I think the original post that started this thread had a user thought process like this:
"I need to upgrade my media player. It looks like I'm going to have to rebuy my music, this sucks. Fuck you Microsoft, at least I can be fairly comfortable that if I switch to iPod it'll be the last time I have to rebuy my music if I stick with Apple, as opposed to a clear track record of compatibility breaks even between devices from the same vendor."
I think the point made a few posts up was that people are angry with MS not because of DRM in general, but because they pushed the "Plays for Sure" DRM initiative, which had two problems:
a) It didn't really "play for sure" even on devices that were theoretically compatible and supported b) After heavily marketing PlaysForSure, Microsoft made their very first self-branded media player incompatible with it. Not just "claimed compatibility that doesn't work" but explicitly "not compatible".
As much as Apple's DRM sucks, at least one thing can be said about it - It's compatible with every iPod ever released since Apple started using that DRM technology, and as far as anyone can tell will continue to be compatible with all future iPods. Yes, you're locked in to Apple hardware, but at least you don't have to rebuy your music every time Apple releases a new iPod, whereas Microsoft's track record with compatibility is awful, even between different versions of their own products.
One claims temporal dithering (a variant of PWM, and potentially a variant of sigma-delta modulation) of a single pixel.
The other claims spatial dithering across multiple pixels.
Spatial dithering cannot be performed without sacrificing resolution. Temporal dithering can be performed without sacrificing resolution, as long as the monitor is fast enough.
For example, if the response time is 10 ms, then you could achieve effective 7-bit temporal dithering that gave you an effective refresh rate of 50 Hz. While this may seem low (50 Hz on a CRT is painful for many), keep the following in mind:
On a CRT, you have a pixel that is lit very brightly at a low duty cycle at the refresh rate. i.e. on for a fraction of the refresh rate, and more importantly completely off for the rest (other than the fact that phosphors do take some time to decay). The end result of this full-swing "on-off" behavior is that flicker can be quite noticeable and annoying. If, instead, the flicker is between values of 45/64 and 46/64 with no off timeto give an effective 91/128 brightness, the flicker will be far less noticeable.
It's just the same as common DACs in audio equipment - many of them are 1-bit sigma-delta modulators operating at an extremely high sampling rate (1 MHz+) and feeding an analog interpolation filter. Usually this results in superior performance to a true 16-bit DAC operating at 44.1 kHz. Temporal dithering is the same basic idea but instead of an analog filter in the output device, it depends on the inherent filtering of the eye.
I don't know if there are any studies or proof, but it's an ongoing joke at my current job. Not much more than a joke though.
That said, along with the eyes, the testes are one of the most temperature sensitive organs in the body (and hence one of the first two organs that is likely to experience damage if you exceed safe RF exposure levels), and RF engineers in the defense industry frequently are exposed at levels right up at the OSHA safety limits.
I would have used a 40W light bulb (something which you don't want to be holding for extended periods of time) as the example - similar power intensity to a waveguide carrying that much power at that frequency.
If a person was at the focal point of a receive dish... Well, due to path loss they wouldn't get much exposure, unless the transmitter and dishes were massively overengineered (why have that high of a signal strength at the receiver when there is no need? use smaller dishes and save some electrical power...)
If a person was at the focal point of a transmit dish - well, that would be pretty hard since usually the feed mechanism (either a waveguide horn or sometimes a dipole) is going to be there, and if it's not there won't be any RF.:) If you touched an exposed antenna element you would get a local burn (even at far lower power levels, the inverse square law is NOT your friend when you have direct physical contact with an antenna or circuit trace carrying RF), but most cellular systems have radomes over their antenna elements for protection against the outside environment, one would have to press themselves against a radome for an extended period of time to sustain injury at a power level of 45W average.
I stand corrected regarding the "cooks from inside", although I don't think things are as clear cut as the article says. Some things will have much deeper skin depth because of low water content (for example, biscuits cook quite evenly.) Humans do have much higher water content, but there are still plenty of situations where permanent internal damage is suffered due to high power RF exposure before external damage becomes visible.
I do stand corrected regarding 2.4 GHz absorption. My bad.
"Except, you know...the nuclear radiation that is RF radiation...which is all of it." Nope. Yes, RF radiation and gamma radiation are both electromagnetic radiation. They have vastly different wavelengths and energies per photon though - RF radiation has extremely long wavelength (low energy) compared to visible light. (Yes, visible light falls into the same category) Gamma, on the other hand, has a much shorter wavelength (higher energy per photon) than visible light. UV is very close to gamma in terms of energy and wavelength. In the case of UV and gamma, individual photons have the ability to make the electron shells of individual atoms change states. (hence the term "ionizing"). As a result, UV and gamma can change the chemical makeup of molecules by breaking and rearranging individual molecular bonds (this is why it can damage DNA permanently). RF, on the other hand, acts to cause entire molecules to vibrate (heating) but does not change their chemical composition unless the temperature exceeds that required to start a chemical reaction.
Let's not forget that nuclear radiation also can be particle radiation (alpha and beta particles), which are also ionizing.
"Your story aside, that much power could easily burn someone to cinders if they happened to be sitting on the focal point of a microwave dish. They don't actually get 45W of microwave energy hitting them ever, so it's not a problem." Oh yeah, agreed, many such coworkers did get RF burns from accidental brief contact with circuit traces in open PAs they were working with. That said, most of them (including myself) did far more tissue damage with soldering iron accidents than with RF burns. Still, even when not having accidental contact with traces, we were all (in general) exposed to far more RF than the average person is on a regular basis.
I believe there is a scientific reason for the ISM band being there - I think water has a bit of an absorption peak in the 2.4 GHz region.
For this reason, 2.4 GHz wasn't too hot for long-haul communications due to water vapor in the air, so no one was in a rush to license spectrum for it, and no one fought designating it as an "Industrial, Scientific, Medical" band. (with the primary use in all three of those categories being to take advantage of that water absorption peak for heating.) Now, because the band is such a cesspool, no one minded allowing low-power unlicensed communications in that band.
Now, as to the health effects of this - Yes, the water in your body is more likely to absorb 2.4 GHz RF. No, that absorption will not do any cumulative damage. Absorbing 2.4 GHz RF will make the water molecules in your body vibrate a little more (i.e. it will heat you up.) At high powers, this does become dangerous as the heat basically cooks you from the inside (just like a microwave oven). At low powers (with 802.11 being a great example), the body is able to safely dissipate the heat rapidly enough so that not only is no damage done, the change in temperature at any point in the body is negligible. You're more likely to get burned by touching the heatsink of the RF amp than you are by touching a circuit trace carrying RF at those power levels.
RF radiation is nothing like nuclear radiation - the critical difference is that nuclear radiation is ionizing, that is to say that it can not only vibrate molecules a bit, but it has enough energy to alter them. This has the effect of "flipping bits" in your DNA and other such nasty stuff. Since "bit flipping" can have cumulative effects, low levels of ionizing radiation can be dangerous in the long term, because the damage accumulates. With RF, it doesn't unless power levels are so high as to induce temperatures that cause thermal damage.
Prior to graduate school, I worked at a company that built RF power amplifiers for cell towers (30-45W average power output), and many of my coworkers had been working with microwave RF amps since the very first cell system Motorola deployed. (Yes, we had some ex-Motorola old hands there, who had interesting stories from the early days when the system designers were also heavily involved with the installation process of new base stations.) No health problems whatsoever.
Since graduate school, one of the tasks of my department is taking equipment through EMI testing. We're frequently right at OSHA RF exposure limits - no health problems with any of us (Well, at least no new ones that weren't preexisting conditions), even our mentor who has been doing this for 20-30 years.
Not quite true. You can easily buy tuners for unencrypted digital cable.
But that's for channels that wouldn't have been affected by this change anyway. A CableCARD-capable tuner (which can tune encrypted channels) is a whole different story. As you have said, you can't buy those except with a CableLabs-certified PC.
20k-40k subscribers is a bloody nose, but not by any means a massive threat to XM.
I never listened to O&A (Just like I never liked Stern back when I lived in 92.3 WXRK's coverage area), so for the moment will continue to stay with XM. In fact, I'm fairly certain O&A being added to the lineup was a contributor to XMLM's death (bandwidth concerns).
Note that I didn't dislike Stern or O&A because they were offensive - I just plain don't like talk and wanted to listen to music on my way to work in the morning, and that's when Stern was on.
That said, I AM wary of XM touching their other "xL" channels now. (xL were their "potentially offensive" content channels that the subscriber could choose to block from their subscription, but for others was the main reason for subscribing.) If they start bleeping XM 48 (Squizz xL) or censoring the DJs, I will start considering dropping XM. Unfortunately I don't have too much choice of other services - It sounds like this censorship is a side effect of the XM-Sirius merger.
Can they fix the application? Yes. See the list of numerous patches to various "notorious" offenders.
Before you comment about patches being too difficult to apply - in nearly all cases those patches have been sent upstream and are being integrated into the app by the developers of that app. The end result is that while in the short term, PowerTOP benefits only power users who can patch and compile from source, it has enabled identification of offending sections of application code so that the application authors can fix it. (For example, the next release of Pidgin will come with numerous fixes for behavior found with PowerTOP.)
In short: PowerTOP has almost no benefit for the "normal" user in the short term PowerTOP has quite a lot of potential benefit for the "power" user PowerTOP has the ability to enable application developers to make optimizations that help the "normal" users some time down the line (depending on application/distribution release cycles), thus PowerTOP has great benefit for "normal" users in the long term.
Can they stop the application? Usually not, but there are some notorious offenders that are "on by default" that most users don't benefit too much from, and would rather temporarily or permanently disable to increase battery life. (See Beagle for example).
Yup. Even in an "optional" (I say that in quotes for reasons I will discuss shortly) summer program, the students could be quite unruly and hard to control. Some of them just plain didn't want to be there - they had been forced into it by their parents.
Many of them, though, did want to learn but just had too high of an energy level not to try to make at least SOME diversion at some point. To their credit, at least these students were creative in their troublemaking and many of us had to resist the urge to begin laughing (or even worse, agree with the students' excellent logical argument of why they should be allowed to do something that was forbidden...)
Even if the pay and politics were far better, I still don't think I could deal with a normal high school class that wasn't in the room (mostly) by choice. No Child Left Behind is even worse - to avoid leaving behind the students who simply don't want to be there and don't want to learn, the students who DO want to learn and move ahead in their education get held back. Even before NCLB, I don't know how many times my parents and I had to fight administrators who didn't like the idea of a student moving ahead in their curriculum by (god forbid) taking summer classes to get ahead rather than make up for a failed class!
A friend of mine from high school worked as a substitute teacher at our old high school to make some extra money to pay for graduate school. The stories she told of the current state of our high school were horrifying - Many of the "old guard" teachers (who actually had a clue what they were doing) had retired, and their replacements were awful, many of the current teachers at the school went to high school with us, and saying that some of them were not the best students at our school back then is giving them too much credit.
The problem is that those who are best qualified to teach are also usually qualified to do something that pays FAR better. Between the better pay and the horrific politics of public schools, it's pretty hard to convince someone to teach unless they have nothing else they can do.
A few summers ago I got a job as a teaching assistant at a summer program for gifted high school students. As stressful as it was, it was the most rewarding job I have ever had in my life. Unfortunately, as much as I enjoyed helping to teach those students, there's no way I could teach high school. As rewarding as it can be, it can also be VERY stressful, and the pay is just not worth the stress, especially when you have to deal with public school politics in addition to unruly students.
In short - unless the educational system in our country gets overhauled soon (not likely, considering that we have giant leaps backwards like No Child Left Behind which makes the political bullshit WORSE), we're screwed.
Not true. There's plenty of "HD" stuff that doesn't screw you.
Google "HD HomeRun"... Admittedly it's limited to unencrypted OTA broadcasts and unencrypted QAM (which is usually just rebroadcasts of the aforementioned OTA channels), but you can get quite a lot of HD content without any DRM whatsoever.
My guess is you would never see this in a consumer product. I would not be surprised if such measures were part of the anti-tamper measures put into military comsec equipment though.
Actually, I'm fairly certain the breakdown between client and subscription is this:
Client one-time fees: Pay for the initial development of the game (and, if it is an expansion, the expansion). All MMOs cost a decent amount of money initially due to this, even EVE cost $30-50 when it came out. Subscription fees: Pays for server maintenance costs, and minor content improvement and development.
The reason EVE is now (essentially) free to start (Actually, my experience back last August that the client fee was about $5 - creating an account cost $20 and included a month of free play, the sub fee was $11-15 depending on whether you were month-to-month or prepaid a few months in advance.) is that the initial development has been more than paid for. EVE does have more continuing ongoing development than other MMOs paid for out of sub fees, but this is because they don't ever release expansions to the game. (They call them expansions, but they are really just major codebase patches, where other games need to add whole new artwork for new maps with their expansions, EVE has only added additional space for players to use once, and in that case, it was just a matter of firing up their RNG as the artwork is the same for the new solar systems as the old ones.) In short, one of the most labor-intensive aspects of MMOG expansion development (artwork, coding is nowhere near as much effort as artwork in modern engines.) is mostly avoided in EVE's major patches, allowing them to focus more on adding functionality in patching the backend code with bugfixes and new features.
For example, EVE's Revelations major patch added the following artwork: Some 2-D icons for various new modules 8 new ships (tier 2 battlecruisers, one for each of four races, and tier 3 battleships, one for each of the four races) Maybe some new NPC models? Not much else really, maybe a few other miscellaneous models.
Some of their other added content (faction ships, tech 2 ships), has been a matter of reskinning an existing model, and in most cases, that reskinning was just a color change.
This lets them focus more on the actual codebase, which is why EVE has changed so much in terms of added modes of gameplay (not necessarily new content - I consider new art and storyline additions to be new content, not new code functionality, but adding new facets to existing content is just as exciting, if not moreso, than adding more content.)
I'm fairly certain SWG came out well after 2002 - I'd already been playing DAoC for a while when it came out, and I started DAoC in June 2002. (DAoC launched in 2001 I believe, as I'm fairly certain I started about 3/4 of a year after release.)
In my opinion, DAoC did pretty well, and continued to do so until some dumbass decided to replace the grandparent's "do Everquest, but make it fun", with just "do Everquest" when they added EQ-style "rare mob" camping in the Trials of Atlantis expansion. Things went downhill from there, almost immediately players started looking for somewhere else to go, but until WoW, didn't find anywhere else. Mythic didn't realize how angry their playerbase was with them until WoW was released and their subscriber base dropped by 30% or more in a matter of a month or two, and started continually going down from there. They finally started fixing ToA, but by then it was too late, their players had already lost faith in the company as one that was reactive rather than proactive. To this day, I don't think Mythic realizes just how badly they screwed up - Due to their highly unique RvR endgame (which resulted in some players actually coming back from WoW, albeit only briefly in most cases followed by a break from MMOGs in general), they had the ability to weather WoW if they'd been smart, but they spent nearly two years antagonizing their player base instead of keeping them happy.
At this point, DAoC is dead with no way to revive the game, Mythic has one of two options: a) Keep the status quo. The hardcore addicts stay happy, but the game continues hemorraghing the more casual players (which are now considered addicts by any other game's standards) because they can't compete in RvR with the hardcores. Game eventually dies as its playerbase dwindles and it is impossible to recruit new blood. Mythic has gone a long way in making the grind to 50 enjoyable, but once you hit 50, a new player basically is going to get their ass kicked out in the Frontiers, with no good way to progress. If they join the zerg, they make no RPs. If they try to 8-man, the hardcores farm them and they not only get no RPs, but they make the hardcores even stronger. b) Overhaul RvR, or at least the rewards system. For a game whose developer vision has always been massive capture-and-hold warfare at keeps (and later towers with the NF overhaul), the rewards for keep warfare sure are shitty. If you want to gain RPs, you need to join a roaming 8-man group and avoid the massive keep battles (other than farming reinforcement groups). For a long time there were zero rewards for keep/tower taking and defending, eventually rewards were added but they were insignificant. (For example, spending 3 hours sieging a keep and successfully taking it is worth about as much as two player kills in an 8-man roaming group.) Mythic needs to drop the RP rewards for player kills and crank the keep/tower taking rewards WAY up. (Plus perhaps a 3-4x bonus for player kills made in defense of a strategic asset, to encourage people to defend keeps rather than let them go and retake them.) But such an overhaul that devalues 8-man roaming groups, while it will enable the game to attract and retain new blood, will also drive away their existing hardcore playerbase. In short, they need to somehow pull off something akin to NGE without destroying the game, but unlike SWG NGE, Mythic would be doing this to save a dying game, rather than try to overhaul a recently launched game that was still potentially growing.
Around where I live (admittedly I'm in upstate NY, near Binghamton), there are Wii accessories (controllers, nunchuks, classic gamepads, etc) everywhere. Circuit City, Wally World, Target, they all have them. Same for Best Buy and Target/Wally World up in Ithaca.
Now the actual systems themselves - that's a different story...
Let's face it. The RIAA and MPAA love closing the barn door after the horses have been out for a long time.
In the case of the RIAA, they insist on DRM for downloads, but still continue to sell un-DRMed CDs (and will be forced to do so for a long time due to the installed base of CD players with no easy way to obsolete them - for music, CDs are pretty close to the maximum quality achievable, with less than 1% of the population having good enough ears to really hear the difference between CDs and something with a little more dynamic range.) They have tried to "copy protect" CDs, but all of those efforts have focused on evil tricks with Windows autorun that utterly fail on every other computing platform that exists (because other computing platforms are smarter than Windows and realize that a disc can actually have data AND music on the same disc!) So all the pirates have to do is have one guy go out and buy a CD to supply his 100 friends, one of whom is guaranteed to spread their copy to thousands on the Internet. It's a perfect example of DRM that does not deter pirates in the slightest but only screws legitimate users.
Re:It doesn't support Office Communicator. :(
on
Pidgin 2.0 Released
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
If you read above, there are some early attempts at supporting Office Communicator, but none that are very reliable or polished.
The reason is that Microsoft bastardized their SIP/SIMPLE implementation in LCS so badly (in typical Microsoft fashion) that it won't interoperate with any software that is actually SIP/SIMPLE compliant. So lots of IM programs support SIP/SIMPLE, but to talk to MS LCS, they have to break their implementation so badly that they won't talk to anything else!
See past news articles regarding GAIM vs. AOL lawsuits - Development pace (and scope) was slowed down significantly due to the lawsuit.
In essence, per their lawyers' advice, the developers agreed not to make any major releases while negotiations were going on.
As to why there wasn't too much progress in their betas - if there had been significant progress other than a UI overhaul and bugfixes, AOL would likely have claimed that their "betas" were really releases that were only being called betas as a loophole.
The trademark lawsuit has been fully resolved, so what matters is where things go in the future, and I suspect we'll be seeing a lot of progress now. I wouldn't be surprised if the developers have been working on voice/video support in a seperate codebase somewhere but keeping it quiet until the lawsuits were resolved.
octave + gnuplot + LaTeX = absolutely beautiful plots in anything I submitted (homework assignments, term papers) in grad school.
To get you started (there could be errors here, I'm doing this from memory, but Octave code something similar to this:
plot blah hold on plot something plot otherstuff hold off
gset term postscript eps color 22 gset output someplot.eps
replot
gset output foo %bad shit happens to your plot output if you don't change the output file when setting the term back to X11 gset term x11
Would do the following: Plot multiple things in a plot to the screen Output that plot to an EPS file Reset the output so the next plot would go back to the screen
You could then run the.eps files through epstopdf, write some document in LaTeX that included your plots by their basename (i.e. without the.pdf extension in the document), and use pdflatex to generate a nice PDF file complete with clickable cross references
(There are a lot of details I'm not mentioning here of course, unfortunately there really isn't any single good central HOWTO for doing all sorts of useful stuff in LaTeX.)
Slashdot Mirror
I think the original post that started this thread had a user thought process like this:
"I need to upgrade my media player. It looks like I'm going to have to rebuy my music, this sucks. Fuck you Microsoft, at least I can be fairly comfortable that if I switch to iPod it'll be the last time I have to rebuy my music if I stick with Apple, as opposed to a clear track record of compatibility breaks even between devices from the same vendor."
I think the point made a few posts up was that people are angry with MS not because of DRM in general, but because they pushed the "Plays for Sure" DRM initiative, which had two problems:
a) It didn't really "play for sure" even on devices that were theoretically compatible and supported
b) After heavily marketing PlaysForSure, Microsoft made their very first self-branded media player incompatible with it. Not just "claimed compatibility that doesn't work" but explicitly "not compatible".
As much as Apple's DRM sucks, at least one thing can be said about it - It's compatible with every iPod ever released since Apple started using that DRM technology, and as far as anyone can tell will continue to be compatible with all future iPods. Yes, you're locked in to Apple hardware, but at least you don't have to rebuy your music every time Apple releases a new iPod, whereas Microsoft's track record with compatibility is awful, even between different versions of their own products.
Both your post and parent conflict quite a bit.
One claims temporal dithering (a variant of PWM, and potentially a variant of sigma-delta modulation) of a single pixel.
The other claims spatial dithering across multiple pixels.
Spatial dithering cannot be performed without sacrificing resolution. Temporal dithering can be performed without sacrificing resolution, as long as the monitor is fast enough.
For example, if the response time is 10 ms, then you could achieve effective 7-bit temporal dithering that gave you an effective refresh rate of 50 Hz. While this may seem low (50 Hz on a CRT is painful for many), keep the following in mind:
On a CRT, you have a pixel that is lit very brightly at a low duty cycle at the refresh rate. i.e. on for a fraction of the refresh rate, and more importantly completely off for the rest (other than the fact that phosphors do take some time to decay). The end result of this full-swing "on-off" behavior is that flicker can be quite noticeable and annoying. If, instead, the flicker is between values of 45/64 and 46/64 with no off timeto give an effective 91/128 brightness, the flicker will be far less noticeable.
It's just the same as common DACs in audio equipment - many of them are 1-bit sigma-delta modulators operating at an extremely high sampling rate (1 MHz+) and feeding an analog interpolation filter. Usually this results in superior performance to a true 16-bit DAC operating at 44.1 kHz. Temporal dithering is the same basic idea but instead of an analog filter in the output device, it depends on the inherent filtering of the eye.
I don't know if there are any studies or proof, but it's an ongoing joke at my current job. Not much more than a joke though.
That said, along with the eyes, the testes are one of the most temperature sensitive organs in the body (and hence one of the first two organs that is likely to experience damage if you exceed safe RF exposure levels), and RF engineers in the defense industry frequently are exposed at levels right up at the OSHA safety limits.
I would have used a 40W light bulb (something which you don't want to be holding for extended periods of time) as the example - similar power intensity to a waveguide carrying that much power at that frequency.
:) If you touched an exposed antenna element you would get a local burn (even at far lower power levels, the inverse square law is NOT your friend when you have direct physical contact with an antenna or circuit trace carrying RF), but most cellular systems have radomes over their antenna elements for protection against the outside environment, one would have to press themselves against a radome for an extended period of time to sustain injury at a power level of 45W average.
If a person was at the focal point of a receive dish... Well, due to path loss they wouldn't get much exposure, unless the transmitter and dishes were massively overengineered (why have that high of a signal strength at the receiver when there is no need? use smaller dishes and save some electrical power...)
If a person was at the focal point of a transmit dish - well, that would be pretty hard since usually the feed mechanism (either a waveguide horn or sometimes a dipole) is going to be there, and if it's not there won't be any RF.
I stand corrected regarding the "cooks from inside", although I don't think things are as clear cut as the article says. Some things will have much deeper skin depth because of low water content (for example, biscuits cook quite evenly.) Humans do have much higher water content, but there are still plenty of situations where permanent internal damage is suffered due to high power RF exposure before external damage becomes visible.
I do stand corrected regarding 2.4 GHz absorption. My bad.
"Except, you know...the nuclear radiation that is RF radiation...which is all of it."
Nope.
Yes, RF radiation and gamma radiation are both electromagnetic radiation. They have vastly different wavelengths and energies per photon though - RF radiation has extremely long wavelength (low energy) compared to visible light. (Yes, visible light falls into the same category) Gamma, on the other hand, has a much shorter wavelength (higher energy per photon) than visible light. UV is very close to gamma in terms of energy and wavelength. In the case of UV and gamma, individual photons have the ability to make the electron shells of individual atoms change states. (hence the term "ionizing"). As a result, UV and gamma can change the chemical makeup of molecules by breaking and rearranging individual molecular bonds (this is why it can damage DNA permanently). RF, on the other hand, acts to cause entire molecules to vibrate (heating) but does not change their chemical composition unless the temperature exceeds that required to start a chemical reaction.
Let's not forget that nuclear radiation also can be particle radiation (alpha and beta particles), which are also ionizing.
"Your story aside, that much power could easily burn someone to cinders if they happened to be sitting on the focal point of a microwave dish. They don't actually get 45W of microwave energy hitting them ever, so it's not a problem."
Oh yeah, agreed, many such coworkers did get RF burns from accidental brief contact with circuit traces in open PAs they were working with. That said, most of them (including myself) did far more tissue damage with soldering iron accidents than with RF burns. Still, even when not having accidental contact with traces, we were all (in general) exposed to far more RF than the average person is on a regular basis.
I believe there is a scientific reason for the ISM band being there - I think water has a bit of an absorption peak in the 2.4 GHz region.
For this reason, 2.4 GHz wasn't too hot for long-haul communications due to water vapor in the air, so no one was in a rush to license spectrum for it, and no one fought designating it as an "Industrial, Scientific, Medical" band. (with the primary use in all three of those categories being to take advantage of that water absorption peak for heating.) Now, because the band is such a cesspool, no one minded allowing low-power unlicensed communications in that band.
Now, as to the health effects of this - Yes, the water in your body is more likely to absorb 2.4 GHz RF. No, that absorption will not do any cumulative damage. Absorbing 2.4 GHz RF will make the water molecules in your body vibrate a little more (i.e. it will heat you up.) At high powers, this does become dangerous as the heat basically cooks you from the inside (just like a microwave oven). At low powers (with 802.11 being a great example), the body is able to safely dissipate the heat rapidly enough so that not only is no damage done, the change in temperature at any point in the body is negligible. You're more likely to get burned by touching the heatsink of the RF amp than you are by touching a circuit trace carrying RF at those power levels.
RF radiation is nothing like nuclear radiation - the critical difference is that nuclear radiation is ionizing, that is to say that it can not only vibrate molecules a bit, but it has enough energy to alter them. This has the effect of "flipping bits" in your DNA and other such nasty stuff. Since "bit flipping" can have cumulative effects, low levels of ionizing radiation can be dangerous in the long term, because the damage accumulates. With RF, it doesn't unless power levels are so high as to induce temperatures that cause thermal damage.
Prior to graduate school, I worked at a company that built RF power amplifiers for cell towers (30-45W average power output), and many of my coworkers had been working with microwave RF amps since the very first cell system Motorola deployed. (Yes, we had some ex-Motorola old hands there, who had interesting stories from the early days when the system designers were also heavily involved with the installation process of new base stations.) No health problems whatsoever.
Since graduate school, one of the tasks of my department is taking equipment through EMI testing. We're frequently right at OSHA RF exposure limits - no health problems with any of us (Well, at least no new ones that weren't preexisting conditions), even our mentor who has been doing this for 20-30 years.
Not quite true. You can easily buy tuners for unencrypted digital cable.
But that's for channels that wouldn't have been affected by this change anyway. A CableCARD-capable tuner (which can tune encrypted channels) is a whole different story. As you have said, you can't buy those except with a CableLabs-certified PC.
20k-40k subscribers is a bloody nose, but not by any means a massive threat to XM.
I never listened to O&A (Just like I never liked Stern back when I lived in 92.3 WXRK's coverage area), so for the moment will continue to stay with XM. In fact, I'm fairly certain O&A being added to the lineup was a contributor to XMLM's death (bandwidth concerns).
Note that I didn't dislike Stern or O&A because they were offensive - I just plain don't like talk and wanted to listen to music on my way to work in the morning, and that's when Stern was on.
That said, I AM wary of XM touching their other "xL" channels now. (xL were their "potentially offensive" content channels that the subscriber could choose to block from their subscription, but for others was the main reason for subscribing.) If they start bleeping XM 48 (Squizz xL) or censoring the DJs, I will start considering dropping XM. Unfortunately I don't have too much choice of other services - It sounds like this censorship is a side effect of the XM-Sirius merger.
Wrong.
Can they fix the application? Yes. See the list of numerous patches to various "notorious" offenders.
Before you comment about patches being too difficult to apply - in nearly all cases those patches have been sent upstream and are being integrated into the app by the developers of that app. The end result is that while in the short term, PowerTOP benefits only power users who can patch and compile from source, it has enabled identification of offending sections of application code so that the application authors can fix it. (For example, the next release of Pidgin will come with numerous fixes for behavior found with PowerTOP.)
In short:
PowerTOP has almost no benefit for the "normal" user in the short term
PowerTOP has quite a lot of potential benefit for the "power" user
PowerTOP has the ability to enable application developers to make optimizations that help the "normal" users some time down the line (depending on application/distribution release cycles), thus PowerTOP has great benefit for "normal" users in the long term.
Can they stop the application? Usually not, but there are some notorious offenders that are "on by default" that most users don't benefit too much from, and would rather temporarily or permanently disable to increase battery life. (See Beagle for example).
"is it against the patent law to interoperate with another system?"
No, but it is against the law to use a patented technology without some sort of license to that patent.
DMCA and its interoperability clauses have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with this.
Exactly. Now go read it for me please. :)
Yup. Even in an "optional" (I say that in quotes for reasons I will discuss shortly) summer program, the students could be quite unruly and hard to control. Some of them just plain didn't want to be there - they had been forced into it by their parents.
Many of them, though, did want to learn but just had too high of an energy level not to try to make at least SOME diversion at some point. To their credit, at least these students were creative in their troublemaking and many of us had to resist the urge to begin laughing (or even worse, agree with the students' excellent logical argument of why they should be allowed to do something that was forbidden...)
Even if the pay and politics were far better, I still don't think I could deal with a normal high school class that wasn't in the room (mostly) by choice. No Child Left Behind is even worse - to avoid leaving behind the students who simply don't want to be there and don't want to learn, the students who DO want to learn and move ahead in their education get held back. Even before NCLB, I don't know how many times my parents and I had to fight administrators who didn't like the idea of a student moving ahead in their curriculum by (god forbid) taking summer classes to get ahead rather than make up for a failed class!
A friend of mine from high school worked as a substitute teacher at our old high school to make some extra money to pay for graduate school. The stories she told of the current state of our high school were horrifying - Many of the "old guard" teachers (who actually had a clue what they were doing) had retired, and their replacements were awful, many of the current teachers at the school went to high school with us, and saying that some of them were not the best students at our school back then is giving them too much credit.
The problem is that those who are best qualified to teach are also usually qualified to do something that pays FAR better. Between the better pay and the horrific politics of public schools, it's pretty hard to convince someone to teach unless they have nothing else they can do.
A few summers ago I got a job as a teaching assistant at a summer program for gifted high school students. As stressful as it was, it was the most rewarding job I have ever had in my life. Unfortunately, as much as I enjoyed helping to teach those students, there's no way I could teach high school. As rewarding as it can be, it can also be VERY stressful, and the pay is just not worth the stress, especially when you have to deal with public school politics in addition to unruly students.
In short - unless the educational system in our country gets overhauled soon (not likely, considering that we have giant leaps backwards like No Child Left Behind which makes the political bullshit WORSE), we're screwed.
Not true. There's plenty of "HD" stuff that doesn't screw you.
Google "HD HomeRun"... Admittedly it's limited to unencrypted OTA broadcasts and unencrypted QAM (which is usually just rebroadcasts of the aforementioned OTA channels), but you can get quite a lot of HD content without any DRM whatsoever.
My guess is you would never see this in a consumer product. I would not be surprised if such measures were part of the anti-tamper measures put into military comsec equipment though.
Actually, I'm fairly certain the breakdown between client and subscription is this:
Client one-time fees: Pay for the initial development of the game (and, if it is an expansion, the expansion). All MMOs cost a decent amount of money initially due to this, even EVE cost $30-50 when it came out.
Subscription fees: Pays for server maintenance costs, and minor content improvement and development.
The reason EVE is now (essentially) free to start (Actually, my experience back last August that the client fee was about $5 - creating an account cost $20 and included a month of free play, the sub fee was $11-15 depending on whether you were month-to-month or prepaid a few months in advance.) is that the initial development has been more than paid for. EVE does have more continuing ongoing development than other MMOs paid for out of sub fees, but this is because they don't ever release expansions to the game. (They call them expansions, but they are really just major codebase patches, where other games need to add whole new artwork for new maps with their expansions, EVE has only added additional space for players to use once, and in that case, it was just a matter of firing up their RNG as the artwork is the same for the new solar systems as the old ones.) In short, one of the most labor-intensive aspects of MMOG expansion development (artwork, coding is nowhere near as much effort as artwork in modern engines.) is mostly avoided in EVE's major patches, allowing them to focus more on adding functionality in patching the backend code with bugfixes and new features.
For example, EVE's Revelations major patch added the following artwork:
Some 2-D icons for various new modules
8 new ships (tier 2 battlecruisers, one for each of four races, and tier 3 battleships, one for each of the four races)
Maybe some new NPC models?
Not much else really, maybe a few other miscellaneous models.
Some of their other added content (faction ships, tech 2 ships), has been a matter of reskinning an existing model, and in most cases, that reskinning was just a color change.
This lets them focus more on the actual codebase, which is why EVE has changed so much in terms of added modes of gameplay (not necessarily new content - I consider new art and storyline additions to be new content, not new code functionality, but adding new facets to existing content is just as exciting, if not moreso, than adding more content.)
I'm fairly certain SWG came out well after 2002 - I'd already been playing DAoC for a while when it came out, and I started DAoC in June 2002. (DAoC launched in 2001 I believe, as I'm fairly certain I started about 3/4 of a year after release.)
In my opinion, DAoC did pretty well, and continued to do so until some dumbass decided to replace the grandparent's "do Everquest, but make it fun", with just "do Everquest" when they added EQ-style "rare mob" camping in the Trials of Atlantis expansion. Things went downhill from there, almost immediately players started looking for somewhere else to go, but until WoW, didn't find anywhere else. Mythic didn't realize how angry their playerbase was with them until WoW was released and their subscriber base dropped by 30% or more in a matter of a month or two, and started continually going down from there. They finally started fixing ToA, but by then it was too late, their players had already lost faith in the company as one that was reactive rather than proactive. To this day, I don't think Mythic realizes just how badly they screwed up - Due to their highly unique RvR endgame (which resulted in some players actually coming back from WoW, albeit only briefly in most cases followed by a break from MMOGs in general), they had the ability to weather WoW if they'd been smart, but they spent nearly two years antagonizing their player base instead of keeping them happy.
At this point, DAoC is dead with no way to revive the game, Mythic has one of two options:
a) Keep the status quo. The hardcore addicts stay happy, but the game continues hemorraghing the more casual players (which are now considered addicts by any other game's standards) because they can't compete in RvR with the hardcores. Game eventually dies as its playerbase dwindles and it is impossible to recruit new blood. Mythic has gone a long way in making the grind to 50 enjoyable, but once you hit 50, a new player basically is going to get their ass kicked out in the Frontiers, with no good way to progress. If they join the zerg, they make no RPs. If they try to 8-man, the hardcores farm them and they not only get no RPs, but they make the hardcores even stronger.
b) Overhaul RvR, or at least the rewards system. For a game whose developer vision has always been massive capture-and-hold warfare at keeps (and later towers with the NF overhaul), the rewards for keep warfare sure are shitty. If you want to gain RPs, you need to join a roaming 8-man group and avoid the massive keep battles (other than farming reinforcement groups). For a long time there were zero rewards for keep/tower taking and defending, eventually rewards were added but they were insignificant. (For example, spending 3 hours sieging a keep and successfully taking it is worth about as much as two player kills in an 8-man roaming group.) Mythic needs to drop the RP rewards for player kills and crank the keep/tower taking rewards WAY up. (Plus perhaps a 3-4x bonus for player kills made in defense of a strategic asset, to encourage people to defend keeps rather than let them go and retake them.) But such an overhaul that devalues 8-man roaming groups, while it will enable the game to attract and retain new blood, will also drive away their existing hardcore playerbase. In short, they need to somehow pull off something akin to NGE without destroying the game, but unlike SWG NGE, Mythic would be doing this to save a dying game, rather than try to overhaul a recently launched game that was still potentially growing.
Around where I live (admittedly I'm in upstate NY, near Binghamton), there are Wii accessories (controllers, nunchuks, classic gamepads, etc) everywhere. Circuit City, Wally World, Target, they all have them. Same for Best Buy and Target/Wally World up in Ithaca.
Now the actual systems themselves - that's a different story...
Let's face it. The RIAA and MPAA love closing the barn door after the horses have been out for a long time.
In the case of the RIAA, they insist on DRM for downloads, but still continue to sell un-DRMed CDs (and will be forced to do so for a long time due to the installed base of CD players with no easy way to obsolete them - for music, CDs are pretty close to the maximum quality achievable, with less than 1% of the population having good enough ears to really hear the difference between CDs and something with a little more dynamic range.) They have tried to "copy protect" CDs, but all of those efforts have focused on evil tricks with Windows autorun that utterly fail on every other computing platform that exists (because other computing platforms are smarter than Windows and realize that a disc can actually have data AND music on the same disc!) So all the pirates have to do is have one guy go out and buy a CD to supply his 100 friends, one of whom is guaranteed to spread their copy to thousands on the Internet. It's a perfect example of DRM that does not deter pirates in the slightest but only screws legitimate users.
If you read above, there are some early attempts at supporting Office Communicator, but none that are very reliable or polished.
The reason is that Microsoft bastardized their SIP/SIMPLE implementation in LCS so badly (in typical Microsoft fashion) that it won't interoperate with any software that is actually SIP/SIMPLE compliant. So lots of IM programs support SIP/SIMPLE, but to talk to MS LCS, they have to break their implementation so badly that they won't talk to anything else!
See past news articles regarding GAIM vs. AOL lawsuits - Development pace (and scope) was slowed down significantly due to the lawsuit.
In essence, per their lawyers' advice, the developers agreed not to make any major releases while negotiations were going on.
As to why there wasn't too much progress in their betas - if there had been significant progress other than a UI overhaul and bugfixes, AOL would likely have claimed that their "betas" were really releases that were only being called betas as a loophole.
The trademark lawsuit has been fully resolved, so what matters is where things go in the future, and I suspect we'll be seeing a lot of progress now. I wouldn't be surprised if the developers have been working on voice/video support in a seperate codebase somewhere but keeping it quiet until the lawsuits were resolved.
This is the first time I've seen a UID lower than mine...
:)
That said, you make the rest of us sub-1000ers look bad.
A low UID is good for one thing, and one thing only - shutting up a "my UID is lower than yours" battle between a pair of 6-digit-plus users.
octave + gnuplot + LaTeX = absolutely beautiful plots in anything I submitted (homework assignments, term papers) in grad school.
.eps files through epstopdf, write some document in LaTeX that included your plots by their basename (i.e. without the .pdf extension in the document), and use pdflatex to generate a nice PDF file complete with clickable cross references
To get you started (there could be errors here, I'm doing this from memory, but Octave code something similar to this:
plot blah
hold on
plot something
plot otherstuff
hold off
gset term postscript eps color 22
gset output someplot.eps
replot
gset output foo %bad shit happens to your plot output if you don't change the output file when setting the term back to X11
gset term x11
Would do the following:
Plot multiple things in a plot to the screen
Output that plot to an EPS file
Reset the output so the next plot would go back to the screen
You could then run the
(There are a lot of details I'm not mentioning here of course, unfortunately there really isn't any single good central HOWTO for doing all sorts of useful stuff in LaTeX.)