This gadget is claimed to take an MPEG2 stream and convert it to a digital stream for a SDI port.
Okay - that's a fairly nice conversion chip, but there really interesting question is where in the DVD player is it getting that MPEG2 stream? As has so often been pointed out here on/., any encrypted stream has to be decoded at some point - even the 'secure' digital video displays must decode the stream just before putting the images up. So, this gadget must sit right after the DSS decoding and pick it's data up from there. But if it is that simple to pick up the data stream, would a simple hardware hack allow you to pick this data up and feed it into the computer? No DeCSS needed anymore - we'd just need to fly a cable around inside our PC's off the DVD ROM to, say, a high speed serial or ethernet port and slurp away.
Sad news indeed. I just hope some other company will take over producing entertaining games for those of us who actually appreciate a storyline
Take a look at Bungie Software's offerings - Bungie actually bother crafting something approaching a plot for almost all of their games (as evidenced by the ongoing discussion of the Marathon story years after it was released). Better still, Loki ported Bungie's Myth II to Linux, so there is hope that we might see Oni and Halo at some point. Plot/story/whatever make a huge impact on the longeivity and repeat playability of a game, and it's sad to see a company like Looking Glass shut it's doors, regardless of the rest of the industry.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Next Generation - full speech recognition in a UI
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Gnome 1.2.0 Released
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· Score: 4
While I'm pleased that the GNOME project is coming along well, I must admit that I still find it truly underwhelming. GNOME still feels to be very much emulating the look and feel of Windows 95, although GNOME's superior stability is the major difference.
From where I'm sitting, I'd say you can just about configure a window manager running Gnome applications to look like almost any windowing system currently available. Because the majority of people who use computers these days are used to the GUI paradigms of Windows and Mac OS, it's hardly surprising that much of the Gnome functionality is familiar too. If they had produced something a long way away from the current User Interfaces they would have faced accusations of being out of touch with current GUI thinking.
Much as I hate to admit this, Microsoft revolutionised GUI with the "Start" button and taskbar, which provides an easy and efficient way to get things done.
B*&^^%#@!!!
Sorry. I get so mad when somebody gets this idea that MS came up with the taskbar first for Windows 95, especially since I'd been using a system with a taskbar and application launcher for about 7 years in 1995 (Acorn Risc OS, preceeded by Acorn Arthur for those with long memories). And I'm fairly certain Risc OS was not the only GUI using a taskbar before Windows 95.
The other GUIs (CDE, KDE, GNOME) have all followed suit with similar taskbars, and have been sucessful in their attempts.
The taskbar is a useful guide which should, at it's most basic level, provide two things:
a list of currently running applications;
a means to launch programs.
Anything else is window dressing or convenience, but these two seem to be the core requirement. Since most of the window managers, such as Sawfish, Afterstep, E, etc., all provide copious mechanisms for customizing or doing away with the taskbar altogether, it's not surprising that they have been successful in their efforts. It is also rewarding to see that they have not blindly followed the "Windows Way" of doing things and have left the choice of how to optimize the available tools as a customizable feature.
My point is, surely there must be another quantum leap which can be made, which will again revolutionise the way we use our computer desktops?
There may be. But first, we need to see some serious standardization in the way that the window elements are arranged so that the elusive goal of a consistent user interface across many applications is acheived. Nothing slows a GUI user down more than discovering that orders of buttons like 'Continue Editing', 'Save', 'Cancel' keep switching around so that Cancel is sometimes on the left and sometimes on the right, or ridiculously small toolbar buttons on an application which bear no resemblence to their function, or other nasties like 40+ small icons on a toolbar to distract the eye when looking for one little used function.
Once there is a degree of uniformity in the way that applications are laid out, then maybe we can step onto the next level of user friendliness. Quite where this will lead is another matter. I, for one, do not want the GUI interfering with my work or making inane suggestions - I have Vigor for that. I think that speech integration may go a long way to speeding up the interaction with the computer. For example, I want an application loaded, say Emacs (what else could I need?:-) ) and I simply ask for it to be loaded. I want to see the time, I ask for it and the computer tells me - this could be either spoken to me or shown on screen. I want to bold text while editing, I simply say "Bold" and keep typing. In fact, speech recognition should allow a user to keep their hands on the keyboard for most of the time and leave that mouse gathering cobwebs at the side. Finally all those modal windows could be dismissed with a quick word. I'd say that would make a huge step forward in productivity with a UI - effectively making use of another channel of input to supplement the accurate input channel of the keyboard.
Given the extremely well considered approach to fixing the MS Outlook attachment problem (i.e. don't fix the problem, just make sure there is a patch which makes it impossible to get to the problem) will MS now do the right thing? Will they kill, scrag, frag, smash, disembowl and eviscerate Clippy the ultra-annoying? Totally, utterly expunge the cruel, procrastinating, patronising, difficult-to-put-up-with and even-harder-to-disable office assistant from our hard drives:-)
While they are at it, they could solve a few other of the problems in the same way? MS IE 5.5 not standards compliant - fix it so it doesn't run. BSOD - delete that c:\winnt directory. I think we'd all be happier for it.:-)
Amazing. MS chooses to remove all access to the attachments. Not just stop them running, but actually stop them being saved out to disk. That's going to really impress the user who receives the Kerberos document in EXE form:-)
I went out and browsed through the local Business Depot (aka Staples) in search of a desk and came away with this one . Don't bother with the hutch - if you get a really big monitor, you'll never fit it in the gap. Why do I like this desk? First - it's deeper than most, so a big monitor doesn't end up pressed against your forehead while you grope underneath it trying to find the keyboard on the recessed sliding shelf. The entire right-hand side of the desk can be pushed into the desk and disappears from sight - useful if space in your room is a bit limited but you need that flat working area when you are at the desk (and I do!). It's good if you are right handed - the mouse mat sits on the pull-out portion in a close to ideal position next to the pull-out keyboard and you can rest your elbow on the desk at the same time. And you can hide the computer box in the left hand holding bay and free up more desk space. My only complaint with this desk is that the self-assembly could do with some guidance from the Gods at IKEA - there were some 25+ types of screws and bolts to hold this desk together, along with a 60 page manual and 40 pieces of wood. This is not a trivial self-assembly which can be done manual-free (and we know how much coders love reading those manuals...):-)
Of course, this relies on your computer having long enough leads to do the mass of knitting required. This is fast becoming my biggest headache - there are now more leads coming out the back of the machine than I know what to do with - with printer, monitor, keyboard, mouse, speakers all requiring connections, along with PNA network card, 56K modem card, Ethernet interface all having multiple leads and the need for 7 power point connections to power this baby, it's a major task to add hardware now because most of the leads only just reach far enough for me to get the computer box out of the desk without pulling the keyboard, mouse and speakers off the back of the desk. Anyone know of a good supplier of extremely long leads, or of a decent wire containment system?
These businesses are more interested in criteria like reliability, availability, and scalability.
How do these large businesses justify buying MS "innovations" if they are more interested in criteria like reliability, availability and scalability?
Several possible reasons:
They are writing software for the Windows platfrom so they have to use, work and develop on Windows.
They swallow the MS marketing without delving below the surface.
Hardware and software procurement is handled by a different department to the development team.
Support contracts are waved in their direction.
They don't believe that something which is 'free' or 'cheap' could possibly be as good as something you have to pay megabucks for.
I could go on. Some of the reasons are obvious - if your product is aimed at Windows, you have to develop on Windows at least some of the time. On the other hand, the people who pay for the hardware/software may be disjoint from the team of people who really use the machines. Or there is the usual catch that if you deploy an office-load of Windows machines so that the employees will have a familiar platform to work on, there is a natural bias to round it off with a Windows server. The availability of other options may not even be explored. And with MS moving towards greater 'integration' of server and client machines (i.e. Windows 2000 Active Directory, MS Kerberos, etc.) that trend will stay.
If large ammounts of not only interstellar but intergalactic hydrogen exist out there, it may eliminate the need for "dark matter" in explaining the continued expansion of the universe.
If there wasn't an appreciable amount of intergalactic hydrogen out there, my thesis would have been very dull indeed, since it hinged on imaging the distribution of high-temperature (around 10^9K) electrons trapped in the gravity well found in clusters of galaxies. There the group I was working with used radio interferometry techniques to produce maps of the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect like this one . This matter can also be 'seen' by it's effect on gravitational lensing, where the additional matter affects the strength of the lensing. So the presence of this ionized hydrogen is well known - those electrons had to come from somewhere! Using highly ionized oxygen as a tracer for fully ionized hydrogen is the interesting step here, and I hope they have some really solid connection between the two because this entire publication rests on the assumption that oxygen is accurately tracing the hydrogen.
There is a bias in astronomy that unless you prove it in the optical wavelengths you haven't proved it at all, and this looks like one of those announcements.
I'm amazed. Truely amazed. Given that nobody could be under any illusions at all that Microsoft was very much in the eye of the world at a time when the abuse of monopoly power has just been acknowledged by the courts, you would have thought that Microsoft would be on its best behaviour until the dust settled. But no.
And it's not just the Kerberos 'embrace and extend' play which has surfaced. The story going around about the Bill Gates 'smoking gun' memo on altering Windows 2000 apps to make life harder for people with Palm Pilots has also just appeared. A large part of the DOJ/ US States proposal is that MS be split up *and* be subjected to 3 years of scrutiny under fairly draconian terms. So the last thing that MS could possibly want is to make the need for scrutiny mandatory and yet this is, in all effective purposes, exactly what moves like this are liable to do - leave the courts/govt no choice except to constantly sit on the coat tails of MS and see where they are going.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
MP3 radio stations? Digital broadcasts happen now.
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MP3.com Loses In Court
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· Score: 4
They were distributing copyrighted material without a license. Even if they were sure that the users alreay owned the CD's, the legality is still very questionable. And with the availability of free ripping software, the usefulness of such a service is also rather questionable.
I wasn't aware it was that black and white - from what I heard it was distinctly grey. MP3 own copies of all the CDs you get beamed. In order to get a CD beamed you have to physically have it at some point - most people will own the CDs rather than nick their friends collections. MP3.com allows to to access MP3's of your CDs once these conditions are met. Now maybe they need a radio playing license or something similar to be able to provide a directed broadcast to your authenticated browser, but in principle it sounds reasonable. Whether this constitutes fair use, which I suspect is MP3's defence, is another matter - the courts don't appear to think so.
How long is it going to be before we get a real MP3 broadcasting radio statio playing MP3's of mainstream artists? With the increase of digital broadcasting over the air (i.e. the UK is going towards digital broadcasts as the BBC ramps up it's transmitters, and satellites have broadcast NICAM digital radio for a while), I see no possible justification to stop some website broadcasting MP3s if they can get a license. Why do I get the feeling that RIAA really don't want that sort of license to arrive?
In all seriousness, isn't AMD having horrible supply problems already?
It depends what you mean. AMD is having far less trouble turning out it's high end chips (ie Athlons above 800MHz) than Intel is with its equivalently clocked PIIICu's, as evidenced by the chip availabilities. From the look of things, it's the K6-2/3 line which is pretty much already spoken for, so if you want one of those, you are probably going to have to search for it. On the other hand, you might as well get a low-end Athlon or a budget Duron anyway and you get the advantages of a 21164-derived FPU which scrags any Intel processor and a nine-way instruction scheduler. Oh, and against the Celeron, both the Athlon and the Duron have 200MHz buses in contrast to the 66MHz one on the Celery. Take your pick... it's not hard... I'll not rush you...
A 240x320 pixel screen is going to hurt if people try and use a large number of Linux applications on this. Even a text only terminal is only going to get 80 columns if the font is 4 pixels wide, which while possible is really uncomfortable on the eyes. Most window managers are going to have to be configured to use a really thin toolkit (titlebar, icons etc) to be vaguely useable. It strikes me that this would be better off with a greyscale screen of at least twice the resolution in each direction (i.e. a minimum of 480x640) or a colour one if costs allow. For example, web browsing won't even fit the small Netscape icons across the screen in 240 pixels.
There I was, all intrigued to see whether the cosmological constant was about to bite the dust and finally lay Einstein's "greatest mistake" to rest, and all they've found is that the universe is flat within 12%. Oh well - have to wait for the next set of results. I'm still rooting for Omega_m to be 1 just so that the universe is old enough to hold its oldest constituents;-)
I have the installation FAQ in front of me, and it's a long and careful list of things to do. From a quick scan, it looks like people of a nervous disposition should think twice before going down this list - making a quick backup of your current Xfree installation might not be a bad idea, or at least keep the old Xfree86 rpms at hand in case of crisis. Beyond that, it looks like it may conflict a bit with Mesa, so those modules need to be deleted or renamed as well (all in the FAQ).
For a speed comparison under the new drivers, Linux Games has a First Look up which gives me hope that I'll finally see some speed on my TNT2 card!
So, the StrongARM processor chalks up yet another adoptee. Ever since Acorn Computers spun off Advanced Risc Machines (ARM) as a separate company, ARM has made progressively more and more inroads into the embedded processor market. Today there are ARM chips almost everywhere I look, from ATM routing systems to palm-helds to the odd desktop PC or Net box running either RiscOS or ARMLinux. And this has been a fairly quiet revolution happening out of sight of the general public, who neither know nor care what sits inside that little black organiser. When there is so much noise happening in the desktop PC CPU market, this is an almost refreshing change.
Now - the real question is since there is a port of Linux on the StrongARM processor, how long will it be before we can attach a microdrive to this baby and run a pocket Linux machine?
Given that setting up MS SQL server 7.0 comes with a whole raft of default passwords for system administrator and related positions, I don't think that MS could even come close to complaining about the Piranha system having a default password. Like this excerpt from http://www.microsoft.com/t echnet/SQL/Technote/secure.asp
If the sa password is blank (as per a default installation), an intruder (or the Windows NT Administrator) would be able to gain access to the server. For information on ways to reduce the chance of such an attack, see "Registry."
I mean, it's not as if the database is an essential part of the Web E-commerce revolution...:-)
"One study reveals that young men who are habitually aggressive may be especially vulnerable to the aggression-enhancing effects of repeated exposure to violent games," said psychologists Craig A. Anderson, Ph.D., and Karen E. Dill, Ph.D. "The other study reveals that even a brief exposure to violent video games can temporarily increase aggressive behavior in all types of participants."
I look at this report and I worry. Not because of the details of the report in particular, but because aggressive behaviour is difficult to pin down and is not necessarily a bad thing. The first report seems to me to say that aggressive people may be stimulated by aggressive situations. That doesn't strike me as being an illogical statement - it is merely stating the obvious. The second study is more interesting. If I play an immersive video game, yes, my heart rate goes up. In a tricky situation when I'm pinned down by sniper fire or there is a helicopter whirring overhead, I'm tense, edgy. If I get into an open fire-fight with half a dozen other human players or computer-controlled players, I may get aggressive and noisy. So yes, video games do have an effect, probably far more effective then TV because the interaction between what you see and can do is so much more complete.
But is this limited to computer games, or does it extend to other activities? I would argue that any competitive activity will lead to increased aggression over my normal, fairly passive self. If I play rugby, there is no way I'm going to survive on the playing field unless I get going. If I'm not pumped when I get the ball, I'm going to get flattened by someone who wants it more than I do. If I'm being chased by some back row player who is technically faster than me on paper, then that extra adrenaline is going to be needed if I'm going to make it to the line. If I'm going to tackle some 6ft6 tight-head prop forward who weighs 260 lbs, I'd better be aggressive!
Any involving competitive activity will require an increased level of adrenaline, alertness and aggression. And it's not necessarily a bad thing - these are our survival instincts being used in a modern arena, whether it's rugby, Quake or even some individual sport like badminton. Aggression can help us out when our other resources are low. The only time aggression becomes a problem is when it is taken from the field of play/battle/sport whatever and spills over into our daily lives. And I really don't feel that this report works through this last point.
It will be a very welcome addition to have cscope join the ranks of code management tools - it's something I use at work a lot to navigate very quickly through a vast amount of code, and it has different strengths and weakness when compared with etags (Emacs Tags for the uninitiated).
From my experience, cscope wins over Etags for navigation because it produces lists of likely jump points, whereas etags invoke with a tags search can leave you at some first level define which is not necessarily where you want to be (multiple #ifdef #define... type calls muck up the etag reference lists). Cscope is also pretty speedy with its reference database, and can be stacked inside an editor, so you can do cscope -> editor -> cscope -> editor and then you can work back out by quiting the chosen level which makes it nice for chasing ideas through the code.
On the other hand, the tight integration between etags and Emacs means that etags still comes in very useful for traversal of source files - it just doesn't quite offer the same flexibility that cscope does.
Of course, I may have just started a major holy war, but such is life...!
Refresh my memory; should it actually be able to get down to 25 magnitudes V filter? I thought Keck reached just a shade over 26, with almost an order greater collection area, among other things.
Well - despite their choice of asinh magnitude scheme, the quasar they found at z>5 had conventional V around 24.5 so I'll stand by my figure until someone pushes me off! Why they couldn't have used AB magnitudes like any reasonable person... or maybe these asinh magnitudes are the same - they certainly sound similar (linear flux) but I'm about 1.5 years out of date now so I'm a little less certain.
I wonder if there was a particular choice to their section of the sky being surveyed, or if it was mainly observ/operational requirements.
My recollection is that this is an observational limitation - one telescope can see about half the 'sky' but you really only want to image stuff which is above you - as soon as you point more than 30' from straight up, the image quality goes down as you are looking through more of the atmosphere, and to my knowledge there are not adaptive optics on the SDSS imaging system.
Since you mentioned the significant additional work that could/may/will be done on these images, and the issues with their auto-processing, I wonder if they will also release raw(-er) data for better reduction, if nothing else. I can see plenty of potential shortcomings with their, in some areas, one-size-fits-all "pipelines." Seems like better, more frustrating by-hand work on many of these image strips will often be necessary. And massive deconvolution reps on terabytes of images...yum...and tedium...wow. And heck, people will be doing statistical surveys of these data for decades.
Definitely. I strongly hope that they release raw data (FITS format or whatever) - see my other post here for more discussion of things to do. On the other hand, a commercial entity like MS may be less interested in real science and more in disceminating pretty pictures...
If the raw data isn't forthcoming I would be very surprised though - once the initial 'safe' period is over so the professional astronomers can stake their claim to the best and latest data, it makes little sense to restrict the data. As Skyview proved, general access to lots of data is a good thing, whether you depend on the data for your next round of research funding or whether you are merely interested in a little home study.
Well, as I understood it, the StrongARM chips will NEVER be used in consumer computers (not including palmtops) for the simple fact that the StrongARM family of processors are designed without floating point units. The lack of a floating point unit (meaning all floating point calculations would have to be done in software) would not be all that large of a burdon for typical business applications, but it would make it completely and utterly useless for any sort of game. While gaming is usually not the focus of most laptop owners, I doubt that any laptop without gaming capability would ever become more than a special-use product.
Wow. I must have been smoking something particularly interesting when I was playing Quake on my StrongARM'd RiscPC. Okay - so it only does 20 fps, but that's not a total failure for a machine doing FP emulation. Or maybe I was completely out of my skull when I was playing HoMM2 on it. Or FreeCiv on my ARM Linux installation. Or the many other games which exist for the StrongARM written either straight in assembler or compiled with gcc/Acorn C/whatever. Don't assume that 'no FPU' == 'no fun'. While I'd love to see a StrongARM with an FPU, I'd probably be more excited to see it teamed up to a DSP chip and DSPs tend to involve less transistors making them ideal for low power consumption (and yes you could use the DSP as a cheap FP emulator as needed).
Well, could this be made into an app like SETI@Home? A nice distributed app that runs on all sorts of computers with some pretty screensaver (maybe of the current pics being processed) might be something people really like. Even just a catalogue would be pretty extensive. But if a whole lot of people each proccess one picture, it might be worth it.
There are possibly some applications that could be automated, such as building a complete two-point correlation function for the clustering of the objects in the field, or maybe trying to categorize all the objects by colour, redshift and position into groupings in space and colour. However, most of these tasks are doable in a reasonable amount of computing time - say two-weeks computation on an UltraSparc machine (although the two-point correlation function is an O(n^2) problem, that requires 10^16 comparisons at a rough estimate, with maybe 10^8 comparisons a second, that would require... umm... err... about 3 years of CPU time). So yes - possibly an automated tool might well be worth it. I strongly suspect that few astronomers would bother to do the correlation function for the whole field at all scales, and would settle for looking at the function for scales up to around 4 degrees separation on the sky (that's much bigger than the largest known cluster of galaxies).
However, looking at the automatically processed picture strips, I see all sorts of problems with background level correction (the background appears to be wavey in these pictures so there is definitely room for improvement). Modern astronomical analysis often requires significant time spent on looking at a particular frame of interest - I spent over a year examining and refining an image of a pair of Quasars as part of my thesis - so my feeling is that there is much to be gained by picking an object which interests you, possibly from a Radio or X-ray survey, and following it up with the SDSS survey here. With this much data I think you can be assured that the Astronomy community will get to grips with the important statistical analysis on it's own. What it won't be able to do is follow up every field, every interesting quasar or galaxy and really really work on it. It may be possible to see gravitational lensing (although it won't be very clear since the point spread function will be around an arcsec) or do some funky image processing to try and deconvolve the images to recover more detail. In fact, there are lots of things to play with which are unlikely to ever get done on every part of this image data, so grab yourself a copy of IRAF or Source Extractor and go play.
For those of you who don't keep tabs on every astronomical survey underway, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey covers a quarter of the entire sky down to fairly faint magnitudes - at a guess to about 25 magnitude in V (the faintest object you can see at night away from street lights is about 5th magnitude, and for every extra 2.5 magnitudes, the objects get 10 times fainter). While this data does not go as deep as the Hubble Deep Field, the sheer number of objects covered (and more than half of them will be galaxies, since the number of galaxies visible at these faint magnitudes is several factors more than the number of stars in our own galaxies) means that this data allows a far more thorough analysis of the clustering of galaxies in the universe around us. Since this survey is not just imaging these objects but is also measuring the spectra using a grism (basically a series of prisms arranged linearly across the field), you can extrapolate the position on the sky and obtain an estimate of distance from the redshift. So you can do some fairly heavy duty astronomy with this data once it gets released, and the sheer amount of information means that it will be many years before it is all properly worked through. Picking a particular area of sky for study will almost certainly yield something new.
Of course, you can just go window shopping through this data for pretty pictures. And there should be lots...!
Now I DO know how to code. I'm taking my super-happy C++ coding classes in high school, so I know my way around a compiler and the like. So, after reading this article, I thought "hey, lets see if I can understand this NOW!" Guess what? It's still spaghetti code. I still can't unstand a stick of it, other then the PRINTFs and SCANFs. That's it. And I got a 98% in the class.
For any project, serious or recreational, if it's spagetti code it will never reach its potential. Period. One person - i.e. the original author - may have a fairly comprehensive understanding of what the code does, but if nobody else can come close to understanding its functions without commiting major time to digging through the mess, it will never get the examination and development that having many people work on the code brings. Of my own personal projects, the early ones (before I discovered that copious comments not only made life easier but speeded up development because I could clarify my own ideas when writing the comments) are useless now, either as starting points for new projects or just for code reuse. My point is that for a project to acheive its intended goal, especially if security is the main focus, the source code has to be clear, well documented and fully modularized as far as possible. Failure to accomplish this, including random global variables floating all over the place and sections of code which end up getting treated as a black box because they are near-impossible to decipher, will leave a project falling short.
Just think - now in the summer we can get outside, use that wireless LAN to hookup to the server, enjoy the fresh air, and... yes... if you position those solar cells under you chin like so... you can even get an even tan!
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Re:I've just done a quick read of the paper...
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Wormholes? Maybe.
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· Score: 2
..and one thing I noticed: way too little math. I will grant that I did not look at the math closely, but have you ever read through any Astrophysics journal article that had more words than equations?
Obviously having difficulty with his LaTeX equation skills. Either that or the rubber gloves are making it difficult to type:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Okay - that's a fairly nice conversion chip, but there really interesting question is where in the DVD player is it getting that MPEG2 stream? As has so often been pointed out here on /., any encrypted stream has to be decoded at some point - even the 'secure' digital video displays must decode the stream just before putting the images up. So, this gadget must sit right after the DSS decoding and pick it's data up from there. But if it is that simple to pick up the data stream, would a simple hardware hack allow you to pick this data up and feed it into the computer? No DeCSS needed anymore - we'd just need to fly a cable around inside our PC's off the DVD ROM to, say, a high speed serial or ethernet port and slurp away.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Sad news indeed. I just hope some other company will take over producing entertaining games for those of us who actually appreciate a storyline
Take a look at Bungie Software's offerings - Bungie actually bother crafting something approaching a plot for almost all of their games (as evidenced by the ongoing discussion of the Marathon story years after it was released). Better still, Loki ported Bungie's Myth II to Linux, so there is hope that we might see Oni and Halo at some point. Plot/story/whatever make a huge impact on the longeivity and repeat playability of a game, and it's sad to see a company like Looking Glass shut it's doors, regardless of the rest of the industry.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
While I'm pleased that the GNOME project is coming along well, I must admit that I still find it truly underwhelming. GNOME still feels to be very much emulating the look and feel of Windows 95, although GNOME's superior stability is the major difference.
From where I'm sitting, I'd say you can just about configure a window manager running Gnome applications to look like almost any windowing system currently available. Because the majority of people who use computers these days are used to the GUI paradigms of Windows and Mac OS, it's hardly surprising that much of the Gnome functionality is familiar too. If they had produced something a long way away from the current User Interfaces they would have faced accusations of being out of touch with current GUI thinking.
Much as I hate to admit this, Microsoft revolutionised GUI with the "Start" button and taskbar, which provides an easy and efficient way to get things done.
B*&^^%#@!!!
Sorry. I get so mad when somebody gets this idea that MS came up with the taskbar first for Windows 95, especially since I'd been using a system with a taskbar and application launcher for about 7 years in 1995 (Acorn Risc OS, preceeded by Acorn Arthur for those with long memories). And I'm fairly certain Risc OS was not the only GUI using a taskbar before Windows 95.
The other GUIs (CDE, KDE, GNOME) have all followed suit with similar taskbars, and have been sucessful in their attempts.
The taskbar is a useful guide which should, at it's most basic level, provide two things:
Anything else is window dressing or convenience, but these two seem to be the core requirement. Since most of the window managers, such as Sawfish, Afterstep, E, etc., all provide copious mechanisms for customizing or doing away with the taskbar altogether, it's not surprising that they have been successful in their efforts. It is also rewarding to see that they have not blindly followed the "Windows Way" of doing things and have left the choice of how to optimize the available tools as a customizable feature.
My point is, surely there must be another quantum leap which can be made, which will again revolutionise the way we use our computer desktops?
There may be. But first, we need to see some serious standardization in the way that the window elements are arranged so that the elusive goal of a consistent user interface across many applications is acheived. Nothing slows a GUI user down more than discovering that orders of buttons like 'Continue Editing', 'Save', 'Cancel' keep switching around so that Cancel is sometimes on the left and sometimes on the right, or ridiculously small toolbar buttons on an application which bear no resemblence to their function, or other nasties like 40+ small icons on a toolbar to distract the eye when looking for one little used function.
Once there is a degree of uniformity in the way that applications are laid out, then maybe we can step onto the next level of user friendliness. Quite where this will lead is another matter. I, for one, do not want the GUI interfering with my work or making inane suggestions - I have Vigor for that. I think that speech integration may go a long way to speeding up the interaction with the computer. For example, I want an application loaded, say Emacs (what else could I need? :-) ) and I simply ask for it to be loaded. I want to see the time, I ask for it and the computer tells me - this could be either spoken to me or shown on screen. I want to bold text while editing, I simply say "Bold" and keep typing. In fact, speech recognition should allow a user to keep their hands on the keyboard for most of the time and leave that mouse gathering cobwebs at the side. Finally all those modal windows could be dismissed with a quick word. I'd say that would make a huge step forward in productivity with a UI - effectively making use of another channel of input to supplement the accurate input channel of the keyboard.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Given the extremely well considered approach to fixing the MS Outlook attachment problem (i.e. don't fix the problem, just make sure there is a patch which makes it impossible to get to the problem) will MS now do the right thing? Will they kill, scrag, frag, smash, disembowl and eviscerate Clippy the ultra-annoying? Totally, utterly expunge the cruel, procrastinating, patronising, difficult-to-put-up-with and even-harder-to-disable office assistant from our hard drives :-)
While they are at it, they could solve a few other of the problems in the same way? MS IE 5.5 not standards compliant - fix it so it doesn't run. BSOD - delete that c:\winnt directory. I think we'd all be happier for it. :-)
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Amazing. MS chooses to remove all access to the attachments. Not just stop them running, but actually stop them being saved out to disk. That's going to really impress the user who receives the Kerberos document in EXE form :-)
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
I went out and browsed through the local Business Depot (aka Staples) in search of a desk and came away with this one . Don't bother with the hutch - if you get a really big monitor, you'll never fit it in the gap. Why do I like this desk? First - it's deeper than most, so a big monitor doesn't end up pressed against your forehead while you grope underneath it trying to find the keyboard on the recessed sliding shelf. The entire right-hand side of the desk can be pushed into the desk and disappears from sight - useful if space in your room is a bit limited but you need that flat working area when you are at the desk (and I do!). It's good if you are right handed - the mouse mat sits on the pull-out portion in a close to ideal position next to the pull-out keyboard and you can rest your elbow on the desk at the same time. And you can hide the computer box in the left hand holding bay and free up more desk space. My only complaint with this desk is that the self-assembly could do with some guidance from the Gods at IKEA - there were some 25+ types of screws and bolts to hold this desk together, along with a 60 page manual and 40 pieces of wood. This is not a trivial self-assembly which can be done manual-free (and we know how much coders love reading those manuals ...) :-)
Of course, this relies on your computer having long enough leads to do the mass of knitting required. This is fast becoming my biggest headache - there are now more leads coming out the back of the machine than I know what to do with - with printer, monitor, keyboard, mouse, speakers all requiring connections, along with PNA network card, 56K modem card, Ethernet interface all having multiple leads and the need for 7 power point connections to power this baby, it's a major task to add hardware now because most of the leads only just reach far enough for me to get the computer box out of the desk without pulling the keyboard, mouse and speakers off the back of the desk. Anyone know of a good supplier of extremely long leads, or of a decent wire containment system?
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
How do these large businesses justify buying MS "innovations" if they are more interested in criteria like reliability, availability and scalability?
Several possible reasons:
I could go on. Some of the reasons are obvious - if your product is aimed at Windows, you have to develop on Windows at least some of the time. On the other hand, the people who pay for the hardware/software may be disjoint from the team of people who really use the machines. Or there is the usual catch that if you deploy an office-load of Windows machines so that the employees will have a familiar platform to work on, there is a natural bias to round it off with a Windows server. The availability of other options may not even be explored. And with MS moving towards greater 'integration' of server and client machines (i.e. Windows 2000 Active Directory, MS Kerberos, etc.) that trend will stay.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
If large ammounts of not only interstellar but intergalactic hydrogen exist out there, it may eliminate the need for "dark matter" in explaining the continued expansion of the universe.
If there wasn't an appreciable amount of intergalactic hydrogen out there, my thesis would have been very dull indeed, since it hinged on imaging the distribution of high-temperature (around 10^9K) electrons trapped in the gravity well found in clusters of galaxies. There the group I was working with used radio interferometry techniques to produce maps of the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect like this one . This matter can also be 'seen' by it's effect on gravitational lensing, where the additional matter affects the strength of the lensing. So the presence of this ionized hydrogen is well known - those electrons had to come from somewhere! Using highly ionized oxygen as a tracer for fully ionized hydrogen is the interesting step here, and I hope they have some really solid connection between the two because this entire publication rests on the assumption that oxygen is accurately tracing the hydrogen.
There is a bias in astronomy that unless you prove it in the optical wavelengths you haven't proved it at all, and this looks like one of those announcements.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
I'm amazed. Truely amazed. Given that nobody could be under any illusions at all that Microsoft was very much in the eye of the world at a time when the abuse of monopoly power has just been acknowledged by the courts, you would have thought that Microsoft would be on its best behaviour until the dust settled. But no.
And it's not just the Kerberos 'embrace and extend' play which has surfaced. The story going around about the Bill Gates 'smoking gun' memo on altering Windows 2000 apps to make life harder for people with Palm Pilots has also just appeared. A large part of the DOJ/ US States proposal is that MS be split up *and* be subjected to 3 years of scrutiny under fairly draconian terms. So the last thing that MS could possibly want is to make the need for scrutiny mandatory and yet this is, in all effective purposes, exactly what moves like this are liable to do - leave the courts/govt no choice except to constantly sit on the coat tails of MS and see where they are going.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
They were distributing copyrighted material without a license. Even if they were sure that the users alreay owned the CD's, the legality is still very questionable. And with the availability of free ripping software, the usefulness of such a service is also rather questionable.
I wasn't aware it was that black and white - from what I heard it was distinctly grey. MP3 own copies of all the CDs you get beamed. In order to get a CD beamed you have to physically have it at some point - most people will own the CDs rather than nick their friends collections. MP3.com allows to to access MP3's of your CDs once these conditions are met. Now maybe they need a radio playing license or something similar to be able to provide a directed broadcast to your authenticated browser, but in principle it sounds reasonable. Whether this constitutes fair use, which I suspect is MP3's defence, is another matter - the courts don't appear to think so.
How long is it going to be before we get a real MP3 broadcasting radio statio playing MP3's of mainstream artists? With the increase of digital broadcasting over the air (i.e. the UK is going towards digital broadcasts as the BBC ramps up it's transmitters, and satellites have broadcast NICAM digital radio for a while), I see no possible justification to stop some website broadcasting MP3s if they can get a license. Why do I get the feeling that RIAA really don't want that sort of license to arrive?
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
In all seriousness, isn't AMD having horrible supply problems already?
It depends what you mean. AMD is having far less trouble turning out it's high end chips (ie Athlons above 800MHz) than Intel is with its equivalently clocked PIIICu's, as evidenced by the chip availabilities. From the look of things, it's the K6-2/3 line which is pretty much already spoken for, so if you want one of those, you are probably going to have to search for it. On the other hand, you might as well get a low-end Athlon or a budget Duron anyway and you get the advantages of a 21164-derived FPU which scrags any Intel processor and a nine-way instruction scheduler. Oh, and against the Celeron, both the Athlon and the Duron have 200MHz buses in contrast to the 66MHz one on the Celery. Take your pick ... it's not hard ... I'll not rush you ...
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
A 240x320 pixel screen is going to hurt if people try and use a large number of Linux applications on this. Even a text only terminal is only going to get 80 columns if the font is 4 pixels wide, which while possible is really uncomfortable on the eyes. Most window managers are going to have to be configured to use a really thin toolkit (titlebar, icons etc) to be vaguely useable. It strikes me that this would be better off with a greyscale screen of at least twice the resolution in each direction (i.e. a minimum of 480x640) or a colour one if costs allow. For example, web browsing won't even fit the small Netscape icons across the screen in 240 pixels.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
There I was, all intrigued to see whether the cosmological constant was about to bite the dust and finally lay Einstein's "greatest mistake" to rest, and all they've found is that the universe is flat within 12%. Oh well - have to wait for the next set of results. I'm still rooting for Omega_m to be 1 just so that the universe is old enough to hold its oldest constituents ;-)
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
I have the installation FAQ in front of me, and it's a long and careful list of things to do. From a quick scan, it looks like people of a nervous disposition should think twice before going down this list - making a quick backup of your current Xfree installation might not be a bad idea, or at least keep the old Xfree86 rpms at hand in case of crisis. Beyond that, it looks like it may conflict a bit with Mesa, so those modules need to be deleted or renamed as well (all in the FAQ).
For a speed comparison under the new drivers, Linux Games has a First Look up which gives me hope that I'll finally see some speed on my TNT2 card!
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
So, the StrongARM processor chalks up yet another adoptee. Ever since Acorn Computers spun off Advanced Risc Machines (ARM) as a separate company, ARM has made progressively more and more inroads into the embedded processor market. Today there are ARM chips almost everywhere I look, from ATM routing systems to palm-helds to the odd desktop PC or Net box running either RiscOS or ARMLinux. And this has been a fairly quiet revolution happening out of sight of the general public, who neither know nor care what sits inside that little black organiser. When there is so much noise happening in the desktop PC CPU market, this is an almost refreshing change.
Now - the real question is since there is a port of Linux on the StrongARM processor, how long will it be before we can attach a microdrive to this baby and run a pocket Linux machine?
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Given that setting up MS SQL server 7.0 comes with a whole raft of default passwords for system administrator and related positions, I don't think that MS could even come close to complaining about the Piranha system having a default password. Like this excerpt from http://www.microsoft.com/t echnet/SQL/Technote/secure.asp
If the sa password is blank (as per a default installation), an intruder (or the Windows NT Administrator) would be able to gain access to the server. For information on ways to reduce the chance of such an attack, see "Registry."
I mean, it's not as if the database is an essential part of the Web E-commerce revolution... :-)
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
"One study reveals that young men who are habitually aggressive may be especially vulnerable to the aggression-enhancing effects of repeated exposure to violent games," said psychologists Craig A. Anderson, Ph.D., and Karen E. Dill, Ph.D. "The other study reveals that even a brief exposure to violent video games can temporarily increase aggressive behavior in all types of participants."
I look at this report and I worry. Not because of the details of the report in particular, but because aggressive behaviour is difficult to pin down and is not necessarily a bad thing. The first report seems to me to say that aggressive people may be stimulated by aggressive situations. That doesn't strike me as being an illogical statement - it is merely stating the obvious. The second study is more interesting. If I play an immersive video game, yes, my heart rate goes up. In a tricky situation when I'm pinned down by sniper fire or there is a helicopter whirring overhead, I'm tense, edgy. If I get into an open fire-fight with half a dozen other human players or computer-controlled players, I may get aggressive and noisy. So yes, video games do have an effect, probably far more effective then TV because the interaction between what you see and can do is so much more complete.
But is this limited to computer games, or does it extend to other activities? I would argue that any competitive activity will lead to increased aggression over my normal, fairly passive self. If I play rugby, there is no way I'm going to survive on the playing field unless I get going. If I'm not pumped when I get the ball, I'm going to get flattened by someone who wants it more than I do. If I'm being chased by some back row player who is technically faster than me on paper, then that extra adrenaline is going to be needed if I'm going to make it to the line. If I'm going to tackle some 6ft6 tight-head prop forward who weighs 260 lbs, I'd better be aggressive!
Any involving competitive activity will require an increased level of adrenaline, alertness and aggression. And it's not necessarily a bad thing - these are our survival instincts being used in a modern arena, whether it's rugby, Quake or even some individual sport like badminton. Aggression can help us out when our other resources are low. The only time aggression becomes a problem is when it is taken from the field of play/battle/sport whatever and spills over into our daily lives. And I really don't feel that this report works through this last point.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
It will be a very welcome addition to have cscope join the ranks of code management tools - it's something I use at work a lot to navigate very quickly through a vast amount of code, and it has different strengths and weakness when compared with etags (Emacs Tags for the uninitiated).
From my experience, cscope wins over Etags for navigation because it produces lists of likely jump points, whereas etags invoke with a tags search can leave you at some first level define which is not necessarily where you want to be (multiple #ifdef #define ... type calls muck up the etag reference lists). Cscope is also pretty speedy with its reference database, and can be stacked inside an editor, so you can do cscope -> editor -> cscope -> editor and then you can work back out by quiting the chosen level which makes it nice for chasing ideas through the code.
On the other hand, the tight integration between etags and Emacs means that etags still comes in very useful for traversal of source files - it just doesn't quite offer the same flexibility that cscope does.
Of course, I may have just started a major holy war, but such is life ...!
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Refresh my memory; should it actually be able to get down to 25 magnitudes V filter? I thought Keck reached just a shade over 26, with almost an order greater collection area, among other things.
Well - despite their choice of asinh magnitude scheme, the quasar they found at z>5 had conventional V around 24.5 so I'll stand by my figure until someone pushes me off! Why they couldn't have used AB magnitudes like any reasonable person ... or maybe these asinh magnitudes are the same - they certainly sound similar (linear flux) but I'm about 1.5 years out of date now so I'm a little less certain.
I wonder if there was a particular choice to their section of the sky being surveyed, or if it was mainly observ/operational requirements.
My recollection is that this is an observational limitation - one telescope can see about half the 'sky' but you really only want to image stuff which is above you - as soon as you point more than 30' from straight up, the image quality goes down as you are looking through more of the atmosphere, and to my knowledge there are not adaptive optics on the SDSS imaging system.
Since you mentioned the significant additional work that could/may/will be done on these images, and the issues with their auto-processing, I wonder if they will also release raw(-er) data for better reduction, if nothing else. I can see plenty of potential shortcomings with their, in some areas, one-size-fits-all "pipelines." Seems like better, more frustrating by-hand work on many of these image strips will often be necessary. And massive deconvolution reps on terabytes of images...yum...and tedium...wow. And heck, people will be doing statistical surveys of these data for decades.
Definitely. I strongly hope that they release raw data (FITS format or whatever) - see my other post here for more discussion of things to do. On the other hand, a commercial entity like MS may be less interested in real science and more in disceminating pretty pictures...
If the raw data isn't forthcoming I would be very surprised though - once the initial 'safe' period is over so the professional astronomers can stake their claim to the best and latest data, it makes little sense to restrict the data. As Skyview proved, general access to lots of data is a good thing, whether you depend on the data for your next round of research funding or whether you are merely interested in a little home study.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Well, as I understood it, the StrongARM chips will NEVER be used in consumer computers (not including palmtops) for the simple fact that the StrongARM family of processors are designed without floating point units. The lack of a floating point unit (meaning all floating point calculations would have to be done in software) would not be all that large of a burdon for typical business applications, but it would make it completely and utterly useless for any sort of game. While gaming is usually not the focus of most laptop owners, I doubt that any laptop without gaming capability would ever become more than a special-use product.
Wow. I must have been smoking something particularly interesting when I was playing Quake on my StrongARM'd RiscPC. Okay - so it only does 20 fps, but that's not a total failure for a machine doing FP emulation. Or maybe I was completely out of my skull when I was playing HoMM2 on it. Or FreeCiv on my ARM Linux installation. Or the many other games which exist for the StrongARM written either straight in assembler or compiled with gcc/Acorn C/whatever. Don't assume that 'no FPU' == 'no fun'. While I'd love to see a StrongARM with an FPU, I'd probably be more excited to see it teamed up to a DSP chip and DSPs tend to involve less transistors making them ideal for low power consumption (and yes you could use the DSP as a cheap FP emulator as needed).
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Well, could this be made into an app like SETI@Home? A nice distributed app that runs on all sorts of computers with some pretty screensaver (maybe of the current pics being processed) might be something people really like. Even just a catalogue would be pretty extensive. But if a whole lot of people each proccess one picture, it might be worth it.
There are possibly some applications that could be automated, such as building a complete two-point correlation function for the clustering of the objects in the field, or maybe trying to categorize all the objects by colour, redshift and position into groupings in space and colour. However, most of these tasks are doable in a reasonable amount of computing time - say two-weeks computation on an UltraSparc machine (although the two-point correlation function is an O(n^2) problem, that requires 10^16 comparisons at a rough estimate, with maybe 10^8 comparisons a second, that would require ... umm ... err ... about 3 years of CPU time). So yes - possibly an automated tool might well be worth it. I strongly suspect that few astronomers would bother to do the correlation function for the whole field at all scales, and would settle for looking at the function for scales up to around 4 degrees separation on the sky (that's much bigger than the largest known cluster of galaxies).
However, looking at the automatically processed picture strips, I see all sorts of problems with background level correction (the background appears to be wavey in these pictures so there is definitely room for improvement). Modern astronomical analysis often requires significant time spent on looking at a particular frame of interest - I spent over a year examining and refining an image of a pair of Quasars as part of my thesis - so my feeling is that there is much to be gained by picking an object which interests you, possibly from a Radio or X-ray survey, and following it up with the SDSS survey here. With this much data I think you can be assured that the Astronomy community will get to grips with the important statistical analysis on it's own. What it won't be able to do is follow up every field, every interesting quasar or galaxy and really really work on it. It may be possible to see gravitational lensing (although it won't be very clear since the point spread function will be around an arcsec) or do some funky image processing to try and deconvolve the images to recover more detail. In fact, there are lots of things to play with which are unlikely to ever get done on every part of this image data, so grab yourself a copy of IRAF or Source Extractor and go play.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
For those of you who don't keep tabs on every astronomical survey underway, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey covers a quarter of the entire sky down to fairly faint magnitudes - at a guess to about 25 magnitude in V (the faintest object you can see at night away from street lights is about 5th magnitude, and for every extra 2.5 magnitudes, the objects get 10 times fainter). While this data does not go as deep as the Hubble Deep Field, the sheer number of objects covered (and more than half of them will be galaxies, since the number of galaxies visible at these faint magnitudes is several factors more than the number of stars in our own galaxies) means that this data allows a far more thorough analysis of the clustering of galaxies in the universe around us. Since this survey is not just imaging these objects but is also measuring the spectra using a grism (basically a series of prisms arranged linearly across the field), you can extrapolate the position on the sky and obtain an estimate of distance from the redshift. So you can do some fairly heavy duty astronomy with this data once it gets released, and the sheer amount of information means that it will be many years before it is all properly worked through. Picking a particular area of sky for study will almost certainly yield something new.
Of course, you can just go window shopping through this data for pretty pictures. And there should be lots ...!
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Now I DO know how to code. I'm taking my super-happy C++ coding classes in high school, so I know my way around a compiler and the like. So, after reading this article, I thought "hey, lets see if I can understand this NOW!" Guess what? It's still spaghetti code. I still can't unstand a stick of it, other then the PRINTFs and SCANFs. That's it. And I got a 98% in the class.
For any project, serious or recreational, if it's spagetti code it will never reach its potential. Period. One person - i.e. the original author - may have a fairly comprehensive understanding of what the code does, but if nobody else can come close to understanding its functions without commiting major time to digging through the mess, it will never get the examination and development that having many people work on the code brings. Of my own personal projects, the early ones (before I discovered that copious comments not only made life easier but speeded up development because I could clarify my own ideas when writing the comments) are useless now, either as starting points for new projects or just for code reuse. My point is that for a project to acheive its intended goal, especially if security is the main focus, the source code has to be clear, well documented and fully modularized as far as possible. Failure to accomplish this, including random global variables floating all over the place and sections of code which end up getting treated as a black box because they are near-impossible to decipher, will leave a project falling short.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Just think - now in the summer we can get outside, use that wireless LAN to hookup to the server, enjoy the fresh air, and ... yes ... if you position those solar cells under you chin like so ... you can even get an even tan!
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Obviously having difficulty with his LaTeX equation skills. Either that or the rubber gloves are making it difficult to type :-)
Cheers,
Toby Haynes