Nope, they can do that with any mpeg stream they want to. The FBI warning and such are just MPEG data encoded so that it hits one frame for 10 seconds straight. ----------------------------
Regarding your sig, I take it you have a pre-released Vestax VRX-2000, eh?.
On topic, you're partially right, DAT is for most consumers, dead, myself I own a plethora of Dat decks (Tascam DA-302 (dual well, high speed dub), Tascam DA-P1 (HQ portable), Sony M-1 (TINY!), Sony D-8(POS backup portable)) but I know this is an exception. As for digital VCRs though, how often do you really need to take the tapes to someplace other than your house? Honestly, I almost always watch my recorded material in my own home. I already own a Sony DSR20 which I use for those purposes, and I fail to see how anybody could really do anything about it. The one thing I really want though is a direct digital stream from my DirecTV, through my TiVo, and optionally into my DVTR.
DAT is only around because of the pirate tax? hardly. It's around because it's great for live recording, and for making continuous recordings of up to 3 hour length. (just use a 90m DDS). As for the pirate tax, I own a lot of DAT equipment and trade DATs fairly heavily and to be honest it seems that we all own 'professional' equipment which is exempt from the tax, and from the copying restrictions. DAT is just a great format for a lot of things, it isn't lossy, no annoying tape flips/swaps for most things... it just works. ----------------------------
Well, actually the regexes can be as good as perl's if you use the perl compatible regex stuff on compilation.
As for database support, it's very thorough though I'm having a little trouble getting PHP4.0 to compile against Solid 3.5. Of course I've only put an hour or so into it, including download time. ----------------------------
The fact is that for the majority of database backed sites, cost is far more important than functionality when it comes to databases. MySQL is cheap in almost every sense of the word. It costs nothing to use, administration is incredibly simple, and there's nothing particularly confusing about it.
A lot of people, even given the funds to purchase a DB like Oracle, don't know how it works. Thus MySQL works well enough for them. They don't care about the lack of stored procedures because they've never used them before. They don't care about the high-load write performance problems because they won't have load.
Another excellent reference to learn about Operating Systems in general is Tannenbaum's 'Modern Operating Systems'. It's a well written text which covers operating system concepts thoroughly without making things unneccessarily complex.
In my initial comment I had assumed that anybody who would attempt to work on the kernel would have already made themselves familiar with general operating concepts through a book such as the ones mentioned by each of us. I'm not familiar with the text you suggested, however. ----------------------------
It's not about understanding the absolute latest kernel source. The book doesn't get rendered obsolete because we went from 2.2.12 to 2.2.15 or even to 2.4.0pre5000. It's a book for understanding the basics of how the kernel works, why things are structured as they are, and to learn about this design, thus making it so that you may be able to understand the latest version of the kernel.
And those of us who know what in the kernel we want to quickly search a file for, in order to learn about Linux's memory management for example, have quite probably already read and understood the source code, so therefore have no use for the book anyway. ----------------------------
then don't buy the book. look through your technical book collection, and count the number of scribbles. If your books are like mine there's probably a comment i wrote to myself every few pages. While yes, I could just comment the code, and keep it in a source tree, I can't do that while I'm sitting in a park, enjoying not being near a computer. ----------------------------
And besides, we have the source, were somebody to get obnoxious with it, and start displaying ads, I think we can all be sure that there'd be a common patch that'd get distributed, to remove all ads.
These aren't ads though, these are about as obtrusive as the mention of swansea university that many of us see on boot. ----------------------------
Well, if you went to the webpage and actually read the entries, you'd see that each of them justifies their existance as part of the proposal.
blah blah blah is a very weak argument compared to the statements found, for example in the paper for BuildConf. Also you only list two programs, cook and autoconf. Configure, last I checked, is an autoconf generated script.
Of these programs I've only used autoconf, and I must agree with the author of BuildConf, that it's poorly documented and confusing. It forces a syntax on you (m4) which is rarely used in other situations. It does many things right, but this, combined with a lack of good documentation on it, is a fatal flaw.
And more importantly, why does it matter if we get other, better tools? You may prefer better documentation to autoconf, I may not. Does that make me wrong, or you wrong? not at all. There's room for all of us, and software darwinism will help choose the best (most adaptable, most powerful, most appropriate) tool. ----------------------------
The reason we do this is simple. The United States government. Nope, I'm not claiming conspiracy, but look at what one has to do to do business with the US government. You must submit your specs in Word.
Now all the businesses that want to do business with the government switch to word. So what happens next? The businesses that do businesses with those busiensses switch to word. It's recursive.
Personally, I think the government could do much to open up the playing field by making it so all documents sent to the government had to be in some openly documented file format (XML based if you like to pretend that XML solves all problems, or just some random binary format or what not.)
This simple move would smack Microsoft far harder, and more fairly than most any DoJ action. ----------------------------
Contrary to the people who said it doesn't exist, a coworker and I just went and bought two of these suckers at the local CompUSA for $50/each. The sales droid noted that these things are selling unusually well, but didn't ask us to sign the contract.
It's worth trying, at the very least. ----------------------------
Warning, goatse.cx is a *REALLY* nasty link. Now that I know your interest is piqued, again, don't follow it unless you want to see some sick sick shit. ----------------------------
I dropped a whole big mess of bouncy balls down it one day out of the curiousity of 'what *would* happen if you did that?' definitely worth the five bucks for the bouncy balls. One thing to note though... make sure the stairway is clear before you drop, there was somebody on the second floor who I owed a beer after they got nailed with one of the bouncy balls on a rebound. ----------------------------
If memory serves correctly, the drop squad guys didn't drink. That was bad, dropping Sparcs on the other hand, was perfectly acceptable. I'm not sure though, I went to RPI 95-96 before transferring out, so I'm basing this on a 5 year old memory of the story. ----------------------------
It's a few years out of date, but at my last job we purchased around 100 identical Acer workstations. After carefully selecting the parts to be used and such (everything was reasonable. not good, but i was on a *very* tight budget) the order was placed and received. The computers were *not* identical. They came with parts that weren't requested (sound cards and modems to be specific) which had to be removed, and the cd-rom was an even lesser model than the one previously agreed upon. These machines, after a year, had five power supply failures and two cd-rom drive failures.
As for the company acknowledging my claims, all parts were replaced at their expense, so I guess they do acknowledge them. I'd provide documentation, but as noted, this happened at a previous job. ----------------------------
Nope, no specific method. I helped a little, I did the neccessary cruelties... throwing out his liquor and wine (a move he took me down hard for that night, and thanked me for about two days later) and if we went out to shoot pool or somethin', i let him drink, but only the same as what i was drinking (which is to say, not much. generally just a guinness or two)
Once he had stopped drinking for a week, well.. he had all sorts of nasty sickness in the middle, but then he started to feel better, and after another week or two, he didn't want to drink, because to quote him 'i don't remember ever feeling this good.' of course it certainly didn't hurt that he found himself a lovely little ladyfriend right after quitting drinking, and she was also very supportive:-) ----------------------------
I sync to a Macintosh, so I don't have first hand experience with syncing to any of the Win OSs. I know my sister and my lady sync to win98se machines and it seems easy enough. There is supposedly NT software to sync this camera, but I can't give first hand user experience on it, sorry.
As for the Canon, yep, it appears that it does take a Microdrive. Unfortunately I didn't know about it at the time of purchase, so I haven't a clue if it has good optics or anything else. An interesting possibility for the future though ----------------------------
I think the problem is that there's a line of what's advanced and what's not? I consider normalizing a database schema to be trivial. It's in one of the early chapters of the first every database book I read, and that was an application guide, not a Database Theory book. I would fully trust that anybody who could solve a differential equation could be taught quickly how to normalize a database, without a college class on it.
As for programming style. You're absolutely correct again, good style is important, design is CRUCIAL, and hacking doesn't work for maintainable code.
Please understand, I don't think that getting a degree is a waste of time at all. I'm in a dreaded middle cube, and if I go around every cube near mine, I'm surrounded by two Princeton PhDs, an MIT Masters, an RPI bachelors, an RPI masters, a CMU masters and I'm not sure of the last person's education. Then there's me. A guy who didn't quite finish college because life got in the way, and suddenly it was more important to be self-sufficient than it was to be degreed. It's amazing the decisions you make when you find out a parent is terminally ill. In my case, my decision was that I'd sacrifice the degree, and get a job to pay to finish my education sometime in the future, thus freeing up extra money to take care of my mom.
Education is useful, degrees are not. Too many people confuse the two. ----------------------------
Alcoholism is not as simple as it would appear to be... Alcoholism is a depressant and logically goes hand in hand with depression. When abused, alcohol can lead to a downward spiral which is hard to comprehend.
One of my best friends is a recently recovered alcoholic. He used to down a bottle of hard liquor every night, often chased with some other nastiness. Finally, I got him to slow down, and just drink socially and he got out of a three year depression and thanks me far far far too much for helping him quit the alcohol abuse.
The trouble is that you drink to stop feeling like shit, but the drink causes you to feel like shit later... so you drink more and.... well, it's just sad.
(now some wannabe troll will just post a rude folowup that isn't even funny) ----------------------------
really? give us details. what instruction sequence fails on AMD? Can I have demo code to reproduce the failure? What is the workaround? Did you report the bug to AMD? Do you have documentation of that available?
I work for a company that uses AMD and Intel processors interchangably on mission critical machines. Both of them make chips that have passed all of our qualifications flawlessly so I have a lot of trouble believing you.
Okay, enough, we all know what you are, go back under your bridge and next time at least be funny. ----------------------------
I have to say, I love this camera, the only thing that's wrong with it is a flimsy feeling lens cover, IMHO. In the past months I've purchased four of them with the 340 meg IBM microdrives. One for myself, my sister, my father and my girlfriend. Of these people, I'm the only computer-ish one, and they all love their cameras.
They're great because with the microdrive you have enough storage to go on vacation for a week or two, take lots of photos, and not have to sync to a laptop or something. (who wants to bring their computer on vacation? oh, i forgot, this is/. probably a lot of people.)
The picture quality is excellent, and while no, it will not supplant the professional style 35mm camera with lots of lenses and filters and such, it does a nice job of replacing the average 35mm point and shoot. While I wish it were smaller (if they made one that looked like my Elph, that'd be great), it's a great little camera, with decent battery life, good picture quality (colour balance is fairly accurate and such) and easy to use operation.
As for price, I honestly am not sure. I believe they ran a tad over $500 for the camera plus $350-ish for the microdrive to buy seperate and there's some sort of deal if you buy the camera with the microdrive. ----------------------------
Slashdot Mirror
Nope, they can do that with any mpeg stream they want to. The FBI warning and such are just MPEG data encoded so that it hits one frame for 10 seconds straight.
----------------------------
Regarding your sig, I take it you have a pre-released Vestax VRX-2000, eh?.
On topic, you're partially right, DAT is for most consumers, dead, myself I own a plethora of Dat decks (Tascam DA-302 (dual well, high speed dub), Tascam DA-P1 (HQ portable), Sony M-1 (TINY!), Sony D-8(POS backup portable)) but I know this is an exception. As for digital VCRs though, how often do you really need to take the tapes to someplace other than your house? Honestly, I almost always watch my recorded material in my own home. I already own a Sony DSR20 which I use for those purposes, and I fail to see how anybody could really do anything about it. The one thing I really want though is a direct digital stream from my DirecTV, through my TiVo, and optionally into my DVTR.
----------------------------
DAT is only around because of the pirate tax? hardly. It's around because it's great for live recording, and for making continuous recordings of up to 3 hour length. (just use a 90m DDS). As for the pirate tax, I own a lot of DAT equipment and trade DATs fairly heavily and to be honest it seems that we all own 'professional' equipment which is exempt from the tax, and from the copying restrictions. DAT is just a great format for a lot of things, it isn't lossy, no annoying tape flips/swaps for most things... it just works.
----------------------------
Well, actually the regexes can be as good as perl's if you use the perl compatible regex stuff on compilation.
As for database support, it's very thorough though I'm having a little trouble getting PHP4.0 to compile against Solid 3.5. Of course I've only put an hour or so into it, including download time.
----------------------------
The fact is that for the majority of database backed sites, cost is far more important than functionality when it comes to databases. MySQL is cheap in almost every sense of the word. It costs nothing to use, administration is incredibly simple, and there's nothing particularly confusing about it.
A lot of people, even given the funds to purchase a DB like Oracle, don't know how it works. Thus MySQL works well enough for them. They don't care about the lack of stored procedures because they've never used them before. They don't care about the high-load write performance problems because they won't have load.
----------------------------
Another excellent reference to learn about Operating Systems in general is Tannenbaum's 'Modern Operating Systems'. It's a well written text which covers operating system concepts thoroughly without making things unneccessarily complex.
In my initial comment I had assumed that anybody who would attempt to work on the kernel would have already made themselves familiar with general operating concepts through a book such as the ones mentioned by each of us. I'm not familiar with the text you suggested, however.
----------------------------
It's not about understanding the absolute latest kernel source. The book doesn't get rendered obsolete because we went from 2.2.12 to 2.2.15 or even to 2.4.0pre5000. It's a book for understanding the basics of how the kernel works, why things are structured as they are, and to learn about this design, thus making it so that you may be able to understand the latest version of the kernel.
And those of us who know what in the kernel we want to quickly search a file for, in order to learn about Linux's memory management for example, have quite probably already read and understood the source code, so therefore have no use for the book anyway.
----------------------------
then don't buy the book. look through your technical book collection, and count the number of scribbles. If your books are like mine there's probably a comment i wrote to myself every few pages. While yes, I could just comment the code, and keep it in a source tree, I can't do that while I'm sitting in a park, enjoying not being near a computer.
----------------------------
And besides, we have the source, were somebody to get obnoxious with it, and start displaying ads, I think we can all be sure that there'd be a common patch that'd get distributed, to remove all ads.
These aren't ads though, these are about as obtrusive as the mention of swansea university that many of us see on boot.
----------------------------
Well, if you went to the webpage and actually read the entries, you'd see that each of them justifies their existance as part of the proposal.
blah blah blah is a very weak argument compared to the statements found, for example in the paper for BuildConf. Also you only list two programs, cook and autoconf. Configure, last I checked, is an autoconf generated script.
Of these programs I've only used autoconf, and I must agree with the author of BuildConf, that it's poorly documented and confusing. It forces a syntax on you (m4) which is rarely used in other situations. It does many things right, but this, combined with a lack of good documentation on it, is a fatal flaw.
And more importantly, why does it matter if we get other, better tools? You may prefer better documentation to autoconf, I may not. Does that make me wrong, or you wrong? not at all. There's room for all of us, and software darwinism will help choose the best (most adaptable, most powerful, most appropriate) tool.
----------------------------
The reason we do this is simple. The United States government. Nope, I'm not claiming conspiracy, but look at what one has to do to do business with the US government. You must submit your specs in Word.
Now all the businesses that want to do business with the government switch to word. So what happens next? The businesses that do businesses with those busiensses switch to word. It's recursive.
Personally, I think the government could do much to open up the playing field by making it so all documents sent to the government had to be in some openly documented file format (XML based if you like to pretend that XML solves all problems, or just some random binary format or what not.)
This simple move would smack Microsoft far harder, and more fairly than most any DoJ action.
----------------------------
Contrary to the people who said it doesn't exist, a coworker and I just went and bought two of these suckers at the local CompUSA for $50/each. The sales droid noted that these things are selling unusually well, but didn't ask us to sign the contract.
It's worth trying, at the very least.
----------------------------
Warning, goatse.cx is a *REALLY* nasty link. Now that I know your interest is piqued, again, don't follow it unless you want to see some sick sick shit.
----------------------------
I dropped a whole big mess of bouncy balls down it one day out of the curiousity of 'what *would* happen if you did that?' definitely worth the five bucks for the bouncy balls. One thing to note though... make sure the stairway is clear before you drop, there was somebody on the second floor who I owed a beer after they got nailed with one of the bouncy balls on a rebound.
----------------------------
If memory serves correctly, the drop squad guys didn't drink. That was bad, dropping Sparcs on the other hand, was perfectly acceptable.
I'm not sure though, I went to RPI 95-96 before transferring out, so I'm basing this on a 5 year old memory of the story.
----------------------------
If memory serves correctly, the drop squad guys didn't drink. That was bad, dropping Sparcs on the other hand, was perfectly acceptable. I'm not sure though, I went to RPI 95-96 before transferring out, so I'm basing this on a 5 year old memory of the story.
----------------------------
The binary-only driver will work fine on a BSD box just as long as you have the Linux kernel module loaded... hmmm...
----------------------------
The last time I purchased something made in France was earlier today actually... I picked up some Moet & Chandon and a little Perrier-Jouet.
----------------------------
It's a few years out of date, but at my last job we purchased around 100 identical Acer workstations. After carefully selecting the parts to be used and such (everything was reasonable. not good, but i was on a *very* tight budget) the order was placed and received. The computers were *not* identical. They came with parts that weren't requested (sound cards and modems to be specific) which had to be removed, and the cd-rom was an even lesser model than the one previously agreed upon. These machines, after a year, had five power supply failures and two cd-rom drive failures.
As for the company acknowledging my claims, all parts were replaced at their expense, so I guess they do acknowledge them. I'd provide documentation, but as noted, this happened at a previous job.
----------------------------
Nope, no specific method. I helped a little, I did the neccessary cruelties... throwing out his liquor and wine (a move he took me down hard for that night, and thanked me for about two days later) and if we went out to shoot pool or somethin', i let him drink, but only the same as what i was drinking (which is to say, not much. generally just a guinness or two)
:-)
Once he had stopped drinking for a week, well.. he had all sorts of nasty sickness in the middle, but then he started to feel better, and after another week or two, he didn't want to drink, because to quote him 'i don't remember ever feeling this good.' of course it certainly didn't hurt that he found himself a lovely little ladyfriend right after quitting drinking, and she was also very supportive
----------------------------
I sync to a Macintosh, so I don't have first hand experience with syncing to any of the Win OSs. I know my sister and my lady sync to win98se machines and it seems easy enough. There is supposedly NT software to sync this camera, but I can't give first hand user experience on it, sorry.
As for the Canon, yep, it appears that it does take a Microdrive. Unfortunately I didn't know about it at the time of purchase, so I haven't a clue if it has good optics or anything else. An interesting possibility for the future though
----------------------------
I think the problem is that there's a line of what's advanced and what's not? I consider normalizing a database schema to be trivial. It's in one of the early chapters of the first every database book I read, and that was an application guide, not a Database Theory book. I would fully trust that anybody who could solve a differential equation could be taught quickly how to normalize a database, without a college class on it.
As for programming style. You're absolutely correct again, good style is important, design is CRUCIAL, and hacking doesn't work for maintainable code.
Please understand, I don't think that getting a degree is a waste of time at all. I'm in a dreaded middle cube, and if I go around every cube near mine, I'm surrounded by two Princeton PhDs, an MIT Masters, an RPI bachelors, an RPI masters, a CMU masters and I'm not sure of the last person's education. Then there's me. A guy who didn't quite finish college because life got in the way, and suddenly it was more important to be self-sufficient than it was to be degreed. It's amazing the decisions you make when you find out a parent is terminally ill. In my case, my decision was that I'd sacrifice the degree, and get a job to pay to finish my education sometime in the future, thus freeing up extra money to take care of my mom.
Education is useful, degrees are not. Too many people confuse the two.
----------------------------
Alcoholism is not as simple as it would appear to be... Alcoholism is a depressant and logically goes hand in hand with depression. When abused, alcohol can lead to a downward spiral which is hard to comprehend.
One of my best friends is a recently recovered alcoholic. He used to down a bottle of hard liquor every night, often chased with some other nastiness. Finally, I got him to slow down, and just drink socially and he got out of a three year depression and thanks me far far far too much for helping him quit the alcohol abuse.
The trouble is that you drink to stop feeling like shit, but the drink causes you to feel like shit later... so you drink more and.... well, it's just sad.
(now some wannabe troll will just post a rude folowup that isn't even funny)
----------------------------
really? give us details. what instruction sequence fails on AMD? Can I have demo code to reproduce the failure? What is the workaround? Did you report the bug to AMD? Do you have documentation of that available?
I work for a company that uses AMD and Intel processors interchangably on mission critical machines. Both of them make chips that have passed all of our qualifications flawlessly so I have a lot of trouble believing you.
Okay, enough, we all know what you are, go back under your bridge and next time at least be funny.
----------------------------
I have to say, I love this camera, the only thing that's wrong with it is a flimsy feeling lens cover, IMHO. In the past months I've purchased four of them with the 340 meg IBM microdrives. One for myself, my sister, my father and my girlfriend. Of these people, I'm the only computer-ish one, and they all love their cameras.
/. probably a lot of people.)
They're great because with the microdrive you have enough storage to go on vacation for a week or two, take lots of photos, and not have to sync to a laptop or something. (who wants to bring their computer on vacation? oh, i forgot, this is
The picture quality is excellent, and while no, it will not supplant the professional style 35mm camera with lots of lenses and filters and such, it does a nice job of replacing the average 35mm point and shoot. While I wish it were smaller (if they made one that looked like my Elph, that'd be great), it's a great little camera, with decent battery life, good picture quality (colour balance is fairly accurate and such) and easy to use operation.
As for price, I honestly am not sure. I believe they ran a tad over $500 for the camera plus $350-ish for the microdrive to buy seperate and there's some sort of deal if you buy the camera with the microdrive.
----------------------------