In other words, will PS2 users play in the same world as PC users?
That would quickly become a nightmare the moment they decided to release a patch for the PC version. Unless they are going to require you to add a hard drive to your PS2 as well, there is no way they are going to be able to patch a PS2 version to match.
Of course all of that is moot apparently, as someone has already mentioned that the games take place in different timelines, and thus do not intersect.
Still an intersting issue though. Can you think of any popular online game that hasn't absolutely required periodic patching to deal with bugs and/or cheating?
I remember a few years back there was this huge scandal in Canada where people had devised a Palm Pilot add on which could act as a magnetic strip reader.
You could swipe any card and it would extract the information from the magnetic strip and store it in a database.
And actually now there is a springboard module for the Handspring Visor that does this.
Features listed on the website:
Low Cost - Transforms Visor Handheld PDA into a low cost, handheld magnetic card transaction processing platform.
Plug-and-Play functionality - Built in Flash memory means that applications are installed automatically during CardTool reader module insertion. Eliminated application downloads from a PC. Even if power is lost, just add new batteries and the application is automatically reloaded.
Back up transaction data - with additional flash memory software, transaction data may be stored in CardTool's flash memory, thus ensuring data isn't lost during power outages.
Springboard expansion slot - Since CardTool reader module uses Springboard(TM) expansion slot, the USB/Serial port is available for other functions.
Versatile Reader - A 3-Track read head with a wide range of decode algorithms means an extensive range of magnetic cards can be read. There is even a raw data mode which allows application level decode.
Palm OS Development environment - no need to invest in proprietary operating systems.
They already have Linux running on these, on both the ARM and the C55x DSP cores that comprise the OMAP chip. They even share the same process space, so you can initiate/control/kill processes on the DSP from the ARM. This is being done by a third party company called RidgeRun Unfortunately, the OMAP version is not quite out yet it seems, but they have versions out for ARM + C54x DSP.
Re:Great OS, but Palm's platforms are lagging...
on
Palm OS 5.0 Preview
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· Score: 2, Informative
Licensees can choose from a full range of processors - From the Palm Press Release.
This, among other things on those pages, mean OS 5 will also work on the 68000(Dragonball) processors as well.
No, this means that you have many choices of ARM processor. You could for example, pick an OMAP chip from Texas Instruments (e.g. ARM7 + C55x DSP), or you could pick some StrongARM based chip from Intel, or whatever. So long as it's ARM, it's fine.
The press release says it pretty plainly:
Licensees can choose from a full range of processors, starting with the ARM 7 CPU and scaling to the highest-performance ARM chips from Intel, Motorola and Texas Instruments.
Nothing is magically going to make that OS, which is written in/compiled to the ARM instruction set, run on a 68k, unless you're planning on writing an ARM emulator for the 68k. This would of course be rather dumb, as it would be so sloooooooooow that you would lose any benefit of moving to the ARM architecture.
To listen to the CD on your PC, use the media player included in the CD.
DESCRIPTION OF PLAYER AND CONTENT
The compact disc you are using contains copy protection technology. When you use the compact disc in a conventional CD player, it operates like any other CD. When you use the compact disc in a CD ROM drive, the technology launches an audio player (the "Player"), and plays compressed audio files (the "Content").
The Content has been encoded using software that incorporates the LAME encoder; more information about the encoder is available at http:// www.mp3dev.org.
The Content files are encrypted and the Player contains decryption technology
So basically, they've ripped the MP3s for you, and they're sitting there encrypted (somehow) on the disc.
Ok slashdotters, get cracking!:-) I'm willing to bet that someone can reverse engineer that player. Make sure you're in a non-DMCA jurisdiction though.
In the worst case, we could always start a new distributed.net project...:-)
One reason why projects can be late is if management dictates the schedule. If the product/program manager decides that "We need this product to come out first quarter," then generally speaking they will find a way to make it happen, or at least they will find a way to make it happen on paper anyway. The opinions of the programmers can and will get trampled as a result.
Personal anecdote:
About a year ago, our company hired a program/project manager (yes he wears both hats simultaneously) to oversee our project. He asked us to generate a list of tasks for the project, and then list estimates of the time required for each one.
We, having experience working on previous versions of the product, knew that by the nature of our product (ported software), that sometimes you could hit an unexpected problem that would take a long time to resolve. E.g. maybe you find out that your bug is actually due to assumptions by the original programmers about how the compiler on their target platform worked (Windows), which aren't applicable on your target platform (UNIX), and it takes you a month to refactor the code to work around not being able to use that particular C++ feature. That sort of thing. Experience told us that something would happen like this probably a few times during the course of the project.
Armed with this knowledge, we came up with our estimates, but we were smart about it. We gave three estimates for each task; a best case (things go better than we expect), an expected case, and a worst case (something fundamental blows up and it takes a long time to debug or fix). As you could gather from the previous paragraph, the "worst case" was actually rather likely to happen, and not senseless paranoia on our part. We made this clear to the manager when he questioned why we didn't just give one estimate, and why the worst case estimates were so large.
Predictably, the manager looked at the sum of the worst case values and didn't like what he saw (since he wanted the product out in a certain quarter), and used all the expected case values when making the schedule, which then fit his timeframe. Then he wondered why the project was running behind before too long.
He even went so far as to try to blame it on our team leader, saying that he hadn't given him good estimates, and that he was having to cover for the team lead's screwup. The team lead gave him a piece of his mind over that one. Needless to say our team lead demanded a transfer to another group not long after that.
I don't know how familiar you are with Code Composer Studio, but it sounds pretty much like what you're looking for. It is TI's debugger for their Digital Signal Processors. You can either run your DSP software on real DSP silicon, or you can run it on a simulator that runs on the host computer. If you needed to capture data or pipe it to another program, you could then stream out blocks of memory to a file. Of course, this all requires you to be able to write DSP code:-)
There is also a free 30 day evaluation copy that you can order. Simulator only, but otherwise fully functional. If you can do all of your work in 30 days, this might be all you need:-)
There is special pricing for universities. They get the software are very reduced rates.
The software listed on the website is for the PC, and runs on Windows. It is not really advertised to the mass market, but there is a version for Solaris as well. If you wanted to get a hold of that, you might be able to, but you'd have to do a lot of pestering. That product is Code Composer Studio for Solaris 1.1
It is not out of the realm of possibility for Linux or HP-UX versions of the software to be released as well, if it is perceived that there is enough interest. If you want it, start pestering people:-)
Mechanik
Douglas Adams is rolling in his grave
on
Share The Pi!
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· Score: 1
Does this mean that 42 is not the meaning of life, the universe, and everything after all?
Think of them as the old-fashioned telephone equivalent of an anonymous proxy server.
What would be really great would be if the pay phones provided anonymous ISP services. Think of the following scenario:
1. You hook your laptop/handheld/wearable into the provided ethernet jack (or use some wireless protocol, e.g. 802.11).
2. You plug in maybe $0.50 or something (I'm just pulling a number out of my ass... that's a pretty expensive figure compared to your average dialup ISP) in coins for every 5 minutes of access you need.
3. The phone opens up its connection, and you are configured via DHCP.
4. Proceed to do whatever you want anonymously. There is no ISP contract that can tie you to your connection, since you paid with cold, hard cash.
Nice idea, no? Just make sure you encrypt the hell out of whatever traffic you send that might be remotely private. And also watch that you don't communicate with any sites that could be tied to you.
Your only real worry other than that is if they started putting cameras in the payphones.
Even if you didn't need anonymity, the idea of having a net connection just a payphone away is damn sweet.
This reminds me of a story my friend told me once...
Back in the days of those big monster dishes that sat in your back yard, you used to have parental controls built into them so that you could lock out certain channels, usually the porn channels. These channels were typically locked out with a secret code consisting of 3 or 4 digits.
My friend's cousins (about 10 years old) sat for an entire day systematically trying different codes until they found the right one, and poof, let there be porn. Their parents never knew the difference.
The bottom line is that if they want it, they will get it. If they don't decide to crack the code, there are other avenues... going to a friend's house to watch TV for instance. Or watching on an "old" TV which doesn't support V-chip. If they're really desperate, they can shoplift R-rated movies from Walmart if they really want to (or buy them... I'm willing to bet 99% of cashiers won't give a rat's ass).
The closest I could figure out before I shrugged my shoulders in apathy is that some guy was posting Ellison's short stories to a newsgroup, and when his ISP was notified of the copyright infringements they cut off his account. So now Ellison is suing AOL and the owners of this guy's ISP? AOL wasn't even the poster's ISP as far as I can tell? Ellison seems to be upset about the fact that people were able to read these postings on AOL, as well as for his stuff being traded on Gnutella, and since an AOL subsidiary developed the Gnutella protocol he seems to blame them for that too. Thats as close as I can figure, anyhow.
Guess he ought to sue Microsoft and Netscape too. Chances are that these pirate websites that he is also complaining about for posting his work were either viewed with IE or Netscape. They are aiding and abetting the crime just as much as whomoever wrote Gnutella, seeing as both Gnutella and the big two browsers are just methods of viewing content that is posted by third parties, and in both cases the content is in no way related to the people that wrote the "viewer" software, the "viewer" being a browser, or Gnutella.
I'd really like to see how quickly Microsoft would use their gazillions of dollars to shut down this retarded lawsuit and make Ellison their bitch. Somehow I don't think the DMCA would last very long if Gates et al didn't like it.
While you're at it Harlan, why don't you sue the guy that wrote the http protocol too... without that the websites couldn't be viewed either.
What's next, we sue Al Gore because he "invented" the internet??? Or I know, let's sue the crap out of the descendents of Alan Turing or some other notable figure in the history of the invention of the modern computer... without computers after all, those people wouldn't be using Gnutella, would they?
I for one haven't really understood what the big deal is with being able to run Media Player on WinCE devices. Sure, you could upload your Lord of The Rings movie trailer to it, but then you would not have any RAM left to do anything practical, e.g. store your contact lists, calendar, etc. Same goes for MP3s if you are going to put enough of them on there to make it worthwhile (32 MB+).
Playing media on these devices seems more like something people do for bragging rights than out of actual need or practicality. It is much more economical to just buy a dedicated MP3 player if you want one.
Not to mention that your battery life would go to shit if you were using your CE device to play MP3s/movies. CE is a battery hog already just doing basic tasks (from what I hear) without chewing up 100% CPU playing pr0n mpegs on it.
Although, the idea of being able to watch pr0n *anywhere* might be a real plus, LOL.
And FYI, there are several Gameboy emulators out there for the Palm such as
Liberty
and
GameboyEMU
Not really... Bristol's product (Wind/U) sucks ass compared to Mainsoft's (MainWin). I can't see people suddenly deciding to invest in them now, especially seeing as how Mainsoft and Microsoft are even more in bed together than before. Mainsoft is already the clear winner in the Win32-to-UNIX porting toolkit arena.
Mainsoft deserves to be the winner too. I always found it interesting that our incidences of random crashes in our ported app went to basically zero once we switched from Wind/U to MainWin. Not to mention that Mainsoft supports more of Win32/MFC, e.g. DCOM. The only thing Wind/U has over Mainsoft right now is that they support the version 3.0 of the ATL (MainWin only supports 1.2 right now), but that will all change when MainWin 4.0 comes out Real Soon Now. I could write a laundry list of complaints about Wind/U.
For those that don't know (you certainly wouldn't from the article), Mainsoft produces a toolkit (MainWin) which implements the WinNT/2k kernel and MFC on various flavours of *NIX, including Solaris and Linux. This enables one to take a Win32/MFC program that was developed on windows and (in theory) have it work on *NIX just by linking to their MainWin libraries. The toolkit has been discussed some here on/. before, but I thought I'd refresh everyone's memory.
I/we use the toolkit here at work (a MAJOR hardware company) to port our dev tools to *NIX, and we've had quite a positive experience with it. Sure there are problems here and there, but for the most part they're due to our windoze developers making assumptions based on the program being run in a win32 environment (things like endianess issues, or the fact that windows uses backslashes for dir separators rather than slashes). It has enabled us to port a product consisting of over 300,000 lines of code without having to rewrite the whole thing. I don't imagine Mainsoft would be having as hard a time porting Office as people are making out, not only because the toolkit is good IMHO, but because in my dealings with them they have seemed like a very sharp bunch of people.
"Now," you say, "why would Microsoft want to port Office to Linux? Isn't Linux their enemy?"
1) Further entrenching the.doc and.xls formats into the market. Right now people are trying to compete with Wordperfect and StarOffice, but I am willing to bet that if Office made it to *NIX, that would spell the death knell for WP and SO (and who knows, maybe Corel along with them). Suddenly the few alternatives you have to office are gone. Not to mention that one of SO's big selling points is its supposed "MSOffice compatibility"... why would you bother if you could just run MSOffice natively?
2) Doing this port will lend MUCH credibility in the public eye to MainWin. If they are lucky, then people will start organizing their multi-platform development strategies around it right from the get-go, and thus Microsoft will "lock them into" using the MFC development model. Right now people tend to use Mainwin to port apps they already have on Windows to *NIX... perhaps if MainWin got enough prestige people would decide right from the start that if they are doing a cross-platform app that they will do it in MFC and use MainWin to do the porting.
Do NOT underestimate this... Mainsoft (and through them, Microsoft) makes some serious bucks off of licensing/royalties for products that use MainWin, as their code is actually linked into yours. If you just make your app on windows and compile with Dev Studio, you pay no royalties, but with a MainWin ported app you are shipping with compiled libs that implement MFC and the NT kernel... that means $$ for Mainsoft and Microsoft.
It especially means $$ if people start deciding that they would like to forge off into the Linux arena because using MainWin is so much more attractive than doing a native port from the ground up. Companies that before were never even considering doing ports to *NIX might start thinking about it if this MSOffice port goes off well because they will say to themselves "shit, we hardly have to do anything ourselves to do this," even though that's not quite necessarily true.
This is very good for Linux in a way too... it means that you will be able to get much more of your favourite apps on your favourite OS.
In grade 12, our class made Tetris clones with Turbo C++ 3.0, using Borland's dos-only, 16-colour VGA graphics libraries.
Granted, some of us were a bit more experienced than the others, and weren't wowed by learning such breathtaking new concepts as using bitmapped graphics in a program, but nevertheless, it was still extremely fun. The relatively low-techness of the thing kept it from becoming work to us, as you didn't really have to butt your head up against a wall figuring out how to go about designing the thing so much as it was just straightforward and you spent your time just coding up the details. Many of us even finished early and added all kinds of cool enhancements and new play modes to our programs.
In the same class that we made that Tetris program in, we also had to do a project. I made a nifty little encryption program (command-line or GUI, depending on how you invoked it). It wasn't very secure (replicated your password to fill a buffer, then played the game of life on the bits, then broke it up into 8 seeds to feed on each pass to srand, and then rand was used to successively generate bytes for a one-time-pad that was XORed with the plaintext), but it was pretty cool for high school, and impressed the hell out of the teacher.
I really miss those days... you just don't get to do fun stuff like that in university. Sure, coding up a module that implements a red-black tree for your algorithms class might be intellectually stimulating, but I don't think any of us would really call it "fun." Neither do you ever get to create an entire, stand-alone program, where you actually have to worry about making the thing a good experience for the user (for the most part anyway... HCI courses aside), with error checking and the whole bit. Instead you end up mostly implementing little text proggies that implement some data structures and algorithms, and your TAs run them through some test cases. Interesting though it may be, none of it has ever had the same magic of those days I spent churning out that crappy little Tetris game.
Rather than using dogs, you could use one of those suckers to track criminals through the woods, search for lost skiiers, search for earthquake victims in rubble... the list is endless. Of course for the thing to be worth it would have to be more sensitive than a dog, cost-effective, and hand-held.
Shadowrun is great and all, but almost everything in it (except, notably, the whole magical theme) is lifted right out of the books of William Gibson, right down to the terminology. No offence, but this article really ought to have referenced Gibson instead. Shadowrun didn't invent these ideas by any means.
And Neuromancer was published when exactly? Early eighties? I think anyone that hasn't noticed the trend of society gravitating towards things Gibson-esque by now has been caught napping. The article to me is years too late, and doesn't really tell me anything I didn't already know, at least from that perspective.
If you want to check out a game that does a really good job with the theme of the death of magic and creativity at the hands of technological advancement and the corporate agenda, check out Mage: The Ascension from White Wolf Games. Blows Shadowrun out of the water IMHO. Read it and tell me that you don't see some eerie parallels with recent technological advancements... the Progenitors and Iteration X are taking over;-)
Mechanik
Re:Wow... and so technologically advanced too!
on
Daikatana Goes Gold!
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· Score: 1
Actually Halflife is based on the Quake 1 engine, not Q2. You can tell because some of the engine features from Q2 are missing in the HL engine, e.g. true colour skies.
Mechanik
universities guilty for having open ports? WTF?!
on
Pay Lars
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· Score: 1
You know, it seems pretty retarded to me that Metallica, RIAA (hope I got that right), et al, seem to think that just because a university has the napster ports unrestricted, that means that they are encouraging and helping piracy.
Last time I checked, ANY PROGRAM THAT USES SOCKETS can basically use any damn port it pleases. Who is to say that there are not thousands of legitemate programs (not that I'm saying Napster isn't legit, that's a separate debate) that use that port too, and that you're unfairly restricting their use by closing off the port?
By the same token, the Napster folks can easily change their program to use another port. Closing off whatever port they are using now is just a band-aid solution. I'm sure that someone could come up with a scheme whereby Napster would randomly rotate ports every so often and the clients would have some way of finding out what the port of the day was. Or heck, they could even use a port that you DON'T DARE close, like say some http ports...
The notion that just because a university has a port open on its systems that it is liable for what is done with those ports is bullshit to me... If I write a program to distribute illegal content on port XXXX, does that mean that my ISP is liable because they "should have known" that I could do this on that port? If that's the case ISPs might as well shut down everything but http right now, because anyone can write a program that uses any port. Goodbye Quake, goodbye ICQ, goodbye everything, because someone MIGHT do something naughty on that port. It's not like your ISP has the resources to police every single port out there.
The point is that even if we accept this bullshit assertion that the universities are somehow helping the pirates, are they any less helping them now that they've banned one measly port?!? I don't think so.
You know, people with the proper know how can make transmitters from scratch out of parts. Next thing you know the government is going to be raiding Radio Shack just because they carry parts that *might* be used to create listening devices. Before you know it you'll have to get a permit just to buy some friggin transistors and breadboards.
Well, this is going to be really dry to read, but I'll let Drexler speak for himself...
/quote Nanosystems, p.370
12.8. Cooling and computational capacity
In nanomechanical systems of sufficiently large scale, the ~10^12 W/m^3 power dissipation density of ~1 GHz nanomechanical logic systems described here exceeeds any possible means of cooling. On a sufficiently small scale, however, cooling poses no problem. For example, the equilibrium delta t of an isolated 100 nW system of 400 nm dimensions is 0.01 K in a medium with a thermal conductivity of 10 W/(m*k).
On an intermediate scale, convective cooling is appropriate. Section 11.5 outlines a cooling technology based on branced channels, inhomogeneous phase-changing coolants, and high pressures capable of removing ~10^15 W of thermal energy from a 1 cm^3 volume at ~273 K. This is sufficient to cool ~10^12 CPU-scale systems with an aggregate instruction-execution rate of ~10^21 per second. A more modest 10 W system can deliver ~10^11 MIPS.
"Perhaps you should open a computer once, and compare the size of the CPU with the size of the box. While there is certainly a relation between the size of the CPU and its speed to some extend, there isn't much relation between the size of the CPU and the size of a computer."
Like I said, I wasn't allowing for any of that. However, Drexler and others have come up with many interesting ideas regarding nanoscale memories and other neccessary items. I saw an interesting lecture in which a guy from NASA described a memory scheme that used individual atoms as bits... it would enable you to put about 10^15 bytes of information on a square centimeter of diamondoid. The system wouldn't need a whole bunch of peripherals like floppy drives, a sound card, and all that crap (which is why your motherboard is so big in the first place)... each processing unit wouldn't need much more than the CPU, some small amount of memory, and a connection to the rest of the system. The increase in the size of the processing unit would not be all that great... you're still talking probably hundreds of billions of nanoprocessors per square inch.
The nanocomputers Drexler talks about in Nanosystems aren't electronic at all, but mechanical. Instead of transistors and such, you have logic rods instead. All logic in the computer is represented by the displacement of these rods... a small displacement might be a zero, while a large displacement would be a 1.
In terms of architecture, they are just like any other RISC machine... the only difference is that the logic of the components is mechanical rather than electronic. You still have gates, you still have a bus, you still have registers, only all of these things are built mechanically rather than electronically.
Sorry if this is a brief reply, but Drexler wrote an entire book on this sort of thing, and it's really way too much info to condense into a post.
Slashdot Mirror
And name an OS Winux. . .
:-)
I think Winsux would be more accurate
Mechanik
In other words, will PS2 users play in the same world as PC users?
That would quickly become a nightmare the moment they decided to release a patch for the PC version. Unless they are going to require you to add a hard drive to your PS2 as well, there is no way they are going to be able to patch a PS2 version to match.
Of course all of that is moot apparently, as someone has already mentioned that the games take place in different timelines, and thus do not intersect.
Still an intersting issue though. Can you think of any popular online game that hasn't absolutely required periodic patching to deal with bugs and/or cheating?
Mechanik
You could swipe any card and it would extract the information from the magnetic strip and store it in a database.
And actually now there is a springboard module for the Handspring Visor that does this.
Features listed on the website:
Low Cost - Transforms Visor Handheld PDA into a low cost, handheld magnetic card transaction processing platform.
Plug-and-Play functionality - Built in Flash memory means that applications are installed automatically during CardTool reader module insertion. Eliminated application downloads from a PC. Even if power is lost, just add new batteries and the application is automatically reloaded.
Back up transaction data - with additional flash memory software, transaction data may be stored in CardTool's flash memory, thus ensuring data isn't lost during power outages. Springboard expansion slot - Since CardTool reader module uses Springboard(TM) expansion slot, the USB/Serial port is available for other functions.
Versatile Reader - A 3-Track read head with a wide range of decode algorithms means an extensive range of magnetic cards can be read. There is even a raw data mode which allows application level decode.
Palm OS Development environment - no need to invest in proprietary operating systems.
:-)
Happy cracking!
Mechanik
Where does linux fit in to all this?
:-)
Let the karma whoring commence!
They already have Linux running on these, on both the ARM and the C55x DSP cores that comprise the OMAP chip. They even share the same process space, so you can initiate/control/kill processes on the DSP from the ARM. This is being done by a third party company called RidgeRun Unfortunately, the OMAP version is not quite out yet it seems, but they have versions out for ARM + C54x DSP.
Read this PDF for more technical info.
Compilers are gcc in the case of the ARM, and the TI proprietary compiler for the DSP (ported to Linux). Debugger in both cases is GDB.
Mechanik
Disclaimer: I am a TI employee.
So where are you registered? Thinkgeek?
Mechanik
Licensees can choose from a full range of processors - From the Palm Press Release.
This, among other things on those pages, mean OS 5 will also work on the 68000(Dragonball) processors as well.
No, this means that you have many choices of ARM processor. You could for example, pick an OMAP chip from Texas Instruments (e.g. ARM7 + C55x DSP), or you could pick some StrongARM based chip from Intel, or whatever. So long as it's ARM, it's fine.
The press release says it pretty plainly:
Licensees can choose from a full range of processors, starting with the ARM 7 CPU and scaling to the highest-performance ARM chips from Intel, Motorola and Texas Instruments.
Nothing is magically going to make that OS, which is written in/compiled to the ARM instruction set, run on a 68k, unless you're planning on writing an ARM emulator for the 68k. This would of course be rather dumb, as it would be so sloooooooooow that you would lose any benefit of moving to the ARM architecture.
Mechanik
Note the following quotes:
:-) I'm willing to bet that someone can reverse engineer that player. Make sure you're in a non-DMCA jurisdiction though.
:-)
To listen to the CD on your PC, use the media player included in the CD.
DESCRIPTION OF PLAYER AND CONTENT The compact disc you are using contains copy protection technology. When you use the compact disc in a conventional CD player, it operates like any other CD. When you use the compact disc in a CD ROM drive, the technology launches an audio player (the "Player"), and plays compressed audio files (the "Content").
The Content has been encoded using software that incorporates the LAME encoder; more information about the encoder is available at http:// www.mp3dev.org.
The Content files are encrypted and the Player contains decryption technology
So basically, they've ripped the MP3s for you, and they're sitting there encrypted (somehow) on the disc.
Ok slashdotters, get cracking!
In the worst case, we could always start a new distributed.net project...
Mechanik
One reason why projects can be late is if management dictates the schedule. If the product/program manager decides that "We need this product to come out first quarter," then generally speaking they will find a way to make it happen, or at least they will find a way to make it happen on paper anyway. The opinions of the programmers can and will get trampled as a result.
Personal anecdote:
About a year ago, our company hired a program/project manager (yes he wears both hats simultaneously) to oversee our project. He asked us to generate a list of tasks for the project, and then list estimates of the time required for each one.
We, having experience working on previous versions of the product, knew that by the nature of our product (ported software), that sometimes you could hit an unexpected problem that would take a long time to resolve. E.g. maybe you find out that your bug is actually due to assumptions by the original programmers about how the compiler on their target platform worked (Windows), which aren't applicable on your target platform (UNIX), and it takes you a month to refactor the code to work around not being able to use that particular C++ feature. That sort of thing. Experience told us that something would happen like this probably a few times during the course of the project.
Armed with this knowledge, we came up with our estimates, but we were smart about it. We gave three estimates for each task; a best case (things go better than we expect), an expected case, and a worst case (something fundamental blows up and it takes a long time to debug or fix). As you could gather from the previous paragraph, the "worst case" was actually rather likely to happen, and not senseless paranoia on our part. We made this clear to the manager when he questioned why we didn't just give one estimate, and why the worst case estimates were so large.
Predictably, the manager looked at the sum of the worst case values and didn't like what he saw (since he wanted the product out in a certain quarter), and used all the expected case values when making the schedule, which then fit his timeframe. Then he wondered why the project was running behind before too long.
He even went so far as to try to blame it on our team leader, saying that he hadn't given him good estimates, and that he was having to cover for the team lead's screwup. The team lead gave him a piece of his mind over that one. Needless to say our team lead demanded a transfer to another group not long after that.
Mechanik
Disclaimer: I work for Texas Instruments.
:-)
:-)
:-)
I don't know how familiar you are with Code Composer Studio, but it sounds pretty much like what you're looking for. It is TI's debugger for their Digital Signal Processors. You can either run your DSP software on real DSP silicon, or you can run it on a simulator that runs on the host computer. If you needed to capture data or pipe it to another program, you could then stream out blocks of memory to a file. Of course, this all requires you to be able to write DSP code
There is also a free 30 day evaluation copy that you can order. Simulator only, but otherwise fully functional. If you can do all of your work in 30 days, this might be all you need
There is special pricing for universities. They get the software are very reduced rates.
The software listed on the website is for the PC, and runs on Windows. It is not really advertised to the mass market, but there is a version for Solaris as well. If you wanted to get a hold of that, you might be able to, but you'd have to do a lot of pestering. That product is Code Composer Studio for Solaris 1.1
It is not out of the realm of possibility for Linux or HP-UX versions of the software to be released as well, if it is perceived that there is enough interest. If you want it, start pestering people
Mechanik
Mechanik
What would be really great would be if the pay phones provided anonymous ISP services. Think of the following scenario:
1. You hook your laptop/handheld/wearable into the provided ethernet jack (or use some wireless protocol, e.g. 802.11).
2. You plug in maybe $0.50 or something (I'm just pulling a number out of my ass... that's a pretty expensive figure compared to your average dialup ISP) in coins for every 5 minutes of access you need.
3. The phone opens up its connection, and you are configured via DHCP.
4. Proceed to do whatever you want anonymously. There is no ISP contract that can tie you to your connection, since you paid with cold, hard cash.
Nice idea, no? Just make sure you encrypt the hell out of whatever traffic you send that might be remotely private. And also watch that you don't communicate with any sites that could be tied to you.
Your only real worry other than that is if they started putting cameras in the payphones.
Even if you didn't need anonymity, the idea of having a net connection just a payphone away is damn sweet.
Mechanik
Back in the days of those big monster dishes that sat in your back yard, you used to have parental controls built into them so that you could lock out certain channels, usually the porn channels. These channels were typically locked out with a secret code consisting of 3 or 4 digits.
My friend's cousins (about 10 years old) sat for an entire day systematically trying different codes until they found the right one, and poof, let there be porn. Their parents never knew the difference.
The bottom line is that if they want it, they will get it. If they don't decide to crack the code, there are other avenues... going to a friend's house to watch TV for instance. Or watching on an "old" TV which doesn't support V-chip. If they're really desperate, they can shoplift R-rated movies from Walmart if they really want to (or buy them... I'm willing to bet 99% of cashiers won't give a rat's ass).
Mechanik
Guess he ought to sue Microsoft and Netscape too. Chances are that these pirate websites that he is also complaining about for posting his work were either viewed with IE or Netscape. They are aiding and abetting the crime just as much as whomoever wrote Gnutella, seeing as both Gnutella and the big two browsers are just methods of viewing content that is posted by third parties, and in both cases the content is in no way related to the people that wrote the "viewer" software, the "viewer" being a browser, or Gnutella.
I'd really like to see how quickly Microsoft would use their gazillions of dollars to shut down this retarded lawsuit and make Ellison their bitch. Somehow I don't think the DMCA would last very long if Gates et al didn't like it.
While you're at it Harlan, why don't you sue the guy that wrote the http protocol too... without that the websites couldn't be viewed either.
What's next, we sue Al Gore because he "invented" the internet??? Or I know, let's sue the crap out of the descendents of Alan Turing or some other notable figure in the history of the invention of the modern computer... without computers after all, those people wouldn't be using Gnutella, would they?
Mechanik
I for one haven't really understood what the big deal is with being able to run Media Player on WinCE devices. Sure, you could upload your Lord of The Rings movie trailer to it, but then you would not have any RAM left to do anything practical , e.g. store your contact lists, calendar, etc. Same goes for MP3s if you are going to put enough of them on there to make it worthwhile (32 MB+).
Playing media on these devices seems more like something people do for bragging rights than out of actual need or practicality. It is much more economical to just buy a dedicated MP3 player if you want one.
Not to mention that your battery life would go to shit if you were using your CE device to play MP3s/movies. CE is a battery hog already just doing basic tasks (from what I hear) without chewing up 100% CPU playing pr0n mpegs on it.
Although, the idea of being able to watch pr0n *anywhere* might be a real plus, LOL.
And FYI, there are several Gameboy emulators out there for the Palm such as Liberty and GameboyEMU
Mechanik
Not really... Bristol's product (Wind/U) sucks ass compared to Mainsoft's (MainWin). I can't see people suddenly deciding to invest in them now, especially seeing as how Mainsoft and Microsoft are even more in bed together than before. Mainsoft is already the clear winner in the Win32-to-UNIX porting toolkit arena.
Mainsoft deserves to be the winner too. I always found it interesting that our incidences of random crashes in our ported app went to basically zero once we switched from Wind/U to MainWin. Not to mention that Mainsoft supports more of Win32/MFC, e.g. DCOM. The only thing Wind/U has over Mainsoft right now is that they support the version 3.0 of the ATL (MainWin only supports 1.2 right now), but that will all change when MainWin 4.0 comes out Real Soon Now. I could write a laundry list of complaints about Wind/U.
Mechanik
I definitely can see this as being true.
/. before, but I thought I'd refresh everyone's memory.
.doc and .xls formats into the market. Right now people are trying to compete with Wordperfect and StarOffice, but I am willing to bet that if Office made it to *NIX, that would spell the death knell for WP and SO (and who knows, maybe Corel along with them). Suddenly the few alternatives you have to office are gone. Not to mention that one of SO's big selling points is its supposed "MSOffice compatibility"... why would you bother if you could just run MSOffice natively?
For those that don't know (you certainly wouldn't from the article), Mainsoft produces a toolkit (MainWin) which implements the WinNT/2k kernel and MFC on various flavours of *NIX, including Solaris and Linux. This enables one to take a Win32/MFC program that was developed on windows and (in theory) have it work on *NIX just by linking to their MainWin libraries. The toolkit has been discussed some here on
I/we use the toolkit here at work (a MAJOR hardware company) to port our dev tools to *NIX, and we've had quite a positive experience with it. Sure there are problems here and there, but for the most part they're due to our windoze developers making assumptions based on the program being run in a win32 environment (things like endianess issues, or the fact that windows uses backslashes for dir separators rather than slashes). It has enabled us to port a product consisting of over 300,000 lines of code without having to rewrite the whole thing. I don't imagine Mainsoft would be having as hard a time porting Office as people are making out, not only because the toolkit is good IMHO, but because in my dealings with them they have seemed like a very sharp bunch of people.
"Now," you say, "why would Microsoft want to port Office to Linux? Isn't Linux their enemy?"
1) Further entrenching the
2) Doing this port will lend MUCH credibility in the public eye to MainWin. If they are lucky, then people will start organizing their multi-platform development strategies around it right from the get-go, and thus Microsoft will "lock them into" using the MFC development model. Right now people tend to use Mainwin to port apps they already have on Windows to *NIX... perhaps if MainWin got enough prestige people would decide right from the start that if they are doing a cross-platform app that they will do it in MFC and use MainWin to do the porting.
Do NOT underestimate this... Mainsoft (and through them, Microsoft) makes some serious bucks off of licensing/royalties for products that use MainWin, as their code is actually linked into yours. If you just make your app on windows and compile with Dev Studio, you pay no royalties, but with a MainWin ported app you are shipping with compiled libs that implement MFC and the NT kernel... that means $$ for Mainsoft and Microsoft.
It especially means $$ if people start deciding that they would like to forge off into the Linux arena because using MainWin is so much more attractive than doing a native port from the ground up. Companies that before were never even considering doing ports to *NIX might start thinking about it if this MSOffice port goes off well because they will say to themselves "shit, we hardly have to do anything ourselves to do this," even though that's not quite necessarily true.
This is very good for Linux in a way too... it means that you will be able to get much more of your favourite apps on your favourite OS.
Mechanik
In grade 12, our class made Tetris clones with Turbo C++ 3.0, using Borland's dos-only, 16-colour VGA graphics libraries.
Granted, some of us were a bit more experienced than the others, and weren't wowed by learning such breathtaking new concepts as using bitmapped graphics in a program, but nevertheless, it was still extremely fun. The relatively low-techness of the thing kept it from becoming work to us, as you didn't really have to butt your head up against a wall figuring out how to go about designing the thing so much as it was just straightforward and you spent your time just coding up the details. Many of us even finished early and added all kinds of cool enhancements and new play modes to our programs.
In the same class that we made that Tetris program in, we also had to do a project. I made a nifty little encryption program (command-line or GUI, depending on how you invoked it). It wasn't very secure (replicated your password to fill a buffer, then played the game of life on the bits, then broke it up into 8 seeds to feed on each pass to srand, and then rand was used to successively generate bytes for a one-time-pad that was XORed with the plaintext), but it was pretty cool for high school, and impressed the hell out of the teacher.
I really miss those days... you just don't get to do fun stuff like that in university. Sure, coding up a module that implements a red-black tree for your algorithms class might be intellectually stimulating, but I don't think any of us would really call it "fun." Neither do you ever get to create an entire, stand-alone program, where you actually have to worry about making the thing a good experience for the user (for the most part anyway... HCI courses aside), with error checking and the whole bit. Instead you end up mostly implementing little text proggies that implement some data structures and algorithms, and your TAs run them through some test cases. Interesting though it may be, none of it has ever had the same magic of those days I spent churning out that crappy little Tetris game.
Mechanik
Rather than using dogs, you could use one of those suckers to track criminals through the woods, search for lost skiiers, search for earthquake victims in rubble... the list is endless. Of course for the thing to be worth it would have to be more sensitive than a dog, cost-effective, and hand-held.
Mechanik
Shadowrun is great and all, but almost everything in it (except, notably, the whole magical theme) is lifted right out of the books of William Gibson, right down to the terminology. No offence, but this article really ought to have referenced Gibson instead. Shadowrun didn't invent these ideas by any means.
;-)
And Neuromancer was published when exactly? Early eighties? I think anyone that hasn't noticed the trend of society gravitating towards things Gibson-esque by now has been caught napping. The article to me is years too late, and doesn't really tell me anything I didn't already know, at least from that perspective.
If you want to check out a game that does a really good job with the theme of the death of magic and creativity at the hands of technological advancement and the corporate agenda, check out Mage: The Ascension from White Wolf Games. Blows Shadowrun out of the water IMHO. Read it and tell me that you don't see some eerie parallels with recent technological advancements... the Progenitors and Iteration X are taking over
Mechanik
Actually Halflife is based on the Quake 1 engine, not Q2. You can tell because some of the engine features from Q2 are missing in the HL engine, e.g. true colour skies.
Mechanik
You know, it seems pretty retarded to me that Metallica, RIAA (hope I got that right), et al, seem to think that just because a university has the napster ports unrestricted, that means that they are encouraging and helping piracy.
Last time I checked, ANY PROGRAM THAT USES SOCKETS can basically use any damn port it pleases. Who is to say that there are not thousands of legitemate programs (not that I'm saying Napster isn't legit, that's a separate debate) that use that port too, and that you're unfairly restricting their use by closing off the port?
By the same token, the Napster folks can easily change their program to use another port. Closing off whatever port they are using now is just a band-aid solution. I'm sure that someone could come up with a scheme whereby Napster would randomly rotate ports every so often and the clients would have some way of finding out what the port of the day was. Or heck, they could even use a port that you DON'T DARE close, like say some http ports...
The notion that just because a university has a port open on its systems that it is liable for what is done with those ports is bullshit to me... If I write a program to distribute illegal content on port XXXX, does that mean that my ISP is liable because they "should have known" that I could do this on that port? If that's the case ISPs might as well shut down everything but http right now, because anyone can write a program that uses any port. Goodbye Quake, goodbye ICQ, goodbye everything, because someone MIGHT do something naughty on that port. It's not like your ISP has the resources to police every single port out there.
The point is that even if we accept this bullshit assertion that the universities are somehow helping the pirates, are they any less helping them now that they've banned one measly port?!? I don't think so.
Mechanik
You know, people with the proper know how can make transmitters from scratch out of parts. Next thing you know the government is going to be raiding Radio Shack just because they carry parts that *might* be used to create listening devices. Before you know it you'll have to get a permit just to buy some friggin transistors and breadboards.
Mechanik
Well, this is going to be really dry to read, but I'll let Drexler speak for himself...
/quote Nanosystems, p.370
12.8. Cooling and computational capacity
In nanomechanical systems of sufficiently large scale, the ~10^12 W/m^3 power dissipation density of ~1 GHz nanomechanical logic systems described here exceeeds any possible means of cooling. On a sufficiently small scale, however, cooling poses no problem. For example, the equilibrium delta t of an isolated 100 nW system of 400 nm dimensions is 0.01 K in a medium with a thermal conductivity of 10 W/(m*k).
On an intermediate scale, convective cooling is appropriate. Section 11.5 outlines a cooling technology based on branced channels, inhomogeneous phase-changing coolants, and high pressures capable of removing ~10^15 W of thermal energy from a 1 cm^3 volume at ~273 K. This is sufficient to cool ~10^12 CPU-scale systems with an aggregate instruction-execution rate of ~10^21 per second. A more modest 10 W system can deliver ~10^11 MIPS.
/end quote
Mechanik
"Perhaps you should open a computer once, and compare the size of the CPU with the size of the box. While there is certainly a relation between the size of the CPU and its speed to some extend, there isn't much relation between the size of the CPU and the size of a computer."
Like I said, I wasn't allowing for any of that. However, Drexler and others have come up with many interesting ideas regarding nanoscale memories and other neccessary items. I saw an interesting lecture in which a guy from NASA described a memory scheme that used individual atoms as bits... it would enable you to put about 10^15 bytes of information on a square centimeter of diamondoid. The system wouldn't need a whole bunch of peripherals like floppy drives, a sound card, and all that crap (which is why your motherboard is so big in the first place)... each processing unit wouldn't need much more than the CPU, some small amount of memory, and a connection to the rest of the system. The increase in the size of the processing unit would not be all that great... you're still talking probably hundreds of billions of nanoprocessors per square inch.
Mechanik
The nanocomputers Drexler talks about in Nanosystems aren't electronic at all, but mechanical. Instead of transistors and such, you have logic rods instead. All logic in the computer is represented by the displacement of these rods... a small displacement might be a zero, while a large displacement would be a 1.
In terms of architecture, they are just like any other RISC machine... the only difference is that the logic of the components is mechanical rather than electronic. You still have gates, you still have a bus, you still have registers, only all of these things are built mechanically rather than electronically.
Sorry if this is a brief reply, but Drexler wrote an entire book on this sort of thing, and it's really way too much info to condense into a post.
Mechanik