Here's some info on the SP0256. I had forgotten that there was an option for extra RAM -- the processor uses this for a buffer for incoming text; without it, its limited to something on the order of 10-30 characters. So, that socket could be for the serial rom -- check to see if it connects to pins 3-6 of the SP0256. Otherwise, it might be a socket for a 1488/1489 RS232 driver/rec'vr.
No, those chips (it was a pair) were power-hungry 5 volt parts made by General Instrument. One was a microcontroller (8051?) with the text-to-phonome algorithm, and the other was the phonome-to-audio processor (GI SP0256). Actually, the SP0256 could accept external roms for specialized words, so it could have spoken in any language you wanted.
Check out quadravox for boards that emulate the SP0256, using ISD's analog flash memory and a microcontroller.
(My misadventure with the old GI chip: -12 instead of +5, just for a split second. After that, it developed an stutter!)
Oh, no! Please don't end up like the Russian Buran in Gorky Park!!!. The Buran is russia's strangely shuttle-esque reusable orbiter. The test article is now a restraunt, and the 3 real ones are in storage.
The Kosmos-Zemlya company formed by NPO Molniya, the park, Kosmoflot and headed by Gherman Titov, is trying to make a buck by using the test article as the framework for a new space motif restaurant. Videokosmos has produced a video production of Earth views to be shown in simulated port holes as up to 60 patrons eat from 100 varieties of space food for a cost of $70
(Just FYI, it's a dual athlon, 3 hard drive computer in a room with a lot of hard surfaces in an otherwise quiet house) Also, sony has two noise cancelling headphones, but the open-ear design one seemed ineffective, the closed-ear version seemed to add to much 'hiss' of its own.
That's good if you can break up the task into multiple program batches (i.e. each program applies x effect to frame y), but doesn't help if you had a massively multithreaded ap (like the ap I'm writing, once I get it working on a single thread), or if you're just plain too lazy to cut up a parallizable task into small batches (that would also describe me).
Also, do the regular unix batch stuff have some sort of load-spreading? I don't know unix well enough to answer. It seems that the mosix/vm combo would do this automatically.
The batch system is definately something I've want to learn... (I've been interested ever since I found out that on the old honeywell mainframe at school each program gets equal time. Divide your task into lots of programs = more time for you!)
I wonder how this would work with mosix... it could be a dream system!
You could use mosix to combine the compute resources of several boxes to look like one box. And then, you could use this divy up the space so that people don't step on each other. When anyone (working in thier own space) kicks off a large compile, the load would transparently be distributed among all the boxen.
Of course, I have zippy experience with any of this, but it sounds possible.
check out mosix -- it looks like the simplest way to combine the two transparently. I haven't used it, but it looks easy. This would be helpful for some tasks more than others (ie. povray or orher intesive math, but not quake), and of course, things that are multi-process (the same requirement needed for SMP). There was a./ article about this a while ago.
I've always loved computers and hacking out new programs. I started writing programs in the early 80's, wrote some cool programs in high school (a cache for proDos; an NLQ printer driver for the Imagewriter when NLQ printers were new), and then went to college as an EE.
During college, I still kept writing programs. I wanted to take the graphics course, but found that I had taught myself and implemented most of the stuff. I co-oped during the breaks, and got to write some cool software for a company (I designed a way to extend the capabilities of a piece of hardware way beyond it's original intent), and worked for this company upon graduation.
I got some neat projects; I loved designing the hardware and software. Eventually, though, the good engineers left and I was working overtime to needlessly cover other peoples butts. The only thing that kept me going was my fun side projects... reverse-engineering the garmin gps protocol, more computer graphics.
I started work at a new company, and it was great for a while. I learned a lot, but then got somewhat stuck in a rut. The work turned into just programming dma engines and writing drivers. My side projects kept me going... programming the sega vmu, and I began another (still-secret) really ambitious project (RAP).
I had saved up enough money for a really nice car or a downpayment on a house. But, neither appealed to me anymore. I wanted more...
I had always heard the advice "don't make your hobby your job", but never took it. I had been beginning to worry that maybe I had made a mistake. But, after slaving away at the job, I found it was always fun to work on my side projects, even if it was essentially the same kind of work. What I'm learning is that, for me, the freedom to design is really motivating.
So I took a leave of absence (a sabbatical) and am now squandering my life savings chasing that really ambitious project full-time. I'm having a blast. I moved out of the city, live in a college town, have time to do fun stuff, and still working like heck on my project. I code till late into the night, just like I used to in high school.
For the last two days, I've been trying to figure out how to determine a certain condition. I've been racking my brains, but it's been fun because I know that there is a creative answer and I'll find it. I know it's just me and geometry, and there isn't some half-documented chip or lame buggy software in the way. The challenge is real, and for once, not just fixing or working around other peoples' mistakes.
So, my advice, find out what you love, and do it. If this means some time off, then it's worth it. My college-educated sister cleaned toilets in alaska before deciding on a career. I know when I'm ready for another job, I'll know what I want from it and I'll be a lot pickier.
ps. and don't mistake your job for your love. I've done that too. doh!
Yeah, originally I was going for funny. But, despite being about agriculture, this is definitely on-topic. It's a contrast to the "good" licenses discussed above, and how companies can use their patents to force compliance with these licenses even to people who don't want to. If you care about software licenses, you should be interested in biotechnology licenses (both are concerned with protecting IP). While the GPL and its ilk are accused of being viral, here's an example of a license that literally is. Farmers face a terrible plight -- inability to control what they plant and who they buy it from -- and I hope to god that it never comes to computers. How is this possible, you say? Well, I gave you start -- virii -- so start the discussion! Is there some patented technology that will become essential for interoperability (like GIFs, but moreso)? Will passport become necessary to conduct transactions over the web? In the slashdot tradition, go ahead and add your favorite ms conspiracy theory.
And before modding down a seemingly unrelated post down, remember that cross-fertilization (no pun intented!) from other disciplines is an amazing tool to understand something about the topic at hand.
p.s. not to harp on farming, but I thought that the Autonomic Computing article made good use of cross-disciplinary comparisons in its whitepaper.
Just to clarify: The Motosoto license is different from the Monsanto license. The biotech giant will sue you for growing crops using their patented genes, even if the genes got into your crops because of cross-contamination from neighbors fields. Even if you don't want to grow genetically modified crops, and you don't use roundup (a monsanto herbicide - their plants have genes that make them resistant to this, so you can spray it indiscriminately and kill only weeds), they still sue. More monsanto info.
It's almost as if the people behind nimda demanded money from you for running their copyrighted software! The sad thing, this is a very good comparison. Genetically modified organic crops are worth much less than pure organic.
I used to think that my HP48 was slow, too. But these things have a 16-key type ahead buffer. Once I stopped waiting to see my keypresses and intermedite results on the screen (possible, thanks to a really nice keyboard), and I learned some of the menu sequences (i.e. Blue - 6/UNITS - A is the unit convert function "CONV"), its slow response didn't bother me at all.
The calculator actually skips some redrawing of the screen if there keystrokes pending, so you don't have to wait for it to render all the in-between steps.
True, it would be nicer to be faster, but once you know the secret, it isn't a hinderance. My 48SX has a 1MHz processor, compared to your 4MHz! I don't know about the 49, but the 48GX (@ 2 MHz) has software that's about twice as complicated, so it doesn't feel any faster than the 48SX.
RF Interference:
I don't think there will be a problem with interference. Check out these computers. They use a similar system, but instead of being on a pidly motherboard, they use the ubiquitous VME format. They really pack in the processors -- 4 G4 PPC's per daughter card, and 4 daughter cards per single 9U VME card, and then 16 9U cards per chassis, and then three chassis. (4*4*16*3=48 TFLOPS) The pitch spacing on PCI is comprable to that on VME.
Also, I wondered about the connector on the tops of these boards. It looks like another PCI card edge. I wonder if this is a duplicate of the host PCI interface (for debug purposes), if it's a new "slot" to connect to the server's internal bus, or if it's a way to connect server cards bypassing the main PCI bus (for better performance).
Nah, I'm pretty sure I got them right... I'll explain my math:
USB is 12 Mbit/sec. I guessed that since it's polled, that we wouldn't get peak efficiency and that maybe only 8 Mbit/sec was realizable. I'm also assuming the MP3 being transfered is encoded at 128kbit/sec. Thus, the transfer rate 'x' factor is 8192/128 = 64x. Transfering an MP3 file effectively increases the 'x' factor - to get the same number of seconds recorded on an uncompressed CD requires more data, which requires more time.
Now, the point's moot if you're burning CDs of MP3s, but even for normal CDs I would still find 64x to be worthwhile.
I wonder how the MPAA will defend their use of region coding? When's the last time that you bought a piece of software that was linked to the theatrical release of a movie. I can just see it... Microsoft won't release Office 2004 until after "Back to the Future IV" has shown in theaters in your area.
If they dropped region coding (which they won't do), do you think that rental stores will just buy (probably cheaper) grey market videos?
The way this used to work in the days of VHS was that they would sell only one version of the tapes... For the first few months it would be priced at the rental-store-price of $100-$300, and then after that it would drop to the consumer-price of $20-$30. Now, I guess they're getting greedy and want to sell to consumers as soon as possible.
This was the best picture of DaVinci's bike that I could find on the net. (Also try here) It's only got one triangle instead of the two that the modern bike has, so it looks a bit stressful on the parts. I'd love to see more; especially the steering (or lack of steering?) mechanism.
I'm surprised no one's brought up Zork. This old slashdot article links to a great paper on infocom and zork. This was a time when there were many more home-computer platforms than there are today, and infocom found a way to easily port to any of them. The Z-machine was a virtual machine (unheard of on home computers back in the day!), and they only had to write one interpreter per architecture: instantly their library of a dozen games would be available on the new platform. Of course, the hardware requirements were simpler (i.e. text, no graphics), but for what it did, you would have never known it was interpreted. I think that eventually graphics will reach that point- we're just starting to get relatively cheap hardware ( O($1.0E2)) hardware that is getting closer to photorealistic and is today what text was then (relatively straightforward to implement decent useability). Any, check out the article, it's a great read.
Actually, you want it to blow hot air! That's the heat from the chip... if it blows cold air, then the heat isn't making it to the heatsink and you've got a problem. [automotive parallel: if your heater doesn't blow hot air, then your cooling system isn't working; same situation]
IIRC, AMD was recomending phase-change material instead of paste for just this reason. The paste works better... until it dries out. The phase-change material lasts longer. Just wondering... is it just me, or this the phase-change stuff seem like starburst candy? I removed my heatsinks and didn't want to reuse the p-c stuff, so I had to use paste. Could I have used a small slice of orange chew instead?
Also, everyone else, when he says "freezing" he doesn't mean cold (like I originally thought), but locking up. Took me a few seconds to figure that out. BAM!
I've got a 4x USB CD burner - that seems to be the top speed for USB. So, a 150MB disc will take (at 600KB/sec) 250 seconds, or, in other words, about 4 1/2 minutes is the most you'll have to wait to burn a disc.
Slashdot Mirror
> The document ... is still partly censored. This implies that the CIA was embarrassed about disclosing all the details of Acoustic Kitty
Actually, the reason is that project Acoustic Bovine was a success, and is being covertly operated on the streets of moscow as we speak.
Here's some info on the SP0256. I had forgotten that there was an option for extra RAM -- the processor uses this for a buffer for incoming text; without it, its limited to something on the order of 10-30 characters. So, that socket could be for the serial rom -- check to see if it connects to pins 3-6 of the SP0256. Otherwise, it might be a socket for a 1488/1489 RS232 driver/rec'vr.
No, those chips (it was a pair) were power-hungry 5 volt parts made by General Instrument. One was a microcontroller (8051?) with the text-to-phonome algorithm, and the other was the phonome-to-audio processor (GI SP0256). Actually, the SP0256 could accept external roms for specialized words, so it could have spoken in any language you wanted.
Check out quadravox for boards that emulate the SP0256, using ISD's analog flash memory and a microcontroller.
(My misadventure with the old GI chip: -12 instead of +5, just for a split second. After that, it developed an stutter!)
After playing around with fans and such in my rig, I finally gave in and bought a set of bose noise cancelling headphones. They work well; the only problem is that you've got a well-sealed headphone on your head (leading to warm sweaty ears!), and they are somewhat spendy ($300). When I put them on, I can still hear the computer, but it's at a reasonable level. When I take off the headphones, I am consistently amazed at how loud the computer is! My comfortable music level I usually less than the computer!
(Just FYI, it's a dual athlon, 3 hard drive computer in a room with a lot of hard surfaces in an otherwise quiet house) Also, sony has two noise cancelling headphones, but the open-ear design one seemed ineffective, the closed-ear version seemed to add to much 'hiss' of its own.
That's good if you can break up the task into multiple program batches (i.e. each program applies x effect to frame y), but doesn't help if you had a massively multithreaded ap (like the ap I'm writing, once I get it working on a single thread), or if you're just plain too lazy to cut up a parallizable task into small batches (that would also describe me).
Also, do the regular unix batch stuff have some sort of load-spreading? I don't know unix well enough to answer. It seems that the mosix/vm combo would do this automatically.
The batch system is definately something I've want to learn... (I've been interested ever since I found out that on the old honeywell mainframe at school each program gets equal time. Divide your task into lots of programs = more time for you!)
I wonder how this would work with mosix... it could be a dream system!
You could use mosix to combine the compute resources of several boxes to look like one box. And then, you could use this divy up the space so that people don't step on each other. When anyone (working in thier own space) kicks off a large compile, the load would transparently be distributed among all the boxen.
Of course, I have zippy experience with any of this, but it sounds possible.
check out mosix -- it looks like the simplest way to combine the two transparently. I haven't used it, but it looks easy. This would be helpful for some tasks more than others (ie. povray or orher intesive math, but not quake), and of course, things that are multi-process (the same requirement needed for SMP). There was a ./ article about this a while ago.
I've always loved computers and hacking out new programs. I started writing programs in the early 80's, wrote some cool programs in high school (a cache for proDos; an NLQ printer driver for the Imagewriter when NLQ printers were new), and then went to college as an EE.
During college, I still kept writing programs. I wanted to take the graphics course, but found that I had taught myself and implemented most of the stuff. I co-oped during the breaks, and got to write some cool software for a company (I designed a way to extend the capabilities of a piece of hardware way beyond it's original intent), and worked for this company upon graduation.
I got some neat projects; I loved designing the hardware and software. Eventually, though, the good engineers left and I was working overtime to needlessly cover other peoples butts. The only thing that kept me going was my fun side projects... reverse-engineering the garmin gps protocol, more computer graphics.
I started work at a new company, and it was great for a while. I learned a lot, but then got somewhat stuck in a rut. The work turned into just programming dma engines and writing drivers. My side projects kept me going... programming the sega vmu, and I began another (still-secret) really ambitious project (RAP).
I had saved up enough money for a really nice car or a downpayment on a house. But, neither appealed to me anymore. I wanted more...
I had always heard the advice "don't make your hobby your job", but never took it. I had been beginning to worry that maybe I had made a mistake. But, after slaving away at the job, I found it was always fun to work on my side projects, even if it was essentially the same kind of work. What I'm learning is that, for me, the freedom to design is really motivating.
So I took a leave of absence (a sabbatical) and am now squandering my life savings chasing that really ambitious project full-time. I'm having a blast. I moved out of the city, live in a college town, have time to do fun stuff, and still working like heck on my project. I code till late into the night, just like I used to in high school.
For the last two days, I've been trying to figure out how to determine a certain condition. I've been racking my brains, but it's been fun because I know that there is a creative answer and I'll find it. I know it's just me and geometry, and there isn't some half-documented chip or lame buggy software in the way. The challenge is real, and for once, not just fixing or working around other peoples' mistakes.
So, my advice, find out what you love, and do it. If this means some time off, then it's worth it. My college-educated sister cleaned toilets in alaska before deciding on a career. I know when I'm ready for another job, I'll know what I want from it and I'll be a lot pickier.
ps. and don't mistake your job for your love. I've done that too. doh!
Rating: +1, Selfish.
Try here.
not off-topic.
Yeah, originally I was going for funny. But, despite being about agriculture, this is definitely on-topic. It's a contrast to the "good" licenses discussed above, and how companies can use their patents to force compliance with these licenses even to people who don't want to. If you care about software licenses, you should be interested in biotechnology licenses (both are concerned with protecting IP). While the GPL and its ilk are accused of being viral, here's an example of a license that literally is. Farmers face a terrible plight -- inability to control what they plant and who they buy it from -- and I hope to god that it never comes to computers. How is this possible, you say? Well, I gave you start -- virii -- so start the discussion! Is there some patented technology that will become essential for interoperability (like GIFs, but moreso)? Will passport become necessary to conduct transactions over the web? In the slashdot tradition, go ahead and add your favorite ms conspiracy theory.
And before modding down a seemingly unrelated post down, remember that cross-fertilization (no pun intented!) from other disciplines is an amazing tool to understand something about the topic at hand.
p.s. not to harp on farming, but I thought that the Autonomic Computing article made good use of cross-disciplinary comparisons in its whitepaper.
end rant; it wasn't about karma.
Since eclipse.org seems slashdotted, you can get a copy of the technical overview from google's cache, but it's just the text from the pdf (no pretty pictures).
The orginal whitepaper is here
Just to clarify: The Motosoto license is different from the Monsanto license. The biotech giant will sue you for growing crops using their patented genes, even if the genes got into your crops because of cross-contamination from neighbors fields. Even if you don't want to grow genetically modified crops, and you don't use roundup (a monsanto herbicide - their plants have genes that make them resistant to this, so you can spray it indiscriminately and kill only weeds), they still sue. More monsanto info.
It's almost as if the people behind nimda demanded money from you for running their copyrighted software! The sad thing, this is a very good comparison. Genetically modified organic crops are worth much less than pure organic.
But, there are hypodermic needles this size! Maybe that's what he meant.
0.9mm=19 gauge. You can get 18 and 22 gauge needles.
I used to think that my HP48 was slow, too. But these things have a 16-key type ahead buffer. Once I stopped waiting to see my keypresses and intermedite results on the screen (possible, thanks to a really nice keyboard), and I learned some of the menu sequences (i.e. Blue - 6/UNITS - A is the unit convert function "CONV"), its slow response didn't bother me at all.
The calculator actually skips some redrawing of the screen if there keystrokes pending, so you don't have to wait for it to render all the in-between steps.
True, it would be nicer to be faster, but once you know the secret, it isn't a hinderance. My 48SX has a 1MHz processor, compared to your 4MHz! I don't know about the 49, but the 48GX (@ 2 MHz) has software that's about twice as complicated, so it doesn't feel any faster than the 48SX.
RF Interference:
I don't think there will be a problem with interference. Check out these computers. They use a similar system, but instead of being on a pidly motherboard, they use the ubiquitous VME format. They really pack in the processors -- 4 G4 PPC's per daughter card, and 4 daughter cards per single 9U VME card, and then 16 9U cards per chassis, and then three chassis. (4*4*16*3=48 TFLOPS) The pitch spacing on PCI is comprable to that on VME.
Also, I wondered about the connector on the tops of these boards. It looks like another PCI card edge. I wonder if this is a duplicate of the host PCI interface (for debug purposes), if it's a new "slot" to connect to the server's internal bus, or if it's a way to connect server cards bypassing the main PCI bus (for better performance).
Nah, I'm pretty sure I got them right... I'll explain my math:
USB is 12 Mbit/sec. I guessed that since it's polled, that we wouldn't get peak efficiency and that maybe only 8 Mbit/sec was realizable. I'm also assuming the MP3 being transfered is encoded at 128kbit/sec. Thus, the transfer rate 'x' factor is 8192/128 = 64x. Transfering an MP3 file effectively increases the 'x' factor - to get the same number of seconds recorded on an uncompressed CD requires more data, which requires more time.
Now, the point's moot if you're burning CDs of MP3s, but even for normal CDs I would still find 64x to be worthwhile.
83 minutes, at 8 Mbit/sec. It's the equivalent speed of a 64x CD burner.
So don't gripe, unless you have > 64x cd rewriter and you've never had your computer on for over an hour and half at a time.
I wonder how the MPAA will defend their use of region coding? When's the last time that you bought a piece of software that was linked to the theatrical release of a movie. I can just see it... Microsoft won't release Office 2004 until after "Back to the Future IV" has shown in theaters in your area.
If they dropped region coding (which they won't do), do you think that rental stores will just buy (probably cheaper) grey market videos?
The way this used to work in the days of VHS was that they would sell only one version of the tapes... For the first few months it would be priced at the rental-store-price of $100-$300, and then after that it would drop to the consumer-price of $20-$30. Now, I guess they're getting greedy and want to sell to consumers as soon as possible.
This was the best picture of DaVinci's bike that I could find on the net. (Also try here) It's only got one triangle instead of the two that the modern bike has, so it looks a bit stressful on the parts. I'd love to see more; especially the steering (or lack of steering?) mechanism.
> hard to imagine a fast-moving cloud of fine dust particles causing such damage
High pressure steam causing damage
I'm surprised no one's brought up Zork. This old slashdot article links to a great paper on infocom and zork. This was a time when there were many more home-computer platforms than there are today, and infocom found a way to easily port to any of them. The Z-machine was a virtual machine (unheard of on home computers back in the day!), and they only had to write one interpreter per architecture: instantly their library of a dozen games would be available on the new platform. Of course, the hardware requirements were simpler (i.e. text, no graphics), but for what it did, you would have never known it was interpreted. I think that eventually graphics will reach that point- we're just starting to get relatively cheap hardware ( O($1.0E2)) hardware that is getting closer to photorealistic and is today what text was then (relatively straightforward to implement decent useability). Any, check out the article, it's a great read.
Don't forget about the mac cube, too... lots of compute power & no fan, either!
Actually, you want it to blow hot air! That's the heat from the chip... if it blows cold air, then the heat isn't making it to the heatsink and you've got a problem. [automotive parallel: if your heater doesn't blow hot air, then your cooling system isn't working; same situation]
IIRC, AMD was recomending phase-change material instead of paste for just this reason. The paste works better... until it dries out. The phase-change material lasts longer. Just wondering... is it just me, or this the phase-change stuff seem like starburst candy? I removed my heatsinks and didn't want to reuse the p-c stuff, so I had to use paste. Could I have used a small slice of orange chew instead?
Also, everyone else, when he says "freezing" he doesn't mean cold (like I originally thought), but locking up. Took me a few seconds to figure that out. BAM!
I've got a 4x USB CD burner - that seems to be the top speed for USB. So, a 150MB disc will take (at 600KB/sec) 250 seconds, or, in other words, about 4 1/2 minutes is the most you'll have to wait to burn a disc.