Yeah, certainly you won't find any prior art like that in the record store! They use a completely different sorting; first you find the right section for the genre, and then you browse until you find the artist and then you look for the... uh... album.
None of the pics online seem to contain folders like I mentioned. You just gotta trust me that it did it...
Well, it could do it.
What I really liked was, if you sorted the list by genre, you got a level of automatic folders for the genres, containing folders for the artists, containing folders for the albums, with the album folders containing the actual tracks.
Sort by artist and you skip the genre level, so each artist folder has all the appropriate albums. And sort by albums and there's just album folders.
Made browsing really nice; I still don't like the iTunes interface as much as that aspect of SoundJam. But in other ways, especially ripping and coding reliability, iTunes kicks SoundJam's butt. I've still got a few tracks around that have a "buzz" in them from when I tried to do too much on a machine while SoundJam was ripping and it botched the CD read.
So how many ways are there of presenting "Genre", "Artist" and "Album"?
Patents need to be for a novel, non-obvious invention (despite what the USPTO is granting these days); the 2- or 3-pane view above the track list is hardly non-obvious.
I had a decent-enough Duron 1800 board from them, one of those all-on-the-board things where you drop it in a case, add a disk, and plug it in to the screen and keyboard.
Worked alright, and I didn't expect much from it, so it was actually a lot better than I expected.
However, after about a year, it developed a thermal fault that trips at fairly low temperatures; run a complex enough program for a while and the board would lock up.
There's an ASUS A7V8X-MX SE in its place now. With an nVidia video card; on-board video can really, really suck even if you aren't doing serious gaming.
Well, it's probably because motherboard is not easy to translate and keep the nuance; you're going to wind up with mainboard anyway.
Could be worse. Could be IBM-speak and they're talking about the "system planar", "memory planar" or "I/O planar".
Though I have heard talk of "midplanes" around some Macintosh machines; so looks like IBMeze is included free with a PowerPC.
Once you start calling your disk drives "DASD" or "hard files", you might as well give up. (Though "portafiles" were kind of cute--imagine a full-height 5.25" SCSI HDD in a hot-plug type enclosure... well, it would have been called hot-plug if it was 5 or 10 years later.)
Yes, you are "party of the first part", your customer is "party of the second part", and you can start at "party of the third part" for other persons or entities after that.
But, only one of the alternatives in section three says "any third party"--option B. Option C allows you to distribute the binary you recieved under that option and propagate it--and only noncommercially and only if you received it in binary form (and therefore couldn't modify the source).
If you use option A and provide the source code with your binaries, you are not exposed to the "any third party" clause.
But anyone you give the source and binary to can then give the source and binary to anyone else, for any fee they can get someone to pay. (The only restriction on fees is for obtaining a copy of the source once you have obtained a binary-only copy.)
There is no such way as patch level on Solaris for overall system.
Similarly for AIX; the system is updated by applying updates to each "fileset" (smallest selectable grain of install).
They (IBM) do provide an "oslevel" command which will vet the current installation against known maintenance releases. But most admins on production boxes patch only what they need, and that's really easy to do on AIX.
The fileset dependency information on AIX will prevent you removing something that is needed by another fileset. It is possible to craft a dependency that will request specific vesions and not accept newer versions.
In general, that's not needed. If you install a newer fileset, everything still works with it.
The main exception is C++. Unless you are very careful with your class definitions, it is very easy to break binary compatibility. You have to be extremely cautious about anything that affects the virtual function table layout, as well as the usual rules for POD type (plain-old-data, C-style structs) compatibility.
AIX provides a way to have multiple shared objects in a single.a file, only one of which is available for linking. Solaris (and Linux) use the libfoo.so.V convention, where you set the soname in libfoo.so.V and use a symlink to the latest for the linker.
But you have to have done that right when you first set up your library. I've seen uselessly versioned.so files on Linux and Solaris--they don't have the soname set, so applications link to the "plain".so version, so having the old and new one on the system doesn't work--you always get whichever one the.so symlink points to.
A lot of this is solved problems. But very few people know the solutions, and others often aren't interested in listening to people who do know how to construct dependencies, or build shared objects robustly, and so on.
Don't be so sure that current Airport cards are Apple-designed ASICs. I forget which, but I believe that at least one generation was Lucent, as you note--but with the connector reversed or something similarly odd.
Similarly, Apple's special SuperDrive has been various models of Pioneer DVD-RW, perhaps the new dual-layer model is still a Pioneer.
From reading some things between the lines, their built-in Bluetooth support is based on the D-Link USB chips, only packaged for internal mounting.
The special video cards are regular nVidias and ATIs set up for big endian and Open Firmware.
Apple makes computers, not chips. You're thinking Commodore & MOS.
You've figured out why I always wander through all the Preferences of a particular program the first time I use it. Generally looking for stuff to turn off.
For iTunes, as others said, it uses pretty much the same logic I was using. It even names files on CD-R the way I wanted to; and I'd even written a C program to process ID3 to make everything ISO-9660 safe.
Maybe it's new for ink jet, but it isn't new for printing. Line printers were pretty standard for high-speed but low-quality printing up until about 15 years ago; the economical laser printer killed them off.
The dot-matrix line printers would have a solid row of pins across the ribbon, and would form a complete row at a time. The fixed-font printers had a solid row of character hammers and a chain with the letter-forms on it. The chain was set up so that there would be more of the more frequently-used letters. The controller would then fire all the hammers it could when the right letters were in front of them, so very quickly it had formed the entire line also.
Oh, and "dot matrix" means "formed with a matrix of dots", so ink jet, laser, thermal, electrostatic, and pin-impact printers are all dot matrix. Daisy wheel, type ball, that funny thimble one, and the letter-chain line printer are all fixed-font... and we used to like them!
Modern low-end laser and LED printers really work the same way; a laser scan or LED bar exposes a row on a photostatic drum, which then picks up the toner and sticks it on the page. But you're still drawing a line of dots at a time, you just have to draw it on a transfer medium. (And with toner, you have to iron it out to make it stick--the so-called "fuser".)
But Fram oil filters work on your Ford and his Acura and my Honda. NGK spark plugs work on all of them. I'm able to hook up power to my Garmin GPSes and Cobra CB from the Honda 12V accessory circuit. I can use a ClearView, Rifle or Laminar windshield if I don't like the standard Honda one. I can put a Corbin or Russell seat on it, or a Givi top-box. I can put Mobil, Quaker State, Motul, or many other oils in the engine or final drive. I can put gasoline from any decent refinery into the fuel tank.
In fact, the only thing that is a bit odd is the headlamp bulbs are a little weird; but they are easily adaptable to standard H4 bulbs, so that's no big deal either--and Honda isn't trying to sue anyone for making H4 adapter rings or telling people how to modify the headlamp assembly or an H4 bulb to fit it.
And, finally, I do NOT expect all components from my older Honda (VF700C) to fit the new one (ST1100A); even wearables--I can't use the same brake pads, oil filter, fuel filter, water thermostat, fan thermostat, cylinder head gaskets, valve shims, and so on.
I also can't use ink tanks from my Epson Stylus Color 740 in my Stylus Photo R200.
No, you need to make accessable to community/everyone, not just your users.
(Reading "recipients of copies of the object code or executable" for "users", since copyright law is all about making and distributing copies, not using them.)
Really, AC? Want to point to the clause in the LGPL that says that?
I've noticed that they never put those big round "***NEW***" signs on changed speed limits or parking restrictions.
Which is a bugger if you travel a section of road regularly, but infrequently--like every few months. If I know the signage, I'll just watch for traffic or potholes or children or deer or skunks or minivans or raccoons or porcupines or haywagons or moose or bears or all the other road hazards in rural central Ontario.
One place did do it right: they moved the limit farther from the center of "town", which mainly featured a vacation lodge across the highway from the waterfront, so a lower limit made sense. (And blind S-curves getting to it, so you can't go too fast and be able to react to someone crossing the road.) The new loewr-speed-limit-begins signs were Bigger Than Normal and equipped with flashing yellow lights.
And, BTW, at the "MAXIMUM XX BEGINS" signs, you need to already have slowed down. That's not where you start slowing, it's where you stop slowing. (In Ontario, we have "MAXIMUM XX AHEAD" signs where the drop is more than 10 km/h; I notice New York likes "SPEED ZONE AHEAD", but doesn't say what speed is in the zone ahead. And I have no idea what single or double orange diamonds mean on top of a limit sign.)
Skipping over all the issues over energy storage that are leading to the success of the hybrid design....
How is this motor new? They don't describe how multiple rotors are connected. They don't even mention the basic motor technology.
Not having permanent magnets is not a selling point in Real Motors. Permanent magnet motors are only used in very small, low-power applications--tape player, model car, windshield washer pump, hard disk motor.
Replacing the permanent magnet with an electromagnet lets you build a MUCH bigger motor. And how you connect it (the field or stator coil) to the rotor coil lets you do neat tricks. It's the motor that made electric rail possible. Same thing is in those old "Mixmaster" mixers, rigged in such a way that they keep constant speed under almost any load. Same sort of motor in your vacuum, blender, power drill, and so on. They're called "DC Machines", but because of the electromagnet, they can run off AC as well (0-60 Hz, it says in the old Mixmaster manual), and are also called "Universal machines".
But with modern solid-state controls we can do better using various kinds of "AC machines", neither of which use permanent magnets either. An induction machine is your basic steady-speed AC workhorse motor--tablesaw, drill press, washing machine, drier, window fan, fridge or AC compressor, furnace fan. They're weak at start, so tend to come up to speed slowly. An induction machine is basically a lump of aluminum in a changing magnetic field. Set it up with 3-phase AC and you don't need anything at all, set up 3 coils and put a coffee can in the middle and watch it turn. Change the frequency of the AC and you change the speed. For better power, replace the lump of aluminum with actual wound coils shorted together--no brushes, no commutator, no permanent magnet.
Next is the "synchronous machine", which can be built with a permanent magnet, but you generally don't. You do need sliprings or brushes with this one, as you provide power to a rotating electromagnet. Your car's alternator (and some bikes) use one of these--by adjusting the current through the rotating electromagnet, you adjust the generated voltage. (That's how your charging system regulator works--by changing the amount of power actually generated.)
You get bags of torque from a synchronous motor, but the problem is getting one to start turning. The classic way is to start it as an induction motor, then engage the rotating electromagnet when it is at speed. If you just start bashing 60 Hz AC into one already in synchronous mode, it will just vibrate, as the magnetic field (still thinking 3-phase) are zipping by faster than it can turn to catch up.
But with recent (last 10-15 years) improvements in power switching semiconductors, we no longer have to settle with 60 Hz AC. And, on DC supplied vehicles, we have to invert to power a synchronous machine anyway. So, you build a frequency-controlled inverter, so you can start the motor from near-zero Hz and bring it up to whatever speed you want--the synchronous nature of the beast will "lock" it to the speed from the inverter. (And you can watch the power on your drive circuits to see if you are trying to drive it too hard and are about to lose synchronization.) You can do that trick with an induction machine too, but an induction machine relies on the stator windings to induce a magnet in the rotor, so it's not so good at very low frequencies. On the other hand, it starts easily, so you don't need to match frequency to motor speed, it will just "slip". (The difference between syncrhonous speed and actual speed is called slip.)
One final trick: I've been assuming you've got a 2-pole motor: One north, one south around the outer circle at any given time. At 60 Hz, this gives you 3600 RPM--each time the voltage makes a complete cycle, the rotor has to turn to follow. Another poster hit on the right basic idea for electr
Motorcycle speedos are typically driven off the front wheel, while car speedos are taken off the propshaft coming out of the transmission. So, sure you've got the differential or front-wheel-drive equivelent, but that's a fixed gear ratio, and so irrelevant. It all comes down to tire diameter.
Both drive the odometer from the same cable as the speedo... at least for those that are still a mechanical set-up.
So you can check your wheel-diameter calibration by running a "measured mile" and seeing how your odometer fares. Get a friend with a stopwatch and try to work out your speedo if you like...
But the easiest way to check your speedo, if you don't have a GPS receiver, is to find one of those small towns with a "YOUR SPEED IS" sign. You're reading slashdot, though, so why don't you have a GPS receiver?
Back to cars vs. bikes; I'm fortunate in that both bikes I've owned have had speedos that read no more than 2% high. (Speedos are required by law, in Canada and the US anyway, to never read low.)
Some of the articles I've read in bike magazines suggest that bike speedos--typically sport bikes--are often set to read 5% high, so riders think they're going faster than they really are.
I figure that's just because the manufacturer had to to meet the -0% +10% legal limits (or whatever they are), so they shifted the target reading up 5%, since the manufacturing process gives +/- 5%. (Numbers are invented for purpose of example only, I don't expect that +/- 5% is the correct error these days.)
A friend's car has a dead-on odometer, but reads 10% high on speed--until he discovered that, he got tailgated a lot.
The GP means compare the multiple subtitle channels, not the subtitles to the spoken.
At least all the subtitle channels are given the same space constraint. Of course, every language takes a different amount of space to express a given idea, so each translation will have different trade-offs.
And then, as others said, you get cultural translation too, like:
Spoken Japanese: "I am most sorry, it is a terrible dishonor, I humbly beg for your forgiveness."
Subtitled English: "My fault."
ever since people have figured out how to make money - and avoid paying - from software sales of all kinds
But media DRM, and many software "put the disc in", or "plug in the dongle", or "read line 7 on page 12 of the manual", all they create is an access barrier that is reached only by the honest user.
The music downloader is pulling already-ripped-and-coded tracks of their favorite P2P network.
The warez user has a cracked program without the copyright check.
The guy who paid for the music:
Can't put it on his iPod
Can't make a regular mix CD for his non-WMA player
Can't transfer it to his generic MP3-only player
Can't make a backup so that the wonky car player doesn't scratch the original
Can't use cdparanoia to recover a CD with failing media (got a few of those)
you can only make verbatim copies of the original.
You sure can't. If it was verbatim, it wouldn't work--you couldn't tell the copy from the original.
You can make protected WMA copies of the original. Which will play really well in... like... uh... nothing I use regularly, anyway. Not in the car, not in the house, not in the old Discman. Though everything's on the iPod now anyway; so I'm sure not buying a new Discman or car deck just to keep Sony happy. (Ugh; they're both Sonys. I think it's a little late to get my money back.)
I'm guessing this is probably going to need some sort of machine for which a fully tricked-out version of Windows Media is available. And, of course, operating system collusion with the DRM on the original CD to prevent you doing whatever the Windows equivelent of cdparanoia or cdrdao is.
I expect Mac Mini sales and Linux downloads will continue.
I used a batch of unlacquered CD-Rs for a bit. Until I discovered that the glue on a Post-It note was enough to peel the recording surface right off the top of the disc.
I went back up a notch in the price range. There's a reason some discs are really, really cheap--it's 'cause they're not made as well. (Unfortunately, not cheap discs aren't necessarily made well.)
Actually, I keep two piles of blanks around: really, really, really cheap discs for one-shots, test burns, and abusing in the portable MP3 players. And some nice lacquered surface ones for things I want to keep around for a bit. I've got discs 6-8 years old that are reading back at full speed, no problems at all. And some 6-8 weeks old that are toast.
I haven't found the "peeling media" thing to be as big a deal with DVD blanks. But I do have a pile of DVD-Rs which failed after a few months of service. But I couldn't figure out just what the common thread was--several different kinds of disc from a couple of makers. I eventually decided it was possibly the use of adhesive labels that killed them, as unlabelled discs from the same batch were OK.
But discs made both before and after that run have been fine.
New Sun machines, starting from at least 5 years ago, have USB keyboards, so sure. Might take some keymap tweaking to map the Sun keys to some useful function.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, certainly you won't find any prior art like that in the record store! They use a completely different sorting; first you find the right section for the genre, and then you browse until you find the artist and then you look for the... uh... album.
Ooops.
Well, it could do it.
What I really liked was, if you sorted the list by genre, you got a level of automatic folders for the genres, containing folders for the artists, containing folders for the albums, with the album folders containing the actual tracks.
Sort by artist and you skip the genre level, so each artist folder has all the appropriate albums. And sort by albums and there's just album folders.
Made browsing really nice; I still don't like the iTunes interface as much as that aspect of SoundJam. But in other ways, especially ripping and coding reliability, iTunes kicks SoundJam's butt. I've still got a few tracks around that have a "buzz" in them from when I tried to do too much on a machine while SoundJam was ripping and it botched the CD read.
Patents need to be for a novel, non-obvious invention (despite what the USPTO is granting these days); the 2- or 3-pane view above the track list is hardly non-obvious.
I had a decent-enough Duron 1800 board from them, one of those all-on-the-board things where you drop it in a case, add a disk, and plug it in to the screen and keyboard.
Worked alright, and I didn't expect much from it, so it was actually a lot better than I expected.
However, after about a year, it developed a thermal fault that trips at fairly low temperatures; run a complex enough program for a while and the board would lock up.
There's an ASUS A7V8X-MX SE in its place now. With an nVidia video card; on-board video can really, really suck even if you aren't doing serious gaming.
Could be worse. Could be IBM-speak and they're talking about the "system planar", "memory planar" or "I/O planar".
Though I have heard talk of "midplanes" around some Macintosh machines; so looks like IBMeze is included free with a PowerPC.
Once you start calling your disk drives "DASD" or "hard files", you might as well give up. (Though "portafiles" were kind of cute--imagine a full-height 5.25" SCSI HDD in a hot-plug type enclosure... well, it would have been called hot-plug if it was 5 or 10 years later.)
So with the Intel Macs be in violation of the ACMD?
But, only one of the alternatives in section three says "any third party"--option B. Option C allows you to distribute the binary you recieved under that option and propagate it--and only noncommercially and only if you received it in binary form (and therefore couldn't modify the source).
If you use option A and provide the source code with your binaries, you are not exposed to the "any third party" clause.
But anyone you give the source and binary to can then give the source and binary to anyone else, for any fee they can get someone to pay. (The only restriction on fees is for obtaining a copy of the source once you have obtained a binary-only copy.)
Similarly for AIX; the system is updated by applying updates to each "fileset" (smallest selectable grain of install).
They (IBM) do provide an "oslevel" command which will vet the current installation against known maintenance releases. But most admins on production boxes patch only what they need, and that's really easy to do on AIX.
The fileset dependency information on AIX will prevent you removing something that is needed by another fileset. It is possible to craft a dependency that will request specific vesions and not accept newer versions.
In general, that's not needed. If you install a newer fileset, everything still works with it.
The main exception is C++. Unless you are very careful with your class definitions, it is very easy to break binary compatibility. You have to be extremely cautious about anything that affects the virtual function table layout, as well as the usual rules for POD type (plain-old-data, C-style structs) compatibility.
AIX provides a way to have multiple shared objects in a single .a file, only one of which is available for linking. Solaris (and Linux) use the libfoo.so.V convention, where you set the soname in libfoo.so.V and use a symlink to the latest for the linker.
But you have to have done that right when you first set up your library. I've seen uselessly versioned .so files on Linux and Solaris--they don't have the soname set, so applications link to the "plain" .so version, so having the old and new one on the system doesn't work--you always get whichever one the .so symlink points to.
A lot of this is solved problems. But very few people know the solutions, and others often aren't interested in listening to people who do know how to construct dependencies, or build shared objects robustly, and so on.
Similarly, Apple's special SuperDrive has been various models of Pioneer DVD-RW, perhaps the new dual-layer model is still a Pioneer.
From reading some things between the lines, their built-in Bluetooth support is based on the D-Link USB chips, only packaged for internal mounting.
The special video cards are regular nVidias and ATIs set up for big endian and Open Firmware.
Apple makes computers, not chips. You're thinking Commodore & MOS.
For iTunes, as others said, it uses pretty much the same logic I was using. It even names files on CD-R the way I wanted to; and I'd even written a C program to process ID3 to make everything ISO-9660 safe.
And you cannot have a CWD on a UNC path with CMD.EXE; if you do, it will dump you in the system folder instead.
You'll need to use some other shell to get a CWD on a UNC directory; then run "cmd.exe".
Modern Windows programs don't need drive letters for network resources--modern as in circa 1994 Windows NT.
So they reinvented the dot-matrix line printer.
Maybe it's new for ink jet, but it isn't new for printing. Line printers were pretty standard for high-speed but low-quality printing up until about 15 years ago; the economical laser printer killed them off.
The dot-matrix line printers would have a solid row of pins across the ribbon, and would form a complete row at a time. The fixed-font printers had a solid row of character hammers and a chain with the letter-forms on it. The chain was set up so that there would be more of the more frequently-used letters. The controller would then fire all the hammers it could when the right letters were in front of them, so very quickly it had formed the entire line also.
Oh, and "dot matrix" means "formed with a matrix of dots", so ink jet, laser, thermal, electrostatic, and pin-impact printers are all dot matrix. Daisy wheel, type ball, that funny thimble one, and the letter-chain line printer are all fixed-font... and we used to like them!
Modern low-end laser and LED printers really work the same way; a laser scan or LED bar exposes a row on a photostatic drum, which then picks up the toner and sticks it on the page. But you're still drawing a line of dots at a time, you just have to draw it on a transfer medium. (And with toner, you have to iron it out to make it stick--the so-called "fuser".)
ssh -p 443 user@foreignhost
ssh -p 80 user@foreignhost
In fact, the only thing that is a bit odd is the headlamp bulbs are a little weird; but they are easily adaptable to standard H4 bulbs, so that's no big deal either--and Honda isn't trying to sue anyone for making H4 adapter rings or telling people how to modify the headlamp assembly or an H4 bulb to fit it.
And, finally, I do NOT expect all components from my older Honda (VF700C) to fit the new one (ST1100A); even wearables--I can't use the same brake pads, oil filter, fuel filter, water thermostat, fan thermostat, cylinder head gaskets, valve shims, and so on.
I also can't use ink tanks from my Epson Stylus Color 740 in my Stylus Photo R200.
But I can use the same paper....
(Reading "recipients of copies of the object code or executable" for "users", since copyright law is all about making and distributing copies, not using them.)
Really, AC? Want to point to the clause in the LGPL that says that?
Section 4 certainly doesn't.
I've noticed that they never put those big round "***NEW***" signs on changed speed limits or parking restrictions.
Which is a bugger if you travel a section of road regularly, but infrequently--like every few months. If I know the signage, I'll just watch for traffic or potholes or children or deer or skunks or minivans or raccoons or porcupines or haywagons or moose or bears or all the other road hazards in rural central Ontario.
One place did do it right: they moved the limit farther from the center of "town", which mainly featured a vacation lodge across the highway from the waterfront, so a lower limit made sense. (And blind S-curves getting to it, so you can't go too fast and be able to react to someone crossing the road.) The new loewr-speed-limit-begins signs were Bigger Than Normal and equipped with flashing yellow lights.
And, BTW, at the "MAXIMUM XX BEGINS" signs, you need to already have slowed down. That's not where you start slowing, it's where you stop slowing. (In Ontario, we have "MAXIMUM XX AHEAD" signs where the drop is more than 10 km/h; I notice New York likes "SPEED ZONE AHEAD", but doesn't say what speed is in the zone ahead. And I have no idea what single or double orange diamonds mean on top of a limit sign.)
Skipping over all the issues over energy storage that are leading to the success of the hybrid design....
How is this motor new? They don't describe how multiple rotors are connected. They don't even mention the basic motor technology.
Not having permanent magnets is not a selling point in Real Motors. Permanent magnet motors are only used in very small, low-power applications--tape player, model car, windshield washer pump, hard disk motor.
Replacing the permanent magnet with an electromagnet lets you build a MUCH bigger motor. And how you connect it (the field or stator coil) to the rotor coil lets you do neat tricks. It's the motor that made electric rail possible. Same thing is in those old "Mixmaster" mixers, rigged in such a way that they keep constant speed under almost any load. Same sort of motor in your vacuum, blender, power drill, and so on. They're called "DC Machines", but because of the electromagnet, they can run off AC as well (0-60 Hz, it says in the old Mixmaster manual), and are also called "Universal machines".
But with modern solid-state controls we can do better using various kinds of "AC machines", neither of which use permanent magnets either. An induction machine is your basic steady-speed AC workhorse motor--tablesaw, drill press, washing machine, drier, window fan, fridge or AC compressor, furnace fan. They're weak at start, so tend to come up to speed slowly. An induction machine is basically a lump of aluminum in a changing magnetic field. Set it up with 3-phase AC and you don't need anything at all, set up 3 coils and put a coffee can in the middle and watch it turn. Change the frequency of the AC and you change the speed. For better power, replace the lump of aluminum with actual wound coils shorted together--no brushes, no commutator, no permanent magnet.
Next is the "synchronous machine", which can be built with a permanent magnet, but you generally don't. You do need sliprings or brushes with this one, as you provide power to a rotating electromagnet. Your car's alternator (and some bikes) use one of these--by adjusting the current through the rotating electromagnet, you adjust the generated voltage. (That's how your charging system regulator works--by changing the amount of power actually generated.)
You get bags of torque from a synchronous motor, but the problem is getting one to start turning. The classic way is to start it as an induction motor, then engage the rotating electromagnet when it is at speed. If you just start bashing 60 Hz AC into one already in synchronous mode, it will just vibrate, as the magnetic field (still thinking 3-phase) are zipping by faster than it can turn to catch up.
But with recent (last 10-15 years) improvements in power switching semiconductors, we no longer have to settle with 60 Hz AC. And, on DC supplied vehicles, we have to invert to power a synchronous machine anyway. So, you build a frequency-controlled inverter, so you can start the motor from near-zero Hz and bring it up to whatever speed you want--the synchronous nature of the beast will "lock" it to the speed from the inverter. (And you can watch the power on your drive circuits to see if you are trying to drive it too hard and are about to lose synchronization.) You can do that trick with an induction machine too, but an induction machine relies on the stator windings to induce a magnet in the rotor, so it's not so good at very low frequencies. On the other hand, it starts easily, so you don't need to match frequency to motor speed, it will just "slip". (The difference between syncrhonous speed and actual speed is called slip.)
One final trick: I've been assuming you've got a 2-pole motor: One north, one south around the outer circle at any given time. At 60 Hz, this gives you 3600 RPM--each time the voltage makes a complete cycle, the rotor has to turn to follow. Another poster hit on the right basic idea for electr
Both drive the odometer from the same cable as the speedo... at least for those that are still a mechanical set-up.
So you can check your wheel-diameter calibration by running a "measured mile" and seeing how your odometer fares. Get a friend with a stopwatch and try to work out your speedo if you like...
But the easiest way to check your speedo, if you don't have a GPS receiver, is to find one of those small towns with a "YOUR SPEED IS" sign. You're reading slashdot, though, so why don't you have a GPS receiver?
Back to cars vs. bikes; I'm fortunate in that both bikes I've owned have had speedos that read no more than 2% high. (Speedos are required by law, in Canada and the US anyway, to never read low.)
Some of the articles I've read in bike magazines suggest that bike speedos--typically sport bikes--are often set to read 5% high, so riders think they're going faster than they really are.
I figure that's just because the manufacturer had to to meet the -0% +10% legal limits (or whatever they are), so they shifted the target reading up 5%, since the manufacturing process gives +/- 5%. (Numbers are invented for purpose of example only, I don't expect that +/- 5% is the correct error these days.)
A friend's car has a dead-on odometer, but reads 10% high on speed--until he discovered that, he got tailgated a lot.
At least all the subtitle channels are given the same space constraint. Of course, every language takes a different amount of space to express a given idea, so each translation will have different trade-offs.
And then, as others said, you get cultural translation too, like:
Spoken Japanese: "I am most sorry, it is a terrible dishonor, I humbly beg for your forgiveness."
Subtitled English: "My fault."
But media DRM, and many software "put the disc in", or "plug in the dongle", or "read line 7 on page 12 of the manual", all they create is an access barrier that is reached only by the honest user.
The music downloader is pulling already-ripped-and-coded tracks of their favorite P2P network.
The warez user has a cracked program without the copyright check.
The guy who paid for the music:
You sure can't. If it was verbatim, it wouldn't work--you couldn't tell the copy from the original.
You can make protected WMA copies of the original. Which will play really well in... like... uh... nothing I use regularly, anyway. Not in the car, not in the house, not in the old Discman. Though everything's on the iPod now anyway; so I'm sure not buying a new Discman or car deck just to keep Sony happy. (Ugh; they're both Sonys. I think it's a little late to get my money back.)
I'm guessing this is probably going to need some sort of machine for which a fully tricked-out version of Windows Media is available. And, of course, operating system collusion with the DRM on the original CD to prevent you doing whatever the Windows equivelent of cdparanoia or cdrdao is.
I expect Mac Mini sales and Linux downloads will continue.
That's the reason I'm not buying a G5 iMac.
I have an LCD screen. I have a keyboard and trackball.
And I have 3 computers connected to them all with a nice-ish switchbox.
It really, really, really sucks to have a machine with a built-in display for use on a KVM setup.
So it's a Mini soon for web/e-mail/file/backup server, and a dual G5 when I feel rich.
And don't forget the line of fairly slim under-the-screen machines in the LC series way back in the 68K days.
_Some_ CDs you burn don't have the final coat.
I used a batch of unlacquered CD-Rs for a bit. Until I discovered that the glue on a Post-It note was enough to peel the recording surface right off the top of the disc.
I went back up a notch in the price range. There's a reason some discs are really, really cheap--it's 'cause they're not made as well. (Unfortunately, not cheap discs aren't necessarily made well.)
Actually, I keep two piles of blanks around: really, really, really cheap discs for one-shots, test burns, and abusing in the portable MP3 players. And some nice lacquered surface ones for things I want to keep around for a bit. I've got discs 6-8 years old that are reading back at full speed, no problems at all. And some 6-8 weeks old that are toast.
I haven't found the "peeling media" thing to be as big a deal with DVD blanks. But I do have a pile of DVD-Rs which failed after a few months of service. But I couldn't figure out just what the common thread was--several different kinds of disc from a couple of makers. I eventually decided it was possibly the use of adhesive labels that killed them, as unlabelled discs from the same batch were OK.
But discs made both before and after that run have been fine.
New Sun machines, starting from at least 5 years ago, have USB keyboards, so sure. Might take some keymap tweaking to map the Sun keys to some useful function.