Posts by Ben Bonsall 357 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Jun 2008
... to put the SPEAKERS into some kind of enclosure that reduces the amount of sound they give out?
The speaker has been put in an enclosure already, one that is designed to make it louder, or fill a space with sound, or resonate at particular frequencies to make more efficient use of the power being put into it.
May as well go to a club and stand outside, it sounds quieter there.
The EQ setting called rock would cut out most of the bass if the bass performance if the speaker is weak. Otherwise you just get ghastly distortion and power wasted where it can't be heard. Although, as it's aimed at kids, they may as well just turn all the bands to +10, cos that's what they'll do anyway.
Dear god, there's a lot of selfish opinionated bullsh*t in these comments.
Everyone wants more and better but refuses to make any sacrafice to get it.
Some things to consider-
Driving your car causes congestion.
The bigger the car, the more congestion.
If this was Johannesburg, there might be a reason to drive 500m to take your kids to school.
Not using public transport causes it to decline in quality and increase in price.
There is a huge amount of rail infrastructure that is being upgraded at the moment. (Both speed and capacity.)
It is easy to show that adding CO2 to a volume of gas increases it's heat storage capacity. (We might not know how such a complex system as the earth will respond to such an increase in stored heat, but human activity is definetly increasing it.)
Tax causes growth in an economy.
Growth of an ecomony causes an increase in the standard of living. (there's more money around to buy stuff with.)
You Don't Get Something For Nothing.
You'd still need more than one license anyway, depending on what you were allowed to do with the source once you had it. Verify and run, modify for private use, modify and provide the modifications to the community, modify for commercial gain, extend but not modify, extend for commercial gain, each varient would require a different license, and would be governed by different laws. You'd also have to seriously rewrite copyright and patent law, not to mention trade secret protection law, which would require years, millions of pounds and international cooperation.
I'm trying to think of another thing that someone could buy and reasonably demand full access to the thousands of hours of work that went into it so they could make sure it worked, or make changes because it's not quite to their liking, and I can't think of one. Go to a resturant and insist on watching the food being cooked so you could change the seasoning if you think you can do better? Watch your car being built, so you can pick the nuts and bolts yourself? Buy a book and change the ending so it comes out the way you want? You could do all these things, but if you have the skills needed to do it well, you also have the skills to do it from scratch, exactly to your liking. It might take a while, but then it took the original developers a while as well.
Personally, I have never sold or supplied a single copy of any piece of software I have written. I sell access to my software, which runs on machines I own and control. My clients have no need to see, and would have no idea what to do with, the source to the applications they use. All they need it to know how the interface works, what the business logic is behind the application, and the data model that backs up the logic. This is why they hired me in the first place. And if they are interested, and were prepared to spend some more money, I might let them know the details of the API, so they could build their own interface.
This is the future. And also the past. It's only the present model that's flawed, where users think they own the software they paid to use.
Open source vs. closed source is a pointless distinction for the 99.9% of computer users who don't write code. If you download the binaries, you have *no idea* what is in them, or indeed where they came from. Anything can be spoofed, as the internet was designed to be robust, not secure. It is effectivly anonymous, despite all the recent privacy/data mining/phorm type stuff, because end users have no way of telling that the *provider* is genuine, you just have to trust them.
The whole net as it stands is hack built on hack built on 30-year-old-hack, and the conflicting requirements of privacy, anonymity, verification, mobility, deniability, accountability, and trust will never be reconciled until we start from the ground and rebuild the net (and all of 'connected computing', (ghastly phrase,)) to include all these things.
It's not about OS wars, corporate giants vs public spirited coders, or any of that bullsh1te, fundamentaly it's about trust, and at the moment you can't trust anyone.
Where's the icon showing a precariously balanced pile of hardware with a confused looking punter at the top when you need it?
How about a steg encrypted usb stick, each seperate set of data stored isolated from any other, with a certificate store to give access to data sets to specific 'users'.
You could store bank details, website passwords, medical records, all hidden from each other.
Logging into a website: when you register, you save their certificate as having access to it's datastore. When logging in, you enter your password into the usbstick, the website provides it's certificate check and the stick returns the data if it matches.
Paying in a shop: the seller sends you thier certificate, you verify it and add them as a single transaction 'user'. the payment request goes to the bank, the bank requests confirmation from the stick, the stick confirms and deletes the access.
The data sets could be actual data, or key generator algorithms. No need for centrailsed store of anything except certificate chains. Not saying it couldn't be hacked if you had physical access to it, but if you lost it, you could revoke your certificate and so prevent access to any of the data sets when the stick next tries to access something.
Long enough keys and encryption between the stick and the certificate store would make attacking it pretty tricky. Storing the access certificates in memory that dies if the case is tampered with would leave a patternless jumble of data.
It can't print PCBs yet, but it can't be far off... all you need is an acid resisting pen to draw out the circuit, a small drill head, and a solder extruder. Or you could print a flat insulating plastic sheet, and print on it with conductive ink.
Putting the components in would be tricky though. You'd need more than one 'print' head, one to place the part, and one to solder.
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