I've been looking for a portable record player that sony put out in about 82-84. It's tall, and clamps a record and holds it vertically, clamping it in the middle. About 80% of the record was exposed, much like the d88 discplayer mentioned at the site. A linear needle moves to follow the groove.
Of course you couldn't use this while walking, or even jogging or in a car, but it was the smallest record player I've ever seen. Does anyone know the model number or have more info?
But one of our first satellites (I worked for a very small satellite firm) had a debug terminal for informational messages it spat out as it ran. No, we never expected to receive a keypress on this terminal... but we did most of our testing with this terminal because if something went wrong, we'd want to be able to see the error messages.
When we tried to run the satellite without the terminal, the low level hardware CTS/DTR loopback wasn't present and the satellite hung when it tried to send its first character to the console. We caught that only a couple weeks before shipping the thing, too!
I've just started learning Spanish, and to my exceptional disappointment it is as spelling-sensitive as English. I'd like to ask Slashdot readers to make the case for spelling-sensitivity in a written language, because I can't see it. Although I've used English on and off since 1976, I also have a history of Egyptian heiroglyphics, runatic symbols, street signs, pictographs, and other legacy languages that were never spelling sensitive (perhaps due to the lack of letters in these symbolic languagues). Today I use modern languages including American Sign Language which preserves spelling for pleasing appearance, but is not spelling-sensitive itself (it will correct the case for you in the Word, which is quite nice). In all my years of speaking I have never seen the rationale for making a language spelling sensitive. It simply makes typing it in harder, and mistakes easier, yet we persevere with maintaining it in modern languages like Spanish. Without making this into a religious war, can someone make the argument of why spelling-sensitivity in a language is 'a good thing'? And don't confuse this with handling spelling-sensitive surnames, which is fine."
And actually, the jog dial was on the beocom 6000 cordless phone. It's used for the same functions -- to select a name from a big list and to navigate menus -- so I don't see how using it on an mp3 player would be different than using it on a phone.
Sorry, but he's got the EUCD, which is like the DMCA but without any exceptions. Hopefully this law is so bad that it will be laughed out by judges, but I've been waiting for that to happen to the DMCA for about 5 years now, and I keep waiting...
Re:ESA is not very clever.
on
News from Mars
·
· Score: 1
good point. I didn't realize it was such a low orbit already -- LMO (low mars orbit). Yep, even halving it to 150km would make the perp. enlargement bigger than the speed-increase-resolution-loss. I guess they've already maximized this problem and that's how they got that orbit...
Re:ESA is not very clever.
on
News from Mars
·
· Score: 4, Informative
If you fly lower, you'll make more orbits per day, making the images zip past the camera even faster. With a pushbroom-type sensor such as this appears to be, this can actually lead to worse resolution in the direction of travel. But, being closer would make the perpindicular direction a little better -- it's all about compromises.
The contest website doesn't mention a $1M prize, but from the "details" pdf, it looks like you can earn the $1M prize by solving 19 smaller problems, each with their own bounty. $30k for an "infeasable" problem seems a little low to me... I imagine the mob may pay more;-)
From the pdf: The 109-bit Level I challenges are feasible using a very large network of computers. The 131-bit Level I challenges are expected to be infeasible against realistic software and hardware attacks, unless of course, a new algorithm for the ECDLP is discovered.
The Level II challenges are infeasible given today's computer technology and knowledge. The elliptic curves for these challenges meet the stringent security requirements imposed by existing and forthcoming ANSI banking standard
Challenge Field-size(in-bits) Estimated-number-of-machine-days Prize(US$) Elliptic curves over f2^m - Exercises: ECC2-79 79 352 Handbook of Applied Cryptography & Maple V software ECC2-89 89 11278 Handbook of Applied Cryptography & Maple V software ECC2K-95 97 8637 $ 5,000 ECC2-97 97 180448 $ 5,000
Level I challenges: ECC2K-108 109 1.3 x 10 6 $ 10,000 ECC2-109 109 2.1 x 10 7 $ 10,000 ECC2K-130 131 2.7 x 10 9 $ 20,000 ECC2-131 131 6.6 x 10 10 $ 20,000
Level II challenges: ECC2-163 163 6.2 x 10 15 $ 30,000 ECC2K-163 163 3.2 x 10 14 $ 30,000 ECC2-191 191 1.0 x 10 20 $ 40,000 ECC2-238 239 2.1 x 10 27 $ 50,000 ECC2K-238 239 9.2 x 10 25 $ 50,000 ECC2-353 359 1.3 x 10 45 $ 100,000 ECC2K-358 359 2.8 x 10 44 $ 100,000
Elliptic curves over Fp - Exercises: ECCp-79 79 146 Handbook of Applied Cryptography & Maple V software ECCp-89 89 4360 Handbook of Applied Cryptography & Maple V software ECCp-97 97 71982 $ 5,000
Level I challenges: ECCp-109 109 9.0 x 10 6 $ 10,000 ECCp-131 131 2.3 x 10 10 $ 20,000
Level II challenges: ECCp-163 163 2.3 x 10 15 $ 30,000 ECCp-191 191 4.8 x 10 19 $ 40,000 ECCp-239 239 1.4 x 10 27 $ 50,000 ECCp-359 359 3.7 x 10 45 $ 100,000
Magically moving dates not fixed
on
iCal 1.5.2 Released
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Does anyone else have this problem? I've got the EFF's calender loaded in, and when I click on the checkbox that enables/disables viewing of this, I'll get different events.
For example, I'll click on and I'll get an event on monday and another on friday. Then I'll click off, and then on again, and I'll get a different event on tuesday and another different event on saturday. If I do it again, It'll randomy switch between three different events (only one visible at a time) and it seems purely random. This update didn't fix that.
Full Screen Superstitial is guaranteed to play perfectly for every consumer, every time. Now if only I could say that for all the websites I visit!
The ads run on Windows Media Player software, which an estimated 8 of 10 Internet users have on their computers. I guess every consumer is running Windows media player, or maybe the other 20% of internet users don't consume anything.
Also, if this loads "in the background" so that it doesn't affect the speed of page downloads, I doubt it will be smart enough not to slow down my other web pages loading in different tabs (they'll want these new ads, too), my ftp transfer going on, or the bandwidth that other people on my network are using. Sounds like the technology is probably being oversold/overpromised and advertisers are either falling for it or turning a blind eye.
the only advantage of a larger disk-based cache is that it needs to be filled fewer times (less interrupts)
What I meant was that when the cache became empty, the os should re-fill it relatively pronto, or else the drive is sitting idle not transfering data. (I'm talking about writes here)
You do bring up a good point... the drive may have more info than the OS if it has information about the physical location of the data on the drive (which may not be contiguous because of bad sectors being remapped). It would be cool if the drive could communicate this stuff back to the OS to factor in.
Solaris is good at managing interrupt latencies (so the disk's cache won't empty under heavy loads) If the drive indicates that it is about out of cache data, and the OS can't get it new data quickly (the latency is too long), the drive will become idle and thoroughput will go down. (again talking about writes)
The machine already has 512 or 1024 MB of memory, of which Solaris already uses a decent amount of that as cache. Solaris can manage that cache better than the hard drive because it has more information available to it (like knowing what blocks represent deleted files that no longer have to be cached). So, the only advantage of a larger disk-based cache is that it needs to be filled fewer times (less interrupts)... solaris is good at managing interrupt latencies (so the disk's cache won't empty under heavy loads), and the difference between 10 and 2.5 interrupts per second (2MB and 8MB at 20MB/sec) is negligable.
Besides saving the $10, Sun also gets to choose from a broader range of suppliers, yielding bigger savings that could be more usefully put into expanding the main RAM. (or improving the look of that ugly case!)
I developed drivers for a sun ultra... it was pretty messy stuff with untested hardware, high speed dma transfers, and hard real-time requirements. Just about as ugly of a driver as you'd want to do. And, as much abuse as that machine got, I never needed a reset button -- it would usually just dump core and reset itself. I was really impressed with the OS.
Actually, I uploaded MP3s way before I downloaded.
My favorite band hand a long-anticipated album coming out, and I had gotten a review copy about a month before it hit the shelves. What's a geek to do, except review it? I put together a little webpage and recorded 30-second snippits of each song, and then uploaded at 28.8k... ta da, people could hear the new direction the band was going in. This was a few years before Amazon started having samples, so it was kindof unique.
Although it used an MP3 codec, it was still in a.WAV format... I wonder if this has kept me from being contacted by overzealous RIAA robots who don't any fair use could be possible.
It's a cool band. They left their label and started their own, using their website to better connect with fans (tour diary, exclusive cds, etc.) and touring a lot... so far so good, it seems.
Ah, I was going with a 350Mil estimate we toss around at work. Looks like 290Mil is closer. Thanks - I used to think it was 250Mil and they made fun of me... (I forget what evidence we used) I guess I was pretty close after all.
The satellites I used to work on were $1 mil, and the rockets were $10 mil*, with the result being an extremely simple LEO low bandwidth store-and-forward satellite. The mars rover is definitely 36x cooler!
(* discount price because it was an untested rocket. It blew up, of course! The diamond-looking emblem on the top of the rocket? it's a "GEM" for GEMSTAR- "G"lobal "E"lectronic "M"ail)
$400 million? Does that include the cost of getting it there?
No, it doesn't. NASA engineers saved up some frequent flyer miles accrued on the space shuttle and the space station, and got a free trip to mars. Next, they'll be saving up for a round-trip and I've heard that they are soliciting milage donations from the public.
Put another way, $400 million is about a dollar for each american. Have you gotten your dollar's worth of entertainment yet? (Or $2.30 if the price is $810 mil)
To compare, bush's little iraq war is going to cost 100-200 Billion dollars and over 500 coallition lives so far. Do you expect to get your $1400 worth of oil/entertainment from that?
It was a back-in-the-day fully loaded dell inspirion 7000. It had a 15" screen (when they were new), PII 366 MHz, windows 98, and 256MB of ram. The ram alone was $800, and was more than any other machine in the office (even more than our sun workstations, which weren't the newest). Still a useful computer today.
I also had an old company-owned tadpole sparcbook... the newer ones are easily $8k, so a friend bought an old small sun for $150 off of ebay instead and ran it display-less (telnetting into that with his regular laptop)
good point - I skipped over that. But I still disagree with " In the event... that your second bag is also lost, you're just in the same position you're in now when you arrive with lost baggage" . I plan my trips so that I can lose the stowed baggage & make sure I have everything I need in my carry-on (which I've never lost).
They did give me a funny look at the other end of the x-ray line once when I claimed two laptops! (one was a sun tadpole, the other my win box)
p.s. thanks for taking the time to reply to so many of your responses in this thread!
Between 1995 and 2002, the proportion of counterfeit bills that were digitally created grew from 1 percent to 40 percent
Correction: The proportion of counterfeit bills detected grew. I'm guessing that digital copies aren't as good as what the professionals use, and they're more easily detected -- the well made bills stay in circulation. Here's a cool pdf from the GAO that illustrates many types of counterfeits, including the superdollar.
Well, it sounds like I should be checking out the trash bin at the band-replacement desk of my local watch place... there might be a used for those old bands after all!
I wonder if it uses the same module as the speedpass, just repackaged in the band? My speedpass had a glass oil-filled capsule inside it (so it's hermetically sealed), cradled in some rubber to insulate it from shocks. I put the thing in my pen and I have AFAIK the world's only speedpass pen. The glass module might not be a good idea for a band, though, and even the coil antenna may be too bulky for any kind of compatible packaging.
Slashdot Mirror
YES!!! Thanks, that's exactly what I was looking for! Thanks, and the picture is pretty cool, too!
yeah, I seem to remember it from the Sharper Image catalog or something like that... I've looked a few times, but haven't found it yet online.
I've been looking for a portable record player that sony put out in about 82-84. It's tall, and clamps a record and holds it vertically, clamping it in the middle. About 80% of the record was exposed, much like the d88 discplayer mentioned at the site. A linear needle moves to follow the groove.
Of course you couldn't use this while walking, or even jogging or in a car, but it was the smallest record player I've ever seen. Does anyone know the model number or have more info?
But one of our first satellites (I worked for a very small satellite firm) had a debug terminal for informational messages it spat out as it ran. No, we never expected to receive a keypress on this terminal... but we did most of our testing with this terminal because if something went wrong, we'd want to be able to see the error messages.
When we tried to run the satellite without the terminal, the low level hardware CTS/DTR loopback wasn't present and the satellite hung when it tried to send its first character to the console. We caught that only a couple weeks before shipping the thing, too!
I've just started learning Spanish, and to my exceptional disappointment it is as spelling-sensitive as English. I'd like to ask Slashdot readers to make the case for spelling-sensitivity in a written language, because I can't see it. Although I've used English on and off since 1976, I also have a history of Egyptian heiroglyphics, runatic symbols, street signs, pictographs, and other legacy languages that were never spelling sensitive (perhaps due to the lack of letters in these symbolic languagues). Today I use modern languages including American Sign Language which preserves spelling for pleasing appearance, but is not spelling-sensitive itself (it will correct the case for you in the Word, which is quite nice). In all my years of speaking I have never seen the rationale for making a language spelling sensitive. It simply makes typing it in harder, and mistakes easier, yet we persevere with maintaining it in modern languages like Spanish. Without making this into a religious war, can someone make the argument of why spelling-sensitivity in a language is 'a good thing'? And don't confuse this with handling spelling-sensitive surnames, which is fine."
And actually, the jog dial was on the beocom 6000 cordless phone. It's used for the same functions -- to select a name from a big list and to navigate menus -- so I don't see how using it on an mp3 player would be different than using it on a phone.
Sorry, but he's got the EUCD, which is like the DMCA but without any exceptions. Hopefully this law is so bad that it will be laughed out by judges, but I've been waiting for that to happen to the DMCA for about 5 years now, and I keep waiting...
good point. I didn't realize it was such a low orbit already -- LMO (low mars orbit). Yep, even halving it to 150km would make the perp. enlargement bigger than the speed-increase-resolution-loss. I guess they've already maximized this problem and that's how they got that orbit...
If you fly lower, you'll make more orbits per day, making the images zip past the camera even faster. With a pushbroom-type sensor such as this appears to be, this can actually lead to worse resolution in the direction of travel. But, being closer would make the perpindicular direction a little better -- it's all about compromises.
thanks everyone - i will!
The contest website doesn't mention a $1M prize, but from the "details" pdf, it looks like you can earn the $1M prize by solving 19 smaller problems, each with their own bounty. $30k for an "infeasable" problem seems a little low to me... I imagine the mob may pay more ;-)
From the pdf: The 109-bit Level I challenges are feasible using a very large network of computers. The 131-bit Level I challenges are expected to be infeasible against realistic software and hardware attacks, unless of course, a new algorithm for the ECDLP is discovered.
The Level II challenges are infeasible given today's computer technology and knowledge. The elliptic curves for these challenges meet the stringent security requirements imposed by existing and forthcoming ANSI banking standard
Challenge Field-size(in-bits) Estimated-number-of-machine-days Prize(US$)
Elliptic curves over f2^m - Exercises:
ECC2-79 79 352 Handbook of Applied Cryptography & Maple V software
ECC2-89 89 11278 Handbook of Applied Cryptography & Maple V software
ECC2K-95 97 8637 $ 5,000
ECC2-97 97 180448 $ 5,000
Level I challenges:
ECC2K-108 109 1.3 x 10 6 $ 10,000
ECC2-109 109 2.1 x 10 7 $ 10,000
ECC2K-130 131 2.7 x 10 9 $ 20,000
ECC2-131 131 6.6 x 10 10 $ 20,000
Level II challenges:
ECC2-163 163 6.2 x 10 15 $ 30,000
ECC2K-163 163 3.2 x 10 14 $ 30,000
ECC2-191 191 1.0 x 10 20 $ 40,000
ECC2-238 239 2.1 x 10 27 $ 50,000
ECC2K-238 239 9.2 x 10 25 $ 50,000
ECC2-353 359 1.3 x 10 45 $ 100,000
ECC2K-358 359 2.8 x 10 44 $ 100,000
Elliptic curves over Fp - Exercises:
ECCp-79 79 146 Handbook of Applied Cryptography & Maple V software
ECCp-89 89 4360 Handbook of Applied Cryptography & Maple V software
ECCp-97 97 71982 $ 5,000
Level I challenges:
ECCp-109 109 9.0 x 10 6 $ 10,000
ECCp-131 131 2.3 x 10 10 $ 20,000
Level II challenges:
ECCp-163 163 2.3 x 10 15 $ 30,000
ECCp-191 191 4.8 x 10 19 $ 40,000
ECCp-239 239 1.4 x 10 27 $ 50,000
ECCp-359 359 3.7 x 10 45 $ 100,000
Does anyone else have this problem? I've got the EFF's calender loaded in, and when I click on the checkbox that enables/disables viewing of this, I'll get different events.
For example, I'll click on and I'll get an event on monday and another on friday. Then I'll click off, and then on again, and I'll get a different event on tuesday and another different event on saturday. If I do it again, It'll randomy switch between three different events (only one visible at a time) and it seems purely random. This update didn't fix that.
Full Screen Superstitial is guaranteed to play perfectly for every consumer, every time.
Now if only I could say that for all the websites I visit!
The ads run on Windows Media Player software, which an estimated 8 of 10 Internet users have on their computers.
I guess every consumer is running Windows media player, or maybe the other 20% of internet users don't consume anything.
Also, if this loads "in the background" so that it doesn't affect the speed of page downloads, I doubt it will be smart enough not to slow down my other web pages loading in different tabs (they'll want these new ads, too), my ftp transfer going on, or the bandwidth that other people on my network are using. Sounds like the technology is probably being oversold/overpromised and advertisers are either falling for it or turning a blind eye.
the only advantage of a larger disk-based cache is that it needs to be filled fewer times (less interrupts)
What I meant was that when the cache became empty, the os should re-fill it relatively pronto, or else the drive is sitting idle not transfering data. (I'm talking about writes here)
You do bring up a good point... the drive may have more info than the OS if it has information about the physical location of the data on the drive (which may not be contiguous because of bad sectors being remapped). It would be cool if the drive could communicate this stuff back to the OS to factor in.
Solaris is good at managing interrupt latencies (so the disk's cache won't empty under heavy loads)
If the drive indicates that it is about out of cache data, and the OS can't get it new data quickly (the latency is too long), the drive will become idle and thoroughput will go down. (again talking about writes)
The machine already has 512 or 1024 MB of memory, of which Solaris already uses a decent amount of that as cache. Solaris can manage that cache better than the hard drive because it has more information available to it (like knowing what blocks represent deleted files that no longer have to be cached). So, the only advantage of a larger disk-based cache is that it needs to be filled fewer times (less interrupts)... solaris is good at managing interrupt latencies (so the disk's cache won't empty under heavy loads), and the difference between 10 and 2.5 interrupts per second (2MB and 8MB at 20MB/sec) is negligable.
Besides saving the $10, Sun also gets to choose from a broader range of suppliers, yielding bigger savings that could be more usefully put into expanding the main RAM. (or improving the look of that ugly case!)
I developed drivers for a sun ultra... it was pretty messy stuff with untested hardware, high speed dma transfers, and hard real-time requirements. Just about as ugly of a driver as you'd want to do. And, as much abuse as that machine got, I never needed a reset button -- it would usually just dump core and reset itself. I was really impressed with the OS.
Actually, I uploaded MP3s way before I downloaded.
.WAV format... I wonder if this has kept me from being contacted by overzealous RIAA robots who don't any fair use could be possible.
My favorite band hand a long-anticipated album coming out, and I had gotten a review copy about a month before it hit the shelves. What's a geek to do, except review it? I put together a little webpage and recorded 30-second snippits of each song, and then uploaded at 28.8k... ta da, people could hear the new direction the band was going in. This was a few years before Amazon started having samples, so it was kindof unique.
Although it used an MP3 codec, it was still in a
It's a cool band. They left their label and started their own, using their website to better connect with fans (tour diary, exclusive cds, etc.) and touring a lot... so far so good, it seems.
Ah, I was going with a 350Mil estimate we toss around at work. Looks like 290Mil is closer. Thanks - I used to think it was 250Mil and they made fun of me... (I forget what evidence we used) I guess I was pretty close after all.
Yep, I agree.
The satellites I used to work on were $1 mil, and the rockets were $10 mil*, with the result being an extremely simple LEO low bandwidth store-and-forward satellite. The mars rover is definitely 36x cooler!
(* discount price because it was an untested rocket. It blew up, of course! The diamond-looking emblem on the top of the rocket? it's a "GEM" for GEMSTAR- "G"lobal "E"lectronic "M"ail)
$400 million? Does that include the cost of getting it there?
No, it doesn't. NASA engineers saved up some frequent flyer miles accrued on the space shuttle and the space station, and got a free trip to mars. Next, they'll be saving up for a round-trip and I've heard that they are soliciting milage donations from the public.
Put another way, $400 million is about a dollar for each american. Have you gotten your dollar's worth of entertainment yet? (Or $2.30 if the price is $810 mil)
To compare, bush's little iraq war is going to cost 100-200 Billion dollars and over 500 coallition lives so far. Do you expect to get your $1400 worth of oil/entertainment from that?
It was a back-in-the-day fully loaded dell inspirion 7000. It had a 15" screen (when they were new), PII 366 MHz, windows 98, and 256MB of ram. The ram alone was $800, and was more than any other machine in the office (even more than our sun workstations, which weren't the newest). Still a useful computer today.
I also had an old company-owned tadpole sparcbook... the newer ones are easily $8k, so a friend bought an old small sun for $150 off of ebay instead and ran it display-less (telnetting into that with his regular laptop)
good point - I skipped over that. But I still disagree with " In the event ... that your second bag is also lost, you're just in the same position you're in now when you arrive with lost baggage" . I plan my trips so that I can lose the stowed baggage & make sure I have everything I need in my carry-on (which I've never lost).
They did give me a funny look at the other end of the x-ray line once when I claimed two laptops! (one was a sun tadpole, the other my win box)
p.s. thanks for taking the time to reply to so many of your responses in this thread!
Wow, my grandma has a tattoo of a $20 bill on her bum, too!
Between 1995 and 2002, the proportion of counterfeit bills that were digitally created grew from 1 percent to 40 percent
Correction: The proportion of counterfeit bills detected grew. I'm guessing that digital copies aren't as good as what the professionals use, and they're more easily detected -- the well made bills stay in circulation. Here's a cool pdf from the GAO that illustrates many types of counterfeits, including the superdollar.
Well, it sounds like I should be checking out the trash bin at the band-replacement desk of my local watch place... there might be a used for those old bands after all!
I wonder if it uses the same module as the speedpass, just repackaged in the band? My speedpass had a glass oil-filled capsule inside it (so it's hermetically sealed), cradled in some rubber to insulate it from shocks. I put the thing in my pen and I have AFAIK the world's only speedpass pen. The glass module might not be a good idea for a band, though, and even the coil antenna may be too bulky for any kind of compatible packaging.