Intel Create-&-Share cameras come with a bouncing ball screen saver program that works essentially the same way.
If the lighting is right (light behind you rather than infront of you), you can watch yourself on the screen as a little ball bounces around, and you can "whack" the ball with your hands, or a stick, or whatever.
It just sees a dark area moving across the captured image and compares it to where the ball is on the screen. Simple, really. Great time waster.
SMP is working fine on sparc32 and sparc64. Haven't a clue about PPC, I think it's there but I don't recall.
The only archetecture that I know for sure doesn't SMP under linux is Mips. Mostly because Mips processors don't handle cache coherency the way other archetectures do, so a lot more motherboard logic is required to make it work. There are plenty of SMP Mips systems in existance (for instance the discontinued NEC NetPower series) but documentation for the SMP hardware implementations is scarse.
My feelings for KDE have nothing to do with differences in the style of "freedom" espoused by the authors of the varous components. Or their personalities, or nationalities, or whatever.
I've got nothing specific against KDE, not as such. I just don't like QT.
And it's not that i don't like QT in the sense that trolltech did something that offended me, and I'm as ignorant of the programming interface as your grandmother.
I dislike QT because it looks and feels awkward to me. It quite literally looks and feels to annoy me exactly the way OS/2 Presentation Manager does when using buggy video drivers at a very high resolution:
The fonts always look a few points too big, the kerning always a few points off kilter, the space between menu items too wide, etc. It just looks and feels awkward and I don't like it.
That being said, I don't use gnome either. I use icewm, but I *like* the look and feel of applications written with Gtk+
Now, if i could just take the time to figure out how to make gnome use small icons on the panel instead of those big clunky 64x64 things, I might give gnome another shot. Maybe.
Why is it so hard to understand that NeXTStep only looked so good because those icons were insignificant on a display that large? Some of us use notebooks with 800x600 10.4" displays . .
You know I've got that exact unit, cost me $5 at a second hand store. It's real neat the first couple times you hit the print button.
I sorta wish i knew how to replace the words "Mitsubishi Electric" with, well, anything else. They have a DIN connector on the back but who knows what plugs into it. Of course, I only wish i knew so that I could change it, print out a few more things, and then put it back on the shelf.
My brotherinlaw says that he used to use these at Hart Scientific to print out test results from some piece of test gear that outputted NTSC video.
Yes, that's correct. Current MP support in MacOS is a lot like the way most operating systems don't support MP -- they require the application to be written to access the other processors.
And to think they were bragging about it when they added that feature . . .
It's a pain in the ass to do most things in linux. I don't see why you're complaining.
also, you've forgotten an important rule: Never ask a geek 'why' - just nod your head and back away slowly. don't make any sudden moves, make sure they can see the open palms of your hands.
I read their little speil, and i think it's bad science.
The thing about scientists is, whenever they set out to prove something they want to prove, they invariably find a way of proving it.
They do show a short-term correlation between agressive behavior in a lab, and agressive behavior in a video game.
What they did not address, however, is the massive ammount of collected evidence already available on the subject. Namely, the fact that while violent video games have become more and more popular over the last several years, all state and federal statistics show that violent crime committed by monors has gone down every year for the last several years.
So, there's this controlled environment where, under short-term evaluation, a certian correlation is shown.
And then there's this big, uncontrolled situation we call reality, where for the last several years a different correlation has been shown. And they failed to address it.
This is different from internal dsl gear HOW?
on
WinDSL Coming?
·
· Score: 2
Y'all aren't paying attention!
Most of us who have DSL were early adopters and have outboard dsl-to-ethernet bridges that are fully self-contained. I got my Cisco 675 for free, and it was the only way to connect to USWest DSL for a good long time.
These days, the basic DSL hookup comes with either a Cisco or an Intel DSL PCI card.
This card already doesn't have any support or planned support for Linux, BSD, etc.
So, the news that there is going to be *another* DSL card without Linux support is simply, well, not news.
Call me when there is at least one vendor of a DSL card that supports anything but Windows.
Portege notebooks (I'm typing this on a 3010 right now) are magnesium. They are using the water cooling system to tramsit the heat to the case.
naturally, if you spread the heat out over a larger area, it dissipates better and doesn't make any one part of the case hot.
The 3010 I'm using right now is a far cry from the new one, uses a 266mhz mobile pentium mmx. It gets a little warm, but i wouldn't say hot.
But really, who needs even the cpu in that thing? I'll keep this portege 3010 until I can get something of equal weight that gives me longer battery life, even if it's the same speed or only a little faster.
Yes, I'm anxious to see a Transmeta based ultraportable, but not because i wan to buy one. I'm anxious because I'll believe the hype when i can talk to someone who's owned one for six months, and then maybe I'll be able to decide if it would be better than what I'm using now.
The actual fix is to get off your duff and write a helper module for your game.
The one-machine limitation for many games is there because the game essentially runs as a daemon, and needs other computers to be able to connect to it.
If you have a good enough understanding of the protocol, it should be possible to write a masq module that will appropriately mangle the outgoing packets and appropriately route the incoming packets.
ipmasq module work has pretty much dropped off at this point as most authors are concentrating on the netfilters implementation in 2.4.
The real problem, of course, is having a deep understanding of the protocol. This isn't hard to come by if you don't mind signing an NDA, but signing that NDA will pretty much keep it out of the linux kernel source.
Maybe game makers can be encouraged to release protocol specs? Or better yet, maybe they can be encouraged to make their protocols RFC1918 compliant.
A couple years ago a passing aquaintance of mine set up a site called CoolText.
However, while it's essentially the same thing (web front end to Gimp functions) it's really designed for putting together logos. It's a quick way to come up with web-type graphics.
CoolText has been up for at least two years, and the banner ads make Bryan enough money to pay for some of his classes.
So, the "hack" here is that they drilled a hole in the side of their AirPort to enable them to plug the vendor-approved signal amp into the stock wireless card inside?
Yes, this will work with any WaveLan card. Of course it will, it's a Lucent product that's marketed for this purpose.
Call me back when you're homebrewing your own signal amps out of arrays of power transistors.
I think it is imporant, even crucial, that the source code for any kind of program, especially malignant, down right evil, wrong programs, be considered protected speech.
Evil DOES NOT go away when you slap it with a gag order. It merely becomes quieter, and thus more pervasive.
Consider the licensing agreement from, was it Symantec? That offered severe penalties for reporting faults in their software. How is viral or otherwise exploitave source code different?
"Malignant" software relies on the shortcomings of other software. Without the protected right to communicate these faults, people will foolishly believe vounerable systems to be invounerable, and faults will exist that will allow anyone with enough anger or boredom to abuse those systems, and thus abuse you.
The utopian view that if nobody was able to tell anyone about security faults then security wouldn't ever be breached is flat out stupid.
Someone will figure it out. Someone will use that knowledge to serve their own purposes. Their purposes may include abuse of your rights, your property, or your livelihood.
The thing is, when the telco wires into an area, they don't just run a few pairs, they run a *Lot* of pairs.
When you order a dry pair, essentially they just figure out what they have to do to get a connection from point A to point B - this usually goes through any number of cables that converge at various points on regular punchdown blocks.
The problem is, in many areas, you can't get a dry pair for love or money.
Well, that's not true, in USWest country, you can get a dry pair for one heck of a lot of money. Classically, yes, they are $20/mo. As soon as USWest figured out people were using them for data, they (legally) priced them as data-capable circuits for several hundred dollars a month, so that they wouldn't hurt their frame relay sales.
Basically, they now charge about as much for a dry pair as they do for frame relay. So why bother.
This sounds like he's investing about $1200 per connection in hardware - he might have been able to pull off the same thing using off the shelf wireless gear and directional antennae for about the same money. Wavelan cards with appropriate signal amps and antennae can go 3 or 4 miles easily.
The real problem with wireless, within a city, tho, is that non-licensed bands require a very clear line of sight.
The common misconception is that you essentially need a clear area about the size of the transciever element to get from here to there. This is completely, depressingly untrue.
Pretty much all the unlicensed gear is 2.4ghz - that sounds great, doesn't it? It's not.
At a 7 mile distance, a 2.4ghz signal needs a corridor fourty feet wide with no obstructions. And just one tree branch in the way can screw with your signal.
They call this the fresnel zone. 2.4ghz is especially sensitive to obstruction because the leaves of most trees make wonderful quarterwave antennae for the signal, and you get lots of reflection off of solid objects like brick or cement.
If you're serious about a point to point connection, licensed bands are the way to go. a 23ghz (note the lack of a decimal point) link over the same distance requires more like a 12 foot corridor.
That's the problem with wireless - the vendors hype it up, but in reality it's actually problematic.
It's late, and I don't know where I'm going with this. G'nite.
Many aeons ago (mid 80's), when my older brother was learning how to program on our kickin 8mhz PC-XT clone with EGA graphics and a truly caverous 20 meg harddrive, people would ask me "So, what is he writing?"
I regularly told people that he was writing a virus that would alter the internal wiring of their cpu, causing it to melt or possibly explode after a significant period of exposure - thus, explaining the occasional crashes of our system:)
Man, seeing an email virus that does the same thing really takes me back . . .
I disagree. In a former job, for almost two years i worked exclusively with educators, mostly jr. high and highschool level. I would say that some, maybe 4% of teachers are bright people. And I'm being generous.
Let me reiterate. I am not stating this as an analysis of the teachers i experienced while in school. I am stating this as an analysis of the teachers, councilors, and school administrators i worked with on a daily basis as part of my job function as an adult. Thousands of people, from many hundreds of schools. Day in, day out.
Morons. Drooling morons. Drooling morons who just wanted three months vacation every year, embittered because that turned out to be actual work. Most of them are dead weight, some of them are actively malignant.
This is so *Shockingly* mundane a thing to hear that I'm really, truly saddened to see it wasting bandwidth.
You know those little boxes you can buy to let you duplicate VHS tapes that they sell in the back of Popular Mechanics? They really work, and they still really work for DVD players. All of them. Not just PSX2. And they're essentially the same thing as the upscan converter refered to here.
Lemme 'splain the concept behind Macrovision.
One of the qualities of the VHS format is that the horizontal sync signal is weakly recorded. This wasn't due to some corporate conspiracy, It's just Not a Very Good Format. VHS doesn't record the whole video signal, including not recording the whole sync signal. This is why even non-copy-protected VHS tapes look like crap when you copy them. Let me reiterate, this is NOT because of the fiendish plans of Mr. Valenti. It's simply because VHS is crappy technology.
"Macrovision" is essentially the act of intentionally providing a weak sync signal. That's right. All they do is make it weaker.
This works brilliantly, because Mr. Valenti has made it illegal to fix a VCR so that it has it's own amplifier on the sync signal. You take a poor sync signal, record it badly, and you have a really crappy copy.
TV's don't suffer from this because they are designed to recieve the whole video signal and not just some of it. Thus, you can get good video plugging DVD directly into your tv, and you can get good video plugging VHS directly into your tv, but when you plug DVD into VHS there's too much loss between the two to end up with a good signal.
SO, insert something that makes up for the poor sync signal, or prevent the sync signal from being degraded, and everything is hunky-dory.
A common complaint regarding the Gnome desktop is interface consistency. I've heard some people refer to it as being like a randomly mixed jumble of good ideas.
I'm a former OS/2 user, so, to an extent i know what it's like to use an interface where everything has a somewhat predictable "feel" - SOM objects act a particular way on the WorkplaceShell desktop, and you come to expect it.
It's because of that that I use plain old IceWM instead of Gnome. It's not the memory overhead, it's not the processing overhead, it's the feeling that it's a bunch of unrelated methods for displaying data all on the same screen.
Are there plans to come up with a set of design guidelines, like Apple had in the early MacOS days to define how the interface of a particular module should act?
That's the real question tho - if they could have legally taken a laptop downstairs and plugged into the same backbone, the theft of service charge probably won't stick.
However, what could definately stick is if they had to pull breaking & entering to connect the cable. and if the school is pissed off enough . . .
Slashdot Mirror
Intel Create-&-Share cameras come with a bouncing ball screen saver program that works essentially the same way.
If the lighting is right (light behind you rather than infront of you), you can watch yourself on the screen as a little ball bounces around, and you can "whack" the ball with your hands, or a stick, or whatever.
It just sees a dark area moving across the captured image and compares it to where the ball is on the screen. Simple, really. Great time waster.
There are HAM band packet radio systems in excess of 56k last I checked.
The bigger problem, I'd think, is obtaining the appropriate license to operate said device.
how is this different from Bongs being sold as tobbacco prodcuts?
It aint. Surely you don't expect to hold up the war on drugs as a shining example of government controll at it's best, do you?
SMP is working fine on sparc32 and sparc64. Haven't a clue about PPC, I think it's there but I don't recall.
The only archetecture that I know for sure doesn't SMP under linux is Mips. Mostly because Mips processors don't handle cache coherency the way other archetectures do, so a lot more motherboard logic is required to make it work. There are plenty of SMP Mips systems in existance (for instance the discontinued NEC NetPower series) but documentation for the SMP hardware implementations is scarse.
My feelings for KDE have nothing to do with differences in the style of "freedom" espoused by the authors of the varous components. Or their personalities, or nationalities, or whatever.
I've got nothing specific against KDE, not as such. I just don't like QT.
And it's not that i don't like QT in the sense that trolltech did something that offended me, and I'm as ignorant of the programming interface as your grandmother.
I dislike QT because it looks and feels awkward to me. It quite literally looks and feels to annoy me exactly the way OS/2 Presentation Manager does when using buggy video drivers at a very high resolution:
The fonts always look a few points too big, the kerning always a few points off kilter, the space between menu items too wide, etc. It just looks and feels awkward and I don't like it.
That being said, I don't use gnome either. I use icewm, but I *like* the look and feel of applications written with Gtk+
Now, if i could just take the time to figure out how to make gnome use small icons on the panel instead of those big clunky 64x64 things, I might give gnome another shot. Maybe.
Why is it so hard to understand that NeXTStep only looked so good because those icons were insignificant on a display that large? Some of us use notebooks with 800x600 10.4" displays . .
You know I've got that exact unit, cost me $5 at a second hand store. It's real neat the first couple times you hit the print button.
I sorta wish i knew how to replace the words "Mitsubishi Electric" with, well, anything else. They have a DIN connector on the back but who knows what plugs into it. Of course, I only wish i knew so that I could change it, print out a few more things, and then put it back on the shelf.
My brotherinlaw says that he used to use these at Hart Scientific to print out test results from some piece of test gear that outputted NTSC video.
Yes, that's correct. Current MP support in MacOS is a lot like the way most operating systems don't support MP -- they require the application to be written to access the other processors.
And to think they were bragging about it when they added that feature . . .
It's a pain in the ass to do most things in linux. I don't see why you're complaining.
also, you've forgotten an important rule: Never ask a geek 'why' - just nod your head and back away slowly. don't make any sudden moves, make sure they can see the open palms of your hands.
Just hit the main menu and select the start of the movie from the scene selection menu, it's not hard to miss the previews on DVD movies . . .
I read their little speil, and i think it's bad science.
The thing about scientists is, whenever they set out to prove something they want to prove, they invariably find a way of proving it.
They do show a short-term correlation between agressive behavior in a lab, and agressive behavior in a video game.
What they did not address, however, is the massive ammount of collected evidence already available on the subject. Namely, the fact that while violent video games have become more and more popular over the last several years, all state and federal statistics show that violent crime committed by monors has gone down every year for the last several years.
So, there's this controlled environment where, under short-term evaluation, a certian correlation is shown.
And then there's this big, uncontrolled situation we call reality, where for the last several years a different correlation has been shown. And they failed to address it.
Y'all aren't paying attention!
Most of us who have DSL were early adopters and have outboard dsl-to-ethernet bridges that are fully self-contained. I got my Cisco 675 for free, and it was the only way to connect to USWest DSL for a good long time.
These days, the basic DSL hookup comes with either a Cisco or an Intel DSL PCI card.
This card already doesn't have any support or planned support for Linux, BSD, etc.
So, the news that there is going to be *another* DSL card without Linux support is simply, well, not news.
Call me when there is at least one vendor of a DSL card that supports anything but Windows.
Portege notebooks (I'm typing this on a 3010 right now) are magnesium. They are using the water cooling system to tramsit the heat to the case.
naturally, if you spread the heat out over a larger area, it dissipates better and doesn't make any one part of the case hot.
The 3010 I'm using right now is a far cry from the new one, uses a 266mhz mobile pentium mmx. It gets a little warm, but i wouldn't say hot.
But really, who needs even the cpu in that thing? I'll keep this portege 3010 until I can get something of equal weight that gives me longer battery life, even if it's the same speed or only a little faster.
Yes, I'm anxious to see a Transmeta based ultraportable, but not because i wan to buy one. I'm anxious because I'll believe the hype when i can talk to someone who's owned one for six months, and then maybe I'll be able to decide if it would be better than what I'm using now.
The actual fix is to get off your duff and write a helper module for your game.
The one-machine limitation for many games is there because the game essentially runs as a daemon, and needs other computers to be able to connect to it.
If you have a good enough understanding of the protocol, it should be possible to write a masq module that will appropriately mangle the outgoing packets and appropriately route the incoming packets.
ipmasq module work has pretty much dropped off at this point as most authors are concentrating on the netfilters implementation in 2.4.
The real problem, of course, is having a deep understanding of the protocol. This isn't hard to come by if you don't mind signing an NDA, but signing that NDA will pretty much keep it out of the linux kernel source.
Maybe game makers can be encouraged to release protocol specs? Or better yet, maybe they can be encouraged to make their protocols RFC1918 compliant.
Doesn't LART stand for Luser Attitude Readjustment Tool?
Usually when printed on a blunt object . . .
A couple years ago a passing aquaintance of mine set up a site called CoolText.
However, while it's essentially the same thing (web front end to Gimp functions) it's really designed for putting together logos. It's a quick way to come up with web-type graphics.
CoolText has been up for at least two years, and the banner ads make Bryan enough money to pay for some of his classes.
So, the "hack" here is that they drilled a hole in the side of their AirPort to enable them to plug the vendor-approved signal amp into the stock wireless card inside?
Yes, this will work with any WaveLan card. Of course it will, it's a Lucent product that's marketed for this purpose.
Call me back when you're homebrewing your own signal amps out of arrays of power transistors.
I disagree.
I think it is imporant, even crucial, that the source code for any kind of program, especially malignant, down right evil, wrong programs, be considered protected speech.
Evil DOES NOT go away when you slap it with a gag order. It merely becomes quieter, and thus more pervasive.
Consider the licensing agreement from, was it Symantec? That offered severe penalties for reporting faults in their software. How is viral or otherwise exploitave source code different?
"Malignant" software relies on the shortcomings of other software. Without the protected right to communicate these faults, people will foolishly believe vounerable systems to be invounerable, and faults will exist that will allow anyone with enough anger or boredom to abuse those systems, and thus abuse you.
The utopian view that if nobody was able to tell anyone about security faults then security wouldn't ever be breached is flat out stupid.
Someone will figure it out. Someone will use that knowledge to serve their own purposes. Their purposes may include abuse of your rights, your property, or your livelihood.
THINK for once.
The thing is, when the telco wires into an area, they don't just run a few pairs, they run a *Lot* of pairs.
When you order a dry pair, essentially they just figure out what they have to do to get a connection from point A to point B - this usually goes through any number of cables that converge at various points on regular punchdown blocks.
The problem is, in many areas, you can't get a dry pair for love or money.
Well, that's not true, in USWest country, you can get a dry pair for one heck of a lot of money. Classically, yes, they are $20/mo. As soon as USWest figured out people were using them for data, they (legally) priced them as data-capable circuits for several hundred dollars a month, so that they wouldn't hurt their frame relay sales.
Basically, they now charge about as much for a dry pair as they do for frame relay. So why bother.
This sounds like he's investing about $1200 per connection in hardware - he might have been able to pull off the same thing using off the shelf wireless gear and directional antennae for about the same money. Wavelan cards with appropriate signal amps and antennae can go 3 or 4 miles easily.
The real problem with wireless, within a city, tho, is that non-licensed bands require a very clear line of sight.
The common misconception is that you essentially need a clear area about the size of the transciever element to get from here to there. This is completely, depressingly untrue.
Pretty much all the unlicensed gear is 2.4ghz - that sounds great, doesn't it? It's not.
At a 7 mile distance, a 2.4ghz signal needs a corridor fourty feet wide with no obstructions. And just one tree branch in the way can screw with your signal.
They call this the fresnel zone. 2.4ghz is especially sensitive to obstruction because the leaves of most trees make wonderful quarterwave antennae for the signal, and you get lots of reflection off of solid objects like brick or cement.
If you're serious about a point to point connection, licensed bands are the way to go. a 23ghz (note the lack of a decimal point) link over the same distance requires more like a 12 foot corridor.
That's the problem with wireless - the vendors hype it up, but in reality it's actually problematic.
It's late, and I don't know where I'm going with this. G'nite.
Many aeons ago (mid 80's), when my older brother was learning how to program on our kickin 8mhz PC-XT clone with EGA graphics and a truly caverous 20 meg harddrive, people would ask me "So, what is he writing?"
:)
I regularly told people that he was writing a virus that would alter the internal wiring of their cpu, causing it to melt or possibly explode after a significant period of exposure - thus, explaining the occasional crashes of our system
Man, seeing an email virus that does the same thing really takes me back . . .
Actually, nearly every surplus & closeout dealer on the net is selling DXR2 cards for $30.
I disagree. In a former job, for almost two years i worked exclusively with educators, mostly jr. high and highschool level. I would say that some, maybe 4% of teachers are bright people. And I'm being generous.
Let me reiterate. I am not stating this as an analysis of the teachers i experienced while in school. I am stating this as an analysis of the teachers, councilors, and school administrators i worked with on a daily basis as part of my job function as an adult. Thousands of people, from many hundreds of schools. Day in, day out.
Morons. Drooling morons. Drooling morons who just wanted three months vacation every year, embittered because that turned out to be actual work. Most of them are dead weight, some of them are actively malignant.
I think what's irking you is the obvious journalism.
This is so *Shockingly* mundane a thing to hear that I'm really, truly saddened to see it wasting bandwidth.
You know those little boxes you can buy to let you duplicate VHS tapes that they sell in the back of Popular Mechanics? They really work, and they still really work for DVD players. All of them. Not just PSX2. And they're essentially the same thing as the upscan converter refered to here.
Lemme 'splain the concept behind Macrovision.
One of the qualities of the VHS format is that the horizontal sync signal is weakly recorded. This wasn't due to some corporate conspiracy, It's just Not a Very Good Format. VHS doesn't record the whole video signal, including not recording the whole sync signal. This is why even non-copy-protected VHS tapes look like crap when you copy them. Let me reiterate, this is NOT because of the fiendish plans of Mr. Valenti. It's simply because VHS is crappy technology.
"Macrovision" is essentially the act of intentionally providing a weak sync signal. That's right. All they do is make it weaker.
This works brilliantly, because Mr. Valenti has made it illegal to fix a VCR so that it has it's own amplifier on the sync signal. You take a poor sync signal, record it badly, and you have a really crappy copy.
TV's don't suffer from this because they are designed to recieve the whole video signal and not just some of it. Thus, you can get good video plugging DVD directly into your tv, and you can get good video plugging VHS directly into your tv, but when you plug DVD into VHS there's too much loss between the two to end up with a good signal.
SO, insert something that makes up for the poor sync signal, or prevent the sync signal from being degraded, and everything is hunky-dory.
Any questions?
A common complaint regarding the Gnome desktop is interface consistency. I've heard some people refer to it as being like a randomly mixed jumble of good ideas.
I'm a former OS/2 user, so, to an extent i know what it's like to use an interface where everything has a somewhat predictable "feel" - SOM objects act a particular way on the WorkplaceShell desktop, and you come to expect it.
It's because of that that I use plain old IceWM instead of Gnome. It's not the memory overhead, it's not the processing overhead, it's the feeling that it's a bunch of unrelated methods for displaying data all on the same screen.
Are there plans to come up with a set of design guidelines, like Apple had in the early MacOS days to define how the interface of a particular module should act?
That's the real question tho - if they could have legally taken a laptop downstairs and plugged into the same backbone, the theft of service charge probably won't stick.
However, what could definately stick is if they had to pull breaking & entering to connect the cable. and if the school is pissed off enough . . .