Re:general principle of abandoned intellectual pro
on
Abandoned Games
·
· Score: 1
good points about the timescales to get works of art noticed. I think the principle of artistic copyright that it should last until the day the creator dies or his/her wife dies or his/her dependent children reach the age of 21 or 90 years after creators birth, whichever comes later... i.e. the works of art act as as regular salary or pension.
general principle of abandoned intellectual props
on
Abandoned Games
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I think there's a good case for automatically expiring copyrights and trademarks if they're abandoned.
For example, if software is no longer supported and sold, it should become open source unless it can be shown that it makes up a substantial part of a newer version which is being actively developed.
If music or movies not published for say five years, they should lose copyright protection.
If the owner of a patent does not create or license a product embodying the invention for five years, it should expire.
Ok, so this is simplistic, but the spirit I am trying to get at is to stop hoarding of intellectual property and denying the public at large the chance to enjoy it.
TomTom GO series run on linux - they boot it off the SD card in the case of the Go300 and Go500. Google for "opentom" for a team of people who are rolling their own images.
before I RTFA'd I thought it might be a currency version of the G drive - just upload all your money to Google for safe keeping, where they will index all the serial numbers, and you can get to download it whenever you need it. And when the government come to ask for it, they will refuse as much as possible!
There seem to be so many bullshit comments I felt to add another comment (hopefully not 100% BS).
Different headphones have different sensitivies - by as much as 20dB. This means that even if the player has a calibrated output to ensure it cannot blow your ears, switching to more sensitive headphones will cause overload on your ears. Conversely, the player will be unusable with an insensitive pair of 'phones.
I have read many mp3 player reviews, and one of the key things pointed out by reviewers is whether the sound goes really loud, and people won't buy a player (and I recall the same happened to tape walkmans and radios) if it won't go really loud.
It's one of the things I do in shops with TVs and radios - I check I can turn them up really loud and not get rattles and buzzes. I also discard the cheap nasty phones that come with many portable audio devices and use my noice-cancelling phones or medium/low cost Sennheisers - these transform the sound from a cheap player.
The common sense advice is to take a break from listening to music every 20 mins, and "reset" your ears, that way you won't let the volume level keep creeping up
I used to work for a company which bought one of the oldest ISPs in the UK, and inherited their venerable antique set of sparc servers.
There was a server (named after a famous London landmark), which did DNS serving and also resolving, and was open to the whole internet (which, admittedly, wasn't too big). When customers moved away, they continued to use it for resolving. When the server was finally shut down in, errm, 1999 (wasn't the Y2k bug a marvellous excuse to get rid of services noone wanted to maintain anymore?!), we sniffed the network and there were still people using it. The network block was reallocated for other purposes, and even two+ years on there were still steady numbers of DNS resolving requests.
We also had separate resolvers and name servers, and we put up big announcements for months that name servers were going to lose recursion (because reloading the servers was taking longer and longer and people complained about slow resolving), and yet there were die-hards who held out until rebutted customer complaints made them fix things. We guessed these customers, basically, had had someone set things up, the person resigned/died/was fired/kidnapped by aliens from redmon/ and they had no clue how anything worked any more.
So, yes, changing the default behaviour of DNS servers to not resolve can cause problems.
Oh yeah, one final thing. When I started work at that ISP in the mid nineties, 20-25% of customers ran windows, the rest ran some form of unix; the windows users "ate" 80%+ of support. When I left three years later the windows users were 60-70% of customers, and the number of support staff grew to accomodate the cluelessness.
At $JOB-1 I trialled and bought Yourkit's YJP, which is truly excellent, very easy to use and a very effective tool. Moreover, it's not expensive, and the support is pretty good too. I'm just a happy customer, not affiliated in any other way.
may still be our only hope, because changing the lifestyles of billions of people isn't possible.
The way things are going, we may not have to change the lifestyles of that many people if the destruction of the planet causes a step-change in climate leading to the wiping out of 80% of the population. We don't necessarily need a dinosaur-killer asteroid to come along, we seem capable of the same impact ourselves.
The tragedy will be that the people who are causing the damage - USA and Western Europe - are likely to be the survivors of such an extinction event, because we have the most resources to adapt to a massively changed environment.
When Rutherford first discussed the splitting of the atom and how it might lead to useful power generation, he said it was speculation and pure moonshine.
Just for kicks and giggles..., The power supply of your computer is DC! It is transformed generally down to 12VDC, 5VDC and 3VDC
A transformer is an electromagnetically-coupled device which requires a changing magnetic field (and therefore a changing current) created by a primary coil in order to induce a current in the secondary coil. QED, you don't transform DC to DC!
As the parent said, using DC to feed the racks still requires point-of-load DC to DC converters.
In fact, the biggest problems with today's AC supplies is that the frequency is TOO LOW... this results in the transformers and other AC-AC converters being oversized. Pretty much every switching supply today, including the ones in PCs, chop up either AC or DC into much higher frequencies and this allows smaller components. Avionics have used this for quite a long time, as weight and size savings are crucial!
The only limit on using higher frequencies comes when you start to get magnetic losses in transformers and chokes, so in practise a few hundred kHz is the useful limit in switched mode PSUs.
Thus, if you were starting again with an electric grid system, 500 or 1000Hz would be a much better solution.
I hope you meant enigma and not enema... a java enema would probably give you a hell of a caffeine hit, but it'd probably be a tad unpleasant cleaning the espresso machine afterwards!
I recall a few years ago about a Japanese inventor who also claimed to get more power out than he was putting in due to some magic properties of the magnets.
The conundrum is usually resolved by using ammeters which can cope with non unity power-factors - motors and generators and inductive loads usually give a false reading on an cheap/off the shelp multimeter.
The difficulty of measuring inductive loads used to be exploited by large organisations who'd use capacitors to shift the phase of their fluorescent lights and thus not have to pay for their lighting!
There's a key advantage to using a flywheel/generator combination: your electricity supply is massively cleaned up because you're generating a new clean electricity supply, the inertia of the flywheel also smooths out most glitches in the mains.
Not only don't you need the UPS, you also do away with the problem of keeping the UPS cool.
The only issue is noise, these things aren't quiet.
The best words of wisdom I can give you from my own experience are:
"being alone is better than a bad relationship".
Yes, it's true; when you're desperate, you'll put up with a lot of things. I had three quite manipulative/abusive girlfriends in succession, and then went for more than two years without one and it was only after I'd achieved closure that I realised the above, and understood it deep down.
To meet the right person is one thing, but to be attractive to them requires that you're not desperate, are interesting with a good sense of humour, and have reasonable personal hygiene. If you have a good social life, some non-solitary hobbies, and don't dress like a tramp, you're mostly there!
there are a bunch of colleges churning out people who've become "experts" having taken a 6 week course in the language with no prior IT experience
Joel could easily have been talking about.net or.java or.latest-easy-to-write-language. He hit the nail on the head when he said that (to paraphrase) teaching people using a language which avoids the requirement to understand how computers actually work makes it hard to assess whether a programmer is any good.
Joel's the Perils of Java School
When I used to work in embedded systems (oh gosh, 12 years ago!) I was stunned to discover that some of my colleagues didn't understand how to write interrupt routines and thought they were black magic! I can see why, although jobs are not often advertised, linux kernel programmers get a very high premium salary - because so many software engineers don't even have an insight into memory allocation strategies and stacks, let alone assembler and interrupts.
Sorry to rant, but I gotta justify the grey hairs somehow!
That ringing you hear everytime you finish listening to your music? Yeah, that's your ears telling you to turn it down!
the medical profession now reckon that ANY overload of your hearing causes at least SOME permanent loss of hearing, so if you do regularly get a ringing in your ears, or if peaks of volume make your ears hurt, you're setting yourself up for big trouble later in life. My mother works at a charity for acquired deafness (people go go deaf rather than being born without hearing) and she says that whilst once hearing loss was associated with heavy industrial work with lots of noise, she's seeing younger and younger people develop the problem - it's no longer an elderly "disease"
So, moral of the story, resist the urge to increase the sound level as you listen - don't let it creep up. If you're listening in a noisy environment, consider noise-cancelling closed-cup phones, so you can listen at a lower level.
There's an alternative for to OO and KOffice and Abiword for linux which supports Microsoft doc format. It's not free, but it's quite well polished. It's also cross-platform, and works on portable devices... and I'm not talking about Hancom Word!
There are occasional deals on ebay for it - I already got mine so feel free to bid the next license deal up to the max!
Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with TM. My liability towards you is zilch regarding this suggestion, even if you get sucked into a black hole as a result of following it.
my particular point was that when you're dealing with embedded systems, and memory is eight bits wide, having to have four chips on board to have a 32 bit memory tends to make things quite big.
anyone here heard of ARM processors? Oh you have, good!
well, quite a long time ago, Arm discovered that their risc processors were all very well and good, but the instruction stream was quite BIG and required lots of storage (and wasn't too good for embedded systems which typically use only 8 or 16 bit wide memory, whereas RISC uses 32), so they added something called "thumb" which had a 16-bit wide instructions which decode to the full risc set.
I was a tester on this program, taking various programs (some downloaded, some in-house utilities, some written specially) and compiling them for various different architectures (8 + 16 + 33 bit x86, full 32 bit arm risc and 16 bit thumb). This allowed comparison of space and performance. With full-width memory, 32 bit risc was faster than thumb, but as soon as you only had 16 bit memory with a double-fetch, thumb was better.
Disclaimer: this was all quite a long time ago so my memory is imperfect. At the time, the highest spec processor was a 50MHz 486DX, where the internal and external clock rates were the same, and Acorn's Risc desktop computers were attempting to gain a market share and offered pretty good performance.
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good points about the timescales to get works of art noticed. I think the principle of artistic copyright that it should last until the day the creator dies or his/her wife dies or his/her dependent children reach the age of 21 or 90 years after creators birth, whichever comes later... i.e. the works of art act as as regular salary or pension.
I think there's a good case for automatically expiring copyrights and trademarks if they're abandoned. For example, if software is no longer supported and sold, it should become open source unless it can be shown that it makes up a substantial part of a newer version which is being actively developed. If music or movies not published for say five years, they should lose copyright protection. If the owner of a patent does not create or license a product embodying the invention for five years, it should expire. Ok, so this is simplistic, but the spirit I am trying to get at is to stop hoarding of intellectual property and denying the public at large the chance to enjoy it.
try www.gpspassion.com as a good place to start to find info on gps hardware, reviews etc.
I tried to decode that using rot-13, but it didn't work
:-)
TomTom GO series run on linux - they boot it off the SD card in the case of the Go300 and Go500. Google for "opentom" for a team of people who are rolling their own images.
before I RTFA'd I thought it might be a currency version of the G drive - just upload all your money to Google for safe keeping, where they will index all the serial numbers, and you can get to download it whenever you need it. And when the government come to ask for it, they will refuse as much as possible!
Different headphones have different sensitivies - by as much as 20dB. This means that even if the player has a calibrated output to ensure it cannot blow your ears, switching to more sensitive headphones will cause overload on your ears. Conversely, the player will be unusable with an insensitive pair of 'phones.
I have read many mp3 player reviews, and one of the key things pointed out by reviewers is whether the sound goes really loud, and people won't buy a player (and I recall the same happened to tape walkmans and radios) if it won't go really loud.
It's one of the things I do in shops with TVs and radios - I check I can turn them up really loud and not get rattles and buzzes. I also discard the cheap nasty phones that come with many portable audio devices and use my noice-cancelling phones or medium/low cost Sennheisers - these transform the sound from a cheap player.
The common sense advice is to take a break from listening to music every 20 mins, and "reset" your ears, that way you won't let the volume level keep creeping up
There was a server (named after a famous London landmark), which did DNS serving and also resolving, and was open to the whole internet (which, admittedly, wasn't too big). When customers moved away, they continued to use it for resolving. When the server was finally shut down in, errm, 1999 (wasn't the Y2k bug a marvellous excuse to get rid of services noone wanted to maintain anymore?!), we sniffed the network and there were still people using it. The network block was reallocated for other purposes, and even two+ years on there were still steady numbers of DNS resolving requests.
We also had separate resolvers and name servers, and we put up big announcements for months that name servers were going to lose recursion (because reloading the servers was taking longer and longer and people complained about slow resolving), and yet there were die-hards who held out until rebutted customer complaints made them fix things. We guessed these customers, basically, had had someone set things up, the person resigned/died/was fired/kidnapped by aliens from redmon/ and they had no clue how anything worked any more.
So, yes, changing the default behaviour of DNS servers to not resolve can cause problems.
Oh yeah, one final thing. When I started work at that ISP in the mid nineties, 20-25% of customers ran windows, the rest ran some form of unix; the windows users "ate" 80%+ of support. When I left three years later the windows users were 60-70% of customers, and the number of support staff grew to accomodate the cluelessness.
At $JOB-1 I trialled and bought Yourkit's YJP, which is truly excellent, very easy to use and a very effective tool. Moreover, it's not expensive, and the support is pretty good too. I'm just a happy customer, not affiliated in any other way.
The way things are going, we may not have to change the lifestyles of that many people if the destruction of the planet causes a step-change in climate leading to the wiping out of 80% of the population. We don't necessarily need a dinosaur-killer asteroid to come along, we seem capable of the same impact ourselves.
The tragedy will be that the people who are causing the damage - USA and Western Europe - are likely to be the survivors of such an extinction event, because we have the most resources to adapt to a massively changed environment.
When Rutherford first discussed the splitting of the atom and how it might lead to useful power generation, he said it was speculation and pure moonshine.
History proved that great physicist wrong.
A transformer is an electromagnetically-coupled device which requires a changing magnetic field (and therefore a changing current) created by a primary coil in order to induce a current in the secondary coil. QED, you don't transform DC to DC!
In fact, the biggest problems with today's AC supplies is that the frequency is TOO LOW... this results in the transformers and other AC-AC converters being oversized. Pretty much every switching supply today, including the ones in PCs, chop up either AC or DC into much higher frequencies and this allows smaller components. Avionics have used this for quite a long time, as weight and size savings are crucial!
The only limit on using higher frequencies comes when you start to get magnetic losses in transformers and chokes, so in practise a few hundred kHz is the useful limit in switched mode PSUs.
Thus, if you were starting again with an electric grid system, 500 or 1000Hz would be a much better solution.
I hope you meant enigma and not enema... a java enema would probably give you a hell of a caffeine hit, but it'd probably be a tad unpleasant cleaning the espresso machine afterwards!
The conundrum is usually resolved by using ammeters which can cope with non unity power-factors - motors and generators and inductive loads usually give a false reading on an cheap/off the shelp multimeter.
The difficulty of measuring inductive loads used to be exploited by large organisations who'd use capacitors to shift the phase of their fluorescent lights and thus not have to pay for their lighting!
There's a key advantage to using a flywheel/generator combination: your electricity supply is massively cleaned up because you're generating a new clean electricity supply, the inertia of the flywheel also smooths out most glitches in the mains.
Not only don't you need the UPS, you also do away with the problem of keeping the UPS cool.
The only issue is noise, these things aren't quiet.
A quick google found these people: http://www.activepower.com/
"being alone is better than a bad relationship".
Yes, it's true; when you're desperate, you'll put up with a lot of things. I had three quite manipulative/abusive girlfriends in succession, and then went for more than two years without one and it was only after I'd achieved closure that I realised the above, and understood it deep down.
To meet the right person is one thing, but to be attractive to them requires that you're not desperate, are interesting with a good sense of humour, and have reasonable personal hygiene. If you have a good social life, some non-solitary hobbies, and don't dress like a tramp, you're mostly there!
what are you doing? demands the man
isn't this a westinghouse? asks the squirrel
yes, but... says the man
then I'm westing.
ba-boom-cha! I'll be here all season, thank you.
Joel could easily have been talking about .net or .java or .latest-easy-to-write-language. He hit the nail on the head when he said that (to paraphrase) teaching people using a language which avoids the requirement to understand how computers actually work makes it hard to assess whether a programmer is any good.
Joel's the Perils of Java School
When I used to work in embedded systems (oh gosh, 12 years ago!) I was stunned to discover that some of my colleagues didn't understand how to write interrupt routines and thought they were black magic! I can see why, although jobs are not often advertised, linux kernel programmers get a very high premium salary - because so many software engineers don't even have an insight into memory allocation strategies and stacks, let alone assembler and interrupts.
Sorry to rant, but I gotta justify the grey hairs somehow!
the medical profession now reckon that ANY overload of your hearing causes at least SOME permanent loss of hearing, so if you do regularly get a ringing in your ears, or if peaks of volume make your ears hurt, you're setting yourself up for big trouble later in life. My mother works at a charity for acquired deafness (people go go deaf rather than being born without hearing) and she says that whilst once hearing loss was associated with heavy industrial work with lots of noise, she's seeing younger and younger people develop the problem - it's no longer an elderly "disease"
So, moral of the story, resist the urge to increase the sound level as you listen - don't let it creep up. If you're listening in a noisy environment, consider noise-cancelling closed-cup phones, so you can listen at a lower level.
or use mplayer dump stream
dude, you need a girlfriend real bad!
http://www.textmaker.de/
There are occasional deals on ebay for it - I already got mine so feel free to bid the next license deal up to the max!
Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with TM. My liability towards you is zilch regarding this suggestion, even if you get sucked into a black hole as a result of following it.
my particular point was that when you're dealing with embedded systems, and memory is eight bits wide, having to have four chips on board to have a 32 bit memory tends to make things quite big.
well, quite a long time ago, Arm discovered that their risc processors were all very well and good, but the instruction stream was quite BIG and required lots of storage (and wasn't too good for embedded systems which typically use only 8 or 16 bit wide memory, whereas RISC uses 32), so they added something called "thumb" which had a 16-bit wide instructions which decode to the full risc set.
I was a tester on this program, taking various programs (some downloaded, some in-house utilities, some written specially) and compiling them for various different architectures (8 + 16 + 33 bit x86, full 32 bit arm risc and 16 bit thumb). This allowed comparison of space and performance. With full-width memory, 32 bit risc was faster than thumb, but as soon as you only had 16 bit memory with a double-fetch, thumb was better.
Disclaimer: this was all quite a long time ago so my memory is imperfect. At the time, the highest spec processor was a 50MHz 486DX, where the internal and external clock rates were the same, and Acorn's Risc desktop computers were attempting to gain a market share and offered pretty good performance.