Do some googling on "CAM Brain Machine" if you want to see a very interesting (from all angles) computer design. Not only was this computer's physical design something to marvel over, but the idea behind how it worked (whether it worked well or not is another story) was pretty interesting, too. Think "on-the-fly evolutionary neural net processing", done in hardware using a specific (now discontinued) model of Xilinx FPGA. I would so love to pick one of those "boxes" up off of Ebay (probably have an easier time buying a Cray 3 from there, though)...
Here's why - fly-by-wire systems are very complex. The vetting procedure done to ensure that the code is of the highest quality (that is, the Q&A process) is so complex and expensive, that changes are only done on an as-needed, very careful basis (we are talking a situation here where a single line change in the code costs many thousands of dollars, and many man hours, to QA).
This code is put into a multi-redundant computer system that controls the fly-by-wire system. There are typically at least three computers in this system wired to the controls. These real-time systems take all the inputs they have gathered (including feedback sensor readings, such as from position sensors and such), and cast a "vote". If all three vote the same way, then that is determined to be the "true" inputs, perform the output for those inputs. If two or more vote the same way, then same thing, plus a bit of logging (and probably some statistical gathering of data regarding the one computer that dissented - to see how often it dissents from "popular" opinion). If they all disagree, then I would imagine another vote is taken, and seen how it agrees with the prior vote, etc - there are probably warning lights and such given to the pilot, etc - in case there is a real problem.
I am sure the system is even more complex than this, but you get the gist of it. It isn't a single computer, it isn't just an electronic disconnect between the controls and the control surfaces. It is a very complex system designed with one purpose in mind - keeping the plane and you in the air in as safe a manner as humanly possible. Most planes even prevent the pilot from accidentally or on-purpose doing things that the craft would consider "out-of-design-spec", unless overridden in some not-so-obvious manner (probably in a manner that would require co-pilot participation). This system works, and it works extremely well. There have been rare occasions where the code actually caused issues, and I am certain that such a system does have failure modes which have been seen in the real-world, but it is one system where we get multiple 9's of fault-tolerancy. But this level costs the aircraft manufacturing companies big bucks for software development.
Now, what scares me is the automobile manufacturers - things like GM's HyWire concept vehicle. Interesting idea, nice execution, but I wouldn't drive it unless they took it to the same level of redundancy and checking as the aircraft manufacturer's have. Not that I expect it - after all, if Ford couldn't be bothered to fix the exploding gas tank issue on the Pinto (not to mention the Crown Vic Interceptor - what is it with Ford and Saddle fuel tanks?) for want of a part that would have cost 10 cents, you think they (or other manufacturers of vehicles) are going to do the same vetting process that aircraft manufacturers do for their future drive-by-wire vehicle systems? Not likely...
Some bookclubs may work that way, but not all do. I was, until recently, a member of the "Book of the Month Club", and it certainly was not set up this way. I only stayed a member for a couple of years, and didn't buy that many books from them. Basically, they sell you "N" number of books for a rediculously low price (like a dollar or so), you have to pay the shipping (which is where it can be $$$). After that, you agree to buy at least (IIRC) two more per year for a couple of years, minimum. Many times, though, where they get you is that they send out (if you don't return the card in time saying not to, or you don't log in and say "nope") "recommended choice" books (or some other wording). If you don't catch this, then you either have to go through the hassle of returning them (paying shipping back), or keep them and pay for them.
Other than that last bit, I had no problem with the service. I liked the club, the books were good quality (book clubs sell books that are in a "club format" - they are a particular standard size, which I like, because it makes for a nice collection of books on a shelf - but they typically have some kind of ragged edge page binding that is fairly ugly - but they are cheap hardcovers!), and I bought my share before I left.
Leaving required me to write a letter stating that I was leaving. I ended up leaving because I just wasn't buying enough books from them to deal with the hassle, and the books that I was buying were coming from used book sources more often than not, and I had a huge back-catalogue of these yet to read. It just didn't make sense for me to continue.
I think you could still advocate it, provided you tell people about its strengths (most important to me is the freedom I have to do what I want with what I have - software or hardware - knowing I am not locked into anything), as well as its weaknesses. Tell them where things haven't been as smooth, and what you did to try to solve those problems, and if you were successful. Explain to them all the issues, then let them make a choice.
For me it was a choice between an OS where I had a dev tool I liked (Visual Studio), and a host of other applications, and games - but knowing I was "locked in" to something like that, and that Microsoft's business practices were shady at best, illegal at worst (can I support that morally?) - or go with an unknown system that looks fun (if more difficult to use), didn't have the dev environment I wanted (but plenty of other tools I could learn), no mainstream games (but plenty of open source and free ones, many quite entertaining), and a guiding principle that I liked (the idea of sharing source code and such has always been a good principle to me - I remember the days of typing in code from a magazine, and open source is similar to this - I also was quite into distributing my VB - and earlier QuickBasic - code to others as well).
The choice was a no-brainer for me (but not one I could see everyone making) - I went out and bought a copy of TurboLinux 2.0 (in 1997), and didn't look back (at least at home on my personal box - at work, it is a different story - ugh). To be fair, I actually started with a funky form of Linux called "MonkeyLinux" running on top of DOS, about 6 months before my TurboLinux escapade - got that installed on a Compaq 386/SLT laptop with 6 megs of RAM - yeah, my first Linux "install" was on a laptop (I must be a real glutten for punishment).
I can understand your frustration with the hardware issues you are having. Both wireless adaptors (from what I understand - I have no experience here because I haven't had a need yet to set up such an adaptor) and webcams (USB) are bears to setup and configure, and hope to get working - under Linux. For most hardware that I think may be "esoteric" (for Linux - not for Windows) in support, I tend to do a lot of research before I buy, and then buy what I know has drivers and works under Linux.
The other thing I tend to do is avoid "latest and greatest" hardware - especially peripheral products. I find that things that are a year or more old tend to have support under Linux. Newer stuff can be more a crapshoot, unless the chipset or whatever being used is a common and older chipset, or has support for good emulation (ie, most new cheapo soundcards will work in Linux with SB16 emulation and similar). For a webcam, it would be something I would want to review a lot first - that, or bust out my parallel port B/W old-skool QuickCam (I know it will always work).
I will tell you though that it ticks me off that companies don't provide real support in the form of documentation on how to "talk" with their hardware. Nothing has ticked me off more than having sitting an old Snappy capture device that I had (and loved using) for Windows, where there is virtually no hope of getting it working under Linux because they wouldn't release information on how to interface to it (I asked), so code could be developed - and now the company that made it is long gone, and who knows who has the rights to the device design, etc...
Actually, I would say that while not all 50,000 spam messages each went to 1.2 million AOL subscribers, that some portion of those 50,000 spams went to some portion of those 1.2 million AOL subscribers. Think of it this way - say you have three spam messages (analogous to the 50,000 spams), and 100 email addresses (analogous to the 1.2 mil AOL subs). Those 100 addresses are your "target market". Those three messages may be a message about viagra, a message about porn, and a message on free energy (or something else). Now, of the 100 email addresses, some will want to see maybe 2 out of the three spams, some may only want to see one of the three, and some may want to see all three. There is overlap. So while you wouldn't sent out 300 emails to the list (everyone receiving each spam), all of the spams would be sent to some portion of the list...
I used to recommend Linux, but I won't anymore. Not untill *every single piece of hardware* plugs and plays into the system without any fuss.
That will likely never happen, unless at minimum Linux has gains in the marketshare of operating systems equal to or better than OSX. In fact, it would probably have to be better than that percentage, simply because hardware vendors will not want to support developing the drivers for three operating systems, when two of them have low marketshare.
Who you really need to be talking to is the hardware vendors - tell them you tried their product on your Linux box, and had no luck with it. Maybe they could help you (unlikely, but you won't know unless you try). At minimum, they would have one more datapoint that lets them know that there is a market for them under Linux. Since Linux doesn't have any centralized sales figures (outside of the major distros, and they only measure those copies actually sold, not copies), and everything else is guesswork, they are very hesitant to support our operating system. From a business perspective, this makes sense, and I can't blame them for it.
What I can blame them for, though, is not taking the simple step of at least providing specifications for the hardware to allow others to develop drivers without the long and tedious guesswork that revolves around reverse-engineering a driver. There is no good excuse for it - the whole copyrights/patents/trademarks/etc argument shtick they give as a reason holds no water - if their tech is so transparent that another manufacturer can figure it out from some software, then their hardware is not much more than a glorified DSP with a microcontroller reflashed on bootup by a driver. If that is really the case (and I bet there is some, maybe a lot, of hardware that is like this), then a manufacturer can easily decompile the driver if they really wanted to. Whether they are or not is another question - but we don't really hear much about it, so who really knows?
For your situation: Did you just give up on the whole process? I realize that getting wireless networking working on a Linux box can be a real exercise in frustration, if not downright futility. If you don't have a driver already, it becomes an arcane process with using ndiswrapper and a bunch of luck, and you still might not get a working system. However, did you work and see what your errors were? Did you report your experience to the developers of the driver or ndiswrapper? Did you document your experience in any way that others with the same product could perhaps gain some insight from? If not, you are doing nothing to help the situation.
Lastly, did you just give up on Linux and wireless networking, or did you look into what products/chipsets/drivers work and buy an adaptor that fit that criteria (maybe none of the USB wifi adaptors work - I don't know)? Once again, did you let the device manufacturer know of your issue, and then let the manufacturer of the adaptor that did work (if you found another device) your experience with their products under Linux?
I hope you don't take this wrong - I am not "yelling" at you. It is just in the development model of Linux and the software we use, there needs to be heavy feedback in all directions: it helps marketing, it helps development, it helps any RE efforts going on. Not providing that feedback doesn't help the process as a whole, and likely hinders it. I just hope you realized and acted, so as to help others (even if your needs were not met), rather than throwing up your hands and saying "oh well, Linux is crap". Please know I share your pain - I have had several such instances in my own experience with Linux since I started playing with it in 1997 or so (thankfully, they get fewer each and every year). Each and every time I try to document my experience and let others (including manufacturers) know via whatever forums I can, in the hope that it will make for a better system.
Playback of MP3 files was choppy on this Mandriva/VIA platform, and if it can't play my MP3's, then it'll have to be just a backup browser/e-mail system.
Dude, you have something really messed up on your system if you are having choppy MP3 playback under Linux on that system. I just finished installing (last night) a "new" machine for my wife, to replace her Win98 POS box. It is running a stock install of Mandrake 10.1, using a 366 MHz Celeron, 384 megs of SDRAM, 6.4 gig IDE drive. Basically a bunch of "scrap" I had in my shop. Other than KDE feeling a tad "laggy" (I might tune it down on effects if she complains), it plays MP3s perfectly off the network server. I can't even say I tuned the drive using hdparm yet...
You didn't give many details about your system, but I doubt the problem is your Linux install, or the hardware (unless something really funky is going on). I have managed in the past to get MP3 playback running on a AMD 586/133 (you know the one - the funky "overclocked" 486 Pentium-beater chip that AMD made in the late-1990s - excellent CPU) w/16 meg RAM under DOS (it could barely do this - but it did work). If that can be done, then your system should have no problems.
If you are stream the MP3 from a CD-ROM, check the hdparm settings for the drive (make sure DMA, etc is on - plenty of docs out there on this - BTW, this is a good thing to check for the hard drive device as well). Also, make sure the driver is 100% correct for the soundcard chipset in the system - sometimes the auto-installer on distros pick the wrong driver (or a generic Soundblaster driver) for the chipset, even when the driver for the chipset is available. Make sure your swap partition is big enough. You sound like you should have enough RAM for such a use, but if you are running KDE as your WM, that might be a little low. Something else to try is installing a command line MP3 playback util and try seeing how well that plays things under X vs dropping out of X and to the command line. Also, make sure there isn't any IRQ conflicts between the soundcard/system and the rest of the box.
I am sure there are several other things that I am missing here, but the ones I listed are the first ones I would look into. The system you describe should be more than capable of doing what you need to do...
If I understand the basic paradox that started everybody marching down Quantum Road was: Light is a particle if you look at it one way, but a wave if you look at it another way. Therefore it must be both or neither, but can't truly be one or the other.
What you are describing is more commonly known as the "Dual-Slit Experiment". Please note that what I describe below is how I remember it, but I may be incorrect in some details - fellow Slashdotters, please help me out where I fail in my descriptions...
Remember in high school (or another time), performing experiments with waves in a shadow wave tank? If you do, you remember at one end of the tank was the wave making device (basically a little lever that vibrates in the water). Light shined through or reflected off the water showed light and dark bands indicating the peaks and troughs (the amplitudes) of the waves being created. Now, at the other end of the tank, put a divider with two slits in it. The divider prevents the waves from passing, but the two slits allow the waves to pass, thus producing two separate waves, spaced apart. However, as the waves spread, they can interact, where peaks add, and troughs subtract. What you then get in the shadow tank is interesting - you get what is known as an "interference pattern". This pattern of light and dark represents how the waves are interacting, but more importantly shows that what is interacting are waves, and not something else.
Now, instead of water, do the same thing with light. Now, of course, you can't do this with just any kind of light, because regular light is incoherent, that is, it is scattered in every direction and orientation. What you need is coherent light. Hmm - where do you get such a source of coherent light...?
That's right - a LASER. Now, you need your barrier with slits in it. Since laser light is such a different beast than water, you can't use such a large "macro" system like was used in the wave tank. What you need is called a "diffraction grating" or "diffraction screen" - basically a piece of glass with extremely fine lines printed or etched on it (or a fine mesh wire screening), which performs the same function as our larger barrier with two slits in it (in fact, in the water demonstration, you can add slits, and the resulting interference pattern looks the same - it is just that in such an experiment, two slits are easier to observe and understand). Now, shine a laser through that and onto a projection screen - what do you see?
That's right - you will see an interference pattern of dark and light banding of the laser light. In fact, this is very similar to how a visible-light spectrogram works, where the banding indicates the relative levels of various wavelengths of the light being observed. BTW - if you want to try this experiment yourself, a simple laser pointer, some fine mesh screening, and a white wall or piece of blank white paper is all you need to verify this (note, though, that the mesh screening will produce a grid-like pattern due to the "slits" being in both the vertical and horizontal orientations - in fact, if you think about it, you can begin to understand how laser-pointer image "heads", which are included with most cheap laser pointers, work, as well as how you could get a monochrome-LCD with a high enough resolution to do the same thing).
So, with this experiment, we have shown that light has the properties of a wave. But what about photons?
Photons are the particles which make up light, and give it its dual-nature - of being both a particle and a wave at the same time. But, how do we prove this? Well, we need a device to measure light at the level of a single photon - a photo detector, if you will. We do have such devices, they are basically extremely sensitive versions of a solar cell, CDS cell, or CMOS sensor.
Now, imagine you had a shotgun, and Cheney was pointing (couldn't resist - my appologies) it at a very strong version of your barrier - but the barrier only had a single slit. If that gun was fired, most of t
If you haven't found it yet, check out Nuts and Volts Magazine and their spinoff Servo Magazine (which is dedicated to robotics - hobbyist and professional) - both are great magazines. I have been a subscriber to Nuts and Volts since around 1992 or so, and a subscriber to Servo since it started (a year or two ago). I highly reccommend both (if for nothing else, as a resource for supplier listings!)...
Here in Phoenix, Arizona, we have a place called "Apache Reclamation and Electronics" - they aren't as "cool" as they used to be (they used to have an outdoor junkyard that they have been rapidly cleaning up to comply with a city ordinance recently passed - dumb thing is, they are in close to one of the crappiest locations in town, approx 3rd Avenue and Apache, just a stone's throw north of the I-10 truck extension, in the beautiful South Phoenix blight) - but their indoor area is still amazing. Interestingly, they have a back room (rarely visted by anyone) full of old vacuum tubes - many in "old-stock-but-new" boxes!
They are basically an electronics junkyard, where crap (surplus, used, junk) goes to die. Just to give a further taste, they have one bin, about a 4-foot per side cube - filled with old electric window motors. One area of a back wall is nothing but large spools of wire. There is a shelf filled with boxes of 15 meter coils of terminated single-mode fiber-optic cable - they sold it to me by the foot, I think it was 10 or 20 cents per foot (they thought it was wire). There are three double side rows of small bins, from floor to about 5 foot high, 50 feet long, filled with every small doohicky mechanical part you can imagine. Another room holds all manner of test equipment and other such devices. The front room holds tons of other parts.
Go there wearing old clothes, though - even if you don't touch anything, you will get plenty dirty, the dirt just seems to "stick", ya know? If it is junk, and electronic, they have it. But, like I said, I miss the outdoor area - there used to be some really fantastic junk out there. I managed to rescue, just before it was likely going to be trashed, an Altair 8800 (alas, without the 8080 cpu board - the original owner upgraded it to a Z-80) - they sold it to me for $100.00. It will someday be a major project for me to restore it to working condition (needs a ton of cleaning, etc).
Personally, I wear a "cheap" Casio digital. Actually, for me it wasn't cheap, it was actually the most expensive (outside of the watch I will describe here in a bit, which I don't carry) watch I have owned - prior to it, I bought el-cheapo POS watches that broke their band (or had other problems) inside a year. So I "splurged" on a $70.00 Casio, and outside of a battery change, I have had no problems. It works great, has all the functions I need on a watch, and a metal band that won't break. I only wish the case was entirely metal (it is some kinda plastic that has lost it's metallic finish over the years).
Now, the other watch I have, which I display at home as a "collectible", is some kind of pocket watch I picked up at the Tuscon Gem and Mineral show a couple of years back. The individual selling it had all kinds of old scientific measuring tools (old brass slide rules, astrolabes, clocks, watches, etc) - at least, they looked old. I have spent enough time in antique stores and such to know when I am looking at fake or not, these didn't look fake - if they were (and as with anything of this nature, they could be), they were excellently faked and only something a true appraiser would pick up.
The pocket watch I picked up (for around $80.00 - so it likely wasn't a very old antique, probably something from the early-1900's, if it is real, which I have no clue) is very interesting, in that the watch has a front and back glass crystal piece that make the watch look almost like a sphere. These pieces magnify the movements and watch face, so it is very easy to read (when held right - at an angle there is distortion, of course), and the movements are very interesting to watch. It has a full three hands, and the windup and settings are done thru the same knob (pull out to set, push in to wind). One side of the glass (on the rear crystal), at the bottom of the watch, is ground flat so you can set it on a desk or shelf and view it.
I bought it because I liked the way it looked, it seems to be a unique watch. The seller had a similar, but much larger, desk clock, which had multiple dials and such, and was about 4 or 6 inches in diameter (I wanted to buy it too, but the price was way more than I was willing to spend). I have never seen any similar watch or clock like these two pieces before or since. I haven't had time to take it anywhere to get it checked out, appraised, or figure out what it is or where it may have come from. I haven't been able to see (from looking in the glass) any markings inside the case (on the movements or otherwise). That doesn't mean they aren't there, just that they aren't easily visible.
So, for an interesting watch, maybe a pocket watch or a wristwatch with a visible movement might suit you?
Interestingly, your last three examples (I have seen them all, unfortunately) seem to stem from not understanding proper contraction forms. For example, the phrase "I could care less", could actually be "I could have cared less", or "I could've cared less". Similarly "it could of happenned" should be "it could've happenned". In your last example, the "of" sound gets dropped off, because the word "couple've" isn't right, and confusion sets in...oh, my!
All three examples seem to stem from confusion over the "of" sound, that the contraction with using "have" takes on, thus leading to using "of" or "have" in the wrong place, leaving it out entirely, or in very severe cases, adding a 've contraction to words where it doesn't make sense at all.
It is sad, really - it is like english isn't being taught at all, just how to make grunts and sounds which "make sense" to another (supposed) speaker of the language. It makes me wonder if it could all devolve into something similar to what I heard at a bar in Mexico - the singers were all singing what sounded like Buffet's "Margaritaville", but they were just singing the sounds - once you started listening, you realized that they didn't understand at all what they were actually singing, because they didn't know english (not that it mattered much at such a bar, of course).
Now, everybody, pay attention: I am sure I messed up my own grammar in this post somewhere, so nitpick away (always a problem when posting about grammar, of course)...
Your locality (and nation) may be different, but if you are in the United States, watch out! You may be legal to build such a thing, even wire it as such, but you may find it hell to get homeowner's insurance. Heck, many insurance carriers in the US look at you funny if you so much as think about daring to be different. Look into the issues with getting HO insurance to cover such radical building systems like rammed earth or straw bale construction. Never mind the fact that both are techniques with hundreds, maybe thousands of years of history in construction, never mind the fact that if constructed right, both are way more fire resistant than a stick-frame house - never mind a myriad of things - you will find it near to impossible to get such insurance, or if you can, your rates will be extremely out of whack vs regular construction.
Don't get me started on trying to get insurance for an old school bus to drive as a private vehicle - here in the Phoenix area you have to pull all kinds of weird trickery just to get it "recognized" as an RV...
This is what made me go "bleh" when I saw what this article was about: nothing this guy did (outside of maybe the VAIO computer, wireless comms, etc - although Steve Mann would disagree) is anything more spectacular than what could be done in say, oh, 1995 or 1996.
Now, this guy did do something, don't get me wrong: he showed that it is now possible to build such a rig using completely off-the-shelf components (most of them looked like they were sourced from EBay - I know you can get the HMD and P5 glove from there, and the VAIO), and do it fairly cheaply (which wasn't as possible in 1995-6). He "made" an HMD from OTS components, and got it to "work" (for some value of "work").
I suppose the "state of the art" for Augmented Reality could be advanced by amateurs using rigs like this - same as cheap PCs led to better software for them. This is a good thing. But this demonstration rig does nothing for advancing the hardware behind VR/AR - which is where the real problems lie. For the best experience, we need cheap HMDs with good resolution and a largish field-of-view (FOV) - which I can guarantee his HMD does not provide. We also need better (as in easier and more comfortable to wear) input devices (gloves or otherwise), along with a better and cheaper sourceless (and/or sourced - ie, magnetic, optic, or otherwise) 3D tracker systems (the majority of these systems, which have the speed and resolutions, not to mention the capability to handle multiple tracked nodes - have price tags well outside most user's budgets - take a look at Polhemus or Ascension products, among others, if you don't believe me).
Ideally, the tracker system would be external in some manner, using one or more video cameras sampling the scene of the user, tracking IR marker stickers or silhoettes of the user to determine head, hand, and body position (in the case of a wearable, this kind of tracking becomes much more difficult, as it inherently must be sourceless).
I guess I was just hoping to see something beyond what was presented in issues of PCVR 10 years ago (indeed, some of the stuff from PCVR could still be considered "state of the art" even today)...
I strongly second this - not only is PyGame an "almost perfect" way of creating games using Python and SDL, and not only is PyOpenGL a great platform to play around with OpenGL (and 3D engines, etc) - but it is very easy to convert stuff written for OpenGL in other languages (like the various C demos) to use the wrapper.
In fact, over at NeHe Productions there are a ton of OpenGL demo tutorials (and a CD available), mostly written in C/C++. Some of these (the "beginner" ones, mainly) have been converted over to Python (and, IIRC, PyOpenGL - that, or some other wrapper), and are very easy to read, well commented, well documented, etc.
Once I had Python and PyOpenGL set up properly on my Linux box, I was able to get the demos working well, and modifying them was easy. Eventually, I took the "simple room walkthrough" demo, and had modded it to allow me to walk around while being able to look whereever I wanted (that is, I could look independently of movement). I eventually modded the code to use the mouse for "lookaround", and the arrow keys were for walking. Now, this isn't too special - what was interesting, though, was getting X to recognize and be able to use two different mice on my system (one was serial, the other PS/2) - I did this 1) to see if I could and if it was possible, and 2) because my "second" mouse was an "off-table" ring-mouse trackball device I had bought specifically for virtual environment navigation, and I didn't want to be constantly swapping the devices out. It was cool while I had it working - a great experiment, and it really showed the power of Python and OpenGL.
I am pretty certain a full 3D engine could be built using Python and PyOpenGL (of course, OpenGL is doing all the "heavy" lifting - though who knows if Python would be up to task of doing everything else a real 3D engine needs - perhaps at that point you move to CrystalSpace or something)...
With a few of modifications, this system could actually work for the submitter's (and maybe other's) needs:
Multiple USB (or other) cameras pointed at each fob
All connected to a webserver which is accessed via it's own 2-factor fob, held by the owner
That's the basics. It could be simplified or expanded in numerous ways. You could have a single camera, for instance, and a stepper-motor controlled by the server rotating a turntable on which the fobs are mounted, to take the pictures of the fobs automatically in-turn. Add in a high-contrast lighting scheme, couple the camera with some edge-detection and/or OCR software, and have the computer interpret the numbers (or enhance the image) so that you know exactly what to type (when I went to the site it was difficult to read the fob image). Put the whole thing inside a modified safe or lockbox, inside a locked room, for better physical security (even better than carrying them around, I would think).
The server itself would have to have its own 2-factor security token fob to access it, so the user of all the fobs would only have to carry around a single fob, instead of a "keychain" of fobs. Also, though I don't know if this is practiced where these fobs are used (or if it breaks the system and isn't?), if multiple users need access to all the fobs, then they each can carry their own fob to get to the fobcam system, which can be set up to allow this (I would imagine). Perhaps in certain setups, a 4-factor auth scheme could be done - with the user's fobcam access fob, and the "fobcam" stored fobs providing the numbers (would prove who access which system).
Please note: here is a niche problem in need of a solution - I have just outlined step 2 of the business plan above - we all know what steps one and three are, of course...
You want more exciting work, and are willing to take a pay cut? This seems OK on the surface of it, but when I look at it a certain way, I see a downside to such a decision.
You have a job right now that is boring, but has a lot of perks: great pay, nice hours, the ability to telecommute as you want, etc. You want to find a job with less money, hopefully good benefits, but more exciting work. I can understand if you wanted to leave your current job because you feel it is a rut in your career (and believe me, it could turn out that way if you stay too long). If you have only been there a few years or less, though, think about this:
If you want more exciting work, do you want to give away all of that effort (thoughts and energy) doing that exciting work for an employer in exchange for a little money, or would you rather see a great return on such an investment?
One thing to keep in mind is that in the software business, you may be doing some coding and getting "N" dollars in salary in return, but it is possible that they are turning around and selling that same software for "N x X" - where "X" can be any factor you can think of - to multiple customers. For instance, at one job I was at they needed (for a client) a piece of software which would act as an interface between a scanner and an imaging system. It was to take images, and some data about them (OCR data stored as a CSV file), and dump all of that from that format to the format the imaging system needed. Neither the OCR company nor the imaging company wanted to write it. Since my employer was a VAR for both, they asked me to write it. I wrote a simple app in VB6 which would sit in the tray waiting for jobs, and as it got them, transfer them over. Took me a couple of days to write and debug fully with the test data I had, and to tweak it "just so" to make it easy to install, and to handle licensing issues. I later found out that they sold this software to the client for about $25,000.00! As far as I know, they only sold it that one time, but they could easily sell it over and over again for that same amount! I wouldn't be a bit surprised if the company you are currently working for is doing the same thing with those "boring" VBA scripts and such you create...
Now - if you can get that amount for some fairly retarded (but crucial to some business operations) pieces of code - imagine what you could get for "exciting" code? However, unless you have some sort of financial stake in the next company you work for - you won't get jack (other than your paycheck, of course). So why go that route?
Instead - think of an exciting project, and start doing work on it at home! It doesn't even have to be coding related - or even related to computers! But it does have to be something that is exciting to you. Use your current job as the means to support yourself and family - and if you are willing to take a pay cut - do it now! At your current job, estimate what your "new" job would pay, take the cut, and put that amount from your current job into your "new business fund" savings account. Then, with that squared away, take on your "new job" of building that exciting new product. Once you have it at a certain level of "doneness" - start to think about a business plan and start writing that up. Hopefully, by this time, a year or so of time has passed and your "new business fund" savings have accumulated to a certain amount (maybe $5000.00 or so?). You have code (or whatever exciting product you are making), you have a business plan, you have some savings to launch (or at least as collateral for a small business loan, or something).
Now, all you need to do is find investors in your plan, or find other people interested. Now - you have to do this portion quietly - don't shop it around to your colleagues or clients from work - unless what you wrote (or built) has nothing to do with your current job. If you are doing software, make sure you don't use VBA (for instance) - or that the software does anything similar to what the software you are writing at work doe
I remember a device similar to this one (although, I think, without the special "paste" involved) that was developed in Australia, and shown on Beyond 2000, back in the mid/late 1980's. It was a device, custom fitted and molded like a retainer, with batteries and electronics in it to produce a current in your mouth while you slept at night to reduce/eliminate tooth decay from plaque. From the way it was presented on the program, it seemed like something which should have been, at most, five years to market (at least somewhere, if not in the United States). Yet it still has not been manufactured and marketed, not even to the dental services community. Every once in a while, we see another story like this pop up in the news. But we never, ever, seem to be able to purchase the product from our dentists! Personally, I don't think such a product could replace proper brushing or dental checkups and cleanings. However, such a product might make for healthier, stronger teeth for people throughout their lives, which can only be a good thing. So - what/who is blocking this technology from becoming widespread, and why?
When this understanding is realized, say after a catastrophic event
It didn't take this the first time - when the founding fathers wrote our (US) Constitution, they debated the issue and reasons behind intellectual property quite intensely. Read the Federalist papers if you don't believe me. Some of the FF's didn't even want to define the idea of copyrights, tradmarks, and patents, because they thought such definitions might be perverted and used against the people. I know for a fact that one of the FF's understood how IP was thought made public, there is a quote where he compared it to lighting a candle, and using that candle to light his neighbors, but his stays lit (something akin to that - I think it was Jefferson, or mayby Adams? Can someone back me up?).
Ultimately, they reached a consensus that such things should have a "limited lifetime", and that the "owner" should get a government-backed monopoly to recoup his effort in the creation of said intellectual property, after which time the monopoly status would expire, and the IP would revert to the public domain. They thought this was a good compromise - even so, there were still grumblings that ill would come of it, in the future.
The rise of corporations becoming legal entities able to own IP ultimately proved those FF's who still didn't like the idea correct. So here we are today. A catastrophic event would do nothing to revert this new status quo. It might shake it for a bit, but eventually, history would repeat itself, and this conversation would occur again.
What has been stolen? Making a duplicate of something does not deprive the original owner of the widget the ability to use the widget. If you have an automobile, and you are selling it (maybe as a used car), and I have a magic machine which I can bring to your house, and from the comfort of the street it can make a fully drivable duplicate of your car, and I drive away with that duplicate (and my magic duplication machine, of course - maybe I make a duplicate of this machine and leave a copy of it for you, just to be nice) - have I "stolen" your car?
The simple answer is "no" - I have not stolen anything. The best that could be said is that I have deprived you of potential profits. Guess what - if Joe Shmuck down the street has your exact same car, and he is selling it for less (let's say you are selling it for blue book, he is selling it for $1.00), has he now "stolen" something from you?
Here is where it gets tricky for intellectual property (IP). With IP, making a copy of something still cannot be said to be depriving the owner of that IP of his original IP. If a copy is made, all such a copy can do is deprive the IP owner of potential profit from that IP. It doesn't deprive him of the IP itself.
This is the problem with IP - we try to treat it as real property, when it is clearly not. IP is thought made real, and just like thought, when it is spoken aloud (or displayed), it becomes something all can share - it becomes a part of culture. This whole issue was debated greatly and heatedly by the founding fathers of the United States when they discussed implementing patents and copyright laws in our Constitution. They could see that there was a right for someone who came up with an idea to profit off of it, for a limited time. This idea is what made it into our Constitution. Unfortunately, then lawyers got involved.
With the rise of corporations become legal entities (and able to hold patents, copyrights, and trademarks), the term "limited time" and "lifetime" became meaningless - at least from a human lifespan standpoint. These corporations became more powerful, and with their lawyers were able to shift the meaning (and pass laws) to pervert the meaning of "a limited time", especially as those limits were approached (Sonny Bono Copyright Act). By extending the meaning of "limited time", the length of time to make profit perverts the idea of IP into something that seems like real property, regardless of the fact that it ultimately is still expressed thought. As the idea that IP is "something else" that is "real" was accepted by the public (American and otherwise - this is a worldwide issue), the issue that copying is some form of stealing started to take hold. Eventually, our laws shifted from where copying IP was a civil offense (punishable with fines) - into one where it is a criminal offense (punishable with fines and jailtime, among other things).
This is world we live in now. A world where the expression of other people's thoughts, without permission, is punishable by jailtime (which, for some unfortunate people, might as well be death). At one time, the ordinary man on the street would have laughed at you if you had told him the "in the future, copying that Metallica tape will land you in jail". Currently, the man on the street laughs if you tell him "in the future, whistling that Metallica tune will land you in jail".
Why is the former plausible and accepted now, but the latter seems absurd today? It shouldn't - it is where we are ultimately headed...
Then you'd have two id numbers, and the world would end (well, at least from the view of the marketing department). SSNs avoid that, and there's no having to mess with being careful - the governement does the job for them (in most cases).
It really is this pathetic - it is like their IT department (or whoever maintains there DB systems) have never heard of a "merge" utility. Yes, such a utility does need to be run and verified by a human, but hopefully the system can detect when there are possible duplicates of people, and alert the administrator of member services that such discrepancies exist so that the human can schedule time to take care of them in a timely manner, so no backlog is created. Merge utilities are not difficult pieces of software to write.
As far as allowing the government to "do their job for them", these companies must be really dense in not knowing that SSN duplication and misuse is rampant. Most of the time, these duplicate SSNs are held by illegal immigrants for some kind of tax and/or social security fraud (or to simply look "legit") being perpetrated by their "employer" (most of the time without the immigrant's knowledge)...
Get an accountant for your taxes, and you will feel a lot better around tax time, trust me.
My wife and I did this the first year we filed after we bought a house. We had been doing the long form and hating it for a few years before that. After we got an accountant, we realized how stupid we were for not doing it long before we bought the house.
Since then, each year it costs us about $100.00 for the accountant to do our taxes. All we have to do is keep track of possible deductable amounts thru the year, add them up and stick the amounts on a form mailed to us, which we then send back (I personally drive it over, but it could be mailed), along with the W-2's, 1099's, etc.
With all the forms for taxes from the house, our savings account, our IRA, plus a couple of other things - I can't even imagine doing them personally. My time and sanity is worth the $100.00 knowing it will be done right. I consider that $100.00 to be good money spent. I consider that money just another amount that helps me keep from arguing with my wife from being aggravated by the whole process.
Do it - trust me. Get an accountant for your taxes. When tax time comes around, you won't dread it (as much), and likely you will get a nice return as a bonus (ideally, your return, from all sources, should be close to $0.00 - never use the government as a savings account...it isn't like you get to keep the interest).
Something interesting, since you mention your GF having been diagnosed: I have a couple of other quirks, which I hope not to exhibit here (though I probably will):
I tend "pontificate" on subjects, describing things (or discussing them) in some expansive detail. Stories/descriptions which should be short, become, in effect, long diatribes. Reference some of my other/. postings and see if you don't agree...heh.
Another quirk I have, is that within these long pontifications, I will go off on relevant tangents, which will send me off on further tangents. Invariably, though, I am able to tie all of this together and return back to my main focus of discussion. I have a friend who described this "pattern" as "parenthetical speaking". It seemed an apt description.
So I ask, have you noticed whether these annomolies manifest themselves within your GF's speech patterns?
What you don't understand is that what we define as "normal" people have a hidden communication layer, of non-verbal communication cues, which most of these "normal" people don't even realize they interpret and use. Described variously as "body-language" and such, it consists of the various "poses" and nuances a human takes on (the way hands and other extremities are moved and held in relation to what is being spoken, the way the face is posed, various tonal cues in voice, etc) as they speak with each other. So-called "normal" people do this, and interpret it, and they most often don't realize it unless they think about it after the fact. It is second nature, it is "natural".
Those who have Asperger's, however, typically are unable to read these cues, or express the same cues (or they read them wrong and/or express wrong). This leads the other person/people they are communicating with to be turned off by this behavior or lack of being able to interpretate their own language. For those with Asperger's, it is a very frustrating situation, especially if/when communicating with someone they are attracted to. For these people, if they are lucky they can turn to their analytical side, and learn the proper cues and responses. Unfortunately, this takes a TON of practice and experimentation, and one must be very attentive to it in social situations. Make a simple mistake, and the fact that you are different from the rest becomes very apparent to the so-called "normal" person you are communicating with. "Normal" people do not have to deal with this, because to them, it is as secondary as breathing is.
It is exhausting work, which is why most people who have Asperger's are not very social, or have problems in social situations. You may notice that I have some experience with this: I have not been diagnosed, so take this with a grain or two, but I am pretty sure I have Asperger's myself, to some degree. Granted, it is an armchair self-diagnoses (not a very reliable thing, I realize), but I seem to fit the definitions I have read, and it explains a lot about myself and my relationships with other people. I can't expect people to fully understand my social issues, anymore than they should expect me to understand their so-called "normal" outlook. I understand it at an analytical level, I can emulate it when needed (and manipulate it at will, too), but it is exhausting to do so for long periods of time, so I tend to avoid such situations. However, when I am in such situations, it is very interesting.
For example, my wife and I (I won't discuss here how I managed to date, then gain a spouse - a whole story unto itself) were at a party with friends, and I was comfortable at it. A woman came up to me, my wife nearby, and commented on what I was wearing. I wasn't paying much attention, plus I was a bit inebriated, so I simply responded with "Thank you", etc - and she walked away, kinda confused. My wife (later on that evening, at home) commentted to me about that woman making a pass at me, which, when I thought about it, and we discussed it, was likely the case. Due to her body language, her mode of speech, etc and the way she walked away confused (which I only realized after my wife and I discussed it), I did come away with the conclusion that yes, she was making a pass (or something) to me. However, I completely missed it - I could not, and did not, see her body language or facial expressions in the moment, and I likely didn't respond in the "proper" way.
I don't expect you or anyone else to completely understand this. In a way, it is a handicap, a form of blindness which affects social communication and interaction. It can only be mitigated by severe attention to situations, using real-time analysis of the situation and communication and then emulating proper responses, etc. It is very tiring, and sometimes mistakes are made which, if picked up on by the opposite party (which in most cases they are, unless the other individual/group is very drunk), immediately "outs" you and ruins the encounter. It is simply easier and less taxing to not be in such situations in the first place.
Actually, you might want to rethink the idea that a monitor "has no memory". While you are technically correct that monitors don't have frame buffers or such (ie, gobs of memory to hold an image), LCD monitors, by their very nature, act similar to DRAM with refresh (in that you have a bunch of transistors essentially acting as a very brief storage area for bits which are visible instead of hidden), and I wouldn't doubt that there is some limited amount of memory incorporated into some LCDs to allow the upping of the refresh rate or similar. In a similar vein, regular CRT-based monitors, while not likely having separate memory, could/can be used as memory itself (back in the 1940's/50's, specially designed CRTs, albeit with long-delay phophor coatings, were used as a form of memory storage on some early computers)...
Slashdot Mirror
Do some googling on "CAM Brain Machine" if you want to see a very interesting (from all angles) computer design. Not only was this computer's physical design something to marvel over, but the idea behind how it worked (whether it worked well or not is another story) was pretty interesting, too. Think "on-the-fly evolutionary neural net processing", done in hardware using a specific (now discontinued) model of Xilinx FPGA. I would so love to pick one of those "boxes" up off of Ebay (probably have an easier time buying a Cray 3 from there, though)...
This code is put into a multi-redundant computer system that controls the fly-by-wire system. There are typically at least three computers in this system wired to the controls. These real-time systems take all the inputs they have gathered (including feedback sensor readings, such as from position sensors and such), and cast a "vote". If all three vote the same way, then that is determined to be the "true" inputs, perform the output for those inputs. If two or more vote the same way, then same thing, plus a bit of logging (and probably some statistical gathering of data regarding the one computer that dissented - to see how often it dissents from "popular" opinion). If they all disagree, then I would imagine another vote is taken, and seen how it agrees with the prior vote, etc - there are probably warning lights and such given to the pilot, etc - in case there is a real problem.
I am sure the system is even more complex than this, but you get the gist of it. It isn't a single computer, it isn't just an electronic disconnect between the controls and the control surfaces. It is a very complex system designed with one purpose in mind - keeping the plane and you in the air in as safe a manner as humanly possible. Most planes even prevent the pilot from accidentally or on-purpose doing things that the craft would consider "out-of-design-spec", unless overridden in some not-so-obvious manner (probably in a manner that would require co-pilot participation). This system works, and it works extremely well. There have been rare occasions where the code actually caused issues, and I am certain that such a system does have failure modes which have been seen in the real-world, but it is one system where we get multiple 9's of fault-tolerancy. But this level costs the aircraft manufacturing companies big bucks for software development.
Now, what scares me is the automobile manufacturers - things like GM's HyWire concept vehicle. Interesting idea, nice execution, but I wouldn't drive it unless they took it to the same level of redundancy and checking as the aircraft manufacturer's have. Not that I expect it - after all, if Ford couldn't be bothered to fix the exploding gas tank issue on the Pinto (not to mention the Crown Vic Interceptor - what is it with Ford and Saddle fuel tanks?) for want of a part that would have cost 10 cents, you think they (or other manufacturers of vehicles) are going to do the same vetting process that aircraft manufacturers do for their future drive-by-wire vehicle systems? Not likely...
Other than that last bit, I had no problem with the service. I liked the club, the books were good quality (book clubs sell books that are in a "club format" - they are a particular standard size, which I like, because it makes for a nice collection of books on a shelf - but they typically have some kind of ragged edge page binding that is fairly ugly - but they are cheap hardcovers!), and I bought my share before I left.
Leaving required me to write a letter stating that I was leaving. I ended up leaving because I just wasn't buying enough books from them to deal with the hassle, and the books that I was buying were coming from used book sources more often than not, and I had a huge back-catalogue of these yet to read. It just didn't make sense for me to continue.
For me it was a choice between an OS where I had a dev tool I liked (Visual Studio), and a host of other applications, and games - but knowing I was "locked in" to something like that, and that Microsoft's business practices were shady at best, illegal at worst (can I support that morally?) - or go with an unknown system that looks fun (if more difficult to use), didn't have the dev environment I wanted (but plenty of other tools I could learn), no mainstream games (but plenty of open source and free ones, many quite entertaining), and a guiding principle that I liked (the idea of sharing source code and such has always been a good principle to me - I remember the days of typing in code from a magazine, and open source is similar to this - I also was quite into distributing my VB - and earlier QuickBasic - code to others as well).
The choice was a no-brainer for me (but not one I could see everyone making) - I went out and bought a copy of TurboLinux 2.0 (in 1997), and didn't look back (at least at home on my personal box - at work, it is a different story - ugh). To be fair, I actually started with a funky form of Linux called "MonkeyLinux" running on top of DOS, about 6 months before my TurboLinux escapade - got that installed on a Compaq 386/SLT laptop with 6 megs of RAM - yeah, my first Linux "install" was on a laptop (I must be a real glutten for punishment).
I can understand your frustration with the hardware issues you are having. Both wireless adaptors (from what I understand - I have no experience here because I haven't had a need yet to set up such an adaptor) and webcams (USB) are bears to setup and configure, and hope to get working - under Linux. For most hardware that I think may be "esoteric" (for Linux - not for Windows) in support, I tend to do a lot of research before I buy, and then buy what I know has drivers and works under Linux.
The other thing I tend to do is avoid "latest and greatest" hardware - especially peripheral products. I find that things that are a year or more old tend to have support under Linux. Newer stuff can be more a crapshoot, unless the chipset or whatever being used is a common and older chipset, or has support for good emulation (ie, most new cheapo soundcards will work in Linux with SB16 emulation and similar). For a webcam, it would be something I would want to review a lot first - that, or bust out my parallel port B/W old-skool QuickCam (I know it will always work).
I will tell you though that it ticks me off that companies don't provide real support in the form of documentation on how to "talk" with their hardware. Nothing has ticked me off more than having sitting an old Snappy capture device that I had (and loved using) for Windows, where there is virtually no hope of getting it working under Linux because they wouldn't release information on how to interface to it (I asked), so code could be developed - and now the company that made it is long gone, and who knows who has the rights to the device design, etc...
Actually, I would say that while not all 50,000 spam messages each went to 1.2 million AOL subscribers, that some portion of those 50,000 spams went to some portion of those 1.2 million AOL subscribers. Think of it this way - say you have three spam messages (analogous to the 50,000 spams), and 100 email addresses (analogous to the 1.2 mil AOL subs). Those 100 addresses are your "target market". Those three messages may be a message about viagra, a message about porn, and a message on free energy (or something else). Now, of the 100 email addresses, some will want to see maybe 2 out of the three spams, some may only want to see one of the three, and some may want to see all three. There is overlap. So while you wouldn't sent out 300 emails to the list (everyone receiving each spam), all of the spams would be sent to some portion of the list...
That will likely never happen, unless at minimum Linux has gains in the marketshare of operating systems equal to or better than OSX. In fact, it would probably have to be better than that percentage, simply because hardware vendors will not want to support developing the drivers for three operating systems, when two of them have low marketshare.
Who you really need to be talking to is the hardware vendors - tell them you tried their product on your Linux box, and had no luck with it. Maybe they could help you (unlikely, but you won't know unless you try). At minimum, they would have one more datapoint that lets them know that there is a market for them under Linux. Since Linux doesn't have any centralized sales figures (outside of the major distros, and they only measure those copies actually sold, not copies), and everything else is guesswork, they are very hesitant to support our operating system. From a business perspective, this makes sense, and I can't blame them for it.
What I can blame them for, though, is not taking the simple step of at least providing specifications for the hardware to allow others to develop drivers without the long and tedious guesswork that revolves around reverse-engineering a driver. There is no good excuse for it - the whole copyrights/patents/trademarks/etc argument shtick they give as a reason holds no water - if their tech is so transparent that another manufacturer can figure it out from some software, then their hardware is not much more than a glorified DSP with a microcontroller reflashed on bootup by a driver. If that is really the case (and I bet there is some, maybe a lot, of hardware that is like this), then a manufacturer can easily decompile the driver if they really wanted to. Whether they are or not is another question - but we don't really hear much about it, so who really knows?
For your situation: Did you just give up on the whole process? I realize that getting wireless networking working on a Linux box can be a real exercise in frustration, if not downright futility. If you don't have a driver already, it becomes an arcane process with using ndiswrapper and a bunch of luck, and you still might not get a working system. However, did you work and see what your errors were? Did you report your experience to the developers of the driver or ndiswrapper? Did you document your experience in any way that others with the same product could perhaps gain some insight from? If not, you are doing nothing to help the situation.
Lastly, did you just give up on Linux and wireless networking, or did you look into what products/chipsets/drivers work and buy an adaptor that fit that criteria (maybe none of the USB wifi adaptors work - I don't know)? Once again, did you let the device manufacturer know of your issue, and then let the manufacturer of the adaptor that did work (if you found another device) your experience with their products under Linux?
I hope you don't take this wrong - I am not "yelling" at you. It is just in the development model of Linux and the software we use, there needs to be heavy feedback in all directions: it helps marketing, it helps development, it helps any RE efforts going on. Not providing that feedback doesn't help the process as a whole, and likely hinders it. I just hope you realized and acted, so as to help others (even if your needs were not met), rather than throwing up your hands and saying "oh well, Linux is crap". Please know I share your pain - I have had several such instances in my own experience with Linux since I started playing with it in 1997 or so (thankfully, they get fewer each and every year). Each and every time I try to document my experience and let others (including manufacturers) know via whatever forums I can, in the hope that it will make for a better system.
Dude, you have something really messed up on your system if you are having choppy MP3 playback under Linux on that system. I just finished installing (last night) a "new" machine for my wife, to replace her Win98 POS box. It is running a stock install of Mandrake 10.1, using a 366 MHz Celeron, 384 megs of SDRAM, 6.4 gig IDE drive. Basically a bunch of "scrap" I had in my shop. Other than KDE feeling a tad "laggy" (I might tune it down on effects if she complains), it plays MP3s perfectly off the network server. I can't even say I tuned the drive using hdparm yet...
You didn't give many details about your system, but I doubt the problem is your Linux install, or the hardware (unless something really funky is going on). I have managed in the past to get MP3 playback running on a AMD 586/133 (you know the one - the funky "overclocked" 486 Pentium-beater chip that AMD made in the late-1990s - excellent CPU) w/16 meg RAM under DOS (it could barely do this - but it did work). If that can be done, then your system should have no problems.
If you are stream the MP3 from a CD-ROM, check the hdparm settings for the drive (make sure DMA, etc is on - plenty of docs out there on this - BTW, this is a good thing to check for the hard drive device as well). Also, make sure the driver is 100% correct for the soundcard chipset in the system - sometimes the auto-installer on distros pick the wrong driver (or a generic Soundblaster driver) for the chipset, even when the driver for the chipset is available. Make sure your swap partition is big enough. You sound like you should have enough RAM for such a use, but if you are running KDE as your WM, that might be a little low. Something else to try is installing a command line MP3 playback util and try seeing how well that plays things under X vs dropping out of X and to the command line. Also, make sure there isn't any IRQ conflicts between the soundcard/system and the rest of the box.
I am sure there are several other things that I am missing here, but the ones I listed are the first ones I would look into. The system you describe should be more than capable of doing what you need to do...
What you are describing is more commonly known as the "Dual-Slit Experiment". Please note that what I describe below is how I remember it, but I may be incorrect in some details - fellow Slashdotters, please help me out where I fail in my descriptions...
Remember in high school (or another time), performing experiments with waves in a shadow wave tank? If you do, you remember at one end of the tank was the wave making device (basically a little lever that vibrates in the water). Light shined through or reflected off the water showed light and dark bands indicating the peaks and troughs (the amplitudes) of the waves being created. Now, at the other end of the tank, put a divider with two slits in it. The divider prevents the waves from passing, but the two slits allow the waves to pass, thus producing two separate waves, spaced apart. However, as the waves spread, they can interact, where peaks add, and troughs subtract. What you then get in the shadow tank is interesting - you get what is known as an "interference pattern". This pattern of light and dark represents how the waves are interacting, but more importantly shows that what is interacting are waves, and not something else.
Now, instead of water, do the same thing with light. Now, of course, you can't do this with just any kind of light, because regular light is incoherent, that is, it is scattered in every direction and orientation. What you need is coherent light. Hmm - where do you get such a source of coherent light...?
That's right - a LASER. Now, you need your barrier with slits in it. Since laser light is such a different beast than water, you can't use such a large "macro" system like was used in the wave tank. What you need is called a "diffraction grating" or "diffraction screen" - basically a piece of glass with extremely fine lines printed or etched on it (or a fine mesh wire screening), which performs the same function as our larger barrier with two slits in it (in fact, in the water demonstration, you can add slits, and the resulting interference pattern looks the same - it is just that in such an experiment, two slits are easier to observe and understand). Now, shine a laser through that and onto a projection screen - what do you see?
That's right - you will see an interference pattern of dark and light banding of the laser light. In fact, this is very similar to how a visible-light spectrogram works, where the banding indicates the relative levels of various wavelengths of the light being observed. BTW - if you want to try this experiment yourself, a simple laser pointer, some fine mesh screening, and a white wall or piece of blank white paper is all you need to verify this (note, though, that the mesh screening will produce a grid-like pattern due to the "slits" being in both the vertical and horizontal orientations - in fact, if you think about it, you can begin to understand how laser-pointer image "heads", which are included with most cheap laser pointers, work, as well as how you could get a monochrome-LCD with a high enough resolution to do the same thing).
So, with this experiment, we have shown that light has the properties of a wave. But what about photons?
Photons are the particles which make up light, and give it its dual-nature - of being both a particle and a wave at the same time. But, how do we prove this? Well, we need a device to measure light at the level of a single photon - a photo detector, if you will. We do have such devices, they are basically extremely sensitive versions of a solar cell, CDS cell, or CMOS sensor.
Now, imagine you had a shotgun, and Cheney was pointing (couldn't resist - my appologies) it at a very strong version of your barrier - but the barrier only had a single slit. If that gun was fired, most of t
If you haven't found it yet, check out Nuts and Volts Magazine and their spinoff Servo Magazine (which is dedicated to robotics - hobbyist and professional) - both are great magazines. I have been a subscriber to Nuts and Volts since around 1992 or so, and a subscriber to Servo since it started (a year or two ago). I highly reccommend both (if for nothing else, as a resource for supplier listings!)...
They are basically an electronics junkyard, where crap (surplus, used, junk) goes to die. Just to give a further taste, they have one bin, about a 4-foot per side cube - filled with old electric window motors. One area of a back wall is nothing but large spools of wire. There is a shelf filled with boxes of 15 meter coils of terminated single-mode fiber-optic cable - they sold it to me by the foot, I think it was 10 or 20 cents per foot (they thought it was wire). There are three double side rows of small bins, from floor to about 5 foot high, 50 feet long, filled with every small doohicky mechanical part you can imagine. Another room holds all manner of test equipment and other such devices. The front room holds tons of other parts.
Go there wearing old clothes, though - even if you don't touch anything, you will get plenty dirty, the dirt just seems to "stick", ya know? If it is junk, and electronic, they have it. But, like I said, I miss the outdoor area - there used to be some really fantastic junk out there. I managed to rescue, just before it was likely going to be trashed, an Altair 8800 (alas, without the 8080 cpu board - the original owner upgraded it to a Z-80) - they sold it to me for $100.00. It will someday be a major project for me to restore it to working condition (needs a ton of cleaning, etc).
Now, the other watch I have, which I display at home as a "collectible", is some kind of pocket watch I picked up at the Tuscon Gem and Mineral show a couple of years back. The individual selling it had all kinds of old scientific measuring tools (old brass slide rules, astrolabes, clocks, watches, etc) - at least, they looked old. I have spent enough time in antique stores and such to know when I am looking at fake or not, these didn't look fake - if they were (and as with anything of this nature, they could be), they were excellently faked and only something a true appraiser would pick up.
The pocket watch I picked up (for around $80.00 - so it likely wasn't a very old antique, probably something from the early-1900's, if it is real, which I have no clue) is very interesting, in that the watch has a front and back glass crystal piece that make the watch look almost like a sphere. These pieces magnify the movements and watch face, so it is very easy to read (when held right - at an angle there is distortion, of course), and the movements are very interesting to watch. It has a full three hands, and the windup and settings are done thru the same knob (pull out to set, push in to wind). One side of the glass (on the rear crystal), at the bottom of the watch, is ground flat so you can set it on a desk or shelf and view it.
I bought it because I liked the way it looked, it seems to be a unique watch. The seller had a similar, but much larger, desk clock, which had multiple dials and such, and was about 4 or 6 inches in diameter (I wanted to buy it too, but the price was way more than I was willing to spend). I have never seen any similar watch or clock like these two pieces before or since. I haven't had time to take it anywhere to get it checked out, appraised, or figure out what it is or where it may have come from. I haven't been able to see (from looking in the glass) any markings inside the case (on the movements or otherwise). That doesn't mean they aren't there, just that they aren't easily visible.
So, for an interesting watch, maybe a pocket watch or a wristwatch with a visible movement might suit you?
All three examples seem to stem from confusion over the "of" sound, that the contraction with using "have" takes on, thus leading to using "of" or "have" in the wrong place, leaving it out entirely, or in very severe cases, adding a 've contraction to words where it doesn't make sense at all.
It is sad, really - it is like english isn't being taught at all, just how to make grunts and sounds which "make sense" to another (supposed) speaker of the language. It makes me wonder if it could all devolve into something similar to what I heard at a bar in Mexico - the singers were all singing what sounded like Buffet's "Margaritaville", but they were just singing the sounds - once you started listening, you realized that they didn't understand at all what they were actually singing, because they didn't know english (not that it mattered much at such a bar, of course).
Now, everybody, pay attention: I am sure I messed up my own grammar in this post somewhere, so nitpick away (always a problem when posting about grammar, of course)...
Your locality (and nation) may be different, but if you are in the United States, watch out! You may be legal to build such a thing, even wire it as such, but you may find it hell to get homeowner's insurance. Heck, many insurance carriers in the US look at you funny if you so much as think about daring to be different. Look into the issues with getting HO insurance to cover such radical building systems like rammed earth or straw bale construction. Never mind the fact that both are techniques with hundreds, maybe thousands of years of history in construction, never mind the fact that if constructed right, both are way more fire resistant than a stick-frame house - never mind a myriad of things - you will find it near to impossible to get such insurance, or if you can, your rates will be extremely out of whack vs regular construction.
Don't get me started on trying to get insurance for an old school bus to drive as a private vehicle - here in the Phoenix area you have to pull all kinds of weird trickery just to get it "recognized" as an RV...
Now, this guy did do something, don't get me wrong: he showed that it is now possible to build such a rig using completely off-the-shelf components (most of them looked like they were sourced from EBay - I know you can get the HMD and P5 glove from there, and the VAIO), and do it fairly cheaply (which wasn't as possible in 1995-6). He "made" an HMD from OTS components, and got it to "work" (for some value of "work").
I suppose the "state of the art" for Augmented Reality could be advanced by amateurs using rigs like this - same as cheap PCs led to better software for them. This is a good thing. But this demonstration rig does nothing for advancing the hardware behind VR/AR - which is where the real problems lie. For the best experience, we need cheap HMDs with good resolution and a largish field-of-view (FOV) - which I can guarantee his HMD does not provide. We also need better (as in easier and more comfortable to wear) input devices (gloves or otherwise), along with a better and cheaper sourceless (and/or sourced - ie, magnetic, optic, or otherwise) 3D tracker systems (the majority of these systems, which have the speed and resolutions, not to mention the capability to handle multiple tracked nodes - have price tags well outside most user's budgets - take a look at Polhemus or Ascension products, among others, if you don't believe me).
Ideally, the tracker system would be external in some manner, using one or more video cameras sampling the scene of the user, tracking IR marker stickers or silhoettes of the user to determine head, hand, and body position (in the case of a wearable, this kind of tracking becomes much more difficult, as it inherently must be sourceless).
I guess I was just hoping to see something beyond what was presented in issues of PCVR 10 years ago (indeed, some of the stuff from PCVR could still be considered "state of the art" even today)...
In fact, over at NeHe Productions there are a ton of OpenGL demo tutorials (and a CD available), mostly written in C/C++. Some of these (the "beginner" ones, mainly) have been converted over to Python (and, IIRC, PyOpenGL - that, or some other wrapper), and are very easy to read, well commented, well documented, etc.
Once I had Python and PyOpenGL set up properly on my Linux box, I was able to get the demos working well, and modifying them was easy. Eventually, I took the "simple room walkthrough" demo, and had modded it to allow me to walk around while being able to look whereever I wanted (that is, I could look independently of movement). I eventually modded the code to use the mouse for "lookaround", and the arrow keys were for walking. Now, this isn't too special - what was interesting, though, was getting X to recognize and be able to use two different mice on my system (one was serial, the other PS/2) - I did this 1) to see if I could and if it was possible, and 2) because my "second" mouse was an "off-table" ring-mouse trackball device I had bought specifically for virtual environment navigation, and I didn't want to be constantly swapping the devices out. It was cool while I had it working - a great experiment, and it really showed the power of Python and OpenGL.
I am pretty certain a full 3D engine could be built using Python and PyOpenGL (of course, OpenGL is doing all the "heavy" lifting - though who knows if Python would be up to task of doing everything else a real 3D engine needs - perhaps at that point you move to CrystalSpace or something)...
That's the basics. It could be simplified or expanded in numerous ways. You could have a single camera, for instance, and a stepper-motor controlled by the server rotating a turntable on which the fobs are mounted, to take the pictures of the fobs automatically in-turn. Add in a high-contrast lighting scheme, couple the camera with some edge-detection and/or OCR software, and have the computer interpret the numbers (or enhance the image) so that you know exactly what to type (when I went to the site it was difficult to read the fob image). Put the whole thing inside a modified safe or lockbox, inside a locked room, for better physical security (even better than carrying them around, I would think).
The server itself would have to have its own 2-factor security token fob to access it, so the user of all the fobs would only have to carry around a single fob, instead of a "keychain" of fobs. Also, though I don't know if this is practiced where these fobs are used (or if it breaks the system and isn't?), if multiple users need access to all the fobs, then they each can carry their own fob to get to the fobcam system, which can be set up to allow this (I would imagine). Perhaps in certain setups, a 4-factor auth scheme could be done - with the user's fobcam access fob, and the "fobcam" stored fobs providing the numbers (would prove who access which system).
Please note: here is a niche problem in need of a solution - I have just outlined step 2 of the business plan above - we all know what steps one and three are, of course...
You have a job right now that is boring, but has a lot of perks: great pay, nice hours, the ability to telecommute as you want, etc. You want to find a job with less money, hopefully good benefits, but more exciting work. I can understand if you wanted to leave your current job because you feel it is a rut in your career (and believe me, it could turn out that way if you stay too long). If you have only been there a few years or less, though, think about this:
If you want more exciting work, do you want to give away all of that effort (thoughts and energy) doing that exciting work for an employer in exchange for a little money, or would you rather see a great return on such an investment?
One thing to keep in mind is that in the software business, you may be doing some coding and getting "N" dollars in salary in return, but it is possible that they are turning around and selling that same software for "N x X" - where "X" can be any factor you can think of - to multiple customers. For instance, at one job I was at they needed (for a client) a piece of software which would act as an interface between a scanner and an imaging system. It was to take images, and some data about them (OCR data stored as a CSV file), and dump all of that from that format to the format the imaging system needed. Neither the OCR company nor the imaging company wanted to write it. Since my employer was a VAR for both, they asked me to write it. I wrote a simple app in VB6 which would sit in the tray waiting for jobs, and as it got them, transfer them over. Took me a couple of days to write and debug fully with the test data I had, and to tweak it "just so" to make it easy to install, and to handle licensing issues. I later found out that they sold this software to the client for about $25,000.00! As far as I know, they only sold it that one time, but they could easily sell it over and over again for that same amount! I wouldn't be a bit surprised if the company you are currently working for is doing the same thing with those "boring" VBA scripts and such you create...
Now - if you can get that amount for some fairly retarded (but crucial to some business operations) pieces of code - imagine what you could get for "exciting" code? However, unless you have some sort of financial stake in the next company you work for - you won't get jack (other than your paycheck, of course). So why go that route?
Instead - think of an exciting project, and start doing work on it at home! It doesn't even have to be coding related - or even related to computers! But it does have to be something that is exciting to you. Use your current job as the means to support yourself and family - and if you are willing to take a pay cut - do it now! At your current job, estimate what your "new" job would pay, take the cut, and put that amount from your current job into your "new business fund" savings account. Then, with that squared away, take on your "new job" of building that exciting new product. Once you have it at a certain level of "doneness" - start to think about a business plan and start writing that up. Hopefully, by this time, a year or so of time has passed and your "new business fund" savings have accumulated to a certain amount (maybe $5000.00 or so?). You have code (or whatever exciting product you are making), you have a business plan, you have some savings to launch (or at least as collateral for a small business loan, or something).
Now, all you need to do is find investors in your plan, or find other people interested. Now - you have to do this portion quietly - don't shop it around to your colleagues or clients from work - unless what you wrote (or built) has nothing to do with your current job. If you are doing software, make sure you don't use VBA (for instance) - or that the software does anything similar to what the software you are writing at work doe
I remember a device similar to this one (although, I think, without the special "paste" involved) that was developed in Australia, and shown on Beyond 2000, back in the mid/late 1980's. It was a device, custom fitted and molded like a retainer, with batteries and electronics in it to produce a current in your mouth while you slept at night to reduce/eliminate tooth decay from plaque. From the way it was presented on the program, it seemed like something which should have been, at most, five years to market (at least somewhere, if not in the United States). Yet it still has not been manufactured and marketed, not even to the dental services community. Every once in a while, we see another story like this pop up in the news. But we never, ever, seem to be able to purchase the product from our dentists! Personally, I don't think such a product could replace proper brushing or dental checkups and cleanings. However, such a product might make for healthier, stronger teeth for people throughout their lives, which can only be a good thing. So - what/who is blocking this technology from becoming widespread, and why?
It didn't take this the first time - when the founding fathers wrote our (US) Constitution, they debated the issue and reasons behind intellectual property quite intensely. Read the Federalist papers if you don't believe me. Some of the FF's didn't even want to define the idea of copyrights, tradmarks, and patents, because they thought such definitions might be perverted and used against the people. I know for a fact that one of the FF's understood how IP was thought made public, there is a quote where he compared it to lighting a candle, and using that candle to light his neighbors, but his stays lit (something akin to that - I think it was Jefferson, or mayby Adams? Can someone back me up?).
Ultimately, they reached a consensus that such things should have a "limited lifetime", and that the "owner" should get a government-backed monopoly to recoup his effort in the creation of said intellectual property, after which time the monopoly status would expire, and the IP would revert to the public domain. They thought this was a good compromise - even so, there were still grumblings that ill would come of it, in the future.
The rise of corporations becoming legal entities able to own IP ultimately proved those FF's who still didn't like the idea correct. So here we are today. A catastrophic event would do nothing to revert this new status quo. It might shake it for a bit, but eventually, history would repeat itself, and this conversation would occur again.
The simple answer is "no" - I have not stolen anything. The best that could be said is that I have deprived you of potential profits. Guess what - if Joe Shmuck down the street has your exact same car, and he is selling it for less (let's say you are selling it for blue book, he is selling it for $1.00), has he now "stolen" something from you?
Here is where it gets tricky for intellectual property (IP). With IP, making a copy of something still cannot be said to be depriving the owner of that IP of his original IP. If a copy is made, all such a copy can do is deprive the IP owner of potential profit from that IP. It doesn't deprive him of the IP itself.
This is the problem with IP - we try to treat it as real property, when it is clearly not. IP is thought made real, and just like thought, when it is spoken aloud (or displayed), it becomes something all can share - it becomes a part of culture. This whole issue was debated greatly and heatedly by the founding fathers of the United States when they discussed implementing patents and copyright laws in our Constitution. They could see that there was a right for someone who came up with an idea to profit off of it, for a limited time. This idea is what made it into our Constitution. Unfortunately, then lawyers got involved.
With the rise of corporations become legal entities (and able to hold patents, copyrights, and trademarks), the term "limited time" and "lifetime" became meaningless - at least from a human lifespan standpoint. These corporations became more powerful, and with their lawyers were able to shift the meaning (and pass laws) to pervert the meaning of "a limited time", especially as those limits were approached (Sonny Bono Copyright Act). By extending the meaning of "limited time", the length of time to make profit perverts the idea of IP into something that seems like real property, regardless of the fact that it ultimately is still expressed thought. As the idea that IP is "something else" that is "real" was accepted by the public (American and otherwise - this is a worldwide issue), the issue that copying is some form of stealing started to take hold. Eventually, our laws shifted from where copying IP was a civil offense (punishable with fines) - into one where it is a criminal offense (punishable with fines and jailtime, among other things).
This is world we live in now. A world where the expression of other people's thoughts, without permission, is punishable by jailtime (which, for some unfortunate people, might as well be death). At one time, the ordinary man on the street would have laughed at you if you had told him the "in the future, copying that Metallica tape will land you in jail". Currently, the man on the street laughs if you tell him "in the future, whistling that Metallica tune will land you in jail".
Why is the former plausible and accepted now, but the latter seems absurd today? It shouldn't - it is where we are ultimately headed...
It really is this pathetic - it is like their IT department (or whoever maintains there DB systems) have never heard of a "merge" utility. Yes, such a utility does need to be run and verified by a human, but hopefully the system can detect when there are possible duplicates of people, and alert the administrator of member services that such discrepancies exist so that the human can schedule time to take care of them in a timely manner, so no backlog is created. Merge utilities are not difficult pieces of software to write.
As far as allowing the government to "do their job for them", these companies must be really dense in not knowing that SSN duplication and misuse is rampant. Most of the time, these duplicate SSNs are held by illegal immigrants for some kind of tax and/or social security fraud (or to simply look "legit") being perpetrated by their "employer" (most of the time without the immigrant's knowledge)...
My wife and I did this the first year we filed after we bought a house. We had been doing the long form and hating it for a few years before that. After we got an accountant, we realized how stupid we were for not doing it long before we bought the house.
Since then, each year it costs us about $100.00 for the accountant to do our taxes. All we have to do is keep track of possible deductable amounts thru the year, add them up and stick the amounts on a form mailed to us, which we then send back (I personally drive it over, but it could be mailed), along with the W-2's, 1099's, etc.
With all the forms for taxes from the house, our savings account, our IRA, plus a couple of other things - I can't even imagine doing them personally. My time and sanity is worth the $100.00 knowing it will be done right. I consider that $100.00 to be good money spent. I consider that money just another amount that helps me keep from arguing with my wife from being aggravated by the whole process.
Do it - trust me. Get an accountant for your taxes. When tax time comes around, you won't dread it (as much), and likely you will get a nice return as a bonus (ideally, your return, from all sources, should be close to $0.00 - never use the government as a savings account...it isn't like you get to keep the interest).
Something interesting, since you mention your GF having been diagnosed: I have a couple of other quirks, which I hope not to exhibit here (though I probably will):
I tend "pontificate" on subjects, describing things (or discussing them) in some expansive detail. Stories/descriptions which should be short, become, in effect, long diatribes. Reference some of my other /. postings and see if you don't agree...heh.
Another quirk I have, is that within these long pontifications, I will go off on relevant tangents, which will send me off on further tangents. Invariably, though, I am able to tie all of this together and return back to my main focus of discussion. I have a friend who described this "pattern" as "parenthetical speaking". It seemed an apt description.
So I ask, have you noticed whether these annomolies manifest themselves within your GF's speech patterns?
Those who have Asperger's, however, typically are unable to read these cues, or express the same cues (or they read them wrong and/or express wrong). This leads the other person/people they are communicating with to be turned off by this behavior or lack of being able to interpretate their own language. For those with Asperger's, it is a very frustrating situation, especially if/when communicating with someone they are attracted to. For these people, if they are lucky they can turn to their analytical side, and learn the proper cues and responses. Unfortunately, this takes a TON of practice and experimentation, and one must be very attentive to it in social situations. Make a simple mistake, and the fact that you are different from the rest becomes very apparent to the so-called "normal" person you are communicating with. "Normal" people do not have to deal with this, because to them, it is as secondary as breathing is.
It is exhausting work, which is why most people who have Asperger's are not very social, or have problems in social situations. You may notice that I have some experience with this: I have not been diagnosed, so take this with a grain or two, but I am pretty sure I have Asperger's myself, to some degree. Granted, it is an armchair self-diagnoses (not a very reliable thing, I realize), but I seem to fit the definitions I have read, and it explains a lot about myself and my relationships with other people. I can't expect people to fully understand my social issues, anymore than they should expect me to understand their so-called "normal" outlook. I understand it at an analytical level, I can emulate it when needed (and manipulate it at will, too), but it is exhausting to do so for long periods of time, so I tend to avoid such situations. However, when I am in such situations, it is very interesting.
For example, my wife and I (I won't discuss here how I managed to date, then gain a spouse - a whole story unto itself) were at a party with friends, and I was comfortable at it. A woman came up to me, my wife nearby, and commented on what I was wearing. I wasn't paying much attention, plus I was a bit inebriated, so I simply responded with "Thank you", etc - and she walked away, kinda confused. My wife (later on that evening, at home) commentted to me about that woman making a pass at me, which, when I thought about it, and we discussed it, was likely the case. Due to her body language, her mode of speech, etc and the way she walked away confused (which I only realized after my wife and I discussed it), I did come away with the conclusion that yes, she was making a pass (or something) to me. However, I completely missed it - I could not, and did not, see her body language or facial expressions in the moment, and I likely didn't respond in the "proper" way.
I don't expect you or anyone else to completely understand this. In a way, it is a handicap, a form of blindness which affects social communication and interaction. It can only be mitigated by severe attention to situations, using real-time analysis of the situation and communication and then emulating proper responses, etc. It is very tiring, and sometimes mistakes are made which, if picked up on by the opposite party (which in most cases they are, unless the other individual/group is very drunk), immediately "outs" you and ruins the encounter. It is simply easier and less taxing to not be in such situations in the first place.
Actually, you might want to rethink the idea that a monitor "has no memory". While you are technically correct that monitors don't have frame buffers or such (ie, gobs of memory to hold an image), LCD monitors, by their very nature, act similar to DRAM with refresh (in that you have a bunch of transistors essentially acting as a very brief storage area for bits which are visible instead of hidden), and I wouldn't doubt that there is some limited amount of memory incorporated into some LCDs to allow the upping of the refresh rate or similar. In a similar vein, regular CRT-based monitors, while not likely having separate memory, could/can be used as memory itself (back in the 1940's/50's, specially designed CRTs, albeit with long-delay phophor coatings, were used as a form of memory storage on some early computers)...