We must not forget that quantum theory (and its application in particle physics) is the most accurate theory / model in the world.
True.
However, we don't understand how it works. Quantum theory is a bunch of constants and equations, and it all works but we don't understand why. The "many-worlds interpretation" of quantum mechanics suggests that parallel universes have something to do with how quantum mechanics works.
P.S. We also don't understand why quantum mechanics rules apply at very small scales, but very different rules apply at larger scales. (A photon can seem to go through two slits at once, but you won't get a baseball to do that trick, or even a really tiny speck of dust.)
This demonstrates that light can act like a wave, and have a diffraction pattern.
The "parallel universe" part comes in to explain why it still works if you fire single photons, but since you can't fire single photons (or easily check the results if you could), this isn't really a "home test" of any use.
The fact that single photons can make a diffraction pattern, seemingly interfering with themselves, is a truly weird feature of quantum mechanics (but then, I repeat myself -- quantum mechanics is always truly weird!). And one of the explanations proposed is that light in parallel universes is somehow causing the interference with the single photons in this universe.
Another explanation is that light sometimes acts as a particle, and sometimes as a wave, and when you detect a single photon coming through a slit, you are forcing that photon to act like a particle, and it will not throw a diffraction pattern; but if there is no measurement to decide which slit the photon passed through, the light can act as a wave instead of a particle, and can have an interference pattern.
This page lists various explanations of why the single-photon two-slit experiment behaves as it does. One of the explanations is the parallel-universes one.
Here's just the part with the "Many-Worlds Interpretation":
There are two sets of universes, each containing a version of our photon, one set in which the photon passes through the left slit and one set in which it passes through the right. (Actually there are an even greater number of universes in which the experiment is never carried out in the first place, but we are ignoring those.) The photons are particles that carry a property called "quantum phase" which oscillates as they travel. Two universes which are identical except for the photon arriving at a certain point on the film with opposite phases, cancel each other out. Neither one is "real". Maybe it is more correct to say that the multiverse cannot contain two such contradictory universes in the first place, rather than to imagine them existing, and then meeting and going "poof".
The renderings show a directional pad, a pair of joysticks, four buttons, and what looks like a rocker switch.
In other words, the standard set of controls on a typical console game pad these days.
So, this will be great for playing any game that can be mapped to those controls, and doesn't need more performance than a VIA Eden chip at 533 MHz can provide. (Hint: Doom III is not going to run on this thing.) Oh, and don't forget that the screen is only 4 inches, so you'll never play games like StarCraft on it unless you have eyes like an eagle.
Summary: this would be great for playing old console games, if anyone bothered to port them from the console to this thing. And it would be great for arcade emulation for low-detail games.
Would you pay over $500 for a hard-to-carry gadget that could only do that? Me neither.
...in about a year, after this crashes and burns horribly in the marketplace, when they dump the remaining inventory through TigerDirect or eBay or something. After the miserable failure of this product, we will probably be able to get one for a couple hundred dollars or so.
I mean, look at the thing. $500, then you get to pay more to turn on the disabled features? A weird, non-foldable shape that won't fit in a pocket and might not even fit in a briefcase? This thing is a trainwreck of a product.
I just hope the product engineers planned ahead for the dismal sales, and designed it to be easy to hack (bootable from USB, etc.)
This would make a decent little gadget for playing my old Atari 2600 games. The tiny screen wouldn't be a handicap and the controls are right there. If you can get MAME on it you could play quite a lot of stuff.
You could also use it as a "photo wallet" (each day on vacation, dump all your photos to its hard drive, look at them with the screen to verify that they are there, and wipe your camera's chips clean for the next day). It only has CompactFlash, though.
You could even use it as a universal remote for your home; with 802.11 networking, it could talk to a computer and you could then do anything.
Of course you could use it as a portable audio/video player, if you can deal with the awkward shape.
Let's hope they make lots of these things before they figure out that no one wants them; they'll be really cheap!
I don't think the DCT really works that way, although I don't deeply grok the math so I suppose there might be a case where that happens. I know that empirically, when I was working with DCT, it did a fabulous job of concentrating the signal in the lower-frequency part.
But I think if this did somehow happen, MPEG would encode it okay. After the DCT you have a series of numbers specifying the amount of signal at various frequencies, and the encoder does an integer division with no remainder to make the series of numbers smaller. Any of the numbers that happens to be smaller than the integer will go to zero, and any that are not zero are encoded (using Huffman codes). So if the low-frequency terms happened to go to zero but some high-frequency ones didn't, then that's what the encoder would encode.
Somewhat offtopic, but I'd like to ask about search and rescue. Specifically, are S&R teams typically fully staffed, or are they likely to be looking for additional volunteers? (Is S&R purely volunteer, or do S&R guys get paid anything?)
And if they are looking for volunteers, what are the qualifications? Do you need an amateur radio license? First aid certifications? How much time does it take to be a member of an S&R team -- I presume there are training sessions, meetings, and of course the occasional actual S&R assignment.
I've sometimes thought that I should join an S&R team, because my life is set up so that if I had to suddenly take a day off, I could do so. But I have no idea if an S&R team would even want me.
he'd seen fractal encodings of images which pull out more detail than was actually in the image that was encoded.
Sure. The fractal encoding is basically specifying the shapes of the various elements of the image, and then when you ask for more detail, it creates some. It's kind of like taking a scanned image, then converting it to a vector image (say, for Adobe Illustrator), then printing it at a large size.
You can buy fractal filters for Photoshop, that allow you to upsample your images to a larger size (say, to make a poster). I've read that if the fractal algorithm has enough data to work with (2 megapixel image was the recommended minimum, IIRC) it can do a very nice job of making the image bigger. Much nicer than simply replicating pixels with some smoothing between them, which is the straightforward way to upsample an image.
One of the advantages of MPEG is that it compresses not only within a frame but across frames.
Sure. This is called "temporal compression", when you take advantage of the fact that over time, large blocks of the image stay the same. Change blocks, that just represent the difference, are very small (at least if the original video source is clean). And MPEG has a way to specify that a part of the image moved, so you can say "first move this block over there, then apply a change block".
Does this codec compress across frames?
I haven't seen it yet, but I cannot imagine that it wouldn't. Temporal compression isn't that hard to do, and it's a huge win.
MJPEG is a format that encodes each frame of video as a JPEG image. No temporal compression. It's great as a format for editing video, but its compression sucks compared to any format with temporal compression.
The standard way to compress both audio and video is with the Discrete Cosine Transform, or DCT. MPEG audio and video are based on DCT.
The basic idea of DCT is to transform the data into a series of waves, which tends to concentrate the data. Then you throw away part of the data, and then use lossless encoding on what is left. If you just threw away pixels, the result would be obvious in an image; but if you throw away part of the wave specification data, the results are not as obvious.
With DCT, consistent data sets compress very well (e.g., a blue sky or a white wall). Pictures with lots of sharp little edges (e.g., a field of blades of grass) compress much less well.
My understanding is that potentially wavelets will compress even better than the DCT. However, they are not enough better to be a huge win at the moment.
It is not easy to move Linux/Unix stuff to Windows. It is expensive - costs the developers time and effort, and there are other costs supporting a rather different architecture- look at the various apache-win bugs. And what does that gain Linux and the rest? More Windows software. Wow, great move that.
0) If you port GTK and other building blocks to run under Windows, then you can port apps without too much trouble. They will run a bit slower, thanks to an emulation layer, but PCs are fast.
1) The extra trouble may pay off; it may expose hidden bugs in the code. John Carmack likes to build his games on multiple platforms to help find bugs. It is extra trouble, but not a complete waste of time.
2) Porting your app to Windows means more people use your software. If you just want to write free software to make people happy, then this means more people will be happy. It may or may not be a strategic thing for making free software "win" against Windows, but that's not the only goal.
3) Free apps for Windows will help people move to Linux. If you can get people used to free apps that are available both on Linux and Windows, then you lessen the shock when they move from Windows to Linux. Consider Novell; they are moving the whole company to OpenOffice.org right now, under Windows, and once everyone is used to OpenOffice.org they will start moving them over to Linux instead of Windows. If all the apps are there, it's much easier to move to Linux.
"Another Microsoft spokesperson told internetnews.com that, "Mono is just one example of the level of excitement within the developer community around.NET," he said. "At this point, we have millions of developers building.NET connected applications." "
Insert image of MS spokesperson "rubbing hands with glee" - More Windows software.
But Mono software isn't "Windows software", it's Mono software that can be run on Linux. If it can also be run on Windows, that's fine with me, and it's clearly fine with Microsoft. And you know that Microsoft wants to spin every bit of news in as pro-MS a way as possible. Instead of saying "Mono makes it easy to write software that runs under Windows and Linux", of course an MS guy is going to say "Mono makes it easy to write Windows software".
THEN the software available for Windows increases more than software available for Linux. Go figure.
From the beginning, Linux has had fewer software titles compared to Windows. That doesn't really matter for Linux adoption. If people need certain programs, then making those programs available on Linux can only be good for Linux adoption; if they are also made available for Windows, that doesn't hurt Linux.
Linux can compete on its own merits if it has the apps. If it doesn't have the apps, people won't change to it.
And what if there's an "embrace and extend" war? With some slight incompatibilities? Who wins? Mono-certified.Net apps or MS/Windows Logo certified?
First you said that Mono is dumb because it provides apps to both Linux and Windows. Now you are saying that Mono is dumb because the apps might not be portable to Windows. D'oh.
Miguel's position is that Mono is cool and worth having, whether or not it is compatible with Windows. If Mono makes it easier and faster to create software for Linux, then Linux gets more softwar more quickly. If the Windows users are denied that software because MS is playing games with patents or whatever, that's too bad.
Miguel also believes that there is so much prior art out there that MS cannot ever just shut down Mono with patents.
we aren't strong enough to compete much, we already have too much duplication of efforts like in the whole KDE vs Gnome mess, and the BSDs vs GNU/Linux vs Hurd one.
It's just the way things are. There is no Grand Conspiracy of FOSS People, giving marching orders to all the free software developers. People work on what they want to work on. There will always be multiple projects.
Worse yet, he is happy that Sun users get less goodies!
You know, I think he was being a bit tongue-in-cheek. Do you really believe he is happier to have Sun ignore his pet project, than he would be to have Sun embrace his pet project?
I thought it was funny.
It would be much better to work with Sun to address its concerns
How can he force Sun to work with him on this? Sun's policy is "Java good, Mono bad", and there is nothing he can do about that!
Correct me if I am wrong, but I thought the difference between US and EU patents was that US patents are backdated to the claimed date of invention while EU patents are based on date of filing. In the EU it should not be possible to patent any existing technology that is in the public domain - and that means all of OSS, by definition.
I had never heard of that, and I was certain you were probably wrong, but google seems to bear you out. Here's a few links:
In the US it is all too possible for something to be well established prior art, but an inventor claims to have made the invention prior to the first date of open publication.
However, that's not really the major problem with patents in the US. The major problem is that the Patent Office just keeps granting even the silliest of patents, with even really ancient prior art. Microsoft recently patented the idea of a button doing different things depending on how long you hold it down -- I think we can find quite a lot of very old prior art on that one!
Actually, on further thought, forget about cutting the power to reboot the thing. Just wire up your "play" button to first hit the "Stop" button on the player, then its "play" button.
You will need to put in a small delay between hitting "stop" and "play". You would have needed a delay between cycling power and hitting "play" anyhow.
I don't think you should have moving parts. A cheap MP3 player that uses flash memory should be good.
If you can find one that "boots up" quickly from power-off, you could wire up your "play" button to do two things: briefly interrupt the supply of power to the player, and press the "play" button on the player. Interrupting the power would ensure that the player is not playing when the "play" button is pressed; therefore the player would not pause if the button were hit again, but would rather start playing over again from the beginning. (I think this is more elegant than the proposal to make it loop forever and wire your pushbutton to the next track button.)
As for a way to listen, someone already suggested an old telephone handset, and I don't think you can beat that idea. There are plenty of sturdy newer telephone handsets, but you might want to put a security cable on them so people don't just disconnect them from the phone cord and walk away. (That's assuming you use the phone cord to hook them up to the listening station; you could open them up to wire something directly, but if you bought the phone, you also bought the cord that connects the handset so why not use it?) If you can get 10 handsets from pay phones, that would of course be perfect; those are designed to be tough.
I thought about proposing you put a speaker inside some kind of protective enclosure, basically making your own "sound stick", but I think a telephone handset is a much better solution.
If you could do the "parabolic speaker" suggestion, that is also a good idea. I've been to music stores where you stand under a parabolic speaker, and you can clearly hear the audio; and someone a few feet away can't hear it. Here's a web page by someone who built one of these.
Check out the GATOS project. They might have code that will let your card work.
You could use that card for sure as a video card, and both 2D and 3D will work (using DRI). If you can't get it working as a TV card, you could always get an inexpensive TV capture card, such as an ATI TV Wonder.
Concur. I've been using AMD for years, and my computers are stable. I buy good motherboards, good RAM, and good cooling solutions.
The worst thing about the Athlon XP is how easy it is to kill the chip by putting on a heat sink incorrectly. AMD has learned its lesson, and the newest chips (Athlon 64, Opteron) have a metal heat spreader protecting the actual chip. (That's one thing Intel did right with the Pentium 4 and it's about time AMD did it too.) The newest AMD chips are better than the Intel counterpart chips in every way, including price.
It's not so much an incredibly smart move, as it is walking away from an incredibly dumb move (pinning the future on the Pentium 4 architecture). The Pentium 4 is so broken in so many ways.
DMV == Department of Motor Vehicles, where you go to get a license to drive or a registration for your car. This is not a universal term.
I used to live in California, and I've spent a few hours standing in queues at the DMV.
In Washington state, where I live now, we don't have the DMV, we have the DOL (Department of Licensing).
I remember seeing a TV movie, made in California of course but supposedly taking place in Seattle, where someone said "I need to go to the DMV" and the other characters understood. It made me wonder how many places use the "DMV" acronym; if you live in e.g. England, do you say "DMV"? How many states in the US use this term? And does the fact that Hollywood uses the term in movies and TV shows mean that everyone understands it now?
I read an article about this years ago. The idea was something like this:
Memory chips are made on wafers. They are made side-by-side, then sliced apart, then each tested and mounted in a package. (Then eventually mounted on a little circuit board, and thence into our hands to install into our computers.)
The idea was to make a wafer of memory chips, but not to just have them side-by-side; actually have traces connecting one chip to another. Then use the whole wafer as a RAM unit. You would need to test and find any defective RAM chips in the wafer, then cut a trace (or burn out a fuse, or whatever) to disconnect them from the rest of the wafer. (Not too different from bad-block management on a hard drive, really.) Finally you could make a stack of these wafers in a box, and sell it as a disk drive.
This should be much cheaper than current RAM-based disk drives. It would be slower (the traces connecting the chips would be slower than a direct memory bus to each chip) but still way faster than a drive with moving parts.
My understanding is that wafer-scale integration isn't very interesting for most applications, but for the specific niche of RAM-based storage units it seemed promising. Clearly I'm wrong since it didn't happen. Anyone know why?
He took "The Soft Weapon" and rewrote it with Trek characters.
Yes.
But he couldn't even be bothered to change the Kzinti to Klingons, which would've been the logical mapping from Known Space to Trek.
I'm sure he wanted to leave a bit of his own stamp on Trek. He invented Kzinti, and now they are sort of part of Trek. (When my friends and I played a Trek role-playing game in the late 70's, Kzinti were common in our games.)
I've never seen "The Slaver Weapon" episode of TAS, but I did read "The Soft Weapon" short story. One plot point was that the Kzinti didn't adequately guard a female character because Kzinti females aren't sentient. Did he apply this plot point to the episode, and have Uhura able to make an escape at a critical moment? If so, that's another reason why he wouldn't have used Klingons.
No DRM. Just ebooks. They are trusting you not to be a pirate, and charging a fair price, and for that I reward them by buying stuff and recommending them.
Let me say that again. No DRM! No serial numbers, no registration, no limit on the number of cards you can copy it to. No DRM.
Even the ones they want you to pay for have a few chapters online for free. This is to give you a taste of the book, hook you in and make you want to finish reading it. If the book is a collection of stories, often one or more complete stories will be available for free reading.
I have a Palm Tungsten T. The screen is fine for indoors, but not good outdoors.
The Palm Tungsten T2 is pretty much the same PDA, but has a "transflective" screen that is better than the screen on the T, both indoors and outdoors.
Both are 320x320, and you can get very nice text on it for your ebook. I use it with Linux, no problem hotsyncing with the USB (I use J-Pilot).
You can also use SD or MMC cards for storing your ebooks; you can get a lot of reading material on one of those, and you can just use any USB card reader/writer to write the ebooks onto it.
If you check eBay, you can get a T2 for $250 or so. You can get a T for less than that.
The T3 has the advantage of a screen that is 480x320 when you have it fully open. It has a 400 MHz processor, so it's fast... but the battery life sucks.
You can get a device from Palm called the "Power To Go", which is just a lithium ion battery sled. You dock the Palm in the sled and the Palm draws power from it. You can fully recharge a drained Palm at least twice on a fully charged sled, or run the Palm from the sled to get very long run times. With one of these you could fly to Japan and read continuously, without running out of power.
If you can stand a pixelated reading font, an old Handspring Visor makes a decent reader. It runs just forever on two AAA cells. That's what I have used for reading novels on a plane to Japan. But you specified a high-resolution screen for smooth fonts, so the older 160x160 greyscale devices are out.
If you had to pick just one to buy, I'd say the T2. If you want the cheapest one, get a used T from eBay.
Be sure to get a quality leather case to protect it. I use the EB flip case, the one that uses magnets to hold it closed.
By the way, I read more novels as ebooks on my Palm than I read as paper, these days. And I have even started reading Slashdot on my Tungsten (using a PalmModem).
Slashdot Mirror
We must not forget that quantum theory (and its application in particle physics) is the most accurate theory / model in the world.
True.
However, we don't understand how it works. Quantum theory is a bunch of constants and equations, and it all works but we don't understand why. The "many-worlds interpretation" of quantum mechanics suggests that parallel universes have something to do with how quantum mechanics works.
P.S. We also don't understand why quantum mechanics rules apply at very small scales, but very different rules apply at larger scales. (A photon can seem to go through two slits at once, but you won't get a baseball to do that trick, or even a really tiny speck of dust.)
steveha
The "parallel universe" part comes in to explain why it still works if you fire single photons, but since you can't fire single photons (or easily check the results if you could), this isn't really a "home test" of any use.
The fact that single photons can make a diffraction pattern, seemingly interfering with themselves, is a truly weird feature of quantum mechanics (but then, I repeat myself -- quantum mechanics is always truly weird!). And one of the explanations proposed is that light in parallel universes is somehow causing the interference with the single photons in this universe.
Another explanation is that light sometimes acts as a particle, and sometimes as a wave, and when you detect a single photon coming through a slit, you are forcing that photon to act like a particle, and it will not throw a diffraction pattern; but if there is no measurement to decide which slit the photon passed through, the light can act as a wave instead of a particle, and can have an interference pattern.
http://www.starlight-pub.com/UnitNatureofMatter/P
This page lists various explanations of why the single-photon two-slit experiment behaves as it does. One of the explanations is the parallel-universes one.
http://members.aol.com/jmtsgibbs/TwoSlit.htm
Here's just the part with the "Many-Worlds Interpretation":
steveha
The renderings show a directional pad, a pair of joysticks, four buttons, and what looks like a rocker switch.
In other words, the standard set of controls on a typical console game pad these days.
So, this will be great for playing any game that can be mapped to those controls, and doesn't need more performance than a VIA Eden chip at 533 MHz can provide. (Hint: Doom III is not going to run on this thing.) Oh, and don't forget that the screen is only 4 inches, so you'll never play games like StarCraft on it unless you have eyes like an eagle.
Summary: this would be great for playing old console games, if anyone bothered to port them from the console to this thing. And it would be great for arcade emulation for low-detail games.
Would you pay over $500 for a hard-to-carry gadget that could only do that? Me neither.
steveha
...in about a year, after this crashes and burns horribly in the marketplace, when they dump the remaining inventory through TigerDirect or eBay or something. After the miserable failure of this product, we will probably be able to get one for a couple hundred dollars or so.
I mean, look at the thing. $500, then you get to pay more to turn on the disabled features? A weird, non-foldable shape that won't fit in a pocket and might not even fit in a briefcase? This thing is a trainwreck of a product.
I just hope the product engineers planned ahead for the dismal sales, and designed it to be easy to hack (bootable from USB, etc.)
This would make a decent little gadget for playing my old Atari 2600 games. The tiny screen wouldn't be a handicap and the controls are right there. If you can get MAME on it you could play quite a lot of stuff.
You could also use it as a "photo wallet" (each day on vacation, dump all your photos to its hard drive, look at them with the screen to verify that they are there, and wipe your camera's chips clean for the next day). It only has CompactFlash, though.
You could even use it as a universal remote for your home; with 802.11 networking, it could talk to a computer and you could then do anything.
Of course you could use it as a portable audio/video player, if you can deal with the awkward shape.
Let's hope they make lots of these things before they figure out that no one wants them; they'll be really cheap!
steveha
I don't think the DCT really works that way, although I don't deeply grok the math so I suppose there might be a case where that happens. I know that empirically, when I was working with DCT, it did a fabulous job of concentrating the signal in the lower-frequency part.
But I think if this did somehow happen, MPEG would encode it okay. After the DCT you have a series of numbers specifying the amount of signal at various frequencies, and the encoder does an integer division with no remainder to make the series of numbers smaller. Any of the numbers that happens to be smaller than the integer will go to zero, and any that are not zero are encoded (using Huffman codes). So if the low-frequency terms happened to go to zero but some high-frequency ones didn't, then that's what the encoder would encode.
steveha
Somewhat offtopic, but I'd like to ask about search and rescue. Specifically, are S&R teams typically fully staffed, or are they likely to be looking for additional volunteers? (Is S&R purely volunteer, or do S&R guys get paid anything?)
And if they are looking for volunteers, what are the qualifications? Do you need an amateur radio license? First aid certifications? How much time does it take to be a member of an S&R team -- I presume there are training sessions, meetings, and of course the occasional actual S&R assignment.
I've sometimes thought that I should join an S&R team, because my life is set up so that if I had to suddenly take a day off, I could do so. But I have no idea if an S&R team would even want me.
steveha
he'd seen fractal encodings of images which pull out more detail than was actually in the image that was encoded.
Sure. The fractal encoding is basically specifying the shapes of the various elements of the image, and then when you ask for more detail, it creates some. It's kind of like taking a scanned image, then converting it to a vector image (say, for Adobe Illustrator), then printing it at a large size.
You can buy fractal filters for Photoshop, that allow you to upsample your images to a larger size (say, to make a poster). I've read that if the fractal algorithm has enough data to work with (2 megapixel image was the recommended minimum, IIRC) it can do a very nice job of making the image bigger. Much nicer than simply replicating pixels with some smoothing between them, which is the straightforward way to upsample an image.
steveha
One of the advantages of MPEG is that it compresses not only within a frame but across frames.
Sure. This is called "temporal compression", when you take advantage of the fact that over time, large blocks of the image stay the same. Change blocks, that just represent the difference, are very small (at least if the original video source is clean). And MPEG has a way to specify that a part of the image moved, so you can say "first move this block over there, then apply a change block".
Does this codec compress across frames?
I haven't seen it yet, but I cannot imagine that it wouldn't. Temporal compression isn't that hard to do, and it's a huge win.
MJPEG is a format that encodes each frame of video as a JPEG image. No temporal compression. It's great as a format for editing video, but its compression sucks compared to any format with temporal compression.
steveha
This is from 1998.
http://www.seyboldreports.com/SRIP/wavelet/
steveha
An obvious troll. Lots of doubletalk and no references. Wavelets have been shown to be a good way to compress video data.
steveha
The standard way to compress both audio and video is with the Discrete Cosine Transform, or DCT. MPEG audio and video are based on DCT.
The basic idea of DCT is to transform the data into a series of waves, which tends to concentrate the data. Then you throw away part of the data, and then use lossless encoding on what is left. If you just threw away pixels, the result would be obvious in an image; but if you throw away part of the wave specification data, the results are not as obvious.
With DCT, consistent data sets compress very well (e.g., a blue sky or a white wall). Pictures with lots of sharp little edges (e.g., a field of blades of grass) compress much less well.
My understanding is that potentially wavelets will compress even better than the DCT. However, they are not enough better to be a huge win at the moment.
steveha
It is not easy to move Linux/Unix stuff to Windows. It is expensive - costs the developers time and effort, and there are other costs supporting a rather different architecture- look at the various apache-win bugs. And what does that gain Linux and the rest? More Windows software. Wow, great move that.
.NET," he said. "At this point, we have millions of developers building .NET connected applications." "
.Net apps or MS/Windows Logo certified?
0) If you port GTK and other building blocks to run under Windows, then you can port apps without too much trouble. They will run a bit slower, thanks to an emulation layer, but PCs are fast.
1) The extra trouble may pay off; it may expose hidden bugs in the code. John Carmack likes to build his games on multiple platforms to help find bugs. It is extra trouble, but not a complete waste of time.
2) Porting your app to Windows means more people use your software. If you just want to write free software to make people happy, then this means more people will be happy. It may or may not be a strategic thing for making free software "win" against Windows, but that's not the only goal.
3) Free apps for Windows will help people move to Linux. If you can get people used to free apps that are available both on Linux and Windows, then you lessen the shock when they move from Windows to Linux. Consider Novell; they are moving the whole company to OpenOffice.org right now, under Windows, and once everyone is used to OpenOffice.org they will start moving them over to Linux instead of Windows. If all the apps are there, it's much easier to move to Linux.
"Another Microsoft spokesperson told internetnews.com that, "Mono is just one example of the level of excitement within the developer community around
Insert image of MS spokesperson "rubbing hands with glee" - More Windows software.
But Mono software isn't "Windows software", it's Mono software that can be run on Linux. If it can also be run on Windows, that's fine with me, and it's clearly fine with Microsoft. And you know that Microsoft wants to spin every bit of news in as pro-MS a way as possible. Instead of saying "Mono makes it easy to write software that runs under Windows and Linux", of course an MS guy is going to say "Mono makes it easy to write Windows software".
THEN the software available for Windows increases more than software available for Linux. Go figure.
From the beginning, Linux has had fewer software titles compared to Windows. That doesn't really matter for Linux adoption. If people need certain programs, then making those programs available on Linux can only be good for Linux adoption; if they are also made available for Windows, that doesn't hurt Linux.
Linux can compete on its own merits if it has the apps. If it doesn't have the apps, people won't change to it.
And what if there's an "embrace and extend" war? With some slight incompatibilities? Who wins? Mono-certified
First you said that Mono is dumb because it provides apps to both Linux and Windows. Now you are saying that Mono is dumb because the apps might not be portable to Windows. D'oh.
Miguel's position is that Mono is cool and worth having, whether or not it is compatible with Windows. If Mono makes it easier and faster to create software for Linux, then Linux gets more softwar more quickly. If the Windows users are denied that software because MS is playing games with patents or whatever, that's too bad.
Miguel also believes that there is so much prior art out there that MS cannot ever just shut down Mono with patents.
steveha
we aren't strong enough to compete much, we already have too much duplication of efforts like in the whole KDE vs Gnome mess, and the BSDs vs GNU/Linux vs Hurd one.
It's just the way things are. There is no Grand Conspiracy of FOSS People, giving marching orders to all the free software developers. People work on what they want to work on. There will always be multiple projects.
Worse yet, he is happy that Sun users get less goodies!
You know, I think he was being a bit tongue-in-cheek. Do you really believe he is happier to have Sun ignore his pet project, than he would be to have Sun embrace his pet project?
I thought it was funny.
It would be much better to work with Sun to address its concerns
How can he force Sun to work with him on this? Sun's policy is "Java good, Mono bad", and there is nothing he can do about that!
Free Solaris and Java anyone?
Keep dreaming, friend. Keep dreaming.
steveha
Correct me if I am wrong, but I thought the difference between US and EU patents was that US patents are backdated to the claimed date of invention while EU patents are based on date of filing. In the EU it should not be possible to patent any existing technology that is in the public domain - and that means all of OSS, by definition.
w 11040.htm f ofpriority_031109.htm
I had never heard of that, and I was certain you were probably wrong, but google seems to bear you out. Here's a few links:
http://www.webpatent.com/knowbase/evaluate/law/la
http://www.neifeld.com/electronicnotebooksandproo
http://www.patent-ideas.com/recording.htm
In the US it is all too possible for something to be well established prior art, but an inventor claims to have made the invention prior to the first date of open publication.
However, that's not really the major problem with patents in the US. The major problem is that the Patent Office just keeps granting even the silliest of patents, with even really ancient prior art. Microsoft recently patented the idea of a button doing different things depending on how long you hold it down -- I think we can find quite a lot of very old prior art on that one!
steveha
Actually, on further thought, forget about cutting the power to reboot the thing. Just wire up your "play" button to first hit the "Stop" button on the player, then its "play" button.
You will need to put in a small delay between hitting "stop" and "play". You would have needed a delay between cycling power and hitting "play" anyhow.
steveha
I don't think you should have moving parts. A cheap MP3 player that uses flash memory should be good.
If you can find one that "boots up" quickly from power-off, you could wire up your "play" button to do two things: briefly interrupt the supply of power to the player, and press the "play" button on the player. Interrupting the power would ensure that the player is not playing when the "play" button is pressed; therefore the player would not pause if the button were hit again, but would rather start playing over again from the beginning. (I think this is more elegant than the proposal to make it loop forever and wire your pushbutton to the next track button.)
As for a way to listen, someone already suggested an old telephone handset, and I don't think you can beat that idea. There are plenty of sturdy newer telephone handsets, but you might want to put a security cable on them so people don't just disconnect them from the phone cord and walk away. (That's assuming you use the phone cord to hook them up to the listening station; you could open them up to wire something directly, but if you bought the phone, you also bought the cord that connects the handset so why not use it?) If you can get 10 handsets from pay phones, that would of course be perfect; those are designed to be tough.
I thought about proposing you put a speaker inside some kind of protective enclosure, basically making your own "sound stick", but I think a telephone handset is a much better solution.
If you could do the "parabolic speaker" suggestion, that is also a good idea. I've been to music stores where you stand under a parabolic speaker, and you can clearly hear the audio; and someone a few feet away can't hear it. Here's a web page by someone who built one of these.
http://syrinxpc.com/speaker.html
steveha
That 10% was probably just their remaining software developers and their tech support staff. The new SCO only needs lawyers and a few executives.
I expect their stock price will go up when the stock market hears about the newly efficient SCO!
steveha
Check out the GATOS project. They might have code that will let your card work.
You could use that card for sure as a video card, and both 2D and 3D will work (using DRI). If you can't get it working as a TV card, you could always get an inexpensive TV capture card, such as an ATI TV Wonder.
steveha
Concur. I've been using AMD for years, and my computers are stable. I buy good motherboards, good RAM, and good cooling solutions.
The worst thing about the Athlon XP is how easy it is to kill the chip by putting on a heat sink incorrectly. AMD has learned its lesson, and the newest chips (Athlon 64, Opteron) have a metal heat spreader protecting the actual chip. (That's one thing Intel did right with the Pentium 4 and it's about time AMD did it too.) The newest AMD chips are better than the Intel counterpart chips in every way, including price.
steveha
It's not so much an incredibly smart move, as it is walking away from an incredibly dumb move (pinning the future on the Pentium 4 architecture). The Pentium 4 is so broken in so many ways.
steveha
DMV == Department of Motor Vehicles, where you go to get a license to drive or a registration for your car. This is not a universal term.
I used to live in California, and I've spent a few hours standing in queues at the DMV.
In Washington state, where I live now, we don't have the DMV, we have the DOL (Department of Licensing).
I remember seeing a TV movie, made in California of course but supposedly taking place in Seattle, where someone said "I need to go to the DMV" and the other characters understood. It made me wonder how many places use the "DMV" acronym; if you live in e.g. England, do you say "DMV"? How many states in the US use this term? And does the fact that Hollywood uses the term in movies and TV shows mean that everyone understands it now?
steveha
Whatever happened to wafer-scale integration?
I read an article about this years ago. The idea was something like this:
Memory chips are made on wafers. They are made side-by-side, then sliced apart, then each tested and mounted in a package. (Then eventually mounted on a little circuit board, and thence into our hands to install into our computers.)
The idea was to make a wafer of memory chips, but not to just have them side-by-side; actually have traces connecting one chip to another. Then use the whole wafer as a RAM unit. You would need to test and find any defective RAM chips in the wafer, then cut a trace (or burn out a fuse, or whatever) to disconnect them from the rest of the wafer. (Not too different from bad-block management on a hard drive, really.) Finally you could make a stack of these wafers in a box, and sell it as a disk drive.
This should be much cheaper than current RAM-based disk drives. It would be slower (the traces connecting the chips would be slower than a direct memory bus to each chip) but still way faster than a drive with moving parts.
My understanding is that wafer-scale integration isn't very interesting for most applications, but for the specific niche of RAM-based storage units it seemed promising. Clearly I'm wrong since it didn't happen. Anyone know why?
steveha
He took "The Soft Weapon" and rewrote it with Trek characters.
Yes.
But he couldn't even be bothered to change the Kzinti to Klingons, which would've been the logical mapping from Known Space to Trek.
I'm sure he wanted to leave a bit of his own stamp on Trek. He invented Kzinti, and now they are sort of part of Trek. (When my friends and I played a Trek role-playing game in the late 70's, Kzinti were common in our games.)
I've never seen "The Slaver Weapon" episode of TAS, but I did read "The Soft Weapon" short story. One plot point was that the Kzinti didn't adequately guard a female character because Kzinti females aren't sentient. Did he apply this plot point to the episode, and have Uhura able to make an escape at a critical moment? If so, that's another reason why he wouldn't have used Klingons.
steveha
Once you have your device, check out the Baen ebooks. I buy these. They are all science fiction and fantasy.
Here are some free ones to get you started:
http://www.baen.com/library/defaultTitles.htm
And you can buy more here:
http://www.webscription.net/
No DRM. Just ebooks. They are trusting you not to be a pirate, and charging a fair price, and for that I reward them by buying stuff and recommending them.
Let me say that again. No DRM! No serial numbers, no registration, no limit on the number of cards you can copy it to. No DRM.
Even the ones they want you to pay for have a few chapters online for free. This is to give you a taste of the book, hook you in and make you want to finish reading it. If the book is a collection of stories, often one or more complete stories will be available for free reading.
steveha
I have a Palm Tungsten T. The screen is fine for indoors, but not good outdoors.
The Palm Tungsten T2 is pretty much the same PDA, but has a "transflective" screen that is better than the screen on the T, both indoors and outdoors.
Both are 320x320, and you can get very nice text on it for your ebook. I use it with Linux, no problem hotsyncing with the USB (I use J-Pilot).
You can also use SD or MMC cards for storing your ebooks; you can get a lot of reading material on one of those, and you can just use any USB card reader/writer to write the ebooks onto it.
If you check eBay, you can get a T2 for $250 or so. You can get a T for less than that.
The T3 has the advantage of a screen that is 480x320 when you have it fully open. It has a 400 MHz processor, so it's fast... but the battery life sucks.
You can get a device from Palm called the "Power To Go", which is just a lithium ion battery sled. You dock the Palm in the sled and the Palm draws power from it. You can fully recharge a drained Palm at least twice on a fully charged sled, or run the Palm from the sled to get very long run times. With one of these you could fly to Japan and read continuously, without running out of power.
If you can stand a pixelated reading font, an old Handspring Visor makes a decent reader. It runs just forever on two AAA cells. That's what I have used for reading novels on a plane to Japan. But you specified a high-resolution screen for smooth fonts, so the older 160x160 greyscale devices are out.
If you had to pick just one to buy, I'd say the T2. If you want the cheapest one, get a used T from eBay.
Be sure to get a quality leather case to protect it. I use the EB flip case, the one that uses magnets to hold it closed.
By the way, I read more novels as ebooks on my Palm than I read as paper, these days. And I have even started reading Slashdot on my Tungsten (using a PalmModem).
steveha