I believe this would be a good time to plug Minidisc... Please stand by as I climb on my little soap box and starting raving and ranting..
Minidisc's have been around for years and for now, I believe them superior to portable/personal mp3 units in many ways:
1) 74 or 80 Minutes of media/music for around $2 a disc compared to around $200 for a 64 meg expansion for most mp3 players.
2) You can buy tons of blank minidiscs and record your favorite songs to them and take them on road trips and such. With most non-hard drive mp3 units you have to use a laptop or desktop system with the correct transfer software and accesss to your mp3's when you want to change the songs.
3) Most portable mini-disc units can record (digitally and analog) and playback. Want to go record that live performance of the Backdoor Boys or Britney Arguilera, take your minidisc recorder and a mic with you in your pocket.
4) Most smaller portable minidisc units are around the same size as the popular mp3 units.
5) Edit songs on the fly. Most minidisc units allow editing of the media on the disc. This includes slitting, combining, re-ordering and deleting songs.
There are of course a few down-side of minidisc compared to mp3 but since I'm preaching for minidisc, there's no way I'm going to mention those here..
Check out http://www.minidisc.org for more information..
True, but I'm looking for specifics. What is the quietest pump with the best throughput, what heatsink lends it self to welding/soldering the easiest, etc..
Well, since the subject was posted to slashdot I figured this would be the best time to ask:
I'm interested in doing a few water-cooling projects, mostly for the fun of it. I've seen webpages of people that have used copper sheet and welding to using the end of a PVC pipe. Is there a company out there that is making a commercial-quality water cooled heatsink?
A few points that I believe are important in water-cooling:
* Safety: I don't want my heatsink to spring a leak and fry my system.
* Noise: I want a quiet water pump that isnt much louder than my case fan.
* Size: I don't want to have to invest in a huge pump and radiator that sits outside my case.
* Price: I don't want to have to pay over $150 for the unit..
I am willing to make my own. I'm handy with tools and can usually hack something together correctly given the time.
In fact, it could be that the reason that earth occasionally swaps poles, is that the planets are really bits used in computing some cosmic calculation. Maybe the cosmos is already prototype of one of these devices.
If this is true and the universe is just a huge computer used in a huge calculation (who's answer is obviously 42) than just think of the uptime! Script kiddiez and administrators across the world will no longer be shoving record uptime's in each others face when god comes down and utters:
12:59AM, up 10 billion years+, 6,067 million users, load average: 2.23, 1.23, 1.20
Maybe Transmeta can get out of the processor business and invent a technology that prevents sites from getting slashdotted. Oh, wait, there allready is such a technology, its called mirroring!
This is one of my absolute favorite Apple products (can someone buy me a Cube, please?). It uses icons as applications but NOT as files. You tap the Notepad icon to go into that application and then select a tab to see all documents associated with that application.
I really liked this interface (I loved the newton, *true* handwriting recognition, cursive or print), it was simple, clean and compact. How often do you open a binary in netscape, an iso image in vi or a text file in a spreadsheet? Obviously this interface is not perfect but I definetly think its a start towards something new.
This is not flamebait, just an opinion: I am looking forward to KDE2 and have been playing with the beta releases, check it out.
Geoff
Re:Mac Mozilla M17 tries hard to reinvent the whee
on
Mozilla M17 Is Out
·
· Score: 1
The main reason for not using native GUI calls was compatibility. Go look at a webpage *form* in linux, mac and winblows and you'll see that the pages look quite a bit different because every platform uses its own GUI widgets. The idea was (and is) to make a custom, extensible GUI so that every web page would look *exactly* the same on every platform, they're doing a good job at it too...
I've looked over the interbase website but I can't seem to find much information about the product itself and it's capabilities so I will ask the slashdot community:
* What SQL-based features does it have and lack?
* What are the memory and CPU requirements?
* How stable is it?
* How does it compare to Postgres, Oracle and MySQL (in speed and features)?
* How well does it scale? Any clustering cabilities?
>With the way Unix does load averages, a load of 20 means that you are running 20 processors full boar and the other 172 processors are just sitting around running idle.
So what does this mean when my single CPU system reaches a load average of two? If a load average of one means that the system is running its single CPU at full boar, does that mean a load average of two is secretly using some processor in my machine that I never knew existed? What about the few times I've seen a single CPU system read 50 or so load average?
I was once told that the load average indicates how many processes are waiting for CPU time.
The chart in the story shows Jolt as the highest caffeine, 72mg in 12oz. Well, don't forget about Bawls!, it has 80mgs in a 10oz bottle! I drink this stuff when its "one of those mornings" or I want to go to a show or club and I just don't think I will have the energy. You'll know when it kicks in (and you'll definetly know when it starts to wear off)!
To purchase some of your own Bawls, check out ThinkGeek but I highly recommend against buying from BeveragesDirect, they don't answer the phone and forget to ship stuff...
The article mentions the fact that at stop lights and such, the engine actually shuts off and starts back up when you shift into gear and accelerate. I believe that Ars should have gone into this with more detail. Not only is shutting off and starting hard on an engine, it eats through gasoline like a tank during the starting.
When you start to crank the engine with the starter, your pumping gas *through* the engine for a second or two (or 10 depending on how hard your car starts). I say through in that I mean little if no gas gets combusted. Newer cars handle this much better by recylcing as much of this wasted fuel as possible but its' still not perfect. I would imagine that the best way (and hopefully the way that Honda does this) would be to have the electric motor roll the engine over (with no gas intake) for a few seconds to get the engine (and car) rolling and then start to pump gas into the engine where it will start to combust almost immediatly with little waste. If you don't believe what I'm saying, get in your car, drive it around the city shutting it off at every light and starting it up before you start to move. Not only will this reduce your gas milage and harm your engine in the long run, it will drain your battery and piss off the people behind you.
Another interesting point it the camshaft in this car. Almost every engine on the market today has a camshaft. An engine works by letting a gas and air mixture into a chamber (via opening and closing a vertical intake valve), compressing that mixture, combusting the mixture with a spark plug and opening and closing another valve called the exhaust valve to let the gas out. This is where we get a four-stroke engine from. The job of the camshaft is to open and close those intake and exhaust valves in the correct sequence and at the right time. Older cars had a "static" or non-variable camshaft. This was easy to engineer but wasn't the most effecient way of doing things. Due to many laws of physics and such, all engines have power curves where you trade many forces (power, speed, fuel economy, etc) for themselfs. Being able to adjust the camshaft as the engine moves through that curve helps to flatten those forces out and usually give a smoother ride. There are many different ways of achieving this variance in the camshaft, one of them being the way honda appears to have done it and other one being to get rid of the camshaft all together and use a pnuematic (sp) or there force to open and close the valves via a computer. Obviously other methods exist but those seem to be the most common right now.
Hybrid and/or electric cars have come a long way. Electric motors and engines haves increased in effeciency in the past years, new ideas and innovations continue to help the situation. I'm very happy to see what Honda is doing but I wish more car companies would begin to produce/release cars in the same idea into the main stream to produce competion. With comepetion usually comes innovation and a lower price tag.
When I get that $100,000/year job, I'll go get one of these to park next to my 1995 Saturn SC2 and my 1969 MGB GT.
Thanks for reading this comment/post, I hope it helped explain some things and maybe bring up more questions. Feel free to email me at the address I have registered with slashdot.org (remove the "nispam." from the addy) about this topic. I reserve the right to delete any annoying emails that are not on topic...:)
I disagree that this robot may be useless to the consumer. A walking robot that can go almost anywhere a human can go has many important possbilities in the real word:
* A hardened version that can withstand extreme heat would be great to replace firefighters in a civilian and or industrial/military setting
* At least for the next few years as a ground force in the armed forces to replace soldiers or troops.
* Space exploration for building structures in space or on another planet. One of these robots could work almost non-stop (if supplied with connected power) whereas a human would need much more time.
*Any dangerous or high-risk job such as mining, building sky-scrapers or handling large groups of small children.
* Someone to get my dinner and go to work for me when I don't feel like getting up in the moring...
Seriously though, something like this robot (it looks quite limited in agility still) has been a dream of people for many years now, I'm very impressed and happy to see this coming about...
I know this will be *taken* as being a flame but it isn't.
I know that gnome (and KDE) are still very early in there life but I don't see them heading in the correct direction. It's as if the all gnome people use 21inch monitors at 1600x1200, file browser windows are ridiculously bloated (in appearance), icon sizes are very large and widget white-space padding seems unnecessary. I'm still a fan of MacOS's finder GUI. Give me a title bar (close box on one side, window ops on the other please) and maybe another bar with directory stats (number of files/folders and current size of the directory in K). I wish the gnome people would stop going for appearance and start heading towards interface ergonomics, ease of use, fuctionality and intuitiveness. Right now, gnome feels more like a toy to me and less like a real GUI. I would be more than willing to help out on the project as far as human factors go if someone would contact me..
Moderators: Be rational please, this is intended as a comment, not a flame..
To prevent this DDoS from happening I think that everyone should start turning off their computers. Anyone that works at an ISP should go to the server room's and shut everything off. Not only will this stop *this* DDoS right in its tracks, it will save power.
"New Virus Bombards Mobile Phones With Junk Calls"
No, it bombards their cell phones with SMS (short for Short Message Service) messages, not phone calls. I wish slashdot article posters would pay more attention to what they are typing and read more carefully.
No, messages can't just magically appear on your phone but they can appear quite easily. You could easily create a virus that spams cell phones, for instance:
AT&T uses "555-555-1234@mobile.att.net" where 555-555-1234 is the cell phone number and mobile.att.net is the email-2-mobile gateway. Most cell phones use their own exchange apart from the land line community phone exchanges. So, you store a few email-2-mobile gateway servers, store a few exchanges for each gateway and just spin through all viable numbers. Quite easy. This is sort of what the afforementioned virus does, just much simpler.
I would think there would be a simple way to get around this too, maybe some cell phone companies allready do this. Since the cell phone service providers are the ones that provide the cell-2-mobile gateway why not set up an access list for each cell phone. Usually, you don't use your cell phone as a main mail reader and composer, usually you get messsages from a certain group of people. If a person trying to email your phone isn't on the access list, the gateway could simply email them a response telling them so and to send the message again or approve it for it to trully go through.
I just hope that someone doesn't come up with a way to *voice* spam cell phones...
>Seeing as how you can't physicaly steal a statilite. Only wrestel control.
Sure you can. If it's cheap enough for companies (such as the company that wrote napster) to launch servers into space via a "statilite", it will be cheap enough to knock one down. There are just as many problems with "server farms in space" as there are with them on an island. In fact, it may be easier and cheaper to use an island..
1. You can't just go to CompUSA, buy a PC and put it in space. Space has lots of environmental problems, extremes in temperature, radiation and other forces. How do you tell your boss "the server went down because a small piece of space debris hit it, it will be approximately 3-12 months before we can bring it back up."? 2. Although solutions are being developed, TCP/IP still has problems with the lag in space. "Ping server.inspace.net: 64 bytes from server.inspace.net time=30000ms"... 3. Its a real bitch to reset a server that BSOD'd in space.
Not that I dont think your idea is a really cool one, I just dont think were ready yet and I dont personally see much benefit in either space or an island. I think colocation of a server at a good hosting company is much more secure..
Slashdot Mirror
My life is now complete, I can die a happy man.
A new awards ceremony/show should be made, that clip wins every year until Sol collapses and we all die.
Geoff
I believe this would be a good time to plug Minidisc... Please stand by as I climb on my little soap box and starting raving and ranting..
:)
Minidisc's have been around for years and for now, I believe them superior to portable/personal mp3 units in many ways:
1) 74 or 80 Minutes of media/music for around $2 a disc compared to around $200 for a 64 meg expansion for most mp3 players.
2) You can buy tons of blank minidiscs and record your favorite songs to them and take them on road trips and such. With most non-hard drive mp3 units you have to use a laptop or desktop system with the correct transfer software and accesss to your mp3's when you want to change the songs.
3) Most portable mini-disc units can record (digitally and analog) and playback. Want to go record that live performance of the Backdoor Boys or Britney Arguilera, take your minidisc recorder and a mic with you in your pocket.
4) Most smaller portable minidisc units are around the same size as the popular mp3 units.
5) Edit songs on the fly. Most minidisc units allow editing of the media on the disc. This includes slitting, combining, re-ordering and deleting songs.
There are of course a few down-side of minidisc compared to mp3 but since I'm preaching for minidisc, there's no way I'm going to mention those here..
Check out http://www.minidisc.org for more information..
Thank you, and have a nice day!
>Frankly this seems more like "News for Finance Nerds" then anything directly technology related.
"News for Finance Nerds".. Isn't that redundant?
Just kidding, "News for Computer Nerds" is more redundant (if thats possible)..
Geoff
True, but I'm looking for specifics. What is the quietest pump with the best throughput, what heatsink lends it self to welding/soldering the easiest, etc..
Geoff
Well, since the subject was posted to slashdot I figured this would be the best time to ask:
I'm interested in doing a few water-cooling projects, mostly for the fun of it. I've seen webpages of people that have used copper sheet and welding to using the end of a PVC pipe. Is there a company out there that is making a commercial-quality water cooled heatsink?
A few points that I believe are important in water-cooling:
* Safety: I don't want my heatsink to spring a leak and fry my system.
* Noise: I want a quiet water pump that isnt much louder than my case fan.
* Size: I don't want to have to invest in a huge pump and radiator that sits outside my case.
* Price: I don't want to have to pay over $150 for the unit..
I am willing to make my own. I'm handy with tools and can usually hack something together correctly given the time.
Any links/ideas/discussion?
If this is true and the universe is just a huge computer used in a huge calculation (who's answer is obviously 42) than just think of the uptime! Script kiddiez and administrators across the world will no longer be shoving record uptime's in each others face when god comes down and utters:
12:59AM, up 10 billion years+, 6,067 million users, load average: 2.23, 1.23, 1.20
Geoff
Maybe Transmeta can get out of the processor business and invent a technology that prevents sites from getting slashdotted. Oh, wait, there allready is such a technology, its called mirroring!
Geoff
Its disheartening to see that americans are just catching up. The Klingons have had this technology for years!
Geoff
Go find someone with an Apple Newton...
This is one of my absolute favorite Apple products (can someone buy me a Cube, please?). It uses icons as applications but NOT as files. You tap the Notepad icon to go into that application and then select a tab to see all documents associated with that application.
I really liked this interface (I loved the newton, *true* handwriting recognition, cursive or print), it was simple, clean and compact. How often do you open a binary in netscape, an iso image in vi or a text file in a spreadsheet? Obviously this interface is not perfect but I definetly think its a start towards something new.
This is not flamebait, just an opinion: I am looking forward to KDE2 and have been playing with the beta releases, check it out.
Geoff
The main reason for not using native GUI calls was compatibility. Go look at a webpage *form* in linux, mac and winblows and you'll see that the pages look quite a bit different because every platform uses its own GUI widgets. The idea was (and is) to make a custom, extensible GUI so that every web page would look *exactly* the same on every platform, they're doing a good job at it too...
Geoff
I've looked over the interbase website but I can't seem to find much information about the product itself and it's capabilities so I will ask the slashdot community:
* What SQL-based features does it have and lack?
* What are the memory and CPU requirements?
* How stable is it?
* How does it compare to Postgres, Oracle and MySQL (in speed and features)?
* How well does it scale? Any clustering cabilities?
Thanks,
Geoff
Oddly enough, with 2.4.0-test4 I'm seeing the opposite, a 60% disk performance increase, much better than 2.4..
Geoff
>With the way Unix does load averages, a load of 20 means that you are running 20 processors full boar and the other 172 processors are just sitting around running idle.
So what does this mean when my single CPU system reaches a load average of two? If a load average of one means that the system is running its single CPU at full boar, does that mean a load average of two is secretly using some processor in my machine that I never knew existed? What about the few times I've seen a single CPU system read 50 or so load average?
I was once told that the load average indicates how many processes are waiting for CPU time.
Just wondering,
Geoff
The chart in the story shows Jolt as the highest caffeine, 72mg in 12oz. Well, don't forget about Bawls!, it has 80mgs in a 10oz bottle! I drink this stuff when its "one of those mornings" or I want to go to a show or club and I just don't think I will have the energy. You'll know when it kicks in (and you'll definetly know when it starts to wear off)!
To purchase some of your own Bawls, check out ThinkGeek but I highly recommend against buying from BeveragesDirect, they don't answer the phone and forget to ship stuff...
Geoffeg
Yay, another palm that is completely the same as the rest of the palms, but different!
I can't wait until 2010, when palm announces the palm MMMIX, 10 megs of memory, a new screen size and a completely different case, YAY!
Geoff
The article mentions the fact that at stop lights and such, the engine actually shuts off and starts back up when you shift into gear and accelerate. I believe that Ars should have gone into this with more detail. Not only is shutting off and starting hard on an engine, it eats through gasoline like a tank during the starting.
:)
When you start to crank the engine with the starter, your pumping gas *through* the engine for a second or two (or 10 depending on how hard your car starts). I say through in that I mean little if no gas gets combusted. Newer cars handle this much better by recylcing as much of this wasted fuel as possible but its' still not perfect. I would imagine that the best way (and hopefully the way that Honda does this) would be to have the electric motor roll the engine over (with no gas intake) for a few seconds to get the engine (and car) rolling and then start to pump gas into the engine where it will start to combust almost immediatly with little waste. If you don't believe what I'm saying, get in your car, drive it around the city shutting it off at every light and starting it up before you start to move. Not only will this reduce your gas milage and harm your engine in the long run, it will drain your battery and piss off the people behind you.
Another interesting point it the camshaft in this car. Almost every engine on the market today has a camshaft. An engine works by letting a gas and air mixture into a chamber (via opening and closing a vertical intake valve), compressing that mixture, combusting the mixture with a spark plug and opening and closing another valve called the exhaust valve to let the gas out. This is where we get a four-stroke engine from. The job of the camshaft is to open and close those intake and exhaust valves in the correct sequence and at the right time. Older cars had a "static" or non-variable camshaft. This was easy to engineer but wasn't the most effecient way of doing things. Due to many laws of physics and such, all engines have power curves where you trade many forces (power, speed, fuel economy, etc) for themselfs. Being able to adjust the camshaft as the engine moves through that curve helps to flatten those forces out and usually give a smoother ride. There are many different ways of achieving this variance in the camshaft, one of them being the way honda appears to have done it and other one being to get rid of the camshaft all together and use a pnuematic (sp) or there force to open and close the valves via a computer. Obviously other methods exist but those seem to be the most common right now.
Hybrid and/or electric cars have come a long way. Electric motors and engines haves increased in effeciency in the past years, new ideas and innovations continue to help the situation. I'm very happy to see what Honda is doing but I wish more car companies would begin to produce/release cars in the same idea into the main stream to produce competion. With comepetion usually comes innovation and a lower price tag.
When I get that $100,000/year job, I'll go get one of these to park next to my 1995 Saturn SC2 and my 1969 MGB GT.
Thanks for reading this comment/post, I hope it helped explain some things and maybe bring up more questions. Feel free to email me at the address I have registered with slashdot.org (remove the "nispam." from the addy) about this topic. I reserve the right to delete any annoying emails that are not on topic...
Geoff
I can't seem to find "Large, explosive, flaming pipe organ" on my Casio keyboard!
Geoff
If they could only develop some piece of hardware (or software too) to silence or turn down loud car stereo's I'd be happy.
:)
Sorry, I don't want to hear Britney Spears at 3000 db at 2 am in the morning. Come to think of it, I just don't want to hear Britney Spears, period!
Geoff
I disagree that this robot may be useless to the consumer. A walking robot that can go almost anywhere a human can go has many important possbilities in the real word:
* A hardened version that can withstand extreme heat would be great to replace firefighters in a civilian and or industrial/military setting
* At least for the next few years as a ground force in the armed forces to replace soldiers or troops.
* Space exploration for building structures in space or on another planet. One of these robots could work almost non-stop (if supplied with connected power) whereas a human would need much more time.
*Any dangerous or high-risk job such as mining, building sky-scrapers or handling large groups of small children.
* Someone to get my dinner and go to work for me when I don't feel like getting up in the moring...
Seriously though, something like this robot (it looks quite limited in agility still) has been a dream of people for many years now, I'm very impressed and happy to see this coming about...
Just my opinions,
Geoff
Article text... blah blah blah
It sounds crazy.
More article text... blah, blah, blah...
Posted with mozilla
I know this will be *taken* as being a flame but it isn't.
I know that gnome (and KDE) are still very early in there life but I don't see them heading in the correct direction. It's as if the all gnome people use 21inch monitors at 1600x1200, file browser windows are ridiculously bloated (in appearance), icon sizes are very large and widget white-space padding seems unnecessary. I'm still a fan of MacOS's finder GUI. Give me a title bar (close box on one side, window ops on the other please) and maybe another bar with directory stats (number of files/folders and current size of the directory in K). I wish the gnome people would stop going for appearance and start heading towards interface ergonomics, ease of use, fuctionality and intuitiveness. Right now, gnome feels more like a toy to me and less like a real GUI. I would be more than willing to help out on the project as far as human factors go if someone would contact me..
Moderators: Be rational please, this is intended as a comment, not a flame..
To prevent this DDoS from happening I think that everyone should start turning off their computers. Anyone that works at an ISP should go to the server room's and shut everything off. Not only will this stop *this* DDoS right in its tracks, it will save power.
shutdown -h now damnit
Geoff
"New Virus Bombards Mobile Phones With Junk Calls"
No, it bombards their cell phones with SMS (short for Short Message Service) messages, not phone calls. I wish slashdot article posters would pay more attention to what they are typing and read more carefully.
Geoff
No, messages can't just magically appear on your phone but they can appear quite easily. You could easily create a virus that spams cell phones, for instance:
AT&T uses "555-555-1234@mobile.att.net" where 555-555-1234 is the cell phone number and mobile.att.net is the email-2-mobile gateway. Most cell phones use their own exchange apart from the land line community phone exchanges. So, you store a few email-2-mobile gateway servers, store a few exchanges for each gateway and just spin through all viable numbers. Quite easy. This is sort of what the afforementioned virus does, just much simpler.
I would think there would be a simple way to get around this too, maybe some cell phone companies allready do this. Since the cell phone service providers are the ones that provide the cell-2-mobile gateway why not set up an access list for each cell phone. Usually, you don't use your cell phone as a main mail reader and composer, usually you get messsages from a certain group of people. If a person trying to email your phone isn't on the access list, the gateway could simply email them a response telling them so and to send the message again or approve it for it to trully go through.
I just hope that someone doesn't come up with a way to *voice* spam cell phones...
Geoff
>Seeing as how you can't physicaly steal a statilite. Only wrestel control.
Sure you can. If it's cheap enough for companies (such as the company that wrote napster) to launch servers into space via a "statilite", it will be cheap enough to knock one down. There are just as many problems with "server farms in space" as there are with them on an island. In fact, it may be easier and cheaper to use an island..
1. You can't just go to CompUSA, buy a PC and put it in space. Space has lots of environmental problems, extremes in temperature, radiation and other forces. How do you tell your boss "the server went down because a small piece of space debris hit it, it will be approximately 3-12 months before we can bring it back up."?
2. Although solutions are being developed, TCP/IP still has problems with the lag in space. "Ping server.inspace.net: 64 bytes from server.inspace.net time=30000ms"...
3. Its a real bitch to reset a server that BSOD'd in space.
Not that I dont think your idea is a really cool one, I just dont think were ready yet and I dont personally see much benefit in either space or an island. I think colocation of a server at a good hosting company is much more secure..