I don't agree with everything he says, but I like this prediction:
* If you're buying a computer in the coming year, don't get one that uses Windows. It's simply too insecure. (Did you know there's a secret "administrator" account and password on every machine? You didn't? Every hacker does.) Get one with the Linux operating system installed (Evesham does them, for example) or an Apple machine running OSX. Both systems are fast, stable and secure. With Windows XP... well, sometimes two out of three really IS bad.
Couldn't remember exactly, but that rings a bell. I hope people got the gist of it. These memories don't SEEM 22 years old. Wow.
Now I wish I were going home for Christmas so I could dig through the basement and get the old ZX81 going again, play a mean game of hunt the wumpus or something.
Seriously, you're right. I know the difference, by 'assembly code' I meant the output of the assembler, machine code. I guess I was all wrapped up in the moment.
Actually, thinking more about it, I believe *I* was the assembler. I didn't shell out for the fancy ZX81 assembler/disassembler program, so I think I was calculating all the relative branch targets by hand, etc.
Actually, the rate per song isn't that bad, they offered 300 downloads for $50/month with is like $0.17/track. Still, I was used to unlimited downloads, fill your fat pipe all day long downloads, for $15. I guess it was too good to last.
The interesting thing is that when it was "take all you want" I didn't take as much (well, after the initial downloading frenzy) because I knew I could always get stuff whenever I wanted.
They were pretty cool until the service changed, I have an issue with companies that don't even respond to customer service requests, and I told them so when I discontinued using their service a week or two later. They were probably innundated with activity once they announced the shift to metered downloads.
You mean ZX-81?
on
First Computers
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I loved my ZX-81. It was cooler BEFORE Timex jumped in and put their name on it. I tricked mine out with a memory expansion pack, 300 baud modem, and custom (real keys) keyboard. Wish I'd taken some pictures of it. It's probably across the country in my mom's basement.
Oh, and the speed... it was awful. So I started learning assembly. None of the cool programs were in BASIC; they all looked something like this:
10 REM !@#(*~>8A6$^Q@#&@!(... ETC) 20 CALL 16514
The assembly code was stored in a REMark statement, the first line of the program. The second like would jump into the BASIC program storage area. The reserved words were all tokenized, so 'REM' was just one byte at memory location 16513, and 16514 was the first byte of the comments - your assembly program!
Ah, thanks for the trip down memory lane. Almost forgot about that machine.
I did the eMusic thing for about 8 months, mostly hitting their classic jazz selections on the Prestige, Riverside, and Verve labels--all RIAA members. I was a fan, but I never got the Linux client to work, and I got no response from technical support. I wouldn't have said that eMusic "explicitly supports" Linux; my experience was more along the lines of "download available" for Linux.
I forget if they actually stated somewhere that Linux support was (extremely) limited, or if they just flat-out ignored my e-mail to tech support, because at the time I was too angry about the change in terms from unlimited downloads to 65/month. Around that time the actual operation of the service was pathetic; queued downloads just wouldn't start, I'd have to manually cancel and restart a download, and then maybe it work. This was with the Windows download manager. Perhaps all their users were hitting the service hard (like I was) in order to get their final tracks from eMusic before terminating the service (like I did).
I see today that their site has suggestions for my Linux problem ("can't connect" errors and the NCSD thing). Too little, too late, it was the change in terms that killed it for me.
Different, but not revolutionary. Just like most video games, you're better off doing a variation of something most people are familiar with than something new and/or complex.
Maybe if you're an established game company that doesn't want to take risks. Personally I'm more likely to check out something revolutionary than a rehash of recent games.
Your other pitfalls sounded right on target, though.
If the code is actually infringing, SCO doesn't have to worry about a mass cover-up to deny any use of the SCO code. I'm sure there are plenty of Linux distributions on store shelves with CD-ROMs containing kernel source rpms.
I'm more interested in whether or not SCO can actually prove that (non-SCO) programmers intentionlly stole specific non-public-domain code and inserted it into the Linux kernel.
When I see that type of phoentic misspelling, I infer stupitity. Maybe it's the bad haircut I got at Kathy's Kuts when I was a kid, but I find that sort of naming repulsive.
Maybe that's why I've always gravitated towards GNOME. I used to think I just preferred the GNOME artwork, but over time I realized it's the KDE naming. And I know, GNOME does it too, but not to such a degree. Yeah, there's Gnumeric, but Nautilus could have easily been Gnautilus. The GNOME apps don't seem to have this compulsive desire to integrating the 'G' sound into the word, maybe that's the difference.
Here's a question: does xterm, xclock, xpdf, xsane, etc bother you as much? Me neither.
Aarrgh, I'd love to mod this up but I want to expand on this as well.
IMHO, the Zone System was a CRITICAL part of understanding one technical part of photography: exposure. I have a Nikon FE2: manual focus, manual exposure (although there's automatic exposure via shutter speed control if you prefer). I've done some B&W developing and printing at home with a Beseler 23CIII enlarger. I don't do much now that I have kids (no free time, and our digital Canon S400 is just so damn convenient).
Anyway, I had owned this Nikon for ten years before learning about the Zone System. Most of the time I shot with the shutter set to "A" for auto exposure. I trusted the built-in metering. Then one day I took some film to a better lab (I wasn't developing my own at this point) and they said "Hey, your exposure on this roll was all over the map." Basically, the camera was exposing everything to a medium grey because it had no way of knowing if you're shooting a white horse or a black horse. The labs had been correcting this silently for all those years...
To really do the Zone system well, you want a spot meter. I found a used Pentax V Digital spot meter, but many cameras have a spot metering mode. Once you learn the Zone system--really just a system for understanding exposure--you will find spot metering invaluable. Also, check out Fred Picker's "Zone VI Workshop" or Ansel Adams' "The Negative" for info on the Zone system. Heck, get all three of Adams' Photography Series books.
So your predator is looking for one particular fish or bird out of the 500? I think the predator will likely still have a meal, and more easily than if the fish didn't school. Or are you saying that the school looks so big that it discourages the predator? I suppose the latter could be likened to a script-kiddee getting too discouraged at the prospect of cracking 500 steganographized jpeg's.
But will that be possible on these new DRM motherboards? I doubt it.
So who's going to make the Linux zealot motherboards for the 5% of the population that doesn't want to run MSFT/DRM-crippled crapware?
Same thing behind Linux gaming... it hasn't been lagging behind Winblows because gaming on Linux is fundamentally flawed, it's just because that's not where the market is. Clash of open source/free software versus capitalism.
Or better yet, it's because MS will successfully continue their anti-competitive practices, strongarming motherboard vendors and our government into locking the American cattle into buying DRM PC's.
Sorry, this started out calm and rational but it doesn't seem to have ended up that way...
Yeah, I've been an EMusic subscriber and raving fan all year. The selection isn't that great for the modern pop/alternative stuff, but they have TONS of classic jazz. Lots of Riverside & Prestige labels. If they only had Blue Note...
Anyway, the sad thing about EMusic is that their (formerly unlimited) downloads will now be capped. Seems they got bought by another company trying to get into the iTunes/Napster 2.0 business. The closest equivelent plan under the new ownership is 300 downloads/month for $50. That's more than triple what I was paying on a per-track basis. No thanks.
Now that I got the notification e-mail saying that their terms are changing, I intended to fill my bandwidth with downloads--you know, go out in style--but of course, all the former unlimited subscribers have had the same idea. Everyone's been hitting their servers so hard it's like a DDOS attack. Their 'download manager' keeps hanging, no response from technical support. I thought it was cool that they had a Linux version of the download manager, but it didn't work on RH9.0 and they don't offer support for that. Time to move on.
I am not an expert on this, and sfbanutt touched on this down below, but as I scanned the posts I don't think anyone has explicitly cited this as an energy-saving step:
Traditional cars are like blast furnaces on wheels. You hit the gas and accelerate, then when you stop all that speed is converted into waste heat by your brake pads. Incredible losses.
Regenerative electrical cars use the motor as a generator on deceleration. This exerts a braking force and allows the car to recapture some of the energy. Ideally you dump it right back into the batteries. Other methods involve spinning up a flywheel as you decel, keeping the energy in a mechanical (rotational kinetic) form.
It's not all black and white. Statistics can't solve your marble problem the way you seem to think it needs to be solved.
Like Detritus said--and I'm not a hard drive engineer either--you might look at several factors which aren't necessarily 'binary' pass-fail indicators.
You don't have to know *exactly* which drive will fail to know that you're in the manufacturing sweet spot.
And why wouldn't Western Digital just make contracts with their customers for certain quantities of drives meeting certain specifications at certain prices, all of which could vary from customer to customer, be it Dell, Apple, or whomever?
Heh. I just picked up an LSI 22903 SCSI card on eBay for $15. It's a low-profile PCI card, so you have to take the bracket off the back if you want to use it in an ATX case. It's a 64-bit 66 MHz card (though not PCI-X if I understand right) and I happen to have a matching slot in my Tyan Tiger MPX board.
Why bother? Because I have a pair of Maxtor/Quantum Atlas 10k IV U320 drives with sustained transfer rates of 72 MB/sec. When I set them up in a RAID-0 array with my Adaptec 29160N controller (32-bit, 33 MHz) I think it maxed out my PCI bus. I'd only get 95-100 MB/sec sustained transfers. Should have been nearly double the 72 MB/sec for a single drive.
Do I need that kind of speed? Not really. Ok, not at all. This is my personal machine, not some corporate server. My thinking was more like "How cool would 144 MB/sec be?"
Anyway, I also have a RAID-1 IDE array (same machine) with two late-model Seagate 80 GB drives and I can't get anything near that on reading (wouldn't expect it on writing as it has to mirror the data, right? But on reads it should interleave much like RAID-0 would). I get more like 30 MB/sec with the IDE RAID setup.
The only thing I don't understand, at Fantasy Factory; to sort like you're suggesting they must be doing 100% inspection.
Why would you infer that sorting would require 100% inspection? Statistics can tell you when you're in a good run. To be overly general, if you sample drives periodically and they're all "in the green" you can assume it's a good run. If they're all in the red (for some characteristic) you start trying to fix the problem. If they're all just below the cutoff you sell them to Tandy.
Of course, if the samples are all over the map you can't make a prediction, and you probably have to figure out why things are so variable.
The article mentions that many devices aren't high-speed capable. I have a ieee1394 CF card reader that in theory can transfer at 400 Mbps, but the CF card seems to be the limiter. I get 42 Mbps with this arrangement, which is satisfactory.
To your point, though, if I were limited to 12 Mbps I'd definitely notice that. I might even be damned pissed.:)
My HP 7550 printer has a CF card reader, and this is the slowest way I've found to transfer images to a PC. It must implement the low-speed 1.5 Mbps connection.
They may be correct, but they need to work on their presentation a little. I'm afraid the general population (the non-slashdot crowd) is going to read their position and disagree.
Companies (through this "Remote attestation" feature) checking to see if their software has been modified? What's wrong with that, my mom will ask? They own it. The subtleties of how this can run counter to users' interests will escape many.
And what's the EFF's solution? To LIE to these companies. That sounds wrong, doesn't it? To lie? No one should lie, my mom says. Or your mom. Whatever.
Both DC motors and AC brushless servos with VFD (variable frequency drives) usually have constant torque from zero rpm up to base speed. They develop full horsepower at base speed, but the original poster is right, they have constant torque which should translate into constant acceleration.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you ment "think".
:)
Too funny. Welcome to my friends list.
I don't agree with everything he says, but I like this prediction:
* If you're buying a computer in the coming year, don't get one that uses Windows. It's simply too insecure. (Did you know there's a secret "administrator" account and password on every machine? You didn't? Every hacker does.) Get one with the Linux operating system installed (Evesham does them, for example) or an Apple machine running OSX. Both systems are fast, stable and secure. With Windows XP... well, sometimes two out of three really IS bad.
Couldn't remember exactly, but that rings a bell. I hope people got the gist of it. These memories don't SEEM 22 years old. Wow.
Now I wish I were going home for Christmas so I could dig through the basement and get the old ZX81 going again, play a mean game of hunt the wumpus or something.
I think you meant .
Seriously, you're right. I know the difference, by 'assembly code' I meant the output of the assembler, machine code. I guess I was all wrapped up in the moment.
Actually, thinking more about it, I believe *I* was the assembler. I didn't shell out for the fancy ZX81 assembler/disassembler program, so I think I was calculating all the relative branch targets by hand, etc.
Actually, the rate per song isn't that bad, they offered 300 downloads for $50/month with is like $0.17/track. Still, I was used to unlimited downloads, fill your fat pipe all day long downloads, for $15. I guess it was too good to last.
The interesting thing is that when it was "take all you want" I didn't take as much (well, after the initial downloading frenzy) because I knew I could always get stuff whenever I wanted.
They were pretty cool until the service changed, I have an issue with companies that don't even respond to customer service requests, and I told them so when I discontinued using their service a week or two later. They were probably innundated with activity once they announced the shift to metered downloads.
I loved my ZX-81. It was cooler BEFORE Timex jumped in and put their name on it. I tricked mine out with a memory expansion pack, 300 baud modem, and custom (real keys) keyboard. Wish I'd taken some pictures of it. It's probably across the country in my mom's basement.
Oh, and the speed... it was awful. So I started learning assembly. None of the cool programs were in BASIC; they all looked something like this:
10 REM !@#(*~>8A6$^Q@#&@!(... ETC)
20 CALL 16514
The assembly code was stored in a REMark statement, the first line of the program. The second like would jump into the BASIC program storage area. The reserved words were all tokenized, so 'REM' was just one byte at memory location 16513, and 16514 was the first byte of the comments - your assembly program!
Ah, thanks for the trip down memory lane. Almost forgot about that machine.
I did the eMusic thing for about 8 months, mostly hitting their classic jazz selections on the Prestige, Riverside, and Verve labels--all RIAA members. I was a fan, but I never got the Linux client to work, and I got no response from technical support. I wouldn't have said that eMusic "explicitly supports" Linux; my experience was more along the lines of "download available" for Linux.
I forget if they actually stated somewhere that Linux support was (extremely) limited, or if they just flat-out ignored my e-mail to tech support, because at the time I was too angry about the change in terms from unlimited downloads to 65/month. Around that time the actual operation of the service was pathetic; queued downloads just wouldn't start, I'd have to manually cancel and restart a download, and then maybe it work. This was with the Windows download manager. Perhaps all their users were hitting the service hard (like I was) in order to get their final tracks from eMusic before terminating the service (like I did).
I see today that their site has suggestions for my Linux problem ("can't connect" errors and the NCSD thing). Too little, too late, it was the change in terms that killed it for me.
Different, but not revolutionary. Just like most video games, you're better off doing a variation of something most people are familiar with than something new and/or complex.
Maybe if you're an established game company that doesn't want to take risks. Personally I'm more likely to check out something revolutionary than a rehash of recent games.
Your other pitfalls sounded right on target, though.
If the code is actually infringing, SCO doesn't have to worry about a mass cover-up to deny any use of the SCO code. I'm sure there are plenty of Linux distributions on store shelves with CD-ROMs containing kernel source rpms.
I'm more interested in whether or not SCO can actually prove that (non-SCO) programmers intentionlly stole specific non-public-domain code and inserted it into the Linux kernel.
When I see that type of phoentic misspelling, I infer stupitity. Maybe it's the bad haircut I got at Kathy's Kuts when I was a kid, but I find that sort of naming repulsive.
Maybe that's why I've always gravitated towards GNOME. I used to think I just preferred the GNOME artwork, but over time I realized it's the KDE naming. And I know, GNOME does it too, but not to such a degree. Yeah, there's Gnumeric, but Nautilus could have easily been Gnautilus. The GNOME apps don't seem to have this compulsive desire to integrating the 'G' sound into the word, maybe that's the difference.
Here's a question: does xterm, xclock, xpdf, xsane, etc bother you as much? Me neither.
Aarrgh, I'd love to mod this up but I want to expand on this as well.
IMHO, the Zone System was a CRITICAL part of understanding one technical part of photography: exposure. I have a Nikon FE2: manual focus, manual exposure (although there's automatic exposure via shutter speed control if you prefer). I've done some B&W developing and printing at home with a Beseler 23CIII enlarger. I don't do much now that I have kids (no free time, and our digital Canon S400 is just so damn convenient).
Anyway, I had owned this Nikon for ten years before learning about the Zone System. Most of the time I shot with the shutter set to "A" for auto exposure. I trusted the built-in metering. Then one day I took some film to a better lab (I wasn't developing my own at this point) and they said "Hey, your exposure on this roll was all over the map." Basically, the camera was exposing everything to a medium grey because it had no way of knowing if you're shooting a white horse or a black horse. The labs had been correcting this silently for all those years...
To really do the Zone system well, you want a spot meter. I found a used Pentax V Digital spot meter, but many cameras have a spot metering mode. Once you learn the Zone system--really just a system for understanding exposure--you will find spot metering invaluable. Also, check out Fred Picker's "Zone VI Workshop" or Ansel Adams' "The Negative" for info on the Zone system. Heck, get all three of Adams' Photography Series books.
So your predator is looking for one particular fish or bird out of the 500? I think the predator will likely still have a meal, and more easily than if the fish didn't school. Or are you saying that the school looks so big that it discourages the predator? I suppose the latter could be likened to a script-kiddee getting too discouraged at the prospect of cracking 500 steganographized jpeg's.
But will that be possible on these new DRM motherboards? I doubt it.
So who's going to make the Linux zealot motherboards for the 5% of the population that doesn't want to run MSFT/DRM-crippled crapware?
Same thing behind Linux gaming... it hasn't been lagging behind Winblows because gaming on Linux is fundamentally flawed, it's just because that's not where the market is. Clash of open source/free software versus capitalism.
Or better yet, it's because MS will successfully continue their anti-competitive practices, strongarming motherboard vendors and our government into locking the American cattle into buying DRM PC's.
Sorry, this started out calm and rational but it doesn't seem to have ended up that way...
This I agree with:
you shouldn't be reading slashdot if you don't want spoilers at all
This I don't:
you do realise why they're categorized? so that you could go into your prefs and hide it!
So you're right, it's my own damn fault for reading a spoiler, but there's no way I could have filtered out a 'spoiler' with my preferences.
That's for the tip, I guess I missed the "Spoilers" topic. Oh, wait, there *isn't* a spoilers topic.
So you're saying I should hide all "Funny" stories?
Yeah, I've been an EMusic subscriber and raving fan all year. The selection isn't that great for the modern pop/alternative stuff, but they have TONS of classic jazz. Lots of Riverside & Prestige labels. If they only had Blue Note...
Anyway, the sad thing about EMusic is that their (formerly unlimited) downloads will now be capped. Seems they got bought by another company trying to get into the iTunes/Napster 2.0 business. The closest equivelent plan under the new ownership is 300 downloads/month for $50. That's more than triple what I was paying on a per-track basis. No thanks.
Now that I got the notification e-mail saying that their terms are changing, I intended to fill my bandwidth with downloads--you know, go out in style--but of course, all the former unlimited subscribers have had the same idea. Everyone's been hitting their servers so hard it's like a DDOS attack. Their 'download manager' keeps hanging, no response from technical support. I thought it was cool that they had a Linux version of the download manager, but it didn't work on RH9.0 and they don't offer support for that. Time to move on.
I am not an expert on this, and sfbanutt touched on this down below, but as I scanned the posts I don't think anyone has explicitly cited this as an energy-saving step:
Traditional cars are like blast furnaces on wheels. You hit the gas and accelerate, then when you stop all that speed is converted into waste heat by your brake pads. Incredible losses.
Regenerative electrical cars use the motor as a generator on deceleration. This exerts a braking force and allows the car to recapture some of the energy. Ideally you dump it right back into the batteries. Other methods involve spinning up a flywheel as you decel, keeping the energy in a mechanical (rotational kinetic) form.
It's not all black and white. Statistics can't solve your marble problem the way you seem to think it needs to be solved.
Like Detritus said--and I'm not a hard drive engineer either--you might look at several factors which aren't necessarily 'binary' pass-fail indicators.
You don't have to know *exactly* which drive will fail to know that you're in the manufacturing sweet spot.
Statistics can tell you more than % failures.
And why wouldn't Western Digital just make contracts with their customers for certain quantities of drives meeting certain specifications at certain prices, all of which could vary from customer to customer, be it Dell, Apple, or whomever?
Heh. I just picked up an LSI 22903 SCSI card on eBay for $15. It's a low-profile PCI card, so you have to take the bracket off the back if you want to use it in an ATX case. It's a 64-bit 66 MHz card (though not PCI-X if I understand right) and I happen to have a matching slot in my Tyan Tiger MPX board.
Why bother? Because I have a pair of Maxtor/Quantum Atlas 10k IV U320 drives with sustained transfer rates of 72 MB/sec. When I set them up in a RAID-0 array with my Adaptec 29160N controller (32-bit, 33 MHz) I think it maxed out my PCI bus. I'd only get 95-100 MB/sec sustained transfers. Should have been nearly double the 72 MB/sec for a single drive.
Do I need that kind of speed? Not really. Ok, not at all. This is my personal machine, not some corporate server. My thinking was more like "How cool would 144 MB/sec be?"
Anyway, I also have a RAID-1 IDE array (same machine) with two late-model Seagate 80 GB drives and I can't get anything near that on reading (wouldn't expect it on writing as it has to mirror the data, right? But on reads it should interleave much like RAID-0 would). I get more like 30 MB/sec with the IDE RAID setup.
The only thing I don't understand, at Fantasy Factory; to sort like you're suggesting they must be doing 100% inspection.
Why would you infer that sorting would require 100% inspection? Statistics can tell you when you're in a good run. To be overly general, if you sample drives periodically and they're all "in the green" you can assume it's a good run. If they're all in the red (for some characteristic) you start trying to fix the problem. If they're all just below the cutoff you sell them to Tandy.
Of course, if the samples are all over the map you can't make a prediction, and you probably have to figure out why things are so variable.
The article mentions that many devices aren't high-speed capable. I have a ieee1394 CF card reader that in theory can transfer at 400 Mbps, but the CF card seems to be the limiter. I get 42 Mbps with this arrangement, which is satisfactory.
:)
To your point, though, if I were limited to 12 Mbps I'd definitely notice that. I might even be damned pissed.
My HP 7550 printer has a CF card reader, and this is the slowest way I've found to transfer images to a PC. It must implement the low-speed 1.5 Mbps connection.
They may be correct, but they need to work on their presentation a little. I'm afraid the general population (the non-slashdot crowd) is going to read their position and disagree.
Companies (through this "Remote attestation" feature) checking to see if their software has been modified? What's wrong with that, my mom will ask? They own it. The subtleties of how this can run counter to users' interests will escape many.
And what's the EFF's solution? To LIE to these companies. That sounds wrong, doesn't it? To lie? No one should lie, my mom says. Or your mom. Whatever.
Both DC motors and AC brushless servos with VFD (variable frequency drives) usually have constant torque from zero rpm up to base speed. They develop full horsepower at base speed, but the original poster is right, they have constant torque which should translate into constant acceleration.
There needs to be a (-1, Cranky) moderation! :)