Yes, it is sad DNA passed away a premature death, but I'm sure he'd be happy to know that people still enjoy, and will for a long time, his excellent and humorous style of writing. I saw a few stills from the BBC Version of the film and I can say . .."Woah" I really do hope the new people in charge redo a few characters. I've always invisioned Marvin as something like a Bender from futureama.
Hmmm, that's interesting, one would thing the residual IRQ going over the PCI would cancel out the WTF that allows people to RTFM, that being the primary cause of people wondering what the heck others just said.
If the string is gone, that means it's a hurricane.
You sure somebody just didn't steal the string?
On a different note, At camp we had a weather rock (Kansas weather woo), Did basically the same thing. Swaying, it was windy. Broken, it was Hailing. Glowing . . watch for lightning, if it's gone . . had to be a tornado it was too damn heavy to steal.
This development phase implements synthesized bongo beats that are played out through speakers, and microphones that 'listen' for the data being sent by the other computers. Each computer has two different bongo beats (based on pitch) associated with each, making a total of 4 distinct beats. Each computer listens for the other's beats, while ignoring itself. The actual output of the bongo beats is not a big deal, and only takes the following code to implement:
Reply from 199.212.55.2: bytes=1 time=139274ms TTL=254
Ping statistics for 199.212.55.2:
Packets: Sent = 1, Received = 1, Lost = 0 (0% loss), Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 139274ms, Maximum = 139274ms, Average = 139274ms
Didn't think it was THAT easy did you?
Actually a little bit of cheating was required. Since we have high latency and bandwidth, it was found that the ARP requests were flooding the bongo link. The ARP requests allow the router and my machine to resolve IP addresses (i.e. convert MAC addresses to IP addresses). To solve this problem, when the Bongo Link is first brought up, the preamble discussed above actually sends the appropriate IP address (from either the router or the PC on the other side of the Bongo Link) to the other Linux box base on the ARP request it receives. These addresses are then taken, and appropriate generic packets are generated with their appropriate checksums. From this point, any further ARP requests are not sent through the Bongo Link, but instead the generic packet is sent back acting as a ARP reply.
During a lecture about the layers of the OSI model in our fourth year Computer Networks Course, Prof. Townsend was discussing the fact that the lower layers of the model could be replaced with any form of media. Despite this change, the upper layers would function as normal. In fact, others have implemented network protocols over "non-standard" media, including CPIP (carrier pigeon internet protocol) which was implemented using RFC1149, and reached speeds of 0.08bps. Prof. Townsend jokingly suggested that Internet Protocols could even run over forms of primitive communication (i.e. bongo drums, or even smoke signals). In an email sent out after class he offered extra credit to anyone who succesfully implemented TCP/IP via. Bongo Drums. I was the only one crazy enough to sign up, and thus began what was deamed as "The Bongo Project".
The next morning, wondering what I had gotten myself into, I discussed the game plan with Prof. Townsend. It was suggested to whip up a couple Linux boxes to form a transparent bridge that would serve as the Bongo Link itself. Each Linux box would then have a microphone and a pair of bongos, with each microphone "listening" to the appropriate pair of bongos (based on pitch). The pitch recognition would be a project in itself, but luckily both Prof. Townsend and Dr. Keppel-Jones from the Mathematics Department had already developed an interesting method called SAW (Sliding Averaging Window) for me to base some of my work from. With the bridge constructed, the Bongo Link could then be placed anywhere, and in testing cases it was between my PC and the residence LAN.
I had little socket programming experience, and even less experience with devices in UNIX. Jason Tackaberry, the university system administrator, offered some source code from a network monitoring project for me to scan over for some coding help. The gesture was appreciated greatly.
Weekly meetings with Prof. Townsend were scheduled to discuss my progress, as well as online chat sessions which often led to hours of debugging and perfecting pitch recognition algorithms.
By the end of the semester, the project was not 100% completed, so a demonstration was given to the class which used a set of desktop speakers which played recorded bongo beats to simulate the real thing. Since the theory had been proven, I was granted my extra credit and somehow wound up with a 99% in the class.
In order to simulate a Bongo Link, a cross-over 9-pin serial cable was constructed to connect the two linux boxes together. This was used for testing, as there was a concern for buffer overruns and packet dumping with such slow speeds between the two Linux boxes. A network card was ripped out of each Linux box, and the serial cable was placed inbetween instead of the crossover cable.
Even easier to harness the network card, are the serial ports. Under Linux we're taught that files are devices, and devices are files. To read and write to the serial ports we first make our file descriptor and make it point to the device/dev/ttyS0 (which refers to the serial port). Then you're just a read() and write() away from sending and receiving data. This is shown below:
int serial_fd; serial_fd=open("/dev/ttyS0", O_RDWR, 0);
Now we just have to read packets from eth0 and write them to our serial ports on both machines. Some difficulties arose while testing, but it was found that the machines were able to keep up with the demand even at extremely slow speeds.
Since the Bongo Link would eventually be "sound driven", more testing was done, but instead of the serial ports, soundcards were placed in each box and an audio cable (male-male stereo headphone) was placed beween as shown below:
To access the soundcard under Linux, we open the/dev/dsp file and do simple read() and write() commands to the file descriptor pointing to the device.
By setting the bitrates with the ioctl function, we could increase and decrease the "bandwidth". Testing with the audio cable turned out better than with the serial link. We now have the tools to replace the audio cable with some speakers and microphones which was Phase III.
The first step in the Bongo Link was to get most of the socket programming out of the way. To make things as transparent as possible, a bridge was determined to be the best way to implement the Bongo Link. For starters, two network cards were thrown in two Linux boxes for testing purposes, with a patch cable from the wall to the first Linux box, and cross cables between the others. Without having addressable boxes, data taken in from one network card was to be spit out through the other, and vise versa. C programming makes this very simple. Lets take a look at some code to make things clearer.
We first declare two file descriptors that will address each network card in the Linux box, s0 and s1. We'll also create some sockaddr structures that we will bind to our sockets later that will hold information such as which ethernet cards they'll be associated with, and the family type. The sockaddr structures are first cleared with the memset function, and then the family type and ethernet card device are copied into them. The file descriptors are then set to point to two corresponding sockets, which are created using the same family type as the structures and a special argument number which allows the sockets to be placed in promiscuous mode (they'll look at every packet on the wire). These sockets are then bound to the corresponding sockaddr structure. As soon as the two sockets are setup, we can simple use read() and write() calls to the sockets as shown below to read packets and send packets:
The buffer (buf) will be an unsigned char array (8 bits) which contain the packet that is to be sent, or the packet that has been received. Now we have all the coding required to make a bridge! All that has to be done is read everything from eth0 and write it to eth1, and read everything from eth1 and write it to eth0. Pretty easy. There's only one more catch... Since the users should not be aware of such a bridge, we don't want the Linux box to have any IP addresses associated with them (i.e. non- addressable since we want transparency) we must issue a simple unix command to remove any possibility of addressing before running the bongo link. Along with removing our addressable presence on the network, we also set the network cards themselves to promiscuous mode at the same time. We issue a ifconfig command like below:
ifconfig eth0 -arp promisc up 10.1.1.0 ifconfig eth1 -arp promisc up 10.1.1.1
We now have all the tools to make a transparent bridge as shown here:
Since we will require two linux boxes for the final implementation it's just as easy to set up:
There we go, everything's all set. With the above, you could experiment making your own personal firewalls or filters at a very low layers. In fact you could play around a bit too including re-writing packets as they're sent out - just make sure to recalculate checksums or the packet will be garbage. You could also try your skills at some sort of spoofing depending on how the local routers/bridges/switches are set up.
The following non-technical story has appeared in school magazines and many other news sources from around the world.
Modern and Centuries Old Technologies Meet at AUC
Daniel Reid, senior computer science student at Algoma University finished explaining his project to a room full of his peers. The room fell silent as everyone waited in eager anticipation of the demonstration that was about to begin. Danny sat down in front of an ordinary windows computer and typed a simple command, ping www.sony.co.jp This command sends a test message to the specified computer, namely a webserver on the other side of the planet in Japan.
Ah yes the humble ping test, used to test for connectivity between your computer and another. But this was no ordinary test. It would couple together one of the most primitive centuries old technologies known to man together with the one of the fastest fiber-optic backbones in the Internet.
It all began several months earlier when Professor George Townsend was lecturing to a group of computer science students taking his fourth year Computer Networks course. The topic of the day was the OSI networking model, which describes a layered method of combining different types of technologies together to form functional networking systems. During the lecture, Professor Townsend made the claim that the design of the model permits different types of technologies to be transparently connected together. He suddenly stopped in mid lecture, and stared off into space stroking his beard thoughtfully. After a short moment of silent thought, he suggested to the class, that in theory, this should permit us to use any technology we like to connect a computer to the Internet without compromising its ability to participate in the Internet. Furthermore, he exclaimed, his voice rising in excitement, we could use a set of bongo drums to communicate as our technology of choice!
This was a dangerous claim to make at Algoma University where a unique blend of students exist as a result of the very successful Second Degree Accelerated programs it offers in Computer Science and Information Technology. These fast-track programs allow completion of an accredited university degree for people that already have a university degree in another discipline in only one calendar year. The program attracts many mature students who often bring a great deal of real world experience with them. So, of course, it was not surprising that there were many who doubted professor Townsend's words. We demand proof, they shouted!
The next morning, Professor Townsend sent out a challenge to the students in the course offering bonus marks to the first student to volunteer to attempt to connect a standard windows PC to the internet using a system of bongo drums. Danny eagerly took up the challenge. Now, several weeks later, under the guidance and direction of Professor Townsend, Danny had a working prototype.
After typing the ping command, Danny tapped smartly on the enter key, and a hush fell upon the room as the students waited to see what would happen. There was a short pause, and then suddenly the primitive sounds of a message being beaten out on a set of bongos filled the air. Several minutes passed, and yet the class remained quiet not wanting to disturb the communication. Having passed through the bongo-link and out onto the Internet, the ping message then raced to its destination in Japan.
Sony's web server in Japan was none the wiser concerning the source of the communication, and obediently responded to the ping request. The silence was broken by another set of bongos at the opposite side of the classroom as they began relaying their response back to Danny's computer. Several more minutes passed, and the class remained attentive, spellbound by what they were witnessing. Finally, the bongos stopped, and suddenly the successful ping response appeared on the screen of Dannys computer.
The classroom filled with cheers! History had been made! For the very first time, a computer had successfully communicated over the Internet using Bongo drums!
Mewhahahaha (-- supposed to be evil laugh), More bandwidth for me, that's why:D
No seriously, it seems like WB and Apple seem to be buddy-buddy. Apple mirrors lots of WB Trailers, WB Sends their Musical Artists to the Apple iTunes store . . who knows.
Considering there's 7 megs of movies on the page, it might get/.'ed pretty quick:) so:
Southtyrol-game, powered by Linux Clicca qui per la versione italiana di questa pagina
Merano - Italy, September, 24 2003.
Today was the official presentation of the Southtyrol-game. The game is one of the worlds largest hand carved pinball style game machines. (Candidate for the Guinness World Records). It weighs 2.6 tons, is 11 metres long, 2.6 metres high, has 16 user operated levers, 72 metres of pathways for ball travel, 33 moving scenes, 37 electric motors, 22 sensors and 16 audio speakers distributed over the entire game. It took about one year to build the game.
The Southtyrol-game is located at the Touriseum, a museum dedicated to the history of tourism in the province of Southtyrol, which is located in Italy at the border with Austria.
The intent of the game is to provide an ironic and entertaining demonstration of how the advent of tourism shaped the landscape and economic habbits in the small Italian province of Southtyrol
What does a massive 2.6 ton wooden game have to do with Linux? The audio system is powered by Linux!
There are dozens of motors and sensors that are operated by an industrial controller which is linked to the PC with a serial cable. Click here for a simple diagram of how it works.
Everytime a ball passes sensors which are embedded in the pathways, the controller unit animates a nearby object by turning on the related motor and simultaneously sends the sensor number that was triggered through a serial cable.
That way the PC knows which audio samples it must trigger and route to the various speakers located on the game board.
The requirements that make a linux based PC solution more appropriate than dedicated sound modules includes: - low cost of multiple input and output soundcards - flexibility in controlling customized samples, trigger times, volumes, sample lengths, playback orders, assignment to arbitrary channels, etc - capability to play large samples at 44.1Khz and 16bit (CD quality).
With 512MB of ram and a 40GB hard disk (sw-raid1) drive the computer meets all these requirements. The PC is just a standard Athlon box, for the audio we use the M-Audio Delta 1010 cards and for the audio API we use ALSA. Aditionally the PC stores on hard disk all the events (time stamped) that were triggered by the passing of balls. That way we can evaluate usage patterns of the game, eg what sections people like most or what sections are harder to reach. Example movies of the game in action (all movies in DIVX format, sorry for the bad video and audio quality, I recorded them using a digital camera with a builtin mic that does only low quality mjpeg AVIs which were later converted to DIVX thanks to mencoder).
1) movie1.avi (1.6MB) In this movie the ball enters into a scene where a deer and a hunter hidden in the forest. The hunter emerges from his hiding place in the ground to shoot the deer. You hear the gun shot which is followed by applause.
2) movie2.avi (1.3MB) In this scene the ball passes near a farm where it causes the cows to move and triggers the sounds of animals like roosters, cats, etc.
3) movie3.avi (700KB) Here, as the ball passes a busy road, you see trucks traveling along the roadway and hear the sounds of various vehicles.
4) movie4.avi (1.6MB) In this footage the ball rolls into an Apres ski which is an igloo shaped bar located near the ski slopes. You hear people shakin booty to the disco music.
5) movie5.avi (1.5MB) In this movie the ball travels past a flock of noisy sheep which, not by coincidence, are very much like the herds of tourists that populate the ski resorts. Authors: Teo Mahlknecht: Woodcarving, mechanics Benno Senoner: Audio system powered by Linux (audio software development, hardware setup and optimization) Otto Vinatzer: industrial controller About other 10-12 people like electricians, carpenters etc contributed to make the game a reality.
If you have questions, need more informations just contact us.
(IANAL) Even though Congress AND the House GAVE the FTC the authority to do this, how can a District Court Overrule them? WOuldn't it have to come from the Supreme Court?
Yes, I do understand that he is complaining about First Admendment rights of the telemarketers, but isn't the telphone system regulated by the FCC? They should be able to put whatever restrictions on it they want. If the MDA et al, dont like it, find some other medium to peddle your crap to people who dont want it.
So, my question is: Why in hell does anybody uses a system that has a track record of so many bugs, virus, crashes, etc ?
well let's see, I assume you're referring to Linux? For bugs, OpenSSH has had what? 3 releases in a week to fix bugs? How bout that linux kernel that fscked your partitions on umounting, I'm sure the list goes on, but my point is, there ISN'T a system which doesn't have a track record of bugs.
Well maybe they should of considered selling 'plots', I mean it's supposed to be like Life isn't it? I can't go randomly build stuff whereever I want. They buy a plot, you can put whatever you want there.
Wheres the above UO Protest has a 'concrete' goal, bug fixes and upgrades to the server, this is protesting a feature of the 'game/application'. If the people dont like it, dont use it, there are plenty of other 3D-Virtual-Building-Places out there.
I want to see it race the E55 AMG, and if it beats that, then I'd be amazed. I'd still get the E55 though. Sure the tzero get's excellent mpg and emissions are zilch, but the E55 isn't exactly lacking in the rest of the package either.
Slashdot Mirror
I really don't think this is such a big deal. OSes are started to specify the proper GiB instead of GB, so there shouldn't be a problem anymore.
;) )
Afaik Linux has been linux this for a while, then again I'm not a kernel hacker so Here's the thread, it can probably explain better then I can.
Just a side note: ESR strikes again (read that post
Hate to see what Hotmails DNS will look like with a few million: 1.7.168.192.in-addr._smtp_client.hotmail.com. TXT "spf=allow"
entries in it . . .
Yes, it is sad DNA passed away a premature death, but I'm sure he'd be happy to know that people still enjoy, and will for a long time, his excellent and humorous style of writing. I saw a few stills from the BBC Version of the film and I can say . . ."Woah" I really do hope the new people in charge redo a few characters. I've always invisioned Marvin as something like a Bender from futureama.
No because I know that it's impossible to get 100 Mb (small b for bit).
All your overlord joke are belong to us!
I should start charging $699 everytime somebody uses my name . . .
I thought the banners were a clever idea, although a bit small to make anybody really notice them in my opinion. . .
Hmmm, that's interesting, one would thing the residual IRQ going over the PCI would cancel out the WTF that allows people to RTFM, that being the primary cause of people wondering what the heck others just said.
If the string is gone, that means it's a hurricane.
You sure somebody just didn't steal the string?
On a different note, At camp we had a weather rock (Kansas weather woo), Did basically the same thing. Swaying, it was windy. Broken, it was Hailing. Glowing . . watch for lightning, if it's gone . . had to be a tornado it was too damn heavy to steal.
This development phase implements synthesized bongo beats that are played out through speakers, and microphones that 'listen' for the data being sent by the other computers. Each computer has two different bongo beats (based on pitch) associated with each, making a total of 4 distinct beats. Each computer listens for the other's beats, while ignoring itself. The actual output of the bongo beats is not a big deal, and only takes the following code to implement:
for(i=0; i = 0; h--)
{
if((1ping -n 1 -l 1 -w 1000000000 199.212.55.2
Pinging 199.212.55.2 with 1 bytes of data:
Reply from 199.212.55.2: bytes=1 time=139274ms TTL=254
Ping statistics for 199.212.55.2:
Packets: Sent = 1, Received = 1, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 139274ms, Maximum = 139274ms, Average = 139274ms
Didn't think it was THAT easy did you?
Actually a little bit of cheating was required. Since we have high latency and bandwidth, it was found that the ARP requests were flooding the bongo link. The ARP requests allow the router and my machine to resolve IP addresses (i.e. convert MAC addresses to IP addresses). To solve this problem, when the Bongo Link is first brought up, the preamble discussed above actually sends the appropriate IP address (from either the router or the PC on the other side of the Bongo Link) to the other Linux box base on the ARP request it receives. These addresses are then taken, and appropriate generic packets are generated with their appropriate checksums. From this point, any further ARP requests are not sent through the Bongo Link, but instead the generic packet is sent back acting as a ARP reply.
During a lecture about the layers of the OSI model in our fourth year Computer Networks Course, Prof. Townsend was discussing the fact that the lower layers of the model could be replaced with any form of media. Despite this change, the upper layers would function as normal. In fact, others have implemented network protocols over "non-standard" media, including CPIP (carrier pigeon internet protocol) which was implemented using RFC1149, and reached speeds of 0.08bps. Prof. Townsend jokingly suggested that Internet Protocols could even run over forms of primitive communication (i.e. bongo drums, or even smoke signals). In an email sent out after class he offered extra credit to anyone who succesfully implemented TCP/IP via. Bongo Drums. I was the only one crazy enough to sign up, and thus began what was deamed as "The Bongo Project".
The next morning, wondering what I had gotten myself into, I discussed the game plan with Prof. Townsend. It was suggested to whip up a couple Linux boxes to form a transparent bridge that would serve as the Bongo Link itself. Each Linux box would then have a microphone and a pair of bongos, with each microphone "listening" to the appropriate pair of bongos (based on pitch). The pitch recognition would be a project in itself, but luckily both Prof. Townsend and Dr. Keppel-Jones from the Mathematics Department had already developed an interesting method called SAW (Sliding Averaging Window) for me to base some of my work from. With the bridge constructed, the Bongo Link could then be placed anywhere, and in testing cases it was between my PC and the residence LAN.
I had little socket programming experience, and even less experience with devices in UNIX. Jason Tackaberry, the university system administrator, offered some source code from a network monitoring project for me to scan over for some coding help. The gesture was appreciated greatly.
Weekly meetings with Prof. Townsend were scheduled to discuss my progress, as well as online chat sessions which often led to hours of debugging and perfecting pitch recognition algorithms.
By the end of the semester, the project was not 100% completed, so a demonstration was given to the class which used a set of desktop speakers which played recorded bongo beats to simulate the real thing. Since the theory had been proven, I was granted my extra credit and somehow wound up with a 99% in the class.
The final phase is almost near completion.
The Serial and Audio Cable
/dev/ttyS0 (which refers to the serial port). Then you're just a read() and write() away from sending and receiving data. This is shown below:
/dev/dsp file and do simple read() and write() commands to the file descriptor pointing to the device.
In order to simulate a Bongo Link, a cross-over 9-pin serial cable was constructed to connect the two linux boxes together. This was used for testing, as there was a concern for buffer overruns and packet dumping with such slow speeds between the two Linux boxes. A network card was ripped out of each Linux box, and the serial cable was placed inbetween instead of the crossover cable.
Even easier to harness the network card, are the serial ports. Under Linux we're taught that files are devices, and devices are files. To read and write to the serial ports we first make our file descriptor and make it point to the device
int serial_fd;
serial_fd=open("/dev/ttyS0", O_RDWR, 0);
read(serial_fd, &buf, size);
write(serial_fd, &buf, size);
Now we just have to read packets from eth0 and write them to our serial ports on both machines. Some difficulties arose while testing, but it was found that the machines were able to keep up with the demand even at extremely slow speeds.
Since the Bongo Link would eventually be "sound driven", more testing was done, but instead of the serial ports, soundcards were placed in each box and an audio cable (male-male stereo headphone) was placed beween as shown below:
To access the soundcard under Linux, we open the
int sound_fd=open("/dev/dsp", O_RDONLY, 0);
read(sound_fd0, &buf, size);
write(sound_fd0, &buf, size);
By setting the bitrates with the ioctl function, we could increase and decrease the "bandwidth". Testing with the audio cable turned out better than with the serial link. We now have the tools to replace the audio cable with some speakers and microphones which was Phase III.
Bridging Ethernet
s 1=socket(AF_INET,SOCK_PACKET,htons(0x0003));d (s0, &from, sizeof(struct sockaddr));
t sockaddr *)&to,sizeof(to));
The first step in the Bongo Link was to get most of the socket programming out of the way. To make things as transparent as possible, a bridge was determined to be the best way to implement the Bongo Link. For starters, two network cards were thrown in two Linux boxes for testing purposes, with a patch cable from the wall to the first Linux box, and cross cables between the others. Without having addressable boxes, data taken in from one network card was to be spit out through the other, and vise versa. C programming makes this very simple. Lets take a look at some code to make things clearer.
int s0, s1;
struct sockaddr from, to;
memset(&from, '\0', sizeof(from));
from.sa_family = AF_INET;
strcpy(from.sa_data, "eth0");
memset(&to, '\0', sizeof(to));
to.sa_family = AF_INET;
strcpy(to.sa_data, "eth1");
s0=socket(AF_INET,SOCK_PACKET,htons(0x0003));
bin
bind(s1, &to, sizeof(struct sockaddr));
We first declare two file descriptors that will address each network card in the Linux box, s0 and s1. We'll also create some sockaddr structures that we will bind to our sockets later that will hold information such as which ethernet cards they'll be associated with, and the family type. The sockaddr structures are first cleared with the memset function, and then the family type and ethernet card device are copied into them. The file descriptors are then set to point to two corresponding sockets, which are created using the same family type as the structures and a special argument number which allows the sockets to be placed in promiscuous mode (they'll look at every packet on the wire). These sockets are then bound to the corresponding sockaddr structure. As soon as the two sockets are setup, we can simple use read() and write() calls to the sockets as shown below to read packets and send packets:
read(s0,buf,count);
write(s1,buf,size,0,(struc
The buffer (buf) will be an unsigned char array (8 bits) which contain the packet that is to be sent, or the packet that has been received. Now we have all the coding required to make a bridge! All that has to be done is read everything from eth0 and write it to eth1, and read everything from eth1 and write it to eth0. Pretty easy. There's only one more catch... Since the users should not be aware of such a bridge, we don't want the Linux box to have any IP addresses associated with them (i.e. non- addressable since we want transparency) we must issue a simple unix command to remove any possibility of addressing before running the bongo link. Along with removing our addressable presence on the network, we also set the network cards themselves to promiscuous mode at the same time. We issue a ifconfig command like below:
ifconfig eth0 -arp promisc up 10.1.1.0
ifconfig eth1 -arp promisc up 10.1.1.1
We now have all the tools to make a transparent bridge as shown here:
Since we will require two linux boxes for the final implementation it's just as easy to set up:
There we go, everything's all set. With the above, you could experiment making your own personal firewalls or filters at a very low layers. In fact you could play around a bit too including re-writing packets as they're sent out - just make sure to recalculate checksums or the packet will be garbage. You could also try your skills at some sort of spoofing depending on how the local routers/bridges/switches are set up.
The following non-technical story has appeared in school magazines and many other news sources from around the world.
Modern and Centuries Old Technologies Meet at AUC
Daniel Reid, senior computer science student at Algoma University finished explaining his project to a room full of his peers. The room fell silent as everyone waited in eager anticipation of the demonstration that was about to begin. Danny sat down in front of an ordinary windows computer and typed a simple command, ping www.sony.co.jp This command sends a test message to the specified computer, namely a webserver on the other side of the planet in Japan.
Ah yes the humble ping test, used to test for connectivity between your computer and another. But this was no ordinary test. It would couple together one of the most primitive centuries old technologies known to man together with the one of the fastest fiber-optic backbones in the Internet.
It all began several months earlier when Professor George Townsend was lecturing to a group of computer science students taking his fourth year Computer Networks course. The topic of the day was the OSI networking model, which describes a layered method of combining different types of technologies together to form functional networking systems. During the lecture, Professor Townsend made the claim that the design of the model permits different types of technologies to be transparently connected together. He suddenly stopped in mid lecture, and stared off into space stroking his beard thoughtfully. After a short moment of silent thought, he suggested to the class, that in theory, this should permit us to use any technology we like to connect a computer to the Internet without compromising its ability to participate in the Internet. Furthermore, he exclaimed, his voice rising in excitement, we could use a set of bongo drums to communicate as our technology of choice!
This was a dangerous claim to make at Algoma University where a unique blend of students exist as a result of the very successful Second Degree Accelerated programs it offers in Computer Science and Information Technology. These fast-track programs allow completion of an accredited university degree for people that already have a university degree in another discipline in only one calendar year. The program attracts many mature students who often bring a great deal of real world experience with them. So, of course, it was not surprising that there were many who doubted professor Townsend's words. We demand proof, they shouted!
The next morning, Professor Townsend sent out a challenge to the students in the course offering bonus marks to the first student to volunteer to attempt to connect a standard windows PC to the internet using a system of bongo drums. Danny eagerly took up the challenge. Now, several weeks later, under the guidance and direction of Professor Townsend, Danny had a working prototype.
After typing the ping command, Danny tapped smartly on the enter key, and a hush fell upon the room as the students waited to see what would happen. There was a short pause, and then suddenly the primitive sounds of a message being beaten out on a set of bongos filled the air. Several minutes passed, and yet the class remained quiet not wanting to disturb the communication. Having passed through the bongo-link and out onto the Internet, the ping message then raced to its destination in Japan.
Sony's web server in Japan was none the wiser concerning the source of the communication, and obediently responded to the ping request. The silence was broken by another set of bongos at the opposite side of the classroom as they began relaying their response back to Danny's computer. Several more minutes passed, and the class remained attentive, spellbound by what they were witnessing. Finally, the bongos stopped, and suddenly the successful ping response appeared on the screen of Dannys computer.
The classroom filled with cheers! History had been made! For the very first time, a computer had successfully communicated over the Internet using Bongo drums!
Mewhahahaha (-- supposed to be evil laugh), More bandwidth for me, that's why :D
No seriously, it seems like WB and Apple seem to be buddy-buddy. Apple mirrors lots of WB Trailers, WB Sends their Musical Artists to the Apple iTunes store . . who knows.
Considering there's 7 megs of movies on the page, it might get /.'ed pretty quick :) so:
Southtyrol-game, powered by Linux
Clicca qui per la versione italiana di questa pagina
Merano - Italy, September, 24 2003.
Today was the official presentation of the Southtyrol-game.
The game is one of the worlds largest hand carved pinball style game machines. (Candidate for the Guinness World Records).
It weighs 2.6 tons, is 11 metres long, 2.6 metres high, has 16 user operated levers, 72 metres of pathways for ball travel, 33 moving scenes,
37 electric motors, 22 sensors and 16 audio speakers distributed over the entire game.
It took about one year to build the game.
The Southtyrol-game is located at the Touriseum, a museum dedicated to the history of tourism in the province of Southtyrol, which is located in Italy at the border with Austria.
The intent of the game is to provide an ironic and entertaining demonstration of how the advent of tourism shaped the landscape and economic habbits in the small Italian province of Southtyrol
What does a massive 2.6 ton wooden game have to do with Linux?
The audio system is powered by Linux!
There are dozens of motors and sensors that are operated by an industrial controller which is linked to the PC
with a serial cable. Click here for a simple diagram of how it works.
Everytime a ball passes sensors which are embedded in the pathways, the controller unit
animates a nearby object by turning on the related motor and simultaneously sends the sensor number
that was triggered through a serial cable.
That way the PC knows which audio samples it must trigger and route to the various speakers located on the
game board.
The requirements that make a linux based PC solution more appropriate than dedicated sound modules includes:
- low cost of multiple input and output soundcards
- flexibility in controlling customized samples, trigger times, volumes, sample lengths, playback orders, assignment to arbitrary channels, etc
- capability to play large samples at 44.1Khz and 16bit (CD quality).
With 512MB of ram and a 40GB hard disk (sw-raid1) drive the computer meets all these requirements.
The PC is just a standard Athlon box, for the audio we use the M-Audio Delta 1010 cards and for the audio API
we use ALSA.
Aditionally the PC stores on hard disk all the events (time stamped) that were triggered by the passing of balls.
That way we can evaluate usage patterns of the game, eg what sections people like most or what sections are harder
to reach.
Example movies of the game in action
(all movies in DIVX format, sorry for the bad video and audio quality, I recorded them using a digital camera with a builtin mic
that does only low quality mjpeg AVIs which were later converted to DIVX thanks to mencoder).
1) movie1.avi (1.6MB)
In this movie the ball enters into a scene where a deer and a hunter hidden in the forest. The hunter emerges from his hiding place in the ground to shoot the deer. You hear the gun shot which is followed by applause.
2) movie2.avi (1.3MB)
In this scene the ball passes near a farm where it causes the cows to move and triggers the sounds of animals like roosters, cats, etc.
3) movie3.avi (700KB)
Here, as the ball passes a busy road, you see trucks traveling along the roadway and hear the sounds of various vehicles.
4) movie4.avi (1.6MB)
In this footage the ball rolls into an Apres ski which is an igloo shaped bar located near the ski slopes. You hear people shakin booty to the disco music.
5) movie5.avi (1.5MB)
In this movie the ball travels past a flock of noisy sheep which, not by coincidence, are very much like the herds of tourists that populate the ski resorts.
Authors:
Teo Mahlknecht: Woodcarving, mechanics
Benno Senoner: Audio system powered by Linux (audio software development, hardware setup and optimization)
Otto Vinatzer: industrial controller
About other 10-12 people like electricians, carpenters etc contributed to make the game a reality.
If you have questions, need more informations just contact us.
(IANAL) Even though Congress AND the House GAVE the FTC the authority to do this, how can a District Court Overrule them? WOuldn't it have to come from the Supreme Court?
Yes, I do understand that he is complaining about First Admendment rights of the telemarketers, but isn't the telphone system regulated by the FCC? They should be able to put whatever restrictions on it they want. If the MDA et al, dont like it, find some other medium to peddle your crap to people who dont want it.
Slashdot has the right to link to who they want to, if you dont want the traffic, there's router/firewall/apache module solutions to fix that.
For One, I, Overlords RPN welcome our new . . . .
So, my question is: Why in hell does anybody uses a system that has a track record of so many bugs, virus, crashes, etc ?
well let's see, I assume you're referring to Linux? For bugs, OpenSSH has had what? 3 releases in a week to fix bugs? How bout that linux kernel that fscked your partitions on umounting, I'm sure the list goes on, but my point is, there ISN'T a system which doesn't have a track record of bugs.
You must be new, this is a new feature of Slashdot. It's there just in case you didn't see the story the first 5 times.
Attempt to be funny
Well maybe they should of considered selling 'plots', I mean it's supposed to be like Life isn't it? I can't go randomly build stuff whereever I want. They buy a plot, you can put whatever you want there.
Well I, for one, welcome our new Websters Dictionary Overlords
Wheres the above UO Protest has a 'concrete' goal, bug fixes and upgrades to the server, this is protesting a feature of the 'game/application'. If the people dont like it, dont use it, there are plenty of other 3D-Virtual-Building-Places out there.
Anybody got an copy of it? (yes you can save Real Steams)
I want to see it race the E55 AMG, and if it beats that, then I'd be amazed. I'd still get the E55 though. Sure the tzero get's excellent mpg and emissions are zilch, but the E55 isn't exactly lacking in the rest of the package either.