It is easy to install, and works with Ghostscript, so the printer looks like a postscript device.
I have had no problems with it, and installation is pretty straghtforward (instructions are on the above site).
I don't blame HP so much for creating the whole winprinter concept (which after all is not much different then PCL). It makes sense, as current host CPU's are SO powerfull. I don't want to pay for another CPU and more RAM for my printer... I already have that in my PC. Go ahead and make the printer dumb and cheap.
I do blame HP for not opening up the interface specifications, however. It is silly to make people reverse engineer everything to get these (otherwise quite nice) printers supported on other operating systems.
I, for one, would not have bought my 720 had I not known already that it was supported via the above linked product.
That being said, it is a great little printer for black and white output under Linux, and coupled with good plastic coated Kodak inkjet paper, can produce some stunningly high quality photographs under Windows. It's a lot of bang for the buck.
The CD mechanisims are not nearly as delicate. A hard drive head "floats" on a cushion of air above the surface of a spinning hard drive at a heigth about 1/75 the thickness of a human hair. That ain't much. It must, as the magnetic fields generated by the hard drive media are extremely small to begin with, and drop exponentially with distance. This means that even a minor increase in distance between the head and the platter can result in several decimal places change of the strength of the magnetic field the head is trying to detect. This incredibly small distance makes it pretty hard to make sure the head never grinds against the spinning media.
CD's, being optical, fire a focused beam of coherent light (a laser) from just about any distance that is convenient to the mechanisim... generally close to 1/4 inch. This makes it pretty easy for a designer to make sure the laser lens never grinds against the spinning media.
Also, the data density of a CD is way lower then the data density of a hard drive. Think about it, a CD is 5 and 1/4 inches in diameter, and stores about 600 MB of data. A typical hard drive is single platter 3.5 inches in diameter, and stores 10.2 GB of data. This is 10 times as much data in half the space. This level of precision makes the hard drive mechanisims even more vulnerable to shock (and thermal changes... and dust... etc). This is why hard drives are assembled in a clean room, while CDRoms are freely handled.
The CD mechanisims are not nearly as delicate. A hard drive head "floats" on a cushion of air above the surface of a spinning hard drive at a heigth about 1/75 the thickness of a human hair. That ain't much. It must, as the magnetic fields generated by the hard drive media are extremely small to begin with, and drop exponentially with distance. This means that even a minor increase in distance between the head and the platter can result in several decimal places change of the strength of the magnetic field the head is trying to detect. This incredibly small distance makes it pretty hard to make sure the head never grinds against the spinning media.
CD's, being optical, fire a focused beam of coherent light (a laser) from just about any distance that is convenient to the mechanisim... generally close to 1/4 inch. This makes it pretty easy for a designer to make sure the laser lens never grinds against the spinning media.
Also, the data density of a CD is way lower then the data density of a hard drive. Think about it, a CD is 5 and 1/4 inches in diameter, and stores about 600 MB of data. A typical hard drive is single platter 3.5 inches in diameter, and stores 10.2 GB of data. This is 10 times as much data in half the space. This level of precision makes the hard drive mechanisims even more vulnerable to shock (and thermal changes... and dust... etc). This is why hard drives are assembled in a clean room, while CDRoms are freely handled.
Actually, it is much more sophisticated then simply detectecting dead frequencies, and moving the signal around, and in fact it was thought of sooner, and has been done for a long time.
Think of the signal coming in as a spectrum (like winamp shows you in it's default mode). This is basically a bar graph, with frequency along the bottom axis and power on the side axis. When somebody starts jamming on their bass guitar, you get bumps in the low frequency end. When they start playing the flute, you get bumps in the high frequency end.
As a side note, I believe mp3 encoding takes advantage of this concept to achieve it's high compression rates. It (metaphorically) saves the height of the bands, and reproduces those on playback. The higher the number of (more narrow) bands, and the more accurately you measure their height, the better your sound reproduction.
Any transmission medium will distort this spectrum to some degree. If you look at the spectrum on the sending end, and the spectrum on the receiving end, you will see it changed.
Your average phone line has a pretty narrow spectrum that it can transmit. I think it ranges from about 500hz at the low end, to 3500 hz at the top end. A normal CD reproduces sounds from 20 hz to 20000 hz. Unless you are a pre-pubescent female, you likely can't hear much above 15000 hz. ( hz=Hertz, cycles per second).
So anyway, if you want to get more bandwidth (lower lows and higher highs getting crammed through a phone line), there is a neat trick to doing it (which is also used by Bose on several lines of their speakers with great results).
1) Send a known signal through your transmission medium. 2) Receive that signal, and compare it to what you sent. 3) Before you send your next signal, pre-distort it, so that when your transmission medium reshapes it, it ends up at exactly the shape you wanted in the first place.
It's kind of like buying jeans that are not pre-shrunk... by them long, so that when they shrink after being washed they end up the size you wanted.
Simple, huh?
The reason this is becomming more and more common, and that data rates are so amazingly high for such lousy transmission mediums like phone lines, is that heavy duty signal processors are just now becomming affordable enough to embed in consumer devices. It's been around for quite a while, you just could not afford it.
Signal processors (DSP = Digital Signal Processors) are simple computers that have very limited functionality but do their job blindingly fast. This functionality is now to the point where it can be embedded in a single chip, and sold for a few bucks, but the engineering that goes into these things is staggering.
There are other methods of error correction that were necessary to get data rates up the 56k speeds we now see, but they are pretty complicated.
Go ahead moderators... trash my karma... I can take it...
Once again, Katz goes on a one sided rant mocking Christians and Christianity.
Quotes such as "...the never-ending struggle between technology and the self-proclaimed forces of morality..." belie Katz's prejudice. Yes Christians have a code by which they judge behaviour, be it their own or others. Yes, they sometimes succeed in this behaviour, and they sometimes fail. Yes, there are smart articulate Christians and there are narrow and inarticulate Christians. These exact same statements could be made about any other organization that contains human beings.
Were this the ACLU making their "morality" judgements about themselves or others, or perhaps privacy advocates, or GPL advocates, etc... would they have been painted with the same broad, mocking and prejudicial brush?
Somebody talks about a Linux distribution that emphasized Christian beliefs and values, and they are mocked and derided. Somebody else releases a Linux distribution that emphasizes some extremely subtle differences between two competing open software models (GPL vs. LGPL vs. BSD ad. nauseum) and they are respected and promoted.
Personally, I think both are a little whacky, but hey, it's their business so more power to them both!
I enjoyed Quake, Quake II, and Unreal (on the rare occasions it would run without crashing) tremendously, and I am a devout Christian (and was at one time a licensed pastor). I am also a software engineer, linux advocate, and have released open source software.
Did the violence in the game bother me? No. In fact, my personal opinion is that it might be a good idea for kids to play that sort of thing, so that if they are whacked out you get a warning ahead of time because their reaction to it is... well... wierd. Let them play. Ask them what it would be like to do that in real life, perhaps at their school. If they seem unable to seperate between reality and games, raise the red flag, lock up the guns, and get some serious therapy.
Did the constant deamonic imagry bother me? Well, it might of, but then that was what the rocket launcher was for... to smote them mightily:) I did think it all a bit odd and un-necessary, but I was not uptight about it.
So why when Quake came out, full of deamonic imagry, it was "cool", but when the same type of thing comes out with angels it is a thing to be mocked? The deamon imagry in quake has it's roots in the exact same literature that the angels in this game came from (and in fact the deamons are Angels that made different decisions).
Katz goes off on his view that there is a contradiction between violence and Christianity... which just shows how little he understands of what he speaks. To me, one of the greatest large scale Christian acts of this century was the liberation of europe from Hitlers government by the allied forces. No shortage of violence there, as free (and more often then not Christian) men walked into nearly certian death and killed without hesitation to stop true evil.
Katz's seems to repeatedly fall into the same trap, where he is prejudicial and intolerant of groups that he does not agree with and does not understand.
As another example, his quote "Religion and freedom have never really gotten along, from the persecution of Galileo to..." further shows his prejudice and lack of understanding.
For one example, when the big bang theory was originally promoted, the Catholic Church was a strong advocate of it, while the scientific establishment mocked and attacked it's supporters.
Indeed, a huge number of scientific breakthroughs in the previous centuries were done by strong believers in Christianity, and many of these people were supported by the church during a time when no other body was willing to support academic research.
Large beauracratic institutions will always resist change. This is a people problem, not a Christianity problem. Just about every radical scientific breakthrough was attacked by the established scientific establishment before it finally became accepted.
Whew. Enough rants. Katz is entitled to his opinions, I am entitled to mine. Thanks for your time.
As of yesterday afternoon late, they did have instructions on re-flashing and going back to the previous OS. I didn't use them, as I was happy with the upgrade, but I do remember they were there.
As I recall, they were smart enough to build the flash loader into real rom (not the flash rom), so you cannot render your beloved palm unbootable (unlike many pre pentium II motherboards).
With the Handspring Visor shipping yesterday, the new TRG palm compatible unit shipping in December, and 3com lowering prices across the board, the deathnell for wince has sounded.
You can now get a very nice entry level Palm for around $156, and a very nice high end unit for anywhere from $220 (palm IIIx) to $249 (visor deluxe).
These amazing little things just dissapear into your life as an indespensible tool. The darn things are so usefull, reliable, and unobtrusive you forget they are even computers. The three pilots I have owned (I keep upgrading and selling to friends) have been MORE reliable then the paper franklin planner they replaced (as the pilot almost always survives a drop, and the planner would often pop it's ring clips and spread my pages all over the street).
Wince devices, on the other hand, retail for 2 to 3 times the price of a palm unit, have a (well deserved) reputation for being poorly designed and nearly useless in the real world, and have little to no third party software support (relative to the Palm devices, anyway).
Microsoft has blown it too many times... they cannot seem to comprehend that a PDA is not and should not be some sort of ultra small laptop. They only stayed in the game as long as they have because of the massive amounts of $$capitol$$ being hemmoraged by Microsoft, and because 3com was trying to offset terrible losses in other divisions by gouging on the price of the very successfull Pilot.
That was then, and Palm was winning hands down. Now:
1) The palm OS is available and affordable to third party hardware makers. Already, prices on Palm hardware are half what they were, and very usable units are quickly approaching the $100 level.
2) Companies and developers, such as Philips, are sick of pouring money down a rathole, and are abandoning the platform.
3) The potential customer base has seen three versions of wince, none of which have been particulary usefull for a pda platform. All have had SERIOUS problems with desktop synchronization, resource consumption, backwards compatibility, and usability.
"Game over man". If this story is true, it is Microsoft trying a last minute punt to transition away from PDA's and into real time operating systems (where developers are smart enough to demand exclusively open software).
This has the advantage of its own seperate power supply (although serial communication of any kind will still substantially impact battery life on a pilot), and more flexible pricing plans. It may also be removed when not needed, which may or may not be a plus depending on your usage profile. With an MSRP of around $370, you can get it and a palm IIIx for around the same price as a palm VII or the qualcom phone.
Like the palm VII however, it does not have voice or paging capability.
For any of these solutions, there are some GREAT 3rd party tools for internet connectivity. Proxi-Web is a free (last time I checked) web service that grabs a requested web page, converts it to the greyscale image the pilot can use, compresses it, then moves it into the pilot for display. It is well designed and quite effective for a large majority of web pages I have tried. It supports both graphics, and forms, and is quite fast (feels like a 56k modem connection when used with the palm clip on 14.4 modem).
Proxi Mail is a pop3 and smtp mail client that also works exceptionally well, and has some very nice features for filtering, truncating, and other pilot important activities.
AvantGo provides a free web clipping service that also works very well, but for a smaller subset of the web. It also works directly with the pilots internal tcp/ip stack (and therefore any modem, wireless or not).
Obviously, none of these solutions are as nice as having a phone and pda in the Palm V form factor, but in terms of current state of the art they all sound like similiar kludges with different advantages and disadvantages.
It will be interesting to see if someone produces a springboard module for the new handspring units that has operates as both a phone, and as a wireless tcp/ip internet connection... If the form factor is right, that could be the real winner.
Plus, with Nokia's licensing of the Palm OS, they will be ones to watch as well (they intend to have a product in the next two years). If there is one thing those europeans consistantly get right, it is ergodynamics, which seems to be where all the current units fall short.
Bill Kilgallon
Complexity is like a liquid...incompressible
on
Gartner Slams Linux
·
· Score: 5
The Gartner group is missing a key thing that I painfully rediscover any time I install a Linux or Windows system... That complexity will always result in pain (see second law of thermodynamics).
They indicate that the complexity of Linux is a liability. Well, it is, but it is just as much a liability under Windows, but without the tools and controls to address it that are available under Linux.
It used to be that Unix was (relatively) hard, and DOS was (relatively) simple. This was mainly because Unix did so much more then DOS (i.e. networking, multi user support, multi tasking support, etc).
Now DOS (windows) and Unix are much closer in terms of overall capability. And complexity.
Gartner misses two points. First... Microsoft (and most other sources of support) will only really support a very small subset of available hardware (hardware "certified" to work with windows). If you try to get vendors to help you with other products, good luck.
If I were to create an equally small subset of "supported" hardware, I could make Linux darned easy to support and configure as well.
Secondly, the average desktop user NO LONGER DOES their own support. I know, because I (and the rest of you out there like me) do it. I probably solve 200-300 windows problems a year for friends and family, and some can be darn difficult.
I find I spend about the same amount of time setting up both Linux and Windows systems. The difference is that when a Linux system gets working, it stays working. I can count on some random catastrophe on my windows box about once every three months.
The other difference is that when I fix a Linux problem, I generally feel pretty satisfied, as it turns out I was doing something wrong and I now understand what it was and how to do it right. When I fix a windows problem, I am typically just pissed off, because it "magically" went away after performing some random activity (like reinstalling the same driver a third time, or reinstalling window's itself). No explanation, no permanant fix, and I have to leave wondering how long it will be before they call me back to fix it again.
Really, all this article says is that current operating systems contain a large degree of complexity (inevitable in our age of networks and bloated office applications), and that Microsoft has successfully captured the productivity market (read: Microsoft Office).
Both statements are true, and neither "spells the death of Linux".
Ironically, I think the increasing complexity that is inevitable in our computing culture will be an additional driving force to promote Unix...
Unix has been complicated since it's birth, and we have spent 30 YEARS now giving you tools to manage it. You get your unix system, and you get thousands of tools to use on it.
Windows is just now getting complicated. When you get your windows system, it comes with only one tool... a stick of dynamite. The solution to many failure modes it to blow up what you have and start over.
I think Linux needs a better infrastructure to encapsulate error detection and recovery, system configuration and administration, and a better high level encapsulation of the human interface. The foundation is in place however, and tools like gnome, kde, and linuxconf are quickly moving the right direction.
I think Windows needs a better foundation and architecture... it is designed to be flawed at it's core. The user interface is fine (due largely to the fact that they stole it from the mac), but everything under the covers is a mess, and getting worse with every release.
I think Windows is a fantastic consumer wrapping around a terrible design and architecture. It is a credit to a lot of people at microsoft that such a haphazard mess runs as well as it does.
I think Linux is a practical industrial grade wrapping around a great design and architecture. It was designed for smart people to use to do hard jobs well.
I, for one, would much rather be faced with the problem of replacing the industrial grey boilerplate around a state of the art factory with some nice pretty stucco, then have to pull the pretty paper of a great big ball of snot and have to unravel it and keep it working.
As I write this, I see five comments of six suggesting Katz shut up, or not write the article. ... Let Katz write. Filter him, or turn your eyes if you think it worthless. You at worst harm yourself that way. Inhibiting free discussion harms everyone else's right to be exposed to ideas they may find more valuable than you.
So, to avoid inhibiting free discussion, you advocate inhibiting free discussion? Are you saying that people should not be able to express their opinion that a self described "news for nerds" site is not an appropriate forum for rants about leftish idealogy? Or to express their opinion that the the essay in question is disjointed, one sided, shallow, and badly in need of an editor?
This demonstrates exactly what he is talking about. As long as people can't speak without the fear of offending others, we aren't truly free. Not that Katz is going to be inhibited by the abuse he gets, but a more timid person with ideas as or more worthwhile might be.
So here you are saying that I must not only remain silent, but that I must never even be offended?
Are you aware that you are not only trying to control my freedom of speech, but my very freedom of thought?
In a slashdot article last week, I posted a question trying to understand the logic of the root philosophies of RMS camp (versus the ESR camp, which I understand).
My question (which basically boiled down to "if I can trade the program I just wrote to a company in exchange for a mini-van, how can you say it has no value?"), resulted in a caustic email from an individual that apparently felt strongly enough to write me and accuse me of first being an idiot and secondly never reading any RMS material.
Note that as an author of an LGPL released package (backburner, see freshmeat.net), this is a pretty silly accusation to make (the never having read the RMS material that is... he may be right about the idiot part:).
When I pressed him for explanations of the parts of the philosopy that confused me... he kept simply pointing me to the web site.
When I tried to get clarifications on the parts of the logic that escape me, his responses alternated between "if you can't see it, you must be stupid" and "it's on the website, go read it", and "it says what I said it says because I said so".
Plus, the whole exchange was pretty mean spirited.
So anyway, I have experienced exactly what this article is parodying... so like most better parody, I can't decide if it is funny or disturbing...
Please... no email flames already...
Bill Kilgallon
Re:Honest questions...
on
RMS Responds
·
· Score: 1
it just sounds like you suspect there's something there to use to incriminate RMS in the minds of standard-thinking Americans.
Did you even read my post? This is exactly what I said I am trying not to do. I am an author of LGPL software for cripes sake...
If you do not see the link between intellectual property, and non-intellectual property, then just wander by the Bill Gates Mansion. He has translated a great deal of intellectual property into a great deal of non-intellectual property.
I am honestly trying to understand what the FSF philosophy is, and what the logical ramifications are of its core idealogy. If you want dogma, then just go on making statements and tell me I have to accept them at face value. I am trying to understand the theory here.
If I write a program that no one else has thought of, and that many people want and would happily pay for, I can sell it to them and use the money to buy a car.
Here is what I see as the problem with your thinking...
I write program whizbang. Company Widget wants to use it because it will help their 10 employees work twice as fast, saving them $100,000 per year.
I tell them that even though I spent $300,000 developing the software, I will let them use it for as long as they want for only $1000, with the condition that they not sell or copy it for use by other companies or individuals.
How is this im-moral? I gave them a great deal because they ONLY want to purchase the USE of my software, not to purchase the complete results of the entire development effort and all corresponding profit potential.
These are the kind of questions I am trying to figure out about Free Software. The issue does not sound quite so clean cut as the FSF advocates seem to want to make it... (and heck, as an author of a LGPL'd program, I am at least to some degree one of them).
This is going to sound like bait, and I apologize. Just for the record, I have released a package under the LGPL (backburner, see www.freshmeat.net).
Anyway, I understand the GNU position on intellectual property, particularly as it applies to software. In his article, RMS indicates that people that are calling him communist are trying to misrepresent him.
I guess my question then is do the Free Software people have a position on personal property that is different then their position on intellectual property? What about on real estate property? What about artistic property, such as musical performances?
I am not trying to set a trap here, or bait, or anything of the sort. The free software philosophy is very interesting to me, and this is a question that I have been wondering for some time.
Note that this is a personal question, only remotely related to free software and GNU, and RMS is under no obligation to answer it.
I wrote a package (backburner, see www.freshmeat.net) that allows just this sort of thing. You will still need to use dd (and gzip if you wish), but it will do drive image backups (using dd) or filesystem backups (using tar) and allows gzip or bzip to be used as well.
They are a small and simple stream based set of perl scripts. Documentation includes both backup and restore scenarios for just about anything you want to do.
There are 50 to 100 people using this now, and most are having pretty good success.
Sorry I did not see you post sooner, hopefully you are still following the thread.
Although I'm wondering how they've simulated a center channel speaker...
I believe it would be unnecessary with a headphone type arrangement. The thing that limits dual speakers in open air from imaging an infinitely wide sound stage is the fact that the sound coming from the right speaker and intended for the right ear also wraps around the head and reaches the left ear. Same thing for the left side. The net effect of this is that the virtual soundstage is limited (short of special signal processing) to the width of the speakers.
This is because the brain normally calculates the location of an object (width) by knowing the time delta between sound impingement on each ear (as the speed of sound is not infinite). The longer the time, with the known width of the head, the further to the side the virtual sound source is located. The brain is basically continually triangulating based on the known speed of sound, the delay between reception of the same signal, and the width between your ears.
For headphones, the sound for each ear is delivered to each ear, with no spillover. This means the width of the virtual sound stage can be infinite, and is much more amenable to easy signal processing.
The way the front to back location of sound is done by the brain is an even interesting.
Sound is attenuated in a different way as it passes by the back side of your head and as it comes in past the back side of your ears then when it comes in the front. The combination of hair, facial features, and ear shape cause the high, middle, and low frequencies to be shaped differently (an example of this is that sounds from behind can sound "muffled").
Your brain compares the differences in the frequency spectrum envelope received on each ear, and can make a pretty good guess at if it went past the back of your head or the front of your head.
You can use signal processing to create this effect with two front speakers or with headphones, or you can add a third speaker behind on a different channel with a non manipulated signal and let your brain sort it out.
So what are the implications of this uninvited rant?
1) You would not necessarily need a third speaker for surround sound with a headphone like device.
2) Neural nets can achieve amazing performance for some tasks.
Interesting... I usually read his biology more for entertainment, not being a biologist, I would not know the difference between logical and well stated biological fiction and logical and well stated biological facts.
His statistics are more interesting to me, not so much that he proposes anything radical, but in that he takes into account human paradigms as a continual source of bias in interpretation of statistics (for example the age old view of evolution as a ladder leading to humans, when it is at best a bush).
If you don't believe that human perceptions cloud our view of statistics, go find out how much the average casino pulls in a month...
Likewise, I can't tell you how many times I have been CONVINCED that the solitare game on my Palm Pilot has something personal against me!
We are pretty far off topic, so maybe we should take it to email, but I am curious... what is the accepted engine for punctuated equilibrium if not the radical global changes described by Gould?
Also, I really enjoy the "pop" biology and natural history (something I can read, not something I have to study). Are there any other authors you can recommend that are accepted as more accurate?
Bill "Waaaayyyyyyy off topic... somebody moderate me down" Kilgallon
There is an excellent book by Stephan J. Gould called "The Mismeasure of Man" that gives quite a bit of detail about phrenology (trying to measure IQ by brain size), and also about problems with standardized tests.
A very interesting book with excellent scientific underpinnings. Politically, Gould leans a little to the left, but he is honest and backs up his assertions with solid theories and plenty of facts, so both ends of the political spectrum can learn quite a bit from reading his work. The majority of the book is apolitical, so most readers will probably not notice, or even care.
A great and interesting science read, like all of Goulds books (read "Wonderfull Life" for an outstanding overview on evolution and natural selection).
Bill "who leans a little right, but also tries to stick to facts" Kilgallon
Actually, on the new IIIx and V units, its safe
on
Overclock Your Palm
·
· Score: 3
I think the original clock rate (16 MHz?) was set more to extend battery life then to protect silicone. Even the early units can be overclocked up to about 130% (I believe).
Unlike PC overclocking, I think battery life is the main constraint here, not heat dissipation. Your cpu will last forever, but you will be replacing batteries so often you will think you have a wince device:).
The new flavor of dragonball cpu used in the IIIx, V, and VII models is actually designed for much higher rates, they just clocked it lower to stay compatible with existing software, extend battery life, and because the existing speed is plenty fast as it is. It's not like you are going to run quake on the thing (although there are a couple of first person games out there for it).
I know that the batteries on my new IIIx last MUCH longer (over a month) then they did on my palm professional with the 2MB IR upgrade. The darn thing just keeps on running...
These pilots are the single best computer design I have ever used, the thing just dissapears into your life as an indespensible tool.
Somebody correct me if I am wrong, but I believe that the US constitution ensures that _every_ criminal trial can be made a jury trial if the defendant so desires... I forget which ammendment.
Now if he is cutting a deal, then there will be no jury, but he would only be doing that because he believes it will turn out better then a jury trial would end up.
In the slashdot description for this story, it stated the "damage" estimates were in the millions. It is setting up a straw man argument here.
If you actually go read the response letters, it seems pretty clear that government requested figures for the "value" of the stolen material, as well as the damages done. The large dollar values were for the "value" of the source code stolen, not the "damages" as indicated by the slashdot blurb. Is slashdot trying to arbitrarily stir people up, or to report the news?
Mitnick was in possesion of stolen property. Period. The normal metric fo determining value is what price the product would get on the free market. If the product is not available on the free market (proprietary code), then the costs for development is as good a metric as any to try to determine value.
If we don't think access to source code is important and valuable, then why do we get so rightously indignant about proprietary software under Linux? If having the source code means little or nothing, then why is OpenSource software so important?
Kevin Mitnick was in possession of stolen property, and I believe he had no illusions about the legality of his actions.
The court has asked the owners of the stolen property for their best guess at it's value. They have provided it. This is why we have jury trials folks, it will be the jury's job to decide to sentence relative to actual damages, or relative to the value of the stolen property. Whats wrong with that?
If somebody holds up a liquor store at gunpoint and gets $20 bucks, then later gets caught, the individual is properly charged with a felony, not a $20 misdemeanor.
If somebody breaks into your car and steals a linux MP3 player that you spent a year developing and plan to market, then sells it to his buddy for $15, do you want them charged with a $15 crime? Do you want them only charged with a $200 crime because that's all the hardware parts were worth?
These companies just answered a question that was asked them, and the question was a reasonable one to be asked for an upcoming criminal trial.
Diamond is making a smart move here. The problem with the actions of the RIAA against MP3 is not that they are trying to control and protect their own property, the problem is that they are trying to control all possible distribution channels for music.
They have a right to control their own property, just like I have a right not to buy it if their licensing is incompatible with my intended use. They do not have a right to legislate a monopoly however, and this is what they are trying to do by killing MP3.
Diamond is smart here, they are giving the RIAA the tools necessary to protect their own property (via supporting some sort of protected MP3), but also giving other organizations and artists the right to not participate (via supporting normal unprotected MP3's).
I think this will substantially undermine the current RIAA lawsuit against Diamond, and help protect the MP3 movement in general. Before adding this feature, the RIAA could easily spread FUD and get people to confuse piracy with legitimate uses of the MP3 format.
Now, it will be much easier for MP3 advocates to show that it is up to the individual who owns the rights to the music to decide the level of protection to be implemented. It draws a clear line between illegal MP3 distribution (a protected MP3 that has been cracked), and legal MP3 distribution (an uprotected MP3).
The RIAA wants to ban MP3 all together. The adding of this feature by Diamond makes it clear that if they continue pressing their case, they are acting to enforce a monopoly, not acting to protect their assets.
I applaud Diamond for this decision (and I am no big fan of Diamond Multimedia... they abused me terribly as an owner of one of the orginal Wietek 9000 based Viper video cards, and I am still ticked off). They have made a smart tactical move here, and probably done a lot to protect the future of MP3.
Then in this case we must obviously conclude that government knows best, as the wide-scale distribution of firearms has been a social cataclysm for the United States.
I respect your opinion, and believe that you think big government does know best. I am not trying to change your mind, I agree to disagree.
I just prefer people to be consistent in their beliefs. Here is a unix helper, apply it to the above quote: s/firearms/freespeech/g
You get the idea. All of the above have been a "social cataclysm" in many ways at many times. You believe that the best protection is for the power to reside with the government, I believe that the best protection is for the power to reside with the individual, neither of us has a perfect solution, both of us would like it to be better.
I couldn't help notice a curious inconsistency here between this story and the Colorado shooting story (which I believe does not belong on Slashdot, but since it is there I will respond).
Anyway, a number of posters from down under stated in the other thread about what a stroke of genius it was for the Australian government to make it completely illegal for private individuals with no criminal background and no crimnal intent to own a firearm.
Presumably, this was done because the benefits of the vast majority of legal firearm use and ownership (I bet around 99.999%) were deemed not as important as the damages caused by the remaining.001 percent.
Well, Australians, make up your mind. Here in America we have the first two ammendments to the consititution, the first protects the right to free speech, the second protects the right to own firearms. The founding fathers knew that both of these rights will cause some damage, but that also knew that each was far more dangerous in the hands of the government then in the hands of the individual.
Guns and words are both very dangerous. The spoken word has killed far more people then firearms ever will. If guns kill people, then words kill nations.
The founding fathers of the United States got one thing right... Governments are far more dangerous (and as an aside, far more stupid) than individuals. The bill of rights explicitly empowers the individuals at the cost of the government specifically for the purpose of protecting the individual from the government. Both the first AND the second ammendment are critical towards those ends. The first two ammendments protect each other... they simply make Tyranny mathmatically impossible.
So I guess what I am saying is that you should either decide that the government knows whats best and should have strict control and licensing of all dangerous behavior (like free speech and firearm ownership), or you should decide that the individual knows best and minimize governmental controls wherever possible (like limiting free speech restrictions to libel laws and limiting firearm restrictions to preventing felons and psychopaths from possessing firearms).
Slashdot Mirror
A linux driver for the hp 7xx and some 8xx series win-printers exists and works well, although it currently supports black and white printout only.
It is easy to install, and works with Ghostscript, so the printer looks like a postscript device.
I have had no problems with it, and installation is pretty straghtforward (instructions are on the above site).
I don't blame HP so much for creating the whole winprinter concept (which after all is not much different then PCL). It makes sense, as current host CPU's are SO powerfull. I don't want to pay for another CPU and more RAM for my printer... I already have that in my PC. Go ahead and make the printer dumb and cheap.
I do blame HP for not opening up the interface specifications, however. It is silly to make people reverse engineer everything to get these (otherwise quite nice) printers supported on other operating systems.
I, for one, would not have bought my 720 had I not known already that it was supported via the above linked product.
That being said, it is a great little printer for black and white output under Linux, and coupled with good plastic coated Kodak inkjet paper, can produce some stunningly high quality photographs under Windows. It's a lot of bang for the buck.
Bill Kilgallon
The CD mechanisims are not nearly as delicate. A hard drive head "floats" on a cushion of air above the surface of a spinning hard drive at a heigth about 1/75 the thickness of a human hair. That ain't much. It must, as the magnetic fields generated by the hard drive media are extremely small to begin with, and drop exponentially with distance. This means that even a minor increase in distance between the head and the platter can result in several decimal places change of the strength of the magnetic field the head is trying to detect. This incredibly small distance makes it pretty hard to make sure the head never grinds against the spinning media.
CD's, being optical, fire a focused beam of coherent light (a laser) from just about any distance that is convenient to the mechanisim... generally close to 1/4 inch. This makes it pretty easy for a designer to make sure the laser lens never grinds against the spinning media.
Also, the data density of a CD is way lower then the data density of a hard drive. Think about it, a CD is 5 and 1/4 inches in diameter, and stores about 600 MB of data. A typical hard drive is single platter 3.5 inches in diameter, and stores 10.2 GB of data. This is 10 times as much data in half the space. This level of precision makes the hard drive mechanisims even more vulnerable to shock (and thermal changes... and dust... etc). This is why hard drives are assembled in a clean room, while CDRoms are freely handled.
Bill Kilgallon
The CD mechanisims are not nearly as delicate. A hard drive head "floats" on a cushion of air above the surface of a spinning hard drive at a heigth about 1/75 the thickness of a human hair. That ain't much. It must, as the magnetic fields generated by the hard drive media are extremely small to begin with, and drop exponentially with distance. This means that even a minor increase in distance between the head and the platter can result in several decimal places change of the strength of the magnetic field the head is trying to detect. This incredibly small distance makes it pretty hard to make sure the head never grinds against the spinning media.
CD's, being optical, fire a focused beam of coherent light (a laser) from just about any distance that is convenient to the mechanisim... generally close to 1/4 inch. This makes it pretty easy for a designer to make sure the laser lens never grinds against the spinning media.
Also, the data density of a CD is way lower then the data density of a hard drive. Think about it, a CD is 5 and 1/4 inches in diameter, and stores about 600 MB of data. A typical hard drive is single platter 3.5 inches in diameter, and stores 10.2 GB of data. This is 10 times as much data in half the space. This level of precision makes the hard drive mechanisims even more vulnerable to shock (and thermal changes... and dust... etc). This is why hard drives are assembled in a clean room, while CDRoms are freely handled.
Bill Kilgallon
Actually, it is much more sophisticated then simply detectecting dead frequencies, and moving the signal around, and in fact it was thought of sooner, and has been done for a long time.
Think of the signal coming in as a spectrum (like winamp shows you in it's default mode). This is basically a bar graph, with frequency along the bottom axis and power on the side axis. When somebody starts jamming on their bass guitar, you get bumps in the low frequency end. When they start playing the flute, you get bumps in the high frequency end.
As a side note, I believe mp3 encoding takes advantage of this concept to achieve it's high compression rates. It (metaphorically) saves the height of the bands, and reproduces those on playback. The higher the number of (more narrow) bands, and the more accurately you measure their height, the better your sound reproduction.
Any transmission medium will distort this spectrum to some degree. If you look at the spectrum on the sending end, and the spectrum on the receiving end, you will see it changed.
Your average phone line has a pretty narrow spectrum that it can transmit. I think it ranges from about 500hz at the low end, to 3500 hz at the top end. A normal CD reproduces sounds from 20 hz to 20000 hz. Unless you are a pre-pubescent female, you likely can't hear much above 15000 hz. ( hz=Hertz, cycles per second).
So anyway, if you want to get more bandwidth (lower lows and higher highs getting crammed through a phone line), there is a neat trick to doing it (which is also used by Bose on several lines of their speakers with great results).
1) Send a known signal through your transmission medium.
2) Receive that signal, and compare it to what you sent.
3) Before you send your next signal, pre-distort it, so that when your transmission medium reshapes it, it ends up at exactly the shape you wanted in the first place.
It's kind of like buying jeans that are not pre-shrunk... by them long, so that when they shrink after being washed they end up the size you wanted.
Simple, huh?
The reason this is becomming more and more common, and that data rates are so amazingly high for such lousy transmission mediums like phone lines, is that heavy duty signal processors are just now becomming affordable enough to embed in consumer devices. It's been around for quite a while, you just could not afford it.
Signal processors (DSP = Digital Signal Processors) are simple computers that have very limited functionality but do their job blindingly fast. This functionality is now to the point where it can be embedded in a single chip, and sold for a few bucks, but the engineering that goes into these things is staggering.
There are other methods of error correction that were necessary to get data rates up the 56k speeds we now see, but they are pretty complicated.
Bill Kilgallon
Go ahead moderators... trash my karma... I can take it...
:) I did think it all a bit odd and un-necessary, but I was not uptight about it.
..." further shows his prejudice and lack of understanding.
Once again, Katz goes on a one sided rant mocking Christians and Christianity.
Quotes such as "...the never-ending struggle between technology and the self-proclaimed forces of morality..." belie Katz's prejudice. Yes Christians have a code by which they judge behaviour, be it their own or others. Yes, they sometimes succeed in this behaviour, and they sometimes fail. Yes, there are smart articulate Christians and there are narrow and inarticulate Christians. These exact same statements could be made about any other organization that contains human beings.
Were this the ACLU making their "morality" judgements about themselves or others, or perhaps privacy advocates, or GPL advocates, etc... would they have been painted with the same broad, mocking and prejudicial brush?
Somebody talks about a Linux distribution that emphasized Christian beliefs and values, and they are mocked and derided. Somebody else releases a Linux distribution that emphasizes some extremely subtle differences between two competing open software models (GPL vs. LGPL vs. BSD ad. nauseum) and they are respected and promoted.
Personally, I think both are a little whacky, but hey, it's their business so more power to them both!
I enjoyed Quake, Quake II, and Unreal (on the rare occasions it would run without crashing) tremendously, and I am a devout Christian (and was at one time a licensed pastor). I am also a software engineer, linux advocate, and have released open source software.
Did the violence in the game bother me? No. In fact, my personal opinion is that it might be a good idea for kids to play that sort of thing, so that if they are whacked out you get a warning ahead of time because their reaction to it is... well... wierd. Let them play. Ask them what it would be like to do that in real life, perhaps at their school. If they seem unable to seperate between reality and games, raise the red flag, lock up the guns, and get some serious therapy.
Did the constant deamonic imagry bother me? Well, it might of, but then that was what the rocket launcher was for... to smote them mightily
So why when Quake came out, full of deamonic imagry, it was "cool", but when the same type of thing comes out with angels it is a thing to be mocked? The deamon imagry in quake has it's roots in the exact same literature that the angels in this game came from (and in fact the deamons are Angels that made different decisions).
Katz goes off on his view that there is a contradiction between violence and Christianity... which just shows how little he understands of what he speaks. To me, one of the greatest large scale Christian acts of this century was the liberation of europe from Hitlers government by the allied forces. No shortage of violence there, as free (and more often then not Christian) men walked into nearly certian death and killed without hesitation to stop true evil.
Katz's seems to repeatedly fall into the same trap, where he is prejudicial and intolerant of groups that he does not agree with and does not understand.
As another example, his quote "Religion and freedom have never really gotten along, from the persecution of Galileo to
For one example, when the big bang theory was originally promoted, the Catholic Church was a strong advocate of it, while the scientific establishment mocked and attacked it's supporters.
Indeed, a huge number of scientific breakthroughs in the previous centuries were done by strong believers in Christianity, and many of these people were supported by the church during a time when no other body was willing to support academic research.
Large beauracratic institutions will always resist change. This is a people problem, not a Christianity problem. Just about every radical scientific breakthrough was attacked by the established scientific establishment before it finally became accepted.
Whew. Enough rants. Katz is entitled to his opinions, I am entitled to mine. Thanks for your time.
Bill Kilgallon
Actually, I think you can go back...
As of yesterday afternoon late, they did have instructions on re-flashing and going back to the previous OS. I didn't use them, as I was happy with the upgrade, but I do remember they were there.
As I recall, they were smart enough to build the flash loader into real rom (not the flash rom), so you cannot render your beloved palm unbootable (unlike many pre pentium II motherboards).
Bill Kilgallon
There is a discussion of how to do this under Linux over at Palmstation .
You are right... pilot-xfer is a great tool (although the version I have cored when trying to sync a full 8 MB TRG upgraded IIIx).
Bill Kilgallon
With the Handspring Visor shipping yesterday, the new TRG palm compatible unit shipping in December, and 3com lowering prices across the board, the deathnell for wince has sounded.
You can now get a very nice entry level Palm for around $156, and a very nice high end unit for anywhere from $220 (palm IIIx) to $249 (visor deluxe).
These amazing little things just dissapear into your life as an indespensible tool. The darn things are so usefull, reliable, and unobtrusive you forget they are even computers. The three pilots I have owned (I keep upgrading and selling to friends) have been MORE reliable then the paper franklin planner they replaced (as the pilot almost always survives a drop, and the planner would often pop it's ring clips and spread my pages all over the street).
Wince devices, on the other hand, retail for 2 to 3 times the price of a palm unit, have a (well deserved) reputation for being poorly designed and nearly useless in the real world, and have little to no third party software support (relative to the Palm devices, anyway).
Microsoft has blown it too many times... they cannot seem to comprehend that a PDA is not and should not be some sort of ultra small laptop. They only stayed in the game as long as they have because of the massive amounts of $$capitol$$ being hemmoraged by Microsoft, and because 3com was trying to offset terrible losses in other divisions by gouging on the price of the very successfull Pilot.
That was then, and Palm was winning hands down. Now:
1) The palm OS is available and affordable to third party hardware makers. Already, prices on Palm hardware are half what they were, and very usable units are quickly approaching the $100 level.
2) Companies and developers, such as Philips, are sick of pouring money down a rathole, and are abandoning the platform.
3) The potential customer base has seen three versions of wince, none of which have been particulary usefull for a pda platform. All have had SERIOUS problems with desktop synchronization, resource consumption, backwards compatibility, and usability.
"Game over man". If this story is true, it is Microsoft trying a last minute punt to transition away from PDA's and into real time operating systems (where developers are smart enough to demand exclusively open software).
Bill Kilgallon
Another similiar product is the minstrel wireless modem cradle , that snaps onto the back of a normal pilot.
This has the advantage of its own seperate power supply (although serial communication of any kind will still substantially impact battery life on a pilot), and more flexible pricing plans. It may also be removed when not needed, which may or may not be a plus depending on your usage profile. With an MSRP of around $370, you can get it and a palm IIIx for around the same price as a palm VII or the qualcom phone.
Like the palm VII however, it does not have voice or paging capability.
For any of these solutions, there are some GREAT 3rd party tools for internet connectivity.
Proxi-Web is a free (last time I checked) web service that grabs a requested web page, converts it to the greyscale image the pilot can use, compresses it, then moves it into the pilot for display. It is well designed and quite effective for a large majority of web pages I have tried. It supports both graphics, and forms, and is quite fast (feels like a 56k modem connection when used with the palm clip on 14.4 modem).
Proxi Mail is a pop3 and smtp mail client that also works exceptionally well, and has some very nice features for filtering, truncating, and other pilot important activities.
AvantGo provides a free web clipping service that also works very well, but for a smaller subset of the web. It also works directly with the pilots internal tcp/ip stack (and therefore any modem, wireless or not).
Obviously, none of these solutions are as nice as having a phone and pda in the Palm V form factor, but in terms of current state of the art they all sound like similiar kludges with different advantages and disadvantages.
It will be interesting to see if someone produces a springboard module for the new handspring units that has operates as both a phone, and as a wireless tcp/ip internet connection... If the form factor is right, that could be the real winner.
Plus, with Nokia's licensing of the Palm OS, they will be ones to watch as well (they intend to have a product in the next two years). If there is one thing those europeans consistantly get right, it is ergodynamics, which seems to be where all the current units fall short.
Bill Kilgallon
The Gartner group is missing a key thing that I painfully rediscover any time I install a Linux or Windows system... That complexity will always result in pain (see second law of thermodynamics).
They indicate that the complexity of Linux is a liability. Well, it is, but it is just as much a liability under Windows, but without the tools and controls to address it that are available under Linux.
It used to be that Unix was (relatively) hard, and DOS was (relatively) simple. This was mainly because Unix did so much more then DOS (i.e. networking, multi user support, multi tasking support, etc).
Now DOS (windows) and Unix are much closer in terms of overall capability. And complexity.
Gartner misses two points. First... Microsoft (and most other sources of support) will only really support a very small subset of available hardware (hardware "certified" to work with windows). If you try to get vendors to help you with other products, good luck.
If I were to create an equally small subset of "supported" hardware, I could make Linux darned easy to support and configure as well.
Secondly, the average desktop user NO LONGER DOES their own support. I know, because I (and the rest of you out there like me) do it. I probably solve 200-300 windows problems a year for friends and family, and some can be darn difficult.
I find I spend about the same amount of time setting up both Linux and Windows systems. The difference is that when a Linux system gets working, it stays working. I can count on some random catastrophe on my windows box about once every three months.
The other difference is that when I fix a Linux problem, I generally feel pretty satisfied, as it turns out I was doing something wrong and I now understand what it was and how to do it right. When I fix a windows problem, I am typically just pissed off, because it "magically" went away after performing some random activity (like reinstalling the same driver a third time, or reinstalling window's itself). No explanation, no permanant fix, and I have to leave wondering how long it will be before they call me back to fix it again.
Really, all this article says is that current operating systems contain a large degree of complexity (inevitable in our age of networks and bloated office applications), and that Microsoft has successfully captured the productivity market (read: Microsoft Office).
Both statements are true, and neither "spells the death of Linux".
Ironically, I think the increasing complexity that is inevitable in our computing culture will be an additional driving force to promote Unix...
Unix has been complicated since it's birth, and we have spent 30 YEARS now giving you tools to manage it. You get your unix system, and you get thousands of tools to use on it.
Windows is just now getting complicated. When you get your windows system, it comes with only one tool... a stick of dynamite. The solution to many failure modes it to blow up what you have and start over.
I think Linux needs a better infrastructure to encapsulate error detection and recovery, system configuration and administration, and a better high level encapsulation of the human interface. The foundation is in place however, and tools like gnome, kde, and linuxconf are quickly moving the right direction.
I think Windows needs a better foundation and architecture... it is designed to be flawed at it's core. The user interface is fine (due largely to the fact that they stole it from the mac), but everything under the covers is a mess, and getting worse with every release.
I think Windows is a fantastic consumer wrapping around a terrible design and architecture. It is a credit to a lot of people at microsoft that such a haphazard mess runs as well as it does.
I think Linux is a practical industrial grade wrapping around a great design and architecture. It was designed for smart people to use to do hard jobs well.
I, for one, would much rather be faced with the problem of replacing the industrial grey boilerplate around a state of the art factory with some nice pretty stucco, then have to pull the pretty paper of a great big ball of snot and have to unravel it and keep it working.
Bill Kilgallon
As I write this, I see five comments of six suggesting Katz shut up, or not write the article.
...
Let Katz write. Filter him, or turn your eyes if you think it worthless. You at worst harm yourself that way. Inhibiting free discussion harms everyone else's right to be exposed to ideas they may find more valuable than you.
So, to avoid inhibiting free discussion, you advocate inhibiting free discussion? Are you saying that people should not be able to express their opinion that a self described "news for nerds" site is not an appropriate forum for rants about leftish idealogy? Or to express their opinion that the the essay in question is disjointed, one sided, shallow, and badly in need of an editor?
This demonstrates exactly what he is talking about. As long as people can't speak without the fear of offending others, we aren't truly free. Not that Katz is going to be inhibited by the abuse he gets, but a more timid person with ideas as or more worthwhile might be.
So here you are saying that I must not only remain silent, but that I must never even be offended?
Are you aware that you are not only trying to control my freedom of speech, but my very freedom of thought?
Bill Kilgallon
In a slashdot article last week, I posted a question trying to understand the logic of the root philosophies of RMS camp (versus the ESR camp, which I understand).
:).
My question (which basically boiled down to "if I can trade the program I just wrote to a company in exchange for a mini-van, how can you say it has no value?"), resulted in a caustic email from an individual that apparently felt strongly enough to write me and accuse me of first being an idiot and secondly never reading any RMS material.
Note that as an author of an LGPL released package (backburner, see freshmeat.net), this is a pretty silly accusation to make (the never having read the RMS material that is... he may be right about the idiot part
When I pressed him for explanations of the parts of the philosopy that confused me... he kept simply pointing me to the web site.
When I tried to get clarifications on the parts of the logic that escape me, his responses alternated between "if you can't see it, you must be stupid" and "it's on the website, go read it", and "it says what I said it says because I said so".
Plus, the whole exchange was pretty mean spirited.
So anyway, I have experienced exactly what this article is parodying... so like most better parody, I can't decide if it is funny or disturbing...
Please... no email flames already...
Bill Kilgallon
it just sounds like you suspect there's something there to use to incriminate RMS in the minds of standard-thinking Americans.
Did you even read my post? This is exactly what I said I am trying not to do. I am an author of LGPL software for cripes sake...
If you do not see the link between intellectual property, and non-intellectual property, then just wander by the Bill Gates Mansion. He has translated a great deal of intellectual property into a great deal of non-intellectual property.
I am honestly trying to understand what the FSF philosophy is, and what the logical ramifications are of its core idealogy. If you want dogma, then just go on making statements and tell me I have to accept them at face value. I am trying to understand the theory here.
If I write a program that no one else has thought of, and that many people want and would happily pay for, I can sell it to them and use the money to buy a car.
Here is what I see as the problem with your thinking...
I write program whizbang. Company Widget wants to use it because it will help their 10 employees work twice as fast, saving them $100,000 per year.
I tell them that even though I spent $300,000 developing the software, I will let them use it for as long as they want for only $1000, with the condition that they not sell or copy it for use by other companies or individuals.
How is this im-moral? I gave them a great deal because they ONLY want to purchase the USE of my software, not to purchase the complete results of the entire development effort and all corresponding profit potential.
These are the kind of questions I am trying to figure out about Free Software. The issue does not sound quite so clean cut as the FSF advocates seem to want to make it... (and heck, as an author of a LGPL'd program, I am at least to some degree one of them).
This is going to sound like bait, and I apologize. Just for the record, I have released a package under the LGPL (backburner, see www.freshmeat.net).
Anyway, I understand the GNU position on intellectual property, particularly as it applies to software. In his article, RMS indicates that people that are calling him communist are trying to misrepresent him.
I guess my question then is do the Free Software people have a position on personal property that is different then their position on intellectual property? What about on real estate property? What about artistic property, such as musical performances?
I am not trying to set a trap here, or bait, or anything of the sort. The free software philosophy is very interesting to me, and this is a question that I have been wondering for some time.
Note that this is a personal question, only remotely related to free software and GNU, and RMS is under no obligation to answer it.
Bill "not fishing... honest" Kilgallon
I wrote a package (backburner, see www.freshmeat.net) that allows just this sort of thing. You will still need to use dd (and gzip if you wish), but it will do drive image backups (using dd) or filesystem backups (using tar) and allows gzip or bzip to be used as well.
They are a small and simple stream based set of perl scripts. Documentation includes both backup and restore scenarios for just about anything you want to do.
There are 50 to 100 people using this now, and most are having pretty good success.
Sorry I did not see you post sooner, hopefully you are still following the thread.
Although I'm wondering how they've simulated a center channel speaker...
I believe it would be unnecessary with a headphone type arrangement. The thing that limits dual speakers in open air from imaging an infinitely wide sound stage is the fact that the sound coming from the right speaker and intended for the right ear also wraps around the head and reaches the left ear. Same thing for the left side. The net effect of this is that the virtual soundstage is limited (short of special signal processing) to the width of the speakers.
This is because the brain normally calculates the location of an object (width) by knowing the time delta between sound impingement on each ear (as the speed of sound is not infinite). The longer the time, with the known width of the head, the further to the side the virtual sound source is located. The brain is basically continually triangulating based on the known speed of sound, the delay between reception of the same signal, and the width between your ears.
For headphones, the sound for each ear is delivered to each ear, with no spillover. This means the width of the virtual sound stage can be infinite, and is much more amenable to easy signal processing.
The way the front to back location of sound is done by the brain is an even interesting.
Sound is attenuated in a different way as it passes by the back side of your head and as it comes in past the back side of your ears then when it comes in the front. The combination of hair, facial features, and ear shape cause the high, middle, and low frequencies to be shaped differently (an example of this is that sounds from behind can sound "muffled").
Your brain compares the differences in the frequency spectrum envelope received on each ear, and can make a pretty good guess at if it went past the back of your head or the front of your head.
You can use signal processing to create this effect with two front speakers or with headphones, or you can add a third speaker behind on a different channel with a non manipulated signal and let your brain sort it out.
So what are the implications of this uninvited rant?
1) You would not necessarily need a third speaker for surround sound with a headphone like device.
2) Neural nets can achieve amazing performance for some tasks.
3) God was one hell of a good engineer.
Interesting... I usually read his biology more for entertainment, not being a biologist, I would not know the difference between logical and well stated biological fiction and logical and well stated biological facts.
His statistics are more interesting to me, not so much that he proposes anything radical, but in that he takes into account human paradigms as a continual source of bias in interpretation of statistics (for example the age old view of evolution as a ladder leading to humans, when it is at best a bush).
If you don't believe that human perceptions cloud our view of statistics, go find out how much the average casino pulls in a month...
Likewise, I can't tell you how many times I have been CONVINCED that the solitare game on my Palm Pilot has something personal against me!
We are pretty far off topic, so maybe we should take it to email, but I am curious... what is the accepted engine for punctuated equilibrium if not the radical global changes described by Gould?
Also, I really enjoy the "pop" biology and natural history (something I can read, not something I have to study). Are there any other authors you can recommend that are accepted as more accurate?
Bill "Waaaayyyyyyy off topic... somebody moderate me down" Kilgallon
There is an excellent book by Stephan J. Gould called "The Mismeasure of Man" that gives quite a bit of detail about phrenology (trying to measure IQ by brain size), and also about problems with standardized tests.
A very interesting book with excellent scientific underpinnings. Politically, Gould leans a little to the left, but he is honest and backs up his assertions with solid theories and plenty of facts, so both ends of the political spectrum can learn quite a bit from reading his work. The majority of the book is apolitical, so most readers will probably not notice, or even care.
A great and interesting science read, like all of Goulds books (read "Wonderfull Life" for an outstanding overview on evolution and natural selection).
Bill "who leans a little right, but also tries
to stick to facts" Kilgallon
I think the original clock rate (16 MHz?) was set more to extend battery life then to protect silicone. Even the early units can be overclocked up to about 130% (I believe).
:).
Unlike PC overclocking, I think battery life is the main constraint here, not heat dissipation. Your cpu will last forever, but you will be replacing batteries so often you will think you have a wince device
The new flavor of dragonball cpu used in the IIIx, V, and VII models is actually designed for much higher rates, they just clocked it lower to stay compatible with existing software, extend battery life, and because the existing speed is plenty fast as it is. It's not like you are going to run quake on the thing (although there are a couple of first person games out there for it).
I know that the batteries on my new IIIx last MUCH longer (over a month) then they did on my palm professional with the 2MB IR upgrade. The darn thing just keeps on running...
These pilots are the single best computer design I have ever used, the thing just dissapears into your life as an indespensible tool.
Somebody correct me if I am wrong, but I believe that the US constitution ensures that _every_ criminal trial can be made a jury trial if the defendant so desires... I forget which ammendment.
Now if he is cutting a deal, then there will be no jury, but he would only be doing that because he believes it will turn out better then a jury trial would end up.
In the slashdot description for this story, it stated the "damage" estimates were in the millions. It is setting up a straw man argument here.
If you actually go read the response letters, it seems pretty clear that government requested figures for the "value" of the stolen material, as well as the damages done. The large dollar values were for the "value" of the source code stolen, not the "damages" as indicated by the slashdot blurb. Is slashdot trying to arbitrarily stir people up, or to report the news?
Mitnick was in possesion of stolen property. Period. The normal metric fo determining value is what price the product would get on the free market. If the product is not available on the free market (proprietary code), then the costs for development is as good a metric as any to try to determine value.
If we don't think access to source code is important and valuable, then why do we get so rightously indignant about proprietary software under Linux? If having the source code means little or nothing, then why is OpenSource software so important?
Kevin Mitnick was in possession of stolen property, and I believe he had no illusions about the legality of his actions.
The court has asked the owners of the stolen property for their best guess at it's value. They have provided it. This is why we have jury trials folks, it will be the jury's job to decide to sentence relative to actual damages, or relative to the value of the stolen property. Whats wrong with that?
If somebody holds up a liquor store at gunpoint and gets $20 bucks, then later gets caught, the individual is properly charged with a felony, not a $20 misdemeanor.
If somebody breaks into your car and steals a linux MP3 player that you spent a year developing and plan to market, then sells it to his buddy for $15, do you want them charged with a $15 crime? Do you want them only charged with a $200 crime because that's all the hardware parts were worth?
These companies just answered a question that was asked them, and the question was a reasonable one to be asked for an upcoming criminal trial.
Diamond is making a smart move here. The problem with the actions of the RIAA against MP3 is not that they are trying to control and protect their own property, the problem is that they are trying to control all possible distribution channels for music.
They have a right to control their own property, just like I have a right not to buy it if their licensing is incompatible with my intended use. They do not have a right to legislate a monopoly however, and this is what they are trying to do by killing MP3.
Diamond is smart here, they are giving the RIAA the tools necessary to protect their own property (via supporting some sort of protected MP3), but also giving other organizations and artists the right to not participate (via supporting normal unprotected MP3's).
I think this will substantially undermine the current RIAA lawsuit against Diamond, and help protect the MP3 movement in general. Before adding this feature, the RIAA could easily spread FUD and get people to confuse piracy with legitimate uses of the MP3 format.
Now, it will be much easier for MP3 advocates to show that it is up to the individual who owns the rights to the music to decide the level of protection to be implemented. It draws a clear line between illegal MP3 distribution (a protected MP3 that has been cracked), and legal MP3 distribution (an uprotected MP3).
The RIAA wants to ban MP3 all together. The adding of this feature by Diamond makes it clear that if they continue pressing their case, they are acting to enforce a monopoly, not acting to protect their assets.
I applaud Diamond for this decision (and I am no big fan of Diamond Multimedia... they abused me terribly as an owner of one of the orginal Wietek 9000 based Viper video cards, and I am still ticked off). They have made a smart tactical move here, and probably done a lot to protect the future of MP3.
Don't ever link freedom of speech with firearm ownership.
Are you trying to limit my free speech?
:)
(sorry, could not resist)
Then in this case we must obviously conclude that government knows best, as the wide-scale distribution of firearms has been a social cataclysm for the United States.
u re/g
I respect your opinion, and believe that you think big government does know best. I am not trying to change your mind, I agree to disagree.
I just prefer people to be consistent in their beliefs. Here is a unix helper, apply it to the above quote:
s/firearms/freespeech/g
s/firearms/freedomofassembly/g
s/firearms/freedomofreligion/g
s/firearms/freedomfromunreasonablesearchandsezi
s/firearms/presumptionofinnocence/g
You get the idea. All of the above have been a "social cataclysm" in many ways at many times. You believe that the best protection is for the power to reside with the government, I believe that the best protection is for the power to reside with the individual, neither of us has a perfect solution, both of us would like it to be better.
Bill "Not trying to start a fight" Kilgallon
I couldn't help notice a curious inconsistency here between this story and the Colorado shooting story (which I believe does not belong on Slashdot, but since it is there I will respond).
.001 percent.
Anyway, a number of posters from down under stated in the other thread about what a stroke of genius it was for the Australian government to make it completely illegal for private individuals with no criminal background and no crimnal intent to own a firearm.
Presumably, this was done because the benefits of the vast majority of legal firearm use and ownership (I bet around 99.999%) were deemed not as important as the damages caused by the remaining
Well, Australians, make up your mind. Here in America we have the first two ammendments to the consititution, the first protects the right to free speech, the second protects the right to own firearms. The founding fathers knew that both of these rights will cause some damage, but that also knew that each was far more dangerous in the hands of the government then in the hands of the individual.
Guns and words are both very dangerous. The spoken word has killed far more people then firearms ever will. If guns kill people, then words kill nations.
The founding fathers of the United States got one thing right... Governments are far more dangerous (and as an aside, far more stupid) than individuals. The bill of rights explicitly empowers the individuals at the cost of the government specifically for the purpose of protecting the individual from the government. Both the first AND the second ammendment are critical towards those ends. The first two ammendments protect each other... they simply make Tyranny mathmatically impossible.
So I guess what I am saying is that you should either decide that the government knows whats best and should have strict control and licensing of all dangerous behavior (like free speech and firearm ownership), or you should decide that the individual knows best and minimize governmental controls wherever possible (like limiting free speech restrictions to libel laws and limiting firearm restrictions to preventing felons and psychopaths from possessing firearms).
Make up your mind!