an interesting exercise in self-awareness.
on
Online Journals
·
· Score: 3
I kept one for a couple of years, a few years back... It was an interesting exploration of self in a place that's not-quite-real. You learn to dive deep into your psyche to pull out some new nugget to mull over in a matter of minutes. Contemplating the nature of a word; remembering a day gone by differently...
Towards the end though, after two years of daily entries, I'd covered pretty much everything of importance in my life up to that point in time. It was time to start living some more life worth writing about.:-)
I'll probably start another in the future, but not just yet...
For the rest of it, I think Charmed Technology has the right idea. The ultimate form for our every-day tech is when it no longer looks like tech. It's the peripherals that count. A single screen that can pull the video from any device, clip-on headphones to listen to any audio, and cameras and microphones added as you see fit - the Blue Tooth promise.
To be honest, the barriers to physical size reduction are power-source and connectivity between chips. Watch the SOC developments (System-On-Chip) for significant shrinks from multi-chip to single-chip forms. At the rate feature size is shrinking on-chip, the limitation isn't how many transistors or gates you can squeeze on, it's how many bond-pads you need to I/O with the chip.
Aside: Bought myself a couple of E-holsters to take care of more immediate gadget-loading. Works well under a sweater or jacket.
It would be interesting to compare how techno-political interactions happen with you folks to the South, with our situation up here in Canada. After all, our capital (Ottawa) also happens to be the primary hub of tech activity - our "Silicon Valley North".
True, but at least it's a lesser moral issue than the outright "theft" of property that has the industry all litigaseous.
It works both ways though. What's to stop an artist from applying DoS and/or viral techniques to line their pockets with hundreds of thousands of "requests" for their adver-bytten MP3s?;-)
...for a large chunk of un-signed and/or small label groups.
ObRIAA/Napster: As a way to access bootlegged music, it's awesome. I do think it's only fair that the artists (directly) receive some sort of compensation for their studio-recorded material. As much as I dislike advertising, why couldn't compensation be derived from tacking on short audio adver-bytes onto the front of every nth Napster-like download? That way the user doesn't have to micro-pay for downloads, but if they want to guarantee no-advert recordings, they have to buy the CD.
(ObPlug: Of course you're more than welcome to listen to our stuff... And cast one vote for Today's High to open for Edwin at Navan Fair. Voting ends today.:-)
Good points, as others have said, but I would be more tempted to draw parallels between Open Source and making the score/tabs/chord-progressions available (free, as in speech) for anyone to use.
Musicians are the human equivalent of a code compiler. We read in the source, convert it into instrument code, and out pops the binary album. Sure, you can plug it into a sequencer and play it through your synth, but it hasn't been optimized for the human-performed instrument.
The only way I could see your idealized "survive on concerts alone" becoming a reality in today's world is for the studios to stop producing personal-copy media and move to a "pay per use" streamed model - each use is your own personal concert. You then make it cheaper to listen to one song a hundred times from anywhere than to buy a single blank recordable physical media. The personalized radio model. That way, even if you do decide to capture a copy for yourself, at least you've paid a token amount.
Yup, that might work. We need to take the commercialization process a step further, so that theft of product is inherently more expensive and inconvenient. As that Negroponte fellow over at MIT has said and written many times, atoms cost more to move than bits. The industry needs to take atoms out of the personal picture.
How exactly would these rulings apply to the free software itself?
I can see a company like RedHat marketing the service/support of their free distribution; it's the service and/or support contract you make with RedHat that would be waranteed.
Free software is kind of like free water. If you get it out of the tap or a bottle, it's the packaged product that's being marketed and sold, and waranteed to be free of contamination (just look at the e-coli problem we've been having here in Ontario). If you choose to dig a hole in the ground, soak up puddles with a sponge, or collect rain-water in smoggy downtown-Toronto, you're free to do so.
We are all responsible for the quality of the water, probably tap the same water table in the ground, but my well on my property is my responsibility to monitor, and the utility company is answerable to government regulatory bodies.
Free software is the same (IMHO). It's all the same general body of code, however if I want to maintain/compile my own system I'm free to do so. If I don't want the hassle, or live in a community/corporation environment then it's something I can contract out to a company like RedHat. RedHat is the one accountable to warrantees. If the code isn't up to snuff, it's up to them to either fix the code (equivalent to cleaning up the environment), or wrap it in their own proprietary solution (the post-processing, water-treatment plant).
Just to shed a little light on how their costs might break down...
Pricing for individual components is available at http://www.emjembedded.com/
...for the JDM486, JDMCOM, MITEPC and MODBOX, plus a JDMCPS and JDMIOS, the price comes out to $680 before any taxes or shipping.
...from IBM's online shop, the MicroDrive (31L9335) is $379 before taxes and shipping.
So, that's $1,059 worth of individual parts. That leaves $436 for the remainder of the parts, low-volume production of the custom boards, labour for assembly, and some source of funds to pay everyone and offset future development costs.
Recommendation for future development: Transmeta Crusoe as processor.:-)
GPL may or may not be applicable in Taiwan; I have no idea.
However, if they expect to maintain any level of respect in this community, they shouldn't abuse and insult us in this manner.
Their intentions do seem to be to help this (greater Linux) community with their modifications, but their approach is a kind of anti-Robin Hood. They are a rich company stealing from the "poor" (aka non-profit) GPL coding community. Hopefully it is just a temporary breakdown in communications, after all, they are a Taiwanese company therefore not primarily English-literate.
(PS. I'm an ASUS user (P2L97-DS), so it's a technical non-issue for me.)
In spite of the fact that making the content of books available online would make the content readable any time, any where, on any screen, by any text-to-speech or braille "reader", promoting literary awareness and diversity on a global scale, reverence of the paper medium is more important?
Don't get me wrong; I like reading books. But I thought a library was place for preserving and disseminating information, to facilitate literary diversity, not a pyro's paradise.
The printing press may have made the public library possible, but it physically cannot make all literary works in existance today available to everyone, everywhere, at anytime.
...about this current situation, IMHO, is that it's a good time to buy.
Everything else is pure speculation... But then again so is the fact that it's a good time to buy. It's a better time to buy than it was last week, that's certain.
...Don't give me this crap about how you know "this guy who is a friend of a friend who has a garage band that uses Napster to distribute his music."...
Interesting. We were at a studio yesterday, shopping for a place to do some demo recording, and this is (in effect) what we heard from the studio. That a few bands recording demos there have been "doing well at MP3.com", which in turn trickles into the napster networks.
I do agree that the commercial stuff has no business flying that free without compensation, but believe it or not, some people do actually use it to swap "garage band" works.
Some thoughts to cast in the pot. I haven't bought a commercial single-artist CD in months. I do however buy CMJ magazine+sampler-CD on a regular basis. A subscription-based napster network following this model would interest me.
Back in high-school, I did a project in English about espionage and cryptography. You can talk about it until you're blue in the face, and people will just glaze over. The moment you turn on a scanner and tune into a few people's cell phone conversations, people start to understand what it's about.
It demonstrates how there's a big difference between making something illegal (social limit) and making it impractical/difficult (technical limit).
[Note: Check into the legalities of "listening" before you do it. Here in Ontario (Canada) it is (or at least was) legal to listen to anything you want - it's illegal to rebroadcast or record/use whatever you hear without consent.]
It's a pity they didn't consider turning the control and maintenance of these satellites over to AMSAT, since they're going to junk them anyway. They have the knowledge, expertice and infrastructure to deal with satellites.
...could have been real handy having those up there for emergency radio communications purposes.
If they're planning on doing hardware-level memory management, they're probably going to be improving the control algorithms for the TAG and/or CAM memories.
Your basic cache/main-memory hit, miss, refresh, and stale address mapping functions, but with a more flexible and comprehensive interface.
Don't know how much mobile work you do, but you might want to try out Handykey's Twiddler...
Eventually, they're supposed to be releasing their "Twiddler 2", which should have a proper AT/PS-2 interface. The Twiddler only uses the keyboard port as a power source; the serial interface is what carries actual data.
So, when will we be able to buy a Transmeta version of what Jumptec has done for AMD with their DIMM PC, and what Cell Computing has done for Intel with their PNR?
I've been resisting buying Cell Computing's latest with a view to buying an equivalent Transmeta module for my own wearable dabblings... But I can only wait so long.:-)
Re:What about false positives?
on
Digital Nose
·
· Score: 2
To be honest, it's the false negatives that have me more worried...
I don't expect to see real dogs replaced any time soon, but given the amount I travel, I would feel a little more comfortable if we could, say, equip every garbage can and mail-drop at an airport with the bomb-sniffing equivalent of a smoke detector.
Given the breadth of substances the sensor can identify and differentiate (over existing explosive-specific sniffer tech), I would expect the number of false positives to go down with some intelligent signal processing. If you know that Vodka triggers the warning, this is a false-positive "noise factor" you could filter out. (in theory:-)
Slashdot Mirror
I kept one for a couple of years, a few years back... It was an interesting exploration of self in a place that's not-quite-real. You learn to dive deep into your psyche to pull out some new nugget to mull over in a matter of minutes. Contemplating the nature of a word; remembering a day gone by differently...
:-)
Towards the end though, after two years of daily entries, I'd covered pretty much everything of importance in my life up to that point in time. It was time to start living some more life worth writing about.
I'll probably start another in the future, but not just yet...
Heh heh, well it was back in '96 that I worked on the system. :-)
Interesting to see how things have changed since; thanks for the update.
the robominer solution
If you're curious about how they actually get the bandwidth down into the mines, check out this company I did some design work for a few years back:
El-Equip Inc.
A little thinking out loud...
HUDs are the way to go to cure the physical screen limitation. Bonus is you get a little more privacy.
Micro Optical Corporation has the right idea with their Clip-On. IBM could pull it off with their Wearable stuff.
For audio, look to the In-Ear monitors musicians use...
For the rest of it, I think Charmed Technology has the right idea. The ultimate form for our every-day tech is when it no longer looks like tech. It's the peripherals that count. A single screen that can pull the video from any device, clip-on headphones to listen to any audio, and cameras and microphones added as you see fit - the Blue Tooth promise.
To be honest, the barriers to physical size reduction are power-source and connectivity between chips. Watch the SOC developments (System-On-Chip) for significant shrinks from multi-chip to single-chip forms. At the rate feature size is shrinking on-chip, the limitation isn't how many transistors or gates you can squeeze on, it's how many bond-pads you need to I/O with the chip.
Aside: Bought myself a couple of E-holsters to take care of more immediate gadget-loading. Works well under a sweater or jacket.
I was thinking the same thing.
If you can classify genre and style using fractals, why can't you reverse the process and make a fractal sequencer or drum/rhythm machine?
It would be interesting to compare how techno-political interactions happen with you folks to the South, with our situation up here in Canada. After all, our capital (Ottawa) also happens to be the primary hub of tech activity - our "Silicon Valley North".
True, but at least it's a lesser moral issue than the outright "theft" of property that has the industry all litigaseous.
;-)
It works both ways though. What's to stop an artist from applying DoS and/or viral techniques to line their pockets with hundreds of thousands of "requests" for their adver-bytten MP3s?
Also check out:
ObRIAA/Napster: As a way to access bootlegged music, it's awesome. I do think it's only fair that the artists (directly) receive some sort of compensation for their studio-recorded material. As much as I dislike advertising, why couldn't compensation be derived from tacking on short audio adver-bytes onto the front of every nth Napster-like download? That way the user doesn't have to micro-pay for downloads, but if they want to guarantee no-advert recordings, they have to buy the CD.
(ObPlug: Of course you're more than welcome to listen to our stuff... And cast one vote for Today's High to open for Edwin at Navan Fair. Voting ends today. :-)
Good points, as others have said, but I would be more tempted to draw parallels between Open Source and making the score/tabs/chord-progressions available (free, as in speech) for anyone to use.
Musicians are the human equivalent of a code compiler. We read in the source, convert it into instrument code, and out pops the binary album. Sure, you can plug it into a sequencer and play it through your synth, but it hasn't been optimized for the human-performed instrument.
The only way I could see your idealized "survive on concerts alone" becoming a reality in today's world is for the studios to stop producing personal-copy media and move to a "pay per use" streamed model - each use is your own personal concert. You then make it cheaper to listen to one song a hundred times from anywhere than to buy a single blank recordable physical media. The personalized radio model. That way, even if you do decide to capture a copy for yourself, at least you've paid a token amount.
Yup, that might work. We need to take the commercialization process a step further, so that theft of product is inherently more expensive and inconvenient. As that Negroponte fellow over at MIT has said and written many times, atoms cost more to move than bits. The industry needs to take atoms out of the personal picture.
How exactly would these rulings apply to the free software itself?
I can see a company like RedHat marketing the service/support of their free distribution; it's the service and/or support contract you make with RedHat that would be waranteed.
Free software is kind of like free water. If you get it out of the tap or a bottle, it's the packaged product that's being marketed and sold, and waranteed to be free of contamination (just look at the e-coli problem we've been having here in Ontario). If you choose to dig a hole in the ground, soak up puddles with a sponge, or collect rain-water in smoggy downtown-Toronto, you're free to do so.
We are all responsible for the quality of the water, probably tap the same water table in the ground, but my well on my property is my responsibility to monitor, and the utility company is answerable to government regulatory bodies.
Free software is the same (IMHO). It's all the same general body of code, however if I want to maintain/compile my own system I'm free to do so. If I don't want the hassle, or live in a community/corporation environment then it's something I can contract out to a company like RedHat. RedHat is the one accountable to warrantees. If the code isn't up to snuff, it's up to them to either fix the code (equivalent to cleaning up the environment), or wrap it in their own proprietary solution (the post-processing, water-treatment plant).
Just to shed a little light on how their costs might break down...
:-)
Pricing for individual components is available at http://www.emjembedded.com/
...for the JDM486, JDMCOM, MITEPC and MODBOX, plus a JDMCPS and JDMIOS, the price comes out to $680 before any taxes or shipping.
...from IBM's online shop, the MicroDrive (31L9335) is $379 before taxes and shipping.
So, that's $1,059 worth of individual parts. That leaves $436 for the remainder of the parts, low-volume production of the custom boards, labour for assembly, and some source of funds to pay everyone and offset future development costs.
Recommendation for future development: Transmeta Crusoe as processor.
Well, since my submission has been rejected from the queue, I might as well post this link here, in a relevant topic:
Transmeta's magic show
GPL may or may not be applicable in Taiwan; I have no idea.
However, if they expect to maintain any level of respect in this community, they shouldn't abuse and insult us in this manner.
Their intentions do seem to be to help this (greater Linux) community with their modifications, but their approach is a kind of anti-Robin Hood. They are a rich company stealing from the "poor" (aka non-profit) GPL coding community. Hopefully it is just a temporary breakdown in communications, after all, they are a Taiwanese company therefore not primarily English-literate.
(PS. I'm an ASUS user (P2L97-DS), so it's a technical non-issue for me.)
So let me get this straight.
In spite of the fact that making the content of books available online would make the content readable any time, any where, on any screen, by any text-to-speech or braille "reader", promoting literary awareness and diversity on a global scale, reverence of the paper medium is more important?
Don't get me wrong; I like reading books. But I thought a library was place for preserving and disseminating information, to facilitate literary diversity, not a pyro's paradise.
The printing press may have made the public library possible, but it physically cannot make all literary works in existance today available to everyone, everywhere, at anytime.
To presume otherwise is, dare I say it, arrogant.
...about this current situation, IMHO, is that it's a good time to buy.
Everything else is pure speculation... But then again so is the fact that it's a good time to buy. It's a better time to buy than it was last week, that's certain.
Interesting. We were at a studio yesterday, shopping for a place to do some demo recording, and this is (in effect) what we heard from the studio. That a few bands recording demos there have been "doing well at MP3.com", which in turn trickles into the napster networks.
I do agree that the commercial stuff has no business flying that free without compensation, but believe it or not, some people do actually use it to swap "garage band" works.
Some thoughts to cast in the pot. I haven't bought a commercial single-artist CD in months. I do however buy CMJ magazine+sampler-CD on a regular basis. A subscription-based napster network following this model would interest me.
Back in high-school, I did a project in English about espionage and cryptography. You can talk about it until you're blue in the face, and people will just glaze over. The moment you turn on a scanner and tune into a few people's cell phone conversations, people start to understand what it's about.
It demonstrates how there's a big difference between making something illegal (social limit) and making it impractical/difficult (technical limit).
[Note: Check into the legalities of "listening" before you do it. Here in Ontario (Canada) it is (or at least was) legal to listen to anything you want - it's illegal to rebroadcast or record/use whatever you hear without consent.]
It's a pity they didn't consider turning the control and maintenance of these satellites over to AMSAT, since they're going to junk them anyway. They have the knowledge, expertice and infrastructure to deal with satellites.
...could have been real handy having those up there for emergency radio communications purposes.
Oh well, guess you can't win 'em all.
de VE3SLGIf they're planning on doing hardware-level memory management, they're probably going to be improving the control algorithms for the TAG and/or CAM memories.
Your basic cache/main-memory hit, miss, refresh, and stale address mapping functions, but with a more flexible and comprehensive interface.
ALT tags are an accessibility issue, not a "retro-browser-choice" thing, as he puts it in his source.
Here's another similar article: Netsilicon makes embedded Linux production-ready for networked devices
Don't know how much mobile work you do, but you might want to try out Handykey's Twiddler...
Eventually, they're supposed to be releasing their "Twiddler 2", which should have a proper AT/PS-2 interface. The Twiddler only uses the keyboard port as a power source; the serial interface is what carries actual data.
So, when will we be able to buy a Transmeta version of what Jumptec has done for AMD with their DIMM PC, and what Cell Computing has done for Intel with their PNR?
I've been resisting buying Cell Computing's latest with a view to buying an equivalent Transmeta module for my own wearable dabblings... But I can only wait so long. :-)
To be honest, it's the false negatives that have me more worried...
:-)
I don't expect to see real dogs replaced any time soon, but given the amount I travel, I would feel a little more comfortable if we could, say, equip every garbage can and mail-drop at an airport with the bomb-sniffing equivalent of a smoke detector.
Given the breadth of substances the sensor can identify and differentiate (over existing explosive-specific sniffer tech), I would expect the number of false positives to go down with some intelligent signal processing. If you know that Vodka triggers the warning, this is a false-positive "noise factor" you could filter out. (in theory