Does anybody know if the bttv video card issue, the one that would freeze the machine when capturing from a bttv card under heavy system load, is resolved?
I'm not lazy asking about this here, it's just that I looked everywhere in the changelogs and I can't see anything about it, yet the problem is known. Perhaps the problem went away as another was fixed? Anybody has any experience on this?
I'm surprised how e-bay can have such a crap, ugly interface and continue to operate as a successful company.
Marketing 101 my friend: eBay tries to reproduce a garage sale, therefore their interface is carefully designed to be slightly hard to use, to make people warm and fuzzy when they find what they're looking for, just like in a garage sale.
is its very business model: I've always avoided buying things online (and also over the phone) because I dislike not having a real person in front of me to do business with. Buying something over the phone or over the internet is a socially deficient a transaction as it gets, and it deprives you of the all important face to talk to (or to punch) if you were scammed with your purchase.
And don't talk to me about eBay user ratings: these are a joke. These sorts of credentials are a joke even in real-life: as the saying goes, really good con artists can sell you a turd and make you say thank you and beg for more.
On the other hand, eBay brings sellers and buyers from the entire world together, and (more importantly), there's no lower price limit to what you can sell. So if I'm looking for Star Trek paraphernalia for example, I'm much more likely to find that miniature Klingon ship on eBay than from ads in the local newspaper.
So, several years ago, the choice was tough for me: avoid doing business with people online, or be able to find great things? So one day I took the plunge, opened a PayPal account and starting bidding on things. Net result: out of 50-so items I won, I never received 4, and PayPal still owes me $150 of *my* money they just don't want to let go of.
But it's not his right to leave if he feels the conditions are unsatisfactory?
Absolutely. But what I'm saying is, if complained publicly about my employer's choices even a tenth of what he does, my employer would let me go before I had the choice of leaving by choice.
During the dot-com bubble, employees like Stallman, who did and said whatever they wanted and were better treated than the other just because they had some kind of prestige value were called "divas". RMS is a diva, what surprises me is that he still holds a job, most divas I've known are unemployed today.
Stallman says that MIT could have implemented a different system that protected the visitors' privacy. Instead, he says, the Institute chose only convenience, and he's ready to call it a day and take his research elsewhere. "The big sacrifice is leaving MIT," he says. "I am prepared to make that sacrifice."
I don't see any reason why the MIT wouldn't have the right, or wouldn't want to see who enters what building when. It's their premises, and if something gets stolen or damaged, RFID would help tracking down the culprit(s).
This thing is a security issue in this case. It's not the same privacy issue as tracking the general public in malls and K-Marts for no good reason. I Stallman should ease off the 1984 Orwellian paranoia a little and adapted his points of views to the environments he's in.
You could do what they do at the Stonehenge site in the UK : they have a cheapo radio receiver thingy, and buttons to tune in to one of the several languages they offer. I assume they have a base station that broadcasts on several frequencies.
So essentially, what you could do if you want to do it on the cheap is to get several low-power FM transmitters (that won't emit outside the building, presumably, I don't know how the FCC would like that) and lend cheap FM radios with preset stations to receive your broadcasts, with a little "program" sheet, perhaps glued to the receivers.
True true, but a majority of people don't do what you do. Proof is, there are files with kajillions of sources: those are untouched files, and they're usually what people go for.
What you do, in effect, is diluting my ability to download the file from other sources than you, because most likely you're the only person to have that version of the file. Which in turns diminishes the overall value of P2P, and also hurts you because nobody downloads from you, therefore you have a lesser rating to download from other people as a result.
we will be happy to allow you to license our patent to continue your technology-based counter-p2p operations.... for ONE BILLION DOLLARS!" [touch pinkie to corner of mouth, for added effect]
It's a technology for p2p Haters, therefore we shall call it "Preparation-H"! Because it's good on the whole.
If there are 10000 bogus files, but only a handful that have more than 5 sources, chances are these are the real McCoy and all the others are the decoys.
And even if there are 10000 files around with a lot of sources for each file, I'm sure people will start trading files containing the RC5 checksums of real files, on IRC or something. Hell, they might even P2P the real-files index:-)
In short: should the RIAA/MPAA and friends even adopt that technique, it'll give them only a very temporary reprieve. They really should realize the cat's out of the bag and they should start thinking of new business models around digital file sharing, not against it.
it's a URL encoded in a 2D, non-proprietary format. It's also a plus that it's not locked up in some bullshit like the CueCat.
The "Cues" (DigitalConvergence's special barcodes) were just regular CODE128 barcodes with the sync bars removed, so only the CueCat could read them. Other than that, perfectly standard. What's more, the CueCat could read just about any 1D barcode out there, which made it very interesting for a free toy.
The "encryption" used by the CueCat to send codes to the computer's PS/2 port was just XOR and BASE64 encoding. Not much of an encryption really.
The big difference with this is that the Cues were essentially links to entries in Digitalconvergence's database (which itself was just the UPC database + a bunch of special products from companies they partenered with, like RadioShack) so that they could sit between your scans and the information to collect marketting data. This on the other end seems to just be barcode-encoded URLs.
You probably don't have much of a choice, but I would encourage you to look into a Linux migration.
You forget Dealing With Your Boss 101: If Windows causes your pains and trouble, bitch and whine about Microsoft to your boss, he'll "understand" but won't even question your IT choices for the company. If you chose Linux, any little problem, however insignificant, will be Linux' fault, i.e. your fault.
Choosing Windows is a job security choice. Sad but very true...
When you're Joe Blow at home, that's fine. But when you administer dozens, hundreds, thousands of Win boxes and you can't automate installing/configuring/running Spybot, things are a bit different.
After all, you can't go in increasing CPU wattage indefinitely.
For the n-th time, "wattage" isn't a word (perhaps it is, but then only in the M-W). It's called "power".
I can recall the days far past when 30 watts was considered power hungry for a CPU.
I remember a day where it took between 1 and 3 days to complete a raytrace in Povray, where it takes 2 hours tops today. You want to go back to that?
Sure, you can win a little with more and more rococo CPU cooler designs, but at some point you have to look for still more ways to limit CPU power.
I don't think they're waiting for you to tell them to go look for solutions. You'll notice that CPU speeds increase much faster than the power they require, that it's not a linear relationship, and I suspect this doesn't happen magically.
The mobile chips do it by varying their clock rates and turning parts of themselves off part of the time. Just think of it as an additional scheme for reducing CPU heat output.
Run distributed.net or setiathome, or do raytracing on a laptop, and I guarantee you your battery won't last long. The point of power-saving by throttling the CPU and turning parts of it off is to save power while the user does nothing (typically 99% of the time when doing word processing).
1979 - 86 (186 existed too but was a failure) 1982 - 286 1986 - 386 1989 - 486 1993 thru 2004 - Pentium (meaning 5-something), with a sub-version number
Let's analyze and translate the above post shall we:
ok, it runs on a lower voltage.
That much is said in the article.
But isn't the reality that they have a lower wattage?
"wattage", also called power, only has to do with voltage for a fixed resistance. I suppose AMD lowered the voltage to lower the power consumption too, though, so what you said is obvious.
Wattage being what really matters when it comes to power consumption and heat displacemnet.
Yes, power is indeed what matters when it comes to power consumption.
Just wait till NYT find out about this , then they'll go real bonker: imagine that, Morse code sub-channels on IRC, probably for 3v1l spies and terrorists or something!
Macintosh machines are such a small percentage of the personal computer market they're not really an interesting target for virus makers. Kind of like Linux in a sense: however secure it's supposed, it hasn't really been put to the test and never had to withstand, in desktop installs, the kinds of attacks Windows (and DOS before it) have always been through.
ya seriously - with processor speeds what they are these days, there is 0 reasons to use assembly for anything besides device drivers. hardware is cheaper than the extra man years of developer time.
You Sir, and the people who think like you, are the reason I still have a great job.
There is more about computing in this world than PCs and Macs. What do you think runs in your microwave oven? or your fancy watch? or your car's engine computer?
How sad. My first criteria is whether I personally find it interesting,
But you don't understand: what I find interesting is providing great services to people. When someone asks me to code something in any language, and I perform well and deliver what they want in time, I take pride in seeing my customer happy. I'm proud of doing that, just like you're happy doing Java.
As it happens, most of the customers I code C or asm for do have legacy code that needs working on (sometimes not), but they're really glad when someone competent comes and does the work fast and well, and they're equally happy to pay me for my services. You call that being a hooker?
Personally I would rather do interesting work for people that enthusiastically want my skills, rather than for those that grudgingly need those skills - irrespective of the monetary rewards.
You know what? I do whatever people are happy to pay me for. Assembler, C and Forth (I don't do COBOL) are things I do very well, and they are marketable skills right now. I don't force anybody to pay me to code in these languages instead of Java.
The day Java is ubiquitous and C/asm disappear, I'll get a job as a Java programmer, since I can do Java too. My point is, the new generation can't do asm and C efficiently, the old dirty way, because they're been brainwashed into thinking OO and clean-code-over-tricks-at-all-cost : the latter is very nice and desirable, but the former is the reality. Period. And that's not going to change anytime soon.
The more Java programmers the schooling system churns out, the more work for us old-style programmers who know C and assembler.
You'd be surprised how much the industry is sick of Java programmers, and on the lookout for good low-level engineers, or people who can do Forth or COBOL.
It's the current schooling system that allows me to keep a dot-com salary, so don't change anything for me thank you very much.
Slashdot Mirror
Oops, wrong link. That was an old bttv problem. But I can't find the link to the 2.6 one now. Duh me...
Does anybody know if the bttv video card issue, the one that would freeze the machine when capturing from a bttv card under heavy system load, is resolved?
I'm not lazy asking about this here, it's just that I looked everywhere in the changelogs and I can't see anything about it, yet the problem is known. Perhaps the problem went away as another was fixed? Anybody has any experience on this?
I'm surprised how e-bay can have such a crap, ugly interface and continue to operate as a successful company.
Marketing 101 my friend: eBay tries to reproduce a garage sale, therefore their interface is carefully designed to be slightly hard to use, to make people warm and fuzzy when they find what they're looking for, just like in a garage sale.
is its very business model: I've always avoided buying things online (and also over the phone) because I dislike not having a real person in front of me to do business with. Buying something over the phone or over the internet is a socially deficient a transaction as it gets, and it deprives you of the all important face to talk to (or to punch) if you were scammed with your purchase.
And don't talk to me about eBay user ratings: these are a joke. These sorts of credentials are a joke even in real-life: as the saying goes, really good con artists can sell you a turd and make you say thank you and beg for more.
On the other hand, eBay brings sellers and buyers from the entire world together, and (more importantly), there's no lower price limit to what you can sell. So if I'm looking for Star Trek paraphernalia for example, I'm much more likely to find that miniature Klingon ship on eBay than from ads in the local newspaper.
So, several years ago, the choice was tough for me: avoid doing business with people online, or be able to find great things? So one day I took the plunge, opened a PayPal account and starting bidding on things. Net result: out of 50-so items I won, I never received 4, and PayPal still owes me $150 of *my* money they just don't want to let go of.
So FUCK EBAY!
But it's not his right to leave if he feels the conditions are unsatisfactory?
Absolutely. But what I'm saying is, if complained publicly about my employer's choices even a tenth of what he does, my employer would let me go before I had the choice of leaving by choice.
During the dot-com bubble, employees like Stallman, who did and said whatever they wanted and were better treated than the other just because they had some kind of prestige value were called "divas". RMS is a diva, what surprises me is that he still holds a job, most divas I've known are unemployed today.
Stallman says that MIT could have implemented a different system that protected the visitors' privacy. Instead, he says, the Institute chose only convenience, and he's ready to call it a day and take his research elsewhere. "The big sacrifice is leaving MIT," he says. "I am prepared to make that sacrifice."
I don't see any reason why the MIT wouldn't have the right, or wouldn't want to see who enters what building when. It's their premises, and if something gets stolen or damaged, RFID would help tracking down the culprit(s).
This thing is a security issue in this case. It's not the same privacy issue as tracking the general public in malls and K-Marts for no good reason. I Stallman should ease off the 1984 Orwellian paranoia a little and adapted his points of views to the environments he's in.
You could do what they do at the Stonehenge site in the UK : they have a cheapo radio receiver thingy, and buttons to tune in to one of the several languages they offer. I assume they have a base station that broadcasts on several frequencies.
So essentially, what you could do if you want to do it on the cheap is to get several low-power FM transmitters (that won't emit outside the building, presumably, I don't know how the FCC would like that) and lend cheap FM radios with preset stations to receive your broadcasts, with a little "program" sheet, perhaps glued to the receivers.
Just an idea...
The aim of this effort is to explore the possibilities of placing textbooks online -- effectively giving them away.
How would you like to explore the possibilities of placing your credit card number online?
True true, but a majority of people don't do what you do. Proof is, there are files with kajillions of sources: those are untouched files, and they're usually what people go for.
What you do, in effect, is diluting my ability to download the file from other sources than you, because most likely you're the only person to have that version of the file. Which in turns diminishes the overall value of P2P, and also hurts you because nobody downloads from you, therefore you have a lesser rating to download from other people as a result.
we will be happy to allow you to license our patent to continue your technology-based counter-p2p operations.... for ONE BILLION DOLLARS!" [touch pinkie to corner of mouth, for added effect]
It's a technology for p2p Haters, therefore we shall call it "Preparation-H"! Because it's good on the whole.
If there are 10000 bogus files, but only a handful that have more than 5 sources, chances are these are the real McCoy and all the others are the decoys.
:-)
And even if there are 10000 files around with a lot of sources for each file, I'm sure people will start trading files containing the RC5 checksums of real files, on IRC or something. Hell, they might even P2P the real-files index
In short: should the RIAA/MPAA and friends even adopt that technique, it'll give them only a very temporary reprieve. They really should realize the cat's out of the bag and they should start thinking of new business models around digital file sharing, not against it.
it's a URL encoded in a 2D, non-proprietary format. It's also a plus that it's not locked up in some bullshit like the CueCat.
The "Cues" (DigitalConvergence's special barcodes) were just regular CODE128 barcodes with the sync bars removed, so only the CueCat could read them. Other than that, perfectly standard. What's more, the CueCat could read just about any 1D barcode out there, which made it very interesting for a free toy.
The "encryption" used by the CueCat to send codes to the computer's PS/2 port was just XOR and BASE64 encoding. Not much of an encryption really.
The big difference with this is that the Cues were essentially links to entries in Digitalconvergence's database (which itself was just the UPC database + a bunch of special products from companies they partenered with, like RadioShack) so that they could sit between your scans and the information to collect marketting data. This on the other end seems to just be barcode-encoded URLs.
More info on the CueCat here.
Ryan McBride (mcbride@)
Two McBrides involved in two different dead or dying OSes, surely it can't be a coincidence...
Yet you still use Windows...
You probably don't have much of a choice, but I would encourage you to look into a Linux migration.
You forget Dealing With Your Boss 101: If Windows causes your pains and trouble, bitch and whine about Microsoft to your boss, he'll "understand" but won't even question your IT choices for the company. If you chose Linux, any little problem, however insignificant, will be Linux' fault, i.e. your fault.
Choosing Windows is a job security choice. Sad but very true...
Spyware can be a real prick to remove, people just cant do it themselves, even competent computer users.
/X
Sure you can: FORMAT C:
http://www.spybot.info . That's all it takes.
When you're Joe Blow at home, that's fine. But when you administer dozens, hundreds, thousands of Win boxes and you can't automate installing/configuring/running Spybot, things are a bit different.
After all, you can't go in increasing CPU wattage indefinitely.
For the n-th time, "wattage" isn't a word (perhaps it is, but then only in the M-W). It's called "power".
I can recall the days far past when 30 watts was considered power hungry for a CPU.
I remember a day where it took between 1 and 3 days to complete a raytrace in Povray, where it takes 2 hours tops today. You want to go back to that?
Sure, you can win a little with more and more rococo CPU cooler designs, but at some point you have to look for still more ways to limit CPU power.
I don't think they're waiting for you to tell them to go look for solutions. You'll notice that CPU speeds increase much faster than the power they require, that it's not a linear relationship, and I suspect this doesn't happen magically.
The mobile chips do it by varying their clock rates and turning parts of themselves off part of the time. Just think of it as an additional scheme for reducing CPU heat output.
Run distributed.net or setiathome, or do raytracing on a laptop, and I guarantee you your battery won't last long. The point of power-saving by throttling the CPU and turning parts of it off is to save power while the user does nothing (typically 99% of the time when doing word processing).
1979 - 86 (186 existed too but was a failure)
1982 - 286
1986 - 386
1989 - 486
1993 thru 2004 - Pentium (meaning 5-something), with a sub-version number
So, like, where's the Hexium, Heptium, Octium?
Let's analyze and translate the above post shall we:
ok, it runs on a lower voltage.
That much is said in the article.
But isn't the reality that they have a lower wattage?
"wattage", also called power, only has to do with voltage for a fixed resistance. I suppose AMD lowered the voltage to lower the power consumption too, though, so what you said is obvious.
Wattage being what really matters when it comes to power consumption and heat displacemnet.
Yes, power is indeed what matters when it comes to power consumption.
In short: what a stupid post that was...
Just wait till NYT find out about this , then they'll go real bonker: imagine that, Morse code sub-channels on IRC, probably for 3v1l spies and terrorists or something!
Macintosh machines are such a small percentage of the personal computer market they're not really an interesting target for virus makers. Kind of like Linux in a sense: however secure it's supposed, it hasn't really been put to the test and never had to withstand, in desktop installs, the kinds of attacks Windows (and DOS before it) have always been through.
ya seriously - with processor speeds what they are these days, there is 0 reasons to use assembly for anything besides device drivers. hardware is cheaper than the extra man years of developer time.
You Sir, and the people who think like you, are the reason I still have a great job.
There is more about computing in this world than PCs and Macs. What do you think runs in your microwave oven? or your fancy watch? or your car's engine computer?
How sad. My first criteria is whether I personally find it interesting,
But you don't understand: what I find interesting is providing great services to people. When someone asks me to code something in any language, and I perform well and deliver what they want in time, I take pride in seeing my customer happy. I'm proud of doing that, just like you're happy doing Java.
As it happens, most of the customers I code C or asm for do have legacy code that needs working on (sometimes not), but they're really glad when someone competent comes and does the work fast and well, and they're equally happy to pay me for my services. You call that being a hooker?
Personally I would rather do interesting work for people that enthusiastically want my skills, rather than for those that grudgingly need those skills - irrespective of the monetary rewards.
You know what? I do whatever people are happy to pay me for. Assembler, C and Forth (I don't do COBOL) are things I do very well, and they are marketable skills right now. I don't force anybody to pay me to code in these languages instead of Java.
The day Java is ubiquitous and C/asm disappear, I'll get a job as a Java programmer, since I can do Java too. My point is, the new generation can't do asm and C efficiently, the old dirty way, because they're been brainwashed into thinking OO and clean-code-over-tricks-at-all-cost : the latter is very nice and desirable, but the former is the reality. Period. And that's not going to change anytime soon.
The more Java programmers the schooling system churns out, the more work for us old-style programmers who know C and assembler.
You'd be surprised how much the industry is sick of Java programmers, and on the lookout for good low-level engineers, or people who can do Forth or COBOL.
It's the current schooling system that allows me to keep a dot-com salary, so don't change anything for me thank you very much.