With Qt 4.5 going LGPL in March, one would have to wonder why you
would use Mono over Qt or Java.
Because you need to consider your target audiences - Windows users vs Linux users.
Not to make this a flamefest about intelligence, but I think we can all agree that,
almost by definition, Linux users tend to have a far higher comfort level with trying
new things on their machines.
Simply put, Linux users, if they want to use a given package, will install Wine/Mono/Dependency-X
to get the package to work. Windows users will not install QT unless it comes as part
of the whole one-click.msi for the package.
Are these frequencies suitable for low-power transmission by consumers?
They originally chose the frequencies involved because they propagate quite
easily through the Earth's atmosphere (unlike 2.4GHz, to which our atmosphere
basically looks opaque, and the FCC only threw us that scrap because all the Big
Boys considered it nearly worthless).
As for transmission power, with a good high-gain directional transceiver, you only
need to make up for losses between you and the other end; so if 2.4GHz works fine
at 50mW, 100MHz will also work fine at 50mW - Except it will go 20 miles instead of
2000 meters.
Sorry I haven't been paying close enough attention. What did you say your
senior project was? I assume it was a lot more impressive, but I just don't
recall what you said it was.
I don't need to have won seven Olympic gold medals to scoff at someone bragging
about running a 6 minute mile "for the first time ever in Crocks".
But since you ask, I built a "soft" RS485 protocol analyzer and a (fairly simple)
hardware dongle to multiplex four 485 channels into one ECP connection. Not
rocket science, but you don't see me bragging about it, either.
FTA: "While school contacts with the space station are routinely made through the Amateur
Radio on the International Space Station program, many of those contacts are made using a
traditional ham radio."
Seriously people - We should feel pretty damned scared that this counts as some sort of
"achievement" to crow about on the Slashdot FP. These guys built a home-brew shortwave
radio as their senior project?
Sorry if this sounds like "playa-hatin'", but gimme a break! Even as a "first", this
doesn't sound like anything to brag about.
who can say what Oak does, or Chablis, or Feta, or Jujuba, or Sassafras, ad nauseum
Without prior knowledge of the system, no one - Which some might tout as a security
feature, not having your AD advertise which systems will yield the highest
payoff to an attacker.
More relevantly, who can remember what "W2K3-R014-SB2" does, any better than "Oak" or
"Chablis"?
How's that? Electric charges and gravity behave like monopoles but they don't result
in perpetual motion. How would a magnetic monopole be different?
We do extract work from electric "monopoles", with the annoying problem that they weaken
proportional to the amount of energy you extract energy from them - Except at the level of single
electrons, which we currently only know how to herd into tiny channels and use in a way not much
more elegant than how a waterwheel or pneumatic drill works.
We extract quite a lot of energy from Gravitational "monopoles" (see "Hoover Dam"), which
have the perk of not weakening over time (that we know of)... Of course, they also have the down
side of requiring a planet-sized body to have any useful strength, and we can't seem to turn them
off or attenuate the field in any meaningful way (the "hard" required step for a self-resetting
gravity generator).
But a magnetic monopole! Small enough to work with in a relatively normal environment (but not
so small that we can only refer to its position in terms of probability), they don't weaken with use,
and we do know how to block (or at least redirect) magnetic fields!
Traveling north or south becomes much cheaper than heading east or west?
Bigger than that... A real magnetic monopole means real over-unity
generators (aka "perpetual motion", aka "free energy"). That alone makes me take
this "discovery" with a grain of salt the size of Bonneville.
If this amounts to more than sloppy science or outright fraud, I would guess that
it comes with the same sort of huge disclaimer that quantum teleportation has regarding
FTL information transmission - "It just doesn't work that way".
People will leave XP for whatever the next MS milestone is.
That'd mean "Vista", which people resisted as well as they knew how.
For some people it means just not upgrading their machines, for some it means
taking advantage of the Vista-to-XP downgrade licensing, for some it means just
pirating XP to install on their new machines.
But no, Vista nicely demonstrated that people will not put up with
whatever MS throws at them, as long as what they already have works
well enough for their needs.
No, operating a "stateless" vessel is what will get you arrested.
Because, y'know, the US has the "right" to police outside our own borders as
we see fit.
Does Saudi Arabia get to arrest people who don't pray to Mecca five times a day
while in international waters? Does Singapore get to cane people who spit out
their chewing gum in international waters? Does Thailand get to hide anyone
making fun of their king in international waters behind a giant curtain? Do
Israeli companies get to sue scientists proving them charlatans in international
waters?
Combined pollution from making em + using em + disposing them is
order of magnitude worse than conventional lightbulbs.
...If you just throw them in a landfill.
If you properly "dispose" of them (aka "recycle"), you can reuse just about every
part of them except the small PCB in the base, and even that you can strip for the
metals.
So yeah, they have a tiny blob of mercury in them - Of which, when properly recycled, 99.999%
should end up in a new bulb.
If you boost the frequency to a few thousand Hz, yes, you could arbitrarily dim them
via PWM. At 60Hz (half-wave rectified, ugh) or even 120Hz (full-wave, better but
still noticeably particularly with a duty cycle less than 50%), you just can't do that
without making half the people in the room nauseous.
As currently implemented, even the dimmable LEDs really, really suck. Of course, I
personally couldn't care less about true dimmability, as long as I can get at
least a few different levels by simply turning off N out of every M LEDs.
Hi, welcome to Earth, please read your orientation guide and let us know if you
have any questions - In particular, pay attention to chapter 1, "Everything on this
planet evolved to eat you or die trying".
deceiving the public to enrich themselves. They should be deeply ashamed.
All those dollars work pretty well for wiping away their tears of shame...
Seriously, I can't say much about the merits of Midnight Commander as an actual
program, but for years I've not-so-silently cursed it for its choice of
executable names.
Hey, we'd all love to see actual kiddie predators burn at the stake. But we
also know that 99% of these "child protection" laws exist to make it difficult or embarassing
(or sometimes even illegal) for adults to see or do things that society (C.1690) has deemed
of questionable morality.
Ignoring your blatant troll, I think most of us who use Windows, whether
by choice or at work, have experienced exactly what the FP author describes.
Personally, I keep Process Explorer permanently open, and have noticed times when
XP will just sit there and refuse to respond despite literally nothing using up
a significant amount of CPU, RAM, or I/O. And not just for a second or two of lag,
but well over a minute of completely refusing to respond. The mouse still moves,
and most already-running programs will work, if somewhat sluggishly, but try to open
a new program or even get a right-click menu, and you may as well go get coffee.
If someone knows a trick to fix this, I have no doubt we'd all love to hear it.
And for those curious, my HDD remains in DMA-5 mode, it doesn't matter whether or not
I have an active network connection, the pagefile hasn't started growing rapidly, and
I feel fairly confident that I have no viruses, spyware, or even any of the annoying
auto-startups like Quicktime, the Java updater, or Acrotray.
This means the screens use absolutely no power when put into standby
mode, unlike most other screens that use less than 1 watt, but still
require some power
I don't get this obsession with "standby" power draw... My computer and display
and TV and DVD player already draw zero watts when off, thanks to the magic
of the switch on the power strip.
And for the record, I don't even do this for the power savings - More than once,
I've had my "expensive" electronic toys saved from nearby lightning strikes that
took out things like alarm clocks and answering machines (No, a power strip won't
stop a direct hit, but they do wonders to stop spikes up to a few hundred volts).
If you're a hardware wizard, you might be able to do something
The basic task involved for these boxes requires them to properly and fully decode
the broadcast DTV signals, then (to qualify for the coupons) downsample the signal
and reencode it as NTSC.
As a rule of thumb in hardware design, you make it as step-by-step
debuggable as possible - Which in this case means planning for a tap
after the decoding stage but before the downsampling stage.
I would fully expect nearly all of these units to require nothing more complex
than finding the right place to attach a connector or three to pull the fully-featured
DTV signal from it, at a cost less than dedicated units that do just that, and
you get to stick Uncle Sam for a portion of the bill.
Or have we managed to dumb down the public enough that merely soldering a few wires or a
connector to existing test points on a PCB has entered the realm of "hardware wizard"ry?
No, it is completely logical if the utility that you gain by enjoying the
use of the item exceeds the utility you would have gotten from the money
gained by auctioning it to the highest bidder.
Except that the former doesn't depend on its unopenedness, while he could have
sold it, and bought a dozen used ones just to play with via the latter.
Then again, how much money does this really involve? Probably not even in
the hundreds of dollars, so the hassle of selling it and rebuying a used one
probably outweighs just playing with the one he found.
Are you saying Earth is an inertial frame of reference? And that we
would end up at the same place in a different time?
Basically, but not exactly.
The time traveler has an inertial frame of reference with very
nearly zero momentum relative to the Earth. So, he would end up at the
same place in a different time.
Personally, I just picture it as moving in a direction perpendicular to
up/down, forward/backward, and left/right. The (locally relative) position
on those three axes remains fixed, and only position on the fourth axis changes.
Or more accurately, since you have zero (spatial) momentum relative to your
frame of reference, you will end up in the same place at a different time.
To do otherwise would require the Earth to move out from under you relative
to some mythical "rest" frame in which you remain stuck - ie, the entire idea
Einstein so elegantly obliterated.
That basic assumption of science, as I've explained elsewhere in this
thread, is our default view of the world, based on our experiences from
the moment we're born.
Saying "We basically experience the world as it really exists" amounts to
one pretty serious assumption, whether or not you want to call it that.
Philosophy starts with axioms. Science starts with observations.
Science starts with the axiom that something objectively exists to
observe. It further presupposes both causality and (except for some of
the most out-there interpretations of the quantum world) locality.
Try as you might to avoid it, you need axioms. Without a few basic
assumptions about our world, you end up with solipsism.
But generally speaking, how confident are we (read: Science) that we
are actually describing the way the universe truly works
In the worst case, you could argue the solipsist point of view, that we can't ever
objectively prove that anything exists outside our own mind. So in a
very meaningful sense, going beyond even that requires accepting certain
basic physical (and philosophical) principles that you can never actually know
for certain.
More practically, we can "see" to the level of individual atoms. Below that, very
little behaves in a way that makes sense in our 3.5d Euclidean world-view.
However, modern physics has built up a pair of useful, predictive models of
the behavior of a whole zoo of smaller things (many of which we can't
even really call "particles", in the sense of having some fixed material
aspect to which we could relate as in some way like rocks or marbles or
planets but smaller). Those models, however, only offer one possible interpretation
of data far beyond our ability to personally experience and understand.
So in that regard, all of modern physics amounts to little more than a
consistent set of equations that work well to describe how our world behaves
at the smallest scales... And even then, you'll notice I said we have a pair
of models, because we still have a rather drastic middle ground between the scale of
atoms and the scale of electrons.
As much as I like hearing about cases of stickin' it to Da Man, I don't know
that we should necessarily celebrate this decision quite so much...
All software contains bugs. The defense will find some, and even
if they only affect accuracy at the 7th decimal point, the case will get thrown
out by a jury based on reasonable doubt. And this doesn't apply just to the current
case, but to nearly any legal case using machine-generated evidence. The court
allows DNA evidence? How about the firmware in the sequencing machine? Drug test
came back positive? Let's see how Agilent's HPLC code rounds in integration.
Now, in some cases (*cough* Diebold *cough*) we may have a valid gripe against
a closed-source implementation. But in most cases... Not to make this a case of
"for the children", but do you want drunks behind the wheel? Screw the
children (calm down, Mr. Jackson, I didn't mean it like that), I don't
want to DIAF because someone can't stop at two beers.
Slashdot Mirror
With Qt 4.5 going LGPL in March, one would have to wonder why you would use Mono over Qt or Java.
.msi for the package.
Because you need to consider your target audiences - Windows users vs Linux users.
Not to make this a flamefest about intelligence, but I think we can all agree that, almost by definition, Linux users tend to have a far higher comfort level with trying new things on their machines.
Simply put, Linux users, if they want to use a given package, will install Wine/Mono/Dependency-X to get the package to work. Windows users will not install QT unless it comes as part of the whole one-click
Are these frequencies suitable for low-power transmission by consumers?
They originally chose the frequencies involved because they propagate quite easily through the Earth's atmosphere (unlike 2.4GHz, to which our atmosphere basically looks opaque, and the FCC only threw us that scrap because all the Big Boys considered it nearly worthless).
As for transmission power, with a good high-gain directional transceiver, you only need to make up for losses between you and the other end; so if 2.4GHz works fine at 50mW, 100MHz will also work fine at 50mW - Except it will go 20 miles instead of 2000 meters.
Sorry I haven't been paying close enough attention. What did you say your senior project was? I assume it was a lot more impressive, but I just don't recall what you said it was.
I don't need to have won seven Olympic gold medals to scoff at someone bragging about running a 6 minute mile "for the first time ever in Crocks".
But since you ask, I built a "soft" RS485 protocol analyzer and a (fairly simple) hardware dongle to multiplex four 485 channels into one ECP connection. Not rocket science, but you don't see me bragging about it, either.
FTA: "While school contacts with the space station are routinely made through the Amateur Radio on the International Space Station program, many of those contacts are made using a traditional ham radio."
Seriously people - We should feel pretty damned scared that this counts as some sort of "achievement" to crow about on the Slashdot FP. These guys built a home-brew shortwave radio as their senior project?
Sorry if this sounds like "playa-hatin'", but gimme a break! Even as a "first", this doesn't sound like anything to brag about.
who can say what Oak does, or Chablis, or Feta, or Jujuba, or Sassafras, ad nauseum
Without prior knowledge of the system, no one - Which some might tout as a security feature, not having your AD advertise which systems will yield the highest payoff to an attacker.
More relevantly, who can remember what "W2K3-R014-SB2" does, any better than "Oak" or "Chablis"?
How's that? Electric charges and gravity behave like monopoles but they don't result in perpetual motion. How would a magnetic monopole be different?
We do extract work from electric "monopoles", with the annoying problem that they weaken proportional to the amount of energy you extract energy from them - Except at the level of single electrons, which we currently only know how to herd into tiny channels and use in a way not much more elegant than how a waterwheel or pneumatic drill works.
We extract quite a lot of energy from Gravitational "monopoles" (see "Hoover Dam"), which have the perk of not weakening over time (that we know of)... Of course, they also have the down side of requiring a planet-sized body to have any useful strength, and we can't seem to turn them off or attenuate the field in any meaningful way (the "hard" required step for a self-resetting gravity generator).
But a magnetic monopole! Small enough to work with in a relatively normal environment (but not so small that we can only refer to its position in terms of probability), they don't weaken with use, and we do know how to block (or at least redirect) magnetic fields!
Traveling north or south becomes much cheaper than heading east or west?
Bigger than that... A real magnetic monopole means real over-unity generators (aka "perpetual motion", aka "free energy"). That alone makes me take this "discovery" with a grain of salt the size of Bonneville.
If this amounts to more than sloppy science or outright fraud, I would guess that it comes with the same sort of huge disclaimer that quantum teleportation has regarding FTL information transmission - "It just doesn't work that way".
People will leave XP for whatever the next MS milestone is.
That'd mean "Vista", which people resisted as well as they knew how.
For some people it means just not upgrading their machines, for some it means taking advantage of the Vista-to-XP downgrade licensing, for some it means just pirating XP to install on their new machines.
But no, Vista nicely demonstrated that people will not put up with whatever MS throws at them, as long as what they already have works well enough for their needs.
No, operating a "stateless" vessel is what will get you arrested.
Because, y'know, the US has the "right" to police outside our own borders as we see fit.
Does Saudi Arabia get to arrest people who don't pray to Mecca five times a day while in international waters? Does Singapore get to cane people who spit out their chewing gum in international waters? Does Thailand get to hide anyone making fun of their king in international waters behind a giant curtain? Do Israeli companies get to sue scientists proving them charlatans in international waters?
Some slopes come pre-lubed, no tinfoil necessary.
Combined pollution from making em + using em + disposing them is order of magnitude worse than conventional lightbulbs.
...If you just throw them in a landfill.
If you properly "dispose" of them (aka "recycle"), you can reuse just about every part of them except the small PCB in the base, and even that you can strip for the metals.
So yeah, they have a tiny blob of mercury in them - Of which, when properly recycled, 99.999% should end up in a new bulb.
You can trivially dim LEDs using PWM
Yes and no...
If you boost the frequency to a few thousand Hz, yes, you could arbitrarily dim them via PWM. At 60Hz (half-wave rectified, ugh) or even 120Hz (full-wave, better but still noticeably particularly with a duty cycle less than 50%), you just can't do that without making half the people in the room nauseous.
As currently implemented, even the dimmable LEDs really, really suck. Of course, I personally couldn't care less about true dimmability, as long as I can get at least a few different levels by simply turning off N out of every M LEDs.
These people are gaming the system
Hi, welcome to Earth, please read your orientation guide and let us know if you have any questions - In particular, pay attention to chapter 1, "Everything on this planet evolved to eat you or die trying".
deceiving the public to enrich themselves. They should be deeply ashamed.
All those dollars work pretty well for wiping away their tears of shame...
Did he run tests with 16GB files?
.AVI Video file for all testing.".
FTA: "I've taken the 8gig and 4 gig drives, nine in total"
FTA: "I used a 350MB
More importantly, he couldn't use a 16GB file, since FAT32 doesn't support single files over 4GB.
...To mistype "mv".
Seriously, I can't say much about the merits of Midnight Commander as an actual program, but for years I've not-so-silently cursed it for its choice of executable names.
The CEOP's CEO said that any ISP which can't afford to give the police such help 'simply can't afford to do business.'
If the police can't afford to pay for the ISP's time, perhaps they simply can't afford to continue their witch-hunts against teens doing what teens do or works of pure fiction.
Can ya hear the violins, CEOP?
Hey, we'd all love to see actual kiddie predators burn at the stake. But we also know that 99% of these "child protection" laws exist to make it difficult or embarassing (or sometimes even illegal) for adults to see or do things that society (C.1690) has deemed of questionable morality.
slashdot: Individual personalized tech support?
Ignoring your blatant troll, I think most of us who use Windows, whether by choice or at work, have experienced exactly what the FP author describes.
Personally, I keep Process Explorer permanently open, and have noticed times when XP will just sit there and refuse to respond despite literally nothing using up a significant amount of CPU, RAM, or I/O. And not just for a second or two of lag, but well over a minute of completely refusing to respond. The mouse still moves, and most already-running programs will work, if somewhat sluggishly, but try to open a new program or even get a right-click menu, and you may as well go get coffee.
If someone knows a trick to fix this, I have no doubt we'd all love to hear it.
And for those curious, my HDD remains in DMA-5 mode, it doesn't matter whether or not I have an active network connection, the pagefile hasn't started growing rapidly, and I feel fairly confident that I have no viruses, spyware, or even any of the annoying auto-startups like Quicktime, the Java updater, or Acrotray.
This means the screens use absolutely no power when put into standby mode, unlike most other screens that use less than 1 watt, but still require some power
I don't get this obsession with "standby" power draw... My computer and display and TV and DVD player already draw zero watts when off, thanks to the magic of the switch on the power strip.
And for the record, I don't even do this for the power savings - More than once, I've had my "expensive" electronic toys saved from nearby lightning strikes that took out things like alarm clocks and answering machines (No, a power strip won't stop a direct hit, but they do wonders to stop spikes up to a few hundred volts).
If you're a hardware wizard, you might be able to do something
The basic task involved for these boxes requires them to properly and fully decode the broadcast DTV signals, then (to qualify for the coupons) downsample the signal and reencode it as NTSC.
As a rule of thumb in hardware design, you make it as step-by-step debuggable as possible - Which in this case means planning for a tap after the decoding stage but before the downsampling stage.
I would fully expect nearly all of these units to require nothing more complex than finding the right place to attach a connector or three to pull the fully-featured DTV signal from it, at a cost less than dedicated units that do just that, and you get to stick Uncle Sam for a portion of the bill.
Or have we managed to dumb down the public enough that merely soldering a few wires or a connector to existing test points on a PCB has entered the realm of "hardware wizard"ry?
No, it is completely logical if the utility that you gain by enjoying the use of the item exceeds the utility you would have gotten from the money gained by auctioning it to the highest bidder.
Except that the former doesn't depend on its unopenedness, while he could have sold it, and bought a dozen used ones just to play with via the latter.
Then again, how much money does this really involve? Probably not even in the hundreds of dollars, so the hassle of selling it and rebuying a used one probably outweighs just playing with the one he found.
Are you saying Earth is an inertial frame of reference? And that we would end up at the same place in a different time?
Basically, but not exactly.
The time traveler has an inertial frame of reference with very nearly zero momentum relative to the Earth. So, he would end up at the same place in a different time.
Personally, I just picture it as moving in a direction perpendicular to up/down, forward/backward, and left/right. The (locally relative) position on those three axes remains fixed, and only position on the fourth axis changes.
To go back in time inertia is insufficient.
Not true - The inertia just applies in reverse.
Or more accurately, since you have zero (spatial) momentum relative to your frame of reference, you will end up in the same place at a different time. To do otherwise would require the Earth to move out from under you relative to some mythical "rest" frame in which you remain stuck - ie, the entire idea Einstein so elegantly obliterated.
That basic assumption of science, as I've explained elsewhere in this thread, is our default view of the world, based on our experiences from the moment we're born.
Saying "We basically experience the world as it really exists" amounts to one pretty serious assumption, whether or not you want to call it that.
Philosophy starts with axioms. Science starts with observations.
Science starts with the axiom that something objectively exists to observe. It further presupposes both causality and (except for some of the most out-there interpretations of the quantum world) locality.
Try as you might to avoid it, you need axioms. Without a few basic assumptions about our world, you end up with solipsism.
But generally speaking, how confident are we (read: Science) that we are actually describing the way the universe truly works
In the worst case, you could argue the solipsist point of view, that we can't ever objectively prove that anything exists outside our own mind. So in a very meaningful sense, going beyond even that requires accepting certain basic physical (and philosophical) principles that you can never actually know for certain.
More practically, we can "see" to the level of individual atoms. Below that, very little behaves in a way that makes sense in our 3.5d Euclidean world-view. However, modern physics has built up a pair of useful, predictive models of the behavior of a whole zoo of smaller things (many of which we can't even really call "particles", in the sense of having some fixed material aspect to which we could relate as in some way like rocks or marbles or planets but smaller). Those models, however, only offer one possible interpretation of data far beyond our ability to personally experience and understand.
So in that regard, all of modern physics amounts to little more than a consistent set of equations that work well to describe how our world behaves at the smallest scales... And even then, you'll notice I said we have a pair of models, because we still have a rather drastic middle ground between the scale of atoms and the scale of electrons.
As much as I like hearing about cases of stickin' it to Da Man, I don't know that we should necessarily celebrate this decision quite so much...
All software contains bugs. The defense will find some, and even if they only affect accuracy at the 7th decimal point, the case will get thrown out by a jury based on reasonable doubt. And this doesn't apply just to the current case, but to nearly any legal case using machine-generated evidence. The court allows DNA evidence? How about the firmware in the sequencing machine? Drug test came back positive? Let's see how Agilent's HPLC code rounds in integration.
Now, in some cases (*cough* Diebold *cough*) we may have a valid gripe against a closed-source implementation. But in most cases... Not to make this a case of "for the children", but do you want drunks behind the wheel? Screw the children (calm down, Mr. Jackson, I didn't mean it like that), I don't want to DIAF because someone can't stop at two beers.