Looking at one side of a balanced transmission line is not really very useful on a scope since there is no reference that is meaningful other than the other side of the line. Of course there would be lots of noise looking at only one side, since the whole idea of a twisted pair line is to take advantage of common-mode noise rejection at the receiving end.
Thinking about things more, you'd need to do the same common mode rejection in the tap in order to not be overwhelmed by line noise, necessitating the use of two pickups per pair. Careful physical design could allow a very sensitive pickup to be designed while canceling noise common to both. However, as you pointed out, low current could make things impossible still. But... the line is driving an inductive coupling in the form of a transformer at the end in order for things to work in normal operation though, so instinctively I think that something could be made to work.
As for not being worth it, you are probably right, especially since both approaches could be detected with the proper equipment.
Shouldn't it be possible to do an inductive tap? You should be able to pick the signals up without severing any wires or actually connecting anything to the wires themselves. You would have to split the outer jacket of the cat5 cable, but once you isolate the pairs you should be able to get something going. The pairs are differential loops, so you should need only one inductive pickup per pair. Just an idea, not sure how feasible it would be, but I would have thought that this would be a standard way to do a tap. You'd need power for this though, so maybe that limits its usefulness. Could use PoE to power it though.
I wonder if (when pricing is reasonable) we will see surface used in conference tables, etc. Something clicked when I saw a demo of people exchanging things across a table by pushing documents around on the surface of the table. It's hard to tell if it's one of those technologies that looks great but even when it is ubiquitous turns out to be underused.
This article is too loose in throwing around terms. I'm pretty sure the title should be 'Classes Are Not Abstract Data Types'. An 'object' in the OO sense is a separate (albeit related) concept from a 'type' (class). OO is about behavior, not data. If that behavior is tied to an implementation, that is more of a design fault in the program than the language. We have always had abstract classes in c++, and we have interfaces in Java/.NET. The idea of separating the interface from the implementation is not something that we have been overlooking for the past 30 years as the author indicates. Maybe I'm missing something, but having the ability to define the data of a type separately from the behavior seems like a step back toward c structs with static methods to operate on them. The only difference is that you can group your methods into what should probably just be a class rather than a 'protocol'.
I think that there should have been several more levels or something. Maybe different codes for black belt vs. yellow. Or Sensei vs student. Nice idea for basic skill testing though.
At my startup we didn't take CXO titles until we started talking to investors. Then it was basically expected. People on the other side of the table need to know who they are talking to in terms of corporate responsibility. I don't think that the title necessarily reflects the revenue status or anything like that, rather it is an expectation of responsibility, regardless of whether the company is at the stage where you actually act in that capacity yet.
I was considering http://www.zuora.com in the past at the recommendation of a friend. I didn't end up springing for a recurring billing solution though, so I don't have any experience with them. Their product looked impressive though.
Sometimes your mind comes up with solutions to problems you don't know that you have yet, so the thought may not seem particularly relevant at the time. Later on, that information is sometimes hard to reconstruct intentionally. Sometimes what I do is to go back and repeat whatever it was that I was doing when I had the thought to see if I can re-trigger it. I'd love to have something that I could use to manually re-trigger a train of thought somehow. Something like that could allow you to follow convoluted branches of thought more easily also.
1) Incremental backups with only a small 'catalog' as the reference instead of having to have the full backup available
2) Ease of splitting the backup set over multiple devices with the ability to unmount the device in the middle of a backup once it is full to mount a new volume.
These things can be done with tar, but not without some extra work.
I know this thread is old, but I ran across it in a search.
I use a tool called dar (http://dar.linux.free.fr/) that is along the lines of tar, but with extra features for dealing with multi-volume backup sets and diffs easily.
It lets you extract a catalog from the backup set that you can use locally as a checkpoint for doing diff/incremental backups. The catalog is really small, mine is ~10Mb for hundreds of thousands of files.
## here is the initial backup: backing up /nas to
## an archive set /mnt/usb/nas on a usb device
dar -R / -c /mnt/usb/nas -g nas
## extracting the catalog from the backup and
## saving it under my home directory
dar -A /mnt/usb/nas -C /home/dan/backup/nas-catalog
## I use the local copy of the catalog in my home folder
## when doing diff backups to another mounted usb device
dar -R / -c /mnt/usb/nas-diff -g nas -A /home/dan/backup/nas-catalog
I had this funny feeling while reading this, like reading a story about Edison on Wikipedia. I know it's corny, but the high price tag only seems to reinforce the similarities in trajectory to early incandescent bulbs, which probably were just as expensive then.
I tried out the Windows version. All you have to do is extract the 2 system archives into a folder somewhere on your disk and run the executable. It looks like you get the whole environment, with the ability to create multiple document windows. I haven't played with it further though, so I'm not sure how it would differ from running it right on the hardware.
I have Steele and Harbison's "C: A Reference Manual", and _is_ very good, but probably not for _learning_ C. It does have very good explanations of some under-the-hood things that I haven't found elsewhere. It is also a good reference on the C std library, and does a good job at pointing out possible incompatibilities between ISO C, `traditional' C, and vendor-specific dialects. One of the things that I have always found confusing about C is that code can be written in several ways, depending on how lax the compiler is about enforcing different versions of the C standard.
I do engage in some `re-quoting' usually. In other words, a trade journal may reference some statistics from a report and I'll just use that quote. I don't know if that is really a good thing to do though.
This is going to make installing a retail copy of Windows yourself on a Thinkpad a real pain. With the updater service you just grab the updater and the rest is automatic. The little bits of sofware that you need for things like the battery manager and the onscreen displays are strewn around in small packages that you otherwise have to install manually.
This article assumes that talent and an assertive ego go hand in hand. There may be two star players in terms of talent, where one views everything as a competition, and the other may be more self-competitive. I wonder if you try to redirect the competitive ego, or try to build up the less extroverted one?
I was in the same boat, taking at least 10 notes in a session, several times a day. I work best by blasting notes in and sorting through them when I come up for air. There wasn't anything that allowed me to work this way very effectively, so I did what any of you would have done - started a startup, of course!
We are live, you can check us out at the link below:
Interesting idea, freebie hardware with paid support. Similar to MySql arrangement but for hardware. It's the actual terms that just don't seem attractive. $3k support contract on what is practically an embedded device? I could see paying some money for support on a cluster of these to do something interesting, like distributed data acquisition nodes maybe? But not to the tune of 3,000 per node.
Ativiti looks cool, but in this article they say that the user shouldn't have to do anything differently, yet they call themselves a `platform'. I haven't actually tried the app, so maybe it isn't fair to say, but if I see `platform' I usually think of complex all-encompassing products that require some integration.
I think one of the reasons that there are so many apps that could be considered task management apps is that everyone has different ideas on what task management is. Also, there is some value in having local task items that are available in the tools that you already have at your disposal, ie Outlook. For us (shameless plug: http://www.ubernote.com), we wanted to have task lists inline in notes where we already had data, so we added the feature. Add one more app to the list....
It would have been nice had the article gone into a little detail about what a `non-replicable element' could be. I mean, for programming projects that you intend to market, it kind of goes without saying that there should be a differentiator that would give you a sustainable advantage. This article kind of left me hanging. Beyond that, I'd argue that although the _mechanics_ of software development has improved quite a bit, there is still plenty of room to mess things up if you aren't good at thinking about programming problems.