But for many people (Linus included) those "loopholes" are features not bugs. Those holding views can argue those features are what caused GPL 2 to be so widely adopted and that the "fixes" in v3 will cause v3 to "crumble" (ie nobody using it).
So what? If that's the worst that can happen, what have we got to lose?
Let's say that GPL3 is a huge flop. Nobody wants to use it, and as a result, there's no software relased under the license. It disappears into history, with nothing but a Wikipedia page to remember it by.
Fine. It'll mean a lot of effort was wasted writing the thing and bickering over it, but it's not like anybody is being forced to participate; those people wasted their own time.
However, if it is popular, then it could mean good things for the FOSS movement in general, and be exactly what's needed in order to keep Free Software from being fenced in behind hardware-enforced checksums or web services, effectively making it as opaque and unmodifiable as proprietary binary code, and doing as little for the community.
I don't get why people have such a problem with GPL3. It's a license. If you don't like it, you don't have to use it on your software. GPL2 will always be around for you to use if you want to, and it's clear now that the Linux kernel will always be GPL2 (at least until there's a complete rewrite). It's a move that might do a lot of good, and if it fails, probably won't do much harm except to the egos of a bunch of people.
We have a Free and open-source OS which is basically useable for anyone who wants to use it; that's not going away. GPL3 can't take away what's already here; it's purely forward-looking. If it succeeds, great, if it doesn't, then back to the drawing board.
Personal items don't make sense.
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Mobile phones are generally only used by one person; thus they're only covered with your own bacteria, and it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to disinfect them.
After all, if you touch the phone to your face, and then wait a while and touch it to your face again, you didn't accomplish anything. The bacteria that were on your face are still on your face; even if you hadn't used the phone they just would have stayed there.
Now, if you had a phone that was shared by large numbers of people, there might be a reason to disinfect it so you didn't spread things, but even then I'm not sure how dirty your face is. Your hands are probably much worse, and people still seem to shake hands without hesitation. Regular handwashing would probably be more effective at preventing the spread of disease than whether your mobile phone is oozing Lysol.
The objects which it makes sense to make self-disinfecting are those which are used by large numbers of people, and are principally touched with their hands. The keyboards and mice of public terminals strike me as a good use, but more than that, I'd like to see the interior door-handles of public restrooms made self-disinfecting. (Or mandate that all restroom doors have to be free-swinging and open outwards, so you could just push them.)
Little bastards; who said they're allowed to get it on in there? If I'm not getting any, nobody better be getting any, capiche?
Make it "different," instead of "hostile."
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This is probably true, but assuming bacteria did evolve to be able to survive on this surface, what are the chances that they would also be able to survive and reproduce inside the human body?
The objective isn't necessarily making a surface that's totally impossible for bacteria to live on, it's to make a surface that's so different from the inside of the body, that the bacteria that could concievably live on said surface wouldn't be capable of harming you.
Sorta like how there are bacteria evolved to live in the very harsh environments surrounding deep-sea vents (high pressure, high temperature, etc.), I don't doubt that over time some strains will evolve to survive just about anywhere. If in the process of evolving to live there, they lose the ability to live in our lungs, so much the better.
This already exists; the predecessor to this technology in TFA was a display that showed two images, one to each eye. I've never used it but according to some other comments from people who have, it was rather low resolution and caused a lot of eyestrain.
Makes sense, seeing as how with that kind of parallax, you'd need to keep your nose basically right along the midline axis of the screen; if you got even a few degrees off, you'd be seeing just the image designed for one eye (and at half the normal resolution).
Not really; nobody says it has to be all in one straight line (although that's advantageous, usually). You could have part of that length taken up by a coil or some other shape, allowing you to pack a long antenna into a small space. Many portable scanner antennas ("rubber ducks") do this; it's nothing new.
Sometimes not even that is necessary: an AM radio receiver that you might have on your desk or in your car is capable of receiving broadcasts down to around 660kHz, using only a crummy extendable antenna and matching network; that's a wavelength of about 454 meters (which is about 1,370 feet). Portable shortwave receivers can go even lower/longer.
If you've ever used a radio-syncronized self-setting "atomic clock" (of the Sharper Image variety, not a true atomic clock), they contain radio receivers for the 60kHz longwave time signal. The antennas to do this are smaller than a large-size pack of gum, in most cases. Rather than stringing a long antenna out straight, they bundle it together. There are disadvantages to doing this obviously, but for receive-only, the tradeoffs are usually worthwhile.
In terms of antennas, more metal in the air is almost always better. However, that doesn't mean you can't get quite decent performance using compact equipment. Especially considering the poor performance of UHF signals in structures and built-up areas, there are some good arguments for using the lower-freqency bands wisely, when the higher data-carrying capacity of the VHF and UHF aren't necessary and greater distance is desired.
"Energy only flows if there is a difference in current."
Should read: 'Energy only flows if there is a difference in voltage.'
It's the potential difference that causes the current to flow from one point to another; it makes no sense to talk about a 'difference in current' in this context. (You could certainly have a difference of current, but that would be if you had two separate currents and were comparing them.)
If you connect, via a conductor, an area of higher potential (aka, voltage) to an area of lower potential, a current will flow between them through the conductor.
Well, generally to be effective, the holes in a Faraday cage should be less than half of the wavelength of the highest frequency that you want to block.
So if you wanted to block visible light (lambda ~= 400nm) you would have to make sure that your sheeting didn't have any holes bigger than around 200 nm.
Agreed. I'm in the same boat; I rarely play games on my Linux machine, and when I do, they're typically 2D games anyway (*cough* TuxRacer *cough*).
I'm using the video card that came in the computer when I bought it, and have found it to be pretty good: it's an NVidia Quadro4 NVS 280. Allegedly it's a $200 card for the AGP version, but I think you could find it for a lot less than that, based only on the fact that I got the entire computer that it's in for about $280. (It's a HP Workstation from Retrobox; I can't say enough good about that company.) There seem to be a lot of OEM-branded ones hanging around, mostly IBM and HP because they were used in a lot of low-end workstations; I bet you could find one for under $50. Just make sure you get the LFH to DVI or VGA cable if you get a card used; otherwise it won't be worth much.
Anyway, for what I do, a decent 2D card with dual-display capabilities is better than an insane 3D card that I'm never going to use. The Quadro4 is passively cooled, so no fan noise, and it only draws around 20 watts or so, from the specs I've seen.
I don't know whether a 2D card like this would allow you to do hardware acceleration of windowing (a la Xgl or Quartz Extreme), but I've never been particularly driven to play with that stuff anyway. My Mac does it automagically, and that's just dandy, but it's not worth the afternoon/weekend that I suspect it would take to get working on my Linux machine.
It would be interesting to see a comparison between 2D 'workstation,' 3D 'gaming,' and built-in graphics chipsets, doing average desktop tasks, specifically not 3D games, but including lots of window resizing, text scrolling, and video playback. I suspect that this sort of thing would be of use to a lot of non-gaming users, who are not really served by the focus of reviews as they're currently done.
The idea of being able to run a higher framerate in Quake than my monitor refreshes at really has never excited me; but knowing which cards will be able to do a live resize of a 1080p video window without dropping frames would be nice.
Other than cases where laptops are seized in raids (it's hard to argue you didn't type something in your own personal copy of Outlook) or the feds haul every hard drive out of a building, why does email have any value in courts at all?
I think you'll find that this is basically SOP as part of the discovery process. If you're under suspicion of anything that even remotely involves a computer, expect to have every computer seized.
That's where most of the email evidence comes from; it's not from people voluntarily producing an email to corroborate stuff, as it is email that's been found in situ on a computer, with no reason to suspect tampering since it's been part of the evidence from the beginning.
Might be different in civil trials, though; I could see lots of possibilities for forgery there. I can only hope that a judge would be smart enough to disallow one party to produce an email from a system that hadn't been under seal from the beginning of the case (at least) or without allowing its authenticity to be challenged. Then again, we hear a lot of stuff about judges who don't really understand technology allowing all sorts of dumb stuff to happen.
I don't think any GPS receivers record or store that. Until I started looking, I wasn't even sure how you would measure something like that, without moving mechanical parts. There are magnetic compass sensors and solid-state MEMS accelerometers, but none of them do the trick.
I did some Googling and it would seem that there are things called "tilt sensors" or "electrolytic inclinometers" that would probably do the trick if you were wanting to. They use fluid-filled capsules, almost like a mercury switch but with more resolution. (More info here.) I've certainly never heard of a GPS instrument with them built in, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
The only applications I can think of where you'd want to combine something like that with a GPS would be in aircraft navigation, or perhaps some very special remote-control/robotics systems (*cough* cruise missiles *cough*). Nothing that you're going to find for a few hundred bucks at WalMart, I'd guess.
But as the idea of geotagging photos becomes more mainstream, I think we can plan on seeing a lot more interesting hardware applications of GPS. After all, the camera manufacturers need to find some way to get folks to upgrade -- once everybody has a 4 or 6MP camera, the upgrade cycle that's been driving the market for the last few years (more pixels) is effectively over. The difference between a 6MP and an 8MP camera, or between 8 and 10, is small to the layman who doesn't do more than the very slight cropping to his photos -- and even more irrelevant if it doesn't come with prohibitively expensive optics.
It's electronics and integration -- cellular integration, WiFi, GPS -- that are going to be big features in the next round of cameras; that's if convergence devices don't kill them off first (I don't think they will, but we'll see).
I think people are getting their opinions of Microsoft too tied up in this issue; I hate MS as much as the next guy, but that still doesn't mean that I think what happened was wrong. I find it distasteful, but I also realize that Microsoft is a major contributor to the U.S.'s technological dominance, and a not-insignificant source of export dollars. Given the way the U.S. and world economies are going, it's these sort of high-tech/intellectual-property exports that are going to have to become the lifeblood of the U.S. if we want to stay relevant in the future.
So regardless of one's personal feelings on Microsoft's business practices, it's hard to deny that if they got a cold, it might quickly spread across a whole section of the U.S. economy and financial market. That would be bad for everone here, thus it's in the national interest to prevent it.
What would I prefer? I would have preferred that MS not get so big in the first place. Monopolies are dangerous, not just to their competitors, but also to the health of the market and the economy in which they reside in general. However, once entrenched, it becomes the duty of a responsible government to protect its citizens from financial ruin, even if this means doing things that are not in the best interest of some other country's citizens.
The mandate of the U.S. government is to represent the interests of the U.S. citizenry abroad; like it or not, a whole lot of that citizenry is dependent or linked, in one way or another (if not directly, than via their mutual funds / retirement / etc.) to Microsoft. The USG is doing exactly what it should be, in trying to do what's best for its citizens. (Of course, in many cases there are good reasons for being nice, even when it's not advantageous in the short run, because it'll work out better over the longer term.)
Now, what I think should happen is that at the same time that we're trying to maintain our exports by propping up a giant like MS, we should be looking for ways internally to let it down slowly: eliminate the monopoly, in other words. It's too huge to let crash, to be sure, so we need to find an alternative; one that retains U.S. dominance but also removes the dangling guillotine blade which is any firm that is so big and so central to our future economy.
The only reason that the U.S. is different from most other countries in this regard is because the U.S. has a lot more power than most.
I expect that when China "lobbies" one of it's neighboring countries -- or virtually anyone else -- from a position of power, they apply all the same pressure. There I expect it's probably even stronger, since politics and industry are so closely intertwined.
The states that complain most about the U.S. using its power for its (by which I mean, its citizens) own advantage are mostly those states that are less powerful, and it smacks more of jealousy than it does of real moral outrage.
The government of the United States is elected by the citizens of the United States, and has its only mandate to them. If Americans as a whole wanted a kinder, gentler foreign policy, they'd vote for people who were in favor of that; however, such stances are quite unpopular.
Your points are well-taken, but I'm not sure that they're specific to this type of car.
Right now, we consume huge quantities of energy in the form of petroleum products, for transportation. This energy is going to have to be replaced somewhere and somehow, as we move into and beyond the peak oil years.
Some other system that didn't require megawatts of power going out to every individual garage might lessen the expense of the infrastructure rollout, say if you used electricity to produce liquid fuel in centralized refineries, but the generating capacity would be the same or close to it (or more, depending on the end-to-end efficiency of the system).
One way or another, we're going to have to build enough power plants -- of whatever type, personally I suspect they'll be nuclear -- to replace the energy we current extract from oil wells and burn in our cars.
I think it's important not to get too worked up over this one. As much as I'd love to see the judge give SCO the legal equivalent of that old Mortal Kombat finishing move where the guy shoves his fist in through his enemy's sternum and rips out his spine, given the way this case has gone in the past I don't see it happening.
Motions for summary judgement are just part of the process; both sides file 'em, even when it's ridiculous (as SCO's are), usually the judge ignores them both, and life moves on.
Yeah (as other people have pointed out) the 3D modeling applications of this are pretty big.
My question is, does the EXIF specification have a place for an "azimuth" variable? I know it has Lat/Lon and time, but azimuth is really the key if you want to be able to reconstruct a model of a place. You need to at least know where the camera was and where it was pointing. Granted, most GPS units won't give you this information (a few that have magnetic compasses might) but it would be good to at least have the place in the format for it to go later.
How does it deal with photos that are taken at a time between GPS waypoints? I assume that the 'track files' produced by the GPS are a series of fixed positions and timestamps; e.g. x1,y1,z1,t1;x2,y2,z2,t2, where delta-t varies depending on the resolution you have the GPS recording at. What happens if you take a photo at t1.5? Does it pick the nearest timestamp, or does it interpolate a vector between the two points and estimate one's position at the time? Seems like it could be significant which method is used, because of gaps in the track that might occur during loss of signal, etc.
Anyway, very cool. I'd also point out (just to everyone else) that based on the readme on the download page, it's licensed under the GPL. Maybe some enterprising person will make a version for systems other than Linux? I could see something like that being a slick feature in an iPhoto-like management app.
This really isn't true. CB is only in the 11m band, which you can easily transmit on using a 1/4 or 1/8 wave vertical -- that's why it got chosen for mobile communications. If you were going to be broadcasting, using a full-wave vertical or some sort of phased array isn't that impractical: it's only 11 meters. If you're spending the money for a power amp and the rest of the gear you need to broadcast, I hope to heck you can at least get something 35 feet up in the air. (Flagpole, gutter pipe...whatever.)
The CB is adjacent to the amateur 10m band, and people work that using minimal (100W equipment) to talk hundreds or thousands of miles. Granted, usually not on AM, which is the CB standard, but the equipment isn't the limiting factor, it's generally atmospheric propagation.
Anyway; I agree that the FCC has totally ignored its mandate of public service in terms of giving spectrum in the higher frequencies to projects that would have a local focus, because there's a lot of cool stuff that can be done up there. I have somewhat controversial feelings on the issue: I think that a lot of what you're trying to motivate could be done through a revamping of the Amateur Radio service to make it a little more current with the state of the radio art and less off-putting to today's geeks. Amateurs could -- and have, in the past -- laid the groundwork for lots of useful technology. In the past, when the cutting edge was in shortwave radio, this was in global communication, but now that the cutting edge has moved upwards into the microwave and higher, it could mean things like ultrawideband data or advanced types of software defined, frequency-agnostic "radios." However, the molasses-like pace of the FCC in regards to everything that doesn't involve millions of dollars of cash is acting like a retardant on all development in the area.
He said "he thought"... you don't need substantiation for that. It's an opinion. He said that his opinion was that Stewart's coverage of Israel was biased. You might disagree, but his original statement was factually correct and self-supporting.
Besides which, it's almost impossible to really bring any 'evidence' into this forum; unless you have a show transcript, and who has that? Plus I don't think that quoting part of the show would really be useful in discussing the perhaps subtle or indirect slant of a particular news venue.
You have a point, but you didn't take it far enough.
People form various justifications for actions.... which they've already decided to take. I.e., they wanted to support the war, so they invented a justification for it.
The justification is separate -- sometimes totally divorced -- from the motivation.
It's my personal opinion that such is the case of the War in Iraq; which is why you really don't put a dent in the pro-war camp by proving that there were no WMDs, no ties to Al Qaeda, etc. Those hammer away at particular justifications, but new ones can (and were) easily invented. They don't get close to the central motivation.
Well I have been told that those funny Mexican Hairless cats are less prone to causing allergies, because they have less fur and (possibly?) less dander, but to me they don't look like cats.
So I guess that this new development should really be called: "People who want a hypoallergenic cat that actually looks like a cat and not like a shaved poodle."
* I just did some research and it would appear that Mexican Hairless Cats are an extinct breed, and that the dominant breeds of hairless cat are the Canadian Hairless and Sphynx.
From today's perspective, where we look at the EM spectrum and see that the majority of it is really suited more for short-range communication than anything else, it seems like something that ought to be regulated at least in part by the states.
However, the authority of the FCC comes from the Communications Act of 1934, and its predecessor agency from the Radio Act of 1927, which were drafted in a time when most of the radio spectrum in use was down in the HF bands, which travel hundreds or thousands of miles and thus require widespread regulatory authority. From this authority -- which began due to a need to keep civilian transmissions from interfering with maritime wireless service -- they simply continued to regulate as frequencies grew higher and higher, and transmission distances shorter and shorter, until the FCC frequently has a say in things in which there is little or no business for Federal regulation.
I can go from one end of the country to the other, listening to the same music with little if any regional variation, or for that matter care for regional issues or concerns.
This would be a more interesting point if not for the fact that based on the success of satellite radio, it would seem as though this is exactly what a large number of people want.
People don't want "regional variation," they want consistency. They want to be able to drive from Boston to Washington and still have the exact same palette of stations available, and they want them on all the time.
You may certainly disagree (and I'm with you), but both the current state of broadcast radio, as demonstrated by XM and Sirius (so it's not even some giant ClearChannel conspiracy), and historical indicators from other markets show that you're in the minority.
People don't want the "local roadhouse," they want McDonalds. They don't want Jack and Jill's Country Inn, they want Motel 6. They don't want the General Store, they want WalMart. Over and over the market has shunned independents -- even when they had a huge advantage to begin with -- in favor of consistent national chains; with the public only developing a nostalgia for the 'local flavor' after it was mostly gone. But regardless of their stated feelings, the public has over and over voted with their feet and their wallets.
Frankly I think it's surprising that independent radio stations have remained as long as they have, and that 'networking' (in the manner of VHF TV stations) didn't happen sooner. With more competition from consistent, branded satellite networks (and perhaps in the future, content delivered by cell network, etc.) I think in the future we can expect to see more consolidation of terrestrial FM stations into various "channels" that a person can listen to from one coast to the other. Either that, or it will lose its relevance as a mass communications channel and become more like the UHF TV band is today.
Let's see, we'll set aside a band, for random people to use. I wonder what we should call it. The Anonymous Coward Band? How about the Taxpayer Band?
I've got it -- we'll call it the Citizen's Band!
Okay, okay; I know it's slightly different. Technically the rules on C.B. prohibit broadcasting; it's supposed to be for two-way communication. But the idea is basically the same. The equipment to transmit and receive is widely available, and quite cheap.
However, I doubt that the Pirate Radio people would be happy with this, because they're not just looking for spectrum, they want an audience. Basically, they want spectrum on a band which everyone already has receivers for, because that's the only way they're ever going to get people to listen to them.
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But for many people (Linus included) those "loopholes" are features not bugs. Those holding views can argue those features are what caused GPL 2 to be so widely adopted and that the "fixes" in v3 will cause v3 to "crumble" (ie nobody using it).
So what? If that's the worst that can happen, what have we got to lose?
Let's say that GPL3 is a huge flop. Nobody wants to use it, and as a result, there's no software relased under the license. It disappears into history, with nothing but a Wikipedia page to remember it by.
Fine. It'll mean a lot of effort was wasted writing the thing and bickering over it, but it's not like anybody is being forced to participate; those people wasted their own time.
However, if it is popular, then it could mean good things for the FOSS movement in general, and be exactly what's needed in order to keep Free Software from being fenced in behind hardware-enforced checksums or web services, effectively making it as opaque and unmodifiable as proprietary binary code, and doing as little for the community.
I don't get why people have such a problem with GPL3. It's a license. If you don't like it, you don't have to use it on your software. GPL2 will always be around for you to use if you want to, and it's clear now that the Linux kernel will always be GPL2 (at least until there's a complete rewrite). It's a move that might do a lot of good, and if it fails, probably won't do much harm except to the egos of a bunch of people.
We have a Free and open-source OS which is basically useable for anyone who wants to use it; that's not going away. GPL3 can't take away what's already here; it's purely forward-looking. If it succeeds, great, if it doesn't, then back to the drawing board.
Mobile phones are generally only used by one person; thus they're only covered with your own bacteria, and it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to disinfect them.
After all, if you touch the phone to your face, and then wait a while and touch it to your face again, you didn't accomplish anything. The bacteria that were on your face are still on your face; even if you hadn't used the phone they just would have stayed there.
Now, if you had a phone that was shared by large numbers of people, there might be a reason to disinfect it so you didn't spread things, but even then I'm not sure how dirty your face is. Your hands are probably much worse, and people still seem to shake hands without hesitation. Regular handwashing would probably be more effective at preventing the spread of disease than whether your mobile phone is oozing Lysol.
The objects which it makes sense to make self-disinfecting are those which are used by large numbers of people, and are principally touched with their hands. The keyboards and mice of public terminals strike me as a good use, but more than that, I'd like to see the interior door-handles of public restrooms made self-disinfecting. (Or mandate that all restroom doors have to be free-swinging and open outwards, so you could just push them.)
They live and breed inside you
Little bastards; who said they're allowed to get it on in there? If I'm not getting any, nobody better be getting any, capiche?
This is probably true, but assuming bacteria did evolve to be able to survive on this surface, what are the chances that they would also be able to survive and reproduce inside the human body?
The objective isn't necessarily making a surface that's totally impossible for bacteria to live on, it's to make a surface that's so different from the inside of the body, that the bacteria that could concievably live on said surface wouldn't be capable of harming you.
Sorta like how there are bacteria evolved to live in the very harsh environments surrounding deep-sea vents (high pressure, high temperature, etc.), I don't doubt that over time some strains will evolve to survive just about anywhere. If in the process of evolving to live there, they lose the ability to live in our lungs, so much the better.
This already exists; the predecessor to this technology in TFA was a display that showed two images, one to each eye. I've never used it but according to some other comments from people who have, it was rather low resolution and caused a lot of eyestrain.
Makes sense, seeing as how with that kind of parallax, you'd need to keep your nose basically right along the midline axis of the screen; if you got even a few degrees off, you'd be seeing just the image designed for one eye (and at half the normal resolution).
Not really; nobody says it has to be all in one straight line (although that's advantageous, usually). You could have part of that length taken up by a coil or some other shape, allowing you to pack a long antenna into a small space. Many portable scanner antennas ("rubber ducks") do this; it's nothing new.
Sometimes not even that is necessary: an AM radio receiver that you might have on your desk or in your car is capable of receiving broadcasts down to around 660kHz, using only a crummy extendable antenna and matching network; that's a wavelength of about 454 meters (which is about 1,370 feet). Portable shortwave receivers can go even lower/longer.
If you've ever used a radio-syncronized self-setting "atomic clock" (of the Sharper Image variety, not a true atomic clock), they contain radio receivers for the 60kHz longwave time signal. The antennas to do this are smaller than a large-size pack of gum, in most cases. Rather than stringing a long antenna out straight, they bundle it together. There are disadvantages to doing this obviously, but for receive-only, the tradeoffs are usually worthwhile.
In terms of antennas, more metal in the air is almost always better. However, that doesn't mean you can't get quite decent performance using compact equipment. Especially considering the poor performance of UHF signals in structures and built-up areas, there are some good arguments for using the lower-freqency bands wisely, when the higher data-carrying capacity of the VHF and UHF aren't necessary and greater distance is desired.
"Energy only flows if there is a difference in current."
Should read: 'Energy only flows if there is a difference in voltage.'
It's the potential difference that causes the current to flow from one point to another; it makes no sense to talk about a 'difference in current' in this context. (You could certainly have a difference of current, but that would be if you had two separate currents and were comparing them.)
If you connect, via a conductor, an area of higher potential (aka, voltage) to an area of lower potential, a current will flow between them through the conductor.
Well, generally to be effective, the holes in a Faraday cage should be less than half of the wavelength of the highest frequency that you want to block.
So if you wanted to block visible light (lambda ~= 400nm) you would have to make sure that your sheeting didn't have any holes bigger than around 200 nm.
I think sheet metal would probably work fine.
Agreed. I'm in the same boat; I rarely play games on my Linux machine, and when I do, they're typically 2D games anyway (*cough* TuxRacer *cough*).
I'm using the video card that came in the computer when I bought it, and have found it to be pretty good: it's an NVidia Quadro4 NVS 280. Allegedly it's a $200 card for the AGP version, but I think you could find it for a lot less than that, based only on the fact that I got the entire computer that it's in for about $280. (It's a HP Workstation from Retrobox; I can't say enough good about that company.) There seem to be a lot of OEM-branded ones hanging around, mostly IBM and HP because they were used in a lot of low-end workstations; I bet you could find one for under $50. Just make sure you get the LFH to DVI or VGA cable if you get a card used; otherwise it won't be worth much.
Anyway, for what I do, a decent 2D card with dual-display capabilities is better than an insane 3D card that I'm never going to use. The Quadro4 is passively cooled, so no fan noise, and it only draws around 20 watts or so, from the specs I've seen.
I don't know whether a 2D card like this would allow you to do hardware acceleration of windowing (a la Xgl or Quartz Extreme), but I've never been particularly driven to play with that stuff anyway. My Mac does it automagically, and that's just dandy, but it's not worth the afternoon/weekend that I suspect it would take to get working on my Linux machine.
It would be interesting to see a comparison between 2D 'workstation,' 3D 'gaming,' and built-in graphics chipsets, doing average desktop tasks, specifically not 3D games, but including lots of window resizing, text scrolling, and video playback. I suspect that this sort of thing would be of use to a lot of non-gaming users, who are not really served by the focus of reviews as they're currently done.
The idea of being able to run a higher framerate in Quake than my monitor refreshes at really has never excited me; but knowing which cards will be able to do a live resize of a 1080p video window without dropping frames would be nice.
Back in my day we calculated our vertex transformations by hand, in the snow, before breakfast and with no shoes on our feet
... you kids; back in my day, we didn't have hands!
Pfft
Other than cases where laptops are seized in raids (it's hard to argue you didn't type something in your own personal copy of Outlook) or the feds haul every hard drive out of a building, why does email have any value in courts at all?
I think you'll find that this is basically SOP as part of the discovery process. If you're under suspicion of anything that even remotely involves a computer, expect to have every computer seized.
That's where most of the email evidence comes from; it's not from people voluntarily producing an email to corroborate stuff, as it is email that's been found in situ on a computer, with no reason to suspect tampering since it's been part of the evidence from the beginning.
Might be different in civil trials, though; I could see lots of possibilities for forgery there. I can only hope that a judge would be smart enough to disallow one party to produce an email from a system that hadn't been under seal from the beginning of the case (at least) or without allowing its authenticity to be challenged. Then again, we hear a lot of stuff about judges who don't really understand technology allowing all sorts of dumb stuff to happen.
I don't think any GPS receivers record or store that. Until I started looking, I wasn't even sure how you would measure something like that, without moving mechanical parts. There are magnetic compass sensors and solid-state MEMS accelerometers, but none of them do the trick.
I did some Googling and it would seem that there are things called "tilt sensors" or "electrolytic inclinometers" that would probably do the trick if you were wanting to. They use fluid-filled capsules, almost like a mercury switch but with more resolution. (More info here.) I've certainly never heard of a GPS instrument with them built in, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
The only applications I can think of where you'd want to combine something like that with a GPS would be in aircraft navigation, or perhaps some very special remote-control/robotics systems (*cough* cruise missiles *cough*). Nothing that you're going to find for a few hundred bucks at WalMart, I'd guess.
But as the idea of geotagging photos becomes more mainstream, I think we can plan on seeing a lot more interesting hardware applications of GPS. After all, the camera manufacturers need to find some way to get folks to upgrade -- once everybody has a 4 or 6MP camera, the upgrade cycle that's been driving the market for the last few years (more pixels) is effectively over. The difference between a 6MP and an 8MP camera, or between 8 and 10, is small to the layman who doesn't do more than the very slight cropping to his photos -- and even more irrelevant if it doesn't come with prohibitively expensive optics.
It's electronics and integration -- cellular integration, WiFi, GPS -- that are going to be big features in the next round of cameras; that's if convergence devices don't kill them off first (I don't think they will, but we'll see).
I think people are getting their opinions of Microsoft too tied up in this issue; I hate MS as much as the next guy, but that still doesn't mean that I think what happened was wrong. I find it distasteful, but I also realize that Microsoft is a major contributor to the U.S.'s technological dominance, and a not-insignificant source of export dollars. Given the way the U.S. and world economies are going, it's these sort of high-tech/intellectual-property exports that are going to have to become the lifeblood of the U.S. if we want to stay relevant in the future.
So regardless of one's personal feelings on Microsoft's business practices, it's hard to deny that if they got a cold, it might quickly spread across a whole section of the U.S. economy and financial market. That would be bad for everone here, thus it's in the national interest to prevent it.
What would I prefer? I would have preferred that MS not get so big in the first place. Monopolies are dangerous, not just to their competitors, but also to the health of the market and the economy in which they reside in general. However, once entrenched, it becomes the duty of a responsible government to protect its citizens from financial ruin, even if this means doing things that are not in the best interest of some other country's citizens.
The mandate of the U.S. government is to represent the interests of the U.S. citizenry abroad; like it or not, a whole lot of that citizenry is dependent or linked, in one way or another (if not directly, than via their mutual funds / retirement / etc.) to Microsoft. The USG is doing exactly what it should be, in trying to do what's best for its citizens. (Of course, in many cases there are good reasons for being nice, even when it's not advantageous in the short run, because it'll work out better over the longer term.)
Now, what I think should happen is that at the same time that we're trying to maintain our exports by propping up a giant like MS, we should be looking for ways internally to let it down slowly: eliminate the monopoly, in other words. It's too huge to let crash, to be sure, so we need to find an alternative; one that retains U.S. dominance but also removes the dangling guillotine blade which is any firm that is so big and so central to our future economy.
The only reason that the U.S. is different from most other countries in this regard is because the U.S. has a lot more power than most.
I expect that when China "lobbies" one of it's neighboring countries -- or virtually anyone else -- from a position of power, they apply all the same pressure. There I expect it's probably even stronger, since politics and industry are so closely intertwined.
The states that complain most about the U.S. using its power for its (by which I mean, its citizens) own advantage are mostly those states that are less powerful, and it smacks more of jealousy than it does of real moral outrage.
The government of the United States is elected by the citizens of the United States, and has its only mandate to them. If Americans as a whole wanted a kinder, gentler foreign policy, they'd vote for people who were in favor of that; however, such stances are quite unpopular.
Your points are well-taken, but I'm not sure that they're specific to this type of car.
Right now, we consume huge quantities of energy in the form of petroleum products, for transportation. This energy is going to have to be replaced somewhere and somehow, as we move into and beyond the peak oil years.
Some other system that didn't require megawatts of power going out to every individual garage might lessen the expense of the infrastructure rollout, say if you used electricity to produce liquid fuel in centralized refineries, but the generating capacity would be the same or close to it (or more, depending on the end-to-end efficiency of the system).
One way or another, we're going to have to build enough power plants -- of whatever type, personally I suspect they'll be nuclear -- to replace the energy we current extract from oil wells and burn in our cars.
I think it's important not to get too worked up over this one. As much as I'd love to see the judge give SCO the legal equivalent of that old Mortal Kombat finishing move where the guy shoves his fist in through his enemy's sternum and rips out his spine, given the way this case has gone in the past I don't see it happening.
Motions for summary judgement are just part of the process; both sides file 'em, even when it's ridiculous (as SCO's are), usually the judge ignores them both, and life moves on.
Yeah (as other people have pointed out) the 3D modeling applications of this are pretty big.
My question is, does the EXIF specification have a place for an "azimuth" variable? I know it has Lat/Lon and time, but azimuth is really the key if you want to be able to reconstruct a model of a place. You need to at least know where the camera was and where it was pointing. Granted, most GPS units won't give you this information (a few that have magnetic compasses might) but it would be good to at least have the place in the format for it to go later.
Now that is one slick idea.
How does it deal with photos that are taken at a time between GPS waypoints? I assume that the 'track files' produced by the GPS are a series of fixed positions and timestamps; e.g. x1,y1,z1,t1;x2,y2,z2,t2, where delta-t varies depending on the resolution you have the GPS recording at. What happens if you take a photo at t1.5? Does it pick the nearest timestamp, or does it interpolate a vector between the two points and estimate one's position at the time? Seems like it could be significant which method is used, because of gaps in the track that might occur during loss of signal, etc.
Anyway, very cool. I'd also point out (just to everyone else) that based on the readme on the download page, it's licensed under the GPL. Maybe some enterprising person will make a version for systems other than Linux? I could see something like that being a slick feature in an iPhoto-like management app.
This really isn't true. CB is only in the 11m band, which you can easily transmit on using a 1/4 or 1/8 wave vertical -- that's why it got chosen for mobile communications. If you were going to be broadcasting, using a full-wave vertical or some sort of phased array isn't that impractical: it's only 11 meters. If you're spending the money for a power amp and the rest of the gear you need to broadcast, I hope to heck you can at least get something 35 feet up in the air. (Flagpole, gutter pipe...whatever.)
The CB is adjacent to the amateur 10m band, and people work that using minimal (100W equipment) to talk hundreds or thousands of miles. Granted, usually not on AM, which is the CB standard, but the equipment isn't the limiting factor, it's generally atmospheric propagation.
Anyway; I agree that the FCC has totally ignored its mandate of public service in terms of giving spectrum in the higher frequencies to projects that would have a local focus, because there's a lot of cool stuff that can be done up there. I have somewhat controversial feelings on the issue: I think that a lot of what you're trying to motivate could be done through a revamping of the Amateur Radio service to make it a little more current with the state of the radio art and less off-putting to today's geeks. Amateurs could -- and have, in the past -- laid the groundwork for lots of useful technology. In the past, when the cutting edge was in shortwave radio, this was in global communication, but now that the cutting edge has moved upwards into the microwave and higher, it could mean things like ultrawideband data or advanced types of software defined, frequency-agnostic "radios." However, the molasses-like pace of the FCC in regards to everything that doesn't involve millions of dollars of cash is acting like a retardant on all development in the area.
Dude, it was a personal opinion. Chill out.
... you don't need substantiation for that. It's an opinion. He said that his opinion was that Stewart's coverage of Israel was biased. You might disagree, but his original statement was factually correct and self-supporting.
He said "he thought"
Besides which, it's almost impossible to really bring any 'evidence' into this forum; unless you have a show transcript, and who has that? Plus I don't think that quoting part of the show would really be useful in discussing the perhaps subtle or indirect slant of a particular news venue.
You have a point, but you didn't take it far enough.
.... which they've already decided to take. I.e., they wanted to support the war, so they invented a justification for it.
People form various justifications for actions
The justification is separate -- sometimes totally divorced -- from the motivation.
It's my personal opinion that such is the case of the War in Iraq; which is why you really don't put a dent in the pro-war camp by proving that there were no WMDs, no ties to Al Qaeda, etc. Those hammer away at particular justifications, but new ones can (and were) easily invented. They don't get close to the central motivation.
Well I have been told that those funny Mexican Hairless cats are less prone to causing allergies, because they have less fur and (possibly?) less dander, but to me they don't look like cats.
So I guess that this new development should really be called: "People who want a hypoallergenic cat that actually looks like a cat and not like a shaved poodle."
* I just did some research and it would appear that Mexican Hairless Cats are an extinct breed, and that the dominant breeds of hairless cat are the Canadian Hairless and Sphynx.
This is actually a fairly interesting question.
From today's perspective, where we look at the EM spectrum and see that the majority of it is really suited more for short-range communication than anything else, it seems like something that ought to be regulated at least in part by the states.
However, the authority of the FCC comes from the Communications Act of 1934, and its predecessor agency from the Radio Act of 1927, which were drafted in a time when most of the radio spectrum in use was down in the HF bands, which travel hundreds or thousands of miles and thus require widespread regulatory authority. From this authority -- which began due to a need to keep civilian transmissions from interfering with maritime wireless service -- they simply continued to regulate as frequencies grew higher and higher, and transmission distances shorter and shorter, until the FCC frequently has a say in things in which there is little or no business for Federal regulation.
I can go from one end of the country to the other, listening to the same music with little if any regional variation, or for that matter care for regional issues or concerns.
This would be a more interesting point if not for the fact that based on the success of satellite radio, it would seem as though this is exactly what a large number of people want.
People don't want "regional variation," they want consistency. They want to be able to drive from Boston to Washington and still have the exact same palette of stations available, and they want them on all the time.
You may certainly disagree (and I'm with you), but both the current state of broadcast radio, as demonstrated by XM and Sirius (so it's not even some giant ClearChannel conspiracy), and historical indicators from other markets show that you're in the minority.
People don't want the "local roadhouse," they want McDonalds. They don't want Jack and Jill's Country Inn, they want Motel 6. They don't want the General Store, they want WalMart. Over and over the market has shunned independents -- even when they had a huge advantage to begin with -- in favor of consistent national chains; with the public only developing a nostalgia for the 'local flavor' after it was mostly gone. But regardless of their stated feelings, the public has over and over voted with their feet and their wallets.
Frankly I think it's surprising that independent radio stations have remained as long as they have, and that 'networking' (in the manner of VHF TV stations) didn't happen sooner. With more competition from consistent, branded satellite networks (and perhaps in the future, content delivered by cell network, etc.) I think in the future we can expect to see more consolidation of terrestrial FM stations into various "channels" that a person can listen to from one coast to the other. Either that, or it will lose its relevance as a mass communications channel and become more like the UHF TV band is today.
Great idea.
Let's see, we'll set aside a band, for random people to use. I wonder what we should call it. The Anonymous Coward Band? How about the Taxpayer Band?
I've got it -- we'll call it the Citizen's Band!
Okay, okay; I know it's slightly different. Technically the rules on C.B. prohibit broadcasting; it's supposed to be for two-way communication. But the idea is basically the same. The equipment to transmit and receive is widely available, and quite cheap.
However, I doubt that the Pirate Radio people would be happy with this, because they're not just looking for spectrum, they want an audience. Basically, they want spectrum on a band which everyone already has receivers for, because that's the only way they're ever going to get people to listen to them.