"It would be good for farming and would make a greater percentage of the civilized world comfortable for our aging population."
Except that it won't.
a) Rising ocean levels mean less total landmass. b) For every bit of cold region that becomes livable due to global warming, there's an equal if not greater amount of landmass that gets turned into unlivable and unfarmable desert. c) Even small increases in temperature can cause significant changes in the weather. One word that sums this up well: Katrina.
Or more specifically, 90% of IMAP clients out there. They insist on storing crap locally, even though the whole point of IMAP is to leave everything on the server!
IMP, SquirrelMail, and Pine are about the only IMAP clients I've used that don't try to download your mail locally even when using IMAP. Everything else I've tried has been a POP client with IMAP support hacked in.
SquirrelMail chokes on large mailboxes, so I use IMP. It works great, and there is also a version of it designed for mobile devices (mIMP, available from CVS only at the moment.)
For those that need a local copy in a few places, see my above comment about crappy IMAP clients that insist on local storage.
Avoid Evolution at all costs. I don't think they bothered to test Evolution's sync functionality AT ALL in version 2.0. (Worked great in earlier versions, Evo 2.0 and above will make a dupe of every contact every time you sync.)
Heh. Yeah, laptops (at least Dell laptops) have typically been ahead of desktop LCD displays in terms of resolution.
My Inspiron 8200 is 3 years old and 1600x1200 in a 15" screen, and my dad's I8000 was the same in terms of native resolution. My much newer Dell 1800FP is only 1280x1024 with a 18" screen.
I think he didn't mean open source was a problem, but the task of getting accurate numbers on OSS usage data. i.e. how many Linux installations there are vs. the number of Windows installations. (Due to the nature of Linux distribution, there is no accurate way to count exactly how many are using it.) I think he's saying they have the same problem with P2P vs. legit distribution - they have no way of gaining any remotely accurate statistics about exactly how many people are doing it. In short, he was using the example of getting accurate statistics on open source usage to illustrate the sort of problems with trying to get accurate P2P numbers.
Huge backlash, first Intel released tools to disable it for those that wanted it, shortly thereafter it became disabled by default in the BIOS for nearly all motherboards/OSes because no user wanted it.
The problem with propulsion in space is that not only do you have to worry about energy efficiency, you almost always need to worry about mass efficiency. i.e. how much mass you need to shoot out the back of your spacecraft to make its forward velocity increase by a certain amount. In fact, in the long term for spacecraft that orbit the Earth or operate anywhere near the Sun, mass efficiency is the ONLY thing that matters. You can constantly get energy from the Sun via solar cells, or from a long-lived nuclear power supply onboard, but once you use up propellant mass, it's gone. The idea behind ion thrusters and this new propulsion design is to impart as much kinetic energy as possible to the spacecraft while ejecting as little mass as possible. (It can be shown that this mass efficiency is proportional to the exhaust velocity of the reaction mass - this is why so much research is being done into ion thrusters, since their exhaust gas velocity is far higher than that of a chemical engine.)
"There might be an option to turn this off in the system registry but it also turns off other features. For example a window now turns into a wireframe when you drag it."
While there should definately be effort put into making something simpler for new users to use, it should NOT ever be used as an excuse to remove functionality beneficial to those who have more experience.
Three words - Metacity edge flipping (or more appropriately, the lack thereof). Edge flipping is an incredibly popular feature with experienced users, and while I agree that it should be off by default because it can be confusing, that is NOT an excuse to turn the window manager into crippleware by completely removing that feature. (The only other options are to give up some UI consistency with the rest of Gnome by using xfwm4 and possibly introducing significant compatibility issues such as by using sawfish. Another option was brightside, but it was always a hack designed to work around missing functionality in Metacity that should be there.)
Sadly, my favorite IM client Gaim has also given in to the crippleware mentality... Numerous features are not only hidden or off by default in Gaim 2 (which I could completely understand), but they have been completely removed.
I still use GNOME for now - I'm still angry with the KDE developers' cavalier attitude towards the GPL (remember, KDE was not legal until TrollTech changed the Qt license - the KDE developers could have acknowledged the problem and fixed it by adding an exception for Qt to their license, which I believe is allowed by the GPL if all contributors consent to it, but instead they chose to ignore the issue for over a year.), plus I think GNOME looks better for now. Unfortunately, I may need to change soon because GNOME has been becoming less and less useful to me as the years have gone by.
That is until you realize that the features that IBM and MS removed from the 360's CPU because they weren't needed for gaming cripple the CPU for most other applications.
Games often have far smaller cache requirements than many other applications, and as a result, it is preferable to go with a higher speed cache and higher CPU speed than a slower but larger cache/CPU.
The Celeron in the 300A era are one of the best examples of this. They had half the cache of their Pentium III counterparts, BUT the P3 cache ran at half the CPU speed while the Celeron cache ran at full speed. The Celeron's performance was crap despite the faster cache for many applications (including server machines and most office applications) due to its smaller cache, but gamers discovered that for games, the situation was exactly the opposite - clock for clock the Celeron was significantly faster than the P3 due to the fact that most games in that era could fit almost all of their rendering pipeline within even the Celeron's small cache. Rare cache misses and twice the cache speed = much better performance. It also happened that that on-die cache allowed the Celerons to be overclocked like crazy, a significant added bonus.:)
The Xbox 360's CPU takes the whole idea much farther. While most desktop CPUs are designed to perform well over the widest range of situations (with some tradeoffs always being evident - note that Athlons eat P4s for lunch in many cases such as games, while Athlons do actually lose most of their advantages in performance per clock cycle when performing video compression and decompression because most video codecs don't have significant amounts of branching resulting in pipeline stalls from branch mispredictions.) The Xbox 360 CPU goes a step further by optimizing for one thing and one thing only - gaming. Instruction reordering which is critical in most desktop CPUs turns out to be not as necessary for gaming (specifically graphics rendering), and as a result the 360 drops instruction reordering capability completely in favor of having multiple cores at a low cost. (Instruction scheduling takes a LOT of die space in modern CPUs compared to the size of the rest of the CPU core.)
The best thing about your approach is that it works with P&S cameras, which probably far more Slashdotters own.
I recall seeing in someone's blog that they were using a (relatively) cheap Radio Shack triple-lens pocket magnifier to allow macro photography with his cameraphone.
Also, I've seen at least one HOWTO (in a dead-tree format book) for adding an attachment mounting tube to digital cameras that don't normally allow for mounting of attachments/filters. (such as polarizers, macro adapters that are basically just magnifying lenses, and telephoto/wide-angle adapters.) Some semi-P&S digitals had support for such tubes (Olymus C-x000 series cameras for examples) but others don't (Canon Digital Elphs).
I've been contemplating getting a hardcase for my Treo 650 and adding a threaded lens mount where the camera hole is.
Except that P&S digitals with an LCD display ALSO display the exact image that the image sensor sees through the lens. i.e. DSLRs don't have any advantage in framing over P&S digitals. This camera Sony has released is merely a high-end P&S, because it is missing all of the other features typically found in SLR cameras (interchangeable lenses, etc.).
If someone uses BitComet and some of their upload winds up going to DHT, who cares? It just means that user will have to upload more to maintain their share ratio to the main network, which is a Good Thing for everyone but that user.
It also means that if the tracker craps out, it might take less than 24 hours for the torrent to recover, which is a Good Thing. Getting to 99.8% on a torrent and having the tracker crap out on you Really Sucks, especially when it takes nearly 24 hours of not being able to connect to the tracker before the client decides to fall back to DHT. It will have zero effect on the non-BitComet users, since they won't be connected to the DHT network.
"I think Brown is a bit impatient for the future to be here now."
You hit the nail on the head here. Even though it has a version number greater than 1.0, I would still consider OOo to be best described as young and immature open-source software, similar to what many OSS packages are in their pre-1.0 days.
Why? Because as an open-source project, OOo IS young. It is extremely difficult to bring new developers up to speed on a large project, and as a result, anything that suddenly goes from commercial to open-source is going to take a while for all of the advantages of OSS development to kick in. Just look at the Mozilla project - Netscape's source release had so many problems that the Mozilla project floundered for years before they started actually putting out a good project. Look where they are now.
Yes, it is a limitation of OSS development, but it's a limitation of ANY method of development. No matter what you do, it takes time for new developers to get up to speed on a new project. The bigger the project, the more time that is required. The source of OOo was only released 2-3 years ago. (Maybe 4??? I'm positive it was after I finished my undergrad degree in 2002 but I could be wrong...) OOo is a HUGE project, so in terms of quality and bugs it's probably only halfway between a traditional bug-ridden proprietary product and a mature OSS project.
From TFA, which you should probably reread more carefully.
"http://cooking.podkeyword.com/
I was baffled. Who on earth was behind podkeyword.com, and how did they manage to get their feed rather than my official feed listed for my show?"
While I do agree with you that the guy who got hijacked should have included URLs to the proper feed within his podcasts themselves, the fact is that the guy who got hijacked NEVER asked for any service to be performed by the hijacker until AFTER the hijacking had already occurred and the guy who had his podcast hijacked sent a message to the owner of podkeyword.com asking for the feed to be reinstated in order to minimize the damage that the owner of podkeyword.com had done. Only then did the original author discover that podkeyword.com wasn't mirroring his feed out of stupidity, (i.e. "hey cool, I like this podcast and i'm going to mirror it") but instead out of malice and greed.
BTW, using ID3 tags for the purpose you're describing is pointless. ID3 tags are changed way too easily. Only a verbal statement of the original site's URL (and occasional restatements, in case the hijacker cuts one out) is difficult to modify without the listener noticing that something is wrong.
The thing is, that the hijeacker performed the "service" without giving notice to the original creator of the content or without asking permission, and did not ask for money or even notify the original creator of the content until he had an illicit stranglehold on the original content creator's subscribers.
Moral of the story - Mention your site's official URL in every podcast and copyright the original file. That way any hotlinkers have to violate your copyright if they want to hide the original source of the content. Unfortunately, I don't think the guy that had his podcast hijacked has any legal ground to stand on.
When the original poster doesn't even bother to RTFA.
If you actually read the article, it becomes painfully clear that there is no "PSOne touchscreen" - The PSOne display is simply a cheap small display that he is placing behind a touchscreen that didn't come built in to a display. He does not make a SINGLE mention as to exactly what model of touchscreen he used, nor where to get it, and there is nothing preventing you from getting a touchscreen large enough to put on a normal LCD monitor (or a CRT for that matter), other than possibly cost. (He does mention the brand indirectly, apparently the touchscreens are made by eGalax, although looking at eGalax's website gives me the impression that they only make controller ICs for touch screens, not complete touchscreen units. They also do not have any U.S. based distributors listed.)
Often, there are significant sources of noise within the reception or data capture device (such as the ADC). In these cases, it can be beneficial to amplify the input signal to that system.
For example, suppose those 2 bits of noise are from the ADC unit itself. In this case, amplifying the input signal prior to reaching the ADC is beneficial. This especially holds true if the ADC is inside a computer system.
Another good example is placement of a preamplifier before vs. after a long coaxial cable run. It can be shown mathematically that the total noise figure of the amplifier + coax system (SNRin/SNRout) will be lower if the amplifier is placed before the lossy cable rather than after it. (Lower is better.)
"It's not the origin of the radiation that matters, its whether or not it has the energy to knock electrons from their orbits - ionize matter, in other words."
Fact: This ability is a function of the energy contained within a single photon, which is an increasing function of the frequency (and inversely proportional to wavelength). Only UV radiation and higher frequencies (gamma rays, x-rays) have enough energy to cause ionization. Any form of RF cannot cause ionization except at extremely high power levels where the electromagnetic field intensity exceeds the breakdown voltage of whatever medium it is passing through. This requires power densities far greater than that of even the highest power microwave ovens.
"Simply irritating the cells might trigger cancer."
This is why sticking your head in a microwave oven is a Bad Idea. They have high enough power to cause non-negligible heating in anything that absorbs the RF. (Hell, that's how a microwave oven works.) Standing near a high power transmitter on the order of multiple watts could also cause problems. Not the 200 mW max transmit power of handheld CDMA cell phones. (I think GSM is in a similar power category.) AMPS (analog cellular) was typically 600 mW transmit for handhelds, and 3W for the really old analog-only car-based and "bag mobile" phones. 3W is high enough that continued exposure in close proximity to the antenna might actually cause non-negligible heating effects.
Back when I first got a cell phone during my sophomore year as an undergrad (late 1999-early 2000ish), some of the upperclassmen and alumni I knew were commenting, "No college student needs a cell phone". The fact that I had a cell phone was a joke with a number of people I knew.
Two years later, over half of the incoming freshman had cell phones already. Now, three years later, it's unheard of for college students to have landlines because most have cell phones.
"And radiation did leave the plant during the accident."
OH MY GOD! TRACE AMOUNTS OF RADIATION WERE RELEASED!
SHUT DOWN THE COAL-FIRED PLANTS NOW!
Yes, coal-fired plants do release radioactive materials into the atmosphere. There's one plant in Utah that dumps more radioactive material into the atmosphere in a single day than the TMI accident. (This is due to trace amounts of uranium in the coal burned by the plant.) Oh, let's not forget that in addition to being radioactive, the uranium that the aforementioned coal plant releases is chemically toxic too, as opposed to the krypton released by TMI which is chemically inert and hence there is no way for it to bind itself to anything in the body. Let's not forget all the other chemical nastiness in the emissions from coal plants.
In short, coal-fired plants do more damage to the environment each day than the worst nuclear accident in U.S. history.
Chernobyl does not count here, because it could not have happened in a U.S. power reactor, here are a few reasons why: U.S. power reactors are fully water-moderated. If the water boils off, the core will likely melt, but the reaction will begin slowing down because the water is needed for the reaction to continue. Chernobyl, on the other hand, was graphite moderated and hence the reaction could continue even when water boiled off.
U.S. power reactors don't contain large amounts of superheated flammable substances in their core. The initial incident at Chernobyl was a steam explosion that wouldn't have been bad if not for the fact that it exposed the superheated radioactive graphite in the core to air, which immediately began burning violently, dispersing the core's contents into the atmosphere.
Operators of U.S. power reactors don't disable all of their reactor's safety systems in order to run dangerous experiments. (Chernobyl's reactor should have scrammed itself long before the accident occurred, but the operators intentially disabled all of the reactor's safety systems.)
"Hello sir. Would you say that the possibility of getting brain cancer from using your cellphone too often is a real concern or not?"
Exactly. 90% of the idiotic population of this world hears the word "radiation" and IMMEDIATELY thinks "nuclear radiation" - Even though there are other types of radiation in the world. Only a VERY limited subset of the electromagnetic radiation spectrum (gamma rays) are nuclear in origin, and also not all nuclear radiation is electromagnetic - most of it is particle radiation.
There are many forms of electromagnetic radiation that are utterly and completely harmless, such as the light from a light bulb.
Cell phones can't cause cancer - it's not the right type of radiation. Microwave electromagnetic radiation can cause damage in one way (heating), and that requires far higher power levels than any cell phone to have any effect whatsoever on a human body.
As to keeping track of what clients have what being expensive for the tracker - It doesn't seem THAT expensive compared to the amount of data being transferred because that's basically what the BT tracker does.
The issue of slow downloaders is a good one, but even if only 20-30 of the initial clients could download at the full broadcast rate of the initial seed, there would be a HUGE performance improvement, because there would be 20-30 seeders in a very short time.
Note that the problem you mention is where the limitations of explicit multicast I mentioned earlier (do a Google search for xcast) would actually be beneficial.
As far as the lack of multicast being widely available - see my original rant on lack of multicast availability that started this thread. Unfortunately, the xcast project is even more limited in its support (basically only in a handful of research networks). Too bad, because the basic idea behind xcast (multiple destinations in an IP packet a la SMTP) is much simpler for both programmers and router manufacturers to implement. (And yes, I know that such an approach does have its drawbacks in terms of ability to abuse. Most likely the advantages of a system with a limit of 8-16 destinations per packet would far outweigh the potential for abuse.)
Slashdot Mirror
"It would be good for farming and would make a greater percentage of the civilized world comfortable for our aging population."
Except that it won't.
a) Rising ocean levels mean less total landmass.
b) For every bit of cold region that becomes livable due to global warming, there's an equal if not greater amount of landmass that gets turned into unlivable and unfarmable desert.
c) Even small increases in temperature can cause significant changes in the weather. One word that sums this up well: Katrina.
Or more specifically, 90% of IMAP clients out there. They insist on storing crap locally, even though the whole point of IMAP is to leave everything on the server!
IMP, SquirrelMail, and Pine are about the only IMAP clients I've used that don't try to download your mail locally even when using IMAP. Everything else I've tried has been a POP client with IMAP support hacked in.
SquirrelMail chokes on large mailboxes, so I use IMP. It works great, and there is also a version of it designed for mobile devices (mIMP, available from CVS only at the moment.)
For those that need a local copy in a few places, see my above comment about crappy IMAP clients that insist on local storage.
Avoid Evolution at all costs. I don't think they bothered to test Evolution's sync functionality AT ALL in version 2.0. (Worked great in earlier versions, Evo 2.0 and above will make a dupe of every contact every time you sync.)
Talk to Google. They seem to be doing just fine (if not better than the competition) while using text-only ads.
Heh. Yeah, laptops (at least Dell laptops) have typically been ahead of desktop LCD displays in terms of resolution.
My Inspiron 8200 is 3 years old and 1600x1200 in a 15" screen, and my dad's I8000 was the same in terms of native resolution. My much newer Dell 1800FP is only 1280x1024 with a 18" screen.
I think he didn't mean open source was a problem, but the task of getting accurate numbers on OSS usage data. i.e. how many Linux installations there are vs. the number of Windows installations. (Due to the nature of Linux distribution, there is no accurate way to count exactly how many are using it.) I think he's saying they have the same problem with P2P vs. legit distribution - they have no way of gaining any remotely accurate statistics about exactly how many people are doing it. In short, he was using the example of getting accurate statistics on open source usage to illustrate the sort of problems with trying to get accurate P2P numbers.
Huge backlash, first Intel released tools to disable it for those that wanted it, shortly thereafter it became disabled by default in the BIOS for nearly all motherboards/OSes because no user wanted it.
The problem with propulsion in space is that not only do you have to worry about energy efficiency, you almost always need to worry about mass efficiency. i.e. how much mass you need to shoot out the back of your spacecraft to make its forward velocity increase by a certain amount. In fact, in the long term for spacecraft that orbit the Earth or operate anywhere near the Sun, mass efficiency is the ONLY thing that matters. You can constantly get energy from the Sun via solar cells, or from a long-lived nuclear power supply onboard, but once you use up propellant mass, it's gone. The idea behind ion thrusters and this new propulsion design is to impart as much kinetic energy as possible to the spacecraft while ejecting as little mass as possible. (It can be shown that this mass efficiency is proportional to the exhaust velocity of the reaction mass - this is why so much research is being done into ion thrusters, since their exhaust gas velocity is far higher than that of a chemical engine.)
"There might be an option to turn this off in the system registry but it also turns off other features. For example a window now turns into a wireframe when you drag it."
I guess you missed that.
While there should definately be effort put into making something simpler for new users to use, it should NOT ever be used as an excuse to remove functionality beneficial to those who have more experience.
Three words - Metacity edge flipping (or more appropriately, the lack thereof). Edge flipping is an incredibly popular feature with experienced users, and while I agree that it should be off by default because it can be confusing, that is NOT an excuse to turn the window manager into crippleware by completely removing that feature. (The only other options are to give up some UI consistency with the rest of Gnome by using xfwm4 and possibly introducing significant compatibility issues such as by using sawfish. Another option was brightside, but it was always a hack designed to work around missing functionality in Metacity that should be there.)
Sadly, my favorite IM client Gaim has also given in to the crippleware mentality... Numerous features are not only hidden or off by default in Gaim 2 (which I could completely understand), but they have been completely removed.
I still use GNOME for now - I'm still angry with the KDE developers' cavalier attitude towards the GPL (remember, KDE was not legal until TrollTech changed the Qt license - the KDE developers could have acknowledged the problem and fixed it by adding an exception for Qt to their license, which I believe is allowed by the GPL if all contributors consent to it, but instead they chose to ignore the issue for over a year.), plus I think GNOME looks better for now. Unfortunately, I may need to change soon because GNOME has been becoming less and less useful to me as the years have gone by.
That is until you realize that the features that IBM and MS removed from the 360's CPU because they weren't needed for gaming cripple the CPU for most other applications.
Games often have far smaller cache requirements than many other applications, and as a result, it is preferable to go with a higher speed cache and higher CPU speed than a slower but larger cache/CPU.
:)
The Celeron in the 300A era are one of the best examples of this. They had half the cache of their Pentium III counterparts, BUT the P3 cache ran at half the CPU speed while the Celeron cache ran at full speed. The Celeron's performance was crap despite the faster cache for many applications (including server machines and most office applications) due to its smaller cache, but gamers discovered that for games, the situation was exactly the opposite - clock for clock the Celeron was significantly faster than the P3 due to the fact that most games in that era could fit almost all of their rendering pipeline within even the Celeron's small cache. Rare cache misses and twice the cache speed = much better performance. It also happened that that on-die cache allowed the Celerons to be overclocked like crazy, a significant added bonus.
The Xbox 360's CPU takes the whole idea much farther. While most desktop CPUs are designed to perform well over the widest range of situations (with some tradeoffs always being evident - note that Athlons eat P4s for lunch in many cases such as games, while Athlons do actually lose most of their advantages in performance per clock cycle when performing video compression and decompression because most video codecs don't have significant amounts of branching resulting in pipeline stalls from branch mispredictions.) The Xbox 360 CPU goes a step further by optimizing for one thing and one thing only - gaming. Instruction reordering which is critical in most desktop CPUs turns out to be not as necessary for gaming (specifically graphics rendering), and as a result the 360 drops instruction reordering capability completely in favor of having multiple cores at a low cost. (Instruction scheduling takes a LOT of die space in modern CPUs compared to the size of the rest of the CPU core.)
The best thing about your approach is that it works with P&S cameras, which probably far more Slashdotters own.
I recall seeing in someone's blog that they were using a (relatively) cheap Radio Shack triple-lens pocket magnifier to allow macro photography with his cameraphone.
Also, I've seen at least one HOWTO (in a dead-tree format book) for adding an attachment mounting tube to digital cameras that don't normally allow for mounting of attachments/filters. (such as polarizers, macro adapters that are basically just magnifying lenses, and telephoto/wide-angle adapters.) Some semi-P&S digitals had support for such tubes (Olymus C-x000 series cameras for examples) but others don't (Canon Digital Elphs).
I've been contemplating getting a hardcase for my Treo 650 and adding a threaded lens mount where the camera hole is.
Except that P&S digitals with an LCD display ALSO display the exact image that the image sensor sees through the lens. i.e. DSLRs don't have any advantage in framing over P&S digitals. This camera Sony has released is merely a high-end P&S, because it is missing all of the other features typically found in SLR cameras (interchangeable lenses, etc.).
If someone uses BitComet and some of their upload winds up going to DHT, who cares? It just means that user will have to upload more to maintain their share ratio to the main network, which is a Good Thing for everyone but that user.
It also means that if the tracker craps out, it might take less than 24 hours for the torrent to recover, which is a Good Thing. Getting to 99.8% on a torrent and having the tracker crap out on you Really Sucks, especially when it takes nearly 24 hours of not being able to connect to the tracker before the client decides to fall back to DHT. It will have zero effect on the non-BitComet users, since they won't be connected to the DHT network.
"I think Brown is a bit impatient for the future to be here now."
You hit the nail on the head here. Even though it has a version number greater than 1.0, I would still consider OOo to be best described as young and immature open-source software, similar to what many OSS packages are in their pre-1.0 days.
Why? Because as an open-source project, OOo IS young. It is extremely difficult to bring new developers up to speed on a large project, and as a result, anything that suddenly goes from commercial to open-source is going to take a while for all of the advantages of OSS development to kick in. Just look at the Mozilla project - Netscape's source release had so many problems that the Mozilla project floundered for years before they started actually putting out a good project. Look where they are now.
Yes, it is a limitation of OSS development, but it's a limitation of ANY method of development. No matter what you do, it takes time for new developers to get up to speed on a new project. The bigger the project, the more time that is required. The source of OOo was only released 2-3 years ago. (Maybe 4??? I'm positive it was after I finished my undergrad degree in 2002 but I could be wrong...) OOo is a HUGE project, so in terms of quality and bugs it's probably only halfway between a traditional bug-ridden proprietary product and a mature OSS project.
Um, no he did NOT ask for any form of service.
From TFA, which you should probably reread more carefully.
"http://cooking.podkeyword.com/
I was baffled. Who on earth was behind podkeyword.com, and how did they manage to get their feed rather than my official feed listed for my show?"
While I do agree with you that the guy who got hijacked should have included URLs to the proper feed within his podcasts themselves, the fact is that the guy who got hijacked NEVER asked for any service to be performed by the hijacker until AFTER the hijacking had already occurred and the guy who had his podcast hijacked sent a message to the owner of podkeyword.com asking for the feed to be reinstated in order to minimize the damage that the owner of podkeyword.com had done. Only then did the original author discover that podkeyword.com wasn't mirroring his feed out of stupidity, (i.e. "hey cool, I like this podcast and i'm going to mirror it") but instead out of malice and greed.
BTW, using ID3 tags for the purpose you're describing is pointless. ID3 tags are changed way too easily. Only a verbal statement of the original site's URL (and occasional restatements, in case the hijacker cuts one out) is difficult to modify without the listener noticing that something is wrong.
The thing is, that the hijeacker performed the "service" without giving notice to the original creator of the content or without asking permission, and did not ask for money or even notify the original creator of the content until he had an illicit stranglehold on the original content creator's subscribers.
Moral of the story - Mention your site's official URL in every podcast and copyright the original file. That way any hotlinkers have to violate your copyright if they want to hide the original source of the content. Unfortunately, I don't think the guy that had his podcast hijacked has any legal ground to stand on.
When the original poster doesn't even bother to RTFA.
If you actually read the article, it becomes painfully clear that there is no "PSOne touchscreen" - The PSOne display is simply a cheap small display that he is placing behind a touchscreen that didn't come built in to a display. He does not make a SINGLE mention as to exactly what model of touchscreen he used, nor where to get it, and there is nothing preventing you from getting a touchscreen large enough to put on a normal LCD monitor (or a CRT for that matter), other than possibly cost. (He does mention the brand indirectly, apparently the touchscreens are made by eGalax, although looking at eGalax's website gives me the impression that they only make controller ICs for touch screens, not complete touchscreen units. They also do not have any U.S. based distributors listed.)
Often, there are significant sources of noise within the reception or data capture device (such as the ADC). In these cases, it can be beneficial to amplify the input signal to that system.
For example, suppose those 2 bits of noise are from the ADC unit itself. In this case, amplifying the input signal prior to reaching the ADC is beneficial. This especially holds true if the ADC is inside a computer system.
Another good example is placement of a preamplifier before vs. after a long coaxial cable run. It can be shown mathematically that the total noise figure of the amplifier + coax system (SNRin/SNRout) will be lower if the amplifier is placed before the lossy cable rather than after it. (Lower is better.)
"It's not the origin of the radiation that matters, its whether or not it has the energy to knock electrons from their orbits - ionize matter, in other words."
Fact: This ability is a function of the energy contained within a single photon, which is an increasing function of the frequency (and inversely proportional to wavelength). Only UV radiation and higher frequencies (gamma rays, x-rays) have enough energy to cause ionization. Any form of RF cannot cause ionization except at extremely high power levels where the electromagnetic field intensity exceeds the breakdown voltage of whatever medium it is passing through. This requires power densities far greater than that of even the highest power microwave ovens.
"Simply irritating the cells might trigger cancer."
This is why sticking your head in a microwave oven is a Bad Idea. They have high enough power to cause non-negligible heating in anything that absorbs the RF. (Hell, that's how a microwave oven works.) Standing near a high power transmitter on the order of multiple watts could also cause problems. Not the 200 mW max transmit power of handheld CDMA cell phones. (I think GSM is in a similar power category.) AMPS (analog cellular) was typically 600 mW transmit for handhelds, and 3W for the really old analog-only car-based and "bag mobile" phones. 3W is high enough that continued exposure in close proximity to the antenna might actually cause non-negligible heating effects.
Back when I first got a cell phone during my sophomore year as an undergrad (late 1999-early 2000ish), some of the upperclassmen and alumni I knew were commenting, "No college student needs a cell phone". The fact that I had a cell phone was a joke with a number of people I knew.
Two years later, over half of the incoming freshman had cell phones already. Now, three years later, it's unheard of for college students to have landlines because most have cell phones.
"And radiation did leave the plant during the accident."
t -sheets/3mile-isle.html ,the average dose to people nearby was 1 millirem. That's 1/6th of the dose from a full set of chest x-rays and less than 1% of yearly exposure to background radiation.
OH MY GOD! TRACE AMOUNTS OF RADIATION WERE RELEASED!
SHUT DOWN THE COAL-FIRED PLANTS NOW!
Yes, coal-fired plants do release radioactive materials into the atmosphere. There's one plant in Utah that dumps more radioactive material into the atmosphere in a single day than the TMI accident. (This is due to trace amounts of uranium in the coal burned by the plant.) Oh, let's not forget that in addition to being radioactive, the uranium that the aforementioned coal plant releases is chemically toxic too, as opposed to the krypton released by TMI which is chemically inert and hence there is no way for it to bind itself to anything in the body. Let's not forget all the other chemical nastiness in the emissions from coal plants.
According to http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fac
In short, coal-fired plants do more damage to the environment each day than the worst nuclear accident in U.S. history.
Chernobyl does not count here, because it could not have happened in a U.S. power reactor, here are a few reasons why:
U.S. power reactors are fully water-moderated. If the water boils off, the core will likely melt, but the reaction will begin slowing down because the water is needed for the reaction to continue. Chernobyl, on the other hand, was graphite moderated and hence the reaction could continue even when water boiled off.
U.S. power reactors don't contain large amounts of superheated flammable substances in their core. The initial incident at Chernobyl was a steam explosion that wouldn't have been bad if not for the fact that it exposed the superheated radioactive graphite in the core to air, which immediately began burning violently, dispersing the core's contents into the atmosphere.
Operators of U.S. power reactors don't disable all of their reactor's safety systems in order to run dangerous experiments. (Chernobyl's reactor should have scrammed itself long before the accident occurred, but the operators intentially disabled all of the reactor's safety systems.)
"Hello sir. Would you say that the possibility of getting brain cancer from using your cellphone too often is a real concern or not?"
Exactly. 90% of the idiotic population of this world hears the word "radiation" and IMMEDIATELY thinks "nuclear radiation" - Even though there are other types of radiation in the world. Only a VERY limited subset of the electromagnetic radiation spectrum (gamma rays) are nuclear in origin, and also not all nuclear radiation is electromagnetic - most of it is particle radiation.
There are many forms of electromagnetic radiation that are utterly and completely harmless, such as the light from a light bulb.
Cell phones can't cause cancer - it's not the right type of radiation. Microwave electromagnetic radiation can cause damage in one way (heating), and that requires far higher power levels than any cell phone to have any effect whatsoever on a human body.
As to keeping track of what clients have what being expensive for the tracker - It doesn't seem THAT expensive compared to the amount of data being transferred because that's basically what the BT tracker does.
The issue of slow downloaders is a good one, but even if only 20-30 of the initial clients could download at the full broadcast rate of the initial seed, there would be a HUGE performance improvement, because there would be 20-30 seeders in a very short time.
Note that the problem you mention is where the limitations of explicit multicast I mentioned earlier (do a Google search for xcast) would actually be beneficial.
As far as the lack of multicast being widely available - see my original rant on lack of multicast availability that started this thread. Unfortunately, the xcast project is even more limited in its support (basically only in a handful of research networks). Too bad, because the basic idea behind xcast (multiple destinations in an IP packet a la SMTP) is much simpler for both programmers and router manufacturers to implement. (And yes, I know that such an approach does have its drawbacks in terms of ability to abuse. Most likely the advantages of a system with a limit of 8-16 destinations per packet would far outweigh the potential for abuse.)