Microsoft also announced today that Bob(tm) Harbold, its Executive
Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, has become the first
Microsoft TrueName licensee and will have the Windows 95 logo tattooed
to his forehead.
Sadly, someone actually has a Windows Logo tattooed on them.
If Microsoft sued them, would they have to get laser surgery?
I never actually got a chance to use it (and last I checked, Microsoft had purged nearly all mention of the product from their site), but for those who don't recall, MS Bob was essentially "Windows for Dummies" translated into an OS. It also flopped horribly.
Perhaps this approach will find the perfect balance between idiot-proofing (an impossible task, I know) and genius-proofing ("I'm sorry, Dave, I can't do that").
Or perhaps it will fail like Bob did.
Lets just hope that behind the cute and cuddly exterior is a robust true OS that can be shaped to suit it's users warped preferences ("Come on Windows 98, I really do want 2 network cards").
Bear with me on this, but the Watermark is supposed to be hidden in the audio signal of the track, correct? And this form of security-through-obscurity approach basically prevents you from removing the Watermark because you don't know where it is.
Well, assuming I'm BandX and I record my new CD "BandX Live" and I want to release my hit single "It's Not Goatse.cx" for paid download as a SDMI-watermarked track. So, I take my CD, rip the track, slap the watermark on the track and release it.
My question is, what's to prevent one person who owns a copy of "BandX Live" from comparing a direct rip off their CD to the downloaded version and just locating the watermark that way. Once that is done, I imagine you can generate a list of altered bytes. Package that list into some form of standard format compatible with a de-SDMI program (call it "The SoDMIzer") that can take a track and the byte list and remove the watermark.
So all you need is an on-line repository of the byte-lists (or whatever, I'm sure there's a more elegant way of diff'ing the tracks) and the problem goes away.
It's an extra step, but not a big one. What's the catch?
Am I the only one who noticed the mention of "InterPlaNet", the "), the networking protocol whereby we'll communicate across our solar system via the expansion of the Internet"? What the hell?
And I see no mention if the processors are radation hardened or not. I don't know if they have to be if they are inside the shuttle, but that's something be concerned about.
Perhaps not. Hard drive heads fly across the platters because of the Bernoulli principle.
So basically the head acts as an airplane wing, and this helps act as a cushion for shocks and vibrations. However, since the heads are engineered to avoid contact (they don't just fall to the drive surface when you turn the machine off), I imagine that in a microgravity environment, if the air were non-destructivly evacuated from a hard drive (I.E. it didn't blow apart or happen while in use), the drive would probably keep working.
But one small bump and the heads would probably go farming.
Note: I am not a NASA engineer, and my use of the word probably reflects this.
From what I understand, all they did was pressurize the ink to keep it flowing in zero-G.
On a side note, and this may be an urban legend, but it apparently cost millions of taxpayer dollars to design and fabricate this pen that would write in space (first flown in 1967). The Russians just used pencils.
Seriously, I imagine that while you feel really good about your creation (and you should), at the same time what you've told us doesn't help us any.
So I pose some questions:
* Who are these two other people you're living with?
* How did you find them?
* How was the house purchased? Cash up front? Some weird tripartite mortgage thing? And what are the issues you've found regarding joint non-spousal ownership of a residence?
* Did you wire it yourself or hire contractors? (Drilling through studs behind drywall is a big tub of no-fun)
Remember, some laptops have integrated Winmodems. Just saying "Get a Real Modem" usually isn't sufficient.
I'm lucky, though, as my laptop has a Lucent winmodem which has a driver (so to speak). Go see www.linmodems.org for more info.
Keeerist; he wants $250 per case? Is he doing these by hand? Might as well get yourself a PalmV for $40 more.
I remember Slashdot had a quickie about his first custom case (I think the link is dead) that he did by hand. You would think he'd have the milling process automated to the point that he'd be able to just slap two aluminium blocks in a vice and walk away.
I suspect that someone may quickly figure out a way to beam MP3s between Visors (unless the SDMI technology is as kickass as they claim it is). While a non-SoundGood player enabled Visor may only have room in it's onboard memory for one song, maybe two at best, it would still be nifty:
"D00d, like, you've got that new Chemical Brothers track I've been looking for!"
...what does Hollywood know about the computer industry?
Don't be so skeptical; Hollywood has many highly paid people whose job it is to consult on computer issues. I mean, just look at the wonderful film "The Net" and you'll see that they obviously have done their homework.
I have been looking for that company for ages now! I recall one of their products was a LCD display supported by an antique-esque metal (brass?) figurine. Another was an LCD display on the end of an arm attached to a floor lamp. They had really nifty designs, and if anyone knows what happened to them, please let us know!
We need a PDA with near perfect speech to text and a nice built in microphone. With enough storage space you could keep a entire semester of lectures on your palm, without all of that messy ink run off I always had trouble with!
Your idea would be helpful, but it is an imperfect replacement. The benefit of note taking is twofold. The first is the creation of a record of relevant information for later, and more thorough, perusal (something your solution provides). The second benefit, however, comes from having to "interact" with the information (analyzing it and filtering to decide which notes to take). That process helps information retention better than just listening to the lecture. So just recording the lecture alone will do little good, unless it is paired with later filtering and summarization.
Note that I Am Not A Teacher, but a good many teachers and pupils in the course of my educational career have expressed the above opinion in one form or another.
What is the current/planned size of your technical staff, and what will be your requirements for applicants (UK/EU citizenship)? Also, will the staff become residents of Sealand? (And how do I sign up?)
I used to have a TurboGrafix-16 (my class in grade school had a very vocal TG-16 lobby and I decided to forsake the Super Nintendo in it's favor) with the CD drive. Firstly, I hope that Sega decides to release some of the CD games like Y's Books I & II, Monster Lair, and Fighting Street. Also, the game Military Madness (turn-based strategy on the moon) was insanely fun but it's not a game you sit and play straight through for 24 hours (like Final Fantasy *). The rent-to-own or games library on CD options would be more appropriate.
FYI: I still have my TG-16 with CD drive and the system is still way rad.
On the subject of dual-media MP3 players, I was wondering if there were any products (vaporware or not) for MP3 car audio that offer an integrated dashboard control unit (like a standard car radio faceplate) with a CD reader in it and mp3s stored to hard drive in a box in the trunk? I greatly dislike CD changers and I prefer to have the ability to swap disks around with abandon while driving, but I also don't want some strange little dongle hanging off the side of my radio. I'd like to have an integrated system (CD+MP3+radio) managed from one location. Does this exist?
Something you should check out are ACE and TAO. ACE is essentially middleware for C++ programming that will allow you to write code which will compile almost anywhere (all flavors of Unix, Windows CE/NT/9x/2k, various real-time OSs). TAO is a CORBA compliant ORB with the same properties. Basically, if you write your code using ACE (and TAO if you want), it will compile cleanly anywhere without you needing to account for cross-platform weirdness. Oh, and if I recall, ACE & TAO are LGPL'd.
Re:Some are going to be pissed...
on
R.I.P. Iridium
·
· Score: 1
There's one really big "company" that has already bought a bunch of Iridium phones: The US State Department
They have issued something like 2-3 phones per ambassadorial mission (I'm guessing there may be more for heavy-duty missions like Germany and the UK). The Ambassador gets one, the DCM (Deputy Chief of Mission) gets one I believe, and there may be others.
Your tax dollars at work (for all us American citizens).
I'd like to ask you some questions about your experiences with the DataHand, since it costs $50 to give it a try. I don't know if you have experienced all the topics, but... - How is it with: Emacs Quake (games in general)
- Are you satisfied with the weight? - How's the durability? Does it get dirty and gummy easily? How easy it to clean? - Did you have any compatibility problems? - How good is the integrated mouse?
I find that for pure neato value, the datahand is the coolest keyboard (although the twiddler is also nifty). Since I'm a poor typist, it looks better, since you can't really miss a key (nor, for that matter, can you type improperly, since you have no choice which finger hits which key). Of course, it's also expensive as hell (which is why they don't list the price). It's around $900 for the personal (the Pro II is over $1000). I think this could be a really neato slashdot topic: badass input devices.
Perhaps that is part of the problem, but I think my original point is still at least partly vaild. The overhead of a "process-pool" is greater than that of a thread-pool. Threads can share many more resources and thus context switches between threads (although unavoidable) takes less time than context switches between processes (Silberschatz/Galvin). But yes, the pool of processes/threads should be set to a appropriate size relative to the expected load.
I suspect that Apache's number 1 status is due at least partly to the fact that is comes free with many unix flavors. There are better packages around. I posted another message to this end, but I thought I might give another link to a benchmarking paper put out by my research group. It may not be the most recent, but AFAIK, it's still accurate.
If Apache is the bottleneck, I might be able to comment on why: AFAIK, Apache creates multiple heavyweight processes to handle inbound connections. I'm not sure of the ratio of processes-per-connection, but the overhead of this concurrency model is rather high. Higher performance web servers (like Zeus) utilize a thread pool (server threads stick around rather than thread-per-request) model along with certain asychronous IO features (I think) to speed up performance. I'm not sure of Linux's asynchronous IO support, but apparently the underlying filesystem is large bottleneck of any server. I could be talking out of my rectum, so any Apache gurus feel free to flame me, but this was my understanding of the problem. If you want to read more written by people far smarter than I, see http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~jxh/research/ There's more information there.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft also announced today that Bob(tm) Harbold, its Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, has become the first Microsoft TrueName licensee and will have the Windows 95 logo tattooed to his forehead.
Sadly, someone actually has a Windows Logo tattooed on them.
If Microsoft sued them, would they have to get laser surgery?
Perhaps this approach will find the perfect balance between idiot-proofing (an impossible task, I know) and genius-proofing ("I'm sorry, Dave, I can't do that").
Or perhaps it will fail like Bob did.
Lets just hope that behind the cute and cuddly exterior is a robust true OS that can be shaped to suit it's users warped preferences ("Come on Windows 98, I really do want 2 network cards").
Well, assuming I'm BandX and I record my new CD "BandX Live" and I want to release my hit single "It's Not Goatse.cx" for paid download as a SDMI-watermarked track. So, I take my CD, rip the track, slap the watermark on the track and release it.
My question is, what's to prevent one person who owns a copy of "BandX Live" from comparing a direct rip off their CD to the downloaded version and just locating the watermark that way. Once that is done, I imagine you can generate a list of altered bytes. Package that list into some form of standard format compatible with a de-SDMI program (call it "The SoDMIzer") that can take a track and the byte list and remove the watermark.
So all you need is an on-line repository of the byte-lists (or whatever, I'm sure there's a more elegant way of diff'ing the tracks) and the problem goes away.
It's an extra step, but not a big one. What's the catch?
And I see no mention if the processors are radation hardened or not. I don't know if they have to be if they are inside the shuttle, but that's something be concerned about.
So basically the head acts as an airplane wing, and this helps act as a cushion for shocks and vibrations. However, since the heads are engineered to avoid contact (they don't just fall to the drive surface when you turn the machine off), I imagine that in a microgravity environment, if the air were non-destructivly evacuated from a hard drive (I.E. it didn't blow apart or happen while in use), the drive would probably keep working.
But one small bump and the heads would probably go farming.
Note: I am not a NASA engineer, and my use of the word probably reflects this.
Ah, but you forget the power of Wacky American Ingenuity.
From what I understand, all they did was pressurize the ink to keep it flowing in zero-G.
On a side note, and this may be an urban legend, but it apparently cost millions of taxpayer dollars to design and fabricate this pen that would write in space (first flown in 1967). The Russians just used pencils.
Well hello Mr. Fancy-Pants!
Seriously, I imagine that while you feel really good about your creation (and you should), at the same time what you've told us doesn't help us any.
So I pose some questions:
* Who are these two other people you're living with?
* How did you find them?
* How was the house purchased? Cash up front? Some weird tripartite mortgage thing? And what are the issues you've found regarding joint non-spousal ownership of a residence?
* Did you wire it yourself or hire contractors? (Drilling through studs behind drywall is a big tub of no-fun)
To name a few...
Remember, some laptops have integrated Winmodems. Just saying "Get a Real Modem" usually isn't sufficient.
I'm lucky, though, as my laptop has a Lucent winmodem which has a driver (so to speak). Go see www.linmodems.org for more info.
I remember Slashdot had a quickie about his first custom case (I think the link is dead) that he did by hand. You would think he'd have the milling process automated to the point that he'd be able to just slap two aluminium blocks in a vice and walk away.
From the L0pht description:
Taking a step back to the early age of computer pornography. HairyPalm is a collection of Apple ][ adult animation demos.
Ain't technology grand?
"D00d, like, you've got that new Chemical Brothers track I've been looking for!"
"Yah, I'll beam it to you"
Don't be so skeptical; Hollywood has many highly paid people whose job it is to consult on computer issues. I mean, just look at the wonderful film "The Net" and you'll see that they obviously have done their homework.
I have been looking for that company for ages now! I recall one of their products was a LCD display supported by an antique-esque metal (brass?) figurine. Another was an LCD display on the end of an arm attached to a floor lamp. They had really nifty designs, and if anyone knows what happened to them, please let us know!
We need a PDA with near perfect speech to text and a nice built in microphone. With enough storage space you could keep a entire semester of lectures on your palm, without all of that messy ink run off I always had trouble with!
Your idea would be helpful, but it is an imperfect replacement. The benefit of note taking is twofold. The first is the creation of a record of relevant information for later, and more thorough, perusal (something your solution provides). The second benefit, however, comes from having to "interact" with the information (analyzing it and filtering to decide which notes to take). That process helps information retention better than just listening to the lecture. So just recording the lecture alone will do little good, unless it is paired with later filtering and summarization.
Note that I Am Not A Teacher, but a good many teachers and pupils in the course of my educational career have expressed the above opinion in one form or another.
What is the current/planned size of your technical staff, and what will be your requirements for applicants (UK/EU citizenship)? Also, will the staff become residents of Sealand? (And how do I sign up?)
FYI: I still have my TG-16 with CD drive and the system is still way rad.
On the subject of dual-media MP3 players, I was wondering if there were any products (vaporware or not) for MP3 car audio that offer an integrated dashboard control unit (like a standard car radio faceplate) with a CD reader in it and mp3s stored to hard drive in a box in the trunk? I greatly dislike CD changers and I prefer to have the ability to swap disks around with abandon while driving, but I also don't want some strange little dongle hanging off the side of my radio. I'd like to have an integrated system (CD+MP3+radio) managed from one location. Does this exist?
Something you should check out are ACE and TAO. ACE is essentially middleware for C++ programming that will allow you to write code which will compile almost anywhere (all flavors of Unix, Windows CE/NT/9x/2k, various real-time OSs). TAO is a CORBA compliant ORB with the same properties. Basically, if you write your code using ACE (and TAO if you want), it will compile cleanly anywhere without you needing to account for cross-platform weirdness. Oh, and if I recall, ACE & TAO are LGPL'd.
There's one really big "company" that has already bought a bunch of Iridium phones:
The US State Department
They have issued something like 2-3 phones per ambassadorial mission (I'm guessing there may be more for heavy-duty missions like Germany and the UK). The Ambassador gets one, the DCM (Deputy Chief of Mission) gets one I believe, and there may be others.
Your tax dollars at work (for all us American citizens).
I'd like to ask you some questions about your experiences with the DataHand, since it costs $50 to give it a try. I don't know if you have experienced all the topics, but...
- How is it with:
Emacs
Quake (games in general)
- Are you satisfied with the weight?
- How's the durability? Does it get dirty
and gummy easily? How easy it to clean?
- Did you have any compatibility problems?
- How good is the integrated mouse?
Feel free to mail me..
I find that for pure neato value, the datahand is the coolest keyboard (although the twiddler is also nifty). Since I'm a poor typist, it looks better, since you can't really miss a key (nor, for that matter, can you type improperly, since you have no choice which finger hits which key). Of course, it's also expensive as hell (which is why they don't list the price). It's around $900 for the personal (the Pro II is over $1000).
I think this could be a really neato slashdot topic: badass input devices.
Perhaps that is part of the problem, but I think my original point is still at least partly vaild. The overhead of a "process-pool" is greater than that of a thread-pool. Threads can share many more resources and thus context switches between threads (although unavoidable) takes less time than context switches between processes (Silberschatz/Galvin). But yes, the pool of processes/threads should be set to a appropriate size relative to the expected load.
I suspect that Apache's number 1 status is due at least partly to the fact that is comes free with many unix flavors. There are better packages around. I posted another message to this end, but I thought I might give another link to a benchmarking paper put out by my research group. It may not be the most recent, but AFAIK, it's still accurate.
If Apache is the bottleneck, I might be able to comment on why:
AFAIK, Apache creates multiple heavyweight processes to handle inbound connections. I'm not sure of the ratio of processes-per-connection, but the overhead of this concurrency model is rather high.
Higher performance web servers (like Zeus) utilize a thread pool (server threads stick around rather than thread-per-request) model along with certain asychronous IO features (I think) to speed up performance. I'm not sure of Linux's asynchronous IO support, but apparently the underlying filesystem is large bottleneck of any server.
I could be talking out of my rectum, so any Apache gurus feel free to flame me, but this was my understanding of the problem.
If you want to read more written by people far smarter than I, see
http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~jxh/research/
There's more information there.