I guess a Bill is the only way you could get trademark on something as broad as "games" or "2012"... (Do these fascists do this in every country they invade?)
Please do not insult the Smalltalk programming environment by calling it a mere language. Smalltalk was a tap into the living heart of your software; you could alter and play with code as it ran. Alter your programs as they ran, modify types: smalltalk skewed the boundary between application usage and development.
Just because they're both VM powered OO doesnt give you the right to demean Smalltalk by associating it with java. The blasted thing isnt even dynamically typed! Such blaspheme. Java is just another langauge. Smalltalk is an environment.
I was refering to the speed of the RAM. I could have said PC66 RAM, but there is no such thing: PC100 was the first ram to use that nomenclature. As I stated, one of firefox's biggest problems is I/O bandwidth. It sends extrodinary amounts of data around RAM, I have no idea how it finds so much data to send. RAM speed and other system activity are very important to firefox performance.
Myself, I dont even attempt to use Firefox on anything under 500 mhz. I cant imagine how bad it must perform at 128MB ram. At least with more than one tab open, aka actual usage.
A lot of my experience is on crusoe laptops, 800-900 mhz machines, 256-512 MB ram. On a bad day, the crusoe only runs ~350 mhz pentium 3 equivalent, but its very app dependent. Performance is truly quite abysmal.
this is awsome. i spent many years of my youth enjoying scotland yard. a truly fantastic game; get the boardgame or get the recent OS independent python implmeneted London Law free computer game remake (as mentioned on slashdot).
the down sides: - cell phone reception in the tube: ass. - planting RFID clues will get you shot as a terrorist. - (generall) RFID lacks sufficient range to be truly useful for this
it'd be much cooler if you could start tagging the real world & leaving markups on things. subways, unfortunately, while one of the coolest places to do this, are also some of the most likely to get you shot on sight for being a terrorist.
Its a pity firefox is such an usuable POS on a slower computer. Its very much IO bound, even to memory: try running on an "old" pentium 2 with 66 mhz ram. It doesnt scale well at all; start adding tabs and it goes slower and slower, converging very rapidly on unsuable.
On the other hand, both IE and opera remain respectably speedy.
Firefox was supposed to be a cut down slimmed up version of mozilla. Instead I've found ti to have little configurability (wihtou a horde of plugins), to be inconsiderately slow, and worst off to have hideous scalability problems. I'm one of those jerks web developers hate: I install netscape 4.7 on new computers. Why? Because in my experience it works better. Firefox is bloat.
I seriously hope open source has something better up their sleeves for those of us who dont feel web browsing requires 1 Ghz+ and 512 MB ram.
Point of interest, X.509 still requires key exchange/IKE. There is a secure exchange mechanism built on Kerberos. The RFC was implemented in kame's racoon for ipsec.
The coolant chamber for the Saturn rocket was reported to be so efficient it would loose only 2.5 degrees over a ten year span, or some similarly perposterous metric. Course, that was space, but we are exceedingly good at erecting some magnificient thermal barriers.
Hydrogen has suh an energy content that for a significant sized ship (read: not this tiny thing)dumping a little bit of fuel into energy to refridgerate would not be in any way a problem. The only real problem as far as I see is safety issues of storing.
I seriously look forward to seeing future high speed hydrogen powered planes. I think we'll finally see a departure from the tuna can in the sky principle.
There's a number of Mars flying issues. So far I consider X-Plane - Mars Chronciles the definitive layments guide.
Basics: There is only 1% the atmosphere of earth. ~33% gravity.
Trying to stop is pretty much impossible. Propellers are pretty much useless. On the plus side, rocket hydrogen gliders should work pretty damned well... least till they have to land.
Sorry for catching tyhe late flight into this thread, but its only just recently I've actually looked at phone stuff anyways. Here goes;
UMTS is the 3G the rest of the world will be using and is most distinctly the future; EV-Do can kiss off. It just wont scale to multi users. Cingular is trying to move all its cell phoens over to 850 mhz to open up 1900 for UMTS. Deployment has in Atlanta and Chicago initially, with a 2006 rollout. Cingular is dumping a TON of cash into this rollout; they need to. Verizon is dumping money into old dead tech.
Eventually they'll roll out HSDPA. Supposedly available as a software update to phones (yeah right), HSDPA offers 5 mhz channels v. the conventional 1.25 channels and supports a host of new spread spectrum technologies. What should be really interesting is MIMO support- multiple input multiple output. It allows for far better multi-path routing; this extends signal penetration greatly and acts greatly against signal loss. MIMO is some amazing DSP work and will form the cornerstone of cellular data networks one day; its the only responsible use of some very cramped spectrum.
Reponsible use of specturm is really elemental. I dont know how EV-Do works, but old wCDMA used to simply adjust power for each link seperately. HSDPA changes modulation and coding as well.
In the meanwhile, I'd be really interested to compare coverage of Cingular's existing EDGE to Verizon's EV-Do.
Google really lacks at filtering out noise. I was looking for Gran Turismo tuning stuff yesterday. Gran Turismo tuning -"release date" -cheats -faq, &c &c &c. The list of restrictions to filter out noise kept getting bigger and bigger, but it was still just the big agencies that were getting hits, nothing about the game itself.
Clusty on the other hand is no sucker for a press release. I find its much smarter at locating actual content.
With web services becoming all the rage, what are Best Practices for enforcing personal use? If you're releasing source, what manners are there to keep someone from using your script for abuse?
Frankly I think the obligation lies in the hand of the service provider and the person using your code. The whole point of web services is to be able to extend and automate other people's systems. We're simply tool providers, building new systems. If I build a pencil and john goes out and commits triple homicide with my pencil its a shame, yes, but its also not my fault. Why is the internet home of the great double standard; as soon as a tool is easy to use it suddenly becomes the makers problem? As long as our systems designed to promote violations of TOS, its frankly not our problem.
Most every TOS says "for personal use only", google's qualm was that this script makes it easy to circumvent that. These claims are rediculous, even if theres a number of other violations.
It'll be great to see the benchmarks to settle this; SunONE IBM's ldap thingy OpenLDAP Novell's eDirectory maybe even AD for kicks.
Also, just a note, redhat's docs are actually pretty good. Even the web pages ~2500 word Architecture docs probably outweight the usefulness of everything else available on the web. One of the most frequenty Directory Service gripes is how bad the docs are; finding out how to build a good DS system is pretty much a black art. Part fo the reason OpenLDAP is so unacceptable as a solution is because you're at the mercy of whatever tools you can find; docs are MIA. RedHat's already done a decent job of making them accessible, which is good because I might need them to make this thing compile on Debian.
Way to go red-hat. Everytime red hat shows up on campus I always spend five-ten minutes asking about the Netscape DS. Thanks for the release; here's to long life.
I built a number of low budget systems for friends using the nForce2. A fantastic chipset!
The other reason nForce2 rocked was the astounding sound processor. It could decode 5.1 dolby digital, mix in additional streams, and then re encode the whole shebang out to 5.1 again. To this date I know of no moderately priced much less "free" systems which can do this. The sound quality was excellent if you looked for decent A/D, the board had headers so you could run a 5.1 analog system while doing mic/line in. It was perfection.
It really boils my blood that nvidia axed the most amazing novel product they had. I went out and bought a couple extra motherboards just for sound processing. They're about the same price as sound cards anyway.
I've tried writing a reply a number of times now, and I'm still failing short.
My main qualm is that the details became the competition. If there had been a higher calling to the competition, a more integrated dream, many of these issues could be resolved as simply symptoms of the bigger picture problem. Instead of building an AI to cope with surroundings, we built algorithms to patch issues.
The best part of the GC was watching robots in the test courses; this was the only place competitors really felt alive. Where you could watch them interact. Handing out GPS paths eliminated that interactivity, the problem became "can we track the road".... the rest is history (35 mph with a slight left pull), but ultimately fairly boring, uninteresting and, I dare say, not that useful.
I cried when I saw how the DARPA desert race was done. I was thinking vehicles actually had to do pathfinding, you know, like, interesting stuff.
Thats simply not the case. DARPA hands out the final destination a day before launch and the teams madly scramble to find a route to send their vehicle down (on nice sat photos). Then they send the vehicle off on its own. What sort of fun is that?
Knowing this, I'm ashamed how poor last years competition was. The winning team was pretty sweet, but I certainly expect a lot more competitive entries this year. Hand most any college worth its salt $25,000 and let the CS & ME's go to. In a year they should build something which could at least contend with the DARPA incumbent.
As it stands the whole thing requires almost no intelligence. The whole point, from a computer engineers' biased persepctive, was to get people building robots aware of their surroundings. The Berkeley city auto-mapper robot is a perfect example; couple that with Sandstorm and then maybe I'm interested. But so many teams can make a robot which FAILS to track a GPS path while staying moderately on the road is just beyond me.
I understand the whole point is that the terrain is supposedly "hostile"... But when you're driving an `86 Hummer, its quite apparent that any area full of enough dangerous terrain to give you a problem will likely be seen on the sat-maps.
I'm having some major issues with Bold fonts on my laptop. They simply dont look bold. I love Sans, but it refuses to look at all different in bold.
My systems' DPI is 133, I have to give gnome a font size of 4-5 at that DPI to get the small size I want. I just lie and tell it my DPI is 66, and set the fonts to 9 and 10. But the fonts still dont "look" bold. I honestly cannot distinguish which of my Liferea feeds have been updated and which havent (bold/not bold).
I tried a whole army of fonts, still no dice. Its my understanding that you can hint bold fonts. My recommendation to STIX? Provide some extra bold hintings as well as just bold, and make sure they make very small fonts actually look bold.
The main app I try to configure with is the gnome control center's font selection (well done guys,::pat on back::). I dont know any better.
Entirely coincidentally, IFTF's Future Now had a post not but an hour ago on Gershenfeld's FAB, a book about personal fabrication technologies and how computers are enabling their new revolution. This is the exact revolution I'm talking about; the power to build what you dream of.
hopefully extreme DIY like this will become a more and more open possibility. materials keep getting better, and hopefully costs will continue to fall. with integrated design, manufacturers should be able to simply host a file with their machines spec's, allowing amateurs to sort out for themselves what they need built.
PCB manufacturing is a pretty remarkable case study. there are some extremely low cost pcb manufacturers who will run any very small batches of PCB's. this has driven down costs across the board. its was simply a matter of waiting for all the manufacturer's to have online quote & order systems; from there market competition was all it took for the prices to drop.
i'm hoping to see the same sort of effects for all sorts of custom made parts. the price of invention is too high; inventors need access to the same cutting edge advanced materials as the MegaCorps.
Suffice it to say, integrated design is going to whoop some ass kiddies. -Myren
There's a very enthralling read courtesy of MIT: Two Scenarios for 21st Century Organizations. It's both your jokes in one; the need for specialization and experts and the presence of MegaCorpOne.
I really like the idea of progressing to a more Guild like system. Professionals and experts are the answer to outsourcing&commoditization, but we really need professional societies to empower ourselves to this level. There's too much flak in the workforce.
But past this, professional societies can also enguage in profit-sharing, professional development and social functions. I'm still hazy on this last idea, most of my classmates are not the type i'd want to go rock the town with, but I think this is one of the biggest potential benefits of guild like systems; being able to find like people and form real communities.
Anyways, the posted article talks about all this, its great stuff. Enjoy.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess a Bill is the only way you could get trademark on something as broad as "games" or "2012"... (Do these fascists do this in every country they invade?)
Still, sounds like the end of days to me.
Please do not insult the Smalltalk programming environment by calling it a mere language. Smalltalk was a tap into the living heart of your software; you could alter and play with code as it ran. Alter your programs as they ran, modify types: smalltalk skewed the boundary between application usage and development.
Just because they're both VM powered OO doesnt give you the right to demean Smalltalk by associating it with java. The blasted thing isnt even dynamically typed! Such blaspheme. Java is just another langauge. Smalltalk is an environment.
F.U.
-Myren
I was refering to the speed of the RAM. I could have said PC66 RAM, but there is no such thing: PC100 was the first ram to use that nomenclature. As I stated, one of firefox's biggest problems is I/O bandwidth. It sends extrodinary amounts of data around RAM, I have no idea how it finds so much data to send. RAM speed and other system activity are very important to firefox performance.
Myself, I dont even attempt to use Firefox on anything under 500 mhz. I cant imagine how bad it must perform at 128MB ram. At least with more than one tab open, aka actual usage.
A lot of my experience is on crusoe laptops, 800-900 mhz machines, 256-512 MB ram. On a bad day, the crusoe only runs ~350 mhz pentium 3 equivalent, but its very app dependent. Performance is truly quite abysmal.
this is awsome. i spent many years of my youth enjoying scotland yard. a truly fantastic game; get the boardgame or get the recent OS independent python implmeneted London Law free computer game remake (as mentioned on slashdot).
the down sides:
- cell phone reception in the tube: ass.
- planting RFID clues will get you shot as a terrorist.
- (generall) RFID lacks sufficient range to be truly useful for this
it'd be much cooler if you could start tagging the real world & leaving markups on things. subways, unfortunately, while one of the coolest places to do this, are also some of the most likely to get you shot on sight for being a terrorist.
myren
Its a pity firefox is such an usuable POS on a slower computer. Its very much IO bound, even to memory: try running on an "old" pentium 2 with 66 mhz ram. It doesnt scale well at all; start adding tabs and it goes slower and slower, converging very rapidly on unsuable.
On the other hand, both IE and opera remain respectably speedy.
Firefox was supposed to be a cut down slimmed up version of mozilla. Instead I've found ti to have little configurability (wihtou a horde of plugins), to be inconsiderately slow, and worst off to have hideous scalability problems. I'm one of those jerks web developers hate: I install netscape 4.7 on new computers. Why? Because in my experience it works better. Firefox is bloat.
I seriously hope open source has something better up their sleeves for those of us who dont feel web browsing requires 1 Ghz+ and 512 MB ram.
Myren
Point of interest, X.509 still requires key exchange/IKE. There is a secure exchange mechanism built on Kerberos. The RFC was implemented in kame's racoon for ipsec.
One day soon I hope to fsck with it.
-Myren
The coolant chamber for the Saturn rocket was reported to be so efficient it would loose only 2.5 degrees over a ten year span, or some similarly perposterous metric. Course, that was space, but we are exceedingly good at erecting some magnificient thermal barriers.
Hydrogen has suh an energy content that for a significant sized ship (read: not this tiny thing)dumping a little bit of fuel into energy to refridgerate would not be in any way a problem. The only real problem as far as I see is safety issues of storing.
I seriously look forward to seeing future high speed hydrogen powered planes. I think we'll finally see a departure from the tuna can in the sky principle.
-Myren
There's a number of Mars flying issues. So far I consider X-Plane - Mars Chronciles the definitive layments guide.
Basics:
There is only 1% the atmosphere of earth.
~33% gravity.
Trying to stop is pretty much impossible. Propellers are pretty much useless.
On the plus side, rocket hydrogen gliders should work pretty damned well... least till they have to land.
Erm, UMTS IS WCDMA. They better upgrade quick.
Sorry for catching tyhe late flight into this thread, but its only just recently I've actually looked at phone stuff anyways. Here goes;
UMTS is the 3G the rest of the world will be using and is most distinctly the future; EV-Do can kiss off. It just wont scale to multi users. Cingular is trying to move all its cell phoens over to 850 mhz to open up 1900 for UMTS. Deployment has in Atlanta and Chicago initially, with a 2006 rollout. Cingular is dumping a TON of cash into this rollout; they need to. Verizon is dumping money into old dead tech.
Eventually they'll roll out HSDPA. Supposedly available as a software update to phones (yeah right), HSDPA offers 5 mhz channels v. the conventional 1.25 channels and supports a host of new spread spectrum technologies. What should be really interesting is MIMO support- multiple input multiple output. It allows for far better multi-path routing; this extends signal penetration greatly and acts greatly against signal loss. MIMO is some amazing DSP work and will form the cornerstone of cellular data networks one day; its the only responsible use of some very cramped spectrum.
Reponsible use of specturm is really elemental. I dont know how EV-Do works, but old wCDMA used to simply adjust power for each link seperately. HSDPA changes modulation and coding as well.
In the meanwhile, I'd be really interested to compare coverage of Cingular's existing EDGE to Verizon's EV-Do.
Myren
At a cool $2 mil an episode, each episode would be costing much more than their movie-specials.
I'm seriously skeptical that Sci Fi has the cash to continue development. One can only dream.
Myren
Google really lacks at filtering out noise. I was looking for Gran Turismo tuning stuff yesterday. Gran Turismo tuning -"release date" -cheats -faq, &c &c &c. The list of restrictions to filter out noise kept getting bigger and bigger, but it was still just the big agencies that were getting hits, nothing about the game itself.
Clusty on the other hand is no sucker for a press release. I find its much smarter at locating actual content.
Myren
With web services becoming all the rage, what are Best Practices for enforcing personal use? If you're releasing source, what manners are there to keep someone from using your script for abuse?
Frankly I think the obligation lies in the hand of the service provider and the person using your code. The whole point of web services is to be able to extend and automate other people's systems. We're simply tool providers, building new systems. If I build a pencil and john goes out and commits triple homicide with my pencil its a shame, yes, but its also not my fault. Why is the internet home of the great double standard; as soon as a tool is easy to use it suddenly becomes the makers problem? As long as our systems designed to promote violations of TOS, its frankly not our problem.
Most every TOS says "for personal use only", google's qualm was that this script makes it easy to circumvent that. These claims are rediculous, even if theres a number of other violations.
-Myren
Not a dupe, its actually released now.
It'll be great to see the benchmarks to settle this;
SunONE
IBM's ldap thingy
OpenLDAP
Novell's eDirectory
maybe even AD for kicks.
Also, just a note, redhat's docs are actually pretty good. Even the web pages ~2500 word Architecture docs probably outweight the usefulness of everything else available on the web. One of the most frequenty Directory Service gripes is how bad the docs are; finding out how to build a good DS system is pretty much a black art. Part fo the reason OpenLDAP is so unacceptable as a solution is because you're at the mercy of whatever tools you can find; docs are MIA. RedHat's already done a decent job of making them accessible, which is good because I might need them to make this thing compile on Debian.
Way to go red-hat. Everytime red hat shows up on campus I always spend five-ten minutes asking about the Netscape DS. Thanks for the release; here's to long life.
Myren
I built a number of low budget systems for friends using the nForce2. A fantastic chipset!
The other reason nForce2 rocked was the astounding sound processor. It could decode 5.1 dolby digital, mix in additional streams, and then re encode the whole shebang out to 5.1 again. To this date I know of no moderately priced much less "free" systems which can do this. The sound quality was excellent if you looked for decent A/D, the board had headers so you could run a 5.1 analog system while doing mic/line in. It was perfection.
It really boils my blood that nvidia axed the most amazing novel product they had. I went out and bought a couple extra motherboards just for sound processing. They're about the same price as sound cards anyway.
I've tried writing a reply a number of times now, and I'm still failing short.
My main qualm is that the details became the competition. If there had been a higher calling to the competition, a more integrated dream, many of these issues could be resolved as simply symptoms of the bigger picture problem. Instead of building an AI to cope with surroundings, we built algorithms to patch issues.
The best part of the GC was watching robots in the test courses; this was the only place competitors really felt alive. Where you could watch them interact. Handing out GPS paths eliminated that interactivity, the problem became "can we track the road".... the rest is history (35 mph with a slight left pull), but ultimately fairly boring, uninteresting and, I dare say, not that useful.
-Myren
now thats what I'm talking about! thanks for the linkage.
;)
I think Berkeley might have an edge in this one.
-Myren
I cried when I saw how the DARPA desert race was done. I was thinking vehicles actually had to do pathfinding, you know, like, interesting stuff.
Thats simply not the case. DARPA hands out the final destination a day before launch and the teams madly scramble to find a route to send their vehicle down (on nice sat photos). Then they send the vehicle off on its own. What sort of fun is that?
Knowing this, I'm ashamed how poor last years competition was. The winning team was pretty sweet, but I certainly expect a lot more competitive entries this year. Hand most any college worth its salt $25,000 and let the CS & ME's go to. In a year they should build something which could at least contend with the DARPA incumbent.
As it stands the whole thing requires almost no intelligence. The whole point, from a computer engineers' biased persepctive, was to get people building robots aware of their surroundings. The Berkeley city auto-mapper robot is a perfect example; couple that with Sandstorm and then maybe I'm interested. But so many teams can make a robot which FAILS to track a GPS path while staying moderately on the road is just beyond me.
I understand the whole point is that the terrain is supposedly "hostile"... But when you're driving an `86 Hummer, its quite apparent that any area full of enough dangerous terrain to give you a problem will likely be seen on the sat-maps.
Myren
I dont think anyone should be allowed to sell software. You're welcome to buy it if you want, but this whole selling thing is for suckers.
Myren
I'm having some major issues with Bold fonts on my laptop. They simply dont look bold. I love Sans, but it refuses to look at all different in bold.
::pat on back::). I dont know any better.
My systems' DPI is 133, I have to give gnome a font size of 4-5 at that DPI to get the small size I want. I just lie and tell it my DPI is 66, and set the fonts to 9 and 10. But the fonts still dont "look" bold. I honestly cannot distinguish which of my Liferea feeds have been updated and which havent (bold/not bold).
I tried a whole army of fonts, still no dice. Its my understanding that you can hint bold fonts. My recommendation to STIX? Provide some extra bold hintings as well as just bold, and make sure they make very small fonts actually look bold.
The main app I try to configure with is the gnome control center's font selection (well done guys,
I'm going to miss my Krugman dosages. Where else am i supposed to get my economics candies?
Myren
Entirely coincidentally, IFTF's Future Now had a post not but an hour ago on Gershenfeld's FAB, a book about personal fabrication technologies and how computers are enabling their new revolution. This is the exact revolution I'm talking about; the power to build what you dream of.
Future Now post
FAB
hopefully extreme DIY like this will become a more and more open possibility. materials keep getting better, and hopefully costs will continue to fall. with integrated design, manufacturers should be able to simply host a file with their machines spec's, allowing amateurs to sort out for themselves what they need built.
PCB manufacturing is a pretty remarkable case study. there are some extremely low cost pcb manufacturers who will run any very small batches of PCB's. this has driven down costs across the board. its was simply a matter of waiting for all the manufacturer's to have online quote & order systems; from there market competition was all it took for the prices to drop.
i'm hoping to see the same sort of effects for all sorts of custom made parts. the price of invention is too high; inventors need access to the same cutting edge advanced materials as the MegaCorps.
Suffice it to say, integrated design is going to whoop some ass kiddies.
-Myren
People stopped evolving a long time ago. Meme's on the other hand, will continue evovling as long as there is intelligent life left to ride.
-Myren
Hi, great post. Funny and smart.
There's a very enthralling read courtesy of MIT: Two Scenarios for 21st Century Organizations. It's both your jokes in one; the need for specialization and experts and the presence of MegaCorpOne.
I really like the idea of progressing to a more Guild like system. Professionals and experts are the answer to outsourcing&commoditization, but we really need professional societies to empower ourselves to this level. There's too much flak in the workforce.
But past this, professional societies can also enguage in profit-sharing, professional development and social functions. I'm still hazy on this last idea, most of my classmates are not the type i'd want to go rock the town with, but I think this is one of the biggest potential benefits of guild like systems; being able to find like people and form real communities.
Anyways, the posted article talks about all this, its great stuff. Enjoy.
Myren