Start with a radio on a chip, add a small circuit to hardwire a chip ID and broadcast it on demand, and you've got a built-in mechanism for locating every piece of hardware with an Intel chip.
I still don't understand why RIAA is so anti-radio.
If the RIAA could come up with some way to extract performance royalties because you let someone walk by on the sidewalk outside your home and hear you playing a CD on the stereo in your home, they would. After all, if someone outside your home can hear it, it's a 'public performance', and you have to pay more royalties.
Well, besides the fact that the melody strains the range of most singers, now you know the reason why you almost never hear more than the first verse sung.
In general, though, it seems as if most national anthems are overly florid and/or pretentious. A good example is the anthem of the old Soviet Union:
Unbreakable union of free-born republics
Great Russia has welded forever to stand Created in struggle, by will of the people United and mighty, our Soviet land!
Kind of ironic, in view of historical events. But you can say the same of 'Deutschland Uber Alles', and probably dozens more anthems whose singers were overtaken by history. I wonder how future generations will judge the U.S.'s anthem.
It's that M$ wanted to MILK the game for everything they could so they could get people to by their X-Box.
Not to mention that putting out PC and Mac versions of the game that used the full capabilities of the platforms would pretty much kill sales of the Xbox version, given the interface and design limitations of a console gaming system when compared to a desktop computer.
What's with the influx of retards using [] for html tags?
It's not that they're retards per se, it's just that the prevalence of the Universal Bulletin Board (UBB) software for website forums, in which you enclose formatting commands similar to HTML in square brackets, creates confusion when they come to/. and are expected to switch over to real HTML tags for formatting their comments. Because they don't bother to preview their comment before they submit it, they wind up with tags like [u], [b], and [i] scattered through their comment, which makes them look stupider than they are.
The obvious moral from this is that the preview button is your friend; use it early and often, and read the documentation before you embarrass yourself.
Wouldn't it be ironic if this "conversion" happened and groups like PETA wanted to create flyers, newsletters, etc. to "stop the exploitation of chickens" -- but they couldn't because all of the computers were made from chickens?
The mental image of that is just plain disgusting; there just aren't that many ports on a chicken to plug your peripherals into. It's going to have to be all USB, so you can use a hub.
...instead of just turning out unbelievably ugly crap.
Ever wonder why most open-source project websites look completely unprofessional? Maybe we'd make better inroads to businesses if the marketing materials we used looked halfway decent.
I don't know... Do you suppose it might be because the people who manage the websites for open-source projects are part of the project development team, and are primarily concerned that the project works, and assume that someone with the savvy to download, install, and use open-source software can read a basic website oriented around content, rather than pretty graphics?
Last time I looked, there weren't many open-source projects that could afford to pay graphic designers to sit around between brief flurries of developing the latest chrome-riddled incomprehensible website navigation design, and getting graphic designers to do up a pretty website for the project is the last thing that the project developers think about while working on the project. Given a choice between functional and pretty, open-source projects are going to go with functional and plow the effort that would have gone into pretty back into the project.
Almost every site I've seen done in Flash could have been done in plain old HTML just as well. If a page has "Skip Intro" it has been badly designed, and whole-site Flash animations are almost always horrendous.
Even if it's in HTML, a website that has an 'intro page' is badly designed. If I go to 'http://www.companyname.com', I don't need an intro page that consists of some useless graphical chrome and an 'ENTER' link; I want to see your content, not your graphics department's latest tour de farce. What I want probably isn't on your root content page, anyway, so when I find it I'm going to bookmark that page so that next time I'll skip your home page and its useless graphic completely and go right to where I want to be -- so why go to the effort of putting it up in the first place?
"the bulk of the music industry's loss comes from the high amount of 'small-time" MP3 pirating."
Beware of assuming the precedent. Your statement about the industries "losses" assumes a tie to sharing over P2P networks, which is a fallacy (or at least an unproven hypothesis)
It would be interesting to see, if there was some way to get a statistically valid survey performed, how much money people spent on entertainment over, say, the last three years, broken out into spending on movie theatres, videotapes, CDs, and DVDs. Without numbers to prove it, I can't say with any assurance, but I'd be willing to bet that a significant fraction of the 'loss due to MP3 pirating' the RIAA claims is really a loss from people walking into a media store and deciding that their $20 is better spent on a DVD than a CD.
I haven't seen that disposable income has taken any abrupt jump in the last year, so with the amount of money available to spend on entertainment, if DVD sales are surging, that means that other forms of entertainment are going to have less money spent on them -- and that means that CD sales are going to take a hit. But the RIAA won't accept that; the premise that the market will provide them with monotonically increasing sales is Holy Writ to them, so any drop in their sales must, a priori, mean that piracy is the reason people aren't buying CDs.
I have no info about whether or not iris make a good biometric identifier, though.
Look at Iris-Scan Technology; the biggest limitation in the current technology is a maximum 1-meter distance from the camera to the eye, but I'm sure that with some of the advances in CCD design being worked on, the resolution problem will be solved.
I'm surprised that a more low-tech solution wasn't referenced -- full-coverage contacts. Regular-sized contacts, even the colored contacts, would be detectable from the artifacting of reflection at the edge of the contact lens, but full-coverage lenses, that are already used for bestial and other outre' eye effects in movies (Data's off-color eyes in ST:TNG, for example), would avoid that problem. With full-coverage contacts, you could even 'forge' iris patterns, creating a market for people equipped with an iris scanner who walk through crowds 'tagging' people to collect iris patterns for sale as false ID patterns.
... the Me-263. It never went into production, and the Germans only tested it as a glider, but it was test-flown under power by the Russians after WWII, and the design was reworked into the I-270 (a larger aircraft with unswept wings).
It looks like the big advance that XCOR has made is the development of a much safer and more reliable motor than the hypergolic-fueled bombs developed during and after WWII. With more than fifty years of technological advances behind them. Amazing.
A better hack of Gator would be to dike off all the code that contacts the Gator servers, downloads the ads, and displays them, so that not only will your browsing habits not be sent to them, but you'll never even get the popups. Then Gator will just do what people install it for -- saving passwords -- instead of shoving itself in your face all the time.
One OS to find them One OS to bring them all And in the darkness bind them In the land of Redmond where the shadows lie.
Re:What about the other 20 layers, now?
on
Printing Chips
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
You still have to connect the damn dots. And on top of that, your first metalization layer has to be the same "feature size" as your transistors (or else it can't connect them!). So unless they figure out how to get 10nm photo masking for metal deposition, or figure out some other way to put the first metal layer down at 10nm, this is useless.
-5, Clueless.
If you're using mechanical masking for all of the semiconductor layers, why would you suddenly turn brain-dead and use photo-masking for the metal layers?
Sons and daughters? Copyrights last for, what, life + 70 years? Barring advancements in logevity treatment, my children (~20 years younger than I) and my hypothetical grandchildren (~40 years younger than I) will all be dead 70 years after my death. My great-grandchildren will be either dead or retired. At some point, the recipients of my creativity will be my great-grandchildren and my great-great-grandchildren.
Leaving aside the possibility that the original poster was using the terms in the sense of 'descendants', rather than actual offspring (a la the Daughters of the American Revolution, an organization that would be extinct if 'daughters' were interpreted literally.
However, if you're watching the mass lobbying attack by Disney/Sony/RIAA, et al., what they're proposing as a 'solution' to copyright violation would create a de facto non-terminating copyright, allowing them to milk the public for all eternity. See the various threads here on/. and elsewhere regarding the CBDTPA.
As I recall from the various 'technology of coaster design' programs on TDC, A&E, et al., the various companies' coaster-design software will show the induced G force at any point on the track -- on an amorphous object in the coaster car. The dummies allow the coaster builders to record the transient torque forces on the riders' extremities during the ride, as well as other accelerations.
As an example of the difference between theoretical G forces on a mass in a seat and the Real World, take Flashback at Six Flags Magic Mountain. That coaster is acutely painful for me to ride. Not because of the G forces, but because the design of the coaster rolls the riders back and forth sharply, and the pull-down chest harness has the hinge pins conveniently placed for my ears to hit them when the roll accelerations pull my head from side to side. A fundamental design problem, and one that won't be detected by G-force computations based on the track layout.
These light bulbs sound like a feel-good measure for those interested in saving the environment. Save the exchange of information FIRST.
As was pointed out in the original discussion on this subject, the FCC granted access to the spectrum bandwidth used for Wi-Fi with the explicit caveat that it was non-exclusive -- Wi-Fi had no proprietary rights to the band, other devices may cause interference in that band, and that anyone using that band for data transfer could not file any suit or collect damages because of interference from other devices. The people pushing Wi-Fi knew that it was likely that their bandwidth would get stomped on in the future, and went ahead with their development with the assumption that if they can get their technology out widely enough, then the public demand to protect their wireless data transfer would allow them to ram their grab of the bandwidth down the FCC's throat. And now the first device that creates interference in that band has appeared.
The situation is analogous to your owning a plot of land and allowing people to set up tents and live there if they sign a contract agreeing that they know you can develop that land any time you want to, and that you can revoke their tenancy at any time -- and then having the tenants object when you actually do develop the land and start kicking people out.
Online bookstores are great, if you already know what book you want. But, one of the biggest attractions that used bookstores have for me is the thousands of books that I've never heard of.
The two complement each other. A used-book store gives you the opportunity to wander around and find books by authors and on subjects you haven't seen before; an online bookstore gives you the ability to make wide sweeps over inventory to find specific books that you're looking for.
There tend to be fairly hard and fast limits on the size of a used-book store, based on the local population -- the point at which the tradeoff of the cost of the space the books take up versus the value of the books and how fast they move. An online bookstore is more efficient, because it at once has a larger population buying books, and less need to have them displayed for the customer -- as long as the staff can find the book to ship it to the buyer, there's enough space. But as bsartist says, you can't idly browse through an online bookstore reading jacket or cover blurbs; you have to have some idea of what you want.
You're still not getting any more bandwidth than your 56k pipe will allow. If you have a network connection open, and you're not sending any data on it, that bandwidth is gone; your pipe can transfer a maximum of X bits per second, and you're never going to exceed that. What fraction of that maximum you get depends on the network conditions, but you can't 'bank' unused bandwidth for later.
And as long as you can control the player at the device level, someone will come up with software that will be able to read the data off the disk and write it, sans DRM code or with a nulled-out protection, to another disk.
no really? is it the ink? or the technology in the cartridges?
It's because HP patented their ink-jet cartridge designs. Therefore, unless HP licenses the patent, you won't see any other companies producing them, and HP can charge what they want for them. With printers like Epson's, the ink cartridge is just a tank for the ink, rather than having the print head built into the cartridge like HP's, so you see third-party ink tanks; I buy mine (Epson 980) for ~$7 for black and ~$9 for color (with discounts for buying three or more at a time).
On the other hand, as long as you don't let the cartridge run dry (which will damage the print head), you can refill HP cartridges about a half-dozen times before the print head wears enough to be noticeable. The same place I get replacement Epson tanks from also sells refill kits; a refill kit for the HP 700-1300 series cartridges runs ~$30 and has 2oz each of cyan, magenta, and yellow (enough for 3, 6, or 12 refills, depending on which size color cartridge you're using) and 4oz of black (enough for 3, 5, or 6 refills, depending on which size black cartridge you're using). The same quantity of ink for refilling tanks for my Epson 980 is about $6 cheaper (4 black, 3 color refills), because HP uses pigmented black ink, which is more expensive than the dye-based black ink the Epson printers use.
So you can run the cost of operation down, as long as you're willing to make the effort to load more ink into your existing cartridges.
Is it just me, or does anyone else want to avoid paying $30+ for a controller you can only use for one game, on top of the $50+ price tag for the game itself?
Some people are really into making it as real as possible. For myself, the functional G-suit and oxygen system are clearly over the top, but some people are really into the whole gestalt.
Slashdot Mirror
Start with a radio on a chip, add a small circuit to hardwire a chip ID and broadcast it on demand, and you've got a built-in mechanism for locating every piece of hardware with an Intel chip.
In general, though, it seems as if most national anthems are overly florid and/or pretentious. A good example is the anthem of the old Soviet Union: Kind of ironic, in view of historical events. But you can say the same of 'Deutschland Uber Alles', and probably dozens more anthems whose singers were overtaken by history. I wonder how future generations will judge the U.S.'s anthem.
The obvious moral from this is that the preview button is your friend; use it early and often, and read the documentation before you embarrass yourself.
Last time I looked, there weren't many open-source projects that could afford to pay graphic designers to sit around between brief flurries of developing the latest chrome-riddled incomprehensible website navigation design, and getting graphic designers to do up a pretty website for the project is the last thing that the project developers think about while working on the project. Given a choice between functional and pretty, open-source projects are going to go with functional and plow the effort that would have gone into pretty back into the project.
And they're making Windows open-source...
I haven't seen that disposable income has taken any abrupt jump in the last year, so with the amount of money available to spend on entertainment, if DVD sales are surging, that means that other forms of entertainment are going to have less money spent on them -- and that means that CD sales are going to take a hit. But the RIAA won't accept that; the premise that the market will provide them with monotonically increasing sales is Holy Writ to them, so any drop in their sales must, a priori, mean that piracy is the reason people aren't buying CDs.
Look at Iris-Scan Technology; the biggest limitation in the current technology is a maximum 1-meter distance from the camera to the eye, but I'm sure that with some of the advances in CCD design being worked on, the resolution problem will be solved.
I'm surprised that a more low-tech solution wasn't referenced -- full-coverage contacts. Regular-sized contacts, even the colored contacts, would be detectable from the artifacting of reflection at the edge of the contact lens, but full-coverage lenses, that are already used for bestial and other outre' eye effects in movies (Data's off-color eyes in ST:TNG, for example), would avoid that problem. With full-coverage contacts, you could even 'forge' iris patterns, creating a market for people equipped with an iris scanner who walk through crowds 'tagging' people to collect iris patterns for sale as false ID patterns.
... the Me-263. It never went into production, and the Germans only tested it as a glider, but it was test-flown under power by the Russians after WWII, and the design was reworked into the I-270 (a larger aircraft with unswept wings).
It looks like the big advance that XCOR has made is the development of a much safer and more reliable motor than the hypergolic-fueled bombs developed during and after WWII. With more than fifty years of technological advances behind them. Amazing.
A better hack of Gator would be to dike off all the code that contacts the Gator servers, downloads the ads, and displays them, so that not only will your browsing habits not be sent to them, but you'll never even get the popups. Then Gator will just do what people install it for -- saving passwords -- instead of shoving itself in your face all the time.
One OS to find them
One OS to bring them all
And in the darkness bind them
In the land of Redmond where the shadows lie.
-5, Clueless.
If you're using mechanical masking for all of the semiconductor layers, why would you suddenly turn brain-dead and use photo-masking for the metal layers?
Leaving aside the possibility that the original poster was using the terms in the sense of 'descendants', rather than actual offspring (a la the Daughters of the American Revolution, an organization that would be extinct if 'daughters' were interpreted literally.
However, if you're watching the mass lobbying attack by Disney/Sony/RIAA, et al., what they're proposing as a 'solution' to copyright violation would create a de facto non-terminating copyright, allowing them to milk the public for all eternity. See the various threads here on
Depending on which story you read, it's variously attributed to Aristotle, Socrates, Epicurus, and Democritus.
As I recall from the various 'technology of coaster design' programs on TDC, A&E, et al., the various companies' coaster-design software will show the induced G force at any point on the track -- on an amorphous object in the coaster car. The dummies allow the coaster builders to record the transient torque forces on the riders' extremities during the ride, as well as other accelerations.
As an example of the difference between theoretical G forces on a mass in a seat and the Real World, take Flashback at Six Flags Magic Mountain. That coaster is acutely painful for me to ride. Not because of the G forces, but because the design of the coaster rolls the riders back and forth sharply, and the pull-down chest harness has the hinge pins conveniently placed for my ears to hit them when the roll accelerations pull my head from side to side. A fundamental design problem, and one that won't be detected by G-force computations based on the track layout.
As was pointed out in the original discussion on this subject, the FCC granted access to the spectrum bandwidth used for Wi-Fi with the explicit caveat that it was non-exclusive -- Wi-Fi had no proprietary rights to the band, other devices may cause interference in that band, and that anyone using that band for data transfer could not file any suit or collect damages because of interference from other devices. The people pushing Wi-Fi knew that it was likely that their bandwidth would get stomped on in the future, and went ahead with their development with the assumption that if they can get their technology out widely enough, then the public demand to protect their wireless data transfer would allow them to ram their grab of the bandwidth down the FCC's throat. And now the first device that creates interference in that band has appeared.
The situation is analogous to your owning a plot of land and allowing people to set up tents and live there if they sign a contract agreeing that they know you can develop that land any time you want to, and that you can revoke their tenancy at any time -- and then having the tenants object when you actually do develop the land and start kicking people out.
The two complement each other. A used-book store gives you the opportunity to wander around and find books by authors and on subjects you haven't seen before; an online bookstore gives you the ability to make wide sweeps over inventory to find specific books that you're looking for.
There tend to be fairly hard and fast limits on the size of a used-book store, based on the local population -- the point at which the tradeoff of the cost of the space the books take up versus the value of the books and how fast they move. An online bookstore is more efficient, because it at once has a larger population buying books, and less need to have them displayed for the customer -- as long as the staff can find the book to ship it to the buyer, there's enough space. But as bsartist says, you can't idly browse through an online bookstore reading jacket or cover blurbs; you have to have some idea of what you want.
You're still not getting any more bandwidth than your 56k pipe will allow. If you have a network connection open, and you're not sending any data on it, that bandwidth is gone; your pipe can transfer a maximum of X bits per second, and you're never going to exceed that. What fraction of that maximum you get depends on the network conditions, but you can't 'bank' unused bandwidth for later.
And as long as you can control the player at the device level, someone will come up with software that will be able to read the data off the disk and write it, sans DRM code or with a nulled-out protection, to another disk.
It's because HP patented their ink-jet cartridge designs. Therefore, unless HP licenses the patent, you won't see any other companies producing them, and HP can charge what they want for them. With printers like Epson's, the ink cartridge is just a tank for the ink, rather than having the print head built into the cartridge like HP's, so you see third-party ink tanks; I buy mine (Epson 980) for ~$7 for black and ~$9 for color (with discounts for buying three or more at a time).
On the other hand, as long as you don't let the cartridge run dry (which will damage the print head), you can refill HP cartridges about a half-dozen times before the print head wears enough to be noticeable. The same place I get replacement Epson tanks from also sells refill kits; a refill kit for the HP 700-1300 series cartridges runs ~$30 and has 2oz each of cyan, magenta, and yellow (enough for 3, 6, or 12 refills, depending on which size color cartridge you're using) and 4oz of black (enough for 3, 5, or 6 refills, depending on which size black cartridge you're using). The same quantity of ink for refilling tanks for my Epson 980 is about $6 cheaper (4 black, 3 color refills), because HP uses pigmented black ink, which is more expensive than the dye-based black ink the Epson printers use.
So you can run the cost of operation down, as long as you're willing to make the effort to load more ink into your existing cartridges.
Some people are really into making it as real as possible. For myself, the functional G-suit and oxygen system are clearly over the top, but some people are really into the whole gestalt.