No, with USB instead of audio.
The measurement is electrostatic either way, but in the Theremin the capacitance change alters the frequency of an RF oscillator. By mixing (ok, heterodyning) against a fixed oscillator, a varying audio tone is produced.
In this case, it's still measuring capacitance in some form, though with several sensor plates to provide more axes. But the result - however it influences the circuit - is generated as a stream of data over USB. It might even use a bunch of oscillators just like theremins to measure capacitance, but it would be hard to stop them affecting each other.
Hear, Hear !
Part of the problem is that the government used to use post office infrastructure (all the shop counters) as a local representative : the place you collected forms, got paid benefits etc. This part was privatised first and the gov. put those services out to tender. The result is that the offices, deprived of much of their work and no longer directly funded, aren't economic and many are being closed. That removes the remaining services from small communities and the whole system collapses. It worked much better as a gov. subsidised service and probably cost a lot less too.
BT, the UK equivalent to AT&T (big ISP, major carrier) has an agreement with FON : Current BT routers have a FON-like access point and owners of FON and BT-FON routers can use each other's bandwidth. BT-FON users also get free minutes on BT's paid-for hotspots (which are in more useful places than residential areas).
BT has long had a reputation for all the user-unfriendly activities of AT&T etc, but they presumably see commercial benefit in doing this - probably in both increasing their hotspot coverage and seeding popular usage of it.
I'm looking for cross-platform (or possibly linux-only) audio-conferencing software : I want to move IRC chats to audio. Is there such a thing available ?
It's up to management to apportion work to where it's done best. Some people work well in teams, some better as individuals. Make use of people's strengths and give them the work that suits them.
Rudeness is not necessarily an offence (though harrassment of e.g. female coworkers is) - it's just part of the price. If it's not worth the cost, then don't employ him. Similarly with obscure code and prima-donna behaviour: if the overall cost of writing and maintenance is lower when it's all done by easily-managed people, then that's who you should employ. And make sure the same test is applied to the CEO.
Did the FSF really say "DRM does not prevent piracy," ?
I can understand why copyright holders might like to demonise copyright violation by comparing it to violent theft, but why does the FSF have to fall for and even perpetuate this junk ? Leave the word Piracy for nautical robbers. Call this copyright violation, even the more emotive term IP theft if you like. But it's NOT piracy.
Slashdot has been painfully slow here for weeks. It gets stuck on 'images.slashdot.org'. I think it's a cunning plan to get me to log in (and use the simple view).
Microsoft have screwed their customers over and over again. The customers don't learn, or don't care. For any other field, they'd notice that their supplier had replaced junk with more junk and they'd go somewhere else. Or they'd notice that they were dangerously exposed by buying a single-sourced product and would look for a safer source.
But for some reason they're blind to these basic business rules. They'll whinge and moan and negotiate temporary discounts but in the end they'll just keep buying what Microsoft tell them too, because they're sheep.
You can get SMT LEDs with lenses - e.g. ebay item 120362375572 they might have the right beam shape,
If not, you could:
solder a row of leds into a pcb (or matrix board)
square two sides off with a belt sander
re-solder at 90 degrees
square off the other two sides
umm..
profit!
You can also get square leaded LEDs, but the ones I have are really old and dim, and in any case would stack on 0.1" centres which doesn't help you.
I get really bored with this argument.
How is Ogg more silly-sounding than emmpeethree or dubbleyewemmaye ?
It's just a sound. It doesn't have to have an etymology, and if it did I don't suppose for a moment it would help the marketing. The important thing is to attach that word to a concept that people grok, and a word that's unusual will do that more easily than something unpronounceable and tongue-tangling like peecee-emmcee-iyeaye.
Media players don't start and stop with handheld music. Just as Linux made huge inroads into the embedded market before becoming credible as a desktop system, Ogg may well have applications where the customer only cares about the end result, not the method.
An example is the popular Tomtom satnav, which uses Ogg for (presumably) prerecorded speech (and also runs linux).
Although such hidden applications might sound unimportant, they create familiarity for developers and PHBs. So as Linux has crept from turnkey systems - like Tomtom - to phones and netbooks, Ogg may do the same. It's perfectly reasonable to use Ogg as an in-system codec as Apple do with their encoder : it doesn't matter that the end user provides the music in another format. And ultimately, it's all over the place : cheap, license-free and open.
I know it's not the same thing, but I wonder what the result would be if a similar study were done on burglary ?
It might show it's good for the economy (growth in replacement sales, higher turnover for insurance companies etc.) even though some group (householders) suffer a little. Given that politicians currently want us to spend our savings, maybe they'd even see it as a good thing and give burglars a tax break or something ? After all, they're happy to help the thieves in the stock market.
So how is that games, with all their attempts to imitate real life physics and interaction, can't get this simple thing right ?
People should stay dead when they're killed (except maybe if they're zombies..), and take weeks to recover if wounded. If that means the game gets slowly less interesting as it empties of characters, that's fine. And if you're killed, you don't get to play the game any more. Maybe you could play a different character afterwards.
You might think this would ruin the game, make it useless - but it wouldn't. It would raise the stakes for the player (don't you find a life lasts much longer in an arcade game, when you have to pay for more) and speed up the turnover of the game, raising the income for the writer. Some things would have to change to make the game saleable, but ultimately it would be more involving.
Why not get the user's consent first ?
If a zombie is detected, it should be isolated in the same way as a commercial wifi node : no access to the net, and web access pointed to a login page. That page would then offer the option of continuing to use the machine offline, or having the bot software neutralised.
No need to worry about knock-on failures from disconnecting a critical machine : any critical system that relies on its net connection is either broken by design or so unusual that it could be handled as a 'do not block' case by the service provider.
Tests are, indeed, useful. But the idea of using tests as anything other than confirmation of function would be seen as the dark ages in any other branch of engineering. The fact that it's seen as a new concept in software is illuminating..
In civil engineering, a failed test means major rework. Tests are performed either as research or as a confirmation of safety. In the latter case, they are not expected to fail.
In production engineering, tests were once performed to filter the good builds from the bad. This was far too expensive, and largely explains the success of Japanese industry over British and American in the 70s and 80s. Reworking production because of errors costs a huge amount of effort by skilled personnel : building it correctly takes largely automatic effort by much cheaper employees. Worse still than reworking errors is reworking bad design, where production workers have to tease the required performance out of a marginal design. A small batch of components towards the edge of tolerance can shut down manufacturing.
We like to think that a good software engineer designs and implements correctly and gets it 'right first time' and then the software can be duplicated indefinitely. In exceptional cases, this is true. In many cases, especially where a team is involved or the unit has to work in the context of other software, it isn't : the situation is much more like that of an assembly line. When we truly get to the point where we know how to make it right first time and only fail when we screw up, we'll really be Engineers. Until then, we'll be relying on testing to find basic errors, but it's a cop-out.
How so ?
The point of a mobile phone is for my convenience - I don't have to find a public phone that's working (though I do have to find a signa, and my battery has to be charged.. both of which seem to be problems whenever I actually care about making a call). So I can just turn it on, right, and turn it off afterwards. No tracking.
Yes, I know there are some people who think their friends will desert them if they can't ring them at all and every time, or whose message can't wait to be picked up at some convenient time. Fortunately, the rest of us aren't that insecure.
On connecting to the internet, each machine compares its patch level with a master (probably a distributed database). It does this in a state that's analogous to 'windows safe mode' - it isn't running anything non-essential, and has no services available.
If the patch level is such that connection is unsafe, a patch is downloaded and applied before any additional functionality is allowed.
This fails for some organisations where there is considerable local cracking activity and imperfect access to the internet (so a machine might come up and be unable to contact the database, leaving it still vulnerable to local attacks). Any other flaws ?
I can't speak for the quality of that particular cable but in general, correctly formed crimps give a superior result to solder. In particular, they're less likely to fail due to flexing.
FWIW, I've never bought a Monster cable largely because I think they're a ripoff. I'm not defending this one - just pointing out that crimps need not be shoddy.
Slashdot Mirror
What's 'good faith' ? I was under the impression that 'ignorance of the law is not a defence'.
No, with USB instead of audio. The measurement is electrostatic either way, but in the Theremin the capacitance change alters the frequency of an RF oscillator. By mixing (ok, heterodyning) against a fixed oscillator, a varying audio tone is produced.
In this case, it's still measuring capacitance in some form, though with several sensor plates to provide more axes. But the result - however it influences the circuit - is generated as a stream of data over USB. It might even use a bunch of oscillators just like theremins to measure capacitance, but it would be hard to stop them affecting each other.
Hear, Hear ! Part of the problem is that the government used to use post office infrastructure (all the shop counters) as a local representative : the place you collected forms, got paid benefits etc. This part was privatised first and the gov. put those services out to tender. The result is that the offices, deprived of much of their work and no longer directly funded, aren't economic and many are being closed. That removes the remaining services from small communities and the whole system collapses. It worked much better as a gov. subsidised service and probably cost a lot less too.
BT, the UK equivalent to AT&T (big ISP, major carrier) has an agreement with FON : Current BT routers have a FON-like access point and owners of FON and BT-FON routers can use each other's bandwidth. BT-FON users also get free minutes on BT's paid-for hotspots (which are in more useful places than residential areas). BT has long had a reputation for all the user-unfriendly activities of AT&T etc, but they presumably see commercial benefit in doing this - probably in both increasing their hotspot coverage and seeding popular usage of it.
I'm looking for cross-platform (or possibly linux-only) audio-conferencing software : I want to move IRC chats to audio. Is there such a thing available ?
It's up to management to apportion work to where it's done best. Some people work well in teams, some better as individuals. Make use of people's strengths and give them the work that suits them. Rudeness is not necessarily an offence (though harrassment of e.g. female coworkers is) - it's just part of the price. If it's not worth the cost, then don't employ him. Similarly with obscure code and prima-donna behaviour: if the overall cost of writing and maintenance is lower when it's all done by easily-managed people, then that's who you should employ. And make sure the same test is applied to the CEO.
Same in right-pondia. Dog owners are liable for their pets (biting, crap etc) but cat-owners aren't. You can't tell a cat what to do.
s/FSF/EFF/ But you knew that, right ?
Did the FSF really say "DRM does not prevent piracy," ?
I can understand why copyright holders might like to demonise copyright violation by comparing it to violent theft, but why does the FSF have to fall for and even perpetuate this junk ? Leave the word Piracy for nautical robbers. Call this copyright violation, even the more emotive term IP theft if you like. But it's NOT piracy.
Slashdot has been painfully slow here for weeks. It gets stuck on 'images.slashdot.org'. I think it's a cunning plan to get me to log in (and use the simple view).
Microsoft have screwed their customers over and over again. The customers don't learn, or don't care. For any other field, they'd notice that their supplier had replaced junk with more junk and they'd go somewhere else. Or they'd notice that they were dangerously exposed by buying a single-sourced product and would look for a safer source.
But for some reason they're blind to these basic business rules. They'll whinge and moan and negotiate temporary discounts but in the end they'll just keep buying what Microsoft tell them too, because they're sheep.
You can get SMT LEDs with lenses - e.g. ebay item 120362375572 they might have the right beam shape, If not, you could :
solder a row of leds into a pcb (or matrix board)
square two sides off with a belt sander
re-solder at 90 degrees
square off the other two sides
umm..
profit!
You can also get square leaded LEDs, but the ones I have are really old and dim, and in any case would stack on 0.1" centres which doesn't help you.
How did they get to 7, anyway ? there have only been 3 real changes since 3.1
.. only 2K broke this pattern)
3 = almost multitasking
3.1 = last numbered version
95 = windows 4
98 = better hardware support, fairly stable : 4.1
98 SE = worst bugs fixed : 4.11
ME = desperate bodge to make USB useful : 4.2
2K = integration of NT for early adopters : 5
XP = consumerised and tidied : 5.1
Vista = 6.0 (traditional broken first release
7 = 6.1 (bugfix for Vista : nothing really new)
I get really bored with this argument.
How is Ogg more silly-sounding than emmpeethree or dubbleyewemmaye ?
It's just a sound. It doesn't have to have an etymology, and if it did I don't suppose for a moment it would help the marketing. The important thing is to attach that word to a concept that people grok, and a word that's unusual will do that more easily than something unpronounceable and tongue-tangling like peecee-emmcee-iyeaye.
Media players don't start and stop with handheld music. Just as Linux made huge inroads into the embedded market before becoming credible as a desktop system, Ogg may well have applications where the customer only cares about the end result, not the method.
An example is the popular Tomtom satnav, which uses Ogg for (presumably) prerecorded speech (and also runs linux).
Although such hidden applications might sound unimportant, they create familiarity for developers and PHBs. So as Linux has crept from turnkey systems - like Tomtom - to phones and netbooks, Ogg may do the same. It's perfectly reasonable to use Ogg as an in-system codec as Apple do with their encoder : it doesn't matter that the end user provides the music in another format. And ultimately, it's all over the place : cheap, license-free and open.
I know it's not the same thing, but I wonder what the result would be if a similar study were done on burglary ? It might show it's good for the economy (growth in replacement sales, higher turnover for insurance companies etc.) even though some group (householders) suffer a little. Given that politicians currently want us to spend our savings, maybe they'd even see it as a good thing and give burglars a tax break or something ? After all, they're happy to help the thieves in the stock market.
So how is that games, with all their attempts to imitate real life physics and interaction, can't get this simple thing right ? ..), and take weeks to recover if wounded. If that means the game gets slowly less interesting as it empties of characters, that's fine. And if you're killed, you don't get to play the game any more. Maybe you could play a different character afterwards.
People should stay dead when they're killed (except maybe if they're zombies
You might think this would ruin the game, make it useless - but it wouldn't. It would raise the stakes for the player (don't you find a life lasts much longer in an arcade game, when you have to pay for more) and speed up the turnover of the game, raising the income for the writer. Some things would have to change to make the game saleable, but ultimately it would be more involving.
Why not get the user's consent first ?
If a zombie is detected, it should be isolated in the same way as a commercial wifi node : no access to the net, and web access pointed to a login page. That page would then offer the option of continuing to use the machine offline, or having the bot software neutralised.
No need to worry about knock-on failures from disconnecting a critical machine : any critical system that relies on its net connection is either broken by design or so unusual that it could be handled as a 'do not block' case by the service provider.
I think this is Art imitating Art ..
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=UbcMgl5yWwA
Tests are, indeed, useful. But the idea of using tests as anything other than confirmation of function would be seen as the dark ages in any other branch of engineering. The fact that it's seen as a new concept in software is illuminating ..
In civil engineering, a failed test means major rework. Tests are performed either as research or as a confirmation of safety. In the latter case, they are not expected to fail.
In production engineering, tests were once performed to filter the good builds from the bad. This was far too expensive, and largely explains the success of Japanese industry over British and American in the 70s and 80s. Reworking production because of errors costs a huge amount of effort by skilled personnel : building it correctly takes largely automatic effort by much cheaper employees. Worse still than reworking errors is reworking bad design, where production workers have to tease the required performance out of a marginal design. A small batch of components towards the edge of tolerance can shut down manufacturing.
We like to think that a good software engineer designs and implements correctly and gets it 'right first time' and then the software can be duplicated indefinitely. In exceptional cases, this is true. In many cases, especially where a team is involved or the unit has to work in the context of other software, it isn't : the situation is much more like that of an assembly line. When we truly get to the point where we know how to make it right first time and only fail when we screw up, we'll really be Engineers. Until then, we'll be relying on testing to find basic errors, but it's a cop-out.
I would say so. 30 years of accumulated crap to clean up : and he's got to clean faster than Ballmer can make more.
How so ? The point of a mobile phone is for my convenience - I don't have to find a public phone that's working (though I do have to find a signa, and my battery has to be charged .. both of which seem to be problems whenever I actually care about making a call). So I can just turn it on, right, and turn it off afterwards. No tracking.
Yes, I know there are some people who think their friends will desert them if they can't ring them at all and every time, or whose message can't wait to be picked up at some convenient time. Fortunately, the rest of us aren't that insecure.
On connecting to the internet, each machine compares its patch level with a master (probably a distributed database). It does this in a state that's analogous to 'windows safe mode' - it isn't running anything non-essential, and has no services available.
If the patch level is such that connection is unsafe, a patch is downloaded and applied before any additional functionality is allowed.
This fails for some organisations where there is considerable local cracking activity and imperfect access to the internet (so a machine might come up and be unable to contact the database, leaving it still vulnerable to local attacks). Any other flaws ?
I can't speak for the quality of that particular cable but in general, correctly formed crimps give a superior result to solder. In particular, they're less likely to fail due to flexing. FWIW, I've never bought a Monster cable largely because I think they're a ripoff. I'm not defending this one - just pointing out that crimps need not be shoddy.
"When your local transportation department discovers that traffic patterns have changed, they don't start billing you for your time on the highways."
Actually, they do : look up 'congestion charging'.
(But I agree with the rest of your argument - you just need to find a better example)