Brain dead device drivers are only part of the problem. Devices without a controller and memory buffer are the other. Thank goodness hard disks took a step in the right direction on that one. IDE drives have integrated drive electronics AND lots of buffer memory. The CPU can just shove stuff at it and go back to something important like rendering the next scene in Quake with out skipping frames. The less time the CPU spends on being a modem and printer, the more time it has to render smooth video and service mouse interupts. Now if there was only a way to buffer the sound card and CD so CD reads don't break up the sound and drop video frames.
I may have been off base on the video card, but I got burnt on an AGP video card. I updated my old box and put the old WIN 95 upgrade on it. It does not support USB, therefore the new card with new WIN drivers could not display anything above 640 X 480 at 16 colors. That sucked big time on a fancy 8 meg upgrade video card. It said compatible with windows 95 on the box. It just failed to mention it was not compatible with the non OEM OSR2 version of Win 95.
I did not spend another $100 upgrading the OS to support it. I also did not pirate a copy of OEM Win 95 or 98 to support it. I jerked it out and went to a PCI card instead and just blaimed it on the OS and WIN hardware. I learned the hard way that the AGP port is a USB device and the original Win 95 does not support USB, even with all the service packs installed. By the way, Linux supports it;-). I later upgraded the OS to Linux.
I think they have a point in the MS area. Notice how all the hardware becomes WIN hardware with less smarts of their own? Examples I can think of are AGP video cards, Win Printers, Win Modems, and WIN sound cards. Their is no real reason your computer should stop playing music, printing, downloading or whatever because the OS is busy with something else. Put the smarts back into the devices so they can again buffer data and function on their own. A win modem is a waste of CPU cycles, even if it can voice answer the phone. My new computer can't even play the startup wave file properly. It stutters 3 or 4 times because the cpu is busy with disk IO. The cheaper the better concept has hurt the quality of the design.
I know! That is why I have a CDRW drive and do not have a SONY minidisk. I can buy a CD/MP3 portable player for less than $100 US. It has no serial copy protection and will play MP3's.
They forgot the consumer is always right!
All consumers have a vote. Be sure to vote wisely.
I have a Laser Disk player. I bought one when they promised the discs would be cheaper than Videotape because they could be stamped out in mass. It never happened, unless you count famous titles as "how to watch pro football" in your valid selections. In 20 years I have collected less than 15 movies in laserdisc format due to the price. The choice of 12.95 for tape vs 59.95 for the letterbox laserdisc is easy to make. Somebody show me the $10 current release laserdisks please! If the media is high priced and the selection low, it will not catch on.
Napster caught on because the media was cheap and the selection very large.
Unless there is a good savings and good selection, the format will never sell well. It has to compete with the established base of MP3 players and media.
I know SONY has two kinds of MD's, a music and a data MD. Are the data MD's rare in Japan just like they are in the USA? That's why CDRW is so popular here. It can be copied, re-recorded, and the same disk can be used for music and computer data. It's almost impossible to find MD data recorders and media here. It's almost as if they never existed. Renting CD's is not permitted in the USA, however they can be checked out of a library.
SONY in all the wisdom they have decided to make two kinds of MD's. One is a DATA MD. It can be used for comupter programs and other binary uses. It can not be used to cut a MD mix to play at your party. This is because it can be copied. The other format is the Music MD. It has serial copy protection built in. Their is no getting the original binary recording back off the disk. A copy does have a generation loss and the number of generations are set in the software. Unlimited copies of copies do not happen. The copy is not the same as the original. Because the original demand was for music, the data discs got no shelf space. Computer interfaces were even more scarce. Now they are a hard to find specialty item at 5 to 10 X the price of a music blank. CDRW took SONY's market on that one as a blank could be used for either purporse and didn't have serial copy protection. Free market forces went around the roadblock. I see a competitor to DataPlay entering the MD market with a portable MD MP3/Data walkman/external computer drive that will fill the void in the market!
Sony will not provide any player that can make a flawless copy of a copy. They have a music division. The SONY data MD can not be used in a music player because SONY has the rights to the format and a music division. There will not be any licenses given for a MD Data MP3 player from SONY. Another MegnaOptical manufacture will have to do it. Don't expect it from DataPlay. They have RIAA blessing. This means a music recording is converted from the MP3 format! It's converted to a protected format and then recorded. MP3's recorded as DATA can not be played on the player (it's not in the right format). Don't expect to put your MP3's on these and lend them out to be copied!
It will be protected by using a Licensed format like VHS requiring support of copy protection. This will probably be another digital music in, analog out device like the SONY mini-disc (music) so all copies of a copy will be lower quality preventing perfect digital copies of copies. Expect no output other than a headphone jack. I would also expect some kind of watermark also.
RIAA is desprately trying to prevent serial copies, which is defined as a copy of a copy being identical to the original copy. They want the copies of copies to be degraded to discourage the trading of copies of copies. I also expect them to be fragile and easly destroyed by dirt and scratches. A format that wears out from use is also a plus. That much data in that small a form has to be affected by dirt and scratches.
Back in high school many years ago, I saw a sign that read "What will you do when this button replaces your job?". My intuitive response was get a job fixing broken buttons. Keeping an eye on the classifieds kept me on track to the right field. I am one of the few who never made a buck flipping burgers. I knew sticking labels on bottles on an assembly line was not a job for me or the high tech equivelant, stuffing circuit boards. Low cost manual labor is the relm of the uneducated. Many engineering jobs are task oriented and therefore are temporary. Entering the technical service field has paid off well. I like a job requiring thinking and mechanical skills with steady recession resistant employment. Recessions are actualy good. More stuff is fixed instead of replaced.
I know a guy who wrote a payroll program for a company 20 years ago, so this is a little dated. He stayed on to maintian the program. (he assumed correctly after the bugs were worked out he was toast) The program had a feature, if he didn't work, neither did the program. The company's workaround for a couple years was to send him a check for $0.00. As long as he was on the payroll, the program worked. He had a neat collection of uncashed paychecks to prove it.
Yep, TV is dead. Unfortunately the net is now suffering the same fate. TV has lots of channels with "nothing on" and the web is now full of url's with no content but paid advertising. Thank goodness there are a few sites that still have content. It's just getting harder to find thru all that static. Even though the web is bad, the TV is worse, so I don't use the TV much anymore.
To fight windage though, I would think your string would have to be something like 1/8 inch aircraft cable and the weight would have to be a 16 Lb bowling ball. It would have to gain a lot of speed at the bottom of the swing. Doubling the speed increases the wind loss by a square. Losses add up fast.
a quick search on Google for info on the bridge turned up this http://www.thoma.com/thoma/ggbfacts.html. It gives the width at 90 feet and it is 220 feet above mean high tide. It is considerably more than 50 or so feet wide.
It's nessary to encode the names because the limit on the Recording Companies has the following restriction (cut and paste here)
U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel, issuing an injunction she reworked
on the order of an appeals court, said the recording industry will have to
notify Napster of the title of the song, the name of the artist and the name
of the file containing the infringing material.
Because they have to give the filename of the song, they have to keep up the work of finding all the various names and submitting them to get it blocked while new versions of the name pop up. This will make lots of work for the RIAA members and may keep Napster going for a while longer. If they give up and quit hunting, we win. If they keep searching and submitting, we win again. They may find it cheaper to provide better prices for their product like the videotape market did. I stopped copying videotapes when the price dropped below 15 per copy. The original retail tape has much better quality than a copy. At the original $65 and up for the first tapes on the market, tape swapping and copying were very popular, now they are all but gone. Napster is the equivelant of the original videotape clubs. (yea I'm old enough to remember the original release of videotape to the masses and I did join a club)
Windage on a long string is pretty high. I hope you have enough momentum in the fall to go the distance and come up the other side. Remember free falling people (skydiving) only reach terminal velocities of only 140 - 200 MPH due to windage. I think the fall and return up the other side distance is too great to overcome the windage. The bridge is too wide requiring too far of a swing. That's part of being an engineer is comming up with solutions that will work in the real world. To get an idea of the windage on a string, take your average gas powered string trimmer. If the string is too long, it overloads the motor even when it is not cutting anything but air. That's with less than 2 feet of string exposed. The engineers that pulled the stunt used a solution that worked!
I know several easy ways. The first to come to mind is use the wind. Lower a lightweight string on the upwind side of the bridge and let it blow under. On the downwind side, use a weighted hook to snag it and pull it up the other side. That is the easiest since it's almost always windy there. There is two other easy ways I can think of at the moment and there are probably many more. Use your immagination! It's what engineers get paid to do. Solve problems.
It should be well shielded by a solid chunk of Aluminum on one side (heatsink) and a solid chunk of copper on the other (Motherboard Ground Plane). With a multi-layer motherboard (as they all are) the clock and high speed connections can be sandwitched between motherboard ground plane layers to prevent glitches (crosstalk) and meet FCC requirements. These are not high power transistors feeding a 5/8ths wave antenna designed to radiate a strong signal as a phone. They will be poor compitetion with a phone just like the 60 to 166 Mhz stuff of old didn't screw up your FM radio and TV channels much. FYI US TV VHF Low = 54-88 MHZ (ch2-6) FM band = 88-108 MHZ, Mid Band Cable TV A-I (ch14-36) = 108 - 156 MHZ. Interferance was slight and only in weak signal areas.
Ok, Ya got me on the sub 15 Analog input. It doesn't have a non SMDI protected digital input. I guess analog is still permitted at this point. I guess it is an Analog computer monitor. Just watch however, that the new TV will require use of the DVI input forcing an upgrade and breaking the analog (via delibetly reduced resolution) making the protected digital a must have option. Sorry I didn't fully read it first. Moderators do your worst on the original post. I deserve it. I jumped the gun.
I have seen foil in the microwave. If there is a load (food) asorbing much of the power, then the voltage on foil is too low to arc. It is common pratice to cover turkey drumsticks with foil to keep them from over-cooking. What gets covered, no longer receives power. That is the whole idea! A piece of wadded foil without anything else in the oven to asorb the energy does cause very high voltages to build up, and hense the arc. However in a large crowd, I expect empty highly resonant cavity's confining lots of power to be missing.
I've yet to see a copyright on a Virus. Also I don't think anyone would worry avout a virus writer taking them to court. The risk is too great exposing themselves to the angry mob.
They aren't going to either! This is the copy protected stuff the movie industry lobbied to get made manditory on the new digital TV content. (Anti Copy) This is NOT a computer monitor. It does not have SVGA inputs or the digital equivelant. It will never have it. This is the Copy Protected Digital TV and nothing else. It's useless except for digital cable TV that won't work with your VCR or TVIO. There will be no time shift recording!
It's all Pay per Play! No subscription, no service.:-(
I knew they would sell the Anti-Copy stuff as a feature! DVI enabled means it can play via a handshaking encrypted path secure content. This is the stuff we have been against! Content will no longer be released in any copy (and playable) format.
This is the end of Fair Use space and time shifting!
Slashdot Mirror
Brain dead device drivers are only part of the problem. Devices without a controller and memory buffer are the other. Thank goodness hard disks took a step in the right direction on that one. IDE drives have integrated drive electronics AND lots of buffer memory. The CPU can just shove stuff at it and go back to something important like rendering the next scene in Quake with out skipping frames. The less time the CPU spends on being a modem and printer, the more time it has to render smooth video and service mouse interupts. Now if there was only a way to buffer the sound card and CD so CD reads don't break up the sound and drop video frames.
I did not spend another $100 upgrading the OS to support it. I also did not pirate a copy of OEM Win 95 or 98 to support it. I jerked it out and went to a PCI card instead and just blaimed it on the OS and WIN hardware. I learned the hard way that the AGP port is a USB device and the original Win 95 does not support USB, even with all the service packs installed. By the way, Linux supports it ;-). I later upgraded the OS to Linux.
I think they have a point in the MS area. Notice how all the hardware becomes WIN hardware with less smarts of their own? Examples I can think of are AGP video cards, Win Printers, Win Modems, and WIN sound cards. Their is no real reason your computer should stop playing music, printing, downloading or whatever because the OS is busy with something else. Put the smarts back into the devices so they can again buffer data and function on their own. A win modem is a waste of CPU cycles, even if it can voice answer the phone. My new computer can't even play the startup wave file properly. It stutters 3 or 4 times because the cpu is busy with disk IO. The cheaper the better concept has hurt the quality of the design.
They forgot the consumer is always right!
All consumers have a vote. Be sure to vote wisely.
Napster caught on because the media was cheap and the selection very large.
Unless there is a good savings and good selection, the format will never sell well. It has to compete with the established base of MP3 players and media.
I know SONY has two kinds of MD's, a music and a data MD. Are the data MD's rare in Japan just like they are in the USA? That's why CDRW is so popular here. It can be copied, re-recorded, and the same disk can be used for music and computer data. It's almost impossible to find MD data recorders and media here. It's almost as if they never existed. Renting CD's is not permitted in the USA, however they can be checked out of a library.
SONY in all the wisdom they have decided to make two kinds of MD's. One is a DATA MD. It can be used for comupter programs and other binary uses. It can not be used to cut a MD mix to play at your party. This is because it can be copied. The other format is the Music MD. It has serial copy protection built in. Their is no getting the original binary recording back off the disk. A copy does have a generation loss and the number of generations are set in the software. Unlimited copies of copies do not happen. The copy is not the same as the original. Because the original demand was for music, the data discs got no shelf space. Computer interfaces were even more scarce. Now they are a hard to find specialty item at 5 to 10 X the price of a music blank. CDRW took SONY's market on that one as a blank could be used for either purporse and didn't have serial copy protection. Free market forces went around the roadblock. I see a competitor to DataPlay entering the MD market with a portable MD MP3/Data walkman/external computer drive that will fill the void in the market!
Sony will not provide any player that can make a flawless copy of a copy. They have a music division. The SONY data MD can not be used in a music player because SONY has the rights to the format and a music division. There will not be any licenses given for a MD Data MP3 player from SONY. Another MegnaOptical manufacture will have to do it. Don't expect it from DataPlay. They have RIAA blessing. This means a music recording is converted from the MP3 format! It's converted to a protected format and then recorded. MP3's recorded as DATA can not be played on the player (it's not in the right format). Don't expect to put your MP3's on these and lend them out to be copied!
RIAA is desprately trying to prevent serial copies, which is defined as a copy of a copy being identical to the original copy. They want the copies of copies to be degraded to discourage the trading of copies of copies. I also expect them to be fragile and easly destroyed by dirt and scratches. A format that wears out from use is also a plus. That much data in that small a form has to be affected by dirt and scratches.
Back in high school many years ago, I saw a sign that read "What will you do when this button replaces your job?". My intuitive response was get a job fixing broken buttons. Keeping an eye on the classifieds kept me on track to the right field. I am one of the few who never made a buck flipping burgers. I knew sticking labels on bottles on an assembly line was not a job for me or the high tech equivelant, stuffing circuit boards. Low cost manual labor is the relm of the uneducated. Many engineering jobs are task oriented and therefore are temporary. Entering the technical service field has paid off well. I like a job requiring thinking and mechanical skills with steady recession resistant employment. Recessions are actualy good. More stuff is fixed instead of replaced.
I know a guy who wrote a payroll program for a company 20 years ago, so this is a little dated. He stayed on to maintian the program. (he assumed correctly after the bugs were worked out he was toast) The program had a feature, if he didn't work, neither did the program. The company's workaround for a couple years was to send him a check for $0.00. As long as he was on the payroll, the program worked. He had a neat collection of uncashed paychecks to prove it.
Yep, TV is dead. Unfortunately the net is now suffering the same fate. TV has lots of channels with "nothing on" and the web is now full of url's with no content but paid advertising. Thank goodness there are a few sites that still have content. It's just getting harder to find thru all that static. Even though the web is bad, the TV is worse, so I don't use the TV much anymore.
Hmm... That needs to be encrypted. I'm married. ;-)
To fight windage though, I would think your string would have to be something like 1/8 inch aircraft cable and the weight would have to be a 16 Lb bowling ball. It would have to gain a lot of speed at the bottom of the swing. Doubling the speed increases the wind loss by a square. Losses add up fast.
a quick search on Google for info on the bridge turned up this http://www.thoma.com/thoma/ggbfacts.html. It gives the width at 90 feet and it is 220 feet above mean high tide. It is considerably more than 50 or so feet wide.
U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel, issuing an injunction she reworked on the order of an appeals court, said the recording industry will have to notify Napster of the title of the song, the name of the artist and the name of the file containing the infringing material.
Because they have to give the filename of the song, they have to keep up the work of finding all the various names and submitting them to get it blocked while new versions of the name pop up. This will make lots of work for the RIAA members and may keep Napster going for a while longer. If they give up and quit hunting, we win. If they keep searching and submitting, we win again. They may find it cheaper to provide better prices for their product like the videotape market did. I stopped copying videotapes when the price dropped below 15 per copy. The original retail tape has much better quality than a copy. At the original $65 and up for the first tapes on the market, tape swapping and copying were very popular, now they are all but gone. Napster is the equivelant of the original videotape clubs. (yea I'm old enough to remember the original release of videotape to the masses and I did join a club)
Something more powerfull than the Slashdot Effect. The 72 hour Napster Deadline Effect. I hope their servers hold up ;-)
Windage on a long string is pretty high. I hope you have enough momentum in the fall to go the distance and come up the other side. Remember free falling people (skydiving) only reach terminal velocities of only 140 - 200 MPH due to windage. I think the fall and return up the other side distance is too great to overcome the windage. The bridge is too wide requiring too far of a swing. That's part of being an engineer is comming up with solutions that will work in the real world. To get an idea of the windage on a string, take your average gas powered string trimmer. If the string is too long, it overloads the motor even when it is not cutting anything but air. That's with less than 2 feet of string exposed. The engineers that pulled the stunt used a solution that worked!
I know several easy ways. The first to come to mind is use the wind. Lower a lightweight string on the upwind side of the bridge and let it blow under. On the downwind side, use a weighted hook to snag it and pull it up the other side. That is the easiest since it's almost always windy there. There is two other easy ways I can think of at the moment and there are probably many more. Use your immagination! It's what engineers get paid to do. Solve problems.
It should be well shielded by a solid chunk of Aluminum on one side (heatsink) and a solid chunk of copper on the other (Motherboard Ground Plane). With a multi-layer motherboard (as they all are) the clock and high speed connections can be sandwitched between motherboard ground plane layers to prevent glitches (crosstalk) and meet FCC requirements. These are not high power transistors feeding a 5/8ths wave antenna designed to radiate a strong signal as a phone. They will be poor compitetion with a phone just like the 60 to 166 Mhz stuff of old didn't screw up your FM radio and TV channels much. FYI US TV VHF Low = 54-88 MHZ (ch2-6) FM band = 88-108 MHZ, Mid Band Cable TV A-I (ch14-36) = 108 - 156 MHZ. Interferance was slight and only in weak signal areas.
Ok, Ya got me on the sub 15 Analog input. It doesn't have a non SMDI protected digital input. I guess analog is still permitted at this point. I guess it is an Analog computer monitor. Just watch however, that the new TV will require use of the DVI input forcing an upgrade and breaking the analog (via delibetly reduced resolution) making the protected digital a must have option. Sorry I didn't fully read it first. Moderators do your worst on the original post. I deserve it. I jumped the gun.
I have seen foil in the microwave. If there is a load (food) asorbing much of the power, then the voltage on foil is too low to arc. It is common pratice to cover turkey drumsticks with foil to keep them from over-cooking. What gets covered, no longer receives power. That is the whole idea! A piece of wadded foil without anything else in the oven to asorb the energy does cause very high voltages to build up, and hense the arc. However in a large crowd, I expect empty highly resonant cavity's confining lots of power to be missing.
I've yet to see a copyright on a Virus. Also I don't think anyone would worry avout a virus writer taking them to court. The risk is too great exposing themselves to the angry mob.
It's all Pay per Play! No subscription, no service. :-(
This is the end of Fair Use space and time shifting!