with a name like DaFallus I hope you don't expect me to take that serious ;)

well, you use 'ftp', the 'film transfer protocol' and then play it locally.

On behalf of the rocks please stop your insults.

It really will. Had that happen to me in Canada at a balmy -30 Celsius.

Because a 'cats whisker' or detector diode never was intended to be a led, it is simply a side effect and only then with a specific kind of crystal and circuitry. It's intended use was to rectify currents, not to produce light.

To label it 'a primitive led' is a bit over the top, if it would have said 'which can be used to create a primitive kind of led' would have been a lot more accurate.

I've played countless hours with them as a kid when building crystal radio sets, never once seen one light up.

The wording of the summary suggests with 'primitive kind of led' that that was its intended function, it was not. It was a 'primitive kind of diode', and with the right combination of crystal and current you can apparently make one light up.

hm... mod me down please !

It seems that it is possible to get a point contact diode like this to emit light sporadically.

an led produces light continuosly, a crystal detector (the proper name for this device) produces tiny sparks when you make the contact but that doesn't mean it's an led any more than your cars' sparkplug is.

please go kill yourself somewhere. Thank you.

'cats whisker' != a primitive led, it's a primitive diode, but it does not produce any light, visible or otherwise.

the reason os/x beats foss is not 'good enough' to 'great' but lots of marketing dough to 0.

After all, in the past you'd get paid top dollar for the kind of stuff that you can now download for free and businesses use that in order to gain a competitive edge

Case in point: google. They use open source software to drive their whole business, are valued in the tens of billions and give back a pittance of that to the open source community (ok, they do a good PR job so it looks like it is a lot more but it really is but a small fraction of their take).

It has come to the point where if you are 16 or 17 and wondering what career to follow computational biology looks like a *much* better path than IT, and besides it has less risk of being outsourced.

The Cathedral had its shortcomings, but so does the bazaar.

you've been doing way too much oop programming lately ;)

Yes, but that won't get you any bread on the table now, will it ?

There is absolutely no renumeration for the people that code up all that really neat stuff and the businesses that take that hard work and profit of it (and profit of it in ways that would have been considered impossible until not that long ago) are under no obligation whatsoever to share the profits.

> peek at 39.

Spelling sure doesn't peak at 39 now does it ;)

thank you for the taskfreak link!