I'll bet they don't even want to talk to you (an independent artist), because you're a liability. In fact, you're such a liability, I doubt that there will be any truely independent artists on the new napster.
They can get screwed by you in many ways:
1. You claim to be an independent artist, but your band "edle eppelinza" mysteriously sounds exactly like Led Zepplin, down to the bit. Your audience would be people who don't like big record companies, or who can't find a fast, free server with their favorite led zep song.
2. You do cover songs, and they have no way of knowing if you're paying royalties to the songwriters.
3. You claim to play your own original music, but they don't know if you're really the band you claim to be, or someone with a minidisc at a concert.
4. You really do play your own original music, but you have a falling out with the drummer/songwriter who doesn't want the stuff released. Or you were forced to sign an exclusivity deal with someone else. It's yours, but you don't own the rights.
5. You're a billing hassle. Even quarterly checks for $12, you're still a hassle. The amount of investigation that goes into making sure you're legit could easily exceed $100/album.
6. You piss off the major labels, who apparently hold some sway at the new napster (ok, they have to approve every detail of napster's business plan)
Coming from the embedded world, there are a lot of nifty boards available in the PMC form factor. It's bigger than pcmcia and not hot swapable, but it offers comparably much more connector area (such as a dongle-less SCSI 68-pin connector, or 4 RJ45 connectors) in a size that will still fit many power-user-type laptops. I wouldn't want to replace pcmcia, but it would be handy add-on. Some examples
And of course, T1 interfaces, analog, parallel, dual ethernet, and many more custom functions. And, for designing your own custom boards, the package height and case restrictions are a lot easier with PMC than pcmcia.
I don't know which dell you're talking about, but they may have learned their lesson. I have a ~3 year old dell inspirion 7000 with the following features:
Hard drive is held in with two screws on a spring loaded panel. If the screws are missing, the panel flips up and it's pretty easy to notice because it won't sit on anything flat. Beyond that, the connector force is still pretty stiff, so you have one last shot before the thing drops out. But, even then, it'll drop out in slightly protective framework.
Battery/cdrom is held with a spring loaded latch, but there is also a lock switch that requires a fingernail or pencil to unlock.
The memory and video card slot covers don't have any protection other than flimsy grips and a good amount of pressure required to move them. The flimsy grips actually help secure it - it's actually easier to use the whole palm of your hand to remove the panels. There is a spot between these two parts that could have held a screw or two - installation of these screws would keep the lid closed. So, some room for improvement, but i haven't had problems with these.
Now, I *LOVE* the magnetic retracting screen latches on the new macs. Dell messed up there - I lost one clip the first month because it didn't line up well enough with the hole. I took an exacto knife to the guy, and the other clip has lasted me. Sucky because that clip is the same hunk of plastic as the case - it would have been nicer to offer metal or a stronger plastic, or at least something easily replaceable.
...there has to be a translation from protected digital to unprotected digital before it is converted to analog. All I have to do to pirate is capture that stream before it goes to analog.
While technically true, all it would take would be a D/A converter that accepts encrypted input. An example of a chip that does this can be found here (although it's for voice only, right now). You'd need to probe up a dozen spots on the chip, and each spot could be protected by metalization above the trace you're trying to probe. This would raice the cost of digital ripping so high that it would be worthless to most people. DVD pirates would (and do) just make copies of the encrypted digital content.
good enough to steal a large slice of the MP3 player/PDA/Digital Camera pie by simply slashing prices to allow, say, a tiny 1GB MP3 portable for under $250
You did see the headline off of ibm's microdrive site, didn't you? The MP3 player they show has 3 versions:
player + 340 MB Microdrive sells for $299
player + 512 MB Microdrive sells for $349
player + 1000 MB Microdrive sells for $399, the same price as the Apple ipod with a 5000 MB drive.
Still aways away from $250, but getting close.
The biggest surprise is the formfactor of this player. This thing based on the microdrive is BIGGER than the ipod, which is based on a pcmcia-sized form factor 5GB drive! What's the point of a small drive if you stick it in a big case?
edigital: 4.3" x 2.5" x 0.87", 4.9 ounces
ipod: 4.02" x 2.43" x 0.78", 6.5 ounces
The ipod is about an ounce and a half heavier, but holds 5x the data, and has firewire instead of USB. The edigital features voice recognition, but also wastes space with the traditional screen and buttons. Battery life is comparable - 10 hours for the ipod, 12 for the edigital.
Innovatek fan looks like it has a wiring error!
on
Power Water Cooling Kits
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I'm not too sure I'd use the fan speed monitor that comes with the Innovatek... it looks like it could do some damage to a motherboard!
This image on page 3 of the article shows a 4-headed cable. Two connectors form a short disk drive power supply extension cord, with the two outer pins (+5v and +12v) tapped off to supply power to the fans. This trick allows the fan to run off of 12-5 = 7 volts (uh, they messed up the math, calling this 8 volts). These red and black wires go to what looks like a male connector to go to the fan. Then, a yellow wire comes from the fan and seems to go to a motherboard fan connector. That's the problem.
First, a little background. As I understand it, the speed feedback is essentially a switch that connects the yellow wire to ground two times per revolution. The motherboard must supply a little bit of power (in the form of a pull-up resistor) to actually get a signal out. This works well because, since the motherboard is supplying the power, it can make sure it doesn't supply too much voltage. If the chipset is 5 volts (impossibly rare nowdays), it'll supply 5 volts. If it's 3.3, it'll supply 3.3. This way, a fan can be used with any voltage chipset.
Ok, the problem is that the ground pin of the fan is connected to the 5 volt power supply. This is the trick used to get 7 volts. The fan will spin and connect the speed feedback wire to the 5 volt "ground". If you've got a chipset that uses 3.3 volts (most likely), you'll be feeding 5 volts into your 3.3 chip - a big no no that could burn out the speed input or the chip (which probably handles lots of other functions you wouldn't want to lose). The voltage on this pin will oscillate between 5 volts and 3.3 volts - not the 0 to 3.3 it expects. If you have a 5 volt chipset, then this pin will oscillate between 5v (shorted to "ground") and, uh, 5 volts (pulled up by the chipset)... so, while not doing any damage in that case, wouldn't work.
Amonia heat pipe coolers are closed-loop systems that require no pump and are very reliable. We used them on satellites (to even out the "in the sun" side and the "in the darkness of space" side). These are more common in laptops (my inspiron 7000 uses one, and so does the titanium powerbook). If you want to play with one, the (now discontinued and cheap) dreamcast systems have two of them (pictures here), but the heatsink on the end of them probably isn't big enough for a standard desktop cpu.
Doh! I looked at this message not this message. Sorry about that, my fault. The stego part was my main comment, I just noticed the (wrong) timestamp at the last second.
You can track emails, even if someone prints it out and mails it, rewrites it by hand (with a pencil), or even speaks it over the phone. It's called Steganography, and it hides information by subtly changing the punctiation and spelling, or by changing the text (omission or inclusion of various words/sentences). For all we know, the sent line "Sent: Wed 1/2/2002 1:14 PM" indicates that employee #114 leaked the info.
Incidently, it's just barely 2 pm here the US east coast... sure, this is a worldwide email, but in Redmond it's still 11 am, not 1:14 pm.
Thanks for the story and thanks for showing me the new thread. Even though I criticized your article, I didn't mean it personally. I just wanted to clarify something that got through three professional editors (AP, CNN, Slashdot), and was annoyed at the Slashdot editors for another unrelated article.
> Does it take extra effort on the part of the editors to recognize the people who submitted the story? You bet it does. Not necessarily that much effort, though, if slashcode was improved. Check out my proposal here. Actually, though I'm vocal, I'm not so concerned about the recognition. It just peeves me off when a crapy article goes up when someone else has made the effort to do it right. You know, a want to make this a better site. I like the journal submission idea... I think I'll do that.
I'm new to submitting articles, but here's the one that got me upset. Maybe it was someones taste, maybe I put too many details in the article (hey, if I highlight the portions of the proposed scheme that may be of interest to slashdot readers, then I rob them of the opportunity to make a +5 Insightful comment). The article was in about the top 5 most-posted-to for the week (dec25-31), so it couldn't have been that bad. I'm surprised no one else submitted it and michael found it all by himself. Which is possible; I'm not just giving michael a hard time -- it was on the front page of eet.com when I found it, but had been bumped off by the time that michael posted the article.
I got the linksys card because the prism chipset was supposed to be the best for listening with airsnort. Yes, the range is disappointing- it barely makes it to my bathroom. Part of the problem is that I've got the worst case: a firewall+printserver AP which uses a pcmcia card as its radio. The similarly-marketed firewall+switch AP uses a dedicated radio with real antennas.
Actually, I had a tough-as-nails journalism teacher in high school whose spirit comes out in me every once in a while. No passive voice sentences were allowed;).
Ok, I was also a bit miffed that, about 2 weeks ago, I had taken the time to write a good summary for a news article, only to have it rejected. That's fine, but nine days later a not so good summary of the same article appeared on the front page. I understand how it happens - different editors have different standards, get zillions of articles to review (I presume), and don't talk much to each other. Some people have proposed that, to avoid duplicate stories, when an editor submits a story slashcode should check to see if it has links in common with other recently-submitted stories. I'd suggest expanding that to include rejected submissions, too. That way, if a second editor deems a story worthwhile, they can pick among all the submissions. I know that they can let an article ferment, but that's aparently too tedious - easier to reject an article right away rather than reject it later.
Don't mind me, but I found 2 signifcant factual errors in the description.
First off, the rock has only been photographed once. So, saying it was "first noticed" is true, but misleading - it's only been "noticed" once.
Second, it's not that the IAU wants a picture in order to see if it qualifies as a moon, they just want more proof that the object even exists. So, it hasn't been "denied moon status"; it's that (in light of the the available evidence) its entire existence is being denied. CNN made the same error in their headline, "Tiny rock around Uranus denied moon status"
Please forgive me if I sound grumpy. I was just expecting a little more from a 60-word summary of an 8 sentence article (and 3 of these sentences don't describe the rock in question).
I left a job that involved doing a simple low-pass IIR filter on an 8051 (hey, it was low frequency, too). It was one of the few remaining things on the project and was already partially done (I had done all the low level multiply/divide routines to implement another filter elsewhere in the code). They passed the work off to a new guy, a "DSP expert" out of college. I explained the filter, and showed him the code. He had never seen any kind of assembly language. It was hiring decisions like this that was one of the major factors that had caused me to look for another job!
Check out the pretty graphs here and here. Both show that red and green sensitivities are similar and different from blue. The two graphs seem to contradict each other - the first has blue the lowest, and the second has blue the highest, but they are graphing two things: the first shows sensitivity (excitability per # of photons) and the second shows the reciprical (# of photons to excite).
Actually, the older non-12-channel garmin receivers do limit the speed -- I know, I tested my garmin 45. Aparently, the gps 38 does, too. When I bought mine, it was an amazingly cheap receiver -- the magellan one I used at work was just a bare board (no screen, case, or antenna - you talked to it with a terminal program running on a laptop) and cost $500; for $280 from garmin I got the whole shebang.
I've been happy with it, but garmin claimed it was nitrogen filled and waterproof. Friends of mine bought a pair for a sailing trip, and thought it would be a good idea to test the waterproofness since they didn't look too rugged. They drowned two of them in buckets and returned them for warranty service before getting back one with all sorts of extra glue on the seams!
Cell phones put out significantly more power than 802.11, and have the technical problem of being within range of too many cell phone towers, causing routing havoc and tying up frequencies that could be used by multiple people on the ground.
Although commercial GPS receivers are limited by law to about 900 knots and 60,000 ft, you shouldn't reach this in most jetliners since this is about mach 1.3 @ 20,000 feet (the concorde can reach 1260 knots). However, some GPS manufacturers artificially limit their lower end receivers so that you must purchase their more expensive 'aviation' receivers to use above 90 knots.
You're right. amazing. not a single mention of electronic security, unless you count the oh-so-high-tech physical access cards. Sure, they have redundancy, but what about backups? I'd love to hear about a company deploying some high-tech data security measure.
Admitedly, some of this extra security is left over from when the building was a traditional bank vault. But, did money really need armored cooling towers? Did they add those on for the computers? Is armor going a little too far, or since the rest of the place is a vault did they feel that they had to keep up the image?
...stick a high-gain antenna on it and you could probably send it down the elevators and out into the parking lot!
Just to clarify, in case it helps... (not nitpicking here). High gain antennas are, like the name says, antennas that transmit stronger signals than 'usual' ones. However, they don't use any kind of magic to do this; there is a price. They are more directional, meaning that they exhibit high gain in one direction and very low gain in others.
An example of this is a flashlight (after all, light is just another form of electromagentic waves). If you take the reflector off of a mag light, you get a bulb that glows equally in all directions (omnidirectional). If you put the reflector on, you can light something much brighter, but you have to point the flashlight directly at it. Also, the area behind the flashlight is completely in the dark.
So, a high gain antenna for your car would probably do best at the transmitting end, where you can point it at the car as at moves. An ordinary whip antenna (not quite omnidirectional - it's ineffective when you view the antenna end-on) on the car should be fine.
If you want to get really fancy, then go ahead and get a high gain antenna for the car. The problem is that you'll need some sort of tracking device to aim this antenna back at the base station. And when you detect that you've lost the signal due to misaiming (hit a bump, jumped off the curb, etc.), you need an algorithm to autonomously find the base station before you get run over by a big truck. Now you know one reason why nasa missions are complicated.
Actually, I hadn't thought about 'dummy' RFID's. I'm not sure how well the multiple RFID stuff works, either, but I assume that it could be easily ironed out. Dallas semiconductor (now owned by maxim) offers one-wire memory chips, which deliver power and data over a single wire, much like multiple RFIDs working in close proximity (and actually, there is another wire for ground). Most of the time, the wire is at about 5 volts. When transmitting data, it goes down to 0 volts -- a long pulse indicates a logic 1, a shorter pulse indicates a logic 1. When data is transmitted, a capacitor built into the chips retains the memory for a power outage of up the the length of a 'logic 0' pulse.
The neat part of the one wire scheme is that every part has a unique 64-bit serial number. To access multiple devices on the bus, a simple binary search can be done... the host issues a command that it wants to search, and then starts issuing a binary number, one bit at a time. All chips that match this serial number respond... the host then can tell when it hits upon a serial number that no one responds to, and thus knows that the last bit was wrong. Eventually, all the devices are found in a fairly rapid fashion.
Non-powered RFID chips usually send data back by backscattering. The take power from a carrier wave and convert this to DC. Then, the logic inside them toggles on and off a circuit that controls the backscattering: a switchable diode in the right circuit will double (or halve?) the frequency of an incoming signal. The interigator listens for this signal.
Now, you can combine the one-wire and RFID backscatter techniques. You could modulate the carrier signal to send information (not just power) to the RFID chips. These chips would have to have a larger hold-up capacitor now that data is being sent. To receive, you'd have to send the carrier signal and listen for the backscatter. To differentiate between multiple bills, you can use the same serial-number-probe that the one-wire protocol uses.
All this is useless, of course, if you've got a tin foil-lined wallet, which I suspect will become more and more commonplace in the future...
Slashdot Mirror
I'll bet they don't even want to talk to you (an independent artist), because you're a liability. In fact, you're such a liability, I doubt that there will be any truely independent artists on the new napster.
They can get screwed by you in many ways:
1. You claim to be an independent artist, but your band "edle eppelinza" mysteriously sounds exactly like Led Zepplin, down to the bit. Your audience would be people who don't like big record companies, or who can't find a fast, free server with their favorite led zep song.
2. You do cover songs, and they have no way of knowing if you're paying royalties to the songwriters.
3. You claim to play your own original music, but they don't know if you're really the band you claim to be, or someone with a minidisc at a concert.
4. You really do play your own original music, but you have a falling out with the drummer/songwriter who doesn't want the stuff released. Or you were forced to sign an exclusivity deal with someone else. It's yours, but you don't own the rights.
5. You're a billing hassle. Even quarterly checks for $12, you're still a hassle. The amount of investigation that goes into making sure you're legit could easily exceed $100/album.
6. You piss off the major labels, who apparently hold some sway at the new napster (ok, they have to approve every detail of napster's business plan)
Coming from the embedded world, there are a lot of nifty boards available in the PMC form factor. It's bigger than pcmcia and not hot swapable, but it offers comparably much more connector area (such as a dongle-less SCSI 68-pin connector, or 4 RJ45 connectors) in a size that will still fit many power-user-type laptops. I wouldn't want to replace pcmcia, but it would be handy add-on. Some examples
.. an extra 2.4 GFLOPs in your laptop
Quad DSP processors
Fibrechannel, Video, reconfigurable FPGA coprocessors, an Alpha processor
8 serial ports
And of course, T1 interfaces, analog, parallel, dual ethernet, and many more custom functions. And, for designing your own custom boards, the package height and case restrictions are a lot easier with PMC than pcmcia.
I don't know which dell you're talking about, but they may have learned their lesson. I have a ~3 year old dell inspirion 7000 with the following features:
Hard drive is held in with two screws on a spring loaded panel. If the screws are missing, the panel flips up and it's pretty easy to notice because it won't sit on anything flat. Beyond that, the connector force is still pretty stiff, so you have one last shot before the thing drops out. But, even then, it'll drop out in slightly protective framework.
Battery/cdrom is held with a spring loaded latch, but there is also a lock switch that requires a fingernail or pencil to unlock.
The memory and video card slot covers don't have any protection other than flimsy grips and a good amount of pressure required to move them. The flimsy grips actually help secure it - it's actually easier to use the whole palm of your hand to remove the panels. There is a spot between these two parts that could have held a screw or two - installation of these screws would keep the lid closed. So, some room for improvement, but i haven't had problems with these.
Now, I *LOVE* the magnetic retracting screen latches on the new macs. Dell messed up there - I lost one clip the first month because it didn't line up well enough with the hole. I took an exacto knife to the guy, and the other clip has lasted me. Sucky because that clip is the same hunk of plastic as the case - it would have been nicer to offer metal or a stronger plastic, or at least something easily replaceable.
This dude (maybe you've heard of him) has modded his dell laptop with a k-rad sticker
He also modded his car, perhaps you've seen it.
...there has to be a translation from protected digital to unprotected digital before it is converted to analog. All I have to do to pirate is capture that stream before it goes to analog.
While technically true, all it would take would be a D/A converter that accepts encrypted input. An example of a chip that does this can be found here (although it's for voice only, right now). You'd need to probe up a dozen spots on the chip, and each spot could be protected by metalization above the trace you're trying to probe. This would raice the cost of digital ripping so high that it would be worthless to most people. DVD pirates would (and do) just make copies of the encrypted digital content.
good enough to steal a large slice of the MP3 player/PDA/Digital Camera pie by simply slashing prices to allow, say, a tiny 1GB MP3 portable for under $250
You did see the headline off of ibm's microdrive site, didn't you? The MP3 player they show has 3 versions:
player + 340 MB Microdrive sells for $299
player + 512 MB Microdrive sells for $349
player + 1000 MB Microdrive sells for $399, the same price as the Apple ipod with a 5000 MB drive.
Still aways away from $250, but getting close.
The biggest surprise is the formfactor of this player. This thing based on the microdrive is BIGGER than the ipod, which is based on a pcmcia-sized form factor 5GB drive! What's the point of a small drive if you stick it in a big case?
edigital: 4.3" x 2.5" x 0.87", 4.9 ounces
ipod: 4.02" x 2.43" x 0.78", 6.5 ounces
The ipod is about an ounce and a half heavier, but holds 5x the data, and has firewire instead of USB. The edigital features voice recognition, but also wastes space with the traditional screen and buttons. Battery life is comparable - 10 hours for the ipod, 12 for the edigital.
I'm not too sure I'd use the fan speed monitor that comes with the Innovatek... it looks like it could do some damage to a motherboard!
This image on page 3 of the article shows a 4-headed cable. Two connectors form a short disk drive power supply extension cord, with the two outer pins (+5v and +12v) tapped off to supply power to the fans. This trick allows the fan to run off of 12-5 = 7 volts (uh, they messed up the math, calling this 8 volts). These red and black wires go to what looks like a male connector to go to the fan. Then, a yellow wire comes from the fan and seems to go to a motherboard fan connector. That's the problem.
First, a little background. As I understand it, the speed feedback is essentially a switch that connects the yellow wire to ground two times per revolution. The motherboard must supply a little bit of power (in the form of a pull-up resistor) to actually get a signal out. This works well because, since the motherboard is supplying the power, it can make sure it doesn't supply too much voltage. If the chipset is 5 volts (impossibly rare nowdays), it'll supply 5 volts. If it's 3.3, it'll supply 3.3. This way, a fan can be used with any voltage chipset.
Ok, the problem is that the ground pin of the fan is connected to the 5 volt power supply. This is the trick used to get 7 volts. The fan will spin and connect the speed feedback wire to the 5 volt "ground". If you've got a chipset that uses 3.3 volts (most likely), you'll be feeding 5 volts into your 3.3 chip - a big no no that could burn out the speed input or the chip (which probably handles lots of other functions you wouldn't want to lose). The voltage on this pin will oscillate between 5 volts and 3.3 volts - not the 0 to 3.3 it expects. If you have a 5 volt chipset, then this pin will oscillate between 5v (shorted to "ground") and, uh, 5 volts (pulled up by the chipset)... so, while not doing any damage in that case, wouldn't work.
Amonia heat pipe coolers are closed-loop systems that require no pump and are very reliable. We used them on satellites (to even out the "in the sun" side and the "in the darkness of space" side). These are more common in laptops (my inspiron 7000 uses one, and so does the titanium powerbook). If you want to play with one, the (now discontinued and cheap) dreamcast systems have two of them (pictures here), but the heatsink on the end of them probably isn't big enough for a standard desktop cpu.
Doh! I looked at this message not this message. Sorry about that, my fault. The stego part was my main comment, I just noticed the (wrong) timestamp at the last second.
You can track emails, even if someone prints it out and mails it, rewrites it by hand (with a pencil), or even speaks it over the phone. It's called Steganography, and it hides information by subtly changing the punctiation and spelling, or by changing the text (omission or inclusion of various words/sentences). For all we know, the sent line "Sent: Wed 1/2/2002 1:14 PM" indicates that employee #114 leaked the info.
Incidently, it's just barely 2 pm here the US east coast... sure, this is a worldwide email, but in Redmond it's still 11 am, not 1:14 pm.
yes, sortof
Actually, try something with about the same power as a TI86. This was slashdotted about a year ago.
I suspect you mean guppi the graphing program, not the graping program that Emory University offers.
Thanks for the story and thanks for showing me the new thread. Even though I criticized your article, I didn't mean it personally. I just wanted to clarify something that got through three professional editors (AP, CNN, Slashdot), and was annoyed at the Slashdot editors for another unrelated article.
> Does it take extra effort on the part of the editors to recognize the people who submitted the story? You bet it does.
Not necessarily that much effort, though, if slashcode was improved. Check out my proposal here. Actually, though I'm vocal, I'm not so concerned about the recognition. It just peeves me off when a crapy article goes up when someone else has made the effort to do it right. You know, a want to make this a better site. I like the journal submission idea... I think I'll do that.
I'm new to submitting articles, but here's the one that got me upset. Maybe it was someones taste, maybe I put too many details in the article (hey, if I highlight the portions of the proposed scheme that may be of interest to slashdot readers, then I rob them of the opportunity to make a +5 Insightful comment). The article was in about the top 5 most-posted-to for the week (dec25-31), so it couldn't have been that bad. I'm surprised no one else submitted it and michael found it all by himself. Which is possible; I'm not just giving michael a hard time -- it was on the front page of eet.com when I found it, but had been bumped off by the time that michael posted the article.
I got the linksys card because the prism chipset was supposed to be the best for listening with airsnort. Yes, the range is disappointing- it barely makes it to my bathroom. Part of the problem is that I've got the worst case: a firewall+printserver AP which uses a pcmcia card as its radio. The similarly-marketed firewall+switch AP uses a dedicated radio with real antennas.
Actually, I had a tough-as-nails journalism teacher in high school whose spirit comes out in me every once in a while. No passive voice sentences were allowed ;).
Ok, I was also a bit miffed that, about 2 weeks ago, I had taken the time to write a good summary for a news article, only to have it rejected. That's fine, but nine days later a not so good summary of the same article appeared on the front page. I understand how it happens - different editors have different standards, get zillions of articles to review (I presume), and don't talk much to each other. Some people have proposed that, to avoid duplicate stories, when an editor submits a story slashcode should check to see if it has links in common with other recently-submitted stories. I'd suggest expanding that to include rejected submissions, too. That way, if a second editor deems a story worthwhile, they can pick among all the submissions. I know that they can let an article ferment, but that's aparently too tedious - easier to reject an article right away rather than reject it later.
Don't mind me, but I found 2 signifcant factual errors in the description.
First off, the rock has only been photographed once. So, saying it was "first noticed" is true, but misleading - it's only been "noticed" once.
Second, it's not that the IAU wants a picture in order to see if it qualifies as a moon, they just want more proof that the object even exists. So, it hasn't been "denied moon status"; it's that (in light of the the available evidence) its entire existence is being denied. CNN made the same error in their headline, "Tiny rock around Uranus denied moon status"
Please forgive me if I sound grumpy. I was just expecting a little more from a 60-word summary of an 8 sentence article (and 3 of these sentences don't describe the rock in question).
I left a job that involved doing a simple low-pass IIR filter on an 8051 (hey, it was low frequency, too). It was one of the few remaining things on the project and was already partially done (I had done all the low level multiply/divide routines to implement another filter elsewhere in the code). They passed the work off to a new guy, a "DSP expert" out of college. I explained the filter, and showed him the code. He had never seen any kind of assembly language. It was hiring decisions like this that was one of the major factors that had caused me to look for another job!
Check out the pretty graphs here and here. Both show that red and green sensitivities are similar and different from blue. The two graphs seem to contradict each other - the first has blue the lowest, and the second has blue the highest, but they are graphing two things: the first shows sensitivity (excitability per # of photons) and the second shows the reciprical (# of photons to excite).
Actually, the older non-12-channel garmin receivers do limit the speed -- I know, I tested my garmin 45. Aparently, the gps 38 does, too. When I bought mine, it was an amazingly cheap receiver -- the magellan one I used at work was just a bare board (no screen, case, or antenna - you talked to it with a terminal program running on a laptop) and cost $500; for $280 from garmin I got the whole shebang.
I've been happy with it, but garmin claimed it was nitrogen filled and waterproof. Friends of mine bought a pair for a sailing trip, and thought it would be a good idea to test the waterproofness since they didn't look too rugged. They drowned two of them in buckets and returned them for warranty service before getting back one with all sorts of extra glue on the seams!
I think 574 mph hurts my little brain, too.
Cell phones put out significantly more power than 802.11, and have the technical problem of being within range of too many cell phone towers, causing routing havoc and tying up frequencies that could be used by multiple people on the ground.
Although commercial GPS receivers are limited by law to about 900 knots and 60,000 ft, you shouldn't reach this in most jetliners since this is about mach 1.3 @ 20,000 feet (the concorde can reach 1260 knots). However, some GPS manufacturers artificially limit their lower end receivers so that you must purchase their more expensive 'aviation' receivers to use above 90 knots.
You're right. amazing. not a single mention of electronic security, unless you count the oh-so-high-tech physical access cards. Sure, they have redundancy, but what about backups? I'd love to hear about a company deploying some high-tech data security measure.
Admitedly, some of this extra security is left over from when the building was a traditional bank vault. But, did money really need armored cooling towers? Did they add those on for the computers? Is armor going a little too far, or since the rest of the place is a vault did they feel that they had to keep up the image?
...stick a high-gain antenna on it and you could probably send it down the elevators and out into the parking lot!
Just to clarify, in case it helps... (not nitpicking here). High gain antennas are, like the name says, antennas that transmit stronger signals than 'usual' ones. However, they don't use any kind of magic to do this; there is a price. They are more directional, meaning that they exhibit high gain in one direction and very low gain in others.
An example of this is a flashlight (after all, light is just another form of electromagentic waves). If you take the reflector off of a mag light, you get a bulb that glows equally in all directions (omnidirectional). If you put the reflector on, you can light something much brighter, but you have to point the flashlight directly at it. Also, the area behind the flashlight is completely in the dark.
So, a high gain antenna for your car would probably do best at the transmitting end, where you can point it at the car as at moves. An ordinary whip antenna (not quite omnidirectional - it's ineffective when you view the antenna end-on) on the car should be fine.
If you want to get really fancy, then go ahead and get a high gain antenna for the car. The problem is that you'll need some sort of tracking device to aim this antenna back at the base station. And when you detect that you've lost the signal due to misaiming (hit a bump, jumped off the curb, etc.), you need an algorithm to autonomously find the base station before you get run over by a big truck. Now you know one reason why nasa missions are complicated.
Actually, I hadn't thought about 'dummy' RFID's. I'm not sure how well the multiple RFID stuff works, either, but I assume that it could be easily ironed out. Dallas semiconductor (now owned by maxim) offers one-wire memory chips, which deliver power and data over a single wire, much like multiple RFIDs working in close proximity (and actually, there is another wire for ground). Most of the time, the wire is at about 5 volts. When transmitting data, it goes down to 0 volts -- a long pulse indicates a logic 1, a shorter pulse indicates a logic 1. When data is transmitted, a capacitor built into the chips retains the memory for a power outage of up the the length of a 'logic 0' pulse.
The neat part of the one wire scheme is that every part has a unique 64-bit serial number. To access multiple devices on the bus, a simple binary search can be done... the host issues a command that it wants to search, and then starts issuing a binary number, one bit at a time. All chips that match this serial number respond... the host then can tell when it hits upon a serial number that no one responds to, and thus knows that the last bit was wrong. Eventually, all the devices are found in a fairly rapid fashion.
Non-powered RFID chips usually send data back by backscattering. The take power from a carrier wave and convert this to DC. Then, the logic inside them toggles on and off a circuit that controls the backscattering: a switchable diode in the right circuit will double (or halve?) the frequency of an incoming signal. The interigator listens for this signal.
Now, you can combine the one-wire and RFID backscatter techniques. You could modulate the carrier signal to send information (not just power) to the RFID chips. These chips would have to have a larger hold-up capacitor now that data is being sent. To receive, you'd have to send the carrier signal and listen for the backscatter. To differentiate between multiple bills, you can use the same serial-number-probe that the one-wire protocol uses.
All this is useless, of course, if you've got a tin foil-lined wallet, which I suspect will become more and more commonplace in the future...