It's nothing of the sort. The purpose of a driver's license is not track your whereabouts, it's a license to drive. When you pull out of your driveway and go to work, is there somebody waiting there to check your ID and ask where you are going?
Quite right. But I'm not trying to argue against drivers licences; I'm trying to argue that travelling anonymously is not an inalienable right.
It may, indeed, be good policy to require that travel be anonymous; but I assert that it is no violation of some basic human need to require identification at an airport.
Calling something a basic human right is an oft-used method of deflecting opposition to it (see also "well-poisoning", an ad hominem version of the same). Now if I say that people ought to present identification at airports, they will tell me that it's a violation of basic human rights to do so; but this has certainly not been established.
I love this type of argument -- I call it the "Hey, let's draw a completely stupid and unjustified analogy and hope the other guy just doesn't notice" method.
I love it too: it's called reductio ad absurdum, and it's a handy way to make a point. Except that my object is exactly to get the other guy to notice.
Clearly it didn't work this time; you've cleverly ignored completely what I was driving at (no pun intended). You are rebutting something I never asserted. But hey, at least you got a +4 mod. Glad I could be of service.
Perhaps you could find a bit of time to explain to me why travelling anonymously is a basic human right. Not only would you be actually answering my assertion, you might even get modded up again. Or is it bad form around here to answer people directly?
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; the right to travel anonymously..."
Since when has it been a right to travel anonymously? We can argue whether the government ought to ask people for identification, and whether the airlines ought to ask people for identification; but when you call it a right, you are saying that it is a foregone conclusion that part of the proper treatment of a human being consists in not asking him who he is when he steps on board an airplane.
This is nonsense, stark and staring. If travelling anonymously is a universal right, the system of driving licences is a human-rights atrocity of gigantic scale.
Then again, this could come in handy. I think I'm going to tell my boss that I have a right to make over $200,000 a year. That way I won't have to argue about whether he ought to be paying me so handsomely. My rights are at stake!
I used to use Emacs a lot. I use jEdit mainly now, because I really like it; it helps me work faster. But I definitely don't use it because it's fast. It's not. jEdit isn't as slow as Micro$oft Word (substitute 'tu' for 'wo' to see my opinion of that "program"), but it's pretty darn slow. It's so slow that, although I liked the program when I first tried it, it was just too slow, on every platform I tried it on (Linux, Windows, OS X). I've got past that now, because slow as it is, it helps me work faster.
Know why jEdit is slow? 'Cause it's written in Java. Every Java app I've ever used is dog-slow, especially compared to C++ apps. C++ was designed to be fast; and when used properly, it is. Java was designed to be portable; after several years, false starts, marketing hype and outright sabotage, it pretty much is. But it wasn't designed to be fast. That's not the point of it. It's designed to be portable and easy to program (and to make lots of money for Sun, somehow, but that's another topic).
This guy may have thrown together a benchmark, but I've got a better one: experience. Wake me up when jEdit runs almost as fast as Emacs on the same machine; then I'll start to believe this stuff.
And yes, I know Emacs isn't written in C++; it's written partly in C, partly in Lisp. So most of it's interpreted. (Some claim that Emacs stands for "eighty megs and continuously swapping".) So I think this is a way more than fair comparison.
(Note: this is a college-rival joke. I'm a Georgia Tech grad, so I pick on UGA. Feel free to substitute your rival school for UGA here.)
Once upon a time, a group of University of Georgia students decided to take a trip to Paris. One day, they came across a man selling tickets for an airplane tour of the city. They all decided to go, and each of them bought a ticket.
On the day of the flight, they found that a group of students from the University of Krakow had also bought tickets for the same trip. The pilot decided to seat them on opposite sides of the plane.
Off they went, flying here and there above the city, enjoying the remarkable views. Finally, the pilot announced the highlight of the trip: a flight around the Eiffel Tower.
As they neared the Eiffel Tower, the students from Krakow saw that the pilot would make a counter-clockwise flight around it. Since they were on the left side of the plane, all of them rushed over to the right side, where the UGA students were sitting, so they could get a better view.
But just at the moment they did so, the plane began to vibrate wildly, entered a spectacular cartwheel stall, and crashed!
And the moral of this story is: It doesn't matter how many zeros you have on the right side of the plane - if any Poles are there, it will always become unstable.
An electrical engineer, a mechanical engineer, and a chemical engineer were arguing about what was the greatest invention of all time.
The mechanical engineer said, "The greatest invention is the airplane. It allows anybody to go anywhere in the world in under 24 hours."
"No way," said the electrical engineer, "the greatest invention is the television. With it, you can see anything in the world instantly - you don't even have to go there."
The two went back and forth like this for a few minutes. Finally the chemical engineer broke in.
"You two are both wrong," he said, "the greatest invention is the Thermos bottle."
"The Thermos bottle!" exclaimed the other two. "How can *that* be the greatest invention?"
"Because," replied the chemical engineer, "it keeps hot things hot, and cold things cold, but it has no moving parts. How does it know?"
Garrett's letter didn't seem the least bit shocking to me. Much of it is stuff that anybody who looks at the situation and the players can deduce on their own after a little thought. The rest is interesting, but not particularly revelatory. Really, who's scandalized that the very, very powerful arrive by helicopter, or that many of the very rich are intelligent and hard-working? And if you're shocked that the richest people in the world get skittish about war because it might affect their fortunes - umm, welcome to Planet Earth, dude. Enjoy your stay.
Garrett's piece was reminiscent of, but much shorter than, another first-hand account of this year's WEF, written by Jay Nordlinger of National Review, and which you can find in four parts:
Part I,
Part II,
Part III,
Part IV. I liked it, but then again, I'm a conservative Catholic...
Good points all, I think. However, I thought I'd point something out..
Also, the term "peripheral connect interface" didn't seem to come up in the TM searches I did...
"PCI" stands for "Peripheral Component Interconnect"; try that search and see whether you get anything.
----
PCI is a recently registered trademark of the PCI-SIG. The PCI-SIG is very proud of this, so please don't say, use, or think about the letters "P", "C" or "I" in conjunction with peripherals, components, interconnections, or computers, or some hot-headed trademark lawyers will break your grandmother's kneecaps, after sending you a polite cease-and-desist letter.
Although this seems like a fine idea in theory, I am having difficulty imagining many situations where people would use it, which would be useful to others.
It's not just a fine idea in theory: it's a fine idea in practice. This is exactly the kind of thing I want for releasing my music.
I currently labour in obscurity, and one day, when I release another album, I'll probably want some way to promote it - that is, get as many people as possible to hear it, on the theory that a few of them will want to hear it again. One good way for me to do this is to release my music into the world (the Internet is an ideal way to do this), and let it spread by word-of-mouth (word-of-ear?). If somebody hears my stuff and likes it, he very well might buy a CD from me. It's what I'd do myself, and I don't think I'm all that weird.
The Creative Commons licences look like excellent candidates for this. I can use them to declare, legally and explicitly, that people can trade my music. If even ten people buy CDs as a result, I won't complain, since I'm not exactly making a lot of money off my stuff right now.;) (And that's fine. I decided not to make music to make money. I became an engineer instead.)
Furthermore, I quite like the idea of people taking samples from my stuff and making other things with it. I'd be very flattered if they did. The "derivative works" licence allows me to declare that I explicitly give people permission to do that.
Suppose that Dr. Dre, for example, happens to hear a track of mine, and loops part of it into an Eminem hit or something. A certain small percentage of the people who hear it will like it (the sample, I mean), and will want to know where he got that sample from. They'll find out that it was me, because Dre will - in theory at least - have to give me credit. Then they'll order a CD - and a small percentage of Dre's listenership is still a very large number of people. Therefore, when they buy CDs, I'll get rich and famous:D.
Of course, that example is completely hypothetical and not a little far-fetched. But it illustrates one very practical reason why I consider the sampling of my work a good thing for me. Sampling, to me, is something like free promotion, to say nothing of flattery. The Creative Commons licences allow me to explicitly grant people permission to do it.
Re:32 bits != 4 gig max
on
AMD's 64-bit Plot
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Mostly, I agree. In fact, I spend lots of time
writing software for 8 and 16 bit machines, and
I spend half that time turning single bits on and
off.
One thing I'd like to point out, though: I've noticed
that an awful
lot of mathematics is being done using doubles
(i.e., 64-bit floats) these days. It's partially
laziness, but it's also really the case that 32-bit
IEEE floats only give you 24 bits of accuracy. Doing
math with doubles really cuts down on roundoff
errors, so a lot of people switch to doubles and
forget about it.
There were about three women in the electrical engineering (undergrad) program when I was at Georgia Tech. There were about three hundred men.
We didn't have a "no-women-allowed" policy. Far from it: they used to line up troops of high-school girls and march 'em through, promising them money, full-paid scholarships, you name it. Didn't work. Couldn't beg 'em in. The few that opted for engineering invariably went chemical or industrial. (Tech had to open a business school just to keep the Feds off their back.) And two of the women who were in the EE program weren't even planning to be engineers - they were planning to be lawyers. They're both probably a lot richer than me now.
Everybody assumes that the only reason that engineering populations aren't half male and half female, like the population at large, is because of some evil sexist plot to keep women out. Try suggesting this to any EE undergrad some time. Observe his hearty laughter.
I'd like to offer another explanation: perhaps most women (like most _people_, actually) simply don't want to be electrical engineers. If this is the case, it would be far more productive to _force_ them in.
Of course, you'd wind up with a bunch of people who hate their jobs, but at least we'd have a diverse workplace, right?
In fact, I just used it to look up my Slashdot password.:)
I use my Handspring Prism for the following things:
1. Beeping at me when I have a meeting to go to 2. Reading books - once you get used to the small screen size, using Weasel Reader is almost better than paper! And I have a copy of the Douay-Rheims Bible in there too. 3. Keeping passwords. I use a program called YAPS by Markus Bosshard. Very secure 'cause it's attached to my belt, and requires a master password, which I won't tell you. 4. Talking to people. I have the VisorPhone module and I love it. (I bought it before the Treos came out, and it's still cheaper.) 5. As a calculator. It can't beat a real 48G with real buttons, but Russell Webb's RPN is quite nice. 6. Keeping names and addresses. 7. Taking short notes and keeping lists. For example, I have lists of movies I want to see, CDs I want to buy, shopping lists, etc. 8. Playing games, occasionally. Sometimes a game of Drug Wars is a very relaxing way to while away the hours:)
Syncing is much less of a problem since Handspring got off their butts and finished their OS X Palm Desktop release; and I use iSync, iCal, and Address Book. Works pretty well.
My first "PDA" was a Casio Digital Diary, which I got for a high school graduation present back in 1992. I used it constantly. Everybody thought I was nuts for having one, but the "Digital Diary" concept has always greatly appealed to me.
The most unusual use I found for my Casio was when I lost my voice due to a really bad cold. When this happens to me, I quite literally can't talk - I can't even whisper without difficulty. So I tapped out what I wanted to say on my Casio, and showed it to people. Way better than carrying around a pad of paper, but the reactions I got were... umm.. interesting...
George Washington Carver is another example of an
important inventor who, although he did engage in
the process once, very seldom patented his
ideas; he was granted three patents - all relating
to the same work - but is credited with over three
hundred other inventions.
Carver was once asked why he so seldom patented
his inventions. He replied: "God gave them to
me; how can I sell them to someone else?"
A lot of people have already pointed out that Apple has an unusually strong cash position - I've heard that they have never, ever been in debt. Quite a contrast with most other go-go tech companies.
Even so, it doesn't take a lot of cash to buy a shop like Emagic. They are big in their world - one of the biggest - but in the greater world of business, they're a minnow. Heck, even compared to music hardware companies like Roland and Yamaha (and I mean just the musical instruments divisions), they're a minnow.
When I saw the announcement on Emagic's website this morning, I had to check the date twice to make sure it was July, and not April. But I didn't have to think about it long before I saw how shrewd this move is. It's cheap, it gives them some serious audio cred, and it fits right in with their recent buyouts: all small, but highly talented, outfits with some really good ideas.
Apple's already assembled a crack team of audio people; their CoreAudio API is second to none - even Paul Davis begrudgingly says so. If they manage this right, things will only get better. But they'd better not go freezing out third-party developers: that would be suicide...
You can dynamically link on an embedded system, but whether there's any point to it depends on the system.
A low-cost portable audio player will likely be designed so that all the code runs from ROM. There might not even be an OS, per se'; so there will be no program loader, and no linker, nor will there be any need for these. Dynamic linking, in the traditional sense, would require that a loader and linker be present.
Object files are not, generally speaking, directly executable; they must be relocated, and symbols must be resolved in the linking code. It makes no sense to do this sort of thing in a ROM-based environment, on a device which will run only one program.
Your idea of partitioning out the GPLed code and communicating with it through pipes or sockets is fine, but not necessarily for the close confines of an OS-less system without the notion of sockets or pipes. Most of the current crop of audio players seem to be built around fairly capable MCUs like the Super-H, the ColdFire or an ARM7TDMI core, and any of these are perfectly capable of handling multiple processes (Linux, or ucLinux, has been ported to them all); but when you're under deadline to get a product out, the machinery of multiple processes, linkers, loaders, and IPC starts to look, well, just a little bit frivolous.
Very small embedded operating systems do exist: ucLinux can be shrunk to amazingly small sizes, eCos even smaller. But for the kinds of devices under consideration, even these are of little use.
A portable "jukebox" device is usually designed to run only one program; that program's function is fixed. Therefore, the ROM image will usually be executable, statically linked object code, and the image will have been prepared on a cross-compilation system. Dynamic linking has little place in that sort of environment.
Not the "crucial ingredient in capacitors"
on
The Congo Tantalum Rush
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Hate to say it, but technically speaking, the article and the post are both way off. Tantalum isn't "the crucial ingredient in capacitors", and the electronics industry doesn't "depend on this stuff" at all. Most caps are made with ceramic materials (e.g. clays) or paper soaked in an electrolytic solution, but there are many other dielectrics available, like polypropylene, mica, etc., each with their own favourable characteristics.
The nice thing about tantalums is that they are very small for the amount of capacitance they have - hence their popularity in PDAs and celphones. But they're expensive, and polarised - you have to plug them in the right way, or they literally blow up. They also can't tolerate much overvoltage.
For the things that tantalums are most often used for (power-supply filtering), a kind of capacitor called multilayer ceramic actually works better. These are made mostly from nickel powder, and they're much cheaper and tougher. They're also non-polarised, which can reduce assembly costs, and they don't depend on hard-to-get tantalum powder.
Last year there was a shortage of tantalum powder, which made tantalum caps really hard to get. Now word is getting out that the new breed of multilayer ceramic chip caps can do just as well, people aren't using tantalums nearly as much as they were. I think this is the real reason for the tantalum ore crash.
I don't care about the $10k myself. I just want to take apart their system, and make them go back to the drawing board for another three years.
That said, I think the boycott is not a bad idea, because if we wait until after the boycott is done, and then we wait until the protocols are widely implemented, and then publish hacks, they'll be in a DVD situation all over again. They can't recall DeCSS; let's make them wish they could recall SDMI. We can keep this up as long as they can.
But if you must start hacking it now, don't release anything until at least a while after the contest - and release it anonymously. I suggest Usenet for that purpose - or how about Gnutella?:)
It looks to me like they're relying on the resistance change, rather than optical properties, to read the phase state of the storage material - a quick examination of their logo confirms this:) So no light needs to be emitted to read the state; that ought to be a considerable power savings right there.
My guess on writing is that of course it would take more power, but since they are working with a greatly reduced area, the amount of energy required to effect a state change should also be less than for CDRs. Also the shorter distance from the "write head" to the storage material should help them at least a little.
Stanley Jaki has written a book entitled "Brain, Mind, and Computers" in which he offers a most compelling argument, based on Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem, that intelligent, spiritual machines cannot exist. He would have made a very interesting addition to Hofstadter's panel.
I like good newspapers, but there aren't many. I like the newspaper here in Baton Rouge, and I do read it. I hated the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and specifically did not read it when I lived in Atlanta.
Believe it or not, one thing I like about newspapers is the fact that they're not immediate. Sometimes I like to read about things that didn't happen five minutes ago, but two days ago, or two weeks ago. History can't be understood merely by looking at it from a distance of two inches; like a skyscraper, or an elephant, one needs to get not only close to it, but far away from it, to understand it completely. Newspapers provide one with an important, and useful, day-or-two-old perspective.
I don't think papers will go away. If "immediate media" could destroy them, it already would have, because radio and television are, like the net, forms of immediate media. They're "push" systems; the Web is a "pull" system. Both have their uses, and both are fairly immediate; if immediacy was enough to invalidate newspapers, they would have begun to die forty years ago.
Granted, the presence of other media will certainly diminish the market share of newspapers; that stands to reason. But will they go away? I don't think so. Even weekly newsmagazines have their purpose; I subscribe to the Economist, myself, which is where I get my world news, and I also read National Review, when I'm over at my parents' house.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Quite right. But I'm not trying to argue against drivers licences; I'm trying to argue that travelling anonymously is not an inalienable right.
It may, indeed, be good policy to require that travel be anonymous; but I assert that it is no violation of some basic human need to require identification at an airport.
Calling something a basic human right is an oft-used method of deflecting opposition to it (see also "well-poisoning", an ad hominem version of the same). Now if I say that people ought to present identification at airports, they will tell me that it's a violation of basic human rights to do so; but this has certainly not been established.
I love this type of argument -- I call it the "Hey, let's draw a completely stupid and unjustified analogy and hope the other guy just doesn't notice" method.
I love it too: it's called reductio ad absurdum, and it's a handy way to make a point. Except that my object is exactly to get the other guy to notice.
Clearly it didn't work this time; you've cleverly ignored completely what I was driving at (no pun intended). You are rebutting something I never asserted. But hey, at least you got a +4 mod. Glad I could be of service.
Perhaps you could find a bit of time to explain to me why travelling anonymously is a basic human right. Not only would you be actually answering my assertion, you might even get modded up again. Or is it bad form around here to answer people directly?
Since when has it been a right to travel anonymously? We can argue whether the government ought to ask people for identification, and whether the airlines ought to ask people for identification; but when you call it a right, you are saying that it is a foregone conclusion that part of the proper treatment of a human being consists in not asking him who he is when he steps on board an airplane.
This is nonsense, stark and staring. If travelling anonymously is a universal right, the system of driving licences is a human-rights atrocity of gigantic scale.
Then again, this could come in handy. I think I'm going to tell my boss that I have a right to make over $200,000 a year. That way I won't have to argue about whether he ought to be paying me so handsomely. My rights are at stake!
I used to use Emacs a lot. I use jEdit mainly now, because I really like it; it helps me work faster. But I definitely don't use it because it's fast. It's not. jEdit isn't as slow as Micro$oft Word (substitute 'tu' for 'wo' to see my opinion of that "program"), but it's pretty darn slow. It's so slow that, although I liked the program when I first tried it, it was just too slow, on every platform I tried it on (Linux, Windows, OS X). I've got past that now, because slow as it is, it helps me work faster.
Know why jEdit is slow? 'Cause it's written in Java. Every Java app I've ever used is dog-slow, especially compared to C++ apps. C++ was designed to be fast; and when used properly, it is. Java was designed to be portable; after several years, false starts, marketing hype and outright sabotage, it pretty much is. But it wasn't designed to be fast. That's not the point of it. It's designed to be portable and easy to program (and to make lots of money for Sun, somehow, but that's another topic).
This guy may have thrown together a benchmark, but I've got a better one: experience. Wake me up when jEdit runs almost as fast as Emacs on the same machine; then I'll start to believe this stuff.
And yes, I know Emacs isn't written in C++; it's written partly in C, partly in Lisp. So most of it's interpreted. (Some claim that Emacs stands for "eighty megs and continuously swapping".) So I think this is a way more than fair comparison.
(Note: this is a college-rival joke. I'm a Georgia Tech grad, so I pick on UGA. Feel free to substitute your rival school for UGA here.)
Once upon a time, a group of University of Georgia students decided to take a trip to Paris. One day, they came across a man selling tickets for an airplane tour of the city. They all decided to go, and each of them bought a ticket.
On the day of the flight, they found that a group of students from the University of Krakow had also bought tickets for the same trip. The pilot decided to seat them on opposite sides of the plane.
Off they went, flying here and there above the city, enjoying the remarkable views. Finally, the pilot announced the highlight of the trip: a flight around the Eiffel Tower.
As they neared the Eiffel Tower, the students from Krakow saw that the pilot would make a counter-clockwise flight around it. Since they were on the left side of the plane, all of them rushed over to the right side, where the UGA students were sitting, so they could get a better view.
But just at the moment they did so, the plane began to vibrate wildly, entered a spectacular cartwheel stall, and crashed!
And the moral of this story is: It doesn't matter how many zeros you have on the right side of the plane - if any Poles are there, it will always become unstable.
An electrical engineer, a mechanical engineer, and a chemical engineer were arguing about what was the greatest invention of all time.
The mechanical engineer said, "The greatest invention is the airplane. It allows anybody to go anywhere in the world in under 24 hours."
"No way," said the electrical engineer, "the greatest invention is the television. With it, you can see anything in the world instantly - you don't even have to go there."
The two went back and forth like this for a few minutes. Finally the chemical engineer broke in.
"You two are both wrong," he said, "the greatest invention is the Thermos bottle."
"The Thermos bottle!" exclaimed the other two. "How can *that* be the greatest invention?"
"Because," replied the chemical engineer, "it keeps hot things hot, and cold things cold, but it has no moving parts. How does it know?"
Garrett's piece was reminiscent of, but much shorter than, another first-hand account of this year's WEF, written by Jay Nordlinger of National Review, and which you can find in four parts: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV. I liked it, but then again, I'm a conservative Catholic ...
----
PCI is a recently registered trademark of the PCI-SIG. The PCI-SIG is very proud of this, so please don't say, use, or think about the letters "P", "C" or "I" in conjunction with peripherals, components, interconnections, or computers, or some hot-headed trademark lawyers will break your grandmother's kneecaps, after sending you a polite cease-and-desist letter.
It's not just a fine idea in theory: it's a fine idea in practice. This is exactly the kind of thing I want for releasing my music.
I currently labour in obscurity, and one day, when I release another album, I'll probably want some way to promote it - that is, get as many people as possible to hear it, on the theory that a few of them will want to hear it again. One good way for me to do this is to release my music into the world (the Internet is an ideal way to do this), and let it spread by word-of-mouth (word-of-ear?). If somebody hears my stuff and likes it, he very well might buy a CD from me. It's what I'd do myself, and I don't think I'm all that weird.
The Creative Commons licences look like excellent candidates for this. I can use them to declare, legally and explicitly, that people can trade my music. If even ten people buy CDs as a result, I won't complain, since I'm not exactly making a lot of money off my stuff right now. ;) (And that's fine. I decided not to make music to make money. I became an engineer instead.)
Furthermore, I quite like the idea of people taking samples from my stuff and making other things with it. I'd be very flattered if they did. The "derivative works" licence allows me to declare that I explicitly give people permission to do that.
Suppose that Dr. Dre, for example, happens to hear a track of mine, and loops part of it into an Eminem hit or something. A certain small percentage of the people who hear it will like it (the sample, I mean), and will want to know where he got that sample from. They'll find out that it was me, because Dre will - in theory at least - have to give me credit. Then they'll order a CD - and a small percentage of Dre's listenership is still a very large number of people. Therefore, when they buy CDs, I'll get rich and famous :D.
Of course, that example is completely hypothetical and not a little far-fetched. But it illustrates one very practical reason why I consider the sampling of my work a good thing for me. Sampling, to me, is something like free promotion, to say nothing of flattery. The Creative Commons licences allow me to explicitly grant people permission to do it.
One thing I'd like to point out, though: I've noticed that an awful lot of mathematics is being done using doubles (i.e., 64-bit floats) these days. It's partially laziness, but it's also really the case that 32-bit IEEE floats only give you 24 bits of accuracy. Doing math with doubles really cuts down on roundoff errors, so a lot of people switch to doubles and forget about it.
There were about three women in the electrical engineering (undergrad) program when I was at Georgia Tech. There were about three hundred men.
We didn't have a "no-women-allowed" policy. Far from it: they used to line up troops of high-school girls and march 'em through, promising them money, full-paid scholarships, you name it. Didn't work. Couldn't beg 'em in. The few that opted for engineering invariably went chemical or industrial. (Tech had to open a business school just to keep the Feds off their back.) And two of the women who were in the EE program weren't even planning to be engineers - they were planning to be lawyers. They're both probably a lot richer than me now.
Everybody assumes that the only reason that engineering populations aren't half male and half female, like the population at large, is because of some evil sexist plot to keep women out. Try suggesting this to any EE undergrad some time. Observe his hearty laughter.
I'd like to offer another explanation: perhaps most women (like most _people_, actually) simply don't want to be electrical engineers. If this is the case, it would be far more productive to _force_ them in.
Of course, you'd wind up with a bunch of people who hate their jobs, but at least we'd have a diverse workplace, right?
In fact, I just used it to look up my Slashdot password. :)
:)
... umm .. interesting ...
I use my Handspring Prism for the following things:
1. Beeping at me when I have a meeting to go to
2. Reading books - once you get used to the small screen size, using Weasel Reader is almost better than paper! And I have a copy of the Douay-Rheims Bible in there too.
3. Keeping passwords. I use a program called YAPS by Markus Bosshard. Very secure 'cause it's attached to my belt, and requires a master password, which I won't tell you.
4. Talking to people. I have the VisorPhone module and I love it. (I bought it before the Treos came out, and it's still cheaper.)
5. As a calculator. It can't beat a real 48G with real buttons, but Russell Webb's RPN is quite nice.
6. Keeping names and addresses.
7. Taking short notes and keeping lists. For example, I have lists of movies I want to see, CDs I want to buy, shopping lists, etc.
8. Playing games, occasionally. Sometimes a game of Drug Wars is a very relaxing way to while away the hours
Syncing is much less of a problem since Handspring got off their butts and finished their OS X Palm Desktop release; and I use iSync, iCal, and Address Book. Works pretty well.
My first "PDA" was a Casio Digital Diary, which I got for a high school graduation present back in 1992. I used it constantly. Everybody thought I was nuts for having one, but the "Digital Diary" concept has always greatly appealed to me.
The most unusual use I found for my Casio was when I lost my voice due to a really bad cold. When this happens to me, I quite literally can't talk - I can't even whisper without difficulty. So I tapped out what I wanted to say on my Casio, and showed it to people. Way better than carrying around a pad of paper, but the reactions I got were
Carver was once asked why he so seldom patented his inventions. He replied: "God gave them to me; how can I sell them to someone else?"
Even so, it doesn't take a lot of cash to buy a shop like Emagic. They are big in their world - one of the biggest - but in the greater world of business, they're a minnow. Heck, even compared to music hardware companies like Roland and Yamaha (and I mean just the musical instruments divisions), they're a minnow.
When I saw the announcement on Emagic's website this morning, I had to check the date twice to make sure it was July, and not April. But I didn't have to think about it long before I saw how shrewd this move is. It's cheap, it gives them some serious audio cred, and it fits right in with their recent buyouts: all small, but highly talented, outfits with some really good ideas.
Apple's already assembled a crack team of audio people; their CoreAudio API is second to none - even Paul Davis begrudgingly says so. If they manage this right, things will only get better. But they'd better not go freezing out third-party developers: that would be suicide ...
You can dynamically link on an embedded system, but whether there's any point to it depends on the system.
A low-cost portable audio player will likely be designed so that all the code runs from ROM. There might not even be an OS, per se'; so there will be no program loader, and no linker, nor will there be any need for these. Dynamic linking, in the traditional sense, would require that a loader and linker be present.
Object files are not, generally speaking, directly executable; they must be relocated, and symbols must be resolved in the linking code. It makes no sense to do this sort of thing in a ROM-based environment, on a device which will run only one program.
Your idea of partitioning out the GPLed code and communicating with it through pipes or sockets is fine, but not necessarily for the close confines of an OS-less system without the notion of sockets or pipes. Most of the current crop of audio players seem to be built around fairly capable MCUs like the Super-H, the ColdFire or an ARM7TDMI core, and any of these are perfectly capable of handling multiple processes (Linux, or ucLinux, has been ported to them all); but when you're under deadline to get a product out, the machinery of multiple processes, linkers, loaders, and IPC starts to look, well, just a little bit frivolous.
Very small embedded operating systems do exist: ucLinux can be shrunk to amazingly small sizes, eCos even smaller. But for the kinds of devices under consideration, even these are of little use.
A portable "jukebox" device is usually designed to run only one program; that program's function is fixed. Therefore, the ROM image will usually be executable, statically linked object code, and the image will have been prepared on a cross-compilation system. Dynamic linking has little place in that sort of environment.
Hate to say it, but technically speaking, the article and the post are both way off. Tantalum isn't "the crucial ingredient in capacitors", and the electronics industry doesn't "depend on this stuff" at all. Most caps are made with ceramic materials (e.g. clays) or paper soaked in an electrolytic solution, but there are many other dielectrics available, like polypropylene, mica, etc., each with their own favourable characteristics.
The nice thing about tantalums is that they are very small for the amount of capacitance they have - hence their popularity in PDAs and celphones. But they're expensive, and polarised - you have to plug them in the right way, or they literally blow up. They also can't tolerate much overvoltage.
For the things that tantalums are most often used for (power-supply filtering), a kind of capacitor called multilayer ceramic actually works better. These are made mostly from nickel powder, and they're much cheaper and tougher. They're also non-polarised, which can reduce assembly costs, and they don't depend on hard-to-get tantalum powder.
Last year there was a shortage of tantalum powder, which made tantalum caps really hard to get. Now word is getting out that the new breed of multilayer ceramic chip caps can do just as well, people aren't using tantalums nearly as much as they were. I think this is the real reason for the tantalum ore crash.
That said, I think the boycott is not a bad idea, because if we wait until after the boycott is done, and then we wait until the protocols are widely implemented, and then publish hacks, they'll be in a DVD situation all over again. They can't recall DeCSS; let's make them wish they could recall SDMI. We can keep this up as long as they can.
But if you must start hacking it now, don't release anything until at least a while after the contest - and release it anonymously. I suggest Usenet for that purpose - or how about Gnutella? :)
It looks to me like they're relying on the resistance change, rather than optical properties, to read the phase state of the storage material - a quick examination of their logo confirms this :) So no light needs to be emitted to read the state; that ought to be a considerable power savings right there.
My guess on writing is that of course it would take more power, but since they are working with a greatly reduced area, the amount of energy required to effect a state change should also be less than for CDRs. Also the shorter distance from the "write head" to the storage material should help them at least a little.
Stanley Jaki has written a book entitled "Brain, Mind, and Computers" in which he offers a most compelling argument, based on Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem, that intelligent, spiritual machines cannot exist. He would have made a very interesting addition to Hofstadter's panel.
I like good newspapers, but there aren't many. I like the newspaper here in Baton Rouge, and I do read it. I hated the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and specifically did not read it when I lived in Atlanta.
Believe it or not, one thing I like about newspapers is the fact that they're not immediate. Sometimes I like to read about things that didn't happen five minutes ago, but two days ago, or two weeks ago. History can't be understood merely by looking at it from a distance of two inches; like a skyscraper, or an elephant, one needs to get not only close to it, but far away from it, to understand it completely. Newspapers provide one with an important, and useful, day-or-two-old perspective.
I don't think papers will go away. If "immediate media" could destroy them, it already would have, because radio and television are, like the net, forms of immediate media. They're "push" systems; the Web is a "pull" system. Both have their uses, and both are fairly immediate; if immediacy was enough to invalidate newspapers, they would have begun to die forty years ago.
Granted, the presence of other media will certainly diminish the market share of newspapers; that stands to reason. But will they go away? I don't think so. Even weekly newsmagazines have their purpose; I subscribe to the Economist, myself, which is where I get my world news, and I also read National Review, when I'm over at my parents' house. :)