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Comment Re:Yeah, right. (Score 1) 534

Tell a bridge engineer that he has no absolutely control over the hardware he has to work with and that it may have a billion variations, and see if he signs his name to it.

You know, that's what modern operating systems with hardware abstraction layers and APIs, and high-level development toolkits are for. I don't think I care what hardware or even OS my stinky, SQL-injection-prone PHP code is running on. Sheesh.

Comment Re:Choice to Make (Score 1) 254

Actually, EM radiation is also composed of photons, which are particles. Nuclear radiation is mostly made up of alpha particles (helium nuclei), beta particles (plain electrons) and gamma radiation (electromagnetic photons, which just happen to have a very high energy and frequency so they look more like tiny bullets than like EM waves). X rays are also electromagnetic ionizing radiation, as are UV rays (which are close to visible mind you, and also cancer-causing).

Comment Re:In a way I blame certain scientists (Score 3, Informative) 467

Electrons and quarks are NOT singularities, they're described by wave equations. They're not balls or points or anything like that either. They are "spread out" in space and time if you will. Only because they have significant momentum due to thermal motion, their spread is so small they look like points. If you cool them down to fractions of a kelvin you get Bose-Einstein condensates that actually do look like waves.

Comment Re:Analog Blog (Score 1) 117

Analog means that a voltage or current is analogous to another physical quantity, therefore the term analog computer (google it). For instance the voltage in a circuit is analogous to the pressure in your voice -- hence analog recording and processing. It can also be applied for non-electrical parameters -- the depth/width of the groove in a vinyl record for instance. You can also build pneumatic PID industrial process controllers -- they used to have those some decades ago -- those are analog machines, though not electronic. Of course you could also sigma-delta modulate the voice and record it as a stream of pulses -- it's still analog, the pulse density is the analog of the voice pressure. Once you throw in a clock and convert the pulse stream into multi-bit words and add and shift them in a FIR filter, then you're digital. Yes, you can say that analog is the oposite of digital, since there are no other means of processing and storing information that exist yet (or that I know of at least).
Technology

What is the Current State of Home Automation? 409

StonyCreekBare writes "What do people have to say about the current state of Home Automation software? Preferably Linux based, but mainly the field in general, and principally the DIY flavors as opposed to the upscale turnkey systems. I am familiar with Misterhouse, HomeSeer and Automated Living's HAL2000, all of which have serious flaws and weaknesses, but which sometimes succeed well in specific areas. But in all cases, the state of the art seems to have moved little in the last decade. Is any interesting work being done in this space? Or should I just grab one of the three and try to mold it to fit my vision of what it should be? Misterhouse at least is open source so I can add new features, but it has not had an update in a long long time and seems to be missing some modern stuff. The other two are expensive and closed source, and from all I can see, quite flawed, not the least by their dependence on intimate ties to Microsoft. Yet they seem to offer a lot more than Misterhouse despite their weaknesses. Is the Home Automation field as bleak as it appears? Or have I missed the forest for the trees?" What home automation projects have people tackled? Any examples of wild success or failure?

Comment Re:13 percent? (Score 1) 127

I'm not quite sure what value to assign to an oppressive government's software either.

Does the computer allow one to erase said software and install a clean distribution? If so, I see no fundamental problem. True, I don't expect many peasants to do that, if not because of the necessary technical skills, then because of their having better things to do such as caring for their crops. On the other hand, does its BIOS include a hidden hypervisor/backdoor? Is monitoring software included, that once erased, ceases to report the user's activities to the government, prompting repressive action? If not, again, I see no fundamental problem, but I see how this can help people manage their business better and also promote free software.

Comment Data management problem (Score 5, Insightful) 98

Science has always been about extracting knowledge from thoughtfully-generated and -processed data. Managing enormous datasets is not science per se, it's computer engineering. It's useless to say 'hey I'm processing 30 TB' if you're processing them wrong. Scientific method and principles are what count, and they don't change.

Comment Re:Sweet! (Score 0) 177

I don't know, if I buy a book I can't legally make photocopies of it and distribute them, or make derivative works or whatever; I guess its content is "licensed not sold" to me; its paper would be just like the CD that carries the licensed software. Despite this, I've yet to see any book that includes a license agreement. Why should software be different.

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