...you can buy cubesats off the shelf now, and for less than you might think. (Although I haven't inquired about the price for professional installation...)
The little country might not care, but the bigger country the other end of that broadband pipe is connected to, might care. It's bad enough having to explain to your roommates that their Internet is cut off because you got caught warezing. Try being the guy who has to explain how you got your entire COUNTRY's internet cut off...
Why bother with WaReZ? if you really wanted to mess with them, the economies of scale are such that one could just pass the originals around by mail. The upside is no one has figured out a way to make this illegal (yet). A $15 DVD could be copied hundreds of times over before it was too scratched up for use. Those who subscribed to the pirating system could chip in some nominal monthly amount to cover the cost of piping new/replacement media into the system, ensuring it would perpetuate itself forever! I wonder what the world would be like if such a service existed;-)
There is a 'trick' to it, but it's more of a hack around USB's limitations than an explicit lockdown ploy by Apple. There's not a cryptographic lockout chip in the Apple chargers or anything. They signal the charge current (as high as 1-2A, while the USB spec only allows 500mA) by tweaking the pull-up resistor values on the D+/D- lines which ordinarily allow the host to identify lo/full/hi speed devices.
If you have an older/unofficial/DIY charger which shows 'Unsupported', you can add 4 ordinary resistors to make it supported (and limit the charge rate, if needed): http://www.ladyada.net/make/mintyboost/icharge.html
The part being quoted (description), while pretty clearly talking vague nonsense, actually has zero bearing on the patent itself. When determining whether or not a patent is infringed, the Claims section is the only part worth even looking at. Pretty much the only time the description can have any effect on a patent is if an undefined or loosely-defined term is used in the claims; the examiners/court/whomever is then generally allowed to use the definition, if any, present in the description.
The 2nd independent claim is:
2. A computer-based method for aiding a user in assembling a customized body of information from a larger body of available information segments, the method comprising displaying a set of labels, each label providing an abbreviated indication of information content of a corresponding one of said available information segments in said larger body, enabling a user to point to individual labels in said set using an electronic pointing technique, for each label to which said user points, displaying to the user, for previewing, information content of the corresponding segment, simultaneously while displaying said information content of a segment corresponding to a label to which the user is pointing, displaying information content for a segment corresponding to a label to which the user had previously pointed.
I can't even parse that, but it seems to come closer to describing a rollover for a suitably creative interpretation, IFF the rollover shows an abbreviated label/category normally and switches to a more detailed subset of what that category contains (auto-popping-out submenu, pictures of multiple products in a category). Still, it's a pretty big stretch. (OTOH, there are 76 more claims I didn't bother to read...)
From what I saw of the pictures, it had only 1 of the required 3 elements, the battery pack. Where's the blinking LED and the 7-segment digital countdown?
Interesting point you bring up - obviously, touching pretty much any exterior-accessible surface of the car is legally clear for these guys; they have to really get in there to jam a GPS up above the tailpipe. Reaching through an open window to pull the hood release would maybe be off-limits, but reaching up underneath the engine compartment and giving the cable it's attached to a little tug...
Heh, when described like that, it sounds suspiciously like they are successfully extracting zero-point money from the quantum foam. No wonder physicists and engineers have such a hate on for finance people:-)
Because it doesn't exist yet. FTFA: "IMDb told the team that if a movie is not set up with a production company with a history of theatrically released movies, getting it listed at the early stages of development would not be possible."
I agree wholeheartedly if you're using something in an industrial setting (besides the obvious safety concern, your robot's dance moves may be a trade secret!), but is that what Arduino ethernet shields really are targeting? As you said, there are already plenty of existing, commercial hardware products for that niche. Personally, I'm not worried about my neighbor hacking in and spoofing data from my homemade garden light meter. (If it came to that, 2048-bit AES won't stop them walking over to put some chewing gum on the sensor...)
Those with a programming and hardware background, too:-) Once you get used to the pin-numbering abstraction, it's a real suck-saver for quick n dirty / one-off / non-production projects. The entire Arduino project, toolchain and most users' projects are open-source, and it's its own bootloader! One of the Mechies calls up and needs a quick test fixture to cycle a valve once per minute and log a sensor reading for the next several weeks. I can grab someone's microSD-FAT library off the internet and cobble something together in the time it takes to figure out whose desk the PIC programmer is hiding under this week and where the license code for their C (not C++) compiler went.
Careful with that. I recently rebuilt my broken not-quite-5-years-old S*ars (rebadged appliances from Whirl***/Electrol**/etc.) washing machine...on opening it, find that it is designed with about 50-100lb. of cinderblocks (yes, really) bolted onto the drum to help stabilize it during the spin cycle.
Shh! Don't give 'em any ideas! On the bits thing, either. Next we'll see the marketing claims of 120GB/mo change to the much more favorable 960Gb(its)/mo... (they'll be hard-drive manufacturer "marketing" gigabits too...)
This isn't a problem that can be blamed on software or any specific game, driving the hardware as designed. Unfortunately, to "fix" it for good takes some elbow grease, as it seems every videocard manufacturer is following the same poor-tolerances-optimized manufacturing scheme. Take out the videocard (if removable), remove the fiddly spring-clips that hold the heatsink onto the GPU, peel those silly rubber 'bumpons' from the corners and throw them in the trash. Seriously. While you're at it, make sure the idiots didn't leave a rough GPU contact surface of the heatsink, or worse, paint this surface (if either, sand off any paint and lap flat). Remove 99% of that giant wad of OEM thermal grease left on the chip. I'd recommend trashing those springclips too and use a couple 4-40 bolts (lightly finger tight only!) to ensure firm but gentle contact to the GPU. Remember that thermal compound (no matter how "good" thermal compound, diamond-silver-nanotube or whatever) is a crutch for filling nanoscale imperfections in mating surfaces; it is NOT a substitute for metal-to-metal contact.
The weak-springclips-and-bumpons thing is a manufacturing hack to facilitate machine assembly of cheap heatsinks onto cards, where the thickness of the heatsink can vary considerably and the assembly bot can unknowingly crush the GPU with tens-hundreds of lbs blocked force due to a too-thick heatsink contacting sooner than expected. To avoid this, manufacturers intentionally stand off the heatsink from the GPU up to half a mm or more using these rubber pads, then use a thick blob of white thermal grease to make up the difference. The conductivity of this stuff is poor (relative to metal-metal contact) as it is, moving to worthless in a year or two when it begins to dry up and peel/shrink away from the GPU.
Heh, I've heard it the other way around: never use compressed air to hose out your computer because it packs all the dust and crap down into expansion slots and dozens of other places it's never coming out of again. If you use shop air (not canned air) from a humid place, it can sometimes carry significant liquid condensation as well.
Personally, I just take my PCs to work every year or so, crank the shop air up to 11 (120+PSI?) and let 'em have it. I assume I'll be replacing the machine in a few years anyway (before dust packing affects me personally), and that any metal bits bent and any SMDs blown off in the process weren't that important anyway:-) Just be sure to hold any fans in place while blowing 120PSI of air thru them, else you'll find a very quick method of inducing premature bearing failures (when your 4k-rpm northbridge fan hits 150k-rpm).
Without stereotyping any more than necessary, and lacking any detail about the projects you have in mind, I'm going to guess that with your background (CE+CS) you're probably working more toward the digital side of things - that is, you're more likely to need the scope for debugging why your I2C transactions are failing than checking if your homebrew PLL is working. In this case, rather than a fancy scope you might be best off with an 8- or 16-channel logic analyzer that happens to include basic scope functionalities. Since the LA will ideally be sending 1 bit/channel/sample (ideally less, if the designers were clever), a PC-based device might make sense and perform reasonably well. Key things to look for here is whether the software can be set up to decode common bus protocols (RS232/SPI/I2C/SMbus/etc), or at least let you plug in your own e.g. python script to do so. Few things suck more than diagnosing a protocol bug by running your eyes and cursor over the traces going "one, zero, zero, one..." to determine that your microcontroller is occasionally misreporting the length of the bus transfer that will follow.
Alas, by 'resources' the article is referring to page elements. Still waiting for the extension that can throttle on a per-plugin basis (*cough*FLASH*cough*) to say, 10% CPU across all its running instances.
I have ADHD, you insensitive clod:-) But seriously. It's sad but true that some people, myself included, are much more easily defocused than the general population by things that blink, dance, flicker, float around and play music/speech while trying to read text. I for one can't wait until disallowing animated/flash/noisemaking ad-blocking is an ADA violation (or insert country-specific accessibility law here).
That said, I would have no issue with 'render off-screen' as opposed to outright blocking, so the site would still be paid for the impression without giving someone an epileptic fit.
Where did you get the idea that 'open source' == 'free'?;-) The deliverable is still just design files in most cases; it's not like open hardware folks put out buckets full of assembled PCBs in subway stations. (good thing, too, because in some cities you'd get arrested for that...)
It's $100 for 100in^2 (that's a lot of space!) for 2-layer. In 6 years I've only once had a pressing need for more layers. Obviously, $100 is definitely not free (it's tangible goods and labor after all), but if you have a few friends who want boards, your price per design drops pretty quickly. BatchPCB does exactly this.
There's plenty of design space left for people who are not making GHz PCs and cell phones. If you're prototyping and your needs are not that extravagent, your cost is ~ 99 cents, and you can build a machine for it yourself from an open-source design and readily available parts:-) (mine was ~ $200 and the gas to get to home depot and back).
Slashdot Mirror
...you can buy cubesats off the shelf now, and for less than you might think. (Although I haven't inquired about the price for professional installation...)
The little country might not care, but the bigger country the other end of that broadband pipe is connected to, might care. It's bad enough having to explain to your roommates that their Internet is cut off because you got caught warezing. Try being the guy who has to explain how you got your entire COUNTRY's internet cut off...
Why bother with WaReZ? if you really wanted to mess with them, the economies of scale are such that one could just pass the originals around by mail. The upside is no one has figured out a way to make this illegal (yet). A $15 DVD could be copied hundreds of times over before it was too scratched up for use. Those who subscribed to the pirating system could chip in some nominal monthly amount to cover the cost of piping new/replacement media into the system, ensuring it would perpetuate itself forever! I wonder what the world would be like if such a service existed ;-)
There is a 'trick' to it, but it's more of a hack around USB's limitations than an explicit lockdown ploy by Apple. There's not a cryptographic lockout chip in the Apple chargers or anything. They signal the charge current (as high as 1-2A, while the USB spec only allows 500mA) by tweaking the pull-up resistor values on the D+/D- lines which ordinarily allow the host to identify lo/full/hi speed devices.
If you have an older/unofficial/DIY charger which shows 'Unsupported', you can add 4 ordinary resistors to make it supported (and limit the charge rate, if needed):
http://www.ladyada.net/make/mintyboost/icharge.html
The part being quoted (description), while pretty clearly talking vague nonsense, actually has zero bearing on the patent itself. When determining whether or not a patent is infringed, the Claims section is the only part worth even looking at. Pretty much the only time the description can have any effect on a patent is if an undefined or loosely-defined term is used in the claims; the examiners/court/whomever is then generally allowed to use the definition, if any, present in the description.
The 2nd independent claim is:
2. A computer-based method for aiding a user in assembling a customized body of information from a larger body of available information segments, the method comprising
displaying a set of labels, each label providing an abbreviated indication of information content of a corresponding one of said available information segments in said larger body, enabling a user to point to individual labels in said set using an electronic pointing technique, for each label to which said user points, displaying to the user, for previewing, information content of the corresponding segment, simultaneously while displaying said information content of a segment corresponding to a label to which the user is pointing, displaying information content for a segment corresponding to a label to which the user had previously pointed.
I can't even parse that, but it seems to come closer to describing a rollover for a suitably creative interpretation, IFF the rollover shows an abbreviated label/category normally and switches to a more detailed subset of what that category contains (auto-popping-out submenu, pictures of multiple products in a category). Still, it's a pretty big stretch. (OTOH, there are 76 more claims I didn't bother to read...)
From what I saw of the pictures, it had only 1 of the required 3 elements, the battery pack. Where's the blinking LED and the 7-segment digital countdown?
Interesting point you bring up - obviously, touching pretty much any exterior-accessible surface of the car is legally clear for these guys; they have to really get in there to jam a GPS up above the tailpipe. Reaching through an open window to pull the hood release would maybe be off-limits, but reaching up underneath the engine compartment and giving the cable it's attached to a little tug...
"the system may require the user to follow activities that generate a certain amount of advertising ... before the program will continue."
Trans:
"You must punch _7_ more monkeys to continue. You have punched: _3_ monkeys."
Obligatory Soviet Russia: "It's 10 o'clock. Do you know where your parents are?"
Heh, when described like that, it sounds suspiciously like they are successfully extracting zero-point money from the quantum foam. No wonder physicists and engineers have such a hate on for finance people :-)
Because it doesn't exist yet. FTFA: "IMDb told the team that if a movie is not set up with a production company with a history of theatrically released movies, getting it listed at the early stages of development would not be possible."
I agree wholeheartedly if you're using something in an industrial setting (besides the obvious safety concern, your robot's dance moves may be a trade secret!), but is that what Arduino ethernet shields really are targeting? As you said, there are already plenty of existing, commercial hardware products for that niche. Personally, I'm not worried about my neighbor hacking in and spoofing data from my homemade garden light meter. (If it came to that, 2048-bit AES won't stop them walking over to put some chewing gum on the sensor...)
Those with a programming and hardware background, too :-) Once you get used to the pin-numbering abstraction, it's a real suck-saver for quick n dirty / one-off / non-production projects. The entire Arduino project, toolchain and most users' projects are open-source, and it's its own bootloader! One of the Mechies calls up and needs a quick test fixture to cycle a valve once per minute and log a sensor reading for the next several weeks. I can grab someone's microSD-FAT library off the internet and cobble something together in the time it takes to figure out whose desk the PIC programmer is hiding under this week and where the license code for their C (not C++) compiler went.
Careful with that. I recently rebuilt my broken not-quite-5-years-old S*ars (rebadged appliances from Whirl***/Electrol**/etc.) washing machine...on opening it, find that it is designed with about 50-100lb. of cinderblocks (yes, really) bolted onto the drum to help stabilize it during the spin cycle.
Wow. This might be the most literal example of the nominative use defense in trademark infringement claims.
Shh! Don't give 'em any ideas! On the bits thing, either. Next we'll see the marketing claims of 120GB/mo change to the much more favorable 960Gb(its)/mo... (they'll be hard-drive manufacturer "marketing" gigabits too...)
Are you saying one is the mouth and the other is the anus?
This isn't a problem that can be blamed on software or any specific game, driving the hardware as designed. Unfortunately, to "fix" it for good takes some elbow grease, as it seems every videocard manufacturer is following the same poor-tolerances-optimized manufacturing scheme. Take out the videocard (if removable), remove the fiddly spring-clips that hold the heatsink onto the GPU, peel those silly rubber 'bumpons' from the corners and throw them in the trash. Seriously. While you're at it, make sure the idiots didn't leave a rough GPU contact surface of the heatsink, or worse, paint this surface (if either, sand off any paint and lap flat). Remove 99% of that giant wad of OEM thermal grease left on the chip. I'd recommend trashing those springclips too and use a couple 4-40 bolts (lightly finger tight only!) to ensure firm but gentle contact to the GPU. Remember that thermal compound (no matter how "good" thermal compound, diamond-silver-nanotube or whatever) is a crutch for filling nanoscale imperfections in mating surfaces; it is NOT a substitute for metal-to-metal contact.
The weak-springclips-and-bumpons thing is a manufacturing hack to facilitate machine assembly of cheap heatsinks onto cards, where the thickness of the heatsink can vary considerably and the assembly bot can unknowingly crush the GPU with tens-hundreds of lbs blocked force due to a too-thick heatsink contacting sooner than expected. To avoid this, manufacturers intentionally stand off the heatsink from the GPU up to half a mm or more using these rubber pads, then use a thick blob of white thermal grease to make up the difference. The conductivity of this stuff is poor (relative to metal-metal contact) as it is, moving to worthless in a year or two when it begins to dry up and peel/shrink away from the GPU.
Heh, I've heard it the other way around: never use compressed air to hose out your computer because it packs all the dust and crap down into expansion slots and dozens of other places it's never coming out of again. If you use shop air (not canned air) from a humid place, it can sometimes carry significant liquid condensation as well.
Personally, I just take my PCs to work every year or so, crank the shop air up to 11 (120+PSI?) and let 'em have it. I assume I'll be replacing the machine in a few years anyway (before dust packing affects me personally), and that any metal bits bent and any SMDs blown off in the process weren't that important anyway :-) Just be sure to hold any fans in place while blowing 120PSI of air thru them, else you'll find a very quick method of inducing premature bearing failures (when your 4k-rpm northbridge fan hits 150k-rpm).
Without stereotyping any more than necessary, and lacking any detail about the projects you have in mind, I'm going to guess that with your background (CE+CS) you're probably working more toward the digital side of things - that is, you're more likely to need the scope for debugging why your I2C transactions are failing than checking if your homebrew PLL is working. In this case, rather than a fancy scope you might be best off with an 8- or 16-channel logic analyzer that happens to include basic scope functionalities. Since the LA will ideally be sending 1 bit/channel/sample (ideally less, if the designers were clever), a PC-based device might make sense and perform reasonably well. Key things to look for here is whether the software can be set up to decode common bus protocols (RS232/SPI/I2C/SMbus/etc), or at least let you plug in your own e.g. python script to do so. Few things suck more than diagnosing a protocol bug by running your eyes and cursor over the traces going "one, zero, zero, one..." to determine that your microcontroller is occasionally misreporting the length of the bus transfer that will follow.
(Not to mention block in-browser access to specific resources such as my soundcard...)
Alas, by 'resources' the article is referring to page elements. Still waiting for the extension that can throttle on a per-plugin basis (*cough*FLASH*cough*) to say, 10% CPU across all its running instances.
I have ADHD, you insensitive clod :-)
But seriously. It's sad but true that some people, myself included, are much more easily defocused than the general population by things that blink, dance, flicker, float around and play music/speech while trying to read text. I for one can't wait until disallowing animated/flash/noisemaking ad-blocking is an ADA violation (or insert country-specific accessibility law here).
That said, I would have no issue with 'render off-screen' as opposed to outright blocking, so the site would still be paid for the impression without giving someone an epileptic fit.
Where did you get the idea that 'open source' == 'free'? ;-) The deliverable is still just design files in most cases; it's not like open hardware folks put out buckets full of assembled PCBs in subway stations. (good thing, too, because in some cities you'd get arrested for that...)
Extraordinary? For work prototyping I usually get mine here: http://goldphoenixpcb.biz/quote2.php
It's $100 for 100in^2 (that's a lot of space!) for 2-layer. In 6 years I've only once had a pressing need for more layers. Obviously, $100 is definitely not free (it's tangible goods and labor after all), but if you have a few friends who want boards, your price per design drops pretty quickly. BatchPCB does exactly this.
There's plenty of design space left for people who are not making GHz PCs and cell phones. If you're prototyping and your needs are not that extravagent, your cost is ~ 99 cents, and you can build a machine for it yourself from an open-source design and readily available parts :-) (mine was ~ $200 and the gas to get to home depot and back).