well, you know, faraday figured out the relevant laws in 1831. why is this guy trying to reinvent the wheel not using all the knowledge available right at his fingertips? i'm not saying that he should copy other people's implementations as there might be a lot of interesting things to figure out there - but he's not using elementary laws of physics. and that's just not going to yield any useful or interesting results any time soon since he'll have to find a lot of 19th century physics first.
gee, this article is really full of a hell of a lot of stupidity. i suggest taking physics 101 at the closest university/college (if this guy can get in). a little bit of knowledge about electromagnetism would save him from publishing bull... like "I have no idea yet what the effect of adding a second spinning ring of magnets to the back side of the coil will be, but I'm sure it will be significant." or "At this point, seems to me like an alternator built with 7 coils hooked either in series or parrallel-(or a combination) would perform reasonably well at low rpm."...
i guess it really hurt those artists from the 80s that i remembered half a line of lyrics, used google to find the title of the song and then bought the cds. so here we go:
dear MPA,
i'm terribly sorry for spending money on these cds - i'll make sure it never happens again in the future.
well, it might be cracked - but what about if apple starts watermarking all the files you download on the fly (much easier than doing it with individual cds)so they can be tracked to the original downloader. you could still burn them on cd for yourself but you won't make them available for download. yanking a good watermark out of an audio file will be hard to do and it shouldn't suffer too much from format conversion.
in my eyes, that'd be a good approach - fair use would be covered but illegal downloading would be stopped. but they shouldn't stop you from burning it on cd in the first place then so people have to crack the drm before they can get their fair use.
i hope this gets included into the vanilla kernel - i was quite shocked to learn initially that while e.g. true 64 (formerly known as digital unix formerly known as osf/1) had a non-executable stack and linux didn't (which i now understand was a problem with x86 vs. alpha hardware, not linux in particular).
and i sure hope that the non-exec flag has been implemented on amd's and intel's 64 bit cpus.
as a non-native english speaker, i am often surprised by the pronounciation of english words. but this sure is the weirdest case i've come across so far: it's spelt liberation and pronounced colonialism. weird.
to beam electricity without the need for unsightly pylons and overhead cables
all overhead cables have been removed from many european cities years ago. the secret? underground cables. yeah, i know it costs money but not having to worry about power outages in storms (never mind surges when lightning strikes nearby), having the wires and poles removed is sure worth it. no brain frying either.
that makes about as much sense as not wanting to get on a 737 because another 737 crashed that day.
yes, the design of the space shuttle probably has some flaws but then again they had a hell of a lot of flights that didn't blow up - it's not the least bit more dangerous than it was before, they actually will have more safety measures in place next time.
being an active astronaut is not an office job and everybody knows it's dangerous.
what? cost of living in europe is higher than in north america? well, when i moved from germany (stuttgart to be exact) to canada (vancouver) three years ago, it seemed that the pricetags showed the same numbers in both places - just that 1$ canadian was about as much as 1.44 german marks. travelling to the states things got worse: in seattle, again, pricetags seemed to show the same numbers, while the us$ is worth about 1.50$ canadian.
i live in toronto now and i pay more than twice as much rent as i payed back in germany for a comparable room (ok, that was three years ago and the city was somewhat smaller but still, that's quite a difference).
yes, gas i roughly twice as much in germany as it is in canada (which - for all i know - is still more than people pay in the us but i'm somewhat too lazy to convert us$/gallon into ca$/liter) but that only accounts for a very small percentage of my cost of living - and as you pointed out, you don't really need a car.
the atari st had a pretty dumb sound chip - it would only play something resembling square waves at 16 different volumes, noise and every channel could be modulated with some predefined envelope functions. how do you make something like this play digitized samples? well, a friend of mine and me had seen it work (e.g. in awesome programs like oxyd). being the geeks we were we had to figure it out (we were 13 years old at the time). so we set the frequency of the sound chip to 0 which makes it output a dc voltage and start playing with the volume control registers (of course that was in assembly language, all interrupts masked off, everything else would have been waaay too slow). sounds awful. well, the volume control was obviously far from being linear. so we decide to make a lookup table to linearize it. unfortunately there was no accessible sound output. so solder wires to the audio and ground pin on the monitor output and take my father's percussion drill and drill a hole right through the case to mount a headphone jack. well, i suppose we could have taken out the board first but we didn't. next thing you know, i hit the roms containing the os (tos) when the drill finally goes through the plastic case. a pretty big piece chips off. gee, my adrenalin level was way up there! well, the computer still worked and with an oscilloscope hooked up to the output we finally managed to linearize the output (using all three channels we actually made it up to 32 steps - i.e. 5 bit samples...).
"oh yes, those were the days." - misty eyed smile - "when i was young and filesizes were small. you should have seen it. today's youth is so spoiled that they don't even learn assembly language any more. i tell you, you're all going to die because of your large files, yes, die!" - madly waves his cane in the air - "2gb, that's more than anybody will ever need and you are greedy for even more! the holy bit will punish you for this, it will!" - dies of a heart attack.
i remember a case (lost te link) where someone got sued (as far as i remember) under the dmca for explaining people how to put a larger hd into their digital video recorder. where's the copyright connection there?
so what exactly is so substandard about them? lubricants, bearings and motors are often _exactly_ the same, some manufacturers will even sell the same hd in two versions, one with ide, one with scsi interface.
the reason why scsi drives are more expensive are imho:
-way more ide chips than scsi chips are produced. this makes them cheaper. -scsi is more suitable for professional applications because you can easily add additional devices on the same bus (more devices can be addressed, longer cable lengths etc.) -a hype that makes people believe that they must be more reliable since they are more expensive.
i'm not saying that the _average_cheap_ ide drive is less reliable than the average scsi drive (simply because the very low-end stuff will not be produced with scsi interfaces) but that has nothing to do with the fact that it is an ide drive. if you buy two drives, one ide, one scsi with the same storage capacity, at the same price, the ide drive will be at least as good as the scsi drive when it comes to reliability.
While this story from SchoolNet Namibia might give you a warm, fuzzy feeling, I wonder if this story would do that as well; from the article
SchoolNet Namibia Shuts The Door To Porn Portals
[...]
Students surfing the World Wide Web at more than 160 primary, secondary and junior secondary schools in Namibia have now been protected from viewing sexually explicit material, reading hate literature and downloading other forms of objectionable content available online.
[...]
Given that this is a country that already banned foreign TV programs because they turn Namibians gay you can probably guess what other forms of objectionable content might be.
The fact that OS X needs to improve in VM and I/O handling is understandable given its relatively young age. After all, Linux has had more than ten years to get where it is today, and even that is not much by OS standards.
i would have expected the guys at apple take the vm and i/o handling from bsd and maybe tweak it to make it faster. they did not write this from scratch - so what's this age comparison about? linux does not have a consistent history of beating bsd in this department...
this happens at much lower frequencies already - just look at the spec sheet of your microwave oven: it operates at 2500MHz (or 2.5GHz). this frequency is absorbed by water molecules which is why your food heats up when you put it into the microwave oven. a radio link in the neighbourhood of this frequency might work in a very dry environment but fog or rain would render it completely useless. the trick is finding a frequency that is not in resonance with any of the vibrational/rotational modes of any of the gases that make up the atmosphere.
these are two completely different issues - security is normally implemented on top of a high speed link (e.g. encryption) or on a level below (protecting cables physically from access etc.). the beauty of a layered system is that the different layers can be developed separately without interfering with other layers.
...there are many hardware accelerated winmodems aroud and they are heavily used in pcs (mainly laptops) and there are actually drivers for linux for most of them around. however, they are all semi-proprietary (meaning that at least some part of them is not open source) since writing a codec (using a dsp or not) for a 56k modem is a tough problem. there was a lot of discussion about it on the linmodem mailing list and the conlusion was that it's non trivial.
i'd be happy if this problem could be solved for the dreamcast but i have some serious doubts since it's been around with popular pcs for some time now and noone has solved it yet.
Slashdot Mirror
well, you know, faraday figured out the relevant laws in 1831. why is this guy trying to reinvent the wheel not using all the knowledge available right at his fingertips? i'm not saying that he should copy other people's implementations as there might be a lot of interesting things to figure out there - but he's not using elementary laws of physics. and that's just not going to yield any useful or interesting results any time soon since he'll have to find a lot of 19th century physics first.
snoozing, daydreaming, overconsuming food and beverages, or sitting like a mindless slug waiting for time to pass.
add reading slashdot to that list - that's certainly my biggest waste of time while at work.
gee, this article is really full of a hell of a lot of stupidity. i suggest taking physics 101 at the closest university/college (if this guy can get in). a little bit of knowledge about electromagnetism would save him from publishing bull... like "I have no idea yet what the effect of adding a second spinning ring of magnets to the back side of the coil will be, but I'm sure it will be significant." or "At this point, seems to me like an alternator built with 7 coils hooked either in series or parrallel-(or a combination) would perform reasonably well at low rpm."...
burn them in a standard thermal plant - that's probably the best thing that can happen to a floppy, no matter is 8, 5 1/4 or 3 1/2 inch...
i guess it really hurt those artists from the 80s that i remembered half a line of lyrics, used google to find the title of the song and then bought the cds. so here we go:
dear MPA,
i'm terribly sorry for spending money on these cds - i'll make sure it never happens again in the future.
yours sincerely
heby
yeah, be careful kids - if you fall out of a tree you'll end up like this guy!
well, it might be cracked - but what about if apple starts watermarking all the files you download on the fly (much easier than doing it with individual cds)so they can be tracked to the original downloader. you could still burn them on cd for yourself but you won't make them available for download. yanking a good watermark out of an audio file will be hard to do and it shouldn't suffer too much from format conversion.
in my eyes, that'd be a good approach - fair use would be covered but illegal downloading would be stopped. but they shouldn't stop you from burning it on cd in the first place then so people have to crack the drm before they can get their fair use.
i hope this gets included into the vanilla kernel - i was quite shocked to learn initially that while e.g. true 64 (formerly known as digital unix formerly known as osf/1) had a non-executable stack and linux didn't (which i now understand was a problem with x86 vs. alpha hardware, not linux in particular).
and i sure hope that the non-exec flag has been implemented on amd's and intel's 64 bit cpus.
as a non-native english speaker, i am often surprised by the pronounciation of english words. but this sure is the weirdest case i've come across so far: it's spelt liberation and pronounced colonialism. weird.
to beam electricity without the need for unsightly pylons and overhead cables
all overhead cables have been removed from many european cities years ago. the secret? underground cables. yeah, i know it costs money but not having to worry about power outages in storms (never mind surges when lightning strikes nearby), having the wires and poles removed is sure worth it. no brain frying either.
that makes about as much sense as not wanting to get on a 737 because another 737 crashed that day.
yes, the design of the space shuttle probably has some flaws but then again they had a hell of a lot of flights that didn't blow up - it's not the least bit more dangerous than it was before, they actually will have more safety measures in place next time.
being an active astronaut is not an office job and everybody knows it's dangerous.
what? cost of living in europe is higher than in north america? well, when i moved from germany (stuttgart to be exact) to canada (vancouver) three years ago, it seemed that the pricetags showed the same numbers in both places - just that 1$ canadian was about as much as 1.44 german marks. travelling to the states things got worse: in seattle, again, pricetags seemed to show the same numbers, while the us$ is worth about 1.50$ canadian.
i live in toronto now and i pay more than twice as much rent as i payed back in germany for a comparable room (ok, that was three years ago and the city was somewhat smaller but still, that's quite a difference).
yes, gas i roughly twice as much in germany as it is in canada (which - for all i know - is still more than people pay in the us but i'm somewhat too lazy to convert us$/gallon into ca$/liter) but that only accounts for a very small percentage of my cost of living - and as you pointed out, you don't really need a car.
the atari st had a pretty dumb sound chip - it would only play something resembling square waves at 16 different volumes, noise and every channel could be modulated with some predefined envelope functions. how do you make something like this play digitized samples? well, a friend of mine and me had seen it work (e.g. in awesome programs like oxyd). being the geeks we were we had to figure it out (we were 13 years old at the time). so we set the frequency of the sound chip to 0 which makes it output a dc voltage and start playing with the volume control registers (of course that was in assembly language, all interrupts masked off, everything else would have been waaay too slow). sounds awful. well, the volume control was obviously far from being linear. so we decide to make a lookup table to linearize it. unfortunately there was no accessible sound output. so solder wires to the audio and ground pin on the monitor output and take my father's percussion drill and drill a hole right through the case to mount a headphone jack. well, i suppose we could have taken out the board first but we didn't. next thing you know, i hit the roms containing the os (tos) when the drill finally goes through the plastic case. a pretty big piece chips off. gee, my adrenalin level was way up there! well, the computer still worked and with an oscilloscope hooked up to the output we finally managed to linearize the output (using all three channels we actually made it up to 32 steps - i.e. 5 bit samples...).
why not say it like it is:
SonyEricsson P800 smartphone is Doomed
or
SonyEricsson P800 smartphone meets its Doom?
"oh yes, those were the days." - misty eyed smile - "when i was young and filesizes were small. you should have seen it. today's youth is so spoiled that they don't even learn assembly language any more. i tell you, you're all going to die because of your large files, yes, die!" - madly waves his cane in the air - "2gb, that's more than anybody will ever need and you are greedy for even more! the holy bit will punish you for this, it will!" - dies of a heart attack.
i remember a case (lost te link) where someone got sued (as far as i remember) under the dmca for explaining people how to put a larger hd into their digital video recorder. where's the copyright connection there?
aren't you going to get sued for publishing this information?
i guess "you're so smart that you'd fail the turing test" will be the next big insult then?
go away or i'll replace you with a very simple shell script.
so what exactly is so substandard about them? lubricants, bearings and motors are often _exactly_ the same, some manufacturers will even sell the same hd in two versions, one with ide, one with scsi interface.
the reason why scsi drives are more expensive are imho:
-way more ide chips than scsi chips are produced. this makes them cheaper.
-scsi is more suitable for professional applications because you can easily add additional devices on the same bus (more devices can be addressed, longer cable lengths etc.)
-a hype that makes people believe that they must be more reliable since they are more expensive.
i'm not saying that the _average_cheap_ ide drive is less reliable than the average scsi drive (simply because the very low-end stuff will not be produced with scsi interfaces) but that has nothing to do with the fact that it is an ide drive. if you buy two drives, one ide, one scsi with the same storage capacity, at the same price, the ide drive will be at least as good as the scsi drive when it comes to reliability.
While this story from SchoolNet Namibia might give you a warm, fuzzy feeling, I wonder if this story would do that as well; from the article
SchoolNet Namibia Shuts The Door To Porn Portals
[...]
Students surfing the World Wide Web at more than 160 primary, secondary and junior secondary schools in Namibia have now been protected from viewing sexually explicit material, reading hate literature and downloading other forms of objectionable content available online.
[...]
Given that this is a country that already banned foreign TV programs because they turn Namibians gay you can probably guess what other forms of objectionable content might be.
The fact that OS X needs to improve in VM and I/O handling is understandable given its relatively young age. After all, Linux has had more than ten years to get where it is today, and even that is not much by OS standards.
i would have expected the guys at apple take the vm and i/o handling from bsd and maybe tweak it to make it faster. they did not write this from scratch - so what's this age comparison about? linux does not have a consistent history of beating bsd in this department...
this happens at much lower frequencies already - just look at the spec sheet of your microwave oven: it operates at 2500MHz (or 2.5GHz). this frequency is absorbed by water molecules which is why your food heats up when you put it into the microwave oven. a radio link in the neighbourhood of this frequency might work in a very dry environment but fog or rain would render it completely useless. the trick is finding a frequency that is not in resonance with any of the vibrational/rotational modes of any of the gases that make up the atmosphere.
these are two completely different issues - security is normally implemented on top of a high speed link (e.g. encryption) or on a level below (protecting cables physically from access etc.). the beauty of a layered system is that the different layers can be developed separately without interfering with other layers.
...there are many hardware accelerated winmodems aroud and they are heavily used in pcs (mainly laptops) and there are actually drivers for linux for most of them around. however, they are all semi-proprietary (meaning that at least some part of them is not open source) since writing a codec (using a dsp or not) for a 56k modem is a tough problem. there was a lot of discussion about it on the linmodem mailing list and the conlusion was that it's non trivial.
i'd be happy if this problem could be solved for the dreamcast but i have some serious doubts since it's been around with popular pcs for some time now and noone has solved it yet.