Re:The teacher passes responsiblity to student
on
Professors vs. WiFi
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· Score: 2
Sometimes there's a point where the professors' knowledge is the benefit and perhaps not his (lack of) english.
Now, I'm sure you've studied Latin and Greek to read the western classics in their original right?
One of my best English teachers was foreign. He had an advantage. He had to learn (there's a word for you) the language. I've had several Amurrican teachers whos qualifications were mainly that they spoke English. I learned some bizarre and wrong things from them.
Oh, well.... I guess you would have dropped out of Professor Einstein's Science classes because his english wasn't good enough for him to be smart enough to teach you things. And those Neils Bohr lectures you skipped are the reason your Quantum makes a terrible whining noise when you turn it on.
Get over it. Sometimes, you have to move from your mono-lingual cultural prejudices to learn.
Mind/Umbrella and all that.
Or course if you are just one of those sheep not in college to learn how to think, but rather to memorize enough to takes tests so you can get the receipt, then just keep taking those gut classes and don't be crowding out the smart people for the good seats.
People spent stupid amounts of money to watch sports. Most large screen TVs were sold so people could watch their (foot|base|basket)ball at 40+ inches at a ripping ~400 x ~320 res.
NTSC (never twice same color) was developed in 1925 and standardized by 1927. It allows for around 525 lines vertical res. You're lucky if a GOOD SVideo will put out 400. Enough to trick the eye, but then 24 frames/second tricks the eye pretty well in the theater. The eye is easily fooled and the brain can make pictures out of the most staticy images. Doesn't mean that better won't look lots better to you, it just means that you can see ok with really bad images; like NTSC.
If you've ever seen the experimental film stuff that ran at > 60 frames/sec rather than the 24 you see in the theater, you'd notice that camera motion doesn't blur the screen radically. Some parts of LOTR were just hard to see because of that. (both CG and real).
Current TV is "good enough"
Well yeah. So was 18 frame per second film in 1910 (old old films sometimes look very fast cause
they were shot at 18FPS and xfered at 24 by fools).
We could have, and should have, dumped the current NTSC signal when color came along. But "thousands" of people had bought these expensive TVs so the gubmint decreed that any of this new fangled color stuff must be viewable on the good ol black and white TVs. Nice work.
I came out of film. I hate movies that lop off around 1/4 of the screen when shown on TV. Most film camera view finders have TV ratios marked on the viewer so directors these days don't have much action on the sides (lame, but most producers and directors know that most of the viewing money comes out of video, in the end), but sports is really an immediate driver.
When I was in the UK, widescreen was being pushed as "See *all* of the world cup, not just 3/4's of it."
As I travelled through Asia, bars in the most impoverished nations had widescreen high res showing Football aka Soccer everywhere. With crowds.
So imagine the NFL pushing that with HD/Wide you get to see it more clearly - so they can use longer shots and you get the same resolution you USED to have, but lots more of the field in the frame. Imagine taking your cheapo 19" and stacking 2x2 of them. Each with the same resolution but continuing the a larger image. That's 1080i.
Don't believe for a minute that these people who pay $100+/month for sport feeds, who have old huge $2000 dishes in their yards - now worthless and replaced by little dishes, won't drop a year of satellite
fees on a HDTV. Or two years. That's beer money, dude. These guys are the ones not buying new computers every two years.
What if Superbowl/2004 or the world series was
shot ONLY in HD? What if movies were shown all there but "squeezed" for you guys watching that 100 year old 4:3 ratio stuff?
You wanna stick with your mommy's 19" $150 TV past 2006? Fine, someone will come out with a box that drops 3/4 pixels for you. And everything will be letterboxed. And eventually, older HD's will be available on the used market for cheap.
Now, where can I get a video card that works well on 16:9? The most my computer will dump on my 30" HD wide is 1280x1024. Unreal rules at 30".
I'm all with you on the subscription thing (adding $250 makes its value suddenly var less than a $120 VCR), but...
If you have structured wiring, I'll presume you have enough clue to say run the Tivo output to all the VCRs...
Actually, if you want to filter out say, channel 18 (arbitrary choice) and modulate the Tivo, it will just be on channel 18 on all your TVs. A little IR relaying and you have full control
Hobbit/LOTR has pretty much always been acknowledged to have been inspired on Saxon and particularly Norse Mythology as describe in the Edda (elder edda and younger edda).
Nothing new here, he read the stuff in its original. As you all should if you're so intrigued - good resume filler.
One thing I miss about CD's was sitting there listening to it with the
album cover and all it's detail.
Oh, and it's hard to focus on the little tiny Pink Floyd covers when you're baked.:) I miss that.
On one hand, there's no sound to me like the sound of the needle landing and finding the groove.
On the other hand, it's nice to have high end after playing it 30 times.
And not getting up to flip them every 20 minutes.
And not having them warp.
And not having to carry them when I move (we weighed 250lbs of records).
And skips.
Ripping them all to mp3 means I still get that needle/groove sound, but can carry them all in an iPod.
(does the fact that I paid the RIAA license to use the music mean that I have a right to the CD quality version of it? If I own 20 Dylan records, can I just use my pal's CD version? I paid them, right? Hell, I'll sling bob $20 for it - more than he'd get from the corp.)
And I'm sure Sony the music magnate is trembling while Sony the movie studio dances that you paid $40 for $1-2 of media.
I'll presume that the efforts of the editors would add another $2 and royalties to the director and Speilberg, Inc add another $1-$2. Maybe a buck or two for the artists to all split.
50% markup and that makes Sony (the movie studio) $15 (37%) for no effort and the locally owned store* that you bought it from $20 (50%).
You show them!
- - - -
* I know you didn't buy it from Blockbuster, which forces edits of movies. Perhaps if EVERYONE went in and asked for "last temptation of christ" (banned cause it's not christian enough for the owners), we could start a movement.
And walmart refuses to carry material White Alabamans consider too offensive for you. Nice.
It truly scares me when the gov't and entertainment companies feel the need to change what was acceptable a few years ago.
As a student of film and animation, watching the old 20's and 30's cartoons with betty boop and heckle & jeckle and the watermelon eating negros of that time certainly show the changes that have happened. (except with Trent Lott:)
To go and CHANGE that and show it is wrong. It's important to know where we came from and what attitudes were. Its fine to understand that these attitudes were wrong, but denying that they existed is just horrifying.
Perhaps charlie chaplin's imitations of hilter should be altered to not offend people. Perhaps all our references to iraqi's as friends should be stricken from the record.
It's not like I have much expectation from the king of sugar coated movies, steven spielberg, but for him and zemekis to allow the content to be edited for non language (swearing) reasons is just frightening.
I still have a (working) floppy drive that I got from them in my (working) Apple ][.
Hmm, wonder if they have Z80 cards (for the new ][e I just got to complement the ][+)
in that liquidation sale...
Until you've managed to slice off 20 bytes from your code to make it run quicker, you have no place calling yourself a software hacker.
Now, trivia question: What's the memory location (in hex) that contained the current pixel being drawn? (and a note, in 20 some years, I forget too).
(useful so you don't get snow by writing to video RAM while it's being displayed)
You kids with your gigabytes. Any application larger than 48k is a waste of space.
So, anyone got IPv6 running on the 6502 or 65802 upgrade?
PATRIOT act - all caps, it's an acronym
Per: The act This Act may be cited as the `Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA PATRIOT ACT) Act of 2001
And the constituion (a fine read, really) allows enough power to the citizens to defend the country and safeguard its citizens from the government.
In 1979, cable hit homes. We turned our TV to channel 3, hooked up the box and watched with decent reception. Cool. And I could still play my Atari.
Channel's 2-13 came in direct, pay channels were scrambled, 14-upper needed the STB (tv's now tune the upper cable channels just fine).
In the 80's, we got VCRs. These played tapes but they also tuned channels so they could record. We set them to channel 3 and hoped that we remembered to set the STB to the right channel before the show we wanted started. Or we went direct and couldn't record the pay or high channels.
Or we got A/B switches and splitters and Dad got a headache every time he had to record something.
TVs now directly access all the channels. But we need a whole STB at some cost to tune the pay channels or, in some places, ALL the channels to decrypt them. So my STB goes into my VCR (which has an IR mouse for the STB) which goes into my TV. I still have A/B switches. (e.g. it still causes headaches).
My new TV is just a monitor. No tuner. It's HD in fact.
It's hooked up to my (old) VCR for tuning. Which is attached to
an STB to decrypt some channels.
Remarkably, the STB has never really gotten smaller. I *have* the
one from 1979. It had push buttons for each channel, but it's the
same size. They both make like room heaters. Didn't IC's make things smaller?
Proposal DUMP THE STB NOTION
It's out of date. It's nearly 30 years old. It's in the way.
In each Tuner (VCR, TV, Tivo), put a card. perhaps something that looks like a PCCARD (pcmcia), perhaps not.
When the card is in the Tuner, perhaps the tuner will divert the (tuned) video feed THROUGH the card with info about the channel on a data feed.
The card will do the descrambling it might need or (better) provide information/software to descramble to the tuner (the tuner might have a generic DSP).
Volume costs? About $10 tops. No case, no power supply. here's the extra:
I have a high quality tuner. I get to use it.
They start pushing HD down the pipe, they don't need to replace every STB. It's software. Upgrades are easier.
Extra Credit:
Can we discuss that, with the rate increases for cable since the comcast/ATT merger that wouldn't raise rates, that perhaps Congress could mandate HD over cable by, hmmm, 2006?
How about getting the freaking fiber into the house. I'm tired of ground loops and worrying about lightning down the street taking out my VCR.
I look forward to affording an HD tuner that feeds my new TV via firewire.
It's been sort of said, but recall that MS had Excel and Word.
The dominant presentation tool was Harvard Graphics. It was used by EVERY business that needed a tool like that. Microsoft used it all the time.
Then they created PowerPoint. As typical of their strategy, version one and two we're worth wiping your butt with. A friend at MS was ORDERED to stop using HG and start using PowerPoint. He lost animation, audio, etc. "PPT is a multimedia presentation tool without the burden of being multi or very useful" in his words.
How to get market share for this ? Hmmmm (/me strokes beard).
I know! Bundle it with Word and Excel, call it "Office" and make that the only way for businesses to buy it!
It was a two-fer. If you lived on WordPerfect and Excel, or Word and 1-2-3 or Quattro Pro, well, when you upgraded, you have both MS products. It's now a bad business idea to also go get WordPerfect or 1-2-3 (to be fair, Lotus never really upgraded 1-2-3 in a timely way and Quattro smoked it for $119).
Need a presentation tool? PowerPoint is Free! (no, your honor, it was fair competitive practices - we just gave customers the 3 tools and charged them for Word and Excel but we didn't make PowerPoint "free").
As it aged, it did become more useful. And bloated. And proprietary.
UUCP and PPP meant spool up mail, send it periodially.
UUCP ran periodically (cron), when PPP started up, a startup
script would run a sendmail queue runner.
The only difference here is (1) determining when you are "on the net" via ethernet or wireless and (perhaps) (2) using TLS and SMTP AUTH to allow you to send ANY TIME you are on ANY net - you authenticate yourself to a machine on the net and use TLS to encrypt the transaction. Or setup an IPSec connection to your server. Or use UUCP over SSH (scary, but I've done it).
Configure sendmail in "queue only mode" and treat it like an occasionally connected machine. This is basic (for mail).
Hmmm, software raid ain't cutting it and ain't available for RAID 5 (and dearies, RAID 5 is out there, big time - a big win for my friend putting up about a terrabyte/week for their web server farm).
What to do, what to do?/me strokes beard. Hey! How about using "A HARDWARE RAID!"
Why waste your CPU cycles calculating stuff when you can have a dedicated processor taking care of your storage issues?
Call your nearby raid vendor and get a box in. It speaks SCSI, it gives you lots of bonuses. Me? For high performance RAID at a decent price (too much for hobbyists and home users, don't waste your time), try these guys. Just a personal favorite, I'm not part of their company, just a customer.
Why hardware RAID? When your MoBo/CPU/Disk dies and you can't get that software RAID reconfigured, you unplug the hardware RAID, plug it into a new machine and just go.
When you want real speed, those baydel guys have a screaming, mirrored RAM cache so you get to write at 160MB/s.
Jeez, you put all that money into your server and network connections and want to cheap out by using slow IDE disks and your CPU to do all the work?
HFS+? Yeah, I still have it for my Mac Classic II on an 80MB drive.
THanks, I'll use FFS with softupdates or ReiserFS (or XFS mmmmmm) on my real volumes.
No, using a friend's company as an example:
They have 20 or so guys out there in the warehouse with clipboards showing where stuff is and marking down what's being taken out and brought in. They tell the forklift guys where to go.
At this point, every couple hours (AM break, milk and cookies:), lunch, PM break, quitting time), they drop the board back in the office where about 7 clerical people take them and do data entry. These people also do printouts of what's the current situation and put those in clipboards for these guys to take out when the break is over. It's usually one phase out of sync, except for the first morning crew at 7:00AM.
Now lets make those clipboards smart. Let's shove WiFi or Bluetooth into them, lets make them the PARC Tabs.
Now there are 1-2 clerks, just dealing with the machines and checking that what was ordered actually came it and following it up.
5 salaries at ~ $24k each per year, times 3 years depreciation pays for a lot of tablets and someone two write the software interfaces.
They clearly save money (most important). They reduce staff (not a priority from history); they have more accurate information - floor guys can start moving out what might have come in 25 minutes ago if they are running tight inventory.
Now we have opportunities: When something that's scheduled to go out on an 11AM truck comes in at 9, they can put it over by the outgoing truck's bay and not bother to rack them.
One of the current gripes from all sides is that when 400 cases of an item comes in, they stack em and rack them into the shelves. If 50 of those are going out in an hour, why did they just waste the time finding a place for it and leaving it on the other side of the warehouse? Oh, and Foreman Jimmy doesn't know where they are cause Foreman Hector just got them in and that info is on his clipboard and only there.
--
In summary, this is an area where computers haven't penetrated well - smaller businesses doing blue collar work. The tools haven't existed.
MS and the PC makers are dying cause of market saturation. Many of the people who are going to BUY PCs have - there's not a big market Joe Sixpack doesn't really NEED to upgrade his Pentium 300 to a 2GHz, especially during a recession.
In your work, maybe they don't equip the workers with the tools they need to most effectively do their jobs, but this is a factor of larger white collar businesses.
In the real world of shipping and manufacturing, yeah, the boss might be running a new PC. He might have a PDA but it's seen as a lower priority in the real world still. (only in the spoiled bubble companies does someone actually threaten to quit when they won't buy him a PDA)
The line guys do get a 2 million dollar machine that runs those metal straps to fix the cargo to pallets. They will get electronic clipboards. It can directly help productivity. That makes partners and shareholders happy. Perhaps as a bonus, the folks who make it happen will get a shiny new PDA.
Where is this useful?
all those places where laptops and pda's don't work well, work for a tablet.
Now granted, it's Microsoft, so it's not innovative. The Xerox PARC pads 'n Tabs was sort of the Platonic ideal. Sun's been the only folks to come out with workable computing where your session follows you (really your smart card) from screen to screen.
But getting the hardware out is a step. And yeah, wait 20 minutes for KDE, GNome, Linux and NetBSD to be running on it better than MS.
So uses? Warehouses, any place live inventory management happens. Any place a clipboard is in use. Very useful to the blue collar/labor people where a PDA is useful mostly to white collar/office people.
The Newton was too small for much of that and my Zaurus certainly is. A large screen, lightweight tablet has been a missing part of the lineup for a long time. My laptop is WAY too bulky and using a keyboard when you're walking around is impossible.
Profits are not good. Viewership of the broadcast networks is at a low that will only increase.
The whining out TiVo and the like are all about an old model that just isn't working.
My example is coverage of Olympics. Since CBS's fiasco in, what 1996? when the got labeled "Can't Broadcast Sports" was the start of a decline. Accurate critisism of very poorly done, US-centric coverage meant that people I know were getting satelite dishes to snag the direct feeds. If the US wasn't in it, it wasn't shown. If the US was in it, it was shown poorly except for a couple events.
The model is failing. All they need for it to completely fail is some cable-only provider like ESPN or Comedy Central to dedicate coverage and they will lose viewership.
So envision TV (yeah, non-broadcast TV) with a new model.
Basic ABC does what they usually do - broadcast tripe and banal TV written by and for 13 years olds who get ideas from TV guides from 1965.
When something that wants MORE COVERAGE comes long, they run some of it during mainstream ad hours, but otherwise they direct you to their Alternate channel setup just for this purpose.
Want all war all the time? Go to CNN's Iraq II channel. Then CNN and whatever can actually cover things that are ignored when some big event pushes new aside.
Use it for lighter reasons: Toon Channel (aka the HannaBarbera/WB channel that wouldn't show true alternative or historical animation channel) could run an Anime fest from 10-midnight.
Oh look, a week of all anime all evening is coming up on AlterToon - the channel setup just for that weeks festivities.
I guess its sort of like PPV but geared towards longer than 2hr events - more like a week or month - even just a week of evenings.
Dynamic content, dynamic channels.
The old model is failing. That I can snag MPEGs from the air (or elsewhere) and make them available to friends means that the centralized model is about where the RIAA was in 1996.
Perhaps they can seize the initiative and meet the consumers before they ALL go away.
That said: try turning off your TV altogether for just a week. maybe two.
Re:The original release was slower
on
Is Mac OS X Slow?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
The original OS-X was NeXTStep 1.0 and trust me, as the owner of a 25MHz cube, it's slower than the 300MHz laptop I'm using now. Even with the cube running NS 3.1
NeXTStep 5.1 (aka OS X 10.0) was a bit slow. Unoptimized, but important to get out the door so developers would get some pressure to compile for OSX which they had ignored for the 4 month Beta period. This strategy of pushing developers was successful with the 128kb Mac that forced developers to use the consistent, common ROM routines rather than writing their own UI as DOS had taught them to do.
10.1 involved lots of work to optimize libraries and make it a bit more than the "Hey, the OS built!" level of quality.
10.2 (NeXTStep 6.1 more or less) is a fairly major step forward and is brisk enough for me. But then, I run a bunch of terminals, iCab or Opera (or mozilla), occasional PhotoShop and that's most of it.
The kernel is finally enabled with debuging so ktrace works. I just wish the thing were OpenSource. Darwin isn't enough. Oh, and real IPv6 support (more than just "ping6") would be useful. NetBSD runs fine, but it would be nice to cvsup from apple, rebuild and go.
Hell, it would be nice to cvsup from RedHat or Suse, run "make build" and go.
If I need speed, I can log into the 8 way SGI at work (from the Mac) and do stuff there.
But looking at the 166MHz BSD SPARC 20 that's the home server, I'm not sure why I need more than the power suckage and heat that 500MHz gives me except for gaming.
I'd rather save the cash for a new machine and get a T1 or more RAM in the current machines.
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Now, I'm sure you've studied Latin and Greek to read the western classics in their original right?
One of my best English teachers was foreign. He had an advantage. He had to learn (there's a word for you) the language. I've had several Amurrican teachers whos qualifications were mainly that they spoke English. I learned some bizarre and wrong things from them.
Oh, well.... I guess you would have dropped out of Professor Einstein's Science classes because his english wasn't good enough for him to be smart enough to teach you things. And those Neils Bohr lectures you skipped are the reason your Quantum makes a terrible whining noise when you turn it on.
Get over it. Sometimes, you have to move from your mono-lingual cultural prejudices to learn.
Mind/Umbrella and all that.
Or course if you are just one of those sheep not in college to learn how to think, but rather to memorize enough to takes tests so you can get the receipt, then just keep taking those gut classes and don't be crowding out the smart people for the good seats.
"I'm sorry I flunked out mom, my professor wasn't entertaining enough for me."
People spent stupid amounts of money to watch sports. Most large screen TVs were sold so people could watch their (foot|base|basket)ball at 40+ inches at a ripping ~400 x ~320 res.
NTSC (never twice same color) was developed in 1925 and standardized by 1927. It allows for around 525 lines vertical res. You're lucky if a GOOD SVideo will put out 400. Enough to trick the eye, but then 24 frames/second tricks the eye pretty well in the theater. The eye is easily fooled and the brain can make pictures out of the most staticy images. Doesn't mean that better won't look lots better to you, it just means that you can see ok with really bad images; like NTSC.
If you've ever seen the experimental film stuff that ran at > 60 frames/sec rather than the 24 you see in the theater, you'd notice that camera motion doesn't blur the screen radically. Some parts of LOTR were just hard to see because of that. (both CG and real).
Current TV is "good enough"
Well yeah. So was 18 frame per second film in 1910 (old old films sometimes look very fast cause they were shot at 18FPS and xfered at 24 by fools).
We could have, and should have, dumped the current NTSC signal when color came along. But "thousands" of people had bought these expensive TVs so the gubmint decreed that any of this new fangled color stuff must be viewable on the good ol black and white TVs. Nice work.
I came out of film. I hate movies that lop off around 1/4 of the screen when shown on TV. Most film camera view finders have TV ratios marked on the viewer so directors these days don't have much action on the sides (lame, but most producers and directors know that most of the viewing money comes out of video, in the end), but sports is really an immediate driver.
When I was in the UK, widescreen was being pushed as "See *all* of the world cup, not just 3/4's of it."
As I travelled through Asia, bars in the most impoverished nations had widescreen high res showing Football aka Soccer everywhere. With crowds.
So imagine the NFL pushing that with HD/Wide you get to see it more clearly - so they can use longer shots and you get the same resolution you USED to have, but lots more of the field in the frame. Imagine taking your cheapo 19" and stacking 2x2 of them. Each with the same resolution but continuing the a larger image. That's 1080i.
Don't believe for a minute that these people who pay $100+/month for sport feeds, who have old huge $2000 dishes in their yards - now worthless and replaced by little dishes, won't drop a year of satellite fees on a HDTV. Or two years. That's beer money, dude. These guys are the ones not buying new computers every two years.
What if Superbowl/2004 or the world series was shot ONLY in HD? What if movies were shown all there but "squeezed" for you guys watching that 100 year old 4:3 ratio stuff?
You wanna stick with your mommy's 19" $150 TV past 2006? Fine, someone will come out with a box that drops 3/4 pixels for you. And everything will be letterboxed. And eventually, older HD's will be available on the used market for cheap.
Now, where can I get a video card that works well on 16:9? The most my computer will dump on my 30" HD wide is 1280x1024. Unreal rules at 30".
HD coming soon, cable sitting on their butts with that...
I have an HD ready wide TV. I ain't getting a PVR until it can record higher resolutions and do progressive scan.
I want my
I want my HDTV
If you have structured wiring, I'll presume you have enough clue to say run the Tivo output to all the VCRs...
Actually, if you want to filter out say, channel 18 (arbitrary choice) and modulate the Tivo, it will just be on channel 18 on all your TVs. A little IR relaying and you have full control
Nothing new here, he read the stuff in its original. As you all should if you're so intrigued - good resume filler.
Those who think in binary, and those who don't.
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Thank you,...I'll be here all week. Try the veal
One thing I miss about CD's was sitting there listening to it with the album cover and all it's detail.
Oh, and it's hard to focus on the little tiny Pink Floyd covers when you're baked. :) I miss that.
On one hand, there's no sound to me like the sound of the needle landing and finding the groove.
On the other hand, it's nice to have high end after playing it 30 times.
And not getting up to flip them every 20 minutes.
And not having them warp.
And not having to carry them when I move (we weighed 250lbs of records).
And skips.
Ripping them all to mp3 means I still get that needle/groove sound, but can carry them all in an iPod.
(does the fact that I paid the RIAA license to use the music mean that I have a right to the CD quality version of it? If I own 20 Dylan records, can I just use my pal's CD version? I paid them, right? Hell, I'll sling bob $20 for it - more than he'd get from the corp.)
I'll presume that the efforts of the editors would add another $2 and royalties to the director and Speilberg, Inc add another $1-$2. Maybe a buck or two for the artists to all split.
50% markup and that makes Sony (the movie studio) $15 (37%) for no effort and the locally owned store* that you bought it from $20 (50%).
You show them!
- - - -
* I know you didn't buy it from Blockbuster, which forces edits of movies. Perhaps if EVERYONE went in and asked for "last temptation of christ" (banned cause it's not christian enough for the owners), we could start a movement.
And walmart refuses to carry material White Alabamans consider too offensive for you. Nice.
As a student of film and animation, watching the old 20's and 30's cartoons with betty boop and heckle & jeckle and the watermelon eating negros of that time certainly show the changes that have happened. (except with Trent Lott :)
To go and CHANGE that and show it is wrong. It's important to know where we came from and what attitudes were. Its fine to understand that these attitudes were wrong, but denying that they existed is just horrifying.
Perhaps charlie chaplin's imitations of hilter should be altered to not offend people. Perhaps all our references to iraqi's as friends should be stricken from the record.
It's not like I have much expectation from the king of sugar coated movies, steven spielberg, but for him and zemekis to allow the content to be edited for non language (swearing) reasons is just frightening.
And you WISHED you could afford the upgrade from 8KB to 32.
Or for $1700 you could get a really GOOD used card (to drive uphill in the snow in your escher-town).
So quite complaining and be glad there is an alternative to the x86 monopoly.
Now where the hell is my HighDef recording?
I still have a (working) floppy drive that I got from them in my (working) Apple ][.
Hmm, wonder if they have Z80 cards (for the new ][e I just got to complement the ][+) in that liquidation sale...
Until you've managed to slice off 20 bytes from your code to make it run quicker, you have no place calling yourself a software hacker.
Now, trivia question: What's the memory location (in hex) that contained the current pixel being drawn? (and a note, in 20 some years, I forget too).
(useful so you don't get snow by writing to video RAM while it's being displayed)
You kids with your gigabytes. Any application larger than 48k is a waste of space.
So, anyone got IPv6 running on the 6502 or 65802 upgrade?
Per: The act
This Act may be cited as the `Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA PATRIOT ACT) Act of 2001
And the constituion (a fine read, really) allows enough power to the citizens to defend the country and safeguard its citizens from the government.
Don't waste your money, get a full processor for Intel or AMD, not Intel's castrated little puppy dog chip.
No executable pages.
Basically you can set chunks of memory to not be executable. Like data segments. Avoid buffer overruns.
OpenBSD does this on chips that allow it:
i386, sparc, sparc64 , alpha, macppc, (unreleased) hppa
-- -- -- --1 15.html
http://monkey.org/openbsd/archive/misc/0211/msg02
More specific is hard without docs :)
---
war is peace
television is truth
protest is treason
Why ask why?
Channel's 2-13 came in direct, pay channels were scrambled, 14-upper needed the STB (tv's now tune the upper cable channels just fine).
In the 80's, we got VCRs. These played tapes but they also tuned channels so they could record. We set them to channel 3 and hoped that we remembered to set the STB to the right channel before the show we wanted started.
Or we went direct and couldn't record the pay or high channels.
Or we got A/B switches and splitters and Dad got a headache every time he had to record something.
TVs now directly access all the channels. But we need a whole STB at some cost to tune the pay channels or, in some places, ALL the channels to decrypt them. So my STB goes into my VCR (which has an IR mouse for the STB) which goes into my TV. I still have A/B switches. (e.g. it still causes headaches).
My new TV is just a monitor. No tuner. It's HD in fact.
It's hooked up to my (old) VCR for tuning. Which is attached to an STB to decrypt some channels.
Remarkably, the STB has never really gotten smaller. I *have* the one from 1979. It had push buttons for each channel, but it's the same size. They both make like room heaters. Didn't IC's make things smaller?
Proposal
DUMP THE STB NOTION
It's out of date. It's nearly 30 years old. It's in the way.
In each Tuner (VCR, TV, Tivo), put a card. perhaps something that looks like a PCCARD (pcmcia), perhaps not.
When the card is in the Tuner, perhaps the tuner will divert the (tuned) video feed THROUGH the card with info about the channel on a data feed.
The card will do the descrambling it might need or (better) provide information/software to descramble to the tuner (the tuner might have a generic DSP).
Volume costs? About $10 tops. No case, no power supply. here's the extra:
I have a high quality tuner. I get to use it.
They start pushing HD down the pipe, they don't need to replace every STB. It's software. Upgrades are easier.
Extra Credit:
Can we discuss that, with the rate increases for cable since the comcast/ATT merger that wouldn't raise rates, that perhaps Congress could mandate HD over cable by, hmmm, 2006?
How about getting the freaking fiber into the house. I'm tired of ground loops and worrying about lightning down the street taking out my VCR. I look forward to affording an HD tuner that feeds my new TV via firewire.
His well tuned Postfix was much faster than his untuned unix running an untuned Sendmail.
We tuned Sendmail. It smoked Postfix (200k+/hour/machine) before using better hardware (faster disks, not more CPUs).
So if Sendmail is too hard for you, then perhaps Unix (therefore Linux) is too hard and you should go back to Windows.
The dominant presentation tool was Harvard Graphics. It was used by EVERY business that needed a tool like that. Microsoft used it all the time.
Then they created PowerPoint. As typical of their strategy, version one and two we're worth wiping your butt with. A friend at MS was ORDERED to stop using HG and start using PowerPoint. He lost animation, audio, etc.
"PPT is a multimedia presentation tool without the burden of being multi or very useful" in his words.
How to get market share for this ? Hmmmm (/me strokes beard).
I know! Bundle it with Word and Excel, call it "Office" and make that the only way for businesses to buy it!
It was a two-fer. If you lived on WordPerfect and Excel, or Word and 1-2-3 or Quattro Pro, well, when you upgraded, you have both MS products. It's now a bad business idea to also go get WordPerfect or 1-2-3 (to be fair, Lotus never really upgraded 1-2-3 in a timely way and Quattro smoked it for $119).
Need a presentation tool? PowerPoint is Free! (no, your honor, it was fair competitive practices - we just gave customers the 3 tools and charged them for Word and Excel but we didn't make PowerPoint "free").
As it aged, it did become more useful. And bloated. And proprietary.
UUCP and PPP meant spool up mail, send it periodially.
UUCP ran periodically (cron), when PPP started up, a startup script would run a sendmail queue runner.
The only difference here is (1) determining when you are "on the net" via ethernet or wireless and (perhaps) (2) using TLS and SMTP AUTH to allow you to send ANY TIME you are on ANY net - you authenticate yourself to a machine on the net and use TLS to encrypt the transaction. Or setup an IPSec connection to your server. Or use UUCP over SSH (scary, but I've done it).
Configure sendmail in "queue only mode" and treat it like an occasionally connected machine. This is basic (for mail).
What to do, what to do? /me strokes beard. Hey! How about using "A HARDWARE RAID!"
Why waste your CPU cycles calculating stuff when you can have a dedicated processor taking care of your storage issues?
Call your nearby raid vendor and get a box in. It speaks SCSI, it gives you lots of bonuses. Me? For high performance RAID at a decent price (too much for hobbyists and home users, don't waste your time), try these guys. Just a personal favorite, I'm not part of their company, just a customer.
Why hardware RAID? When your MoBo/CPU/Disk dies and you can't get that software RAID reconfigured, you unplug the hardware RAID, plug it into a new machine and just go.
When you want real speed, those baydel guys have a screaming, mirrored RAM cache so you get to write at 160MB/s.
Jeez, you put all that money into your server and network connections and want to cheap out by using slow IDE disks and your CPU to do all the work?
HFS+? Yeah, I still have it for my Mac Classic II on an 80MB drive.
THanks, I'll use FFS with softupdates or ReiserFS (or XFS mmmmmm) on my real volumes.
They have 20 or so guys out there in the warehouse with clipboards showing where stuff is and marking down what's being taken out and brought in. They tell the forklift guys where to go.
At this point, every couple hours (AM break, milk and cookies :), lunch, PM break, quitting time), they drop the board back in the office where about 7 clerical people take them and do data entry. These people also do printouts of what's the current situation and put those in clipboards for these guys to take out when the break is over. It's usually one phase out of sync, except for the first morning crew at 7:00AM.
Now lets make those clipboards smart. Let's shove WiFi or Bluetooth into them, lets make them the PARC Tabs.
Now there are 1-2 clerks, just dealing with the machines and checking that what was ordered actually came it and following it up.
5 salaries at ~ $24k each per year, times 3 years depreciation pays for a lot of tablets and someone two write the software interfaces.
They clearly save money (most important). They reduce staff (not a priority from history); they have more accurate information - floor guys can start moving out what might have come in 25 minutes ago if they are running tight inventory.
Now we have opportunities: When something that's scheduled to go out on an 11AM truck comes in at 9, they can put it over by the outgoing truck's bay and not bother to rack them.
One of the current gripes from all sides is that when 400 cases of an item comes in, they stack em and rack them into the shelves. If 50 of those are going out in an hour, why did they just waste the time finding a place for it and leaving it on the other side of the warehouse? Oh, and Foreman Jimmy doesn't know where they are cause Foreman Hector just got them in and that info is on his clipboard and only there.
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In summary, this is an area where computers haven't penetrated well - smaller businesses doing blue collar work. The tools haven't existed.
MS and the PC makers are dying cause of market saturation. Many of the people who are going to BUY PCs have - there's not a big market Joe Sixpack doesn't really NEED to upgrade his Pentium 300 to a 2GHz, especially during a recession.
In your work, maybe they don't equip the workers with the tools they need to most effectively do their jobs, but this is a factor of larger white collar businesses.
In the real world of shipping and manufacturing, yeah, the boss might be running a new PC. He might have a PDA but it's seen as a lower priority in the real world still. (only in the spoiled bubble companies does someone actually threaten to quit when they won't buy him a PDA)
The line guys do get a 2 million dollar machine that runs those metal straps to fix the cargo to pallets. They will get electronic clipboards. It can directly help productivity. That makes partners and shareholders happy. Perhaps as a bonus, the folks who make it happen will get a shiny new PDA.
all those places where laptops and pda's don't work well, work for a tablet.
Now granted, it's Microsoft, so it's not innovative. The Xerox PARC pads 'n Tabs was sort of the Platonic ideal. Sun's been the only folks to come out with workable computing where your session follows you (really your smart card) from screen to screen.
But getting the hardware out is a step. And yeah, wait 20 minutes for KDE, GNome, Linux and NetBSD to be running on it better than MS.
So uses? Warehouses, any place live inventory management happens. Any place a clipboard is in use. Very useful to the blue collar/labor people where a PDA is useful mostly to white collar/office people.
The Newton was too small for much of that and my Zaurus certainly is. A large screen, lightweight tablet has been a missing part of the lineup for a long time. My laptop is WAY too bulky and using a keyboard when you're walking around is impossible.
The whining out TiVo and the like are all about an old model that just isn't working.
My example is coverage of Olympics. Since CBS's fiasco in, what 1996? when the got labeled "Can't Broadcast Sports" was the start of a decline. Accurate critisism of very poorly done, US-centric coverage meant that people I know were getting satelite dishes to snag the direct feeds. If the US wasn't in it, it wasn't shown. If the US was in it, it was shown poorly except for a couple events.
The model is failing. All they need for it to completely fail is some cable-only provider like ESPN or Comedy Central to dedicate coverage and they will lose viewership.
So envision TV (yeah, non-broadcast TV) with a new model.
Basic ABC does what they usually do - broadcast tripe and banal TV written by and for 13 years olds who get ideas from TV guides from 1965.
When something that wants MORE COVERAGE comes long, they run some of it during mainstream ad hours, but otherwise they direct you to their Alternate channel setup just for this purpose.
Want all war all the time? Go to CNN's Iraq II channel. Then CNN and whatever can actually cover things that are ignored when some big event pushes new aside.
Use it for lighter reasons: Toon Channel (aka the HannaBarbera/WB channel that wouldn't show true alternative or historical animation channel) could run an Anime fest from 10-midnight.
Oh look, a week of all anime all evening is coming up on AlterToon - the channel setup just for that weeks festivities.
I guess its sort of like PPV but geared towards longer than 2hr events - more like a week or month - even just a week of evenings.
Dynamic content, dynamic channels.
The old model is failing. That I can snag MPEGs from the air (or elsewhere) and make them available to friends means that the centralized model is about where the RIAA was in 1996.
Perhaps they can seize the initiative and meet the consumers before they ALL go away.
That said: try turning off your TV altogether for just a week. maybe two.
NeXTStep 5.1 (aka OS X 10.0) was a bit slow. Unoptimized, but important to get out the door so developers would get some pressure to compile for OSX which they had ignored for the 4 month Beta period. This strategy of pushing developers was successful with the 128kb Mac that forced developers to use the consistent, common ROM routines rather than writing their own UI as DOS had taught them to do.
10.1 involved lots of work to optimize libraries and make it a bit more than the "Hey, the OS built!" level of quality.
10.2 (NeXTStep 6.1 more or less) is a fairly major step forward and is brisk enough for me. But then, I run a bunch of terminals, iCab or Opera (or mozilla), occasional PhotoShop and that's most of it.
The kernel is finally enabled with debuging so ktrace works. I just wish the thing were OpenSource. Darwin isn't enough. Oh, and real IPv6 support (more than just "ping6") would be useful. NetBSD runs fine, but it would be nice to cvsup from apple, rebuild and go.
Hell, it would be nice to cvsup from RedHat or Suse, run "make build" and go.
If I need speed, I can log into the 8 way SGI at work (from the Mac) and do stuff there.
But looking at the 166MHz BSD SPARC 20 that's the home server, I'm not sure why I need more than the power suckage and heat that 500MHz gives me except for gaming.
I'd rather save the cash for a new machine and get a T1 or more RAM in the current machines.