The RIAA represents the recording industry collective. The recording industry has one goal, to make money. Now all of that money is important to the economy, they employ people, pay taxes, pay for goods and services etc.
Now you have a bunch of people wittingly or unwittingly downloading their products for free robbing them of sales and threatening their income. That income is quite substantial and politicians whether they be Dems, Reps or whatever see that as a threat to the US economy. Remember the federal government is concerned with the country as a whole. They don't care if the RIAA is suing little girls and grandmothers, that money is peanuts and not even a blip on the economic radar. Yet if the recording industry were to go down, the economic impact would be substantial.
So now your in charge of your country, what matters to you more: little girls and grandmothers being sued for thousands or corporations standing to loose hundreds of millions to billions? So when you have a position open to help fight those losses and someone comes along with the right credentials, who do you hire? Howell may be a cold uncaring vampire succubus but who better to defend the economic interests of the USAA? She is actually perfect for the job.
In a political sense, Obama made the right choice whether we like it or not. And if it were anyone else, lets say McCain, he would have done the same thing. Its about protecting the wealth and power of the USA. We, the plebs, are just a bunch of little piss ant drones who fuel it. And if a few of us are squashed, who will notice?
And on a side note: the RIAA suits are a scare tactic to keep people from downloading music, not a revenue stream. Do you really think the RIAA thinks it can fund itself by settling with people out of court for a few thousand bucks? Instead they will settle for whatever is in that persons piggy bank and move on. The idea is if the word gets out that your "$200 life savings that has to go toward this months rent or your going to be tossed out into the street" can be taken away by the RIAA for downloading Lady Gaga, people might think twice. Its called bullying.
Note: I don't condone the RIAA harassment and suing perpetuated by their army of undead vampire shark lawyers. But lets be logical here. Music is part of our culture but it sold its soul to the corporate mindset long ago. Either learn to like it or stop listening to it. That or buy/download indy music that isn't part of the RIAA umbrella. And to those of you who like to ride the "but the artists only see pennies for each album sold" train, who gives a fuck about them? Honestly? Many of them are talentless soulless lime light whores who want attention and money. Yes there are many great RIAA musicians/bands out there but they signed the contracts. In the end its up to you to vote with your dollar, period.
Not trying to start an argument here but what exactly are we going to fail at?
Nuclear is transitional but to say we shouldn't be using it in 40 years to charge a device that consumes power measured in mW is foolish at best. You have a very overly simplistic view of the power grid, its complexity and its vast range of different loads. and who knows what the future holds for us.
In 40 years what will our oil/gas situation be? Will we have to start burning coal again? Who is going to buy all of the solar panels for your home? How many fields have to be peppered with hulking wind turbines? How many batteries full of toxic metals have to be produced/disposed of to store all of that intermittent energy?
iPhones are relativly easy to solar charge, they are the least of our worries. Solar works great for the smallish loads found in homes such as: lighting, TV's, home entertainment systems, microwaves, refrigerators PC's etc. But there are some larger loads that can consume a few kilowatts: electric heat, electric cloths dryer, electric hot water heater, electric range / oven. Those would surely drain the batteries on a solar system. What about industrial plants that have motors rated in megawatts? Or factories with hundreds or thousands of kW in machinery? How many solar panels will they need?
Lets quickly list some things that require lots and lots of electric energy: - Large synchronous motors - passenger trains / trolly's - Steel / Aluminum foundries - combined machinery load in Factories - Particle accelerators
Wind, solar and geothermal are limited. Steam plants fired by some constant source of heat energy (combustion or nuclear) are the only stable source of energy to power large industrial scale plants and infrastructure that are vital to the economy. They can be supplemented with renewable energy but not completely replaced in any economical or practical scale.
One idea could be to locate those little portable nuclear reactors near large industrial/municipal loads. So you keep power close to the load. But of course in the time we live in they would have to be fenced off and have guards posted for security reasons. Anti nuclear groups would spread fear and panic about them so its a real battle.
There is no simple answer for our electric energy requirements.
Few years back ConEdison in NYC started a program where they would replace the lighting in your commercial building with more energy efficient lighting for free. Why? Because after the 2006 Queens blackout they figured it would be cheaper to cut the grid load by upgrading inefficient lighting rather than grid infrastructure. They changed incandescents to CFL's, put LED's in the Exit signs and then replaced the T12 ballasts and bulbs in fluorescent with efficient T8 bulbs/ballasts. So my mother who is the owner took the bait and had the place upgraded. Well the CFL's all burnt out within 2 months. The first one to blow went within the first week and almost caught fire. I flicked the switch, the light came on and heard an arcing sound. I looked up to see the plastic base glowing and smoking! What if that had happened when no one was looking? To this day half the T8 ballasts have burnt out and I still use CFL's in certain fixtures.
And today I was over at our building and I again had a cheap Home Depot CFL flicker with an arcing sound. That bulb is not used very often so it might be upward of 2 years old so maybe its age. But I bet you any money an incandescent will still turn on after sitting for over a decade. These CFL's are all made in China by the lowest bidder. I hope LED lighting will soon replace those crappy bulbs. Warn up time, poor performance in the cold, possible fire and environmental hazard are all reasons these things should go away. And there are candelabra CFL's, but they are ugly bulky pieces of crap that no one would ever put in a chandelier.
And getting back to the fluorescent lighting, anyone notice how Home Depot does not carry T12 fixtures anymore? I went the other week trying to buy an 8 foot twin lamp for a work bench and all they had were T8 and T5 fixtures with 2, 4 and even 6 bulbs. The only 8 foot they had was a quad T5 fixture with two sets of 4 foot bulbs end to end. Maybe its just the one near me but I found it odd.
I think he never looked at the mbed NXP. Compared to the Arduino, the mbed blows it out of the water. The programming language is C++ and there are tons of great libraries out there. Want to turn some pins into a bus and interface with with old logic components? No problem just include the header file and a line of code that sets up the pins of your choice into a bus that you can now easy read and write to. If your LCD is supported, just wire it in and a simple printf for the lcd library prints to the screen. Oh and it has support for SD cards and reading/writing to them with simple easy to use libraries. Just setup an SPI port for an SD file system, wire it strait to the SD card slot and make some simple calls to a function to read/write data from the card. PWM drive a servo motor, there's a library for that. To many to list but there are easy to use libraries for many chips and devices out there.
For $59 you get the following I/O: Digital I/O (up to 26) SPI Serial (up to 3) I2C (up to 2 ports) Analog In (up to 6) Analog out Ethernet (no matching transformer needed, you can stick the stripped ends of a CAT 5 cable right into a prototype board.) USB host CAN port PWM (up to 6) 4 on board LEDs that are digital or PWM
The compiler works in your web browser so its truly platform agnostic. Its also cloud based, you can open a browser anywhere in the world, code, and have all of your notes and projects/code at your fingertips. Bring it to a friends house or professor, plug it into a PC, goto the mbed website and demo some code. Its that easy. You can also download and upload your code or libraries. Once your code is written, you compile and if successful a download dialog pops up and you download the code strait to the mbed, press the reset button and your code is now running. The mbed itself has a mini USB connector on it (separate from the USB host port) and it mounts up as a flash drive (2MB and you can read write to it from within your code!). You can swap binary files via drag n drop or from a command line. The USB port also doubles as a COM port (usb com port, no drivers necessary) to directly enable communication with the PC. The USB port can power the board as well as a few low current ancillary components. There are NO DRIVERS to install and no software to download/install. Everything is based on standards built into just about every modern OS. So it should work on Solaris and BSD as well.
The only drawback its compiler is online based but you could use the NXP tools if you wanted to work off line. Also you can't use every I/O at the same time as most pins are shard save for the Ethernet port and the USB host port. But that is not a big deal you have enough as it is.
I don't work for mbed but I have one in front of me and I play with it just about every weekend. Its so damn easy to use. I bought it about two years ago, a few days after it was released and before all the Arduino hype. I looked at Arduino and it looks like a really cheap alternative to the mbed but not as flexible or easy to use.
I had to plug the mbed because its developers really want to make a powerful and flexible MC dev platform that anyone can dive right into. You really see the effort they poured into it in order to establish a community effort to improve and share. And they did a fantastic job, no question about that. But it feels like the mbed as well as others, are getting drowned out by all the Arduino noise. Yea the Arduino is a nice little platform but its not the best nor the easiest MC platform out there. The only real strong point it has is its price.
Then you have this dopey ass hole write a bunch of fluff abut an imaginary battle, and then declares a winner when he makes no comparisons to any other platform. His article clearly shows he has picked a side and is willing to declare it superior to everything else without comparison. Best part is the bullet points he makes toward the bottom of the page apply to the mbed and many apply to other micro controller development kits as well.
Hey Phillip, pull your head out of your ass. Moron.
"You can't make one yourself, as they use a special laser diode."
Actually a green laser starts out as a red laser. First the red laser is used to pump a YAG crystal that creates an infrared beam. That infrared beam is then sent through a LBO (Lithium triborate) crystal which doubles the frequency to green light. Look up NdYAG on Wikipedia for more information.
So its not impossible at all, it just takes a little know how and skill to do so. Also high power laser diodes are readily available from hobbyist sites as well as eBay. Even small NdYAG lasers with pulsed/continious power ratings over 1 watt are available on those sites as well.
Its good to see a fun tech article like this on/. I haven't seen any in a while (maybe its just me).
I assume that during boot time, the Qt UI and low level hardware modules are loaded immediately. Then other modules and services can be loaded later on such as networking, video capture drivers and other lower priority services. I also assume the UI is not based on X but a Qt implementation that is directly drawing to the frame buffer.
Lately I have been on a bit of an embedded systems kick playing around with PLC's and embedded micro controllers. This is a great article.
My story might not be as elaborate as some others here, but it was quite a satisfying feeling of accomplishment at the time.
At work we have two old laptops running DOS 6.22. Both laptops are 486's with sub 100MB full height 2.5" hard disks. The only ports available were parallel and serial along with the old 16 bit PCMCIA card slot and a floppy drive. One laptop was hooked to an Allen Bradley 8400MP CNC controller on a Raytheon Nd:YAG production laser welding machine. The laptop was used to transfer CNC programs to and from the AB 8400 as it has very limited storage. Our laser welding engineer is an eccentric and impatient man. He frequently slammed the laptop when he became frustrated. Well one day that wound up breaking the floppy drive which was the only method of making backups. That day he needed to transfer a program that was stuck on the laptop and he was furious. Well I had the idea to yank the drive and use one of those ATA-USB drive adapters. For some reason the USB adapter did not work with that disk (no surprise seeing how old it was). So I had to take the second laptop apart and swap in the drive. Then I had to setup the cylinders, heads and sectors per track in the BIOS as the two disks were different (remember that?). I went online and searched for a DOS based serial file transfer program and found a nice free one (forget the name) an threw it on a floppy. I installed DOSBox on my XP based workstation, hooked a null modem cable from the laptop to the workstation and mapped a serial port in DOSBox. Using pkzip I zipped up all the data and transferred it to the PC running DOSBox which in turn was running the serial transfer software in listen mode.
So in essence I used one old laptop to fix another, old DOS file transfer software randomly found on the net and the open source DOSBox to bridge the DOS software to the XP machine. It took me little over an hour to do all that and saved the day for our crazy engineer. The second laptop was also backed up as it runs the DOS programming software for an old PLC we have to make adjustments to from time to time.
I have since retired the two laptops and now a more modern Dell running XP has DOSBox installed with all of the necessary software for the shop. A USB serial adapter takes care of the rest.
Finally! I love the idea and I thought this should be done for all lanes since I first stood in line for a self checkout machine. Sure the queue looks long but the checkout speed is optimized. Supermarkets, certain retailers and home improvement centers frequently feature self checkout lanes that are fed by a single line. Even if a person has a hard time using the machine, you are pretty much guaranteed the others are speedily checking out and will be done in minutes.
I have always thought it stupid that many retail chains have a dozen or more checkout lanes with a large front aisle clogged with carts and people. There should be one large queue from one end of the building to the other and the checkout lanes should be arranged in a circular or star like shape so the center is where the queue terminates. The queue can be fed from the main aisle and feature benches on one side and racks of last minute crap like magazines, candy and the like. This eliminates the god awful clogged front aisle. It also guarantees you wont get stuck on line behind someone with 100 items and a slow cashier.
FTFA: "Little is known about Jakubec, a 54-year-old unemployed software consultant. His estranged wife has told the San Diego Union-Tribune that he became increasingly unstable since losing his job several years ago. "
"unemployed software consultant" is the key phrase here.
"What happens when she runs for president and her opposition preys on some stupid social gaffe of hers? If it's any less than what she's already done, it's merely going to be ignored by or reinforce her supporter's commitment."
Maybe that is the point of it all. Throw all of the crazy stuff out in the open, watch the reaction. Then come campaign time, your opponents cant call you out on anything because its all said and forgotten about.
I bet a 25mm can do serious damage, the M67 fragmentation grenade and M406 40mm HE round both have a casualty radius of 15 meters and a kill radius of 5 meters. If you are firing into a window trying to get someone who is shooting out of it, chances are you only need a casualty radius of a few meters. 25mm isn't that far off from 40.
On the same note I was having a few beers the other night with a friend who served in Iraq during the initial push (Army Infantry). He told me a story where his convoy was ambushed and he saw two foes run for cover next to a house in an alcove. They were shooting through smoke (From an IED blast)and the other solders could not tell where the fire was coming from. He quickly engaged them and then got into a fire fight. he ran from one parked car to another, exchanging fire, letting off bursts for suppressive fire until he was very close. As he approached, the frequency of enemy shots became less and less. Then he heard one last shot, the sound of a magazine hitting the ground and panicked chatter. He realized they were out of ammo and knew he had them. He still had no clear sight of them but knew their position so what does he do? Squeeze off two HE rounds in quick succession from his M203. Killed the both of them. He was so close he felt the shock wave and was a bit stunned from the blasts. I asked him why not just fire the 203 from far away when you first saw them? Answer: I had no way to get a clean hit with a grenade. Either I could hit the side of the house which most likely would not have killed them giving them a chance to change position. That or the grenade would just whiz pas them. So he had to get into a position where he had the ability to smack the grenade against a hard surface to detonate it as HE rounds are impact detonation only. He risked his life to get those two men but a fancy gun the the XM25 could have let him gauge the distance to the nearest corner of the house and dial another meter or two for an air burst. That would have been it.
Good riddance. Limewire has been a cesspool for years. Nothing but bogus files, many of which are infested with malware. I just cleaned out an acquaintances computer that was rooted due to downloading phony music videos that were supposed to be WMV files. I told him I had to uninstall Limewire to prevent future infections (he is not a savvy computer user at all).
"The cause of the failure remains unknown, although it is suspected to be a breach of underground cables deep beneath the base, according to a senior military official."
Mole People working for Al Qaeda! How else can this act of sabotage be explained?
I doubt most of the copper POTS wiring out there is cat 3. The phone wire used in most homes is the old 4 conductor cable that did not have twisted pairs. Nowadays I believe most of the four conductor phone cable is indeed twisted and meets CAT 3 standards. I bought some at home depot not too long ago and it was 4 conductor CAT 3 twisted pair with RED/GREEN and BLACK/YELLOW pairs. The non twisted pair might still be sold so no guarantee there.
And that is just the home wiring. Who knows what crusty old non twisted pair cable lurks between homes and the central office.
And getting back to the grand parent poster: 1000BT is an IEEE 802.3-2008 standard. It not only defines the data layer (how the bits are transmitted) but also the physical link which defines the electrical interface. DSL is different than the 802.3 standard both at the data link layer and the physical layer. So its an apples to oranges comparison. Gigabit is Ethernet and DSL and other broadband technologies are completely different.
Maybe you loose track of time and forget to put some extra quarters in the meter. Maybe you don't have change but go to a store and get some for the meter (during that time you are illegally parked). Maybe you cant find a parking spot for what fells like miles and you get tired of circling the area 10 times to find one.
Its illegal to park next to a fire hydrant or in bus stop even if you do so temporarily and you do not exit the car. But living in a big city has shown that this is in many cases the only alternative. Near my bank there is little metered parking and the surrounding neighborhood is already clogged. The bus stop in front of the bank is the best shot you have. You have to pray there int a meter maid near by. But they know the horrible parking situation on that street and circle like vultures.
People forget the awful parking situations cities sometimes present people. Breaking the parking laws is a sometimes daily occurrence one has to risk just to go about their lives. Sorry if you cant understand that.
There is no saying that the virus was stuffed with fake clues pointing to Israel. Who knows where it came from but this is either a read herring (most likely) or someone trying to start a war. Its a very interesting subject you could turn it into a book or movie plot.
That means nothing. SCADA software mostly runs on Windows nowadays. The PLC's/PAC's/RTU's might be made in Germany by Semins but the software that ties them together is most likely Windows.
Slashdot Mirror
Lets look at it from Obamas perspective:
The RIAA represents the recording industry collective. The recording industry has one goal, to make money. Now all of that money is important to the economy, they employ people, pay taxes, pay for goods and services etc.
Now you have a bunch of people wittingly or unwittingly downloading their products for free robbing them of sales and threatening their income. That income is quite substantial and politicians whether they be Dems, Reps or whatever see that as a threat to the US economy. Remember the federal government is concerned with the country as a whole. They don't care if the RIAA is suing little girls and grandmothers, that money is peanuts and not even a blip on the economic radar. Yet if the recording industry were to go down, the economic impact would be substantial.
So now your in charge of your country, what matters to you more: little girls and grandmothers being sued for thousands or corporations standing to loose hundreds of millions to billions? So when you have a position open to help fight those losses and someone comes along with the right credentials, who do you hire? Howell may be a cold uncaring vampire succubus but who better to defend the economic interests of the USAA? She is actually perfect for the job.
In a political sense, Obama made the right choice whether we like it or not. And if it were anyone else, lets say McCain, he would have done the same thing. Its about protecting the wealth and power of the USA. We, the plebs, are just a bunch of little piss ant drones who fuel it. And if a few of us are squashed, who will notice?
And on a side note: the RIAA suits are a scare tactic to keep people from downloading music, not a revenue stream. Do you really think the RIAA thinks it can fund itself by settling with people out of court for a few thousand bucks? Instead they will settle for whatever is in that persons piggy bank and move on. The idea is if the word gets out that your "$200 life savings that has to go toward this months rent or your going to be tossed out into the street" can be taken away by the RIAA for downloading Lady Gaga, people might think twice. Its called bullying.
Note: I don't condone the RIAA harassment and suing perpetuated by their army of undead vampire shark lawyers. But lets be logical here. Music is part of our culture but it sold its soul to the corporate mindset long ago. Either learn to like it or stop listening to it. That or buy/download indy music that isn't part of the RIAA umbrella. And to those of you who like to ride the "but the artists only see pennies for each album sold" train, who gives a fuck about them? Honestly? Many of them are talentless soulless lime light whores who want attention and money. Yes there are many great RIAA musicians/bands out there but they signed the contracts. In the end its up to you to vote with your dollar, period.
Overrated is a better way to describe xkcd.
as well as Richard Stallman and the first copy of Unix.
Not trying to start an argument here but what exactly are we going to fail at?
Nuclear is transitional but to say we shouldn't be using it in 40 years to charge a device that consumes power measured in mW is foolish at best. You have a very overly simplistic view of the power grid, its complexity and its vast range of different loads. and who knows what the future holds for us.
In 40 years what will our oil/gas situation be? Will we have to start burning coal again? Who is going to buy all of the solar panels for your home? How many fields have to be peppered with hulking wind turbines? How many batteries full of toxic metals have to be produced /disposed of to store all of that intermittent energy?
iPhones are relativly easy to solar charge, they are the least of our worries. Solar works great for the smallish loads found in homes such as: lighting, TV's, home entertainment systems, microwaves, refrigerators PC's etc. But there are some larger loads that can consume a few kilowatts: electric heat, electric cloths dryer, electric hot water heater, electric range / oven. Those would surely drain the batteries on a solar system. What about industrial plants that have motors rated in megawatts? Or factories with hundreds or thousands of kW in machinery? How many solar panels will they need?
Lets quickly list some things that require lots and lots of electric energy:
- Large synchronous motors
- passenger trains / trolly's
- Steel / Aluminum foundries
- combined machinery load in Factories
- Particle accelerators
Wind, solar and geothermal are limited. Steam plants fired by some constant source of heat energy (combustion or nuclear) are the only stable source of energy to power large industrial scale plants and infrastructure that are vital to the economy. They can be supplemented with renewable energy but not completely replaced in any economical or practical scale.
One idea could be to locate those little portable nuclear reactors near large industrial/municipal loads. So you keep power close to the load. But of course in the time we live in they would have to be fenced off and have guards posted for security reasons. Anti nuclear groups would spread fear and panic about them so its a real battle.
There is no simple answer for our electric energy requirements.
Originally someone said five.
Few years back ConEdison in NYC started a program where they would replace the lighting in your commercial building with more energy efficient lighting for free. Why? Because after the 2006 Queens blackout they figured it would be cheaper to cut the grid load by upgrading inefficient lighting rather than grid infrastructure. They changed incandescents to CFL's, put LED's in the Exit signs and then replaced the T12 ballasts and bulbs in fluorescent with efficient T8 bulbs/ballasts. So my mother who is the owner took the bait and had the place upgraded. Well the CFL's all burnt out within 2 months. The first one to blow went within the first week and almost caught fire. I flicked the switch, the light came on and heard an arcing sound. I looked up to see the plastic base glowing and smoking! What if that had happened when no one was looking? To this day half the T8 ballasts have burnt out and I still use CFL's in certain fixtures.
And today I was over at our building and I again had a cheap Home Depot CFL flicker with an arcing sound. That bulb is not used very often so it might be upward of 2 years old so maybe its age. But I bet you any money an incandescent will still turn on after sitting for over a decade. These CFL's are all made in China by the lowest bidder. I hope LED lighting will soon replace those crappy bulbs. Warn up time, poor performance in the cold, possible fire and environmental hazard are all reasons these things should go away. And there are candelabra CFL's, but they are ugly bulky pieces of crap that no one would ever put in a chandelier.
And getting back to the fluorescent lighting, anyone notice how Home Depot does not carry T12 fixtures anymore? I went the other week trying to buy an 8 foot twin lamp for a work bench and all they had were T8 and T5 fixtures with 2, 4 and even 6 bulbs. The only 8 foot they had was a quad T5 fixture with two sets of 4 foot bulbs end to end. Maybe its just the one near me but I found it odd.
I think he never looked at the mbed NXP. Compared to the Arduino, the mbed blows it out of the water. The programming language is C++ and there are tons of great libraries out there. Want to turn some pins into a bus and interface with with old logic components? No problem just include the header file and a line of code that sets up the pins of your choice into a bus that you can now easy read and write to. If your LCD is supported, just wire it in and a simple printf for the lcd library prints to the screen. Oh and it has support for SD cards and reading/writing to them with simple easy to use libraries. Just setup an SPI port for an SD file system, wire it strait to the SD card slot and make some simple calls to a function to read/write data from the card. PWM drive a servo motor, there's a library for that. To many to list but there are easy to use libraries for many chips and devices out there.
For $59 you get the following I/O:
Digital I/O (up to 26)
SPI
Serial (up to 3)
I2C (up to 2 ports)
Analog In (up to 6)
Analog out
Ethernet (no matching transformer needed, you can stick the stripped ends of a CAT 5 cable right into a prototype board.)
USB host
CAN port
PWM (up to 6)
4 on board LEDs that are digital or PWM
The compiler works in your web browser so its truly platform agnostic. Its also cloud based, you can open a browser anywhere in the world, code, and have all of your notes and projects/code at your fingertips. Bring it to a friends house or professor, plug it into a PC, goto the mbed website and demo some code. Its that easy. You can also download and upload your code or libraries. Once your code is written, you compile and if successful a download dialog pops up and you download the code strait to the mbed, press the reset button and your code is now running. The mbed itself has a mini USB connector on it (separate from the USB host port) and it mounts up as a flash drive (2MB and you can read write to it from within your code!). You can swap binary files via drag n drop or from a command line. The USB port also doubles as a COM port (usb com port, no drivers necessary) to directly enable communication with the PC. The USB port can power the board as well as a few low current ancillary components. There are NO DRIVERS to install and no software to download/install. Everything is based on standards built into just about every modern OS. So it should work on Solaris and BSD as well.
The only drawback its compiler is online based but you could use the NXP tools if you wanted to work off line. Also you can't use every I/O at the same time as most pins are shard save for the Ethernet port and the USB host port. But that is not a big deal you have enough as it is.
I don't work for mbed but I have one in front of me and I play with it just about every weekend. Its so damn easy to use. I bought it about two years ago, a few days after it was released and before all the Arduino hype. I looked at Arduino and it looks like a really cheap alternative to the mbed but not as flexible or easy to use.
I had to plug the mbed because its developers really want to make a powerful and flexible MC dev platform that anyone can dive right into. You really see the effort they poured into it in order to establish a community effort to improve and share. And they did a fantastic job, no question about that. But it feels like the mbed as well as others, are getting drowned out by all the Arduino noise. Yea the Arduino is a nice little platform but its not the best nor the easiest MC platform out there. The only real strong point it has is its price.
Then you have this dopey ass hole write a bunch of fluff abut an imaginary battle, and then declares a winner when he makes no comparisons to any other platform. His article clearly shows he has picked a side and is willing to declare it superior to everything else without comparison. Best part is the bullet points he makes toward the bottom of the page apply to the mbed and many apply to other micro controller development kits as well.
Hey Phillip, pull your head out of your ass. Moron.
"You can't make one yourself, as they use a special laser diode."
Actually a green laser starts out as a red laser. First the red laser is used to pump a YAG crystal that creates an infrared beam. That infrared beam is then sent through a LBO (Lithium triborate) crystal which doubles the frequency to green light. Look up NdYAG on Wikipedia for more information.
So its not impossible at all, it just takes a little know how and skill to do so. Also high power laser diodes are readily available from hobbyist sites as well as eBay. Even small NdYAG lasers with pulsed/continious power ratings over 1 watt are available on those sites as well.
Its good to see a fun tech article like this on /. I haven't seen any in a while (maybe its just me).
I assume that during boot time, the Qt UI and low level hardware modules are loaded immediately. Then other modules and services can be loaded later on such as networking, video capture drivers and other lower priority services. I also assume the UI is not based on X but a Qt implementation that is directly drawing to the frame buffer.
Lately I have been on a bit of an embedded systems kick playing around with PLC's and embedded micro controllers. This is a great article.
Rumor has it the canopy from the Chinese fighter will fit an F22 without modification but ranks lower in crash safety tests.
My story might not be as elaborate as some others here, but it was quite a satisfying feeling of accomplishment at the time.
At work we have two old laptops running DOS 6.22. Both laptops are 486's with sub 100MB full height 2.5" hard disks. The only ports available were parallel and serial along with the old 16 bit PCMCIA card slot and a floppy drive. One laptop was hooked to an Allen Bradley 8400MP CNC controller on a Raytheon Nd:YAG production laser welding machine. The laptop was used to transfer CNC programs to and from the AB 8400 as it has very limited storage. Our laser welding engineer is an eccentric and impatient man. He frequently slammed the laptop when he became frustrated. Well one day that wound up breaking the floppy drive which was the only method of making backups. That day he needed to transfer a program that was stuck on the laptop and he was furious. Well I had the idea to yank the drive and use one of those ATA-USB drive adapters. For some reason the USB adapter did not work with that disk (no surprise seeing how old it was). So I had to take the second laptop apart and swap in the drive. Then I had to setup the cylinders, heads and sectors per track in the BIOS as the two disks were different (remember that?). I went online and searched for a DOS based serial file transfer program and found a nice free one (forget the name) an threw it on a floppy. I installed DOSBox on my XP based workstation, hooked a null modem cable from the laptop to the workstation and mapped a serial port in DOSBox. Using pkzip I zipped up all the data and transferred it to the PC running DOSBox which in turn was running the serial transfer software in listen mode.
So in essence I used one old laptop to fix another, old DOS file transfer software randomly found on the net and the open source DOSBox to bridge the DOS software to the XP machine. It took me little over an hour to do all that and saved the day for our crazy engineer. The second laptop was also backed up as it runs the DOS programming software for an old PLC we have to make adjustments to from time to time.
I have since retired the two laptops and now a more modern Dell running XP has DOSBox installed with all of the necessary software for the shop. A USB serial adapter takes care of the rest.
Finally! I love the idea and I thought this should be done for all lanes since I first stood in line for a self checkout machine. Sure the queue looks long but the checkout speed is optimized. Supermarkets, certain retailers and home improvement centers frequently feature self checkout lanes that are fed by a single line. Even if a person has a hard time using the machine, you are pretty much guaranteed the others are speedily checking out and will be done in minutes.
I have always thought it stupid that many retail chains have a dozen or more checkout lanes with a large front aisle clogged with carts and people. There should be one large queue from one end of the building to the other and the checkout lanes should be arranged in a circular or star like shape so the center is where the queue terminates. The queue can be fed from the main aisle and feature benches on one side and racks of last minute crap like magazines, candy and the like. This eliminates the god awful clogged front aisle. It also guarantees you wont get stuck on line behind someone with 100 items and a slow cashier.
Why is this not modded funny! I almost fell out of my chair after I read that last part.
As George Carlin said once: "Where are all the bright, honest people of conscience?"
In just about every other profession/occupation except for politics and management.
FTFA:
"Little is known about Jakubec, a 54-year-old unemployed software consultant. His estranged wife has told the San Diego Union-Tribune that he became increasingly unstable since losing his job several years ago. "
"unemployed software consultant" is the key phrase here.
"What happens when she runs for president and her opposition preys on some stupid social gaffe of hers? If it's any less than what she's already done, it's merely going to be ignored by or reinforce her supporter's commitment."
Maybe that is the point of it all. Throw all of the crazy stuff out in the open, watch the reaction. Then come campaign time, your opponents cant call you out on anything because its all said and forgotten about.
I bet a 25mm can do serious damage, the M67 fragmentation grenade and M406 40mm HE round both have a casualty radius of 15 meters and a kill radius of 5 meters. If you are firing into a window trying to get someone who is shooting out of it, chances are you only need a casualty radius of a few meters. 25mm isn't that far off from 40.
On the same note I was having a few beers the other night with a friend who served in Iraq during the initial push (Army Infantry). He told me a story where his convoy was ambushed and he saw two foes run for cover next to a house in an alcove. They were shooting through smoke (From an IED blast)and the other solders could not tell where the fire was coming from. He quickly engaged them and then got into a fire fight. he ran from one parked car to another, exchanging fire, letting off bursts for suppressive fire until he was very close. As he approached, the frequency of enemy shots became less and less. Then he heard one last shot, the sound of a magazine hitting the ground and panicked chatter. He realized they were out of ammo and knew he had them. He still had no clear sight of them but knew their position so what does he do? Squeeze off two HE rounds in quick succession from his M203. Killed the both of them. He was so close he felt the shock wave and was a bit stunned from the blasts. I asked him why not just fire the 203 from far away when you first saw them? Answer: I had no way to get a clean hit with a grenade. Either I could hit the side of the house which most likely would not have killed them giving them a chance to change position. That or the grenade would just whiz pas them. So he had to get into a position where he had the ability to smack the grenade against a hard surface to detonate it as HE rounds are impact detonation only.
He risked his life to get those two men but a fancy gun the the XM25 could have let him gauge the distance to the nearest corner of the house and dial another meter or two for an air burst. That would have been it.
Good riddance. Limewire has been a cesspool for years. Nothing but bogus files, many of which are infested with malware. I just cleaned out an acquaintances computer that was rooted due to downloading phony music videos that were supposed to be WMV files. I told him I had to uninstall Limewire to prevent future infections (he is not a savvy computer user at all).
"The cause of the failure remains unknown, although it is suspected to be a breach of underground cables deep beneath the base, according to a senior military official."
Mole People working for Al Qaeda! How else can this act of sabotage be explained?
I doubt most of the copper POTS wiring out there is cat 3. The phone wire used in most homes is the old 4 conductor cable that did not have twisted pairs. Nowadays I believe most of the four conductor phone cable is indeed twisted and meets CAT 3 standards. I bought some at home depot not too long ago and it was 4 conductor CAT 3 twisted pair with RED/GREEN and BLACK/YELLOW pairs. The non twisted pair might still be sold so no guarantee there.
And that is just the home wiring. Who knows what crusty old non twisted pair cable lurks between homes and the central office.
And getting back to the grand parent poster:
1000BT is an IEEE 802.3-2008 standard. It not only defines the data layer (how the bits are transmitted) but also the physical link which defines the electrical interface.
DSL is different than the 802.3 standard both at the data link layer and the physical layer. So its an apples to oranges comparison. Gigabit is Ethernet and DSL and other broadband technologies are completely different.
I have not yet had my coffee. Clicked submit instead of preview. FML.
Maybe you loose track of time and forget to put some extra quarters in the meter. Maybe you don't have change but go to a store and get some for the meter (during that time you are illegally parked). Maybe you cant find a parking spot for what fells like miles and you get tired of circling the area 10 times to find one.
Its illegal to park next to a fire hydrant or in bus stop even if you do so temporarily and you do not exit the car. But living in a big city has shown that this is in many cases the only alternative. Near my bank there is little metered parking and the surrounding neighborhood is already clogged. The bus stop in front of the bank is the best shot you have. You have to pray there int a meter maid near by. But they know the horrible parking situation on that street and circle like vultures.
People forget the awful parking situations cities sometimes present people. Breaking the parking laws is a sometimes daily occurrence one has to risk just to go about their lives. Sorry if you cant understand that.
There is no saying that the virus was stuffed with fake clues pointing to Israel. Who knows where it came from but this is either a read herring (most likely) or someone trying to start a war. Its a very interesting subject you could turn it into a book or movie plot.
That means nothing. SCADA software mostly runs on Windows nowadays. The PLC's/PAC's/RTU's might be made in Germany by Semins but the software that ties them together is most likely Windows.
I prefer lead foil.