That's quite a neat way to construct a Helmholtz coil. Thanks.
A small technical glitch. A Helmholtz coil only gives a uniform field along its axis. (An infinitely long solenoid has a constant field everywhere inside.) There's an easy work around though. We will just get the students to sit in a line. Your patent or mine?;-)
Is it really fair that a taller student's vote counts more than a shorter student's?
Here is a better idea:
Enclose the room in a giant coil. Ideally this coil will be of infinite length to get a uniform field, thus giving short students the same vote as taller students. Each student gets to keep their magnet.
At the count of three, each student either points the north pole of their magnet to the front of the room (for yes) or the rear of the room (for no).
The polarity of the current spike induced in the coil indicates the majority yes/no vote. The magnitude can be usd to inicate the strength of the yes/no.
Apart from being fair to short students, this method does better then needing no batteries. It generates power. The power generated can be sold to the electricity grid and the system will eventually pay for itself. Once it has paid for itself the system will return a profit to the university. Surely a good thing in this day and age when Universities are expected to return money from teaching and research?
By the way, the GL841 is used in the LiDE 35, 40, 50 and 80. Thus sane support for the LiDE35 should translate into support for LiDE 40, 50 and 80 as well. It's possible some of the extra buttons might not work until someone has tweeked LiDE35 support for each specific model.
Question: Does anyone know whether anyone has actually "rolled their sleeves" up yet and written the LiDE35 specific bits for the development version of sane? Last time I looked it wasn't there, but it might have changed by now.
LiDE20 and LiDE30 are supported by sane. Sane is the scanning system for Linux, so supported by sane equates to supported by Linux.
LiDE 35, 40, 50, 80 are officially unsupported by sane but work is in progress to support them. A standalone program has been written, which can scan from an LiDE35 under linux. I gather this is serving as a guide to supporting the LiDE 35 (and others) under sane. Support for the GL841 chipset, used in the LiDE 35, is already in the development version of sane.
I would imagine that complete support for the LiDE series in sane would be a matter of someone rolling their sleeves up and writing the LiDE 35 specific bits (based on the test program) on top of the sane GL841 driver.
> Well at least one of them must have sent it to a third party...
A third party is not the public. For that matter, given the insecurity of email a third party within the company could easily have copied the email of the company's intranet and published it.
> Given they work for a legal firm...
You overestimate the intelligence of lawyers. Like everyone else they can have self importantance and think the rules don't apply to themselves.
As far as they were concerned it was not for public consumption. End result is they get the bullet and the person (high up in the company???) who was responsible for any negative impact on the company gets off scott free. The terms scapegoat and shafted come to mind. I hope their legal action succeeds.
By my reading the exchange might even be a tongue in cheek exchange between two mates. Under the right circumstances, mates (using the Australian understanding of the word) can freely trade insults without offence.
I would think that GPL V3 will try to stop companies from enforcing software patents, not from obtaining them. Thus a company (such as IBM) can have a defensive portfolio and can do what they want with it, as long as they don't use it against GPL software.
a couple of points.
1) It is unlikely that the FSF would modify the GPL without consulting major GPL users, such as IBM. I suspect the GPL V3 will have the blessing of IBM's legal department and it might even turn out that the FSF was influenced by their opinion.
2) One of the purposes if the GPL V3 woul have to be to encourage giants, such as IBM, to stomp on the parasites and encourage the spread of free software. You don't do that by discouraging the use of software patents against parasites and non-free software.
Small point. Moog synthesisers are analog and produce their sound 'from scratch'. There are no samples involved. (In the time domain at least.) To quote Moog
"Synthesizers (at least Moog synthesizers) do NOT use manufactured effects and they do NOT use pre-recorded samples."
I think you will find that the first digital sampling synthesiser was the Fairlight.
The first analog sampling synthesiser was the Mellotron.
Anyone know what the first digital synthesiser was?
That covers both meanings of "sample", as in a short sound or a single data point of a digital sequence.
Just in case you wanted to know the basics of perpendicular recording, Hitachi have released quite an informative (and even mildly amusing) animation about it.
I just happen to have finished building an FPGA based system which can handle multiple WiFi channels. (5 channels per board, number of boards only limited by how many PCI slots available.) Anyone interested in it?
Does anyone actually believe the '911 justification'? In practise will being able to automatically locate all phones help emergency response? Wouldn't a better solution be an all in one 'emergency' button which will send a distress call along with a location? The person wouldn't even have to be able to speak. The normal 'call' button would just place a normal call and not send a location.
If the answer to the first question is 'no', the next question is "Is anyone getting sick of the lies being told by our governments as a matter of routine?"
To get "non-major" (aka non-RIAA??) tracks you need to go to "more options" and click "Include alternates, imports, EPs, etc.".
This option is disabled by default. I'm getting the feeling that this seach might just be a marketing tool for some major labels. What do others think?
The binary compatibility mode of wine is restricted to x86 machines (since wine doesn't emulate the x86 instruction set).
The source compatibility mode is not restricted to x86 machines!
You take the source code for the program to be 'ported' and the source to wine (available under the LGPL) and compile them both on your target machine. The result is a binary (with the WINE libraries compiled in) that will run on any (non-x86) architecture running Linux.
That's how it works in theory (your real life experience may differ).
WiFi operates in the ISM bands. Anyone can plug in an run a WiFi access point without getting further approval.
Current WiMax equipment is being targeted at licensed bands. You need to buy (expensive) spectrum to operate WiMax. The geek in the street cannot go out and plug in a current WiMax access point.
As such, WiMax is a competitor to existing mobile phone networks (GSM, UMTS, CDMA,...), not a successor to 802.11 wireless LANs. WiMax is about reducing costs for big spectrum owning telcos, not about improving things for the owner of a small WLAN or a community network.
In summary, you won't be thowing your home 802.11 WiFi access point away and replacing it with the current crop of 802.16 WiMax 'access points' (probably better called base stations).
WINE provides a set of Windows compatible APIs running on top of Linux. In theory this allows a developer to trivially 'port' to Linux by doing a recompilation of their unmodified windows source, against WINE. The result is a binary which runs natively on Linux.
Then there is the (possibly) more well known binary compatibility aspect of WINE, which allows Windows binaries to be executed with Linux.
It is great (and completely valid) that the University is promoting non-RIAA music.
Who says music==RIAA (apart from the RIAA)? The University at least is smart enough to realise that this is not the case and that it is not required to provide RIAA 'music' on tap.
It's not a question of which is being better, but what you are trying to achieve by your choice of license. Just as apples and oranges have different uses, the two licenses suit different purposes, so aren't really worth comparing.
Debate the merits of each purpose if you will (and get into an argument where 'right' depends your point of view), but neither of the two licenses is 'better'.
IMO the problem is not with the actual paying money bit (though that will be a deterrent to next generation applications, which use more bandwidth).
The problem is that billing requires control. It is inevitable that such control will be abused and eventually be used for controlling what people say on the network.
Here is a scenario. Company XYZ builds a network with billing built in at the lowest levels. Biling requires that company XYZ knows
who is sending each bit (so they know who to bill for sending)
who is receiving each bit (so they know who to bill for receiving and maybe tariff calculation), and
have the abilty to prevent individuals from sending and receiving (in case they haven't paid their bills).
At the start XYZ promises that this control will only used for billing purposes.
After someone has blown up a few thousand people the government passes a law that says all networks must monitor and control traffic the government deems to be suspect. Company XYZ says 'cannot do', but the government points to the fact that they have enough control to bill customers. Subsequently cetain users are locked out of the network.
A few years down the track there is a change of government. The new government is backed by a religious group, which objects to certain online content. They push the government to use their control to remove certian online content.
Then an association representing a small portion of content publishers takes company XYZ to court, alleging copyright violation. They allege XYZ is allowing copyright violations on their network. Company XYZ says 'we can't control our users'. The court sees that customers can be barred for not paying bills and orders XYZ to barr all customers who have not agreed to install a monitoring program written by the 'small content holders trade association'.
After a few years, competition has shrunk profit margins. Company XYZ's service level falls and cuctomers start posting complaints online. Company XYZ bars those users who complain.
Next small company ABC comes up with with holo-messanger, a messanger product that has the potential to make the existing mico-messanger protocol obsolete. Company XYZ derives 90% of its income from micro-messaging and feels legally obliged to protect its shareholders interests by monitoring all 'holo-messaging' traffic on its network (via the billing system) and droppping 1 in 100 packets, so end users think holo-messaging is inferior to micro-messaging.
Meanwhile the government has locked up someone who sent an email claiming the Divine Right of Presidents is heresy. They were tracked when the company XYZ associated the sent email with their cuctomer number.
All from having a billing system built into the network.
For example, perhaps the printing press took 50 years or more to develop? As the time since invention increases, we tend to regard the development time as negligible compared the large time period since invention. Consequently, we regard most 'old' inventions as having happened instantaneously and being 'revolutionary'. Hence we regard the printing press as something that happened in a short, revolutionary, burst of inventiveness.
Compare that with the fifty year 'evolution' of the computer. Maybe in 500 years time computers will be regarded as a revolution that exploded on the scene?
economic infrastructure = having billing built into the network protocols, as for the Public Switched Telephone Network?
That is a crap idea. The Internet is out competing Telcos precisely because billing (and the consequent control) is not built in, allowing innovation. Insert "economic infrastructure" (a.k.a billing) and the culture of the Internet (as geeks know it) dies.
Slashdot Mirror
A small technical glitch. A Helmholtz coil only gives a uniform field along its axis. (An infinitely long solenoid has a constant field everywhere inside.) There's an easy work around though. We will just get the students to sit in a line. Your patent or mine? ;-)
Here is a better idea:
Enclose the room in a giant coil. Ideally this coil will be of infinite length to get a uniform field, thus giving short students the same vote as taller students. Each student gets to keep their magnet.
At the count of three, each student either points the north pole of their magnet to the front of the room (for yes) or the rear of the room (for no).
The polarity of the current spike induced in the coil indicates the majority yes/no vote. The magnitude can be usd to inicate the strength of the yes/no.
Apart from being fair to short students, this method does better then needing no batteries. It generates power. The power generated can be sold to the electricity grid and the system will eventually pay for itself. Once it has paid for itself the system will return a profit to the university. Surely a good thing in this day and age when Universities are expected to return money from teaching and research?
Question: Does anyone know whether anyone has actually "rolled their sleeves" up yet and written the LiDE35 specific bits for the development version of sane? Last time I looked it wasn't there, but it might have changed by now.
LiDE 35, 40, 50, 80 are officially unsupported by sane but work is in progress to support them. A standalone program has been written, which can scan from an LiDE35 under linux. I gather this is serving as a guide to supporting the LiDE 35 (and others) under sane. Support for the GL841 chipset, used in the LiDE 35, is already in the development version of sane.
I would imagine that complete support for the LiDE series in sane would be a matter of someone rolling their sleeves up and writing the LiDE 35 specific bits (based on the test program) on top of the sane GL841 driver.
Logitech announces their "PC mouse", complete with monitor and networking. For an extra $9.95 it comes with the optional PC mouse mouse.
A third party is not the public. For that matter, given the insecurity of email a third party within the company could easily have copied the email of the company's intranet and published it.
> Given they work for a legal firm...
You overestimate the intelligence of lawyers. Like everyone else they can have self importantance and think the rules don't apply to themselves.
As far as they were concerned it was not for public consumption. End result is they get the bullet and the person (high up in the company???) who was responsible for any negative impact on the company gets off scott free. The terms scapegoat and shafted come to mind. I hope their legal action succeeds.
By my reading the exchange might even be a tongue in cheek exchange between two mates. Under the right circumstances, mates (using the Australian understanding of the word) can freely trade insults without offence.
We have the biggest bananna in the southern hemisphere!
a couple of points.
1) It is unlikely that the FSF would modify the GPL without consulting major GPL users, such as IBM. I suspect the GPL V3 will have the blessing of IBM's legal department and it might even turn out that the FSF was influenced by their opinion.
2) One of the purposes if the GPL V3 woul have to be to encourage giants, such as IBM, to stomp on the parasites and encourage the spread of free software. You don't do that by discouraging the use of software patents against parasites and non-free software.
I think you will find that the first digital sampling synthesiser was the Fairlight.
The first analog sampling synthesiser was the Mellotron.
Anyone know what the first digital synthesiser was?
That covers both meanings of "sample", as in a short sound or a single data point of a digital sequence.
Just in case you wanted to know the basics of perpendicular recording, Hitachi have released quite an informative (and even mildly amusing) animation about it.
I just happen to have finished building an FPGA based system which can handle multiple WiFi channels. (5 channels per board, number of boards only limited by how many PCI slots available.) Anyone interested in it?
If the answer to the first question is 'no', the next question is "Is anyone getting sick of the lies being told by our governments as a matter of routine?"
This option is disabled by default. I'm getting the feeling that this seach might just be a marketing tool for some major labels. What do others think?
The source compatibility mode is not restricted to x86 machines!
You take the source code for the program to be 'ported' and the source to wine (available under the LGPL) and compile them both on your target machine. The result is a binary (with the WINE libraries compiled in) that will run on any (non-x86) architecture running Linux.
That's how it works in theory (your real life experience may differ).
WiFi operates in the ISM bands. Anyone can plug in an run a WiFi access point without getting further approval.
Current WiMax equipment is being targeted at licensed bands. You need to buy (expensive) spectrum to operate WiMax. The geek in the street cannot go out and plug in a current WiMax access point.
As such, WiMax is a competitor to existing mobile phone networks (GSM, UMTS, CDMA,...), not a successor to 802.11 wireless LANs. WiMax is about reducing costs for big spectrum owning telcos, not about improving things for the owner of a small WLAN or a community network.
In summary, you won't be thowing your home 802.11 WiFi access point away and replacing it with the current crop of 802.16 WiMax 'access points' (probably better called base stations).
WINE provides a set of Windows compatible APIs running on top of Linux. In theory this allows a developer to trivially 'port' to Linux by doing a recompilation of their unmodified windows source, against WINE. The result is a binary which runs natively on Linux.
Then there is the (possibly) more well known binary compatibility aspect of WINE, which allows Windows binaries to be executed with Linux.
Who says music==RIAA (apart from the RIAA)? The University at least is smart enough to realise that this is not the case and that it is not required to provide RIAA 'music' on tap.
[ ] Unix
[ ] Mainframe
[ ] Windows
beard #2
[ ] Unix
[ ] Mainframe
[ ] Windows
beard #3
[ ] Unix
[ ] Mainframe
[ ] Windows
$500k = team of engineers to figure out how to make 10 million containers per month.
$24,490k = marketing guys to decide on shape of the container and what to print on the outside of it.
It's just as valid to debate the above.
It's not a question of which is being better, but what you are trying to achieve by your choice of license. Just as apples and oranges have different uses, the two licenses suit different purposes, so aren't really worth comparing.
Debate the merits of each purpose if you will (and get into an argument where 'right' depends your point of view), but neither of the two licenses is 'better'.
The problem is that billing requires control. It is inevitable that such control will be abused and eventually be used for controlling what people say on the network.
Here is a scenario. Company XYZ builds a network with billing built in at the lowest levels. Biling requires that company XYZ knows
At the start XYZ promises that this control will only used for billing purposes.
After someone has blown up a few thousand people the government passes a law that says all networks must monitor and control traffic the government deems to be suspect. Company XYZ says 'cannot do', but the government points to the fact that they have enough control to bill customers. Subsequently cetain users are locked out of the network.
A few years down the track there is a change of government. The new government is backed by a religious group, which objects to certain online content. They push the government to use their control to remove certian online content.
Then an association representing a small portion of content publishers takes company XYZ to court, alleging copyright violation. They allege XYZ is allowing copyright violations on their network. Company XYZ says 'we can't control our users'. The court sees that customers can be barred for not paying bills and orders XYZ to barr all customers who have not agreed to install a monitoring program written by the 'small content holders trade association'.
After a few years, competition has shrunk profit margins. Company XYZ's service level falls and cuctomers start posting complaints online. Company XYZ bars those users who complain.
Next small company ABC comes up with with holo-messanger, a messanger product that has the potential to make the existing mico-messanger protocol obsolete. Company XYZ derives 90% of its income from micro-messaging and feels legally obliged to protect its shareholders interests by monitoring all 'holo-messaging' traffic on its network (via the billing system) and droppping 1 in 100 packets, so end users think holo-messaging is inferior to micro-messaging.
Meanwhile the government has locked up someone who sent an email claiming the Divine Right of Presidents is heresy. They were tracked when the company XYZ associated the sent email with their cuctomer number.
All from having a billing system built into the network.
Today's evolution is tomorrow's revolution?
For example, perhaps the printing press took 50 years or more to develop? As the time since invention increases, we tend to regard the development time as negligible compared the large time period since invention. Consequently, we regard most 'old' inventions as having happened instantaneously and being 'revolutionary'. Hence we regard the printing press as something that happened in a short, revolutionary, burst of inventiveness.
Compare that with the fifty year 'evolution' of the computer. Maybe in 500 years time computers will be regarded as a revolution that exploded on the scene?
That is a crap idea. The Internet is out competing Telcos precisely because billing (and the consequent control) is not built in, allowing innovation. Insert "economic infrastructure" (a.k.a billing) and the culture of the Internet (as geeks know it) dies.
No independence, as you're then a tame pawn for a corrupt Haliburton lookalike.