Is this really a widespread problem? Myself and several friends all use cable modems in the San Diego area (both Time Warner and Cox) and I don't think I've ever heard any complaints. Incidentally, I've been using it for a year and a half now and I think I've only had one short ( 1 hr. ) service interruption and the only drop in speed came about a year ago - I originally could get 400kB/s (yes, that's kilobytes) on ftp while now I can only get 150 or so...
Now if they could figure out a way to deal with endianness, and the other 99% of the platform specific stuff in most code, it might be worth something...
Wow... maybe I got a version compiled with debug because its about half as fast as IE and even had a Modern Theme bug where it drew the address bar about 5 pixels too low...
Here in San Diego we just had all of our green stop lights (go-lights???) replaced with LEDs... The red were already LEDs.. I would imagine you could modulate those LED bulbs a lot faster than a flourescent.
Hmm... That sounds like a nifty way to pass traffic data to a car... You could even tell the car "Hey, I'm about to turn yellow" thus giving the driver more information to better decide his speed...
Now that this is public, can I use this as prior art when someone tries to patent it?
Doesn't that kinda go against the grain of the open source model? If I want to contribute and help out mandrake, shouldn't I be writing code, giving feedback, using the product, writing documentation, etc? Think about the amount of money a professional programmer makes and the amount of money you'd have to give in order to get something done. Why not just contribute? Sure, you may not help them survive as a business, but why is that the goal?
5 years ago people like Jarron Lanier (sp?) were prancing about spouting the amazing benefits that strapping 20 pound headsets to everyone (doctors, pupils, scientists, etc) would have(and what ever happened to VRML, anyway?). Now where are we? The closest thing we seem to have to VR is Quake III.
I understand there are probably alot of academics still playing with this stuff, but where are the real world applications? Did this stuff die, or just get pushed to the back burner by the "e-commerce" revolution?
Check out Darwin's Black Box. Its a book on evolution written by a biochemist.
He puts forth the idea that there is a certain "irreducable complexity" to many complex systems. This means that the system doesn't function unless all parts are present. He argues that many of the leaps in evolution couldn't have happened without some type of creationary controller.
For instance, a bicycle factory(bad example) is producing bikes. Over time it mutates and starts producing bikes with engine blocks stuck to the side. A few million years later it starts making bikes with engine blocks and gas tanks. (It would have gone out of business long ago, nature is very conservative with energy). A few million later it gets a piston... etc.. etc..
The point is that basic logic can show us that some of the evolutionary leaps required cannot take place unless many, many components change at the exact instant. He argues that this points us towards intelligent design, yet science has already outlawed the idea of God. "It can't be intelligent design because God does not exist!". Its funny how alot of scientists sound like regular Jerry Fallwels on this issue.
As a Christian, I can say that the idea of God isn't supposed to make sense to us. God says "My ways aren't your ways", and that Christianity is "Foolishness" to our natural selves.
Check out this book by Francis Schaeffer on the consequences of an atheistic world view. Its very scary and I'd figure alot of slashdotters would enjoy it.
Its interesting that we, as slashdotters, value freedom so highly, yet we reject God. Well, I have yet to see an atheistic society that respects individual anything. They shouldn't! Given that worldview, only the success of the species matters.
Thats cool, I think revelations talks about how, in the "end times" man will be united as one.
Anyway, think for a second about what would really happen if religion were removed from this world. You end up with a "might makes right" type of morality in which we kill all the "dumb" people and make way for the more evolved. Hey, we can even make a genetic test to determine how evolved you are! "Oh, your genes aren't acceptable Mr Smith, you may have one final phone call."
Is that a future you want? Oh, well I guess its not bad, because you've lost your ability to even define what "bad" is. The only things that are "bad" are those that interfere with the propagation and evolution of our species. Therefore privacy is bad! It allows all sorts of activities that aren't good for the collective. Personal choice in marriage? No Way! We've got your mate picked out!
What's that? The Constitution? Look buddy, those freaks thought God gave rights. There is no God, therefore you have no rights, except those which the strong give you.
Now I understand the damage that man's religion has done thoughout the ages, but you have to separate what man did in God's name(Crusades, Spanish Inquisition, Armenian Massacre, World Trade Center Bombing, etc..) with what God says.
Don't blame God for the confusion in man made religion.
But I don't think embedded linux has made much of a dent in our sales yet. I'm in a strange position here because I do like linux and wish it well. A year ago I was ranting about the demise of my company if they didn't switch to embedded linux soon...
Ok, here we are a year later and.... Wow, we're still here, still selling our OS like crazy, and embedded linux hasn't really penetrated like I thought it would. I'm sure it will continue to grow, but I think people forget that spending 75k on a proprietary(yet proven and well supported) OS is worth it when a late product delivery could cost you 10 times that.
I like linux and want to see it succeed, but I think its gonna be about 2 years before it really gets going in that space.
As for the whole licensing thing, most embedded developers still link everything together when they go to program the [flash/chip/eprom/etc]. This causes all the problems.
No one ever got fired for picking wind river(ok, maybe that mars lander guy:) ).
I always wondered why noone has exploited the possibility of selling ad-space in the game... I think it would be about as effective as real world advertising.
Maybe you could even get advertiser sponsored game servers. I don't think I'd mind an occasional coke ad on the wall (or even product placements!!! Just like the movies.. ) in exchange for a nice, fast server to play on.
Really? I've owned/had experience with cards on both sides of the isle and I'd have to say that NVidia beat 3dfx hands down when it came to overall stability and visual quality.
For my current system I decided to go with the Voodoo 3 instead of the TNT2 and regretted losing the rock solid stability I had with my old TNT.
I do appreciate 3dfx's commitment to the OSS community, though. That was the deciding factor in my graphics card debate. It will be VERY interesting to see if NVidia continues 3dfx's commitment to the OSS arena.
Flame me if I'm wrong, but isn't the data on a CD encoded as FSK data? Wouldn't it make more sense to directly store the zero's and one's instead of that encoding?
With FSK they have to look at the disk and say "wow, look at all these pits, and wow, their spacing seems to vary slightly.." and hope they don't just pass it on as bad manufacturing...
I guess if they could read a unencoded disk they could probably figure out fsk though...
What would our programming styles be if the bulk of computer science research had been done in, say, China? I'm not interested in how a language is going to effect keywords - that's obvious. What's interesting is how the language structure translates into programming structure ( object oriented, functional, or something else our english minds don't think of ).
That would be cool, but to run OSX (or any other operating system) you need alot more than just the right processor. There are all kinds of issues relating to the supporting hardware configuration. For instance the Power PC is a big endian processor, while the x86 is a little endian. Also, a Mac OS would expect the peripherals (serial ports, control registers, disk controllers, memory controllers... etc..) to be at certain addresses.
Basically, youd have to recode parts of the OS and recompile anyway.
Actually you're talking to an embedded guy who programmed in C for 2 years before he used a printf. Come on, a language is NOT a collection of libraries. If that were the case why wouldn't we have just created a few more libraries and stuck with fortran?
I will admit, though, that a bunch of nifty libraries will allow a bad language to prosper as people overlook syntactical and structural problems because of its "ease of use".
I hear visual basic has alot of nifty built in stuff, maybe you should try doing all of your coding in that.
Umm... What does a language have to do with the libraries available for it? Why on earth would you want to include a web browser in the language? Should C have an official web browser? Don't confuse the language with its libraries. Java is a great language and it also sports a large collection of high level classes that come with the default JVM.
Though I think that emulation technology is really interesting, I'm concerned that cool OSes like Be, Linux, or BSD will strive for compatibility rather than breaking new ground.
What does having a emulator application have to do with an OS's innovations? In fact, this kind of emulation allows us to move forward with new OS features (and new OSes) without totally losing all legacy code/data.
Slashdot Mirror
Is this really a widespread problem? Myself and several friends all use cable modems in the San Diego area (both Time Warner and Cox) and I don't think I've ever heard any complaints. Incidentally, I've been using it for a year and a half now and I think I've only had one short ( 1 hr. ) service interruption and the only drop in speed came about a year ago - I originally could get 400kB/s (yes, that's kilobytes) on ftp while now I can only get 150 or so...
Read the article...
1.2 Million...
Now if they could figure out a way to deal with endianness, and the other 99% of the platform specific stuff in most code, it might be worth something...
Wow... maybe I got a version compiled with debug because its about half as fast as IE and even had a Modern Theme bug where it drew the address bar about 5 pixels too low...
I'll keep waiting....
Here in San Diego we just had all of our green stop lights (go-lights???) replaced with LEDs... The red were already LEDs.. I would imagine you could modulate those LED bulbs a lot faster than a flourescent.
Hmm... That sounds like a nifty way to pass traffic data to a car... You could even tell the car "Hey, I'm about to turn yellow" thus giving the driver more information to better decide his speed...
Now that this is public, can I use this as prior art when someone tries to patent it?
One OS to Rule Them All,
One OS to Find Them,
One OS to Bring Them All,
And in the Darkness, Bind Them
Doesn't that kinda go against the grain of the open source model? If I want to contribute and help out mandrake, shouldn't I be writing code, giving feedback, using the product, writing documentation, etc? Think about the amount of money a professional programmer makes and the amount of money you'd have to give in order to get something done. Why not just contribute? Sure, you may not help them survive as a business, but why is that the goal?
What ever happened to "Virtual Reality" anyway?
5 years ago people like Jarron Lanier (sp?) were prancing about spouting the amazing benefits that strapping 20 pound headsets to everyone (doctors, pupils, scientists, etc) would have(and what ever happened to VRML, anyway?). Now where are we? The closest thing we seem to have to VR is Quake III.
I understand there are probably alot of academics still playing with this stuff, but where are the real world applications? Did this stuff die, or just get pushed to the back burner by the "e-commerce" revolution?
This stuff has been 5 years away since the early 90's... Its always 5 years away... "5 Years away" must be marketing speak for "We don't have a clue"
Check out Darwin's Black Box. Its a book on evolution written by a biochemist.
He puts forth the idea that there is a certain "irreducable complexity" to many complex systems. This means that the system doesn't function unless all parts are present. He argues that many of the leaps in evolution couldn't have happened without some type of creationary controller.
For instance, a bicycle factory(bad example) is producing bikes. Over time it mutates and starts producing bikes with engine blocks stuck to the side. A few million years later it starts making bikes with engine blocks and gas tanks. (It would have gone out of business long ago, nature is very conservative with energy). A few million later it gets a piston... etc.. etc..
The point is that basic logic can show us that some of the evolutionary leaps required cannot take place unless many, many components change at the exact instant. He argues that this points us towards intelligent design, yet science has already outlawed the idea of God. "It can't be intelligent design because God does not exist!". Its funny how alot of scientists sound like regular Jerry Fallwels on this issue.
As a Christian, I can say that the idea of God isn't supposed to make sense to us. God says "My ways aren't your ways", and that Christianity is "Foolishness" to our natural selves.
Check out this book by Francis Schaeffer on the consequences of an atheistic world view. Its very scary and I'd figure alot of slashdotters would enjoy it.
Its interesting that we, as slashdotters, value freedom so highly, yet we reject God. Well, I have yet to see an atheistic society that respects individual anything. They shouldn't! Given that worldview, only the success of the species matters.
Thats cool, I think revelations talks about how, in the "end times" man will be united as one.
Anyway, think for a second about what would really happen if religion were removed from this world. You end up with a "might makes right" type of morality in which we kill all the "dumb" people and make way for the more evolved. Hey, we can even make a genetic test to determine how evolved you are! "Oh, your genes aren't acceptable Mr Smith, you may have one final phone call."
Is that a future you want? Oh, well I guess its not bad, because you've lost your ability to even define what "bad" is. The only things that are "bad" are those that interfere with the propagation and evolution of our species. Therefore privacy is bad! It allows all sorts of activities that aren't good for the collective. Personal choice in marriage? No Way! We've got your mate picked out!
What's that? The Constitution? Look buddy, those freaks thought God gave rights. There is no God, therefore you have no rights, except those which the strong give you.
Now I understand the damage that man's religion has done thoughout the ages, but you have to separate what man did in God's name(Crusades, Spanish Inquisition, Armenian Massacre, World Trade Center Bombing, etc..) with what God says.
Don't blame God for the confusion in man made religion.
Ok, so I'm biased :)...
:) ).
But I don't think embedded linux has made much of a dent in our sales yet. I'm in a strange position here because I do like linux and wish it well. A year ago I was ranting about the demise of my company if they didn't switch to embedded linux soon...
Ok, here we are a year later and.... Wow, we're still here, still selling our OS like crazy, and embedded linux hasn't really penetrated like I thought it would. I'm sure it will continue to grow, but I think people forget that spending 75k on a proprietary(yet proven and well supported) OS is worth it when a late product delivery could cost you 10 times that.
I like linux and want to see it succeed, but I think its gonna be about 2 years before it really gets going in that space.
As for the whole licensing thing, most embedded developers still link everything together when they go to program the [flash/chip/eprom/etc]. This causes all the problems.
No one ever got fired for picking wind river(ok, maybe that mars lander guy
I think someone already patented the idea... If I remember right, its called "Algae"... Must be an acronym for something...
How about a geek sick-out day to protest stupid patents. The business school morons need a wake up call. How about it?
I always wondered why noone has exploited the possibility of selling ad-space in the game... I think it would be about as effective as real world advertising.
Maybe you could even get advertiser sponsored game servers. I don't think I'd mind an occasional coke ad on the wall (or even product placements!!! Just like the movies.. ) in exchange for a nice, fast server to play on.
Really? I've owned/had experience with cards on both sides of the isle and I'd have to say that NVidia beat 3dfx hands down when it came to overall stability and visual quality.
For my current system I decided to go with the Voodoo 3 instead of the TNT2 and regretted losing the rock solid stability I had with my old TNT.
I do appreciate 3dfx's commitment to the OSS community, though. That was the deciding factor in my graphics card debate. It will be VERY interesting to see if NVidia continues 3dfx's commitment to the OSS arena.
"Something wonderful is coming. Do you want to join the exciting battle to change computing and topple the choking monopolies within the industry? :)"
And help us build our monopoly, centered around our proprietary OS!
Ok, so I work for WRS, but I still think these guys are trying to ride the fence and get some free apps for their proprietary OS...
Flame me if I'm wrong, but isn't the data on a CD encoded as FSK data? Wouldn't it make more sense to directly store the zero's and one's instead of that encoding?
With FSK they have to look at the disk and say "wow, look at all these pits, and wow, their spacing seems to vary slightly.." and hope they don't just pass it on as bad manufacturing...
I guess if they could read a unencoded disk they could probably figure out fsk though...
Bingo!
What would our programming styles be if the bulk of computer science research had been done in, say, China? I'm not interested in how a language is going to effect keywords - that's obvious. What's interesting is how the language structure translates into programming structure ( object oriented, functional, or something else our english minds don't think of ).
Basically, youd have to recode parts of the OS and recompile anyway.
Actually you're talking to an embedded guy who programmed in C for 2 years before he used a printf. Come on, a language is NOT a collection of libraries. If that were the case why wouldn't we have just created a few more libraries and stuck with fortran?
I will admit, though, that a bunch of nifty libraries will allow a bad language to prosper as people overlook syntactical and structural problems because of its "ease of use".
I hear visual basic has alot of nifty built in stuff, maybe you should try doing all of your coding in that.
Umm... What does a language have to do with the libraries available for it? Why on earth would you want to include a web browser in the language? Should C have an official web browser? Don't confuse the language with its libraries. Java is a great language and it also sports a large collection of high level classes that come with the default JVM.
That would make a great slashdot poll: Which model of the Amiga do you have rotting in your parents garage?
The cops took my 500, but my 600 still sits in my mom's garage...
Wait a second!
First we get miniature balls, then miniature springs... Now all we need are miniature flippers and quarter slots and we got ourselves a pinball game!
Forgive me Mods - Its Early...
Though I think that emulation technology is really interesting, I'm concerned that cool OSes like Be, Linux, or BSD will strive for compatibility rather than breaking new ground.
What does having a emulator application have to do with an OS's innovations? In fact, this kind of emulation allows us to move forward with new OS features (and new OSes) without totally losing all legacy code/data.