alex.moskalyuk

Napster starts giving away free MP3 players to the customers who buy the yearly subscription (at $9.95 a month it comes to roughly $119.40 a year). The customers have a choice of 128 MB Rio Chiba Sport for $120 or 1.5 GB Rio Nitrus for $200. The subscription, however, does not allow you to fill the player with the music - Napster $9.95 a month plans allow only to stream music from its catalog. The customers still have to pony up 99c a track to download a song.

Two teams at NIST and University of Innsbruck transmitted the characteristics between two atoms - a phenomenon commonly known as teleportation, that even Albert Einsterin called “spooky”. It is possible now under certain conditions to transfer the physical properties of an atom to another atom, no matter what the distance between two atoms is.

Turn off your phones, shut down instant messengers, send the kids to the neighbors as Joel Spolsky has a new article out. How Microsoft Lost the API War is an insider’s look at Microsoft current API development, with the war going on between backward-compatibility camp and new off-the-shelf technologies camp. In the article Joel, a former Microsoft employee and currently an entrepreneur, envisions the fall of the Windows platform as application development environment. Win32 did not get killed by Linux, or MacOS or Sun desktop systems (which have by far worse record of keeping the applications backward-compatible). Win32 will be killed by Microsoft, constantly inventing and re-organizing its APIs. From Win32 to COM to COM+ to .NET to WinFX the software developers are finding it more and more difficult to develop an app that actually runs on Windows, and that, as Joel points out, will lead to growth in Web apps and software companies running away from Windows development platform.

A lot of people are coming to this site searching for .NET Serial communications on Google. And while Paul Wilson made it known that System.IO.Ports.SerialPort will arrive in .NET Framework 2.0, that fact is not really useful to you if your project is due next week.

Jonathan Travers from Berkshire, England, is an experienced engineer, who just recently started playing with .NET and, according to his site, is impressed with Linux OS. He publishes and sells the RS232.dll .NET library for serial port communication (via C# or any other .NET-supported language), and the current price is 10 British pounds, which is pretty much a giveaway. My employer got a copy of the DLL, and so far it’s been probably the easiest tool for RS232 communication.

Download Jonathan’s help file, which he distributes for free. The instructions include adding the RS232Comms component to the Toolbox in Visual Studio, but apparently the example works only under Visual Studio .NET 2003 and higher as I have been unable to make an addition to my toolbox in the original Visual Studio .NET. Nevertheless, adding a DLL to the application is easy, and in older version of VS you just need to create a reference.

The objects reside in RS232 namespace, and you can specify the COM port number, baudrate, parity, stopbit, data bits, flow control settings and timeout value for the port. After initializing the port and setting all the parameters for the object, calling OpenComms() opens the serial port. WriteChar, WriteByte, WriteBlock(byte[]) and WriteBlock(string) account for majority of the data you’d want to send to the COM port, while everything that’s received can be handled in public event DataReceivedHandler DataRxEvent. The receiving part is completely event-driven, so no need to set up the timers and implement polling for the RS232 data, which can sometimes result in buffering errors and subsequent data loss.

public event CTS_EventHandler CTS_Event and public event CTS_EventHandler DSR_Event are there as well, but for my project I did not need them. Logging is enabled, so after discovering some errors that need debugging you can pull the data out of the ArrayList (which is really nothing more but a bunch of log strings):

ArrayList opencom = com1.GetPortOpenLog();

Business Week magazine publishes two excerpts from Michael Mandel’s Rational Exuberance, where the author explores the economic cycles produced by invention and innovation. Part 1 - A Free Lunch for the Economy - discusses the concept of “free lunch” in the modern capitalist economy, which, as far as we know, is non-existant. However, things like electricity and air conditioning, while being not free, have led to much larger economic boosts that purely driving profits for the electric companies and air conditioner sellers. The whole region of Atlanta exists today due to the availability of air conditioning.

Part 2 - Fast Growth: Pain Now, Gain Later - deals with the issues of jobs in exuberant economy. Mandel suggests we use the unemployment metrics to track the economy cycles:

Interestingly enough, periods of innovation and exuberant growth also seem to be the periods of the lowest unemployment and the fastest job growth. In the 1960s, when productivity was growing very quickly, unemployment dropped below 4 percent. As innovation and productivity growth slowed in the 1970s and 1980s, unemployment rose. And then, as the economy went through another innovation and productivity spurt in the 1990s, unemployment dropped below 4 percent again.

Folks at the Scriptometer conducted a practical survey of which scripting language is the best. While question like that is bound to generate flamewars between the usual Perl vs PHP, Python vs Perl, VBScript vs everything crowds, the Scriptometer survey is practical: if I have to write a script, I have to write it fast, it has to be small (less typing), it should allow me to either debug itself via a debugger or just verbose output mode.

sh, Perl and Ruby won the competition, and with the difference of 1-2 points you could really proclaim them vying for the first place. Smalltalk, tcc, C# and Java are the last ones, with Java being completely unusable in scripting environment (part of that could be the fact that neither Java nor C# are scripting languages). See the “Hello world” examples and the smallest code examples. Interesting that ICFP contests lately pronounced OCaml as the winner for rapid development.

Afraid that digital radio listeners might soon be able to cherry-pick certain songs and share them with others on the Internet, RIAA urged FCC to consider broadcast regulations that limit such copying. National Association of Broadcaster is not too happy with RIAA’s request, as more than 300 broadcasters either have digital CD-quality radio, or are in the process of setting them up. Meanwhile, as MSNBC notes, products like The Bug from Pure Digital are already capable of recording digital radio.

Raymond Chen tells.

Voice-over-IP in Wireless LAN environment - a futurist’s dream of always-on always-connected service. Guy Kewney from eWeek tests the technologies that try to satisfy this market today and finds nothing but disappointment.

The best result we got was that just once, I heard his voice with a delay of about 15 seconds, saying “You just have to speak up!”—which was part of a 20-second burst of speech from him. The rest was lost.

Rob Enderle points out an ironic twist - while a lot of Linux server development was anti-Microsoft, Sun was the one who got killed by Linux server growth. Now that both Novell and Red Hat are looking into improving the user experiences, will the name of the next victim be Microsoft, or will it really be Apple Computer? And will Microsoft and Linux communities come together to fight a common enemy?

Unlike SCO, Apple has a well-funded marketing organization and could be far more effective at painting Linux advocates as communists and thieves. But this could get incredibly ugly. Apple is seeking patents to protect its interface better, but its litigation against Microsoft a decade ago didn’t go well, and Microsoft will clearly dispute these patent attempts and make it difficult even if Linux supporters don’t initially dispute these patents.