I know you have received many replies, but here's a different approach.:)
If you can seperate the funcionality of parts B and C, then you can create a seperate program so that A is one program and B/C is the other. The two programs can interface using a pipe, a local network socket or by exchanging data files all transparently to the user. Either one could be setup to processes your data or acts as a front end calling the other for data manipulation. Without details of A, B and C it's hard to say much more.
Under the GPL, you would only be required to add and GPL the interface code to make B/C into a generic stand-alone utility. The community gets additional functionality of a standalone B/C utility and you can still distribute and keep proprietary the A program.:)
While a wholly open-source machine would be great, it won't be a reality until we have technology that breaks the electronics mass production bottleneck
It's not technology that will make it a reality, but rather published technical specs of the hardware. If we had the specs that all tech companies used to publish, we could easily write our own drivers, bios, etc. If I found a company that supported such a dissemination of technical information, I would likely go out of my way to use their products and recommend them to others.
I keep hoping that eventually some company will see the potential of having open specs so that the community can evolve the software to make their product much more desirable. If a company released a hardware device with network, storage, IR in, and Audio/Video output and with open specs, I have no doubt that the software would rapidly apear to turn the device into a dream-machine for home multimedia. I'd be working on it anyway!
Don't suppose you know how to make on the cheap,...
For a traditional hologram, it would probably be fairly easy... if you have a large enough dark room and the ability to develop film of that size... (In my dreams). My guess is that for this application they're probably using bleached-phase holography which is probably done directly on the glass with a coating of photo sensative gelatin. Hopefully a patent search would reveal more information.:)
Their techniques could be called precise refraction at best.
Sorry, but... This IS NOT refraction and neither is holography. As I'm sure you're aware, holograms are caused by recording the interference pattern of two wavefronts. After creating a hologram, it will direct light from a prticular direction (a laser usually) to be refracted at different angles. This device utilizes an interference pattern created in the same way as any other holographic film to procuce the same effect, but just utilized in a novel way. The novel aspect of this is that the inteference pattern effectively scatters light only when coming from a particular angle. This screen IS a hologram. It's just being used in a non-traditional manner to achieve a particular result.
You could say that "Their techniques could be called precise DIFFRACTION", but then again, that's precisely what holography is.
Blizzard isn't the (only?) reason that his purchase is faulty.
Are you reading the same article as the rest of us? Blizzard IS the ONLY reason his purchase is faulty. They're creating an artificial restriction that isn't listed on their EULA while breaking other terms of the EULA which claim the game can be transferred (which is apparently a lie).
Could you please tell your grandparents 'thank you' for being good people?
Gee, and I was thinking: "Could you please tell your grandparents 'thank you' for being good sheeple?";)
If his grandmother went to a store and they ended up not having just what she wanted, would she settle for something she didn't want just because she took up some time of the salesman? Would she feel obligated to buy something?
I believe you owe the salesman some gratitude for spending their time to help (even though that is their job), but to translate that into an obligation to purchase because of that is wrong thinking IMHO. I'm sure salesmen of diverse ethical backgrounds all absolutely LOVE people like his grandmother.
...if you have a sign in your driveway that says "Parking: $5," then it is [theft].
NOT. By your logic, if I put a sign up that says "Parking: $5000000000000" and they park there anyway then you they've stolen $5 trillion dollars from me? Wow! The crime of the century!;)
... they are losing money by your actions. You are depriving them of a legitimate sale.
That's an unprovable assumption. They could just as easily be making money by those actions. If I downloaded an excellent show I would be highly inclined to go out and buy the DVD, both to recompense the makers of the film for their excellent work and also to have a quality copy to view.
You may claim that more sales are lost than made due to file sharing, but sales trends seem to show that these are fairly evenly ballanced or possibly even result in more sales than losses made as a result of file sharing.
The same way that we use planets to slingshot probes and increase their velocity
Sorry, but it doesn't quite work that way in this case. In a slingshot trajectory, if you measure from the inertial reference frame of the massive body (the galactic core in this case) you will observe the incoming and outgoing velocities of the less masive object (the star) to be roughly equivalent. In the reference frame of the less massive object however, this may result in a huge velocity gain or loss depending on the interaction. If the massive object providing the slingshot effect is at rest with respect to our galaxy (as in this claim) then the less massive star cannot appreciatively change its velocity with respect to the galaxy without gravitational interaction with other objects which are not at rest with respect to the galaxy.
Even many of the phone company tech support aren't aware you can 'dial' out using the hook switch. When I was a kid, I remember that one day none of our touch-tone phones would dial. My dad pulse dialed the phone company using the hook switch to see what might be the problem. After he told them the touch tone pad wasn't working he had a hard time convincing them it wasn't a prank call.;)
It ended up that during some line work the wires had been switched. The phone is powered off the line, but the old phones didn't have a full wave rectifier to drive the digital cirtuitry so that the DTMF encoder wasn't working. We just switched the polarity where it entered our house and everything was working again. I've noticed that with newer phones the polarity doesn't matter.
I did not move to Fedora because of the Windows XP dual boot issue.
I'm just curious what issue you're referring to. I'm a late-commer to fedora core 3 (amd64) which I just downloaded and installed this weekend. I'm using it in a dual boot setup with WindowsXP on my laptop and haven't seen any problems related to dual boot issues. The only pain was having to add mp3 support, and finding no 64-bit Thunderbird builds, or 64-bit flashplayer support (I'm still tyring to get GNUFlash to compile in 64-bit).
The 200mW green monsters that have been talked about here before would be scary close up, but again they aren't going to do much at that range.
That's a common misconception. With a laser, it really depends on the beam convergenge. Lasers have a linear power falloff rather than the geometric one we're used to. While ordinary lights get much dimmer as you get further away, a laser with perfect convergence would be just as bright 10000 meters away as 1 meter away (except for relatively small atmospheric losses). Moderately good lasers have an angular divergence of only a fraction of a milliradian.
Also, the HeNe laser we used in highschool was an el-cheapo late 1970s Meteorologic and I doubt it was anywhere close to 10mW. We couldn't even get it to laze half the time. If you decide to try the same experimant out for yourself with a higer power green laser, you'll have to take responsibility for any permanent retinal damage that may occur.;)
Laser pointers over 15 miles away - or even nearly 2 miles away - lose a lot of their energy and are no brighter than dim LED bulbs at those distances.
I'm sorry but this is wrong. Have you ever been on the receiving end of a laser that's 15 miles away? In highschool we took the science department's low power helium neon laser and shot it accross the valley (about 20+ miles) then photographed it's relative brightness against the city lights (Salt Lake City). It was extremely bright and dwarfed the light output of the entire city by several orders of magnitude. One of the newer green pointers is probably at least 100 times brighter in appearance than that crappy HeNe laser!
I have no doubt that you could temporarily blind someone easily with a green laser pointer from 15 miles or more away, especially at night.
Most articles dealing with changes in the earths rotational velocity deal with long time periods such as "3 microseconds per decade", so you can't always just assume anything you want to.
Yes, that statement in the Reuters article is meaningless.
A quick search on google for more information shows that the information was misquoted in the Reuters article and that the original quote was that this event "May have shortened the day by 3 microseconds" which IS a meaningful statement.
Judging by the responces your post has garnered, it seems that far too many/. readers have a fairly difficult time with analytical thought.;)
"We're talking about the time it takes for 'the planet to spin'"
Are we? Let's see now...
Do you mean "to spin once? Hmmm.. don't think that was anywhere in the article.
Or maybe you thought that "spin" somehow actually means 'just once'. Guess not.
Maybe you made an *ASSUMPTION*.
Well, maybe that's what the previous post was getting at. Ya think?;)
When dealing with a time differential as in this case, you have to have a reference. Most articles dealing with changes in the earths rotational velocity deal with long time periods such as "3 microseconds per decade", so you can't always just assume anything you want to.
Well.. that earth rotates once every 24 hours right? So, by the article, that means that the day is shortened by 3 microseconds.
What does "earth rotates once every 24 hours" have to do with anything?
The article DIDN'T say that one rotation was shortened by 3 microseconds.
The article DIDN'T say that one day was shortened by 3 microseconds.
The article DIDN'T say that one month was shortened by 3 microseconds.
That's what the previous post was correctly complaining about!
When dealing with a time differential as in this case, you have to have a reference. Most articles dealing with changes in the earths rotational velocity deal with long time periods such as "3 microseconds per decade", so you can't always just assume anything you want to.
The grandfather post was perfectly correct in saying that the information in the article was not well defined. The article said "caused the planet to spin 3 microseconds, or 3 millionths of a second, faster". That statement is scientifically meaningless. Since you seem to thing the article was clear I can only guess that you may have *ASSUMED* that the article MEANT "caused the planet to spin exaclty once 3 microseconds faster." Is that what you assumed? I'd really like to know. Either way, that doesn't make the artcle correct.
The fact is that the original (and meaningful) quote was "May have shortened the day by 3 microseconds" and was misrepresented in the dicussed Reuters article.
It looks bad when you say someone is "joking or stupid" just because you don't understand something that is immediately obvious to many others. If you would have taken a second to answer the "3 microseconds per __???__" question you were responding to, you may have realized that the article didn't support any answer you would have given... and you'd be taking your first steps toward anylitical thinking.;)
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe you should try actually reading the article next time.
Hint: It has somthing to do with the "Trusted Computing" initiative. (aka Paladium.)
If you can seperate the funcionality of parts B and C, then you can create a seperate program so that A is one program and B/C is the other. The two programs can interface using a pipe, a local network socket or by exchanging data files all transparently to the user. Either one could be setup to processes your data or acts as a front end calling the other for data manipulation. Without details of A, B and C it's hard to say much more.
Under the GPL, you would only be required to add and GPL the interface code to make B/C into a generic stand-alone utility. The community gets additional functionality of a standalone B/C utility and you can still distribute and keep proprietary the A program. :)
It's not technology that will make it a reality, but rather published technical specs of the hardware. If we had the specs that all tech companies used to publish, we could easily write our own drivers, bios, etc. If I found a company that supported such a dissemination of technical information, I would likely go out of my way to use their products and recommend them to others.
I keep hoping that eventually some company will see the potential of having open specs so that the community can evolve the software to make their product much more desirable. If a company released a hardware device with network, storage, IR in, and Audio/Video output and with open specs, I have no doubt that the software would rapidly apear to turn the device into a dream-machine for home multimedia. I'd be working on it anyway!
Only if you assume that the only relevant forces are gravitational. ;)
So... which card are you using? Would you recommend it?
For a traditional hologram, it would probably be fairly easy... if you have a large enough dark room and the ability to develop film of that size... (In my dreams). My guess is that for this application they're probably using bleached-phase holography which is probably done directly on the glass with a coating of photo sensative gelatin. Hopefully a patent search would reveal more information. :)
Er... make that " to be diffracted at different angles."
I hate it when that happens! ;)
You could say that "Their techniques could be called precise DIFFRACTION", but then again, that's precisely what holography is.
Are you reading the same article as the rest of us? Blizzard IS the ONLY reason his purchase is faulty. They're creating an artificial restriction that isn't listed on their EULA while breaking other terms of the EULA which claim the game can be transferred (which is apparently a lie).
Gee, and I was thinking: "Could you please tell your grandparents 'thank you' for being good sheeple?" ;)
If his grandmother went to a store and they ended up not having just what she wanted, would she settle for something she didn't want just because she took up some time of the salesman? Would she feel obligated to buy something?
I believe you owe the salesman some gratitude for spending their time to help (even though that is their job), but to translate that into an obligation to purchase because of that is wrong thinking IMHO. I'm sure salesmen of diverse ethical backgrounds all absolutely LOVE people like his grandmother.
NOT. By your logic, if I put a sign up that says "Parking: $5000000000000" and they park there anyway then you they've stolen $5 trillion dollars from me? Wow! The crime of the century! ;)
That's an unprovable assumption. They could just as easily be making money by those actions. If I downloaded an excellent show I would be highly inclined to go out and buy the DVD, both to recompense the makers of the film for their excellent work and also to have a quality copy to view.
You may claim that more sales are lost than made due to file sharing, but sales trends seem to show that these are fairly evenly ballanced or possibly even result in more sales than losses made as a result of file sharing.
Sorry, but it doesn't quite work that way in this case. In a slingshot trajectory, if you measure from the inertial reference frame of the massive body (the galactic core in this case) you will observe the incoming and outgoing velocities of the less masive object (the star) to be roughly equivalent. In the reference frame of the less massive object however, this may result in a huge velocity gain or loss depending on the interaction. If the massive object providing the slingshot effect is at rest with respect to our galaxy (as in this claim) then the less massive star cannot appreciatively change its velocity with respect to the galaxy without gravitational interaction with other objects which are not at rest with respect to the galaxy.
It ended up that during some line work the wires had been switched. The phone is powered off the line, but the old phones didn't have a full wave rectifier to drive the digital cirtuitry so that the DTMF encoder wasn't working. We just switched the polarity where it entered our house and everything was working again. I've noticed that with newer phones the polarity doesn't matter.
Finally! A keyboard to match the Look-and-Feel of Windows XP! ;)
Thanks for the info. I guess getting into the game late can have its advantages. :)
I'm just curious what issue you're referring to. I'm a late-commer to fedora core 3 (amd64) which I just downloaded and installed this weekend. I'm using it in a dual boot setup with WindowsXP on my laptop and haven't seen any problems related to dual boot issues. The only pain was having to add mp3 support, and finding no 64-bit Thunderbird builds, or 64-bit flashplayer support (I'm still tyring to get GNUFlash to compile in 64-bit).
That's a common misconception. With a laser, it really depends on the beam convergenge. Lasers have a linear power falloff rather than the geometric one we're used to. While ordinary lights get much dimmer as you get further away, a laser with perfect convergence would be just as bright 10000 meters away as 1 meter away (except for relatively small atmospheric losses). Moderately good lasers have an angular divergence of only a fraction of a milliradian.
Also, the HeNe laser we used in highschool was an el-cheapo late 1970s Meteorologic and I doubt it was anywhere close to 10mW. We couldn't even get it to laze half the time. If you decide to try the same experimant out for yourself with a higer power green laser, you'll have to take responsibility for any permanent retinal damage that may occur. ;)
I'm sorry but this is wrong. Have you ever been on the receiving end of a laser that's 15 miles away? In highschool we took the science department's low power helium neon laser and shot it accross the valley (about 20+ miles) then photographed it's relative brightness against the city lights (Salt Lake City). It was extremely bright and dwarfed the light output of the entire city by several orders of magnitude. One of the newer green pointers is probably at least 100 times brighter in appearance than that crappy HeNe laser!
I have no doubt that you could temporarily blind someone easily with a green laser pointer from 15 miles or more away, especially at night.
Most articles dealing with changes in the earths rotational velocity deal with long time periods such as "3 microseconds per decade", so you can't always just assume anything you want to.
A quick search on google for more information shows that the information was misquoted in the Reuters article and that the original quote was that this event "May have shortened the day by 3 microseconds" which IS a meaningful statement.
Judging by the responces your post has garnered, it seems that far too many /. readers have a fairly difficult time with analytical thought. ;)
Are we? Let's see now ...
Well, maybe that's what the previous post was getting at. Ya think? ;)
When dealing with a time differential as in this case, you have to have a reference. Most articles dealing with changes in the earths rotational velocity deal with long time periods such as "3 microseconds per decade", so you can't always just assume anything you want to.
Which would be great if the article had actually said that the 3 milliseconds was per rotation (which it didn't).
What does "earth rotates once every 24 hours" have to do with anything?
- The article DIDN'T say that one rotation was shortened by 3 microseconds.
- The article DIDN'T say that one day was shortened by 3 microseconds.
- The article DIDN'T say that one month was shortened by 3 microseconds.
That's what the previous post was correctly complaining about!When dealing with a time differential as in this case, you have to have a reference. Most articles dealing with changes in the earths rotational velocity deal with long time periods such as "3 microseconds per decade", so you can't always just assume anything you want to.
The fact is that the original (and meaningful) quote was "May have shortened the day by 3 microseconds" and was misrepresented in the dicussed Reuters article.
It looks bad when you say someone is "joking or stupid" just because you don't understand something that is immediately obvious to many others. If you would have taken a second to answer the "3 microseconds per __???__" question you were responding to, you may have realized that the article didn't support any answer you would have given... and you'd be taking your first steps toward anylitical thinking. ;)