We still need better inverters. These are the devices that convert DC into AC for use by common appliances and to power your home. The ones designed for home operation are wimpy, apparently intended for a home where people trim back on using energy in electrical form, already. The ones designed specifically for the wide range of voltage change from photovoltaic arrays/strings are big expensive commercial units intended for selling power to utilities, or for the utilities to buy for themselves (they shut down and night and can't run from batteries very well).
I want to reduce my carbon footprint with emphasis on reducing use of fossil fuels in particular. I'm less concerned about burning wood than I am about burning gas (natural gas or liquified propane). So I'd like to run my kitchen from solar and wind generated electricity. That means I need on the order of 12 kW of power just for potential peak cooking. Add another 2 kW for microwave. Add some more watts for the blender, coffee maker, refrigerator, etc. It adds up.
One of the big makers of home inverters for general DC conversion (e.g. batteries charged from various sources) is Xantrex. But their largest unit in this market segment is only 5500 watts. Two of the North American 120 volt units can be "stacked" to get 120/240 volts, but that's still only 11 kW. Some other companies offer as much as 6000 watts in a single unit, and do not even appear to be "stackable". What we need is a line of inverters, each specifically designed for the various world power systems so people can use their common domestic appliances, but with a variety of power levels in many steps all the way up to 100 kW or more.
There is one technical issue with inverters, and this is not something that is easy to solve. It also exists to some extent with small generators. That issue is that under short circuit conditions, they produce only barely (about 15%) more current than their design rating. To many this might seem like a good thing. But it actually is a hazard. The reason is because short circuits will fail to trip home branch circuit breakers. A common circuit breaker rated for say 15 amps generally won't trip for a while under a 20 amp load, until its thermal element gets quite warm. For an instantaneous trip using its magnetic element, the current has to be significantly higher, like 150 amps or more. Utility power through a transformer can easily deliver several hundred amps under a short circuit condition. With hefty power lines and transformers these days, if you are close to the transformer, you could even get several thousand amps real close to the breaker panel. This is why if you have ever shorted out a power circuit, you get a nasty *POP*. That's some big amps followed by the breaker cutting the circuit off.
I've found some inverters that have circuit breakers on the output AC side that are rated at a higher amperage than the maximum they could deliver under a short circuit condition. In other words, short out the AC right after the circuit breaker and you can't even get enough juice to cause the breaker to kick off. The inverter itself may very well detect the overload and soon shut off.
Many appliances may not even work under this low fault current condition. Big motors can have trouble getting started if they can't pull 3 to 5 times the normal amperage for part or all of a second. And even some electronics wants that much power or more when you turn them on to charge up the power supply capacitors. One relative has found that his big screen TV, although using way less than the 5000 watts his generator can produce, just won't even turn on under the generator. When he turns it on with utility power, all the lights in the house dim significantly for just an instant as the monster sucks a huge number of amps.
Ultimately, if you want to power you whole home with AC power through an inverter that converts the DC stored in your batteries charged up from your solar and/or wind power sources, you'll need some hefty
This does NOT show any net benefit to IT workers of offshoring... which is what I think you meant when you said outsourcing.
What offshoring has done is:
Delay the shortage a few years by taking advantage of a new pool.
Lower the costs to big business by using cheaper workers.
Produce real fear, uncertainly, and doubt, among students in America and Europe about the prospects of a long term career in IT.
Produced a greater domestic shortage new technology graduates as a result of those students choosing non-tech study/career paths.
To validly assert that offshoring has produced a net benefit, you will need to show that the total number of technically oriented IT jobs (and engineering, too) in each country is greater than it would have been without it. I think we can easily agree that it has had that benefit on contries like India and China. But there is no evidence that more jobs exist in the USA as a result of this, unless you also include sales jobs and the like (which not so many techies can ever hope to do).
All that this does show, if these figures are valid, is that offshoring does not represent a permanent loss of technical jobs. But who do we blame for the shortage of technically trained people coming out of schools for the next few years? The correct blame belongs to the businesses that chose to not hired Americans for several years, creating a glut of unemployed and underemployed technology workers in the USA. If business wants to reverse that trend more quickly, they should start hiring up the people that are available now.
For me this is actually a very interesting development. I might actually be able to find a company that would pay me to move to India.
Exactly! There is absolutely no need for civil dates and traditional clock times in a space mission, with the exception of showing things to humans in terms they can understand. Everything should be done absolutely linearly because physics does not follow our strange date and time structures. Even the Julian Day or modified JD is excessive for missions beyond the Earth. The ultimate clock will just be counting a large integer at a standard clocking rate based on a standard epoch.
The availability of CDs are why I do not pirate music. I can buy the music I want on a CD and rip it into whatever I want to play it on. That happens to be my Linux and BSD based desktops for the most part. As long as the CD is available, clearly the music industry considers me (a Linux/BSD user) in their market. So it would be wrong for me to deprive the music industry of wealth and riches by pirating music online, since online purchases like iTunes don't work on my computers. However, if the music industry were to stop selling CDs, then clearly they would not longer be considering me to be in the market. They wouldn't be expecting revenues from music I like. So then, downloading the music for free would not be depriving them of any revenues whatsoever, since they aren't expecting any from people like me (who use Linux/BSD). If that day ever comes, I would have no moral reason not to download. Also, if they decide that the "extras" on a CD shall be DRM that doesn't let me play the music I pay for, then I would consider that as being excluded from the market, too.
It's not just cheaper prices in foreign countries. The domestic distribution companies, e.g. "Nikon USA", etc., are the ones doing the marketing and advertising to promote the Nikon brand in the USA. Same for many other companies. In exchange for paying for what is essentially an untrackable investment (they don't literally know for sure that X dollars spent on a TV ad produced Y dollars in sales revenue), they get the "exclusive" on selling these products in the USA. They are also the ones that service the warranty (as opposed to the parent company in the parent country). In many cases the parent company wholely owns the domestic company. This is structured this way so there aren't complications in dealing with tax issues and such. If the parent company in some foreign country were doing a world-wide TV/magazine/internet ad campaign, they can't so easily get the tax considerations due to the ambiguity of measuring how much was spent in each country. In effect, the higher prices in the USA are paying for advertising in the USA, among other things.
This is entirely different than a case of a manufacturing facility that runs a production under contract from a company like Cisco making some extra of the same design, perhaps with cheaper components, and selling them secretly to some distributor that has connections in the USA where they want to sell them. This generally happens with premium units that come with good support from companies like Cisco, where they cost more to pay for that support. By buying the black market units, you're really not paying for support, and may well be screwing yourself with inferior parts, too. Whoever really made them and really brought them into the USA is not worried about losing their reputation in the market... you don't even know who they are.
Many photo professionals regularly buy gray market cameras and lenses because they are more likely to fail as a result of the abuse by the photographer than any manufacturing glitches. It's often a smarter buy, especially if they are taking the equipment out of the country, such as to do photojournalism in places like Iraq and Afghanistan (more than half the equipment doesn't even make it back, sometimes). Many others buy overseas, anyway.
I've bought gray market lenses and never had any trouble. I've had one problem once with one lens bought on USA warranty, but it happened about a month after the warranty period. I would generally not worry about the gray market gear if the seller is going to cover it.
These are not fakes. If you buy a gray market Nikon or Canon lens, and it has the name Nikon or Canon on it, it almost certainly is made by them. The difference is that it is packaged for a different country where they lower the price there to compete in that country's weaker economy. Additionally, the domestic arm of the parent company in each country is invested in by different investment groups that want to be the ones to make the money. This is why they call these things gray market instead of black market, because they really are non-fakes, but just diverted in their distribution.
Computers may be getting smaller, but applications keep getting bigger and more bloated at an even faster pace. As long as there is the bloat, datacenters will keep growing under the planet is covered with them.
That's definitely an interesting approach. Maybe it has a truly fundamental meaning about PI? But that sqrt(8) in there bothers me a bit. All in all, this calculation would take more time than the division would. But it is a great "compression" of PI.
I started designing just such a thing over a year ago. It hasn't gotten to the coding stage as I never invested in the hardware necessary to do it. Unfortunately the TV station I was hoping to work with went out of business, so the project got shelved. But it would have been rather easy and cheap to do for standard definition, NTSC or PAL. High definition would have been harder because more expensive hardware would be needed, and the data rate would have been higher making it necessary to be more careful in the architecture design.
My design would have involved multiple computers in a high speed LAN. One, plus a backup, would be the "play to air engine". It would have a very lean design program that would play out the video/audio to the hardware. The hardware would do the decompression and syncronization. It could then output to composite, component, or SDI, depending on the hardware used. The other machines would essentially be specialized file servers that would serve up the video files using HTTP (not NFS or SMB). Another machine would run a scheduling database (probably MySQL) and be accessed by the engine to keep up to date on the schedule, and accessed by a web interface by programming and sales to schedule programming and select the commercials to play in breaks. And one more machine would be used by master control to ingest and segment programming. Additional machines of each type could be added as needed, such as more file storage space, and parallel ingestion.
The notes I had on the software design included putting some smarts into the system so that it would automatically handle things like commercial and PSA rotations, and master control operator directed last minute schedule or timing adjustments. Having done master control entirely manually, and semi-automated, I've seen how things can get messed up, and how the existing crop of automation facilities are really fairly bad.
I would definitely avoid commodity tools like cron for this. Things are too hard to change on the fly and confirm what is about to happen. What I would want such an engine to have is a direct display (not a refreshing web browser or anything clunky like that) that constantly showed what just played, what is playing, and a list of several things about to be played. Additionally, there would be master control commands to do things like delete or change the schedule immediately on the fly. There would also be commands to change the timing in case it becomes necessary to change when a sequence of segments or programs need to be forced to end at a different time. Then it would duplicate frames or drop frame periodically to adjust for that.
I also planned to use a very lean custom Linux system (thus making its own distribution, in effect) that can reboot very fast in case of power problems (like cheap UPSes failing) and get back on track, like being able to resume video out within a second or two of the kernel launching the first user space process. This lean system would essentially have nothing else running but the video engine program, and a shell on a 2nd console for maintenance. There would be no network services, no DNS, no SSH. It would be tight and lean. The other machines (database, ingest, storage) might have more running on them.
So, to answer your question... most definitely yes. How good it will be depends on how goo you are at building a system that best matches the needs, and programming the software appropriately.
OK, so you really meant 355/113. The value of that fraction is actually accurate to 7 digits, which is 1 digit more than how it is expressed in whole fraction form. But if you look further, you can find a fraction that has an accuracy that is 3 digits more than the total number of digits in the fraction. That fraction is (with digits chopped so it doesn't get mangled in Slashdot HTML):
That's 217 numerator digits and 216 denominator digits for a total of 433 digits that gives PI to 436 digits. It doesn't get any better until a fraction with 14593 digits in both numerator and denominator for a total of 29186 digits that gives PI to an accuracy of 29190 digits, 4 more digits than in the fraction.
But 355/113 is easier to remember and 355/133 is apparently easier to type:-)
I have to agree with you that too many browsers (even Firefox) handle this so poorly. For example, it should be possible to right click any image and select "disable animation", or "enable animation", or even "animate one cycle". I'd also like to have a "stop everything" button that freezes everything, including animations, javascript, java, flash... everything. I just want to read the text without being distracted or slowing down my CPU.
But despite all that, I still wish PNG had had animation from day one. Then at least we could have had a uniform consistent format, and completely dumped GIF, whether the animations are bad or OK.
I'm not confused at all. I think he will find that the pricing he could offer is lower. Then it should be obvious that the real cause is the fact that there are too few providing the service, at least in that market segment (embedded Linux, apparently).
If you were to find that getting the support for the app server (that you don't want to hire programmers of) is exceedingly expensive, then you also need to consider this. It's not that you must get into the business of providing the support. But do consider what the pricing would be if you did (in which case you would surely hire someone who knows the app server). If your own pricing gives you the same figure, then you'll understand you're paying the going rate, even if it hurts to make that payment. OTOH, if you discover you could provide the service at a much lower rate, then you'll know you... and many others... are getting ripped off, perhaps due to lack of competition. FOSS does foster competition in support. But people do need to get into that business to make it work.
And of course the public would be hard to educate on why they need to avoid these designs, and products from Intel in particular. I hope it actually does get cracked and the FCC turns around and fines Intel millions of dollars for not "black boxing" the RF control functions.
This is also a reason why we need more of a base of users of Linux and BSD. I'm not really a person who is interested in killing Microsoft as some people are. But I really want to get Linux and BSD up to a usage level where hardware manufacturers can't dismiss them and must consider them among the OS choices they need to make their products work correctly in.
The six disconnect rule applies to a source of power. If you are running a generator inside the building, and it is wired such that the code comes into force, then the disconnect rule applies. It doesn't matter even if there is no wire coming in at all. This rule has been around for a long long time. I know because I've gotten a red tag from an inspector for this very reason. This is why I began to learn the electrical code so thoroughly. Remember, the code actually comes from the NFPA... this is substantially about protecting people and protecting fire fighters, too. There's a reason why fire fighters need to be able to shut off all the power in the building, including battery supplied power. If it's part of the building, they give a damn, because fire fighters have died as a result of these rules not being followed. I sure hope someone from NYFD is reading this article.
We do not want to spend time for any OSS bug fixing so our main requirement was -official support for all OSS products-.
It seems this business decision was actually wrong for you. It might not be for many others, but it seems it was for you. Businesses that are in the business of doing something other than computer related work (for example, a law firm), such a decision to outsource all the support would usually be a good one. But in your case, I think that is not so. The behaviour of the core system is actually a critical element of your business model, and by outsourcing that, you will be paying premium.
Why not call a meeting together with both technical staff and business staff, and raise the issue of what you (your business) would have to charge if you (your business) were to offer support to other companies for the very thing you wanted to outsource. See if you can come up with a price. If that price is similar to what you've found in the market, then apparently you already understand why the price is that high. But if the pricing you come up with is significantly lower, then you have identified a new business model to expand into.
There once was a time when the firmware came built in to the device when you bought it. Actually, external wireless routers still do. It's the internal cards that seem to be so dumbed down that they have to have the driver load the firmware each time.
Part of the problem is that this approach complicates software distribution because the firmware has to be included in the wrong place (the OS). It needs to be included in the right place (built in to the hardware). If Intel had built the firmware into the hardware (and provided a separate tool to update it when needed), and documented the interface to access the device, then Theo would not be having this issue and the device could be truly open.
As much of the firmware that is essential to comply with the FCC rules (or equivalent in other countries) should be separated off from the rest. That part should come built in to the hardware and not need to be loaded from the driver. It would only be changed if an upgrade is needed and then only with an upgrade tool. If properly isolated and small, it should be easy enough to debug and not require very many upgrades. The rest, however much that would be, that would not impact the radio regulations, can then be opened up.
I suspect it is highly likely that Intel is playing this game because they failed to design the card or chipset properly. I've seen so many badly designed chips from Intel in the past (like ethernet ones that lose sync when more than so many 0's come in), that it's easy enough to believe this is yet another poor design from Intel. The proper way would be to isolate the minimum portion that controls the regulated details into its own section. That would be things like frequency and transmitter power. Other aspects, like the coding used according to the IEEE standard, really don't need to be isolated. And the frequency would be bound to a set of channel numbers, so the open firmware or the OS driver could select the channel number, and have the selection enforced by the isolated section that controls the regulated aspects. So if the OS selects a channel not valid for that area, the transmitter will not function and an error status indicating this can be sent back.
None of this is hard to do. The problem is likely that Intel designs themselves into a corner because they don't think about open source during the design process. If they did, they could design it like above or work out something like that which works well with open source.
How it is that the closed firmware figures out which country it is in, now that is a mystery to me. You can't make an assumption based on where it is purchased (people do carry these things around), and you can't trust the OS to give a correct country code (else someone would give a code that indicates a country that allows everything... there are a few of those).
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We still need better inverters. These are the devices that convert DC into AC for use by common appliances and to power your home. The ones designed for home operation are wimpy, apparently intended for a home where people trim back on using energy in electrical form, already. The ones designed specifically for the wide range of voltage change from photovoltaic arrays/strings are big expensive commercial units intended for selling power to utilities, or for the utilities to buy for themselves (they shut down and night and can't run from batteries very well).
I want to reduce my carbon footprint with emphasis on reducing use of fossil fuels in particular. I'm less concerned about burning wood than I am about burning gas (natural gas or liquified propane). So I'd like to run my kitchen from solar and wind generated electricity. That means I need on the order of 12 kW of power just for potential peak cooking. Add another 2 kW for microwave. Add some more watts for the blender, coffee maker, refrigerator, etc. It adds up.
One of the big makers of home inverters for general DC conversion (e.g. batteries charged from various sources) is Xantrex. But their largest unit in this market segment is only 5500 watts. Two of the North American 120 volt units can be "stacked" to get 120/240 volts, but that's still only 11 kW. Some other companies offer as much as 6000 watts in a single unit, and do not even appear to be "stackable". What we need is a line of inverters, each specifically designed for the various world power systems so people can use their common domestic appliances, but with a variety of power levels in many steps all the way up to 100 kW or more.
There is one technical issue with inverters, and this is not something that is easy to solve. It also exists to some extent with small generators. That issue is that under short circuit conditions, they produce only barely (about 15%) more current than their design rating. To many this might seem like a good thing. But it actually is a hazard. The reason is because short circuits will fail to trip home branch circuit breakers. A common circuit breaker rated for say 15 amps generally won't trip for a while under a 20 amp load, until its thermal element gets quite warm. For an instantaneous trip using its magnetic element, the current has to be significantly higher, like 150 amps or more. Utility power through a transformer can easily deliver several hundred amps under a short circuit condition. With hefty power lines and transformers these days, if you are close to the transformer, you could even get several thousand amps real close to the breaker panel. This is why if you have ever shorted out a power circuit, you get a nasty *POP*. That's some big amps followed by the breaker cutting the circuit off.
I've found some inverters that have circuit breakers on the output AC side that are rated at a higher amperage than the maximum they could deliver under a short circuit condition. In other words, short out the AC right after the circuit breaker and you can't even get enough juice to cause the breaker to kick off. The inverter itself may very well detect the overload and soon shut off.
Many appliances may not even work under this low fault current condition. Big motors can have trouble getting started if they can't pull 3 to 5 times the normal amperage for part or all of a second. And even some electronics wants that much power or more when you turn them on to charge up the power supply capacitors. One relative has found that his big screen TV, although using way less than the 5000 watts his generator can produce, just won't even turn on under the generator. When he turns it on with utility power, all the lights in the house dim significantly for just an instant as the monster sucks a huge number of amps.
Ultimately, if you want to power you whole home with AC power through an inverter that converts the DC stored in your batteries charged up from your solar and/or wind power sources, you'll need some hefty
This does NOT show any net benefit to IT workers of offshoring ... which is what I think you meant when you said outsourcing.
What offshoring has done is:
To validly assert that offshoring has produced a net benefit, you will need to show that the total number of technically oriented IT jobs (and engineering, too) in each country is greater than it would have been without it. I think we can easily agree that it has had that benefit on contries like India and China. But there is no evidence that more jobs exist in the USA as a result of this, unless you also include sales jobs and the like (which not so many techies can ever hope to do).
All that this does show, if these figures are valid, is that offshoring does not represent a permanent loss of technical jobs. But who do we blame for the shortage of technically trained people coming out of schools for the next few years? The correct blame belongs to the businesses that chose to not hired Americans for several years, creating a glut of unemployed and underemployed technology workers in the USA. If business wants to reverse that trend more quickly, they should start hiring up the people that are available now.
For me this is actually a very interesting development. I might actually be able to find a company that would pay me to move to India.
Exactly! There is absolutely no need for civil dates and traditional clock times in a space mission, with the exception of showing things to humans in terms they can understand. Everything should be done absolutely linearly because physics does not follow our strange date and time structures. Even the Julian Day or modified JD is excessive for missions beyond the Earth. The ultimate clock will just be counting a large integer at a standard clocking rate based on a standard epoch.
A D365 bug?
Just C and dietlibc.
The availability of CDs are why I do not pirate music. I can buy the music I want on a CD and rip it into whatever I want to play it on. That happens to be my Linux and BSD based desktops for the most part. As long as the CD is available, clearly the music industry considers me (a Linux/BSD user) in their market. So it would be wrong for me to deprive the music industry of wealth and riches by pirating music online, since online purchases like iTunes don't work on my computers. However, if the music industry were to stop selling CDs, then clearly they would not longer be considering me to be in the market. They wouldn't be expecting revenues from music I like. So then, downloading the music for free would not be depriving them of any revenues whatsoever, since they aren't expecting any from people like me (who use Linux/BSD). If that day ever comes, I would have no moral reason not to download. Also, if they decide that the "extras" on a CD shall be DRM that doesn't let me play the music I pay for, then I would consider that as being excluded from the market, too.
The first one million units sold shall have DRM disabled.
It's not just cheaper prices in foreign countries. The domestic distribution companies, e.g. "Nikon USA", etc., are the ones doing the marketing and advertising to promote the Nikon brand in the USA. Same for many other companies. In exchange for paying for what is essentially an untrackable investment (they don't literally know for sure that X dollars spent on a TV ad produced Y dollars in sales revenue), they get the "exclusive" on selling these products in the USA. They are also the ones that service the warranty (as opposed to the parent company in the parent country). In many cases the parent company wholely owns the domestic company. This is structured this way so there aren't complications in dealing with tax issues and such. If the parent company in some foreign country were doing a world-wide TV/magazine/internet ad campaign, they can't so easily get the tax considerations due to the ambiguity of measuring how much was spent in each country. In effect, the higher prices in the USA are paying for advertising in the USA, among other things.
This is entirely different than a case of a manufacturing facility that runs a production under contract from a company like Cisco making some extra of the same design, perhaps with cheaper components, and selling them secretly to some distributor that has connections in the USA where they want to sell them. This generally happens with premium units that come with good support from companies like Cisco, where they cost more to pay for that support. By buying the black market units, you're really not paying for support, and may well be screwing yourself with inferior parts, too. Whoever really made them and really brought them into the USA is not worried about losing their reputation in the market ... you don't even know who they are.
Many photo professionals regularly buy gray market cameras and lenses because they are more likely to fail as a result of the abuse by the photographer than any manufacturing glitches. It's often a smarter buy, especially if they are taking the equipment out of the country, such as to do photojournalism in places like Iraq and Afghanistan (more than half the equipment doesn't even make it back, sometimes). Many others buy overseas, anyway.
I've bought gray market lenses and never had any trouble. I've had one problem once with one lens bought on USA warranty, but it happened about a month after the warranty period. I would generally not worry about the gray market gear if the seller is going to cover it.
These are not fakes. If you buy a gray market Nikon or Canon lens, and it has the name Nikon or Canon on it, it almost certainly is made by them. The difference is that it is packaged for a different country where they lower the price there to compete in that country's weaker economy. Additionally, the domestic arm of the parent company in each country is invested in by different investment groups that want to be the ones to make the money. This is why they call these things gray market instead of black market, because they really are non-fakes, but just diverted in their distribution.
Just goes to show how sex motivates. Afterall, look what the "16 virgins in heaven" hypocracy has done.
From TFA:
The simple solution was already revealed.
Computers may be getting smaller, but applications keep getting bigger and more bloated at an even faster pace. As long as there is the bloat, datacenters will keep growing under the planet is covered with them.
Here is an alternate link since it appears the original site has been emptied.
That's definitely an interesting approach. Maybe it has a truly fundamental meaning about PI? But that sqrt(8) in there bothers me a bit. All in all, this calculation would take more time than the division would. But it is a great "compression" of PI.
No. But a program I wrote did.
Hell no. I can't even remember my Slashdot password.
I started designing just such a thing over a year ago. It hasn't gotten to the coding stage as I never invested in the hardware necessary to do it. Unfortunately the TV station I was hoping to work with went out of business, so the project got shelved. But it would have been rather easy and cheap to do for standard definition, NTSC or PAL. High definition would have been harder because more expensive hardware would be needed, and the data rate would have been higher making it necessary to be more careful in the architecture design.
My design would have involved multiple computers in a high speed LAN. One, plus a backup, would be the "play to air engine". It would have a very lean design program that would play out the video/audio to the hardware. The hardware would do the decompression and syncronization. It could then output to composite, component, or SDI, depending on the hardware used. The other machines would essentially be specialized file servers that would serve up the video files using HTTP (not NFS or SMB). Another machine would run a scheduling database (probably MySQL) and be accessed by the engine to keep up to date on the schedule, and accessed by a web interface by programming and sales to schedule programming and select the commercials to play in breaks. And one more machine would be used by master control to ingest and segment programming. Additional machines of each type could be added as needed, such as more file storage space, and parallel ingestion.
The notes I had on the software design included putting some smarts into the system so that it would automatically handle things like commercial and PSA rotations, and master control operator directed last minute schedule or timing adjustments. Having done master control entirely manually, and semi-automated, I've seen how things can get messed up, and how the existing crop of automation facilities are really fairly bad.
I would definitely avoid commodity tools like cron for this. Things are too hard to change on the fly and confirm what is about to happen. What I would want such an engine to have is a direct display (not a refreshing web browser or anything clunky like that) that constantly showed what just played, what is playing, and a list of several things about to be played. Additionally, there would be master control commands to do things like delete or change the schedule immediately on the fly. There would also be commands to change the timing in case it becomes necessary to change when a sequence of segments or programs need to be forced to end at a different time. Then it would duplicate frames or drop frame periodically to adjust for that.
I also planned to use a very lean custom Linux system (thus making its own distribution, in effect) that can reboot very fast in case of power problems (like cheap UPSes failing) and get back on track, like being able to resume video out within a second or two of the kernel launching the first user space process. This lean system would essentially have nothing else running but the video engine program, and a shell on a 2nd console for maintenance. There would be no network services, no DNS, no SSH. It would be tight and lean. The other machines (database, ingest, storage) might have more running on them.
So, to answer your question ... most definitely yes. How good it will be depends on how goo you are at building a system that best matches the needs, and programming the software appropriately.
OK, so you really meant 355/113. The value of that fraction is actually accurate to 7 digits, which is 1 digit more than how it is expressed in whole fraction form. But if you look further, you can find a fraction that has an accuracy that is 3 digits more than the total number of digits in the fraction. That fraction is (with digits chopped so it doesn't get mangled in Slashdot HTML):
1901870728 5669230760 9014394471 4770339621 5907683135 4633719252 6115562704 3396809635 6432000780 8107929370 2997523451 8768883574 1387003036 8533612856 7115805986 7702399073 2279944269 0522019469 9766118756 0590556190 3648850292 8002591
... divided by ...
6053842551 4642032610 2361023215 9405317163 9147815034 5020739231 2531721347 4068823247 6946000058 7137745497 9656144746 8267746412 8740227175 4410094658 7144148739 6268034351 3347328160 6663121381 1257617460 3015134435 3855924025 288111
That's 217 numerator digits and 216 denominator digits for a total of 433 digits that gives PI to 436 digits. It doesn't get any better until a fraction with 14593 digits in both numerator and denominator for a total of 29186 digits that gives PI to an accuracy of 29190 digits, 4 more digits than in the fraction.
But 355/113 is easier to remember and 355/133 is apparently easier to type :-)
I have to agree with you that too many browsers (even Firefox) handle this so poorly. For example, it should be possible to right click any image and select "disable animation", or "enable animation", or even "animate one cycle". I'd also like to have a "stop everything" button that freezes everything, including animations, javascript, java, flash ... everything. I just want to read the text without being distracted or slowing down my CPU.
But despite all that, I still wish PNG had had animation from day one. Then at least we could have had a uniform consistent format, and completely dumped GIF, whether the animations are bad or OK.
I'm not confused at all. I think he will find that the pricing he could offer is lower. Then it should be obvious that the real cause is the fact that there are too few providing the service, at least in that market segment (embedded Linux, apparently).
If you were to find that getting the support for the app server (that you don't want to hire programmers of) is exceedingly expensive, then you also need to consider this. It's not that you must get into the business of providing the support. But do consider what the pricing would be if you did (in which case you would surely hire someone who knows the app server). If your own pricing gives you the same figure, then you'll understand you're paying the going rate, even if it hurts to make that payment. OTOH, if you discover you could provide the service at a much lower rate, then you'll know you ... and many others ... are getting ripped off, perhaps due to lack of competition. FOSS does foster competition in support. But people do need to get into that business to make it work.
And of course the public would be hard to educate on why they need to avoid these designs, and products from Intel in particular. I hope it actually does get cracked and the FCC turns around and fines Intel millions of dollars for not "black boxing" the RF control functions.
This is also a reason why we need more of a base of users of Linux and BSD. I'm not really a person who is interested in killing Microsoft as some people are. But I really want to get Linux and BSD up to a usage level where hardware manufacturers can't dismiss them and must consider them among the OS choices they need to make their products work correctly in.
So there is no firmware to load in?
The six disconnect rule applies to a source of power. If you are running a generator inside the building, and it is wired such that the code comes into force, then the disconnect rule applies. It doesn't matter even if there is no wire coming in at all. This rule has been around for a long long time. I know because I've gotten a red tag from an inspector for this very reason. This is why I began to learn the electrical code so thoroughly. Remember, the code actually comes from the NFPA ... this is substantially about protecting people and protecting fire fighters, too. There's a reason why fire fighters need to be able to shut off all the power in the building, including battery supplied power. If it's part of the building, they give a damn, because fire fighters have died as a result of these rules not being followed. I sure hope someone from NYFD is reading this article.
It seems this business decision was actually wrong for you. It might not be for many others, but it seems it was for you. Businesses that are in the business of doing something other than computer related work (for example, a law firm), such a decision to outsource all the support would usually be a good one. But in your case, I think that is not so. The behaviour of the core system is actually a critical element of your business model, and by outsourcing that, you will be paying premium.
Why not call a meeting together with both technical staff and business staff, and raise the issue of what you (your business) would have to charge if you (your business) were to offer support to other companies for the very thing you wanted to outsource. See if you can come up with a price. If that price is similar to what you've found in the market, then apparently you already understand why the price is that high. But if the pricing you come up with is significantly lower, then you have identified a new business model to expand into.
There once was a time when the firmware came built in to the device when you bought it. Actually, external wireless routers still do. It's the internal cards that seem to be so dumbed down that they have to have the driver load the firmware each time.
Part of the problem is that this approach complicates software distribution because the firmware has to be included in the wrong place (the OS). It needs to be included in the right place (built in to the hardware). If Intel had built the firmware into the hardware (and provided a separate tool to update it when needed), and documented the interface to access the device, then Theo would not be having this issue and the device could be truly open.
As much of the firmware that is essential to comply with the FCC rules (or equivalent in other countries) should be separated off from the rest. That part should come built in to the hardware and not need to be loaded from the driver. It would only be changed if an upgrade is needed and then only with an upgrade tool. If properly isolated and small, it should be easy enough to debug and not require very many upgrades. The rest, however much that would be, that would not impact the radio regulations, can then be opened up.
I suspect it is highly likely that Intel is playing this game because they failed to design the card or chipset properly. I've seen so many badly designed chips from Intel in the past (like ethernet ones that lose sync when more than so many 0's come in), that it's easy enough to believe this is yet another poor design from Intel. The proper way would be to isolate the minimum portion that controls the regulated details into its own section. That would be things like frequency and transmitter power. Other aspects, like the coding used according to the IEEE standard, really don't need to be isolated. And the frequency would be bound to a set of channel numbers, so the open firmware or the OS driver could select the channel number, and have the selection enforced by the isolated section that controls the regulated aspects. So if the OS selects a channel not valid for that area, the transmitter will not function and an error status indicating this can be sent back.
None of this is hard to do. The problem is likely that Intel designs themselves into a corner because they don't think about open source during the design process. If they did, they could design it like above or work out something like that which works well with open source.
How it is that the closed firmware figures out which country it is in, now that is a mystery to me. You can't make an assumption based on where it is purchased (people do carry these things around), and you can't trust the OS to give a correct country code (else someone would give a code that indicates a country that allows everything ... there are a few of those).