I recently read "Apres l'Empire" by Emmanuel Todd. In French, armed with a dictionary. Slowly. Chances are the book I read isn't what he wrote. I bought it and read it because I wanted to get a feel for what the French are really thinking (the book is on the best seller list in the hypermarket) when I'm being told they're cheese eating surrender monkeys (an example of democracy in practice I don't think).
He made the point that societies in transition, he gave Iran as an example, adopt political systems that look strange from a Western viewpoint, but are shaped by anthropological factors like family structures, and eventually sort themselves out. It just doesn't happen overnight, or how we might want it to.
So, you can't just expect democracy to work if, for example, the tribal elders get together, decide what the party line is, and dictate what everyone else should vote, in societies where folks are conditioned to do what they're told not just by dictators but by custom and family ties. I'm not saying this represents Iraq, just that it is naive to expect that democracy is just about giving people the tools.
Which, in a roundabout way, comes to Todd's point, and the point of this article. He says that two things combine to make society change for the better, falling birthrates and better education,
which re-inforce each other. Democracy will wither away without education, education encourages democracy, and also helps prevents abuses of same.
Got mine on Monday, woohoo! I made some test DiVX CDs using mencoder, it seems happy with bitrates around 800k, but moans about wrong 4CC codec with higher bitrates, as does a Windows player - although I don't remember using a different codec in the lavcopts. I'm mentioning this just to see if anyone else has encountered a bitrate limitation, so don't anyone jump to premature conclusions bout what the KiSS can and can't do please. It's nice and quiet in operation and the internal build quality looks fine to me.
They get no sympathy from me, especially the ones (NVidia) that won't provide programming information for the hardware they sell us
nVIDIA can't disclose hardware details if it infringes someone else's IP or license or whatever. Or if it trashes a hardware patent they rely on (let's not red-herring on software patents)
nVIDIA support Linux within the constraints of their business. Those drivers work well for me on many machines I've been involved with. So I can't hack the source code for fun, well boo hoo, but at least I have a kickass driver. So maybe nVIDIA ought not to enter into licensing agreements with others so they can GPL their source for hardware they develop 100% in-house, as if their shareholders would like that.
90% of people who moan that they don't have it wouldn't have a clue what to do with it, 90% of the remaining 10% could understand it but couldn't do better than nVIDIA. Of the remainder, the fine people who drive Linux for our benefit, they don't sit inside nVIDIA so the latest hardware features they work out the hard way would be a year late. Go sign an NDA with nVIDIA if you're curious - I did once.
GPL is a fine thing, but it can't solve all the world's problems, so give nVIDIA a break, at least they provide Linux drivers.
I wouldn't buy one until I was sure that OLED doesn't suffer from the equivalent of screen burn on old CRTs. If the light output as a function of coltage/current changes over time for OLED, flat regions of colour would show ghostly afterimages. So if you switch to full screen video you'd get a ghostly desktop pager or whatever.
I've seen Philips wOOx kit that comes with a clear tube and a ping pong ball that can be fitted over the upwards facing bass drivers, turn up the volume and the ping pong ball bounces.
They might have to take the name "Buffy" out of the title
I don't necessarily think it's a good idea to do so, but they could use the Dr Who approach, zap Buffy with magic and voila, same character, different face.
Well, I did avoid 3:2 pulldown and NTSC with my disclaimer about PAL here in Europe:) Widescreen is everywhere in the UK, and the 4:3 14:9 16:9 transition has been handled well enough, although I'm totally brassed off with 2.35:1 DVD on a 4:3 screen, you'd think DVD could have got pan-scan sorted.
Yes it'a all a nightmare and a mess, I guess I was trying to convey my admiration for all the poor people who've had to deal with it. Non trivially, you simply can't walk away from 50 years of legacy equipment in the real world of telly - PC people have it easy with planned obsolescence.
Good post, but I feel obliged to speak up for the humble TV set.
In Europe, with analogue PAL and DVB, it's safe to say that a PC monitor is a poor substitute for a TV when displaying video. Teletext shows you can display legible text, albeit at low-res but you watch TV from a distance of several metres and not everyone has 20:20. The phosphors in a TV CRT behave differently from those in a PC CRT - sure, you can mess with your graphics card gamma and colour calibration but you can't alter the phosphor persistence or the phosphor composition, and why should you, because TVs just work and give a decent picture.
TV rocks. Type "Charles Poynton" into Google and you'll learn so much about what lies behind your humble TV screen - this is deeply deeply well thought out engineering, that the PC world in its arrogance thinks it can muscle in on.
So what if we find out exactly what the asteroids are made of that we send the probes to. Chance would have it that the one that hits us will be made of solid iron. If you are going to spend any money at all, spend it on preparations for the worst case. Anything else is just a waste.
How do you know what THE asteroid is made of? If it's made of spongy stuff, your "worst case" city buster nuke (or whatever) won't deflect it. There might not be enough time to get your big bomb up there, because spongy asteroids absorb radiation and are hard to spot in the first place. I think the recommended approach is to build a huge solar mirror and melt the thing on one side, outgassing then acts as a rocket motor and it deflects itself.
It surprised me that there are spongy asteroids. Just because they're spongy doesn't mean they can't be "dinosaur killers". Saying they don't exist and can't hurt, and introducing rhetoric about Bush isn't science, it isn't even good risk management, and it's no good me saying I told you so when the spongy one hits either. We should gather hard facts, spread our bets and plan accordingly.
Here in the UK there was a TV documentary (probably BBC2 Horizon, not sure) about asteroid impacts, how to deal with them and so on. I for one thought it was much like Arthur C Clarke's Hammer of God - find it early, deliver an impulse, deflect it a teeny weeny bit, and it misses by a few miles. Nope. The asteroid could be very porous, it just absorbs the blast, or requires an impossibly big bang to be sure it deflects. So sending probes to gather facts about asteroid composition is a good and useful practical thing over and above the scientific justification.
But it's not the Chinese or Indian or, bless 'em, the French way. These nations have their own movie culture, their own markets, and their own way of doing things, and lots of clever people. If Hollywood needs protection (DRM) that much, then it's open to market competition. It might take 20 years, but the signs are there. Where do all the DVD players come from? Will kids still be watching "A Fairy Tale Rehashed Part XVII" in 2023? Computer special effects will be easier in 20 years. Pretty actors grow on trees, all over the world. Good musicians do too. They'll work in China or India or France if there's a decent living to be made. This whole DRM lark, trying to solve social problems with technology and lawyers is a symptom of decline, it's not healthy. Of course it's a pain in the bum to live through the next 20 years, so I'm not saying "it will all go away, so don't care about it or do anything" - I'm just pointing out that it might just collapse. Or something. Mumble.
With 6 in 1 card readers for USB costing around $30 in the UK, its easy enough to transfer data between different card formats, provided you buy one that has a slot for each type rather than a slot or two that multitasks. A PC with a card reader is such a useful machine for sorting out collections of MP3s or photos or whatever, maybe doing a bit of red eye removal, that the apparent disadvantage of going via an intermediate card reader isn't as bad as it seems.
Golden rule - Don't make any assumptions about hardware. Build a prototype, test it, clone it. Test 2 before you buy more. I have a system to do more or less what you're thinking of built around 5 Shuttle SV25 and 1 Shuttle SV24. I got my prototype going on the SV24, bought the 5 SV25s because SV24 was obsolete, and found out that a chipset change between two very similar models meant I couldn't rip CDs on the SV25 (still not fixed by 2.4.20 I'm told, I run 2.4.19, but I'm told Windows works fine - sigh). Since there's only one PCI slot per machine adding an IDE board fixed it for one SV25, but the others don't have a free slot. I have 3 Pinnacle DC10 analogue video in/out boards, all worked beautifully, then I bought one for another different setup and got ghastly grey diagonal lines interference that needed a hardware soldering hack (electrolytic decoupling capacitors) to fix - that could have been an expensive ~$200 mistake. I bought 3 instances of a respectable brand CDRW/DVD drive that had issues playing the first track of VCDs that two other brands do not.
I've never heard of police cars being equipped with live OCR equipment. First you'd have to be able to single out the license plate text from that of the neighboring car, or a road sign, or even a piece of litter tumbling across your Line-of-Sight.
Congestion chargingin London starts soon, cameras read your car number plate, if you don't pay five pounds (~$7.50)for entering London (details in article) you get in trouble.
Premature optimisation is the root of all evil
on
Hacker's Delight
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I've not read the book yet, but I do have a general worry, that optimisation isn't always done in the right context or for the right reasons. Code that runs faster in a small test program can break when part of a larger program (by thrashing the cache for example). What's the point of optimising something that's seldom invoked, in other words, always ask an enthusiastic optimiser to show you their profiling results.
My favourite hacks are Jim Blinn's floating point tricks - 10% accurate square roots and reciprocals that blow away a floating point unit and are just what you need in graphics and games.
The thing about expanding to new frontiers is that more or less unlimited natural resources determine cultural attitudes to consumption that aren't appropriate in a resource constrained situation. It's OK for those who make it to the new world, but there are many who don't. The 21st century could pay a high price for the 19th's free lunch the way things are going.
I'm old enough to have done an electronics project building a joystick interface for a PDP8 as an undergraduate. I spent ages soldering TTL chips and after a few weeks plugged the card in, to a strong smell of fish and burning insulation. It wasn't my fault, the slot in the edge connector was too wide, and every single connector on the backplane had shorted to every other. It was 6 months to get the machine repaired, so someone figured out they could take out the power transformer, scrape off the burnt mess, figure out how many primary and secondary turns were needed on the transformer, then wind them on using a reel of wire and a lathe. They go the machine going, someone else filled the board slot with epoxy and cut a new slot. My project was saved! A few weeks later i reached round the back of a PDP8 to unplug a power connector, grabbed the live pin, but was saved because my arm was earthed to the PDP8 case. I love that machine, I still have the instruction set on a sheet of paper.
Slashdot Mirror
I recently read "Apres l'Empire" by Emmanuel Todd. In French, armed with a dictionary. Slowly. Chances are the book I read isn't what he wrote. I bought it and read it because I wanted to get a feel for what the French are really thinking (the book is on the best seller list in the hypermarket) when I'm being told they're cheese eating surrender monkeys (an example of democracy in practice I don't think).
He made the point that societies in transition, he gave Iran as an example, adopt political systems that look strange from a Western viewpoint, but are shaped by anthropological factors like family structures, and eventually sort themselves out. It just doesn't happen overnight, or how we might want it to.
So, you can't just expect democracy to work if, for example, the tribal elders get together, decide what the party line is, and dictate what everyone else should vote, in societies where folks are conditioned to do what they're told not just by dictators but by custom and family ties. I'm not saying this represents Iraq, just that it is naive to expect that democracy is just about giving people the tools.
Which, in a roundabout way, comes to Todd's point, and the point of this article. He says that two things combine to make society change for the better, falling birthrates and better education, which re-inforce each other. Democracy will wither away without education, education encourages democracy, and also helps prevents abuses of same.
is a source of applications you can compile
Got mine on Monday, woohoo! I made some test DiVX CDs using mencoder, it seems happy with bitrates around 800k, but moans about wrong 4CC codec with higher bitrates, as does a Windows player - although I don't remember using a different codec in the lavcopts. I'm mentioning this just to see if anyone else has encountered a bitrate limitation, so don't anyone jump to premature conclusions bout what the KiSS can and can't do please. It's nice and quiet in operation and the internal build quality looks fine to me.
I've had one on order for almost two weeks and the delivery date is slipping a day per day. Has anyone here actually got one?
Thanks for an interesting reply, I must admit I never appreciated some of the consequences you pointed out above.
They get no sympathy from me, especially the ones (NVidia) that won't provide programming information for the hardware they sell us
nVIDIA can't disclose hardware details if it infringes someone else's IP or license or whatever. Or if it trashes a hardware patent they rely on (let's not red-herring on software patents)
nVIDIA support Linux within the constraints of their business. Those drivers work well for me on many machines I've been involved with. So I can't hack the source code for fun, well boo hoo, but at least I have a kickass driver. So maybe nVIDIA ought not to enter into licensing agreements with others so they can GPL their source for hardware they develop 100% in-house, as if their shareholders would like that.
90% of people who moan that they don't have it wouldn't have a clue what to do with it, 90% of the remaining 10% could understand it but couldn't do better than nVIDIA. Of the remainder, the fine people who drive Linux for our benefit, they don't sit inside nVIDIA so the latest hardware features they work out the hard way would be a year late. Go sign an NDA with nVIDIA if you're curious - I did once.
GPL is a fine thing, but it can't solve all the world's problems, so give nVIDIA a break, at least they provide Linux drivers.
I wouldn't buy one until I was sure that OLED doesn't suffer from the equivalent of screen burn on old CRTs. If the light output as a function of coltage/current changes over time for OLED, flat regions of colour would show ghostly afterimages. So if you switch to full screen video you'd get a ghostly desktop pager or whatever.
I've seen Philips wOOx kit that comes with a clear tube and a ping pong ball that can be fitted over the upwards facing bass drivers, turn up the volume and the ping pong ball bounces.
Nice post. Cute typo too!
Ok, thank you for being patent enough to read that first part
They might have to take the name "Buffy" out of the title
I don't necessarily think it's a good idea to do so, but they could use the Dr Who approach, zap Buffy with magic and voila, same character, different face.
Well, I did avoid 3:2 pulldown and NTSC with my disclaimer about PAL here in Europe :) Widescreen is everywhere in the UK, and the 4:3 14:9 16:9 transition has been handled well enough, although I'm totally brassed off with 2.35:1 DVD on a 4:3 screen, you'd think DVD could have got pan-scan sorted.
Yes it'a all a nightmare and a mess, I guess I was trying to convey my admiration for all the poor people who've had to deal with it. Non trivially, you simply can't walk away from 50 years of legacy equipment in the real world of telly - PC people have it easy with planned obsolescence.
Good post, but I feel obliged to speak up for the humble TV set.
In Europe, with analogue PAL and DVB, it's safe to say that a PC monitor is a poor substitute for a TV when displaying video. Teletext shows you can display legible text, albeit at low-res but you watch TV from a distance of several metres and not everyone has 20:20. The phosphors in a TV CRT behave differently from those in a PC CRT - sure, you can mess with your graphics card gamma and colour calibration but you can't alter the phosphor persistence or the phosphor composition, and why should you, because TVs just work and give a decent picture.
TV rocks. Type "Charles Poynton" into Google and you'll learn so much about what lies behind your humble TV screen - this is deeply deeply well thought out engineering, that the PC world in its arrogance thinks it can muscle in on.
So what if we find out exactly what the asteroids are made of that we send the probes to. Chance would have it that the one that hits us will be made of solid iron. If you are going to spend any money at all, spend it on preparations for the worst case. Anything else is just a waste.
How do you know what THE asteroid is made of? If it's made of spongy stuff, your "worst case" city buster nuke (or whatever) won't deflect it. There might not be enough time to get your big bomb up there, because spongy asteroids absorb radiation and are hard to spot in the first place. I think the recommended approach is to build a huge solar mirror and melt the thing on one side, outgassing then acts as a rocket motor and it deflects itself.
It surprised me that there are spongy asteroids. Just because they're spongy doesn't mean they can't be "dinosaur killers". Saying they don't exist and can't hurt, and introducing rhetoric about Bush isn't science, it isn't even good risk management, and it's no good me saying I told you so when the spongy one hits either. We should gather hard facts, spread our bets and plan accordingly.
Here in the UK there was a TV documentary (probably BBC2 Horizon, not sure) about asteroid impacts, how to deal with them and so on. I for one thought it was much like Arthur C Clarke's Hammer of God - find it early, deliver an impulse, deflect it a teeny weeny bit, and it misses by a few miles. Nope. The asteroid could be very porous, it just absorbs the blast, or requires an impossibly big bang to be sure it deflects. So sending probes to gather facts about asteroid composition is a good and useful practical thing over and above the scientific justification.
Rendering Ringworld to 1/10 mm resolution is within the dynamic range of a C double's 52 bit mantissa - true or false? (go on, work it out)
That's the American Way
But it's not the Chinese or Indian or, bless 'em, the French way. These nations have their own movie culture, their own markets, and their own way of doing things, and lots of clever people. If Hollywood needs protection (DRM) that much, then it's open to market competition. It might take 20 years, but the signs are there. Where do all the DVD players come from? Will kids still be watching "A Fairy Tale Rehashed Part XVII" in 2023? Computer special effects will be easier in 20 years. Pretty actors grow on trees, all over the world. Good musicians do too. They'll work in China or India or France if there's a decent living to be made. This whole DRM lark, trying to solve social problems with technology and lawyers is a symptom of decline, it's not healthy. Of course it's a pain in the bum to live through the next 20 years, so I'm not saying "it will all go away, so don't care about it or do anything" - I'm just pointing out that it might just collapse. Or something. Mumble.
With 6 in 1 card readers for USB costing around $30 in the UK, its easy enough to transfer data between different card formats, provided you buy one that has a slot for each type rather than a slot or two that multitasks. A PC with a card reader is such a useful machine for sorting out collections of MP3s or photos or whatever, maybe doing a bit of red eye removal, that the apparent disadvantage of going via an intermediate card reader isn't as bad as it seems.
Golden rule - Don't make any assumptions about hardware. Build a prototype, test it, clone it. Test 2 before you buy more. I have a system to do more or less what you're thinking of built around 5 Shuttle SV25 and 1 Shuttle SV24. I got my prototype going on the SV24, bought the 5 SV25s because SV24 was obsolete, and found out that a chipset change between two very similar models meant I couldn't rip CDs on the SV25 (still not fixed by 2.4.20 I'm told, I run 2.4.19, but I'm told Windows works fine - sigh). Since there's only one PCI slot per machine adding an IDE board fixed it for one SV25, but the others don't have a free slot. I have 3 Pinnacle DC10 analogue video in/out boards, all worked beautifully, then I bought one for another different setup and got ghastly grey diagonal lines interference that needed a hardware soldering hack (electrolytic decoupling capacitors) to fix - that could have been an expensive ~$200 mistake. I bought 3 instances of a respectable brand CDRW/DVD drive that had issues playing the first track of VCDs that two other brands do not.
I've never heard of police cars being equipped with live OCR equipment. First you'd have to be able to single out the license plate text from that of the neighboring car, or a road sign, or even a piece of litter tumbling across your Line-of-Sight.
Congestion chargingin London starts soon, cameras read your car number plate, if you don't pay five pounds (~$7.50)for entering London (details in article) you get in trouble.
I've not read the book yet, but I do have a general worry, that optimisation isn't always done in the right context or for the right reasons. Code that runs faster in a small test program can break when part of a larger program (by thrashing the cache for example). What's the point of optimising something that's seldom invoked, in other words, always ask an enthusiastic optimiser to show you their profiling results.
My favourite hacks are Jim Blinn's floating point tricks - 10% accurate square roots and reciprocals that blow away a floating point unit and are just what you need in graphics and games.
The thing about expanding to new frontiers is that more or less unlimited natural resources determine cultural attitudes to consumption that aren't appropriate in a resource constrained situation. It's OK for those who make it to the new world, but there are many who don't. The 21st century could pay a high price for the 19th's free lunch the way things are going.
Only because the monkeys got tired of being punched all the time.
He's had a talking computer for 35 years and his typing skills may have suffered.
Computer! control-A meta-cokebottle!
Computer! fill-paragraph!
Computer! dabbrev-expand SPANG!
Posted in the hope someone will read it. Written in 1930.
I'm old enough to have done an electronics project building a joystick interface for a PDP8 as an undergraduate. I spent ages soldering TTL chips and after a few weeks plugged the card in, to a strong smell of fish and burning insulation. It wasn't my fault, the slot in the edge connector was too wide, and every single connector on the backplane had shorted to every other. It was 6 months to get the machine repaired, so someone figured out they could take out the power transformer, scrape off the burnt mess, figure out how many primary and secondary turns were needed on the transformer, then wind them on using a reel of wire and a lathe. They go the machine going, someone else filled the board slot with epoxy and cut a new slot. My project was saved! A few weeks later i reached round the back of a PDP8 to unplug a power connector, grabbed the live pin, but was saved because my arm was earthed to the PDP8 case. I love that machine, I still have the instruction set on a sheet of paper.