last year, including the #9 card which is no
longer made.
These days though, if you want a high res LCD,
you might look at a high end laptop, like an
IBM Thinkpad A20p (1400x1050) or A21p (1600x1200),
or (less expensive but not as nice) a Dell 5000e.
All of these use the ATI Rage 128 chip which is
supported by XFree86 4.01 and later.
I've heard that vendors have moved toward physically
smaller tapes because automated libraries are
easier to build when the tapes are smaller.
For example, a DAT library mechanism is quite
a bit cheaper than an 8mm library, which in
turn is cheaper than a DLT library, and so on.
On a related note though, the cost of backups
is getting ridiculous. 5 years ago, disk space
cost $250/GB and tape media (DDS-2 tape) was
$5/GB, so backing up $1000 worth of disk space
(4 GB) cost $20. Today, disk space is about
$4/GB (75 GB Maxtor drive $300) but tape media
(Exabyte Mammoth, AIT, DLT, etc.) is all well
over $1/GB, so backing up $1000 worth of disks
is going to cost over $250. So tape may be
pricing itself out of existence.
The RSA and Diffie-Hellman patents finally expired
in the past few years, but they hobbled the
growth of public-key cryptography for decades.
And Vorbis's technical advantages over MP3 are
no big deal. Its main attraction is being patent
free. If that's put into serious doubt,
then there's not much reason to spread quasi-legal
Vorbis encoders around. It's just as easy, and
more interoperable, to spread quasi-legal MP3
encoders.
So, somebody needs to pursue the matter
vigorously, which means burning a lot of money.
Or else we may have to fall back on a lower-performance compression format using
methods that predate MP3. That might not be
so bad now, since storage has gotten so cheap.
If an MPEG layer 2 encoder at 256 kbits gives
audio as as good as MP3 at 128 kbits, it uses
2x as much storage, but storage is 5x cheaper
now than when we started using MP3, so we're
still ahead. Plus, encoding the older formats
needs much less CPU cycles than MP3 or Vorbis,
so CD ripping in realtime or faster than realtime
because easy on today's PC's.
What's this about "Tynux" being a "re-engineered
Linux developed by PalmPalm"? And you have to
pay $2500 for the SDK, which includes a GCC based
toolchain, Tynux kernel etc. licensed for
educational and research use only (the SDK does
include some development hardware, not just bits).
But either Tynux is Linux (maybe a GPL violation
if they're limiting redistribution) or it isn't
(in which case why are they using the name Linux?). Or the SDK is some mixture of free and
proprietary stuff that's hard to separate.
Anyway, I'm not so happy, and I hope someone can
check into this more carefully. Palm/3com have
done well by making the development stuff open
and these guys should do the same.
Yggdrasil's DVD is the first dvd-9 (9 gigabyte
double layer DVD) with this kind of content.
There are some single layer (4.7 GB) DVD's around
and SuSe's might be one of them. Those are
easier to make.
Against Software Patents, by the League for
Programming Freedom (founded mostly by RMS):
http://www-swiss.ai.mit.edu/6805/articles/int-prop /lpf-against-software-patents.html.
The article is a little bit out of date, but it does
a good job of explaining the problems of software
patents and has many specific examples.
It's still a good introduction to the subject.
The comments people are making about SSL servers needing there own IP addresses are all true.
The reason there aren't a lot more SSL servers running now are 1) US crypto export regulations
have made it a pain to ship the software around;
and 2) SSL servers in the US generally need to
license the RSA patent to use RSA cryptography.
The export stuff has just been relaxed a lot, and
the RSA patent will expire on September 20, just
a few weeks from now. I expect a lot of new SSL servers to go up after that. Sites that store any personal info (not just financial stuff like credit card numbers) should use SSL a lot more than they do. There's easy-to-install free
server software available, certificates are a lot cheaper than they used to be,
and computers now are fast enough that the crypto computations aren't a real bottleneck any more.
I'll probably announce SSL availability on my
own personal site on September 21, the day after the patent expires;-).
Lots of people are using CF cameras. The one I'm using (Canon S100) writes a 600k jpeg file to flash in about 3 seconds. Also, normally you'd compress by at least 10:1. A 640x480 file is typically compressed to about 40k. That should be able to write to flash almost instantaneously.
Slashdot Mirror
These days though, if you want a high res LCD, you might look at a high end laptop, like an IBM Thinkpad A20p (1400x1050) or A21p (1600x1200), or (less expensive but not as nice) a Dell 5000e. All of these use the ATI Rage 128 chip which is supported by XFree86 4.01 and later.
On a related note though, the cost of backups is getting ridiculous. 5 years ago, disk space cost $250/GB and tape media (DDS-2 tape) was $5/GB, so backing up $1000 worth of disk space (4 GB) cost $20. Today, disk space is about $4/GB (75 GB Maxtor drive $300) but tape media (Exabyte Mammoth, AIT, DLT, etc.) is all well over $1/GB, so backing up $1000 worth of disks is going to cost over $250. So tape may be pricing itself out of existence.
The RSA and Diffie-Hellman patents finally expired in the past few years, but they hobbled the growth of public-key cryptography for decades. And Vorbis's technical advantages over MP3 are no big deal. Its main attraction is being patent free. If that's put into serious doubt, then there's not much reason to spread quasi-legal Vorbis encoders around. It's just as easy, and more interoperable, to spread quasi-legal MP3 encoders. So, somebody needs to pursue the matter vigorously, which means burning a lot of money. Or else we may have to fall back on a lower-performance compression format using methods that predate MP3. That might not be so bad now, since storage has gotten so cheap. If an MPEG layer 2 encoder at 256 kbits gives audio as as good as MP3 at 128 kbits, it uses 2x as much storage, but storage is 5x cheaper now than when we started using MP3, so we're still ahead. Plus, encoding the older formats needs much less CPU cycles than MP3 or Vorbis, so CD ripping in realtime or faster than realtime because easy on today's PC's.
Can WINE be ported to Win32?
What's this about "Tynux" being a "re-engineered Linux developed by PalmPalm"? And you have to pay $2500 for the SDK, which includes a GCC based toolchain, Tynux kernel etc. licensed for educational and research use only (the SDK does include some development hardware, not just bits). But either Tynux is Linux (maybe a GPL violation if they're limiting redistribution) or it isn't (in which case why are they using the name Linux?). Or the SDK is some mixture of free and proprietary stuff that's hard to separate. Anyway, I'm not so happy, and I hope someone can check into this more carefully. Palm/3com have done well by making the development stuff open and these guys should do the same.
Nobody has made a DVD-9 full of free software before. The mastering software didn't exist. But it does now, and it's free.
Yggdrasil's DVD is the first dvd-9 (9 gigabyte double layer DVD) with this kind of content. There are some single layer (4.7 GB) DVD's around and SuSe's might be one of them. Those are easier to make.
Against Software Patents, by the League for Programming Freedom (founded mostly by RMS):p /lpf-against-software-patents.html.
http://www-swiss.ai.mit.edu/6805/articles/int-pro
The article is a little bit out of date, but it does a good job of explaining the problems of software patents and has many specific examples. It's still a good introduction to the subject.
The reason there aren't a lot more SSL servers running now are 1) US crypto export regulations have made it a pain to ship the software around; and 2) SSL servers in the US generally need to license the RSA patent to use RSA cryptography.
The export stuff has just been relaxed a lot, and the RSA patent will expire on September 20, just a few weeks from now. I expect a lot of new SSL servers to go up after that. Sites that store any personal info (not just financial stuff like credit card numbers) should use SSL a lot more than they do. There's easy-to-install free server software available, certificates are a lot cheaper than they used to be, and computers now are fast enough that the crypto computations aren't a real bottleneck any more.
I'll probably announce SSL availability on my own personal site on September 21, the day after the patent expires ;-).
Lots of people are using CF cameras. The one I'm using (Canon S100) writes a 600k jpeg file to flash in about 3 seconds. Also, normally you'd compress by at least 10:1. A 640x480 file is typically compressed to about 40k. That should be able to write to flash almost instantaneously.
Namely the MultiMedia Card used in devices like still/video camcorders (JVC DVM series etc). It's about the same size as the Memory Stuck Duo.
This link has probably appeared on /. before, but if you missed it, it's worth a read. Courtney Love's speech to the Digital Hollywood online entertainment conference, given in New York on May 16. She stands up for artists while ripping the big recording companies to shreds.
That's interesting about region-free players in Europe. Unfortunately I expect they're PAL players, which means we can't them in the US.