He didn't get 3 million visitors... he got 3.5 million hits. Each page has at least 1 hit, plus one more for each graphic, and embedded object like music, or flash animation. Most people will hit a few pages, so it adds up quickly. A good log analyzer can convert that to unique visitors with a very small margin of error.
You know, as little as I like MS SQL Server (for it's licensing, and price points vs. scalbility), it's REALLY powerful. MySQL does NOT do subselects. It's default installation doesn't support transactions. Splitting tables across files is not supported. The developer tools are nothing compared to the combination of Prolier (for tacing all events, and selectivly reporting on events, and execution times) and Query Analyzer (which allows you to display/edit/run queries, and can also diagram the internal execution, and optimizations of a query).
Basically, although the price may be nice, and the fuzzy feeling of using software which is created by a company nice enough to release it for free, it's simply not condusive to quick development of large applications. Which, if you're a dedicated individual with limited means, means that you'll just have to invest time into getting it right. Most developers, and development houses I work with really need to be able to get quick answers to their many problems, and MySQL would be innapropriate for them.
I can't believe I'm adding to this conversation, but here I go. Voltage will not kill you. Current will. It takes.1 milliamp across the heart to cause problems, and 1mA to kill. The human body has a nominal resistance (left hand to right hand) of a few Megaohms for the most part, but it has been measures as low as 300 Kohms in certains conditions (wet, and bleeding). Taking these number, you go with about 30 volts is dangerous, for a conservative amount. You cannot get 1 amp across your body at 5V. V=IR does not allow for that.
Unless you're in a strong magnetic field, but that's for another day....
giggle. You have nothing to worry about. 5v is not harmful under real-world circumstances. However, you would be out a $130 keyboard. So pay $230, and get the industrial NEMA 4X version. Awww. Yeah.
Sorry to say this, but I know plenty of musicians who use windows for music production. Live. Even such "Kiddie Grade" programs, like MixMan Studio, are amizingly effective if you use your own samples, and throw a little beat matching with wax on it. Most of the Mac stuff is production quality, and the BeOS stuff is still not too well known.
So why is linux good for this? Simple:
Multithreaded across multiple processors. Win 98 can't do this, and NT won't support a lot of hardware, or run some of the software.
Efficiency. Running X with a lightweight WM, and very little other stuff will generally beat out Windows in terms of OS overhead, and available clock cylces to mix it up wit' (,yo!).
Stability. I have had stuff crash on stage for me. Uncool.
OK, so what does windows have going for it? Glad you asked:
Lots of software. 'nuff said.
Support for peripherals. Nothing sucks more than the sound chips in a laptop. Almost any outboard processor would be better. The real high-end stuff like the Event Layla, won't run on Linux. Forget USB devices.
So if I wuz going to sit down and write my ultimate appz for live performance, what would I do? 1] KeyKit for MIDI support. 2] Something like TerminatorX for loops, but with the ability to sync to a clock. 3] a software synth like re-birth. Add some turntables, and my board, and life will be good.
I'm currently working on an outdoor pc system designed to basically work in man holes (15 feet fully submersible for prolonged periods, dust/water proof). What you need (and this is only one solution, but it is cheap) is a single board computer, power supply, NEMA 4 rated enclosure, and applicable glands to bring the wires out. Basically you mount everything inside your box (generally made from fiberglass, aluminum or some type of plastic), install the glands (watertight cable feed throughs), and mount this baby.
JumpTec has some of the systems you could use, and more importantly has an IDE flash disk that makes all this easy to do without a hard disk. Also Win Systems is a pretty popular place to get PC/104 embedded systems.
As for the case, Hoffman has all the enclosures you could ever need (unless you're working in man holes).
Some people have recomended Dolche, but I'd avoid them as they are way expensive. More useful for interactive systems.
good luck
Zoning out for fun, and proffit
on
Interface Zen
·
· Score: 2
Best user interface for zoning out I've seen so far is the old ViewLogix ECAD system. 1 letter commands, and mouse for connecting the parts. As a test, I decided to CAD the PC-XT, and it took 30 minutes. 30 minutes to CAD out a PC motherboard.
But, alas, they made the windows version. They got rid of middle mouse button support after a while. Then the command keys became chord combinations. All bad. I just couldn't get into it.
Many programs have this whole "mouse for drawing, and keyboard for entering command" thing going, but I just haven't found too many that do it well. AutoCAD, for instance... not being extremely familiar with it, but I just couldn't get into the whole picking from the palette thing, or type in the primitive you were trying to draw, and then moving hands to the keybaord to punch in parameters... there must be a better way...
And as for arrow keys, I'm going to have to disagree here... there is nothing intuative, or good about using 'hjkl' for movement. Except that your terminal software doesn't need to send extended control characters to make it work (very useful when using the M$ telnet abortion. VT100 emulation, and sends ANSI ID, what?!?).
And as a finaly note, I do agree with most of what the author is saying, but the big thing missing here is choice. I normally work a bunch of differnt editors, and I choose them based on suitability to task. XEMACS has it hands down when coding (for me). Syntax highlighting, auto tabbing, parenthases matching, and numerous other nifties make my life easier, and make the code roll out faster. This is because it takes care of crap that I don't want to deal with.
When editing text files, and long config files, and most other things.... vi rules. it has a faster search system (fewer keystrokes to get it to give you the love you need), and is so much faster to load. Doesn't use up megs of swap, either.
Summary: Utiliy, familiarity, and suitability should choose your editor, and input device. There is no absolute on any.
The picture is available her e, and as you can see it is not a dual gated FET, but just has a gate that wraps around. Granted, I'm fairly sure that the picture is not to scale.
It looks like these suckers will require a couple of poly layers to get the gate to wrap around the channel... will that require any type of mass changes to the fab process (besides going to, oh, I don't know, the x-ray band for the masking)
Since the channel is about 18nm wide, these babies will have a (reletively) massive amount of resitance, as oppsed to the Bell Labs design which has a small gate, but a fairly large channel. Will this effect the charging of the next few gates down the line from them because...
... the gates seem to be rather large, and pretty full of poly. Will they have larger gate capacitances, and require more current to switch at the same speed?
In a nutshell, would someone use these devices in high-performance applications, or would they only be suitable for getting better density on a chip? Oh ya, my knowledge of VLSI sucks, so please be kind with flames.
John, I usually enjoy reading your articles, but this time I really have to ask: Are you on smack?
What you are proposing is a system by which a third party rates, and cuts down your choices for you. This is mass censorship. Nothing less. Now I know that you'll argue that "ya, well you can choose to lower the level at which you take in the information, and get more noise", but you wind up with a largly influential body dictating the mainstream, instead of what's good. Microsoft? Car companies? VHS?
Slashdot works because even if a couple people aren't working for the better good, it's ok. Most people will read at a real low level. If we all went with what was good, then we run the risk of missing smaller, possibly useful counter-points, and other less-popular, or even just less well written ideas.
And an AI? Great. We're already having problems with just the I. A person is intelligent, people are stupid (with appologies to who ever originally wrote that).
I think I'l just stick with consumer reports, for now.
So you have a disorder that has an amazing number of common personality quirks associated with it, and really, nothing that is all that unusal. That in itself promotes a little uncertainty in me about how good the research on the syndrome is....but then actually putting it on print that maybe a good number of geeks have this syndrome...now that's a bold statement.
I find a serious lack of connection in the article. From the people with Asperger's syndrome don't pick up on non-verbal emotional cues in person to person communication to And boy, are these people apt to play with technology. I can see there might be a connection with "these people are more likely to preffer more concrete forms of communication, like e-mail, or letter writing", but author failed to convince me of his point that Asperger's makes for a good geek, and that they are all around. Please correct me if I read it wrong.
You can reproduce a bandwidth limited signal exactly through 2x the highest frequency with perfect sampling.
So what is the catch? "Perfect Sampling". Basically to 'sample' as it applies to the theory you discuss, you need to filter the input at 1/2 your sampling frequency (a perfect filter, that is, which is unattainable in real-time). Then you multiply the input by a train of impulses at the sampling frequency. An impulse is described as a signal with infinate magnitude, and no width, but has an area of exacly 1.
To get the signal out, you simply multiply the pulse string by a low-pass filter, and ta-da, instant, perfect output (the LPF is one of the previously mentioned non-realtime jobs, that are practically worthless)
You posted that you would get out a triangle wave with only the 3 samples taken. This is incorrect. A triangle wave is made up of frequency components in the fundamental, 2nd, 3rd, 4th...and on with exponentially decreasing values. The perfect filter would filter out all the 2nd, and higher harmonics, leaving a sin wave.
OK...so that's theorhetical....what's reality? You take you signal, high pass filter it (1st order) to remove DC. Maybe lowpass filter it with a 2nd order filter. Take and Analog sample (sample and hold circuit), and then convert to digital. What you end up with closely approximates the signal being multiplied by a string of PI functions (basically a string of rectangles who's area in this case is 1, just like the impulse). To play back, you send the sampled input through a filter that acts like a LPF. The problem is that the frequency components of the resulting signal are not the same as what came out. When you run the math (and please forgive me for not giving the proof), you need to boost the middle in order to get back what you started with.
The point I'm making is that sampling is a bit of an art. The real trick to getting what you want out is the input/output conditioning. I could have a 32-bit ADC, and DAC, and get ass-like performance if I start using bad op-amps, crappy caps, and 1st order filters. If the filtering IS bad, then ya, you WOULD get a triangle wave out.
OK, so you've installed Red Hat and played with everything, and seen about a Gig of HD space go "bye bye" with all the ferver of a hungry tiger to a sleeping zebra. Now you have a ton of crap, and my guess is that you're not going to use all of it. If you feel like really hacking your system, you have to go around RH's config/init/rc files, and make sure not to break too much. After a bit you're getting sick of package dependancies, and the possible bloat they entail.
That's why you use Slackware. It's dumb. Rock simple. Somebody put a cute installer (that you will rarely ever use to install anything after the initial install) on Linux, and made it mostly work (remember how Slack's 3.something had a umount that wouldn't umount NFS directories on 2.0 kernels?). The rc files weren't a mess of calls to other files, and "." this file for config information. They were very straight ahead, and just did the work.
Now would this be good for the home user with little experience? Maybe, if he/she/it were trying to learn as much about the workings of Linux as possible. If this person just wanted to play, then maybe some other distribution would be a bit better. Most of the customer installs I do, I use RedHat because they have vendor support available, and the upgrades can generally be done by the end user by doing the RPM dance. But when it comes to a simple machine to take care of bidness without a whole lot of GNOME/KDE/E/config files/fancy UI to deal with system tasks, I'll deal with slack. Glad the change happened.
You are, of course, correct in your post...What I was talking about is mostly the super-introverted, or super-crude type geeks who gweep for too long everyday, and aren't capable of coming up with a useable pick-up line (my favorite, actually is 'Hi.'), or are just too nervous in any type of flirting situation (gross generalization). Do geeks have more class? Some, certainly. Are they nicer people? In general, I'd have to say yes. I just know too many geeks who couldn't pull off talking to someone new at a party without having other people there to help them out.
I'm also not talking about overly manly, and slobinly 'jocks' and thier aleged social graces (you know, people who are usually described as pigs). The less said the better.
OK. I can dig myself a huge hole here, but hopefully I made my point: Many geeks need a refresher on how to be social. Not saying that the general populous isn't rude, just that they aren't as shy. I appologize if that didn't come through in the original post.
People who are all about "sports, drinking beer, and getting laid" are not any more well rounded than people who are all about "hacking, Quaking, and geeking out". What they are is more socially adept. Sorry to say this, but sports, drinking, and getting laid are generally social events. People who do this a lot, are going to be better at it.
Does it mean that we are worse at being romantic, and caring, and good in bed? No, certainly not. Does it mean we're worse at picking up chicks at bars, and generally socializing? The answer is, saddly, yes. I believe that a widespread lack of social graces would lead people to think that we're not as well rounded as other people, when in reality the problem is that most geeks aren't into the same things as the people who are assuming we're not well rounded.
I've seen two kinds of geek women in any sort of numbers: The uber-strong, self relient types who give a big, old 'FU' to the world around them. These types of women are fine for just about any type of realtionship, if they can put up with you. The second type is what I find to be the most common type: the one who wasn't popular in high school, and never got over it.
You know you've seen this geek girl...regardless of how attractive she is, how nice, how socialy adept she is, she still suffers from confidence problems from growing up. Even after going to college, and (hopefully) learning that there are a lot of people around just like her, she still sees herself as meek, and awash in a see of people who will pick on her.
If you date this woman you will be happy. Until she gets even the slightest incling that someone doesn't like her. Or someone picks on her...etc... be prepared to have to reassure her of many basic things. Heaven forbid someone actually says some bad about her out loud, then you're in a world of suffering for days.
Am I being insensative? Well, yes. I am intentionally ignoring the emotional state of the person actually experiencing the pain. My point is that if you pick the wrong geek girl, and I dare say that there are many like this, you cold wind up being more of an emotional crutch than a boyfriend/girlfriend.
Traffic shaping is part of the protocol, and is sometimes necessary. Cisco is merely utalizing sleazy marketing tactics to pawn off this feature for all the wrong reasons. There has never been anything to stop people from doing this in the past, except that they were ignorant to the fact that it could be done.
If we call this ultimate act of Kenedy Stupidity (there are many examples) a 'trajedy', what do we reserve for mass destruction? Earthquakes? Floods? Famine?
At best, this whole incident can be considered unfortunate, and at worst another example of a Kennedy doing something stupid and offing himself, and some hapless participants.
As for the investigation, that is standard operating procedure. Fishing boats get pretty much the same treatment when they go down. No press coverage though (outside of New Bedford or Gloucester where these vessels naturally came from). Usually there isn't as much hope, or hype.
High powered UV Lasers are not a big deal, though...I have seen home built kits for a 100,000 Watt UV laser using only a big ass capacitor, ignition coil, vacum pump, spark gap, and battery. Granted it's only on for a few nanoseconds, but that would be enough.
A little bit better equipment, and different trigger mechanism, and its forseeable to have a 1000W laser for a few milliseconds. Get your self a high voltage inverter for the 100mA stun current, and you are so all set.
I'm more concerned with what happens when you get one of these babies running. Sure, the cops could use it to stun the allged assailant, or the alleged assailant can use it to escape from the cops. All this is proving is that the tools are getting better, but how they're used may need to catch up to the actual technology.
...but certainly not completely accurate. If this article was any cheerier, I'd have to puke.
First off, the 2038 problem is glazed over rather quickly, and then passed off as easily fixable. While it is true that fixing the problem with OpenSource software is rather simple, there are still binary-only programs out there that require fixing.
The size of the date field is defined in only one place in any Unix system. This is a variable called time_t. Moving from a 32-bit chip to a 64-bit chip involves, among other unrelated things, merely changing the definition of time_t in this one place from 32 bits to 64 bits. When the operating system is then recompiled, it will use the new definition and store all dates in 64 bits from then on.
The author neglects to mention that you will then need to recompile anything that ever used that constant for that architechture. This is fine for new architechtures, but has the distinct possibility of killing off any 32-bit hardware. Anyone can change the definition of time_t to 'long long time_t', recompile the kernel, and then watch as your programs seg fault.
In the 'Virus-Proof' discussion the author does make a good point that viruses are significantly more difficult to write for UNIX than they are for DOS/Windows. They are not impossible to write though. The Macro Virus argument is not even an OS issue; it is an issue of poor software implementation. You can bet if MS ported Word to Linux, that the macro viruses would come with it.
In dismissing the Mindcraft study (the first one), the author overlooks a good point that came out of that experiance. Linux is not a magic bullet for instant performance, and stability. Like other OSes it will require careful set-up, and tuning. It is important not to over look that fact when explaining why it typically takes about 2 days to get a Linux box working well at high server loads.
In the server discussion the author neglects (quite glaringly) to mention that Linux cannot handle large files. If your corporation will require files over 2GB in size, you can forget about it. Instantly remove Linux from the list of acceptable OSes.
The was only a quick mention of FreeBSD in the article saying how Linux is almost as fast now. I thought this was an interesting oversight. FreeBSD is more stable than Linux, and more refined. It is also faster on some operations. It is a viable OS for organizations that need a fast, dedicated server, and have no intention on using Gee-Whizz-Bang New Peripheral of the Minute type hardware. Ignoring it makes it look like a completely biased report.
All in all it is a good summary fo Linux's features, but I think the style is a little too glowing for some people to swallow the article as a whole.
How unusual...people in silicon valley pimping themselves out to the highest bidder? What next? Maybe we'll start seeing internet companies with high stock prices that have never made a profit...oh...wait...
Not to be a pain in the ass, but you must remember that Apple bought the GUI ideas from Xerox. One piece design? TRS-80 Model III & IV. Not to mention that the Mac development environment has a remarkable similarity to UNIX utilities. Don't some of them use IDE drives now?
What I'm getting at is that Apples got its biggest innovation (GUI for everything) from someone else. They had the vision, yes, but lets not go out and say that people are stealing ideas here. Ideas have been bought, and reworked since the beinging of time.
What I will concede to is that Macs have better workmanship/assembly, and overall hardware quality than most PCs I've seen. The little bomb pisses me off, though.
Slashdot Mirror
He didn't get 3 million visitors... he got 3.5 million hits. Each page has at least 1 hit, plus one more for each graphic, and embedded object like music, or flash animation. Most people will hit a few pages, so it adds up quickly. A good log analyzer can convert that to unique visitors with a very small margin of error.
You know, as little as I like MS SQL Server (for it's licensing, and price points vs. scalbility), it's REALLY powerful. MySQL does NOT do subselects. It's default installation doesn't support transactions. Splitting tables across files is not supported. The developer tools are nothing compared to the combination of Prolier (for tacing all events, and selectivly reporting on events, and execution times) and Query Analyzer (which allows you to display/edit/run queries, and can also diagram the internal execution, and optimizations of a query).
Basically, although the price may be nice, and the fuzzy feeling of using software which is created by a company nice enough to release it for free, it's simply not condusive to quick development of large applications. Which, if you're a dedicated individual with limited means, means that you'll just have to invest time into getting it right. Most developers, and development houses I work with really need to be able to get quick answers to their many problems, and MySQL would be innapropriate for them.
That said, all my businesses run off of MySQL.
I can't believe I'm adding to this conversation, but here I go. Voltage will not kill you. Current will. It takes .1 milliamp across the heart to cause problems, and 1mA to kill. The human body has a nominal resistance (left hand to right hand) of a few Megaohms for the most part, but it has been measures as low as 300 Kohms in certains conditions (wet, and bleeding). Taking these number, you go with about 30 volts is dangerous, for a conservative amount. You cannot get 1 amp across your body at 5V. V=IR does not allow for that.
Unless you're in a strong magnetic field, but that's for another day....
Distributed denial of service? It's called service pack 2.
giggle. You have nothing to worry about. 5v is not harmful under real-world circumstances. However, you would be out a $130 keyboard. So pay $230, and get the industrial NEMA 4X version. Awww. Yeah.
Sorry to say this, but I know plenty of musicians who use windows for music production. Live. Even such "Kiddie Grade" programs, like MixMan Studio, are amizingly effective if you use your own samples, and throw a little beat matching with wax on it. Most of the Mac stuff is production quality, and the BeOS stuff is still not too well known.
So why is linux good for this? Simple:
OK, so what does windows have going for it? Glad you asked:
So if I wuz going to sit down and write my ultimate appz for live performance, what would I do? 1] KeyKit for MIDI support. 2] Something like TerminatorX for loops, but with the ability to sync to a clock. 3] a software synth like re-birth. Add some turntables, and my board, and life will be good.
opinions? Am I wrong? Better ideas?
To qualify this guy's remark, that was a direct quote from Hemos.
I think I can help you.
I'm currently working on an outdoor pc system designed to basically work in man holes (15 feet fully submersible for prolonged periods, dust/water proof). What you need (and this is only one solution, but it is cheap) is a single board computer, power supply, NEMA 4 rated enclosure, and applicable glands to bring the wires out. Basically you mount everything inside your box (generally made from fiberglass, aluminum or some type of plastic), install the glands (watertight cable feed throughs), and mount this baby.
JumpTec has some of the systems you could use, and more importantly has an IDE flash disk that makes all this easy to do without a hard disk. Also Win Systems is a pretty popular place to get PC/104 embedded systems.
As for the case, Hoffman has all the enclosures you could ever need (unless you're working in man holes).
Some people have recomended Dolche, but I'd avoid them as they are way expensive. More useful for interactive systems.
good luck
Best user interface for zoning out I've seen so far is the old ViewLogix ECAD system. 1 letter commands, and mouse for connecting the parts. As a test, I decided to CAD the PC-XT, and it took 30 minutes. 30 minutes to CAD out a PC motherboard.
But, alas, they made the windows version. They got rid of middle mouse button support after a while. Then the command keys became chord combinations. All bad. I just couldn't get into it.
Many programs have this whole "mouse for drawing, and keyboard for entering command" thing going, but I just haven't found too many that do it well. AutoCAD, for instance... not being extremely familiar with it, but I just couldn't get into the whole picking from the palette thing, or type in the primitive you were trying to draw, and then moving hands to the keybaord to punch in parameters... there must be a better way...
And as for arrow keys, I'm going to have to disagree here... there is nothing intuative, or good about using 'hjkl' for movement. Except that your terminal software doesn't need to send extended control characters to make it work (very useful when using the M$ telnet abortion. VT100 emulation, and sends ANSI ID, what?!?).
And as a finaly note, I do agree with most of what the author is saying, but the big thing missing here is choice. I normally work a bunch of differnt editors, and I choose them based on suitability to task. XEMACS has it hands down when coding (for me). Syntax highlighting, auto tabbing, parenthases matching, and numerous other nifties make my life easier, and make the code roll out faster. This is because it takes care of crap that I don't want to deal with.
When editing text files, and long config files, and most other things.... vi rules. it has a faster search system (fewer keystrokes to get it to give you the love you need), and is so much faster to load. Doesn't use up megs of swap, either.
Summary: Utiliy, familiarity, and suitability should choose your editor, and input device. There is no absolute on any.
The picture is available her e, and as you can see it is not a dual gated FET, but just has a gate that wraps around. Granted, I'm fairly sure that the picture is not to scale.
Comments? And thank you for an intelligent reply.
So can anyone answer a couple of questions?
It looks like these suckers will require a couple of poly layers to get the gate to wrap around the channel... will that require any type of mass changes to the fab process (besides going to, oh, I don't know, the x-ray band for the masking)
Since the channel is about 18nm wide, these babies will have a (reletively) massive amount of resitance, as oppsed to the Bell Labs design which has a small gate, but a fairly large channel. Will this effect the charging of the next few gates down the line from them because...
In a nutshell, would someone use these devices in high-performance applications, or would they only be suitable for getting better density on a chip? Oh ya, my knowledge of VLSI sucks, so please be kind with flames.
John, I usually enjoy reading your articles, but this time I really have to ask: Are you on smack?
What you are proposing is a system by which a third party rates, and cuts down your choices for you. This is mass censorship. Nothing less. Now I know that you'll argue that "ya, well you can choose to lower the level at which you take in the information, and get more noise", but you wind up with a largly influential body dictating the mainstream, instead of what's good. Microsoft? Car companies? VHS?
Slashdot works because even if a couple people aren't working for the better good, it's ok. Most people will read at a real low level. If we all went with what was good, then we run the risk of missing smaller, possibly useful counter-points, and other less-popular, or even just less well written ideas.
And an AI? Great. We're already having problems with just the I. A person is intelligent, people are stupid (with appologies to who ever originally wrote that).
I think I'l just stick with consumer reports, for now.
So you have a disorder that has an amazing number of common personality quirks associated with it, and really, nothing that is all that unusal. That in itself promotes a little uncertainty in me about how good the research on the syndrome is....but then actually putting it on print that maybe a good number of geeks have this syndrome...now that's a bold statement.
I find a serious lack of connection in the article. From the people with Asperger's syndrome don't pick up on non-verbal emotional cues in person to person communication to And boy, are these people apt to play with technology. I can see there might be a connection with "these people are more likely to preffer more concrete forms of communication, like e-mail, or letter writing", but author failed to convince me of his point that Asperger's makes for a good geek, and that they are all around. Please correct me if I read it wrong.
NO! NO! NO! NO!
You can reproduce a bandwidth limited signal exactly through 2x the highest frequency with perfect sampling.
So what is the catch? "Perfect Sampling". Basically to 'sample' as it applies to the theory you discuss, you need to filter the input at 1/2 your sampling frequency (a perfect filter, that is, which is unattainable in real-time). Then you multiply the input by a train of impulses at the sampling frequency. An impulse is described as a signal with infinate magnitude, and no width, but has an area of exacly 1.
To get the signal out, you simply multiply the pulse string by a low-pass filter, and ta-da, instant, perfect output (the LPF is one of the previously mentioned non-realtime jobs, that are practically worthless)
You posted that you would get out a triangle wave with only the 3 samples taken. This is incorrect. A triangle wave is made up of frequency components in the fundamental, 2nd, 3rd, 4th...and on with exponentially decreasing values. The perfect filter would filter out all the 2nd, and higher harmonics, leaving a sin wave.
OK...so that's theorhetical....what's reality? You take you signal, high pass filter it (1st order) to remove DC. Maybe lowpass filter it with a 2nd order filter. Take and Analog sample (sample and hold circuit), and then convert to digital. What you end up with closely approximates the signal being multiplied by a string of PI functions (basically a string of rectangles who's area in this case is 1, just like the impulse). To play back, you send the sampled input through a filter that acts like a LPF. The problem is that the frequency components of the resulting signal are not the same as what came out. When you run the math (and please forgive me for not giving the proof), you need to boost the middle in order to get back what you started with.
The point I'm making is that sampling is a bit of an art. The real trick to getting what you want out is the input/output conditioning. I could have a 32-bit ADC, and DAC, and get ass-like performance if I start using bad op-amps, crappy caps, and 1st order filters. If the filtering IS bad, then ya, you WOULD get a triangle wave out.
OK...I think I've gone on enough.
OK, so you've installed Red Hat and played with everything, and seen about a Gig of HD space go "bye bye" with all the ferver of a hungry tiger to a sleeping zebra. Now you have a ton of crap, and my guess is that you're not going to use all of it. If you feel like really hacking your system, you have to go around RH's config/init/rc files, and make sure not to break too much. After a bit you're getting sick of package dependancies, and the possible bloat they entail.
That's why you use Slackware. It's dumb. Rock simple. Somebody put a cute installer (that you will rarely ever use to install anything after the initial install) on Linux, and made it mostly work (remember how Slack's 3.something had a umount that wouldn't umount NFS directories on 2.0 kernels?). The rc files weren't a mess of calls to other files, and "." this file for config information. They were very straight ahead, and just did the work.
Now would this be good for the home user with little experience? Maybe, if he/she/it were trying to learn as much about the workings of Linux as possible. If this person just wanted to play, then maybe some other distribution would be a bit better. Most of the customer installs I do, I use RedHat because they have vendor support available, and the upgrades can generally be done by the end user by doing the RPM dance. But when it comes to a simple machine to take care of bidness without a whole lot of GNOME/KDE/E/config files/fancy UI to deal with system tasks, I'll deal with slack. Glad the change happened.
You are, of course, correct in your post...What I was talking about is mostly the super-introverted, or super-crude type geeks who gweep for too long everyday, and aren't capable of coming up with a useable pick-up line (my favorite, actually is 'Hi.'), or are just too nervous in any type of flirting situation (gross generalization). Do geeks have more class? Some, certainly. Are they nicer people? In general, I'd have to say yes. I just know too many geeks who couldn't pull off talking to someone new at a party without having other people there to help them out.
I'm also not talking about overly manly, and slobinly 'jocks' and thier aleged social graces (you know, people who are usually described as pigs). The less said the better.
OK. I can dig myself a huge hole here, but hopefully I made my point: Many geeks need a refresher on how to be social. Not saying that the general populous isn't rude, just that they aren't as shy. I appologize if that didn't come through in the original post.
People who are all about "sports, drinking beer, and getting laid" are not any more well rounded than people who are all about "hacking, Quaking, and geeking out". What they are is more socially adept. Sorry to say this, but sports, drinking, and getting laid are generally social events. People who do this a lot, are going to be better at it.
Does it mean that we are worse at being romantic, and caring, and good in bed? No, certainly not. Does it mean we're worse at picking up chicks at bars, and generally socializing? The answer is, saddly, yes. I believe that a widespread lack of social graces would lead people to think that we're not as well rounded as other people, when in reality the problem is that most geeks aren't into the same things as the people who are assuming we're not well rounded.
Hold your horses, bucky....
DISCLAIMER: gross generalizations follow
I've seen two kinds of geek women in any sort of numbers: The uber-strong, self relient types who give a big, old 'FU' to the world around them. These types of women are fine for just about any type of realtionship, if they can put up with you. The second type is what I find to be the most common type: the one who wasn't popular in high school, and never got over it.
You know you've seen this geek girl...regardless of how attractive she is, how nice, how socialy adept she is, she still suffers from confidence problems from growing up. Even after going to college, and (hopefully) learning that there are a lot of people around just like her, she still sees herself as meek, and awash in a see of people who will pick on her.
If you date this woman you will be happy. Until she gets even the slightest incling that someone doesn't like her. Or someone picks on her...etc... be prepared to have to reassure her of many basic things. Heaven forbid someone actually says some bad about her out loud, then you're in a world of suffering for days.
Am I being insensative? Well, yes. I am intentionally ignoring the emotional state of the person actually experiencing the pain. My point is that if you pick the wrong geek girl, and I dare say that there are many like this, you cold wind up being more of an emotional crutch than a boyfriend/girlfriend.
Flame away
No this is nothing like that...
Traffic shaping is part of the protocol, and is sometimes necessary. Cisco is merely utalizing sleazy marketing tactics to pawn off this feature for all the wrong reasons. There has never been anything to stop people from doing this in the past, except that they were ignorant to the fact that it could be done.
If we call this ultimate act of Kenedy Stupidity (there are many examples) a 'trajedy', what do we reserve for mass destruction? Earthquakes? Floods? Famine?
At best, this whole incident can be considered unfortunate, and at worst another example of a Kennedy doing something stupid and offing himself, and some hapless participants.
As for the investigation, that is standard operating procedure. Fishing boats get pretty much the same treatment when they go down. No press coverage though (outside of New Bedford or Gloucester where these vessels naturally came from). Usually there isn't as much hope, or hype.
High powered UV Lasers are not a big deal, though...I have seen home built kits for a 100,000 Watt UV laser using only a big ass capacitor, ignition coil, vacum pump, spark gap, and battery. Granted it's only on for a few nanoseconds, but that would be enough.
A little bit better equipment, and different trigger mechanism, and its forseeable to have a 1000W laser for a few milliseconds. Get your self a high voltage inverter for the 100mA stun current, and you are so all set.
I'm more concerned with what happens when you get one of these babies running. Sure, the cops could use it to stun the allged assailant, or the alleged assailant can use it to escape from the cops. All this is proving is that the tools are getting better, but how they're used may need to catch up to the actual technology.
...but certainly not completely accurate. If this article was any cheerier, I'd have to puke.
First off, the 2038 problem is glazed over rather quickly, and then passed off as easily fixable. While it is true that fixing the problem with OpenSource software is rather simple, there are still binary-only programs out there that require fixing.
The author neglects to mention that you will then need to recompile anything that ever used that constant for that architechture. This is fine for new architechtures, but has the distinct possibility of killing off any 32-bit hardware. Anyone can change the definition of time_t to 'long long time_t', recompile the kernel, and then watch as your programs seg fault.
In the 'Virus-Proof' discussion the author does make a good point that viruses are significantly more difficult to write for UNIX than they are for DOS/Windows. They are not impossible to write though. The Macro Virus argument is not even an OS issue; it is an issue of poor software implementation. You can bet if MS ported Word to Linux, that the macro viruses would come with it.
In dismissing the Mindcraft study (the first one), the author overlooks a good point that came out of that experiance. Linux is not a magic bullet for instant performance, and stability. Like other OSes it will require careful set-up, and tuning. It is important not to over look that fact when explaining why it typically takes about 2 days to get a Linux box working well at high server loads.
In the server discussion the author neglects (quite glaringly) to mention that Linux cannot handle large files. If your corporation will require files over 2GB in size, you can forget about it. Instantly remove Linux from the list of acceptable OSes.
The was only a quick mention of FreeBSD in the article saying how Linux is almost as fast now. I thought this was an interesting oversight. FreeBSD is more stable than Linux, and more refined. It is also faster on some operations. It is a viable OS for organizations that need a fast, dedicated server, and have no intention on using Gee-Whizz-Bang New Peripheral of the Minute type hardware. Ignoring it makes it look like a completely biased report.
All in all it is a good summary fo Linux's features, but I think the style is a little too glowing for some people to swallow the article as a whole.
How unusual...people in silicon valley pimping themselves out to the highest bidder? What next? Maybe we'll start seeing internet companies with high stock prices that have never made a profit...oh...wait...
Not to be a pain in the ass, but you must remember that Apple bought the GUI ideas from Xerox. One piece design? TRS-80 Model III & IV. Not to mention that the Mac development environment has a remarkable similarity to UNIX utilities. Don't some of them use IDE drives now?
What I'm getting at is that Apples got its biggest innovation (GUI for everything) from someone else. They had the vision, yes, but lets not go out and say that people are stealing ideas here. Ideas have been bought, and reworked since the beinging of time.
What I will concede to is that Macs have better workmanship/assembly, and overall hardware quality than most PCs I've seen. The little bomb pisses me off, though.