It seems like a lot of the functionality of a tv-recording unit that people want can be implemented by hooking a computer (with an mpeg-2 compression chip on some video capture card) up to the tuner box, and making a little infrared control that comes out of your serial port or something, and controls the tuner box. That way you can have as many tuner boxes as you like, the computer will capture it all onto a hard drive that is as big as you see fit, and you can play it all back whenever you want. So what I'm asking is this -- why isn't there a software package out there that does all of this already? Maybe it would come with a $100 tv card... It seems like there's a spot in the market for it.
Isn't the processor name rather old, and the anime thing a coincidence? I'm not very sure. But those dragonball processors are pretty much based on the 68000 (old old toaster mac) chips. When was the dragonball anime first published? It seems like those toaster macs came out a loong time ago... so I'm not sure which actually came first.
Besides, dragonball doesn't suck:)
Hehe trunks will check my email and vegeta will yell at me until I get all my to-do's done...
California's system seems inconsistent. If we compare software piracy to drug posession, marijuana is legal in amsterdam, for example, but illegal in california. So just because someone can hide some dope in their buttcrack, get on the plane, and bring it to cal doesn't mean it's illegal to do in amsterdam... so I don't get it.
the whole thing smells badly.
It seems like knowing the x86 architecture, it's possible to design some code that would execute in a known number of instructions, and with basic knowledge about the athlon's instruction cycle, it would be possible to calculate the actual speed of the chip. What about speed comparisons to current chips? They can't be too different on very simple things like repeated addition, stuff like that... Perhaps the number can be calculated by comparison to current hardware....
Tuning down acceleration is easy -- just have a bigger mass. No matter how many newtons of force the engine can put out at some ungodly fast mach cruising speed, you can always add more drag and more weight to the plane...
The thing is that we don't know that the grounds are at equal potential, and in fact if the handheld is charged, we know that they are NOT at equal potential. Thus to prevent damage, we want the potential to change slowly -- something you accomplish with a lot of resistance.
If you intend to use CD's anyway, you can just get a cd player that will play mp3's from a disc. Check out easybuy2000.com -- they have that stuff.
I've got an MPTrip, and it's been working very well for at least a year now.
Most of the time spent booting up is really the operating system's fault -- Linux and Windows are pretty bad at this. Let's not even mention the HP-UX units sitting in the computer labs someplace on this campus...
So shaving off a few seconds off the boot time is great, but it seems like the major problem is still the operating system.
I go to umich and our student ID cards have a so-called "cash chip" which on the surface looks a whole lot like those things on the smart cards. The chip on my ID card can hold up to $20, redeemable at soda machines and the like. Anyway, the problem with them is that after a year of lugging the card around in my pocket, I tried to use the chip and it failed to function. I later got a new ID card, and again the chip failed after a few months. I would be reluctant to trust anything important to a technology that ceases to funciton after a few months of sitting in my pocket, so this smart-card thing sounds like a terrible idea to me.
Say that you could get your webcam thing to launch some script if something funky was going on, eg the image changed cuz people walked in it.
What that script could do is send an email to your telephone, or page your pager. Since a lot of celphone/pager companies offer this service, it seems like a good way to get this part done.
As for the first part with the video -- you could write a program that captures some video somehow, and then sees how much different one frame is from one captured, say, a second before (through a sum of the per-pixel difference squared or soemthing).
All in all it would take some time, but I don't see it as being impossible to accomplish.
It seems to me that I would be hard-pressed to go out and find a piece of infected software, for pretty much any operating system. If I want some program taht does something, I stick it into google, get the homepage. The bins/source on that homepage isn't gonna be infected, cause they want people to use their program, not NOT use it. Even tucows/sunsite/sourceforge or whatever isn't gonna have viruses. I think that we're talking about a completely nonexistant problem here.
I would naturally think twice about installing something I got from somebody on IRC, but come on, I think that when you get something off a large software repository, it's not gonna be infected.
To begin with, there are many different types of cancer. What makes it cancer is that cells that are 'cancerous' do not kill themselves at the proper time, and always undergo mitosis no matter the circumstances. That may be inappropriate if a cell is already surrounded by other cells, for example. Anyway, somehow either the ability to not split or the ability to apoptose (kill self) if beyond repair is removed.
There is a protein called p53 that's responsible for (among other things) detecting damage in a cell, and then either trying to fix the cell, or kill it (apoptosis). The levels of this protein are elevated when cells are in distress -- for example from ultraviolet radiation, starvation, etc. Levels are also affected by mitosis phase, etc etc. In any case, if it is possible to design something that detects high levels of p53 in a cell, and then nondeterministically triggers massive expression of the apoptosis gene (this thing they discovered) then this method could be used to treat some cancers, because in some cancers, levels of p53 are elevated. While this method will likely kill a lot of cells in the middle of mitosis, in a healthy tissue only a small fraction are dividing at any one time.
In some cancers, the p53 gene is damaged and does not get expressed, so in that case some other metric would have to be used to trigger apoptosis.
Anyway, between approaches like this, chemo, surgical removal, and whatever else there is, cancer is slowly becoming a survivable disease.
I imagine that that is the problem for trying to emulate games in general. You know a lot of games crash on the target OS, so clearly it's only going to be worse if you stick another layer of possible mistakes into the mix.
On the other hand, if games were written in a modular way, replacing the graphics/sound/input parts of it wouldn't be that terribly bad, especially cause OpenGL compiles well across platforms...
If I wanted to run an operating system for fun on my computer, I'd stick BeOS on it, and stick one of those funky apple schemes on it. Besides, I'm sure that porting the whole frickin' OS over would not be worth whatever money they will make from 10 guys going to the store and getting it to play with over the weekend.
And the most irrectifiable transition between apple's platform and the x86 is... You guessed it. More than 1 button on a mouse.
All that will happen is another warez culture will emerge. This time instead of sneaking a camera into a theatre or renting a dvd or going out and buying a program, and then spreading the joy, somebody will simply download the file (whatever it is) for pennies, then encrypt it so that the ISP cannot know the contents, and send it to his/her 10000 closest friends. It will be just the same. There will always be ways around any kind of payment scheme, unless you can't buy the internet service without also buying a subscription to the content service, and you don't get charged per-download, you get charged a flat rate (ie $50 a month for a 10-megabit line on which you can download any TV show or recording ever made in any part of the globe). Attempts at making users pay for content that fall short of this will never remove the warez distributors, and only THEN will the recording industry truly have what they are after, which is eveyrone paying them oodles of money and nobody getting anything for free.
Sorting out the dependencies is the whole point of packaging, ie.deb,.rpm, et cetera. If sources were distributed in those formats with proper dependencies, all one would have to do is type apt-get mythingthatIwant and it will be magically updated.
Formats other than straight tar-ball with a 10-page README on how to get it to compile should be the norm. Topological sorting is something best left to computers, because people don't want to do mundane tasks.
A standard for storing files on a CD already exists, it's called an iso9660 filesystem, or maybe even Joliet stuff. In any case, these standards already exist, and my experience with my MPTrip (device which reads mp3's off of a cd and plays them) is just fine -- I can't complain about slow access times or whatever, and I can even jog with it, and even bang it around on my desk for minutes, without any distruptions to the music.
All these corporate types want to do is make it harder for me to stick all my music on a few disks.
The best thing to do would be to just build devices that play stuff in alphabetical order (or random, or in a specific directory) from a regular old iso, so you can use it in your computer transparently, there is no point in introducing a new 'standard'.
Blah, all these people want is money!
Worthless or not, it takes at least *some* knowledge to get any kind of degree. You can't just page through a textbook, say "LOok at that, it's a transistor" and get a degree, you have to know at least something!
My point is that a decent college curriculum ought to provide the foundation for any kind of exploration the kid wants to do, and that he already has a good idea about what to do.
On a completely different note, nuts to making your own OS! Just improve what's out there already. It's really easy to make something small and shitty that no one will use. The point is to make something eveyrbody can make use of.
Slashdot Mirror
What about arachnids?
It seems like a lot of the functionality of a tv-recording unit that people want can be implemented by hooking a computer (with an mpeg-2 compression chip on some video capture card) up to the tuner box, and making a little infrared control that comes out of your serial port or something, and controls the tuner box. That way you can have as many tuner boxes as you like, the computer will capture it all onto a hard drive that is as big as you see fit, and you can play it all back whenever you want. So what I'm asking is this -- why isn't there a software package out there that does all of this already? Maybe it would come with a $100 tv card... It seems like there's a spot in the market for it.
Isn't the processor name rather old, and the anime thing a coincidence? I'm not very sure. But those dragonball processors are pretty much based on the 68000 (old old toaster mac) chips. When was the dragonball anime first published? It seems like those toaster macs came out a loong time ago... so I'm not sure which actually came first. :)
Besides, dragonball doesn't suck
Hehe trunks will check my email and vegeta will yell at me until I get all my to-do's done...
California's system seems inconsistent. If we compare software piracy to drug posession, marijuana is legal in amsterdam, for example, but illegal in california. So just because someone can hide some dope in their buttcrack, get on the plane, and bring it to cal doesn't mean it's illegal to do in amsterdam... so I don't get it.
the whole thing smells badly.
It seems like knowing the x86 architecture, it's possible to design some code that would execute in a known number of instructions, and with basic knowledge about the athlon's instruction cycle, it would be possible to calculate the actual speed of the chip. What about speed comparisons to current chips? They can't be too different on very simple things like repeated addition, stuff like that... Perhaps the number can be calculated by comparison to current hardware....
Tuning down acceleration is easy -- just have a bigger mass. No matter how many newtons of force the engine can put out at some ungodly fast mach cruising speed, you can always add more drag and more weight to the plane...
Is it just my browser, or is there a monkey in the middle of the text on that web page?
The thing is that we don't know that the grounds are at equal potential, and in fact if the handheld is charged, we know that they are NOT at equal potential. Thus to prevent damage, we want the potential to change slowly -- something you accomplish with a lot of resistance.
If you intend to use CD's anyway, you can just get a cd player that will play mp3's from a disc. Check out easybuy2000.com -- they have that stuff.
I've got an MPTrip, and it's been working very well for at least a year now.
Most of the time spent booting up is really the operating system's fault -- Linux and Windows are pretty bad at this. Let's not even mention the HP-UX units sitting in the computer labs someplace on this campus...
So shaving off a few seconds off the boot time is great, but it seems like the major problem is still the operating system.
I go to umich and our student ID cards have a so-called "cash chip" which on the surface looks a whole lot like those things on the smart cards. The chip on my ID card can hold up to $20, redeemable at soda machines and the like. Anyway, the problem with them is that after a year of lugging the card around in my pocket, I tried to use the chip and it failed to function. I later got a new ID card, and again the chip failed after a few months. I would be reluctant to trust anything important to a technology that ceases to funciton after a few months of sitting in my pocket, so this smart-card thing sounds like a terrible idea to me.
Matters for Deluxe Mahjongg CVVII if there are robots on the tiles shooting back at you... har har
Say that you could get your webcam thing to launch some script if something funky was going on, eg the image changed cuz people walked in it.
What that script could do is send an email to your telephone, or page your pager. Since a lot of celphone/pager companies offer this service, it seems like a good way to get this part done.
As for the first part with the video -- you could write a program that captures some video somehow, and then sees how much different one frame is from one captured, say, a second before (through a sum of the per-pixel difference squared or soemthing).
All in all it would take some time, but I don't see it as being impossible to accomplish.
But remember, they'll need the power from the dam to run the mile-high building...
It seems to me that I would be hard-pressed to go out and find a piece of infected software, for pretty much any operating system. If I want some program taht does something, I stick it into google, get the homepage. The bins/source on that homepage isn't gonna be infected, cause they want people to use their program, not NOT use it. Even tucows/sunsite/sourceforge or whatever isn't gonna have viruses. I think that we're talking about a completely nonexistant problem here.
I would naturally think twice about installing something I got from somebody on IRC, but come on, I think that when you get something off a large software repository, it's not gonna be infected.
What does matter is better linux games...
To begin with, there are many different types of cancer. What makes it cancer is that cells that are 'cancerous' do not kill themselves at the proper time, and always undergo mitosis no matter the circumstances. That may be inappropriate if a cell is already surrounded by other cells, for example. Anyway, somehow either the ability to not split or the ability to apoptose (kill self) if beyond repair is removed.
There is a protein called p53 that's responsible for (among other things) detecting damage in a cell, and then either trying to fix the cell, or kill it (apoptosis). The levels of this protein are elevated when cells are in distress -- for example from ultraviolet radiation, starvation, etc. Levels are also affected by mitosis phase, etc etc. In any case, if it is possible to design something that detects high levels of p53 in a cell, and then nondeterministically triggers massive expression of the apoptosis gene (this thing they discovered) then this method could be used to treat some cancers, because in some cancers, levels of p53 are elevated. While this method will likely kill a lot of cells in the middle of mitosis, in a healthy tissue only a small fraction are dividing at any one time.
In some cancers, the p53 gene is damaged and does not get expressed, so in that case some other metric would have to be used to trigger apoptosis.
Anyway, between approaches like this, chemo, surgical removal, and whatever else there is, cancer is slowly becoming a survivable disease.
I imagine that that is the problem for trying to emulate games in general. You know a lot of games crash on the target OS, so clearly it's only going to be worse if you stick another layer of possible mistakes into the mix.
On the other hand, if games were written in a modular way, replacing the graphics/sound/input parts of it wouldn't be that terribly bad, especially cause OpenGL compiles well across platforms...
A body with no head just got elected president.
If I wanted to run an operating system for fun on my computer, I'd stick BeOS on it, and stick one of those funky apple schemes on it. Besides, I'm sure that porting the whole frickin' OS over would not be worth whatever money they will make from 10 guys going to the store and getting it to play with over the weekend.
And the most irrectifiable transition between apple's platform and the x86 is... You guessed it. More than 1 button on a mouse.
I'm suprised this idea hasn't come out sooner; I've been thinking about splitting keyboards even more drastically since I got my first split keyboard.
I think that the best angle isn't actually 90 degrees, but somewhere in the middle, closer to 30 or 40 degrees. But ohwell.
All that will happen is another warez culture will emerge. This time instead of sneaking a camera into a theatre or renting a dvd or going out and buying a program, and then spreading the joy, somebody will simply download the file (whatever it is) for pennies, then encrypt it so that the ISP cannot know the contents, and send it to his/her 10000 closest friends. It will be just the same. There will always be ways around any kind of payment scheme, unless you can't buy the internet service without also buying a subscription to the content service, and you don't get charged per-download, you get charged a flat rate (ie $50 a month for a 10-megabit line on which you can download any TV show or recording ever made in any part of the globe). Attempts at making users pay for content that fall short of this will never remove the warez distributors, and only THEN will the recording industry truly have what they are after, which is eveyrone paying them oodles of money and nobody getting anything for free.
TSIA
Sorting out the dependencies is the whole point of packaging, ie .deb, .rpm, et cetera. If sources were distributed in those formats with proper dependencies, all one would have to do is type apt-get mythingthatIwant and it will be magically updated.
Formats other than straight tar-ball with a 10-page README on how to get it to compile should be the norm. Topological sorting is something best left to computers, because people don't want to do mundane tasks.
A standard for storing files on a CD already exists, it's called an iso9660 filesystem, or maybe even Joliet stuff. In any case, these standards already exist, and my experience with my MPTrip (device which reads mp3's off of a cd and plays them) is just fine -- I can't complain about slow access times or whatever, and I can even jog with it, and even bang it around on my desk for minutes, without any distruptions to the music.
All these corporate types want to do is make it harder for me to stick all my music on a few disks.
The best thing to do would be to just build devices that play stuff in alphabetical order (or random, or in a specific directory) from a regular old iso, so you can use it in your computer transparently, there is no point in introducing a new 'standard'.
Blah, all these people want is money!
Worthless or not, it takes at least *some* knowledge to get any kind of degree. You can't just page through a textbook, say "LOok at that, it's a transistor" and get a degree, you have to know at least something!
My point is that a decent college curriculum ought to provide the foundation for any kind of exploration the kid wants to do, and that he already has a good idea about what to do.
On a completely different note, nuts to making your own OS! Just improve what's out there already. It's really easy to make something small and shitty that no one will use. The point is to make something eveyrbody can make use of.