Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Centrinissimo, Damages, Software
Formalization schmormalization. kaisyain's review today of Software Craftsmanship raised a spirited conversation about the nature of software, software engineering, and related disciplines. cconnell conveniently submits a great companion piece: "I wrote this article a couple years ago but it has continued to get good readership within the software engineering community. Should provoke some interesting discussion..."
The bleeding edge costs money. JeffyVernon writes with an followup to CNET's early review of Centrino laptops: "AnandTech published two articles on Centrino today, an overview of the CPU architecture (including some interesting history behind the chip) and a roundup of four notebooks including the new Dell that wasn't in CNet's roundup. It looks like the 4.9lbs IBM T40p ended up winning the roundup, it lasted over 6 hours on battery!"
What scarcity was this exactly? RadBlock writes "Lawrence Lessig is addressing the issue of radio spectrum on CIO Insight... something that was talked about on Slashdot the other day. Lessig states that the spectrum has been defined too generally as if there can only be one message per frequency, when better equipment will vastly increase the amount of 'spectrum' that is usable."
I like that phrase "general welfare." We've mentioned eGovOS several times before -- now, here's a last-minute announcement that may be of interest: free registration is still open for next week's (March 17-19) eGovOS conference in Washington D.C., "Open Standards/Open Source for National and Local eGovernment Programs in the U.S. and EU." Perhaps some folks there ought to consider the question eugene ts wong raised the other day, namely, Which North American government offices won't move to Linux? Someone needs to set up a big map with different colored countries and states!
Who's laughing and where is his bank? deelowe writes "From ars. Back in September we reported on a class action suit leveled at a number of Music industry players that accused them of anti-competitive price-fixing. Back in January, we reported that victims of said price fixing could hit this website and sign up (too late now), and eventually receive up to $20 in the settlement, provided of course that you had actually purchased a CD between January 1 1995 and December 22, 2000. 3.5 million Americans made their way to the on-line form, and it appears that victims will receive $12.60 apiece, should a judge approve it."
They still have a while to go ... sp1nl0ck writes CNet News.com.com.com are reporting that The Neo Project guys have restarted the attempt to crack the 2048-bit XBox key following advice from their lawyers. CNet are citing a link to Operation Project X, but it was a bit temperamental in loading earlier. Maybe it's been CNetted..."
I'll still think of it as the GIMP for a few years ;) Agermain writes "CinePaint has just released its first Windows build. From their website: "CinePaint is an open source painting program used by motion picture studios to retouch images in 35mm films. It was formerly called Film Gimp. It has been used in a dozen feature films including Harry Potter, Scooby-Doo, and the Fast & the Furious... This first Windows beta release is mainly intended for developers and testers.""
Operation Project X is a project to run linux on the x-box. But to run the client to crack the code you have to be running windows!!! Where the hell is my linux hack the evil empire client??
The kind of list you're charging them with suddenly being able to use to advertise, which even then is a pretty glib assumption, is not worth 50 million dollars.
Email lists with 3.5 million opt-in targetted blue-chip collected address would costa tiny fraction of that money. The idea that 50 million dollars is a good price for that tiny amount of contacts, even if you *were* allowed to suddenly spam them, is insane. That kind of price would get you absolutely laughed out of any online advertising campaign sales meeting.
Take off the tinfoil, buddy!
"Old man yells at systemd"
I get 7 hours out of my widescreen Fujitsu P2120 sporting a Crusoe 933MHz, and it's 3.4lbs and half the price. If you're interested in more, here's the specs.
I'm not affiliated with Fujitsu, I just can't praise this laptop enough ;)
You should have 20/20 vision though, at 1280x768 in 10.4" widescreen, the pixels are small. But with sub-pixel rendering, the fonts are a visual orgasm for typography nerds like myself ;)
The AnandTech review made numerous comparisons between the Dell Latitude D800 and the Dell "Latitude 8200." There is no such product. I suspect the comparisons were to the Inspiron 8200, which is not being replaced by the Latitude D800. Ultimately, the Latitude D800 will replace the Latitude C8xx series, but the two products will coexist for a while, because a lot of companies (mine included) own a lot of Latitude Cxxx hardware for which all the docking stations, batteries and CD-ROM/CD-RW/DVD-ROM drives are interchangeable.
In the meantime, the Dell Centrino-based product most comparable to the Inspiron 8200 is the Inspiron 600m.
There are already systems allowing radio users such as taxi's and security guards to use the same frequencys.
The same frequency is often allocated to firms in geographically seperate locations. A system called CTCSS is used so that even if a signal from the base transmitter of a building reaches the walkie talkie of a security guard miles away it dosn't come out of the speaker. CTCSS sends a low frequency tone along with the voice, the receivers only turn on the audio output when the correct tone is detected.
Security guards don't talk on their radio all the time and the wanted signal are usually closer and stronger so it works well.
Digital trunked radio systems, similar to cellular phone systems are also gaining ground.
This model aircraft spectrum change was motivated by two things. Get more channels so that more models could be flow simultaneously and improve standards in transmitters and receivers to reduce interference. If I remember correctly, they basically doubled the number of channels by creating a new channel between the existing channels. The standards for performance of the transmitters and receivers was toughened up quite a bit.
Contemporary model aircraft radios are pretty sophisticated. High end radios use digital protocols over the air. Error correction, etc. I've been away from it for about 10 years. Anyone know if spread spectrum is in common (or any) use yet for model aircraft? Seems to me that would go a long way toward preventing unintended landings. I don't remember any provision for it in the new frequency allocations. Too bad I guess.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
You can always buy non-RIAA music.
kazaalite.com is not the page for Kazaa Lite. That guy is. from what I have heard, a domain squatter.
Try www.kazaalite.tk instead.
Also, kazaa lite runs just fine under WINE.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
my poor webserver.
I actually started mapping out which countries were implementing linux in their government, but it became too much of a hassle.
please go easy on my server....
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Except that spread-spectrum transmissions can actually Transmit BELOW the noise-floor, so therefore can also Receive data BELOW the noise floor.
This is achieved by increasing the bandwidth of the transmission (to sometimes several MHz), and using code-division multiplexing to allow different transmitters to use the same frequency band as other transmitters.
These systems rely on the code used in the code division multiplexing to be unique.
The code is actually mathematically very close to Cyclic Redundancy code used in CD's.
It follows that this code must therefore be long enough to allow other transmitters to use the same frequency base. The electronics of the receiver actually rely on convolving the noise received out of the air with the Code used by the transmitter.
The cost, with this system is that the data throughput is reduced, due to the length of the Code transmitted.
So : it IS possible to have unlimited users on the same frequency band, but the Throughput for the system will be necessarily reduced, and limited by the absolute maximum frequency (and to a lesser extent, power) that the Transmitter/Reciever pair are capable of using.
If I correctly understood the articles I've read, Pentium-M is designed around a bus that does not support SMP. This is part of its power saving strategy, but it also makes it a bad choice for a line of servers.