You're probably right. It's likewise been a while since I've looked at the math closely. If you go to the page I linked in my original post, it probably has the answer on it somewhere.
The heating would be more even potentially, but shallow. The other (obvious) thing I didn't think of in my earlier post was that as you increased the frequency, the waves would penetrate less far into the food, meaning that you'd have cold spots in the center. Maybe this would be useful for something (something that you'd want to cook the outside of but not the inside.. liquid-center cakes maybe?), but in general I think it would just be annoying.
There are probably other molecules that you could heat by using different frequencies: I think any atom which is an electrical dipole will be "microwavable" at some frequency; it might be that there are uses for magnetron-based heating systems at higher or lower frequencies in industry somewhere. (Is SiO2 a dipole?)
Or were you joking too and I'm going to get flames for responding to this?:)
Run for office, and I might just vote for you. I used to be a Republican, but that was back when that party actually stood for something tangible. Now I just vote for whichever guy is going to let me stay armed while the country goes to hell in a handbasket, and requires me to pay the least amount of taxes necessary into our broken system.
I probably wouldn't be so averse to paying taxes if I actually trusted the people I elected not to waste it, but I've yet to see someone on the ballot (at anything more than a local level) that I'd say that about, in either party. As long as I suspect that they're going to waste and squander everything that they take out of my paycheck, I'm just going to vote for whoever wastes the least, and lets me retain the most to spend on myself and my (future) family.
However, I'm not sure that the system is designed to let trustworthy people with actual values (and I don't mean the Fox News "values" so often espoused by members of the Right, e.g. "abortion is bad... sometimes" or "I don't hate gay people, I just don't like them being gay") rise to the top. Involvement in government self-selects for people who have a desire for power, and they're often the worst people for the job. But it's the tendency of a democracy to encourage people who'll say anything for votes, and do anything for contributions; rinse, repeat.
For that reason, somehow I suspect I'll always be voting for the "sucks least" candidate.
You laugh, but I've honestly seen advertisements on TV and on the radio for government programs. As if we don't have enough people getting Social Security already, they decide to spend a few extra kilobucks saturating the airwaves, making sure there isn't somebody out there not getting their check. Thanks a lot -- what's next, free promotional giveaways for going on welfare? (How about a gift certificate to WalMart?)
That obnoxious guy in the question-mark suit who sells the "Free Government Money!" books should sue for unfair competition. If they make it too easy to suckle on the State teat, he'll be out of a job.
Not really sure (who can understand the slashmind?), but my guess is that people bristled at the suggestion back in your original comment (#15570352) that people not in the service should have access to the military healthcare system, or even that it would be nice if this were the case, since people in the military get access to such a nice taxpayer-funded healthcare system as a result of or partially in payment for the rather hazardous/boring/underpaid work that they do. If everyone had that available to them, it would (from a certain point of view) diminish the value of that special benefit to servicepeople. It's a roundabout way of considering the issue, I know.
Probably depends on whether or not you think all people inherently deserve free (by which I mean collectively-paid) healthcare. A lot of Americans, ultimately, don't think so (regardless of whether they admit it to themselves or not), and so what to one person seems like an unequivocally true statement ("wouldn't it be nice if everyone had healthcare?") is answered with a resounding "no" by many.
That, and idealism is in short supply on Slashdot; display any and you'll get flames. If you want karma, try cynicism.:-)
I'm with you there. I don't know why a computer needs a shut-down sound; it always struck me as a stupid Windows thing, something they tossed in there to amuse people while they were watching the "Windows is shutting down" screen.
When I tell my computer to shut down, the only thing I want to hear is the fans going quiet, and I want to hear that as quickly as possible.
I'm a little more open to the idea of startup sound effects, but only if they serve some sort of purpose. The Mac always gave its startup chime as part of its self-test routine, as a confirmation that the hardware was good. So if you got the chime and then the system refused to boot, you knew it was a software issue and not hardware. Even if your video card was bad or blown, or you didn't have a monitor plugged in. (Which is incidentally handy if you're ever buying a used system at a trade show or something.) There are some HP workstations which will even play a diagnostic tone on startup if they've gone bad, which you can play into a telephone to a tech support rep, and they will decode to tell you what's FUBARed.
I might even be convinced that playing a sound once the OS's GUI is started and it's ready for user input is useful, since it's a good way to tell the user "okay, I'm here, ready to go!", but this necessitates making sure that playing the sound is the ABSOLUTE LAST thing that happens in the startup sequence. If that's the purpose of the sound, I don't want to walk over to the computer upon hearing it, and still have it churning away on some part of the boot sequence, or loading the GUI.
I think the Mandriva people, as well as anyone else involved in designing an OS, should sit down and think about what purpose exactly these sounds serve, and make sure they're doing their jobs, before they invest a lot of time -- either their own or somebody else's -- in making it pretty. If they're serving a legitimate function, by all means then make them pretty and polished. But I'd rather lose the excess noise if they're not functional.
The $100 device may not give you a 'free lunch,' and almost certainly won't hold a candle to a $5000 or $25,000 analyzer, but that doesn't mean it's not worth the money.
People are comparing this to really expensive professional tools. That's a fine comparison to make, but it's purely academic. I'd like to have a spectrum analyzer -- what geek wouldn't? But I also have a budget, and $5k for a tool I'll only use occasionally isn't in it.
So really, instead of comparing this thing to tools that the average person will never be able to afford, it would make more sense to talk about what it can do, and how it compares to other tools in its price range (if there are any).
To beat the old transportation analogy a little, if the $100 USB dongle is a bicycle and the "real" spectrum analyzer is a Porsche, you're not doing anyone a favor by pulling up alongside the dude on a bicycle in your Porsche and telling him about how it has 11" disc brakes or a six-speed sequential-manual gearbox or how much faster than his bicycle it can do a quarter-mile in.
If you can only afford the bicycle, it doesn't matter how much faster the Porsche can go. Likewise, it doesn't matter how much better the $5000 spectrum analyzer is, if you can only afford the $100 version.
Go read the military pay rates if you want. I'm not saying they're not a bad deal if you want to be in the military, but if you have half a brain you don't do it for the money, that's for sure.
Oops -- there's one too many negatives in there. What I meant was "I'm not saying they're a bad deal if you want to be in the military...", i.e. if what you want to do in life is be a soldier/airman/marine/etc., then by all means they pay you enough to live on assuming you're frugal when you're getting started. But if your goal is to make money, there are other paths available to people of average intelligence that will get you there faster. You don't go into the service for the money. (Possible exception of college scholarships; if you play those correctly, you can possibly come out ahead of what you would have ever made in the same amount of time in the private sector.)
It's not really "free," it's just being rolled into the opportunity cost of the job: it's like a benefit, one of the few benefits of being in the military. A civilian would have to pay for the surgery, sure, but they would probably so make significantly more money. Same with the health plan and free housing (barracks). Go read the military pay rates if you want. I'm not saying they're not a bad deal if you want to be in the military, but if you have half a brain you don't do it for the money, that's for sure.
So saying the surgery is 'free' is right up there with Verizon wireless telling me I can get a 'free phone,' if only I agree to pay them $50 a month for three years. Only fools and people who work in advertising would call that 'free.'
This isn't how a Communist country is supposed to be run.
Well, that's kinda the problem with Communist countries. That is how they are run. Since the system doesn't really work, instead you just keep your society working as best you can using whatever alternative means you can throw together. In China, they seem to be using a combination of oppression and massive exploitation of their natural resources, in an effort to keep things together long enough to transition to a sustainable economy and government.
You can't have a chicken in every pot when there aren't enough chickens to go around. History has taught us that an elite group of individuals is no better in the long run at distributing resources across a society than everyone just trying to grab whatever they can for themselves based on their ability to do so is, and usually they can be a lot worse.
"Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can."
The PHB's in charge of the various companies' IM divisions don't just want to be an IM service, deep down they'd really like to figure out some way to accomplish everything you want to do on your computer with regards to communications. Really, I think they see themselves not as a special-purpose tool, but as a portal; thus they will continue to toss in (mis)features in an attempt to drive out other applications from the space.
The Mac version sucked hard from Day 1. I installed it once and created an account, and then never opened it up again.
Frankly, they ought to just take that abomination out back and put it out of its misery, and take the salaries of whatever developers were working on it (probably none, but you never know) and send it as a donation to the Adium project, since I expect most people using Yahoo Messenger on the Mac are doing it through that. (Or if they're not, they should be.)
OT: Shouldn't the title of this article really be "Yahoo Opens Up Their Instant Messenging Client"? Because they're not really 'opening up' their instant messenging protocol, they're seemingly opening up the client (and just the Windows one at that) API to plug-ins, not their network. All in all, very lame.
I can only hope that the IM providers' insistence on trying to maintain their little fiefdoms of incompatibility will be their downfall someday; the first two major networks to combine and settle on an open standard will probably kill the rest of them.
A while back when it first came out that you could call up certain companies and for less than $100 get basically anyone's cell phone records, I remember that somebody did it to the Canadian Privacy Minister (or someone to that effect, I forget their actual title) and mailed the results to them.
Short of actually tossing tons of money at them, that's probably one of the more effective means of influencing politicians on privacy issues: make them care by putting their privacy into question along with everyone else's.
I wouldn't ever advocate anything illegal per se, but a lot of good could potentially come from a massive data theft of every member of Congress' credit histories and banking records (besides just finding out who's really on the take).
isn't that kind of the point of the scoring system in winvista? the 500GHz processor would get a score of 243, but the overall system would score a 2 because there's only 128Mb of video memory.
That's a pretty odd microwave then, since most of them operate at 2.45 GHz, which is chosen because of the way it causes liquid water molecules to vibrate. See this article, particularly the graphs showing dielectric temperature as a function of frequency. It's pretty clear that a 10GHz microwave oven would be a lot less efficient at heating water than a conventional 2.45 GHz one, although I suppose you could choose a multiple of 2.45GHz and probably still have a functional product.
Overall, unless your goal was to build a miniature microwave (a 21st century E-Z Bake Oven?), I don't know why you'd want to use 10GHz instead of 2.4Ghz ones. The tolerances of parts in the magnetron and waveguide would have to be much tighter, I think, and this would almost certainly cause it to be more expensive.
I waited to get a DSLR for years because I have so much invested in Minolta AF lenses for my film system, and they barely get a decent lineup of DSLRs out the door, and then go belly-up and sell out to Sony of all people. (Couldn't they have just sold out to Sigma and done us all a favor?) Heck of a way to reward your customers. True, they were nice cameras: image stabilization in the body and all that, but they were so long in coming that it was almost a joke.
Anyway, my plan is to pick up a Maxxum 7D sometime in the next few months, and then hold on to it until somebody pries it from my cold, dead hands. It's the camera that could have saved that company if they had only made it about 5 years sooner.
Just remember that anytime you're talking on a cordless phone, you're using a radio transmitter. While that might seem like a painfully obvious thing to say, it's amazing how many people don't get the connection between "cordless telephone" and "anyone with a scanner can hear everything I'm saying." If you don't believe me, find any good radio that has wideband receive and try searching from around 46.6-50 MHz for the older phones and 900-928 MHz for the new ones. I don't have a receiver that goes to 2.4GHz but I have no doubt that if you did, you'd hear lots of people up in that band, too (although decoding the digital ones might be non-trivial).
Whenever somebody brings up email privacy I just laugh -- we'll work on email encryption right after we figure out a way to convince people that broadcasting their conversations miles in every direction probably isn't a great idea.
Anyway, I recommend that anybody who uses a cordless phone as their primary means of communication should borrow a scanner for an evening and play around with it--see if you can find the frequency of your own unit. I know I'll never discuss anything sensitive on one ever again.
Everyone seems to be assuming that Asterisk = "regular PC running all the time." Why does this have to be the case?
I haven't ever set up an Asterisk system, but if you only needed a few lines and didn't need space for the huge full-length PCI cards that people use to bring in T1 lines and interface with lots of copper POTS extensions, couldn't you do it in a very small, low-power enclosure?
Set up a dedicated machine, like the set-top-boxes people use for DVRs. Micro-ATX, small case, fanless processor, and then run it off of a CF card or something. Enough people have done stuff like this to make it not exactly state of the art: I don't know what the system requirements are for Asterisk, but without any fancy psychoacoustic compression I can't think it's that bad to only manage one connection at a time. Certainly it ought to be within the realm of currently available low-power and embedded systems, even. In addition to routing calls, it could probably handle his voicemail and maybe even do other slick features like email recorded VM messages or play them back through the internal speaker. Replacing some existing devices, if he was so inclined, could substantially reduce the power burden of a new machine.
The OP has said he wants a hardware solution that doesn't involve his PC -- fine; that doesn't mean that it can't use some PC software, running on a dedicated "appliance" or appliance-like system. Just because it's a computer doesn't mean it has to look like a computer, smell like a computer, or draw power like a computer.
It's interesting that this came up, since last week I was reading an article on the resolving power of the human eye as it pertains to photography and how to choose output resolutions. Short answer: 50 lines per degree of view. From there you can do some right-triangle trig to figure out how many line pairs should be perceivable for some output format based on how close you're going to be to it. For an 8x10 image, the author says 2300 pixels in the long dimension or 230 PPI would cut it (I didn't double-check his math). I tend to wonder if you don't have to introduce a factor of two in there somewhere, since to reproduce a "line" of resolution seems like it ought to require two pixels.
Of course, that's an oversimplification; hence the long answer. The human eye doesn't have a fixed number of "megapixels" that you could easily convert to a measurement of a photo or really even of another camera. First, you have the problem that the eye's "resolution" isn't evenly spread across the field of view: it's concentrated near the center, and thinner out in the periphery. This is why if you concentrate and try to pay attention to something that's not in the center of your field of view (that you're not looking directly at) it won't be as clear as when you look directly at it. (The exception is in very low light: your indirect vision is better at night vision.) However your brain reassembles the image and makes you think that you're seeing one great-big full-res panorama, when in reality at any one time you're only seeing a small part in "full rez" with the rest of your field of vision at something less, but with the full version available on-demand (by looking at it).
If you could actually do a 'screen grab' of the image your eyes were actually feeding into your brain, at any particular time, I think it would be a lot lower-quality than many people suspect. Almost without question, it would be lower quality than many photographs of the same scene. The depth of field is short, the resolution is concentrated in the center, as is the color, and there's a hole in the dead center of the image because of your optic nerve's placement on your retina. Your sense of sight works as well as it does, in large part, because of all the caching and postprocessing that's done transparently by your brain to the incoming information stream.
Really, when we compare a photo to our "sight," what we're really comparing is the photo to our brain's recollection of how it saw a particular scene, which might be very different from what our eyes actually took in, and further still from the 'objective truth' (if you believe in such a thing, that is) of what actually was there at that moment. The easiest example is color saturation: we tend to see and remember things as being far more colorful than they actually are: an "accurate" photo will therefore look dull compared to memory, so we compensate by oversaturating our photos to make them look more 'realistic.'
It's only possible to make comparisons between our eyes and mechanical cameras, and between our overall sense of sight and recording systems, for very limited cases. Even to answer a relatively simple question like "what's the eye's maximum megapixels?" completely would probably stretch the boundaries of currently understood optometry, neuroscience, and psychology.
I never made any claim that what I was describing was new.:)
I learned about after I saw someone demagnetizing the heads of a big open-reel multitrack, quite a long time ago: many people try to demagnetize the heads on open-reel machines by just holding the demagnetizer (which is just a small coil of wire in a wand, which you plug into the wall) next to the heads, and then flipping it on and off. This is insufficent to demagnetize them (and can potentially make it worse); to do it thoroughly, you have to turn it on, then move the wand away from the machine, then turn it off. (IIRC most of them came with instructions to this effect, but not an explanation.) The reason why this is required, in my opinion, is neither obvious nor trivial.
At any rate, today I doubt even the majority of readers here on Slashdot, and definitely the majority of computer-users, have had any experience with magnetic tape outside of the varieties that come in little cassettes, and will probably never have to use a head demagnetizer.
I used to subscribe to a paper (and before that, I bought it out of the machine where I used to live, almost every day), but now I just buy it irregularly on the weekends because I can't find the time to read it.
Compared to pulling open another window on my computer's screen and typing in a Web address, actually carrying around a paper and futzing around with flipping pages seems like a lot of work. I'm sure that sounds like the height of laziness (and I suppose I could easily imagine the reverse situation: someone who wasn't already sitting at a computer all day and instead was working at a conventional desk might find it rather obnoxious to have to go fire up a computer to get their news, versus having it delivered on paper every day), but it's the truth. I generally read my morning news at the same time as I'm checking my email in the morning, and for whatever reason (at least in my work environment), it's a whole lot more acceptable to read an online paper than it is to sit there and read a paper one.
The majority of the paper-news readers I know are mostly people who commute to work by train, and thus have a lot of non-internet-connected time to kill. But I don't think I'm very anomalous in getting most of my news while using a computer at work, and as long as my job requires that I be in front of a screen most of the time, news media that's presented there is always going to be more convenient than anything else.
Back when I was in school and taking lots of notes (I take rather copious notes), I thought it would be nice to be able to erase things instead of just cross them out, but I could never find a mechanical pencil that wrote as easily as a pen. Even with.05mm leads, it always seemed like I would have to constantly rotate the pencil to avoid the line thickness changing and keep it sharp. Maybe it has something to do with the way I hold my writing instruments (at an angle). Also, I never managed to find a pencil lead soft enough or dark enough to give the kind of contrast you can get from pigment-based (or even good dye-based) pen inks.
It sure would be nice, though, if someone could come up with an erasable pen that wasn't a crummy ballpoint. I can't think of how you would do it, maybe something like the trick "disappearing inks" that used to be sold as gags. Even if it required a solution that had to be put on like white-out, but wasn't as obvious, that would be pretty neat.
I eventually just settled on using Pilot P-700 disposable rolling ball pens, and then white-out pens to cover the occasional mistake. Not quite as good as erasing, though.
If any other pen addicts have found a pencil that they thought was a substitute for pens, I'd be interested in hearing others' experiences.
I know there are going to be people crawling out of the woodwork to give how many seconds it takes to create a new registration for a particular site, but honestly I'm just not interested. I have to remember enough usernames and passwords as it is already, I don't need to remember another half dozen or two for my news sites.
Google News seems to be pretty good about finding stories from no-reg-required sites, and it's easy enough if you click a link and end up at a registration page just to back up one level and find the same story from a different news source.
I don't know what most of those sites use their "free registrations" for -- some sort of data collection that they can mine later, I assume -- but they're losing my readership because of it.
Before someone accuses me of having a "short attention span," let me just say that I have a perfectly fine attention span, when I'm reading what I want. I don't have the time or interest or inclination to look at somebody else's registration/login page, or interstital ads, or frankly any other content that I didn't choose specifically to view. If I can't get to the story I wanted to read on the first click in, then I'll just back up and read it somewhere else. News, as far as I'm concerned, is a fungible good. You can read the AP wire stories as easily on the West Bumfuck Herald's page as you can on the East Bend Times, and I'll get it from whoever puts the least obstacles in my way.
It's a great start. All you're missing is about a billion dollars or so in cold, hard cash. That being roughly the amount of money you'd need to toss around Capitol Hill in order to buy enough politicians to ever have a shot at passing something when every financial institution, insurance company, and data-mining outfit in the country would be fighting it tooth-and-nail.
Come to think of it, I doubt a billion bucks would be enough.
I think this is going to be another area where the corporate interests are going to keep the problem happening for years to come, until it finally becomes such a screamingly big issue -- and right now it's not; "identity theft" is still a lot further down on Ma and Pa Kettle's radar screen than gay marriage and abortion and the war -- that the politicans honestly believe that they'll get thrown out of office if they don't support a protective measure against it. In any given year, the politicians (generally speaking) never pick more than a handful of issues which are popular with the people but unpopular with corporations, and nothing makes it onto that short list unless it's really, really obviously popular with a particularly critical demographic.
Then, and only then, will you see a law passed. Until then, it doesn't matter what you propose, the companies who own your information and use it for their own profit will fight any change in the status quo that gives the consumer/citizen more rights, since it must necessarily come at some expense to them.
I've seen some reports that would indicate that the TCO of many "wife" implementations is rather high. Vendors are often willing to subsidize the rollout, but pretty much leave you on your own after that in terms of maintainence. Not to mention that once you contract, it can be notoriously difficult to bring in outside consultants down the road.
Slashdot Mirror
You're probably right. It's likewise been a while since I've looked at the math closely. If you go to the page I linked in my original post, it probably has the answer on it somewhere.
The heating would be more even potentially, but shallow. The other (obvious) thing I didn't think of in my earlier post was that as you increased the frequency, the waves would penetrate less far into the food, meaning that you'd have cold spots in the center. Maybe this would be useful for something (something that you'd want to cook the outside of but not the inside .. liquid-center cakes maybe?), but in general I think it would just be annoying.
:)
There are probably other molecules that you could heat by using different frequencies: I think any atom which is an electrical dipole will be "microwavable" at some frequency; it might be that there are uses for magnetron-based heating systems at higher or lower frequencies in industry somewhere. (Is SiO2 a dipole?)
Or were you joking too and I'm going to get flames for responding to this?
Run for office, and I might just vote for you. I used to be a Republican, but that was back when that party actually stood for something tangible. Now I just vote for whichever guy is going to let me stay armed while the country goes to hell in a handbasket, and requires me to pay the least amount of taxes necessary into our broken system.
... sometimes" or "I don't hate gay people, I just don't like them being gay") rise to the top. Involvement in government self-selects for people who have a desire for power, and they're often the worst people for the job. But it's the tendency of a democracy to encourage people who'll say anything for votes, and do anything for contributions; rinse, repeat.
I probably wouldn't be so averse to paying taxes if I actually trusted the people I elected not to waste it, but I've yet to see someone on the ballot (at anything more than a local level) that I'd say that about, in either party. As long as I suspect that they're going to waste and squander everything that they take out of my paycheck, I'm just going to vote for whoever wastes the least, and lets me retain the most to spend on myself and my (future) family.
However, I'm not sure that the system is designed to let trustworthy people with actual values (and I don't mean the Fox News "values" so often espoused by members of the Right, e.g. "abortion is bad
For that reason, somehow I suspect I'll always be voting for the "sucks least" candidate.
You laugh, but I've honestly seen advertisements on TV and on the radio for government programs. As if we don't have enough people getting Social Security already, they decide to spend a few extra kilobucks saturating the airwaves, making sure there isn't somebody out there not getting their check. Thanks a lot -- what's next, free promotional giveaways for going on welfare? (How about a gift certificate to WalMart?)
That obnoxious guy in the question-mark suit who sells the "Free Government Money!" books should sue for unfair competition. If they make it too easy to suckle on the State teat, he'll be out of a job.
Not really sure (who can understand the slashmind?), but my guess is that people bristled at the suggestion back in your original comment (#15570352) that people not in the service should have access to the military healthcare system, or even that it would be nice if this were the case, since people in the military get access to such a nice taxpayer-funded healthcare system as a result of or partially in payment for the rather hazardous/boring/underpaid work that they do. If everyone had that available to them, it would (from a certain point of view) diminish the value of that special benefit to servicepeople. It's a roundabout way of considering the issue, I know.
:-)
Probably depends on whether or not you think all people inherently deserve free (by which I mean collectively-paid) healthcare. A lot of Americans, ultimately, don't think so (regardless of whether they admit it to themselves or not), and so what to one person seems like an unequivocally true statement ("wouldn't it be nice if everyone had healthcare?") is answered with a resounding "no" by many.
That, and idealism is in short supply on Slashdot; display any and you'll get flames. If you want karma, try cynicism.
I'm with you there. I don't know why a computer needs a shut-down sound; it always struck me as a stupid Windows thing, something they tossed in there to amuse people while they were watching the "Windows is shutting down" screen.
When I tell my computer to shut down, the only thing I want to hear is the fans going quiet, and I want to hear that as quickly as possible.
I'm a little more open to the idea of startup sound effects, but only if they serve some sort of purpose. The Mac always gave its startup chime as part of its self-test routine, as a confirmation that the hardware was good. So if you got the chime and then the system refused to boot, you knew it was a software issue and not hardware. Even if your video card was bad or blown, or you didn't have a monitor plugged in. (Which is incidentally handy if you're ever buying a used system at a trade show or something.) There are some HP workstations which will even play a diagnostic tone on startup if they've gone bad, which you can play into a telephone to a tech support rep, and they will decode to tell you what's FUBARed.
I might even be convinced that playing a sound once the OS's GUI is started and it's ready for user input is useful, since it's a good way to tell the user "okay, I'm here, ready to go!", but this necessitates making sure that playing the sound is the ABSOLUTE LAST thing that happens in the startup sequence. If that's the purpose of the sound, I don't want to walk over to the computer upon hearing it, and still have it churning away on some part of the boot sequence, or loading the GUI.
I think the Mandriva people, as well as anyone else involved in designing an OS, should sit down and think about what purpose exactly these sounds serve, and make sure they're doing their jobs, before they invest a lot of time -- either their own or somebody else's -- in making it pretty. If they're serving a legitimate function, by all means then make them pretty and polished. But I'd rather lose the excess noise if they're not functional.
The $100 device may not give you a 'free lunch,' and almost certainly won't hold a candle to a $5000 or $25,000 analyzer, but that doesn't mean it's not worth the money.
People are comparing this to really expensive professional tools. That's a fine comparison to make, but it's purely academic. I'd like to have a spectrum analyzer -- what geek wouldn't? But I also have a budget, and $5k for a tool I'll only use occasionally isn't in it.
So really, instead of comparing this thing to tools that the average person will never be able to afford, it would make more sense to talk about what it can do, and how it compares to other tools in its price range (if there are any).
To beat the old transportation analogy a little, if the $100 USB dongle is a bicycle and the "real" spectrum analyzer is a Porsche, you're not doing anyone a favor by pulling up alongside the dude on a bicycle in your Porsche and telling him about how it has 11" disc brakes or a six-speed sequential-manual gearbox or how much faster than his bicycle it can do a quarter-mile in.
If you can only afford the bicycle, it doesn't matter how much faster the Porsche can go. Likewise, it doesn't matter how much better the $5000 spectrum analyzer is, if you can only afford the $100 version.
It's not really "free," it's just being rolled into the opportunity cost of the job: it's like a benefit, one of the few benefits of being in the military. A civilian would have to pay for the surgery, sure, but they would probably so make significantly more money. Same with the health plan and free housing (barracks). Go read the military pay rates if you want. I'm not saying they're not a bad deal if you want to be in the military, but if you have half a brain you don't do it for the money, that's for sure.
So saying the surgery is 'free' is right up there with Verizon wireless telling me I can get a 'free phone,' if only I agree to pay them $50 a month for three years. Only fools and people who work in advertising would call that 'free.'
TANSTAAFL.
You can't have a chicken in every pot when there aren't enough chickens to go around. History has taught us that an elite group of individuals is no better in the long run at distributing resources across a society than everyone just trying to grab whatever they can for themselves based on their ability to do so is, and usually they can be a lot worse.
The Mac version sucked hard from Day 1. I installed it once and created an account, and then never opened it up again.
Frankly, they ought to just take that abomination out back and put it out of its misery, and take the salaries of whatever developers were working on it (probably none, but you never know) and send it as a donation to the Adium project, since I expect most people using Yahoo Messenger on the Mac are doing it through that. (Or if they're not, they should be.)
OT: Shouldn't the title of this article really be "Yahoo Opens Up Their Instant Messenging Client"? Because they're not really 'opening up' their instant messenging protocol, they're seemingly opening up the client (and just the Windows one at that) API to plug-ins, not their network. All in all, very lame.
I can only hope that the IM providers' insistence on trying to maintain their little fiefdoms of incompatibility will be their downfall someday; the first two major networks to combine and settle on an open standard will probably kill the rest of them.
In all honesty, there's something to that idea.
A while back when it first came out that you could call up certain companies and for less than $100 get basically anyone's cell phone records, I remember that somebody did it to the Canadian Privacy Minister (or someone to that effect, I forget their actual title) and mailed the results to them.
Short of actually tossing tons of money at them, that's probably one of the more effective means of influencing politicians on privacy issues: make them care by putting their privacy into question along with everyone else's.
I wouldn't ever advocate anything illegal per se, but a lot of good could potentially come from a massive data theft of every member of Congress' credit histories and banking records (besides just finding out who's really on the take).
That's a pretty odd microwave then, since most of them operate at 2.45 GHz, which is chosen because of the way it causes liquid water molecules to vibrate. See this article, particularly the graphs showing dielectric temperature as a function of frequency. It's pretty clear that a 10GHz microwave oven would be a lot less efficient at heating water than a conventional 2.45 GHz one, although I suppose you could choose a multiple of 2.45GHz and probably still have a functional product.
Overall, unless your goal was to build a miniature microwave (a 21st century E-Z Bake Oven?), I don't know why you'd want to use 10GHz instead of 2.4Ghz ones. The tolerances of parts in the magnetron and waveguide would have to be much tighter, I think, and this would almost certainly cause it to be more expensive.
I waited to get a DSLR for years because I have so much invested in Minolta AF lenses for my film system, and they barely get a decent lineup of DSLRs out the door, and then go belly-up and sell out to Sony of all people. (Couldn't they have just sold out to Sigma and done us all a favor?) Heck of a way to reward your customers. True, they were nice cameras: image stabilization in the body and all that, but they were so long in coming that it was almost a joke.
Anyway, my plan is to pick up a Maxxum 7D sometime in the next few months, and then hold on to it until somebody pries it from my cold, dead hands. It's the camera that could have saved that company if they had only made it about 5 years sooner.
Just remember that anytime you're talking on a cordless phone, you're using a radio transmitter. While that might seem like a painfully obvious thing to say, it's amazing how many people don't get the connection between "cordless telephone" and "anyone with a scanner can hear everything I'm saying." If you don't believe me, find any good radio that has wideband receive and try searching from around 46.6-50 MHz for the older phones and 900-928 MHz for the new ones. I don't have a receiver that goes to 2.4GHz but I have no doubt that if you did, you'd hear lots of people up in that band, too (although decoding the digital ones might be non-trivial).
Whenever somebody brings up email privacy I just laugh -- we'll work on email encryption right after we figure out a way to convince people that broadcasting their conversations miles in every direction probably isn't a great idea.
Anyway, I recommend that anybody who uses a cordless phone as their primary means of communication should borrow a scanner for an evening and play around with it--see if you can find the frequency of your own unit. I know I'll never discuss anything sensitive on one ever again.
Everyone seems to be assuming that Asterisk = "regular PC running all the time." Why does this have to be the case?
I haven't ever set up an Asterisk system, but if you only needed a few lines and didn't need space for the huge full-length PCI cards that people use to bring in T1 lines and interface with lots of copper POTS extensions, couldn't you do it in a very small, low-power enclosure?
Set up a dedicated machine, like the set-top-boxes people use for DVRs. Micro-ATX, small case, fanless processor, and then run it off of a CF card or something. Enough people have done stuff like this to make it not exactly state of the art: I don't know what the system requirements are for Asterisk, but without any fancy psychoacoustic compression I can't think it's that bad to only manage one connection at a time. Certainly it ought to be within the realm of currently available low-power and embedded systems, even. In addition to routing calls, it could probably handle his voicemail and maybe even do other slick features like email recorded VM messages or play them back through the internal speaker. Replacing some existing devices, if he was so inclined, could substantially reduce the power burden of a new machine.
The OP has said he wants a hardware solution that doesn't involve his PC -- fine; that doesn't mean that it can't use some PC software, running on a dedicated "appliance" or appliance-like system. Just because it's a computer doesn't mean it has to look like a computer, smell like a computer, or draw power like a computer.
It's interesting that this came up, since last week I was reading an article on the resolving power of the human eye as it pertains to photography and how to choose output resolutions. Short answer: 50 lines per degree of view. From there you can do some right-triangle trig to figure out how many line pairs should be perceivable for some output format based on how close you're going to be to it. For an 8x10 image, the author says 2300 pixels in the long dimension or 230 PPI would cut it (I didn't double-check his math). I tend to wonder if you don't have to introduce a factor of two in there somewhere, since to reproduce a "line" of resolution seems like it ought to require two pixels.
Of course, that's an oversimplification; hence the long answer. The human eye doesn't have a fixed number of "megapixels" that you could easily convert to a measurement of a photo or really even of another camera. First, you have the problem that the eye's "resolution" isn't evenly spread across the field of view: it's concentrated near the center, and thinner out in the periphery. This is why if you concentrate and try to pay attention to something that's not in the center of your field of view (that you're not looking directly at) it won't be as clear as when you look directly at it. (The exception is in very low light: your indirect vision is better at night vision.) However your brain reassembles the image and makes you think that you're seeing one great-big full-res panorama, when in reality at any one time you're only seeing a small part in "full rez" with the rest of your field of vision at something less, but with the full version available on-demand (by looking at it).
If you could actually do a 'screen grab' of the image your eyes were actually feeding into your brain, at any particular time, I think it would be a lot lower-quality than many people suspect. Almost without question, it would be lower quality than many photographs of the same scene. The depth of field is short, the resolution is concentrated in the center, as is the color, and there's a hole in the dead center of the image because of your optic nerve's placement on your retina. Your sense of sight works as well as it does, in large part, because of all the caching and postprocessing that's done transparently by your brain to the incoming information stream.
Really, when we compare a photo to our "sight," what we're really comparing is the photo to our brain's recollection of how it saw a particular scene, which might be very different from what our eyes actually took in, and further still from the 'objective truth' (if you believe in such a thing, that is) of what actually was there at that moment. The easiest example is color saturation: we tend to see and remember things as being far more colorful than they actually are: an "accurate" photo will therefore look dull compared to memory, so we compensate by oversaturating our photos to make them look more 'realistic.'
It's only possible to make comparisons between our eyes and mechanical cameras, and between our overall sense of sight and recording systems, for very limited cases. Even to answer a relatively simple question like "what's the eye's maximum megapixels?" completely would probably stretch the boundaries of currently understood optometry, neuroscience, and psychology.
I never made any claim that what I was describing was new. :)
I learned about after I saw someone demagnetizing the heads of a big open-reel multitrack, quite a long time ago: many people try to demagnetize the heads on open-reel machines by just holding the demagnetizer (which is just a small coil of wire in a wand, which you plug into the wall) next to the heads, and then flipping it on and off. This is insufficent to demagnetize them (and can potentially make it worse); to do it thoroughly, you have to turn it on, then move the wand away from the machine, then turn it off. (IIRC most of them came with instructions to this effect, but not an explanation.) The reason why this is required, in my opinion, is neither obvious nor trivial.
At any rate, today I doubt even the majority of readers here on Slashdot, and definitely the majority of computer-users, have had any experience with magnetic tape outside of the varieties that come in little cassettes, and will probably never have to use a head demagnetizer.
I used to subscribe to a paper (and before that, I bought it out of the machine where I used to live, almost every day), but now I just buy it irregularly on the weekends because I can't find the time to read it.
Compared to pulling open another window on my computer's screen and typing in a Web address, actually carrying around a paper and futzing around with flipping pages seems like a lot of work. I'm sure that sounds like the height of laziness (and I suppose I could easily imagine the reverse situation: someone who wasn't already sitting at a computer all day and instead was working at a conventional desk might find it rather obnoxious to have to go fire up a computer to get their news, versus having it delivered on paper every day), but it's the truth. I generally read my morning news at the same time as I'm checking my email in the morning, and for whatever reason (at least in my work environment), it's a whole lot more acceptable to read an online paper than it is to sit there and read a paper one.
The majority of the paper-news readers I know are mostly people who commute to work by train, and thus have a lot of non-internet-connected time to kill. But I don't think I'm very anomalous in getting most of my news while using a computer at work, and as long as my job requires that I be in front of a screen most of the time, news media that's presented there is always going to be more convenient than anything else.
I tried to like mechanical pencils, I really did.
.05mm leads, it always seemed like I would have to constantly rotate the pencil to avoid the line thickness changing and keep it sharp. Maybe it has something to do with the way I hold my writing instruments (at an angle). Also, I never managed to find a pencil lead soft enough or dark enough to give the kind of contrast you can get from pigment-based (or even good dye-based) pen inks.
Back when I was in school and taking lots of notes (I take rather copious notes), I thought it would be nice to be able to erase things instead of just cross them out, but I could never find a mechanical pencil that wrote as easily as a pen. Even with
It sure would be nice, though, if someone could come up with an erasable pen that wasn't a crummy ballpoint. I can't think of how you would do it, maybe something like the trick "disappearing inks" that used to be sold as gags. Even if it required a solution that had to be put on like white-out, but wasn't as obvious, that would be pretty neat.
I eventually just settled on using Pilot P-700 disposable rolling ball pens, and then white-out pens to cover the occasional mistake. Not quite as good as erasing, though.
If any other pen addicts have found a pencil that they thought was a substitute for pens, I'd be interested in hearing others' experiences.
Same here.
I know there are going to be people crawling out of the woodwork to give how many seconds it takes to create a new registration for a particular site, but honestly I'm just not interested. I have to remember enough usernames and passwords as it is already, I don't need to remember another half dozen or two for my news sites.
Google News seems to be pretty good about finding stories from no-reg-required sites, and it's easy enough if you click a link and end up at a registration page just to back up one level and find the same story from a different news source.
I don't know what most of those sites use their "free registrations" for -- some sort of data collection that they can mine later, I assume -- but they're losing my readership because of it.
Before someone accuses me of having a "short attention span," let me just say that I have a perfectly fine attention span, when I'm reading what I want. I don't have the time or interest or inclination to look at somebody else's registration/login page, or interstital ads, or frankly any other content that I didn't choose specifically to view. If I can't get to the story I wanted to read on the first click in, then I'll just back up and read it somewhere else. News, as far as I'm concerned, is a fungible good. You can read the AP wire stories as easily on the West Bumfuck Herald's page as you can on the East Bend Times, and I'll get it from whoever puts the least obstacles in my way.
Come to think of it, I doubt a billion bucks would be enough.
I think this is going to be another area where the corporate interests are going to keep the problem happening for years to come, until it finally becomes such a screamingly big issue -- and right now it's not; "identity theft" is still a lot further down on Ma and Pa Kettle's radar screen than gay marriage and abortion and the war -- that the politicans honestly believe that they'll get thrown out of office if they don't support a protective measure against it. In any given year, the politicians (generally speaking) never pick more than a handful of issues which are popular with the people but unpopular with corporations, and nothing makes it onto that short list unless it's really, really obviously popular with a particularly critical demographic.
Then, and only then, will you see a law passed. Until then, it doesn't matter what you propose, the companies who own your information and use it for their own profit will fight any change in the status quo that gives the consumer/citizen more rights, since it must necessarily come at some expense to them.