But why not, say, hardware Theora encoding/decoding?
Because hardware that encodes/decodes Theora does not exist to the best of my knowledge. that, and MPEG 4 (and its varients) is widely supported by many systems/devices now (it's the video equivalent of mp3).
Why not software encoding/decoding, if it was just as fast?
Okay. I'm not fundamentally opposed to this, especially on the decoding side. A hardware encoder gives you the opportunity to use a much lower power (ie, no fans needed, lower power consumption) general purpose processor. This also generally brings the cost of the hardware down (which any embedded systems engineer like myself is obsessed with).
8) Upgradable I thought harddrive upgrading was implicit in 6, but might as well make it explicit. In fact, sell it to me without a harddrive, just an image of the firmware on a CD. Further, since the firmware is entirely open, you can boot whatever you wish.
9) No reliance on proprietary/Windows stuff. Absolutely.
And btw, how do you get the content of subscriptions, without the subscription?
Easy: you buy a subscription, but not from the hardware manufacturer. Instead of trying to make the money back on loss-leading hardware, the hardware people are out of the picture now. I can buy a subscription at a super-low rate from anyone who will sell it to me (competition), scrape it from a website, type it in myself. And when I stop paying my subscription, my device doesn't stop working.
How about a mac mini? It's pretty close on points 1, 4, and 7
That's a damn good example. In fact, it's a DVD player too, as an added bonus. The primary thing that is lacking is a coax cable input and RCA outputs. A USB/firewire video capture device takes care of the first part (this would also cover the hardware encoding part of it). A DVI to RCA would do the other end, but I'd be a little worried about signal quality (then again, I should probably get a TV with DVI). So it's pretty close. Though now we're at about 800 USD, and we haven't even bought the upgraded hard drive yet. A good integrated product should cost half of this (though it still may be worth doing with the mac).
Someone out there make a streamlined tivo-like box (using the reference board above), having the following properties:
1) Slick design. Not a computer in a funny case, something with a home electronics feel. Fanless! 2) Good remote control. 3) Hardware MPEG4 encoding/decoding 4) Open source tivo-like software (not mythtv, something usable). 5) Quality TV output and sound hookups. 6) Open firmware (no DRM, no proprietary files, no restrictions, hardware documentation provided). 7) Ethernet and/or wifi and/or USB.
I'll buy it. I'll buy two, one for my parents. It should work out of the box like a tivo, but be hackable by anyone that desires to do so. Make your money selling the hardware, not subscriptions. The community will take care of improving the software (which will make your hardware even more attractive).
i'll third this. the new groups interface is painful to use. i don't mind ads, but the ui is crap.
i use groups often (i've learned more from comp.lang.c than from any of my professors over the years). i know some google employee is reading this. please, please send an email to the usenet group and tell them to make the hurting stop.
Never gone out at night? Never needed to call a friend to find out what pub they're drinking at, or call your girlfriend to change plans on when/where you're going to meet after she's been shopping?
of course not, his slashdot id is even lower than yours. he probably hasn't seen anything outside his parents' basement in years.
while i'm butting in to the conversation, i'd like to point out that you can turn the phone off at your discretion. it's amazing how many luddites like the grandparent fail to grasp this concept. don't want to be bothered? turn your phone off. don't like work people calling you on the weekend? reject their calls. don't want your kids racking up $800 sms charges? disable sms on their phone (or better yet, teach them to act responsibly).
North American workers simply aren't willing to view themselves as cheap labour to pick up the slack from more expensive places to do manufacturing.
Not true. Several Japanese automobile manufacturers assemble in the U.S. a large number of the cars they sell in North America. Toyota does it (my 4runner was built in their plant in Kentucky). Honda and Nissan do it. However, they do NOT do it in Michigan, due to the low quality of the workforce there, and the strength of the UAW in that state. Car stickers (at least in California) are required to state what country the car was assembled in, as well as what country the majority of the parts were manufactured in (usually Japan).
at scour.net (later.com too) had this 6 years ago, with animated previews (six frames out of the video in an animated gif). heh, we used to run everyone's desktop machines at night to generate the video previews.
Why do people spell it pr0n? Seriously, I don't get that.
the origin for this is pretty simple: so that system administrators doing a search for "porn" either in file names or grepping through logs or email will not find your porn. think back to the time when most people did not have a personal computer, certainly not one capable of networking. they had shared systems (especially at colleges and labs) or bbs accounts.
Y'know, you can buy a PC with FreeDOS installed today, in the U.S., from Dell. FreeDOS is there to meet their "preloaded OS" requirement. At the same time, it assures that they never have to support it, because nobody is really going to use it. My $350 Dell is happily running Gentoo, no Microsoft tax paid.
No hits for OMAP or PXA families which are well supported by Linux
Both the TI OMAP and the Intel PXA are ARM-architecture. The OMAP is pretty much a standard ARM-9, and the PXA is specifically mentioned on the evbarm page.
Not an emulator; they are porting OpenVMS to Itanium.
yes, there is native openvms on itanium.
(They are not, as far as I know, emulating the Alpha instruction set; apps will need to be recompiled.)
not true. hp has a third solution. they are going to provide a "binary translation" program, that will take an openvms/alpha app (binary, not source) and generate an identical app for openvms/ia64. this means that the applications should behave identically on both platforms. this removes a lot of the validation concerns that customers may have when moving apps to a new system that is not binary compatible with what they've been using for years. this also helps in cases where the source code is either gone or impossible to build nowadays.
Re:So why is Gentoo the right choice for this?
on
Embedded Gentoo?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
well, let's not underestimate the statement "it doesn't take much space". if you've ever had to remove print statements from your code to make it fit in the memory, you'll know that kilobyte of space weighs heavily upon the mind of the embedded programmer.
busybox is a terrible user experience, i agree. but it is generally not there to be used by the user. it's mostly to run scripts, do shell executes, and because unix programs are not happy if there is no/bin/sh. generally, you're going to want to statically link your binaries, and generally you'll be using uclibc for smaller code. the problem is, once you start having too many binaries, the advantages of static linking start to disappear now you have a dozen binaries (sh, ls, rm,...), that all have duplicate code statically linked, eating up your file cache ram and non-volatile storage. if you only have 2MB of ram, you're going to be thinking twice about your memory consumption at this point. with busybox, you can run a dozen binaries, and they all share the same single executable image in the memory, and you don't waste ram on a dozen versions of printf() or the time to load each one from a potentially slow storage medium.
second, there are so many external dependencies, even with the most basic programs. "ls" depends on locale information in some libc helper library somewhere, terminal size, colors,.... i don't need support for fancy sorting order, i just need ls. busybox gives you very basic versions of all of these utilities (no tab completion in the shell, no color in ls, etc). this means speed and memory! besides, have you *seen* the code in some of these apps? good luck fixing bash2 if you find it broken on your system.
finally, it's a management issue. you don't have to worry about your binaries, they're all in the same place. if you need to re-make everything because you changed something, it's only one application to worry about.
X-Bender: but i don't want people thinking we're robosexuals. if anyone asks, say you're my debugger.
Re:So why is Gentoo the right choice for this?
on
Embedded Gentoo?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
as an embedded systems developer and a gentoo user, i'll tell you that my company certainly will not be putting a gentoo system into our devices. we might look at their kernel if it's good and light. our embedded linux is not much more than a kernel and busybox.
BUT... if you hack up some device and install linux on it, it has huge advantages. you don't have to use some guy's Linux-4-XYZdevice distribution, which might be a mess, never maintained, and poorly supported. you don't have to go hunting for applications that will run on your arch, mess with build scripts to make it build right, and get the patches that will make things run on this processor and with your devices. if you installed linux on your device from 2 years ago that everyone forgot about, you can still have up to date software for it right now. and finally, you have a working ifrastructure of bug reporting and fixing, and a good way to communicate with people doing similar things as you (even if the devices they use are different).
hit ctrl and +, then ctrl and -. it will change your font size up and down, forcing firefox to re-render. no refreshing, and it will be rendered correctly.
SLASHDOT EDITORS: find out what this problem is and either submit a bug to mozilla or fix your broken code.
Re:strings on the graphic
on
SCO.com Defaced
·
· Score: 3, Funny
"hacked by realloc("
i knew realloc(3) was a bad apple! sure, it seems so simple to use, but how many people handle the error case correctly? however, i never would have expected an ansi c function to deface a website like that. it's just so high level (and childish). that kind of behaviour you'd imagine seeing from a language like perl, perhaps. from stdlib, i expected better.
i used to work for a search engine (whos name i shall not mention, but it's not google). 24 out of out top 25 queries were for porn, and over 80% of the top 100. they are definitely filtering those results.
i can do better. when rolling down hill, i can push in the clutch, put the car into neutral, and shut off the engine. the car's guages don't seem to work too well when it's shut off, but by my rough calculations (since my car is accelerating down hill without using any gasoline), i am getting better than infinity miles per gallon. i tried to check if i had more gas in my tank when i reached the bottom of the hill than at the top, but unfortunately, this was not the case.
i'll second this. and i need that shirt. my policy is: i will not fix your computer, unless you are: 1) in my immediate family, or 2) a girl with which there is a high probability that i will have sex in the near future. no more cute girls with which i have no chance (ah, the college dorm years). the only exception i made so far is a good client of my dad's business. i didn't like doing it, but it had to be done.
these early south-carolinians, homo-courouge as they were dubbed by researchers, exhibit some peculiar behaviour not found in other native tribes. several skulls have been found that seem to have an imprint of a cylinder which was crushed on their foreheads. archeologists have also found early versions of spear-racks, presumably for mules or horses, large rusty ornamental iron works (perhaps religious icons) which were stored on blocks in front of their dwellings, as well as cave painting of an early strom thurmand election poster. we may never know how they lived, but their remains leave us with fascinating clues into the ways of a civilization now gone forever.
Slashdot Mirror
But why not, say, hardware Theora encoding/decoding?
Because hardware that encodes/decodes Theora does not exist to the best of my knowledge. that, and MPEG 4 (and its varients) is widely supported by many systems/devices now (it's the video equivalent of mp3).
Why not software encoding/decoding, if it was just as fast?
Okay. I'm not fundamentally opposed to this, especially on the decoding side. A hardware encoder gives you the opportunity to use a much lower power (ie, no fans needed, lower power consumption) general purpose processor. This also generally brings the cost of the hardware down (which any embedded systems engineer like myself is obsessed with).
8) Upgradable
I thought harddrive upgrading was implicit in 6, but might as well make it explicit. In fact, sell it to me without a harddrive, just an image of the firmware on a CD. Further, since the firmware is entirely open, you can boot whatever you wish.
9) No reliance on proprietary/Windows stuff.
Absolutely.
And btw, how do you get the content of subscriptions, without the subscription?
Easy: you buy a subscription, but not from the hardware manufacturer. Instead of trying to make the money back on loss-leading hardware, the hardware people are out of the picture now. I can buy a subscription at a super-low rate from anyone who will sell it to me (competition), scrape it from a website, type it in myself. And when I stop paying my subscription, my device doesn't stop working.
How about a mac mini? It's pretty close on points 1, 4, and 7
That's a damn good example. In fact, it's a DVD player too, as an added bonus. The primary thing that is lacking is a coax cable input and RCA outputs. A USB/firewire video capture device takes care of the first part (this would also cover the hardware encoding part of it). A DVI to RCA would do the other end, but I'd be a little worried about signal quality (then again, I should probably get a TV with DVI). So it's pretty close. Though now we're at about 800 USD, and we haven't even bought the upgraded hard drive yet. A good integrated product should cost half of this (though it still may be worth doing with the mac).
Someone out there make a streamlined tivo-like box (using the reference board above), having the following properties:
1) Slick design. Not a computer in a funny case, something with a home electronics feel. Fanless!
2) Good remote control.
3) Hardware MPEG4 encoding/decoding
4) Open source tivo-like software (not mythtv, something usable).
5) Quality TV output and sound hookups.
6) Open firmware (no DRM, no proprietary files, no restrictions, hardware documentation provided).
7) Ethernet and/or wifi and/or USB.
I'll buy it. I'll buy two, one for my parents. It should work out of the box like a tivo, but be hackable by anyone that desires to do so. Make your money selling the hardware, not subscriptions. The community will take care of improving the software (which will make your hardware even more attractive).
MIT computers are made of people! PEOPLE!!!
i'll third this. the new groups interface is painful to use. i don't mind ads, but the ui is crap.
i use groups often (i've learned more from comp.lang.c than from any of my professors over the years). i know some google employee is reading this. please, please send an email to the usenet group and tell them to make the hurting stop.
Never gone out at night? Never needed to call a friend to find out what pub they're drinking at, or call your girlfriend to change plans on when/where you're going to meet after she's been shopping?
of course not, his slashdot id is even lower than yours. he probably hasn't seen anything outside his parents' basement in years.
while i'm butting in to the conversation, i'd like to point out that you can turn the phone off at your discretion. it's amazing how many luddites like the grandparent fail to grasp this concept. don't want to be bothered? turn your phone off. don't like work people calling you on the weekend? reject their calls. don't want your kids racking up $800 sms charges? disable sms on their phone (or better yet, teach them to act responsibly).
North American workers simply aren't willing to view themselves as cheap labour to pick up the slack from more expensive places to do manufacturing.
Not true. Several Japanese automobile manufacturers assemble in the U.S. a large number of the cars they sell in North America. Toyota does it (my 4runner was built in their plant in Kentucky). Honda and Nissan do it. However, they do NOT do it in Michigan, due to the low quality of the workforce there, and the strength of the UAW in that state. Car stickers (at least in California) are required to state what country the car was assembled in, as well as what country the majority of the parts were manufactured in (usually Japan).
Domestic cars are top quality ...in Japan
i see how it is. i finally get a girlfriend and now the planet's going to freeze over.
thanks a fucking bunch, environment.
at scour.net (later .com too) had this 6 years ago, with animated previews (six frames out of the video in an animated gif). heh, we used to run everyone's desktop machines at night to generate the video previews.
Why do people spell it pr0n? Seriously, I don't get that.
the origin for this is pretty simple: so that system administrators doing a search for "porn" either in file names or grepping through logs or email will not find your porn. think back to the time when most people did not have a personal computer, certainly not one capable of networking. they had shared systems (especially at colleges and labs) or bbs accounts.
After 300 hours of work and an A average on the exams, I expect to fail the course.
but we've all learned a valuable lesson: don't take a class taught by DJB
Y'know, you can buy a PC with FreeDOS installed today, in the U.S., from Dell. FreeDOS is there to meet their "preloaded OS" requirement. At the same time, it assures that they never have to support it, because nobody is really going to use it. My $350 Dell is happily running Gentoo, no Microsoft tax paid.
No hits for OMAP or PXA families which are well supported by Linux
Both the TI OMAP and the Intel PXA are ARM-architecture. The OMAP is pretty much a standard ARM-9, and the PXA is specifically mentioned on the evbarm page.
Not an emulator; they are porting OpenVMS to Itanium.
yes, there is native openvms on itanium.
(They are not, as far as I know, emulating the Alpha instruction set; apps will need to be recompiled.)
not true. hp has a third solution. they are going to provide a "binary translation" program, that will take an openvms/alpha app (binary, not source) and generate an identical app for openvms/ia64. this means that the applications should behave identically on both platforms. this removes a lot of the validation concerns that customers may have when moving apps to a new system that is not binary compatible with what they've been using for years. this also helps in cases where the source code is either gone or impossible to build nowadays.
well, let's not underestimate the statement "it doesn't take much space". if you've ever had to remove print statements from your code to make it fit in the memory, you'll know that kilobyte of space weighs heavily upon the mind of the embedded programmer.
/bin/sh. generally, you're going to want to statically link your binaries, and generally you'll be using uclibc for smaller code. the problem is, once you start having too many binaries, the advantages of static linking start to disappear now you have a dozen binaries (sh, ls, rm, ...), that all have duplicate code statically linked, eating up your file cache ram and non-volatile storage. if you only have 2MB of ram, you're going to be thinking twice about your memory consumption at this point. with busybox, you can run a dozen binaries, and they all share the same single executable image in the memory, and you don't waste ram on a dozen versions of printf() or the time to load each one from a potentially slow storage medium.
.... i don't need support for fancy sorting order, i just need ls. busybox gives you very basic versions of all of these utilities (no tab completion in the shell, no color in ls, etc). this means speed and memory! besides, have you *seen* the code in some of these apps? good luck fixing bash2 if you find it broken on your system.
busybox is a terrible user experience, i agree. but it is generally not there to be used by the user. it's mostly to run scripts, do shell executes, and because unix programs are not happy if there is no
second, there are so many external dependencies, even with the most basic programs. "ls" depends on locale information in some libc helper library somewhere, terminal size, colors,
finally, it's a management issue. you don't have to worry about your binaries, they're all in the same place. if you need to re-make everything because you changed something, it's only one application to worry about.
X-Bender: but i don't want people thinking we're robosexuals. if anyone asks, say you're my debugger.
as an embedded systems developer and a gentoo user, i'll tell you that my company certainly will not be putting a gentoo system into our devices. we might look at their kernel if it's good and light. our embedded linux is not much more than a kernel and busybox.
BUT... if you hack up some device and install linux on it, it has huge advantages. you don't have to use some guy's Linux-4-XYZdevice distribution, which might be a mess, never maintained, and poorly supported. you don't have to go hunting for applications that will run on your arch, mess with build scripts to make it build right, and get the patches that will make things run on this processor and with your devices. if you installed linux on your device from 2 years ago that everyone forgot about, you can still have up to date software for it right now. and finally, you have a working ifrastructure of bug reporting and fixing, and a good way to communicate with people doing similar things as you (even if the devices they use are different).
slashdot rendering incorrectly:
hit ctrl and +, then ctrl and -. it will change your font size up and down, forcing firefox to re-render. no refreshing, and it will be rendered correctly.
SLASHDOT EDITORS: find out what this problem is and either submit a bug to mozilla or fix your broken code.
"hacked by realloc("
i knew realloc(3) was a bad apple! sure, it seems so simple to use, but how many people handle the error case correctly? however, i never would have expected an ansi c function to deface a website like that. it's just so high level (and childish). that kind of behaviour you'd imagine seeing from a language like perl, perhaps. from stdlib, i expected better.
i used to work for a search engine (whos name i shall not mention, but it's not google). 24 out of out top 25 queries were for porn, and over 80% of the top 100. they are definitely filtering those results.
i can do better. when rolling down hill, i can push in the clutch, put the car into neutral, and shut off the engine. the car's guages don't seem to work too well when it's shut off, but by my rough calculations (since my car is accelerating down hill without using any gasoline), i am getting better than infinity miles per gallon. i tried to check if i had more gas in my tank when i reached the bottom of the hill than at the top, but unfortunately, this was not the case.
i'll second this. and i need that shirt.
my policy is: i will not fix your computer, unless you are: 1) in my immediate family, or 2) a girl with which there is a high probability that i will have sex in the near future. no more cute girls with which i have no chance (ah, the college dorm years). the only exception i made so far is a good client of my dad's business. i didn't like doing it, but it had to be done.
Insert obligatory 1984 reference here.
dude, i just bought the new cassette by cyndi lauper. it's totally rad! want me to dub it for you?
these early south-carolinians, homo-courouge as they were dubbed by researchers, exhibit some peculiar behaviour not found in other native tribes. several skulls have been found that seem to have an imprint of a cylinder which was crushed on their foreheads. archeologists have also found early versions of spear-racks, presumably for mules or horses, large rusty ornamental iron works (perhaps religious icons) which were stored on blocks in front of their dwellings, as well as cave painting of an early strom thurmand election poster. we may never know how they lived, but their remains leave us with fascinating clues into the ways of a civilization now gone forever.