There's no way Google has 2721 megabytes reserved for each Gmail account. They are relying on people like me that have only 2 emails there right now, consisting of only a few hundred bytes.
I just realized that many of the jokes we apply to lawyers could also be used on spammers with good effect:
So what do you have when you push 50% of all the spammers in the world into a hole and bury them? A good start.
Did you know that if you took all the spammers in the world and lined them up end to end around the equator of the earth that two thirds of them would drown?
I would like a gadget like this that plugs between my motherboard and hard drive and encrypts all the data going to the HD in real time, transparent to the OS.
"I wonder how much of that was just pure luck (and the fact that it happened during a stretch where the trail was much wider than in many other spots)."
Yeah, it would have been interesting to see what would happen if Stanley had caught up to Highlander at a spot where there wasn't room to pass. Would it believe that Highlander was a stationary object and stop moving, thinking there was no way to proceed, or would it just have followed behind Highlander?
I understand that it is not within the spirit of this competition, but I also have to wonder if it would have been possible to program in a little "offensive" driving where Highlander could have somehow prevented Stanley from ever passing.
Let's see, I could choose Blu-Ray as my next technology to adopt, but since it was created by Sony, the people who brought us rootkit enabled audio CDs that opened huge security holes on users PCs, that is completely out of the question.
Or I could choose HD-DVD. And thereby render every television and computer monitor I have useless for seeing the HD content because none of them support HDCP. Also out of the question.
Oh, and don't forget, if the DRM gods decide that your new Blu-ray or HD-DVD player broke the rules by doing something like not hiding a region code setup menu good enough, they can revoke the keys for that player and turn it into a boat anchor.
It's not just you. It is insane (for the average user at least).
You know what I would like? A million dollars.
Seriously, what I would like is a video card that doesn't make my computer sound like a vacuum cleaner. I've put sound deadening material in my system and installed fan speed controls on all the fans and turned them way down. But none of that mattered because the video card sits there spinning it's fan at like 4000 rpm.
I'm a bit behind the technology curve. My video card is a Radeon 9800. But it works fine for what I do with my computer (not much gaming). Modern cards can do far more than the 9800, so it only logically follows that with this new tech you could make a card that was underclocked and maybe some pipelines turned off, to get it down to the point that a passive heatsink (and not some huge zalman type thing) is sufficient for cooling, and still have better performance than the 9800 that works fine in my system. I'd seriously consider such a video card.
It's amazing how often parents make really poor choices when naming their children. For example, Yahoo's people search comes up with 82 occurances of people named Richard Head.
Another thing to keep in mind when ordering from DigiKey is that they charge a $5 handling charge if your order is under $25 (I think). So if your order is between $20 and $25, you might as well find $5 of other stuff to buy, because you're paying for it anyway.
Also, it helps to look at price breaks. I was looking at some IRL530 MOSFETs (DK P/N IRL530N-ND). In quantities between 10 and 100 they are $0.99 each. Quantities over 100 are $0.75 each. So it makes no sense to order a quantity between 76 and 100. It will actually cost more than just buying 100.
"Nostalgia is lovely honey, but when was the last time you bought a Zener diode?"
Actually it's been about a year. But I was thinking of buying some more, since I blew up a few of the exact voltage I need while debugging a project.
Unfortunately, mail order now seems to be the only way to buy a zener diode, despite the fact that I live in a reasonably large city. And with shipping and handling a 10 cent diode will cost you $10. So now I'm considering what other electronic components I might need, so that I can work up a decent sized order for some place like digikey.
I also have two MCE computers. They require constant attention to keep working. And they often just don't. One day I realized that it was supposed to have switched channels and started recording a show, but hadn't. I switched to the channel and there was the show. I hit the guide button and there was a red dot on it. But it wasn't recording and there was no red dot in the systray. The history page said "This episode will record." I don't know how it though it was doing that when it wasn't even on the right channel and wasn't recording. That's just one example of an endless parade of malfunctions.
Now MCE does have it's advantages too. But the only one that matters to me is this: I can hook up a second monitor and watch TV on it at my desk in my home office (as long as I don't want to play a full screen game on the primary).
"I am an IP lawyer, so I may be slightly biased, but if people want something that someone else went to the trouble of creating, doesn't it seem kinda fair if the creator asks to get paid?"
Besides the fact that it isn't the creators that are getting paid (musicians) it is the middlemen, here's my thought on this.
Since you're an IP laywer I'll make an analogy. Say you want to license rights to a patent. You go to the patent holder and offer $1 million. They say OK, you can license that patent, but you also have to pay $1 million each to license these other 15 patents that you have no use for and don't even want. You likely wouldn't find that an acceptable deal.
That's how I feel when I hear a song I like and find that the only way to get it is to pay $18 for a CD with about 15 other songs that I don't even want.
So for most people this results in one of the following: 1. Pirate the one song they want from P2P. 2. Say "screw it" and do without it. 3. Pay to download the one song they want from a legal download service.
Since I am sick and tired of hearing the RIAA complain that illegal downloading is the root of all their woes I won't do #1. And since the music download services I've looked into have unacceptably restrictive DRM, I also skip option #3, which results in #2 being the only remaining choice.
I recently did a project using 802.15.4 (the MAC layer under Zigbee - I didn't implement the full ZigBee protocol).
Anyway, 200 meters might be pushing it. From my experience, this distance is easily achievable outside, but if you have to go from inside a building like a well house into your house, the walls will probably prevent 200 meters.
You shouldn't need a big car battery. One of the main points of 802.15.4 and ZigBee is low power consumption. You put the microcontroller and sensor circuitry into sleep mode except when taking and transmitting a reading. For something like a well monitor, it would probably be fine to get a reading only once every 5 minutes. It should be no problem to make the microcontroller wake up, take a reading, transmit it, and go back to sleep in a tenth of a second. This way your microcontroller is on only 1/3000 of the time. A simple 9 volt battery could last for years.
Not to downplay the importance of the safety of the astronauts currently in space, but here's something else...
This probably means an end to the Hubble telescope. NASA had said that a mission to do maintenance to the Hubble wasn't worth the risk, and their wouldn't be such a mission, since going to the Hubble would leave the shuttle unable to get to the ISS if necessary. Then it started sounding like maybe they were reconsidering a trip to the Hubble. But now it obviously won't happen.
So what frequencies do HD stations broadcast on? I keep hearing the purpose of killing the analog broadcasts is to reclaim the spectrum space for other uses (like lining the FCC's pockets with cash) but what little info I can find on the frequencies used for HD stations say that they are broadcasting on frequencies still in the same TV VHF/UHF range. So how does that reclaim spectrum space?
Sure, $15 for 15 songs is $1 per song, but I don't want to pay $1 per song for 14 songs I don't even want.
My problem with music download services is the flat monthly fee. With the current sorry state of the music industry there may be 2 songs a month that I would actually want to download. If I have to pay a $10 monthly fee and $1 for each song, I really pay $6 per song.
Slashdot Mirror
There's no way Google has 2721 megabytes reserved for each Gmail account. They are relying on people like me that have only 2 emails there right now, consisting of only a few hundred bytes.
I just realized that many of the jokes we apply to lawyers could also be used on spammers with good effect:
So what do you have when you push 50% of all the spammers in the world into a hole and bury them? A good start.
Did you know that if you took all the spammers in the world and lined them up end to end around the equator of the earth that two thirds of them would drown?
I would like a gadget like this that plugs between my motherboard and hard drive and encrypts all the data going to the HD in real time, transparent to the OS.
"I wonder how much of that was just pure luck (and the fact that it happened during a stretch where the trail was much wider than in many other spots)."
Yeah, it would have been interesting to see what would happen if Stanley had caught up to Highlander at a spot where there wasn't room to pass. Would it believe that Highlander was a stationary object and stop moving, thinking there was no way to proceed, or would it just have followed behind Highlander?
I understand that it is not within the spirit of this competition, but I also have to wonder if it would have been possible to program in a little "offensive" driving where Highlander could have somehow prevented Stanley from ever passing.
"But mostly these robots depend on the assumption that everything remains still."
But "Stanley" did pass whoever had been in first place while that vehicle was moving.
Let's see, I could choose Blu-Ray as my next technology to adopt, but since it was created by Sony, the people who brought us rootkit enabled audio CDs that opened huge security holes on users PCs, that is completely out of the question.
Or I could choose HD-DVD. And thereby render every television and computer monitor I have useless for seeing the HD content because none of them support HDCP. Also out of the question.
Oh, and don't forget, if the DRM gods decide that your new Blu-ray or HD-DVD player broke the rules by doing something like not hiding a region code setup menu good enough, they can revoke the keys for that player and turn it into a boat anchor.
No thanks, I'll stick with DVDs.
It's not just you. It is insane (for the average user at least).
You know what I would like? A million dollars.
Seriously, what I would like is a video card that doesn't make my computer sound like a vacuum cleaner. I've put sound deadening material in my system and installed fan speed controls on all the fans and turned them way down. But none of that mattered because the video card sits there spinning it's fan at like 4000 rpm.
I'm a bit behind the technology curve. My video card is a Radeon 9800. But it works fine for what I do with my computer (not much gaming). Modern cards can do far more than the 9800, so it only logically follows that with this new tech you could make a card that was underclocked and maybe some pipelines turned off, to get it down to the point that a passive heatsink (and not some huge zalman type thing) is sufficient for cooling, and still have better performance than the 9800 that works fine in my system. I'd seriously consider such a video card.
"I'm sorry, is this some kind of new feature I was unaware of?"
Am I missing something? Double the read speed of a normal HD sounds like a good feature to me. Systems boot faster, apps load faster, etc...
"Nobody names their kid 'Elonka'"
It's amazing how often parents make really poor choices when naming their children. For example, Yahoo's people search comes up with 82 occurances of people named Richard Head.
Another thing to keep in mind when ordering from DigiKey is that they charge a $5 handling charge if your order is under $25 (I think). So if your order is between $20 and $25, you might as well find $5 of other stuff to buy, because you're paying for it anyway.
Also, it helps to look at price breaks. I was looking at some IRL530 MOSFETs (DK P/N IRL530N-ND). In quantities between 10 and 100 they are $0.99 each. Quantities over 100 are $0.75 each. So it makes no sense to order a quantity between 76 and 100. It will actually cost more than just buying 100.
"Nostalgia is lovely honey, but when was the last time you bought a Zener diode?"
Actually it's been about a year. But I was thinking of buying some more, since I blew up a few of the exact voltage I need while debugging a project.
Unfortunately, mail order now seems to be the only way to buy a zener diode, despite the fact that I live in a reasonably large city. And with shipping and handling a 10 cent diode will cost you $10. So now I'm considering what other electronic components I might need, so that I can work up a decent sized order for some place like digikey.
"Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?"
Yes, there are. And a good portion of them appear to work for the MPAA and RIAA.
Why do I use TiVo?
1. I got mine for $134.
2. It just works.
I also have two MCE computers. They require constant attention to keep working. And they often just don't. One day I realized that it was supposed to have switched channels and started recording a show, but hadn't. I switched to the channel and there was the show. I hit the guide button and there was a red dot on it. But it wasn't recording and there was no red dot in the systray. The history page said "This episode will record." I don't know how it though it was doing that when it wasn't even on the right channel and wasn't recording. That's just one example of an endless parade of malfunctions.
Now MCE does have it's advantages too. But the only one that matters to me is this: I can hook up a second monitor and watch TV on it at my desk in my home office (as long as I don't want to play a full screen game on the primary).
"I am an IP lawyer, so I may be slightly biased, but if people want something that someone else went to the trouble of creating, doesn't it seem kinda fair if the creator asks to get paid?"
Besides the fact that it isn't the creators that are getting paid (musicians) it is the middlemen, here's my thought on this.
Since you're an IP laywer I'll make an analogy. Say you want to license rights to a patent. You go to the patent holder and offer $1 million. They say OK, you can license that patent, but you also have to pay $1 million each to license these other 15 patents that you have no use for and don't even want. You likely wouldn't find that an acceptable deal.
That's how I feel when I hear a song I like and find that the only way to get it is to pay $18 for a CD with about 15 other songs that I don't even want.
So for most people this results in one of the following:
1. Pirate the one song they want from P2P.
2. Say "screw it" and do without it.
3. Pay to download the one song they want from a legal download service.
Since I am sick and tired of hearing the RIAA complain that illegal downloading is the root of all their woes I won't do #1. And since the music download services I've looked into have unacceptably restrictive DRM, I also skip option #3, which results in #2 being the only remaining choice.
I recently did a project using 802.15.4 (the MAC layer under Zigbee - I didn't implement the full ZigBee protocol).
Anyway, 200 meters might be pushing it. From my experience, this distance is easily achievable outside, but if you have to go from inside a building like a well house into your house, the walls will probably prevent 200 meters.
You shouldn't need a big car battery. One of the main points of 802.15.4 and ZigBee is low power consumption. You put the microcontroller and sensor circuitry into sleep mode except when taking and transmitting a reading. For something like a well monitor, it would probably be fine to get a reading only once every 5 minutes. It should be no problem to make the microcontroller wake up, take a reading, transmit it, and go back to sleep in a tenth of a second. This way your microcontroller is on only 1/3000 of the time. A simple 9 volt battery could last for years.
All Your Hans Island Are Belong To Us!
Not to downplay the importance of the safety of the astronauts currently in space, but here's something else...
This probably means an end to the Hubble telescope. NASA had said that a mission to do maintenance to the Hubble wasn't worth the risk, and their wouldn't be such a mission, since going to the Hubble would leave the shuttle unable to get to the ISS if necessary. Then it started sounding like maybe they were reconsidering a trip to the Hubble. But now it obviously won't happen.
I was just looking at the pictures on the NASA site and I saw see a piece of debr... Never mind, it was just a bug crawling across my monitor.
Obviously, the MSN earth server didn't like the concept of drawing an infinite loop.
Yeah, but did it run Windows?
On one hand, we have to give up our biometrics.
Why?
Last time I was at Disneyworld they didn't scan my fingerprints. Why do they need to do so now?
So what frequencies do HD stations broadcast on? I keep hearing the purpose of killing the analog broadcasts is to reclaim the spectrum space for other uses (like lining the FCC's pockets with cash) but what little info I can find on the frequencies used for HD stations say that they are broadcasting on frequencies still in the same TV VHF/UHF range. So how does that reclaim spectrum space?
So how do you write that sound that Homer Simpson makes when he sees a box of donuts? That's the sound I'm making right now...
Kittens give Morbo gas.
Sure, $15 for 15 songs is $1 per song, but I don't want to pay $1 per song for 14 songs I don't even want.
My problem with music download services is the flat monthly fee. With the current sorry state of the music industry there may be 2 songs a month that I would actually want to download. If I have to pay a $10 monthly fee and $1 for each song, I really pay $6 per song.