> Essentially, it's the same type of display that many wearables come with
I'm not aware of (m)any wearable computers that use retinal scan display technology, but I'm willing to be enlightenend. There's a fundamental difference between retinal scan (no picture plane other than the retina) and LCD goggles, which create an intermediary picture plane that your eye has to focus on. The potential for miniaturization is much greater in retinal scan.
If you're into electronics at all you would be crazy not to be a regular Circuit Cellar magazine reader. They have the kinds of articles perfect for the hardware/software hacker. In issue #113 from December 1999 they had a feature article on a Poisson network.
Basically it's a one-way RF network where each sensor (doesn't really matter what kind) has a cheap RF transmitter and a uC. They're using a Poisson distribution to create pseudo-random transmission intervals for each sensor, so that the likehood of collisions is minimized, since there's no network master, only a receiver that aggregates all valid transmissions it receives. The nice thing is that the per-node cost can be extremely low, depending on what kind of sensor you have.
Email me if you want some more details or some help on getting your hands on the article.
...at $3400 for the DVD model I'll leave it on the store shelf, thank you very much. Machines with that kind of functionality need to come down a HELL of a lot more in price before they become really appealing.
The November 2000 issue was dedicated to digital entertainment. The article "Digital Cinema is for Reel" covers most of the issues of digital distribution and projection. I think the NYT article is a bit too optimistic about the costs of getting it all in place, in particular the costs to the theaters, which get squeezed more and more by Hollywood.
The whole SDMI issue should have opened your mind to the fact that watermarking isn't the obvious solution it might appear to be. You're treating it as if it was an already solved problem, and we just need to apply it to digital film. Maybe someday a truly effective digital watermarking method will arrive, but until then let's not pretend it's a solution. In the interim the only reasonable security comes from a combination of software and write-once hardware, like CD-R or WORM.
Budwiser, the All-American beer founded by All-German immigrants in the quest to become All-Americans themselves. The only thing that suffered in the process was any sense of quality of the beer itself.
I didn't say that the command line is faster period, but rather that it's faster in some instances, while the GUI is faster in others. I do use CTRL-Click a lot, and I use column sorting a lot as well--in your case here it would be easy to sort by date and select yesterday's files. I'm just saying that having both options and the ability to use either at any time would be ideal.
> Windows Explorer is pretty flexible when it comes to shell extensions and folder templates.
Yeah, I know. I've dabbled with shell extensions in Visual C++ and Delphi. VC++ YUCK, COM in C++ is a holy mess with all the macros and stuff. I'm using Delphi exclusively nowadays.
I bought a book on the Windows registry, it's amazing how much you can achieve just by fiddling with the registy, without any programming at all.
It would be great if the address bar could also function as a command line, sort of like the old DOS4Win (or something like that). Now go make it so:-)
I believe the ideal is a combination of command line and GUI. Some things are a lot quicker to achieve graphically, other quites awkward or impossible, but very easily done on a command line. Two examples:
1. Opening a document. If you're in the proper directory in Windows Explorer, you see the document icon right there, in front of you. Just double-click on it, and it opens. You don't have to know which application opens it, what the exact name of that app is, etc. On a command line, even after a DIR or LS, you still have to type the name of the viewer app (and potentially its full path) as well as the name of the document, even though it's RIGHT THERE, in front of you, you want to point to it and grab it. While some die-hard CLS users would argue that the command line approach is easier anyway, many people wouldn't concur.
2. Selecting a bunch of files. Here the GUI can get quite awkward or useless. If the selection criterion is simple enough, it might be workable: select all files starting with project1*, for example. Sort by name, select the relevant files. But if the selection pattern is more complex, that might not work. You really have the urge to type something like SELECT *YAHOO* in the address bar, that would be so much easier.
> It is much harder to remember where something is than remember the name.
A lot of people would disagree with this statement, myself included. I can remember how to get to someone's house, but I rarely remember the street name. Many people think think very graphically, in terms of objects and actions. I often forget the syntax difference between regedit and regedt32, or regsvr32 or other such abominations (which abound especially in unix). It's a blessing to have the command history in the RUN command under the Start menu. On Linux after a few months of disuse, I have to run back to the manual for a lot of commands, even though I know exactly what I'm trying to achieve.
To a large extent things work exactly like you're describing them. In rural areas a lot of commodities ARE more expensive; are you suggesting that in Harmony the gas, milk, bread, video tapes etc are subsidized as well? Get real!
We're talking about lifeline services, necessities of life: phone service, electricity, mail service, etc. It's not a matter of whether they would be more expensive than in urban areas, but rather whether they would be available at all. If a community such as Harmony had to fully bear the cost of these services, they wouldn't have phone service or electricity AT ALL. It's not a matter of $100 versus $30 for a service, but of millions of dollars versus $30. Calculate the cost of running a line from the nearest larger conurbation out to a CO in Harmony, and of running a line out to each house, and of paying the staff at the CO. Then divide it all by 17.
There's no question that for some people it's a perk to live out in the sticks, a lifestyle choice. But for many others it's a heritage, or a function of society that they fulfill by being farmers or what have you. As long as rural areas produce some sort of goods, they require local people to produce them. And as long as people congregate in a community by necessity, others will follow just because there's a community there. It's called the pioneer spirit, and it's funny to hear it knocked by Americans themselves.
You're arguing with reality, and that's an argument you'll always loose, you should know that by now.
The fact is that people living in remote places, such as the farmers that you mention, are also often economically depressed (and I don't mean psychologically), and couldn't necessarily afford the real cost of obtaining that service. While the necessity of phone service might potentially be debatable (the government considers it essential), the same isn't true about other services: electricity, water, mail service, health care etc.
Of course the expense of subsidizing these services is carried by someone else, amongst others you. While some people (such as yourself) take offense at paying a penny for someone else, thankfully there is a sufficient majority of us who think it the duty of a civilized society, and we will do our best to keep it that way.
God, both sides can sometimes go to obscene extremes. Government regulation can provide a minimum base service for the Important Things In Life. That's why you can get basic analog phone service anywhere in the US, because the phone company MUST provide it. That's why the mail man will drive out to your hog farm in the middle of Iowa and deliver your NRA membership renewal, because the Post Office MUST render that service. In many of these mandatory service cases, the companies in question might wince and squirm and provide the shittiest service they can dream up, but they do provide it.
On the other hand, when they smell money, they need no regulation. Multiple companies enter lucrative markets and compete to the blood. That's why in large population centers it's easy to get cable modems and ADSL. That's also why you will never see high speed internet access in many areas of the country. In many rural parts of the US you can't even get cable TV, and you probably never will. Same holds for cell phone service and other non-essential services.
Saying that regulation is ALWAYS bad is nonsense. Lifeline services such as phone, mail and electricity MUST be regulated, otherwise only the convenient-to-service people will have them. As time passes, new services might be deemed essential and start being regulated. Maybe one day internet service will be essential to life in modern society (we seem to be moving that way already), and it will become mandatory to render that service. That's what happened to phone service, which used to be a luxury only one hundred years ago.
It would be a developer's worst nightmare. Each time you whip out a quick utility--on a good week that could be dozens for me--you need to go through the signing process. Also, enterprises and shops that write their own software and distribute it internally are going to get sick REALLY quickly of the extra cycle involved.
If you simply add a signing capability to the compiler or IDE, and it signs the executable automatically when you hit RUN, what's the point? The signature is meaningless, it doesn't signify squat regarding the safety of the code. If, on the other hand, the signature has to be applied by QA after at least some testing, they'll get sick really quickly of signing every little piece of shit code churned out by anybody--they simply won't have time to do it, and/or the developers will eventually quit in disgust.
I'm running Win95A with DUN1.3 on a 386SX/33 with 4MB RAM and a 120MB HD as an access point. Doesn't even take that long to boot--it's amazing how lean Win95A was by today's standards. And it's even more amazing how few people know about its secret routing capabilities; I've never met anyone in the flesh that knew, only on the net. It works with 4MB because it doesn't really do much while routing; once you actually try to bring up apps and use them, you quickly notice what hardware you're on.
At TVA where I work the standard desktop OS is still Win95, and the office suite is Office 95. They're currently "evaluating" Win98 and Office 97, but they're not yet available. The main reason is cost: the argument is that the software isn't broken, it does everything it's supposed to, so why upgrade? The logic breaks down mainly with Office, when TVA has to exchange documents with The Rest Of The World, where users are quite likely to be using a more current (and thus incompatible) version.
From various corners all kinds of rumours are emanating that The Government is evaluating Linux as a desktop OS, in conjunction with some of the free office suites. In the light of maniacal cost cutting, this almost seems credible. It would certainly fit the spirit of how things work at TVA, with the exception of development tools, where everybody is still worshipping at the shrine of Microsoft and Visual Basic. But that's another story...
Just push the tip of the Exacto knife in between the conductors until it penetrates through the ribbon, then separate the conductors by pushing the DULL side of the knife tip along. This will guarantee that you don't cut into the conductor shielding. You can then either separate the entire length with the dull side of the blade, or just a few inches and do the rest by hand.
It's got both stored procedures and triggers. Some people I know that moved from Interbase to MSSQL have liked both features better on Interbase. Of course, MSSQL comes with a lot of eye candy such as Enterprise Mangler. Also, a lot of people consider Interbase one of the most rock solid db servers out there. I'm running one setup at home using Interbase 6 on RedHat 6.2 on a 486DX2/66 with 32MB RAM. Performance is quite decent for 3-5 users. The limiting factor is the slow-ass drive in there (250MB IDE). More RAM and a faster drive would grease it up.
I've evaluated several free (as in I can make money with it without paying anyone a dime) DB servers for a small startup company, and Interbase so far looks by far the best. Not only are the features attractive, it also has more name recognition than MySQL or Posgres, and for some people that's important. We're using it particularly from Delphi apps, and support for that is great. It's amazing that the entire server can be configured to take less space than the BDE itself.
Anyway, I'm not saying that Interbase is an Oracle or MS SQL killer. But for a lot of clients and a lot of applications it's a suitable choice, and the client saves a stack of money to boot. Add to that the fact that you can deploy it on Linux, and for cost conscious customers it's essentially a no-cost solution. Just buy the box, the rest is free.
It's been over ten years since I saw it and I don't remember too much about it, but I remember it was so long that if for nothing else it should get marks for trying so hard.
That's pretty interesting, I didn't actually go to their web site, I only read the original article. This kind of technology should have arrived a long time ago, it's a shame that it is working its way into the market so slowly. I would like to see them apply an equally bold data transfer technology to actually take advantage of all that hard work.
I've been a long-time fan of holographic storage. I've been reading articles about the state of research for about the last ten years, but progress seems so sluggish. There was a company that came out with OROM storage somewhat based on that technology, though not 3D but rather individual planes spread out on the surface of a carrier. Sounded really great, but I've never heard of the product again.
> Thus a 12x FMD drive could approach speeds of 387MB/s due to the greater density.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the 12X type speed monikers are a measure of data throughput, not rotational speed. They are based on the original audio CD spec of 150KB/s sustained throughput. Of course, since CD drives have started moving to CAV rather than CLV, that's kind of meaningless anyway. For media with higher densities that still stick to CLV (not a sensible choice) you would have to take into account both the linear velocity and data density to arrive at an equivalent SSX multiplier speed.
> These optical drives are going to need to come out pretty quick to ever match hard disk space
> and even then, they will probably be quickly left behind.
Well, you're probably right about that. History certainly would make you think so.
> I wouldn't be surprised to see disks with native Infini-band interfaces by 2004.
Never heard of that. Which means I must get off my behind and do some storage tech reading.
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> Essentially, it's the same type of display that many wearables come with
I'm not aware of (m)any wearable computers that use retinal scan display technology, but I'm willing to be enlightenend. There's a fundamental difference between retinal scan (no picture plane other than the retina) and LCD goggles, which create an intermediary picture plane that your eye has to focus on. The potential for miniaturization is much greater in retinal scan.
If you're into electronics at all you would be crazy not to be a regular Circuit Cellar magazine reader. They have the kinds of articles perfect for the hardware/software hacker. In issue #113 from December 1999 they had a feature article on a Poisson network.
Basically it's a one-way RF network where each sensor (doesn't really matter what kind) has a cheap RF transmitter and a uC. They're using a Poisson distribution to create pseudo-random transmission intervals for each sensor, so that the likehood of collisions is minimized, since there's no network master, only a receiver that aggregates all valid transmissions it receives. The nice thing is that the per-node cost can be extremely low, depending on what kind of sensor you have.
Email me if you want some more details or some help on getting your hands on the article.
...at $3400 for the DVD model I'll leave it on the store shelf, thank you very much. Machines with that kind of functionality need to come down a HELL of a lot more in price before they become really appealing.
The November 2000 issue was dedicated to digital entertainment. The article "Digital Cinema is for Reel" covers most of the issues of digital distribution and projection. I think the NYT article is a bit too optimistic about the costs of getting it all in place, in particular the costs to the theaters, which get squeezed more and more by Hollywood.
The whole SDMI issue should have opened your mind to the fact that watermarking isn't the obvious solution it might appear to be. You're treating it as if it was an already solved problem, and we just need to apply it to digital film. Maybe someday a truly effective digital watermarking method will arrive, but until then let's not pretend it's a solution. In the interim the only reasonable security comes from a combination of software and write-once hardware, like CD-R or WORM.
Budwiser, the All-American beer founded by All-German immigrants in the quest to become All-Americans themselves. The only thing that suffered in the process was any sense of quality of the beer itself.
I didn't say that the command line is faster period, but rather that it's faster in some instances, while the GUI is faster in others. I do use CTRL-Click a lot, and I use column sorting a lot as well--in your case here it would be easy to sort by date and select yesterday's files. I'm just saying that having both options and the ability to use either at any time would be ideal.
> Windows Explorer is pretty flexible when it comes to shell extensions and folder templates.
:-)
Yeah, I know. I've dabbled with shell extensions in Visual C++ and Delphi. VC++ YUCK, COM in C++ is a holy mess with all the macros and stuff. I'm using Delphi exclusively nowadays.
I bought a book on the Windows registry, it's amazing how much you can achieve just by fiddling with the registy, without any programming at all.
It would be great if the address bar could also function as a command line, sort of like the old DOS4Win (or something like that). Now go make it so
I believe the ideal is a combination of command line and GUI. Some things are a lot quicker to achieve graphically, other quites awkward or impossible, but very easily done on a command line. Two examples:
1. Opening a document. If you're in the proper directory in Windows Explorer, you see the document icon right there, in front of you. Just double-click on it, and it opens. You don't have to know which application opens it, what the exact name of that app is, etc. On a command line, even after a DIR or LS, you still have to type the name of the viewer app (and potentially its full path) as well as the name of the document, even though it's RIGHT THERE, in front of you, you want to point to it and grab it. While some die-hard CLS users would argue that the command line approach is easier anyway, many people wouldn't concur.
2. Selecting a bunch of files. Here the GUI can get quite awkward or useless. If the selection criterion is simple enough, it might be workable: select all files starting with project1*, for example. Sort by name, select the relevant files. But if the selection pattern is more complex, that might not work. You really have the urge to type something like SELECT *YAHOO* in the address bar, that would be so much easier.
> It is much harder to remember where something is than remember the name.
A lot of people would disagree with this statement, myself included. I can remember how to get to someone's house, but I rarely remember the street name. Many people think think very graphically, in terms of objects and actions. I often forget the syntax difference between regedit and regedt32, or regsvr32 or other such abominations (which abound especially in unix). It's a blessing to have the command history in the RUN command under the Start menu. On Linux after a few months of disuse, I have to run back to the manual for a lot of commands, even though I know exactly what I'm trying to achieve.
To a large extent things work exactly like you're describing them. In rural areas a lot of commodities ARE more expensive; are you suggesting that in Harmony the gas, milk, bread, video tapes etc are subsidized as well? Get real!
We're talking about lifeline services, necessities of life: phone service, electricity, mail service, etc. It's not a matter of whether they would be more expensive than in urban areas, but rather whether they would be available at all. If a community such as Harmony had to fully bear the cost of these services, they wouldn't have phone service or electricity AT ALL. It's not a matter of $100 versus $30 for a service, but of millions of dollars versus $30. Calculate the cost of running a line from the nearest larger conurbation out to a CO in Harmony, and of running a line out to each house, and of paying the staff at the CO. Then divide it all by 17.
There's no question that for some people it's a perk to live out in the sticks, a lifestyle choice. But for many others it's a heritage, or a function of society that they fulfill by being farmers or what have you. As long as rural areas produce some sort of goods, they require local people to produce them. And as long as people congregate in a community by necessity, others will follow just because there's a community there. It's called the pioneer spirit, and it's funny to hear it knocked by Americans themselves.
You're arguing with reality, and that's an argument you'll always loose, you should know that by now.
The fact is that people living in remote places, such as the farmers that you mention, are also often economically depressed (and I don't mean psychologically), and couldn't necessarily afford the real cost of obtaining that service. While the necessity of phone service might potentially be debatable (the government considers it essential), the same isn't true about other services: electricity, water, mail service, health care etc.
Of course the expense of subsidizing these services is carried by someone else, amongst others you. While some people (such as yourself) take offense at paying a penny for someone else, thankfully there is a sufficient majority of us who think it the duty of a civilized society, and we will do our best to keep it that way.
God, both sides can sometimes go to obscene extremes. Government regulation can provide a minimum base service for the Important Things In Life. That's why you can get basic analog phone service anywhere in the US, because the phone company MUST provide it. That's why the mail man will drive out to your hog farm in the middle of Iowa and deliver your NRA membership renewal, because the Post Office MUST render that service. In many of these mandatory service cases, the companies in question might wince and squirm and provide the shittiest service they can dream up, but they do provide it.
On the other hand, when they smell money, they need no regulation. Multiple companies enter lucrative markets and compete to the blood. That's why in large population centers it's easy to get cable modems and ADSL. That's also why you will never see high speed internet access in many areas of the country. In many rural parts of the US you can't even get cable TV, and you probably never will. Same holds for cell phone service and other non-essential services.
Saying that regulation is ALWAYS bad is nonsense. Lifeline services such as phone, mail and electricity MUST be regulated, otherwise only the convenient-to-service people will have them. As time passes, new services might be deemed essential and start being regulated. Maybe one day internet service will be essential to life in modern society (we seem to be moving that way already), and it will become mandatory to render that service. That's what happened to phone service, which used to be a luxury only one hundred years ago.
That is the problem. Ask any x86 Linux user who couldn't view a particular page because of required plugins available only for Windows.
It would be a developer's worst nightmare. Each time you whip out a quick utility--on a good week that could be dozens for me--you need to go through the signing process. Also, enterprises and shops that write their own software and distribute it internally are going to get sick REALLY quickly of the extra cycle involved.
If you simply add a signing capability to the compiler or IDE, and it signs the executable automatically when you hit RUN, what's the point? The signature is meaningless, it doesn't signify squat regarding the safety of the code. If, on the other hand, the signature has to be applied by QA after at least some testing, they'll get sick really quickly of signing every little piece of shit code churned out by anybody--they simply won't have time to do it, and/or the developers will eventually quit in disgust.
I'm running Win95A with DUN1.3 on a 386SX/33 with 4MB RAM and a 120MB HD as an access point. Doesn't even take that long to boot--it's amazing how lean Win95A was by today's standards. And it's even more amazing how few people know about its secret routing capabilities; I've never met anyone in the flesh that knew, only on the net. It works with 4MB because it doesn't really do much while routing; once you actually try to bring up apps and use them, you quickly notice what hardware you're on.
At TVA where I work the standard desktop OS is still Win95, and the office suite is Office 95. They're currently "evaluating" Win98 and Office 97, but they're not yet available. The main reason is cost: the argument is that the software isn't broken, it does everything it's supposed to, so why upgrade? The logic breaks down mainly with Office, when TVA has to exchange documents with The Rest Of The World, where users are quite likely to be using a more current (and thus incompatible) version.
From various corners all kinds of rumours are emanating that The Government is evaluating Linux as a desktop OS, in conjunction with some of the free office suites. In the light of maniacal cost cutting, this almost seems credible. It would certainly fit the spirit of how things work at TVA, with the exception of development tools, where everybody is still worshipping at the shrine of Microsoft and Visual Basic. But that's another story...
Just push the tip of the Exacto knife in between the conductors until it penetrates through the ribbon, then separate the conductors by pushing the DULL side of the knife tip along. This will guarantee that you don't cut into the conductor shielding. You can then either separate the entire length with the dull side of the blade, or just a few inches and do the rest by hand.
Yeah, I think we should send you in instead, you're much more level headed.
It's got both stored procedures and triggers. Some people I know that moved from Interbase to MSSQL have liked both features better on Interbase. Of course, MSSQL comes with a lot of eye candy such as Enterprise Mangler. Also, a lot of people consider Interbase one of the most rock solid db servers out there. I'm running one setup at home using Interbase 6 on RedHat 6.2 on a 486DX2/66 with 32MB RAM. Performance is quite decent for 3-5 users. The limiting factor is the slow-ass drive in there (250MB IDE). More RAM and a faster drive would grease it up.
I've evaluated several free (as in I can make money with it without paying anyone a dime) DB servers for a small startup company, and Interbase so far looks by far the best. Not only are the features attractive, it also has more name recognition than MySQL or Posgres, and for some people that's important. We're using it particularly from Delphi apps, and support for that is great. It's amazing that the entire server can be configured to take less space than the BDE itself.
Anyway, I'm not saying that Interbase is an Oracle or MS SQL killer. But for a lot of clients and a lot of applications it's a suitable choice, and the client saves a stack of money to boot. Add to that the fact that you can deploy it on Linux, and for cost conscious customers it's essentially a no-cost solution. Just buy the box, the rest is free.
It's been over ten years since I saw it and I don't remember too much about it, but I remember it was so long that if for nothing else it should get marks for trying so hard.
That's pretty interesting, I didn't actually go to their web site, I only read the original article. This kind of technology should have arrived a long time ago, it's a shame that it is working its way into the market so slowly. I would like to see them apply an equally bold data transfer technology to actually take advantage of all that hard work.
I've been a long-time fan of holographic storage. I've been reading articles about the state of research for about the last ten years, but progress seems so sluggish. There was a company that came out with OROM storage somewhat based on that technology, though not 3D but rather individual planes spread out on the surface of a carrier. Sounded really great, but I've never heard of the product again.
> Thus a 12x FMD drive could approach speeds of 387MB/s due to the greater density.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the 12X type speed monikers are a measure of data throughput, not rotational speed. They are based on the original audio CD spec of 150KB/s sustained throughput. Of course, since CD drives have started moving to CAV rather than CLV, that's kind of meaningless anyway. For media with higher densities that still stick to CLV (not a sensible choice) you would have to take into account both the linear velocity and data density to arrive at an equivalent SSX multiplier speed.
> and the fact that it will eventually spin at CD (12x) speeds
That would be about 1.8MB per second. There's no CD-ROM on the market that comes even close to 30MB/s.
> These optical drives are going to need to come out pretty quick to ever match hard disk space
> and even then, they will probably be quickly left behind.
Well, you're probably right about that. History certainly would make you think so.
> I wouldn't be surprised to see disks with native Infini-band interfaces by 2004.
Never heard of that. Which means I must get off my behind and do some storage tech reading.