I think they are taking a step in the right direction... especially their choice of OS.
If I see this right, it will be kinda like a computer with a lot of mobile interface built-in, so it could be programmed with things its creator never dreamed of, much as Linux is probably being programmed with things Linus never thought of.
I can think already of a whole plethora of things I could program this beastie for.. like when I am under the car and I want it to look up a database and show me where some wire connects to. Or "staying awake", watching my surroundings, when I snooze off. Basically, I kinda see this as a self-propelled laptop which I never switch off... something coming with a lot of rudimentary intelligence for recognizing its environment, yet leaving itself open for any training I may want to give it. ( A closed-source box is absolutely useless in this regard - getting one of those would be about as useful as getting a tool that only does a specific thing - said specific thing most likely being something I have no need of.)
I've seen the little robotic dog... cute! Nice toy. I've seen where people were able to program it to do all sorts of cute little tricks. Now, if they play their cards right and make this one completely open source, I think they will make one of those things that everyone will want. Even if you do not have the skills to program it yourself, there will be many people who do, and programs will circulate among the net. I think if they are smart, they will provide the hardware and enough software to demonstrate what can be done, then stand back and wait for the flood of orders to the factory.. as I think they may have trouble building them fast enough.
No Gravity! No Oxygen! Consider how hard it is on Earth to try to refine metals when we not only have to burn tremendous amounts of carbon-based fuels to get heat, and then use even more carbon-based materials (coke-not the stuff you drink) to keep air away from it while you try to process it.
In space, just about any amount of heat you want can be provided by a parabolic reflector, aimed at the Sun. There is no air to contaminate your materials. There is no gravity trying to move your materials around... they will have a tendency to stay just where you put them.
I forsee the day when things like very high grades of steel are fabricated in space, then formed into a sort of robotic glider. The gliders make a one-way trip to Earth, landing wherever you want, where their materials are then stripped to construct buildings or whatever else you may want the steels for.
Think of all the pollution that would never have been generated because the sun, not the burning of fossil fuels, provided the energy to refine the metals.
The one thing I am concerned with is the pollution of space though. Maybe its no big deal, but its not the existence of the objects that scare me, it is the velocity of the objects. Imagine being hit by the proverbial tossed beer-bottle travelling at 16,000 miles per hour.
I was just speaking as an old analog designer. I often counted on, say, a 1-watt resistor being able to dissipate 0.6 watts easily in a biasing circuit.. but if the airflow was impeded, the resistor would overheat. Over time, with 0.6 watts (thermal) being generated in the resistor, and no transport to remove it, it was trouble waiting to happen. The resistor did not need a heat sink normally, as its body itself presented adequate surface area to the coolant stream. I'm not saying that *will* happen, but in today's cost conscious environment, don't count on things like the transformers, resistors, and maybe even inoccous things like driver transistors *not* overheating if their designer assumed there would be airflow.
You have *many* things generating heat.. and the airflow touches all of them.
If you water-cool, you will have to plumb all of the heat sources.
( I understand the Cray's were freon-cooled, that is they submerged the whole kit'n'kaboodle into a tank of freon - a nonconconductive nonionic noncorrosive fluid - to cool it. Any component radiating heat would have it absorbed by the liquid coolant a heckuva lot better than air could, but I am counting on another slashdotter to verify/confirm this. )
Note: he may pull a vacuum on the water circuit. That will cause water to flash into steam at a lower temperature.
Remember the old high school science class where the teacher would hook a vacuum pump to a bell jar and the beaker inside would boil when he pulled a vacuum?
Many times while surfing the net, I am looking for something I need. They do not need a big ad, but it needs to be appropriately placed.
My best example of ads done right is Google.
Many times, their ads along the right of the results page have been exactly what I was looking for, and their appropriate placement saved me a lot of time.
Yeh, maybe he got a bit excited when he was typing his post and minced a few words. I do it a lot.
Maybe what this is all about is that a digital camera does not have the same spectral sensitivity as a human eye. Note you can take pictures of infrared handheld remotes with a digital camera, as the IR emitters are within the spectral window of the silicon imager, however our human retinas do not register a thing.
There is a very good chance the camera recorded phenomena in the infrared range that our human eyes cannot see.
I think the pizza driver who is coerced into unsafe practices to deliver $10 worth of pizza knows it firsthand. If he doesn't deliver, they will find someone else who says they will.
NASA was forced to "cut corners" to save "costs". But maintain "productivity".
We did not allocate enough resources to do it right. Now we will have to do it over.
Honestly ( and my religion runs me out of town for saying it ), I do not know what God is.
The only way I see I can study God is to study science, because it is the only God which is evident to me. I can only study my creator by studying creation. I have no idea what it is. A person? A spirit? I flat do not have the foggiest idea yet. But it does not mean I will try to find out.
I have no intention of accepting anything cuz someone says so. I need proof. I feel I can preach when I have some concrete evidence to support my position.
If I gave the intent of preaching, my sincere apology. anubi.
I think this thread shows a great deal of insight. We are messing around right now with the structures which will allow us to use biology in much the same way we have designed mechanical structures in the past: Genomic Development - Hacking the DNA codes themselves.
It wasn't all that long ago in the scheme of things that we harnessed some of the energy flows we found in nature. Now, I think we are on the virge of something far greater.
When God ( insert your own belief here on how everything came to be ) created the Universe and any/all life in it, He provided a heckuva lot of DNA coding examples for us. The Firefly. The Electric Eel. Viruses ( Yes, they are a splendid example of how to alter existing code in a cell ), even cancer itself can be seen as something to be harnessed, as the time may come we *want* something to take something else over. There is an almost infinite variety of code segments out there that do all sorts of useful things. If we can figure out how to take the code snippets that do useful things and arrange them in such a manner to provide useful functions, we will arrive in the next generation of our "evolution". I believe God meant us to do this. I find no other reason He coded his work with so many examples of how to do things. Like a textbook! If God had wanted sheep, He would have stopped there.
I hope the best for the Space Program. It is my firm belief God expects us to leave Earth one day, because He made Pulsars. Can you imagine interstellar navigation in four dimensions ( remember time shifts come into play when we start talking substantial velocities ), without stellar "lighthouses" which generate extremely consistent and unique timing pulses which can be seen from anywhere in the Universe? I think that was such insight to provide such a thing.
Food for thought for me. Thanks. God, for all the toys! May we use them for the benefit of all.
If anything, requiring fingerprints or retinal scans will make these ids more secure and trustworthy.
So true. There is nothing really private anymore right now anyway. Just let a patrolman run your driver licence, it all shows up. If you want to be persistent, you can follow the links from there.
But what if you lost your wallet? Who can really tell if your signature is valid? And so many friggen credit cards and the like to track.
I get the idea is to have something that you have that nobody else is *likely* to have. I get the idea of marking anybody is going to go over very poorly, as the Bible has already warned us about accepting the "Mark of the Beast". Besides a mark on someone would make a poor identifier - a good tattoo artist could probably spoof one as quickly as a good geek can spoof an IP.
It may be hard for a store clerk to tell if it is *really* you signing the sales slip. But it is darned hard to fake out a retinal scan ( my preferred ) or fingerprint ( not preferred because prints can be corrupted by many things, as well as something worse I'll discuss in a moment).
If the retinal scan parameters are stored in the remote database, like the PIN is now, there would be no way to spoof the card in such a manner to validate it or recover the data which would pass the remote server's verification. Because the data is simply not there.
Right now, if someone mugs someone else for their ATM card, and they are in a secluded spot, they can almost always coerce the PIN number from the victim with sufficient.. er... "incentives" ( providing the mugger stays in control ).
Imagine trying to mug someone for their wallet, only to discover what you took is going to require the person you mugged's eyes looking into the ATM before you get anything. You are gonna look damned suspicious to all bystander for any method you try to get those eyes into scan position.
That's the other reason why I recommend against fingerprints, especially at ATM's. It would give a mugger reason to mutilate his victim. I hate to be so gruesome, but I tend to consider what could happen if the circumstances demanded it... only things you needed was the ATM card and the victim's fingers and take it to that 24 hour ATM at 3AM.
Without use of amplifiers, if they want to make the noise of 10,000 musicians, they would have to hire 10,000 musicians. Amplifiers put musicians out of work!
I guess someone else is getting it.. because I'm not getting any.
They clamped down at the College on P2P. I used to bring a Zip Disk along and download a few samples using the lab's high speed access. I "met" all of my favorite artists that way. Example: I had no idea of who "Enya" was, but I got one of her songs on one of my kinda random downloads, I liked it. I found several more of hers. Liked them too. Next thing I know, when I was in any record store, I was looking for her CD's... I think I have her complete set now ( except for one compilation CD ). These were all purchased.
Now that I have been prohibited from sampling the music, I find something odd happening. Although I still go into the record store, there is now nothing running through my head that I want to buy. I see rows upon rows of CD's, but to me they are just so much clutter - I have no idea what they are - they may as well be in another language. I just do not see a thing I'm specifically looking for
I know what the problem is... I do not listen to the radio anymore. They would continuously play the hot list, interspersed with as much jabber as they thought I would tolerate. Problem is now its not just the "top 40" I have to choose from... its literally thousands of different titles in the store... and I don't know the slightest thing about any of the new ones.. I just remember some of the oldies from earlier years.
Yes, the store does have listening kiosks, but each only has access to maybe 5 CD's, and I am quite uncomfortable having to stand in one spot for several minutes at a time trying to listen to them. Its not at all like queueing the disk up I made at College and having it play in the background while I do my homework, then if something strikes me while listening, reopening the jukebox window to see what it was. Most of the stuff I got at College was crap anyway, but there were a few gems in it, such as Enya and others. Well, maybe not crap - because music preferences are so unique to each individual, but definitely not mine.
I remember when I used to get excited about Baseball games. Then they had a strike. During the strike, I found something else to do. Guess what, I haven't been back to a game since! Now, it seems I take just about as much interest in how far some baseball player hits the friggen ball as I suspect he cares how I did on my calculus exam. I find once I "get out of sync" with something, I lose interest in it.
Yes, I guess the **AA may have won this one on me - as not only have I not downloaded for about 4 months now, nor have I had any reason to buy any recordings either.
I am not for sure that they really wanted what they won.
Ashton Tate was the publisher of dBASE (II, III, and IV) and not 1,2,3 (which was published by Lotus, Inc.)
Whoops, I stand corrected. I made several little boo-boos.
I have the the DOS database too - dBASE III, and I guess I was thinking of it when I was typing, but it was 1-2-3 ( release 3.1) that I used a lot. Both 1-2-3 and MathCad were really neat little spreadsheets - incredibly simple little things. DOS.
I guess those things to me were the equivalent of screwdrivers and pliers.. sometimes I really do not need a lot of sophistication to "get the lid off a can of paint". Or do some plain numerical analysis. If it was really weird, I would hit it with the C++ compiler, which was guaranteed to handle any problem that I ever messed with.
I still have licensed copies of dBase III and IV, and Lotus 2.2, but unfortunately they're on 5 1/4 diskettes, and hence useless
I note the hardware on even the latest machines still seem to support the old 5 inch drives. Try to find an older floppy and its companion cable. Remember, the 3 inch drives use the pins, but the older 5 inch drives had connectors fabricated as part of the pcb etch itself. The connections themselves were in the same order. The trick is having the old card edge connectors
on the cable. The old cables had both card-edge and pin socket connectors. The power connectors on those old 5" drives were the same as on a 3" hard drive. Plug it up and your bios should recognize you now have drives A and B. Then, with any luck, you should be able to copy all files from one to the other. Hopefully, the disks are old enough, (pre copy restriction paranoria), that you can recover the program onto your new media.
I have a lot of old stuff thats still on the 5 inch media. Some even in the 360K format, and I can still read them on my latest Pentiums. Remember, the one at the end of the cable is Drive A.
Good post otherwise... could be a troll, though... hmmmm
Believe me, I would hardly want to use so much of my own time, as well as everyone else's, to post a troll. These are just observations I have had, and I post them in the same way that I would post a program I may have worked long and hard on for any benefit others may get from it. I guess its my way of trying to repay those who have shared with me. By the time I finished it though, I did have reservations it might be modded ( Score -1: Windbag ):-0
sn0wcrash - you must have some experience to see this.
I guess I was in my mid 30's when I started really noticing how much work it was to have to re-do things that I had done poorly the first time. I think the catch phrase went something like " If you can't find the time to do it right, you will make the time to do it over.".
I have lived through galvanized pipe - I will never have it again. Do you know how much work it is to have to strip the plumbing infrastructure from a house to re-do it? I do. Copper went back in. I soldered it personally. Never again will I have anything to do with galvanized pipe where I can't get to it.
I moved from another house because I discovered it had aluminum wiring.
There are some things I have learned to very highly value, and thats the elegance of things made right. I have a toaster, made by Sunbeam Electric Company, that was given to my parents as a wedding gift. I am no spring chicken either, but I still use that toaster every morning. ( Well, maybe that's why Sunbeam is out of business, they never sold me another one? ), but I really like that toaster. I have one of the very first microwave ovens ever built. It was a prototype, or at least that was what was stamped on its innards. It still works.
When I took my first job in a major oil refinery, I participated in, a huge effort to put all our plant drawings into a CAD system, then powered with DEC computers. I watched as the company then abandoned the computers, going to another system - but the data files were incompatible, so they had to do it all over. What a waste!!! I learned by observation how much effort could have been saved if there had been such a thing as a standard data file. I learned the value of things like simple ascii files and comma-delimited-format database files.
Technology will change. Most of the time, its been for the better, but many of the "improvements" to me are of dubious real value. Is a 1GHz Pentium laptop, which goes through batteries at an astronomical pace really any better than that old Radio Shach model 100 computer which used to get hundreds of hours on a set of penlight cells, albeit it only had a simple text LCD screen? I have a little 386SX laptop I like because it gets around 40 hours on its battery if I use the backlight sparingly. The screen is a little crude for graphics, and admittedly its a bit slow if its a graphics intensive program, such as font mapping under Win 3.1.. but if I am doing text stuff, I drop to DOS anyway because the machine is hundreds of times faster than I am when its using its hardware mapped character generator. But I can have the machine on from the time I leave the house, through the airport, on the plane, through the taxi trip, onto the hotel, and still have the battery running. Maybe Ashton-Tate 1-2-3 is a little dated, but it works. Same with MathCad. And the Futurenet electronic schematic editor. And the Spice analyzer. And the PCB Layout program. And my Borland C++ compiler. And the file sizes are small. And the files were simpler then. Most of the time, even if something does happen, I can usually open the files with a hexadecimal editor and see what the problem is.
I have really learned the value of trying to do things right the first time so you do not *have* to do it over ( usually at the most inconvient of times ). I like having the option of replacing something when *I* feel its warranted, not when someone else gets it into their head they want to commandeer me to do so.
I have worked with enough businesses now that I can see the smart ones do this too. You will see the smart ones configuring things so they get their system in place, then start using that system to make money... not so smart businesses never get their system working, as parts of it are constantly failing and needing to be replaced... kinda like that guy who never figured out what kind of plumbing would run till the proverbial cows come home, and which one would necessitate a constant stream of work to keep it running. Yes, I know one has to know how to solder to install copper, but in the long term, doing it right the first time leaves you free to spend your remaining time doing what was really important, now that your infrastructure is stable.
The best example I can think of for GOOD ENGINEERING is the old Romans. They built roads and water aqueducts which are even in use today. Its not like *everything* needs to last an eternity, but I consider it a really good investment if one designs the Important Stuff to last the proverbial eternity. That way its there until *you* decide to change it.
So, according to the proposal at ITWorld ( http://www.itworld.com/Net/4087/030131euantipiracy / ), "Peer-to-peer file-sharing services that encourage copyright infringement and make money from advertising are commercial, according to the Commission. "That is illegal and should be stopped," the Commission said. Examples of file sharing services are Kazaa and Morpheus."
I thought that was exactly the thing which the recording industry was so miffed about - and this legislation is nailing that one straight on.
I still wonder about how hard they are going to hit onto what I consider "fair use". I consider placing of impediments to fair use applications to be a severe infringement of MY rights.
This stuff telling me I can not make backup and make proper use of what it is I am purchasing.. well looks like the European Commission didn't like it much either. I wonder how the European Union recognizes it. I hope they recognize a noose when they see it.
Don't get me wrong, I am not an unreasonable man...I am willing to compromise my position.
If you want me to give up my right to make backups, you *must* be willing to provide me with one at any time in the future I may need one - and be willing to compensate me for my time and other losses that was incurred because I put said product in a critical position, when having backups in place would have eliminated that loss.
Remember, the vendor will have to issue me the exact software I had running with whatever patches I had applied... or come in and make whatever he has work in a way that is acceptable to *me*.
I can bend too in my belief that I am not supposed to "reverse engineer" the product to try to make it work, if the vendor is also willing to take unlimited liability in assuring me the software does what it says it does, nothing more, and nothing less. So if I get some software that sent stuff out on the net, I would have recourse to recover from the vendor whatever I valued the data it sent at. Basically the same law they had the US Congress pass for them, but directed back at them as the target of the Liability.
I do not think I am asking anything unreasonable, its just if you want to take away my rights to try to make the thing work, you will take on that responsibility of making it work. If you want to do something behind my back and don't want me to see - you will take full responsibility for what it does.
The same Top 40 songs are heard day in and day out in every city. Nothing changes. Only artists with big media contracts (Sony, Columbia, etc.) can afford to buy air time.
So the "big media" likes to *pay* to "afford air time". I wonder if these are the same "big media" which are suing Kazaa for distributing the same songs. For free.
Unfortunately, I am replying to a post of score 0. If I could mod the parent up, I would. There is a good chance this post won't ever be seen, but I will post my reply anyway for the benefit for the poster above me and the one who asked Slashdot.
This phenomena noted by AC is real. I have noted from much "autopsy" that failure of aluminum electrolytic capacitors is very common after only a few years, even if that, of service.
This is the failure mechanism: the aluminum electrolytics are highly stressed by the high pulse currents generated by switching power supplies. Within a few hours ( often in the thousands, but could be in the hundreds ), the ESR (Equivalent Series Resistance) of the capacitor begins to climb. When that occurs, the capacitor begins not only failing to accept the current pulse which was supposed to charge it, but begins to dissipate that energy, which was intended for the load, as heat. It gets hot. Fast. Then it pops open as its releases its innards of boiling electrolyte. ( Thats why you see those little grooves pressed into the top of the electrolytic capacitor cans...they are stress reliefs... they are supposed to rip open and vent the capacitor before it holds the pressure of boiling electrolyte in long enough to explode. Literally. )
I see this a lot in the main switching power supply in PC's. The tip off is watching the power supply with an analog oscilloscope while loading the power supply with things such as 12V 25watt lamps while it is powering the computer. Under running circumstances, this amount of power may only be consumed during a disk seek, but to make the phenomena continuously visible, you have to provide this extra load. If the power supply is having problems, you will see it drop voltage as its capacitors fail to supply the energy. Usually at a 60Hz rate, as only one of the two capacitors in the main voltage doubler is failing, 120HZ drops mean they are both failing.
These instantaneous and very-short lived power glitches do wonderful things to the software being executed. It makes the computer do the damndest things you ever did see. You would think you were hit by a really weird virus... and may spend months trying to track it down. I did. By the time I was closing in on this, I was seriously concerned that my debuggers themselves were infected, because weird jumps kept happening - for no reason at all as I could discern! The pattern had absolutely no rhyme or reason to it as far as I could see, and it was driving me absolutely nuts.
Being I've seen this now, I am quite quick to grab the oscilloscope and test lamps ( banks of #93 or other automotive bulbs connected to a disk-drive power connector so I can just plug 'em in to whatever spare disk-drive power connector I can find in the computer ) when I see unexplained stuff that looks too weird to be a virus.
(Note: Power-up with the bulbs connected. The step-function of the load, as well as cold-resistance of the lamps - make it very inadvisable to connect/remove lamp load while the power supply is energized. )
Yup. I looked at Pressplay and MusicNet which the music industry was pushing... same old stuff. It required special stuff to play it and it was full of restrictions. I could not legally buy what it is I wanted (plain MP3). Sorry, not interested. I think an understanding of what the market wants is in order.
Let me relate a personal experience. I generated a post on Slashdot on another forum. Looking back on it, I should not have posted it, but I did. It was promptly moderated down to -1 (redundant).
Did the moderators have anything against me? I think not. It was a crappy post.
What did I learn? Slashdot provided me with a forum where I could run an idea up the pole and see if anybody salutes it. In this case, they pissed on it. The system worked. I simply had a lousy approach. Often I do not see my own fallacy, but others did. Once it was pointed out to me, it was obvious. I shall not grace the pages of Slashdot with another post of the likes of that ever again.
How does that relate to this topic? The industry is trying again and again to force something down our throats. We "moderate", via the market, that the concept is not to our liking. It is up to the industry to either come back with something better or just drop the whole idea. Coming back with the same marketing plan is paramount to me making a similar post to the one everyone pissed on. History will repeat itself, and much money and time will be invested uselessly.
Slashdot Mirror
If I see this right, it will be kinda like a computer with a lot of mobile interface built-in, so it could be programmed with things its creator never dreamed of, much as Linux is probably being programmed with things Linus never thought of.
I can think already of a whole plethora of things I could program this beastie for.. like when I am under the car and I want it to look up a database and show me where some wire connects to. Or "staying awake", watching my surroundings, when I snooze off. Basically, I kinda see this as a self-propelled laptop which I never switch off... something coming with a lot of rudimentary intelligence for recognizing its environment, yet leaving itself open for any training I may want to give it. ( A closed-source box is absolutely useless in this regard - getting one of those would be about as useful as getting a tool that only does a specific thing - said specific thing most likely being something I have no need of.)
I've seen the little robotic dog... cute! Nice toy. I've seen where people were able to program it to do all sorts of cute little tricks. Now, if they play their cards right and make this one completely open source, I think they will make one of those things that everyone will want. Even if you do not have the skills to program it yourself, there will be many people who do, and programs will circulate among the net. I think if they are smart, they will provide the hardware and enough software to demonstrate what can be done, then stand back and wait for the flood of orders to the factory.. as I think they may have trouble building them fast enough.
No Gravity! No Oxygen! Consider how hard it is on Earth to try to refine metals when we not only have to burn tremendous amounts of carbon-based fuels to get heat, and then use even more carbon-based materials (coke-not the stuff you drink) to keep air away from it while you try to process it.
In space, just about any amount of heat you want can be provided by a parabolic reflector, aimed at the Sun. There is no air to contaminate your materials. There is no gravity trying to move your materials around... they will have a tendency to stay just where you put them.
I forsee the day when things like very high grades of steel are fabricated in space, then formed into a sort of robotic glider. The gliders make a one-way trip to Earth, landing wherever you want, where their materials are then stripped to construct buildings or whatever else you may want the steels for.
Think of all the pollution that would never have been generated because the sun, not the burning of fossil fuels, provided the energy to refine the metals.
The one thing I am concerned with is the pollution of space though. Maybe its no big deal, but its not the existence of the objects that scare me, it is the velocity of the objects. Imagine being hit by the proverbial tossed beer-bottle travelling at 16,000 miles per hour.
You have *many* things generating heat .. and the airflow touches all of them.
If you water-cool, you will have to plumb all of the heat sources.
( I understand the Cray's were freon-cooled, that is they submerged the whole kit'n'kaboodle into a tank of freon - a nonconconductive nonionic noncorrosive fluid - to cool it. Any component radiating heat would have it absorbed by the liquid coolant a heckuva lot better than air could, but I am counting on another slashdotter to verify/confirm this. )
Remember the old high school science class where the teacher would hook a vacuum pump to a bell jar and the beaker inside would boil when he pulled a vacuum?
Many times while surfing the net, I am looking for something I need. They do not need a big ad, but it needs to be appropriately placed.
My best example of ads done right is Google.
Many times, their ads along the right of the results page have been exactly what I was looking for, and their appropriate placement saved me a lot of time.
Maybe what this is all about is that a digital camera does not have the same spectral sensitivity as a human eye. Note you can take pictures of infrared handheld remotes with a digital camera, as the IR emitters are within the spectral window of the silicon imager, however our human retinas do not register a thing.
There is a very good chance the camera recorded phenomena in the infrared range that our human eyes cannot see.
"Faster, Better, Cheaper."
I think the pizza driver who is coerced into unsafe practices to deliver $10 worth of pizza knows it firsthand. If he doesn't deliver, they will find someone else who says they will.
NASA was forced to "cut corners" to save "costs". But maintain "productivity".
We did not allocate enough resources to do it right. Now we will have to do it over.
Its a lesson we have to learn over and over.
Honestly ( and my religion runs me out of town for saying it ), I do not know what God is.
The only way I see I can study God is to study science, because it is the only God which is evident to me. I can only study my creator by studying creation. I have no idea what it is. A person? A spirit? I flat do not have the foggiest idea yet. But it does not mean I will try to find out.
I have no intention of accepting anything cuz someone says so. I need proof. I feel I can preach when I have some concrete evidence to support my position.
If I gave the intent of preaching, my sincere apology. anubi.
It wasn't all that long ago in the scheme of things that we harnessed some of the energy flows we found in nature. Now, I think we are on the virge of something far greater.
When God ( insert your own belief here on how everything came to be ) created the Universe and any/all life in it, He provided a heckuva lot of DNA coding examples for us. The Firefly. The Electric Eel. Viruses ( Yes, they are a splendid example of how to alter existing code in a cell ), even cancer itself can be seen as something to be harnessed, as the time may come we *want* something to take something else over. There is an almost infinite variety of code segments out there that do all sorts of useful things. If we can figure out how to take the code snippets that do useful things and arrange them in such a manner to provide useful functions, we will arrive in the next generation of our "evolution". I believe God meant us to do this. I find no other reason He coded his work with so many examples of how to do things. Like a textbook! If God had wanted sheep, He would have stopped there.
I hope the best for the Space Program. It is my firm belief God expects us to leave Earth one day, because He made Pulsars. Can you imagine interstellar navigation in four dimensions ( remember time shifts come into play when we start talking substantial velocities ), without stellar "lighthouses" which generate extremely consistent and unique timing pulses which can be seen from anywhere in the Universe? I think that was such insight to provide such a thing.
Food for thought for me. Thanks. God, for all the toys! May we use them for the benefit of all.
The state assesses what they think my property is worth and they send me a bill for about 1% of that.
I note the states seem to be having a budget shortfall.
And a lot of people in the state with the worst budget problems are discussing millions of dollars and property in the same sentence.
Hmmm... I pay "property tax" to the government so they recognize and protect my property...
I think you know where I am going with this.
So true. There is nothing really private anymore right now anyway. Just let a patrolman run your driver licence, it all shows up. If you want to be persistent, you can follow the links from there.
But what if you lost your wallet? Who can really tell if your signature is valid? And so many friggen credit cards and the like to track.
I get the idea is to have something that you have that nobody else is *likely* to have. I get the idea of marking anybody is going to go over very poorly, as the Bible has already warned us about accepting the "Mark of the Beast". Besides a mark on someone would make a poor identifier - a good tattoo artist could probably spoof one as quickly as a good geek can spoof an IP.
It may be hard for a store clerk to tell if it is *really* you signing the sales slip. But it is darned hard to fake out a retinal scan ( my preferred ) or fingerprint ( not preferred because prints can be corrupted by many things, as well as something worse I'll discuss in a moment).
If the retinal scan parameters are stored in the remote database, like the PIN is now, there would be no way to spoof the card in such a manner to validate it or recover the data which would pass the remote server's verification. Because the data is simply not there.
Right now, if someone mugs someone else for their ATM card, and they are in a secluded spot, they can almost always coerce the PIN number from the victim with sufficient.. er... "incentives" ( providing the mugger stays in control ).
Imagine trying to mug someone for their wallet, only to discover what you took is going to require the person you mugged's eyes looking into the ATM before you get anything. You are gonna look damned suspicious to all bystander for any method you try to get those eyes into scan position. That's the other reason why I recommend against fingerprints, especially at ATM's. It would give a mugger reason to mutilate his victim. I hate to be so gruesome, but I tend to consider what could happen if the circumstances demanded it... only things you needed was the ATM card and the victim's fingers and take it to that 24 hour ATM at 3AM.
What you *will* do is reveal a lot of personal info.
Check it out if you wanna: Music CD Settlement
Without use of amplifiers, if they want to make the noise of 10,000 musicians, they would have to hire 10,000 musicians. Amplifiers put musicians out of work!
How about tossing all the CD's into the Boston Harbor?
Last time we tried that, a little over 200 years ago, it made quite a statement thats talked about even to this day.
No, I am not trying to incite an online riot. A plain old riot will be fine.
They clamped down at the College on P2P. I used to bring a Zip Disk along and download a few samples using the lab's high speed access. I "met" all of my favorite artists that way. Example: I had no idea of who "Enya" was, but I got one of her songs on one of my kinda random downloads, I liked it. I found several more of hers. Liked them too. Next thing I know, when I was in any record store, I was looking for her CD's... I think I have her complete set now ( except for one compilation CD ). These were all purchased.
Now that I have been prohibited from sampling the music, I find something odd happening. Although I still go into the record store, there is now nothing running through my head that I want to buy. I see rows upon rows of CD's, but to me they are just so much clutter - I have no idea what they are - they may as well be in another language. I just do not see a thing I'm specifically looking for
I know what the problem is... I do not listen to the radio anymore. They would continuously play the hot list, interspersed with as much jabber as they thought I would tolerate. Problem is now its not just the "top 40" I have to choose from... its literally thousands of different titles in the store... and I don't know the slightest thing about any of the new ones.. I just remember some of the oldies from earlier years.
Yes, the store does have listening kiosks, but each only has access to maybe 5 CD's, and I am quite uncomfortable having to stand in one spot for several minutes at a time trying to listen to them. Its not at all like queueing the disk up I made at College and having it play in the background while I do my homework, then if something strikes me while listening, reopening the jukebox window to see what it was. Most of the stuff I got at College was crap anyway, but there were a few gems in it, such as Enya and others. Well, maybe not crap - because music preferences are so unique to each individual, but definitely not mine.
I remember when I used to get excited about Baseball games. Then they had a strike. During the strike, I found something else to do. Guess what, I haven't been back to a game since! Now, it seems I take just about as much interest in how far some baseball player hits the friggen ball as I suspect he cares how I did on my calculus exam. I find once I "get out of sync" with something, I lose interest in it.
Yes, I guess the **AA may have won this one on me - as not only have I not downloaded for about 4 months now, nor have I had any reason to buy any recordings either.
I am not for sure that they really wanted what they won.
Whoops, I stand corrected. I made several little boo-boos.
I have the the DOS database too - dBASE III, and I guess I was thinking of it when I was typing, but it was 1-2-3 ( release 3.1) that I used a lot. Both 1-2-3 and MathCad were really neat little spreadsheets - incredibly simple little things. DOS.
I guess those things to me were the equivalent of screwdrivers and pliers.. sometimes I really do not need a lot of sophistication to "get the lid off a can of paint". Or do some plain numerical analysis. If it was really weird, I would hit it with the C++ compiler, which was guaranteed to handle any problem that I ever messed with.
I still have licensed copies of dBase III and IV, and Lotus 2.2, but unfortunately they're on 5 1/4 diskettes, and hence useless
I note the hardware on even the latest machines still seem to support the old 5 inch drives. Try to find an older floppy and its companion cable. Remember, the 3 inch drives use the pins, but the older 5 inch drives had connectors fabricated as part of the pcb etch itself. The connections themselves were in the same order. The trick is having the old card edge connectors on the cable. The old cables had both card-edge and pin socket connectors. The power connectors on those old 5" drives were the same as on a 3" hard drive. Plug it up and your bios should recognize you now have drives A and B. Then, with any luck, you should be able to copy all files from one to the other. Hopefully, the disks are old enough, (pre copy restriction paranoria), that you can recover the program onto your new media. I have a lot of old stuff thats still on the 5 inch media. Some even in the 360K format, and I can still read them on my latest Pentiums. Remember, the one at the end of the cable is Drive A.
Good post otherwise... could be a troll, though... hmmmm
Believe me, I would hardly want to use so much of my own time, as well as everyone else's, to post a troll. These are just observations I have had, and I post them in the same way that I would post a program I may have worked long and hard on for any benefit others may get from it. I guess its my way of trying to repay those who have shared with me. By the time I finished it though, I did have reservations it might be modded ( Score -1: Windbag ) :-0
Bad Law fosters Civil Disobedience.
I guess I was in my mid 30's when I started really noticing how much work it was to have to re-do things that I had done poorly the first time. I think the catch phrase went something like " If you can't find the time to do it right, you will make the time to do it over.".
I have lived through galvanized pipe - I will never have it again. Do you know how much work it is to have to strip the plumbing infrastructure from a house to re-do it? I do. Copper went back in. I soldered it personally. Never again will I have anything to do with galvanized pipe where I can't get to it.
I moved from another house because I discovered it had aluminum wiring.
There are some things I have learned to very highly value, and thats the elegance of things made right. I have a toaster, made by Sunbeam Electric Company, that was given to my parents as a wedding gift. I am no spring chicken either, but I still use that toaster every morning. ( Well, maybe that's why Sunbeam is out of business, they never sold me another one? ), but I really like that toaster. I have one of the very first microwave ovens ever built. It was a prototype, or at least that was what was stamped on its innards. It still works.
When I took my first job in a major oil refinery, I participated in, a huge effort to put all our plant drawings into a CAD system, then powered with DEC computers. I watched as the company then abandoned the computers, going to another system - but the data files were incompatible, so they had to do it all over. What a waste!!! I learned by observation how much effort could have been saved if there had been such a thing as a standard data file. I learned the value of things like simple ascii files and comma-delimited-format database files.
Technology will change. Most of the time, its been for the better, but many of the "improvements" to me are of dubious real value. Is a 1GHz Pentium laptop, which goes through batteries at an astronomical pace really any better than that old Radio Shach model 100 computer which used to get hundreds of hours on a set of penlight cells, albeit it only had a simple text LCD screen? I have a little 386SX laptop I like because it gets around 40 hours on its battery if I use the backlight sparingly. The screen is a little crude for graphics, and admittedly its a bit slow if its a graphics intensive program, such as font mapping under Win 3.1.. but if I am doing text stuff, I drop to DOS anyway because the machine is hundreds of times faster than I am when its using its hardware mapped character generator. But I can have the machine on from the time I leave the house, through the airport, on the plane, through the taxi trip, onto the hotel, and still have the battery running. Maybe Ashton-Tate 1-2-3 is a little dated, but it works. Same with MathCad. And the Futurenet electronic schematic editor. And the Spice analyzer. And the PCB Layout program. And my Borland C++ compiler. And the file sizes are small. And the files were simpler then. Most of the time, even if something does happen, I can usually open the files with a hexadecimal editor and see what the problem is.
I have really learned the value of trying to do things right the first time so you do not *have* to do it over ( usually at the most inconvient of times ). I like having the option of replacing something when *I* feel its warranted, not when someone else gets it into their head they want to commandeer me to do so.
I have worked with enough businesses now that I can see the smart ones do this too. You will see the smart ones configuring things so they get their system in place, then start using that system to make money... not so smart businesses never get their system working, as parts of it are constantly failing and needing to be replaced... kinda like that guy who never figured out what kind of plumbing would run till the proverbial cows come home, and which one would necessitate a constant stream of work to keep it running. Yes, I know one has to know how to solder to install copper, but in the long term, doing it right the first time leaves you free to spend your remaining time doing what was really important, now that your infrastructure is stable.
The best example I can think of for GOOD ENGINEERING is the old Romans. They built roads and water aqueducts which are even in use today. Its not like *everything* needs to last an eternity, but I consider it a really good investment if one designs the Important Stuff to last the proverbial eternity. That way its there until *you* decide to change it.
I thought that was exactly the thing which the recording industry was so miffed about - and this legislation is nailing that one straight on.
I still wonder about how hard they are going to hit onto what I consider "fair use". I consider placing of impediments to fair use applications to be a severe infringement of MY rights.
This stuff telling me I can not make backup and make proper use of what it is I am purchasing.. well looks like the European Commission didn't like it much either. I wonder how the European Union recognizes it. I hope they recognize a noose when they see it.
Don't get me wrong, I am not an unreasonable man...I am willing to compromise my position.
If you want me to give up my right to make backups, you *must* be willing to provide me with one at any time in the future I may need one - and be willing to compensate me for my time and other losses that was incurred because I put said product in a critical position, when having backups in place would have eliminated that loss. Remember, the vendor will have to issue me the exact software I had running with whatever patches I had applied... or come in and make whatever he has work in a way that is acceptable to *me*.
I can bend too in my belief that I am not supposed to "reverse engineer" the product to try to make it work, if the vendor is also willing to take unlimited liability in assuring me the software does what it says it does, nothing more, and nothing less. So if I get some software that sent stuff out on the net, I would have recourse to recover from the vendor whatever I valued the data it sent at. Basically the same law they had the US Congress pass for them, but directed back at them as the target of the Liability.
I do not think I am asking anything unreasonable, its just if you want to take away my rights to try to make the thing work, you will take on that responsibility of making it work. If you want to do something behind my back and don't want me to see - you will take full responsibility for what it does.
So the "big media" likes to *pay* to "afford air time". I wonder if these are the same "big media" which are suing Kazaa for distributing the same songs. For free.
This phenomena noted by AC is real. I have noted from much "autopsy" that failure of aluminum electrolytic capacitors is very common after only a few years, even if that, of service.
This is the failure mechanism: the aluminum electrolytics are highly stressed by the high pulse currents generated by switching power supplies. Within a few hours ( often in the thousands, but could be in the hundreds ), the ESR (Equivalent Series Resistance) of the capacitor begins to climb. When that occurs, the capacitor begins not only failing to accept the current pulse which was supposed to charge it, but begins to dissipate that energy, which was intended for the load, as heat. It gets hot. Fast. Then it pops open as its releases its innards of boiling electrolyte. ( Thats why you see those little grooves pressed into the top of the electrolytic capacitor cans...they are stress reliefs... they are supposed to rip open and vent the capacitor before it holds the pressure of boiling electrolyte in long enough to explode. Literally. )
I see this a lot in the main switching power supply in PC's. The tip off is watching the power supply with an analog oscilloscope while loading the power supply with things such as 12V 25watt lamps while it is powering the computer. Under running circumstances, this amount of power may only be consumed during a disk seek, but to make the phenomena continuously visible, you have to provide this extra load. If the power supply is having problems, you will see it drop voltage as its capacitors fail to supply the energy. Usually at a 60Hz rate, as only one of the two capacitors in the main voltage doubler is failing, 120HZ drops mean they are both failing.
These instantaneous and very-short lived power glitches do wonderful things to the software being executed. It makes the computer do the damndest things you ever did see. You would think you were hit by a really weird virus... and may spend months trying to track it down. I did. By the time I was closing in on this, I was seriously concerned that my debuggers themselves were infected, because weird jumps kept happening - for no reason at all as I could discern! The pattern had absolutely no rhyme or reason to it as far as I could see, and it was driving me absolutely nuts.
Being I've seen this now, I am quite quick to grab the oscilloscope and test lamps ( banks of #93 or other automotive bulbs connected to a disk-drive power connector so I can just plug 'em in to whatever spare disk-drive power connector I can find in the computer ) when I see unexplained stuff that looks too weird to be a virus.
(Note: Power-up with the bulbs connected. The step-function of the load, as well as cold-resistance of the lamps - make it very inadvisable to connect/remove lamp load while the power supply is energized. )
Let me relate a personal experience. I generated a post on Slashdot on another forum. Looking back on it, I should not have posted it, but I did. It was promptly moderated down to -1 (redundant).
Did the moderators have anything against me? I think not. It was a crappy post.
What did I learn? Slashdot provided me with a forum where I could run an idea up the pole and see if anybody salutes it. In this case, they pissed on it. The system worked. I simply had a lousy approach. Often I do not see my own fallacy, but others did. Once it was pointed out to me, it was obvious. I shall not grace the pages of Slashdot with another post of the likes of that ever again.
How does that relate to this topic? The industry is trying again and again to force something down our throats. We "moderate", via the market, that the concept is not to our liking. It is up to the industry to either come back with something better or just drop the whole idea. Coming back with the same marketing plan is paramount to me making a similar post to the one everyone pissed on. History will repeat itself, and much money and time will be invested uselessly.