So... Am I allowed to watch the SuperBowl? Or any TV shows? I have FIOS cable service... Or do I have to leave home to find a legal TV set?
Is my wife allowed to join me?
Can a few friends come watch too? Can they bring snacks, or does that count as a form of entry payment?
Oh, wait. I don't like football, so I'm not watching anyway. And we recently got married, are combining our houses, and my otherwise small living room is a large pile of everything we both own and we can't sit anywhere or see the giant screen anyway.
I'll look up the commercials on my laptop later.
But, what about the TV I do watch when things are cleared out? Caprica? Lost?
Animal rights group Peta has welcomed the laboratory grown meat announcing that "as far as we're concerned, if meat is no longer a piece of a dead animal there's no ethical objection while the Vegetarian Society remained skeptical.
Uh, well, whatever this stuff is, it is a piece of some animal out there. And at some point that particular animal will die of old age or some natural cause. And then, 100% of that laboratory-grown steak-clone is suddenly part of a dead animal. So... We gotta keep that cell donor animal alive on some crazy life support for eternity!
I've since learned about the Hauppauge HD-PVR. So I guess it is possible now. I couldn't find such a thing a while ago, and since Lucas release "proper" DVDs finally, I stopped caring and never came across this thing.
During an earlier iteration of this kind of discussion, I had been pondering how to get my Laserdisc copies of the "true" Star Wars triogy (without all that messed up Special Edition crap) onto DVD. I found a Laserdisc player with Component outputs, but that might have even only been for the DVD half of a combo DVD/Laserdisc player. But I was not able to find a component "tuner" input card to capture onto. At least not anything that a mortal like me can afford. So, without being a millionaire, without engineering and building my own copying machine, and without giving an all-out howto, is there a cost-effective way for any of us, or our grandparents, to copy and play back stuff from these analog component outputs? I hesitate to ask for links to purchase the equipment, I'm mostly curious if the MPAA's claimed fears are realistic or even possible at all. If people here know it's not possible, why aren't we lobbying that fact to the congresscritters that need to know?
As for the big moneymaking pirates in Hong Kong, if they can afford to have a special analog copying machine engineered and made for their own use, they can surely also afford to have an HDMI+HDCP copying machine made up too. No law here will be able to stop the likes of them. But I really don't believe that being able to turn off HDTVs made before HDMI or HDCP and preventing legitimate customers from seeing anything is worth-while side-effect of this phantom people copying everything at home "problem".
Uhm, the Amiga Hand is not a bug or crash screen. That's the ROM telling you the floppy drive is empty and it wants some bootable media. It would pretty much never be seen with a hard drive system.
The Amiga crash screen is called the Guru Meditiation. It's either a red or yelow blinking box with some cryptic text inside, which only a developer would try to understand. Red is crash, yellow is "recoverable alert", which may leave the computer running but a crash is frequently soon to happen after a yellow guru. Earlier AmigaOS versions only had red, yellow was added sometime in 2.x or 3.x versions.
I think for the much more recent 4.x versions of AmigaOS, it's been changed to the Grim Reaper, and it's more of a window than a black screen with a blinking thing in it. Chances of recovering and continuing use are much better now.
So, assuming batteries so these people aren't dragging around a long extension cord, how are you going to get someone that doesn't know where they are etc. to remember and charge the batteries every night?
That's a good point, but many students will have already been exposed to schematics in earlier prerequisite courses before being tossed into an FPGA class. In the real word today, people are using vhdl and/or verilog and or other languages isntead of schematics for FPGA work. Look at those FPGAs today, holding millions of gates to use, it'd be unreasonable to design for that using schematics. Look at available resources like opencores.org which have open-source projects/cores in vhdl and in verilog. In the real world, the simulators most in use today are verilog and/or vhdl and/or other languages.
I think it'd be nice to have some exposure for your students in what is done in real life as well as whatever benefit there is to starting with schematic. Perhaps this FPGA course could be a follow up to a more basic digital logic design course showing schematics etc. as a prerequisite?
Who's teaching the course, you? Have a look at them and see if you have a strong preference. Most people do one way or the other. I like Verilog and hate VHDL. I think the instructor should teach what he's more comfortable himself, so you're all more confident that he's teaching it correctly and not tossing out things that are confusing and may be somehow inaccurate in that language he's not as good with. I could help someone understand Verilog, but I would be a horrible teacher/mentor/tutor in VHDL trying to read and understand my answers to questions from the same (and/or other) books the students have. Other people are likely the reverse. Which way does this intructor for your course go? It'd be nice to find that out before you choose the wrong language for him.
Of course a superb instructor would be fluent in both, and more, but it'd be nice to avoid focusing on a good but fluent in only one teacher's weaker language.
I work at a chip company doing ASIC and custom SOC microprocessor stuff. We mostly use verilog here for our stuff. Most of the VHDL I see comes from customers, which often gets blended into our verilog platforms. All our RTL IP cores are verilog that I know of, at least that I've used/seen, and our integration work to make platforms out of all the IP pieces is verilog. What we synthesize to gates is also a verilog gates netlist result that goes to place/route into silicon.
In college the class I took that involved this sort of thing was in VHDL, and I hated that. had me really nto wanting to do this kind of work, I was really happy when I was exposed to verilog and I didn't hate it, and I've been a chip guy for over 10 years now.
But as I understand, VHDL is far more popular in some locations, and verilog in others, so jobs in other locales may be completely opposite to my work environment. It would probably be nice to show some of each to be a little familiar with both such as comparing/contrasting = to = and == to ===, but focus on one or the other for people to really get experience fitting pieces together and learning the general stuff about RTL design, etc. that are not as dependent on what language you use.
I have a multimedia computer in my living room, which is not right next to where I sit. Bluetooth seems to be better for across-the-room distance than RF. The RF keyboards/mice I tried could go a few feet, but were unreliable beyond that, and while fresh batteries made it seem OK, it wasn't long before they were no longer quite new enough to do it anymore. Bluetooth parts seem much better for that.
I've in the past used Soft Scrub cleaner to clean up my old Amiga stuff. This way may be better than what I've done, possibly easier than the gentle scrubbing I did, and I did have to individually scrub each keyboard keycap, which was not particularly fun. I may try this as I get some old stuff ready for ebay.
My laptop didn't offer a downgrade to XP at all, but I wanted this particular one specifically because of the feature set and graphics chip model which was hard to find other sources for, for peculiar but important to me reasons. I had to pay full retail to buy XP for this thing, which was a lot, but worth it since some of my software still doesn't run on Vista today. (which includes the VPN software supported/provided by my employer, they do not currently support Vista)
I jsut got a 1TB predecessor to this drive. They were waiting for me to buy before they announced the double size of it weren't they! I got it for my Tivo HD, I understand it's supposed to be nice and quiet and relatively low power compared to other drives. Others will likely enjoy it in DVR boxes when that kind of capacity is supported. (I understand Tivo's kernel currently won't do mroe than 1TB anyway)
I've heard tales of an ancient form of communication that used small slabs of tree fiber carried by occasionally tempermental human beings. You can use an antiquated stylus-like device, which instead of selecting icons or doing script recognition on touchscreens of today, they leave behind a quasi-permanent colored marking on the tree fiber substrate, and these glyphical markings can serve to contain the message you would like to send. These tree fiber substrates are capable of including graphic attachments on one side, and hte mesage on the opposite side of the slab. They are often pre-encoded with a selection of graphics to choose from, and sometimes you can create a substrate encoded with a graphic of your own creation using a device able to translate your digital imagery files into the pigmentious container format which is compatible with the wood fiber slab. You will likely need to include a second attachment to these messages, in the form of a second, but smaller slab of wood fiber, a kind of wood-fiber-slab tax which the occasionally tempermental human transporters require, without this second attachment file then you risk your message and other attachments being lost in a sort of delivery black hole. You may have to search for an acceptable terminal which is compatible with sending messages in this format, and these terminals may not always be available to you. But the ancients once used such laughable methods with great success, so it may be somewhat usable for you as well.
Our sysadming at work refuses to install FF3, largely because of the large number of support libraries that he would also need to install/update. I guess I can understand to some extent that some things are certified for our CAD software vendors to support things, but it feels uncomfortable to move into a situation lacking security updates in any part of the system.
I'd tried using Google Apps for some stuff in my HOA (Home Owners Association) to make up flyers to hand out and stuff like that. I can tell OpenOffice I want a 50 point font size for a big headline. I can't make a really large font size in Google Apps. Google Apps does not seem to have a WYSIWYG editing environment, so it's hard to tell if I'm fitting into a single page, into a single half-page, or what amount of space it's taking up. I have to keep telling it to "print" which then gives me a pdf dump that I can see in Acrobat to see my real-life formatting. It's a huge pain in the ass.
I ended up typing it up in OpenOffice and then uploading it to Google Apps for access by other HOA board members and shared storage. Weird, as uploading docs, it preserves the large font sizes that it does not allow me to choose during document creation directly on their site. I've ended up considering Google Apps to be an online storage area only, and not as a functional office tool.
And my biggest annoyance is just using the Google Apps tools. The user interface for spreadsheet is extremely different than the user interface for their "word processor". There's really no commonality in the user interface at all between tools. That annoys me. I'd like a little consistency, but Google doesn't seem interested in that at all.
One of these days I'll take some time to check out Adobe's online office tools. They can't be any less useful than Google Apps are.
I use Linux at work, and a number of us would love to have Firefox 3 available. Our Sysadmin is not interested in dealing with all the required libraries and other prerequisites to making this happen on all our machines. We're at the mercy of him and the managment that allows him to disregard requests from us users. So what, we'll need to deal with nag screens we are powerless to comply to? That sucks.
I'd like to put up security cameras around my house. I talked to my county police for advice on the proper ways to go about doing this. I'm not allowed to point them at someone else's property at all (without their permission), not even if it's visible from public view. I can point them at my own property, and I can point them at public property. I'm also not allowed to record any audio at all, not even if it's pointed at my own stuff.
While I don't think it makes up for such a large price increase, changing things in Apples can be more labor than others. I'd like to upgrade the hard drive in my iBook G4, which I'm told is soldered to the motherboard instead of plugged into an IDE header to save some miniscule amount of space. I'm willing to do that myself, but a lot of end-users are not, and not every PC nerd friend or kid across the street is either. There's also a little more liability to screwing that up. I'm tol dI can just use PC3200 laptop memory, which should be no more difficult to install than any PC laptop though. I'd bet the Air isn't a trivial end-user upgrade path either.
What about tall people? So it's not as common for Japanese to be very tall, but it does happen from time to time. Does it make sense to restrict a 6' tall person to 33.5" waist as it does for a 5'2" person?
I'm glad I don't live there, though I wouldn't mind losing a small amount of my 36". (I'm 6'2" tall and I do not consider this to be obese) I'm just happy my contry does not require me to actually RTFA. The world will be an awkward place if that ever happens...
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So... Am I allowed to watch the SuperBowl? Or any TV shows? I have FIOS cable service... Or do I have to leave home to find a legal TV set?
Is my wife allowed to join me?
Can a few friends come watch too? Can they bring snacks, or does that count as a form of entry payment?
Oh, wait. I don't like football, so I'm not watching anyway. And we recently got married, are combining our houses, and my otherwise small living room is a large pile of everything we both own and we can't sit anywhere or see the giant screen anyway.
I'll look up the commercials on my laptop later.
But, what about the TV I do watch when things are cleared out? Caprica? Lost?
Why hasn't anyone gotten clever and made Firefox use Chrome's faster Javascript code? Porting it to Firefox and all that?
Animal rights group Peta has welcomed the laboratory grown meat announcing that "as far as we're concerned, if meat is no longer a piece of a dead animal there's no ethical objection while the Vegetarian Society remained skeptical.
Uh, well, whatever this stuff is, it is a piece of some animal out there. And at some point that particular animal will die of old age or some natural cause. And then, 100% of that laboratory-grown steak-clone is suddenly part of a dead animal. So... We gotta keep that cell donor animal alive on some crazy life support for eternity!
I've since learned about the Hauppauge HD-PVR. So I guess it is possible now. I couldn't find such a thing a while ago, and since Lucas release "proper" DVDs finally, I stopped caring and never came across this thing.
During an earlier iteration of this kind of discussion, I had been pondering how to get my Laserdisc copies of the "true" Star Wars triogy (without all that messed up Special Edition crap) onto DVD. I found a Laserdisc player with Component outputs, but that might have even only been for the DVD half of a combo DVD/Laserdisc player. But I was not able to find a component "tuner" input card to capture onto. At least not anything that a mortal like me can afford. So, without being a millionaire, without engineering and building my own copying machine, and without giving an all-out howto, is there a cost-effective way for any of us, or our grandparents, to copy and play back stuff from these analog component outputs? I hesitate to ask for links to purchase the equipment, I'm mostly curious if the MPAA's claimed fears are realistic or even possible at all. If people here know it's not possible, why aren't we lobbying that fact to the congresscritters that need to know?
As for the big moneymaking pirates in Hong Kong, if they can afford to have a special analog copying machine engineered and made for their own use, they can surely also afford to have an HDMI+HDCP copying machine made up too. No law here will be able to stop the likes of them. But I really don't believe that being able to turn off HDTVs made before HDMI or HDCP and preventing legitimate customers from seeing anything is worth-while side-effect of this phantom people copying everything at home "problem".
Uhm, the Amiga Hand is not a bug or crash screen. That's the ROM telling you the floppy drive is empty and it wants some bootable media. It would pretty much never be seen with a hard drive system.
The Amiga crash screen is called the Guru Meditiation. It's either a red or yelow blinking box with some cryptic text inside, which only a developer would try to understand. Red is crash, yellow is "recoverable alert", which may leave the computer running but a crash is frequently soon to happen after a yellow guru. Earlier AmigaOS versions only had red, yellow was added sometime in 2.x or 3.x versions.
I think for the much more recent 4.x versions of AmigaOS, it's been changed to the Grim Reaper, and it's more of a window than a black screen with a blinking thing in it. Chances of recovering and continuing use are much better now.
I'd love to understand their algorithm for determining that 373,375 American jobs are affected by this.
So, assuming batteries so these people aren't dragging around a long extension cord, how are you going to get someone that doesn't know where they are etc. to remember and charge the batteries every night?
That's a good point, but many students will have already been exposed to schematics in earlier prerequisite courses before being tossed into an FPGA class. In the real word today, people are using vhdl and/or verilog and or other languages isntead of schematics for FPGA work. Look at those FPGAs today, holding millions of gates to use, it'd be unreasonable to design for that using schematics. Look at available resources like opencores.org which have open-source projects/cores in vhdl and in verilog. In the real world, the simulators most in use today are verilog and/or vhdl and/or other languages.
I think it'd be nice to have some exposure for your students in what is done in real life as well as whatever benefit there is to starting with schematic. Perhaps this FPGA course could be a follow up to a more basic digital logic design course showing schematics etc. as a prerequisite?
Who's teaching the course, you? Have a look at them and see if you have a strong preference. Most people do one way or the other. I like Verilog and hate VHDL. I think the instructor should teach what he's more comfortable himself, so you're all more confident that he's teaching it correctly and not tossing out things that are confusing and may be somehow inaccurate in that language he's not as good with. I could help someone understand Verilog, but I would be a horrible teacher/mentor/tutor in VHDL trying to read and understand my answers to questions from the same (and/or other) books the students have. Other people are likely the reverse. Which way does this intructor for your course go? It'd be nice to find that out before you choose the wrong language for him.
Of course a superb instructor would be fluent in both, and more, but it'd be nice to avoid focusing on a good but fluent in only one teacher's weaker language.
I meant comparing = to <= up there. Sorry, html ate my less than char
I work at a chip company doing ASIC and custom SOC microprocessor stuff. We mostly use verilog here for our stuff. Most of the VHDL I see comes from customers, which often gets blended into our verilog platforms. All our RTL IP cores are verilog that I know of, at least that I've used/seen, and our integration work to make platforms out of all the IP pieces is verilog. What we synthesize to gates is also a verilog gates netlist result that goes to place/route into silicon.
In college the class I took that involved this sort of thing was in VHDL, and I hated that. had me really nto wanting to do this kind of work, I was really happy when I was exposed to verilog and I didn't hate it, and I've been a chip guy for over 10 years now.
But as I understand, VHDL is far more popular in some locations, and verilog in others, so jobs in other locales may be completely opposite to my work environment. It would probably be nice to show some of each to be a little familiar with both such as comparing/contrasting = to = and == to ===, but focus on one or the other for people to really get experience fitting pieces together and learning the general stuff about RTL design, etc. that are not as dependent on what language you use.
I have a multimedia computer in my living room, which is not right next to where I sit. Bluetooth seems to be better for across-the-room distance than RF. The RF keyboards/mice I tried could go a few feet, but were unreliable beyond that, and while fresh batteries made it seem OK, it wasn't long before they were no longer quite new enough to do it anymore. Bluetooth parts seem much better for that.
Lightwave 3d. It's PC/Windows now, maybe Linux, dunno. But it started on AmigaOS with the Video Toaster.
AmigaOS 4.1 was released in September 2008. Sure, there may be a miniscule number of people still using/buying it in your terms, but it's still here.
I've in the past used Soft Scrub cleaner to clean up my old Amiga stuff. This way may be better than what I've done, possibly easier than the gentle scrubbing I did, and I did have to individually scrub each keyboard keycap, which was not particularly fun. I may try this as I get some old stuff ready for ebay.
My laptop didn't offer a downgrade to XP at all, but I wanted this particular one specifically because of the feature set and graphics chip model which was hard to find other sources for, for peculiar but important to me reasons. I had to pay full retail to buy XP for this thing, which was a lot, but worth it since some of my software still doesn't run on Vista today. (which includes the VPN software supported/provided by my employer, they do not currently support Vista)
I jsut got a 1TB predecessor to this drive. They were waiting for me to buy before they announced the double size of it weren't they! I got it for my Tivo HD, I understand it's supposed to be nice and quiet and relatively low power compared to other drives. Others will likely enjoy it in DVR boxes when that kind of capacity is supported. (I understand Tivo's kernel currently won't do mroe than 1TB anyway)
I've heard tales of an ancient form of communication that used small slabs of tree fiber carried by occasionally tempermental human beings. You can use an antiquated stylus-like device, which instead of selecting icons or doing script recognition on touchscreens of today, they leave behind a quasi-permanent colored marking on the tree fiber substrate, and these glyphical markings can serve to contain the message you would like to send. These tree fiber substrates are capable of including graphic attachments on one side, and hte mesage on the opposite side of the slab. They are often pre-encoded with a selection of graphics to choose from, and sometimes you can create a substrate encoded with a graphic of your own creation using a device able to translate your digital imagery files into the pigmentious container format which is compatible with the wood fiber slab. You will likely need to include a second attachment to these messages, in the form of a second, but smaller slab of wood fiber, a kind of wood-fiber-slab tax which the occasionally tempermental human transporters require, without this second attachment file then you risk your message and other attachments being lost in a sort of delivery black hole. You may have to search for an acceptable terminal which is compatible with sending messages in this format, and these terminals may not always be available to you. But the ancients once used such laughable methods with great success, so it may be somewhat usable for you as well.
Our sysadming at work refuses to install FF3, largely because of the large number of support libraries that he would also need to install/update. I guess I can understand to some extent that some things are certified for our CAD software vendors to support things, but it feels uncomfortable to move into a situation lacking security updates in any part of the system.
I'd tried using Google Apps for some stuff in my HOA (Home Owners Association) to make up flyers to hand out and stuff like that. I can tell OpenOffice I want a 50 point font size for a big headline. I can't make a really large font size in Google Apps. Google Apps does not seem to have a WYSIWYG editing environment, so it's hard to tell if I'm fitting into a single page, into a single half-page, or what amount of space it's taking up. I have to keep telling it to "print" which then gives me a pdf dump that I can see in Acrobat to see my real-life formatting. It's a huge pain in the ass.
I ended up typing it up in OpenOffice and then uploading it to Google Apps for access by other HOA board members and shared storage. Weird, as uploading docs, it preserves the large font sizes that it does not allow me to choose during document creation directly on their site. I've ended up considering Google Apps to be an online storage area only, and not as a functional office tool.
And my biggest annoyance is just using the Google Apps tools. The user interface for spreadsheet is extremely different than the user interface for their "word processor". There's really no commonality in the user interface at all between tools. That annoys me. I'd like a little consistency, but Google doesn't seem interested in that at all.
One of these days I'll take some time to check out Adobe's online office tools. They can't be any less useful than Google Apps are.
I use Linux at work, and a number of us would love to have Firefox 3 available. Our Sysadmin is not interested in dealing with all the required libraries and other prerequisites to making this happen on all our machines. We're at the mercy of him and the managment that allows him to disregard requests from us users. So what, we'll need to deal with nag screens we are powerless to comply to? That sucks.
I'd like to put up security cameras around my house. I talked to my county police for advice on the proper ways to go about doing this. I'm not allowed to point them at someone else's property at all (without their permission), not even if it's visible from public view. I can point them at my own property, and I can point them at public property. I'm also not allowed to record any audio at all, not even if it's pointed at my own stuff.
While I don't think it makes up for such a large price increase, changing things in Apples can be more labor than others. I'd like to upgrade the hard drive in my iBook G4, which I'm told is soldered to the motherboard instead of plugged into an IDE header to save some miniscule amount of space. I'm willing to do that myself, but a lot of end-users are not, and not every PC nerd friend or kid across the street is either. There's also a little more liability to screwing that up. I'm tol dI can just use PC3200 laptop memory, which should be no more difficult to install than any PC laptop though. I'd bet the Air isn't a trivial end-user upgrade path either.
What about tall people? So it's not as common for Japanese to be very tall, but it does happen from time to time. Does it make sense to restrict a 6' tall person to 33.5" waist as it does for a 5'2" person?
I'm glad I don't live there, though I wouldn't mind losing a small amount of my 36". (I'm 6'2" tall and I do not consider this to be obese) I'm just happy my contry does not require me to actually RTFA. The world will be an awkward place if that ever happens...