A waveguide antenna feeding into a dish reflector is called a feedhorn. They work very well.
Re:Driven by the Engineers?
on
Inside Intel
·
· Score: 2
FYI, If you want to see it yourself firsthand, the openhouse is Saturday the 23rd of Febuary from 10:00 to 3:00. It includes a window tour of the new copper 300mm facility. You will be able to see the new class of automated material handeling. Wafers are no longer carried by hand. It's completely done by robots. Come watch it work. It's at the Ronlar Acres campus just off Cornelius Pass near the new Hillsboro stadium. It's on 229th and Evergreen Parkway. See you there.
My microwave oven operates at 2.4 Ghz. How safe is a long term exposure at point blank range. Microwave ovens are an intermittant use item and are not operated in your lap, hand or in your ear. The leakage is limited to a few mW per square cM at the surface of an oven. What is the safety of these wireless broadband microwave transmitters that operate in your lap with long duty cycles?
It's a lot less expensive than paying dammages to Netscape, being broken up and allowing Netscape to expose API's. Netscape could make an OS that would run web appications that would negate the need for a MS OS. They are fighting to keep the monopoly. They don't dare loose at any cost.
Re:The LinuX(P) convergence
on
SuSE 7.3 vs XP
·
· Score: 2
My main point was that the relevance of TCO and other stuff is not that high anymore, and in the end we just have to say: Know your OS and do what you want the best way. There is no Best OS and there is no Best Way. Back in the 80's PC XT days, friends used to ask which computer should I buy. What I told them still aplies today. I said find the software you need to run and get the hardware that will run it. I have a Linux box for Netscape which is immune out of the box to.VBS scripts. It fits my needs on that count. I have a WIN laptop as the National Goegraphic Topo maps require it. It's the best map interface I have for my GPS. I haven't found a replacement for it in a non-WIN format yet.. I'm still looking. Hopefully soon I'll ditch the requiremet to have 3 computers. (Wildflower/Topo/National Geographic, are you listening?)
Same deal if I sell you a print of one of my photos. You don't own the right to scan it and sell it to others or to publishers. Sorry 'bout that. I got burnt by a for hire photographer on just that subject. Believing the consumer is always right, I have since written all my own contracts for photographers labor... The key is labor. Most photographers refuse as they see it as an attack on their cash cow of reprints. To get a photographer, I send a copy of the labor agreement asking for bids for the labor. All proofs and negatives are my property, not the other way around. It's worth the effort to hire a photographer for his labor and be able to get the extra prints that are always needed at a wedding. You can hire him for the reprints if you like his work and prices. You can also have the negatives scanned and put on the web which traditional photographers copyright prohibits. Make sure you own the copyright of your important events.
Walt Disney learned that the hard way. His first mouse was owned by the studio he used to work for. His name was Mortimer Mouse. Walt Disney did not have permission to use his creation. He created another mouse very much diffrent from Mortimer. He refused to give up ownership of Mickey to any studio. He saw loss of ownership of his creation never happened to him again.
I can just see MS software and Adobe software CD's in mass mailings that have a 30 day 1000 free hour trial period. Sound familiar. You've got mail. You can't send mail or print anything until you subscribe. Adobe and MS disks may become as common and as usefull as AOL disks. They will know how to get past the definetion as a sale minor technicality. They sell subscriptions to the software. You buy a certificate, disk and manual at the store for a nominal charge. A small modification in coding will eliminate any confusion that the software subscription is a purchase. I'm serious. Look for it. This is not a troll.
There will be two kinds of software. The buy a copy and the subscribe to a copy. One can be installed and used. The other will only have a DL subscription form to download and activate the it. It will come free in the mail. It will come free pre-loaded on computers with a 30 day free trial... Sound familiar? 30 day 1000 hours free ring a bell? Knock your self out and sell the disks on E-Bay. MS and maybe Adobe know how to sidestep this one.
It's true special magnetic ink is used on checks, however the other special ink used with barcodes is used for infared readers. Dye based inkjet ink is transparent to infared and can not be scanned by an IR reader. Carbon pigmented dye inkjet (or laser printer) can be read. The IR readers are used where a barcode is obscured by a black dye based overcoat. (it's transparant to IR) This is to prevent the barcode from being copied on a photocopier, or being read by a hacker and duplicated. This is used in some low security access controls & ID badges. The black stripe on the back of a ID badge or student card might be optical, not magnetic. As a good Cue Cat Hack, replace the LED with an IR LED from an old TV remote to use IR barcodes. (A modified Cue Cat might not read a propritory code on a ID badge. Use with your own code.)
Here's a quick 3 of 9 primer... Most TTF fonts I have seen for barcodes support 3 of 9 encoding as it does not have any interleaving or require a checksum. It does require a start and stop code however. (usualy a *) As a font the spacebar will place on unreadable gap in the barcode. To print the code that represents a space to the reader, an alternate translation charactor must be typed. (in my font it's an exclimation point!) 3 of 9 barcodes support the following 0-9, A-Z (uppercase only), and hyphen, period, Dollar, slash, plus, percent, and space. (yes you can barcode/.) To get lowercase and other ASCII, you must use extended 3 of 9. The Cue Cat reader does not support extended 3 of 9 and will provide only the pairs used to represent the extended caracters. Extended characters are a pair of characters that represent another single character. As an example a lower case A is coded +A and prints as a. A plus in front of a number prints as a +. Eg. +125 prints +125. Armed with this information my John Henry would be preped for a barcode font as follows. *JOHN!HENRY* A search of HP's website will get you the full extended 3 of 9 information. Another tidbit.. If you hack the Cat, all 3 of 9 is output in lower case instead of uppercase by the Cue Cat.
This makes *far* more sense than what you have described your Radioshack does. Two words.. Labor costs. A portable CD player that sells for $50 costs less than that to manufacture. If the laser or spindle motor or such goes out, you have at least an hour troubleshooting, ordering parts, looking up part numbers, keeping inventory of unique parts, replacing the part, aligning and warrenting the repair. You break even with techs at $20 per hour how?? Short answer.. replace it. Very little sold in radio shack sells for over a $100.00. I used to fix VCR's when they were a 600 to 1200 dollar item. Now that they are a 60 dollar item, I found other work.
It was an oversite I neglected to include the small town in the Northwest part of the state where I used to live. Sorry. Actualy I grew up in Redmond and I no longer live in Oregon. I moved to a lower tax state. It's funny to hear the revenue problems the state has while being one of the higher taxed states. Maybe they want to tax like California and not like Idaho or Washington.
I don't know about latency in encoding and decoding the optical end, but on a purely physical level, the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. The speed of light in air is almost the same as speed of light in a vacuum. Wire on the other hand rarely goes in a straight line and due to the dielectric covering on the wire, the propogation factor is quite a bit slower than speed of light. (about 70% the speed of light for Cat 5 cable)
Do you have an address that has a unit or apt number in it? Mine was just a street address which triggered marketers to single family dwelling status instead of apartment renter. Is your dwelling in an area known for single family housing? If you know the area, I lived in the 110th and SE Stark area. It's all single family homes except the apartment on Stark. The apartments used house type street addresses, not apt numbers. Another factor that has changed a few years ago is it's much harder to get the DMV public records due to the backlash from people wanting their privacy. My incident with junk mail started in 1982.
I had a paper trail on a snail mail issue I had with the Oregon Department of Transportation. I registered my new car (got plates). Due to a typo, my middle initial was wrong on the title and registration. I was going to correct it when I got a chance, but changed my mind when I got my first junk mail with the same mistake. After that, I decided not to correct the error. About 1/3 of my junk mail had that error for as long as I owned my car. About half the telemarketers also asked for me by that name. It was mostly chimney sweeps, re-financers, and vinyl siding salesmen. They were totaly useless calls as I was renting an apartment at that time and it didn't have a fireplace. I should have had them drop by for the free estimate to waste some of their time. Maybe they will get their demographic close enough to quit bothering me.
"they" know you've read the message."
I go one step further.. I have maintained dialup at home for e-mail. I always drop the connection before checking the inbox. Any mail that requests something off the web and pops up my dialer gets deleted.
I wonder if the 5 cent tags are in the same league as Cd's cheaper than cassettes, Lastedisks cheaper than videotape etc. etc. (Royalties and refusal to release something that may price cut the current cash cow were the biggest preventers of seeing these) These are not a 5 cent item yet. I doubt they ever will. Someone will want their cut of the pie. Too many pieces add up. Royalties, manufacturing, distribution, licensing, marketing, etc....
Re:If this goes on credit cards and drivers licens
on
Sun Joins RFID Program
·
· Score: 2
I can scan you as you walk in the door of my rug store A simple farady cage (card sleeve) takes care of the snoops. Not a problem, just a new line of security products for the business traveler.
Would it be a copyright violation to collect all the dead disks, Polish them (like a semiconductor plant planar tool) and re-coat them? You could sell recycled plastic.
I agree.. The day I get a threatening letter is the day I close shop and send the emplyees home. I don't need the overhead to use a shark cage to swim in the ocean. When the threat of sharks is too great, I stay out! I'll write my vendors and say why they are no longer my vendors. There is no way I can afford to loose my retirement to the sharks. I also am not going to throw out all the software I bought just because I can't find the reciept. I do have the original disks. Needing a reciept in addition to the Certificate of Authenticity, original packaging and disks is too much. I don't meet the requirements. I'll close shop before buying extra copies just for the file cabinet. I am not buying extra floor space and cabinets just to store this. It raises the cost of doing business too much.
Re:Works great if you have a clean room available
on
Clear Hard Drive Mods
·
· Score: 3, Funny
I I work in a chip fab in research. Not everybody has dirty jobs....;-)
Slashdot Mirror
A waveguide antenna feeding into a dish reflector is called a feedhorn. They work very well.
FYI, If you want to see it yourself firsthand, the openhouse is Saturday the 23rd of Febuary from 10:00 to 3:00. It includes a window tour of the new copper 300mm facility. You will be able to see the new class of automated material handeling. Wafers are no longer carried by hand. It's completely done by robots. Come watch it work. It's at the Ronlar Acres campus just off Cornelius Pass near the new Hillsboro stadium. It's on 229th and Evergreen Parkway. See you there.
My microwave oven operates at 2.4 Ghz. How safe is a long term exposure at point blank range. Microwave ovens are an intermittant use item and are not operated in your lap, hand or in your ear. The leakage is limited to a few mW per square cM at the surface of an oven. What is the safety of these wireless broadband microwave transmitters that operate in your lap with long duty cycles?
It's a lot less expensive than paying dammages to Netscape, being broken up and allowing Netscape to expose API's. Netscape could make an OS that would run web appications that would negate the need for a MS OS. They are fighting to keep the monopoly. They don't dare loose at any cost.
My main point was that the relevance of TCO and other stuff is not that high anymore, and in the end we just have to say: Know your OS and do what you want the best way. There is no Best OS and there is no Best Way. .VBS scripts. It fits my needs on that count. I have a WIN laptop as the National Goegraphic Topo maps require it. It's the best map interface I have for my GPS. I haven't found a replacement for it in a non-WIN format yet.. I'm still looking. Hopefully soon I'll ditch the requiremet to have 3 computers. (Wildflower/Topo/National Geographic, are you listening?)
Back in the 80's PC XT days, friends used to ask which computer should I buy. What I told them still aplies today. I said find the software you need to run and get the hardware that will run it. I have a Linux box for Netscape which is immune out of the box to
Hi wish I could say something about Suse Linux. So bad they don't have a downlodable version. :-(
;-)
Neither does XP.. So what's the point?
Same deal if I sell you a print of one of my photos. You don't own the right to scan it and sell it to others or to publishers. Sorry 'bout that.
I got burnt by a for hire photographer on just that subject. Believing the consumer is always right, I have since written all my own contracts for photographers labor... The key is labor. Most photographers refuse as they see it as an attack on their cash cow of reprints. To get a photographer, I send a copy of the labor agreement asking for bids for the labor. All proofs and negatives are my property, not the other way around. It's worth the effort to hire a photographer for his labor and be able to get the extra prints that are always needed at a wedding. You can hire him for the reprints if you like his work and prices. You can also have the negatives scanned and put on the web which traditional photographers copyright prohibits. Make sure you own the copyright of your important events.
Walt Disney learned that the hard way. His first mouse was owned by the studio he used to work for. His name was Mortimer Mouse. Walt Disney did not have permission to use his creation. He created another mouse very much diffrent from Mortimer. He refused to give up ownership of Mickey to any studio. He saw loss of ownership of his creation never happened to him again.
I can just see MS software and Adobe software CD's in mass mailings that have a 30 day 1000 free hour trial period. Sound familiar. You've got mail. You can't send mail or print anything until you subscribe. Adobe and MS disks may become as common and as usefull as AOL disks. They will know how to get past the definetion as a sale minor technicality. They sell subscriptions to the software. You buy a certificate, disk and manual at the store for a nominal charge. A small modification in coding will eliminate any confusion that the software subscription is a purchase. I'm serious. Look for it. This is not a troll.
There will be two kinds of software. The buy a copy and the subscribe to a copy. One can be installed and used. The other will only have a DL subscription form to download and activate the it. It will come free in the mail. It will come free pre-loaded on computers with a 30 day free trial... Sound familiar? 30 day 1000 hours free ring a bell? Knock your self out and sell the disks on E-Bay. MS and maybe Adobe know how to sidestep this one.
It's true they don't perform as well as a Symbol laser scanner. But hey what were you expecting for free?
If you use any MS software, print the CD key as a barcode. It makes the weekly rebuild go much quicker. ;-)
It's true special magnetic ink is used on checks, however the other special ink used with barcodes is used for infared readers. Dye based inkjet ink is transparent to infared and can not be scanned by an IR reader. Carbon pigmented dye inkjet (or laser printer) can be read. The IR readers are used where a barcode is obscured by a black dye based overcoat. (it's transparant to IR) This is to prevent the barcode from being copied on a photocopier, or being read by a hacker and duplicated. This is used in some low security access controls & ID badges. The black stripe on the back of a ID badge or student card might be optical, not magnetic. As a good Cue Cat Hack, replace the LED with an IR LED from an old TV remote to use IR barcodes. (A modified Cue Cat might not read a propritory code on a ID badge. Use with your own code.)
Here's a quick 3 of 9 primer... /.) To get lowercase and other ASCII, you must use extended 3 of 9. The Cue Cat reader does not support extended 3 of 9 and will provide only the pairs used to represent the extended caracters. Extended characters are a pair of characters that represent another single character. As an example a lower case A is coded +A and prints as a. A plus in front of a number prints as a +. Eg. +125 prints +125. Armed with this information my John Henry would be preped for a barcode font as follows.
Most TTF fonts I have seen for barcodes support 3 of 9 encoding as it does not have any interleaving or require a checksum. It does require a start and stop code however. (usualy a *) As a font the spacebar will place on unreadable gap in the barcode. To print the code that represents a space to the reader, an alternate translation charactor must be typed. (in my font it's an exclimation point!) 3 of 9 barcodes support the following 0-9, A-Z (uppercase only), and hyphen, period, Dollar, slash, plus, percent, and space. (yes you can barcode
*JOHN!HENRY*
A search of HP's website will get you the full extended 3 of 9 information. Another tidbit.. If you hack the Cat, all 3 of 9 is output in lower case instead of uppercase by the Cue Cat.
This makes *far* more sense than what you have described your Radioshack does.
Two words.. Labor costs. A portable CD player that sells for $50 costs less than that to manufacture. If the laser or spindle motor or such goes out, you have at least an hour troubleshooting, ordering parts, looking up part numbers, keeping inventory of unique parts, replacing the part, aligning and warrenting the repair. You break even with techs at $20 per hour how?? Short answer.. replace it. Very little sold in radio shack sells for over a $100.00. I used to fix VCR's when they were a 600 to 1200 dollar item. Now that they are a 60 dollar item, I found other work.
It was an oversite I neglected to include the small town in the Northwest part of the state where I used to live. Sorry. Actualy I grew up in Redmond and I no longer live in Oregon. I moved to a lower tax state. It's funny to hear the revenue problems the state has while being one of the higher taxed states. Maybe they want to tax like California and not like Idaho or Washington.
I don't know about latency in encoding and decoding the optical end, but on a purely physical level, the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. The speed of light in air is almost the same as speed of light in a vacuum. Wire on the other hand rarely goes in a straight line and due to the dielectric covering on the wire, the propogation factor is quite a bit slower than speed of light. (about 70% the speed of light for Cat 5 cable)
Do you have an address that has a unit or apt number in it? Mine was just a street address which triggered marketers to single family dwelling status instead of apartment renter. Is your dwelling in an area known for single family housing? If you know the area, I lived in the 110th and SE Stark area. It's all single family homes except the apartment on Stark. The apartments used house type street addresses, not apt numbers. Another factor that has changed a few years ago is it's much harder to get the DMV public records due to the backlash from people wanting their privacy. My incident with junk mail started in 1982.
I had a paper trail on a snail mail issue I had with the Oregon Department of Transportation. I registered my new car (got plates). Due to a typo, my middle initial was wrong on the title and registration. I was going to correct it when I got a chance, but changed my mind when I got my first junk mail with the same mistake. After that, I decided not to correct the error. About 1/3 of my junk mail had that error for as long as I owned my car. About half the telemarketers also asked for me by that name. It was mostly chimney sweeps, re-financers, and vinyl siding salesmen. They were totaly useless calls as I was renting an apartment at that time and it didn't have a fireplace. I should have had them drop by for the free estimate to waste some of their time. Maybe they will get their demographic close enough to quit bothering me.
"they" know you've read the message."
I go one step further.. I have maintained dialup at home for e-mail. I always drop the connection before checking the inbox. Any mail that requests something off the web and pops up my dialer gets deleted.
they don't work quite right if more than one tag is in range
Read the FAQ. Some models of tags have collision avoidance and detection.
I wonder if the 5 cent tags are in the same league as Cd's cheaper than cassettes, Lastedisks cheaper than videotape etc. etc. (Royalties and refusal to release something that may price cut the current cash cow were the biggest preventers of seeing these) These are not a 5 cent item yet. I doubt they ever will. Someone will want their cut of the pie. Too many pieces add up. Royalties, manufacturing, distribution, licensing, marketing, etc....
I can scan you as you walk in the door of my rug store
A simple farady cage (card sleeve) takes care of the snoops. Not a problem, just a new line of security products for the business traveler.
Would it be a copyright violation to collect all the dead disks, Polish them (like a semiconductor plant planar tool) and re-coat them? You could sell recycled plastic.
I agree.. The day I get a threatening letter is the day I close shop and send the emplyees home. I don't need the overhead to use a shark cage to swim in the ocean. When the threat of sharks is too great, I stay out! I'll write my vendors and say why they are no longer my vendors. There is no way I can afford to loose my retirement to the sharks. I also am not going to throw out all the software I bought just because I can't find the reciept. I do have the original disks. Needing a reciept in addition to the Certificate of Authenticity, original packaging and disks is too much. I don't meet the requirements. I'll close shop before buying extra copies just for the file cabinet. I am not buying extra floor space and cabinets just to store this. It raises the cost of doing business too much.
I I work in a chip fab in research. Not everybody has dirty jobs....;-)