Some controller IC's require magnetics on the PHY side in order to work at all. Others will work without magnetics, but only if short cables are used.
If the Raspberry Pi circuit was designed such that the magnetics are responsible for 'pulling up' the output stages to the positive supply, then the Ethernet function simply would not have worked at all without magnetics in the connectors.
BTW, 'magnetics' is a very common term in the field of electronics. It typically applies to inductors, transformers, and ferrite beads, but interestingly enough, is not used to refer to such components as relays, which also rely on electro-magnetism for their operation.
Yes, because exposure to Methyl Esters (BioDiesel) is soooooooo much better than exposure to petroleum-based Methyl Esters.
Yeah, except I neither said nor meant BioDiesel - I'm talking about plain old vegetable oil. With some fairly minor modifications, diesel engines can be started on traditional fuel and switched over to vegetable oil, (NOT BioDiesel), when they're hot. If you ever encounter exhaust that smells like French fries, you'll know what I'm talking about.
It would be interesting to conduct this study using plant-sourced oils rather than petroleum fractions. My guess is that the cancer risk would be greatly reduced
...while ignoring the fact that he's getting the votes.
Not really "getting the votes", rather "getting the seats". The Conservatives got less than 40% of the votes cast in the last election. That means that more than 60% of the people who voted DIDN'T want Harper as PM.
Harper, to me, seems to have an actual personality, like you could actually converse with him in a normal fashion if you were two people who just happen to pass each other on the street.
Really? The first time I ever saw the man, before I knew anything about him, he positively gave me the creeps. There are plenty of other politicians whose policies and attitudes I've despised to the point of hatred, (former PM Brain Mulroney and former Premier Mike Harris come to mind), whom I could nevertheless imagine sitting down and having a beer with. Whereas I'd feel uncomfortable being in the same room with Harper.
GlaxoSmithKline Pharmaceuticals makes over $8 billion dollars a year on 1 drug alone... Advair. It's $450 for a 30day supply.
From this, it's REALLY obvious that they're simply charging whatever they can get away with. I live in Canada, and I pay $170, including the dispensing fee, for a 120-dose Advair 25/250 inhaler. (I don't like the disk). I don't have a benefits plan, so the price I pay is the full shot, yet it's well under half of what you pay. Raping and pillaging, anyone? Is it any wonder that Big Pharma is universally despised?
There's countless millions of pre-industrial people alive today. Do they commonly exhibit this behavior?
That's an interesting question, but we may be unable to answer it. Even in supposedly pre-industrial segments of the world population, artificial light at night is more common than it was back in the 17th century. So it might be difficult, if not impossible, to find a truly pre-industrial population to study.
Also, from TFA:
"In the early 1990s, psychiatrist Thomas Wehr conducted an experiment in which a group of people were plunged into darkness for 14 hours every day for a month. It took some time for their sleep to regulate but by the fourth week the subjects had settled into a very distinct sleeping pattern. They slept first for four hours, then woke for one or two hours before falling into a second four-hour sleep."
I get the feeling that you're writing this tongue-in-cheek, at least a little bit. But what you're saying is supported by other evidence.
The ruling Reform Party, (er, The Progressive Conservatives - yeah, that's it!), have embarked on a 'tough on crime agenda', (one of whose major points is a $150M prison expansion), at a time when Statistics Canada reports that crime rates are lower than they have been in almost 50 years. So it seems likely that the government will do everything it can to increase the crime rate, even if that means coining new crimes and creating new guilty-until-proven-innocent victims. After all, what else are they gonna do with those new prison cells?
This is what comes of a government that is faith-based and driven by ideology, as opposed to one that is evidence-based and motivated by its citizens' welfare. These people truly excel at magical thinking - it's no surprise to find that most of them are religious fundamentalists of some stripe or other. I'm ashamed of my fellow Canadians for handing these dangerous clowns a majority, and I'm sad that the country I love is slowly rotting away from within under the influence of fanatically and/or opportunistically religious corporate whores.
I don't know if there are enough of us doing serious technical/scientific searches to constitute more than a rounding error in Google's search numbers. But if the market for 'social' searches really is tanking, then I wonder what would happen if Google made itself better for 'real' searches? You know, as good as they were 5 or 6 years ago? Would their search numbers be significantly better?
I mostly use Google for researching electronics information - component data, repair manuals, and the like, as well as circuit topologies and theory for design projects I'm working on. In my experience, Google is much less useful for this purpose than it used to be. First off, they automagically change my search terms to what they think I'm looking for, instead of what I really am looking for, so I have to click again to get what I wanted in the first place - this is a several-times-a-day occurrence. Second, their 'allintext' operator, (which I never even had to use several years ago, when Google worked better), does its intended job less and less these days - cached results often don't contain at least one of my search terms. Third, their seeming inability to screen out content farms, (which I can usually identify simply by viewing the summary), slows down searches. Fourth, the automated preview crap they now put on the right side of the screen, slows things down too much, and is awkward and distracting. Fifth, having to use NoScript to disable said nonsense slows me down on those occasions when I DO need to allow Google to run JS for some reason.
While Google's stated intention has been to provide more relevant search results, every 'improvement' they've made seems designed solely to increase the number of matches, and relevance be damned - to the point where they actively undermine the tools that they themselves have provided to refine searches.
I suppose some of these deficiencies might be fixable to some extent if I had a Google account - but with Google's stated and demonstrated intention to rape everybody's privacy, I'd rather not let them get their hooks into me any farther than I already have.
...I'm sure that gamba grass itself seemed harmless too when it was introduced to Australia as a pasture grass. Then there were Cane Toads, (also in Australia), Kudzu, and countless other examples.
Given man's mobility and restlessness such occurrences are probably inevitable. At least this time the assertion that "this introduction could solve that problem" was accompanied by a note that careful monitoring would be required. So there's some effort being made to anticipate and mitigate the potential negative consequences of their solutions, but I suspect that effort could be both more strenuous and more anticipatory.
There are far too many disputes in tech these days around formerly-open-source stuff that some bastard decides to co-opt and pretend he owns. This case strikes me as simple, clear-cut, winnable, and potentially precedent-setting. It would be good if the EFF brought its weight to bear on this issue - it could be crucial to the future of FOSS.
...I urge every Canadian reading this to send an e-mail expressing your (reasonably worded and well-considered) views to consultations@international.gc.ca. I also suggest that you write to or e-mail your Minister of Parliament, and any other MP's that are involved in the process of destrying the Public Domain in Canada.
In the past these letter writing campaigns have resulted in unfavourable and unfair Internet legislation in Canada being rejected, and although the current Conservative majority does not bode well for maintaining a healthy Public Domain, it's still worhwhile trying. In my view these issues are like elections - if you don't weigh in and make yourself heard, you have no right to complain about the outcome. So please raise your voices in an effort to stop this ill-conceived attack on the public good.
The fact that Apple doesn't want these dolls to be produced makes me want one, just to piss off Apple, whereas I couldn't have cared less about the stupid dolls if Apple hadn't lawyered up in such an obnoxious manner. It seems that these days all a business has to do raise its hind leg and piss on something, and suddenly it's exclusive territory, but even if the law supports these stupidly extreme "IP rights", that doesn't mean companies should exercise them.
FTA: "It is beyond me why PayPal simply didn't have the violin returned to me."
It is beyond me why anyone uses PayPal. I feel genuinely sorry for the seller, but then again, caveat emptor. It's not as though there aren't thousands of well-publicized horror stories about these fuckwit douchebags - if you need a citation, just Google "paypal sucks" and check out a few of the 189,000 results. If PayPal were the last financial institution on earth I'd be keeping my money in my mattress.
It's said that we get the government we deserve - I guess that applies to companies as well. If people would just stop using PayPal then they'd change their ways or go out of business. But I guess expecting the majority of people to get their heads out of their asses, do a little research, and take a principled stand on something is asking too much.
Just like the Volstead Act, any attempt at stopping filesharing is ultimately doomed, and these figures prove it. When an overwhelming majority of the population engages in an activity, and a minuscule percentage of people support legislation against that activity, resistance on the part of corporations, and their minions in government and law enforcement, is a futile waste of valuable resources.
The Internet and the vast number of computers connected to it form a vast, dynamic, and complex system whose detailed behaviour is difficult to fully understand and impossible to confidently predict.
Just like the introduction of Cane Toads in Australia, ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cane_toads_in_Australia ), and so many other similar introductions of organisms to 'fix' some problem in a complex ecosystem, this will probably turn out badly. And it may be impossible to undo once the virus is released into the favourable ecosystem that is the Internet.
Inappropriately? It could be argued that flagging various government and law enforcement sites as terrorist in nature would not only be appropriate, but would be definitionally correct.
Telus charges an extra 2 bucks a month for having a paper bill, as opposed to paying online. Granted that makes some kind of sense, but still...
I really wish these companies would just be openly and honestly avaricious, and simply raise their rates. They're really not fooling anyone with their lame attempts at disguising their gouging, and they probably piss us off more with all the bullshit nonsense than they would if they just instituted a rate increase.
I think you're confusing simple shielded cable with coaxial cable. No, you don't need an impedance-matched transmission line at audio frequencies, but shielding CAN be relevant with some amps in some setups. The wavelength of audio frequencies is irrelevant here - speaker cables can be efficient antennae for RF signals, which can then mix with other RF signals and/or be demodulated in the diode junctions that comprise the bi-polar transistors used in the outputs of many amps. This can cause audible artifacts, including hearing radio stations through your speakers even when there's no tuner attached to your system, especially if you're close to the transmitting tower.
As for kilo-buck HDMI cables, that IS an ultimate stupidity. However, you should be careful regarding this whole 'ones and zeros' business. At the frequencies used for HDMI, (and given the rectangular nature of the signals, frequency response up to ten times the fundamental may be important), you're basically back in the analog realm, with rise times a significant fraction of the total waveform period. Impedance mismatches, slowed waveform edges, and extraneous interference can cause jitter and increase bit error rate, and although you're unlikely to see the difference in a typical home setup, these errors can add up over multiple generations of signal transfer.
So no, there won't be any visible or audible difference between a 10 dollar HDMI cable and a thousand dollar one. Just be aware that you can't stick any old cable in there and expect good results.
This seems about as obvious as walking and chewing gum at the same time - maybe I should patent that, 'prior art' or no, and get rich for a bullshit-trivial idea. The patent office needs to grow a pair; and all the C-levels and lawyers of all of the corporations that are trying to lock down the very air we breathe, ought to be bare-ass spanked and sent to bed without supper every day for a year. Irresponsible snot-nosed brats with entitlement issues, every single one.
...should a music company have the right to have a news podcast removed on copyright grounds, when it's not even clear that said company has had any copyrights violated?
Seriously, this question shouldn't be asked, even rhetorically. The answer is so obvious it isn't even debatable. Due process was invented for a very good reason, and we allow it to be circumvented at our extreme peril.
Every US citizen on Slashdot should be contacting his or her appropriate representatives, as often and as loudly as necessary, and raising a stink over this issue. The discussion here is good for getting the word out, but all the fine prose and witty thoughts expressed on Slashdot don't mean jack shit in the outside world - it's time to take this matter up with those who count on your votes to keep them riding the gravy train. Industry may buy elections for politicians, but if we don't allow our votes and our voices to be bought then things will have to change.
If outrages such as this aren't challenged in any meaningful way, they'll only become even more commonplace, to the point where we'll just bend over and 'take it' every day without even realizing what's going on. This continuing erosion of rights and concentration of power has to stop, or we'll soon be living on a totalitarian continent.
Disclaimer: I'm Canadian, not American, but when this stuff comes up in my country I DO write letters and take the time to get others engaged.
Slashdot Mirror
Some controller IC's require magnetics on the PHY side in order to work at all. Others will work without magnetics, but only if short cables are used.
If the Raspberry Pi circuit was designed such that the magnetics are responsible for 'pulling up' the output stages to the positive supply, then the Ethernet function simply would not have worked at all without magnetics in the connectors.
BTW, 'magnetics' is a very common term in the field of electronics. It typically applies to inductors, transformers, and ferrite beads, but interestingly enough, is not used to refer to such components as relays, which also rely on electro-magnetism for their operation.
Yes, because exposure to Methyl Esters (BioDiesel) is soooooooo much better than exposure to petroleum-based Methyl Esters.
Yeah, except I neither said nor meant BioDiesel - I'm talking about plain old vegetable oil. With some fairly minor modifications, diesel engines can be started on traditional fuel and switched over to vegetable oil, (NOT BioDiesel), when they're hot. If you ever encounter exhaust that smells like French fries, you'll know what I'm talking about.
It would be interesting to conduct this study using plant-sourced oils rather than petroleum fractions. My guess is that the cancer risk would be greatly reduced
People here like their big trucks, and they don't want to lose their big trucks, and everything else is secondary.
Seriously, that sounds like an ideology to me. Not sophisticated, not well thought out, but an ideology nonetheless.
...while ignoring the fact that he's getting the votes.
Not really "getting the votes", rather "getting the seats". The Conservatives got less than 40% of the votes cast in the last election. That means that more than 60% of the people who voted DIDN'T want Harper as PM.
Harper, to me, seems to have an actual personality, like you could actually converse with him in a normal fashion if you were two people who just happen to pass each other on the street.
Really? The first time I ever saw the man, before I knew anything about him, he positively gave me the creeps. There are plenty of other politicians whose policies and attitudes I've despised to the point of hatred, (former PM Brain Mulroney and former Premier Mike Harris come to mind), whom I could nevertheless imagine sitting down and having a beer with. Whereas I'd feel uncomfortable being in the same room with Harper.
GlaxoSmithKline Pharmaceuticals makes over $8 billion dollars a year on 1 drug alone... Advair. It's $450 for a 30day supply.
From this, it's REALLY obvious that they're simply charging whatever they can get away with. I live in Canada, and I pay $170, including the dispensing fee, for a 120-dose Advair 25/250 inhaler. (I don't like the disk). I don't have a benefits plan, so the price I pay is the full shot, yet it's well under half of what you pay. Raping and pillaging, anyone? Is it any wonder that Big Pharma is universally despised?
There's countless millions of pre-industrial people alive today. Do they commonly exhibit this behavior?
That's an interesting question, but we may be unable to answer it. Even in supposedly pre-industrial segments of the world population, artificial light at night is more common than it was back in the 17th century. So it might be difficult, if not impossible, to find a truly pre-industrial population to study.
Also, from TFA:
"In the early 1990s, psychiatrist Thomas Wehr conducted an experiment in which a group of people were plunged into darkness for 14 hours every day for a month. It took some time for their sleep to regulate but by the fourth week the subjects had settled into a very distinct sleeping pattern. They slept first for four hours, then woke for one or two hours before falling into a second four-hour sleep."
(...goes and hides in his den and looks for that Canuckistan immigration packet...)
I'm afraid you won't find it much more to your liking here in Canada:
http://news.slashdot.org/story/12/02/13/1539259/canadian-govt-to-introduce-massive-internet-surveillance-law
http://news.slashdot.org/story/12/02/14/1832205/against-online-surveillance-you-must-be-for-child-porn-says-legislator
It seems that our government's fondest wish is to turn our country into either America's clone or America's bitch - I haven't yet figured out which.
I get the feeling that you're writing this tongue-in-cheek, at least a little bit. But what you're saying is supported by other evidence.
The ruling Reform Party, (er, The Progressive Conservatives - yeah, that's it!), have embarked on a 'tough on crime agenda', (one of whose major points is a $150M prison expansion), at a time when Statistics Canada reports that crime rates are lower than they have been in almost 50 years. So it seems likely that the government will do everything it can to increase the crime rate, even if that means coining new crimes and creating new guilty-until-proven-innocent victims. After all, what else are they gonna do with those new prison cells?
This is what comes of a government that is faith-based and driven by ideology, as opposed to one that is evidence-based and motivated by its citizens' welfare. These people truly excel at magical thinking - it's no surprise to find that most of them are religious fundamentalists of some stripe or other. I'm ashamed of my fellow Canadians for handing these dangerous clowns a majority, and I'm sad that the country I love is slowly rotting away from within under the influence of fanatically and/or opportunistically religious corporate whores.
I don't know if there are enough of us doing serious technical/scientific searches to constitute more than a rounding error in Google's search numbers. But if the market for 'social' searches really is tanking, then I wonder what would happen if Google made itself better for 'real' searches? You know, as good as they were 5 or 6 years ago? Would their search numbers be significantly better?
I mostly use Google for researching electronics information - component data, repair manuals, and the like, as well as circuit topologies and theory for design projects I'm working on. In my experience, Google is much less useful for this purpose than it used to be. First off, they automagically change my search terms to what they think I'm looking for, instead of what I really am looking for, so I have to click again to get what I wanted in the first place - this is a several-times-a-day occurrence. Second, their 'allintext' operator, (which I never even had to use several years ago, when Google worked better), does its intended job less and less these days - cached results often don't contain at least one of my search terms. Third, their seeming inability to screen out content farms, (which I can usually identify simply by viewing the summary), slows down searches. Fourth, the automated preview crap they now put on the right side of the screen, slows things down too much, and is awkward and distracting. Fifth, having to use NoScript to disable said nonsense slows me down on those occasions when I DO need to allow Google to run JS for some reason.
While Google's stated intention has been to provide more relevant search results, every 'improvement' they've made seems designed solely to increase the number of matches, and relevance be damned - to the point where they actively undermine the tools that they themselves have provided to refine searches.
I suppose some of these deficiencies might be fixable to some extent if I had a Google account - but with Google's stated and demonstrated intention to rape everybody's privacy, I'd rather not let them get their hooks into me any farther than I already have.
...I'm sure that gamba grass itself seemed harmless too when it was introduced to Australia as a pasture grass. Then there were Cane Toads, (also in Australia), Kudzu, and countless other examples.
Given man's mobility and restlessness such occurrences are probably inevitable. At least this time the assertion that "this introduction could solve that problem" was accompanied by a note that careful monitoring would be required. So there's some effort being made to anticipate and mitigate the potential negative consequences of their solutions, but I suspect that effort could be both more strenuous and more anticipatory.
can I just run 'startx' from a console?
doctors warn that scratching your ass too much, or doing it the wrong way, may also result in Repetitive Stress Injuries.
This also applies to hammering nails, polishing windows, playing tennis, etc. Too much joint strain causes problems - this is news how?
There are far too many disputes in tech these days around formerly-open-source stuff that some bastard decides to co-opt and pretend he owns. This case strikes me as simple, clear-cut, winnable, and potentially precedent-setting. It would be good if the EFF brought its weight to bear on this issue - it could be crucial to the future of FOSS.
Then the public outcry there would force the government to abandon its efforts at censorship, which are ultimately doomed to fail anyway.
...I urge every Canadian reading this to send an e-mail expressing your (reasonably worded and well-considered) views to consultations@international.gc.ca. I also suggest that you write to or e-mail your Minister of Parliament, and any other MP's that are involved in the process of destrying the Public Domain in Canada.
In the past these letter writing campaigns have resulted in unfavourable and unfair Internet legislation in Canada being rejected, and although the current Conservative majority does not bode well for maintaining a healthy Public Domain, it's still worhwhile trying. In my view these issues are like elections - if you don't weigh in and make yourself heard, you have no right to complain about the outcome. So please raise your voices in an effort to stop this ill-conceived attack on the public good.
The fact that Apple doesn't want these dolls to be produced makes me want one, just to piss off Apple, whereas I couldn't have cared less about the stupid dolls if Apple hadn't lawyered up in such an obnoxious manner. It seems that these days all a business has to do raise its hind leg and piss on something, and suddenly it's exclusive territory, but even if the law supports these stupidly extreme "IP rights", that doesn't mean companies should exercise them.
FTA: "It is beyond me why PayPal simply didn't have the violin returned to me."
It is beyond me why anyone uses PayPal. I feel genuinely sorry for the seller, but then again, caveat emptor. It's not as though there aren't thousands of well-publicized horror stories about these fuckwit douchebags - if you need a citation, just Google "paypal sucks" and check out a few of the 189,000 results. If PayPal were the last financial institution on earth I'd be keeping my money in my mattress.
It's said that we get the government we deserve - I guess that applies to companies as well. If people would just stop using PayPal then they'd change their ways or go out of business. But I guess expecting the majority of people to get their heads out of their asses, do a little research, and take a principled stand on something is asking too much.
Just like the Volstead Act, any attempt at stopping filesharing is ultimately doomed, and these figures prove it. When an overwhelming majority of the population engages in an activity, and a minuscule percentage of people support legislation against that activity, resistance on the part of corporations, and their minions in government and law enforcement, is a futile waste of valuable resources.
The Internet and the vast number of computers connected to it form a vast, dynamic, and complex system whose detailed behaviour is difficult to fully understand and impossible to confidently predict.
Just like the introduction of Cane Toads in Australia, ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cane_toads_in_Australia ), and so many other similar introductions of organisms to 'fix' some problem in a complex ecosystem, this will probably turn out badly. And it may be impossible to undo once the virus is released into the favourable ecosystem that is the Internet.
Inappropriately? It could be argued that flagging various government and law enforcement sites as terrorist in nature would not only be appropriate, but would be definitionally correct.
Telus charges an extra 2 bucks a month for having a paper bill, as opposed to paying online. Granted that makes some kind of sense, but still...
I really wish these companies would just be openly and honestly avaricious, and simply raise their rates. They're really not fooling anyone with their lame attempts at disguising their gouging, and they probably piss us off more with all the bullshit nonsense than they would if they just instituted a rate increase.
I think you're confusing simple shielded cable with coaxial cable. No, you don't need an impedance-matched transmission line at audio frequencies, but shielding CAN be relevant with some amps in some setups. The wavelength of audio frequencies is irrelevant here - speaker cables can be efficient antennae for RF signals, which can then mix with other RF signals and/or be demodulated in the diode junctions that comprise the bi-polar transistors used in the outputs of many amps. This can cause audible artifacts, including hearing radio stations through your speakers even when there's no tuner attached to your system, especially if you're close to the transmitting tower.
As for kilo-buck HDMI cables, that IS an ultimate stupidity. However, you should be careful regarding this whole 'ones and zeros' business. At the frequencies used for HDMI, (and given the rectangular nature of the signals, frequency response up to ten times the fundamental may be important), you're basically back in the analog realm, with rise times a significant fraction of the total waveform period. Impedance mismatches, slowed waveform edges, and extraneous interference can cause jitter and increase bit error rate, and although you're unlikely to see the difference in a typical home setup, these errors can add up over multiple generations of signal transfer.
So no, there won't be any visible or audible difference between a 10 dollar HDMI cable and a thousand dollar one. Just be aware that you can't stick any old cable in there and expect good results.
This seems about as obvious as walking and chewing gum at the same time - maybe I should patent that, 'prior art' or no, and get rich for a bullshit-trivial idea. The patent office needs to grow a pair; and all the C-levels and lawyers of all of the corporations that are trying to lock down the very air we breathe, ought to be bare-ass spanked and sent to bed without supper every day for a year. Irresponsible snot-nosed brats with entitlement issues, every single one.
...should a music company have the right to have a news podcast removed on copyright grounds, when it's not even clear that said company has had any copyrights violated?
Seriously, this question shouldn't be asked, even rhetorically. The answer is so obvious it isn't even debatable. Due process was invented for a very good reason, and we allow it to be circumvented at our extreme peril.
Every US citizen on Slashdot should be contacting his or her appropriate representatives, as often and as loudly as necessary, and raising a stink over this issue. The discussion here is good for getting the word out, but all the fine prose and witty thoughts expressed on Slashdot don't mean jack shit in the outside world - it's time to take this matter up with those who count on your votes to keep them riding the gravy train. Industry may buy elections for politicians, but if we don't allow our votes and our voices to be bought then things will have to change.
If outrages such as this aren't challenged in any meaningful way, they'll only become even more commonplace, to the point where we'll just bend over and 'take it' every day without even realizing what's going on. This continuing erosion of rights and concentration of power has to stop, or we'll soon be living on a totalitarian continent.
Disclaimer: I'm Canadian, not American, but when this stuff comes up in my country I DO write letters and take the time to get others engaged.