A regular motor uses brushes (blocks of graphite) against brass plates to do the switching.
At least the ones typically used in vacuum cleaners do. Series motors start fast and spin fast.
And they probly mean ozone, not carbon.
Both. Brush/commutator motors gradually grind up the graphite brushes. The motor is in the exhaust air path (to cool it while keeping dirt out of it), so the graphite dust tends to be blown out into the room unless caught with an additional filter.
There's not enough to re-dirty your rugs. But graphite dust accumulates in lungs and is bad for them.
It's a very small amount of the dirt your lungs are exposed to. But why let them be exposed to any extra crud at all, now that hall-effect sensors are available to replace brushes? It's a nice selling point.
[Why does] their stock sky-rocket[], when there are little or no reasons for it to do so, other than people's fascination with linux, and the potential for the so-called 'future growth'?
You answered your own question. Potential for future growth, and a perception that Linux is the next big thing, is quite enough.
There are a lot of people trying to invest a lot of money in something that will reap them a profit. Among the best opportunities for growth they can identify are:
Internet infrastructure.
The next PC operating system after Windows.
Linux fits both those categories: It already drives a big chunk of the servers on the web, and everywhere they look are signs that it has become the OS of choice for future growth.
VA Linux is an even better fit to both categories: An established seller of Linux-driven servers and clusters. What an opportunity!
And why do you think they're "Stupid"? Don't YOU believe that Linux and the Internet are taking over a bunch of very lucrative markets? If that's true, doesn't it make sense to buy in?
And if you bought in early and the crowd's attention then pushes the price beyond all reason, doesn't it then make sense to sell, take an "outrageous" instant profit, and use your puffed-up pile of money to buy in on the NEXT Linux/Internet opportunity?
Investment is a market. Markets are partially a gamble. (They call that "market risk".) Ownership is a bet that what you own will be worth more than you paid for it. Why not buy what you expect to be valuable, thus betting on the horse you expect to win? Once others decide it is valuable and offer you more, why not sell, collecting your winnings?
Sure, sometimes people get carried away and offer a whole lot more than makes sense. But they do that for used cars, too. Value is defined as what other people will pay.
Studies have shown that the presence of frequencies above the usually audible range (20Hz-22kHz) help the listener to locate the source of the sound. This is depite the fact that most people can't even hear above 18kH.
What's probably happenening is taht the listener is using phase information from the sound as part of the location process. The low-pass filter that cuts off the signals above the Nyquist limit to prevent aliasing also causes phase errors as the filter's cutoff is approached, and that distorts the phase information and impairs the listener's ability to localize.
So it's possible that the listener is not actually using sound he can't hear to localize, but instead that the tests distorted the sounds he could hear in the process of filtering out the higher frequencies, and the result was misinterpreted.
Raising the sampling rate and moving the filter up will also reduce the phase distortion at the high end. So regardless of whether the localization is from phase info near the high-end of hearing or something from higher frequencies than what is perceived as sound, the localization will be improved by the change. And regardless of whether the tests were misinterpreted they did what was intended: Showed the designers that improvement was possible and how to do it.
Back in the '60s, when I was taking undergrad classes on the subject, it was believed (by authors of perceptual psych texts) that phase information (at least above a few tens of cycles) was not processed into perceptual localization. (Steve Chaikin, who designed the DCM loudspeakers, knew better. B-) ) I was able to easily prove to myself that they were wrong:
We had two phones in my office in Ann Arbor, and a tie-line trunk to Detroit. The dial tones in the two exchanges were generated separately, and were a fraction of a cycle-per-second off. (A dial tone is the sum of two sine waves, and in those days was generated by rotary equipment, i.e. a motor-generator.) By putting one phone to each ear I could hear the Ann Arbor tone in one ear and the Detroit tone in the other. The frequency error gave the perceptual illusion of a sound source slowly orbiting my head.
What Cisco is proposing using multipath effects to avoid the line-of-sight problems is asking a LOT. I really doubt this is possible. I was involved in a research project over a year ago that basically ruled out this from being possible.
problem A: If you use a non directional antenna (easiest to set up, no alignment issues) you are then presented with the amount of processing needed to weed out signal from reflections - it is enormous. Your antenna also has no gain - a big problem with lossy low power MMDS or LMDS systems. No signal = lots of noise = low bandwidth or high error rate.
Why not use a vaguely-directional antenna (no serious alignment problems, picks up primary and/or several major ghosts), then pick the strongest handful of unmoving signals, delay them into sync, and add them? (I thought the latter was what Metricom was already doing with their non-directional antenna.)
The box might take a minute or so to train itself on startup. But with the base and remote fixed the training wouldn't have to be tweaked in real-time after that.
The use of ghosting is to get around things that block line-of-sight. In rural areas you don't have a forest of buildings. If it's flat, you have line of sight. If it's hilly, treat the hills as "buildings" and pick up a ghost.
If it's a forest of trees you might have a problem.
End-to-end encryption only works if the other end does it, too. Even then you are subject to traffic analysis, unless you use encrypted tunneliing to some unrelated server.
Of course encrypted tunneling to a server solves the on-the-air-in-the-clear problem, too. (But it also provides a fixed central location for a physical tap.)
Perhaps a plurality of encrypted-tunnel servers? B-)
In case you hadn't noticed, we're not at war. In fact, we haven't been since World War II.
Korea was a "police action". Vietnam wasn't even that - just a response to an "incident". Desert Storm and the like were UN actions for which we provided aid.
We aren't at war unless war has been declared - which takes a 2/3 vote of the Senate. We don't have "enemies" within the meaning of the Treason definition unless we are at war.
That's why Jane Fonda is still at large, despite her visit to, and propaganda for, North Vietnam during the Vietnam Hootenany.
Now it only takes one side to "levy war", so don't try nuking DC. But until a war is declared you can give aid and comfort to anyone you want. You might be breaking laws. But you aren't committing Treason.
But if you do something the current operators of the government dislike, don't be surprised if members of the Executive Branch harass you. Governments generally have a dismal record when it comes to getting their employees to actually obey or correctly interpret their own laws.
If you look at the shooters, you'll find that most of them fit that item.
Merely anti-gun parents insulate their children against the realities of the use of firearms. So they get their ideas from the media and their peers - both of whom tend to substitute fantasy for facts. Active anti-gun campaigners go farther, by feeding the kid fantasies of their own.
Originally, Alpha meant not feature complete, but most features are there, while beta meant feature complete, but still too buggy.
I'm not disagreeing. But as I've seen it used currently the distinction is:
Alpha means the feature set may change before release.
Beta means the feature set is frozen.
That's very slight distinction from the above definition - features may also be eliminated.
Of course, alpha is also earlier and expected to be more buggy than beta.
Alpha is to get it into people's hands when major chunks are known not to be working - both to debug the things that are there and to debug the choice of features and the interface to them.
Alpha isn't just a matter of missing features. Sometimes a feature turns out to be a "misfeature": confusing, counter-productive, or actively hazardous. Sometimes a feature is redundant with another, and may be dropped in favor of one that is easier to use, or more powerful and general. (And sometimes a redundant feature will be added as a simplified shortcut for the more general feature.)
Between alpha releases the user interface may be significantly thrashed or even totally replaced. Even underlying communication protocols and file formats may be modified or replaced.
At Beta the choice of features is frozen. The interface may change slightly (be "tuned"), but this will normally be minor tweaking rather than a significant change in appearance. Protocols and file formats have assumed their final count and basic form, and may even remain compatable between releases.
But don't count on it. During Beta the hope is that everything is there, frozen, but probably needs bug fixes. But if there's a really serious problem with something, there might be a thaw.
Essentially, the difference between Alpha and Beta is management intent: In Alpha, design suggestions might be considered for V1. In Beta, they will generally be ignored - but might be considered for V2.
I happen to work with a tech honcho ex of AMD. He says that there was no serial number in the last one he worked on (K6-2) - and he was in postion to know. (So guess what laptop I'm buying...)
I don't have any info on K7/Athawhatever. But I thought I'd pass on this info about the K6-2, so the truly paranoid would have an extra datapoint.
(Of course the really truly utterly paranoid won't trust me, or my unnamed source, either. B-) )
A word document written five years in the past can, on a serialized PII/PIII, be traced to a particular computer.
Seems to me that, to be consistent, they should also embargo word processing software (such as Microsoft Word) that stelthily embeds CPU addresses, software serial numbers, MAC addresses, and other such identification in its output files.
Oh gosh! How will you KNOW if the software does this? I guess you'll just have to READ THE SOURCE, won't you. B-)
Touch screen would be a lot better. I don't know why they aren't more popular.
Because supporting the weight of your arm for hours at a time, day after day, also causes problem. First you get very sore and cramped. If you manage to keep it up for weeks at a time you overdevelop a couple muscles in the arm - and end up unbalanced WRT the other arm.
They have dressed Bill Gates up as a member of the "Borg" - the Startrek alien lifeform that assimilates other lifeforms (mainly humans and humanoids) into a cyborg group-mind.
This is apparently a reference to MicroSoft's tendency to substitute assimilation for innovation, buying out, allying with and screwing over, or cloning and driving out of business any competing company that has invented anything useful in their potential product space.
It may also be a reference to a story arc in the "Dilbert" comic strip, where Microsoft is The Borg assimilating everything and everybody technological and Dilbert is assimilated - as a result of failing to read the fine print on a software shrink-wrap contract which thus obligates him to become Bill Gates' manservent.
The meme that conspiracy theories are paranoid ravings is very convenient for actual conspirators.
Throughout history groups of people, especially people in high places, have conspired to obtain power and wealth at the expense of others. Many of these conspiracies were exposed and are now well documented.
Why should that have suddenly stopped in the 1960s?
Now, any particular conspiracy theory may be bogus. But don't be surprised when some of them turn out to be true.
Of COURSE the government spy agencies spy on everybody they can. That's what government spy agencies DO.
Of COURSE corrupt politicians and bureaucrats have given such information to their business cronies. Of COURSE politicians and bureaucrats, corrupt or perhaps otherwise, have given the data to industries in their countries, to give them an advantage over foreign competition. That's government at work.
Of COURSE investigative agencies have targeted politically "troublesome" opposition groups. That's where the trouble comes from, right?
And get ready for the next "Of COURSE" revalations: How investigative and law enforcement organizations have used this information to engage in "dirty trick" campaigns against members of those out groups. "Dirty tricks" that may have turned out to be horrendously damaging and sometimes fatal. Did you think that stuff stopped after COINTELPRO?
Government is a disease masquerading as its own cure.
Perhaps they patented it to keep Microsoft from cloning it and driving them out of business? Regardless:
Perhaps open source developers might want to try patenting their stuff and licensing the patent with the open source - payment is that you open-source anything that uses it (GPL model). Don't want to open your source? Negotiate a for-pay license with the patent holder. (If he doesn't want to play, like if you're Microsoft, you're S.O.L.)
Analogs of the other open-source licenses are left as an exercise for the reader.
Be sure to write your license so that if you've had to drag them into court (and thus incurred more cost) they can't just open the source to wiggle out, but have to settle for some bux first.
Much of the problem is that the patent office has plenty of hooks for searching for prior art among prior patents, but essentially none for searching the open literature and state-of-the-art.
Since software patents are new there's essentially no patented prior art, so everything looks new to them.
What they need is twofold: Patent examiners with education and experience in the software field, and access to a database of unpatented prior art. There are some twitches in that direction from outside, but not enough yet to count on it happening.
The patent office knows it's not doing well. But the system is designed to be driven (and funded) from outside. (They're largely reacting to court decisions and applicants at this point.) This will be an expensive fix. Congress probably won't just hand them the bux to do it themselves - especially if Congress doesn't have a lot of pressure from people wanting it fixed. Even if they do get the bux, how do they hire the skilled heads in competition with the private sector? How do they even hire skilled heads to IDENTIFY what skilled heads they need?
Unfortunately, I don't recall exactly who, if anyone, is working on assembling a database of open prior-art.
Such a database would also be useful to programmers, so they can find out what solutions are already available for their problems and not have to reinvent them constantly. B-) So good candidates for support would be industry associations, volunteers from the free software movement, and educational institutions.
The NSA dosent have any secret facilities off in never-never land.. There HQ is at Ft. Mead, Marryland, and thats where they have acers of Crays. This is by no means a secret.
It was back then.
Regardless - the NoneSuch Agency is just the sort of people to fly you around for a couple hours and land you ten miles from where you started, isn't it?
Some years ago I worked with a Systems Engineering Laboratories SEL 32. This was a very high-end minicomputer, in the form of a six-foot hunk of 19-inch rack, chock full of circuitry. Just under 1 Megabuck.
The computer itself was made of wire-wrapped socket boards stuffed full of standard chips, then tied together by a big backplane and some ribbon cables. It had downloadable firmware. Part of the standard documentation was the complete set of diagrams for the circuitry and complete listings of the firmware. You could get the listings of the OS if you wanted them.
So it was an totally open-source machine, at least to the customers. You could hack the OS, or use it as a base to write your own system. you could change the firmware. You could even rewire the beast itself.
Our hardware maintainence man was ex of SEL's own customer engineering (i.e. onsite-repair) department. He had a few tales to tell.
It seems that a bit over half their production was delivered to designated loading docks at apparently abandoned warehouses, and was gone the next day. The bills were paid. And they never had to go fix 'em. (Or almost...)
One time he DID have to go fix one. And they flew him there in an airplane with blacked-out windows, which did quite a few manouvers during several hours of flight. Then they took him from the plane to the building in a tent tunnel.
It seems the computer was very popular with the No Such Agency, for doing cryptography. They could fix it themselves, using generic parts. They could hack on it to add stuff they didn't want out of their sight and into the industry. And they could be sure that did exactly what they thought it did.
Or at least they could usually fix it. Which is why my collegue ended up in spookland for an afternoon.
Changing amplitude only at zero crossings rather than at other places changes the details of how the energy is smeared among frequencies, but doesn't change the fact, or amount, of the smearing.
You can derive the result of amplitude modulation from the trignometric identity:
sin(a) * sin(b) = sin(a+b) + sin(a-b)
By treating the carrier as a sine wave and the modulation as a sum of sine waves, and using the normal properties of real-number multiplication and addition you can work out the spectrum that results from amplitude modulating a carrier with any periodic waveform. It gets slightly more complicated for aperiodic waveforms, but the basic result is the same: A pair of sidebands, on either side of the carrier, that reproduce the spectrum of the modulating signal.
To send more bits on an AM carrier you essentially have to either modulate the signal faster (spreading out the spectrum of the modulating signal and thus that of the modulated signal) or modulate it more finely (using more bits to control the amplitude). The number of bits you can cram into the second is limited by the signal-to-noise ration of the channel (i.e. when you get near the noise your least significant bits get corrupted).
The Nyquist sampling criterion gives you a quantitative limit on this: If you have a band-limited signal, you can encode it with a number of bits-per-second equal to 2 times the bandwidth times the base-2 log of the signal-to-noise ratio, and reproduce it to within the the noise threshold. So that's the absolute maximum number of bits the signal can carry.
We need to run fiber to every home in the nation with gov't footing a large chunk of the bill (otherwise no one would do it).
We'll run fiber to the homes shortly, if something isn't developed soon that's even better. (Take a look at the recent Scientific American articles on the current candidates.)
Individual fibers to the home are a lot of bux. But a multiwavelengh fiber to the neighborhood and a passive wavelength divider (think prisim) and a bunch of short fibers to the house look like a good cost-tradeoff.
But having the government pay for it means you get to pay for whichever solution they chose at least three times - once for the install, twice more for the administrators. And the government will chose the wrong one. And the government won't even chose the best price/performance combo for the data rate they do chose.
Sure the government built the Interstates (kinda). And then they installed a 55 MPH speed limit - city, prarie, or deserted desert. Let them wire your home (or your kid's school) and they'll do it badly, expensively, and use it as a wedge to control the content.
The fact that I can plug in a *crank* telephone (not pushbutton, not rotary,... a crank phone) from 189x and *still* use it to make and receive calls on POTS lines should say something about the state of telephone tech in supposed advanced nations like the US.
Actually, it says more about good standards lasting a long time. Just like the Roman's choice of wheel spacing affecting cars, trains, and spacecraft components (that are shipped on trains) to this day.
The POTS standard is about getting audio from the switch in the city to the houses in the city and to the farms around it. The last mile of the audio part of that job hasn't changed materially since Bell and Strowager. A cheap low-tech solution does it, so why pay a bunch of bux to replace it with something that doesn't interact? Especially when doing so creates an administrative nightmare for no advantage.
Data is now hitting the wall on the capacity of the infrastructure designed for voice, so you need to replace part or all of it to go beyond.
Slashdot Mirror
At least the ones typically used in vacuum cleaners do. Series motors start fast and spin fast.
And they probly mean ozone, not carbon.
Both. Brush/commutator motors gradually grind up the graphite brushes. The motor is in the exhaust air path (to cool it while keeping dirt out of it), so the graphite dust tends to be blown out into the room unless caught with an additional filter.
There's not enough to re-dirty your rugs. But graphite dust accumulates in lungs and is bad for them.
It's a very small amount of the dirt your lungs are exposed to. But why let them be exposed to any extra crud at all, now that hall-effect sensors are available to replace brushes? It's a nice selling point.
You answered your own question. Potential for future growth, and a perception that Linux is the next big thing, is quite enough.
There are a lot of people trying to invest a lot of money in something that will reap them a profit. Among the best opportunities for growth they can identify are:
Internet infrastructure.
The next PC operating system after Windows.
Linux fits both those categories: It already drives a big chunk of the servers on the web, and everywhere they look are signs that it has become the OS of choice for future growth.
VA Linux is an even better fit to both categories: An established seller of Linux-driven servers and clusters. What an opportunity!
And why do you think they're "Stupid"? Don't YOU believe that Linux and the Internet are taking over a bunch of very lucrative markets? If that's true, doesn't it make sense to buy in?
And if you bought in early and the crowd's attention then pushes the price beyond all reason, doesn't it then make sense to sell, take an "outrageous" instant profit, and use your puffed-up pile of money to buy in on the NEXT Linux/Internet opportunity?
Investment is a market. Markets are partially a gamble. (They call that "market risk".) Ownership is a bet that what you own will be worth more than you paid for it. Why not buy what you expect to be valuable, thus betting on the horse you expect to win? Once others decide it is valuable and offer you more, why not sell, collecting your winnings?
Sure, sometimes people get carried away and offer a whole lot more than makes sense. But they do that for used cars, too. Value is defined as what other people will pay.
Yes, but that doesn't change the issue. Even ssh is far from all-pervasive. (It's also licensed, which restricts its availability further.)
What's probably happenening is taht the listener is using phase information from the sound as part of the location process. The low-pass filter that cuts off the signals above the Nyquist limit to prevent aliasing also causes phase errors as the filter's cutoff is approached, and that distorts the phase information and impairs the listener's ability to localize.
So it's possible that the listener is not actually using sound he can't hear to localize, but instead that the tests distorted the sounds he could hear in the process of filtering out the higher frequencies, and the result was misinterpreted.
Raising the sampling rate and moving the filter up will also reduce the phase distortion at the high end. So regardless of whether the localization is from phase info near the high-end of hearing or something from higher frequencies than what is perceived as sound, the localization will be improved by the change. And regardless of whether the tests were misinterpreted they did what was intended: Showed the designers that improvement was possible and how to do it.
Back in the '60s, when I was taking undergrad classes on the subject, it was believed (by authors of perceptual psych texts) that phase information (at least above a few tens of cycles) was not processed into perceptual localization. (Steve Chaikin, who designed the DCM loudspeakers, knew better. B-) ) I was able to easily prove to myself that they were wrong:
We had two phones in my office in Ann Arbor, and a tie-line trunk to Detroit. The dial tones in the two exchanges were generated separately, and were a fraction of a cycle-per-second off. (A dial tone is the sum of two sine waves, and in those days was generated by rotary equipment, i.e. a motor-generator.) By putting one phone to each ear I could hear the Ann Arbor tone in one ear and the Detroit tone in the other. The frequency error gave the perceptual illusion of a sound source slowly orbiting my head.
problem A: If you use a non directional antenna (easiest to set up, no alignment issues) you are then presented with the amount of processing needed to weed out signal from reflections - it is enormous.
Your antenna also has no gain - a big problem with lossy low power MMDS or LMDS systems. No signal = lots of noise = low bandwidth or high error rate.
Why not use a vaguely-directional antenna (no serious alignment problems, picks up primary and/or several major ghosts), then pick the strongest handful of unmoving signals, delay them into sync, and add them? (I thought the latter was what Metricom was already doing with their non-directional antenna.)
The box might take a minute or so to train itself on startup. But with the base and remote fixed the training wouldn't have to be tweaked in real-time after that.
Is there something I've missed?
The use of ghosting is to get around things that block line-of-sight. In rural areas you don't have a forest of buildings. If it's flat, you have line of sight. If it's hilly, treat the hills as "buildings" and pick up a ghost.
If it's a forest of trees you might have a problem.
Of course encrypted tunneling to a server solves the on-the-air-in-the-clear problem, too. (But it also provides a fixed central location for a physical tap.)
Perhaps a plurality of encrypted-tunnel servers? B-)
Does that make it "holy writ"?
Korea was a "police action". Vietnam wasn't even that - just a response to an "incident". Desert Storm and the like were UN actions for which we provided aid.
We aren't at war unless war has been declared - which takes a 2/3 vote of the Senate. We don't have "enemies" within the meaning of the Treason definition unless we are at war.
That's why Jane Fonda is still at large, despite her visit to, and propaganda for, North Vietnam during the Vietnam Hootenany.
Now it only takes one side to "levy war", so don't try nuking DC. But until a war is declared you can give aid and comfort to anyone you want. You might be breaking laws. But you aren't committing Treason.
But if you do something the current operators of the government dislike, don't be surprised if members of the Executive Branch harass you. Governments generally have a dismal record when it comes to getting their employees to actually obey or correctly interpret their own laws.
Parents are active in the anti-gun movement.
If you look at the shooters, you'll find that most of them fit that item.
Merely anti-gun parents insulate their children against the realities of the use of firearms. So they get their ideas from the media and their peers - both of whom tend to substitute fantasy for facts. Active anti-gun campaigners go farther, by feeding the kid fantasies of their own.
I'm not disagreeing. But as I've seen it used currently the distinction is:
Alpha means the feature set may change before release.
Beta means the feature set is frozen.
That's very slight distinction from the above definition - features may also be eliminated.
Of course, alpha is also earlier and expected to be more buggy than beta.
Alpha is to get it into people's hands when major chunks are known not to be working - both to debug the things that are there and to debug the choice of features and the interface to them.
Alpha isn't just a matter of missing features. Sometimes a feature turns out to be a "misfeature": confusing, counter-productive, or actively hazardous. Sometimes a feature is redundant with another, and may be dropped in favor of one that is easier to use, or more powerful and general. (And sometimes a redundant feature will be added as a simplified shortcut for the more general feature.)
Between alpha releases the user interface may be significantly thrashed or even totally replaced. Even underlying communication protocols and file formats may be modified or replaced.
At Beta the choice of features is frozen. The interface may change slightly (be "tuned"), but this will normally be minor tweaking rather than a significant change in appearance. Protocols and file formats have assumed their final count and basic form, and may even remain compatable between releases.
But don't count on it. During Beta the hope is that everything is there, frozen, but probably needs bug fixes. But if there's a really serious problem with something, there might be a thaw.
Essentially, the difference between Alpha and Beta is management intent: In Alpha, design suggestions might be considered for V1. In Beta, they will generally be ignored - but might be considered for V2.
I don't have any info on K7/Athawhatever. But I thought I'd pass on this info about the K6-2, so the truly paranoid would have an extra datapoint.
(Of course the really truly utterly paranoid won't trust me, or my unnamed source, either. B-) )
Seems to me that, to be consistent, they should also embargo word processing software (such as Microsoft Word) that stelthily embeds CPU addresses, software serial numbers, MAC addresses, and other such identification in its output files.
Oh gosh! How will you KNOW if the software does this? I guess you'll just have to READ THE SOURCE, won't you. B-)
In politics the equivalent strategy is called "Astroturf" - because it's creating phony grass-roots comments.
Because supporting the weight of your arm for hours at a time, day after day, also causes problem. First you get very sore and cramped. If you manage to keep it up for weeks at a time you overdevelop a couple muscles in the arm - and end up unbalanced WRT the other arm.
It's called "gorilla arm".
This is apparently a reference to MicroSoft's tendency to substitute assimilation for innovation, buying out, allying with and screwing over, or cloning and driving out of business any competing company that has invented anything useful in their potential product space.
It may also be a reference to a story arc in the "Dilbert" comic strip, where Microsoft is The Borg assimilating everything and everybody technological and Dilbert is assimilated - as a result of failing to read the fine print on a software shrink-wrap contract which thus obligates him to become Bill Gates' manservent.
Throughout history groups of people, especially people in high places, have conspired to obtain power and wealth at the expense of others. Many of these conspiracies were exposed and are now well documented.
Why should that have suddenly stopped in the 1960s?
Now, any particular conspiracy theory may be bogus. But don't be surprised when some of them turn out to be true.
Of COURSE the government spy agencies spy on everybody they can. That's what government spy agencies DO.
Of COURSE corrupt politicians and bureaucrats have given such information to their business cronies. Of COURSE politicians and bureaucrats, corrupt or perhaps otherwise, have given the data to industries in their countries, to give them an advantage over foreign competition. That's government at work.
Of COURSE investigative agencies have targeted politically "troublesome" opposition groups. That's where the trouble comes from, right?
And get ready for the next "Of COURSE" revalations: How investigative and law enforcement organizations have used this information to engage in "dirty trick" campaigns against members of those out groups. "Dirty tricks" that may have turned out to be horrendously damaging and sometimes fatal. Did you think that stuff stopped after COINTELPRO?
Government is a disease masquerading as its own cure.
Perhaps open source developers might want to try patenting their stuff and licensing the patent with the open source - payment is that you open-source anything that uses it (GPL model). Don't want to open your source? Negotiate a for-pay license with the patent holder. (If he doesn't want to play, like if you're Microsoft, you're S.O.L.)
Analogs of the other open-source licenses are left as an exercise for the reader.
Be sure to write your license so that if you've had to drag them into court (and thus incurred more cost) they can't just open the source to wiggle out, but have to settle for some bux first.
B-)
Since software patents are new there's essentially no patented prior art, so everything looks new to them.
What they need is twofold: Patent examiners with education and experience in the software field, and access to a database of unpatented prior art. There are some twitches in that direction from outside, but not enough yet to count on it happening.
The patent office knows it's not doing well. But the system is designed to be driven (and funded) from outside. (They're largely reacting to court decisions and applicants at this point.) This will be an expensive fix. Congress probably won't just hand them the bux to do it themselves - especially if Congress doesn't have a lot of pressure from people wanting it fixed. Even if they do get the bux, how do they hire the skilled heads in competition with the private sector? How do they even hire skilled heads to IDENTIFY what skilled heads they need?
Unfortunately, I don't recall exactly who, if anyone, is working on assembling a database of open prior-art.
Such a database would also be useful to programmers, so they can find out what solutions are already available for their problems and not have to reinvent them constantly. B-) So good candidates for support would be industry associations, volunteers from the free software movement, and educational institutions.
It was back then.
Regardless - the NoneSuch Agency is just the sort of people to fly you around for a couple hours and land you ten miles from where you started, isn't it?
Some years ago I worked with a Systems Engineering Laboratories SEL 32. This was a very high-end minicomputer, in the form of a six-foot hunk of 19-inch rack, chock full of circuitry. Just under 1 Megabuck.
The computer itself was made of wire-wrapped socket boards stuffed full of standard chips, then tied together by a big backplane and some ribbon cables. It had downloadable firmware. Part of the standard documentation was the complete set of diagrams for the circuitry and complete listings of the firmware. You could get the listings of the OS if you wanted them.
So it was an totally open-source machine, at least to the customers. You could hack the OS, or use it as a base to write your own system. you could change the firmware. You could even rewire the beast itself.
Our hardware maintainence man was ex of SEL's own customer engineering (i.e. onsite-repair) department. He had a few tales to tell.
It seems that a bit over half their production was delivered to designated loading docks at apparently abandoned warehouses, and was gone the next day. The bills were paid. And they never had to go fix 'em. (Or almost...)
One time he DID have to go fix one. And they flew him there in an airplane with blacked-out windows, which did quite a few manouvers during several hours of flight. Then they took him from the plane to the building in a tent tunnel.
It seems the computer was very popular with the No Such Agency, for doing cryptography. They could fix it themselves, using generic parts. They could hack on it to add stuff they didn't want out of their sight and into the industry. And they could be sure that did exactly what they thought it did.
Or at least they could usually fix it. Which is why my collegue ended up in spookland for an afternoon.
Now maybe Gilmore will have the bucks that Hudson needs to get his rotary rocket into space. B-)
You can derive the result of amplitude modulation from the trignometric identity:
sin(a) * sin(b) = sin(a+b) + sin(a-b)
By treating the carrier as a sine wave and the modulation as a sum of sine waves, and using the normal properties of real-number multiplication and addition you can work out the spectrum that results from amplitude modulating a carrier with any periodic waveform. It gets slightly more complicated for aperiodic waveforms, but the basic result is the same: A pair of sidebands, on either side of the carrier, that reproduce the spectrum of the modulating signal.
To send more bits on an AM carrier you essentially have to either modulate the signal faster (spreading out the spectrum of the modulating signal and thus that of the modulated signal) or modulate it more finely (using more bits to control the amplitude). The number of bits you can cram into the second is limited by the signal-to-noise ration of the channel (i.e. when you get near the noise your least significant bits get corrupted).
The Nyquist sampling criterion gives you a quantitative limit on this: If you have a band-limited signal, you can encode it with a number of bits-per-second equal to 2 times the bandwidth times the base-2 log of the signal-to-noise ratio, and reproduce it to within the the noise threshold. So that's the absolute maximum number of bits the signal can carry.
We'll run fiber to the homes shortly, if something isn't developed soon that's even better. (Take a look at the recent Scientific American articles on the current candidates.)
Individual fibers to the home are a lot of bux. But a multiwavelengh fiber to the neighborhood and a passive wavelength divider (think prisim) and a bunch of short fibers to the house look like a good cost-tradeoff.
But having the government pay for it means you get to pay for whichever solution they chose at least three times - once for the install, twice more for the administrators. And the government will chose the wrong one. And the government won't even chose the best price/performance combo for the data rate they do chose.
Sure the government built the Interstates (kinda). And then they installed a 55 MPH speed limit - city, prarie, or deserted desert. Let them wire your home (or your kid's school) and they'll do it badly, expensively, and use it as a wedge to control the content.
The fact that I can plug in a *crank* telephone (not pushbutton, not rotary,... a crank phone) from 189x and *still* use it to make and receive calls on POTS lines should say something about the state of telephone tech in supposed advanced nations like the US.
Actually, it says more about good standards lasting a long time. Just like the Roman's choice of wheel spacing affecting cars, trains, and spacecraft components (that are shipped on trains) to this day.
The POTS standard is about getting audio from the switch in the city to the houses in the city and to the farms around it. The last mile of the audio part of that job hasn't changed materially since Bell and Strowager. A cheap low-tech solution does it, so why pay a bunch of bux to replace it with something that doesn't interact? Especially when doing so creates an administrative nightmare for no advantage.
Data is now hitting the wall on the capacity of the infrastructure designed for voice, so you need to replace part or all of it to go beyond.