Apparantly they can develop enough thrust to levitate the engine itself in earth atmosphere against earth gravity - but I have yet to see one that could also hoist its own power supply along with it.
I think they are just starting off, just as we do on a new topic. We quickly accumulate a variety of off-topic, trolls, redundant, insightful, interesting, funny, etc. posts. In their case, they will quickly accumulate a wide variety of music - of all types - just as we have types of posts.
The gurus at Slashdot devised this really clever little distributed moderation system that works quite well to sort these posts by genre and revelence. I would think that Slashdot itself may provide an example of a ranking paradigm to help moderate the music at Magnatune. Statistics will evolve which show the more meaningful parameters of the music offered.
If I were working on their system, I would probably try to configure the radio streams so I could detect if the stream was aborted. That is a strong indication the guy on the other end was not much interested in that one. I would maintain statistics on which song of an album was downloaded first. Knowing which track was downloaded first probably will generate data for which tracks are the best ones of the album, based on which spawned off downloads of other tracks.
The album gets modded up for selling a track, a major mod if the entire album sells.
Its a brand new site, a brand new paradigm. But they will have the same bugs to work out as CmdrTaco has worked out here. Maybe they can look over here and talk to CmdrTaco for some insights on handling a torrent of data of various quality and how to set up some sort of moderation system similar to the one working here.
If I had mod points, I would have modded you up, but lacking them, I will comment.
All the "popular artists" I am aware of are that way because they have been hyped. And the artist prostituted to the label so the label would have incentive to invest in all this expensive hyping. Just because an artist has been hyped by the "star making machinery" does not mean that they are superior artists.
Finally - Magnatune has leveled the playing field for all artists. They ALL now have equal exposure. It has been such a waste to have a lot of talent wasted only for lack of exposure. Word will get around. I noted Magnatune did everything imaginable to make the music easy to license.
I hope this shakes up the RIAA cartel much like the invention of the printing press shook up the old religious orders ( you know where only certain people had access to the "Word of God" and your soul was destined for the fiery Gates of Hell if you didn't smooch up to them. They sure had you where they wanted you as long as they could get you to believe them. )
This is one business model I am really rooting for.
I think you touched on one of the major problems we techie types are having maintaining the system... that the systems are extremely sophisticated and require a helluva lot of knowledge to maintain properly.
Here you have some upper management type playing around with technologies far beyond his comprehension. Sure, he may be good at the political persuasions of running a business, but often it seems that "powerful" people ( in terms of salary and ranking status ) within a company often overestimate how much power they have. They seem to often think their position of power protects them from the disasters that affect us mere mortals. So they feel free to "lead" the company down the paths of insecure systems and unstable computing infrastructure. To add to this, people who are very technically aware of the risks the power-person is unnecessarily taking are often viewed as "not team players" and are dismissed from employment at the first available opportunity. Being I personally experienced this at a big company, I am pretty quick now to see the turnaround a company can do sometimes upon the hiring of just one executive - its not his salary that drives the company into the ground, its having to obey his leadership.
I think we see this a helluva lot in the information services sector. There are a lot of people out there in the support side who are very uncomfortable working with proprietary technologies they do not understand thoroughly and resist them like the plague. Its kinda like the doctors who have a lot of respect for those viruses responsible for haemorragic fevers, as they do not know how to control them. Others not so intimately aware of the problem are apt to be far less concerned about hygeine.
Its been my observation that many of the "leadership" types running in the high technology arena are really good at getting funding and lining up venture capitalists, but are often sorely lacking in technological "horse sense". They are apt to force implementation of way overcomplicated Rube-Goldbergian technologies for the sake of show. Image seems to become everything, and substance becomes something hidden in the back room. Like the fancy restaurant where everything looks so nice in the dining room but the kitchen is a real low-grade sweatshop.
As one colleague was telling me upon my frustration of dealing with one of these manager types, he told me my timing was all wrong. The venture capitalist had just blown the management up with money. Just imagine blowing up a bunch of balloons and letting them loose in a room... they bounce all over the place until they run out of propellant, then its back on the floor again. He told me to just wait a year for the guys to run out of propellant, then they will finally listen. Only trouble is that by that time, the company is so snared up with contracts and committments that trying to fix it is hopeless. Its like watching a guy wire a house with aluminum wire. You know once he gets it all in, its gonna be a helluva mess to fix. But today, he has the money, and he's gonna put in aluminum wire no matter what the techie guys say.
I know this is kinda a rant, but these failures with a subsequent delay in knowing what the problem is causing the failure is an indication to me that the complexity of the system is becoming more than the capacity to understand it. And that is a scary proposition.
Whether some dot-com or department store puts in stuff they do not understand and can not maintain does not scare me much, as I will gladly go to their going out of business sale for a few fire-sale priced items I may need, but what does scare me is if I see infrastructure critical to our society, such as banking, adopting these technologies.
But, as we see, a lot of parents are getting sleepless nights worrying about what kind of trouble their kids may inadvertantly bring upon them.
And those parents may well be apt to quickly vote for anyone who can adjust the law so that their kids won't be held in criminal courts for a song.
Signing of a piece of paper created this legislation. Removal of certain politicians and a nullification of their actions is what it will take to uncreate it. But, to do this, enough people must see it for what it is. It is my hope that RIAA, in their quest to spread terror amongst the population, brings the DMCA itself into review, as well as the career of any politician who backs it. But to do this, large numbers of people must be concerned. If RIAA pulls this fear campaign off right, maybe we can get critical mass and get rid of this law and its associated politicians.
BJH, you are so right about the first posts in a thread. Most of the time, they are not well thought out, and reflect emotional responses.
And rarely does any of the first 50 or so comments seem to come from anybody who has RTFA.
I found setting up my Slashdot preferences to show newest posts first best for me.
Its also why I have yet to mod a post "redundant", as I often do not make it to the very beginning of a thread.
Note to others.. never be discouraged from entering a late post thinking it will never be read. I get the idea the Slashdot gurus would not have provided that reverse-listing option unless it was pretty well used. The last posts entered into the forum are the first ones we see.
Generally, I find the very last posts of most of the Slashdot topics to be the most insightful of them all.
I still question whether or not this whole thing is cause for alarm... the entire global system looks to me like a very stable system with multiple feedback loops - for every condition, there will be a change in the feedback loop compensating for it.
I am not saying there won't be ramifications. What used to be useless frigid land may well become good farm land. What used to be good farm land could well become desert. So, Russian Siberia, Norway, Sweden, etc. may well come online as their land becomes warmer, hence better suited for farming. Maybe the midwest US may become as the Sahara. Who knows? What may cook one's goose may keep another warm.
But the ramifications for humanity as a whole? My jury is still out.
Its frustrating to be out of mod points. My parent post hit the nail on the head.
I, for one, feel a helluva lot more comfortable when not only me, but others well-versed in the technology are privy to its inner workings and have verified its core paradigms are valid.
This reminds me of those old mechanical G&S security locks we used on top secret stuff. You could examine the lock all you wanted. You could take it apart and reassemble it. You could know exactly how it works. And still be helpless if you found yourself on the wrong side of a locked lock.
I have some of those old G&S locks on my house that I bought from Surplus at the Aerospace contractor I used to work at. I know nobody's coming through the back door without first destoying the door, but in the event I lock myself out of the house, I can go around back and dial myself back in.
To me, Top Security is security that everyone has looked at, yet has no idea how to crack given they know every detail of its implementation, and find themselves helpless if they are "locked out". You can rest assured that on any "security based on obscurity" paradigm, someone out there will know the "obscurity" part and will have free reign.
The open-source system is working. Now everyone, not just the crooks, know where the vulnerabilities are, and those vulnerabilities should be addressed post haste. "Faith" is for religions, not for assurance you are running a secure system.
There is no reason why just the crooks will know how to compromise a secure system. NO-ONE should know how to compromise a secure system.
Yes..."can incorporate". No biggie. I can "incorporate" this kind of cooling in my old AT cases, no less.
When I typed in "designed around", I meant having advanced cooling technologies designed in already. Kinda like the "new" ATX power supplies had power management/switching designed in. Not some add-on I could just as easily add to one of my original PC 66 watters.
I was just disappointed that we are going through all this big upgrade broughah with just what appears to me to be a rearrangement of slots. I wanted to see some sort of quantum breakthrough in design.. like some integral heat spreader to get the CPU heat directly to the case without involving failure-prone and noisy fans. Perhaps by mounting the CPU UNDER the circuit board instead of the traditional top mounting so as to expose its thermal surface to intimate thermal contact to the case, which would have an appropriately designed heat spreader surface at that area. Or something similar.
I did RTFA... I was just a bit underwhelmed.
Re:I'm gonna have a hard time programming my AVRs.
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Ohhh yes... I have AVR capability too. I love Atmel's products - they make really neat stuff for us embedded guys who don't wanna wanna use a sledgehammer to tap a tack into place.
And a helluva lot of other legacy stuff.
But, you know, a lot of those old machines were designed very conservatively. I even have some old 286 running, and will continue to run them until they no longer function. Don't replace your legacy system... kinda like replacing your old SUV with the latest sports car should the bobbling heads start advocating it. Sure, the later one may be faster, but the old SUV will tote the kids.
In a pinch, a USB to serial converter will probably work. If its works, great, otherwise, its another case of having to do yesterday's work all over again, instead of doing today's work. Remember, you already got paid for yesterday's work... you don't get paid again for doing it again.
I did yesterday's work yesterday. I built my foundation years ago. Today, I use it. Kinda like years ago I put copper pipe in the house because I did not wanna mess with it ever again. I pour concrete foundations, because I know the wood one, albeit cheaper, will rot, and force me to do all my work over again. Some people have the money to do yesterday's work over and over and over again. Sure, they have the latest foundation in the neighborhood. But even I wonder how they economically justify such a paradigm.
Once I invest in a good solid foundation, I intend to use it for the lifetime I designed it for. Its not like I wanna design the Grand Coulee Dam, and demolish it every couple of years because someone came up with a different mix of concrete... Once I go through the trouble of building the thing, I intend it to perform its intended function from then on, usually indefinitely. Kinda like those Romans did things, where their aqueducts and roads still function as originally designed to this day.
I really take no thrill in developing the capability to sign checks to pay others to do the work... I take great pride in having the capability to do it. ( And also take comfort in knowing how my stuff works, as well as what to do if it doenn't work the way I want it to work. I think almost all Open-Source guys have this same mental picture. )
I am quite surprised that on this next "quantum leap" of case design, it wasn't designed around "heat pipes".
There is no reason the entire case itself can't be used as a heat sink, as aluminum is quite thermally conductive. I could only imagine a case that was intentionally designed with a sort of "semi-porous" exterior to facilitate heat transfer and blackbody radiation.
I get the idea that there is a helluva lot more contamination in processed foods that we never are told about. As one said before, anyone who likes sausage or the law should never watch them being made.
Much ado about nothing. I am not a doctor, health fanaticist, or anything else for that matter, but if the floor is reasonably clean, and it didn't fall in muck, I'll probably recover it. But if
its a sticky thing, like the innards of my hamburger, I'll probably call the dog.
Inside every commercial radio of the superheterodyne design ( of which its been years since I have seen one NOT of this design ), there is a local oscillator which runs in the case of AM 455 KHz above the frequency you are tuning to and in the case of FM, 10.7 MHz above the frequency you are tuned to. The reason for doing this is its very easy to construct narrowband tuned amplifiers which work at only one frequency - say 455 KHz, or 10.7 MHz. These are called IF (Intermediate Frequency ) amplifiers. When you have your local oscillator tuned to the correct frequency offset, the station you want to listen to is the only one that will "mix" into your narrowband IF which gets amplified and subsequently converted to audio.
The billboard detectors work by simply looking at the spectrum of signals emitted by the local oscillators of the car's radios as they pass by. The emitted frequency is always 455Khz (AM) or 10.7MHz (FM) away from the frequency they are listening to. It would be very difficult ( but not impossible ) to tell which car was listening to what, but quite easy to get an aggregate idea of listening patterns.
TV is the same way... the IF is 45 MHz away from the station you are tuned to. Or if you just simply want to know of the existence of an operating TV receiver, just tune to its color oscillator frequency of 3.58MHz or its horizontal frequency of 15.746KHz. It'll show up in all its glory on darned near any spectrum analyzer.
All these interlocking frequencies is the reason we have all these concerns on EMI compatibility. You may be surprised at the plethora of signals an ordinary PC generates!
I wonder if somewhere in the application EULA, there is some clause which assigns any IP, copyright, or patent rights of any entry to the company, much like a RIAA contract. This would be a helluva way of capturing lots of code snippets so that the company could be indemnified for their usage, despite the fact they did not author that concepts. A "sharp business" technique to use the leverage of Modern Copyright Law to see to it that even the coder which coined some innovative technique maybe can't even use it himself in another application?
As we enter into an economy that appears to be funded by the legal ability to grant permission, instead of the ability to create, I am increasingly skeptical of ulterior motives.
But if a substantial percentage of the town's population is "caught speeding", it sure makes the limit appear ill-chosen. Where I live, the limits posted are just about what most sane people would drive anyway, limit or no limit. Limits are there just to have something substantiative to hang onto those who scream recklessly through our neighborhood. ( Well, everywhere is somebody's neighborhood. )
If damn near everybody's getting nailed by a 5MPH limit, it means the law is not representing the people. Its now 25MPH, and from my viewpoint just about right. There are times I could go 40 safely, ( like 2AM if nobody is parked along the side ), but those times are rare.
I have got nailed for speeding before, but that does not mean I want to overthrow the speed limit.
What I do insist on is the law represents the will of the public at large. You know, the old "Government of the people, by the people, and for the people" thing. My individual will, along with a corporate will, is not "the will of the people".
Consider substituting "RIAA" for "East India Tea Company", "DMCA" for "Tea Act", and "music" for "tea", and things look awful similar to today's situation. Note how the people involved in the "overthrow" are referred to as "Patriots". You would infer from this the "Patriot Act" would mean something completely different from what it does, ya?
Ok.. technically, maybe my parent is redundant ( or at least at the time I am posting this, it is moderated as such ).
And I am definitely off-topic here.
But I do want to point out one of the things that
make it hard on me when I am called on to meta-moderate. Posts like this come up and I am asked if its a fair or unfair moderation. And I am expected to reply. Its hard as hell to reply honestly without a helluva lot of research. And even then, if I confirm or deny the moderation, it was a helluva lot more trouble to do so than its worth.
Personally, I am very apt to metamod as "unfair" any moderation I see where someone attempts to post a decent response and gets whammed for it, but then, technically, I could be wrong.
Please, if you don't think its a stellar post, don't kill it, just don't bump it up.
I will always agree with negative moderations for those obvious crap-flood junk posts. Please hold the bad mods for guys who deserve it. There are way too many really good posts on these forums which receive no recognition at all. It seems a waste to use moderation to ram an honest poster.
And no, I have no relation to the poster. Its just I have had my fill of metamodding posts like this, and wanted to point a live one out while it was still "hot".
Ah yes.. the Intergraph! I absolutely loved their digitizer pad - much more than all this pull-down menu stuff. And the puck never skipped. By the laws of physics, it couldn't. It always knew exactly where it was on the digitizer surface by being cued from underneath by sequentially strobing current pulses from rows of parallel vertical and horizontal traces etched onto a pcb.
I still have a couple of these ( with the old 12-button puck ) hoping one day to find the time to program an AVR microcontroller chip to convert the native strobe codes to a logitech mouse codes, while relaying the "menu" items through a lookup table to send strings to the keyboard buffer.
I loved the idea that if I wanted an AND gate right "here", I just picked up the gate from the digitizer pad with the mouse ("Command" button) and dropped it on the screen ("Data" button). The "Properties" button did much the same as a right click, and the "Undo" button did just that.
After a while, you would grow so used to the menu (placed under that little plastic sheet covering the digitizer pad) that you just had a feel for where everything was, and you would retrieve it without even thinking about it. And at any time, if you decided you didn't like your menu, you could always redesign it and print another, then tell the computer your new grid layout, and where on your new menu would send what keyboard codes to the system.
Geez, that was a sad day for me to see that old system go... all I could keep was the digitizer tables, as I knew I could not maintain the old DEC computers the system was based on.
I have always noted true/false stuff sometimes becomes royally snarled because of the very paradoxes you mention. We get them in logic design too, but due to the time delay to get the answer, we just end up with an oscillating gate. Like connecting the output of an inverter back to its input. Like you say... its not true, its not false. Its invalid.
I am afraid that if you want me to believe something with all my heart, you need to back that something up with demonstrable proof. Tell me God is gonna send my soul to eternal hell if I masturbate and I really have my doubts if you know what you are talking about. Hold an anvil six feet above my foot and talk about dropping it and I will believe with all my heart and soul that I am going to be in for a great deal of hurt if I don't get my foot out of the way.
In that case, you have just invoked God's law. God's will be done. It's not just a metaphor. Its not a request. Its inevitable fact. We humans have interpreted a number of these laws ( among them being gravitation and the integration of momentum ) and have a reasonable understanding of them for the time being. We know what happens when we try to break these laws.
I get into word-wars quite often with "religions" over biblical numerology - especially timelines. I usually end up quite amused that entities as omnipowerful as God would have such a sense of humor to tell one man the Earth is six thousand years old, yet coin physical law that leaves all these old dinosaur bones for geologists to find. Geez, does God get a chuckle out of watching all the fights resulting from us discovering all these conflicts? Damm, seems like a heavenly version of a good Microsoft vs Linux bashing. Somehow I thought my God was above that kind of thing.
I make no bones about it... I consider Science my personal religion... and I study it as such. I can see nowhere that Science and God are at odds with each other... to me Science confirms God. If God had wanted us to think like sheep, He could have left it as such. I have no idea of the grand scheme of things, but I do believe that He left sufficient evidence that bears witness of creation.. which the study of ( via Science ) will reveal how, maybe why.
And please don't tell me God is some big man in the clouds with a quiver full of ligntning bolts that he throws at naughty people. Right now, I have no idea what God is. And no-one has come yet to me with any demonstrable proof to back up their arguments. To me, Scientists are the most honorable out there, yet they also suffer the same fallacies you noted. But at least they make the effort to demonstrate how they arrived at their conclusions.
I did get some cheapo opticals (Iconcepts 4D wheel scroll optical mouse #77052) at Pic 'N Save the other day that used the PS/2 interface - I have to admit I do like the opticals - even then the Logitech mouse driver that ran the C7 found them on the PS/2 port and ran 'em without a hitch. I have to have three-button mice to support legacy stuff, and Iconcepts built theirs such that depressing the wheel acted as the middle button.
Yeh, I bought a couple of samples of Iconcepts mice and brought them back to the lab for testing.. as Pic 'N Save had crates of them on the floor for a really good price. I returned a couple of days later and left a bevy of store clerks wondering what I was going to do with six cases of mice. I think the machinists will like them. They work nice.
Logitech sure made some good stuff. I very rarely ever had problems with them. I was quite pleased when I opened my mouse for servicing that they used decent switches. They were even replaceable ( if you knew your way around a soldering iron ) - and I always kept a few injured mice in one of my parts drawers for donors in the case an emergency transplant was needed. ( When I have a machinist in the shop waiting, this is not the time to try to install new software... if ten minutes with a soldering iron gets him back up.) Ideally, I would have him a new mouse pronto, but this was my backup plan if I had no new mice. My attitude: come hell or high water, the machinist is going back online.
But, at least these days, the mice are not in the $250 region, as you noted they were during the early days. That sounds a lot like what I was paying for C7's. And why I would justify taking the time to fix 'em. I got the opticals for less than $10 / ea. At that price, I am not gonna worry about fixing 'em.. I just got enough so if one suffers an unfortunate accident with the wrench or greasy hand, I just replace it.
Ok, whether or not you consider science to be religion... consider this statement: " God created the universe and everything in it."
Note the glaring omission of what God is, how, why, when, etc.
Science is the study of God by witness of his creation.
I have no idea what God is, and I get the idea sometimes that trying to understand it is almost as tedious as trying to teach calculus to a hamster. But I do know that if I take the statement I base my beliefs on above, then Science is the truest study of God - as the study is centered on things authored by God himself.
I know Man all too well. By nature, he's greedy, selfish, and often lies to achieve his ends. I don't trust anything Man has meddled with further than I can spit. I know psychology and motivational theory all too well, and know the schemery men will use not only to obtain power, but also to avoid responsibility for their actions ( by inserting themselves in a "chain of command" so the convenience "God" they created can take the heat for their doings.)
God authored the Universe. Science studies the Universe. And by studying the Universe, it bears witness to its creator.
Even the Bible warns repeatedly about deception. Just what does God want me to believe? The evidence of his own work, or some human blathering a bunch of stuff to me reminiscent of one trying to unload speculative stock investments?
God set the law down, in language readable to anyone regardless of his spoken tongue - in the universal language of mathematics. Its right there - literally written in stone if you are a geologist.
Slashdot Mirror
Take your 670,616,629 miles per hour , and divide by 3600, as there are 3600 seconds in an hour, and it leaves you with 186,282 miles per second.
This could get expensive.
Ehh... "lifters" ?
Apparantly they can develop enough thrust to levitate the engine itself in earth atmosphere against earth gravity - but I have yet to see one that could also hoist its own power supply along with it.
The gurus at Slashdot devised this really clever little distributed moderation system that works quite well to sort these posts by genre and revelence. I would think that Slashdot itself may provide an example of a ranking paradigm to help moderate the music at Magnatune. Statistics will evolve which show the more meaningful parameters of the music offered.
If I were working on their system, I would probably try to configure the radio streams so I could detect if the stream was aborted. That is a strong indication the guy on the other end was not much interested in that one. I would maintain statistics on which song of an album was downloaded first. Knowing which track was downloaded first probably will generate data for which tracks are the best ones of the album, based on which spawned off downloads of other tracks.
The album gets modded up for selling a track, a major mod if the entire album sells.
Its a brand new site, a brand new paradigm. But they will have the same bugs to work out as CmdrTaco has worked out here. Maybe they can look over here and talk to CmdrTaco for some insights on handling a torrent of data of various quality and how to set up some sort of moderation system similar to the one working here.
We are evolving. They will too.
All the "popular artists" I am aware of are that way because they have been hyped. And the artist prostituted to the label so the label would have incentive to invest in all this expensive hyping. Just because an artist has been hyped by the "star making machinery" does not mean that they are superior artists.
Finally - Magnatune has leveled the playing field for all artists. They ALL now have equal exposure. It has been such a waste to have a lot of talent wasted only for lack of exposure. Word will get around. I noted Magnatune did everything imaginable to make the music easy to license.
I hope this shakes up the RIAA cartel much like the invention of the printing press shook up the old religious orders ( you know where only certain people had access to the "Word of God" and your soul was destined for the fiery Gates of Hell if you didn't smooch up to them. They sure had you where they wanted you as long as they could get you to believe them. )
This is one business model I am really rooting for.
Here you have some upper management type playing around with technologies far beyond his comprehension. Sure, he may be good at the political persuasions of running a business, but often it seems that "powerful" people ( in terms of salary and ranking status ) within a company often overestimate how much power they have. They seem to often think their position of power protects them from the disasters that affect us mere mortals. So they feel free to "lead" the company down the paths of insecure systems and unstable computing infrastructure. To add to this, people who are very technically aware of the risks the power-person is unnecessarily taking are often viewed as "not team players" and are dismissed from employment at the first available opportunity. Being I personally experienced this at a big company, I am pretty quick now to see the turnaround a company can do sometimes upon the hiring of just one executive - its not his salary that drives the company into the ground, its having to obey his leadership.
I think we see this a helluva lot in the information services sector. There are a lot of people out there in the support side who are very uncomfortable working with proprietary technologies they do not understand thoroughly and resist them like the plague. Its kinda like the doctors who have a lot of respect for those viruses responsible for haemorragic fevers, as they do not know how to control them. Others not so intimately aware of the problem are apt to be far less concerned about hygeine.
Its been my observation that many of the "leadership" types running in the high technology arena are really good at getting funding and lining up venture capitalists, but are often sorely lacking in technological "horse sense". They are apt to force implementation of way overcomplicated Rube-Goldbergian technologies for the sake of show. Image seems to become everything, and substance becomes something hidden in the back room. Like the fancy restaurant where everything looks so nice in the dining room but the kitchen is a real low-grade sweatshop.
As one colleague was telling me upon my frustration of dealing with one of these manager types, he told me my timing was all wrong. The venture capitalist had just blown the management up with money. Just imagine blowing up a bunch of balloons and letting them loose in a room ... they bounce all over the place until they run out of propellant, then its back on the floor again. He told me to just wait a year for the guys to run out of propellant, then they will finally listen. Only trouble is that by that time, the company is so snared up with contracts and committments that trying to fix it is hopeless. Its like watching a guy wire a house with aluminum wire. You know once he gets it all in, its gonna be a helluva mess to fix. But today, he has the money, and he's gonna put in aluminum wire no matter what the techie guys say.
I know this is kinda a rant, but these failures with a subsequent delay in knowing what the problem is causing the failure is an indication to me that the complexity of the system is becoming more than the capacity to understand it. And that is a scary proposition.
Whether some dot-com or department store puts in stuff they do not understand and can not maintain does not scare me much, as I will gladly go to their going out of business sale for a few fire-sale priced items I may need, but what does scare me is if I see infrastructure critical to our society, such as banking, adopting these technologies.
But, as we see, a lot of parents are getting sleepless nights worrying about what kind of trouble their kids may inadvertantly bring upon them.
And those parents may well be apt to quickly vote for anyone who can adjust the law so that their kids won't be held in criminal courts for a song.
Signing of a piece of paper created this legislation. Removal of certain politicians and a nullification of their actions is what it will take to uncreate it. But, to do this, enough people must see it for what it is. It is my hope that RIAA, in their quest to spread terror amongst the population, brings the DMCA itself into review, as well as the career of any politician who backs it. But to do this, large numbers of people must be concerned. If RIAA pulls this fear campaign off right, maybe we can get critical mass and get rid of this law and its associated politicians.
And rarely does any of the first 50 or so comments seem to come from anybody who has RTFA.
I found setting up my Slashdot preferences to show newest posts first best for me.
Its also why I have yet to mod a post "redundant", as I often do not make it to the very beginning of a thread.
Note to others.. never be discouraged from entering a late post thinking it will never be read. I get the idea the Slashdot gurus would not have provided that reverse-listing option unless it was pretty well used. The last posts entered into the forum are the first ones we see.
Generally, I find the very last posts of most of the Slashdot topics to be the most insightful of them all.
I am not saying there won't be ramifications. What used to be useless frigid land may well become good farm land. What used to be good farm land could well become desert. So, Russian Siberia, Norway, Sweden, etc. may well come online as their land becomes warmer, hence better suited for farming. Maybe the midwest US may become as the Sahara. Who knows? What may cook one's goose may keep another warm.
But the ramifications for humanity as a whole? My jury is still out.
I, for one, feel a helluva lot more comfortable when not only me, but others well-versed in the technology are privy to its inner workings and have verified its core paradigms are valid.
This reminds me of those old mechanical G&S security locks we used on top secret stuff. You could examine the lock all you wanted. You could take it apart and reassemble it. You could know exactly how it works. And still be helpless if you found yourself on the wrong side of a locked lock.
I have some of those old G&S locks on my house that I bought from Surplus at the Aerospace contractor I used to work at. I know nobody's coming through the back door without first destoying the door, but in the event I lock myself out of the house, I can go around back and dial myself back in.
To me, Top Security is security that everyone has looked at, yet has no idea how to crack given they know every detail of its implementation, and find themselves helpless if they are "locked out". You can rest assured that on any "security based on obscurity" paradigm, someone out there will know the "obscurity" part and will have free reign.
The open-source system is working. Now everyone, not just the crooks, know where the vulnerabilities are, and those vulnerabilities should be addressed post haste. "Faith" is for religions, not for assurance you are running a secure system.
There is no reason why just the crooks will know how to compromise a secure system. NO-ONE should know how to compromise a secure system.
When I typed in "designed around", I meant having advanced cooling technologies designed in already. Kinda like the "new" ATX power supplies had power management/switching designed in. Not some add-on I could just as easily add to one of my original PC 66 watters.
I was just disappointed that we are going through all this big upgrade broughah with just what appears to me to be a rearrangement of slots. I wanted to see some sort of quantum breakthrough in design.. like some integral heat spreader to get the CPU heat directly to the case without involving failure-prone and noisy fans. Perhaps by mounting the CPU UNDER the circuit board instead of the traditional top mounting so as to expose its thermal surface to intimate thermal contact to the case, which would have an appropriately designed heat spreader surface at that area. Or something similar.
I did RTFA... I was just a bit underwhelmed.
And a helluva lot of other legacy stuff.
But, you know, a lot of those old machines were designed very conservatively. I even have some old 286 running, and will continue to run them until they no longer function. Don't replace your legacy system... kinda like replacing your old SUV with the latest sports car should the bobbling heads start advocating it. Sure, the later one may be faster, but the old SUV will tote the kids.
In a pinch, a USB to serial converter will probably work. If its works, great, otherwise, its another case of having to do yesterday's work all over again, instead of doing today's work. Remember, you already got paid for yesterday's work... you don't get paid again for doing it again.
I did yesterday's work yesterday. I built my foundation years ago. Today, I use it. Kinda like years ago I put copper pipe in the house because I did not wanna mess with it ever again. I pour concrete foundations, because I know the wood one, albeit cheaper, will rot, and force me to do all my work over again. Some people have the money to do yesterday's work over and over and over again. Sure, they have the latest foundation in the neighborhood. But even I wonder how they economically justify such a paradigm.
Once I invest in a good solid foundation, I intend to use it for the lifetime I designed it for. Its not like I wanna design the Grand Coulee Dam, and demolish it every couple of years because someone came up with a different mix of concrete... Once I go through the trouble of building the thing, I intend it to perform its intended function from then on, usually indefinitely. Kinda like those Romans did things, where their aqueducts and roads still function as originally designed to this day.
I really take no thrill in developing the capability to sign checks to pay others to do the work... I take great pride in having the capability to do it. ( And also take comfort in knowing how my stuff works, as well as what to do if it doenn't work the way I want it to work. I think almost all Open-Source guys have this same mental picture. )
I am quite surprised that on this next "quantum leap" of case design, it wasn't designed around "heat pipes".
There is no reason the entire case itself can't be used as a heat sink, as aluminum is quite thermally conductive. I could only imagine a case that was intentionally designed with a sort of "semi-porous" exterior to facilitate heat transfer and blackbody radiation.
I get the idea that there is a helluva lot more contamination in processed foods that we never are told about. As one said before, anyone who likes sausage or the law should never watch them being made.
Much ado about nothing. I am not a doctor, health fanaticist, or anything else for that matter, but if the floor is reasonably clean, and it didn't fall in muck, I'll probably recover it. But if its a sticky thing, like the innards of my hamburger, I'll probably call the dog.
Inside every commercial radio of the superheterodyne design ( of which its been years since I have seen one NOT of this design ), there is a local oscillator which runs in the case of AM 455 KHz above the frequency you are tuning to and in the case of FM, 10.7 MHz above the frequency you are tuned to. The reason for doing this is its very easy to construct narrowband tuned amplifiers which work at only one frequency - say 455 KHz, or 10.7 MHz. These are called IF (Intermediate Frequency ) amplifiers. When you have your local oscillator tuned to the correct frequency offset, the station you want to listen to is the only one that will "mix" into your narrowband IF which gets amplified and subsequently converted to audio.
The billboard detectors work by simply looking at the spectrum of signals emitted by the local oscillators of the car's radios as they pass by. The emitted frequency is always 455Khz (AM) or 10.7MHz (FM) away from the frequency they are listening to. It would be very difficult ( but not impossible ) to tell which car was listening to what, but quite easy to get an aggregate idea of listening patterns.
TV is the same way... the IF is 45 MHz away from the station you are tuned to. Or if you just simply want to know of the existence of an operating TV receiver, just tune to its color oscillator frequency of 3.58MHz or its horizontal frequency of 15.746KHz. It'll show up in all its glory on darned near any spectrum analyzer.
All these interlocking frequencies is the reason we have all these concerns on EMI compatibility. You may be surprised at the plethora of signals an ordinary PC generates!
As we enter into an economy that appears to be funded by the legal ability to grant permission, instead of the ability to create, I am increasingly skeptical of ulterior motives.
If damn near everybody's getting nailed by a 5MPH limit, it means the law is not representing the people. Its now 25MPH, and from my viewpoint just about right. There are times I could go 40 safely, ( like 2AM if nobody is parked along the side ), but those times are rare.
I have got nailed for speeding before, but that does not mean I want to overthrow the speed limit. What I do insist on is the law represents the will of the public at large. You know, the old "Government of the people, by the people, and for the people" thing. My individual will, along with a corporate will, is not "the will of the people".
Ignoring this only leads to things like our famous Boston Tea Party.
Consider substituting "RIAA" for "East India Tea Company", "DMCA" for "Tea Act", and "music" for "tea", and things look awful similar to today's situation. Note how the people involved in the "overthrow" are referred to as "Patriots". You would infer from this the "Patriot Act" would mean something completely different from what it does, ya?
And I am definitely off-topic here.
But I do want to point out one of the things that make it hard on me when I am called on to meta-moderate. Posts like this come up and I am asked if its a fair or unfair moderation. And I am expected to reply. Its hard as hell to reply honestly without a helluva lot of research. And even then, if I confirm or deny the moderation, it was a helluva lot more trouble to do so than its worth.
Personally, I am very apt to metamod as "unfair" any moderation I see where someone attempts to post a decent response and gets whammed for it, but then, technically, I could be wrong.
Please, if you don't think its a stellar post, don't kill it, just don't bump it up.
I will always agree with negative moderations for those obvious crap-flood junk posts. Please hold the bad mods for guys who deserve it. There are way too many really good posts on these forums which receive no recognition at all. It seems a waste to use moderation to ram an honest poster.
And no, I have no relation to the poster. Its just I have had my fill of metamodding posts like this, and wanted to point a live one out while it was still "hot".
There will be immense competition as to marking a cloud as it forms to claim ownership.
What's this? Ridiculous? Don't we already patent things as nebulous as concepts and sound wave patterns? And confer "ownership"?
I still have a couple of these ( with the old 12-button puck ) hoping one day to find the time to program an AVR microcontroller chip to convert the native strobe codes to a logitech mouse codes, while relaying the "menu" items through a lookup table to send strings to the keyboard buffer.
I loved the idea that if I wanted an AND gate right "here", I just picked up the gate from the digitizer pad with the mouse ("Command" button) and dropped it on the screen ("Data" button). The "Properties" button did much the same as a right click, and the "Undo" button did just that.
After a while, you would grow so used to the menu (placed under that little plastic sheet covering the digitizer pad) that you just had a feel for where everything was, and you would retrieve it without even thinking about it. And at any time, if you decided you didn't like your menu, you could always redesign it and print another, then tell the computer your new grid layout, and where on your new menu would send what keyboard codes to the system.
Geez, that was a sad day for me to see that old system go... all I could keep was the digitizer tables, as I knew I could not maintain the old DEC computers the system was based on.
I have always noted true/false stuff sometimes becomes royally snarled because of the very paradoxes you mention. We get them in logic design too, but due to the time delay to get the answer, we just end up with an oscillating gate. Like connecting the output of an inverter back to its input. Like you say... its not true, its not false. Its invalid.
I am afraid that if you want me to believe something with all my heart, you need to back that something up with demonstrable proof. Tell me God is gonna send my soul to eternal hell if I masturbate and I really have my doubts if you know what you are talking about. Hold an anvil six feet above my foot and talk about dropping it and I will believe with all my heart and soul that I am going to be in for a great deal of hurt if I don't get my foot out of the way.
In that case, you have just invoked God's law. God's will be done. It's not just a metaphor. Its not a request. Its inevitable fact. We humans have interpreted a number of these laws ( among them being gravitation and the integration of momentum ) and have a reasonable understanding of them for the time being. We know what happens when we try to break these laws.
I get into word-wars quite often with "religions" over biblical numerology - especially timelines. I usually end up quite amused that entities as omnipowerful as God would have such a sense of humor to tell one man the Earth is six thousand years old, yet coin physical law that leaves all these old dinosaur bones for geologists to find. Geez, does God get a chuckle out of watching all the fights resulting from us discovering all these conflicts? Damm, seems like a heavenly version of a good Microsoft vs Linux bashing. Somehow I thought my God was above that kind of thing.
I make no bones about it... I consider Science my personal religion... and I study it as such. I can see nowhere that Science and God are at odds with each other... to me Science confirms God. If God had wanted us to think like sheep, He could have left it as such. I have no idea of the grand scheme of things, but I do believe that He left sufficient evidence that bears witness of creation.. which the study of ( via Science ) will reveal how, maybe why.
And please don't tell me God is some big man in the clouds with a quiver full of ligntning bolts that he throws at naughty people. Right now, I have no idea what God is. And no-one has come yet to me with any demonstrable proof to back up their arguments. To me, Scientists are the most honorable out there, yet they also suffer the same fallacies you noted. But at least they make the effort to demonstrate how they arrived at their conclusions.
What is "D&C"?
They work great, so why change 'em?
I did get some cheapo opticals (Iconcepts 4D wheel scroll optical mouse #77052) at Pic 'N Save the other day that used the PS/2 interface - I have to admit I do like the opticals - even then the Logitech mouse driver that ran the C7 found them on the PS/2 port and ran 'em without a hitch. I have to have three-button mice to support legacy stuff, and Iconcepts built theirs such that depressing the wheel acted as the middle button.
Yeh, I bought a couple of samples of Iconcepts mice and brought them back to the lab for testing.. as Pic 'N Save had crates of them on the floor for a really good price. I returned a couple of days later and left a bevy of store clerks wondering what I was going to do with six cases of mice. I think the machinists will like them. They work nice.
Logitech sure made some good stuff. I very rarely ever had problems with them. I was quite pleased when I opened my mouse for servicing that they used decent switches. They were even replaceable ( if you knew your way around a soldering iron ) - and I always kept a few injured mice in one of my parts drawers for donors in the case an emergency transplant was needed. ( When I have a machinist in the shop waiting, this is not the time to try to install new software... if ten minutes with a soldering iron gets him back up.) Ideally, I would have him a new mouse pronto, but this was my backup plan if I had no new mice. My attitude: come hell or high water, the machinist is going back online.
But, at least these days, the mice are not in the $250 region, as you noted they were during the early days. That sounds a lot like what I was paying for C7's. And why I would justify taking the time to fix 'em. I got the opticals for less than $10 / ea. At that price, I am not gonna worry about fixing 'em.. I just got enough so if one suffers an unfortunate accident with the wrench or greasy hand, I just replace it.
Note the glaring omission of what God is, how, why, when, etc.
Science is the study of God by witness of his creation.
I have no idea what God is, and I get the idea sometimes that trying to understand it is almost as tedious as trying to teach calculus to a hamster. But I do know that if I take the statement I base my beliefs on above, then Science is the truest study of God - as the study is centered on things authored by God himself.
I know Man all too well. By nature, he's greedy, selfish, and often lies to achieve his ends. I don't trust anything Man has meddled with further than I can spit. I know psychology and motivational theory all too well, and know the schemery men will use not only to obtain power, but also to avoid responsibility for their actions ( by inserting themselves in a "chain of command" so the convenience "God" they created can take the heat for their doings.)
God authored the Universe. Science studies the Universe. And by studying the Universe, it bears witness to its creator.
Even the Bible warns repeatedly about deception. Just what does God want me to believe? The evidence of his own work, or some human blathering a bunch of stuff to me reminiscent of one trying to unload speculative stock investments?
God set the law down, in language readable to anyone regardless of his spoken tongue - in the universal language of mathematics. Its right there - literally written in stone if you are a geologist.