Not many comments so far, so here's mildly off-topic Fat Man memories...
I look back to the guy's work in the early 1990s for my faves. The top one in my mind is probably Faceball 2000, circa 1991. Here's the Gameboy soundtrack (ripped to MID). The SNES and Game Gear versions are even better if you can find them.
Putting the merits of the music and game into context... This was a pre-Wolf 3D, pre-Doom FPS from 14 years ago that ran on 4 MHz Z80 handhelds that you could cable together for "LAN" play. On-the-fly rendered 3D graphics (on otherwise sprite and tile-scroller platforms) spiced up with some good Fat Man tunes (for the day)... it was a beautiful thing. Okay, so the framerates weren't great.
On contract, Sanger would deliver developers the audio routine (Z80 code, in this case) which would play back his highly compressed audio data (destined for preciously small ROMs), using even more precious cycles in the horizontal and/or vertical interrupts to trigger frequency, volume, timbre, envelope change events. Heady stuff.
You want all the benefits of the socialist economy of Sweden and all the benefits of (largely) free-enterprize Canada. Umm, something has to give somewhere.
No, good for him. It's people like him who dream about having it "all" (and occasionally succeed at it) that eventually demonstrate to others that a life of quiet desperation and constant compromise isn't the only way to live.
Also, while Canada certainly permits USA-style free enterprise, you'd be practicing it above a safety net of welfare, healthcare, and other socialized benefits. Some think that's the best of both worlds. Others find it contrary to a real capitalist mindset. Either way, you'll be paying for it with moderately high taxes in Canada (e.g. income, capital gain, sales, service, tariff, import, inheritance, estate, consumption, and other taxes)
Creating anything, material or philosophical, can be equally impermanent and unlikely to last. Build a bridge, it falls apart. Build a theory, it falls apart. Your "only a theory" implication of inferiority doesn't stand up.
That's a bit out of context... it's not that he's necessarily against reverse engineering
Fair enough. The request was for a "1 or 2 line summary", so I skipped details. Anyways, here's more of Larry McVoy's thoughts around why he doesn't want to condone RE (point b) below):
We ended up in a no-win situation. OSDL didn't appear to care and we couldn't trust what we were being told. With that we were fairly confident that Tridge was going to release his code. That was a problem for us for two reasons:
a) Corruption. [full text in previous post]
b) IP loss. If we sat back and did nothing about Tridge then we are implicitly condoning reverse engineering.
Any chance we could get a 1-2 line summary of what the "debacle" is exactly?
Larry McVoy sees two problems with Andrew Tridgell's reverse-engineered, free tool. One is "condoning reverse engineering". The other is, in his words:
Corruption. BK is a complicated system, there are >10,000 replicas of the BK database holding Linux floating around. If a problem starts moving through those there is no way to fix them all by hand. This happened once before, a user tweaked the ChangeSet file, and it costs $35,000 plus a custom release to fix it.
If Tridge's tool is out there we are now supporting our code and his code. We couldn't do that.
I've noticed significant reduction in lows and an unsettling amount of distortion when I go from vinyl to wax cylinder.
Run a green, felt-tipped pen around the outside of the wax cylinder. It will restore the low frequencies lost from vinyl. I would describe the restored sound as quite earthy, rather than airy though. If airy is what you're going for, I suggest making make two light applications of green felt-tipped marker, rather than one heavy one. This however, could result in very cinnamon flavored mids and highs though, so be careful. In a pinch, you could use a black felt-tipped pen, but don't just use any old Sharpie. Use something really expensive, preferably immediately after writing a page of taoist scriptures on parchment paper. Northern taoist is fine, but southern taoist would be better, especially if you listen to a lot of jazz. Unless it's smooth jazz. Oh, and insulate yourself with 24K gold arch supports before trying any of this, otherwise the earth's own vibrations could mellow your high frequencies, resulting in distinctly cedar-flavored vocals.
If the "$5 lamp timer" idea to shut down the router during off-hours doesn't work for you (eg. you need wired connections to stay up), a script to enable/disable the wl_net_mode setting on the http://192.168.1.xxx/Wireless_Basic.asp page of a Linksys WRT54GS would seem pretty doable. Put an enable/disable entry into a cron schedule and you've closed the window for hackers somewhat.
Cooking a script up like this (with POST and HTTP Basic Authentication for login) wouldn't be very hard, but does anyone know of Linksys scripts that might already be usable?
Finally, a list of *big* companies using PostgreSQL for *serious* projects.
I genuinely like PostgreSQL and have used it extensively. I want to see a list of big name users as much as anyone. But that "list of *big* companies" is topped by:
* Affymetrix * Afilias * BASF * Cognitivity * Journyx * Royal * The American Chemical Society * Tsutaya
With the possible exception of BASF, these aren't exactly household names. I have no doubt that these are huge organizations with serious database needs, but what PostgreSQL could really use, IMHO, is a recognizable headliner.
when your on-board video-chip burns-out... When your gigabit ethernet burns out...
If something on my motherboard burned out, I don't think I'd be trusting it at all anymore, with or without expansion slots!
Anyways, this would be my logic if such a problem actually happened:
if mobo.age < 12_months:
manufacturer.warranty_claim() elif mobo.age < 24_months:
credit_card.warranty_claim() # always double your warranty for free else:
buy(new mobo) # they're cheap and in 2+ years, it's upgrade time anyways!
Re:There are deaf admirers of Donald Knuth
on
Donald Knuth On NPR
·
· Score: 1
If Deaf admirers of Knuth don't already know about it, they may want to pick up his book: Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About. It contains transcripts of a great set of MIT lectures (including Q&A) by Knuth. These are edited and commented by Knuth.
This won't contain the recent NPR interview, obviously, but it's worth a read if you're a Knuth fan. (And open to an intelligent person's opinions on computers and religion.)
True, but any <insert-belief-set> militant group is simply doublespeak for terrorists. Christian, vegetarian, feminist, racial pride, etc.
Fo an intro to Wahhabism that doesn't resort to conclusions like "nutballs" and "islamic nut cases", there's an article here (probably with its own biases, but I found it more informative and it includes references.)
Manitoba Telecom Systems have been serving digital television over DSL lines for a while (in Winnipeg only right now, but if a "small" operator like MTS can make it work in a small city like Winnipeg, that's probably good news for the rest of us.)
Code is left intact, but here is the whitespace massaged into a more widely-accepted (and readable) convention. You see, Python isn't -that- sensitive to whitespace!;-)
# tinyp2p.py 1.0 (documentation at http://freedom-to-tinker.com/tinyp2p.html)
f = lambda p, n, a: \
(p == pw(myU)) and \
(((n == 0) and pr(a)) or ((n == 1) and [ls(a)]) or c(a))
def aug(u):
return ((u == myU) and pr()) or pr(pxy(u).f(pw(u), 0, pr([myU])))
pr() and [aug(s) for s in aug(pr()[0])]
(lambda sv: sv.register_function(f, "f") or
srv(sv))(xs((ar[3], int(ar[4]))))
for url in pxy(ar[3]).f(pw(ar[3]), 0, []):
for fn in filter(lambda n:
not n in ls(),
(pxy(url).f(pw(url), 1, ar[4]))[0]):
(lambda fi: fi.write(pxy(url).f(pw(url), 2, fn)) or
fi.close())(file(fn, "wc"))
I don't claim to be an expert in PCI or MiniPCI, but any notebook I've seen comes with a MiniPCI slot, and since I -think- MiniPCI is a "bus" in the true sense of the word, can this simply become a (carefully designed) cabling & connector problem? ie, extend your MiniPCI bus out into several MiniPCI (or ideally even PCI) slots?
the expression: 1+1=2 is neither true nor false, it is part of a definition, based on Piano's 5 Axioms.
Isn't that just one very narrow way to see that expression? Tell me then, from your perspective, what was the nature of the expression 1+1=2before Piano's 5 Axioms.
The Dasher Project is an interesting approach to gesture-based input for written communication that works on PDAs or workstations. There's a demo you can download.
The Tetra Society is a society of volunteer engineers & technical people who build and customize devices to assist people with disabilities. Take a look on their projects page for some ideas.
I'm planning to write an sftp "browser" front end in python
Sounds like a good project, but have you seen the SFTP KIOSlave? If you run KDE, you can read/write/browse SFTP transparently in KDE apps like Konqueror). CVS I don't use SFTP but I regularly edit files "live" over SCP (SSH) in KDevelop with nothing more than a File|Open, browse, edit, File|Save.
It's one of those features of KDE that almost makes the rest of its complexity worth it. (Fingers crossed until such transparency makes it to the kernel/filesystem level.)
The SID (audio) emulation is apparently bad
on
Commodore 64 DTV Hacked
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The SID chip is my All Time Favorite Chip, for the crazy bleepy goodness it produces and for relative ease of programming. Unfortunately, emulating the sucker is quite difficult because of its design quirks. I just scanned the C64 DTV hacking forums, it sounds like the audio emulation leaves a lot to be desired. Sigh.
It's too bad, because a little plug & play C64 tracker or demo player or SID player at that price would have been a great toy.
Yes, I dislike fan noise, disk noise, and energy wasting myself. So I'll bite... what's wrong with suspend or even hibernate?
These are quicker (and thus, more energy-friendly) operations that accomplish the same thing. If you motherboard doesn't support ACPI then you can still run a software suspend to disk (including your swap partition, if you're that miserly).
Notebook users have known this for years... Why shutdown & reboot when you can just suspend to RAM (or disk, if you have to).
Code is left intact, but here is the whitespace massaged into a more widely-accepted (and readable) convention. You see, Python isn't -that- sensitive to whitespace!;-)
# tinyp2p.py 1.0 (documentation at http://freedom-to-tinker.com/tinyp2p.html)
f = lambda p, n, a: \
(p == pw(myU)) and (((n == 0) and pr(a)) or ((n == 1) and [ls(a)]) or c(a))
def aug(u):
return ((u == myU) and pr()) or pr(pxy(u).f(pw(u), 0, pr([myU])))
pr() and [aug(s) for s in aug(pr()[0])]
(lambda sv: sv.register_function(f, "f") or srv(sv))(xs((ar[3],int(ar[4]))))
for url in pxy(ar[3]).f(pw(ar[3]), 0, []):
for fn in filter(lambda n: not n in ls(), (pxy(url).f(pw(url), 1, ar[4]))[0]):
(lambda fi: fi.write(pxy(url).f(pw(url), 2, fn)) or fi.close())(file(fn, "wc"))
Slashdot Mirror
Not many comments so far, so here's mildly off-topic Fat Man memories...
I look back to the guy's work in the early 1990s for my faves. The top one in my mind is probably Faceball 2000, circa 1991. Here's the Gameboy soundtrack (ripped to MID). The SNES and Game Gear versions are even better if you can find them.
Putting the merits of the music and game into context... This was a pre-Wolf 3D, pre-Doom FPS from 14 years ago that ran on 4 MHz Z80 handhelds that you could cable together for "LAN" play. On-the-fly rendered 3D graphics (on otherwise sprite and tile-scroller platforms) spiced up with some good Fat Man tunes (for the day)... it was a beautiful thing. Okay, so the framerates weren't great.
On contract, Sanger would deliver developers the audio routine (Z80 code, in this case) which would play back his highly compressed audio data (destined for preciously small ROMs), using even more precious cycles in the horizontal and/or vertical interrupts to trigger frequency, volume, timbre, envelope change events. Heady stuff.
You want all the benefits of the socialist economy of Sweden and all the benefits of (largely) free-enterprize Canada. Umm, something has to give somewhere.
No, good for him. It's people like him who dream about having it "all" (and occasionally succeed at it) that eventually demonstrate to others that a life of quiet desperation and constant compromise isn't the only way to live.
Also, while Canada certainly permits USA-style free enterprise, you'd be practicing it above a safety net of welfare, healthcare, and other socialized benefits. Some think that's the best of both worlds. Others find it contrary to a real capitalist mindset. Either way, you'll be paying for it with moderately high taxes in Canada (e.g. income, capital gain, sales, service, tariff, import, inheritance, estate, consumption, and other taxes)
...a margin of error smaller than a "horse hair" (a Persian unit). Problem solved, next problem. ... Here's to Al-Kashi, a sane man and a pragmatic!
So thinking about the practicality of a project makes one cool?
News for pragmatists, stuff that's useful? Wrong site.
Enjoy and contribute..
Creating anything, material or philosophical, can be equally impermanent and unlikely to last. Build a bridge, it falls apart. Build a theory, it falls apart. Your "only a theory" implication of inferiority doesn't stand up.
Fair enough. The request was for a "1 or 2 line summary", so I skipped details. Anyways, here's more of Larry McVoy's thoughts around why he doesn't want to condone RE (point b) below):
Larry McVoy sees two problems with Andrew Tridgell's reverse-engineered, free tool. One is "condoning reverse engineering". The other is, in his words:
I've noticed significant reduction in lows and an unsettling amount of distortion when I go from vinyl to wax cylinder.
Run a green, felt-tipped pen around the outside of the wax cylinder. It will restore the low frequencies lost from vinyl. I would describe the restored sound as quite earthy, rather than airy though. If airy is what you're going for, I suggest making make two light applications of green felt-tipped marker, rather than one heavy one. This however, could result in very cinnamon flavored mids and highs though, so be careful. In a pinch, you could use a black felt-tipped pen, but don't just use any old Sharpie. Use something really expensive, preferably immediately after writing a page of taoist scriptures on parchment paper. Northern taoist is fine, but southern taoist would be better, especially if you listen to a lot of jazz. Unless it's smooth jazz. Oh, and insulate yourself with 24K gold arch supports before trying any of this, otherwise the earth's own vibrations could mellow your high frequencies, resulting in distinctly cedar-flavored vocals.
If the "$5 lamp timer" idea to shut down the router during off-hours doesn't work for you (eg. you need wired connections to stay up), a script to enable/disable the wl_net_mode setting on the http://192.168.1.xxx/Wireless_Basic.asp page of a Linksys WRT54GS would seem pretty doable. Put an enable/disable entry into a cron schedule and you've closed the window for hackers somewhat.
Cooking a script up like this (with POST and HTTP Basic Authentication for login) wouldn't be very hard, but does anyone know of Linksys scripts that might already be usable?
I have some important decisions to make ... I'm not even totally sure ... decisions, decisions...
"Ever notice that 'what the hell!' is always the right decision?"
- Marilyn Monroe (1926 - 1962)
(I think Marilyn would take the year off.)
Finally, a list of *big* companies using PostgreSQL for *serious* projects.
I genuinely like PostgreSQL and have used it extensively. I want to see a list of big name users as much as anyone. But that "list of *big* companies" is topped by:
* Affymetrix
* Afilias
* BASF
* Cognitivity
* Journyx
* Royal
* The American Chemical Society
* Tsutaya
With the possible exception of BASF, these aren't exactly household names. I have no doubt that these are huge organizations with serious database needs, but what PostgreSQL could really use, IMHO, is a recognizable headliner.
When your gigabit ethernet burns out...
If something on my motherboard burned out, I don't think I'd be trusting it at all anymore, with or without expansion slots!
Anyways, this would be my logic if such a problem actually happened:
If Deaf admirers of Knuth don't already know about it, they may want to pick up his book: Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About. It contains transcripts of a great set of MIT lectures (including Q&A) by Knuth. These are edited and commented by Knuth.
This won't contain the recent NPR interview, obviously, but it's worth a read if you're a Knuth fan. (And open to an intelligent person's opinions on computers and religion.)
True, but any <insert-belief-set> militant group is simply doublespeak for terrorists. Christian, vegetarian, feminist, racial pride, etc.
Fo an intro to Wahhabism that doesn't resort to conclusions like "nutballs" and "islamic nut cases", there's an article here (probably with its own biases, but I found it more informative and it includes references.)
Manitoba Telecom Systems have been serving digital television over DSL lines for a while (in Winnipeg only right now, but if a "small" operator like MTS can make it work in a small city like Winnipeg, that's probably good news for the rest of us.)
MTS TV, and FAQ.
Here's a catchy radio commercial. Well, catchy in a mid-80s sort of way...
Check out the price and RAM comparison in the TV commercial.
And lots more here.
I really hope they fly at all these little idiots with the full weight of the US Army and everything that entails.
Spoken like someone who isn't paying enough taxes to care how his government spends his money.
Really now, do you want military-sized, wasteful, beurocratic budgets to spend time tracking down people who cheat in a video game?
I don't claim to be an expert in PCI or MiniPCI, but any notebook I've seen comes with a MiniPCI slot, and since I -think- MiniPCI is a "bus" in the true sense of the word, can this simply become a (carefully designed) cabling & connector problem? ie, extend your MiniPCI bus out into several MiniPCI (or ideally even PCI) slots?
Just thinking out loud.
the expression: 1+1=2 is neither true nor false, it is part of a definition, based on Piano's 5 Axioms.
Isn't that just one very narrow way to see that expression? Tell me then, from your perspective, what was the nature of the expression 1+1=2 before Piano's 5 Axioms.
The Dasher Project is an interesting approach to gesture-based input for written communication that works on PDAs or workstations. There's a demo you can download.
The Tetra Society is a society of volunteer engineers & technical people who build and customize devices to assist people with disabilities. Take a look on their projects page for some ideas.
WorkshopSolutions has similar ideas.
I'm planning to write an sftp "browser" front end in python
Sounds like a good project, but have you seen the SFTP KIOSlave? If you run KDE, you can read/write/browse SFTP transparently in KDE apps like Konqueror). CVS I don't use SFTP but I regularly edit files "live" over SCP (SSH) in KDevelop with nothing more than a File|Open, browse, edit, File|Save.
It's one of those features of KDE that almost makes the rest of its complexity worth it. (Fingers crossed until such transparency makes it to the kernel/filesystem level.)
The SID chip is my All Time Favorite Chip, for the crazy bleepy goodness it produces and for relative ease of programming. Unfortunately, emulating the sucker is quite difficult because of its design quirks. I just scanned the C64 DTV hacking forums, it sounds like the audio emulation leaves a lot to be desired. Sigh.
It's too bad, because a little plug & play C64 tracker or demo player or SID player at that price would have been a great toy.
Yes, I dislike fan noise, disk noise, and energy wasting myself. So I'll bite... what's wrong with suspend or even hibernate?
These are quicker (and thus, more energy-friendly) operations that accomplish the same thing. If you motherboard doesn't support ACPI then you can still run a software suspend to disk (including your swap partition, if you're that miserly).
Notebook users have known this for years... Why shutdown & reboot when you can just suspend to RAM (or disk, if you have to).
Code is left intact, but here is the whitespace massaged into a more widely-accepted (and readable) convention. You see, Python isn't -that- sensitive to whitespace! ;-)
myU, prs, srv = ("http://"+ar[3]+":"+ar[4], ar[5:], lambda x:x.serve_forever())
# tinyp2p.py 1.0 (documentation at http://freedom-to-tinker.com/tinyp2p.html)
import sys, os, SimpleXMLRPCServer, xmlrpclib, re, hmac # (C) 2004, E.W. Felten
ar, pw, res = (sys.argv, lambda u:hmac.new(sys.argv[1],u).hexdigest(), re.search)
pxy, xs = (xmlrpclib.ServerProxy, SimpleXMLRPCServer.SimpleXMLRPCServer)
def ls(p=""):
return filter(
lambda n: (p == "") or res(p, n),
os.listdir(os.getcwd()))
if ar[2] != "client": # license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0
def pr(x=[]):
return ([(y in prs) or prs.append(y) for y in x] or 1) and prs
def c(n):
return ((lambda f: (f.read(), f.close()))(file(n)))[0]
f = lambda p, n, a: \
(p == pw(myU)) and (((n == 0) and pr(a)) or ((n == 1) and [ls(a)]) or c(a))
def aug(u):
return ((u == myU) and pr()) or pr(pxy(u).f(pw(u), 0, pr([myU])))
pr() and [aug(s) for s in aug(pr()[0])]
(lambda sv: sv.register_function(f, "f") or srv(sv))(xs((ar[3],int(ar[4]))))
for url in pxy(ar[3]).f(pw(ar[3]), 0, []):
for fn in filter(lambda n: not n in ls(), (pxy(url).f(pw(url), 1, ar[4]))[0]):
(lambda fi: fi.write(pxy(url).f(pw(url), 2, fn)) or fi.close())(file(fn, "wc"))