If you are a programmer, what would you rather write? A complete program and gui, or just create the backend and let excel be your frontend?
We are talking stastics, not programming. I have yet to see Excell do anything beyond rudimentry things with stastics. You mentioned Excell does charts. Have you seen an Excell bozplot, 3-axis scatterplot, stastical process control, etc. chart? It isn't the right tool. It will however find the mean, sum, sigma, x-bar, and standard deviation for a dataset. So yes it does have some basic stats functions. It's still like putting in screws with a hammer. Other tools do the job much better. JMP and MINITAB come to mind even though they cost more than the MS Office suite at about a grand per copy.
A spread sheet is not a stastics program. However if your office bundle includes a hammer, everyting starts to look like a nail. Excell does math, It's the hammer that makes stastics look like a spreadsheet problem. Enough said? Hammer - nail, Excell - spredsheetable data. For stastics programs look here for a list of some real stastics programs. They are not spreadsheets.
http://www.wch.org.au/CEBU/software.htm
I guess it's kind of like trying to write HTML with MS Notepad. It can be done, however other tools make the job easer.
I'd rather spend $15 on a dvd than go see a movie in theatres
That's especialy true if you have a family. The tickets for a family of four (plus the begging for the way overpriced popcorn) make a $15 DVD a real bargain even if I have to pick up a 2 Liter pop (for less than a small drink at the concessions) and pop a batch of popcorn myself (12 Lb bag of seed is way less than a small serving at the concessions).
The only thing to ruin it is the phone ringing in the middle of the show is for me, not someone right behind me.
Television advertising is grating, patronizing, lowest-denominator sludge which subtly insults as it offers suburban paradise with five-figure price tags to minimum-wage consumers, and interrupts the crappy programming eight times an hour to do so.
And this is different from the sludge in my internet inbox how?
Oh, you don't wait for it to end (commercials in 5 minute blocks) before skipping it. Instant deletion (skipping) and onto other content without waiting for it makes the difference. Internet just doesn't have a commercial break you have to wait to end. Some sites are trying it, but I choose to no longer waste time there.
they'll have to work damn hard to get me to use a TV tuner again.
What I think is funny is they want you to buy another TV tuner for DTV. It'll be fun to watch the sales figures of the new DTV sets when the FCC mandates digital tuners are to be included in all TV's. I have a feeling computer monitors that will also do NTSC are going to be the replacement for small televisions in the future simply for cost reasons. Why pay an extra $400 to get a tuner to watch on the air crap?
$72.50/month for basic "digital" + HBO where I'm from.
Wow! I used to have basic cable for $6.95/month and dropped it when it went to 12.95/month and 2 of my favorite channels moved out of basic into another tier.
I have a fun dialog when they call at dinner time wanting me to sign-up.
Would you like cable?
(me) Yes, but you no longer have the package I used to have.
What's that? maybe we have it.
(me) affordable basic with real channels not static advertisement pages.
What do you mean?
(me) I dropped cable when the two channels I watched were pulled from the basic tier and the price went over $15/month. Do you offer those two channels (Discovery & AMC) in a basic package for under $15/month?
No
(me) Then I'll stick to internet instead. Call me when you offer the package again.
fdisk/mbr will do you absolutely no good if you're infected with a boot virus, simply because the new boot sector written by fdisk will be infected as well. e.g. NYBOOT, STONER, etc..
Why am I replying to this? I thought it was common knowledge to boot from a non-infected source to virus removal work.
If you boot from an infected copy, this is true a reinfection will be likely. Boot from an original IBM or MS boot disk. You know the one, it's the one without a write protect switch, not the bootleg writable (infectable) copy. Read only devices seldom get infected.
why not send it towards the great bright waste disposal unit in the centre of our system
Getting objects out of our lowly planet's gravity takes more energy than parking in a high orbit. Think going in orbit past the moon then keep going. It's a lot of fuel. On original launch date, they are usualy very concerned with weight. Minimual station keeping fuel is all that usualy remains. They at least had the forsight to take enough fuel to park it in a higher orbit. Most of our stuff doesn't carry the extra fuel. When it runs out of station keeping fuel, it's usualy de-orbited.
Actualy it does work like that. However the influnce is small. Take the tounge in cheek examples of Gasoline, Electricity and Natural Gas.
For high energy items, many people do switch and make choices on their options. It includes choice of Solar, Wood, Gas, Oil, Electric, in combination with better insulation and limiting the distance of vacation trips. Energy effecient homes use much less power than a typical home. I know of a home in Central Oregon of double shell construction. It has flowers growing in the woodstove. They lit it once 3 years ago and it took 3 days to cool the house back down. (winter weather). Not everyone needs a SUV and it's asociated gas consumption. Just read the EPA extimates on the 2004 Prius. True you need to balance the cost of fuel against the cost of fuel effeciency in both home and transportation, but the choices are out there.
Why pay for connect and disconnect or unused months if your a snowbird? (snowbird = North summer home and South winter home. Oposite for those South of the Equater.) Snowbirding is also a cost cutting measure. It cuts winter heating bills and summer cooling bills. A portable phone (cell) and portable cable (dish) is a cost saving option for snowbirds.
I have chosen fuel effecient housing and transportation. I've also chosen to replace Pay TV with Internet, Rentals, and Games. Games don't expire (investment) and can be traded, Internet has more content than Pay TV (very current events included), and DVD rental is the ultimate in a-la-carte pay TV. Rentals are not a monopoly and the prices reflect it (video chains don't charge a monthly or annual membership fee like they tried to do). If Hollywood Video and Blockbuster start to think they have a monopoly, then Wal-Mart, Thriftway, and Mom-n-Pop places will quickly expand and compete. (yes Wal-Mart, they sell some new DVD's cheaper than the rental stores used DVD sale prices.) I wonder if cable could ever be convinced to provide a no-monthly content only service for road warriers.
Don't laugh. It runs the Unreal Engine, (OK old version and needs updated) has bright friendly maps and mixes well with the younger kids. It's not an M rated title. This is very important to some people who are sensitive to how their kids are raised. It will run on older hardware for the budget minded. It's NOT COPY PROTECTED. It's a PG version of UT. It's cheap (under $15) and plays well on a LAN. It has much fewer problems with hardware than trying to run Activision's Siderman or Lucas Arts Pod Racer (other non-gore games. Pod Racer claims LAN play. The game is seeing how far you get before the game crashes. Forget a lan party - too few machines will run Pod Racer). Need for Speed is copy protected. I didn't bother to buy extra copies of it for a LAN party when we found it won't run off work copies.
Lol, you trying to make a point with 'Nerf Arena Blast'.....
So other than it's a litle dated, what's your point. It runs with few crash problems, It'll run on work copies, It has great LAN play. With a Google Search, it will even run without the CD in the drive (in violation of the EULA) with no aditional software installation.
It has lots of play value for the money. I wish I could find more titles like it. Software that simply works on a wide variety of hardware without the hastles and for a reasonable price.
How could it be? I clicked on the 911 and nothing happened. The poster forgot to put in the hyperlink so the system was saved from a/. effect. Quick, someone post the google cache and mirror links for 911!
How often do people use the phone during a severe storm to report dammage etc. How often does a high tension line (7200 volt an up) come down and cross a phone line or cable TV line? Ever seen a report of a wire down taking out an entire area code? Lines do come down all the time due to Ice and Wind storms. I've never heard of this taking out an area code. I have had to do repair work in a home office after a power line crossed a phone line. Anything connected between the phone line and the power line was toast due to arcing. This included a computer with modem, answering machine, cordless telephone base, and fax machine. The POTS was undamaged. The other phones in the neighborhood were OK. Only the line to the house died even though there was enough fault current to burn the line in two and drop it into the street.
If history is any indicator, the portable music player market could forget having a user interface even remotely similar to Apple's in any shape, form or fashion. If they did, Apple would unleash the lawyers and sue them into oblivion
I also remember MS getting sued for stealing Apple's trash can. They inovated and have a recycle bin. Expect more of the same. Other players will have a simular but different style, name, but function about the same. It'l look like the two main browsers. One has a Refresh button and icon, and the other has Reload and arrow. Nope, nothing copied here! Move along.
If you're complaining because you can't install your program to the hard drive,
Um, you're missing a point. I expect software to work out of the box as advertised. Using a 3rd party patch to fix broken software either increases the TCO or violates the EULA or both. I would rather know the software is broken before I buy it so I can choose to not buy it instead of deciding to violate the DMCA. Ever try to return software because it won't run without the CD in the drive? You don't have a fighting chance after you open it and try to run it as advertised. I'd rather not have to deal with potential lawsuits to use my purchases. I'd rather have the choice to vote against copy protection problems with my wallet.
Buying a non-returnable pig in a poke is no way to buy software.
but I couldn't justify the full $50 GameStop insisted I pay.
This puts lots of games into the low selling list. I know the programmers want to get paid, however the high price of a game without a demo is still a pricy pig in a poke for most people. I had a case where the demo ran better than the game. This alone reduces my willingness to buy a high cost game. (Nerf Arena Blast Demo runs on HD, game requires CD in drive slowing gameplay) Unfortunately this descrepancy sent me to google to find the no-CD crack on the net just to get it to run like the demo. If a game won't install on the HD and insists on the CD being in the drive, please let me know before hand. If copy protection is used, let me know before hand. I only let the young kids work from working copies. They too often wind up under the wheels of the chair as carpet protectors. I would rather loose a 20 cent blank than a $50 game. Work copies are cheap insurance. I'm very reluctant to spend $50 on a game that I won't let the kids play because they might break it.
The moral of all these stories is: if it's important which way something is installed, make it asymmetric so that it's physically impossible to install it the wrong way. Labels are not enough.
That must be the reason the eraser is twice the diamater of the pencil I just bought. I can't sharpen the wrong end.
Great choice in music. I have the Mobile Sound Fidelity Labs LP pressing. I agree on buying the same thing over and over again. Where can I exchange my LP's, 8 Track and Cassette tapes for CD's for a nominal replacement media fee?
They did miss a point. They did point out that more blank CD's are sold than audio recordings. In my case, that is easy to explain. I have a digital camera. Duh! My wife and I have cars. I don't carry a case of CD's with me when we change vehicles. I download and burn LEGAL public domain old radio programs (Fibber McGee and Molly, Amos and Andy, Great Gildersleeve, Lone Ranger, Abbott and Costello, and others). I put mixes of MP3's on CD's for the living room DVD player (juke box in a single tray) and portable CD/MP3 player. Somehow the record company thinks all these uses is piracy as I didn't bother to buy multiple copies or carry a huge CD binder everywhere I go. The marketing folks have missed the boat on this one by jumping to conclusions that may not be entirely correct by assuming a blank CD sale equals an unsold audio recording sale. That assumption is simply not true. I'm in my 40's now. I have a library of CD's. I also copy all the computer games to work copies as cheap insurance for the kids. All too often they are used as carpet protectors under the wheels of the chair. I'm still finishing ripping my LP's and cassettes. (that's probably labled as piracy also) I definately bought more blank CD's than audio CD's last year by a factor of about 50:1. I don't have any P-P app installed. I'm on dial-up at home. CD's that don't back up properly get returned as defective. My burnt CD's get marked Work Copy with a listing of the location of the original.
"Work Copy" "Original on file at..."
I resent the implication I'm a pirate because I bought more blanks than I bought pre-recorded.
This is all covered quite well in this article. And here is another article which provides support for a simple claim: uncompressed recordings sound better.
From what I've seen, dynamic range limitations of a CD is not the issue. The issue is louder is precieved as better. To make it sound louder (digital has a hard limit regardless of 8 bit, 16 bit, 24 bit or 128 bit.) There are very few CD's where anybody can hear the noise introduced by not enough sample bits in quiet parts on a CD.
The CD's are compressed to make them sound louder than the competition. Number of bits doesn't matter. They are not trying to make the quiet parts sound better. They are trying to make all the parts sound louder. Highly compressed (high THD levels) are common in modern CD's. After playing a few new cd's, play an old one. It will sound quiet because the average level to provide headroom for peaks is 8-16 DB lower than a highly compressed CD. If you play a lot of older CD's and then play a newer compressed CD, you will quickly want to grab the volume and turn it down because it sounds like it's blasting. (The TV commercials are louder than the program perception. The peak values are the same.)
Switching to a new format with more bits does not change the race to sound louder than the other guys. Expect more highly compressed crap so their pressing doesn't appear to sound quiet. They can and will compress to the limit again for the same reasons. Repeat after me "Louder sounds Better". Until you can program your jukebox to adjust the volume for each CD can the side by side comparison on merits of CD's take place. Then I fully agree, uncompressed sounds better. Uncompressed to sound as loud as compressed, it has much higher peaks (not clipped and distorted by compression).
There will be a few "Audiophile" recordings made, just as there is now with CD's, but don't expect the clear channel stuff to get the "pure recording" treatment. Remember the days of DDD CD's? Digital recorded, Digital mixed, and Digital mastered with no signal processing at all? What happened to the DDD recordings? They just weren't as popular as loud recordings.
Hmm, you said *Meep * Wrong! then said "Who guarantees that MS really didn't know about some of the bugs initially and they didn't just provide a list to NSA?
How can I be wrong and right at the same time. My point is distrust of closed source and full examination of open source will drive use of the open source. The point is closed software may have backdoors you just haven't found out about. It may let in a government or industraial spy by design. Open Source developed by an international team not under a single corporation has a much smaller chance of putting out code with a back door. Closed source may have deliberately hidden API's in the code that is released binary only. Remember the issue with MS and non-published API's. How much of that stuff goes on in the open source world?
My question is this: How long until some moron in D.C. decides that this means there are "alternatives" and try to make MP3 files illegal?
They have a long way to go. There is way too much market use of the format. It would be like making copy machines illegal at this point in time. Fine you can kill Xerox, but can you kill Cannon, HP, Minolta, Lexmark, and company? It'll be dificult to kill the idea behind a photocopy. It's just as hard to kill the format used by home bands, Public Domain, Court Records, Web Pages, etc. Everything from CDeX to Easy CD Creator to Apple, Rio, Creative Labs, use MP3 format extensively. It isn't going away soon even if you decide to change the gamebook overnight. If the format is killed, the idea of a sharable format will remain, just like photocopies will remain long after Xerox is told they can't do that anymore. (Hypothetical ban on photocopies)
It's examined closely for open backdoors. Because it is fully checked for big brother backdoors that could permit spies, it's not likely to have big brother holes in it. This is real security. If you don't want to share your private business with the world, who's software would you use. MS with the hole that gave away SCO's Haloween X secrets, or something that will keep your edits private. I know which editor I don't use for e-mail.
Many of the offerings on C-band are not TV. They are many radio signals spaced through the 6 meg band of a transponder. The best way to get to these is to pick off the IF and tune it with a good scanner. Some signals are FM and some are single sideband. Look for weather fax and other non-TV signals. There is a bunch of scrambled narrow band stuff mixed in there also so don't worry if you don't understand why some things just don't tune in.
If you study microwave waveguides, they are not just empty space. They resemble twin lead transmission wire. How they get an insulator to seperate the two conductors is the hardest part for most people to understand, but in reality most waveguide is twinlead.
Here is how it works. The simplest model is square and the easiest to describe. The same rules apply to eliptical and circurlar. The center of two sides are the conductors. Believe me on that one. Now to insulate them from each other.. Take the conductors and mount them on a pair of 1/4 wave stand off's to ground. The stand off's are conductive. They have a voltage gradient from zero at ground up to the voltage at the conductor they support. A pair of conductors supported by back to back 1/4 wave stubs extended the length of the conductors becomes a waveguide. Two conductors oposite each other made of flat wire seperated by 1/2 wave (the two quarter wave) stubs that extend the entire length of the conductor. This closes the waveguide into it's rectangular shape. Due the skin effect and the influence of the magnatism from currents, the voltage is only on the inside of the waveguide. the outside can be grounded on all 4 sides. This provides 100% shielding of the twin lead transmission line (waveguide).
Knowing the theory doesn't explain the concentric rectangles working as a lens. Hmm I'm going to have to look that up.
Flat antenna's work by having lots of elements, then adding in a sum network all of the elements. Signals in phase add. Those out of phase cancel. Two types of antennas are popular at microwave frequencies. One is a slot antenna where slots are put in a waveguide so the openings are a wavelength apart. This antenna works well with high gain parallel to the face. The drawback is this is a strip antenna with a wide x and narrow y pattern. It is not a narrow beam antenna. To get a beam, many of these would havet to be placed side by side and phased to each other.
The other type of flat antenna is the phased array. This antenna is a flat antenna with lots of dipoles above the face of the array and summing network, or if made in a Printed Circuit Board, (common in pleasure boat radar's) in the plane of the summing network. With active components and more than one face, the phased array antenna is electricaly steerable. Nice if you need an antenna that can be pointed quickly without moving anything. Due to complexity, this type antenna is very expensive. Use may be military for instance to radar track a missle in real time.
Your best bet for a true C'band flat antenna would be to design a printed circuit board antenna. A good place to get ideas would be a service manual for a Ratheon Marine radar for small vessles. Design the phased array from a strip long and narrow (for radar) to a very large square array for C-band. Good luck.
Slashdot Mirror
If you are a programmer, what would you rather write? A complete program and gui, or just create the backend and let excel be your frontend?
We are talking stastics, not programming. I have yet to see Excell do anything beyond rudimentry things with stastics. You mentioned Excell does charts. Have you seen an Excell bozplot, 3-axis scatterplot, stastical process control, etc. chart? It isn't the right tool. It will however find the mean, sum, sigma, x-bar, and standard deviation for a dataset. So yes it does have some basic stats functions. It's still like putting in screws with a hammer. Other tools do the job much better. JMP and MINITAB come to mind even though they cost more than the MS Office suite at about a grand per copy.
A spread sheet is not a stastics program. However if your office bundle includes a hammer, everyting starts to look like a nail. Excell does math, It's the hammer that makes stastics look like a spreadsheet problem. Enough said? Hammer - nail, Excell - spredsheetable data. For stastics programs look here for a list of some real stastics programs. They are not spreadsheets.
http://www.wch.org.au/CEBU/software.htm
I guess it's kind of like trying to write HTML with MS Notepad. It can be done, however other tools make the job easer.
I'd rather spend $15 on a dvd than go see a movie in theatres
That's especialy true if you have a family. The tickets for a family of four (plus the begging for the way overpriced popcorn) make a $15 DVD a real bargain even if I have to pick up a 2 Liter pop (for less than a small drink at the concessions) and pop a batch of popcorn myself (12 Lb bag of seed is way less than a small serving at the concessions).
The only thing to ruin it is the phone ringing in the middle of the show is for me, not someone right behind me.
Television advertising is grating, patronizing, lowest-denominator sludge which subtly insults as it offers suburban paradise with five-figure price tags to minimum-wage consumers, and interrupts the crappy programming eight times an hour to do so.
And this is different from the sludge in my internet inbox how?
Oh, you don't wait for it to end (commercials in 5 minute blocks) before skipping it. Instant deletion (skipping) and onto other content without waiting for it makes the difference. Internet just doesn't have a commercial break you have to wait to end. Some sites are trying it, but I choose to no longer waste time there.
they'll have to work damn hard to get me to use a TV tuner again.
What I think is funny is they want you to buy another TV tuner for DTV. It'll be fun to watch the sales figures of the new DTV sets when the FCC mandates digital tuners are to be included in all TV's. I have a feeling computer monitors that will also do NTSC are going to be the replacement for small televisions in the future simply for cost reasons. Why pay an extra $400 to get a tuner to watch on the air crap?
$72.50/month for basic "digital" + HBO where I'm from.
Wow! I used to have basic cable for $6.95/month and dropped it when it went to 12.95/month and 2 of my favorite channels moved out of basic into another tier.
I have a fun dialog when they call at dinner time wanting me to sign-up.
Would you like cable?
(me) Yes, but you no longer have the package I used to have.
What's that? maybe we have it.
(me) affordable basic with real channels not static advertisement pages.
What do you mean?
(me) I dropped cable when the two channels I watched were pulled from the basic tier and the price went over $15/month. Do you offer those two channels (Discovery & AMC) in a basic package for under $15/month?
No
(me) Then I'll stick to internet instead. Call me when you offer the package again.
(click)
fdisk /mbr will do you absolutely no good if you're infected with a boot virus, simply because the new boot sector written by fdisk will be infected as well. e.g. NYBOOT, STONER, etc..
Why am I replying to this? I thought it was common knowledge to boot from a non-infected source to virus removal work.
If you boot from an infected copy, this is true a reinfection will be likely. Boot from an original IBM or MS boot disk. You know the one, it's the one without a write protect switch, not the bootleg writable (infectable) copy. Read only devices seldom get infected.
why not send it towards the great bright waste disposal unit in the centre of our system
Getting objects out of our lowly planet's gravity takes more energy than parking in a high orbit. Think going in orbit past the moon then keep going. It's a lot of fuel. On original launch date, they are usualy very concerned with weight. Minimual station keeping fuel is all that usualy remains. They at least had the forsight to take enough fuel to park it in a higher orbit. Most of our stuff doesn't carry the extra fuel. When it runs out of station keeping fuel, it's usualy de-orbited.
Actualy it does work like that. However the influnce is small. Take the tounge in cheek examples of Gasoline, Electricity and Natural Gas.
For high energy items, many people do switch and make choices on their options. It includes choice of Solar, Wood, Gas, Oil, Electric, in combination with better insulation and limiting the distance of vacation trips. Energy effecient homes use much less power than a typical home. I know of a home in Central Oregon of double shell construction. It has flowers growing in the woodstove. They lit it once 3 years ago and it took 3 days to cool the house back down. (winter weather). Not everyone needs a SUV and it's asociated gas consumption. Just read the EPA extimates on the 2004 Prius. True you need to balance the cost of fuel against the cost of fuel effeciency in both home and transportation, but the choices are out there.
Why pay for connect and disconnect or unused months if your a snowbird? (snowbird = North summer home and South winter home. Oposite for those South of the Equater.) Snowbirding is also a cost cutting measure. It cuts winter heating bills and summer cooling bills. A portable phone (cell) and portable cable (dish) is a cost saving option for snowbirds.
I have chosen fuel effecient housing and transportation. I've also chosen to replace Pay TV with Internet, Rentals, and Games. Games don't expire (investment) and can be traded, Internet has more content than Pay TV (very current events included), and DVD rental is the ultimate in a-la-carte pay TV. Rentals are not a monopoly and the prices reflect it (video chains don't charge a monthly or annual membership fee like they tried to do). If Hollywood Video and Blockbuster start to think they have a monopoly, then Wal-Mart, Thriftway, and Mom-n-Pop places will quickly expand and compete. (yes Wal-Mart, they sell some new DVD's cheaper than the rental stores used DVD sale prices.) I wonder if cable could ever be convinced to provide a no-monthly content only service for road warriers.
Don't laugh. It runs the Unreal Engine, (OK old version and needs updated) has bright friendly maps and mixes well with the younger kids. It's not an M rated title. This is very important to some people who are sensitive to how their kids are raised. It will run on older hardware for the budget minded. It's NOT COPY PROTECTED. It's a PG version of UT. It's cheap (under $15) and plays well on a LAN. It has much fewer problems with hardware than trying to run Activision's Siderman or Lucas Arts Pod Racer (other non-gore games. Pod Racer claims LAN play. The game is seeing how far you get before the game crashes. Forget a lan party - too few machines will run Pod Racer). Need for Speed is copy protected. I didn't bother to buy extra copies of it for a LAN party when we found it won't run off work copies.
Lol, you trying to make a point with 'Nerf Arena Blast'.....
So other than it's a litle dated, what's your point. It runs with few crash problems, It'll run on work copies, It has great LAN play. With a Google Search, it will even run without the CD in the drive (in violation of the EULA) with no aditional software installation.
It has lots of play value for the money. I wish I could find more titles like it. Software that simply works on a wide variety of hardware without the hastles and for a reasonable price.
How could it be? I clicked on the 911 and nothing happened. The poster forgot to put in the hyperlink so the system was saved from a /. effect. Quick, someone post the google cache and mirror links for 911!
How often do people use the phone during a severe storm to report dammage etc. How often does a high tension line (7200 volt an up) come down and cross a phone line or cable TV line? Ever seen a report of a wire down taking out an entire area code? Lines do come down all the time due to Ice and Wind storms. I've never heard of this taking out an area code. I have had to do repair work in a home office after a power line crossed a phone line. Anything connected between the phone line and the power line was toast due to arcing. This included a computer with modem, answering machine, cordless telephone base, and fax machine. The POTS was undamaged. The other phones in the neighborhood were OK. Only the line to the house died even though there was enough fault current to burn the line in two and drop it into the street.
If history is any indicator, the portable music player market could forget having a user interface even remotely similar to Apple's in any shape, form or fashion. If they did, Apple would unleash the lawyers and sue them into oblivion
I also remember MS getting sued for stealing Apple's trash can. They inovated and have a recycle bin. Expect more of the same. Other players will have a simular but different style, name, but function about the same. It'l look like the two main browsers. One has a Refresh button and icon, and the other has Reload and arrow. Nope, nothing copied here! Move along.
If you're complaining because you can't install your program to the hard drive,
Um, you're missing a point. I expect software to work out of the box as advertised. Using a 3rd party patch to fix broken software either increases the TCO or violates the EULA or both. I would rather know the software is broken before I buy it so I can choose to not buy it instead of deciding to violate the DMCA. Ever try to return software because it won't run without the CD in the drive? You don't have a fighting chance after you open it and try to run it as advertised. I'd rather not have to deal with potential lawsuits to use my purchases. I'd rather have the choice to vote against copy protection problems with my wallet.
Buying a non-returnable pig in a poke is no way to buy software.
but I couldn't justify the full $50 GameStop insisted I pay.
This puts lots of games into the low selling list. I know the programmers want to get paid, however the high price of a game without a demo is still a pricy pig in a poke for most people. I had a case where the demo ran better than the game. This alone reduces my willingness to buy a high cost game. (Nerf Arena Blast Demo runs on HD, game requires CD in drive slowing gameplay) Unfortunately this descrepancy sent me to google to find the no-CD crack on the net just to get it to run like the demo. If a game won't install on the HD and insists on the CD being in the drive, please let me know before hand. If copy protection is used, let me know before hand. I only let the young kids work from working copies. They too often wind up under the wheels of the chair as carpet protectors. I would rather loose a 20 cent blank than a $50 game. Work copies are cheap insurance. I'm very reluctant to spend $50 on a game that I won't let the kids play because they might break it.
The moral of all these stories is: if it's important which way something is installed, make it asymmetric so that it's physically impossible to install it the wrong way. Labels are not enough.
That must be the reason the eraser is twice the diamater of the pencil I just bought. I can't sharpen the wrong end.
Could they not stamp "THIS SIDE UP" or whatever on the components?
In Space--- Which way is up?
Great choice in music. I have the Mobile Sound Fidelity Labs LP pressing. I agree on buying the same thing over and over again. Where can I exchange my LP's, 8 Track and Cassette tapes for CD's for a nominal replacement media fee?
They did miss a point. They did point out that more blank CD's are sold than audio recordings. In my case, that is easy to explain. I have a digital camera. Duh! My wife and I have cars. I don't carry a case of CD's with me when we change vehicles. I download and burn LEGAL public domain old radio programs (Fibber McGee and Molly, Amos and Andy, Great Gildersleeve, Lone Ranger, Abbott and Costello, and others). I put mixes of MP3's on CD's for the living room DVD player (juke box in a single tray) and portable CD/MP3 player. Somehow the record company thinks all these uses is piracy as I didn't bother to buy multiple copies or carry a huge CD binder everywhere I go. The marketing folks have missed the boat on this one by jumping to conclusions that may not be entirely correct by assuming a blank CD sale equals an unsold audio recording sale. That assumption is simply not true. I'm in my 40's now. I have a library of CD's. I also copy all the computer games to work copies as cheap insurance for the kids. All too often they are used as carpet protectors under the wheels of the chair. I'm still finishing ripping my LP's and cassettes. (that's probably labled as piracy also) I definately bought more blank CD's than audio CD's last year by a factor of about 50:1. I don't have any P-P app installed. I'm on dial-up at home. CD's that don't back up properly get returned as defective. My burnt CD's get marked Work Copy with a listing of the location of the original.
"Work Copy"
"Original on file at..."
I resent the implication I'm a pirate because I bought more blanks than I bought pre-recorded.
This is all covered quite well in this article. And here is another article which provides support for a simple claim: uncompressed recordings sound better.
From what I've seen, dynamic range limitations of a CD is not the issue. The issue is louder is precieved as better. To make it sound louder (digital has a hard limit regardless of 8 bit, 16 bit, 24 bit or 128 bit.) There are very few CD's where anybody can hear the noise introduced by not enough sample bits in quiet parts on a CD.
The CD's are compressed to make them sound louder than the competition. Number of bits doesn't matter. They are not trying to make the quiet parts sound better. They are trying to make all the parts sound louder. Highly compressed (high THD levels) are common in modern CD's. After playing a few new cd's, play an old one. It will sound quiet because the average level to provide headroom for peaks is 8-16 DB lower than a highly compressed CD. If you play a lot of older CD's and then play a newer compressed CD, you will quickly want to grab the volume and turn it down because it sounds like it's blasting. (The TV commercials are louder than the program perception. The peak values are the same.)
Switching to a new format with more bits does not change the race to sound louder than the other guys. Expect more highly compressed crap so their pressing doesn't appear to sound quiet. They can and will compress to the limit again for the same reasons. Repeat after me "Louder sounds Better". Until you can program your jukebox to adjust the volume for each CD can the side by side comparison on merits of CD's take place. Then I fully agree, uncompressed sounds better. Uncompressed to sound as loud as compressed, it has much higher peaks (not clipped and distorted by compression).
There will be a few "Audiophile" recordings made, just as there is now with CD's, but don't expect the clear channel stuff to get the "pure recording" treatment. Remember the days of DDD CD's? Digital recorded, Digital mixed, and Digital mastered with no signal processing at all? What happened to the DDD recordings? They just weren't as popular as loud recordings.
Hmm, you said *Meep * Wrong! then said "Who guarantees that MS really didn't know about some of the bugs initially and they didn't just provide a list to NSA?
How can I be wrong and right at the same time. My point is distrust of closed source and full examination of open source will drive use of the open source. The point is closed software may have backdoors you just haven't found out about. It may let in a government or industraial spy by design. Open Source developed by an international team not under a single corporation has a much smaller chance of putting out code with a back door. Closed source may have deliberately hidden API's in the code that is released binary only. Remember the issue with MS and non-published API's. How much of that stuff goes on in the open source world?
My question is this: How long until some moron in D.C. decides that this means there are "alternatives" and try to make MP3 files illegal?
They have a long way to go. There is way too much market use of the format. It would be like making copy machines illegal at this point in time. Fine you can kill Xerox, but can you kill Cannon, HP, Minolta, Lexmark, and company? It'll be dificult to kill the idea behind a photocopy. It's just as hard to kill the format used by home bands, Public Domain, Court Records, Web Pages, etc. Everything from CDeX to Easy CD Creator to Apple, Rio, Creative Labs, use MP3 format extensively. It isn't going away soon even if you decide to change the gamebook overnight. If the format is killed, the idea of a sharable format will remain, just like photocopies will remain long after Xerox is told they can't do that anymore. (Hypothetical ban on photocopies)
It's examined closely for open backdoors. Because it is fully checked for big brother backdoors that could permit spies, it's not likely to have big brother holes in it. This is real security. If you don't want to share your private business with the world, who's software would you use. MS with the hole that gave away SCO's Haloween X secrets, or something that will keep your edits private. I know which editor I don't use for e-mail.
Many of the offerings on C-band are not TV. They are many radio signals spaced through the 6 meg band of a transponder. The best way to get to these is to pick off the IF and tune it with a good scanner. Some signals are FM and some are single sideband. Look for weather fax and other non-TV signals. There is a bunch of scrambled narrow band stuff mixed in there also so don't worry if you don't understand why some things just don't tune in.
If you study microwave waveguides, they are not just empty space. They resemble twin lead transmission wire. How they get an insulator to seperate the two conductors is the hardest part for most people to understand, but in reality most waveguide is twinlead.
Here is how it works. The simplest model is square and the easiest to describe. The same rules apply to eliptical and circurlar. The center of two sides are the conductors. Believe me on that one. Now to insulate them from each other.. Take the conductors and mount them on a pair of 1/4 wave stand off's to ground. The stand off's are conductive. They have a voltage gradient from zero at ground up to the voltage at the conductor they support. A pair of conductors supported by back to back 1/4 wave stubs extended the length of the conductors becomes a waveguide. Two conductors oposite each other made of flat wire seperated by 1/2 wave (the two quarter wave) stubs that extend the entire length of the conductor. This closes the waveguide into it's rectangular shape. Due the skin effect and the influence of the magnatism from currents, the voltage is only on the inside of the waveguide. the outside can be grounded on all 4 sides. This provides 100% shielding of the twin lead transmission line (waveguide).
Knowing the theory doesn't explain the concentric rectangles working as a lens. Hmm I'm going to have to look that up.
Flat antenna's work by having lots of elements, then adding in a sum network all of the elements. Signals in phase add. Those out of phase cancel. Two types of antennas are popular at microwave frequencies. One is a slot antenna where slots are put in a waveguide so the openings are a wavelength apart. This antenna works well with high gain parallel to the face. The drawback is this is a strip antenna with a wide x and narrow y pattern. It is not a narrow beam antenna. To get a beam, many of these would havet to be placed side by side and phased to each other.
The other type of flat antenna is the phased array. This antenna is a flat antenna with lots of dipoles above the face of the array and summing network, or if made in a Printed Circuit Board, (common in pleasure boat radar's) in the plane of the summing network. With active components and more than one face, the phased array antenna is electricaly steerable. Nice if you need an antenna that can be pointed quickly without moving anything. Due to complexity, this type antenna is very expensive. Use may be military for instance to radar track a missle in real time.
Your best bet for a true C'band flat antenna would be to design a printed circuit board antenna. A good place to get ideas would be a service manual for a Ratheon Marine radar for small vessles. Design the phased array from a strip long and narrow (for radar) to a very large square array for C-band. Good luck.