...a project such as this can be conducted entirely under the auspices of Part 15, which is subject to none of the restrictions you cite.
Also, commercial usage rules have been substantially relaxed lately. You should not try to sell ISP services over a link like this. OTOH, using it to order stuff over the 'net is fine.
The FCC's commercial-purpose rules for the Amateur service have been significantly relaxed over the past few years. You wouldn't want to use a ham-radio link like this to run a commercial ISP, but using it to order stuff online is fine. It's no different than using a repeater's telephone-link capability to order a pizza, for instance.
... referenced in the article, at http://www.qsl.net/ke5fx. I'm going to be sort of redundant here, and repost this message as a reply to the "first post", just to make sure all interested parties see it. I got to work late today, so my initial reply is lost somewhere in the noise at the bottom of the article.:-) Sorry for the duplicate post -- if someone can down-moderate the copy at the bottom I'd appreciate it.
Amusingly, I submitted the project page to Slashdot myself about a year ago, when I first got the link working. When the submission was rejected, I wrote to one of the well-known admins at Slashdot asking what I needed to do to make it/.-worthy. The response came back in about 5 minutes:
I just didn't think it was interesting enough. Sorry. -- | (admin name omitted) | Just want to be misunderstood, | (admin name omitted) | I wanna be feared in my neighborhood. | http://slashdot.org/ | Just want to be a moody man, | codejockey*gangstero | say things that nobody can understand. | flove*lovemachine*wr | --Pete Townshend, Misunderstood
Dejected, I was forced to admit that my news-for-nerds quotient just couldn't compete with the guy who built a PC case out of Zebrano wood, or whatever the story-of-the-day was at the time. Consequently, Rob gets major props from me for doing a better job writing up the submission than I did.:-)
Now for the bad news: out of many thousands of hits my site's received over the past year, only one guy, an EE professor at a local university, has successfully duplicated my efforts. In my mind, that somewhat validates the unnamed Slashdot admin's decision not to publicize the project in the first place. People, this is not a project for beginners or casual electronics buffs! In the year since I finished the project, a couple of excellent alternative solutions for RF data links that make good use of off-the-shelf hardware and homemade antennas have come to light. For instance, there's a good page on the topic of modifying Proxim Symphony cards for long-range service at Low-Cost Wireless Network How-To. I would have to say that this is a better approach for 99% of the people who have looked at my microwave link page and thought about building it. Heck, in retrospect this is what I should have done, instead of putting in all that engineering time on a 100%-custom solution.:-)
My own 10-megabit link has been running great since last June with only a couple of hours' downtime for maintenance and tweaks, and it's easily the most 'educational' project I've ever tackled. But I think it's important to temper peoples' expectations. If you are an experienced electronics hacker with access to a very well-equipped RF test bench or a university EE lab, and you just want to spend a lot of time and money building something something cool, then I highly recommend my microwave link project. If not, do yourself a BIG favor and check out the various wireless-Ethernet card tweaks that have been springing up on the Web.
Amusingly, I submitted the project page to Slashdot myself about a year ago, when I first got the link working. When the submission was rejected, I wrote to one of the well-known admins at Slashdot asking what I needed to do to make it/.-worthy. The response came back in about 5 minutes:
I just didn't think it was interesting enough. Sorry. -- | (admin name omitted) | Just want to be misunderstood, | (admin name omitted) | I wanna be feared in my neighborhood. | http://slashdot.org/ | Just want to be a moody man, | codejockey*gangstero | say things that nobody can understand. | flove*lovemachine*wr | --Pete Townshend, Misunderstood
Dejected, I was forced to admit that my news-for-nerds quotient just couldn't compete with the guy who built a PC case out of Zebrano wood, or whatever the story-of-the-day was at the time. Consequently, Rob gets major props from me for doing a better job writing up the submission than I did.:-)
Now for the bad news: out of many thousands of hits my site's received over the past year, only one guy, an EE professor at a local university, has successfully duplicated my efforts. In my mind, that somewhat validates the unnamed Slashdot admin's decision not to publicize the project in the first place. People, this is not a project for beginners or casual electronics buffs! In the year since I finished the project, a couple of excellent alternative solutions for RF data links that make good use of off-the-shelf hardware and homemade antennas have come to light. For instance, there's a good page on the topic of modifying Proxim Symphony cards for long-range service at Low-Cost Wireless Network How-To. I would have to say that this is a better approach for 99% of the people who have looked at my microwave link page and thought about building it. Heck, in retrospect this is what I should have done, instead of putting in all that engineering time on a 100%-custom solution.:-)
My own 10-megabit link has been running great since last June with only a couple of hours' downtime for maintenance and tweaks, and it's easily the most 'educational' project I've ever tackled. But I think it's important to temper peoples' expectations. If you are an experienced electronics hacker with access to a very well-equipped RF test bench or a university EE lab, and you just want to spend a lot of time and money building something something cool, then I highly recommend my microwave link project. If not, do yourself a BIG favor and check out the various wireless-Ethernet card tweaks that have been springing up on the Web.
Pure marketing specsmanship, as far as I can tell.
To Microsoft's credit, they actually tried to drive a stake through interlaced video once and for all when the ATSC standards were under discussion. Unfortunately the NAB lobby won.
Personally, I think anyone who supports 1080i HDTV should be forced to look at it all day on their computer monitors.
Process gain is basically the improvement in signal-to-noise ratio that can be had in exchange for letting your signal take up more space than Mr. Shannon says it needs.
For example, Dixon's Spread Spectrum Systems says that for FM/FSK signals with over-unity deviation ratios, the process gain is 3 * (maximum deviation^2). The S/N ratio for the narrowband information being transmitted is effectively improved by allowing it to occupy more spectrum space than necessary. This is why I have my microwave link tweaked to chew up several dozen more MHz of prime 10-GHz real estate that it probably really needs.:-)
As I understand it, another way to think of process gain in the general case is in terms of jamming immunity; i.e., how much power is it going to require in order to use an uncorrelated transmitter to jam the channel.
I'm sure there are different process-gain equations for various modulation mechanisms, but they are all going to boil down to the same basic idea: trading occupied BW for S/N.
Same here. Getting rid of my landline at home is the smartest thing I've done in the last 5 years.:)
I highly recommend PCS cell service over landline, for those who aren't relying on a hardwired phone connection for Internet service. Cellular technology and hardware has matured to the point at which landline connections no longer serve any purpose.... at least none that I can see.
This will give you an idea of what id and the gaming community as a whole are up against. For those tuning in late, Col. Grossman is the chief evangelist behind this and similar lawsuits which attempt to pin the blame for recent school shootings on creators and distributors of popular culture.
Never one to let facts and statistics interfere with a good diatribe, Grossman and his cronies excel at distracting their followers' attention from the fact that acts of violence in schools (not to mention the rest of US society) are occurring less frequently these days than at any time since the 1960s.
So if correlation really does imply causation, as Grossman would have us believe, then we should be thanking id Software and Valve for selling American kids a violence-dousing cathartic.
Personally, when it comes to figuring out what drove Michael Carneal to go postal at his junior high school, my money's on the town uranium-enrichment plant.:-)
.... limitation and how insignificant it really is, consider a typical hardwired 10/100BaseT Ethernet subnet. In this case, only *1* device may transmit at a time. And that almost always works great, up to several dozen users per concentrator.
As long as you don't have a few hundred AirPort users all running Napster in the same neighborhood, there should not be a problem with interference due to these unauthorized mods.
Also, using a directional antenna to increase effective radiated power is a Good Thing because doing so actually reduces the possibility of causing (or receiving) off-axis interference.
The FCC sees it differently, though: devices like the AirPort are type accepted for use only in their originally-approved form. Even if you stay within the allowable-power limitations, it's still illegal to dork around with external antennas and the like.
In practice, you're about as likely to get busted for this sort of activity as you are for driving 65.1 MPH in a 65 zone. The consequences can be severe, though, if they decide to Make an Example Of You.:)
I bought one of the last Apex players left in the Bay Area on a trip to San Jose a couple of weeks ago. It is one of the few region-free players that can play a PAL DVD on an NTSC set, although I haven't had a chance to verify PAL playback quality in person.
As far as normal NTSC playback goes, a quick video-quality comparison using S-Video output shows no major differences between the SD-600A and my old Toshiba SD-2006 (a $500 first-generation player with 10-bit video DAC). No playback problems were observed watching The Matrix, a common source of trouble for cheaper players such as this one.
I just ordered a Region 3 (Asian) copy of Eyes Wide Shut from Hong Kong. We'll see how the Apex handles the disc when it arrives, but I don't expect any problems. (Kubrick fans in the US should note that this is an uncensored, unrated NTSC release, which should be compatible with all region-free players in the States. In that sense, it should be preferable to the Europe/UK PAL releases that are starting to show up.)
It seems that the MPAA forgot to ask me, the consumer, if I wanted to participate in their DVD region-coding plan. Not that they're interested in my answer, but for the record, it's "No, thanks." Studios like Warner Brothers are giving DVD fans every reason in the world to look for workarounds.
There was a time when we did things like this "Not because it is easy, but because it is hard."
The only way to acquire the technology to bring rocks back from Mars, is to stop talking about it and actually try to bring rocks back from Mars.
The year after I was born, we walked on the moon. Now, 31 years later, it's considered an impressive feat of science to grow tomatoes in low Earth orbit.
It may be about time for us to disband NASA entirely. If we aren't going to give them the money, resources, people, and most important of all, the popular mandate to do the job right, there's no sense in pretending to do the job at all.
"I would personally LOVE to give OrCad a REASONABLE fee for the use (and, PROMOTION - remember, I WILL ask the company I work for to buy OrCad) of their software. Say $100. That's more than I would have to pay for almost ANY other "educational version" software as a student, but still relatively reasonable."
You know, of course, that Orcad will give you, or me, or anyone who asks, a free demo copy of their entire suite, right? There's a 30-component-per-schematic limit, but that shouldn't be a problem for educational/hobby purposes. All of the schematics on my website were drawn with it.
Sorry, you're right. To clarify, noamazon.com absolutely, positively does not make money from any aspect of its existence, including the cgi links.
Now, I can't speak for the author -- although he occupies the office adjacent to mine, he's out of town today. But I doubt he'd say "get lost" if B&N were to offer him a $1,000,000 Award for the Promotion of Good Corporate Citizenship, or anything.:-)
Seriously, I don't believe he has any plans to turn the site into any type of profit center. If he does, I haven't heard anything about it.
Actually, the links are cgi-trapped so that we can tell how many potential Amazon customers are being redirected to competing vendors.
Experience has shown that complaining to Jeff Bezos about Amazon's abuse of the US patent system earns you a cheery "We are proud of our innovative business practices, and we believe that we're entitled to patent protection" spiel in reply.
Our thinking is, if we can demonstrate to Bezos that we sent 10,000 people to Barnes & Noble or DVD Express, he might be convinced to re-examine his company's "innovative" business strategy.
This seems like a worthwhile time to call attention to the efforts of one of my office pals. Visit http://www.noamazon.com for some excellent links to alternative sites for the merchandise purveyed by Amazon.
We've tried to get Slashdot to mention this site as a "quickie" news item, but apparently they are an (ahem) Amazon affiliate themselves.:-)
When the Clintonistas spout platitudes such as "Nobody needs an AK-47 to hunt squirrels," they're employing precisely the same rhetorical device as Slade's argument ("Out of everyone who ever asked me for the code, everyone demanded it saying it's his or her god-given right to the code. Not a single person said they wanted it for fixing up the numerous bugs, or adding to it, or anything that the GPL is supposed to stand for.")
The American founders didn't justify the citizens' right to bear arms by citing their need to hunt squirrels. Likewise, Stallman didn't require GPL licensees to justify their legally-granted right to receive source code.
In both cases, we're seeing perversions of both the letter and the spirit of the law. It's a shame that JohnC will have to spend his own nickel to defend the rights of his licensees. But as others have noted, an airtight test case such as this one wouldn't necessarily be a Bad Thing for open-source licensing in general.
I'm fairly unique, in that I'm a huge fan of both Calvin _and_ Dilbert.
I think I can safely argue that Calvin & Hobbes achieved the status of a "work of art," in that we'll still be enjoying Bill Watterson's work twenty, fifty, a hundred years from now. But the degree to which Watterson thumped his anti-consumer Bible was often just plain absurd. Self-righteous indignation isn't good for art... any art. It's to Watterson's credit that he retired before his encroaching cynicism took over the strip entirely.
Adams occupies the other end of the spectrum entirely. His sense of capitalistic excess is a good antidote to Watterson's pretentiousness. Sure, Adams' incessant self-promotion gets on your nerves, but that's a feature, not a bug. He isn't creating any sort of enduring art and he knows it, but he'll be damned if he isn't going to milk the Dilbert franchise for every penny he can squeeze out of it.
Adams and Watterson are ideological bookends. They opened up space on the shelf for a much wider, healthier variety of cartoons than we ever enjoyed before they came along, and we owe them both big-time, IMHO.
Thanks for that link -- it's pretty amazing to contemplate the extent of human technology's reach. Almost half a light-day's journey in Voyager 1's case, and it's still going strong.
Looking at the performance of these spacecraft, built with decades-old technology, makes one realize just how much is gained by spending the extra dollars up front and doing the job right the first time. Here's hoping things go half as smoothly with Cassini as they have with the V'gers.
Back in college in the mid-1980s, I knew a guy (not me, some other guy, totally unrelated to myself) who used his Apple II+ and ImageWriter printer (which was quite the 'l33t printer back in those days) to embellish ordinary envelopes with the magical sigil:
BUSINESS REPLY MAIL NO POSTAGE NECESSARY IF MAILED IN THE UNITED STATES _______________ _______________ _______________ _______________ _______________ _______________ _______________ _______________
... exactly as used by junk mailers everywhere.
Being that this was undoubtedly a violation of Federal law punishable by 95 years in jail and a $6,000,000 fine, this dude (whose name I am frankly having trouble even remembering) only had the cojones to try his E-Stamp(tm) process on a single letter.
But it worked.
Now, if only this guy had thought to apply for a patent on electronically-printed postage, he would probably be a very wealthy man today.
But that wouldn't do me any good personally, of course, because I'm pretty sure I couldn't even come up with the bright young fellow's name. Not even if asked impolitely by men equipped with sunglasses and guns.
...that the difference between an engineer and a non-engineer comes down to a single point.
Namely, anyone can build a bridge that will stand up.
But it takes an engineer to build a bridge that will barely stand up.
If that old cliche has any truth to it, then most programmers I've met deserve the title of "engineer" as much as any bridge-builder who ever walked the hallowed halls of Harvard.
Anyone else reminded of a Mandelbrot set by the bottom picture, on the 100 nm scale?
At one point Tesla claimed to have reproduced ball lightning in his laboratory, but evidently the margin of his notebook proved too small to contain the procedure he followed.:-|
Slashdot Mirror
...a project such as this can be conducted entirely under the auspices of Part 15, which is subject to none of the restrictions you cite.
Also, commercial usage rules have been substantially relaxed lately. You should not try to sell ISP services over a link like this. OTOH, using it to order stuff over the 'net is fine.
The FCC's commercial-purpose rules for the Amateur service have been significantly relaxed over the past few years. You wouldn't want to use a ham-radio link like this to run a commercial ISP, but using it to order stuff online is fine. It's no different than using a repeater's telephone-link capability to order a pizza, for instance.
... referenced in the article, at http://www.qsl.net/ke5fx. I'm going to be sort of redundant here, and repost this message as a reply to the "first post", just to make sure all interested parties see it. I got to work late today, so my initial reply is lost somewhere in the noise at the bottom of the article. :-) Sorry for the duplicate post -- if someone can down-moderate the copy at the bottom I'd appreciate it.
/.-worthy. The response came back in about 5 minutes:
:-)
:-)
Amusingly, I submitted the project page to Slashdot myself about a year ago, when I first got the link working. When the submission was rejected, I wrote to one of the well-known admins at Slashdot asking what I needed to do to make it
I just didn't think it was interesting enough.
Sorry.
--
| (admin name omitted) | Just want to be misunderstood,
| (admin name omitted) | I wanna be feared in my neighborhood.
| http://slashdot.org/ | Just want to be a moody man,
| codejockey*gangstero | say things that nobody can understand.
| flove*lovemachine*wr | --Pete Townshend, Misunderstood
Dejected, I was forced to admit that my news-for-nerds quotient just couldn't compete with the guy who built a PC case out of Zebrano wood, or whatever the story-of-the-day was at the time. Consequently, Rob gets major props from me for doing a better job writing up the submission than I did.
Now for the bad news: out of many thousands of hits my site's received over the past year, only one guy, an EE professor at a local university, has successfully duplicated my efforts. In my mind, that somewhat validates the unnamed Slashdot admin's decision not to publicize the project in the first place. People, this is not a project for beginners or casual electronics buffs! In the year since I finished the project, a couple of excellent alternative solutions for RF data links that make good use of off-the-shelf hardware and homemade antennas have come to light. For instance, there's a good page on the topic of modifying Proxim Symphony cards for long-range service at Low-Cost Wireless Network How-To. I would have to say that this is a better approach for 99% of the people who have looked at my microwave link page and thought about building it. Heck, in retrospect this is what I should have done, instead of putting in all that engineering time on a 100%-custom solution.
My own 10-megabit link has been running great since last June with only a couple of hours' downtime for maintenance and tweaks, and it's easily the most 'educational' project I've ever tackled. But I think it's important to temper peoples' expectations. If you are an experienced electronics hacker with access to a very well-equipped RF test bench or a university EE lab, and you just want to spend a lot of time and money building something something cool, then I highly recommend my microwave link project. If not, do yourself a BIG favor and check out the various wireless-Ethernet card tweaks that have been springing up on the Web.
-- John Miles, KE5FX
... referenced in the article, at http://www.qsl.net/ke5fx.
/.-worthy. The response came back in about 5 minutes:
:-)
:-)
Amusingly, I submitted the project page to Slashdot myself about a year ago, when I first got the link working. When the submission was rejected, I wrote to one of the well-known admins at Slashdot asking what I needed to do to make it
I just didn't think it was interesting enough.
Sorry.
--
| (admin name omitted) | Just want to be misunderstood,
| (admin name omitted) | I wanna be feared in my neighborhood.
| http://slashdot.org/ | Just want to be a moody man,
| codejockey*gangstero | say things that nobody can understand.
| flove*lovemachine*wr | --Pete Townshend, Misunderstood
Dejected, I was forced to admit that my news-for-nerds quotient just couldn't compete with the guy who built a PC case out of Zebrano wood, or whatever the story-of-the-day was at the time. Consequently, Rob gets major props from me for doing a better job writing up the submission than I did.
Now for the bad news: out of many thousands of hits my site's received over the past year, only one guy, an EE professor at a local university, has successfully duplicated my efforts. In my mind, that somewhat validates the unnamed Slashdot admin's decision not to publicize the project in the first place. People, this is not a project for beginners or casual electronics buffs! In the year since I finished the project, a couple of excellent alternative solutions for RF data links that make good use of off-the-shelf hardware and homemade antennas have come to light. For instance, there's a good page on the topic of modifying Proxim Symphony cards for long-range service at Low-Cost Wireless Network How-To. I would have to say that this is a better approach for 99% of the people who have looked at my microwave link page and thought about building it. Heck, in retrospect this is what I should have done, instead of putting in all that engineering time on a 100%-custom solution.
My own 10-megabit link has been running great since last June with only a couple of hours' downtime for maintenance and tweaks, and it's easily the most 'educational' project I've ever tackled. But I think it's important to temper peoples' expectations. If you are an experienced electronics hacker with access to a very well-equipped RF test bench or a university EE lab, and you just want to spend a lot of time and money building something something cool, then I highly recommend my microwave link project. If not, do yourself a BIG favor and check out the various wireless-Ethernet card tweaks that have been springing up on the Web.
-- John Miles, KE5FX
What kind of waveguide has a velocity factor > 1?!
Pure marketing specsmanship, as far as I can tell.
To Microsoft's credit, they actually tried to drive a stake through interlaced video once and for all when the ATSC standards were under discussion. Unfortunately the NAB lobby won.
Personally, I think anyone who supports 1080i HDTV should be forced to look at it all day on their computer monitors.
Process gain is basically the improvement in signal-to-noise ratio that can be had in exchange for letting your signal take up more space than Mr. Shannon says it needs.
:-)
For example, Dixon's Spread Spectrum Systems says that for FM/FSK signals with over-unity deviation ratios, the process gain is 3 * (maximum deviation^2). The S/N ratio for the narrowband information being transmitted is effectively improved by allowing it to occupy more spectrum space than necessary. This is why I have my microwave link tweaked to chew up several dozen more MHz of prime 10-GHz real estate that it probably really needs.
As I understand it, another way to think of process gain in the general case is in terms of jamming immunity; i.e., how much power is it going to require in order to use an uncorrelated transmitter to jam the channel.
I'm sure there are different process-gain equations for various modulation mechanisms, but they are all going to boil down to the same basic idea: trading occupied BW for S/N.
Same here. Getting rid of my landline at home is the smartest thing I've done in the last 5 years. :)
I highly recommend PCS cell service over landline, for those who aren't relying on a hardwired phone connection for Internet service. Cellular technology and hardware has matured to the point at which landline connections no longer serve any purpose.... at least none that I can see.
...check out the Amazon customer reviews on Lt. Col. David Grossman's Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill .
:-)
This will give you an idea of what id and the gaming community as a whole are up against. For those tuning in late, Col. Grossman is the chief evangelist behind this and similar lawsuits which attempt to pin the blame for recent school shootings on creators and distributors of popular culture.
Never one to let facts and statistics interfere with a good diatribe, Grossman and his cronies excel at distracting their followers' attention from the fact that acts of violence in schools (not to mention the rest of US society) are occurring less frequently these days than at any time since the 1960s.
So if correlation really does imply causation, as Grossman would have us believe, then we should be thanking id Software and Valve for selling American kids a violence-dousing cathartic.
Personally, when it comes to figuring out what drove Michael Carneal to go postal at his junior high school, my money's on the town uranium-enrichment plant.
.... limitation and how insignificant it really is, consider a typical hardwired 10/100BaseT Ethernet subnet. In this case, only *1* device may transmit at a time. And that almost always works great, up to several dozen users per concentrator.
:)
As long as you don't have a few hundred AirPort users all running Napster in the same neighborhood, there should not be a problem with interference due to these unauthorized mods.
Also, using a directional antenna to increase effective radiated power is a Good Thing because doing so actually reduces the possibility of causing (or receiving) off-axis interference.
The FCC sees it differently, though: devices like the AirPort are type accepted for use only in their originally-approved form. Even if you stay within the allowable-power limitations, it's still illegal to dork around with external antennas and the like.
In practice, you're about as likely to get busted for this sort of activity as you are for driving 65.1 MPH in a 65 zone. The consequences can be severe, though, if they decide to Make an Example Of You.
Hmm. A worthy rant. However, consider how England obtained their Enigma machines in the first place.
:)
Maybe the Germans stole it back.
Your angle brackets got removed by the HTML parser.
The correct sequence is Step, (back track), (forward track), at the Preferences menu.
I bought one of the last Apex players left in the Bay Area on a trip to San Jose a couple of weeks ago. It is one of the few region-free players that can play a PAL DVD on an NTSC set, although I haven't had a chance to verify PAL playback quality in person.
As far as normal NTSC playback goes, a quick video-quality comparison using S-Video output shows no major differences between the SD-600A and my old Toshiba SD-2006 (a $500 first-generation player with 10-bit video DAC). No playback problems were observed watching The Matrix, a common source of trouble for cheaper players such as this one.
I just ordered a Region 3 (Asian) copy of Eyes Wide Shut from Hong Kong. We'll see how the Apex handles the disc when it arrives, but I don't expect any problems. (Kubrick fans in the US should note that this is an uncensored, unrated NTSC release, which should be compatible with all region-free players in the States. In that sense, it should be preferable to the Europe/UK PAL releases that are starting to show up.)
It seems that the MPAA forgot to ask me, the consumer, if I wanted to participate in their DVD region-coding plan. Not that they're interested in my answer, but for the record, it's "No, thanks." Studios like Warner Brothers are giving DVD fans every reason in the world to look for workarounds.
There was a time when we did things like this "Not because it is easy, but because it is hard."
The only way to acquire the technology to bring rocks back from Mars, is to stop talking about it and actually try to bring rocks back from Mars.
The year after I was born, we walked on the moon. Now, 31 years later, it's considered an impressive feat of science to grow tomatoes in low Earth orbit.
It may be about time for us to disband NASA entirely. If we aren't going to give them the money, resources, people, and most important of all, the popular mandate to do the job right, there's no sense in pretending to do the job at all.
"I would personally LOVE to give OrCad a REASONABLE fee for the use (and, PROMOTION - remember, I WILL ask the company I work for to buy OrCad) of their software. Say $100. That's more than I would have to pay for almost ANY other "educational version" software as a student, but still relatively reasonable."
You know, of course, that Orcad will give you, or me, or anyone who asks, a free demo copy of their entire suite, right? There's a 30-component-per-schematic limit, but that shouldn't be a problem for educational/hobby purposes. All of the schematics on my website were drawn with it.
Not very far, maybe a couple meters at most. Water is an excellent RF shielding material.
Sorry, you're right. To clarify, noamazon.com absolutely, positively does not make money from any aspect of its existence, including the cgi links.
:-)
Now, I can't speak for the author -- although he occupies the office adjacent to mine, he's out of town today. But I doubt he'd say "get lost" if B&N were to offer him a $1,000,000 Award for the Promotion of Good Corporate Citizenship, or anything.
Seriously, I don't believe he has any plans to turn the site into any type of profit center. If he does, I haven't heard anything about it.
Actually, the links are cgi-trapped so that we can tell how many potential Amazon customers are being redirected to competing vendors.
Experience has shown that complaining to Jeff Bezos about Amazon's abuse of the US patent system earns you a cheery "We are proud of our innovative business practices, and we believe that we're entitled to patent protection" spiel in reply.
Our thinking is, if we can demonstrate to Bezos that we sent 10,000 people to Barnes & Noble or DVD Express, he might be convinced to re-examine his company's "innovative" business strategy.
That's the idea, anyway.
...and start typing www.noamazon.com instead.
:-)
This seems like a worthwhile time to call attention to the efforts of one of my office pals. Visit http://www.noamazon.com for some excellent links to alternative sites for the merchandise purveyed by Amazon.
We've tried to get Slashdot to mention this site as a "quickie" news item, but apparently they are an (ahem) Amazon affiliate themselves.
When the Clintonistas spout platitudes such as "Nobody needs an AK-47 to hunt squirrels," they're employing precisely the same rhetorical device as Slade's argument ("Out of everyone who ever asked me for the code, everyone demanded it saying it's his or her god-given right to the code. Not a single person said they wanted it for fixing up the numerous bugs, or adding to it, or anything that the GPL is supposed to stand for.")
The American founders didn't justify the citizens' right to bear arms by citing their need to hunt squirrels. Likewise, Stallman didn't require GPL licensees to justify their legally-granted right to receive source code.
In both cases, we're seeing perversions of both the letter and the spirit of the law. It's a shame that JohnC will have to spend his own nickel to defend the rights of his licensees. But as others have noted, an airtight test case such as this one wouldn't necessarily be a Bad Thing for open-source licensing in general.
I'm fairly unique, in that I'm a huge fan of both Calvin _and_ Dilbert.
I think I can safely argue that Calvin & Hobbes achieved the status of a "work of art," in that we'll still be enjoying Bill Watterson's work twenty, fifty, a hundred years from now. But the degree to which Watterson thumped his anti-consumer Bible was often just plain absurd. Self-righteous indignation isn't good for art... any art. It's to Watterson's credit that he retired before his encroaching cynicism took over the strip entirely.
Adams occupies the other end of the spectrum entirely. His sense of capitalistic excess is a good antidote to Watterson's pretentiousness. Sure, Adams' incessant self-promotion gets on your nerves, but that's a feature, not a bug. He isn't creating any sort of enduring art and he knows it, but he'll be damned if he isn't going to milk the Dilbert franchise for every penny he can squeeze out of it.
Adams and Watterson are ideological bookends. They opened up space on the shelf for a much wider, healthier variety of cartoons than we ever enjoyed before they came along, and we owe them both big-time, IMHO.
Thanks for that link -- it's pretty amazing to contemplate the extent of human technology's reach. Almost half a light-day's journey in Voyager 1's case, and it's still going strong.
Looking at the performance of these spacecraft, built with decades-old technology, makes one realize just how much is gained by spending the extra dollars up front and doing the job right the first time. Here's hoping things go half as smoothly with Cassini as they have with the V'gers.
Back in college in the mid-1980s, I knew a guy (not me, some other guy, totally unrelated to myself) who used his Apple II+ and ImageWriter printer (which was quite the 'l33t printer back in those days) to embellish ordinary envelopes with the magical sigil:
BUSINESS REPLY MAIL
NO POSTAGE NECESSARY
IF MAILED IN THE UNITED STATES
_______________
_______________
_______________
_______________
_______________
_______________
_______________
_______________
... exactly as used by junk mailers everywhere.
Being that this was undoubtedly a violation of Federal law punishable by 95 years in jail and a $6,000,000 fine, this dude (whose name I am frankly having trouble even remembering) only had the cojones to try his E-Stamp(tm) process on a single letter.
But it worked.
Now, if only this guy had thought to apply for a patent on electronically-printed postage, he would probably be a very wealthy man today.
But that wouldn't do me any good personally, of course, because I'm pretty sure I couldn't even come up with the bright young fellow's name. Not even if asked impolitely by men equipped with sunglasses and guns.
-- jm
...that the difference between an engineer and a non-engineer comes down to a single point.
Namely, anyone can build a bridge that will stand up.
But it takes an engineer to build a bridge that will barely stand up.
If that old cliche has any truth to it, then most programmers I've met deserve the title of "engineer" as much as any bridge-builder who ever walked the hallowed halls of Harvard.
-- jm
Anyone else reminded of a Mandelbrot set by the bottom picture, on the 100 nm scale?
:-|
At one point Tesla claimed to have reproduced ball lightning in his laboratory, but evidently the margin of his notebook proved too small to contain the procedure he followed.
-- jm