At this very moment MS has the technology to just roll over TiVo within the year, they have the Xbox, WebTV, and Windows Media Player, toss all of this into box added with the usual MS marketing and you got a killer app.
Yes. And a good name, like Ultimate TV; and they'll be unbeatable. Except they already tried and failed. They had two advantages over Tivo, they beat Tivo with dual tuner DirecTV and they built PinP into the box, but they still failed. (I recall it cost about $100 more)
Sony is the only one with the resources, name, and establishment to beat MS to the punch, too bad for TiVo, Sony likes to keep things in house and won't be knocking on there door to buy them out.
Given the choice between UltimateTV and DirecTivo, I went with the SONY licensed DirecTivo. Works great, esp. with the 120GB drive upgraded to. (The biggest part of why I went with Tivo, a vibrant hacker community and Tivo's acceptance of them as a positive thing)
Sorry, I know better than to answer trolls like this.
What bothers me is that these aren't subway cars, since as near as I can tell they don't go underground. Per Meriam Webster:
Date: 1825
: an underground way: as a : a passage under a street (as for pedestrians, power cables, or water or gas mains) b : a usually electric underground railway c : UNDERPASS
This really made me nostalgic. When I was a kid, I would eagerly wait for saturday mornings just to watch those cartoons.....
Of course, back then that was the only time they were on. MAYBE a UHF station would show some weird old cartoon after school, but those old analog tuning TV's sucked at getting them in. Today the WB and UPN and maybe even FOX are showing the same stuff before and after school as they do Sat. mornings.
Its got nothing to do with hower quality animation, divorce rates, or cable TV. Its simple overexposure, there's nothing special about Sat mornings anymore, so why should kids get excited? Might as well go play with friends, cause you have all day with no school...
Re:Howto - Legalized Price Fixing
on
DRAM Price Fixing
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
And oh by the way what you didn't see from my example was that. AT&T announces a price hike, and since others didn't follow suit, it adjusts it accordingly. Basically, this is Public Price Fixing. It's pricing-fixing in the open. It takes a few days/weeks to complete. But it still is collusion, under the guise of public disclusure. AT&T went to the public before it went to MCI. But, in the end, the result is the same as if they had gone behind closed doors and announced the price hike.
No, what you describe are free market forces acting to stabilize prices. Companies don't set prices in a vacum, they know what their competitors charge, they know their costs. If a competitor drops his price, often they drop their price in fear of losing customers, if he raises his price, they "might" follow suit to increase funds available for profit, brand building, cover new costs such as taxes or rebuilding of infrastructure, or paying higher salaries to lure better people.
Price fixing means getting together in a back room and agreeing to prices outside of these forces, which means a lot of other things usually get agreed to as well (we'll stay out of your markets, you stay out of ours) Its bad for the consumer, but its often bad for the companies as well, since those forces don't go away. Hell, look at OPEC's history, they have an awful time getting everybody to stick to the line...
OPEC does engage in what would be considered illegal price fixing in any other market.
Um, the reason it does not apply is that US law does not apply to internationally. International Law is really just treaties, and mostly applies to things like the Geneva Convention which regulate conduct in war, national boundries, etc.
Economic Policy is generally not covered, rather they get handled on a case by case basis by threating tariffs and the like to counter the effects of government subsidies to industries or tariffs on imported goods that compete with domestic products; What OPEC does is rather the opposite, they aren't flooding the market to choke off the US industry, they are limiting production to keep prices high
Re:Howto - Legalized Price Fixing
on
DRAM Price Fixing
·
· Score: 2, Funny
OPEC is a single country
I remember my summer's in OPEC, the magestic mooses, cool evenings on the lakes with Sven...
A scenario could be imagined where an attacker would do this to delay the arrival of an important letter, to wreak havoc on the postal system for political reasons, or even worse, to serve as a diversion for a terrorist act, such as the mailing of a contaminated letter.
What a load of self serving crap. Which of course is completely shocking coming from such a community oriented guy such as a Spammer.
When I read this, I expected it to be about something a bit more substantial, such as using the internet to have someones electricity turned off, or altering a sattelite tragectory to include someones house in its path; or maybe even taking over Dr Evil's Moon Laser to burn nasty messages in someones lawn.
But really, taking out the postal service with a series of mass mailings? What kind of fool thinks that an attack that works on one person will scale large enough to take out the post office, or hinder any sort of criminal investigation?
If you got copyrighted material (something you wrote, created,...), then you can choose who can use your material and how. You may insert a copyright notice forbidding the RIAA to view your material or pay a fee of 1$/Kb. You might even ask for 10$/Kb. Just make sure they have to agree to the agreement before seeing your material.
Ah, so all the has to do to protect their plans to is include a click-thru page that says " or other enforcement agencies must pay a 1 billion dollar license fee to read the material access by clicking here. Right thinking individuals are free to access it"
Bullshit. This is not the purpose of copyright laws.
Copyright laws exist to protect creators from unauthorized use of their materials, not to act as an access control for who may read it once it is made public (which posting to a publicly accessable web page (or Kazaa, OpenNapster, or any other internet service) is.
If RIAA comes looking for the MP3's that aren't on my computer and in the process even look at a single byte of the copyrighted data on my hard drive, that is unauthorized.
Unfortunately I see this drivel from time to time. If you have your entire hard drive available via your web server, kazaa, CIFS, or any other non-password protected (that is reasonably secure, as in, not posted to alt.hacks.cracks.warez.porn) you have effectively granted permission to the world to view it for free. You can't arbitrarily decide group A can't read it without charge, anymore than you could walk down the street with a sign saying anyone who reads this notice owes me $100.
Now, if the RIAA were to hack into your computer an access data, that would be another thing, though stupid claims about your data being worth $1/kb (Not even Oracle costs that much) will label you as an idiot for the court.
Someone will be by to bitch-slap you later. Be expecting them.
Actually, only the electronic nose part is new. I recall someone had managed to train a dog to detect skin cancer by scent, it was freakishly accurate.
And if someone patents the "electronic nose" that detects this particular thing, isn't that what patents are all about? Its not like he'd be trying to patent one click shopping, hyperlinks, or swinging sideways.
What if he patents it, mass produces it so every doctor can have one for free if they give him $5 for every test they run with it, making him a Billionare. Is he evil for making so much money, or saintly for making a readily available test thats affordable (remember, Doc's billing $75 for the damned visit) and 1/1000th the cost of the old test.
Let me consult my Slashdot Good vs Evil guidebook; # of seconds since the Epoc, mod Bill Gates current Net worth, subtract 2...
Re:lifetime ?
on
TiVo Basic
·
· Score: 3, Informative
$299 lifetime
Whose lifetime mine or their's. I don't imagine their's to be more than a couple of years... pretty steep anual fee.
The leftime of the electronics. If it dies in 1 year, you're screwed (unless you have an extended warranty, they honor them) I don't think the lifetime plan is a great deal myself, proved right for me when DirecTV took over mine and dropped the price to $5/month (ie 5years!)
That said, I love the idea of progressive scan output, this is definately something I'm looking for on my next DirecTiVo, along with HD (DirecTV and OTA)
Considering that TiVo hasn't advertised at all in three years, and seems to be living hand-to-mouth at the moment, the addition of another country might have to wait until there's a viable bottom line.
Well, their stock is up, so the markets thinking positive things about them. And while they haven't paid for the standard 30 second spots, NBC has done several placements in their TV series (Friends, Scrubs, Will & Grace). Not sure if they're paying for it or NBC's throwing it in as part of their investment.
Besides, the word of mouth advertising they get is pretty strong, and is a damned site better than lame TV spots.
Funny thing is, Tivo is hugely popular with the whole entertainment industry, outside of everyones favorite mad dog, Jack Valenti.
Re:Itsn't it a moot point?
on
TiVo Basic
·
· Score: 2, Informative
By the time the cable companies/dish folks get into the game, along with the pending legalities, will Tivo even survive?
Licensing
DirecTV licenses Tivo to power their DirecTV boxes, together they make a killer app limited mostly by the need for Dishes. DirecTV is all Digital, which plays VERY well with Tivo.
I suspect its only a matter of time before the cable companies give up on their central office based PVR systems. I tried one last weekend on Comcast, it was awful compared to the reponsiveness and control that Tivo gives. Forced comercials, limited content.
I also suspect the manufacturing cost of Tivo's will continue to drop, Hard drives keep getting cheaper (CompUSA is selling 80GB for $100), the various boards and chips can't cost all that much. They might have sold for a loss once upon a time, but I doubt thats still the case. There's a cost associated with providing this basic service, but they sell the viewing data they collect, which might more than pay for the limited service. (Heck, this might be a trick to get consumers to let their Tivo's stay more in touch, I ususally only let mine call home once every two weeks)
Re:will have to be carful
on
TiVo Basic
·
· Score: 1
A 3 day grid is plenty for most folks, Its really the Season passes that folks will miss most, and its easy enough to imagine that.
"Hmm, I don't have to make a point of selecting what shows I want each morning" is easy enough to imagine, though I bet if they allow timed, repeating recording that will satisfy lots of folks. My concern is that they're giving away too much, and folks won't imagine its worth $12.95/month. I know I'd be giving it a second thought; thanksfully my 2 DirecTiVo accounts only cost me $5/month.
Honestly, I can't really comment on what his search engine did and how it was "advertised", I didn't see it in action. I'm not prepared to take his "I was just operating a generic search engine" at face value, though I'm also not willing to take the RIAA's claims at face value either. To address your list:
1) Lecture notes - Usefull, though I would expect a class oriented mailing list to be more helpful.
2) Programing assignments - Are you refering to "borrowing" someone elses assignment? Cheating on programing assignments is not really a defensible position, anything else falls into cat 1
3) Design Arch. - See 2)
4) Accessing your own computer remotely should not involve a search engine. You're losing focus on the issue. I said I support your right to do this, I just won't support someones write to build a searchable index of songs you have negilgently failed to protect with simple security measures to limit access to them.
Having not seen the service in question, I can't really comment on the details any more than you can, though I can see that a college specific search engine might be useful. If the engine really was general purpose, then the suit is VERY questionable. And I'm not saying there aren't very legitimate reasons for having them. But since I don't know how he chose to advertise its presence, if he accepted advertising, what the "home" page looked like, etc. all I can do is take what I do know. He chose to operate the engine/page; which means he chose to accept the liability for such. If he didn't understand this when he started, that $12,000 is going to teach him a usefull lesson in addition to the $80,000 he's already paying to attend RIT (Don't correct me with actual numbers, stay on the issue)
Do I think this kid got screwed? Yes. And I think he's going to get screwed again, cause he's created a "fund" to help him pay the fine, but I don't think he's considered all the ramifications, such as Taxes and Financial aid. But hopefully I'm wrong.
The most disturbing issue about the RIAA's work to shut people down, is that they're going after those who do little economic harm in order to frighten their uninvolved or only marginally involved (in the file trading scene) supporters into compliance somehow.
For the record, those they chose to use as examples were not casual fil traders, they had (in general, can't speak for all of them) chosen to set themselves up as some sort of central clearing house, operating some sort of website/index to help/encourage their fellow students.
While I don't condone the actions of the RIAA, their "victims" are hardly innocent, and were almost certainly aware that trading MP3's is not an ethicly "pure" pastime, and that they were treading on thin ice by operating their sites.
The RIAA has played nice, they made their point and now have settled. If you don't think its a reasonable agreement, keep in mind these are adults (over 18) who clearly had the resources to operate these sites (not running on dad's old 486, or relying on school systems, or spending 4 hours a day putting themselves through school). They made a choice, same the kid busted for selling grass to his "friends".
If you really think this is such a travesty, create a fund to pay their fines, but honestly, don't you think your money would be better off going to the EFF, making sure we don't loose our rights to copy music that we PAID FOR to alternate media such as MP3 players or backup discs we can carry in our cars?
It's basically just wax, formulated to achieve a certain level of viscosity.
Looked that way, but I didn't know we could control the density of wax that well. Its got to be pretty spot on, slightly under the density of water so that when it heats/expands, it drops below that of the fluid its in (or do we dope the fluid density?). Boiling point is important to, can't have the fluid boil and explode the conatainer, and since the whole thing is sealed, there's got to be a decent amount of air that can compress as the fluids expand with T. DAmned lot of science in the fool things, never thought about it before.
I think we may be on to something here, though. It would be neat as all hell to have your processor's heat power a lava lamp. I guess it would have to be some kind of desktop or pizza box type case where the processor is mounted horizontally near the top of the case. You could then mount the lava lamp atop the processor through a hole in the top of the case.
Hm, I was thinking of using a watercooling rig to transport the heat, meatal tube for better heat conduction in the base, a clear tube looped around the outside in the upper visible area (or off to a separate radiator to deal with the excess heat). A direct system might be more efficient/quieter, but we need to redesign the bottle. Glass doesn't conduct heat well, so we'll need to invert the usual design and have a wide copper cap to interface the CPU. (Maybe some fins inside the bottle as well, wax is a decent insulator)
I imagine the heat from the processor would be more than enough to melt the wax and set the whole thing in motion. Since most of the lava lamp is outside the case, it could passively shed excess heat into the surrounding air. I have no idea whether this would keep the processor cool enough or not... I guess it would depend upon several factors, not the least of which would be the processor itself. Maybe you would have to underclock the chip or go with one of the cooler running Via chips instead... I dunno.
Checked the local Lava lamp, its got a 25 watt bulb. So to handle a 80 watt P4 we'll need a bottle with about 3x the surface area. Its a smallish lamp though. The trick I expect will be designing something other than a round bottle to maximize surface area; though I wonder if we could reduce this by utilizing a second radiator at the top (a decorative aluminum cap?) Ought to help a lot, glass is normally a good heat insulator, isn't it?
Maybe you could use the lava lamp to cool your P4.
Actually, I think you have this backwards. Use the P4 to heat the lamp, and just use a nice cool LED or other cool light tech (I think flourecent would give bad EMF karma). Its the heat/cooling cycle that generates the groovy rising falling globules. Is the temperature stable enough? Whats the temperature range the rise/fall process is stable over. Just what is that goo made off?
In contrast, I'm annoyed by thousands of strangers using our marvels of modern electronic communications to constantly interrupt me and steal my life 30 seconds at a time. One 30-second ad that reaches ~4 million people is a murder.
30 sec * 4million viewers = 3.8 man-years; about 5% of a murder.
nothing can
guarantee a lossless compression ratio.
What?
Sometimes I have to wonder where people get this stuff from. So tape drive manufaturers play russian roulette with peoples data every day? Modem users have to tell their modems to turn off data compression to ensure data integrity? The kernels I download might not be the ones Linus uploaded? We rely on lossless compression every day without even thinking about it.
This is utter non-sense. There are lots of lossless compression schemes out there, they are all mathematically proven to be lossless. The problem is that if you know the type of data you are compressing and the patterns it tends to form you (a black pixel rarely follows a white pixel in a photograph, 300hz at 100% is rarely followed by 301hz at 0%) you can toss some of the data with minimal loss. Thus you get lossy compression such as jpeg, mpeg, ogg, etc. By making better assumptions about the data you are compressing, you get more accurate results. Hence jpeg makes a lousy algoritm for audio, and as good as Ogg is for audio, it makes for really nasty pictures
First of all, a group may fail to anticipate a problem before the problem actually arrives.
-- My girlfriend and I will be together forever.
Secondly, when the problem arrives, the group may fail to perceive the problem.
-- She is not interested in other guys, we are simply growing closer.
Then, after they perceive the problem, they may fail even to try to solve the problem.
-- Her dating other guys is simply a cry for more attention.
Finally, they may try to solve it but may fail in their attempts to do so.
-- I will win her back with chocolates and poetry.
You forgot a few steps:
As one attempt fails, more and more radical solutions are attempted
-- I'll stand outside her home/office so she knows I'm there for her.
-- I'll call her friends and family to get them to remind her how good we are for each other
-- I'll secretly more into her attic and hold her cat hostage...
Slashdot Mirror
Yes. And a good name, like Ultimate TV; and they'll be unbeatable. Except they already tried and failed. They had two advantages over Tivo, they beat Tivo with dual tuner DirecTV and they built PinP into the box, but they still failed. (I recall it cost about $100 more)
Sony is the only one with the resources, name, and establishment to beat MS to the punch, too bad for TiVo, Sony likes to keep things in house and won't be knocking on there door to buy them out.
Given the choice between UltimateTV and DirecTivo, I went with the SONY licensed DirecTivo. Works great, esp. with the 120GB drive upgraded to. (The biggest part of why I went with Tivo, a vibrant hacker community and Tivo's acceptance of them as a positive thing)
Sorry, I know better than to answer trolls like this.
Of course, back then that was the only time they were on. MAYBE a UHF station would show some weird old cartoon after school, but those old analog tuning TV's sucked at getting them in. Today the WB and UPN and maybe even FOX are showing the same stuff before and after school as they do Sat. mornings.
Its got nothing to do with hower quality animation, divorce rates, or cable TV. Its simple overexposure, there's nothing special about Sat mornings anymore, so why should kids get excited? Might as well go play with friends, cause you have all day with no school...
No, what you describe are free market forces acting to stabilize prices. Companies don't set prices in a vacum, they know what their competitors charge, they know their costs. If a competitor drops his price, often they drop their price in fear of losing customers, if he raises his price, they "might" follow suit to increase funds available for profit, brand building, cover new costs such as taxes or rebuilding of infrastructure, or paying higher salaries to lure better people.
Price fixing means getting together in a back room and agreeing to prices outside of these forces, which means a lot of other things usually get agreed to as well (we'll stay out of your markets, you stay out of ours) Its bad for the consumer, but its often bad for the companies as well, since those forces don't go away. Hell, look at OPEC's history, they have an awful time getting everybody to stick to the line...
Um, the reason it does not apply is that US law does not apply to internationally. International Law is really just treaties, and mostly applies to things like the Geneva Convention which regulate conduct in war, national boundries, etc.
Economic Policy is generally not covered, rather they get handled on a case by case basis by threating tariffs and the like to counter the effects of government subsidies to industries or tariffs on imported goods that compete with domestic products; What OPEC does is rather the opposite, they aren't flooding the market to choke off the US industry, they are limiting production to keep prices high
I remember my summer's in OPEC, the magestic mooses, cool evenings on the lakes with Sven...
What a load of self serving crap. Which of course is completely shocking coming from such a community oriented guy such as a Spammer.
When I read this, I expected it to be about something a bit more substantial, such as using the internet to have someones electricity turned off, or altering a sattelite tragectory to include someones house in its path; or maybe even taking over Dr Evil's Moon Laser to burn nasty messages in someones lawn.
But really, taking out the postal service with a series of mass mailings? What kind of fool thinks that an attack that works on one person will scale large enough to take out the post office, or hinder any sort of criminal investigation?
Ah, so all the has to do to protect their plans to is include a click-thru page that says " or other enforcement agencies must pay a 1 billion dollar license fee to read the material access by clicking here. Right thinking individuals are free to access it"
Bullshit. This is not the purpose of copyright laws.
Copyright laws exist to protect creators from unauthorized use of their materials, not to act as an access control for who may read it once it is made public (which posting to a publicly accessable web page (or Kazaa, OpenNapster, or any other internet service) is.
Unfortunately I see this drivel from time to time. If you have your entire hard drive available via your web server, kazaa, CIFS, or any other non-password protected (that is reasonably secure, as in, not posted to alt.hacks.cracks.warez.porn) you have effectively granted permission to the world to view it for free. You can't arbitrarily decide group A can't read it without charge, anymore than you could walk down the street with a sign saying anyone who reads this notice owes me $100.
Now, if the RIAA were to hack into your computer an access data, that would be another thing, though stupid claims about your data being worth $1/kb (Not even Oracle costs that much) will label you as an idiot for the court.
Someone will be by to bitch-slap you later. Be expecting them.
Actually, I can understand this, being held in rather "high disregard" myself in some circles.
Ah, the joys of being the "Prince of Insufficient Light"
Sea?
And if someone patents the "electronic nose" that detects this particular thing, isn't that what patents are all about? Its not like he'd be trying to patent one click shopping, hyperlinks, or swinging sideways.
What if he patents it, mass produces it so every doctor can have one for free if they give him $5 for every test they run with it, making him a Billionare. Is he evil for making so much money, or saintly for making a readily available test thats affordable (remember, Doc's billing $75 for the damned visit) and 1/1000th the cost of the old test.
Let me consult my Slashdot Good vs Evil guidebook; # of seconds since the Epoc, mod Bill Gates current Net worth, subtract 2...
Whose lifetime mine or their's. I don't imagine their's to be more than a couple of years ... pretty steep anual fee.
The leftime of the electronics. If it dies in 1 year, you're screwed (unless you have an extended warranty, they honor them) I don't think the lifetime plan is a great deal myself, proved right for me when DirecTV took over mine and dropped the price to $5/month (ie 5years!)
That said, I love the idea of progressive scan output, this is definately something I'm looking for on my next DirecTiVo, along with HD (DirecTV and OTA)
Well, their stock is up, so the markets thinking positive things about them. And while they haven't paid for the standard 30 second spots, NBC has done several placements in their TV series (Friends, Scrubs, Will & Grace). Not sure if they're paying for it or NBC's throwing it in as part of their investment.
Besides, the word of mouth advertising they get is pretty strong, and is a damned site better than lame TV spots.
Funny thing is, Tivo is hugely popular with the whole entertainment industry, outside of everyones favorite mad dog, Jack Valenti.
Licensing
DirecTV licenses Tivo to power their DirecTV boxes, together they make a killer app limited mostly by the need for Dishes. DirecTV is all Digital, which plays VERY well with Tivo.
I suspect its only a matter of time before the cable companies give up on their central office based PVR systems. I tried one last weekend on Comcast, it was awful compared to the reponsiveness and control that Tivo gives. Forced comercials, limited content.
I also suspect the manufacturing cost of Tivo's will continue to drop, Hard drives keep getting cheaper (CompUSA is selling 80GB for $100), the various boards and chips can't cost all that much. They might have sold for a loss once upon a time, but I doubt thats still the case. There's a cost associated with providing this basic service, but they sell the viewing data they collect, which might more than pay for the limited service. (Heck, this might be a trick to get consumers to let their Tivo's stay more in touch, I ususally only let mine call home once every two weeks)
"Hmm, I don't have to make a point of selecting what shows I want each morning" is easy enough to imagine, though I bet if they allow timed, repeating recording that will satisfy lots of folks. My concern is that they're giving away too much, and folks won't imagine its worth $12.95/month. I know I'd be giving it a second thought; thanksfully my 2 DirecTiVo accounts only cost me $5/month.
For the record, please ensure that OSX drivers exist for the PC hardware you are trying out. :^)
I know it sound obvious, but somewhere out there someone is cursing because their FunkMaster 2000 PCI card won't workin their new PowerMac...
1) Lecture notes - Usefull, though I would expect a class oriented mailing list to be more helpful.
2) Programing assignments - Are you refering to "borrowing" someone elses assignment? Cheating on programing assignments is not really a defensible position, anything else falls into cat 1
3) Design Arch. - See 2)
4) Accessing your own computer remotely should not involve a search engine. You're losing focus on the issue. I said I support your right to do this, I just won't support someones write to build a searchable index of songs you have negilgently failed to protect with simple security measures to limit access to them.
Having not seen the service in question, I can't really comment on the details any more than you can, though I can see that a college specific search engine might be useful. If the engine really was general purpose, then the suit is VERY questionable. And I'm not saying there aren't very legitimate reasons for having them. But since I don't know how he chose to advertise its presence, if he accepted advertising, what the "home" page looked like, etc. all I can do is take what I do know. He chose to operate the engine/page; which means he chose to accept the liability for such. If he didn't understand this when he started, that $12,000 is going to teach him a usefull lesson in addition to the $80,000 he's already paying to attend RIT (Don't correct me with actual numbers, stay on the issue)
Do I think this kid got screwed? Yes. And I think he's going to get screwed again, cause he's created a "fund" to help him pay the fine, but I don't think he's considered all the ramifications, such as Taxes and Financial aid. But hopefully I'm wrong.
Never saw this one coming... :^)
For the record, those they chose to use as examples were not casual fil traders, they had (in general, can't speak for all of them) chosen to set themselves up as some sort of central clearing house, operating some sort of website/index to help/encourage their fellow students.
While I don't condone the actions of the RIAA, their "victims" are hardly innocent, and were almost certainly aware that trading MP3's is not an ethicly "pure" pastime, and that they were treading on thin ice by operating their sites. The RIAA has played nice, they made their point and now have settled. If you don't think its a reasonable agreement, keep in mind these are adults (over 18) who clearly had the resources to operate these sites (not running on dad's old 486, or relying on school systems, or spending 4 hours a day putting themselves through school). They made a choice, same the kid busted for selling grass to his "friends".
If you really think this is such a travesty, create a fund to pay their fines, but honestly, don't you think your money would be better off going to the EFF, making sure we don't loose our rights to copy music that we PAID FOR to alternate media such as MP3 players or backup discs we can carry in our cars?
It's basically just wax, formulated to achieve a certain level of viscosity.
Looked that way, but I didn't know we could control the density of wax that well. Its got to be pretty spot on, slightly under the density of water so that when it heats/expands, it drops below that of the fluid its in (or do we dope the fluid density?). Boiling point is important to, can't have the fluid boil and explode the conatainer, and since the whole thing is sealed, there's got to be a decent amount of air that can compress as the fluids expand with T. DAmned lot of science in the fool things, never thought about it before.
I think we may be on to something here, though. It would be neat as all hell to have your processor's heat power a lava lamp. I guess it would have to be some kind of desktop or pizza box type case where the processor is mounted horizontally near the top of the case. You could then mount the lava lamp atop the processor through a hole in the top of the case.
Hm, I was thinking of using a watercooling rig to transport the heat, meatal tube for better heat conduction in the base, a clear tube looped around the outside in the upper visible area (or off to a separate radiator to deal with the excess heat). A direct system might be more efficient/quieter, but we need to redesign the bottle. Glass doesn't conduct heat well, so we'll need to invert the usual design and have a wide copper cap to interface the CPU. (Maybe some fins inside the bottle as well, wax is a decent insulator)
I imagine the heat from the processor would be more than enough to melt the wax and set the whole thing in motion. Since most of the lava lamp is outside the case, it could passively shed excess heat into the surrounding air. I have no idea whether this would keep the processor cool enough or not... I guess it would depend upon several factors, not the least of which would be the processor itself. Maybe you would have to underclock the chip or go with one of the cooler running Via chips instead... I dunno.
Checked the local Lava lamp, its got a 25 watt bulb. So to handle a 80 watt P4 we'll need a bottle with about 3x the surface area. Its a smallish lamp though. The trick I expect will be designing something other than a round bottle to maximize surface area; though I wonder if we could reduce this by utilizing a second radiator at the top (a decorative aluminum cap?) Ought to help a lot, glass is normally a good heat insulator, isn't it?
Actually, I think you have this backwards. Use the P4 to heat the lamp, and just use a nice cool LED or other cool light tech (I think flourecent would give bad EMF karma). Its the heat/cooling cycle that generates the groovy rising falling globules. Is the temperature stable enough? Whats the temperature range the rise/fall process is stable over. Just what is that goo made off?
30 sec * 4million viewers = 3.8 man-years; about 5% of a murder.
What?
Sometimes I have to wonder where people get this stuff from. So tape drive manufaturers play russian roulette with peoples data every day? Modem users have to tell their modems to turn off data compression to ensure data integrity? The kernels I download might not be the ones Linus uploaded? We rely on lossless compression every day without even thinking about it.
This is utter non-sense. There are lots of lossless compression schemes out there, they are all mathematically proven to be lossless. The problem is that if you know the type of data you are compressing and the patterns it tends to form you (a black pixel rarely follows a white pixel in a photograph, 300hz at 100% is rarely followed by 301hz at 0%) you can toss some of the data with minimal loss. Thus you get lossy compression such as jpeg, mpeg, ogg, etc. By making better assumptions about the data you are compressing, you get more accurate results. Hence jpeg makes a lousy algoritm for audio, and as good as Ogg is for audio, it makes for really nasty pictures
-- My girlfriend and I will be together forever.
Secondly, when the problem arrives, the group may fail to perceive the problem.
-- She is not interested in other guys, we are simply growing closer.
Then, after they perceive the problem, they may fail even to try to solve the problem.
-- Her dating other guys is simply a cry for more attention.
Finally, they may try to solve it but may fail in their attempts to do so.
-- I will win her back with chocolates and poetry.
You forgot a few steps:
As one attempt fails, more and more radical solutions are attempted
-- I'll stand outside her home/office so she knows I'm there for her.
-- I'll call her friends and family to get them to remind her how good we are for each other
-- I'll secretly more into her attic and hold her cat hostage...
Hold on, there's a knock on my door...