Can't argue with that, really. I was surprised it wasn't posted to the Games section. If I thought it was going to make the front page, I'd have tried to exercise some editorial restraint.:)
Brings me back to adventure on a Prime 750, and I'll look forward to seeing (and buying) the book in a remainder bin in a year or so. I probably just missed it, but are the graphic mysteries such as Myst and such also to be considered IF as Montfort defines it?
Not according to Montfort, and that's what I was getting at when I argued for a more ecumenical view of IF. (I'm developing a new graphical IF platform at the moment, so I actually have a dog in that particular fight.) Most of the prejudices against text gaming are just that -- prejudices -- and I think they limit the scope of the genre unnecessarily.
... when their designer announced them on the sci.electronics newsgroups. Unfortunately the control software is not open-source, but he might be persuaded to release the interface specs if someone volunteered to do a Linux port.
Well, I didn't say all the bugs were worked out.:)
But, seriously, if getting only five unique songs per day makes people realize what's happened to FM radio, so much the better.
Re:$33 cd? It is going to decrease profit
on
RIAA's Nasty Easter Egg
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
that cannot happen, the way they have XM radio set up currently.
Actually it can.... even on broadcast FM. Think Tivo for radio. You'd have a lot of persistent storage in your car stereo -- a 4 GB Flash drive would hold 1,000 songs' worth -- and a smart, low-power-drain receiver that would seek out and record the songs you've told it to listen for.
Skipping commercials and idiotic station-ID blurbs (buzz beep buzz Q102 FM ROCKZZZ!!!!11!! buzz buzz orchestra-hit beep buzz sound-of-toilet-flushing beep buzz) would be pretty easy, too. The receiver would be equipped with a long-term correlator that would basically say, "If I've heard this segment of audio within the last 24 hours, don't record it."
Something like this would have the potential to make radio not suck... which in this day and age would take nothing short of magic.
If I invent a new compression algorithm that is patentable
The problem is, there's no way you can possibly do that without building on other, similar "inventions" that came before yours. There's not much new under the sun in the data-compression business. What, besides archaic patent laws, gives you the moral right to conduct your own personal IP land rush? It's safe to say that your "inventions," no matter what they may be, are economically feasible only because the people who came before you did not patent their own work.
What if Bresenham had patented his line-drawing algorithm? What if Catmull had patented texture mapping? What if Naylor had patented spatial-partitioning trees? What if Wozniak had filed patents on the hundreds of innovations in PC architecture that the Apple II embodied? Answer: instead of extolling patent protection on Slashdot, you'd be busy playing Zork on your TRS-80.
Because the modern legal trend in the patent field is toward patenting ideas rather than implementations -- something that the US patent system, at least, was never originally intended to allow -- patents on any of those examples would have walled off entire segments of computing and graphics research for decades, just the way Unisys's patent on LZW compression discouraged people from using and improving upon the lineage of that particular algorithm. At the end of the day, did Unisys make much money from their "ownership" of the algorithm used in.GIF image compression? Nope... they just kept other people from benefiting from the presence of a perfectly-reasonable file format for 8-bit graphics. The patent royalties they earned were probably just about enough to pay for the staff of lawyers in charge of collecting them.
Because the reverse-engineering effort needed to make it happen will yield other fruits.
I'd like to know how to add a remote display and simple button-driven UI to an iPod, for instance. My old PC-based car MP3 player is too big and clunky to fit in my current daily driver, and I'd like to come up with a way to interface its LCD and track-selection buttons to an iPod, using a microcontroller to do the dirty work rather than a whole PC. I'm about to go surf their tech notes to see if they offer any clues, even though I have no intention of running Linux on the iPod (if I can help it).
Could very well be. Someone posted a link to one of the Kodak patents below; its filing date was at least a year before I built mine, and it appears to cover the same basic ground with the addition of data compression.
These patent claims bring a (somewhat) amusing anecdote to mind. Around 1990, I was working at Dell Computer as a wet-behind-the-ears engineer, when the company announced a "patent bounty" of $1,000 per filed application. "Cool!", thought I, as I hastened to write up patent disclosures on every personal project I'd worked on for the past couple of years. (Hey, it seemed like a lot of money at the time.)
One of the disclosures I submitted was for an ungainly contraption that predated most manufacturers' earliest portable digital cameras. "PicturePerfect" was inspired by the Canon Xapshot, but, unlike the Xapshot, it had the ability to store images independently of a host computer and transmit them as data rather than raw video. It worked a lot more like a modern digital camera than anything on the market at that time.
The patent committee at Dell was unimpressed. They didn't file the patent(s) I submitted, didn't pay me $1,000... and possibly missed a chance to own a big chunk of the whole digital-photography industry.
Hmm. If I remember correctly, Dell did try to push a couple of their early laptop/notebook models through retail partnerships. I don't know if Staples was one of those partners, though.
20% failure rates don't sound likely, even so, unless they were selling rebranded merchandise from generic Asian OEMs that early in the game. I don't remember when that started, but I was there in the early 90s as well, and the product line was pretty solid for the most part. There were a few weak performers but they were mostly weak in the benchmarking area (316sx, anyone?) rather than the quality department.
Just because a SMB (small- to medium-size business) doesn't need systems running RAID arrays that can survive multiple simultaneous drive failures [which Compaq pioneered]
Actually, no, they didn't do all the RAID pioneering in the PC world. The DDA was an in-house-designed product that was pretty darned nifty for its time, and resulted in quite a few patents for the people who worked on it.
Back in the early 90s, Dell was actually shaping up to be a formidable engineering company in its own right. We (I worked there at the time) designed and debugged our own motherboards and ASICs, and Dell was the first PC vendor to come out with an 80486 workstation, beating Compaq (who was famous for being first with the 80386) to the punch.
People around here seem to be selling Dell short as an engineering outfit, and that's not entirely fair or accurate. After it became clear that the PC was a commodity, Dell's engineering efforts were redirected at manufacturing and support processes rather than the products themselves, and that's when they really started to kick butt. No one -- not HP, not Compaq, not IBM -- proved able to compete with Dell's process engineering talent.
On the other hand, my 2467 has 12,000 operating hours on it. But I'm sure it will vanish in a puff of smoke any day now.
(The 2430s occasionally have CCD or trigger hybrid failures, but they're nowhere near as common as the U800 failures in the analog 2400 scopes. Whole different kettle of fish.)
Quite a few scopes by both Tektronix and Agilent run Windows these days. Windows can be a reasonable embedded platform. It provides a consistent user interface, saving the equipment manufacturer a lot of software work that's outside their core competency. System stability isn't too bad since the OEM maintains tight control over the drivers and only run one application.
Not a bad solution, all in all, at least until you hook up an Ethernet cable to transfer some plots and your $20,000 scope gets r00tz0red and drafted into service in the war against SCO.com.
... can download free/open-source plotter emulation software at http://www.qsl.net/ke5fx/misc/7470.zip. This may be helpful to you if you buy an older scope from eBay. It will let you grab screenshots, overlay them, print them, and save them in several formats including their original HP/GL-2 plotter language. You can see some typical screen captures at http://www.qsl.net/ke5fx/synth.html.
I use a Tek 2430A on my own bench. These are great scopes -- you can get 150 MHz bandwidth for about $400-$600. A National Instruments GPIB adapter to interface it to the PC will set you back another $100.
I'm trying to add support for as many instruments as I can to this package. Any interested parties should feel free to email me...
It's not hard to attack the DMCA on Constitutional grounds. The copyright clause contains the phrase "for a limited time," or something very much like it. The DMCA's language does not make allowance for the fact that it restricts access to copyrighted works forever. It's essentially an in-perpetuity copyright grant, which is unequivocally unconstitutional.
Any judge that disagrees has already been bought and paid for by the entertainment industry; there simply is no room for argument when the violation is so blindingly obvious.
True enough... you want to finish your update cycle within the time allowed by the vertical-blanking interval, but unless your system offers page-flipping or a really fast blitter, you often don't get what you want. In those systems, drawing in the same direction as the raster makes a qualitative difference.
This is really easy. Back in the good old days, when developers measured memory in kilobytes rather than megabytes, and cpu speeds were expressed in single digit mhz rather than single digit ghz, performance was a BIG issue. The layout of the data inside a bitmap was set up to mimic the memory layout of a video card, so that you could literally just copy the data with no transforms.
Which is actually not as good an idea as it sounds. When you refresh the screen (or a large window) upside down, CRT refreshes, which always go from top to bottom, become much more obtrusive. The system looks and feels slower due to more screen-tearing, even though it's technically 1% or so faster.
This is why display systems that put (0,0) at the lower-left corner are a pet peeve of mine. Upside-down rendering = a slightly more elegant mathematical model that yields significantly worse-looking results in real life.
Overall throughput of CF when used as a disk replacement appears to be about 1/2 to 1/3 what you'd get from a normal IDE hard drive. I've been booting an embedded device running Win98 from a CF drive, and it takes a couple of minutes.
They can be used as disk-drive replacements if you can tolerate the reduced throughput and guard against repetitive writes that will eventually destroy the memory cells. (The aforementioned Win98 app runs without a swapfile.)
Slashdot Mirror
(... spoiler space
It's been many years since I played Sorcerer, though -- I could be mis-remembering it entirely.
Maybe too detailed, but thanks for the effort.
:)
Can't argue with that, really. I was surprised it wasn't posted to the Games section. If I thought it was going to make the front page, I'd have tried to exercise some editorial restraint.
Brings me back to adventure on a Prime 750, and I'll look forward to seeing (and buying) the book in a remainder bin in a year or so. I probably just missed it, but are the graphic mysteries such as Myst and such also to be considered IF as Montfort defines it?
Not according to Montfort, and that's what I was getting at when I argued for a more ecumenical view of IF. (I'm developing a new graphical IF platform at the moment, so I actually have a dog in that particular fight.) Most of the prejudices against text gaming are just that -- prejudices -- and I think they limit the scope of the genre unnecessarily.
... when their designer announced them on the sci.electronics newsgroups. Unfortunately the control software is not open-source, but he might be persuaded to release the interface specs if someone volunteered to do a Linux port.
http://www.rockylogic.com/products/ant16.html
So this means you get five songs each day?
:)
Well, I didn't say all the bugs were worked out.
But, seriously, if getting only five unique songs per day makes people realize what's happened to FM radio, so much the better.
that cannot happen, the way they have XM radio set up currently.
Actually it can.... even on broadcast FM. Think Tivo for radio. You'd have a lot of persistent storage in your car stereo -- a 4 GB Flash drive would hold 1,000 songs' worth -- and a smart, low-power-drain receiver that would seek out and record the songs you've told it to listen for.
Skipping commercials and idiotic station-ID blurbs (buzz beep buzz Q102 FM ROCKZZZ!!!!11!! buzz buzz orchestra-hit beep buzz sound-of-toilet-flushing beep buzz) would be pretty easy, too. The receiver would be equipped with a long-term correlator that would basically say, "If I've heard this segment of audio within the last 24 hours, don't record it."
Something like this would have the potential to make radio not suck... which in this day and age would take nothing short of magic.
If I invent a new compression algorithm that is patentable
.GIF image compression? Nope... they just kept other people from benefiting from the presence of a perfectly-reasonable file format for 8-bit graphics. The patent royalties they earned were probably just about enough to pay for the staff of lawyers in charge of collecting them.
The problem is, there's no way you can possibly do that without building on other, similar "inventions" that came before yours. There's not much new under the sun in the data-compression business. What, besides archaic patent laws, gives you the moral right to conduct your own personal IP land rush? It's safe to say that your "inventions," no matter what they may be, are economically feasible only because the people who came before you did not patent their own work.
What if Bresenham had patented his line-drawing algorithm? What if Catmull had patented texture mapping? What if Naylor had patented spatial-partitioning trees? What if Wozniak had filed patents on the hundreds of innovations in PC architecture that the Apple II embodied? Answer: instead of extolling patent protection on Slashdot, you'd be busy playing Zork on your TRS-80.
Because the modern legal trend in the patent field is toward patenting ideas rather than implementations -- something that the US patent system, at least, was never originally intended to allow -- patents on any of those examples would have walled off entire segments of computing and graphics research for decades, just the way Unisys's patent on LZW compression discouraged people from using and improving upon the lineage of that particular algorithm. At the end of the day, did Unisys make much money from their "ownership" of the algorithm used in
Great. Now my cell phone has inertial navigation as well as Reality Engine-class rendering.
How am I supposed to power this thing without a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission?
All I wanted was a phone, dammit.
</luddite>
perhaps you should concentrate on the road and not get distracted by buttons, scroll-wheels, and displays.
I couldn't agree more, actually. That's why I want to stick with a proven UI that requires almost zero "pilot workload."
Using an actual iPod while driving ought to be punishable by thirty days in Driver's Ed.
Because the reverse-engineering effort needed to make it happen will yield other fruits.
I'd like to know how to add a remote display and simple button-driven UI to an iPod, for instance. My old PC-based car MP3 player is too big and clunky to fit in my current daily driver, and I'd like to come up with a way to interface its LCD and track-selection buttons to an iPod, using a microcontroller to do the dirty work rather than a whole PC. I'm about to go surf their tech notes to see if they offer any clues, even though I have no intention of running Linux on the iPod (if I can help it).
I just ordered the Inform designer's manual straight from Amazon, for what it's worth. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/isbn=0971311900
Could very well be. Someone posted a link to one of the Kodak patents below; its filing date was at least a year before I built mine, and it appears to cover the same basic ground with the addition of data compression.
But it sure seemed like a good idea at the time!
No compression, unfortunately. There's no intelligence in the camera interface -- just some dual-port VRAM with a bunch of TTL counters to address it.
Those links were separate disclosures. I was trying for $4,000.00, so I ran all four of them up the flagpole.
I'd just spent $2,000 building the damned thing, and being a wet-behind-the-ear engineer with no stock options, was broke. :-P
These patent claims bring a (somewhat) amusing anecdote to mind. Around 1990, I was working at Dell Computer as a wet-behind-the-ears engineer, when the company announced a "patent bounty" of $1,000 per filed application. "Cool!", thought I, as I hastened to write up patent disclosures on every personal project I'd worked on for the past couple of years. (Hey, it seemed like a lot of money at the time.)
One of the disclosures I submitted was for an ungainly contraption that predated most manufacturers' earliest portable digital cameras. "PicturePerfect" was inspired by the Canon Xapshot, but, unlike the Xapshot, it had the ability to store images independently of a host computer and transmit them as data rather than raw video. It worked a lot more like a modern digital camera than anything on the market at that time.
The patent committee at Dell was unimpressed. They didn't file the patent(s) I submitted, didn't pay me $1,000... and possibly missed a chance to own a big chunk of the whole digital-photography industry.
Hmm. If I remember correctly, Dell did try to push a couple of their early laptop/notebook models through retail partnerships. I don't know if Staples was one of those partners, though.
20% failure rates don't sound likely, even so, unless they were selling rebranded merchandise from generic Asian OEMs that early in the game. I don't remember when that started, but I was there in the early 90s as well, and the product line was pretty solid for the most part. There were a few weak performers but they were mostly weak in the benchmarking area (316sx, anyone?) rather than the quality department.
Just because a SMB (small- to medium-size business) doesn't need systems running RAID arrays that can survive multiple simultaneous drive failures [which Compaq pioneered]
Actually, no, they didn't do all the RAID pioneering in the PC world. The DDA was an in-house-designed product that was pretty darned nifty for its time, and resulted in quite a few patents for the people who worked on it.
Back in the early 90s, Dell was actually shaping up to be a formidable engineering company in its own right. We (I worked there at the time) designed and debugged our own motherboards and ASICs, and Dell was the first PC vendor to come out with an 80486 workstation, beating Compaq (who was famous for being first with the 80386) to the punch.
People around here seem to be selling Dell short as an engineering outfit, and that's not entirely fair or accurate. After it became clear that the PC was a commodity, Dell's engineering efforts were redirected at manufacturing and support processes rather than the products themselves, and that's when they really started to kick butt. No one -- not HP, not Compaq, not IBM -- proved able to compete with Dell's process engineering talent.
On the other hand, my 2467 has 12,000 operating hours on it. But I'm sure it will vanish in a puff of smoke any day now.
(The 2430s occasionally have CCD or trigger hybrid failures, but they're nowhere near as common as the U800 failures in the analog 2400 scopes. Whole different kettle of fish.)
Quite a few scopes by both Tektronix and Agilent run Windows these days. Windows can be a reasonable embedded platform. It provides a consistent user interface, saving the equipment manufacturer a lot of software work that's outside their core competency. System stability isn't too bad since the OEM maintains tight control over the drivers and only run one application.
Not a bad solution, all in all, at least until you hook up an Ethernet cable to transfer some plots and your $20,000 scope gets r00tz0red and drafted into service in the war against SCO.com.
... can download free/open-source plotter emulation software at http://www.qsl.net/ke5fx/misc/7470.zip. This may be helpful to you if you buy an older scope from eBay. It will let you grab screenshots, overlay them, print them, and save them in several formats including their original HP/GL-2 plotter language. You can see some typical screen captures at http://www.qsl.net/ke5fx/synth.html.
I use a Tek 2430A on my own bench. These are great scopes -- you can get 150 MHz bandwidth for about $400-$600. A National Instruments GPIB adapter to interface it to the PC will set you back another $100.
I'm trying to add support for as many instruments as I can to this package. Any interested parties should feel free to email me...
It's not hard to attack the DMCA on Constitutional grounds. The copyright clause contains the phrase "for a limited time," or something very much like it. The DMCA's language does not make allowance for the fact that it restricts access to copyrighted works forever. It's essentially an in-perpetuity copyright grant, which is unequivocally unconstitutional.
Any judge that disagrees has already been bought and paid for by the entertainment industry; there simply is no room for argument when the violation is so blindingly obvious.
Mike's book is available online, actually: http://www.byte.com/abrash/
True enough... you want to finish your update cycle within the time allowed by the vertical-blanking interval, but unless your system offers page-flipping or a really fast blitter, you often don't get what you want. In those systems, drawing in the same direction as the raster makes a qualitative difference.
This is really easy. Back in the good old days, when developers measured memory in kilobytes rather than megabytes, and cpu speeds were expressed in single digit mhz rather than single digit ghz, performance was a BIG issue. The layout of the data inside a bitmap was set up to mimic the memory layout of a video card, so that you could literally just copy the data with no transforms.
Which is actually not as good an idea as it sounds. When you refresh the screen (or a large window) upside down, CRT refreshes, which always go from top to bottom, become much more obtrusive. The system looks and feels slower due to more screen-tearing, even though it's technically 1% or so faster.
This is why display systems that put (0,0) at the lower-left corner are a pet peeve of mine. Upside-down rendering = a slightly more elegant mathematical model that yields significantly worse-looking results in real life.
Overall throughput of CF when used as a disk replacement appears to be about 1/2 to 1/3 what you'd get from a normal IDE hard drive. I've been booting an embedded device running Win98 from a CF drive, and it takes a couple of minutes.
They can be used as disk-drive replacements if you can tolerate the reduced throughput and guard against repetitive writes that will eventually destroy the memory cells. (The aforementioned Win98 app runs without a swapfile.)