Think of software written in an interpreted language. Your program doesnt directly run on the processor, it is merly instructions to the interpreter software which performs actions based upon that input, so by your definition its data not software right?
Incase anybody didn't notice, this comment was made as part of a general debate on possible loop holes and issues that might exist when the 10 year renewal is up, it was not part of any formal law or decision making process.
As an MP was rightly pointing out, there is a potential loophole where a household may not own any televisions at all, and only computers and monitors (without any tv tuner card, as thats already covered) through which they may be able to watch the increasing amount of tv programs the bbc make available over the internet, and thus avoid paying the tv license fee under the current rules.
its pretty obvious that someone is going to suggest 'tax all computers instead then' as a solution to that loop hole, it doesnt mean thats sensible or will ever be seriously considered, its just media sensationalism on an otherwise dull topic.
A little more searching would have also found Scarse a scanner/camera colour calibration tool that can generate icc profiles for you, and littleCMS a colour management library and other associated tools.
Road tax isnt voluntary, maybe you only use a couple of local roads, or maybe you hardly ever use that car at all, you still have to pay a tax to help fund the cost of all the roads.
National Insurance isnt voluntary, so you never get sick, or you have private medical insurance, you still have to pay towards the cost of the NHS so that everyone else can benefit.
Sites like this which only list what doesnt work, and other such sites that only list what does work, all suffer from the same problem: you cant distinguish unknown from does/doesnt work.
The printer people (linuxprinting.org) have the right idea, the site lists every printer thats known, and wether it does, or doesnt work, how well, and why.
This way you can more easily tell the difference between 'my device is too new, nobodies tried yet' and 'the manufacturers a pest, itll never work' and the more common 'theres half a driver that mostly works, give it a go or wait a bit'
If the same philosophy was applied to all devices it would be a really useful resource
CD sales are not down, the RIAA/BMI 'Music Biz' just wants you to think it is. In europe and th euk at least the number of actual CDs sold is up, by quite a lot, but they dont harp on about this.
What is actually down is the Gross Value of CD Sales, this is because the prices have been forced down by large supermarkets and online companies ignoreing the RRP and selling for less profit.
Best i can tell, despite the CDs being sold at a lower price, the RIAA still gets the exact same revenue per disc, so its profits are up. its only the retailers profit per unit that is down.
Time for me to buy a semi-translucent case and fit my Mini-Blinkenlights project inside.
Last Xmas i started a project to build a scalable, miniature version of the CCC blinkenlights project that i could put in the window of my house.
I got one 8x8 tile completed, and had it displaying scrolly messages and the like. Each panel uses a few quids worth of components (a PIC plus a few transistors) plus 64 LEDs of your choice, and hooks upto the PC via the serial port.
It should be pretty easy to change it to do full colour for each pixel, if it wasnt for the expense of the LEDs to do that.
If you make a really great hinge design, i can buy one, take it apart, and discover precisely how it works, i can then make my own identical duplicates and theres nothing you can do about it, its not a copyright issue, so patents step in and give you protection over your design.
If you make a great bit of software, i can buy a copy, but i cant easily take it apart, how it actually works isnt obvious, i can just see the effect it has. i cant just duplicate yours as thats copyright violation, so i have to go and design and impliment my own that appears to work in a similar way. So i have had to put a lot of effort into doing something comparable, so why should you get a patent awarded monopoly when you already had the protections of copyright, and i had to put in effort to create my own work.
I also think that a patent should be automatically voided if it can be reasonably proved that it was independantly invented in more than one place, as it therefore couldnt have been that unique or novel.
Offtopic ~ If health insurance companies really consider your life to be worth a million dollars, why don't they provide life insurance?
Okay, so what happens when your in an accident and your life+health insurance decides its cheaper for them to declare you a write-off, let you die and pay out on the life insurance, than it is to fix you up and pay the medical bills.
That may sound a bit extreme, but you can bet the insurance companies will have a cap on what they are prepared to spend on you, so in effect it will happen, and may already be happening.
Look at the edges of that frame, the original is badly scratched and covered in noise. Now all this noise and scratches doesnt matter so much when theres bright picture detail behind it, but in a large blank black area like the sky it would make the whole picture quality look shitty.
so it seems obvious to me why they cut it out, its to make the picture look better quality than it really is, as joe public doesnt understand the subtlties of what it is and why they would just see it as a crap image.
Wheres the OLED
on
Video T-shirts
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Liquid Crystal Display !?
Not very practical is it, what we really want to see is the flexible OLED version of these, then you really can have a t-shirt with a builtin tv.
Also sounds rather like the Non-Newtonian Fluids experiment that they did in Brainiac (a satellite tv show in the uk which did stupid science experiments to show what happened)
They filled a swimming pool with custard (cornflower based) and demonstrated that a person could walk across it as long as they kept moving, and thus impacting the surface with their feet, the moment the guy stood still he started to sink.
the show also revelled in destroying caravans, but thats beside the point.:)
I always wanted to do an open source project to include one of these formats on the back of a business card, eg. by encoding vcard data into one of these 2d barcodes which can be automatically read via a scanner. giving you error free entries into your address book.
Theres a whole pile of 2D barcode standards out there, many are patented, but some are public domain or free to use, heres a good list of them. http://www.adams1.com/pub/russadam/stack.ht ml
As can be seen discusseed in the 'distributed orkut' group on orkut, i have been work on yet another foaf type project, but with a few differences.
for starters i think that useing email, or email style addresses for user ids is a bad idea, as their either an open invitation to spammers, or you need to have a central repository for the info. So i have been working on using URLs as the unique id. your id then natural leads directly to the information detail who you are and who your linked to, etc. this make forming webs of connected users and sites far easier.
i have attempted to make the rss data file self rendering, but its a little limited, so you can also optionally nominate a site that will render your data and provide a navigable interface, but the viewer is free to choose who does the rendering.
i also have plans for including puplic key blocks and associated data for verification, and restricted access data uses, but havent yet thought of a practical use for it. see the above discussion group for better details.
The main ideas being that the whole system is distributed, and that which cant be purely distributed you get to nominate your choice of server. and that your only requirement to join into the system is that you have access to a website where you can store a static file.
the beginnings of this project can be found on Nepot
My first reaction to reading this was that the MPI have now pretty much put cd-wow out of business.
The supermarkets have been forcing the prices of CD's down for quite a while now, as a result album sales in the UK are at record levels, yet people like the MPI are bitching because the total value of retail sales is down (they still get the same fixed price per cd so their profits are actually up).
Its typical to see prices of 9.99 or less in the supermarkets (like Tesco and Asda) for new chart albums, so cd-wow have just been priced out of the market.
The same kind of thing is also happening with DVDs, the supermarkets have far more muscle than your normal highstreet retailer, and theyre not afraid to annoy the producers of the goods in the search for better prices.
wtf is the point in jamming phone signals for university students in lectures.
If someone isnt paying attention, or causing any kind of disruption, you kick them out, as i saw several lecturers do in my days as a student.
University students dont have to be in every lecture, they are not forced to sit through it, and its not like theyre school kids and theres some legal obligation to teach them.
If the lecture bores you, or you think nattering on your phone is more important, get the feck out and copy someones notes later.
Blocking mobile phones in order to try and force getting peoples attention is just another example of the growing trend in todays society to look for inappropriate technical solutions to social and discipline problems that have always had an effective old-fashioned solution, if only every one wasnt so lazy and/or afraid of frivolous law suits.
This may be an overly simplistic view of things, but the heat dissipation of a device is caused by the energy used up in pushing against the electrical resistance of the materials used. Every conductor has a resistance, and even the insulators used arent perfect so they have a resistance, and when a current flows through this resistance some of the energy is converted to heat.
This heat generation happens no matter what the direction of flow is, so even if as this article suggests you arrange the gates and circuits so you can also run them backwards, well thats still going to be current flow which generates heat. A standard domestic light bulb runs on AC right, where the current is flowing back and forth constantly 'undoing' itself, but it still generates a heck of a lot of heat.
You cant turn the heat back into electricity, you dont make cold by running a hot circuit backwards, and your not transforming the electrical energy into some kind of mythical information energy, you are merly controlling the path of electrons on their inevitable flow back towards a state of equillibrium.
This is just not an issue for the majority of mobile phone users if you have a vaguely sane phone system, like eg. the uk.
If a child has a mobile phone, it will be on one of the Pay As You Go schemes that every network provider offers, your child would likely have at most 5ukp worth or credit on the phone, and if it all gets used up then tough, you give them no more until their next monthly allowance, same as pocket money. The kids then quickly learn how to budget and limit their own usage.
Similarly for many adults (i would speculate probably the majority of adults) who also have a PayG based phone, if it gets stolen then all you loose is the credit that was already on there, and the phone itself (from 60ukp up) which you likely have insurance cover for, so your losses are limited, unlike someone stealing a credit card off you.
Making payments from your phone would be a simple matter of sending an SMS message (something every phone user knows how to do) to the number listed for payments. A lot of premium cost SMS services in the uk now use the new shortcode 5 digit numbers, and can cost 1ukp or more per message, there are even several satellite tv channels dedicated to this kind of thing, with a quid a message chat systems and the like.
Whilst on the subject of phones, i see many north americans complaining about getting junk phone calls on their mobiles, and how they dont give out their mobile numbers to people, that just doesnt really happen here, as it costs you nothing to receive a phone call on your mobile, it just costs the caller a lot more than it would to call a landline, and with mobiles having their own seperate area codes you know in advance what the call costs will be, so they just dont cold call to mobiles.
You do however get some SMS spam to mobiles, as the costs are lower than calls, but i have only ever had junk messages from my network provider.
It seems that the the low cost and ease of distribution and charging that the internet gives us is once more making it viable for the small one-man firms to trade.
A prime example of this is Llamasoft, Jeff Minters old company. Back in the 80's and early nineties he produced what many people would say are some of the finest examples of really addictively playable games. Revenge of the Mutant Camels, and Llamatron being some of my favourites.
For many years since the Yak has put most of these old versions on his website for people to download and enjoy, claiming it wasnt worth the expense of trying to sell anymore, but with little or no new material available.
Now it seems he has relaunched Llamasoft and is releasing new improved games as shareware, with full versions available for about 5UKP, which is serious value for money for work of this high a calibre.
There is an excellent list of 2 dimensional bar codes of this style, some of which are public domain.
I have always wanted to work on an opensource project to put business card info in a standardised format into a 2d barcode you can print on the back of your business cards. Someone can then just slap the card in a scanner and have correct information put straight into their address book.
Yet another item on the ever increasing 'cool ideas if i ever get some spare time' stack.
What happens in England if a land line person calls a cell phone? Do they have to pay for the cell phone charges?
Yes, and it's easy to work out how expensive the call is going to be too.
Mobile phones have a seperate area code to landlines, so do free phone (toll free) numbers, lo-call (charged local call rate no matter where you are), and premium rate numbers.
So if you dial an area code starting 01xxx or 02xxx then you know its a national rate land line call. if you dial 07xxx its a mobile, 09xxx premium, etc.
This also means that a mobile phone could be registered anywhere in the country, the first few digits of the number only tell you which telecoms provider they are with.
The exact cost of the call to a mobile varies according to how much that mobile phone carrier, and how much the originating carrier charges. Which can vary, but not much generally. In the same way that the exact cost of a premium rate call can vary, but the area code prefix tells you the rough size of charge.
I have Sky Digital, and before that analogue cable, and although the occasional mpeg artifact is annoying, the general quality of picture on digital is far cleaner and sharper than any analogue signal ive ever seen. RGB mode SCART from the satellite box to a 32" Sony TV just beats the crap out of any composite or RF signal fed to it.
Maybe if you live in some perfect little world, with perfect aerial alignment and cabling you could get a better picture for all of 5 channels, but for the the rest of us the choice and general quality is far better.
The quality also does vary according to how cheapskate the broadcaster of that channel was feeling, the bbc channels tend to give a lot more bandwidth to their programs, opposed to channels like travel-shop and QVC who try to cut costs and bandwidth.
Until now, to make a hologram, you needed a physical object to work from.
Not true, for a number of years there have been techniques for creating entirely computer generated holograms. The biggest problem so far is getting a printer with a high enough resolution to do this directly. Photo reduction is generally used to compensate for this.
However this technology might not (yet) scale well to commercial uses, the computation required seems to be pretty large.
A quick google should find you plenty of examples.
Sounds like Fraunhofer and the likes are trying to play catchup on the developments that have been made in the open source world, with improved psyco-acoustic models, and refinements in VBR encoding.
With the likes of LAME used in VBR (variable bit rate) mode, even at max. compression i can get files that have an average of only 80kbps and sounds way better than the crud produced by some of the commercial encoders at 192kbps fixed rate. (eg. the encoder shipped with the rio500).
Many people seem to overlook VBR mode, i have yet to find a player that doesnt handle it, the rio, xmms, winamp all handle it fine (the bitrate meter goes silly, but hey) and you can get much better quality for the space, as it ramps the quality up and down as required, so your not wasting a few hundred kbps on the silence.
Slashdot Mirror
Think of software written in an interpreted language. Your program doesnt directly run on the processor, it is merly instructions to the interpreter software which performs actions based upon that input, so by your definition its data not software right?
Incase anybody didn't notice, this comment was made as part of a general debate on possible loop holes and issues that might exist when the 10 year renewal is up, it was not part of any formal law or decision making process.
As an MP was rightly pointing out, there is a potential loophole where a household may not own any televisions at all, and only computers and monitors (without any tv tuner card, as thats already covered) through which they may be able to watch the increasing amount of tv programs the bbc make available over the internet, and thus avoid paying the tv license fee under the current rules.
its pretty obvious that someone is going to suggest 'tax all computers instead then' as a solution to that loop hole, it doesnt mean thats sensible or will ever be seriously considered, its just media sensationalism on an otherwise dull topic.
A little more searching would have also found Scarse a scanner/camera colour calibration tool that can generate icc profiles for you, and littleCMS a colour management library and other associated tools.
Road tax isnt voluntary, maybe you only use a couple of local roads, or maybe you hardly ever use that car at all, you still have to pay a tax to help fund the cost of all the roads.
National Insurance isnt voluntary, so you never get sick, or you have private medical insurance, you still have to pay towards the cost of the NHS so that everyone else can benefit.
Sites like this which only list what doesnt work, and other such sites that only list what does work, all suffer from the same problem: you cant distinguish unknown from does/doesnt work.
The printer people (linuxprinting.org) have the right idea, the site lists every printer thats known, and wether it does, or doesnt work, how well, and why.
This way you can more easily tell the difference between 'my device is too new, nobodies tried yet' and 'the manufacturers a pest, itll never work' and the more common 'theres half a driver that mostly works, give it a go or wait a bit'
If the same philosophy was applied to all devices it would be a really useful resource
CD sales are not down, the RIAA/BMI 'Music Biz' just wants you to think it is. In europe and th euk at least the number of actual CDs sold is up, by quite a lot, but they dont harp on about this.
What is actually down is the Gross Value of CD Sales, this is because the prices have been forced down by large supermarkets and online companies ignoreing the RRP and selling for less profit.
Best i can tell, despite the CDs being sold at a lower price, the RIAA still gets the exact same revenue per disc, so its profits are up. its only the retailers profit per unit that is down.
It should be pretty easy to change it to do full colour for each pixel, if it wasnt for the expense of the LEDs to do that.
A small movie shows a sample scrolling message displaying on it http://sucs.org/~arthur/blinken.mqv
If you make a really great hinge design, i can buy one, take it apart, and discover precisely how it works, i can then make my own identical duplicates and theres nothing you can do about it, its not a copyright issue, so patents step in and give you protection over your design.
If you make a great bit of software, i can buy a copy, but i cant easily take it apart, how it actually works isnt obvious, i can just see the effect it has. i cant just duplicate yours as thats copyright violation, so i have to go and design and impliment my own that appears to work in a similar way. So i have had to put a lot of effort into doing something comparable, so why should you get a patent awarded monopoly when you already had the protections of copyright, and i had to put in effort to create my own work.
I also think that a patent should be automatically voided if it can be reasonably proved that it was independantly invented in more than one place, as it therefore couldnt have been that unique or novel.
That may sound a bit extreme, but you can bet the insurance companies will have a cap on what they are prepared to spend on you, so in effect it will happen, and may already be happening.
Look at the edges of that frame, the original is badly scratched and covered in noise. Now all this noise and scratches doesnt matter so much when theres bright picture detail behind it, but in a large blank black area like the sky it would make the whole picture quality look shitty.
so it seems obvious to me why they cut it out, its to make the picture look better quality than it really is, as joe public doesnt understand the subtlties of what it is and why they would just see it as a crap image.
Liquid Crystal Display !?
Not very practical is it, what we really want to see is the flexible OLED version of these, then you really can have a t-shirt with a builtin tv.
Also sounds rather like the Non-Newtonian Fluids experiment that they did in Brainiac (a satellite tv show in the uk which did stupid science experiments to show what happened)
:)
They filled a swimming pool with custard (cornflower based) and demonstrated that a person could walk across it as long as they kept moving, and thus impacting the surface with their feet, the moment the guy stood still he started to sink.
the show also revelled in destroying caravans, but thats beside the point.
I always wanted to do an open source project to include one of these formats on the back of a business card, eg. by encoding vcard data into one of these 2d barcodes which can be automatically read via a scanner. giving you error free entries into your address book.
t ml
Theres a whole pile of 2D barcode standards out there, many are patented, but some are public domain or free to use, heres a good list of them.
http://www.adams1.com/pub/russadam/stack.h
for starters i think that useing email, or email style addresses for user ids is a bad idea, as their either an open invitation to spammers, or you need to have a central repository for the info. So i have been working on using URLs as the unique id. your id then natural leads directly to the information detail who you are and who your linked to, etc. this make forming webs of connected users and sites far easier.
i have attempted to make the rss data file self rendering, but its a little limited, so you can also optionally nominate a site that will render your data and provide a navigable interface, but the viewer is free to choose who does the rendering.
i also have plans for including puplic key blocks and associated data for verification, and restricted access data uses, but havent yet thought of a practical use for it. see the above discussion group for better details.
The main ideas being that the whole system is distributed, and that which cant be purely distributed you get to nominate your choice of server. and that your only requirement to join into the system is that you have access to a website where you can store a static file.
the beginnings of this project can be found on Nepot
My first reaction to reading this was that the MPI have now pretty much put cd-wow out of business.
The supermarkets have been forcing the prices of CD's down for quite a while now, as a result album sales in the UK are at record levels, yet people like the MPI are bitching because the total value of retail sales is down (they still get the same fixed price per cd so their profits are actually up).
Its typical to see prices of 9.99 or less in the supermarkets (like Tesco and Asda) for new chart albums, so cd-wow have just been priced out of the market.
The same kind of thing is also happening with DVDs, the supermarkets have far more muscle than your normal highstreet retailer, and theyre not afraid to annoy the producers of the goods in the search for better prices.
wtf is the point in jamming phone signals for university students in lectures.
If someone isnt paying attention, or causing any kind of disruption, you kick them out, as i saw several lecturers do in my days as a student.
University students dont have to be in every lecture, they are not forced to sit through it, and its not like theyre school kids and theres some legal obligation to teach them.
If the lecture bores you, or you think nattering on your phone is more important, get the feck out and copy someones notes later.
Blocking mobile phones in order to try and force getting peoples attention is just another example of the growing trend in todays society to look for inappropriate technical solutions to social and discipline problems that have always had an effective old-fashioned solution, if only every one wasnt so lazy and/or afraid of frivolous law suits.
This may be an overly simplistic view of things, but the heat dissipation of a device is caused by the energy used up in pushing against the electrical resistance of the materials used. Every conductor has a resistance, and even the insulators used arent perfect so they have a resistance, and when a current flows through this resistance some of the energy is converted to heat.
This heat generation happens no matter what the direction of flow is, so even if as this article suggests you arrange the gates and circuits so you can also run them backwards, well thats still going to be current flow which generates heat.
A standard domestic light bulb runs on AC right, where the current is flowing back and forth constantly 'undoing' itself, but it still generates a heck of a lot of heat.
You cant turn the heat back into electricity, you dont make cold by running a hot circuit backwards, and your not transforming the electrical energy into some kind of mythical information energy, you are merly controlling the path of electrons on their inevitable flow back towards a state of equillibrium.
This is just not an issue for the majority of mobile phone users if you have a vaguely sane phone system, like eg. the uk.
If a child has a mobile phone, it will be on one of the Pay As You Go schemes that every network provider offers, your child would likely have at most 5ukp worth or credit on the phone, and if it all gets used up then tough, you give them no more until their next monthly allowance, same as pocket money. The kids then quickly learn how to budget and limit their own usage.
Similarly for many adults (i would speculate probably the majority of adults) who also have a PayG based phone, if it gets stolen then all you loose is the credit that was already on there, and the phone itself (from 60ukp up) which you likely have insurance cover for, so your losses are limited, unlike someone stealing a credit card off you.
Making payments from your phone would be a simple matter of sending an SMS message (something every phone user knows how to do) to the number listed for payments. A lot of premium cost SMS services in the uk now use the new shortcode 5 digit numbers, and can cost 1ukp or more per message, there are even several satellite tv channels dedicated to this kind of thing, with a quid a message chat systems and the like.
Whilst on the subject of phones, i see many north americans complaining about getting junk phone calls on their mobiles, and how they dont give out their mobile numbers to people, that just doesnt really happen here, as it costs you nothing to receive a phone call on your mobile, it just costs the caller a lot more than it would to call a landline, and with mobiles having their own seperate area codes you know in advance what the call costs will be, so they just dont cold call to mobiles.
You do however get some SMS spam to mobiles, as the costs are lower than calls, but i have only ever had junk messages from my network provider.
It seems that the the low cost and ease of distribution and charging that the internet gives us is once more making it viable for the small one-man firms to trade.
A prime example of this is Llamasoft, Jeff Minters old company. Back in the 80's and early nineties he produced what many people would say are some of the finest examples of really addictively playable games. Revenge of the Mutant Camels, and Llamatron being some of my favourites.
For many years since the Yak has put most of these old versions on his website for people to download and enjoy, claiming it wasnt worth the expense of trying to sell anymore, but with little or no new material available.
Now it seems he has relaunched Llamasoft and is releasing new improved games as shareware, with full versions available for about 5UKP, which is serious value for money for work of this high a calibre.
There is an excellent list of 2 dimensional bar codes of this style, some of which are public domain.
I have always wanted to work on an opensource project to put business card info in a standardised format into a 2d barcode you can print on the back of your business cards. Someone can then just slap the card in a scanner and have correct information put straight into their address book.
Yet another item on the ever increasing 'cool ideas if i ever get some spare time' stack.
Mobile phones have a seperate area code to landlines, so do free phone (toll free) numbers, lo-call (charged local call rate no matter where you are), and premium rate numbers.
So if you dial an area code starting 01xxx or 02xxx then you know its a national rate land line call. if you dial 07xxx its a mobile, 09xxx premium, etc.
This also means that a mobile phone could be registered anywhere in the country, the first few digits of the number only tell you which telecoms provider they are with.
The exact cost of the call to a mobile varies according to how much that mobile phone carrier, and how much the originating carrier charges. Which can vary, but not much generally. In the same way that the exact cost of a premium rate call can vary, but the area code prefix tells you the rough size of charge.
Sure they seem like crazy ideas NOW, but 5 or 10 years down the line this could be ripe for suing the pants off someone for patent infringement.
---
Be thee not lost amongst precepts of order
I have Sky Digital, and before that analogue cable, and although the occasional mpeg artifact is annoying, the general quality of picture on digital is far cleaner and sharper than any analogue signal ive ever seen. RGB mode SCART from the satellite box to a 32" Sony TV just beats the crap out of any composite or RF signal fed to it.
Maybe if you live in some perfect little world, with perfect aerial alignment and cabling you could get a better picture for all of 5 channels, but for the the rest of us the choice and general quality is far better.
The quality also does vary according to how cheapskate the broadcaster of that channel was feeling, the bbc channels tend to give a lot more bandwidth to their programs, opposed to channels like travel-shop and QVC who try to cut costs and bandwidth.
Not true, for a number of years there have been techniques for creating entirely computer generated holograms. The biggest problem so far is getting a printer with a high enough resolution to do this directly. Photo reduction is generally used to compensate for this.
However this technology might not (yet) scale well to commercial uses, the computation required seems to be pretty large.
A quick google should find you plenty of examples.
Many people seem to overlook VBR mode, i have yet to find a player that doesnt handle it, the rio, xmms, winamp all handle it fine (the bitrate meter goes silly, but hey) and you can get much better quality for the space, as it ramps the quality up and down as required, so your not wasting a few hundred kbps on the silence.