I love PA. I have been using it for network audio since it was called Polypro audio. Having said that, it still isn't finished and maintenance has more or less been abandoned. I recently gave up trying to use it for my media computer. I got tired of living with a 5 year old bug.
I think the problem with Pulseaudio is that it is too monolithic. There is just too much logic stuffed into one place for a good long term open source project. Once the original people lost interest it became too hard to understand for those that just wanted to fix bugs. At this point someone is going to have to devote a significant hunk of their life if the hard bugs are ever to be fixed. Pulseaudio should of stuck to what it did best: network audio...
Why does everything lead to an attack? Perhaps the Iranians feel that they are above such playground level ideas. Iran hasn't attacked anyone for hundreds of years. Maybe they are a bunch of annoying pacifists...
This is classic institutional behaviour. Something happened that could in some way cause the administration to look bad? Do something to delay outside scrutiny until public interest moves elsewhere. Immediately announce that a really really serious investigation is already underway. The result is unimportant. The actual goal is to prevent outsiders from poking around in your kingdom and causing blame.
Is there actually any question as to exactly what MIT did? What new questions remain to be answered?
People in Israel still had to go to the shelters on a regular basis. Some of the rockets got through. The system would of been successful if everyone could of just sat and watched the war on TV.
The Palestinians don't need to actually hurt or kill anyone with their rockets. To achieve a positive political end all they need to do is create a situation where people in Israel can never be completely safe. This serves as an argument against the current policy where the Palestinians are being forced into a small area and then walled in. The rockets mean that even if the policy is taken to it's logical conclusion it will never bring total security.
Why would anyone want to know the actual location of speed signs? Normally people want to know the speed of a particular road at a particular place. We already have a fairly popular version of that that in a Wiki form:
If you wanted to know where Air Force One was wouldn't it be easier just to turn on the news?
Knowing where an aircraft is doesn't really help you if it is at 30000 feet. Anyone trying to assassinate the president will wait until it is approaching or leaving an airport before letting off the shoulder fired missile.
RGB LED lighting is made. Colour matching is a bother but getting the right balance with the phosphor is hard as well. One problem is that RGB LED lights can not pass the Colour Rendering Index (CRI) test at all. It turns out that there is a colour used in the test that just won't work with the wavelengths used in such lamps (it is apparently just a bunch of colour blobs printed on paper). The RGB lighting people feel that the test is not useful for comparing phosphor and RGB lights.
Some supporters of RGB LEDs managed to get a group of people to prefer the RGB based lights in a test so all hope is not lost...
There isn't really any way to deny *anyone* secure tactical communications these days. Just get everyone a push to talk app for their smart phone and a bluetooth headset. You can even encrypt the messages if anyone actually cares (the police wouldn't).
Er, no. There is an actual technical issue here. If you make a passive filter with sharper skirts you end up with more loss to the desired signal. GPS (like all things that transmit from space) is quite power limited. As a result the signal is just above the noise (pretty much all downlinks). So just adding a better filter in front of the receiver will significantly degrade things.
There is stuff that you can do here but it would be expensive and possibly power hungry (some GPS receivers have to run off of batteries).
Normally this issue is resolved by placing guard bands around downlink bands where terrestrial transmitters are not allowed. By not doing this in a reasonable way, the FCC has simply messed up.
Isn't he just rediscovering the smartbook with this? I have a cheesy ARM based smartbook that you can buy these days for $200 that has 6+ hours of battery life (EFIKA MX). It runs Ubuntu.
How is his expensive thing better than my cheap thing?
It is hard to make windows that both insulate really well and provide a large apeture when open. My house (which coincidentally is also in Winnipeg) has laughably small window openings. Modern insulated windows are better but it is still a tradeoff. The uninsulated windows that originally came with the house were much better in the summer than anything I would install today (triple pane R5+).
I can overcome this to some extent with a powerful fan but I have to live with a lot of noise at night...
VDSL2 only gives good speed if you have short high quality loops to a cabinet. You end up with lots of cabinets attached to a fiber network. All the effort to achieve this is better spent extending the fiber the last little bit to the building which allows for fewer and better placed cabinets. As a result VDSL2 is only good for things like apartment buildings with no provision to add fiber. It is more or less a stillborn technology.
Under US patent law, you can be liable for infringement for using the claimed invention (like the individual users), or for making or selling the invention, like the BitTorrent company.
That is interesting in that it seems to fail basic philosophy. A description of something is not the thing itself.
Whatever. I doubt I will ever be able to think like a lawyer. That might not be a bad thing...
The things mentioned are just programs... a description of a process. Wouldn't they have to sue the individual users? After all, you can't be sued for having a copy of a patent. You have to have some sort of implementation to infringe.
Planes are allowed to fly over populated areas where digital and analogue TV signals are being broadcast, CB radio, digital radio, FM, and AM radio, electricity substations, telephone masts, as well as signals from satellites above, not to mention lightning, all kicking out EM noise. Surely those all interfere with the sensors.
Some do. Interference from FM transmitters is a known issue in Europe. Again it is the instrument landing system that is affected. I remember that was a reason for people to want to build the microwave landing system back in the day...
Another common ground based cause of interference to aircraft stuff is leaky cable TV systems.
In general AC at the 110/220V used for residential power is way more dangerous than DC at the same voltages. That is because the 50/60Hz used in these systems is close to the optimal frequency that can cause your heart to go into fibrillation. A nice solid zap with DC current can fix this (defibrillator) but most people do not have access to such a current source at home. The AC current required to mess up your heart can be quite low. I have heard 10mA quoted as a lower limit. The trick is to not get the AC current through your chest. That is what the suggestion that you should put one hand in your pocket when you are messing with the guts of something that is plugged in is based on.
During the AC vs DC wars the DC faction used to like to show how easy it was to electrocute animals with AC. Edison once famously electrocuted an elephant with AC current and filmed the result.
This is hardly a new issue. Metal lath has been popular for exterior stucco for some time now. Metal lath is popular for interior plaster walls. Perhaps the use of drywall has spoiled everyone.
The signals can come in the windows and bounce down the halls. Inside radio propagation has and will always be somewhat problematic. Just run some damn wires if it is a problem...
Just because I like to feel different I will state that I sometimes watch TV the traditional way. I learned a long time ago that there is no such thing as good TV. At some point in my life I gave up on cable and just watched Canadian network television. After a period of adjustment I found I was wasting as much time and more to the point enjoying it as much as before.
TV is like radio. You allow others to decide what you see and hear so you don't have to decide anything. TV is for those times you are not engaged with life enough to play video games. Breaking it up into bite sized chunks and putting it on the net transforms it into something else.
BTW I think the "TV effect" explains how things like infomercials can continue to exist. You don't see stuff like that in other mediums. TV is special in some way...
The evilness of creating a virus that causes large motor drives to damage the systems they are attached to is simply breathtaking. If this gets out into the world it very possibly could create widespread death and destruction. I think that it would be safe to assume that whoever created this virus firmly believed that the ends justified any possible means.
Dunno about the mail. I don't see any reason to assume that law enforcement can't monitor any phone call at will. Things are set up so as to specifically allow no oversight.... or at least that is how it seemed back in the days when I worked for the local phone company...
What possible incentive would the phone company have to get in the way of local law enforcement? Perhaps there are Canadian ISPs that need encouragement to set up the needed infrastructure to allow the convenient monitoring currently possible with voice. Perhaps that is actually what is behind this proposed legislation.
Ubuntu 10.10 is the most 'consumer-friendly' version of the Linux distro to date, but it faces an uphill battle against Microsoft's marketing machine.
Ubuntu is a Linux distribution. In what sense is it competing with an entirely different sort of operating system? OS X runs on Intel/AMD and is at least Unix like. Is Ubuntu competing with that too?
In some places electrical resistive heat is expensive but that is not the point here. Some people try to argue that incandescent bulbs are not efficient electrical heaters which is just not true. One interesting practical effect of this is that compact fluorescents save significantly less money in colder places. That is what the document I linked to was all about.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the problem with Pulseaudio is that it is too monolithic. There is just too much logic stuffed into one place for a good long term open source project. Once the original people lost interest it became too hard to understand for those that just wanted to fix bugs. At this point someone is going to have to devote a significant hunk of their life if the hard bugs are ever to be fixed. Pulseaudio should of stuck to what it did best: network audio...
Why does everything lead to an attack? Perhaps the Iranians feel that they are above such playground level ideas. Iran hasn't attacked anyone for hundreds of years. Maybe they are a bunch of annoying pacifists...
Is there actually any question as to exactly what MIT did? What new questions remain to be answered?
The stuff about "disaster relief" is entirely bogus. They are asking people to work on an entirely military application for very little gain...
The Palestinians don't need to actually hurt or kill anyone with their rockets. To achieve a positive political end all they need to do is create a situation where people in Israel can never be completely safe. This serves as an argument against the current policy where the Palestinians are being forced into a small area and then walled in. The rockets mean that even if the policy is taken to it's logical conclusion it will never bring total security.
OpenStreetMap
Knowing where an aircraft is doesn't really help you if it is at 30000 feet. Anyone trying to assassinate the president will wait until it is approaching or leaving an airport before letting off the shoulder fired missile.
Some supporters of RGB LEDs managed to get a group of people to prefer the RGB based lights in a test so all hope is not lost...
There isn't really any way to deny *anyone* secure tactical communications these days. Just get everyone a push to talk app for their smart phone and a bluetooth headset. You can even encrypt the messages if anyone actually cares (the police wouldn't).
What, there is some standard way to do video chat over 4G? Or will this only work with other Onstar subscribers?
There is stuff that you can do here but it would be expensive and possibly power hungry (some GPS receivers have to run off of batteries).
Normally this issue is resolved by placing guard bands around downlink bands where terrestrial transmitters are not allowed. By not doing this in a reasonable way, the FCC has simply messed up.
How is his expensive thing better than my cheap thing?
I can overcome this to some extent with a powerful fan but I have to live with a lot of noise at night...
VDSL2 only gives good speed if you have short high quality loops to a cabinet. You end up with lots of cabinets attached to a fiber network. All the effort to achieve this is better spent extending the fiber the last little bit to the building which allows for fewer and better placed cabinets. As a result VDSL2 is only good for things like apartment buildings with no provision to add fiber. It is more or less a stillborn technology.
Under US patent law, you can be liable for infringement for using the claimed invention (like the individual users), or for making or selling the invention, like the BitTorrent company.
That is interesting in that it seems to fail basic philosophy. A description of something is not the thing itself.
Whatever. I doubt I will ever be able to think like a lawyer. That might not be a bad thing...
The things mentioned are just programs ... a description of a process. Wouldn't they have to sue the individual users? After all, you can't be sued for having a copy of a patent. You have to have some sort of implementation to infringe.
Planes are allowed to fly over populated areas where digital and analogue TV signals are being broadcast, CB radio, digital radio, FM, and AM radio, electricity substations, telephone masts, as well as signals from satellites above, not to mention lightning, all kicking out EM noise. Surely those all interfere with the sensors.
Some do. Interference from FM transmitters is a known issue in Europe. Again it is the instrument landing system that is affected. I remember that was a reason for people to want to build the microwave landing system back in the day... Another common ground based cause of interference to aircraft stuff is leaky cable TV systems.
In general AC at the 110/220V used for residential power is way more dangerous than DC at the same voltages. That is because the 50/60Hz used in these systems is close to the optimal frequency that can cause your heart to go into fibrillation. A nice solid zap with DC current can fix this (defibrillator) but most people do not have access to such a current source at home. The AC current required to mess up your heart can be quite low. I have heard 10mA quoted as a lower limit. The trick is to not get the AC current through your chest. That is what the suggestion that you should put one hand in your pocket when you are messing with the guts of something that is plugged in is based on. During the AC vs DC wars the DC faction used to like to show how easy it was to electrocute animals with AC. Edison once famously electrocuted an elephant with AC current and filmed the result.
The signals can come in the windows and bounce down the halls. Inside radio propagation has and will always be somewhat problematic. Just run some damn wires if it is a problem...
TV is like radio. You allow others to decide what you see and hear so you don't have to decide anything. TV is for those times you are not engaged with life enough to play video games. Breaking it up into bite sized chunks and putting it on the net transforms it into something else.
BTW I think the "TV effect" explains how things like infomercials can continue to exist. You don't see stuff like that in other mediums. TV is special in some way...
The evilness of creating a virus that causes large motor drives to damage the systems they are attached to is simply breathtaking. If this gets out into the world it very possibly could create widespread death and destruction. I think that it would be safe to assume that whoever created this virus firmly believed that the ends justified any possible means.
What possible incentive would the phone company have to get in the way of local law enforcement? Perhaps there are Canadian ISPs that need encouragement to set up the needed infrastructure to allow the convenient monitoring currently possible with voice. Perhaps that is actually what is behind this proposed legislation.
Ubuntu is a Linux distribution. In what sense is it competing with an entirely different sort of operating system? OS X runs on Intel/AMD and is at least Unix like. Is Ubuntu competing with that too?
I've decoded it. Yeah, it's porn...
In some places electrical resistive heat is expensive but that is not the point here. Some people try to argue that incandescent bulbs are not efficient electrical heaters which is just not true. One interesting practical effect of this is that compact fluorescents save significantly less money in colder places. That is what the document I linked to was all about.