The quote you posted is quite convoluted and I agree that the author might not have been as clear as he could have been. Here's my interpretation of what the author wrote:
"The well known problem in explaining the origin of life is that the complexity of living creatures is so high that the time necessary to form the simplest organic living structure is too large compared to the age of the Earth."
This sentence is pretty clear...
"Similarly, the age of the Universe is also not sufficient for organic life to be created in a distant environment (similar to that on the Earth) and then transferred to the Earth."
(Emphasis mine)
The author thinks that life could not have evolved on another planet and then traveled via meteorite from that planet to the earth. What he left unwritten, and what most posters in this thread seem to miss, is that he wants to say that life originated directly in the interstellar medium! Therefore I wouldn't go as far as to say that the author is a believer in ID, he just has his own brand of panspermia/exogenesis.
Wrong. They did pay the previous fine of some 490M EUR. They now get a daily fine because they still haven't complied with the court's ruling from that trial.
You're making it sound as if the imposed fines had no effect. Admittedly, they haven't had the desired effect (which is compliance with the court's ruling) yet, but they are effective in bleeding (and thereby penalizing) Microsoft.
The fine will be applied retroactively from December 15th.
This means on July 12, they will need to pay 209 * 2.0M EUR = 418.000.000 EUR, or 524.339.200 USD. Following that initial payment, they will continue to pay 2 million EUR each day.
It doesn't state anywhere whether the fine applies only to business days, or also to weekends and holidays. I've assumed it also applies to weekends and holidays since the laws are just as applicable on these days as on any other day.
I've switched a PC in my family from Antivir to AVG, and am now recommending AVG to anyone that asks.
The first reason is that Antivir has a relatively complicated update method for novice users. When it updates the antivirus database (ie. on startup), it sometimes likes to pop up a window with ads for the commercial version or with user surveys. This scares novice users who don't know what to click, and who then promptly call me for support. However that problem gets much worse when an update of Antivir itself is made - because then it just downloads a Setup.exe and starts it. This leaves the confused user (who has never seen an installer before) in front of a (maximized) InstallShield wizard, wondering how to "get back on the Internets". And quite frankly, even I find that installer a bit confusing.
AVG is much better in this regard: on startup, it checks for updates (to either program or antivirus database). If it finds any, it shows a progress bar while downloading and installing them. Then it shows an "Update Complete" dialog, which will vanish automatically after 30 seconds (unless you click it away before that timeout). Not a single click is required, ever.
The second reason I prefer AVG is that AVG's updates are much faster than Antivir's. Either Antivir has really slow servers, or AVG's updates are drastically smaller. I've had Antivir's update downloader timeout on me, but never AVG's.
To conclude: AVG is hasslefree, which is an essential property if you have to support friend's or family member's PCs.
To be able to fairly compare both desktop environments, both must absolutely be allowed to show off the very best that they can do. Since there is currently no single distribution that gets both Gnome *and* KDE right, it will be necessary to run them on different distributions.
Without doubt, the best Gnome experience is currently provided by Ubuntu. I don't know which distribution is currently providing the best KDE experience.
But if you were to compare for example Gnome/Ubuntu with KDE/Mandriva, you'd be comparing more than just Gnome vs. KDE. In a modern desktop environment, it matters a lot how well the desktop integrates with the underlying operating system. For example, hardware and hotplug support, package management integration, the security update mechanism, system and hardware configuration tools, etc, are all handled differently by the distributions, but play a very important role in how much the user feels at ease in the environment.
Another thing is that not all distributions are up-to-date with respect to both environments. It's not fair comparing Gnome/DistroX vs. KDE/DistroX if one of them is out of date by 2 versions.
Yesterday kernel hacker Pavel Machek blogged this:
Smelling x86-64 Macs...
I fell from a horse today... that's not strange. Twice... well that had to happen someday. But then something strange happened: Apple offered me a job. Seeking ACPI & BIOS person, guess what that means:-).
So from that we can guess that at least a PC-style bios could be involved, which AFAICS would be a huge step back for Apple. Hello buggy bioses!
If Apple were partnering with a mainboard manufacturer, and were to create their own Bios, they surely could port OpenFirmware (or whatever it's called that they are using).
If you check out the calendar of the Researchers in Europe 2005 initiative, you'll see that there is a lot more happening than just the "European Researchers' Night" on September 23rd. In fact, from June through November, there are research- and science-related events all over Europe.
Re:Three ENGLISH articles instead of Babelfish
on
Next Generation X11
·
· Score: 1
Re:X free of CPU and RAM usage
on
Next Generation X11
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Dude, jpeg decompression is so efficient that it's basically free. I mean, loading the actual data from disk (or network) takes a hell of a lot more time than decompressing it.
Much more interesting is the ability to render SVG images with hardware acceleration. The xsvg renderer will give us that ability (when used with glitz as cairo backend).
Resolution-independent graphics, rendered at high speed. That is what will make for really amazing possibilities.
I mean why not have the UI in your native Language?
My country's native language is not supported by any distribution. Thus I prefer to use an english desktop.
But this country also has a large community of french-speakers, as well as some german-speakers. The keyboard layout that is used most here is swiss-french, since it has both french and german accented characters. So it would be nice if everyone could use their language when they log in, while the keyboard layout needs to stay fixed.
Ideally, the keyboard layout should be choosable at installation time, while the interface language should be per-user (choosable at first login, then changeable through a nice obvious control center option).
Squeak is an environment that is meant, among other things, to be used to teach children about programming and computers.
It's difficult to explain what it does. If I understand correctly, it is at the same time a "personal 3D environment" which can be shared, a customizable programming environment, a kind of window manager, and a teaching tool.
The special thing about it is that any part of the environment can be edited on the fly, and reprogrammed/modified. This was demonstrated by Alan Kay at his Turing Award Lecture last year. There is a stream of the lecture, although it doesn't work for me right now. The most impressive parts of the demo were near the end, so you might want to watch the parts in reverse order (or watch all of it, it was really good).
There are some examples of simple apps that can be created in the Squeak environment on the website, these should be just the right thing to impress the kids.
Yeah well look at it from the other side... Everyone that does not get the special treatment will be pissed off.
And Microsoft has a huge number of customers, so the pissed-off customers will largely outnumber those few government customers that actually benefit from this.
As a marketing/business initiative, the idea is not that bad. The trick however is to make all of your customers feel special, and certainly not just a minority. This can only backfire for them.
Also this serves to further alienate all other governments. If I understand correctly this initiative is a weird form of reverse corporatism, where a corporation gives "favors" to one specific government but not to others... troubling development, all this.
They will obviously justify this with the "National Security" trump card, and the general public will fall for it.
Get the experimental OS X installer for QEMU. This will emulate an x86 processor plenty fast enough to do some assembly coding. Then you can install some GNU/Linux distribution with the tools you need. Or if you want to keep this lightweight, install FreeDOS and the NASM assembler.
Bugzilla is a critical part of the Free Software process - many projects rely on it and benefit greatly from its use.
Depending on your needs, Bugzilla may be overkill for your own (inhouse) project. From what I read on various blogs, it's somewhat hard to administer and/or install. So if you need a bugtracking system, check out this commented list of alternatives. Most of the systems in the list are free.
It's not actually necessary to combust anything to get a rocket going. Rockets work by ejecting mass and using the reaction force to accelerate. As long as you have something to eject (the O2 in this case), and a means to propel it from yourself, you're fine.
See ion engines for example, which eject tiny particles at tremendous speed to get going. No combustion involved, just electrical acceleration of ionized particles.
So a rocket engine could be built with solely a heat source and an inert propellant that expands when heated. For example, a nuclear reactor could heat liquid O2, which would escape under high pressure through a rocket nozzle.
I'd guess that liquid O2 would expand hugely when heated from -183 degrees celsius (its boiling point) to, say, 500 degrees. A significant amount of thrust could probably be produced this way.
I don't remember how to calculate the specific impulse such an engine could produce, maybe someone else does?
One of the most interesting systems in that list is (IMHO) Eventum, by the company that produces the commercial version of MySQL. It only needs PHP and MySQL, and should therefore run well on Windows. Be advised that I haven't actually tried it though.
Ballmer also defended a comment made earlier this year by Bill Gates, Microsoft's chairman, who said security will not be an issue in three years. "If (that) was something we weren't shooting for, no one should come to this keynote. Whether that statement will come to be true or not remains to be seen. But it expresses Bill's fundamental optimism," he said.
Sure, everybody should just rely on Bill's fundamental optimism and the accuracy of his intuition regarding the future of computing. After all, 640kB of RAM *is* enough for anyone, right? Maybe someone should tell Bill that, as a rule, one shouldn't make such absolute statements, since they tend to make you look silly.
On the topic of Microsoft's shifting marketing initiatives, Ballmer admitted that the company's "integrated innovation" message isn't easy to grasp. "Sometimes, our own people get confused about it. But it's one of the top concerns we hear from customers--they want a coherent development platform and management tools. Most of the integrated innovation points are about reducing complexity," he said.
Reducing complexity is all fine and dandy, but that usually also means reducing flexibility. Microsoft may integrate everything with click'n'play user interfaces, but they leave no room for automation and customization (with scripts for example).
I find that usually heterogenous and open systems are easier to manage (if you have the know-how). You will only seldomly find that something is "impossible", in contrast to Microsoft's products, where you often can't go much beyond what the GUI offers.
Oh well, complexity and flexibility have always been proportional to one another, and are likely to stay so.
Microsoft's intentions in the business software market became an issue in the ongoing trial involving Oracle's hostile takeover attempt of PeopleSoft. Ballmer reiterated that Microsoft has no designs on the very high end of that market. "We are not targeting the largest enterprises. We're not going to bid on a supply chain system for General Motors. That would put our products out of the simplicity band for the companies we target," he said.
Could it be that they know that these "very high end" markets have a need for availability and reliability above all? I guess Microsoft does not want to be responsible for General Motors' assembly lines stopping due to software problems. They dodged that bullet:D
I haven't seen the article since it's slashdotted, but here I go anyway.
You could first use the reaction force of the beam to make the pusher leave orbit (in a carefully calculated way). Later you point it at the spacecraft, and the reaction force will bring the pusher back into orbit. You just have to calculate the first firing of the beam such that the second firing will be in a direction that is useful for bringing the pusher back.
Since the mass of the pusher will likely be bigger than the mass of the spacecraft/probe, the distances that it will travel will probably be reasonable.
This page describes how the descent of the Huygens probe will hopefully be achieved. It's quite complicated, here's a synopsis:
Before the Huygens probe separates from Cassini, a timer is set which will awaken it prior to entry into Titan's atmosphere. This timer triple-redundant.
The probe separates from Cassini, and shuts down all systems (except for the timer). It coasts for 21 days before reaching Titan.
Five days after separation, Cassini (not Huygens, it's asleep, remember?) will perform a deflection maneuver to position itself such that it can receive data from Huygens via radio (which will be relayed to Earth).
A few hours before entering the atmosphere, Huygens will be awakened by its timer.
At the time that Huygens starts to enter the atmosphere, Cassini will start to listen for signals from the probe. It will continue to listen until 30 minutes after the landing of Huygens.
When Huygens has decelerated to 1440 km/h, a mortar will deploy the "pilot" parachute, which in turn will remove the aft cover and deploy the main parachute.
After the 8.3 meter parachute is deployed, the front shield is released and falls away.
After a delay of 30 seconds (to prevent instrument contamination from the shield), inlet ports are opened and atmospheric instruments are activated. At this time, the Atmospheric Structure Instrument boom is also deployed.
2 minutes later, the Imager/Spectral Radiometer cover is ejected.
15 minutes after the main parachute has been deployed, it is ejected and in its place the descent parachute (3 meters) is deployed.
From this point on, the descent will last between 2 and 2.5 hours.
The Huygens probe will shoot 1100 pictures during its descent. I had been hoping for full-motion video of the descent:), the 1800 Watt-hour batteries they have should be powerful enough for a camera. Maybe there are bandwidth issues. Who am I to complain?
One thing that is unclear is that Cassini will turn away its antenna from Huygens 30 minutes after it lands. Does this mean that no further data will be received afterwards? I had the impression that there was a series of surface experiments to be done after landing. Seems kind of cruel to abandon the brave little probe just 30 minutes after it lands.
But I'm happy to hear (according to this) that Huygens seems to be in good shape. It has recently passed its 15th in-flight system check.
Best of luck to the scientists at ESA and NASA - I look forward to having a picture of Titan's surface as my desktop wallpaper.
Often the hard drive is the most important bottleneck in older machines. I don't know exactly how fast the Flash ROM in this thingy is, but it's surely faster than some random old hard drive.
My guess is that many old machines will be plenty fast enough for use as a terminal (which is the intention of this product) with this bottleneck removed.
Now, if their software is well-done it might well be worth the price, in some situations. If you just replace a hard-drive, you still need to install, configure and administer some sort of OS on it. If what comes with this is better than what you can do in $150 worth of time, it's worth it.
QEMU does something similar... it uses a just-in-time-translation approach to emulate different CPUs (currently x86, ARM, SPARC and PowerPC).
For x86-on-x86 emulation, it's only about 4 to 6 times slower than the host CPU.
It can emulate a PC complete with network card, hard drives, graphics, etc. Best of all, it automatically provides a firewall and DHCP server on the emulated network connection, so an operating system running in the emulation can access the "outside" network painlessly.
Apart from emulating complete systems, it's also able to launch binaries compiled for another CPU. In that case it uses dynamic loader tricks to translate library calls to native calls.
I believe the Darwine project plans to use it in conjunction with Wine to run Windows applications on MacOS X.
The decompression part of this driver is in the kernel. This allows applications to get at the uncompressed (or "decoded") videostream through the v4l (video4linux) programming interface.
That's all fine and dandy, you may think. Not so. Nowadays applications shouldn't use these kernel interfaces at all. They should use media frameworks like GStreamer. If they did, the driver core could remain in the kernel, while the decompressor would be a special video-source plugin for GStreamer that talks to the kernel driver through some private interface.
The decompressor code could remain in userspace, where no one gives a flying fsck about its license. Applications would be more portable, and could use any video source instead of only v4l devices. Plus, it would be much easier to reverse engineer that damn decompressor, put it under the GPL, and be done with it.
Slashdot Mirror
The quote you posted is quite convoluted and I agree that the author might not have been as clear as he could have been. Here's my interpretation of what the author wrote:
"The well known problem in explaining the origin of life is that the complexity of living creatures is so high that the time necessary to form the simplest organic living structure is too large compared to the age of the Earth."
This sentence is pretty clear...
"Similarly, the age of the Universe is also not sufficient for organic life to be created in a distant environment (similar to that on the Earth) and then transferred to the Earth."
(Emphasis mine)
The author thinks that life could not have evolved on another planet and then traveled via meteorite from that planet to the earth. What he left unwritten, and what most posters in this thread seem to miss, is that he wants to say that life originated directly in the interstellar medium! Therefore I wouldn't go as far as to say that the author is a believer in ID, he just has his own brand of panspermia/exogenesis.
EU: MS, you didn't pay, you're fined 2.5m a day.
Wrong. They did pay the previous fine of some 490M EUR. They now get a daily fine because they still haven't complied with the court's ruling from that trial.
You're making it sound as if the imposed fines had no effect. Admittedly, they haven't had the desired effect (which is compliance with the court's ruling) yet, but they are effective in bleeding (and thereby penalizing) Microsoft.
TFA didn't say it, but other sources do:
The fine will be applied retroactively from December 15th.
This means on July 12, they will need to pay 209 * 2.0M EUR = 418.000.000 EUR, or 524.339.200 USD. Following that initial payment, they will continue to pay 2 million EUR each day.
It doesn't state anywhere whether the fine applies only to business days, or also to weekends and holidays. I've assumed it also applies to weekends and holidays since the laws are just as applicable on these days as on any other day.
If you regularly need to download videos from Google Video:
- Install the GreaseMonkey Extension for Firefox.
- Install the Google Video - Download Video user script.
- Click the download link to download videos from Google Video.
The videos can be played under Linux with mplayer. Enjoy.
I've switched a PC in my family from Antivir to AVG, and am now recommending AVG to anyone that asks.
The first reason is that Antivir has a relatively complicated update method for novice users. When it updates the antivirus database (ie. on startup), it sometimes likes to pop up a window with ads for the commercial version or with user surveys. This scares novice users who don't know what to click, and who then promptly call me for support. However that problem gets much worse when an update of Antivir itself is made - because then it just downloads a Setup.exe and starts it. This leaves the confused user (who has never seen an installer before) in front of a (maximized) InstallShield wizard, wondering how to "get back on the Internets". And quite frankly, even I find that installer a bit confusing.
AVG is much better in this regard: on startup, it checks for updates (to either program or antivirus database). If it finds any, it shows a progress bar while downloading and installing them. Then it shows an "Update Complete" dialog, which will vanish automatically after 30 seconds (unless you click it away before that timeout). Not a single click is required, ever.
The second reason I prefer AVG is that AVG's updates are much faster than Antivir's. Either Antivir has really slow servers, or AVG's updates are drastically smaller. I've had Antivir's update downloader timeout on me, but never AVG's.
To conclude: AVG is hasslefree, which is an essential property if you have to support friend's or family member's PCs.
To be able to fairly compare both desktop environments, both must absolutely be allowed to show off the very best that they can do. Since there is currently no single distribution that gets both Gnome *and* KDE right, it will be necessary to run them on different distributions.
Without doubt, the best Gnome experience is currently provided by Ubuntu. I don't know which distribution is currently providing the best KDE experience.
But if you were to compare for example Gnome/Ubuntu with KDE/Mandriva, you'd be comparing more than just Gnome vs. KDE. In a modern desktop environment, it matters a lot how well the desktop integrates with the underlying operating system. For example, hardware and hotplug support, package management integration, the security update mechanism, system and hardware configuration tools, etc, are all handled differently by the distributions, but play a very important role in how much the user feels at ease in the environment.
Another thing is that not all distributions are up-to-date with respect to both environments. It's not fair comparing Gnome/DistroX vs. KDE/DistroX if one of them is out of date by 2 versions.
Take care.
Try musicplasma.com.
The next question should be, "How do we make them regret their non-compliance?"
Tarpit them! Bonus points if you feed them bogus data at the same time.
Tarpitting unwelcome spiders not only limits the damage (in terms of bandwidth) they can do to you, but also the damage they can do to everyone else.
Software for this is available, for example Peachpit.
So from that we can guess that at least a PC-style bios could be involved, which AFAICS would be a huge step back for Apple. Hello buggy bioses!
If Apple were partnering with a mainboard manufacturer, and were to create their own Bios, they surely could port OpenFirmware (or whatever it's called that they are using).
If you check out the calendar of the Researchers in Europe 2005 initiative, you'll see that there is a lot more happening than just the "European Researchers' Night" on September 23rd. In fact, from June through November, there are research- and science-related events all over Europe.
The parent linked to the wrong XGL. This is the Xgl that was meant in the article.
Dude, jpeg decompression is so efficient that it's basically free. I mean, loading the actual data from disk (or network) takes a hell of a lot more time than decompressing it.
Much more interesting is the ability to render SVG images with hardware acceleration. The xsvg renderer will give us that ability (when used with glitz as cairo backend).
Resolution-independent graphics, rendered at high speed. That is what will make for really amazing possibilities.
How many people will ever want to do this?
I do.
I mean why not have the UI in your native Language?
My country's native language is not supported by any distribution. Thus I prefer to use an english desktop.
But this country also has a large community of french-speakers, as well as some german-speakers. The keyboard layout that is used most here is swiss-french, since it has both french and german accented characters. So it would be nice if everyone could use their language when they log in, while the keyboard layout needs to stay fixed.
Ideally, the keyboard layout should be choosable at installation time, while the interface language should be per-user (choosable at first login, then changeable through a nice obvious control center option).
Squeak is an environment that is meant, among other things, to be used to teach children about programming and computers.
It's difficult to explain what it does. If I understand correctly, it is at the same time a "personal 3D environment" which can be shared, a customizable programming environment, a kind of window manager, and a teaching tool.
The special thing about it is that any part of the environment can be edited on the fly, and reprogrammed/modified. This was demonstrated by Alan Kay at his Turing Award Lecture last year. There is a stream of the lecture, although it doesn't work for me right now. The most impressive parts of the demo were near the end, so you might want to watch the parts in reverse order (or watch all of it, it was really good).
There are some examples of simple apps that can be created in the Squeak environment on the website, these should be just the right thing to impress the kids.
Yeah well look at it from the other side... Everyone that does not get the special treatment will be pissed off.
And Microsoft has a huge number of customers, so the pissed-off customers will largely outnumber those few government customers that actually benefit from this.
As a marketing/business initiative, the idea is not that bad. The trick however is to make all of your customers feel special, and certainly not just a minority. This can only backfire for them.
Also this serves to further alienate all other governments. If I understand correctly this initiative is a weird form of reverse corporatism, where a corporation gives "favors" to one specific government but not to others... troubling development, all this.
They will obviously justify this with the "National Security" trump card, and the general public will fall for it.
Get the experimental OS X installer for QEMU. This will emulate an x86 processor plenty fast enough to do some assembly coding. Then you can install some GNU/Linux distribution with the tools you need. Or if you want to keep this lightweight, install FreeDOS and the NASM assembler.
Bugzilla is a critical part of the Free Software process - many projects rely on it and benefit greatly from its use.
Depending on your needs, Bugzilla may be overkill for your own (inhouse) project. From what I read on various blogs, it's somewhat hard to administer and/or install. So if you need a bugtracking system, check out this commented list of alternatives. Most of the systems in the list are free.
It's not actually necessary to combust anything to get a rocket going. Rockets work by ejecting mass and using the reaction force to accelerate. As long as you have something to eject (the O2 in this case), and a means to propel it from yourself, you're fine.
See ion engines for example, which eject tiny particles at tremendous speed to get going. No combustion involved, just electrical acceleration of ionized particles.
So a rocket engine could be built with solely a heat source and an inert propellant that expands when heated. For example, a nuclear reactor could heat liquid O2, which would escape under high pressure through a rocket nozzle.
I'd guess that liquid O2 would expand hugely when heated from -183 degrees celsius (its boiling point) to, say, 500 degrees. A significant amount of thrust could probably be produced this way.
I don't remember how to calculate the specific impulse such an engine could produce, maybe someone else does?
Edd Dumbill has a list of (mostly) free issue tracking systems. It's a very good starting point.
One of the most interesting systems in that list is (IMHO) Eventum, by the company that produces the commercial version of MySQL. It only needs PHP and MySQL, and should therefore run well on Windows. Be advised that I haven't actually tried it though.
Ballmer also defended a comment made earlier this year by Bill Gates, Microsoft's chairman, who said security will not be an issue in three years. "If (that) was something we weren't shooting for, no one should come to this keynote. Whether that statement will come to be true or not remains to be seen. But it expresses Bill's fundamental optimism," he said.
:D
Sure, everybody should just rely on Bill's fundamental optimism and the accuracy of his intuition regarding the future of computing. After all, 640kB of RAM *is* enough for anyone, right? Maybe someone should tell Bill that, as a rule, one shouldn't make such absolute statements, since they tend to make you look silly.
On the topic of Microsoft's shifting marketing initiatives, Ballmer admitted that the company's "integrated innovation" message isn't easy to grasp. "Sometimes, our own people get confused about it. But it's one of the top concerns we hear from customers--they want a coherent development platform and management tools. Most of the integrated innovation points are about reducing complexity," he said.
Reducing complexity is all fine and dandy, but that usually also means reducing flexibility. Microsoft may integrate everything with click'n'play user interfaces, but they leave no room for automation and customization (with scripts for example).
I find that usually heterogenous and open systems are easier to manage (if you have the know-how). You will only seldomly find that something is "impossible", in contrast to Microsoft's products, where you often can't go much beyond what the GUI offers.
Oh well, complexity and flexibility have always been proportional to one another, and are likely to stay so.
Microsoft's intentions in the business software market became an issue in the ongoing trial involving Oracle's hostile takeover attempt of PeopleSoft. Ballmer reiterated that Microsoft has no designs on the very high end of that market. "We are not targeting the largest enterprises. We're not going to bid on a supply chain system for General Motors. That would put our products out of the simplicity band for the companies we target," he said.
Could it be that they know that these "very high end" markets have a need for availability and reliability above all? I guess Microsoft does not want to be responsible for General Motors' assembly lines stopping due to software problems. They dodged that bullet
I haven't seen the article since it's slashdotted, but here I go anyway.
You could first use the reaction force of the beam to make the pusher leave orbit (in a carefully calculated way). Later you point it at the spacecraft, and the reaction force will bring the pusher back into orbit. You just have to calculate the first firing of the beam such that the second firing will be in a direction that is useful for bringing the pusher back.
Since the mass of the pusher will likely be bigger than the mass of the spacecraft/probe, the distances that it will travel will probably be reasonable.
The Huygens probe will shoot 1100 pictures during its descent. I had been hoping for full-motion video of the descent
One thing that is unclear is that Cassini will turn away its antenna from Huygens 30 minutes after it lands. Does this mean that no further data will be received afterwards? I had the impression that there was a series of surface experiments to be done after landing. Seems kind of cruel to abandon the brave little probe just 30 minutes after it lands.
But I'm happy to hear (according to this) that Huygens seems to be in good shape. It has recently passed its 15th in-flight system check.
Best of luck to the scientists at ESA and NASA - I look forward to having a picture of Titan's surface as my desktop wallpaper.
Often the hard drive is the most important bottleneck in older machines. I don't know exactly how fast the Flash ROM in this thingy is, but it's surely faster than some random old hard drive.
My guess is that many old machines will be plenty fast enough for use as a terminal (which is the intention of this product) with this bottleneck removed.
Now, if their software is well-done it might well be worth the price, in some situations. If you just replace a hard-drive, you still need to install, configure and administer some sort of OS on it. If what comes with this is better than what you can do in $150 worth of time, it's worth it.
QEMU does something similar... it uses a just-in-time-translation approach to emulate different CPUs (currently x86, ARM, SPARC and PowerPC).
For x86-on-x86 emulation, it's only about 4 to 6 times slower than the host CPU.
It can emulate a PC complete with network card, hard drives, graphics, etc. Best of all, it automatically provides a firewall and DHCP server on the emulated network connection, so an operating system running in the emulation can access the "outside" network painlessly.
Apart from emulating complete systems, it's also able to launch binaries compiled for another CPU. In that case it uses dynamic loader tricks to translate library calls to native calls.
I believe the Darwine project plans to use it in conjunction with Wine to run Windows applications on MacOS X.
It's really really cool stuff!
The decompression part of this driver is in the kernel. This allows applications to get at the uncompressed (or "decoded") videostream through the v4l (video4linux) programming interface.
That's all fine and dandy, you may think. Not so. Nowadays applications shouldn't use these kernel interfaces at all. They should use media frameworks like GStreamer. If they did, the driver core could remain in the kernel, while the decompressor would be a special video-source plugin for GStreamer that talks to the kernel driver through some private interface.
The decompressor code could remain in userspace, where no one gives a flying fsck about its license. Applications would be more portable, and could use any video source instead of only v4l devices. Plus, it would be much easier to reverse engineer that damn decompressor, put it under the GPL, and be done with it.