Besides the old joke (which is Delta Score +0.07 Funny anymore), there is another, more interesting matter here. The number of bytes was really 655360, not 640000, that is a difference of 15360. And this leads me to wonder about the accuracy of these "640000" years. What is the uncertainty? Is it 15360 years, is it 50 years, is it 75000 years? Even an error of 0.1% makes for 640 years or some 20 generations of people... All that seems to be coming out of this is that Something Big Will Happen sooner or later, but no-one knows when this will be. Could be tomorrow, could be in the year 40960, could be whenever, throw a coin 20 times and have heads be 1 and tails be 0, make a 20-bit integer out of that, and there is as good a guess as anything else for when the supervolcano will blow.
First there is the questionable ethics of providing filtered sites to high-school students, things like MSN messenger and MySpace, which is much in the same league as cell phones, and are used for similar purposes, which are frequently quite OK, but which also might include bullying, and this might be one of the reasons why the school has put up the limitations to begin with.
Going around this filtering seems to be similar in spirit to aiding and abetting a crime. I don't find this particularly ethical at all, but that's just my opinion. Then chances are that if, or rather when, this site is discovered to be yet another proxy by the school administration, it will become blocked as well, and what does this help anyone then?
That's just before even considering any legal hassle that may ensue. IANAL so I'm not gonna speculate any further on this.
Then there is the financial reasons for doing this that just don't seem to make sense to me. It will be done for free, with advertising revenue, from the same high-school students that presumably will use the service? What are the spending potential of these? It will depend, it might sell cell-phone ringtones and suchlike, but there seems to be some obvious limitations in the amount of money these students have to spend. And when the filtering starts, then the ad-reading and presumably profitable customers go away.
Heh, all that trouble, and for free with uncertain ad revenue -- how good business is this?
What about something like the second law of thermodynamics? It is a statistical observation generalized to a hypothesis. However, as no experiment ever devised or performed has disproved it, that still doesn't make it disproveable and unscientific. On the contrary, it has been used to support further speculations, such as the one that Stephen Hawking made about black holes disintegrating and vanishing.
It would seem that nothing can ever be proved to be disprovable... at least as long as some kind of experiment can be devised, it would seem to fall within the realm of science. Shouldn't that "final descriptive theory", a hypothesis, become like the thermodynamic "laws" then? Not proven because that isn't the way science works, and not disproven just because no experiment ever performed gave results that falsified the hypothesis.
The big difference between surgeons and electricians on one side, and entertainment and button-makers on the other side, is that even minute faults in the former's practices can lead directly to loss of life and property, while no such fatal consequences are possible for entertainers or button-makers. As for machinery cutting off peoples fingers, we have got some other ways of controlling safety in general, such as the OSHA.
Consider other, non-critical, guild like watch-makers or painters, once also strictly controlled... At worst, the control on their work would be along "fit for purpose"-regulations, but I don't think anyone has ever died from a stopped watch or a house painted in the wrong color.
It is damn hot for the electronics no matter which kinds of degrees are used.
My suggestion would be to try and work towards relocating the whole networking kit somewhere else on the site where there is less heat. Or use some of the same tricks that the presumably adjacent electronics already use, whatever these are.
The LGPL license allows you to use the code and also distribute it along with your own proprietary software, similar to the BSD license.
But unlike the BSD license, the LGPL still gives the same freedoms to the next tier of users as the regular GPL, in that the source of the LGPL'd parts has to be passed on to these, and if any modifications have been done to the code that is LGPL licensed, these will also have to be passed on. The proprietary software can still have trade secrets kept inside it (thus, no source) and be legally distributed along with the LGPL'd (but not GPL'd) libraries.
Like the regular GPL, the LGPL does not allow the code to be "locked away".
What we see happen is that some libraries are LGPL and freely useable for everyone (proprietary or otherwise) and others are dual-licensed, (MySQL and Qt come to mind) where the free ("beer" and "speech") version is GPL-licensed, requiring compliant users also to license their products as GPL, and for those users who can't or won't do so, there is an option of licensing the libraries from their copyright holders for proprietary software use, for a charge, and with closed-source-style restrictions.
But is Microsoft the right one to enforce this? Even if sole proprietorship or general partnership might be inadvisable, it isn't illegal, and Microsoft or anyone else who is not the government has absolutely no jurisdiction and no mandate to make it so.
I've seen CD-based distros that have / as read-only. That certainly is possible, and the Picotux 100 computers are also set up like that on delivery: a read-only / and a read-write/usr filesystem.
You probably want to make at least/tmp,/var,/home,/mnt, the swap space, and parts of/usr read-write. I am quite certain that this is possible.
Second, whatever happened to voting with one's wallet, or eyeballs in this case? I mean, he acts like they are obligated to make their content available to him, and that their apparent refusal to support his browser somehow impinges on his human rights. What the hell?
Considering that this is a local monopoly, (there is only the one subway system, as it makes little sense to have several independent ones), and this same site also gives information on buses and ferries, I'd say that the MBTA, as a public utility, is under the obligation to serve all comers. Whether they are blind or use a specific browser or whatever. Voting with the wallet would mean moving someplace else, and where would the other eyball candidate be? For once, the entitlement demand is right.
Now apparently, the MBTA has reverted to their old page for some reason... I've been seeing similar problems appear in other newly-furbished web-sites, where things aren't quite ready or tested before let loose on the public at large.
Then again, there may be something wrong on the client-side for this particular user, since several others have said they did get the site to work properly with Opera, and then whence the whole big foofaraw? I've had stuff not working, from faults of my own, and have written about it somewhere visibly, but never has there been made a big deal like this out of it. Maybe it is the arrogant reply about "use something other than Opera, as it has only 0.6 % market share so why should we bother" that set the whole thing ablaze. I never received any such reply, perhaps that's why.
Replying like that however, is not a way to run a business no matter how big or who is actually at fault.
Another thing that seems to take some time on Windows after the log-on, is to establish all the Registry stuff under HKEY_CURRENT_USER, with the disk spinning madly in the process. I've noticed the files SYSTEM.DAT and NTUSER.DAT having the most recent update time on a freshly booted machine -- there's lots being written into these.
Also, in order to appear more quick than it actually is, most of the GUI "desktop" is being presented as if it were useful some time before it actually is. Only when the cursor loses the hourglass and the disk-activity stops is when it is time to actually start doing something.
Contrast this to some Linux distro running at "runlevel 5", which goes through the same user-interface process as Windows XP: Login-screen, then the GUI "desktop", but by the time this desktop is present it is also ready for action. However, Linux systems also generally go through establishing kernel data-structures and sniffing out hardware and starting daemons (services) that take some time; the stuff in/etc/rc.d or inittab still takes some time working through.
I usually make sure to mark all the wall-warts with the name of the device they belong to as soon as I've unpacked them, as well as indicating on the device what is the voltage and current rating of its supply. These vary wildly and there are several that use identical connectors for 7.5 V DC or 9 V AC or whatever. The DYMO marking tool is a useful item here.
The power supply I was getting at the airport was fitted with a cable and plug so it would not be a problem plugging it in, it was getting it outta the damn plastic case that was the problem.
And I don't like the wall-warts covering more than one outlet on a power strip, I must agree there.
The serial IO line for reading the set volts and consumed amps would be nice... though once a unit is set to a voltage, it wouldn't be so great if this were changed: a higher voltage could damage it, and a lower voltage would cause it to stop working... neither seem all that useful.
But some kind of "octopus" unit, with half a dozen or more wires coming off of it, and each one being able to be set to different voltage and polarity, and with the current rating large enough to supply all the devices, that would be useful.
In the last year of high-school, I built an electronic organ. Four octaves, powered from 12 V DC, so it would work in a vehicle. And it was built from scratch: the white keys I cut out of leftovers from the new bathroom walls, nice white laminate. The "black" (actually brown keys) were pieces of oak strips from where the wall meets the floor, also leftovers from some construction work on the house.
I drilled holes in all of these 49 keys, and used a long 4 mm steel rod as the pivoting axle, with a number of supports spread out along the length so the whole assembly wouldn't sag down. I put a long screw into the end of each key, and a steel band along the length of the keyboard, so when a key was depressed, the screw would hit this steel band and make electrical contact. Each key also had a return spring attached to its screw, and for these springs, I got them out of a couple defunct mechanical adding machines from the flea market. I also used a couple hundred washers as spacers between the keys so they wouldn't snag on each other.
The electronics were 12 small circuit boards with a 555 oscillator and a 7493 4-stage counter, one for each of the 12 different notes in the highest octave, and with the 7493 generating the other notes in the remaining octaves. There is a 2:1 frequency ratio per octave, very convenient. Each of the output were wired to a key through a resistor, so when the key was pushed down, its screw would make contact with the steel band and feed the signal from this to an output amplifier, an LM380. Chords were possible by holding down several keys in the same way as on a piano or organ, since these series resistors made the waveforms add. Square waves, at TTL level, then attenuated down to line level (about 1V peak-peak) gave it a unique sound.
The thing had to be tuned, each of the 12 oscillators had to be adjusted after the piano or other instrument at hand, but when this was done, it sounded reasonably good. There were some temperature dependences and drift over time so it frequently needed re-tuning....
It was mounted on a steel frame that one of my fellow students welded together, in the car that we had for the traditional "russ" graduation celebrations. It worked well for playing the national anthem and other music, though we were too busy with standard activities such as drinking and dancing, to have time for many concerts. We'd scavenged a bunch of speakers out of old TV sets on the municipal dump, this was long before recycling or RoHS or anything like that, so there were plenty to grab from. The LM380 had its work cut out.
I still have this whole kit around here, slightly modified to use CMOS 4040s and a tone-generator chip that I found at Radio Shack once in the early 1980s, simplifying the tuning as there is just one master oscillator now. This oscillator also has a frequency modulation option to generate tremulo...
Although I haven't played it for a while. A couple years ago, I used it to play christmas songs at my sister's house, but as they have now got a real piano, my homemade instrument is now mostly a museum piece.
I've been wondering about this spaghetti or more often, pasta, packaging myself. But at least this packaging which is frequently supposed to be re-closed, can be dealt with using scissors.
Other kinds of packages are worse: I once bought a power-supply for notebook computers at an airport, one of these nice universal ones that would allow using 12V from the car or 100-240V from the mains. Since I had put the ordinary supply for the computer into checked baggage and I was waiting to change planes at the airport I thought I'd get a power supply from one of the stores there, and be able to sit down and use the computer, which was low on battery.
But this power supply came in one of these armored plastic packages, and of course, air-side, there is not much of scissors or knives available at all, thanks to the paranoia generated after September 11 2001... even the only restaurant there that served something more substantial than sandwiches had only flimsy plastic knives and forks. So, no computing for me until I came home. I still found use for the power supply, as the bag with the original one was delayed.
Radio Frequency Interference? Request for Information? Radio France Internationale? Rodent Fangs Implementation? WHAT?
How about explaining what such an ambigious acronym actually means initially. As neither TFA nor the summary seems to have done so, I therefore will have do it here, just to make heads and tails of the rest of the discussion and perhaps illuminate someone else. Hit Google, slog through a pile of links indicating one of the above, or some company whose name includes the three letters. There are many of these. On Page 3 I found the Wikipedia page for this TLA, on which there is a dead link to what this must be: Remote File Inclusion.
How about that.
I was wondering if it was just me, that I had been off-line for too long (like 2 days) and missed out on the latest and greatest buzzword, again?
The great difference is that there are several competing car manufactureres: If I don't like the new models that Ford puts out, I might go and look at the offerings from Chevrolet, Mazda, Volvo, Mercedes-Benz, Peugeot, Kia, Hyundai, Toyota, Dodge, Honda, BMW, and so forth. Any and all of these will offer useful models that are effectively compatible with each other, to the extent that I can sit myself in the drivers's seat, close the door, start the engine and hit the road. Only the position of switches for lights and windshield wipers will be slightly different; the gearshift and parking brake may also have any of a small handful of locations, but they will be there somewhere.
Now if I don't like the latest version of Windows, there is no real alternative. It is not that I (or my customers) have many other options. There are Linux, the BSDs, Solaris, and so on, that can do much of the same, and actually does do a number of things better but does not do certain other things at all. It is as if the only maker of passenger cars decided to offer just one new model I didn't like, and the only alternatives apart from older passenger cars that may or may not run reliably or even legally anymore, were a rich selection of limousines, lorries, big-rigs, juggernauts, buses, trucks, and dumpers... excellent for heavy-duty and professional work and built to last, but not really the most suitable vehicles for taking the family out to a movie show.
The devil is in the details -- how many times now have I warned people against using Outlook, and set them up with the mail-client in Opera, and then the next week they come with their new mobile phone that has this cable that allows it to hook up to an USB-port, but the software making this communication work only wants to talk with Outlook, and doesn't even understand that there might be alternatives. So Opera gets pushed aside and Outlook is being used for its nice interoperability with the phone. This is the sort of thing that will make Windows continue having a large market share, indeed, a monopoly.
So a harmonica has become an instrument of copyright infringement now? And at a criminal level? If he were passing out sheet music or recordings of the original songs that's one thing, but just (as per the featured article) playing music himself? Even though much of that music wasn't even arranged for the harmonica? There's gotta be something more to this. Failure to pay royalty fees or some such...
Woody Guthrie once put the legend "This machine kills fascists" on his guitar, amazing how things have changed since them...
They've been trying for ages to do that but they're going about it the wrong way. I can still remember that 1 Quart bottle was labeled as containing 0.945 Liters, and the sign on I-5 going southbound coming from Vancouver that read "Speed limit 88 km/h". Now, 1 Quart and 55 Miles are nice and round numbers, and if the metric system is forcing people to put up with things like 0.945 or signs posting the speed limit in weird increments like 88 km/h... then they won't be having any of it. Heck, even I who came from Europe and having grown up with the metric system realized that this couldn't work. Make the bottles an even Liter and make the traditional Quarts come in increments of 1.0582, or make the speed limit 90 km/h even and post them as "56 MPH" to make the old units seem antiquated, tedious, and less useful, and then there might arise a desire for change.
As to daylight savings time, that is just daft no matter what. I'm running everything here on UTC anyways now and then just add the one or two hours to figure out the civil time, keeps me having to re-set the clocks twice a year.
That's all and well, but the problem here isn't just that the ISP (NextGenTel) isn't delivering the announced data speed. If the source of this data can't sustain the maximum speed promised to the customer, the latter will get whatever is available. All nice and well, nothing to see there.
However, the issue at hand here was that the ISP itself decided that a certain media site (NRK) could not be allowed to deliver at its max throughput, but would be limited by an action of this ISP. At the same time there was no such discrimination of other media sites, NRK cried foul, the Consumer Protection people got on the case, and NextGenTel the ISP finally relented. There wasn't the matter of billing a bandwidth-hogging consumer, but throttling one of several high-bandwidth producers, a rather different problem.
Pico is already in use
as a name for pre-programmed DigiConnect ME devices (uClinux, busybox, ARM processor...) that are the smaller cousins of the Gumstix. Now, once the USB-based version of the Gumstix comes along in memory-stick size range there will be another member of the "who's smallest" club.
Of course vi is used. I use it myself, for everything, and I've seen a couple others above mentioning it.
I've also made me a little utility that would take a string from the document I'd be writing in, and generate a link <a href="...">... </a> style, and put it back in, courtesy of vi. Useful when writing up documentation about programming and configuration.
Then there is the matter of getting rid of carriage-returns and get the text file into the true format, with lines separated by newline characters.
No way around false accusations? Unforeseen consequences from vigillantes, or the similar but less severe consequences of deeds and "safety regulations"? Won't last, I'm sure. A lawsuit or worse.
Faraday cages work both ways. Reciprocity, as it is called; the equations describing how it works give the same solution for waves going in either direction. Same thing as an antenna being equally able to transmit and receive.
However, the degree of shielding will depend on the sizes of the openings in the cage, and the wavelength of the signal. If the openings are larger than about 1/10 the wavelength, they will let some of the energy or signal through, and the larger the opening is the more energy or signal will make it through.
I don't know exactly which frequency these will work at, but I'd imagine that even if they used one of the unlicensed ones near 430 MHz, the wavelength is about 70 cm, and so any opening larger than 7 cm (or about 3 inches) could let some of the signal through. The window openings in any car are larger than this, so there is not much in the car stopping the signal from any internal transmitter at this frequency from being received outside it.
Slashdot Mirror
Besides the old joke (which is Delta Score +0.07 Funny anymore), there is another, more interesting matter here. The number of bytes was really 655360, not 640000, that is a difference of 15360. And this leads me to wonder about the accuracy of these "640000" years. What is the uncertainty? Is it 15360 years, is it 50 years, is it 75000 years? Even an error of 0.1% makes for 640 years or some 20 generations of people... All that seems to be coming out of this is that Something Big Will Happen sooner or later, but no-one knows when this will be. Could be tomorrow, could be in the year 40960, could be whenever, throw a coin 20 times and have heads be 1 and tails be 0, make a 20-bit integer out of that, and there is as good a guess as anything else for when the supervolcano will blow.
I for one is not going to lose sleep over this.
First there is the questionable ethics of providing filtered sites to high-school students, things like MSN messenger and MySpace, which is much in the same league as cell phones, and are used for similar purposes, which are frequently quite OK, but which also might include bullying, and this might be one of the reasons why the school has put up the limitations to begin with.
Going around this filtering seems to be similar in spirit to aiding and abetting a crime. I don't find this particularly ethical at all, but that's just my opinion. Then chances are that if, or rather when, this site is discovered to be yet another proxy by the school administration, it will become blocked as well, and what does this help anyone then?
That's just before even considering any legal hassle that may ensue. IANAL so I'm not gonna speculate any further on this.
Then there is the financial reasons for doing this that just don't seem to make sense to me. It will be done for free, with advertising revenue, from the same high-school students that presumably will use the service? What are the spending potential of these? It will depend, it might sell cell-phone ringtones and suchlike, but there seems to be some obvious limitations in the amount of money these students have to spend. And when the filtering starts, then the ad-reading and presumably profitable customers go away.
Heh, all that trouble, and for free with uncertain ad revenue -- how good business is this?
What about something like the second law of thermodynamics? It is a statistical observation generalized to a hypothesis. However, as no experiment ever devised or performed has disproved it, that still doesn't make it disproveable and unscientific. On the contrary, it has been used to support further speculations, such as the one that Stephen Hawking made about black holes disintegrating and vanishing.
It would seem that nothing can ever be proved to be disprovable ... at least as long as some kind of experiment can be devised, it would seem to fall within the realm of science. Shouldn't that "final descriptive theory", a hypothesis, become like the thermodynamic "laws" then? Not proven because that isn't the way science works, and not disproven just because no experiment ever performed gave results that falsified the hypothesis.
The big difference between surgeons and electricians on one side, and entertainment and button-makers on the other side, is that even minute faults in the former's practices can lead directly to loss of life and property, while no such fatal consequences are possible for entertainers or button-makers. As for machinery cutting off peoples fingers, we have got some other ways of controlling safety in general, such as the OSHA.
Consider other, non-critical, guild like watch-makers or painters, once also strictly controlled ... At worst, the control on their work would be along "fit for purpose"-regulations, but I don't think anyone has ever died from a stopped watch or a house painted in the wrong color.
2000 F = 1093 C = 1366 K
2000 K = 1726 C = 3140 F
2000 C = 2273 K = 3632 F
It is damn hot for the electronics no matter which kinds of degrees are used.
My suggestion would be to try and work towards relocating the whole networking kit somewhere else on the site where there is less heat. Or use some of the same tricks that the presumably adjacent electronics already use, whatever these are.
The LGPL license allows you to use the code and also distribute it along with your own proprietary software, similar to the BSD license.
But unlike the BSD license, the LGPL still gives the same freedoms to the next tier of users as the regular GPL, in that the source of the LGPL'd parts has to be passed on to these, and if any modifications have been done to the code that is LGPL licensed, these will also have to be passed on. The proprietary software can still have trade secrets kept inside it (thus, no source) and be legally distributed along with the LGPL'd (but not GPL'd) libraries.
Like the regular GPL, the LGPL does not allow the code to be "locked away".
What we see happen is that some libraries are LGPL and freely useable for everyone (proprietary or otherwise) and others are dual-licensed, (MySQL and Qt come to mind) where the free ("beer" and "speech") version is GPL-licensed, requiring compliant users also to license their products as GPL, and for those users who can't or won't do so, there is an option of licensing the libraries from their copyright holders for proprietary software use, for a charge, and with closed-source-style restrictions.
Chances are they will use ISO standard metric sizes. M12, with coarse or fine threads as appropriate will replace 1/2" UNC / UNF most likely.
But is Microsoft the right one to enforce this? Even if sole proprietorship or general partnership might be inadvisable, it isn't illegal, and Microsoft or anyone else who is not the government has absolutely no jurisdiction and no mandate to make it so.
Something seems definitely out of bounds here...
I've seen CD-based distros that have / as read-only. That certainly is possible, and the Picotux 100 computers are also set up like that on delivery: a read-only / and a read-write /usr filesystem.
You probably want to make at least /tmp, /var, /home, /mnt, the swap space, and parts of /usr read-write. I am quite certain that this is possible.
Second, whatever happened to voting with one's wallet, or eyeballs in this case? I mean, he acts like they are obligated to make their content available to him, and that their apparent refusal to support his browser somehow impinges on his human rights. What the hell?
Considering that this is a local monopoly, (there is only the one subway system, as it makes little sense to have several independent ones), and this same site also gives information on buses and ferries, I'd say that the MBTA, as a public utility, is under the obligation to serve all comers. Whether they are blind or use a specific browser or whatever. Voting with the wallet would mean moving someplace else, and where would the other eyball candidate be? For once, the entitlement demand is right.
Now apparently, the MBTA has reverted to their old page for some reason... I've been seeing similar problems appear in other newly-furbished web-sites, where things aren't quite ready or tested before let loose on the public at large.
Then again, there may be something wrong on the client-side for this particular user, since several others have said they did get the site to work properly with Opera, and then whence the whole big foofaraw? I've had stuff not working, from faults of my own, and have written about it somewhere visibly, but never has there been made a big deal like this out of it. Maybe it is the arrogant reply about "use something other than Opera, as it has only 0.6 % market share so why should we bother" that set the whole thing ablaze. I never received any such reply, perhaps that's why.
Replying like that however, is not a way to run a business no matter how big or who is actually at fault.
Another thing that seems to take some time on Windows after the log-on, is to establish all the Registry stuff under HKEY_CURRENT_USER, with the disk spinning madly in the process. I've noticed the files SYSTEM.DAT and NTUSER.DAT having the most recent update time on a freshly booted machine -- there's lots being written into these.
Also, in order to appear more quick than it actually is, most of the GUI "desktop" is being presented as if it were useful some time before it actually is. Only when the cursor loses the hourglass and the disk-activity stops is when it is time to actually start doing something.
Contrast this to some Linux distro running at "runlevel 5", which goes through the same user-interface process as Windows XP: Login-screen, then the GUI "desktop", but by the time this desktop is present it is also ready for action. However, Linux systems also generally go through establishing kernel data-structures and sniffing out hardware and starting daemons (services) that take some time; the stuff in /etc/rc.d or inittab still takes some time working through.
I usually make sure to mark all the wall-warts with the name of the device they belong to as soon as I've unpacked them, as well as indicating on the device what is the voltage and current rating of its supply. These vary wildly and there are several that use identical connectors for 7.5 V DC or 9 V AC or whatever. The DYMO marking tool is a useful item here.
The power supply I was getting at the airport was fitted with a cable and plug so it would not be a problem plugging it in, it was getting it outta the damn plastic case that was the problem.
And I don't like the wall-warts covering more than one outlet on a power strip, I must agree there.
The serial IO line for reading the set volts and consumed amps would be nice... though once a unit is set to a voltage, it wouldn't be so great if this were changed: a higher voltage could damage it, and a lower voltage would cause it to stop working... neither seem all that useful.
But some kind of "octopus" unit, with half a dozen or more wires coming off of it, and each one being able to be set to different voltage and polarity, and with the current rating large enough to supply all the devices, that would be useful.
In the last year of high-school, I built an electronic organ. Four octaves, powered from 12 V DC, so it would work in a vehicle. And it was built from scratch: the white keys I cut out of leftovers from the new bathroom walls, nice white laminate. The "black" (actually brown keys) were pieces of oak strips from where the wall meets the floor, also leftovers from some construction work on the house.
I drilled holes in all of these 49 keys, and used a long 4 mm steel rod as the pivoting axle, with a number of supports spread out along the length so the whole assembly wouldn't sag down. I put a long screw into the end of each key, and a steel band along the length of the keyboard, so when a key was depressed, the screw would hit this steel band and make electrical contact. Each key also had a return spring attached to its screw, and for these springs, I got them out of a couple defunct mechanical adding machines from the flea market. I also used a couple hundred washers as spacers between the keys so they wouldn't snag on each other.
The electronics were 12 small circuit boards with a 555 oscillator and a 7493 4-stage counter, one for each of the 12 different notes in the highest octave, and with the 7493 generating the other notes in the remaining octaves. There is a 2:1 frequency ratio per octave, very convenient. Each of the output were wired to a key through a resistor, so when the key was pushed down, its screw would make contact with the steel band and feed the signal from this to an output amplifier, an LM380. Chords were possible by holding down several keys in the same way as on a piano or organ, since these series resistors made the waveforms add. Square waves, at TTL level, then attenuated down to line level (about 1V peak-peak) gave it a unique sound.
The thing had to be tuned, each of the 12 oscillators had to be adjusted after the piano or other instrument at hand, but when this was done, it sounded reasonably good. There were some temperature dependences and drift over time so it frequently needed re-tuning....
It was mounted on a steel frame that one of my fellow students welded together, in the car that we had for the traditional "russ" graduation celebrations. It worked well for playing the national anthem and other music, though we were too busy with standard activities such as drinking and dancing, to have time for many concerts. We'd scavenged a bunch of speakers out of old TV sets on the municipal dump, this was long before recycling or RoHS or anything like that, so there were plenty to grab from. The LM380 had its work cut out.
I still have this whole kit around here, slightly modified to use CMOS 4040s and a tone-generator chip that I found at Radio Shack once in the early 1980s, simplifying the tuning as there is just one master oscillator now. This oscillator also has a frequency modulation option to generate tremulo...
Although I haven't played it for a while. A couple years ago, I used it to play christmas songs at my sister's house, but as they have now got a real piano, my homemade instrument is now mostly a museum piece.
If slashdotters don't have parents, whose basement do they live in then?
/me is showing hands
I've been wondering about this spaghetti or more often, pasta, packaging myself. But at least this packaging which is frequently supposed to be re-closed, can be dealt with using scissors.
Other kinds of packages are worse: I once bought a power-supply for notebook computers at an airport, one of these nice universal ones that would allow using 12V from the car or 100-240V from the mains. Since I had put the ordinary supply for the computer into checked baggage and I was waiting to change planes at the airport I thought I'd get a power supply from one of the stores there, and be able to sit down and use the computer, which was low on battery.
But this power supply came in one of these armored plastic packages, and of course, air-side, there is not much of scissors or knives available at all, thanks to the paranoia generated after September 11 2001 ... even the only restaurant there that served something more substantial than sandwiches had only flimsy plastic knives and forks. So, no computing for me until I came home. I still found use for the power supply, as the bag with the original one was delayed.
Radio Frequency Interference? Request for Information? Radio France Internationale? Rodent Fangs Implementation? WHAT?
How about explaining what such an ambigious acronym actually means initially. As neither TFA nor the summary seems to have done so, I therefore will have do it here, just to make heads and tails of the rest of the discussion and perhaps illuminate someone else. Hit Google, slog through a pile of links indicating one of the above, or some company whose name includes the three letters. There are many of these. On Page 3 I found the Wikipedia page for this TLA, on which there is a dead link to what this must be: Remote File Inclusion.
How about that.
I was wondering if it was just me, that I had been off-line for too long (like 2 days) and missed out on the latest and greatest buzzword, again?
The great difference is that there are several competing car manufactureres: If I don't like the new models that Ford puts out, I might go and look at the offerings from Chevrolet, Mazda, Volvo, Mercedes-Benz, Peugeot, Kia, Hyundai, Toyota, Dodge, Honda, BMW, and so forth. Any and all of these will offer useful models that are effectively compatible with each other, to the extent that I can sit myself in the drivers's seat, close the door, start the engine and hit the road. Only the position of switches for lights and windshield wipers will be slightly different; the gearshift and parking brake may also have any of a small handful of locations, but they will be there somewhere.
Now if I don't like the latest version of Windows, there is no real alternative. It is not that I (or my customers) have many other options. There are Linux, the BSDs, Solaris, and so on, that can do much of the same, and actually does do a number of things better but does not do certain other things at all. It is as if the only maker of passenger cars decided to offer just one new model I didn't like, and the only alternatives apart from older passenger cars that may or may not run reliably or even legally anymore, were a rich selection of limousines, lorries, big-rigs, juggernauts, buses, trucks, and dumpers ... excellent for heavy-duty and professional work and built to last, but not really the most suitable vehicles for taking the family out to a movie show.
The devil is in the details -- how many times now have I warned people against using Outlook, and set them up with the mail-client in Opera, and then the next week they come with their new mobile phone that has this cable that allows it to hook up to an USB-port, but the software making this communication work only wants to talk with Outlook, and doesn't even understand that there might be alternatives. So Opera gets pushed aside and Outlook is being used for its nice interoperability with the phone. This is the sort of thing that will make Windows continue having a large market share, indeed, a monopoly.
So a harmonica has become an instrument of copyright infringement now? And at a criminal level? If he were passing out sheet music or recordings of the original songs that's one thing, but just (as per the featured article) playing music himself? Even though much of that music wasn't even arranged for the harmonica? There's gotta be something more to this. Failure to pay royalty fees or some such ...
Woody Guthrie once put the legend "This machine kills fascists" on his guitar, amazing how things have changed since them...
They've been trying for ages to do that but they're going about it the wrong way. I can still remember that 1 Quart bottle was labeled as containing 0.945 Liters, and the sign on I-5 going southbound coming from Vancouver that read "Speed limit 88 km/h". Now, 1 Quart and 55 Miles are nice and round numbers, and if the metric system is forcing people to put up with things like 0.945 or signs posting the speed limit in weird increments like 88 km/h ... then they won't be having any of it. Heck, even I who came from Europe and having grown up with the metric system realized that this couldn't work. Make the bottles an even Liter and make the traditional Quarts come in increments of 1.0582, or make the speed limit 90 km/h even and post them as "56 MPH" to make the old units seem antiquated, tedious, and less useful, and then there might arise a desire for change.
As to daylight savings time, that is just daft no matter what. I'm running everything here on UTC anyways now and then just add the one or two hours to figure out the civil time, keeps me having to re-set the clocks twice a year.
That's all and well, but the problem here isn't just that the ISP (NextGenTel) isn't delivering the announced data speed. If the source of this data can't sustain the maximum speed promised to the customer, the latter will get whatever is available. All nice and well, nothing to see there.
However, the issue at hand here was that the ISP itself decided that a certain media site (NRK) could not be allowed to deliver at its max throughput, but would be limited by an action of this ISP. At the same time there was no such discrimination of other media sites, NRK cried foul, the Consumer Protection people got on the case, and NextGenTel the ISP finally relented. There wasn't the matter of billing a bandwidth-hogging consumer, but throttling one of several high-bandwidth producers, a rather different problem.
Just NRK apparently. Other Norwegian sites, such as newspapers, were not affected.
Just as well that they did stop this throttling practice.
Pico is already in use as a name for pre-programmed DigiConnect ME devices (uClinux, busybox, ARM processor...) that are the smaller cousins of the Gumstix. Now, once the USB-based version of the Gumstix comes along in memory-stick size range there will be another member of the "who's smallest" club.
Of course vi is used. I use it myself, for everything, and I've seen a couple others above mentioning it.
I've also made me a little utility that would take a string from the document I'd be writing in, and generate a link <a href="..."> ... </a> style, and put it back in, courtesy of vi. Useful when writing up documentation about programming and configuration.
Then there is the matter of getting rid of carriage-returns and get the text file into the true format, with lines separated by newline characters.
No way around false accusations? Unforeseen consequences from vigillantes, or the similar but less severe consequences of deeds and "safety regulations"? Won't last, I'm sure. A lawsuit or worse.
Faraday cages work both ways. Reciprocity, as it is called; the equations describing how it works give the same solution for waves going in either direction. Same thing as an antenna being equally able to transmit and receive.
However, the degree of shielding will depend on the sizes of the openings in the cage, and the wavelength of the signal. If the openings are larger than about 1/10 the wavelength, they will let some of the energy or signal through, and the larger the opening is the more energy or signal will make it through.
I don't know exactly which frequency these will work at, but I'd imagine that even if they used one of the unlicensed ones near 430 MHz, the wavelength is about 70 cm, and so any opening larger than 7 cm (or about 3 inches) could let some of the signal through. The window openings in any car are larger than this, so there is not much in the car stopping the signal from any internal transmitter at this frequency from being received outside it.