the twiddler is a one handed keyboard and pointing device. proficient users are able to type faster than qwerty keyboards enable. used in wearable computers, and just cool.
unfortunately the #$@$'s are charging $200+. thankfully i'm out of college soon and will hopefully be making money after that. anyone rouge dev shacks looking for a world class hacker + ace communicator?
they're not the middlemen genius, they're the source. jobs is the middleman hawking xerox's warez to the public. no amount of mac idolary will wipe away that fact, not that jobs was the only one.
none what so ever because the blithering morons tried a shady game of declaring an "open" standard and charging an arm and a leg to use their "open" standard. so its used by a couple high-falutinosity automation suites but hasnt opened up any new markets.
which reads almost exaclty like what this zigbee "open" standard is trying to do, what its going to crack up to if these jackals keep it up.
i cant believe its 2005 and we dont have a decent low data rate protocol yet. yet another perfect textbook case of the failure of the markets, hell, the failure of markets to do the most drop dead obvious thing to benefit themselves.
the powers that be, the big consumer electronic players should jump on this opportunity and force the hand wrangling zigbee alliance to really open up the standard. it'll open up an entire new world of consumer electronics &c for the big players to sell to the consumers all over again.
you guys need to stop advertising in chime-in-mode on slashdot and write some web pages on what the hell tinyos actually is. you guys have great word of mouth advertising, but it takes more than tat. i spent thirty minutes looking for content, for pictures of running boards, tech specs, for anything at all which would actually indicate what you've done on your web page. i'm not sure whether it was i who failed, or you who did.
thats what i like to refer to as a good school. at least so long as you're still having to do work.
a lot of top name schools really arent all that special, they dont really encourage deep thought. they just have hard tests. and while there's something to be said for being able to pull off a gpa in that environment, there's a lot more factors when it comes to finding good coders. and you know what else, in the end, the process is no more than chinese water torture to prove yourself to the corps.
my suggestion for students? dont go to the big name schools. this might sound familiar; you were a star student, except you never studied for tests and skimped out on your homework. you've been hacking a decent part of your life. and now its time for college.
whatever you do, find a school which will encourage your creativity. big roaring top 20 programs with 2,000 kids in your class & major are not going to foster that creativity. you will be another slave to the machine, a machine designed only to seperate the wheat from the chaff. it will not be fun, and for the most part, it will not be educational. every other kid there will be just as bright as you and have half the social life to take away from studying.
your CS classes are going to be BS wherever you go. consider taking electrical engineering instead of cs, you know too much cs anyways. computer engineering is usually a very good middle ground (::raises hand, grad may 2005::).
in the end, you can present employers with your slew of groovy projects and your record for self-motivation. and you'll gain something else; a worthwhile education.
how pathetic. why slave your time copying someone elses piece of crap when you can craft your own?
i'm rapidly loosing faith that operating systems are in any way different from each other. its like arguing athlon/pentium: for the most part its the same bloody thing.
there's a million little operational differences but those are never going to take the windows crown. what we need is something different, something actually better at a deeper level.
its called innovation: think on the boundary build past it
mod_perl, and to a certain extent Java servlets, gives you a huge amount of power over the web serving process, and are suitable for developing web applications that can do almost anything with HTTP. (emph. mine)
even as you attempt to broaden the sense that mod_perl is more than just some content generating script, you undermind the essence of what you talk about.
mod_perl is capable of being used to write entirely different protocol handlers: you can make apache serve FTP or ssh with mod_perl, if you're insane enough to do so. it can completely alter the flow of information at any step in the proces, thanks to apache's beautiful filtering & module structuing.
as you state, mod_perl uses the apachi api to tie itself deeply into the apache server engine itself, performing all sorts of reconfiguration of apache. `tis truly divine.
theres no groundwork to allow Unix to surf the pervasive wave. instead there's only huge ancient walls which people have been waving their hands at for decades. the wall hasnt noticed. unix is a perfect multi-user base, except one flaw.
X needs a way to allow applications (wm's) to discern the source of input. Built off this core, window managers or X itself can hack solutions to craft "multiple cursors". (Ultimately the window manager is going to have to get deeply involved with this policy; I think the best solution is to simlpy expose the source of input and have the window manager hold state for each input-source and manipulate the single corepointer, "faking" multiple pointers. this prevents X from having to deal with drawing&policy (which is the wm's domain)). Currently the best interaction you can get is to mux together your inputs into one keyboard/mouse pair.
The multiple pointers in X problem has been around for a while, but no ones been able to crack it. X was simply never meant to have more than one cursor, never meant to assuming anything past a single keyboard and mouse.
The one plight of this solution is that every X input event would have to pass through the window manager, which I imagine is expensive.
synergy allows you to share input devices between computers (even cross platform) but the next logical step is missing.
All we need is some way to see the physical source of each input event.
The ZigBee specification describes a multihop routing protocol that has been tested in large networks on products made by multiple vendors. You won't have to write your own routing protocol.
We're still going to have to implement it though, which is a bit silly since the spec's are all there.
It just seems like yet another classic case of commercialism getting in the way of a good idea. That vendors wouldnt provide stacks freely is a sure way to cut sales in half. I guess in large part its because 802.15.4 solutions are rarely embedded in micros, so there's no target platform to release for. And releasing free source is giving away a competitive advantage. Still, its kind of like letting your own hand get in the way of your eyes.
Two others: I still am somewhat skeptical of the alleged effectivenes of a 25kB mutli-hop routing protocol. There's a lot of issues with hidden transmitters & what not which generally need to be addressed, 25k seems like a rather thin line of jelly in that sandwitch they're holding.
Lastly, how does Zigbee Alliance plan to enforce their commercial restrictions? If a company goes out of its way to state that its not Zigbee compliant even though their product "happens" to be a flavor of 802.15.4 which is appearing to work fine with Zigbee, there's really nothing they can do,... right?
the spec is becoming available freely? where'd you hear this, and where can i hear it?
i'm still a bit skeptical. its my assumption that 802.15.4 doesnt compass any of the mesh routing standards. even with the free spec, when you're talking about having to do your own routing, writing or using a stack is still going to be a huge barrier to entrance.
more troublesome is my sneaking suspicion that many implementations will not play nicely together. zigbee is very non-trivial, i wouldnt be suprised to see little implementation differences have negative impact.
for all my trashing on zigbee, i'd just like to point out to the general public here that i think zigbee is the most useful wireless spec we've ever cooked up. it simply has a couple problems in implementation which make it unsuited towards the very-low-end wireless its being targetted towards, towards the true embedded. if they fix these barriers to entry, zigbee could fulfil the promise of connecting all the devices in our lives.
zigbee is aimed at very price sensitive markets, but has one currently fatal flaw: you have to purchase software stacks.
most any hardware a developer buys is worthless without another huge investment in a software stack to run the standard.
some people are just using a zigbee's basic transmit/recieve functionality withotu many of the integral spec features for this reason. its like buying an 802.11 chipset that doesnt work with anything else.
the zigbee industry desperately needs to get together and release free software for a number of different micro-architectures.
i sincerely hope you're trolling if your proposing that dynamic languages are un-usable as production devices.
AOP is pretty integral to maintaining dynamic code, but thats yet another can of worms. the situation gets messy, but ultimately it needs to get messy.
dynamic languages are convenient to code in, but essential to the future of web architecture.
many of these emerging distributed technologies rely upon increased switching capabilities. ps3 has some astronomical amount of internal bandwidth**. if cpu's actually are getting significantly harder to make faster, is there any correlation to the difficulty in making cheaper faster switching? i'm a computer engineer, i know a reasonable amount about the difficulties in scaling cpu performance. but from a fabrication standpoint, i'm really not familiar with the challenges of enhanced switching capabilities. how challenging is it to continue creating a backbone to link our growingly wide growingly distributed computer?
switching technology is going to become more and more important to keep these systems connected. both internally and externally.
**(no OpenOffice on this school computer to check my own link, sorry)
PCI-E has symmetric bandwidth. Current generation graphics cards will undoubtedly not be able to take advantage of this feature, they've spent so long getting data to the graphics card that thats all they're optimized for, but in the long run this has some crucial implications.
Namely, it allows for graphics cards to operate better in situations exactly like this; clustered applications. As it stands, the graphics card can crunch an enormous amount of data, but is extremely poor at sending it back to the CPU & system. It's optimized for screen dumping only.
Sony's Cell is going to be absolutely crucial as a tech demo for this foresighted technology. We're heading towards a more distributed computer architecture where various specialized units pipe data between each other.
In summation, Its my hope that eventually graphics cards will catch up and perform better bi-directionally. After that, we've got to wait another 5 years for PCI-E implementations to catch up and perform better switching (vis-a-vise multiple fully-switched x16 busses). We are moving away from the CPU for high performance computing; the cpu currently performs both control and data-processing. Graphics cards are just the first wave of the distributed architecture phenomena, Cell will be a light-year jump towards the future of computing in the intricate levels of hardware reconfigurability. there's a good powerpoint on the patents behind cell here.
Ultimately this will lead towards the tearing down of the computer as a monolithic device, and a rethinking of what exactly the network and os's roles are. Queue exo-kernel and DragonFly BSD debates.
ther was a far better on the article on the future of digital audio a while back, i think it was even on slashdot. cannt find it now. it was pre del.icio.us, evidently.
i'd like to point out that CPU usage on a lot of audio processors is getting worse, even for the same task. A lot of the Via solutions dont try to offload anything at all. Its really quite disheartening.
And my other big pet peeve, syncrhonized audio. xntpd should let you sync a couple systems clocks, and music software should be able to compensate for renegade sound card clocks to keep music synced.
i'm attending one of those purportedly high-falutinosity institutions and my CompE gpa aint so grand. i have a good deal of experience. how maskable is my low gpa?
i'll report back in May. thank heavens, i'm out. at least i know the meaning of the word academic now.
technology consortiums will buy spectrum for their technology and when the technology grows old and die what corporate shareholder would sever the last limb propping up a technology?
Slashdot Mirror
ActiveMQ has REST bindings to make it language agnostic. This doesnt translate to native bindings for each language, true, but its something.
I thought that's what CodeHaus's ActiveMQ was for.
CodeHaus rocks, even if they are overly java biased for my tastes.
the twiddler is a one handed keyboard and pointing device. proficient users are able to type faster than qwerty keyboards enable. used in wearable computers, and just cool.
unfortunately the #$@$'s are charging $200+. thankfully i'm out of college soon and will hopefully be making money after that. anyone rouge dev shacks looking for a world class hacker + ace communicator?
myren
they're not the middlemen genius, they're the source. jobs is the middleman hawking xerox's warez to the public. no amount of mac idolary will wipe away that fact, not that jobs was the only one.
none what so ever because the blithering morons tried a shady game of declaring an "open" standard and charging an arm and a leg to use their "open" standard. so its used by a couple high-falutinosity automation suites but hasnt opened up any new markets.
which reads almost exaclty like what this zigbee "open" standard is trying to do, what its going to crack up to if these jackals keep it up.
i cant believe its 2005 and we dont have a decent low data rate protocol yet. yet another perfect textbook case of the failure of the markets, hell, the failure of markets to do the most drop dead obvious thing to benefit themselves.
the powers that be, the big consumer electronic players should jump on this opportunity and force the hand wrangling zigbee alliance to really open up the standard. it'll open up an entire new world of consumer electronics &c for the big players to sell to the consumers all over again.
-Myren
you guys need to stop advertising in chime-in-mode on slashdot and write some web pages on what the hell tinyos actually is. you guys have great word of mouth advertising, but it takes more than tat. i spent thirty minutes looking for content, for pictures of running boards, tech specs, for anything at all which would actually indicate what you've done on your web page. i'm not sure whether it was i who failed, or you who did.
unforunately you only get the +2 to handguns if you have the neural wetware and interface plugs. still pending on the surgery.
thats what i like to refer to as a good school. at least so long as you're still having to do work.
a lot of top name schools really arent all that special, they dont really encourage deep thought. they just have hard tests. and while there's something to be said for being able to pull off a gpa in that environment, there's a lot more factors when it comes to finding good coders. and you know what else, in the end, the process is no more than chinese water torture to prove yourself to the corps.
my suggestion for students? dont go to the big name schools. this might sound familiar; you were a star student, except you never studied for tests and skimped out on your homework. you've been hacking a decent part of your life. and now its time for college.
whatever you do, find a school which will encourage your creativity. big roaring top 20 programs with 2,000 kids in your class & major are not going to foster that creativity. you will be another slave to the machine, a machine designed only to seperate the wheat from the chaff. it will not be fun, and for the most part, it will not be educational. every other kid there will be just as bright as you and have half the social life to take away from studying.
your CS classes are going to be BS wherever you go. consider taking electrical engineering instead of cs, you know too much cs anyways. computer engineering is usually a very good middle ground (::raises hand, grad may 2005::).
in the end, you can present employers with your slew of groovy projects and your record for self-motivation. and you'll gain something else; a worthwhile education.
Myren
please let them make a badass heads up display with this
how pathetic. why slave your time copying someone elses piece of crap when you can craft your own?
i'm rapidly loosing faith that operating systems are in any way different from each other. its like arguing athlon/pentium: for the most part its the same bloody thing.
there's a million little operational differences but those are never going to take the windows crown. what we need is something different, something actually better at a deeper level.
its called innovation:
think on the boundary
build past it
whether i'm developping c++ or perl modules for apache, I use the mod_perl 2 docs. they are truly fantastic.
a huge shout out to the mod_perl team for not only documenting their own efforts, but for finally making some sense of Apache's scattered api.
mod_perl, and to a certain extent Java servlets, gives you a huge amount of power over the web serving process, and are suitable for developing web applications that can do almost anything with HTTP. (emph. mine)
even as you attempt to broaden the sense that mod_perl is more than just some content generating script, you undermind the essence of what you talk about.
mod_perl is capable of being used to write entirely different protocol handlers: you can make apache serve FTP or ssh with mod_perl, if you're insane enough to do so. it can completely alter the flow of information at any step in the proces, thanks to apache's beautiful filtering & module structuing.
as you state, mod_perl uses the apachi api to tie itself deeply into the apache server engine itself, performing all sorts of reconfiguration of apache. `tis truly divine.
theres no groundwork to allow Unix to surf the pervasive wave. instead there's only huge ancient walls which people have been waving their hands at for decades. the wall hasnt noticed. unix is a perfect multi-user base, except one flaw.
X needs a way to allow applications (wm's) to discern the source of input. Built off this core, window managers or X itself can hack solutions to craft "multiple cursors". (Ultimately the window manager is going to have to get deeply involved with this policy; I think the best solution is to simlpy expose the source of input and have the window manager hold state for each input-source and manipulate the single corepointer, "faking" multiple pointers. this prevents X from having to deal with drawing&policy (which is the wm's domain)). Currently the best interaction you can get is to mux together your inputs into one keyboard/mouse pair.
The multiple pointers in X problem has been around for a while, but no ones been able to crack it. X was simply never meant to have more than one cursor, never meant to assuming anything past a single keyboard and mouse.
The one plight of this solution is that every X input event would have to pass through the window manager, which I imagine is expensive.
synergy allows you to share input devices between computers (even cross platform) but the next logical step is missing.
All we need is some way to see the physical source of each input event.
There's no bigger achilles heel.
Myren
thank god i'm young enough to let the boomer generation gladly pioneer yet another round of drugs for me and my friends.
/duck
way to take one for science boomers.
Myren
The ZigBee specification describes a multihop routing protocol that has been tested in large networks on products made by multiple vendors. You won't have to write your own routing protocol.
We're still going to have to implement it though, which is a bit silly since the spec's are all there.
It just seems like yet another classic case of commercialism getting in the way of a good idea. That vendors wouldnt provide stacks freely is a sure way to cut sales in half. I guess in large part its because 802.15.4 solutions are rarely embedded in micros, so there's no target platform to release for. And releasing free source is giving away a competitive advantage. Still, its kind of like letting your own hand get in the way of your eyes.
Two others:
I still am somewhat skeptical of the alleged effectivenes of a 25kB mutli-hop routing protocol. There's a lot of issues with hidden transmitters & what not which generally need to be addressed, 25k seems like a rather thin line of jelly in that sandwitch they're holding.
Lastly, how does Zigbee Alliance plan to enforce their commercial restrictions? If a company goes out of its way to state that its not Zigbee compliant even though their product "happens" to be a flavor of 802.15.4 which is appearing to work fine with Zigbee, there's really nothing they can do,... right?
the spec is becoming available freely? where'd you hear this, and where can i hear it?
i'm still a bit skeptical. its my assumption that 802.15.4 doesnt compass any of the mesh routing standards. even with the free spec, when you're talking about having to do your own routing, writing or using a stack is still going to be a huge barrier to entrance.
more troublesome is my sneaking suspicion that many implementations will not play nicely together. zigbee is very non-trivial, i wouldnt be suprised to see little implementation differences have negative impact.
for all my trashing on zigbee, i'd just like to point out to the general public here that i think zigbee is the most useful wireless spec we've ever cooked up. it simply has a couple problems in implementation which make it unsuited towards the very-low-end wireless its being targetted towards, towards the true embedded. if they fix these barriers to entry, zigbee could fulfil the promise of connecting all the devices in our lives.
hmm, automated spiffy 3000 toaster.
zigbee is aimed at very price sensitive markets, but has one currently fatal flaw:
you have to purchase software stacks.
most any hardware a developer buys is worthless without another huge investment in a software stack to run the standard.
some people are just using a zigbee's basic transmit/recieve functionality withotu many of the integral spec features for this reason. its like buying an 802.11 chipset that doesnt work with anything else.
the zigbee industry desperately needs to get together and release free software for a number of different micro-architectures.
myren
i sincerely hope you're trolling if your proposing that dynamic languages are un-usable as production devices.
AOP is pretty integral to maintaining dynamic code, but thats yet another can of worms. the situation gets messy, but ultimately it needs to get messy.
dynamic languages are convenient to code in, but essential to the future of web architecture.
system.reflection is pretty juicy stuff.
i have a week of finals before skiing.
its that time before hell freezes over,
and the coder comes out to play.
hope you've got good conditions,
its been a crazy "winter" here on the east coast.
follup question:
many of these emerging distributed technologies rely upon increased switching capabilities. ps3 has some astronomical amount of internal bandwidth**. if cpu's actually are getting significantly harder to make faster, is there any correlation to the difficulty in making cheaper faster switching? i'm a computer engineer, i know a reasonable amount about the difficulties in scaling cpu performance. but from a fabrication standpoint, i'm really not familiar with the challenges of enhanced switching capabilities. how challenging is it to continue creating a backbone to link our growingly wide growingly distributed computer?
switching technology is going to become more and more important to keep these systems connected. both internally and externally.
**(no OpenOffice on this school computer to check my own link, sorry)
Myren
PCI-E has symmetric bandwidth. Current generation graphics cards will undoubtedly not be able to take advantage of this feature, they've spent so long getting data to the graphics card that thats all they're optimized for, but in the long run this has some crucial implications.
Namely, it allows for graphics cards to operate better in situations exactly like this; clustered applications. As it stands, the graphics card can crunch an enormous amount of data, but is extremely poor at sending it back to the CPU & system. It's optimized for screen dumping only.
Sony's Cell is going to be absolutely crucial as a tech demo for this foresighted technology. We're heading towards a more distributed computer architecture where various specialized units pipe data between each other.
In summation,
Its my hope that eventually graphics cards will catch up and perform better bi-directionally. After that, we've got to wait another 5 years for PCI-E implementations to catch up and perform better switching (vis-a-vise multiple fully-switched x16 busses). We are moving away from the CPU for high performance computing; the cpu currently performs both control and data-processing. Graphics cards are just the first wave of the distributed architecture phenomena, Cell will be a light-year jump towards the future of computing in the intricate levels of hardware reconfigurability. there's a good powerpoint on the patents behind cell here.
Ultimately this will lead towards the tearing down of the computer as a monolithic device, and a rethinking of what exactly the network and os's roles are. Queue exo-kernel and DragonFly BSD debates.
ther was a far better on the article on the future of digital audio a while back, i think it was even on slashdot. cannt find it now. it was pre del.icio.us, evidently.
i'd like to point out that CPU usage on a lot of audio processors is getting worse, even for the same task. A lot of the Via solutions dont try to offload anything at all. Its really quite disheartening.
And my other big pet peeve, syncrhonized audio. xntpd should let you sync a couple systems clocks, and music software should be able to compensate for renegade sound card clocks to keep music synced.
Myren
followup question:
how important is gpa?
i'm attending one of those purportedly high-falutinosity institutions and my CompE gpa aint so grand. i have a good deal of experience. how maskable is my low gpa?
i'll report back in May. thank heavens, i'm out. at least i know the meaning of the word academic now.
thanks
Myren
finally, a solution to this growing epedemic! too long we've let these villans roam the streets.
although, in the name of humanitarianism, i hope this prison does have good ventilation.
jk or something
technology consortiums will buy spectrum for their technology
and when the technology grows old and die
what corporate shareholder would sever the last limb propping up a technology?