I did a web search, and found a discussion about this on the debian-gtk-gnome list. The packages are just about ready to go, but they decided to wait until the official 2.0 release before putting packages into Unstable. (There was one message voting for waiting until 2.0.1! I hope they ignored him. This is Unstable, not Stable, and I want GNOME 2.0 sooner rather than later.)
is there NO other information about this hole except that it's "fixed" by 3.3?
Um, it's not fixed by 3.3!
What he said was that the bug exists in 3.3, as in other versions (which other versions, he did not spell out)... however, if you use the new "privsep" feature of 3.3, the bug is blocked.
His stated goal is to get everyone running with "privsep" before the full details of the bug come to light. Even if that means you lose functionality... he feels it is more important to be immune to the possible remote root exploit than to be able to use all the features of ssh.
If I have ssh blocked in/etc/hosts.allow, does that stop the bug?
That ought to work: a bug in sshd shouldn't be a problem if crackers can't access sshd. If you have a firewall, and block the ssh port on the firewall, that should be good too.
People buy PDAs for cheap lap tops or simple organisers. Nither needs speed.
Wrong.
More right than wrong. I know that the PocketPC cannot currently do anything I need that a Palm PDA cannot do.
Once PDAs are available with much much faster processors and tons of RAM, people will find new uses for them. But as things are today, given a choice between the battery life of a Palm or the power of a PocketPC, most people choose the Palm.
Do you fully understand how EVIL you are? People are DYING in hospitals due to medical errors and timing issues that could be essentially eliminated by a sufficiently advanced portable computing system.
Oh, rubbish, and shame on you. I don't believe for a second that PocketPCs (or any other single gadget) can magically solve the problems of hospitals. And I'm dubious about PocketPCs at all in hospitals; they do crash.
You are actively preventing those technologies from being developed as fast as they otherwise would be.
Wow, he sure has a lot of power to affect technological development in the world. That or else you are being insanely over-the-top.
Gnome should in theory be faster, but they kill any speed increase they'd otherwise get by having a slower (well, in v1.4) graphics library and by using incredibly heavy things such as CORBA for ipc, and a daemon for configuration etc.
I don't know about the graphics library thing, but the GNOME ORB is somewhat stripped down to make it faster. Unless you actually serve objects remotely over the net, the GNOME CORBA ORB basically just adds a little bit of function call overhead. I'm willing to accept that tiny bit of overhead for a tested, industrial-strength object model like CORBA. KDE, as I understand it, is inventing their own somewhat lightweight object model, and I'm worried they will later find some situation where they wish they had left in a feature they stripped out to make it lightweight.
As for Win98, don't forget that it is a candy coating around Win95, and Win95 was aggressively optimized for size and speed. The target machine for Win95 was a 486 with 4MB of RAM. There is a bunch of assembly language in there, in critical places; and some of it is even 16-bit code. (16-bit code is much harder to write, since you have to cram things into smaller spaces and you have to explicitly handle near/far pointers, but it's tiny! Even with the thunking overhead, it won't slow you down too much if you just use it rarely.) Also don't forget that the MS C compiler actually does produce very good code, better than GCC is able to now. (Although I hear good things about the latest version of GCC, I don't think they have caught up with MS C yet.)
The tiny size of the Win95 core means that it caches well, too, and a high cache hit rate makes for speedy performance.
I'd be interested to see benchmarks of Win98 vs. a really stripped-down Linux system (no daemons running, etc.) that was compiled with aggressive optimizations and is running a really lightweight window manager (IceWM or ROX or something). And defintely no Nautilus; try your system with ROX Filer instead. I saw a huge speed jump when I did that. (Debian makes it so easy to try such experiments!)
There is still room left in Linux-based systems for size and speed improvements. Every time GCC gets better, every part of the system gets a little better. And I don't believe that much work has been done on either GNOME or KDE to make it stripped-down lean-and-mean... the first law is "make it work before you make it faster", and folks are still busy making it work right. (But Nautilus has had a lot of speed work done on it lately, and I've heard it is much improved compared to its 1.0 release.)
Mandrake really is a good user experience. Before I settled with Debian, I used Mandrake for a while, and it was slick and polished.
This will be great for the consumers who just surf the web and do email; get everything pre-installed and it will just work.
I hope they do a good job of making it easy to set up your ISP, but upon reflection it's probably no big deal. I remember the days when it was tricky to configure net dialup, but these days most ISPs just have a pretty standard PPP setup and all the user really needs to do is enter a phone number in a setup dialog.
Palm PDAs have always been intended to have a symbiotic relationship with your desktop computer. You run Palm Desktop on your desktop computer, and you can pull up all your data, edit your data using the full-size keyboard on your desktop, and hotsync. If you have an accident with the batteries on your Palm, your data is safely backed up in Palm Desktop.
Can you use the USB port on the Dana to hook up a Palm PDA such as a Treo 90, and then do a hotsync? If so, you could use both the Dana and your PDA to work with your data, and reconcile it with hotsync automatically. I'm not sure how useful that might be, but I'm wondering if it would work.
I could see myself buying a Dana. I can see Danas selling here and there. But I don't expect the Dana to be a monster hit.
You can take a Palm PDA and plug it into a keyboard. I have a Visor Deluxe and a GoType, and I do this. But when you do this, you only have a 160x160 display, and you have to be a bit careful with it because it's easy to knock the PDA free from the keyboard.
The Dana gives you a wider screen, good for looking at lots of text or perhaps column data such as a spreadsheet. It's all one unit, and it looks tough. That means you can grab it with one hand and walk around with it casually, or fling it into a backpack to take it to the library. (I hope the keys don't clack too loudly!)
Take a look at the USB ports. Looks like one is an A connector and one is a B! You can hang USB devices off this, such as a printer, and use them. Or you can plug this into a USB port, probably to hotsync your data with your desktop computer. Oh yes.
Now all it needs is a good way to hook it up to a phone line or a cell phone. You ought to be able to get a USB external modem working with this, and you might be able to get a cable that will let a Startac work with it for data. With 560x160 resolution, you can have an 80 column display, although 24 lines would be pretty cramped, but anyway you should be able to use this thing as a remote terminal.
I remember that Apple used to sell a small gadget something like this; they called it an eMate. Schools used to buy eMates. Any school that would buy an eMate would buy one of these; it can do more, it should be equally tough or tougher, and it is half the price the eMate used to be.
did you know that running a DVD at 1600x1200 won't show any quality increase, as the video is only encoded at 720x480 in NTSC (720x576 in PAL)?
Sorry, but I'm picking some nits now.
First of all, 720x480 is not a square-pixels resolution; my understanding is that the actual image, visible pixels only, in square pixels is 640x480.
However, "widescreen" movies in anamorphic format cram extra stuff into a line. Maybe those actually put 720 horizonal pixels on a line?
Second of all, 1600x1200 cannot create new detail from nothing, but it might look nice if the upsampling is done cleverly. There are some good filters that can improve a picture compared to simple pixel-stretching. Video stretched like this should look better than video shown at TV resolution on a screen of the same size; the TV image will be only 640x480 and the gaps between pixels will be more noticeable. The bigger the TV screen and the closer you sit, the more you notice the actual pixels of the image.
Third, the TV image will be 60 Hz interlaced; the computer monitor may well be 85 Hz or more, noninterlaced. There isn't any actual extra image data (it will still update only about 30 times per second) but the computer monitor might well be easier on the eyes (some people are more sensitive to interlacing flicker than other people are).
Fourth, some movies (and some video games) contain images that stress the abilities of NTSC to display them. "Chroma crawl" or flickering can result. A nice upsampling algorithm, and display on a nice computer monitor, and the image should look much nicer than on a real TV. (Note that an S-Video cable or even better still real component cables can help, here.)
Enough nits. And I agree with your suggestion: setting your display to something close to 720x480 may be the best bet. Especially if you have a monitor that can drive an 800x600 image at 120 Hz!
The controls operate "by wire" but the actuators are driven by hydraulics. Something needs to push on the flaps or other moving parts, to make them move correctly, and in the F-16 it's hydraulic power.
The LockMart JSF plane is the first plane to be 100% "power by wire", with no hydraulic systems at all. Motors push on the moving parts, and an electric bus powers the motors.
A friend of mine is a pilot, and he and I have talked about the JSF competition. I was hoping Boeing would win, since that would be good for the economy in my area, but the LockMart plane was better.
The Boeing plane was a fairly traditional design. The LockMart plane was a radical new design. My pilot friend said that LockMart bet everything on the radical design; either the new design would fail and they would lose hugely, or else the new design would work and they would win hugely.
In particular, the Boeing design uses conventional hydraulics for actuating its various parts, but the LockMart plane uses an electrical bus to distribute power to motors that actuate the various parts. It turns out that while the two systems weigh about the same and perform about the same, there are second and third order effects that favor the electrical bus:
While a hydraulic system is constantly under pressure, which means pump motors run constantly and heat must be constantly dissipated, the electrical bus just sits there while you aren't using it. So the power systems and cooling systems for the LockMart plane don't have to be as heavy-duty as the Boeing plane. And you can make an electrical bus redundant more easily, just by running extra cables, much easier than making hydraulics redundant. And think how much easier it will be to repair and service an electrical bus compared to a bunch of heavy-duty hoses and pipes full of hydraulic fluid!
rather than having spacecraft lug around a S%$tload of expensive fuel, keep the fuel back here on earth, and beam a laser at the craft.
Well... almost.
You can make an airplane that works this way: it sucks in cool air, a laser provides power to heat the air, the hot air jets out the back of the airplane engine and makes the plane go. The plane pushes itself along using air. We can call the air "reaction mass".
If you want to power a spacecraft with lasers, you need to do pretty much the same thing. However, in space you cannot suck in cool air, so you need to carry some other sort of reaction mass to jet out the back of the rocket. The laser provides energy to accelerate the reaction mass.
But the best, most practical application of lasers to transportation would be to make a vehicle that goes to space, using the airplane trick to get the vehicle started and then switching over at some point to more conventional rockets. As long as the laser is working and you can suck in cool air, you can jet out hot air and get some lift. This would mean your vehicle can carry less fuel and still reach orbit.
No hard drive. I have heard that Steve Jobs was very firm about not making a Mac with a hard drive; he felt it was more important that the Mac be silent than to have the storage of a hard drive.
there were a LOT of issues relating to the power supply on those early Macs and I'm inclined to think thermal design MAY have been part of the problem.
I'm sure you are correct. I remember seeing an aftermarket mod for the Mac, which added a cooling fan at the top of the Mac to suck hot air out. The ads claimed that your Mac would be much more reliable with the active cooling.
Your wall system sounds neat, but the problem arises that it is hard to regulate power on such large lines.
I don't know much about the practical details of electricity. I had sort of pictured several wires, one set with 110 Volts AC and one or more sets with DC, probably on smaller wires.
Would the hard-to-regulate problem go away if we had room-temperature superconducting wires?
to make it work, you'd need the power conversion circuitry at the wall plug
How bulky is the equipment needed to regulate DC and/or split multiple voltages off one DC line?
I assume this needs transformers, rectifiers, capacitors, and other bulky stuff that dissipates heat. Darn. I was hoping you could have everything in one box in the basement.
You can beam power around as microwaves or a laser beam or something, but the equipment to collect the power and convert it will be large and bulky. And unless you want to turn your apartment into a large microwave oven with you inside it, you would need some kind of complicated aiming system to make sure the power only goes where you want it.
Simpler would be to have your gadgets run on battery power, with charging cradles.
If you imagine ultra-low-power technology combined with ultra-high-density batteries, you would have gadgets that don't need charging often and have no power leads. Then just have robots run around in the middle of the night, charging them while you sleep.
:-)
steveha
Re:Why convert DC to AC to DC?
on
Do-it-yourself UPS
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· Score: 5, Interesting
I have, for years, wished for a DC input on the PC's power supply, and a standard for UPSes that would plug in to that DC input.
Taking DC, converting to AC so the PC power supply is happy, then the power supply converts to DC... it would be nice if it could just be DC all the way.
The problem is that your monitor, modem, etc. all expect AC power. It's easiest just to make a UPS that provides standard AC power, and plug everything in.
Someday, I think we will have "smart" plugs. Wall power outlets will not be live by default; they will only serve power when a proper coded request goes in over a smart plug. The device will be able to tell the wall outlet what kind of power it wants, and the outlet will be able to tell the device what kinds of power it can offer. Then little kids will stick butter knives into wall outlets and not get fried; PCs and monitors will ask for +5 and +12 volts DC and get it; and UPSes will be able to feed +5 and +12 volts DC to those PCs and monitors.
Actually, if you have the complicated smart power system I envision, there will probably be a UPS integral to the system. When your home loses power, the smart power system would broadcast a "power interrupted" signal and devices like your refrigerator and your laser printer will power themselves down; your PC will run for about 5 minutes and then power itself down (unless you are there and override it) and medical devices will run indefinitely. Maybe only the DC devices in your home will be on the UPS by default?
However, a gun isn't the only way to defend yourself or your home. I would suggest that owning a dog is more effective of a deterrent to a burglar than owning a gun.
Depends on the dog, and the burglar.
But I am reminded of something Massad Ayoob once said: "The bad guy may wonder whether your gun is loaded, but he won't wonder whether your dog is loaded."
Anyway, thanks for the thought provoking conversation.
I'm not an expert, but I don't think that any of those 20,000 U.S. laws prevent anyone from obtaining a gun
No, lots of those laws have to do with who isn't allowed to have a gun.
up here in Canada, the laws go further - you can't buy a handgun here, and you can't own one without a LOT of permits. As a result, a small time criminal finds it much tougher to get a handgun
Down here in the USA, laws on cocaine go further -- you can't buy cocaine here, you can't own any (and there aren't any permits). As a result... people with a cocaine habit buy cocaine whenever they want to. And they need to buy more every week, while one gun will do for a long time for a criminal.
If we can't stop drug users from buying drugs every week, we sure as heck can't stop thugs from getting guns. Guns are easy to smuggle, and actually easy to build. Peasants in third-world countries have been known to build working AK-47 rifles using nothing but scrap metal and hand tools.
It turns out that social factors have a lot to do with crime, and simple availability of guns has little. Most homes in Switzerland have loaded assault rifles in them, yet there is little violent crime there. Handguns are tightly controlled (completely illegal with very few exceptions) in Washington, D.C. but you are statistically more likely to get shot there than in my home town (where the average citizen can own as many handguns as he likes).
People claim that England is a good example: tight gun control, low crime. The history looks more like this: low crime, then tight gun control, then low crime. See the book The Samurai, the Mountie, and the Cowboy for details and supporting statistics.
I'll repeat the one point I feel is most important: we don't give up our basic rights for pragmatic reasons, and self-defense is an important basic right (just as free speech is).
The USA has something like 20,000 laws covering guns, their possession, transporting them, using them, carrying them, etc.
The problem is that laws don't magically affect reality. You can pass a law making it illegal to carry a gun; and all the criminals will carry a gun anyway. Criminals know they will get into trouble; they are planning to get into trouble. They want to have a gun when the trouble occurs.
So, if we look at guns from the "pragmatic" point of view, we can judge whether additional gun laws would make the world better; and the answer is no.
But we don't look at our other freedoms from the "pragmatic" point of view much. When people say hateful things, we don't pass laws repressing the freedom of speech. When people invent kooky religions, we don't pass laws repressing freedom of religion, even when sometimes the kooky people commit mass suicide or something. The Second Amendment protects our right to own and carry guns; as with other basic freedoms, this right carries some costs with it, but as with the other freedoms, it's an important right that shouldn't be infringed.
I agree that nukes, deadly viruses, cluster bombs, and missiles that make the Sun explode should be illegal.
Donna Dubinsky of Handspring announced in January 2002 that Handspring would be exiting the organizer business; there would be no more organizers, just "communicators" like the Treo.
Does the Treo 90 represent a reversal of this policy, or can we assume that Handspring is still exiting the organizer business? In other words, is the Treo 90 the last standalone PDA device Handspring will ship?
It appears to me that Donna Dubinsky's announcement was a mistake. The expensive phone/PDA Treo has not sold well, probably simply because it is expensive and times are tough right now. Handspring has been forced to slash prices again and again to keep Visors selling, probably because customers view Visors as a dead-end ever since Ms. Dubinsky's announcement. Now Handspring has shipped the Treo 90 and discontinued the Prism, while continuing to ship other Visor models; this isn't what I would expect if Handspring is serious about exiting the PDA market.
Looks to me like PDAs aren't dead. But I can't really be sure.
If I'm right and Handspring has decided not to exit the PDA market, they ought to have Donna Dubinsky make another announcement. Yes, that's embarrassing to do, but it seems better than leaving customers to wonder whether devices like the Treo 90 will be orphans or not.
I'm trying to figure out the hook for this product. It isn't the smallest Palm PDA. It isn't the highest resolution Palm PDA. It isn't the most expandable Palm PDA. It isn't the cheapest Palm PDA.
It is slightly smaller than a Visor Deluxe, but not much thinner. It is still 160x160, but with 12-bit color. (The Prism has 16-bit color, but the Prism is thicker than a Visor Deluxe, not thinner.)
All I can come up with is: it is the only Palm PDA that has the built-in thumb keyboard. Will this hook be enough to sell lots of these?
My wife and I decided to go yesterday. Our local cinema place has three of its 12 theatres devoted to Episode II. We could have gone at 11:00, 11:30, or 12:00.
We showed up at 11:20, and asked how full the 11:30 show was. The guy looked at his computer screen. "14%", he told us. So we boght tickets for the 11:30 showing.
"I'll bet yesterday was really bad," I said. He shook his head. "It wasn't! It was about like this!" Sometimes I really enjoy living in a suburb, away from the teeming masses of the city.
When we came out, there were about a half-dozen people in the area waiting to get in to the theatre.
I was tempted to go back to the cinema after dinner, just to witness the swarms of people stacked up in huge lines, but I didn't.
P.S. The Cinerama theatre in Seattle is one of the ones with a digital projector, so I will be going there to see Episode II again. (At this moment the projector is broken and they are showing film for Episode II. They don't know when it will be fixed, other than "hopefully soon".)
Slashdot Mirror
I did a web search, and found a discussion about this on the debian-gtk-gnome list. The packages are just about ready to go, but they decided to wait until the official 2.0 release before putting packages into Unstable. (There was one message voting for waiting until 2.0.1! I hope they ignored him. This is Unstable, not Stable, and I want GNOME 2.0 sooner rather than later.)
steveha
is there NO other information about this hole except that it's "fixed" by 3.3?
/etc/hosts.allow, does that stop the bug?
Um, it's not fixed by 3.3!
What he said was that the bug exists in 3.3, as in other versions (which other versions, he did not spell out)... however, if you use the new "privsep" feature of 3.3, the bug is blocked.
His stated goal is to get everyone running with "privsep" before the full details of the bug come to light. Even if that means you lose functionality... he feels it is more important to be immune to the possible remote root exploit than to be able to use all the features of ssh.
If I have ssh blocked in
That ought to work: a bug in sshd shouldn't be a problem if crackers can't access sshd. If you have a firewall, and block the ssh port on the firewall, that should be good too.
steveha
Once again, the words of an idiot.
If you are trolling, then grow up and go do something else.
If you are not trolling, I suggest you take a course in how to effectively communicate your ideas without being a jerk.
I figure you have to be a troll; is anyone this abrasive and annoying without working at it?
Have a nice day.
steveha
Wrong.
More right than wrong. I know that the PocketPC cannot currently do anything I need that a Palm PDA cannot do.
Once PDAs are available with much much faster processors and tons of RAM, people will find new uses for them. But as things are today, given a choice between the battery life of a Palm or the power of a PocketPC, most people choose the Palm.
Do you fully understand how EVIL you are? People are DYING in hospitals due to medical errors and timing issues that could be essentially eliminated by a sufficiently advanced portable computing system.
Oh, rubbish, and shame on you. I don't believe for a second that PocketPCs (or any other single gadget) can magically solve the problems of hospitals. And I'm dubious about PocketPCs at all in hospitals; they do crash.
You are actively preventing those technologies from being developed as fast as they otherwise would be.
Wow, he sure has a lot of power to affect technological development in the world. That or else you are being insanely over-the-top.
steveha
Gnome should in theory be faster, but they kill any speed increase they'd otherwise get by having a slower (well, in v1.4) graphics library and by using incredibly heavy things such as CORBA for ipc, and a daemon for configuration etc.
I don't know about the graphics library thing, but the GNOME ORB is somewhat stripped down to make it faster. Unless you actually serve objects remotely over the net, the GNOME CORBA ORB basically just adds a little bit of function call overhead. I'm willing to accept that tiny bit of overhead for a tested, industrial-strength object model like CORBA. KDE, as I understand it, is inventing their own somewhat lightweight object model, and I'm worried they will later find some situation where they wish they had left in a feature they stripped out to make it lightweight.
As for Win98, don't forget that it is a candy coating around Win95, and Win95 was aggressively optimized for size and speed. The target machine for Win95 was a 486 with 4MB of RAM. There is a bunch of assembly language in there, in critical places; and some of it is even 16-bit code. (16-bit code is much harder to write, since you have to cram things into smaller spaces and you have to explicitly handle near/far pointers, but it's tiny! Even with the thunking overhead, it won't slow you down too much if you just use it rarely.) Also don't forget that the MS C compiler actually does produce very good code, better than GCC is able to now. (Although I hear good things about the latest version of GCC, I don't think they have caught up with MS C yet.)
The tiny size of the Win95 core means that it caches well, too, and a high cache hit rate makes for speedy performance.
I'd be interested to see benchmarks of Win98 vs. a really stripped-down Linux system (no daemons running, etc.) that was compiled with aggressive optimizations and is running a really lightweight window manager (IceWM or ROX or something). And defintely no Nautilus; try your system with ROX Filer instead. I saw a huge speed jump when I did that. (Debian makes it so easy to try such experiments!)
There is still room left in Linux-based systems for size and speed improvements. Every time GCC gets better, every part of the system gets a little better. And I don't believe that much work has been done on either GNOME or KDE to make it stripped-down lean-and-mean... the first law is "make it work before you make it faster", and folks are still busy making it work right. (But Nautilus has had a lot of speed work done on it lately, and I've heard it is much improved compared to its 1.0 release.)
steveha
Mandrake really is a good user experience. Before I settled with Debian, I used Mandrake for a while, and it was slick and polished.
This will be great for the consumers who just surf the web and do email; get everything pre-installed and it will just work.
I hope they do a good job of making it easy to set up your ISP, but upon reflection it's probably no big deal. I remember the days when it was tricky to configure net dialup, but these days most ISPs just have a pretty standard PPP setup and all the user really needs to do is enter a phone number in a setup dialog.
steveha
Palm PDAs have always been intended to have a symbiotic relationship with your desktop computer. You run Palm Desktop on your desktop computer, and you can pull up all your data, edit your data using the full-size keyboard on your desktop, and hotsync. If you have an accident with the batteries on your Palm, your data is safely backed up in Palm Desktop.
Can you use the USB port on the Dana to hook up a Palm PDA such as a Treo 90, and then do a hotsync? If so, you could use both the Dana and your PDA to work with your data, and reconcile it with hotsync automatically. I'm not sure how useful that might be, but I'm wondering if it would work.
steveha
I could see myself buying a Dana. I can see Danas selling here and there. But I don't expect the Dana to be a monster hit.
You can take a Palm PDA and plug it into a keyboard. I have a Visor Deluxe and a GoType, and I do this. But when you do this, you only have a 160x160 display, and you have to be a bit careful with it because it's easy to knock the PDA free from the keyboard.
The Dana gives you a wider screen, good for looking at lots of text or perhaps column data such as a spreadsheet. It's all one unit, and it looks tough. That means you can grab it with one hand and walk around with it casually, or fling it into a backpack to take it to the library. (I hope the keys don't clack too loudly!)
Take a look at the USB ports. Looks like one is an A connector and one is a B! You can hang USB devices off this, such as a printer, and use them. Or you can plug this into a USB port, probably to hotsync your data with your desktop computer. Oh yes.
Now all it needs is a good way to hook it up to a phone line or a cell phone. You ought to be able to get a USB external modem working with this, and you might be able to get a cable that will let a Startac work with it for data. With 560x160 resolution, you can have an 80 column display, although 24 lines would be pretty cramped, but anyway you should be able to use this thing as a remote terminal.
I remember that Apple used to sell a small gadget something like this; they called it an eMate. Schools used to buy eMates. Any school that would buy an eMate would buy one of these; it can do more, it should be equally tough or tougher, and it is half the price the eMate used to be.
steveha
did you know that running a DVD at 1600x1200 won't show any quality increase, as the video is only encoded at 720x480 in NTSC (720x576 in PAL)?
Sorry, but I'm picking some nits now.
First of all, 720x480 is not a square-pixels resolution; my understanding is that the actual image, visible pixels only, in square pixels is 640x480.
However, "widescreen" movies in anamorphic format cram extra stuff into a line. Maybe those actually put 720 horizonal pixels on a line?
Second of all, 1600x1200 cannot create new detail from nothing, but it might look nice if the upsampling is done cleverly. There are some good filters that can improve a picture compared to simple pixel-stretching. Video stretched like this should look better than video shown at TV resolution on a screen of the same size; the TV image will be only 640x480 and the gaps between pixels will be more noticeable. The bigger the TV screen and the closer you sit, the more you notice the actual pixels of the image.
Third, the TV image will be 60 Hz interlaced; the computer monitor may well be 85 Hz or more, noninterlaced. There isn't any actual extra image data (it will still update only about 30 times per second) but the computer monitor might well be easier on the eyes (some people are more sensitive to interlacing flicker than other people are).
Fourth, some movies (and some video games) contain images that stress the abilities of NTSC to display them. "Chroma crawl" or flickering can result. A nice upsampling algorithm, and display on a nice computer monitor, and the image should look much nicer than on a real TV. (Note that an S-Video cable or even better still real component cables can help, here.)
Enough nits. And I agree with your suggestion: setting your display to something close to 720x480 may be the best bet. Especially if you have a monitor that can drive an 800x600 image at 120 Hz!
steveha
isn't the F-16 "fly by wire" too?
The controls operate "by wire" but the actuators are driven by hydraulics. Something needs to push on the flaps or other moving parts, to make them move correctly, and in the F-16 it's hydraulic power.
The LockMart JSF plane is the first plane to be 100% "power by wire", with no hydraulic systems at all. Motors push on the moving parts, and an electric bus powers the motors.
steveha
A friend of mine is a pilot, and he and I have talked about the JSF competition. I was hoping Boeing would win, since that would be good for the economy in my area, but the LockMart plane was better.
The Boeing plane was a fairly traditional design. The LockMart plane was a radical new design. My pilot friend said that LockMart bet everything on the radical design; either the new design would fail and they would lose hugely, or else the new design would work and they would win hugely.
In particular, the Boeing design uses conventional hydraulics for actuating its various parts, but the LockMart plane uses an electrical bus to distribute power to motors that actuate the various parts. It turns out that while the two systems weigh about the same and perform about the same, there are second and third order effects that favor the electrical bus:
While a hydraulic system is constantly under pressure, which means pump motors run constantly and heat must be constantly dissipated, the electrical bus just sits there while you aren't using it. So the power systems and cooling systems for the LockMart plane don't have to be as heavy-duty as the Boeing plane. And you can make an electrical bus redundant more easily, just by running extra cables, much easier than making hydraulics redundant. And think how much easier it will be to repair and service an electrical bus compared to a bunch of heavy-duty hoses and pipes full of hydraulic fluid!
steveha
rather than having spacecraft lug around a S%$tload of expensive fuel, keep the fuel back here on earth, and beam a laser at the craft.
Well... almost.
You can make an airplane that works this way: it sucks in cool air, a laser provides power to heat the air, the hot air jets out the back of the airplane engine and makes the plane go. The plane pushes itself along using air. We can call the air "reaction mass".
If you want to power a spacecraft with lasers, you need to do pretty much the same thing. However, in space you cannot suck in cool air, so you need to carry some other sort of reaction mass to jet out the back of the rocket. The laser provides energy to accelerate the reaction mass.
But the best, most practical application of lasers to transportation would be to make a vehicle that goes to space, using the airplane trick to get the vehicle started and then switching over at some point to more conventional rockets. As long as the laser is working and you can suck in cool air, you can jet out hot air and get some lift. This would mean your vehicle can carry less fuel and still reach orbit.
None of these will happen this year or next year.
steveha
The original 1984 Macintosh was silent
No hard drive. I have heard that Steve Jobs was very firm about not making a Mac with a hard drive; he felt it was more important that the Mac be silent than to have the storage of a hard drive.
there were a LOT of issues relating to the power supply on those early Macs and I'm inclined to think thermal design MAY have been part of the problem.
I'm sure you are correct. I remember seeing an aftermarket mod for the Mac, which added a cooling fan at the top of the Mac to suck hot air out. The ads claimed that your Mac would be much more reliable with the active cooling.
steveha
Your wall system sounds neat, but the problem arises that it is hard to regulate power on such large lines.
I don't know much about the practical details of electricity. I had sort of pictured several wires, one set with 110 Volts AC and one or more sets with DC, probably on smaller wires.
Would the hard-to-regulate problem go away if we had room-temperature superconducting wires?
to make it work, you'd need the power conversion circuitry at the wall plug
How bulky is the equipment needed to regulate DC and/or split multiple voltages off one DC line?
I assume this needs transformers, rectifiers, capacitors, and other bulky stuff that dissipates heat. Darn. I was hoping you could have everything in one box in the basement.
steveha
You can beam power around as microwaves or a laser beam or something, but the equipment to collect the power and convert it will be large and bulky. And unless you want to turn your apartment into a large microwave oven with you inside it, you would need some kind of complicated aiming system to make sure the power only goes where you want it.
Simpler would be to have your gadgets run on battery power, with charging cradles.
If you imagine ultra-low-power technology combined with ultra-high-density batteries, you would have gadgets that don't need charging often and have no power leads. Then just have robots run around in the middle of the night, charging them while you sleep.
:-)
steveha
I have, for years, wished for a DC input on the PC's power supply, and a standard for UPSes that would plug in to that DC input.
Taking DC, converting to AC so the PC power supply is happy, then the power supply converts to DC... it would be nice if it could just be DC all the way.
The problem is that your monitor, modem, etc. all expect AC power. It's easiest just to make a UPS that provides standard AC power, and plug everything in.
Someday, I think we will have "smart" plugs. Wall power outlets will not be live by default; they will only serve power when a proper coded request goes in over a smart plug. The device will be able to tell the wall outlet what kind of power it wants, and the outlet will be able to tell the device what kinds of power it can offer. Then little kids will stick butter knives into wall outlets and not get fried; PCs and monitors will ask for +5 and +12 volts DC and get it; and UPSes will be able to feed +5 and +12 volts DC to those PCs and monitors.
Actually, if you have the complicated smart power system I envision, there will probably be a UPS integral to the system. When your home loses power, the smart power system would broadcast a "power interrupted" signal and devices like your refrigerator and your laser printer will power themselves down; your PC will run for about 5 minutes and then power itself down (unless you are there and override it) and medical devices will run indefinitely. Maybe only the DC devices in your home will be on the UPS by default?
steveha
However, a gun isn't the only way to defend yourself or your home. I would suggest that owning a dog is more effective of a deterrent to a burglar than owning a gun.
Depends on the dog, and the burglar.
But I am reminded of something Massad Ayoob once said: "The bad guy may wonder whether your gun is loaded, but he won't wonder whether your dog is loaded."
Anyway, thanks for the thought provoking conversation.
Thank you, too.
steveha
I'm not an expert, but I don't think that any of those 20,000 U.S. laws prevent anyone from obtaining a gun
No, lots of those laws have to do with who isn't allowed to have a gun.
up here in Canada, the laws go further - you can't buy a handgun here, and you can't own one without a LOT of permits. As a result, a small time criminal finds it much tougher to get a handgun
Down here in the USA, laws on cocaine go further -- you can't buy cocaine here, you can't own any (and there aren't any permits). As a result... people with a cocaine habit buy cocaine whenever they want to. And they need to buy more every week, while one gun will do for a long time for a criminal.
If we can't stop drug users from buying drugs every week, we sure as heck can't stop thugs from getting guns. Guns are easy to smuggle, and actually easy to build. Peasants in third-world countries have been known to build working AK-47 rifles using nothing but scrap metal and hand tools.
It turns out that social factors have a lot to do with crime, and simple availability of guns has little. Most homes in Switzerland have loaded assault rifles in them, yet there is little violent crime there. Handguns are tightly controlled (completely illegal with very few exceptions) in Washington, D.C. but you are statistically more likely to get shot there than in my home town (where the average citizen can own as many handguns as he likes).
People claim that England is a good example: tight gun control, low crime. The history looks more like this: low crime, then tight gun control, then low crime. See the book The Samurai, the Mountie, and the Cowboy for details and supporting statistics.
I'll repeat the one point I feel is most important: we don't give up our basic rights for pragmatic reasons, and self-defense is an important basic right (just as free speech is).
steveha
The USA has something like 20,000 laws covering guns, their possession, transporting them, using them, carrying them, etc.
The problem is that laws don't magically affect reality. You can pass a law making it illegal to carry a gun; and all the criminals will carry a gun anyway. Criminals know they will get into trouble; they are planning to get into trouble. They want to have a gun when the trouble occurs.
So, if we look at guns from the "pragmatic" point of view, we can judge whether additional gun laws would make the world better; and the answer is no.
But we don't look at our other freedoms from the "pragmatic" point of view much. When people say hateful things, we don't pass laws repressing the freedom of speech. When people invent kooky religions, we don't pass laws repressing freedom of religion, even when sometimes the kooky people commit mass suicide or something. The Second Amendment protects our right to own and carry guns; as with other basic freedoms, this right carries some costs with it, but as with the other freedoms, it's an important right that shouldn't be infringed.
I agree that nukes, deadly viruses, cluster bombs, and missiles that make the Sun explode should be illegal.
steveha
Arrgh. I didn't say it, but "this product" is the Treo 90, the one without cell-phone or wireless pager features.
steveha
Sorry, my bad. The "it" I was talking about is the Treo 90, not the 270. The 270 is of course a proper Treo. The 90 is a PDA.
Sorry.
steveha
Donna Dubinsky of Handspring announced in January 2002 that Handspring would be exiting the organizer business; there would be no more organizers, just "communicators" like the Treo.
Does the Treo 90 represent a reversal of this policy, or can we assume that Handspring is still exiting the organizer business? In other words, is the Treo 90 the last standalone PDA device Handspring will ship?
It appears to me that Donna Dubinsky's announcement was a mistake. The expensive phone/PDA Treo has not sold well, probably simply because it is expensive and times are tough right now. Handspring has been forced to slash prices again and again to keep Visors selling, probably because customers view Visors as a dead-end ever since Ms. Dubinsky's announcement. Now Handspring has shipped the Treo 90 and discontinued the Prism, while continuing to ship other Visor models; this isn't what I would expect if Handspring is serious about exiting the PDA market.
Looks to me like PDAs aren't dead. But I can't really be sure.
If I'm right and Handspring has decided not to exit the PDA market, they ought to have Donna Dubinsky make another announcement. Yes, that's embarrassing to do, but it seems better than leaving customers to wonder whether devices like the Treo 90 will be orphans or not.
steveha
Why is Handspring using their Treo brand for this?
The Treo is supposed to do the work of three gadgets: a cell phone, a PDA, and a wireless 2-way pager like a RIM Blackberry. But this is just a PDA.
I guess they just figured that the form factor is the same, the accessories will work just the same, so just go ahead and use the same brand.
The "Visor" brand never really meant anything in the first place, so maybe it doesn't matter that "Treo" no longer means what it used to mean.
steveha
I'm trying to figure out the hook for this product. It isn't the smallest Palm PDA. It isn't the highest resolution Palm PDA. It isn't the most expandable Palm PDA. It isn't the cheapest Palm PDA.
It is slightly smaller than a Visor Deluxe, but not much thinner. It is still 160x160, but with 12-bit color. (The Prism has 16-bit color, but the Prism is thicker than a Visor Deluxe, not thinner.)
All I can come up with is: it is the only Palm PDA that has the built-in thumb keyboard. Will this hook be enough to sell lots of these?
steveha
My wife and I decided to go yesterday. Our local cinema place has three of its 12 theatres devoted to Episode II. We could have gone at 11:00, 11:30, or 12:00.
We showed up at 11:20, and asked how full the 11:30 show was. The guy looked at his computer screen. "14%", he told us. So we boght tickets for the 11:30 showing.
"I'll bet yesterday was really bad," I said. He shook his head. "It wasn't! It was about like this!" Sometimes I really enjoy living in a suburb, away from the teeming masses of the city.
When we came out, there were about a half-dozen people in the area waiting to get in to the theatre.
I was tempted to go back to the cinema after dinner, just to witness the swarms of people stacked up in huge lines, but I didn't.
P.S. The Cinerama theatre in Seattle is one of the ones with a digital projector, so I will be going there to see Episode II again. (At this moment the projector is broken and they are showing film for Episode II. They don't know when it will be fixed, other than "hopefully soon".)
steveha