I don't get it. What is the importance of this surrender dorothy thing?
It's a reference to "The Wizard of Oz". In the case of I-495 outside Washington, there's a spot in the road where the Mormon Temple becomes visible above the trees, and it's reminiscent of the Emerald Palace from the movie. I think it even has a green tinge to it when it's lit up at night.
Right around this point in the interstate, there's a few bridges that cross over the road. Someone managed to spraypaint "SURRENDER DOROTHY" onto one of them in very large letters (and this was probably not an easy feat). I think it was there for years. Someone has since painted over the letters, but since they painted over only the letters you can still sort of make out what it used to say.
A picture should make it clearer: you come around a corner on the interstate and suddently see
this.
scene.
I think the graffiti bridge is right after the one in the second picture.
And let's not forget about the bottles of wine that are included with this. A few years ago, a friend of mine in Spain sent me a couple of bottles of Rioja (mmm!), but they never got to me.
You can't even ship wine within the US without paperwork and specially approved carriers. It's
heavily regulated, I think mainly due to state tax/alcohol laws.
I've ordered far more than one item at a time from both Japan and Hong Kong, and have never had a problem at all with Customs
Same here; I've ordered many DVDs from Hong Kong and Ireland, and even the ones that have been opened for inspection have made it through. I've gotten boxes with 10-20 DVDs in them this way (sometimes the packages are nearly half covered with stamps:-)
I took a quick look at the searches the grandparent post referred to, and noticed that the problems mainly seem to come from:
Goods travelling to Europe, in which
case an import duty may added.
Counterfeit and bootleg merchandise. Well, duh. I usually go out of my way to ensure that the stuff I'm buying is legit.
And yes, this includes things like out-of-region DVDs, region zero DVDs, and legitimate DVDs for movies that haven't hit the theaters in the US yet. These are also all for personal use rather than resale.
The stock versions of
DJB's programs (qmail, djbdns, daemontools, and
so on) usually include his error.h
file, which contains this bug:
extern int errno;
According to the Unix standard (SUSv3), that
produces undefined behavior. On glibc-based systems
it won't even compile cleanly.
The fix is trivial; just replace the line with:
#include <errno.h>
and the problem goes away.
Why he doesn't do this in the released versions,
I don't know.
Before the influx of Windowsisms caused by the attempts of Gnome/KDE to attract converts from Windows and Mac, there was a single standard that worked everywhere; highlight, middle click. The only app that I remember ever having trouble with it was Netscape 4,
Actually the lack of a single standard
goes back further than KDE, Gnome, Netscape, or even Linux.
Just ask anyone who had a Unix desktop in the late 80's and early 90's, when the workstation vendors started switching over from their proprietary windowing systems (Sunview, Apollo/DM, and so on) to X11.
There were several toolkits in use at the time. Older applications with simple interfaces, such as xterm, might use Athena widgets or raw Xlib. Highlighting and clicking the middle mouse to
paste the primary selection was typical.
Some newer applications started using Motif or something similar.
They typically supported the highlight and middle click behavior
for the primary selection, along with some cut and paste menu items that might or might not interoperate with other applications.
And then there was Sun, who had to do it their own damn way, with things like OpenLook and XView. Highlighting and/or middle mouse behavior in those applications was usually a disaster.
The fact that Sun (and others) had custom keys on their keyboards just
for cutting and pasting, left over from the days of their proprietary windowing systems, didn't help. Heck,
Apollo had about two dozen special keys for
window management and other GUI-related stuff.
I've actually got a Solaris 2.4 (circa 1994) machine accessible to me; let's see how/usr/openwin/bin/textedit (an XView
application) behaves:
If I highlight some text in textedit, I can paste it with the middle mouse button into emacs, xterm, and others. I think that may be improved behavior over earlier versions.
If I highlight some text in xterm, and hit the middle mouse button in textedit, textedit decides to interpret that as "select text from the cursor to wherever the mouse happens to be". So rather than pasting, it actually steals the primary selection from xterm.
In fact I'm not sure that there's any way to simply paste the primary
selection from xterm into textedit. As I recall users had to run things like xclipboard to bridge
the gap.
There are plenty of other devices in addition
to that Hauppage one. The problem is that they're
all lacking the one thing that makes the Roku
worth its price: high definition input and output.
For those of us with HD capture cards, playback
has been a problem (especially on Linux). The
Roku has the hardware to solve this problem, at
a much lower price than anything you can build
yourself. The software for this task is indeed
very rough right now, but the potential is there.
The catch is that the HD1000 only has a very limited amount of memory, and it's quite easy to run out -- at which point lockups and other bad behavior are not surprising.
For example, its SDK comes with a native toolchain that runs directly on the HD1000. But if you try running gcc on there without first setting up a swap device, you're in for a world of trouble.
If you do have swap enabled (not something the typical end-user can do), then the machine is quite solid. I have mine up for days a time while doing development on it and generally the only time I actually have to reboot is if I call some API the wrong way putting the hardware into a confused state.
I didn't see any mention of firmware revision
in the linked review. Roku labs has released several updates to improve speed and stability, but out of the box there's no guarantee you'll have the latest one already installed.
Samba apparently eats up lots of memory for each mounted share, so I think recent firmware revisions will refuse to mount more than four of them. But I don't know if older revisions have that self-protection built in.
Also, usually to reboot you only have to hold down the power button for a couple seconds, rather than actually reaching around back to unplug the thing. If this didn't work for them (perhaps they just didn't know about it) then I'd suspect faulty hardware.
One thing just about everyone will agree on, though, is that the remote just plain sucks:-)
My friend and I always thought the ultimate work out game would be some mystical combination of the two
Konami already tried something like that:
Dance
Maniax.
There are lots of other variations as well,
but they're pretty rare.
For example Martial Beat. Some
of these (including Martial Beat and Para Para Paradise) even have home versions in Japan.
Just as a data point, a typical 2.5 hour DDR session for me is somewhere in the 1500-2000 calorie range (according to the game's counter). It averages out to about 26 calories per song.
I typically just pick a mix, set it on heavy event mode, and play through every song once. Though with the Japanese "Extreme" home version I've had to change that a bit since 100 songs is just too many to do in one shot comfortably.
I do this once or twice a week. I've lost about 50 pounds this way.
Then again, I live in NYC and I've seen two starbucks on opposite corners staring at each other, and they're both busy.
In Bowie MD, the Home Depot and Lowes hardware
stores are literally across the street from each other.
15 minutes away in Annapolis MD there are
two more Home Depots,
close enough
together that you can probably see one from
the roof of the other. Mapquest says the
drive between them is around 4 minutes.
These are all full-sized stores
with their own massive parking lots. I guess
we really love fixin' stuff around here.
For a while one of the Annapolis stores was
even open 24 hours.
This one mentions Laura Callahan, who resigned from Homeland Security after a similar scandal last year. I know someone who worked for her (before she was at DHS), and the day the story broke he was practically grinning from ear to ear. Apparently he had not enjoyed working under her very much and was not surprised by this at all.
Well, for starters they could offer an escrow service.
www.escrow.com
is the preferred
escrow provider for ebay. Yes, it costs extra, which is why it isn't done all the time. It's also a bit more work for the buyer and seller; for example when I used it last year it involved doing a wire transfer.
This must be god-sent to the Librarians. The machines turn themselves on and off,
These guys gave a talk to the local LUG a few
months back, and they did say that one of the
librarians' favorite features of this system is
that the systems shut down automatically at
the end of the day.
Apparently the librarians were constantly
having problems getting users
to stop what they were doing and LEAVE, so that
they could close up the library. With the
Linux terminals, the user gets some sort of
notification a few minutes ahead of time, and
then it just unmercifully stops working. This
gets the people to leave, and it doesn't make
the librarians look like the bad guy.
I think the point is that the console
is likely to be 80 columns or less. And code
that wraps off the end of the line
is a pain to edit.
Note also that some versions of vi (actual
vi, not the lookalikes on steroids that Linux
usually ships with) can't handle really wide
terminals.
bash-2.05$ vi Terminal too wide :q bash-2.05$ stty -a | grep col rows = 24; columns = 168; ypixels = 244; xpixels = 1027; bash-2.05$ uname -sr SunOS 5.9
Re:Manufacturing tolerances for full 1080i support
on
CableCARDs and HDTV
·
· Score: 1
Think I'll stick with the sub $3K market and be happy with my HS-20. Like I said, give it two (maybe three) generations and a full 1920x1080 projector will be mine!!!
Yep, I had the same thought. In fact my HS-20
arrived this week:-)
Re:Manufacturing tolerances for full 1080i support
on
CableCARDs and HDTV
·
· Score: 1
Thanks for the heads up on the new 1080 DLP chips coming down the pike. But even if that hits the consumer market,
It's been rumored for a while that the TI 1920x1080
chips intentionally won't be showing up in
consumer front (rather than rear) projectors
any time soon.
However the LCoS companies may force the issue.
The Sony Qualia SXRD front projector is intended
for home theaters and has 1920x1080 LCoS panels.
it'll still be damn expensive
Last I heard the Sony was going to be about $30K
when it comes out in the US. That's expensive
but still well within the "home" market when
compared to 3-chip DLPs.
I've dealt with two machines (with
completely different motherboards and chipset
revisions) with this audio device and have
managed to get sound out of it both times
with 2.4.2x kernels.
Some caveats, however:
SPDIF output will almost certainly give you trouble, because the chip only seems to be really
happy with 48KHz. I found no way to get 44.1KHz audio to come out the SPDIF port, except to use something like sox to resample it at the higher rate.
Some programs may play back audio "too fast" because again most ripped MP3 tracks are based on 44.1KHz audio and the chip spits it out at 48KHz for some reason.
Not all programs do this (xmms is okay, for example) but some do.
At least one version of ALSA I worked with had a bug where you simply could not get it to unmute if the volume was currently set to zero. It'd pretend to unmute, but you wouldn't hear anything. Solution was to use aumix instead of alsamixer to initially set the volume. Once it was truly set nonzero, alsamixer could then deal with it.
In general, you will probably be much happier if you pick up a real sound card that's known to work well in Linux. The VIA stuff can be made to work, but I wouldn't consider it to be working well.
Oh, and the USB driver for some recent VIA chipsets apparently has major problems as well. Just a heads-up.
I've seen information that rods are somewhat slower than cones, so that fast moving things in dim lighting can appear behind their actual position
In fact there's a commonly-used
technique that takes advantage of this response
lag to simulate 3D in ordinary video
or film content. Google for "Pulfrich".
More evidence that Europeans are a more civilized in their driving?
Turkey is apparently so bad that the State
Department has a special
advisory for travellers planning to drive
there.
It notes that you need to watch out
for things such as "trucks parked at night
without lights on the highway rather than on
the side of the road".
Here in Los Angeles, KROQ is doing a "Super Bowl" contest where they send someone to the "Super Bowl" game, but they cannot call it the "Super Bowl" becuase of the NFL restriction. So they are referring to it as the "Big Game".
Here in MD/DC/VA, WHFS has been doing a bunch of
"Upersay Owlbay" stuff for the past few weeks.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a reference to "The Wizard of Oz". In the case of I-495 outside Washington, there's a spot in the road where the Mormon Temple becomes visible above the trees, and it's reminiscent of the Emerald Palace from the movie. I think it even has a green tinge to it when it's lit up at night.
Right around this point in the interstate, there's a few bridges that cross over the road. Someone managed to spraypaint "SURRENDER DOROTHY" onto one of them in very large letters (and this was probably not an easy feat). I think it was there for years. Someone has since painted over the letters, but since they painted over only the letters you can still sort of make out what it used to say.
A picture should make it clearer: you come around a corner on the interstate and suddently see this. scene. I think the graffiti bridge is right after the one in the second picture.
You can't even ship wine within the US without paperwork and specially approved carriers. It's heavily regulated, I think mainly due to state tax/alcohol laws.
Same here; I've ordered many DVDs from Hong Kong and Ireland, and even the ones that have been opened for inspection have made it through. I've gotten boxes with 10-20 DVDs in them this way (sometimes the packages are nearly half covered with stamps :-)
I took a quick look at the searches the grandparent post referred to, and noticed that the problems mainly seem to come from:
And yes, this includes things like out-of-region DVDs, region zero DVDs, and legitimate DVDs for movies that haven't hit the theaters in the US yet. These are also all for personal use rather than resale.
The stock versions of DJB's programs (qmail, djbdns, daemontools, and so on) usually include his error.h file, which contains this bug:
According to the Unix standard (SUSv3), that produces undefined behavior. On glibc-based systems it won't even compile cleanly. The fix is trivial; just replace the line with:
and the problem goes away. Why he doesn't do this in the released versions, I don't know.
Actually the lack of a single standard goes back further than KDE, Gnome, Netscape, or even Linux. Just ask anyone who had a Unix desktop in the late 80's and early 90's, when the workstation vendors started switching over from their proprietary windowing systems (Sunview, Apollo/DM, and so on) to X11.
There were several toolkits in use at the time. Older applications with simple interfaces, such as xterm, might use Athena widgets or raw Xlib. Highlighting and clicking the middle mouse to paste the primary selection was typical.
Some newer applications started using Motif or something similar. They typically supported the highlight and middle click behavior for the primary selection, along with some cut and paste menu items that might or might not interoperate with other applications.
And then there was Sun, who had to do it their own damn way, with things like OpenLook and XView. Highlighting and/or middle mouse behavior in those applications was usually a disaster. The fact that Sun (and others) had custom keys on their keyboards just for cutting and pasting, left over from the days of their proprietary windowing systems, didn't help. Heck, Apollo had about two dozen special keys for window management and other GUI-related stuff.
I've actually got a Solaris 2.4 (circa 1994) machine accessible to me; let's see how /usr/openwin/bin/textedit (an XView
application) behaves:
This is an old, old problem.
There are plenty of other devices in addition to that Hauppage one. The problem is that they're all lacking the one thing that makes the Roku worth its price: high definition input and output.
For those of us with HD capture cards, playback has been a problem (especially on Linux). The Roku has the hardware to solve this problem, at a much lower price than anything you can build yourself. The software for this task is indeed very rough right now, but the potential is there.
The catch is that the HD1000 only has a very limited amount of memory, and it's quite easy to run out -- at which point lockups and other bad behavior are not surprising.
For example, its SDK comes with a native toolchain that runs directly on the HD1000. But if you try running gcc on there without first setting up a swap device, you're in for a world of trouble.
If you do have swap enabled (not something the typical end-user can do), then the machine is quite solid. I have mine up for days a time while doing development on it and generally the only time I actually have to reboot is if I call some API the wrong way putting the hardware into a confused state.
I didn't see any mention of firmware revision in the linked review. Roku labs has released several updates to improve speed and stability, but out of the box there's no guarantee you'll have the latest one already installed. Samba apparently eats up lots of memory for each mounted share, so I think recent firmware revisions will refuse to mount more than four of them. But I don't know if older revisions have that self-protection built in.
Also, usually to reboot you only have to hold down the power button for a couple seconds, rather than actually reaching around back to unplug the thing. If this didn't work for them (perhaps they just didn't know about it) then I'd suspect faulty hardware.
One thing just about everyone will agree on, though, is that the remote just plain sucks :-)
Konami already tried something like that: Dance Maniax.
There are lots of other variations as well, but they're pretty rare. For example Martial Beat. Some of these (including Martial Beat and Para Para Paradise) even have home versions in Japan.
Just as a data point, a typical 2.5 hour DDR session for me is somewhere in the 1500-2000 calorie range (according to the game's counter). It averages out to about 26 calories per song.
I typically just pick a mix, set it on heavy event mode, and play through every song once. Though with the Japanese "Extreme" home version I've had to change that a bit since 100 songs is just too many to do in one shot comfortably.
I do this once or twice a week. I've lost about 50 pounds this way.
In Bowie MD, the Home Depot and Lowes hardware stores are literally across the street from each other.
15 minutes away in Annapolis MD there are two more Home Depots, close enough together that you can probably see one from the roof of the other. Mapquest says the drive between them is around 4 minutes.
These are all full-sized stores with their own massive parking lots. I guess we really love fixin' stuff around here. For a while one of the Annapolis stores was even open 24 hours.
And a more recent article.
This one mentions Laura Callahan, who resigned from Homeland Security after a similar scandal last year. I know someone who worked for her (before she was at DHS), and the day the story broke he was practically grinning from ear to ear. Apparently he had not enjoyed working under her very much and was not surprised by this at all.
www.escrow.com is the preferred escrow provider for ebay. Yes, it costs extra, which is why it isn't done all the time. It's also a bit more work for the buyer and seller; for example when I used it last year it involved doing a wire transfer.
These guys gave a talk to the local LUG a few months back, and they did say that one of the librarians' favorite features of this system is that the systems shut down automatically at the end of the day.
Apparently the librarians were constantly having problems getting users to stop what they were doing and LEAVE, so that they could close up the library. With the Linux terminals, the user gets some sort of notification a few minutes ahead of time, and then it just unmercifully stops working. This gets the people to leave, and it doesn't make the librarians look like the bad guy.
I think the point is that the console is likely to be 80 columns or less. And code that wraps off the end of the line is a pain to edit.
Note also that some versions of vi (actual vi, not the lookalikes on steroids that Linux usually ships with) can't handle really wide terminals.
Yep, I had the same thought. In fact my HS-20 arrived this week :-)
It's been rumored for a while that the TI 1920x1080 chips intentionally won't be showing up in consumer front (rather than rear) projectors any time soon.
However the LCoS companies may force the issue. The Sony Qualia SXRD front projector is intended for home theaters and has 1920x1080 LCoS panels.
Last I heard the Sony was going to be about $30K when it comes out in the US. That's expensive but still well within the "home" market when compared to 3-chip DLPs.
I had a nearly clean mailbox. Then I posted one message to linux-kernel. At least 40 viruses showed up in my inbox within the first 24 hours.
But does the Chewbacca defense work in the Star Wars universe? The mind boggles...
Sounds like it uses the same LED and chip setup that Google has in their light up pen.
- SPDIF output will almost certainly give you trouble, because the chip only seems to be really
happy with 48KHz. I found no way to get 44.1KHz audio to come out the SPDIF port, except to use something like sox to resample it at the higher rate.
- Some programs may play back audio "too fast" because again most ripped MP3 tracks are based on 44.1KHz audio and the chip spits it out at 48KHz for some reason.
Not all programs do this (xmms is okay, for example) but some do.
- At least one version of ALSA I worked with had a bug where you simply could not get it to unmute if the volume was currently set to zero. It'd pretend to unmute, but you wouldn't hear anything. Solution was to use aumix instead of alsamixer to initially set the volume. Once it was truly set nonzero, alsamixer could then deal with it.
In general, you will probably be much happier if you pick up a real sound card that's known to work well in Linux. The VIA stuff can be made to work, but I wouldn't consider it to be working well.Oh, and the USB driver for some recent VIA chipsets apparently has major problems as well. Just a heads-up.
In fact there's a commonly-used technique that takes advantage of this response lag to simulate 3D in ordinary video or film content. Google for "Pulfrich".
Along these lines, here's an interview with a former child actor who was paying his rent this way.
Must have own SMTP, DNS, and HTTP server. Please send pictures and chipset specifications of server.