Damn it you beat me to the obligatory "add ogg" complaint. Well, what I want to know is when are we going to be able to run Linux on a Beowolf cluster of these babies! There!
Quite the contrary. There is a common legal tradition in most areas of contract law that protects consumers from predatory fine print like this. You are generally not allowed to put unreasonable or unrelated clauses into a fine print of a consumer agreement. A creditor cannot put it into the fine print that they can sleep with your wife if you default. I see this kind of EULA as exactly the same type of problem and the govt should protect consumers from them.
Eulas like these should be regulated by the government. It is pretty common in contract law that unreasonable provisions are not enforceable and illegal. Like for example a credit card agreement cannot mention it deep in the fineprint that if you default they own your house or are allowed to enter your home and steal your pants. This kind of EULAs are a consumer protection issue.
Mod up! This slashdotter has a girlfriend. That's much bigger news than WiFi triangulation!
This is similar to whiteboard capturing
on
WiFi Triangulation
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· Score: 4, Informative
Whiteboard capturing devices use a similar principle. Two microphones are at opposite ends of the whiteboard and an ulrasound emitter is attached to the pen. When you move the pen the CPU unit attached to the mikes triangulates the postion of the pen and renders the digital image of the whiteboard. I always thought it was a simple and elegant solution compared to the touch sensitive whiteboards that cost much more. Another company now has a mini version of this technology for iPaq which attaches to a normal writing pad and allows you save anything you write on your iPaq.
Ultra Wide Band technology that uses broad spectrum pulses rather than the traditional carrier frequency approach can potentially be even faster. See here
Very simple, it's called total cost of ownership. When a CTO of a large company evaluates a software purchase he looks not just at the hardware/software cost but also at how expensive will the sysadmins be who will administer that software, how much will they have to pay consultants to install it, how much will it cost to train their employees to use it, etc, etc. Microsoft often makes the claim that their TCO is lower because the MCSEs are a dime a dozen whereas a Unix guru will require a higher a salary. You might or might not buy the argument but it is certainly not uncommon for software with lower upfront cost to have a higher lifetime TCO.
It's amazing how the terms of public debate on this issue have shifted towards the copyright holders. When you talk to an average joe about this they usually think there is nothing wrong with extending copyrights indefinitely, "after all it's their Mickey Mouse, they own it just like I own my car". People seem to be unaware about what the consitution says on this issue. In a more rediculous example of overly long copyrights: Did you know you could get sued for singing "Happy Birthday to You". No joke, see here. It does not run out for another 20 years!
The economist has a great article reviewing the latest codec offerings from different players. Specifically DivX 5.0 "is said to be particularly good at preventing tearing, a playback error that occurs when the software cannot render the video for display at the same pace that it is being decompressed and fed into the media player. And a new codec from supersecretive Pulsent claims to be object rather than block based. Whereas block-based compression and object-oriented codecs slice up backgrounds and foregrounds into grids, the Pulsent approach actually pinpoints real-world items in the frame--such as a person, tree or building--and processes each element separately. story here
Take a coil connect its two ends to a small (3V) light bulb. Take a second coil and run AC current through it. As you move the first coil closer towards the second the light bulb will light up and gradually become brighter
Place two identical tuning forks close by. Hit one and it will start humming. Then silence it with your hand and you'll notice that the one you did not touch is humming too (because of the resonance)
By shining a strobe lamp in the darkness onto a fan and varying the strobe frequency you can make it appear to smoothly stop rotating or even make it rotate backwards!
Dissolve some litmus in a slightly salty water and soak a napkin in it. The connect two wires to a 9V battery and stick the other ends into the napkin. A big red blotch will start forming around one of the electrodes.
One demo thing technically inclined students enjoy is how simple it is to build a simple radio. All you need is a coil and a capacitor which serve as the tuning circuit and a diod which removes the carrying frequency. Well, and of course a small earphone
One of my favorite simple but elegant experiments is like this: take a big bouncy ball (eg basketball) in your hand and place a small bouncy ball (eg 1/5 the size) on top of the big one so their surfaces touch. Then drop them together on the floor from a small height (eg 2-3 feet). Counterintiutively once they touch the ground the big ball will remain there and not bounce at all while the small ball will fly up 8-10 feet in there (in proportion to the size ratio).
You can never go wrong with one of those spinning rubber belt machines. Two meter long lightings can't but impress any crowd. A giant version of this machine was recently featured in XXX movie (in the dance club)
The most impressive physics demo I've ever seen was with a motor gyroscope. It's quite small in size but it's got a low friction very dense heavy rotor inside (about 10 lbs) which can spin up to very high rpms. It's got two convinient handles along its axis. It is first connected to the outlet and is spun. After it's spining rapidly you cannot change the direction of its axis even when you pick it up in the air and even with two people trying. It's spooky. Imagine picking up a small 10lbs dumbbell and not being able to turn in any way with some invisible force preventing you whichever way you push it!
Take an uninflated balloon and place it in a sealed container. Then use an motor pump connected to the container by a hose to pump the air out of it and create vacuum inside. The balloon will "magically" inflate by itself. The end of the balloon has to be tied of course. I saw it in a physics class once - very cool.
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Damn it you beat me to the obligatory "add ogg" complaint. Well, what I want to know is when are we going to be able to run Linux on a Beowolf cluster of these babies! There!
Quite the contrary. There is a common legal tradition in most areas of contract law that protects consumers from predatory fine print like this. You are generally not allowed to put unreasonable or unrelated clauses into a fine print of a consumer agreement. A creditor cannot put it into the fine print that they can sleep with your wife if you default. I see this kind of EULA as exactly the same type of problem and the govt should protect consumers from them.
Eulas like these should be regulated by the government. It is pretty common in contract law that unreasonable provisions are not enforceable and illegal. Like for example a credit card agreement cannot mention it deep in the fineprint that if you default they own your house or are allowed to enter your home and steal your pants. This kind of EULAs are a consumer protection issue.
What I want to know is when are we going to be able to run Linux on a Beowolf cluster of these things?
Mod up! This slashdotter has a girlfriend. That's much bigger news than WiFi triangulation!
Whiteboard capturing devices use a similar principle. Two microphones are at opposite ends of the whiteboard and an ulrasound emitter is attached to the pen. When you move the pen the CPU unit attached to the mikes triangulates the postion of the pen and renders the digital image of the whiteboard. I always thought it was a simple and elegant solution compared to the touch sensitive whiteboards that cost much more. Another company now has a mini version of this technology for iPaq which attaches to a normal writing pad and allows you save anything you write on your iPaq.
Ultra Wide Band technology that uses broad spectrum pulses rather than the traditional carrier frequency approach can potentially be even faster. See here
Very simple, it's called total cost of ownership. When a CTO of a large company evaluates a software purchase he looks not just at the hardware/software cost but also at how expensive will the sysadmins be who will administer that software, how much will they have to pay consultants to install it, how much will it cost to train their employees to use it, etc, etc. Microsoft often makes the claim that their TCO is lower because the MCSEs are a dime a dozen whereas a Unix guru will require a higher a salary. You might or might not buy the argument but it is certainly not uncommon for software with lower upfront cost to have a higher lifetime TCO.
It's amazing how the terms of public debate on this issue have shifted towards the copyright holders. When you talk to an average joe about this they usually think there is nothing wrong with extending copyrights indefinitely, "after all it's their Mickey Mouse, they own it just like I own my car". People seem to be unaware about what the consitution says on this issue. In a more rediculous example of overly long copyrights: Did you know you could get sued for singing "Happy Birthday to You". No joke, see here. It does not run out for another 20 years!
The economist has a great article reviewing the latest codec offerings from different players. Specifically DivX 5.0 "is said to be particularly good at preventing tearing, a playback error that occurs when the software cannot render the video for display at the same pace that it is being decompressed and fed into the media player. And a new codec from supersecretive Pulsent claims to be object rather than block based. Whereas block-based compression and object-oriented codecs slice up backgrounds and foregrounds into grids, the Pulsent approach actually pinpoints real-world items in the frame--such as a person, tree or building--and processes each element separately. story here
Take a coil connect its two ends to a small (3V) light bulb. Take a second coil and run AC current through it. As you move the first coil closer towards the second the light bulb will light up and gradually become brighter
Place two identical tuning forks close by. Hit one and it will start humming. Then silence it with your hand and you'll notice that the one you did not touch is humming too (because of the resonance)
By shining a strobe lamp in the darkness onto a fan and varying the strobe frequency you can make it appear to smoothly stop rotating or even make it rotate backwards!
Dissolve some litmus in a slightly salty water and soak a napkin in it. The connect two wires to a 9V battery and stick the other ends into the napkin. A big red blotch will start forming around one of the electrodes.
One demo thing technically inclined students enjoy is how simple it is to build a simple radio. All you need is a coil and a capacitor which serve as the tuning circuit and a diod which removes the carrying frequency. Well, and of course a small earphone
One of my favorite simple but elegant experiments is like this: take a big bouncy ball (eg basketball) in your hand and place a small bouncy ball (eg 1/5 the size) on top of the big one so their surfaces touch. Then drop them together on the floor from a small height (eg 2-3 feet). Counterintiutively once they touch the ground the big ball will remain there and not bounce at all while the small ball will fly up 8-10 feet in there (in proportion to the size ratio).
You can never go wrong with one of those spinning rubber belt machines. Two meter long lightings can't but impress any crowd. A giant version of this machine was recently featured in XXX movie (in the dance club)
The most impressive physics demo I've ever seen was with a motor gyroscope. It's quite small in size but it's got a low friction very dense heavy rotor inside (about 10 lbs) which can spin up to very high rpms. It's got two convinient handles along its axis. It is first connected to the outlet and is spun. After it's spining rapidly you cannot change the direction of its axis even when you pick it up in the air and even with two people trying. It's spooky. Imagine picking up a small 10lbs dumbbell and not being able to turn in any way with some invisible force preventing you whichever way you push it!
Take an uninflated balloon and place it in a sealed container. Then use an motor pump connected to the container by a hose to pump the air out of it and create vacuum inside. The balloon will "magically" inflate by itself. The end of the balloon has to be tied of course. I saw it in a physics class once - very cool.