I have two of the CD bookshelves sold by O'reilly, the Unix one and the Perl one. They include one real book, and five full books in an unrestricted/unencumbered PDF or HTML format on CD. I simply copy the CD to a directory on my computer and I have instant access to them.
They were reasonably priced (~$40 US, IIRC).
I can see benefits to having a subscription to Safari - In my position I am viewed as a problem solver first, and maintenance/upgrade/keep-current-with-technology guy second. Being able to add a book to my library for the few pages where it will aid in a specific problem without buying the entire thing is certianly advantageous in this respect. Knowing that the library that I can check books out from is large and up to date is also a distinct advantage.
But it's still overpriced and too restricted. I'm certian many will use it who find value in exactly this system. I'm hoping, however, that it becomes an open market - the copyright holder sells electronic rights at a given price and resellers are allowed to sell them at whatever the market will bear. Right now it's a monopoly with a set price.
They are turning this information resource into a service industry. Services typicially cost a lot until there is more competition.
I'd rather see open source books made more available. The opendocs, various FAQs, etc make up a great knowledgebase (some of which is used as the sole basis for many books we now pay for). But writing well is a chore that requires a lot of work and planning. I wonder if there is a partially technical solution that could be married to an inexpensive organizational solution to facilitate the planning, writing, editing, publishing and distribution of good free electronic books. Publishing and distribution are pretty much taken care of, but we need an easy way to plan, write and edit (more formally than, say, a wiki) comprehensive documentation.
The organization could be supported with sales of paper and CD copies of the books. It would require a few editors and a few good project leaders who can guide (and push) volunteer writers, editors, and proof readers. It may not compete with 'real' books in terms of polish and marketting, but as long as it's correct, readable, and useful we technical types would likely support such an effort.
I just got a new TMBG kids CD from the library, "NO". It too talks about supertasters, in particular John Lee, supertaster.
John Lee Supertaster
Nothing tastes the same to a supertaster
When he tastes a pear it's like a hundred pears!
He's got superpowers!
He is a supertaster!
Every flavor explodes! Explodes and explodes!
John Lee Supertaster tastes more than we do
Everything has a flavor some flavors are too much
Can't shut his mouth 'cause he's a Supertaster!
Though he looks like a man he is a Supertaster
Can't drink coffee or beer 'cause he's a Supertaster!
He loves ice cream and pie! He is a Supertaster
John Lee Supertaster tastes more than we know
Everything has a flavor some flavors must go
They probably didn't realize thet John Lee was gonna die of cancer, poor supertaster. Maybe they'll hold a benefit concert for him.
On the upside, the other 360MB of CD space (that which is not consumed by music) is full of flash files that animate 13 of the 17 songs. Pretty spiffy interactive super fun kids animations no less. I think I like Bed the best, but we'll have to see if my toddler approves.
Certainly this system will meet some resistance as well, but much much less. It will only require the clients to change what they are using, not the servers.
Uh-huh. So instead of fixing/updating a relatively *few* servers (which get updated every time there's abug found in one of the major 5 SMTP servers) you'd like to update a *HUGE* number of clients?
Servers were supposed to make such changes and upgrades transparent to clients as far as possible. The server is there for the client, not because of the client.
CD-RW disks are not written to with FAT32 or similar file system formats, so you wouldn't have the same problems. I believe DirectCD and others use a proprietary format, which is why you must have directcd installed on any machine you want to access such a cd from - Windows XP comes with this support built in, including writing.
PJRC has a nice introduction to the fat32 file system on their website. It's aimed at people writing code for microcontrollers to access fat32 partitions on IDE drives, so it's got the goods.
Well, 400 degrees is right around solder melting temperature. I'm not surprised the case plastic didn't melt - tough plastic typically has a high melting point. If she shook the machine violently while it was still 400 F then she could have shaken components off the board.
Otherwise, from an electronics standpoint, I'm not surprised that it still worked. I wouldn't do it, but hey, to each her own.
I'm glad you're not too sure about this. Since wave soldering requires getting the metal bits (pins, copper traces, etc) up to soldering temperature for the soldering process to actually work it doesn't matter where the plastic is if it touches metal that needs to be soldered.
Typicially medium temperature plastics can easily handle the 300-500 F temperatures needed for soldering. The problem with mounting the socket on the backside is that you'd have to solder the opposite side of the board, and the socket would have to be covered so the wave soldering process wouldn't force solder into the socket holes.
Since the chipset is often BGA (Ball Grid Array), and many components are surface mount and require a seperate process anyway (usually infrared heating, sometimes oven heating) then the extra soldering isn't that much of an issue, nor is the protective cover over the socket. Rerouting the board backwards would be a pain though, and since it'd essentially require new case designs and could cause burns if not properly vented...
Well, there really isn't a *good* reason to go to that amount of trouble for what appears to be a very small market of people who would trade $200 - $300 for a passive heatsink on the outside case. (define very small as < 5 million units sold worldwide)
Aside from hammers, though, heat and vibration, taken together, cause serious problems.
The systems I work on, however, have to deal more more heat than vibration. Badly made hard drive motors, such as those in late model Fujitsu hard drives, create ton of heat - you would burn yourself on them if they didn't have a fan.
If your drives are below 60 degrees celsius (hot, but you won't get burned) then you really don't need to worry about heat.
Vibration is not nearly an issue with today's computers as it was when items were socketted to printed circuit boards and connectors were manufactured to loose tolerances. Now everything is soldered, and if it isn't soldered it uses a tight connector that requires forces measured in kilograms to remove.
Vibration is rarely an issue. Even in a hard drive where magnetic and air forces keep the head microns away from the platter, vibrations are still measured in G's - not fractions of G's. Prolonged constant vibrations can cause increased wear and tear, but not by a lot. In order to make an operating hard drive crash it's heads with the vibration of a fan, you'll have to attach it to the equipment tie down point of an industrial cement kiln fan, and attach a 50lb weight to one of the blades at the edge. Even then, I'd bet on the heads not crashing before the fan bearings break. You're piddly little fan is no match for my flying head air bearing technology!
So, in short, take care of the heat first, but only if it's very hot. Don't worry about warm. If your fan is vibrating then it needs to be cleaned. If you've cleaned it and it is still vibrating, get a new fan - they aren't expensive.
If you're playing the cost tradeoff game then you're playing it wrong. When the question is "What's cheaper: a new vibration free fan, or replacing my hard drive every other year..." the answer is always the new vibration free fan.
Lastly, expect new hard drives to last exactly the length of their warranty, regardless of how you treat them. The profit margin for hard drives today is so thin that it's not worth making one that will last longer than the warranty.
As a side note, upon further examination I find that MSWebDVD does have notifications based on playback, as well as muting and changing the clipping window. It would be very simple to set up an example VB application which would accept playback commands with time markers in the format "Title Chapter hh:mm:ss:ff" to script playback of a movie.
C++ should be used for better performance, and if the app is command line driven, it could be developed as quickly as the VB app.
Had I time, I'd whip up an example tonight, and maybe start hacking at one of my movies as an example.
Of course, I should have known that scriptable dvd players were already available from Microsoft and Apple:
Microsoft offers DVD playback control through Directshow and the MSWebDVD ActiveX Object, which, among other methods, gives you the ability to start a playback session with defined start and end points down to the frame. This is likely the method Clearplay uses, so they don't have to pay for a DVD player license - they simply control the one that is registered with DirectX 8.
Apple's DVD player is scriptable to some extent with ActiveScript - a tutorial of the process is available. I didn't look closely enough to determine whether it could go to the frame or not...
I'm sure many linux players can be controlled while playing from the command line, which could easily be scripted, but I doubt current players allow for frame control, and it appears as though none of these methods provide interrupts for when the specified section is done - meaning that you'll be polling the current play time every frame so you don't miss a cut.
MSWebDVD looks like it'll be the first, easiest method of performing this function, and it would have the widest audience for acceptance. Once people get this function for free on their computers (given that others are willing to create the scripts) then people will be wondering why their home DVD player doesn't have that ability.
At that point, producers might actually start including the scripts on their DVDs like they were supposed to in the first place - Do you remember when DVDs were first being marketted? One major feature was that the company producing the DVD could put a menu item to automatically cut scenes from the movie for different ratings. Guess what never happened? DVD players can handle it - but no producer's willing to take the time and money.
It would fix the problem, though, if producers don't want people editing their movies, then they should provide the editings for us. Otherwise, we have no recourse, just as when we had no recourse for watching DVDs on alternative OS's.
We need to add a simple scene scripting language to open source players.
The players would have to identify the movie inserted, and select a script based on it. The script would, at first, simply be commands like:
At frame 5,342 mute
At frame 5,370 unmute
At frame 8,330 goto frame 9,010
At frame 10,377 place a black square(x1,y1,x2,y2) with ID 1
At frame 10,402 move and resize square ID 1 to (x1, y1, x2, y2)
At frame 10,700 remove square ID 1
There could be other options such as only viewing a section of the window, zooming it, pixellizing instead of blacking out, etc.
Such a simple script language could be represented in an XML file and database. You could attach ratings to each particular script action, such that the end user could say, "I don't mind profanity or violence, but cut out the hardcore sex."
Not only would such an open system allow 'clean' editing (which could be added to a centralized database, much like FreeDB does for CD listings) but you could offer your own move edits - shift scenes around, cut out jar jar, etc.
I looked over the website and the site for the current client, and found only faint, inspecific references to what loading such a client does to your machine and internet connection.
This is terrible.
We complain when Gator is loaded as an 'add-on' to our system, yet we don't mind if we are not allowed to download some content without loading some P2P app which then uses our disk space and internet connection to serve others?
They need to put up a specific message that says, in effect, "This download client will significantly speed up the process of obtaining this file. Once downloaded your computer will allow other people to download this same file, or portions of it, from your computer so they can gain the same speed benefit you will get. There is no security risk, and you can stop the client from letting others download this file by moving or deleting the file, or ending the client by doing x, y and z. If you wish to simply download the file normally without installing this client, click here - otherwise click 'OK'"
Yes, we all understand what P2P means - we are donating part of our computer and network to the P2P network for as long as we are connected to the internet. But this is not common terminology - ask a non-computer expert who has spent hours downloading music from their favorite P2P app what the P2P app does, and all they know is that they can get "free" music with this cool program. They often have no idea that others are downloading music from their computer, etc.
This may slow down adoption, but the reality is that the backlash that may come out against it is not worth the extra adoption it may gain without full and well-explained disclosure - as well as a method to download the file normally.
There are a ton of issues wrapped up in this whole bitkeeper saga:
Proprietary vs Open
Cost vs Free
Freedom vs Artificial Restrictions
'Best Tool for the Job vs Ideal Choice
Long Term Investment vs Rapid Development
And that's just scratching the surface. There are valid reasons for choosing one path or another. This article is enlightening in that we now have a face and series of reasons as to why McVoy chose to implement Bitkeeper as a company with a business plan that closely resembles common closed source companies.
We also have some enlightenment as to how and why Linus chose to move to bitkeeper.
McVoy said, "Hey, Linus, let's work out the system for the 'best tool' to help you do your work." They came up with a rough specification, and McVoy has used that data specifically to create a profitable product, which (he claims) Linus started using spontaneously. The fact that it's almost exactly what Linus needs is by design from the start.
People who are up in arms about it being developed as proprietary software are complaining about the wrong thing. McVoy used his connections to gather information for a product which turned out to be a killer app in the area of source management. The fact that he's letting open source people use it for free is no more philanthropic than Microsoft donating software to universities at a reduced rate - it's another business decision.
What open source advocates ought to be up in arms about is, "Why don't we have an open source product that rivals bitkeeper in its scalability?" The answer is that we've long had tools that were 'good enough', and we've never had a project nearly as large and complex with so many developers and scalability issues as Linux itself has that has justified 3 years of its own development.
We've just added another crutch to the tired old horse that is source management, and said, "We'll get around to replacing the horse someday, but right now I only need feature X so I can complete feature Y on the real project - I'm not going to waste my time building tools."
As far as the constant 'best tool' vs 'ideal world' choice goes, the idea that one should use the best tool for the job regardless of ideology is the same argument that says, "It's ok that my t-shirt was made by a 12 year old in malaysia, who works for 12 hours a day and barely gets enough to eat for the pay." There are good reasons for voting with your money, and voting with your use and advocacy of obviously inferior and possibly more expensive (in time, materials, money, etc) tools and products.
However, a good tool can make one significantly more productive, especially if there's no learning curve associated with the use of that tool. I'd have no problem learning that, say, Red Hat uses MS Windows and Office inhouse for its sales force and secratarial staff. They probably don't, but if they did they'd have to give little or no training to new hires, increasing their immediate productivity.
The reverse is also true, in many circumstances though. Investing time and money in training those employees can have long term payoffs - such as increasing the number of people in the world who can use such systems. It took Linus quite some time to come back up to his normal slow speed when he started trying out bitkeeper - but reports indicate that the investment has paid off, and he is now much more able to handle the load at a faster rate.
Remember - this is just a scratch of the surface, and the fact is that these discussions are largely subjective and ideological. First be true to yourself. If you can't, in good conscience, use bitkeeper, then good for you. If you find you're more productive, and that's worth the ideological tradeoff, then congradulations on making that choice, knowing why you made that choice, and defending your choice as right for you. If you don't see it as a good tradeoff, then good for you for sticking to your guns - but don't gun down others because of your beliefs. They are not inferior - they simply have different values and priorities, and if you don't think they have the right to choose, then your closed mind is doing the worst damage to open source that can be done today.
Trust is currently formed in a hierarchical top-down approach, with a 'infintely trusted' organizations
Most web users don't care who says who is trustworthy - if they get a box saying "Possible security risk, they might consider whether the website 'looks' shady or not for a second before clicking accept, or add if directed to do so by the site
Most certs obtained today have very little (and easily forged) real verification, and web browsers don't tell the user what level the site was verified at (ie, name on credit card, billing address for credit card, DBA documents, notary public documents, full-on ID check and records investigation, etc)
Certifiactions tell squat about a person's reputation and previous transactions
The short and the long of it is - there is no reason to have a free cert organization. They aren't going to be added to the major browsers by default because they can't really certify identities without some form of energy expended, which requires money. Therefore there is little reason to go with an 'organization' or follow the current top-down approach since each site is going to have to be clicked-through by the user anyway, or directed to add that org's top-level cert to their browser manually. How many top level certs can current browsers handle efficiently?
This is essentially the same problem as host name resolution, and more currently spam. Rather than rely on a few large organizations to provide credentials, there should be in place a 'web of trust'. I trust certian individuals and companies. These individuals, companies, and I have PGP keys. These people I trust are on my first level of trust. If you trust me, the people I trust are on your second level of trust, and I am on your first level. I would have a list of people who trust me. If you don't know me, you can check my list of people who trust me, then check their lists and find out, within a few mS, how far away I am from your first level of trust. This is a doubly linked list, and every list is signed by the list owner, and verifiable (ie, I may say that MS trusts me, but you can check their list of people they trust and find out)
The potential for abuse is high, though, so a rating system is used. If you get burned by someone you can 'negatively' trust them. This effectively pushes them further away from the edges of your web of trust, and everyone who trusts them will become suspect, and less trusted.
Verisign can continue its cert program, and you can trust them at the first level and have the same benefits you get now by default in your browser.
It's the beginning of an idea, anyway. Lots of issues yet to be resolved, but a lot of them have been tested on peer-to-peer networks, and it could easily be applied to those networks to improve them as a test bed before writing an RFC and moving forward with it.
Make the expiration 50 years from the creation or publiction, whichever is earlier.
There may be an established definition of publication, but with the internet and other forms of publication, I can see this becoming a loophole. If it's 50 years from creation or publication, whichever came first, then no matter what the definition of publication is, the time limit is still fairly well defined. Even handing a finished manuscript to a proofreader could be considered creation.
I can just see someone claiming that just because their work was available through some means for 30 years, it was never "published". Creation still has some thorny issue (it was a work in progress, even though 99% of it was available to people generally), but by making it the limit of both it becomes much harder for corporations and individuals to abuse it.
You can still get the vendor/device list from Google's cache, though the last update in the cache is from October 28, 2002. The cache contains the main page, as well as some other useful data.
I suspect the wayback machine, while considerably slower, would have the CSV files and a few other items which the Google cache does not have.
Lastly, I agree with Jim that this is a really bad way for a non-profit group to act. I understand the pain of seeing someone you are supporting claim your hard earned work is somehow damaging to them, but suggesting that they'd like to have it anyway. Looking back it's easy to regret spending so much time on something which 'get[s] no respect'.
I hope that regardless of what PCI-sig claims or does, Jim finds a way to keep this valuable community resource available to those thousands who appreciate his effort, time, and money. I hope that it remains a free community resource. I hope that Jim isn't offended by Google's cache, and the possibility that others might continue his work, but I can't stand by and let someone destroy their creation to spite a third party, when that creation is of such value to so many others.
Lots of people are pointing out that the human eye is not stacked, and therefore the current digicams are 'good enough', or that Foveon is not needed/overrated , etc.
A more apt comparison could be made, instead, with a video camera and the human eye. The video camera is always moving slightly, just like the eye, and therefore there is enough additional information to fill in the missing data.
A digital still camera doesn't give nearly that much information about what's currently between the pixels. Think of it like encoding an MP3, then decoding and re-encoding it. Sounds terrible, right? The digital camera is encoding a scene in a bayer format of pixels. Whether it's decoded/filtered/antialiased, etc afterwards doesn't matter if it is seen by the human eye later - because it is re-encoded into the eye's format, and not only that, but the eye moves around a bit as it's doing so and it doesn't gain any additional information, or if it does it's artificial. Just like listeneing to doubly encoded music is painful after awhile, looking at digital images is painful after awhile.
To overcome this several techniques for post-processing these images are used now, but in the end they all dumb down to the same thing: bluring algorithms - reducing the effective resolution. Do they work? Yes. Are they good enough for professionals doing 20 by 40 foot billboards? Certianly.
But they aren't as good as a system which takes the entire picture at once, with all the additional information the brain will need later to fix limitations in the eye.
If current CCD and CMOS sensors are to make it, they really ought to consider using micromachine piezo actuators to vibrate the image sensor by a little bit, and take several images. This could be used not only to gather all the color information, but to effectively increase the total reolution, depending on the number of images taken. The problems of safely vibrating the silicon while maintaining connections, processing images quickly, and maintaining sturdiness are not trivial, however. Foveon's approach is much more economical in the long run.
-Adam
It's not what you know. It's knowing how to learn what you don't know.
Which is something you know...
Which means that it is about what you know my head hurts
"...what about a simple to use Music Server?...FM Broadcast is MUCH cheaper."
There are several reasons against both of those solutions, which may or may not outweigh the advantages you've listed above.
For the Music Server (computer):
Noise
Heat
Size
Maintainability
Security
For the FM Transmitter:
Audio quality (nowhere near CD quality)
Tuning drift or expensive transmitter(s) and receiver(s)
Requires one transmitter per stream versus a computer on a network which can serve multiple simultaneous streams
Security - your neighbors can receive said signals, which limits usefulness to non-personally identifiable streams (ie, intercom and other uses), or RIAA could sit outside and check the music you're transmitting against your credit card purchases, or even slap you with illegal broadcasting of copyright material, etc, etc.
Obviously there are good reasons to use either of the two solutions above (notably- you might already have an extra computer lying around doing nothing, and no need to wire if a network is not present).
When a project is given to the opensource community, the optimizations that work should be submitted as well. Possible instability due to such optimizations should be noted, and where expedient, should be fixed.
This is usually taken care of in the form of a makefile. If the author didn't intend any optimizations to be run against the code, they didn't put them in the makefile.
It would be great, however, if there were a project to find out what instabilities happen due to specific optimizations, and either fix GCC so it can more intelligently tell when to optimize and when not to, or get code developers to adopt safe coding practices which will allow the optimizations to be made without problem.
The first thing that came to mind was RFID. If you have each child wear a watch with an RFID unit, then you can detect who is at or near the door. If there's no RFID unit, the door stays locked.
Of course, you'll have the same problem here that you have with other methods - the autistic child will learn and understand what makes it work, and the other children may not be responsible enough to make sure he doesn't have access to their watches (or whatever article of clothing you may attach the RFID to).
You can train the other children that if their watch opens the door for him then their priveledges of moving freely (ie, having a 'working' watch) will be limited for a period of time. They will learn to protect and secure their watches after a time.
The underlying issue, though, is that you cannot protect one child and completely free the others from the same protection. It's obviously an ideal for you to do so, and inexpensively, but it's simply not going to happen. Raising a child is not just a parental responsibility/burden, but a family one. As much as you'd like to keep them from bearing such a burden, it is unaviodable.
Since your autistic child cannot speak well, you may want to look into voice recognition technologies. Children are very flexible, and your other two children should learn very quickly to be able to say a simple phrase that will unlock the door for a period of time. You can change the phrase as frequently as needed to prevent your second child from learning it, but not so quickly that your other children tire of learning the phrase so often.
This can be done on the cheap, and coupled with another method, such as RFID or a keypad, could work very well. Microsoft has a free speech SDK which allows one to develop fairly robust speech applications (both talking and listening) with tools as simple as Visual Basic. Since it's a simple windows API, you could probably even use perl or another language you already know to interface with it. The API is built into XP and later, the SDK is freely downloadable from their website and will install the runtimes necessary for win9x if needed.
You might even consider a 'turing test' type of system. Put a few hundred very simple questions in the system. They press a button, it asks them the question, and they give an answer. Since the speech program as speaker independant, it should be fairly robust. You'll need to choose your questions carefully, and change them from time to time. It can be thought of as a teaching tool, even. Make sure the questions are simple enough that you don't have to program too many possible 'right' answers (put 5 pictures on the screen - ask what color the bird is type of thing).
This question intrigues me. I'd be interested in the final solution - or if you need help with any hardware (and possibly software) issues I may be able to do so. You can find my email address at my website http://ubasics.com/adam/electronics/.
I PAY for a company to remove my garbage. I have not signed away any rights to the garbage, though there are few expectations once the company I've contracted with has taken possesion of said garbage. Until that time, I have placed the garbage in a convenient, agreed upon private piece of property, though it is not protected by more than a can and lid.
But it makes me wonder. Could I tie a contract to each bag?
This bag and its contents are transferred to the custodianship of XYZ HAULING AND WASTE DISPOSAL COMPANY. XYZ is given authority to dispose of this bag and contents in any manner which completes the destruction or decay of this bag and its contents, and is not given authority to use this bag and contents for any other purpose.
If this bag or any of its contents are found, delivered to, or discovered by any other party, that party is strictly prohibited from using, disbursing, collecting, storing, analyzing, or disseminating items, information, evidence, or any other material or immaterial matter which could be gleaned from said contents.
This end user license agreement will expire when said contents are engulfed in the fiery furnace of the exploding sun, or 3.25 eons - whichever comes first.
-Adam
I HATE the lameness filter - license agreements are supposed to be in all caps.
Slashdot Mirror
I wouldn't be surprised if it's partially donated in return for some small amount of advertising.
-Adam
I have two of the CD bookshelves sold by O'reilly, the Unix one and the Perl one. They include one real book, and five full books in an unrestricted/unencumbered PDF or HTML format on CD. I simply copy the CD to a directory on my computer and I have instant access to them.
They were reasonably priced (~$40 US, IIRC).
I can see benefits to having a subscription to Safari - In my position I am viewed as a problem solver first, and maintenance/upgrade/keep-current-with-technology guy second. Being able to add a book to my library for the few pages where it will aid in a specific problem without buying the entire thing is certianly advantageous in this respect. Knowing that the library that I can check books out from is large and up to date is also a distinct advantage.
But it's still overpriced and too restricted. I'm certian many will use it who find value in exactly this system. I'm hoping, however, that it becomes an open market - the copyright holder sells electronic rights at a given price and resellers are allowed to sell them at whatever the market will bear. Right now it's a monopoly with a set price.
They are turning this information resource into a service industry. Services typicially cost a lot until there is more competition.
I'd rather see open source books made more available. The opendocs, various FAQs, etc make up a great knowledgebase (some of which is used as the sole basis for many books we now pay for). But writing well is a chore that requires a lot of work and planning. I wonder if there is a partially technical solution that could be married to an inexpensive organizational solution to facilitate the planning, writing, editing, publishing and distribution of good free electronic books. Publishing and distribution are pretty much taken care of, but we need an easy way to plan, write and edit (more formally than, say, a wiki) comprehensive documentation.
The organization could be supported with sales of paper and CD copies of the books. It would require a few editors and a few good project leaders who can guide (and push) volunteer writers, editors, and proof readers. It may not compete with 'real' books in terms of polish and marketting, but as long as it's correct, readable, and useful we technical types would likely support such an effort.
-Adam
I just got a new TMBG kids CD from the library, "NO". It too talks about supertasters, in particular John Lee, supertaster.
John Lee Supertaster
Nothing tastes the same to a supertaster
When he tastes a pear it's like a hundred pears!
He's got superpowers!
He is a supertaster!
Every flavor explodes! Explodes and explodes!
John Lee Supertaster tastes more than we do
Everything has a flavor some flavors are too much
Can't shut his mouth 'cause he's a Supertaster!
Though he looks like a man he is a Supertaster
Can't drink coffee or beer 'cause he's a Supertaster!
He loves ice cream and pie! He is a Supertaster
John Lee Supertaster tastes more than we know
Everything has a flavor some flavors must go
They probably didn't realize thet John Lee was gonna die of cancer, poor supertaster. Maybe they'll hold a benefit concert for him.
On the upside, the other 360MB of CD space (that which is not consumed by music) is full of flash files that animate 13 of the 17 songs. Pretty spiffy interactive super fun kids animations no less. I think I like Bed the best, but we'll have to see if my toddler approves.
-Adam
Certainly this system will meet some resistance as well, but much much less. It will only require the clients to change what they are using, not the servers.
Uh-huh. So instead of fixing/updating a relatively *few* servers (which get updated every time there's abug found in one of the major 5 SMTP servers) you'd like to update a *HUGE* number of clients?
Servers were supposed to make such changes and upgrades transparent to clients as far as possible. The server is there for the client, not because of the client.
-Adam
CD-RW disks are not written to with FAT32 or similar file system formats, so you wouldn't have the same problems. I believe DirectCD and others use a proprietary format, which is why you must have directcd installed on any machine you want to access such a cd from - Windows XP comes with this support built in, including writing.
-Adam
PJRC has a nice introduction to the fat32 file system on their website. It's aimed at people writing code for microcontrollers to access fat32 partitions on IDE drives, so it's got the goods.
-Adam
Well, 400 degrees is right around solder melting temperature. I'm not surprised the case plastic didn't melt - tough plastic typically has a high melting point. If she shook the machine violently while it was still 400 F then she could have shaken components off the board.
Otherwise, from an electronics standpoint, I'm not surprised that it still worked. I wouldn't do it, but hey, to each her own.
-Adam
I'm glad you're not too sure about this. Since wave soldering requires getting the metal bits (pins, copper traces, etc) up to soldering temperature for the soldering process to actually work it doesn't matter where the plastic is if it touches metal that needs to be soldered.
Typicially medium temperature plastics can easily handle the 300-500 F temperatures needed for soldering. The problem with mounting the socket on the backside is that you'd have to solder the opposite side of the board, and the socket would have to be covered so the wave soldering process wouldn't force solder into the socket holes.
Since the chipset is often BGA (Ball Grid Array), and many components are surface mount and require a seperate process anyway (usually infrared heating, sometimes oven heating) then the extra soldering isn't that much of an issue, nor is the protective cover over the socket. Rerouting the board backwards would be a pain though, and since it'd essentially require new case designs and could cause burns if not properly vented...
Well, there really isn't a *good* reason to go to that amount of trouble for what appears to be a very small market of people who would trade $200 - $300 for a passive heatsink on the outside case. (define very small as < 5 million units sold worldwide)
-Adam
Italians Perform Jawdropping Full Ground Transplant
-Adam
Definitely hammers.
Aside from hammers, though, heat and vibration, taken together, cause serious problems.
The systems I work on, however, have to deal more more heat than vibration. Badly made hard drive motors, such as those in late model Fujitsu hard drives, create ton of heat - you would burn yourself on them if they didn't have a fan.
If your drives are below 60 degrees celsius (hot, but you won't get burned) then you really don't need to worry about heat.
Vibration is not nearly an issue with today's computers as it was when items were socketted to printed circuit boards and connectors were manufactured to loose tolerances. Now everything is soldered, and if it isn't soldered it uses a tight connector that requires forces measured in kilograms to remove.
Vibration is rarely an issue. Even in a hard drive where magnetic and air forces keep the head microns away from the platter, vibrations are still measured in G's - not fractions of G's. Prolonged constant vibrations can cause increased wear and tear, but not by a lot. In order to make an operating hard drive crash it's heads with the vibration of a fan, you'll have to attach it to the equipment tie down point of an industrial cement kiln fan, and attach a 50lb weight to one of the blades at the edge. Even then, I'd bet on the heads not crashing before the fan bearings break. You're piddly little fan is no match for my flying head air bearing technology!
So, in short, take care of the heat first, but only if it's very hot. Don't worry about warm. If your fan is vibrating then it needs to be cleaned. If you've cleaned it and it is still vibrating, get a new fan - they aren't expensive.
If you're playing the cost tradeoff game then you're playing it wrong. When the question is "What's cheaper: a new vibration free fan, or replacing my hard drive every other year..." the answer is always the new vibration free fan.
Lastly, expect new hard drives to last exactly the length of their warranty, regardless of how you treat them. The profit margin for hard drives today is so thin that it's not worth making one that will last longer than the warranty.
-Adam
As a side note, upon further examination I find that MSWebDVD does have notifications based on playback, as well as muting and changing the clipping window. It would be very simple to set up an example VB application which would accept playback commands with time markers in the format "Title Chapter hh:mm:ss:ff" to script playback of a movie.
C++ should be used for better performance, and if the app is command line driven, it could be developed as quickly as the VB app.
Had I time, I'd whip up an example tonight, and maybe start hacking at one of my movies as an example.
-Adam
Of course, I should have known that scriptable dvd players were already available from Microsoft and Apple:
Microsoft offers DVD playback control through Directshow and the MSWebDVD ActiveX Object, which, among other methods, gives you the ability to start a playback session with defined start and end points down to the frame. This is likely the method Clearplay uses, so they don't have to pay for a DVD player license - they simply control the one that is registered with DirectX 8.
Apple's DVD player is scriptable to some extent with ActiveScript - a tutorial of the process is available. I didn't look closely enough to determine whether it could go to the frame or not...
I'm sure many linux players can be controlled while playing from the command line, which could easily be scripted, but I doubt current players allow for frame control, and it appears as though none of these methods provide interrupts for when the specified section is done - meaning that you'll be polling the current play time every frame so you don't miss a cut.
MSWebDVD looks like it'll be the first, easiest method of performing this function, and it would have the widest audience for acceptance. Once people get this function for free on their computers (given that others are willing to create the scripts) then people will be wondering why their home DVD player doesn't have that ability.
At that point, producers might actually start including the scripts on their DVDs like they were supposed to in the first place - Do you remember when DVDs were first being marketted? One major feature was that the company producing the DVD could put a menu item to automatically cut scenes from the movie for different ratings. Guess what never happened? DVD players can handle it - but no producer's willing to take the time and money.
It would fix the problem, though, if producers don't want people editing their movies, then they should provide the editings for us. Otherwise, we have no recourse, just as when we had no recourse for watching DVDs on alternative OS's.
-Adam
We need to add a simple scene scripting language to open source players.
The players would have to identify the movie inserted, and select a script based on it. The script would, at first, simply be commands like:
At frame 5,342 mute
At frame 5,370 unmute
At frame 8,330 goto frame 9,010
At frame 10,377 place a black square(x1,y1,x2,y2) with ID 1
At frame 10,402 move and resize square ID 1 to (x1, y1, x2, y2)
At frame 10,700 remove square ID 1
There could be other options such as only viewing a section of the window, zooming it, pixellizing instead of blacking out, etc.
Such a simple script language could be represented in an XML file and database. You could attach ratings to each particular script action, such that the end user could say, "I don't mind profanity or violence, but cut out the hardcore sex."
Not only would such an open system allow 'clean' editing (which could be added to a centralized database, much like FreeDB does for CD listings) but you could offer your own move edits - shift scenes around, cut out jar jar, etc.
-Adam
I looked over the website and the site for the current client, and found only faint, inspecific references to what loading such a client does to your machine and internet connection.
This is terrible.
We complain when Gator is loaded as an 'add-on' to our system, yet we don't mind if we are not allowed to download some content without loading some P2P app which then uses our disk space and internet connection to serve others?
They need to put up a specific message that says, in effect, "This download client will significantly speed up the process of obtaining this file. Once downloaded your computer will allow other people to download this same file, or portions of it, from your computer so they can gain the same speed benefit you will get. There is no security risk, and you can stop the client from letting others download this file by moving or deleting the file, or ending the client by doing x, y and z. If you wish to simply download the file normally without installing this client, click here - otherwise click 'OK'"
Yes, we all understand what P2P means - we are donating part of our computer and network to the P2P network for as long as we are connected to the internet. But this is not common terminology - ask a non-computer expert who has spent hours downloading music from their favorite P2P app what the P2P app does, and all they know is that they can get "free" music with this cool program. They often have no idea that others are downloading music from their computer, etc.
This may slow down adoption, but the reality is that the backlash that may come out against it is not worth the extra adoption it may gain without full and well-explained disclosure - as well as a method to download the file normally.
-Adam
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Proprietary vs Open
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Cost vs Free
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Freedom vs Artificial Restrictions
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'Best Tool for the Job vs Ideal Choice
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Long Term Investment vs Rapid Development
And that's just scratching the surface. There are valid reasons for choosing one path or another. This article is enlightening in that we now have a face and series of reasons as to why McVoy chose to implement Bitkeeper as a company with a business plan that closely resembles common closed source companies.We also have some enlightenment as to how and why Linus chose to move to bitkeeper.
McVoy said, "Hey, Linus, let's work out the system for the 'best tool' to help you do your work." They came up with a rough specification, and McVoy has used that data specifically to create a profitable product, which (he claims) Linus started using spontaneously. The fact that it's almost exactly what Linus needs is by design from the start.
People who are up in arms about it being developed as proprietary software are complaining about the wrong thing. McVoy used his connections to gather information for a product which turned out to be a killer app in the area of source management. The fact that he's letting open source people use it for free is no more philanthropic than Microsoft donating software to universities at a reduced rate - it's another business decision.
What open source advocates ought to be up in arms about is, "Why don't we have an open source product that rivals bitkeeper in its scalability?" The answer is that we've long had tools that were 'good enough', and we've never had a project nearly as large and complex with so many developers and scalability issues as Linux itself has that has justified 3 years of its own development.
We've just added another crutch to the tired old horse that is source management, and said, "We'll get around to replacing the horse someday, but right now I only need feature X so I can complete feature Y on the real project - I'm not going to waste my time building tools."
As far as the constant 'best tool' vs 'ideal world' choice goes, the idea that one should use the best tool for the job regardless of ideology is the same argument that says, "It's ok that my t-shirt was made by a 12 year old in malaysia, who works for 12 hours a day and barely gets enough to eat for the pay." There are good reasons for voting with your money, and voting with your use and advocacy of obviously inferior and possibly more expensive (in time, materials, money, etc) tools and products.
However, a good tool can make one significantly more productive, especially if there's no learning curve associated with the use of that tool. I'd have no problem learning that, say, Red Hat uses MS Windows and Office inhouse for its sales force and secratarial staff. They probably don't, but if they did they'd have to give little or no training to new hires, increasing their immediate productivity.
The reverse is also true, in many circumstances though. Investing time and money in training those employees can have long term payoffs - such as increasing the number of people in the world who can use such systems. It took Linus quite some time to come back up to his normal slow speed when he started trying out bitkeeper - but reports indicate that the investment has paid off, and he is now much more able to handle the load at a faster rate.
Remember - this is just a scratch of the surface, and the fact is that these discussions are largely subjective and ideological. First be true to yourself. If you can't, in good conscience, use bitkeeper, then good for you. If you find you're more productive, and that's worth the ideological tradeoff, then congradulations on making that choice, knowing why you made that choice, and defending your choice as right for you. If you don't see it as a good tradeoff, then good for you for sticking to your guns - but don't gun down others because of your beliefs. They are not inferior - they simply have different values and priorities, and if you don't think they have the right to choose, then your closed mind is doing the worst damage to open source that can be done today.
-Adam
The short and the long of it is - there is no reason to have a free cert organization. They aren't going to be added to the major browsers by default because they can't really certify identities without some form of energy expended, which requires money. Therefore there is little reason to go with an 'organization' or follow the current top-down approach since each site is going to have to be clicked-through by the user anyway, or directed to add that org's top-level cert to their browser manually. How many top level certs can current browsers handle efficiently?
This is essentially the same problem as host name resolution, and more currently spam. Rather than rely on a few large organizations to provide credentials, there should be in place a 'web of trust'. I trust certian individuals and companies. These individuals, companies, and I have PGP keys. These people I trust are on my first level of trust. If you trust me, the people I trust are on your second level of trust, and I am on your first level. I would have a list of people who trust me. If you don't know me, you can check my list of people who trust me, then check their lists and find out, within a few mS, how far away I am from your first level of trust. This is a doubly linked list, and every list is signed by the list owner, and verifiable (ie, I may say that MS trusts me, but you can check their list of people they trust and find out)
The potential for abuse is high, though, so a rating system is used. If you get burned by someone you can 'negatively' trust them. This effectively pushes them further away from the edges of your web of trust, and everyone who trusts them will become suspect, and less trusted.
Verisign can continue its cert program, and you can trust them at the first level and have the same benefits you get now by default in your browser.
It's the beginning of an idea, anyway. Lots of issues yet to be resolved, but a lot of them have been tested on peer-to-peer networks, and it could easily be applied to those networks to improve them as a test bed before writing an RFC and moving forward with it.
-Adam
I see duplicates. They're everywhere - they don't even know they're duplicates...
-Adam
Make the expiration 50 years from the creation or publiction, whichever is earlier.
There may be an established definition of publication, but with the internet and other forms of publication, I can see this becoming a loophole. If it's 50 years from creation or publication, whichever came first, then no matter what the definition of publication is, the time limit is still fairly well defined. Even handing a finished manuscript to a proofreader could be considered creation.
I can just see someone claiming that just because their work was available through some means for 30 years, it was never "published". Creation still has some thorny issue (it was a work in progress, even though 99% of it was available to people generally), but by making it the limit of both it becomes much harder for corporations and individuals to abuse it.
-Adam
You can still get the vendor/device list from Google's cache, though the last update in the cache is from October 28, 2002. The cache contains the main page, as well as some other useful data.
I suspect the wayback machine, while considerably slower, would have the CSV files and a few other items which the Google cache does not have.
Lastly, I agree with Jim that this is a really bad way for a non-profit group to act. I understand the pain of seeing someone you are supporting claim your hard earned work is somehow damaging to them, but suggesting that they'd like to have it anyway. Looking back it's easy to regret spending so much time on something which 'get[s] no respect'.
I hope that regardless of what PCI-sig claims or does, Jim finds a way to keep this valuable community resource available to those thousands who appreciate his effort, time, and money. I hope that it remains a free community resource. I hope that Jim isn't offended by Google's cache, and the possibility that others might continue his work, but I can't stand by and let someone destroy their creation to spite a third party, when that creation is of such value to so many others.
-Adam
Ignore me. I'm just marking this story so I can come back to it later, when it's off the front page and I don't feel like searching for it.
If you must, mod me down. Offtopic is the most likely candidate.
CMDRTACO, please consider a marking feature, something like a link on each story summary "Mark for later reading" or "Place in personal library", etc.
-Adam
Lots of people are pointing out that the human eye is not stacked, and therefore the current digicams are 'good enough', or that Foveon is not needed/overrated , etc.
A more apt comparison could be made, instead, with a video camera and the human eye. The video camera is always moving slightly, just like the eye, and therefore there is enough additional information to fill in the missing data.
A digital still camera doesn't give nearly that much information about what's currently between the pixels. Think of it like encoding an MP3, then decoding and re-encoding it. Sounds terrible, right? The digital camera is encoding a scene in a bayer format of pixels. Whether it's decoded/filtered/antialiased, etc afterwards doesn't matter if it is seen by the human eye later - because it is re-encoded into the eye's format, and not only that, but the eye moves around a bit as it's doing so and it doesn't gain any additional information, or if it does it's artificial. Just like listeneing to doubly encoded music is painful after awhile, looking at digital images is painful after awhile.
To overcome this several techniques for post-processing these images are used now, but in the end they all dumb down to the same thing: bluring algorithms - reducing the effective resolution. Do they work? Yes. Are they good enough for professionals doing 20 by 40 foot billboards? Certianly.
But they aren't as good as a system which takes the entire picture at once, with all the additional information the brain will need later to fix limitations in the eye.
If current CCD and CMOS sensors are to make it, they really ought to consider using micromachine piezo actuators to vibrate the image sensor by a little bit, and take several images. This could be used not only to gather all the color information, but to effectively increase the total reolution, depending on the number of images taken. The problems of safely vibrating the silicon while maintaining connections, processing images quickly, and maintaining sturdiness are not trivial, however. Foveon's approach is much more economical in the long run.
-Adam
It's not what you know. It's knowing how to learn what you don't know.
Which is something you know...
Which means that it is about what you know
my head hurts
There are several reasons against both of those solutions, which may or may not outweigh the advantages you've listed above.
For the Music Server (computer):
For the FM Transmitter:
Obviously there are good reasons to use either of the two solutions above (notably- you might already have an extra computer lying around doing nothing, and no need to wire if a network is not present).
-Adam
When a project is given to the opensource community, the optimizations that work should be submitted as well. Possible instability due to such optimizations should be noted, and where expedient, should be fixed.
This is usually taken care of in the form of a makefile. If the author didn't intend any optimizations to be run against the code, they didn't put them in the makefile.
It would be great, however, if there were a project to find out what instabilities happen due to specific optimizations, and either fix GCC so it can more intelligently tell when to optimize and when not to, or get code developers to adopt safe coding practices which will allow the optimizations to be made without problem.
-Adam
The first thing that came to mind was RFID. If you have each child wear a watch with an RFID unit, then you can detect who is at or near the door. If there's no RFID unit, the door stays locked.
Of course, you'll have the same problem here that you have with other methods - the autistic child will learn and understand what makes it work, and the other children may not be responsible enough to make sure he doesn't have access to their watches (or whatever article of clothing you may attach the RFID to).
You can train the other children that if their watch opens the door for him then their priveledges of moving freely (ie, having a 'working' watch) will be limited for a period of time. They will learn to protect and secure their watches after a time.
The underlying issue, though, is that you cannot protect one child and completely free the others from the same protection. It's obviously an ideal for you to do so, and inexpensively, but it's simply not going to happen. Raising a child is not just a parental responsibility/burden, but a family one. As much as you'd like to keep them from bearing such a burden, it is unaviodable.
Since your autistic child cannot speak well, you may want to look into voice recognition technologies. Children are very flexible, and your other two children should learn very quickly to be able to say a simple phrase that will unlock the door for a period of time. You can change the phrase as frequently as needed to prevent your second child from learning it, but not so quickly that your other children tire of learning the phrase so often.
This can be done on the cheap, and coupled with another method, such as RFID or a keypad, could work very well. Microsoft has a free speech SDK which allows one to develop fairly robust speech applications (both talking and listening) with tools as simple as Visual Basic. Since it's a simple windows API, you could probably even use perl or another language you already know to interface with it. The API is built into XP and later, the SDK is freely downloadable from their website and will install the runtimes necessary for win9x if needed.
You might even consider a 'turing test' type of system. Put a few hundred very simple questions in the system. They press a button, it asks them the question, and they give an answer. Since the speech program as speaker independant, it should be fairly robust. You'll need to choose your questions carefully, and change them from time to time. It can be thought of as a teaching tool, even. Make sure the questions are simple enough that you don't have to program too many possible 'right' answers (put 5 pictures on the screen - ask what color the bird is type of thing).
This question intrigues me. I'd be interested in the final solution - or if you need help with any hardware (and possibly software) issues I may be able to do so. You can find my email address at my website http://ubasics.com/adam/electronics/.
Good luck!
-Adam
No
I PAY for a company to remove my garbage. I have not signed away any rights to the garbage, though there are few expectations once the company I've contracted with has taken possesion of said garbage. Until that time, I have placed the garbage in a convenient, agreed upon private piece of property, though it is not protected by more than a can and lid.
But it makes me wonder. Could I tie a contract to each bag?
This bag and its contents are transferred to the custodianship of XYZ HAULING AND WASTE DISPOSAL COMPANY. XYZ is given authority to dispose of this bag and contents in any manner which completes the destruction or decay of this bag and its contents, and is not given authority to use this bag and contents for any other purpose.
If this bag or any of its contents are found, delivered to, or discovered by any other party, that party is strictly prohibited from using, disbursing, collecting, storing, analyzing, or disseminating items, information, evidence, or any other material or immaterial matter which could be gleaned from said contents.
This end user license agreement will expire when said contents are engulfed in the fiery furnace of the exploding sun, or 3.25 eons - whichever comes first.
-Adam
I HATE the lameness filter - license agreements are supposed to be in all caps.