"Its ridiculous in general that we have this restriction on electronics in use on Aircraft, when 99.9% of them should have Zero impact on the plane, and should just be allowed to be used at all time." ILS is a very sensitive, interference-prone and fragile system, hence the 10-minute after takeoff/before landing restriction.
It's being slowly replaced with GPS-based systems as GPS units with RAIM become more common.
You pretty much just described how B&N and the Nook work.
Sold in store - check.
Terminals in store - Not quite, but free WiFi access and special "extra features" (the ability to read nearly any eBook offered by B&N for 1 hour/day for free, plus weekly rotated free content) accessible when connected to store WiFi. - So check
"The Kindle is not only considerably cheaper than a Nook" For a period, they were exactly the same price ($259). I forget who shot first in the price war (I think it was Amazon), but the price disparity between the 3G versions lasted about a day.
The Nook WiFi ($50 cheaper than the 3G Kindle or Nook) was available for about 2 weeks before the Kindle WiFi showed up.
The current state is that the Kindle is $10 cheaper for each version. IMO the Nook is worth the extra $10.
"You can browse the web from your Kindle, the Nook has no web browser. The Kindle has over 2 million titles available, the Nook has closer to a half million. The Kindle has a battery life of a month, the Nook is lucky to make it a week." Um, my Nook has a web browser. Does your Kindle have an RSS feed reader and a twitter client? Oh wait, it doesn't because it has a proprietary OS that can't be developed for. (Twook rocks, and yes, my Nook is softrooted.)
"Then there's the interface. The Nook uses a crappy touch screen that wastes battery life. The Kindle has a physical keyboard. Oh, and that "replaceable battery?" It's a proprietary custom battery. Once B&N folds, and the writing's on the wall, even though you can remove it, you won't be able to replace it with anything." The touch screen is quite nice and provides UI flexibility not available with a keyboard. It goes to "sleep" pretty quickly so doesn't waste battery much. The fact is that the Nook has a replacable battery. Yes, it's proprietary, but it's still replacable. Even if B&N folds, there are already enough Nooks sold that I suspect you'll be seeing third party batteries sold soon, just like replacements for proprietary phone batteries and such.
"But the biggest thing is that with the Kindle, you can read your ebooks on a huge variety of devices other than the Kindle itself. You can download Amazon's reader for your PC and smart phone. For the Nook - not so much." There are far fewer platforms that have Amazon.azw readers than there are readers for B&N's DRMed ebooks. Plus if I recall correctly, you need to perform a file conversion on a PC to load non-AZW content into the Kindle. The Nook can read PDF, ePub, and a few other formats natively.
In addition, Amazon DRM is tied to Amazon. B&N DRM is only tied to your name and CC# at time of purchase, and the key generation algorithm is known. Unlike other DRM formats, you can generate the key for your eBooks without having to rip it from cracked reader software.
"not to mention being able to see a damn thing in full sunlight (even sitting under an unbrella)."
Um, this isn't a problem for 95%+ of the eBook readers on the market. There are two big reasons why eInk screens are selling well despite being slow, expensive, and monochrome: 1) 0 power required to retain the image 2) As a purely reflective display, they work well in brightly lit areas. Their contrast ratio is not nearly as good as white paper, but most paperpacks and a good portion of hardcovers use cheap paper that isn't that white, and offers a much lower contrast ratio that eInk screens are pretty close to.
I think the flaw with your argument is the assumption that the drinks and food sold aren't inherently profitable (potentially moreso than the books!).
Of course if no one is eating/drinking, then they're 100% moochers.
Since purchasing my Nook I've gone into the store pretty often for the "More in Store" and "Read in Store" function. I have only bought one eBook (more because of curiosity about the purchase process and DRM), but I have bought quite a few drinks/snacks.
I disagree. My basic Rigol DS1052E has solved many weird problems with microcontroller projects over the past months.
Without the scope I would never have figured out that my I2C master and I2C slaves for a project were playing "Bus Fighter I2C: Noncompliant Master". (I thought the firmware on the master was using hardware I2C mode, but it was actually using a bad software I2C implementation that actively drove the clock and data lines high. Bad Things happened if a slave tried to do clock holdoff.) I might have eventually noticed the issue in the firmware source code, but having the scope saved me a HUGE amount of time in knowing where to look.
Also, for the above problem, a logic analyzer (like the Open Workbench Logic Sniffer) would not have helped, since it wouldn't have shown that the clock line was entering a state where it was about 1/3 of the way between ground and Vcc (a clear sign that two devices were trying to drive the bus to different states simultaneously, which should not be possible on an standard speed I2C bus since nothing should actively drive it high.)
Most employers frown on their assets being used for personal use.
Which is why I own a Rigol DS1052E and an Open Workbench Logic Sniffer despite having access to a LeCroy SDA9000, multiple Tek TDS units, a Tek MSO unit, and a nice Tek dedicated logic analyzer.
The USBee scope is 16MSPS and only one channel, for $545! That is an epic ripoff.
The Rigol DS1052E is a standalone 50 MHz bandwidth scope with 1 GS/s (or was it 2?) samplerate for $400. It is very well regarded by most who have used it, including myself.
And you should be able to pair it with Dangerous Prototype's Open Workbench Logic Sniffer - wire the trigger output of the OWLS to the Rigol's trigger input.
(There are versions of the Rigols with built-in LAs, but they're VERY expensive options.)
I do feel good about it, and I'm not being sarcastic about it. The only bad thing I've got to say about B&N's Nook strategy is the new expanded kiosks. They've done a good job of using the Nook to bring people back into stores with their "extra features", however, they have slowly been reducing the amount of seating available for people to use the Nooks, pretty much my only complaint about how they're handling the Nook.
The Nook's DRM is pretty lenient, it's not really based on "phoning home" (your crypto key is derived from your name and CC number exclusively), and it has been broken. The device has also been rooted so you can install your own Android apps on it.
Plus the new owner would be stupid to do anything to the Nook... As I understand it, the Nook and eBooks are the areas where B&N is actually growing. (The second seems to be their in-store cafes.)
In one of my previous jobs, I had the task of getting a test setup controlled by LabView working in our facility.
Tiny little differences in our setup completely broke LabView, and the "point, click, drool" GUI really insulated you from what was going wrong and how to fix it.
I was able to almost rewrite the whole damn thing in Perl, including adding new test instrument classes to Jeff Mock's long-unmaintained Perl GPIB modules, in less time than it took to try and fix that thing.
Even though Jeff's libraries are long unmaintained, they're still a great place to start. Perl is great for test equipment automation IMO. (However, Jeff's libraries aren't so hot for trying to interface with modern interfaces such as USB-TMC. USB-TMC is just plain not well supported in Linux right now, don't know about Windows.)
Despite the rather "textblock"ish formatting of the above post, I do believe that the Rigol DS1052E is one of the best entry-level choices right now, and is GREAT bang-for-the-buck. I have one and it has proven very useful. My only regret is that I purchased it before it got price-dropped to $400. (I paid around $530 plus New York State sales tax from Saelig.)
FYI, Rigol is the manufacturer of Agilent's entry-level units at this point.
To the article poster: You indicate you've done some looking and have been unhappy with what you've found. What have you looked at and in what way have you found it lacking? What are your requirements?
Strangely enough, the "PC-only" units, while you would expect them to provide more bang for the buck, almost universally are inferior. There's a horrible trend in that market to advertise high analog bandwidths without the samplerate to back up that bandwidth. General rule of thumb is that a good scope needs 10x its analog bandwidth in samplerate to capture transients. You're probably OK with only 5x. Many of the PC-based scopes don't even meet the Nyquist criterion! (The Nyquist criteria pretty much lets you capture a sine wave at the analog bandwidth. Keep in mind the analog bandwidth is usually a cutoff frequency, and it can get information from higher frequencies.)
Could possibly be worse. Is COBOL like FORTRAN in that EVERYTHING IS CODED IN ALL CAPS AND READING THE CODE HURTS YOUR EYES?
I did a tiny bit of FORTRAN work when I was at an internship while in college. The code was painful to read, almost entirely because it was ALL CAPS.:(
There is a parameter used for most high-dissipation ICs (such as CPUs and GPUs) - It's called "thermal design power".
This is the absolute maximum amount of heat the card can dissipate under any circumstances (not counting overclocking). The nature and definition of TDP means it should be physically impossible for ANY software to ever cause the card to exceed TDP.
If you have a system that can't handle the card running at TDP, that's faulty design of your system, not whatever caused it to hit TDP.
Why would that be? Remember, until Android existed, HTC pretty much solely existed as a manufacturer of Windows Mobile devices. They did quite well, and still are doing quite well in that market.
But Cat5e actually meets a defined, standardized specification with defined testing methodology.
Saying you have 20 Gbps HDMI cable means nothing. There is no legitimate official waveform to test at that rate with. So you can claim all this performance with some arbitary waveform, and then guess what - when the next HDMI standard comes out, you may find that said waveform was COMPLETELY irrelevant.
For example, look at Fast Ethernet to Gigabit Ethernet - GbE uses the *exact* same symbol rate as FE. So frequency response requirements didn't change a single bit, however crosstalk requirements did. You could have "500 MHz" Cat5 cable and it wouldn't work for GbE unless it met the crosstalk requirements of Cat5e.
The five grades listed make sense. Standard Speed and High Speed with and without Ethernet (total of 4 combos of those two) and the Automotive cable.
However the other stuff is poorly executed, like the "4K" rule. And do they have any rules on putting arbitrary meaningless bandwidth numbers on their cables like the example in the article and Monster? Any number that exceeds the bandwidth actually used by HDMI is meaningless, but manufacturers still stick crazy numbers on their cables anyway.
Manufacturers should be permitted: To state which version of the HDMI spec they are compliant to, or very clearly defined capabilities (such as High Speed-No Ethernet) To give specific physical properties of their cable's construction such as wire gauge and connector plating materials
They should NOT be permitted: To advertise any electrical performance numbers that exceed the requirements of the defined HDMI specification, as these numbers are irrelevant to all users.
The anonymous poster is lying. BoingBoing contacted Cory and the photographer who owned the image (a friend of Cory's), and they had permission from the start. In fact it's implied that this image was taken by Cory's friend *on property owned by Cory*.
The poster of this article is NOT the owner of the images. (It should be suspicious that the two images he/she claims to own are credited to two different Flickr users.)
There's also the fact that it turns out that PV cells require so much energy to make that it takes them years to break even in terms of energy production.
They don't matter. All they mean is that a carrier/phone manufacturer team can't use the DMCA to go after jailbreakers and SIM-unlockers.
However: They can still put the anti-jailbreaking and SIMlocking technical measures in place They can still legally put in measures that "brick" phones in response to trying to defeat the above if they wish They can still structure their service contracts in a manner such that SIM-unlocking doesn't buy you that much. They can still structure their warranties such that if anything else goes wrong with the phone you're SOL if it's SIM-unlocked or jailbroken
Really, for iPhone users, the DMCA was probably the least of their worries if they wanted to jailbreak or remove SIMlocks.
Slashdot Mirror
"Its ridiculous in general that we have this restriction on electronics in use on Aircraft, when 99.9% of them should have Zero impact on the plane, and should just be allowed to be used at all time."
ILS is a very sensitive, interference-prone and fragile system, hence the 10-minute after takeoff/before landing restriction.
It's being slowly replaced with GPS-based systems as GPS units with RAIM become more common.
You pretty much just described how B&N and the Nook work.
Sold in store - check.
Terminals in store - Not quite, but free WiFi access and special "extra features" (the ability to read nearly any eBook offered by B&N for 1 hour/day for free, plus weekly rotated free content) accessible when connected to store WiFi. - So check
Coffee, tea, miffins - check.
Pretty obvious troll, but I'll bite.
"The Kindle is not only considerably cheaper than a Nook"
For a period, they were exactly the same price ($259). I forget who shot first in the price war (I think it was Amazon), but the price disparity between the 3G versions lasted about a day.
The Nook WiFi ($50 cheaper than the 3G Kindle or Nook) was available for about 2 weeks before the Kindle WiFi showed up.
The current state is that the Kindle is $10 cheaper for each version. IMO the Nook is worth the extra $10.
"You can browse the web from your Kindle, the Nook has no web browser. The Kindle has over 2 million titles available, the Nook has closer to a half million. The Kindle has a battery life of a month, the Nook is lucky to make it a week."
Um, my Nook has a web browser. Does your Kindle have an RSS feed reader and a twitter client? Oh wait, it doesn't because it has a proprietary OS that can't be developed for. (Twook rocks, and yes, my Nook is softrooted.)
"Then there's the interface. The Nook uses a crappy touch screen that wastes battery life. The Kindle has a physical keyboard. Oh, and that "replaceable battery?" It's a proprietary custom battery. Once B&N folds, and the writing's on the wall, even though you can remove it, you won't be able to replace it with anything."
The touch screen is quite nice and provides UI flexibility not available with a keyboard. It goes to "sleep" pretty quickly so doesn't waste battery much. The fact is that the Nook has a replacable battery. Yes, it's proprietary, but it's still replacable. Even if B&N folds, there are already enough Nooks sold that I suspect you'll be seeing third party batteries sold soon, just like replacements for proprietary phone batteries and such.
"But the biggest thing is that with the Kindle, you can read your ebooks on a huge variety of devices other than the Kindle itself. You can download Amazon's reader for your PC and smart phone. For the Nook - not so much." .azw readers than there are readers for B&N's DRMed ebooks. Plus if I recall correctly, you need to perform a file conversion on a PC to load non-AZW content into the Kindle. The Nook can read PDF, ePub, and a few other formats natively.
There are far fewer platforms that have Amazon
In addition, Amazon DRM is tied to Amazon. B&N DRM is only tied to your name and CC# at time of purchase, and the key generation algorithm is known. Unlike other DRM formats, you can generate the key for your eBooks without having to rip it from cracked reader software.
"not to mention being able to see a damn thing in full sunlight (even sitting under an unbrella)."
Um, this isn't a problem for 95%+ of the eBook readers on the market. There are two big reasons why eInk screens are selling well despite being slow, expensive, and monochrome:
1) 0 power required to retain the image
2) As a purely reflective display, they work well in brightly lit areas. Their contrast ratio is not nearly as good as white paper, but most paperpacks and a good portion of hardcovers use cheap paper that isn't that white, and offers a much lower contrast ratio that eInk screens are pretty close to.
I think the flaw with your argument is the assumption that the drinks and food sold aren't inherently profitable (potentially moreso than the books!).
Of course if no one is eating/drinking, then they're 100% moochers.
Since purchasing my Nook I've gone into the store pretty often for the "More in Store" and "Read in Store" function. I have only bought one eBook (more because of curiosity about the purchase process and DRM), but I have bought quite a few drinks/snacks.
Even if you buy their DRMed eBooks, it's not "phone home" DRM and should continue to work even if they go out of business. (Highly unlikely IMO.)
Plus the DRM has been broken (including the key generation algo, no need to rip keys from DRM-enabled software).
I disagree. My basic Rigol DS1052E has solved many weird problems with microcontroller projects over the past months.
Without the scope I would never have figured out that my I2C master and I2C slaves for a project were playing "Bus Fighter I2C: Noncompliant Master". (I thought the firmware on the master was using hardware I2C mode, but it was actually using a bad software I2C implementation that actively drove the clock and data lines high. Bad Things happened if a slave tried to do clock holdoff.) I might have eventually noticed the issue in the firmware source code, but having the scope saved me a HUGE amount of time in knowing where to look.
Also, for the above problem, a logic analyzer (like the Open Workbench Logic Sniffer) would not have helped, since it wouldn't have shown that the clock line was entering a state where it was about 1/3 of the way between ground and Vcc (a clear sign that two devices were trying to drive the bus to different states simultaneously, which should not be possible on an standard speed I2C bus since nothing should actively drive it high.)
Most employers frown on their assets being used for personal use.
Which is why I own a Rigol DS1052E and an Open Workbench Logic Sniffer despite having access to a LeCroy SDA9000, multiple Tek TDS units, a Tek MSO unit, and a nice Tek dedicated logic analyzer.
Most of the lower-end ones still have dedicated firmware. The Tek TDS series, Agilent's lower-end scopes, Rigol's units, Owon's units.
Basically anything in the OP's price range will NOT be Windows/PC-based (unless he gets lucky on the used market)
Right now, the Open Workbench Logic Sniffer beats the USBee for most uses if you need logic analysis. http://dangerousprototypes.com/category/logic-analyzer/
The USBee scope is 16MSPS and only one channel, for $545! That is an epic ripoff.
The Rigol DS1052E is a standalone 50 MHz bandwidth scope with 1 GS/s (or was it 2?) samplerate for $400. It is very well regarded by most who have used it, including myself.
And you should be able to pair it with Dangerous Prototype's Open Workbench Logic Sniffer - wire the trigger output of the OWLS to the Rigol's trigger input.
(There are versions of the Rigols with built-in LAs, but they're VERY expensive options.)
I do feel good about it, and I'm not being sarcastic about it. The only bad thing I've got to say about B&N's Nook strategy is the new expanded kiosks. They've done a good job of using the Nook to bring people back into stores with their "extra features", however, they have slowly been reducing the amount of seating available for people to use the Nooks, pretty much my only complaint about how they're handling the Nook.
The Nook's DRM is pretty lenient, it's not really based on "phoning home" (your crypto key is derived from your name and CC number exclusively), and it has been broken. The device has also been rooted so you can install your own Android apps on it.
Plus the new owner would be stupid to do anything to the Nook... As I understand it, the Nook and eBooks are the areas where B&N is actually growing. (The second seems to be their in-store cafes.)
In one of my previous jobs, I had the task of getting a test setup controlled by LabView working in our facility.
Tiny little differences in our setup completely broke LabView, and the "point, click, drool" GUI really insulated you from what was going wrong and how to fix it.
I was able to almost rewrite the whole damn thing in Perl, including adding new test instrument classes to Jeff Mock's long-unmaintained Perl GPIB modules, in less time than it took to try and fix that thing.
Even though Jeff's libraries are long unmaintained, they're still a great place to start. Perl is great for test equipment automation IMO. (However, Jeff's libraries aren't so hot for trying to interface with modern interfaces such as USB-TMC. USB-TMC is just plain not well supported in Linux right now, don't know about Windows.)
Despite the rather "textblock"ish formatting of the above post, I do believe that the Rigol DS1052E is one of the best entry-level choices right now, and is GREAT bang-for-the-buck. I have one and it has proven very useful. My only regret is that I purchased it before it got price-dropped to $400. (I paid around $530 plus New York State sales tax from Saelig.)
FYI, Rigol is the manufacturer of Agilent's entry-level units at this point.
To the article poster: You indicate you've done some looking and have been unhappy with what you've found. What have you looked at and in what way have you found it lacking? What are your requirements?
Strangely enough, the "PC-only" units, while you would expect them to provide more bang for the buck, almost universally are inferior. There's a horrible trend in that market to advertise high analog bandwidths without the samplerate to back up that bandwidth. General rule of thumb is that a good scope needs 10x its analog bandwidth in samplerate to capture transients. You're probably OK with only 5x. Many of the PC-based scopes don't even meet the Nyquist criterion! (The Nyquist criteria pretty much lets you capture a sine wave at the analog bandwidth. Keep in mind the analog bandwidth is usually a cutoff frequency, and it can get information from higher frequencies.)
Or possibly embedded systems or microcontroller work. That's an arena where there's still a lot of C, and in some cases even ASM still.
Could possibly be worse. Is COBOL like FORTRAN in that EVERYTHING IS CODED IN ALL CAPS AND READING THE CODE HURTS YOUR EYES?
I did a tiny bit of FORTRAN work when I was at an internship while in college. The code was painful to read, almost entirely because it was ALL CAPS. :(
"When driving a car you can 'floor it' for a few seconds, but if you left it that way your engine would eventually overheat"
Only in an improperly designed crappy car.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subaru_Legacy#Speed_records - driven nearly flat out with stops only for refueling, driver changes, and occasional (every 96 hours) tire changes for over 18 days.
There is a parameter used for most high-dissipation ICs (such as CPUs and GPUs) - It's called "thermal design power".
This is the absolute maximum amount of heat the card can dissipate under any circumstances (not counting overclocking). The nature and definition of TDP means it should be physically impossible for ANY software to ever cause the card to exceed TDP.
If you have a system that can't handle the card running at TDP, that's faulty design of your system, not whatever caused it to hit TDP.
Why would that be? Remember, until Android existed, HTC pretty much solely existed as a manufacturer of Windows Mobile devices. They did quite well, and still are doing quite well in that market.
But Cat5e actually meets a defined, standardized specification with defined testing methodology.
Saying you have 20 Gbps HDMI cable means nothing. There is no legitimate official waveform to test at that rate with. So you can claim all this performance with some arbitary waveform, and then guess what - when the next HDMI standard comes out, you may find that said waveform was COMPLETELY irrelevant.
For example, look at Fast Ethernet to Gigabit Ethernet - GbE uses the *exact* same symbol rate as FE. So frequency response requirements didn't change a single bit, however crosstalk requirements did. You could have "500 MHz" Cat5 cable and it wouldn't work for GbE unless it met the crosstalk requirements of Cat5e.
The five grades listed make sense. Standard Speed and High Speed with and without Ethernet (total of 4 combos of those two) and the Automotive cable.
However the other stuff is poorly executed, like the "4K" rule. And do they have any rules on putting arbitrary meaningless bandwidth numbers on their cables like the example in the article and Monster? Any number that exceeds the bandwidth actually used by HDMI is meaningless, but manufacturers still stick crazy numbers on their cables anyway.
Manufacturers should be permitted:
To state which version of the HDMI spec they are compliant to, or very clearly defined capabilities (such as High Speed-No Ethernet)
To give specific physical properties of their cable's construction such as wire gauge and connector plating materials
They should NOT be permitted:
To advertise any electrical performance numbers that exceed the requirements of the defined HDMI specification, as these numbers are irrelevant to all users.
He didn't.
The anonymous poster is lying. BoingBoing contacted Cory and the photographer who owned the image (a friend of Cory's), and they had permission from the start. In fact it's implied that this image was taken by Cory's friend *on property owned by Cory*.
The poster of this article is NOT the owner of the images. (It should be suspicious that the two images he/she claims to own are credited to two different Flickr users.)
There's also the fact that it turns out that PV cells require so much energy to make that it takes them years to break even in terms of energy production.
That's my worry. The logic here makes sense, as long as they don't "grade inflate" the former D students up to C.
The problem is, they likely will do that.
They don't matter. All they mean is that a carrier/phone manufacturer team can't use the DMCA to go after jailbreakers and SIM-unlockers.
However:
They can still put the anti-jailbreaking and SIMlocking technical measures in place
They can still legally put in measures that "brick" phones in response to trying to defeat the above if they wish
They can still structure their service contracts in a manner such that SIM-unlocking doesn't buy you that much.
They can still structure their warranties such that if anything else goes wrong with the phone you're SOL if it's SIM-unlocked or jailbroken
Really, for iPhone users, the DMCA was probably the least of their worries if they wanted to jailbreak or remove SIMlocks.