play games they didn't purchase; and (b) only a tiny, tinfoil-wearing minority (which includes myself) has expressed any concern at all about online activation's potential for failure and abuse.
I have no problem with the former (though it seems silly to force legitimate users to go to the extra trouble), but I would never buy any software with product activation.
A PC game company decides to replace a cumbersome and much-disliked CD copy protection mechanism with an unobtrusive, relatively-harmless one-time online activation system designed to discourage piracy of their single-player game. Without pausing for a breath or a second thought, the Slashbot crowd lights up their torches, grabs their pitchforks, and spills into the streets, howling at the top of their lungs. Liberté - Egalité - Fraternité!
Meanwhile, 70% of those indignant twits are running Windows XP, an operating system that tethers their entire PC and every application running on it to an activation server in Redmond, Washington.
Methinks the crowd doth protest too much... and way the fuck too late.
This is a smart move. The Itanium was built for a niche market.
:)
Yeah, and the Mars rovers were only supposed to last 6 weeks.
Intel is the master at sandbagging their own products. If a new chip or architecture turns out to be a turkey, then it was a "niche" product. If it takes off, then the whole company will cheerfully turn around and follow it to the bank.
80486 chips were never supposed to be used in anything but high-end CAD workstations, if you'll remember.
See the FAQ, question 14. Move along, nothing to see here, etc., etc.
This sounds unfortunate. For what they're charging, you'd think they could do the job right.
Out of those 17, only 7 of them count for this comparison: the Challenger crew. The others died doing things that don't apply to Rutan's efforts (unescapable ground fire in launch vehicle, failed reentry from orbit).
And where in the world did I say anything about luck? I don't have to disrespect Scaled Composites in order to respect NASA, and my point is that the opposite is also true. When Rutan puts a nuclear-powered spacecraft in orbit around Saturn, drives across the surface of Mars, and, hell, makes it to LEO and back in one piece, then we can compare his success rate with NASA's. Right now, they aren't even playing the same ball game.
Honestly, NASA hasn't blown the fuck out of that many people, when you get right down to it. Three on Apollo 1, seven on Challenger, and seven on Columbia. Seventeen deaths in over thirty years. BFD. I'll bet more NASA employees than that have keeled over during their morning coffee/cigarette breaks.
If we want manned space exploration to happen, we'll have to grow a (collective) pair and make the necessary sacrifices that pioneers have always made.
Now, I'm as happy for Rutan as anyone, but when you stand on the shoulders of giants, as he does, it's just plain rude to wear cleats. All of his NASA-bashing talk will sound a lot more credible when he radios in his "neener-neener-neener" comments from Earth orbit.
Nine out of ten "answers" being modded up in this thread are pointless or worse. ("Get a bigger antenna to reduce interference from phones" -> +4 Insightful?!)
Allocating channels properly (1,6,11) is one of the few suggestions that will actually help.
For noise immunity, I'd sample at 1/4, 1/2, and 3/4 bit time and use a weighted average to determine the bit value.
:-P For all I know, some bit patterns might generate a big honking Bessel null right where I want to lock my PLL.
Makes sense. Even with a series of alternating phase reversals you still have one "real" zero crossing per bit cell, at least with traditional BPSK. It could be detected reliably, I guess, but I'd still be tempted to use a tracking filter centered in the baseband spectrum to regenerate a sampling clock. That being said, I'm sort of talking out of my ass since I've never built a BPSK codec.
But then again, I design test equipment, so I am always designing my decoders to deal with severely broken encoders.
Yeah, I've seen enough of those in MP3-land to do me for awhile...
Well, no, they don't, not really. When a phase transition happens, there is no zero crossing. The waveform hits zero, then flips its first derivative and heads back where it came from.
If you look for those events in the amplitude domain with a simple trigger circuit, you will have no noise immunity to speak of.
Right; I didn't phrase that very well. The zero crossings contain the signal information, but you don't want to rely solely on them to regenerate the clock you use to sample at the bit-cell centers.
If you try to detect zero crossings and derive any timing information from them, then you're going to have to discriminate against false triggering at the phase transitions themselves. A frequency-domain solution, as opposed to a time-domain one, won't have that problem. (I'll admit to not knowing how it's done commercially, though.)
And again, why did they not design the slicer to resync on zero crossings
It's a BPSK receiver, so the zero crossings are the data. I would think the decoder would look like a fast PLL whose center frequency corresponds to the nominal data rate, with enough locking range to handle Doppler-induced variations. Guess there was little or no locking range after all.
They are essentially worthless (at $20, I couldn't resist the chance to
try one). They are unable to put enough current through an object to
heat it to solder-melting temperature, unless the object is very small
and delicate (read: a solid-state component that would be easy to damage
by using a soldering iron that deliberately passes current through the
connection being made). It is tough to solder anything larger than or
equal to the size of a 1/8-watt resistor lead with this iron, and you
can forget doing antenna work or anything else that requires serious
heat delivery.
It might have worked a bit better if they had dropped their series R and
required lithium AA cells. As things stand, the miniature butane iron
sold by Radio Shack at about the same price is a much better deal.
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item =2269893061
Who knows how long the photos will stay up, but if you do a completed-items search on "Regency TR-1" you'll find several other examples.
I wonder how much a MINT!! RARE!!11! NWE IN BOX L@@K!! iPod will fetch in 2054?
Usually, the successful phisher will create only one or two auctions offering something pricy (cars, boats, expensive electronic gear...) with a solicitation to "Contact seller for payment information." Photographs and text are typically lifted from previous successful auctions of the same item. When you contact the seller, he spins an elaborate story about being based in the UK but temporarily visiting some Eastern European hellhole (and therefore unreachable by any means other than email). He then requests a Western Union transfer to sell the item immediately at a "bargain" price.
If you express skepticism, he offers to send the item first and provide you with a tracking number.
This just happened to an acquaintance in Hong Kong. He paid $6,000 for a high-end Agilent signal generator that was listed on eBay by an account with lots of positive feedback... and received a package containing three pieces of wood.
The two defenses against these scams are (1) escrow services -- legitimate ones like escrow.com, not bogus ones set up by the scammer; and (2) looking at the seller's last few auctions. If they sold Beanie Babies last week, they are probably not really selling microwave spectrum analyzers today.
... the fast 8-bit AtMEGA chips (AtMEGA128) actually do very well running 32-bit C++ code generated by AVR-GCC.
I recently ported a 3600 bps FSK modem, or at least the demodulator half of it, from Win32 (MSVC) to a 16 MHz AtMEGA128. I had very low expectations, but to my surprised the code was compiling under AVR-GCC in an afternoon and worked great with almost no tinkering needed. A native 32-bit controller would be even better, but many users would be surprised at just how well the 8-bit Atmel parts handle 32-bit code today.
What difference, exactly, does it make who submits a story?
Some people seem to miss the point that without patents there'd be fewer publically available designs.
No, most people realize it wouldn't matter.
The originators of the patent system thought it might spur innovation by establishing a public record of the workings of existing inventions. However, in reality, the only reason anyone carries out patent searches today is to scout out potential infringement claims, for either offensive or defensive purposes.
That is why the system is broken. The USPTO should be throwing out any patent whose description is obvious enough that it's likely to be reinvented without a patent search. Otherwise, the patent system really does benefit nobody but the lawyers (and lucky 'inventors' of soon-to-be-obvious concepts).