that's pretty much the best idea. cammo at night and you cannot even easily detect motion for the camera. however, with infrared, the target will stick out like a sore thumb. i think this guy's on to something that the military will be distinctly interested in.
i mean, he's effectively done the hard work. now just clean up his design a bit, write it all to an FPGA or (maybe) even a PIC and you're off to the races with a nice, neat embedded package.
Watch out with getting a speaker with very low impedance though
not only those effects, but 2-Ohm load impedance horribly alters the output sound. Such a low load generates all kinds of nasty higher order harmonics that degrade the sound and the beta-droop that those loads introduce into the amplifier circuit will eventually not only overheat the circuitry, but begin to change its quiescient point and make the equipment fail prematurely.
espescially if they intend for people to use the credits in the iTunes store. If people just use the $50 to download music, Apple is out virtually nothing.
my fiancee is studying to be a CPA. Apparently, in the legal jargon, you're not only not "of age" prior to being 18, you're considered an "infant." how's that for an ego boost.
when i saw that wording in her study materials, i about dropped my coffee.
very well said, man! I cannot agree enough. i've worked in several different IT departments over the past several years, in addition to my own freelance consulting work.
the one constant, scary thing that i keep seeing among young, naive admins is the tendency to just apply patches blindly without regard to the ramifications. somehow, these admins assume that because a patch is said to 'fix' one thing that it will not break anything else.
that's one reason that it irritates me *so* much when people blindly tell folks to upgrade to XPSP2. sure, SP2 has done a lot to fix a lot of various problems, but i've also seen it break a lot of apps, including many that are not on Microsoft known-to-break list (such as Cadence OrCAD SPICE suite).
11 days is not an unreasonable amount of time to roll a patch out to test box to see what changes it makes and how it affects stability. if that's why the supportfirefox.com team hadn't rolled it out yet, i commend them not condemn them.
i was just thinking that it's sexy enough that Mr Jobs might be interested enough to buy a whole bunch of them and bundle them with future macs since they always have the cool sexy hardware.
that's really silly. Here's why: it's silly because "1-click" and "reminding customers" type patents are nothing "special" on the web. I'm sure that anyone else out there who has spent any time developing interactive sites for the web has had those light bulbs go off in their head a time or two.
Just because no one has ever patented it before doesn't mean it's unique. That would be like General Motors or Ford trying to patent "a circular object used to facilitate the transportation of people and goods." They're not going to find any prior art protections because the usage of THE WHEEL is common knowledge and public domain information.
Actually, it's even simpler than that. The game got an M rating, folks. The kids we're trying to protect shouldn't even be seeing the material in the first place.
If the store sold it to someone under age, then shame on them and fine the hell out of them.
If the parents bought the game *for* the kid, then shame on the parents and I don't want to hear you bitch when your kid shoots up a 7-11 or dies of some horrible STD.
Basically, we're all sitting here arguing the finer points of the moral debate when that debate has long ago been settled. The ESRB doesn't approve of either form of content being in the hands of minors and that's why the M and AO ratings exist.
What we *ought* to be arguing about is how/why the content is getting into the hands of minors and how to combat it.
I don't know about your mileage, but on my ASUS board the ASUS Windows-based update utility routinely corrupts the BIOS during transfer and folks end up with mobos that are four legs up.
This happened to me recently on my K8N-DLX when ASUS's servers were down and my only option was to grab the Windows utility from their German mirror. The Windows flash utility 'appeared' to flash properly, but upon reboot I began to see graphical anomolies, etc that ultimately ended up in what amounted to a White Screen Of Death.
I powered the computer down, waited overnight until ASUS's primary servers came back up, downloaded the DOS utility on a different PC and then tried again on the machine with the screwed up BIOS.
Using the exact same image file that the Windows utility had used, this time things worked flawlessly and I've had not a single problem from the BIOS since. That was enough to convince me that unless one can access the BIOS in *real* mode, there's no business accessing it all.
I've got a Silicon Image 3114 controller on my mobo and XP and 2k do not have native support for the controller. In fact, without the driver, Windows wouldn't even know the controller was there, let alone what to do with it.
Thus, the only way around this is to have the proper driver on floppy and tell XP to use it.
That, I can stand. The next part is what I cannot...
XP and 2k (and from what I've heard, Longhorn too) actually POLL the floppy interrupt and access the floppy controller explicitly during the install process. WTF!? Why doesnt microsoft just turn that kind of control over to the BIOS and just use whatever device the BIOS is telling it 'A:' refers to? That would make *so* much more sense and allow me to use my USB flash drive for the appropriate driver files.
While I agree with both your points and the points brought up in the Ask Slashdot question, I couldn't resist the opportunity to point out your misuse of the word 'raise' here.
Look it up, 'rear' as a verb in this sense is used for bringing up children. 'raise' is used in this sense for growing crops and animals.
My high school English teachers absolutely *loved* to nail us on that one, so I speak from experience.:-D
Really? I know that sub-6-meter GPS resolution was long protected by the US military for security reasons. When was that range opened up for public consumption?
that's what always annoyed me about Sci-Fi buying the rights to seaQuest DSV. They bought the show from NBC (and also, Earth2) and promised the community that they'd be producing new episodes and that all of the cast had signed on, etc.
However, we have yet to see any new episodes and it is unlikely we ever will now given the divergent paths of the actors' careers and the untimely death of Jonathan Brandis.
I suppose you could do a piece-meal Windows -- start with the NT kernel and add functions as you want them or as applications you want to use demand them (ideally the apps would be written to a certain open API so you could install a different chunk of code (ie firefox instead of IE) if so desired) but in all honesty, does anyone REALLY want that? You instantly made computing much more complex and for what purpose?
This was fairly popular during the days of Windows 3.11 The Calmira shell replacement for Windows 3.11 is still very popular among people who have relatively weak hardware. In fact, using Calmira on Windows 3.11 has about the same niche feel that Linux had in its early days. It's even spawned a bit of a side-market where people are either developing custom apps or porting existing apps back to Windows 3.11 so that they don't have to deal with Windows XP, et al.
I've seen WinAmp back-ported, as well as other multimedia and internet-related apps.
As a computer engineer, I am very glad that I chose to attend university. After all, in this discipline, it's rare to be able to advance very far in the modern day without a solid academic background. Of course, Jobs, Woz, and Gates got away with it, but things weren't as robust then as they are now, but I digress...
My younger brother, however, really doesn't belong in college. He attended several semesters (as a EE) and decided he didn't like it.
He later decided that he'd rather go to a trade school for auto maintenance and custom fitting (much like the folks on American Chopper) and get into that field.
I say more power to him! University is not for everyone.
Hell, I see too many parents saying 'go to college and find yourself' and the sad thing is that many graduates have no more clear idea who they are post college than they did before college. If I were that parent, I would've rather they stay home on there ass, then waste my $30+K on college while sitting on their ass.
as an electrical/computer engineer, I definitely applaud the fellow for a really excellent proof of concept.
however, I'm failing to see the practical impact of his work. really, per his example of the two designers, how often will one really need to share workspace with a partner on physically the same terminal?
i suppose I could see a bit of application in the real of software like X Windows and have the lenticular lens allow shift between multple desktops, but even that is stretching it a bit.
anyone think of anything PRACTICAL this is good for, rather than his fairly optimistic view?
No, they shouldn't be. We don't expect our cars, sophisticated pieces of engineering that they are, to just sit and work like TVs and VCRs do. We all internally know that every once in a while we've gotta get the oil changed and check the fluid levels.
Even if we don't do it ourselves (ie, we take it to a shop), we know that it needs to be serviced and we have the appropriate work done.
PCs are the same thing. They require periodic maintenance to get rid of viruses and spyware and the like, as well as uninstalling grandma beatrices crapware program that she insisted on installing because Yahoo! told her it was a good idea.
The bottom line is that PCs are not toasters or TVs or even DVD players. They are sophisticated pieces of machinery and if the owner is too dumb to realize that and take care of it, then they shouldn't own one.
thought... we require drivers licenses to operate cars the benefit of traffic safety. maybe we should require PC licenses for internet safety.
I worked at Office Depot during that time frame, where we sold eMachines as soon as they came out. And, while they were much cheaper than the mainstream brands, they were not in the $300 ballpark (at least not on the sticker).
We sold primarily HP and Compaq machines to most consumers. For a given configuration, the HP or Compaq machine would range from ~$1300 to ~$1700.
Comparably, the eMachines model with approximately the same configuration would be ~$700 on the sticker. However, if you signed for eighteen billion years of AOL and some other promotions, you could get rebates that would knock it down to about $300. But, there wa absolutely no way is $300 flat on the sticker.
Slashdot Mirror
but if there is NO hardware HDCP support, a new driver cannot magically make it appear.
that's pretty much the best idea. cammo at night and you cannot even easily detect motion for the camera. however, with infrared, the target will stick out like a sore thumb. i think this guy's on to something that the military will be distinctly interested in.
i mean, he's effectively done the hard work. now just clean up his design a bit, write it all to an FPGA or (maybe) even a PIC and you're off to the races with a nice, neat embedded package.
...last night we finally switched over to clean HTML 4.01 with a full compliment of CSS...
i think he meant a full COMPLEMENT of CSS
Watch out with getting a speaker with very low impedance though
not only those effects, but 2-Ohm load impedance horribly alters the output sound. Such a low load generates all kinds of nasty higher order harmonics that degrade the sound and the beta-droop that those loads introduce into the amplifier circuit will eventually not only overheat the circuitry, but begin to change its quiescient point and make the equipment fail prematurely.
espescially if they intend for people to use the credits in the iTunes store. If people just use the $50 to download music, Apple is out virtually nothing.
hit her up, too...
http://clinton.senate.gov/contact/webform.cfm
my fiancee is studying to be a CPA. Apparently, in the legal jargon, you're not only not "of age" prior to being 18, you're considered an "infant." how's that for an ego boost.
when i saw that wording in her study materials, i about dropped my coffee.
very well said, man! I cannot agree enough. i've worked in several different IT departments over the past several years, in addition to my own freelance consulting work.
the one constant, scary thing that i keep seeing among young, naive admins is the tendency to just apply patches blindly without regard to the ramifications. somehow, these admins assume that because a patch is said to 'fix' one thing that it will not break anything else.
that's one reason that it irritates me *so* much when people blindly tell folks to upgrade to XPSP2. sure, SP2 has done a lot to fix a lot of various problems, but i've also seen it break a lot of apps, including many that are not on Microsoft known-to-break list (such as Cadence OrCAD SPICE suite).
11 days is not an unreasonable amount of time to roll a patch out to test box to see what changes it makes and how it affects stability. if that's why the supportfirefox.com team hadn't rolled it out yet, i commend them not condemn them.
they can only get a patent if they beat Jeff Bezos to it. I'm sure he'll find some way to bring this under the "1-click" patent he has :-P
i was just thinking that it's sexy enough that Mr Jobs might be interested enough to buy a whole bunch of them and bundle them with future macs since they always have the cool sexy hardware.
beat me to it. good job on the reference +1 :-)
actually, that would be L'Internet. Back to back vowels in French between the definite article and the noun are apostrophied... :-P
that's really silly. Here's why: it's silly because "1-click" and "reminding customers" type patents are nothing "special" on the web. I'm sure that anyone else out there who has spent any time developing interactive sites for the web has had those light bulbs go off in their head a time or two.
Just because no one has ever patented it before doesn't mean it's unique. That would be like General Motors or Ford trying to patent "a circular object used to facilitate the transportation of people and goods." They're not going to find any prior art protections because the usage of THE WHEEL is common knowledge and public domain information.
Actually, it's even simpler than that. The game got an M rating, folks. The kids we're trying to protect shouldn't even be seeing the material in the first place.
If the store sold it to someone under age, then shame on them and fine the hell out of them.
If the parents bought the game *for* the kid, then shame on the parents and I don't want to hear you bitch when your kid shoots up a 7-11 or dies of some horrible STD.
Basically, we're all sitting here arguing the finer points of the moral debate when that debate has long ago been settled. The ESRB doesn't approve of either form of content being in the hands of minors and that's why the M and AO ratings exist.
What we *ought* to be arguing about is how/why the content is getting into the hands of minors and how to combat it.
I don't know about your mileage, but on my ASUS board the ASUS Windows-based update utility routinely corrupts the BIOS during transfer and folks end up with mobos that are four legs up.
This happened to me recently on my K8N-DLX when ASUS's servers were down and my only option was to grab the Windows utility from their German mirror. The Windows flash utility 'appeared' to flash properly, but upon reboot I began to see graphical anomolies, etc that ultimately ended up in what amounted to a White Screen Of Death.
I powered the computer down, waited overnight until ASUS's primary servers came back up, downloaded the DOS utility on a different PC and then tried again on the machine with the screwed up BIOS.
Using the exact same image file that the Windows utility had used, this time things worked flawlessly and I've had not a single problem from the BIOS since. That was enough to convince me that unless one can access the BIOS in *real* mode, there's no business accessing it all.
I've got a Silicon Image 3114 controller on my mobo and XP and 2k do not have native support for the controller. In fact, without the driver, Windows wouldn't even know the controller was there, let alone what to do with it.
Thus, the only way around this is to have the proper driver on floppy and tell XP to use it.
That, I can stand. The next part is what I cannot...
XP and 2k (and from what I've heard, Longhorn too) actually POLL the floppy interrupt and access the floppy controller explicitly during the install process. WTF!? Why doesnt microsoft just turn that kind of control over to the BIOS and just use whatever device the BIOS is telling it 'A:' refers to? That would make *so* much more sense and allow me to use my USB flash drive for the appropriate driver files.
...I was raised and educated to believe...
:-D
While I agree with both your points and the points brought up in the Ask Slashdot question, I couldn't resist the opportunity to point out your misuse of the word 'raise' here.
Look it up, 'rear' as a verb in this sense is used for bringing up children. 'raise' is used in this sense for growing crops and animals.
My high school English teachers absolutely *loved* to nail us on that one, so I speak from experience.
Some also feel that Microsoft is trying to strong-arm the industry into the adoption of an incomplete and not accepted standard.
Umm... duh! What else is new here?
Really? I know that sub-6-meter GPS resolution was long protected by the US military for security reasons. When was that range opened up for public consumption?
that's what always annoyed me about Sci-Fi buying the rights to seaQuest DSV. They bought the show from NBC (and also, Earth2) and promised the community that they'd be producing new episodes and that all of the cast had signed on, etc.
However, we have yet to see any new episodes and it is unlikely we ever will now given the divergent paths of the actors' careers and the untimely death of Jonathan Brandis.
I suppose you could do a piece-meal Windows -- start with the NT kernel and add functions as you want them or as applications you want to use demand them (ideally the apps would be written to a certain open API so you could install a different chunk of code (ie firefox instead of IE) if so desired) but in all honesty, does anyone REALLY want that? You instantly made computing much more complex and for what purpose?
This was fairly popular during the days of Windows 3.11 The Calmira shell replacement for Windows 3.11 is still very popular among people who have relatively weak hardware. In fact, using Calmira on Windows 3.11 has about the same niche feel that Linux had in its early days. It's even spawned a bit of a side-market where people are either developing custom apps or porting existing apps back to Windows 3.11 so that they don't have to deal with Windows XP, et al.
I've seen WinAmp back-ported, as well as other multimedia and internet-related apps.
As a computer engineer, I am very glad that I chose to attend university. After all, in this discipline, it's rare to be able to advance very far in the modern day without a solid academic background.
Of course, Jobs, Woz, and Gates got away with it, but things weren't as robust then as they are now, but I digress...
My younger brother, however, really doesn't belong in college. He attended several semesters (as a EE) and decided he didn't like it.
He later decided that he'd rather go to a trade school for auto maintenance and custom fitting (much like the folks on American Chopper) and get into that field.
I say more power to him! University is not for everyone.
Hell, I see too many parents saying 'go to college and find yourself' and the sad thing is that many graduates have no more clear idea who they are post college than they did before college. If I were that parent, I would've rather they stay home on there ass, then waste my $30+K on college while sitting on their ass.
as an electrical/computer engineer, I definitely applaud the fellow for a really excellent proof of concept.
however, I'm failing to see the practical impact of his work. really, per his example of the two designers, how often will one really need to share workspace with a partner on physically the same terminal?
i suppose I could see a bit of application in the real of software like X Windows and have the lenticular lens allow shift between multple desktops, but even that is stretching it a bit.
anyone think of anything PRACTICAL this is good for, rather than his fairly optimistic view?
No, they shouldn't be. We don't expect our cars, sophisticated pieces of engineering that they are, to just sit and work like TVs and VCRs do. We all internally know that every once in a while we've gotta get the oil changed and check the fluid levels.
Even if we don't do it ourselves (ie, we take it to a shop), we know that it needs to be serviced and we have the appropriate work done.
PCs are the same thing. They require periodic maintenance to get rid of viruses and spyware and the like, as well as uninstalling grandma beatrices crapware program that she insisted on installing because Yahoo! told her it was a good idea.
The bottom line is that PCs are not toasters or TVs or even DVD players. They are sophisticated pieces of machinery and if the owner is too dumb to realize that and take care of it, then they shouldn't own one.
thought... we require drivers licenses to operate cars the benefit of traffic safety. maybe we should require PC licenses for internet safety.
I worked at Office Depot during that time frame, where we sold eMachines as soon as they came out. And, while they were much cheaper than the mainstream brands, they were not in the $300 ballpark (at least not on the sticker).
We sold primarily HP and Compaq machines to most consumers. For a given configuration, the HP or Compaq machine would range from ~$1300 to ~$1700.
Comparably, the eMachines model with approximately the same configuration would be ~$700 on the sticker. However, if you signed for eighteen billion years of AOL and some other promotions, you could get rebates that would knock it down to about $300. But, there wa absolutely no way is $300 flat on the sticker.