I think what's being lumped into the word "driver" here is bogus. To me, a driver is the bare minimum code needed to flip the right bits in the right registers to make a piece of hardware do something. That's all. When you deal with a video card, or a network card, all you want from the driver is the ability to say "blit this over to there" and be done with it. I don't expect anybody to give away their carefully developed software if they don't want to. But that shouldn't prevent anyone else from banging bits on the hardware and exploring/developing on their own.
If there are proprietary algorithms in Nvidia's "driver" that do special graphics manipulations, I really don't want to see them. That, to me, belongs in the application space and has no business being in the driver in the first place. All we need, as *kernel* driver developers, is a documented register map.
When people allow themselves to talk about "drivers" in fuzzy terms, blurring the boundaries between real hardware-level issues and application-level issues, it only confuses things.
I agree. Of course Intel has now announced their Pro2200 card that supports 802.11b/g. I like what I've read about Pentium-M, but I won't buy a Centrino laptop before 802.11g becomes widely available.
As for why to buy Centrino at all - a comment was already made about lower power consumption. There's also a claimed feature (dunno how much water it holds) that using Intel's wireless card means you're assured of no interference between Bluetooth and 802.11a/b/g. I don't use any Bluetooth devices at the moment, nor do I plan to, but that may be important for some...
But it clearly would be folly to try to emulate a neuron using purely digital computing techniques. You're dealing with an analog mechanism that is pretty much a wire-or of many inputs feeding into a capacitor. This is very much an analog computing circuit; now the question is how efficiently you can do A/D-D/A conversion on this scale.
(And as I recall, the sciatic nerve running down your leg is a single cell with an axon over 1 foot long. Definitely some impressive stuff Mother Nature has concocted...)
Er, no. If the nervous system is degenerating, you need to reverse the degeneration. A silicon chip can't enhance a neuron that has died, you still have to figure out why the nerves are dying in the first place.
Unless you don't plan on having children any more, I wouldn't walk around operating my mobile phone while it's in my pocket if I were you.
Line of sight is a bit of a hassle, but at least you have a better chance of privacy and non-interference with IR. You thought wardriving for WiFi spots was fun, now imagine walking down a busy city street with Bluetooth headphones connected to an oversized antenna, listening in to all the "cool people's" phone conversations...
What's the point of building in all these security mechanisms for CDMA, GSM, etc. when the phone user is going to broadcast the entire conversation in a 10m radius?
Hm... I remember watching Martin Carthy playing live, and he retuned between songs all the time. Took 30 seconds, maybe a minute, and he talked about the song the whole time. I think if you're going to mess around with tunings, you should just get adept at tuning. If you're not fast and accurate enough to do it by ear, you're probably not ready to be playing around with it...
I was wondering what the deal was here. I bought a GSM phone for my two-week trip to Ireland last month, with a Vodafone IE SIM. I was pretty dismayed at the pricing structure; My Verizon CDMA phone only cost $0.05 per SMS. I could never get a GPRS data session going, so when using the phone as a modem I had to use CSD 9600bps the whole time, what a pain. (Also a bit of a moot point; downloading 1MB of email is expensive no matter how you slice it, 20 minutes of CSD or 1MB of GPRS...)
Considering that an artist only gets 6.6 cents per recorded track in royalties, you could just send 'em a dime and they'd be ahead of the game.
"If I had a dime for every time someone played my song, I wouldn't need this shitty record contract!"
There are online music distributors that split their profits 50/50 with the artists. I've thought about putting my band's CDs up on those sites, but since I already run my own web site, there's not much incentive for me to split with anyone else. And with 7 performers on the CD, profits are already pretty thin...
The vast majority of musicians in this country (and the world, for that matter) are not clients of the RIAA. Most of them are independent, representing themselves. I myself am an independent musician, playing traditional Celtic music. The music I love is by and large, ignored by the major music industry companies. My music is irrelevant to them, and they are irrelevant to me.
By playing local gigs, and investing about $100 a year in web site space, we sell a thousand CDs a year. If I actually tried to make a full time career out of this, it would be no trouble at all. (As it is, I'm a full time software engineer, and fine with that most of the time.)
We already outsell 70% of RIAA artists, just with one infrequently-updated web site and very little promotional effort.
Generally, only stupid/uneducated musicians jump at big record deals, and they usually wind up *owing* money on those deals. Unfortunately, very few musicians bother to educate themselves properly about the business of music. The RIAA is noeither the artists' nor the consumers' friend.
No mistake.
My only quibble with your otherwise excellent post: there is a glut of *lousy talent* on the market. Real talent and good, original, music will always be rare, and always intrinsically valuable.
Intellectual property is nothing, *intellect* and *talent* is priceless.
Sony originally made two MD-Data drives, the MDH-10 (portable, external) and the MDM-111 (internal), both SCSI-2. There was a version of the MDM-111 available for the IBM Thinkpad Dock II docking station. While the MDH-10 was discontinued in 1995, there have been reports of MDM-111s being made and sold as late as April 2000. This site still lists new units for $280 each http://www.ce-s.com/sohsm.htm
As someone mentioned above, you could always use modem techniques to record data as audio. It would take you 75 minutes to record 140MB worth of data this way, though, and you practically have to reverse-engineer the ATRAC encoding method to reliably modulate your data so that it can be demodulated intact.
re: USB MD interface: note that Sony is now selling a Firewire MD deck in Europe, the MDS-LSA1. This sounds like the Right Thing to me...
Of course, any enterprising hacker can just order the service manual for their favorite Sony MD deck with full schematics, and glue on the USB controller of their choice. The MD-specific ICs communicate with each other over a two-wire serial bus after all.
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I agree with a lot of what you said, but...
I think what's being lumped into the word "driver" here is bogus. To me, a driver is the bare minimum code needed to flip the right bits in the right registers to make a piece of hardware do something. That's all. When you deal with a video card, or a network card, all you want from the driver is the ability to say "blit this over to there" and be done with it. I don't expect anybody to give away their carefully developed software if they don't want to. But that shouldn't prevent anyone else from banging bits on the hardware and exploring/developing on their own.
If there are proprietary algorithms in Nvidia's "driver" that do special graphics manipulations, I really don't want to see them. That, to me, belongs in the application space and has no business being in the driver in the first place. All we need, as *kernel* driver developers, is a documented register map.
When people allow themselves to talk about "drivers" in fuzzy terms, blurring the boundaries between real hardware-level issues and application-level issues, it only confuses things.
I agree. Of course Intel has now announced their Pro2200 card that supports 802.11b/g. I like what I've read about Pentium-M, but I won't buy a Centrino laptop before 802.11g becomes widely available.
As for why to buy Centrino at all - a comment was already made about lower power consumption. There's also a claimed feature (dunno how much water it holds) that using Intel's wireless card means you're assured of no interference between Bluetooth and 802.11a/b/g. I don't use any Bluetooth devices at the moment, nor do I plan to, but that may be important for some...
Thanks for the reply, very enlightening.
But it clearly would be folly to try to emulate a neuron using purely digital computing techniques. You're dealing with an analog mechanism that is pretty much a wire-or of many inputs feeding into a capacitor. This is very much an analog computing circuit; now the question is how efficiently you can do A/D-D/A conversion on this scale.
(And as I recall, the sciatic nerve running down your leg is a single cell with an axon over 1 foot long. Definitely some impressive stuff Mother Nature has concocted...)
Er, no. If the nervous system is degenerating, you need to reverse the degeneration. A silicon chip can't enhance a neuron that has died, you still have to figure out why the nerves are dying in the first place.
Unless you don't plan on having children any more, I wouldn't walk around operating my mobile phone while it's in my pocket if I were you.
Line of sight is a bit of a hassle, but at least you have a better chance of privacy and non-interference with IR. You thought wardriving for WiFi spots was fun, now imagine walking down a busy city street with Bluetooth headphones connected to an oversized antenna, listening in to all the "cool people's" phone conversations...
What's the point of building in all these security mechanisms for CDMA, GSM, etc. when the phone user is going to broadcast the entire conversation in a 10m radius?
But what's the size of a neuron vs the size of a transistor in a 65nm process CPU?
Hm... I remember watching Martin Carthy playing live, and he retuned between songs all the time. Took 30 seconds, maybe a minute, and he talked about the song the whole time. I think if you're going to mess around with tunings, you should just get adept at tuning. If you're not fast and accurate enough to do it by ear, you're probably not ready to be playing around with it...
I was wondering what the deal was here. I bought a GSM phone for my two-week trip to Ireland last month, with a Vodafone IE SIM. I was pretty dismayed at the pricing structure; My Verizon CDMA phone only cost $0.05 per SMS. I could never get a GPRS data session going, so when using the phone as a modem I had to use CSD 9600bps the whole time, what a pain. (Also a bit of a moot point; downloading 1MB of email is expensive no matter how you slice it, 20 minutes of CSD or 1MB of GPRS...)
Considering that an artist only gets 6.6 cents per recorded track in royalties, you could just send 'em a dime and they'd be ahead of the game.
"If I had a dime for every time someone played my song, I wouldn't need this shitty record contract!"
There are online music distributors that split their profits 50/50 with the artists. I've thought about putting my band's CDs up on those sites, but since I already run my own web site, there's not much incentive for me to split with anyone else. And with 7 performers on the CD, profits are already pretty thin...
The vast majority of musicians in this country (and the world, for that matter) are not clients of the RIAA. Most of them are independent, representing themselves. I myself am an independent musician, playing traditional Celtic music. The music I love is by and large, ignored by the major music industry companies. My music is irrelevant to them, and they are irrelevant to me.
By playing local gigs, and investing about $100 a year in web site space, we sell a thousand CDs a year. If I actually tried to make a full time career out of this, it would be no trouble at all. (As it is, I'm a full time software engineer, and fine with that most of the time.)
We already outsell 70% of RIAA artists, just with one infrequently-updated web site and very little promotional effort.
Generally, only stupid/uneducated musicians jump at big record deals, and they usually wind up *owing* money on those deals. Unfortunately, very few musicians bother to educate themselves properly about the business of music. The RIAA is noeither the artists' nor the consumers' friend.
No mistake.
Excellent idea. The national "gas-out" chain emails spread easily enough, even if it was largely a hoax. We should be able to do this for real.
My only quibble with your otherwise excellent post: there is a glut of *lousy talent* on the market. Real talent and good, original, music will always be rare, and always intrinsically valuable.
Intellectual property is nothing, *intellect* and *talent* is priceless.
Sony originally made two MD-Data drives, the MDH-10 (portable, external) and the MDM-111 (internal), both SCSI-2. There was a version of the MDM-111 available for the IBM Thinkpad Dock II docking station. While the MDH-10 was discontinued in 1995, there have been reports of MDM-111s being made and sold as late as April 2000. This site still lists new units for $280 each http://www.ce-s.com/sohsm.htm As someone mentioned above, you could always use modem techniques to record data as audio. It would take you 75 minutes to record 140MB worth of data this way, though, and you practically have to reverse-engineer the ATRAC encoding method to reliably modulate your data so that it can be demodulated intact. re: USB MD interface: note that Sony is now selling a Firewire MD deck in Europe, the MDS-LSA1. This sounds like the Right Thing to me... Of course, any enterprising hacker can just order the service manual for their favorite Sony MD deck with full schematics, and glue on the USB controller of their choice. The MD-specific ICs communicate with each other over a two-wire serial bus after all.