I spend many hours of time reading. And I usually remember where it was I saw something, even though I may forget the details of what it was. So, later loss of the book renders my initial investment of time to read it worthless.
For that reason, I am loathe to use ephemeral DRM formats. I choose paper books for the same reason I keep a PENCIL and pad of paper in the glove compartment of my car... If I have an accident ten years from now and need to record critical details, I rest assured the pencil and paper WILL work.
Ephemeral formats are fine for the Dilbert of the Day, but when its serious stuff, I want something I know will work ten years from now, and I have no reason to believe this DRM laced stuff will be usable for very long.
Adoption of DRM is by far the primary force retarding my adoption of later technologies. I don't care how fancy it is, if I can't count on it to work, besides giving me bragging rights, what's it good for? Its about as useless as a fancy $500 pen that doesn't write.
You ask what message this sends to hardware manufacturers that might want to release drivers for Linux, when all we will do is reverse engineer it and do with it as we like???
Hmmph. A good question that a lot of even today's MBA apparently can't answer... It results in the sale of hardware!!! .
I work in robotics... it is common as hell for me to pick up any number of application notes telling me how to use a product. I am quite sure the manufacturer of the part I am considering is not concerned that I follow the app note to the letter - he's just trying to show me how the part works, so hopefully I will design it into a successful product, which means every time I sell a product, his product is in it, thereby resulting in a sale for him too.
So, who gives a damm if we rewrite the drivers?
I think very few, if any, of us have any intention of redesigning a VIA motherboard. But if we knew how to use it, we may design some interesting product for the market which uses this board. Which results in sold product. For both of us.
Bottom line: People get the opportunity to buy whatever it was we made with a VIA motherboard, we get employed to design and build it, and VIA gets employed to build the hardware its based on.
I see it as such a waste to go through all the work of designing an elegant hardware platform, then not share how to use it. By doing this, many designs based on it will never see the light of day.
I don't know what people are on when they think this way, but whatever they are having, I don't want any part of it.
I have been watching on my nightly walks one of my city's newly installed LED traffic signals going through failure. A row of about 5 LED's began winking on and off in a random pattern while the rest of the light was energized.. ( maybe around 200 or so LED's in the whole lamp ). Now, that patch is dark, other patches did the same, now they are dark, and now the whole lamp is quite a bit dimmer ( but not out ) as the remaining LEDs are running at quite a bit lower intensity per LED than they did.
I wonder if anybody is doing failure analysis?
I betcha the City would gladly send the bulb off to someone in return for a replacement.
If interested, reply to me and I'll print it off and drop it off at City hall.
Sometimes, analyzing a part that failed in the field can yield useful insights into the failure process.
"Make it easy to find yours, and that might be the one I buy."
Yup.. just about everything I actually have *bought* via the internet was aided by lookups on Google. Even my ISP - was derived from a link I originally found via Google.
No, I have no connection to Google. Its just I am very impressed with their no-nonsense no-trickery methods of promoting paid links.
If I were trying to expose something to the online community at large, I would definitely be talking to Google about one of those ads along the right hand side of the search results page.
You just neatly encapsulated what I see as the most massive flaw in our patenting system.
If someone toils by the sweat of his brow to bring something into existence, he should get some sort of protection for *that* implementation. - I thought that was what our patent system was for - so others couldn't see what he had done and go directly into production neatly skipping all the research and failed attempts.
And now we patent dreams? Without substantiation? This just rewards paper pushers who don't do a friggen thing to bring ANYTHING into existence.
This system is just rewarding litigation, using law as a bludgeon to extort the mental effort, construction investments, and intellectual property FROM the artist that actually makes something work.
I know what I am saying is redundant - I don't know of any technical artist who isn't saying the same thing I am saying now.
But, its like hooting and hollering about proprietary code which contains executable scripts and unverifiable intentions.
We don't make a lot of stuff over here in the USA anymore. From what I see, we won't be designing much either. Honestly, I don't know what we are going to do to support our economy, as our law is killing off our breadwinners. Although corporate interests may be able to tie up any conceivable ways to mechanize products, even they don't have the research budgets to bring these products into existence. And by killing off the motivation of the little guy who knows how to do it in his garage, these ideas, 'protected by Patent Law', will likely never see the light of day.
Sorry for the pessimism, but as an artist myself, I consider the laws of man, not the laws of physics, as being the major barrier to my own innovation.
Example: I have all sorts of ideas for using the Atmel AVR series microcontrollers in many security and robotics applications... but after I spend several months debugging the code, designing the interface cirucits, circuit boards, etc, and getting it to work, will I get a letter in the mail from some lawyer representing some corporation who has been sitting on blanket patent just waiting to extort the implementation plans from me after I put forth the effort and knowledge to implement it? This smacks of the same kind of economic help provided by the Professional Domain Name Squatter businesses.
If this patent law is going to perform the intention our founding fathers intended, its going to have to protect the interests of the artists and creators, not the interests of the squatters who merely use this law to extort the efforts from the artists.
You might wanna use a Crystal Semiconductor CS-8900A if you wanna go directly to ethernet, or you may wanna use one of the AVR parts with the built-in UART if you wanna dialup. Yeh, you will have to write a little proggie to make tcpip packets... but you don't have to include everything... just the basic text stuff. Most likely somebody has already done so.
I am looking into these for some of the robotics stuff I work on. They look really nifty - especially when the whole shebang fits in so nicely with my motion control stuff. The ATMEGA series has a hardware multiply, so that makes the 32-bit Multiply - Add routine efficient enough for me to use for a lot of the DSP routines I need for control algorithms.
Silver - Yours is one of the most insightful posts I've seen in this discussion. This makes a helluva lot of sense from a control systems viewpoint.
This entire thing as I saw it looks exactly like the kind of problems I encounter all the time in motion control and power supply instabilities... underdamped - or worse yet - regenerative - oscillatory behaviour.
It looked like similar dynamics as carrying a trayfull of water.
As you know, you use derivative feedback to either magnify or quench an oscillation, but that energy has to come from / go to somewhere.
I would have thought maybe the power companies themselves could modulate their generators - possibly playing with the excitation on their synchronous generators to use their power factor as a control vector. But then, maybe the power generators have tremendous flows of energy in motion, and they have so much inertia that control margins are minimal. I was first guessing maybe ultracapacitors and inverters. Maybe superconductor resonators to act as an energy "tank" ( but talk about EMI!!! ). Then your idea about having this huge distributed reservoir of energy... toware a million cars...
Damn, thats a helluva plan. Maybe only 10KW peak in/out per car, but almost a million cars in the area.. well there's your really nimble source of derivative energy source/sink.
Thanks for posting that. I hope that ACPropulsion succeeds. This is the kind of technology that we need.
The only thing that concerns me is these things are terribly nonlinear. Once you get a hot-spot resulting from the transition from zero to normal resistance, you will get tremendous dissipation in that one spot. These rods don't appear to be all that big.. I wonder which would have more energy in it, the stored rotational energy of a large hydroelelectric dynamo, or a good-sized stick of TNT?
They are cooling them with liquid nitrogen... if you dump a helluva lot of energy into it, you get a phase change into gas. Gas doesn't conduct heat very well, so formation of gas bubbles on the rods could have really unusual nonlinear thermal effects.
They are using magnetic triggers.. with the amount of current which will be supposedly flowing in these conductors, there will be a lot of stray magnetic gradients in the vicinity. Its gonna be a good work of art to ensure your magnetic trigger pulse will be uniform across the "melt-cast" conductors so they drop out of superconductivity gracefully.
They switch in a fraction of a second.. will a thunderstorm strike set it off?
Right now, I am quite ignorant of the technology, so don't take anything I say seriously.. its just I am aware there is a helluva lot of energy that they are dealing with. This does not look like an easy engineering problem. If they can pull this off, they've definitely earned their pay.
I have to agree with you on your point that WIN95 not being the most stable thing out there. It crashes a LOT. And, I have several apps I run on it that have serious memory leak problems; I can only recover my system by rebooting. Not pretty.
Yes, I would much prefer running Linux. But like you noted, its a problem of whats written for what and my knowledge - pretty limited - on how to make my tools work.
But at least I know about most of my limitations. My situation is I have worked with these old tools so long I know them pretty intimately, and know when they hiccup, what the problem is. I am not willing to trade a problem I know about for ones I have no idea what it is. I would rather have a snake in plain view than have a strong suspicion one's hiding where I can't see him.
I do not do computer diagnostic work all the time; I am primarily an analog circuit designer. It took me a long time to get where I was actually getting productive work out of my machine, after investing much time and energy into it to understand how I had to present my problem to it in a way in which it could help me. I had a helluva time with dongles and other copy protection stuff. But, it was pretty simple stuff in those days, and if I could not come up with a work-around, someone else would. It is very important to me that I have several machines running the exact same code, so that if one machine fails for any reason ( which has happened to me ), I don't lose work I spent hours ( possibly years ) doing. I have experienced enough stuff in the field to expect anything could happen. If I am paranoid, there is a reason. I am only protecting myself against threats that have either happened to me, or threats I observed happening to colleagues.
I consider today's software so damn finicky that I have a helluva hard time justifying to myself ( much less anyone else ) why I should invest the time to mess with it. It'll just be obsolete by the time I finally get productive with it. And not only that, they will be able to enforce all sorts of after-the-sale "rights management" on me and there won't be nothing much I can do about it. Actually read the EULAs they require you to accept if you wanna good idea of whats driving my paranoria. Would any business in their right mind agree to such a thing? ( don't answer that.. they do! )
As I had indicated earlier, I consider these latest systems much like a beautiful secretary - but the problem comes if I let her in the door, she confiscates every way I have of doing my work and forces me to channel it through her... then if she doesn't show up for work, I have no idea how to even run the simplest stuff after she's messed with it. I do not know how to make her show up for work, and dealing with her pimp is a real bitch. I am not a big business. To me a day down the tubes because I can't figure out how to make my system run is a big deal. And, without a big corporate support budget, it may take me a sizable portion of my yearly earnings to address fixing my computer. Unlike the salaried corporate executives whose income, pensions, and medical plans are quite independent of their computer system reliability, these problems hit me personally.
So, I kinda have to be paranoid.
And all these virii running around the net, and all these copyright holders bragging on their unstoppable rights management issues don't help my fears one bit. I figure these problems are best solved by the big boys who have the time and money to address such things. I have work to do.
Oooh man, tell me about it. I don't know what I'm missing, I suppose.
I had been working on my CAD system on my home machine running WIN95 and DOS. I wasn't even aware anything was amiss until I logged onto Slashdot to see whats new. I was wondering why it was so slow. My firewall responded in a bit and told me I was getting a helluva lot of connect attempts on port135. So, I go look up the log file and it looked like SQL slammer all over again. Almost a megabyte of infection attempts. I wondered at first if I had made an enemy on a dialup??? In 4 hours??? Why did the whole world seem determined to wax me off the web? Damm, it seemed like everyone in the world was wanting my port135.
Ok.. so I continue to read Slashdot and the story finally loads about this new LoveSan virus making the rounds. Hmmm. When I think of how much work would have been lost had something came in and messed up my machine, I shudder. But then, I don't run my machine wide open to the net. I try to practice secure techniques - such as never allowing any programs to run that I have not verified their intentions, and don't run anything that allows embedded executables ( read: javascript and later things post DMCA that haven't been "cleared" by what I consider trusted groups - which are mostly the groups the DMCA was aimed at in the first place. )
Sure, there are a lot of websites that I can no longer see. I can not even access the Southern California Edison site, nor many business sites - as they require these embedded-executable technologies as a requisite to viewing their content.
So, I sit here, with a pretty fast system, as its pretty simple. I have no virus scanning going on, as I am not running just anything I get in. I do have an integrity monitor running, which does a quickie on startup to see if any critical files are amiss ( it just calculates an MD5 on my key executables and compares to what they should be. ).. if so, booting to GUI is aborted and I drop to DOS to straighten it out - but its never happened outside a test situation.
I keep getting all these people telling me I should upgrade and be current with the times. I would gladly upgrade if the later stuff was actually better and more robust than the earlier stuff - but thats not what I see.
Oh yes, the "presentation skills" are definitely better on the new stuff, but I see the new systems much like a stunningly beautiful secretary that I can't trust, and spends a helluva lot of time doing her makeup.
I try to tell these business people what they are getting into by running software that hasn't been verified for trustworthiness, but they seem happy to go ahead and do it anyway as long as there is someone else to blame if things go amiss. I hoot till I'm blue in the face about these businessmen who put content on the web that can only be viewed with proprietary readers, whose underlying trojan motives, if any, can no longer be legally ascertained as a result of the DMCA.
I am especially puzzled by business's perception of proper etiquette. Would they hire a sales rep that constantly interrupted a customer in mid-question with comments on his grammar or spelling? Or worse yet, rudely hangs up on customers if they don't understand something? Is not a corporate web-site their sales-rep in cyberspace? Why would a business hire such rude representatives that coin their own protocols and chide the customers relentlessly for not adhering to their latest incarnations of the communications protocol "standard"?
At the risk of redundancy, I'll say it again. I do not like these proprietary unverifiable protocols. I consider them very risky - to me. I really don't care if YOU get hit with a virus, but I don't want any part of it.
Ok.. I just had to get this off my chest. It might cost me a bit of karma, but I had to say it in public in the hopes that someone in management that makes the decisions will hear my plea.
Somehow, I can't consider an engineering education complete without some experience in industry such as this. I still remember how I first felt insulted over having my box mangled - how I felt they should have realized it was a delicate instrument and how they should have treated it as such, then realizing later just how wrong I was for thinking that way. Realizing I had spent company resources and made useless crap.
When I showed the remains of my tester to my supervisor, I remember him looking at it, then at me, and chuckling... and him telling me that that was strike one. Maybe I had better go to the machine shop and have one of those guys show me how its done at Chevron - you aren't in College anymore. I did. The next incarnation looked more like a tank than a piece of test equipment. The most expensive assembly in the whole thing was the case! I ended up using 50AMP switches to control milliamps. Not for current - but because of mechanical considerations. And the electronics were no longer designed for serviceability - they were now designed to last as long as possible in a very hostile environment. It was a lot cheaper to build another electronics package than to have one fail in use. So I ended up encapsulating the whole digitizer/display in a big lucite block ( like those paperweights you see stuff embedded in ) with four wires coming out of it. The case was a modified industrial explosion-proof housing, and the connectors were those huge oversized connectors used on welding rigs, with the connector holes going right through the case, so that in the event you dropped it in the muck below ( very probable ) you could pick it back up, hold it under the steam trap when it vented and blow the muck back off the device. And yes, you could
plug a welding lead in it and use it as a test lead if you had to. The big 50 AMP switch turned the box on, off, or connected the input leads in such a manner as to charge its internal battery off the truck battery by "measuring" the truck battery. And it had very powerful magnets on the back to hold it to against the tank.
About the steam trap: Because heavy oils get so viscous when cold, they keep the pipes hot by bundling them with steam pipes under a sheath of insulation. But in the process of keeping the oil hot, the steam condenses back to water. Steam traps are gravitically operated valves which detect a buildup of water in the line and periodically open and vent the water out. They
are very common on piping around heavy-oil processing.
We are talking about some really thick black sticky goo here - and lots of it. In the event of a problem, the goo may well be in places it shouldn't be. So, it was entirely likely that there be goo all over the place when trying to fix the problem. And its outside. And its cold. And its in the middle of the night. And its blowing rain. And forget papers, the wind's blowing rain around like all getout. And the mess is getting worse by the minute until you find and fix whatever broke.
I remember well my day in the field - I came all prepared with drawings. And all my engineering goodies. The first thing that happened was a big gust of rainy wind sent my entire book of drawings across the tank farm with gusto. The book binding snapped apart on the first strike onto the ground, while the individual pages, now free, scattered within seconds, over several miles of muddy terrain. All the stuff which served me so nicely in the lab was gone within minutes.. I think the lead pencil was all that really survived. It was me against the elements now. It seemed only nature could design anything to survive against this. If you didn't wear heavy protective clothing, you were soon so cold you could not feel a thing. If you did, you were so cumbersome that there was no way you were going to adjust any little knob or find the hole to plug the lead into, or not break the lead even if you did succeed in getting it in the little hole.
Ever try to hold anything with big heavy greasy gl
I was very pleased that those videos you posted were.mpgs... I can't tell you how pissed I get when someone has some neat stuff but it requires me to install some proprietary crap viewer to see it.
No, I am not placing blame... anyone would run the AC at 116 degrees. The problem is that you had to... not that you did.
As our climate goes out of control, we expend more and more resources trying to maintain localized habitable spots. Which necessitates burning more fossil fuel, which exacerbates the situation.
I guess its moot in a way cause our generation won't have to worry about it. But in a way I feel partly responsible for the situations I am setting up for those coming later if I don't choose wisely. I am quite concerned over what I perceive to be a rather lackadaisical attitude over the consumption of our earthly resources... especially here in the United States, where it appears there is so much wealth that conservation is not only completely uncalled for, its actually discouraged so as to encourage economic growth based on production of frivolous things.
We have more than enough things to go around, but we arrange things so that no-one has time to spend with family.. I became an engineer in the hopes that I could contribute to the demise of the mandatory two-incomes needed to maintain today's social status... and I have spent near my whole life and have not made a dent. We spend our lives in a hurried rush burning our environment and making junk. I'm sad to be so cynical, but from my seat, I perceive humanity as behaving like so many rats, eating and defecating over their environment, until its spent, then there will be the day of large quantities of rotting rat when the system is exhausted. I am just hoping we are smart enough to control our demands on our support physics to avoid that scenario.
I have to agree with you 100%. If I were given this problem, I would just buy mice by the case.
Here's the justification... In quantity, I can get pretty good optical mice for less than $10/each.
If I buy a cases of them at a time, I get identical mice.. i.e. I do not need to change any setups when I changeout mice.
Time is money. If these mice are getting dirty because people are busy doing something grimey and don't practice good computer hygiene, look how much you are paying the guy to stop what he's doing and try to pamper the mouse. There is no way on God's Green Earth I am going to face some machinist and demand he wash before he uses the machine. I consider it MY job to find the proper equipment so he can do HIS job. The way I see it, I derive my pay from the end customer, who is most likely buying the product the machinist made, not me! I support the machinist - it should not be beholden on him to support me.
This reminds me when I was a brand spanking new engineer on my first job at Chevron Oil Company. I designed a nifty little circuit tester for the mechanics to verify tank gauge readings with. They had it one day. At the end of the day, they brought me back my tester. In a bag. There were not many parts still connected to another anymore. They never got a chance to use it. It did not survive the trip to the job site in the back of the pickup truck, in the toolbox with all the other oilman tools, over rough terrain, to the job site. It taught me a damm good lesson. The next tester I sent to them had a lot better mechanical design - this one would take a ride in a pickup truck bed along with wrenches so heavy I could barely lift ( much less use ). And take submersion in mud, oil, or whatever, and take well to cleaning by being held under a venting steam trap.
Not in my wildest imaginations as a College student did I realize what the men in the field went through, and how they had to improvise using what they had on hand right then to get the job done. Anyone could do it, given infinite time, and catalog in hand, but an experienced mechanic would do things just right in ways I never would have considered. Just one day in the field with those guys gave me a whole different outlook on my relationship with what the company did. I consider them the most hardworking, intelligent, and no-bullshit folks I have ever had the pleasure of working with.
If you can't design the mice so they take well to the job, just plan on replacing them. About the last thing you want to do is mess up the people who are making the products that are sold to provide for your paycheck.
Note the "prismatic lorgnettes" about midway through the article which describes a little pair of prismatic glasses designed to trick the eye to view side-by-side images.
I just hope the solution was more inventive than doing the old theatrical movie stunt about using relative shifting of color information and celluloid glasses - which gives you depth information at the expense of color information.
Spy Kids 3D just did this using a blue or green image for the left eye and a red image for the right.. That one's been around since the 40's. In both movie and book. Cute trick but it gives me headaches to see it for any length of time.
oops.. I did not link to what I was referring to. I don't know if they still cover American History in schools since this Patriot Act stuff started becoming all the rage. So I better point it out.
Well, it was taxes and tea in those days that had the people all miffed... could it be things like copyrights and DMCA, coupled with the frustration of not being able to enforce your needs that push people over the edge these days?
Let copyright be valid for seven years.. A Biblical number, no less...
And enforce the hell out of it during that
time.
And at the end of that time, it becomes public
domain.
So if you want the latest stuff, pay. We are
trying to reward the guys that actually *do*
something, not guys that sit on their arse
milking work they did seven years ago. Would
you hire an employee who expects to remain on the payroll because he did something seven years ago? I thought copyright was to reward the artist for creating, not reward some bozo for sitting on things so nobody else can use it. Excessive copyright time limits only encourage monopolies and extortion, not creativity.
I think a lot of this civil disobedience we are seeing today is a result of this one-sided law we are seeing passed - and a lot of people are getting pissed. They will take it for only so long before we have another Boston Tea Party.
I like your last option best, too. I hate to suppress anyone's right to say whatever they want to, but then I want to reserve my right to what I choose to pay attention to.
Under the existing technology, a spammer is like the royal pest on a city bus which takes advantage of the captive audience. The analogy here is that we have to download our POP box, we have no way of arranging our affairs to where the signals exist, but we deliberately choose not to tap into them.
I believe the technology must change. I am loathe to try to settle what I consider a technological issue by passing some sort of law... doing this just makes immense profits for litigators, but does little to solve the underlying problems.
If the technology could change to where ISP's could provide individual bayesian-type filters at the server level so that messages fitting criteria that each individual screens for, this could let the ISP off the hook for dropping messages, as well as having to supply any long-term storage for them... Somehow I get the idea that spammed messages are going to be very similar and should show a very marked correlation to the same spam sent to other accounts in that ISP. The ISP, upon determining a significant number of accounts filters have flagged a particular mailing as a spam may provide the ISP with the opportunity to only store ONE copy of the spam, while possibly putting only pointers to it to the subscribers.
So, what I would think would solve this is if the internet became more like radio transmissions. I support the idea that anybody can transmit whatever they want to the public, and if anyone wants to listen in, fine. But, like RF, it has to make it through the filters before it gets to the listener. The damn-near infinite advantage to the net-based paradigm is we have an almost infinite bandwidth in the notion that anyone can set up his transmitter and not step on someone else's signal.
( i.e, there's only so many "channels" in the AM, FM, or TV broadcast bands, whereas the internet does not have this limitation. ).
"Dont care what the "experts" say... numbers and what I see in the field take louder and more accurately than any self proclaimed expert."
This is the essence of experience. I would venture to say that the reasons we feel the way we do about a lot of things is precisely this. We don't "depend" on someone else to do the work. We *are* the ones that do it. If we have biases, this is where we get them.
If there is anything good to come from this, it might be it may force us to re-examine the ramifications of copyright and patent law. Is it being used as an incentive to encourage innovation, or is it being used as a bludgeon to quench the free-enterprise forces our economy has run on since its inception?
I think its high time we are forced to look at the law we are passing and consider whether or not it is good law.
I would sure like to know whats supposed to be so damned picky about the cellular frequencies anyway.. If you are going to transmit on a wide open carrier, you might as well be talking in public anyway. I have seen in no case where passing some damned law stopped this kind of eavesdropping, it merely made stuff harder to build, more prone to failures, and did nothing to enhance the usability of it.
I think every analog ( that is, tuned with a variable capacitor ) radio out there that can tune these frequencies will do so. So whats the big deal?
If privacy is a big concern, go scrambled digital. Go ahead and listen if you wanna.. it'll sound like white noise to you unless you have its decryption codes. Many of us that have a desire to tune through the cellular bands have no urge whatsoever to eavesdrop on calls - we are trying to find spectral areas where EMI is causing a problem.. say somebody keys some cellphone in an area and something else goes haywire - this kinda thing is often traced to something as simple as a piece of wire that just happened to be cut to resonance.. ( this works in the RF arena just like a loose piece of metal on your car rattles at a certain speed in the mechanical arena.)
Being this thing is such a wide-range receiver, and apparently also functions as a spectrum analyzer, it sure seems like a moot enforcement of what I consider stupid law to cripple it in such a manner as to render it useless for determining RF "pollution" in such a common area as cellphone spectrum. Especially being there are so many other ways of eavesdropping cell calls if thats what you really wanted to do. This thing would probably be one of the most expensive cell phone monitors you could buy if thats what you wanted it for.
This is such a neat piece of engineering. I just hate to see pesky law poke holes in it. For no good reason at all as I see it.
And you cellphone users: if you want privacy, encrypt your damm calls.
Sunlight is a combination of all frequencies, at quite a high power level.
Just use a prism or diffraction grating to pick whatever frequency you want. A little movement around the focal point for pickup can easily control how much power enters the fiber pickups.
As far as I am concerned, I think its a helluva clever plan. A good-sized collector can easily give you several orders of magnitude more energy than you need, so control of the energy to assure a highly stable amount actually in the fiber should not be a problem.
Why does something have to be expensive, hard to maintain, complicated, or use exquisite technology to be considered useful? Some of the handiest things I have are also the simplest.
Things like this is what makes technical development "worth it" for me. Anybody can design something that has lots and lots of bloat in the design, but one who truely understands the problem and the physics of the resources at hand will design an elegant solution. Remember that really clever little beer-mug-needs-filling chip design discussed a few days ago here on/. ? That is the essence of good design. I think this is too.
Slashdot Mirror
For that reason, I am loathe to use ephemeral DRM formats. I choose paper books for the same reason I keep a PENCIL and pad of paper in the glove compartment of my car... If I have an accident ten years from now and need to record critical details, I rest assured the pencil and paper WILL work.
Ephemeral formats are fine for the Dilbert of the Day, but when its serious stuff, I want something I know will work ten years from now, and I have no reason to believe this DRM laced stuff will be usable for very long.
Adoption of DRM is by far the primary force retarding my adoption of later technologies. I don't care how fancy it is, if I can't count on it to work, besides giving me bragging rights, what's it good for? Its about as useless as a fancy $500 pen that doesn't write.
Hmmph. A good question that a lot of even today's MBA apparently can't answer... It results in the sale of hardware!!! .
I work in robotics... it is common as hell for me to pick up any number of application notes telling me how to use a product. I am quite sure the manufacturer of the part I am considering is not concerned that I follow the app note to the letter - he's just trying to show me how the part works, so hopefully I will design it into a successful product, which means every time I sell a product, his product is in it, thereby resulting in a sale for him too.
So, who gives a damm if we rewrite the drivers?
I think very few, if any, of us have any intention of redesigning a VIA motherboard. But if we knew how to use it, we may design some interesting product for the market which uses this board. Which results in sold product. For both of us.
Bottom line: People get the opportunity to buy whatever it was we made with a VIA motherboard, we get employed to design and build it, and VIA gets employed to build the hardware its based on.
I see it as such a waste to go through all the work of designing an elegant hardware platform, then not share how to use it. By doing this, many designs based on it will never see the light of day.
I don't know what people are on when they think this way, but whatever they are having, I don't want any part of it.
I wonder if anybody is doing failure analysis?
I betcha the City would gladly send the bulb off to someone in return for a replacement.
If interested, reply to me and I'll print it off and drop it off at City hall.
Sometimes, analyzing a part that failed in the field can yield useful insights into the failure process.
No, I have no connection to Google. Its just I am very impressed with their no-nonsense no-trickery methods of promoting paid links.
If I were trying to expose something to the online community at large, I would definitely be talking to Google about one of those ads along the right hand side of the search results page.
You just neatly encapsulated what I see as the most massive flaw in our patenting system.
If someone toils by the sweat of his brow to bring something into existence, he should get some sort of protection for *that* implementation. - I thought that was what our patent system was for - so others couldn't see what he had done and go directly into production neatly skipping all the research and failed attempts.
And now we patent dreams? Without substantiation? This just rewards paper pushers who don't do a friggen thing to bring ANYTHING into existence.
This system is just rewarding litigation, using law as a bludgeon to extort the mental effort, construction investments, and intellectual property FROM the artist that actually makes something work.
I know what I am saying is redundant - I don't know of any technical artist who isn't saying the same thing I am saying now.
But, its like hooting and hollering about proprietary code which contains executable scripts and unverifiable intentions.
We don't make a lot of stuff over here in the USA anymore. From what I see, we won't be designing much either. Honestly, I don't know what we are going to do to support our economy, as our law is killing off our breadwinners. Although corporate interests may be able to tie up any conceivable ways to mechanize products, even they don't have the research budgets to bring these products into existence. And by killing off the motivation of the little guy who knows how to do it in his garage, these ideas, 'protected by Patent Law', will likely never see the light of day.
Sorry for the pessimism, but as an artist myself, I consider the laws of man, not the laws of physics, as being the major barrier to my own innovation.
Example: I have all sorts of ideas for using the Atmel AVR series microcontrollers in many security and robotics applications... but after I spend several months debugging the code, designing the interface cirucits, circuit boards, etc, and getting it to work, will I get a letter in the mail from some lawyer representing some corporation who has been sitting on blanket patent just waiting to extort the implementation plans from me after I put forth the effort and knowledge to implement it? This smacks of the same kind of economic help provided by the Professional Domain Name Squatter businesses.
If this patent law is going to perform the intention our founding fathers intended, its going to have to protect the interests of the artists and creators, not the interests of the squatters who merely use this law to extort the efforts from the artists.
Thanks for pointing it out.
You might wanna use a Crystal Semiconductor CS-8900A if you wanna go directly to ethernet, or you may wanna use one of the AVR parts with the built-in UART if you wanna dialup. Yeh, you will have to write a little proggie to make tcpip packets... but you don't have to include everything... just the basic text stuff. Most likely somebody has already done so.
I am looking into these for some of the robotics stuff I work on. They look really nifty - especially when the whole shebang fits in so nicely with my motion control stuff. The ATMEGA series has a hardware multiply, so that makes the 32-bit Multiply - Add routine efficient enough for me to use for a lot of the DSP routines I need for control algorithms.
This entire thing as I saw it looks exactly like the kind of problems I encounter all the time in motion control and power supply instabilities ... underdamped - or worse yet - regenerative - oscillatory behaviour.
It looked like similar dynamics as carrying a trayfull of water.
As you know, you use derivative feedback to either magnify or quench an oscillation, but that energy has to come from / go to somewhere.
I would have thought maybe the power companies themselves could modulate their generators - possibly playing with the excitation on their synchronous generators to use their power factor as a control vector. But then, maybe the power generators have tremendous flows of energy in motion, and they have so much inertia that control margins are minimal. I was first guessing maybe ultracapacitors and inverters. Maybe superconductor resonators to act as an energy "tank" ( but talk about EMI!!! ). Then your idea about having this huge distributed reservoir of energy... toware a million cars...
Damn, thats a helluva plan. Maybe only 10KW peak in/out per car, but almost a million cars in the area.. well there's your really nimble source of derivative energy source/sink.
Thanks for posting that. I hope that ACPropulsion succeeds. This is the kind of technology that we need.
They are cooling them with liquid nitrogen... if you dump a helluva lot of energy into it, you get a phase change into gas. Gas doesn't conduct heat very well, so formation of gas bubbles on the rods could have really unusual nonlinear thermal effects.
They are using magnetic triggers.. with the amount of current which will be supposedly flowing in these conductors, there will be a lot of stray magnetic gradients in the vicinity. Its gonna be a good work of art to ensure your magnetic trigger pulse will be uniform across the "melt-cast" conductors so they drop out of superconductivity gracefully.
They switch in a fraction of a second.. will a thunderstorm strike set it off?
Right now, I am quite ignorant of the technology, so don't take anything I say seriously.. its just I am aware there is a helluva lot of energy that they are dealing with. This does not look like an easy engineering problem. If they can pull this off, they've definitely earned their pay.
Yes, I would much prefer running Linux. But like you noted, its a problem of whats written for what and my knowledge - pretty limited - on how to make my tools work.
But at least I know about most of my limitations. My situation is I have worked with these old tools so long I know them pretty intimately, and know when they hiccup, what the problem is. I am not willing to trade a problem I know about for ones I have no idea what it is. I would rather have a snake in plain view than have a strong suspicion one's hiding where I can't see him.
I do not do computer diagnostic work all the time; I am primarily an analog circuit designer. It took me a long time to get where I was actually getting productive work out of my machine, after investing much time and energy into it to understand how I had to present my problem to it in a way in which it could help me. I had a helluva time with dongles and other copy protection stuff. But, it was pretty simple stuff in those days, and if I could not come up with a work-around, someone else would. It is very important to me that I have several machines running the exact same code, so that if one machine fails for any reason ( which has happened to me ), I don't lose work I spent hours ( possibly years ) doing. I have experienced enough stuff in the field to expect anything could happen. If I am paranoid, there is a reason. I am only protecting myself against threats that have either happened to me, or threats I observed happening to colleagues.
I consider today's software so damn finicky that I have a helluva hard time justifying to myself ( much less anyone else ) why I should invest the time to mess with it. It'll just be obsolete by the time I finally get productive with it. And not only that, they will be able to enforce all sorts of after-the-sale "rights management" on me and there won't be nothing much I can do about it. Actually read the EULAs they require you to accept if you wanna good idea of whats driving my paranoria. Would any business in their right mind agree to such a thing? ( don't answer that.. they do! )
As I had indicated earlier, I consider these latest systems much like a beautiful secretary - but the problem comes if I let her in the door, she confiscates every way I have of doing my work and forces me to channel it through her... then if she doesn't show up for work, I have no idea how to even run the simplest stuff after she's messed with it. I do not know how to make her show up for work, and dealing with her pimp is a real bitch. I am not a big business. To me a day down the tubes because I can't figure out how to make my system run is a big deal. And, without a big corporate support budget, it may take me a sizable portion of my yearly earnings to address fixing my computer. Unlike the salaried corporate executives whose income, pensions, and medical plans are quite independent of their computer system reliability, these problems hit me personally.
So, I kinda have to be paranoid.
And all these virii running around the net, and all these copyright holders bragging on their unstoppable rights management issues don't help my fears one bit. I figure these problems are best solved by the big boys who have the time and money to address such things. I have work to do.
I had been working on my CAD system on my home machine running WIN95 and DOS. I wasn't even aware anything was amiss until I logged onto Slashdot to see whats new. I was wondering why it was so slow. My firewall responded in a bit and told me I was getting a helluva lot of connect attempts on port135. So, I go look up the log file and it looked like SQL slammer all over again. Almost a megabyte of infection attempts. I wondered at first if I had made an enemy on a dialup??? In 4 hours??? Why did the whole world seem determined to wax me off the web? Damm, it seemed like everyone in the world was wanting my port135.
Ok.. so I continue to read Slashdot and the story finally loads about this new LoveSan virus making the rounds. Hmmm. When I think of how much work would have been lost had something came in and messed up my machine, I shudder. But then, I don't run my machine wide open to the net. I try to practice secure techniques - such as never allowing any programs to run that I have not verified their intentions, and don't run anything that allows embedded executables ( read: javascript and later things post DMCA that haven't been "cleared" by what I consider trusted groups - which are mostly the groups the DMCA was aimed at in the first place. )
Sure, there are a lot of websites that I can no longer see. I can not even access the Southern California Edison site, nor many business sites - as they require these embedded-executable technologies as a requisite to viewing their content.
So, I sit here, with a pretty fast system, as its pretty simple. I have no virus scanning going on, as I am not running just anything I get in. I do have an integrity monitor running, which does a quickie on startup to see if any critical files are amiss ( it just calculates an MD5 on my key executables and compares to what they should be. ).. if so, booting to GUI is aborted and I drop to DOS to straighten it out - but its never happened outside a test situation.
I keep getting all these people telling me I should upgrade and be current with the times. I would gladly upgrade if the later stuff was actually better and more robust than the earlier stuff - but thats not what I see.
Oh yes, the "presentation skills" are definitely better on the new stuff, but I see the new systems much like a stunningly beautiful secretary that I can't trust, and spends a helluva lot of time doing her makeup.
I try to tell these business people what they are getting into by running software that hasn't been verified for trustworthiness, but they seem happy to go ahead and do it anyway as long as there is someone else to blame if things go amiss. I hoot till I'm blue in the face about these businessmen who put content on the web that can only be viewed with proprietary readers, whose underlying trojan motives, if any, can no longer be legally ascertained as a result of the DMCA.
I am especially puzzled by business's perception of proper etiquette. Would they hire a sales rep that constantly interrupted a customer in mid-question with comments on his grammar or spelling? Or worse yet, rudely hangs up on customers if they don't understand something? Is not a corporate web-site their sales-rep in cyberspace? Why would a business hire such rude representatives that coin their own protocols and chide the customers relentlessly for not adhering to their latest incarnations of the communications protocol "standard"?
At the risk of redundancy, I'll say it again. I do not like these proprietary unverifiable protocols. I consider them very risky - to me. I really don't care if YOU get hit with a virus, but I don't want any part of it.
Ok.. I just had to get this off my chest. It might cost me a bit of karma, but I had to say it in public in the hopes that someone in management that makes the decisions will hear my plea.
When I showed the remains of my tester to my supervisor, I remember him looking at it, then at me, and chuckling... and him telling me that that was strike one. Maybe I had better go to the machine shop and have one of those guys show me how its done at Chevron - you aren't in College anymore. I did. The next incarnation looked more like a tank than a piece of test equipment. The most expensive assembly in the whole thing was the case! I ended up using 50AMP switches to control milliamps. Not for current - but because of mechanical considerations. And the electronics were no longer designed for serviceability - they were now designed to last as long as possible in a very hostile environment. It was a lot cheaper to build another electronics package than to have one fail in use. So I ended up encapsulating the whole digitizer/display in a big lucite block ( like those paperweights you see stuff embedded in ) with four wires coming out of it. The case was a modified industrial explosion-proof housing, and the connectors were those huge oversized connectors used on welding rigs, with the connector holes going right through the case, so that in the event you dropped it in the muck below ( very probable ) you could pick it back up, hold it under the steam trap when it vented and blow the muck back off the device. And yes, you could plug a welding lead in it and use it as a test lead if you had to. The big 50 AMP switch turned the box on, off, or connected the input leads in such a manner as to charge its internal battery off the truck battery by "measuring" the truck battery. And it had very powerful magnets on the back to hold it to against the tank.
About the steam trap: Because heavy oils get so viscous when cold, they keep the pipes hot by bundling them with steam pipes under a sheath of insulation. But in the process of keeping the oil hot, the steam condenses back to water. Steam traps are gravitically operated valves which detect a buildup of water in the line and periodically open and vent the water out. They are very common on piping around heavy-oil processing.
We are talking about some really thick black sticky goo here - and lots of it. In the event of a problem, the goo may well be in places it shouldn't be. So, it was entirely likely that there be goo all over the place when trying to fix the problem. And its outside. And its cold. And its in the middle of the night. And its blowing rain. And forget papers, the wind's blowing rain around like all getout. And the mess is getting worse by the minute until you find and fix whatever broke.
I remember well my day in the field - I came all prepared with drawings. And all my engineering goodies. The first thing that happened was a big gust of rainy wind sent my entire book of drawings across the tank farm with gusto. The book binding snapped apart on the first strike onto the ground, while the individual pages, now free, scattered within seconds, over several miles of muddy terrain. All the stuff which served me so nicely in the lab was gone within minutes.. I think the lead pencil was all that really survived. It was me against the elements now. It seemed only nature could design anything to survive against this. If you didn't wear heavy protective clothing, you were soon so cold you could not feel a thing. If you did, you were so cumbersome that there was no way you were going to adjust any little knob or find the hole to plug the lead into, or not break the lead even if you did succeed in getting it in the little hole.
Ever try to hold anything with big heavy greasy gl
No, I am not placing blame... anyone would run the AC at 116 degrees. The problem is that you had to... not that you did.
As our climate goes out of control, we expend more and more resources trying to maintain localized habitable spots. Which necessitates burning more fossil fuel, which exacerbates the situation.
I guess its moot in a way cause our generation won't have to worry about it. But in a way I feel partly responsible for the situations I am setting up for those coming later if I don't choose wisely. I am quite concerned over what I perceive to be a rather lackadaisical attitude over the consumption of our earthly resources... especially here in the United States, where it appears there is so much wealth that conservation is not only completely uncalled for, its actually discouraged so as to encourage economic growth based on production of frivolous things.
We have more than enough things to go around, but we arrange things so that no-one has time to spend with family.. I became an engineer in the hopes that I could contribute to the demise of the mandatory two-incomes needed to maintain today's social status... and I have spent near my whole life and have not made a dent. We spend our lives in a hurried rush burning our environment and making junk. I'm sad to be so cynical, but from my seat, I perceive humanity as behaving like so many rats, eating and defecating over their environment, until its spent, then there will be the day of large quantities of rotting rat when the system is exhausted. I am just hoping we are smart enough to control our demands on our support physics to avoid that scenario.
Here's the justification... In quantity, I can get pretty good optical mice for less than $10/each.
If I buy a cases of them at a time, I get identical mice.. i.e. I do not need to change any setups when I changeout mice.
Time is money. If these mice are getting dirty because people are busy doing something grimey and don't practice good computer hygiene, look how much you are paying the guy to stop what he's doing and try to pamper the mouse. There is no way on God's Green Earth I am going to face some machinist and demand he wash before he uses the machine. I consider it MY job to find the proper equipment so he can do HIS job. The way I see it, I derive my pay from the end customer, who is most likely buying the product the machinist made, not me! I support the machinist - it should not be beholden on him to support me.
This reminds me when I was a brand spanking new engineer on my first job at Chevron Oil Company. I designed a nifty little circuit tester for the mechanics to verify tank gauge readings with. They had it one day. At the end of the day, they brought me back my tester. In a bag. There were not many parts still connected to another anymore. They never got a chance to use it. It did not survive the trip to the job site in the back of the pickup truck, in the toolbox with all the other oilman tools, over rough terrain, to the job site. It taught me a damm good lesson. The next tester I sent to them had a lot better mechanical design - this one would take a ride in a pickup truck bed along with wrenches so heavy I could barely lift ( much less use ). And take submersion in mud, oil, or whatever, and take well to cleaning by being held under a venting steam trap.
Not in my wildest imaginations as a College student did I realize what the men in the field went through, and how they had to improvise using what they had on hand right then to get the job done. Anyone could do it, given infinite time, and catalog in hand, but an experienced mechanic would do things just right in ways I never would have considered. Just one day in the field with those guys gave me a whole different outlook on my relationship with what the company did. I consider them the most hardworking, intelligent, and no-bullshit folks I have ever had the pleasure of working with.
If you can't design the mice so they take well to the job, just plan on replacing them. About the last thing you want to do is mess up the people who are making the products that are sold to provide for your paycheck.
Note the "prismatic lorgnettes" about midway through the article which describes a little pair of prismatic glasses designed to trick the eye to view side-by-side images.
So I didn't RTFA.
I'm assuming its similar to this .
I just hope the solution was more inventive than doing the old theatrical movie stunt about using relative shifting of color information and celluloid glasses - which gives you depth information at the expense of color information. Spy Kids 3D just did this using a blue or green image for the left eye and a red image for the right.. That one's been around since the 40's. In both movie and book. Cute trick but it gives me headaches to see it for any length of time.
Boston Tea Party
Well, it was taxes and tea in those days that had the people all miffed... could it be things like copyrights and DMCA, coupled with the frustration of not being able to enforce your needs that push people over the edge these days?
And enforce the hell out of it during that time.
And at the end of that time, it becomes public domain.
So if you want the latest stuff, pay. We are trying to reward the guys that actually *do* something, not guys that sit on their arse milking work they did seven years ago. Would you hire an employee who expects to remain on the payroll because he did something seven years ago? I thought copyright was to reward the artist for creating, not reward some bozo for sitting on things so nobody else can use it. Excessive copyright time limits only encourage monopolies and extortion, not creativity.
I think a lot of this civil disobedience we are seeing today is a result of this one-sided law we are seeing passed - and a lot of people are getting pissed. They will take it for only so long before we have another Boston Tea Party.
Under the existing technology, a spammer is like the royal pest on a city bus which takes advantage of the captive audience. The analogy here is that we have to download our POP box, we have no way of arranging our affairs to where the signals exist, but we deliberately choose not to tap into them.
I believe the technology must change. I am loathe to try to settle what I consider a technological issue by passing some sort of law... doing this just makes immense profits for litigators, but does little to solve the underlying problems.
If the technology could change to where ISP's could provide individual bayesian-type filters at the server level so that messages fitting criteria that each individual screens for, this could let the ISP off the hook for dropping messages, as well as having to supply any long-term storage for them... Somehow I get the idea that spammed messages are going to be very similar and should show a very marked correlation to the same spam sent to other accounts in that ISP. The ISP, upon determining a significant number of accounts filters have flagged a particular mailing as a spam may provide the ISP with the opportunity to only store ONE copy of the spam, while possibly putting only pointers to it to the subscribers.
So, what I would think would solve this is if the internet became more like radio transmissions. I support the idea that anybody can transmit whatever they want to the public, and if anyone wants to listen in, fine. But, like RF, it has to make it through the filters before it gets to the listener. The damn-near infinite advantage to the net-based paradigm is we have an almost infinite bandwidth in the notion that anyone can set up his transmitter and not step on someone else's signal. ( i.e, there's only so many "channels" in the AM, FM, or TV broadcast bands, whereas the internet does not have this limitation. ).
Anyway, thats my two cents worth.
I think its high time we are forced to look at the law we are passing and consider whether or not it is good law.
I think every analog ( that is, tuned with a variable capacitor ) radio out there that can tune these frequencies will do so. So whats the big deal?
If privacy is a big concern, go scrambled digital. Go ahead and listen if you wanna.. it'll sound like white noise to you unless you have its decryption codes. Many of us that have a desire to tune through the cellular bands have no urge whatsoever to eavesdrop on calls - we are trying to find spectral areas where EMI is causing a problem.. say somebody keys some cellphone in an area and something else goes haywire - this kinda thing is often traced to something as simple as a piece of wire that just happened to be cut to resonance.. ( this works in the RF arena just like a loose piece of metal on your car rattles at a certain speed in the mechanical arena.)
Being this thing is such a wide-range receiver, and apparently also functions as a spectrum analyzer, it sure seems like a moot enforcement of what I consider stupid law to cripple it in such a manner as to render it useless for determining RF "pollution" in such a common area as cellphone spectrum. Especially being there are so many other ways of eavesdropping cell calls if thats what you really wanted to do. This thing would probably be one of the most expensive cell phone monitors you could buy if thats what you wanted it for.
This is such a neat piece of engineering. I just hate to see pesky law poke holes in it. For no good reason at all as I see it.
And you cellphone users: if you want privacy, encrypt your damm calls.
Just use a prism or diffraction grating to pick whatever frequency you want. A little movement around the focal point for pickup can easily control how much power enters the fiber pickups.
As far as I am concerned, I think its a helluva clever plan. A good-sized collector can easily give you several orders of magnitude more energy than you need, so control of the energy to assure a highly stable amount actually in the fiber should not be a problem.
Why does something have to be expensive, hard to maintain, complicated, or use exquisite technology to be considered useful? Some of the handiest things I have are also the simplest.
Things like this is what makes technical development "worth it" for me. Anybody can design something that has lots and lots of bloat in the design, but one who truely understands the problem and the physics of the resources at hand will design an elegant solution. Remember that really clever little beer-mug-needs-filling chip design discussed a few days ago here on /. ? That is the essence of good design. I think this is too.