most auto ticket things dont take into acount time ware you have no choice but to run a red light, for example if your sitting in the middle of an intersection tring to turn and the light turns red you have to turn or else your holding up trafic, the camera will take your pic
If you do, then you are (in most states) in violation of the traffic regulations and you should get a ticket, whether its from a camera or a cop.
Actually, (in AZ) it is legal to pull out into the intersection and turn left on red if traffic doesn't stop up until then. However, you won't get your picture taken if you're already across the "magic line" that marks the boundary for the intersection. Red light cams sense movement across that imaginary line, so if you're already across it when the light turns red...
I purchased a Z53 a while back because it printed fairly quickly and is one of those printers that embeds the printhead in each ink cartridge. I had an Epson before that which died of a plugged head and had eternal warm-up times which I was not eager to re-experience. The Lexmark starts up very quickly and has reasonable Linux support-- there's a binary RPM they provide which handles printhead cleaning, alignment, etc, and works quite well. The only beef I have is it doesn't support the USB port on the printer. There is also an open-source driver available that seemed to work well.
Printer cartridges are predictably expensive, but I haven't purchased one yet as a cheap refill kit works perfectly. If you must buy an inkjet it's not bad, and it's either that or an HP (which doesn't have very good support for the latest printers), since I refuse to buy another inkjet that has a non-replaceable head.
I own the SL-5500 and love it; with a CF->PCMCIA adapter I can connect 802.11b and LAN cards (and hard drives!), and CF can't be beat for the top capacities of flash. The keyboard is a life-saver as opposed to wearing out my hand scribbling graffiti or whatever. And they want to get rid of that??? I don't care if it's so small it fits in my wallet; I want to be able to expand my PDA! In my mind that was one of the cardinal sins of the original Ipaq-- no internal expansion without a bulky boot. From the looks of this device, even a "boot-type" expansion won't be possible unless you like moving data at serial port speeds.
Of course, my biggest problem with either model of the SL-whatever is the $#%$@@@@~ proprietary connector, which cannot be had for love or money in lots of less than 1,000 outside of Japan. Would it have hurt Sharp too much to use the same connector as the Palm V or Clie? As it is, no-one can build a peripheral for it without hacking apart the horrifically expensive cradle ($50 USD) or serial cable (also $50!).
Actually, CW already has a dev kit out for the cube. Unfortunately it's only the software portion that they sell, which is completely useless without a GC dev station (try getting even a picture of one of these!). The only way I can see getting anything but games on the GC is via a modchip which will at least allow booting off of mini-CDRs.
Actually, the Creative Nomad JukeBox allows you to do this as long as the tracks you send over aren't "protected". I don't know how you get protected tracks onto the thing, but all the music you send over can come right off it to, to back up in case of the eventual HD failure. People have even rigged up HTTP servers for the thing (running on a PC with the JB tethered via USB) so you can control or monitor it over a network. Pretty nifty, although it has its own set of problems (chiefly battery life) like most products.
You can also upgrade the HD to 30G if you don't mind voiding your warranty. Fry's has the 6G version refurbished for $150, which is where I got mine.
And really enjoy it. I've had it since back in '98 when they first came out and the software on it has improved enormously. Netwinder.org is still up after all this time and people are still creating new disk images for it and updating it. Even though the processor (275 MHz) is not anything to brag about, it works wonderfully for a firewall/FTP server/etc, which is what I use it for. It's a heck of a lot more versatile than a dedicated box and doesn't make much noise or heat. It's great to be able to fire up a copy of Ethereal to sniff packets right off my cable modem. A great little box for what it does, but unfortunately I think they priced themselves out of their primary market-- dedicated firewalls and print/file servers.
I'll tell you: bad things. This is from personal experience incidentally. I had a shiny new K6-3 450MHz and the world was my oyster. Unfortunately I had also recently heard about using to peltiers to overclock processors, and so it seemed like the perfect opportunity to give it a whirl. I got a 120W peltier and by enlongating the distance between the heatsink and the CPU I was able to wedge it in there. I only fed it 5V, but that was enough. It didn't have any problems at first, but it also didn't O/C worth spit so I gave up on that part and left it on. Little did I know the damage had already begun. About a week later my system started randomly crashing, which was odd because I ran Linux exclusively. It got worse and finally got to a point where it would barely boot. I finally pulled up the heatsink and processor, and to my undying horror saw loads of brownish-green corrosion on the underside of the processor, grouped around several pins. Even worse, touching one caused it to bend easily, whereupon it fell off. We had an evaporative cooler at the time, and the combination of condensation, dust, and electricity ate through the pins like acid. I then learned that it is very difficult to solder a CPU pin back on. It would work for a while and then get flakey again and I'd re-solder the pin on, and then another fell off and I had to fight with it too. It's currently sitting up in my closet in an antistatic bag now.... Moral of the story: never use peltiers unless you know what you're doing.
Well, let's see... The reason I run VMWare (which I've been using since it first beta-tested a couple years ago) is because I need a particular FPGA design package, and I like to be able to use my normal editor for developement with it (using it on a SAMBA share). That, and I can perform all my "normal" activities like surfing the web, email, etc, without having to reboot each time. I could of course use windows for some of these things, but then I'd end up with a situation where mailboxes weren't in sync, and I'd be forced to use some other editor. --Besides the simple fact I hate the windows environment.
One that has been tested and works is the MP3Elf, based on the cool Java-based TINI board from Dallas Semi. Another TINI-based MP3 player is here,
although it's still in the planning stages. The nifty thing about the MP3Elf is that it's open source _and_ hardware so you can build your own. They've sold some bare boards so you can assemble your own, although I'm not sure what they're planning for the future.
1) MD hold less information (~ less music) Yes, than regular CDs. However, they hold 140M vs the 160M the 3" CDs-- not much difference.
2) MD are harder to record onto Actually, CDs are harder to record to for me. Want to know how hard it is to make an MD? Step 1: insert CD into deck; Step 2 insert CD into deck; Step 3 press CD->MD button and wait.
3) MD will not play in CD-MP3 players Yes, and CDs won't play in MD players. So...?
4) MD players are more expensive Which ones? I paid $150 for my RioVolt and $100 for an MD player.
) MD do not allow you to control audio quality -vs- bandwidth tradeoff Not true any longer as has been mentioned. MDLP allows you to get either 2X or 4X the normal time.
Why do we need yet another C-like language? I use PHP now for virtually everything (using the CGI version so you can write standalone scripts) It's great for little one-off scripts or whatever. Another C-interpreter type project is EIC, which is actually extremely close to standard C. It works well for most programs you don't want to constantly recompile.
...You could very nicely simulate heat! I don't know that I'd feel entirely comfortable wearing something constructed with wires that approach 100 degrees C;-)
Re:Good question in "talkbacks"
on
QT Mozilla Port
·
· Score: 1
It's already been done for some time with GTK-- it's called Galeon. I used it a while back and it worked pretty well. It really did strip out a lot of the "extra" stuff, and seemed to speed it up a bit, although not as much as I would have hoped. As others have mentioned, it would probably require more than just a toolkit makeover to really speed up 'zilla.
I saw something like this at Fry's the other day. $200, and it looked kind of like a docking station with a CD player attached. I guess the idea was that you could use the CD player to rip audio CDs without a computer, and then transfer the mp3s to an mp3 player (flash-based). I didn't see the mp3 player that was supposed to dock to it, but it did look like an interesting idea.
I got one of these units back in December, and it is a nifty little gadget... However, anyone who buys these should go into it with their eyes open. At this point, I don't consider it ready for the masses by any stretch of the imagination, so please don't buy it to replace your Visor/Palm/etc with the thought that it will be ready "out of the box". Current units (with the help of the community) are now able to auto-sleep, although there is still no way to meter the battery voltage or have it shut itself automatically when the batteries get low. Speed is still an issue, as is handwriting recognition, etc.
I'm not trying to knock the unit, but I would hope that people who are serious about developing for the device would purchase it (hence the "developer edition"). It seems like a lot of people show up on the mailing list expecting a fully functional unit, when there is still a lot of work to be done.
Synchronous AC clocks are not dead, at least last time I checked... At one point I built a crappy inverter to power a digital clock, which was AC synchronous. The frequency was way too high, and boy did the minutes go by quickly! From the corded clocks I've seen, they will use the AC as their time base, and then switch to a quartz crystal to maintain time in event of a power failure (if they have a battery backup).
Try emusic.com for no less than nine albums of theirs in MP3 format. Not free, but not horribly expensive either ($8.99 USD). The coolest thing about emusic is their subscription service, which for as little as $10 a month you can download all you want. I have it and it's great. Oh, and the URL for the TMBG page on emusic is he re.
For those of you have been to Las Vegas, you've seen just such a thing in action. I have no idea what the resolution of them is (I'd imagine something like 320x200 or MAYBE 640x480 tops). I actually got a chance to get up close to one while it was operating (it was about 6 feet tall), mounted into a wall. Examing it more closely there were indeed little triads of R-G-B LEDs, which when viewed at a range necessary to actually make out that fact were extremely bright. That, and much like putting your nose against a projection tv, it was impossible to make out much detail. What's interesting about 'Vegas is the fact that cruising the strip you can actually see several generations of technology, from the monochrome incandescent bulb displays, all the way up to the state-of-the-art LED full-color animated displays that are viewable in direct sunlight.
I hope this sends a clear message to everyone: When you buy a CD, you are not paying anything for materials!!! The "content" is where the gravy comes from, and apparently the higher quality the format is, the more durable the medium it is distributed on, the more you pay. Even if some record company exec could beam music to you by mind-meld, they'd still want the same $15-20. The price of music will never go down until the industry finally decides to start tightening its collective belt and stop getting such huge margins for music, online or otherwise.
As someone who has done their fair share of embedded design and programming, I can assure you the CC is NOT simple, and it neither contains a DSP nor is it nothing more than running the output through a ACD (analog->digital) inside the microprocessor and then referencing the binary input with a list of values to produce the barcode string. The fact of the matter is, it's a fairly complex process decoding barcodes, as there are a fair number of flavors, such as UPC-A, and UPC-E. Each format is a little (or a lot) different, and last time I checked into writing such a beast, I canned the idea pretty quickly. Also, try pricing out the "wedges" that decode the output of barcode wands sometime; they're not cheap. Anyway, my whole point is the difficult part of the CC design is not the electronics so much as the software running on the microcontroller.
However, an asynchronous design requires that the delay lines be very conservatively designed, as if the delay line was a little faster, and the logic a little slower, on the worst case critical path, the chip would fail completly, which results in a slower processor by design.
This is the same argument I've heard for using asychronous logic. The idea was, that the speed of the entire core is limited by the portion that can't accept a clock higher than N MHz. With asynchronous logic theoretically this allows each function block to work at their maximum speed, with the slow ones affecting only the operations that they're involved with.
I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, but that's the general idea of the counterpoint;-).
I'd have to agree that anyone who says I am stealing by using Junkbuster is smoking something. However, I don't block everything indiscriminately... For a few select sites that I believe are genuinely worthwhile (and don't abuse my confidence by plastering ads within articles/along the sides), I purposely unblock the ads. Over time I have developed a very capable blocking file, but I feel that if you like a site that much, why not give them a break and show some support? I don't have enough cash to send out donations to them all, but this is my little way of saying "Thanks" for running a great site like slashdot.
There's a quote from the movie "The Princess Bride" that goes something like this: You keep using that word, but I do not think it means what you think it means. That basically sums up what I think of Mr. Love's speech. Whatever he's trying to get at, I can't help but disagree. There are some people who will simply not use non GPL/Opensource (tm) software; I am not one of them. However, what he seems to be proposing is essentially moving partially or completely away from the thing that made Linux what it is today: the freedom to access and modify the source, with the stipulation those changes be returned to the community. I hope I never see the day when I can't run a Linux system without some closed-source pieces which may be yanked away at any given moment thanks to the UCITA.
I'd like to refute the argument that there is such a large difference between hardware and software... As the article mentioned (if people read it), this is all implemented in an FPGA-- easily under $100 for a part. I use Altera FPGAs and for less than $70 I built a board using an SMT-to-through-hole adapter board with the FPGA and a setup for downloading designs. The software is free off of Altera's website. Much like traditional programs, I compile under Linux (using wine), and then try the program via a download to the FPGA. It's no different than having to buy a computer to write software; there is always a cost of entry, but once it's paid it is free from there on out. For other people to use or develop your "program", they need to make a similar outlay.
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most auto ticket things dont take into acount time ware you have no choice but to run a red light, for example if your sitting in the middle of an intersection tring to turn and the light turns red you have to turn or else your holding up trafic, the camera will take your pic
If you do, then you are (in most states) in violation of the traffic regulations and you should get a ticket, whether its from a camera or a cop.
Actually, (in AZ) it is legal to pull out into the intersection and turn left on red if traffic doesn't stop up until then. However, you won't get your picture taken if you're already across the "magic line" that marks the boundary for the intersection. Red light cams sense movement across that imaginary line, so if you're already across it when the light turns red...
I purchased a Z53 a while back because it printed fairly quickly and is one of those printers that embeds the printhead in each ink cartridge. I had an Epson before that which died of a plugged head and had eternal warm-up times which I was not eager to re-experience. The Lexmark starts up very quickly and has reasonable Linux support-- there's a binary RPM they provide which handles printhead cleaning, alignment, etc, and works quite well. The only beef I have is it doesn't support the USB port on the printer. There is also an open-source driver available that seemed to work well.
Printer cartridges are predictably expensive, but I haven't purchased one yet as a cheap refill kit works perfectly. If you must buy an inkjet it's not bad, and it's either that or an HP (which doesn't have very good support for the latest printers), since I refuse to buy another inkjet that has a non-replaceable head.
Of course, my biggest problem with either model of the SL-whatever is the $#%$@@@@~ proprietary connector, which cannot be had for love or money in lots of less than 1,000 outside of Japan. Would it have hurt Sharp too much to use the same connector as the Palm V or Clie? As it is, no-one can build a peripheral for it without hacking apart the horrifically expensive cradle ($50 USD) or serial cable (also $50!).
And codwarrior will eventually have a dev kit.
Actually, CW already has a dev kit out for the cube. Unfortunately it's only the software portion that they sell, which is completely useless without a GC dev station (try getting even a picture of one of these!). The only way I can see getting anything but games on the GC is via a modchip which will at least allow booting off of mini-CDRs.
Actually, the Creative Nomad JukeBox allows you to do this as long as the tracks you send over aren't "protected". I don't know how you get protected tracks onto the thing, but all the music you send over can come right off it to, to back up in case of the eventual HD failure. People have even rigged up HTTP servers for the thing (running on a PC with the JB tethered via USB) so you can control or monitor it over a network. Pretty nifty, although it has its own set of problems (chiefly battery life) like most products.
You can also upgrade the HD to 30G if you don't mind voiding your warranty. Fry's has the 6G version refurbished for $150, which is where I got mine.
And really enjoy it. I've had it since back in '98 when they first came out and the software on it has improved enormously. Netwinder.org is still up after all this time and people are still creating new disk images for it and updating it. Even though the processor (275 MHz) is not anything to brag about, it works wonderfully for a firewall/FTP server/etc, which is what I use it for. It's a heck of a lot more versatile than a dedicated box and doesn't make much noise or heat. It's great to be able to fire up a copy of Ethereal to sniff packets right off my cable modem. A great little box for what it does, but unfortunately I think they priced themselves out of their primary market-- dedicated firewalls and print/file servers.
I'll tell you: bad things. This is from personal experience incidentally. I had a shiny new K6-3 450MHz and the world was my oyster. Unfortunately I had also recently heard about using to peltiers to overclock processors, and so it seemed like the perfect opportunity to give it a whirl. I got a 120W peltier and by enlongating the distance between the heatsink and the CPU I was able to wedge it in there. I only fed it 5V, but that was enough. It didn't have any problems at first, but it also didn't O/C worth spit so I gave up on that part and left it on. Little did I know the damage had already begun. About a week later my system started randomly crashing, which was odd because I ran Linux exclusively. It got worse and finally got to a point where it would barely boot. I finally pulled up the heatsink and processor, and to my undying horror saw loads of brownish-green corrosion on the underside of the processor, grouped around several pins. Even worse, touching one caused it to bend easily, whereupon it fell off. We had an evaporative cooler at the time, and the combination of condensation, dust, and electricity ate through the pins like acid. I then learned that it is very difficult to solder a CPU pin back on. It would work for a while and then get flakey again and I'd re-solder the pin on, and then another fell off and I had to fight with it too. It's currently sitting up in my closet in an antistatic bag now.... Moral of the story: never use peltiers unless you know what you're doing.
Well, let's see... The reason I run VMWare (which I've been using since it first beta-tested a couple years ago) is because I need a particular FPGA design package, and I like to be able to use my normal editor for developement with it (using it on a SAMBA share). That, and I can perform all my "normal" activities like surfing the web, email, etc, without having to reboot each time. I could of course use windows for some of these things, but then I'd end up with a situation where mailboxes weren't in sync, and I'd be forced to use some other editor. --Besides the simple fact I hate the windows environment.
One that has been tested and works is the MP3Elf, based on the cool Java-based TINI board from Dallas Semi. Another TINI-based MP3 player is here,
although it's still in the planning stages. The nifty thing about the MP3Elf is that it's open source _and_ hardware so you can build your own. They've sold some bare boards so you can assemble your own, although I'm not sure what they're planning for the future.
1) MD hold less information (~ less music)
Yes, than regular CDs. However, they hold 140M vs the 160M the 3" CDs-- not much difference.
2) MD are harder to record onto
Actually, CDs are harder to record to for me. Want to know how hard it is to make an MD? Step 1: insert CD into deck; Step 2 insert CD into deck; Step 3 press CD->MD button and wait.
3) MD will not play in CD-MP3 players
Yes, and CDs won't play in MD players. So...?
4) MD players are more expensive
Which ones? I paid $150 for my RioVolt and $100 for an MD player.
) MD do not allow you to control audio quality -vs- bandwidth tradeoff
Not true any longer as has been mentioned. MDLP allows you to get either 2X or 4X the normal time.
Why do we need yet another C-like language? I use PHP now for virtually everything (using the CGI version so you can write standalone scripts) It's great for little one-off scripts or whatever. Another C-interpreter type project is EIC, which is actually extremely close to standard C. It works well for most programs you don't want to constantly recompile.
"With some cleverly placed muscle wires"
;-)
...You could very nicely simulate heat! I don't know that I'd feel entirely comfortable wearing something constructed with wires that approach 100 degrees C
It's already been done for some time with GTK-- it's called Galeon. I used it a while back and it worked pretty well. It really did strip out a lot of the "extra" stuff, and seemed to speed it up a bit, although not as much as I would have hoped. As others have mentioned, it would probably require more than just a toolkit makeover to really speed up 'zilla.
I saw something like this at Fry's the other day. $200, and it looked kind of like a docking station with a CD player attached. I guess the idea was that you could use the CD player to rip audio CDs without a computer, and then transfer the mp3s to an mp3 player (flash-based). I didn't see the mp3 player that was supposed to dock to it, but it did look like an interesting idea.
I'm not trying to knock the unit, but I would hope that people who are serious about developing for the device would purchase it (hence the "developer edition"). It seems like a lot of people show up on the mailing list expecting a fully functional unit, when there is still a lot of work to be done.
Synchronous AC clocks are not dead, at least last time I checked... At one point I built a crappy inverter to power a digital clock, which was AC synchronous. The frequency was way too high, and boy did the minutes go by quickly! From the corded clocks I've seen, they will use the AC as their time base, and then switch to a quartz crystal to maintain time in event of a power failure (if they have a battery backup).
Try emusic.com for no less than nine albums of theirs in MP3 format. Not free, but not horribly expensive either ($8.99 USD). The coolest thing about emusic is their subscription service, which for as little as $10 a month you can download all you want. I have it and it's great. Oh, and the URL for the TMBG page on emusic is he re.
For those of you have been to Las Vegas, you've seen just such a thing in action. I have no idea what the resolution of them is (I'd imagine something like 320x200 or MAYBE 640x480 tops). I actually got a chance to get up close to one while it was operating (it was about 6 feet tall), mounted into a wall. Examing it more closely there were indeed little triads of R-G-B LEDs, which when viewed at a range necessary to actually make out that fact were extremely bright. That, and much like putting your nose against a projection tv, it was impossible to make out much detail. What's interesting about 'Vegas is the fact that cruising the strip you can actually see several generations of technology, from the monochrome incandescent bulb displays, all the way up to the state-of-the-art LED full-color animated displays that are viewable in direct sunlight.
That's not the best part...
"Neuticles eliminates 'neuter-hesitant' concerns -
as a 'Neuticled' pet looks and can feel exactly the same after neutering."
Beta testers anyone?
I hope this sends a clear message to everyone:
When you buy a CD, you are not paying anything for materials!!! The "content" is where the gravy comes from, and apparently the higher quality the format is, the more durable the medium it is distributed on, the more you pay. Even if some record company exec could beam music to you by mind-meld, they'd still want the same $15-20. The price of music will never go down until the industry finally decides to start tightening its collective belt and stop getting such huge margins for music, online or otherwise.
As someone who has done their fair share of embedded design and programming, I can assure you the CC is NOT simple, and it neither contains a DSP nor is it nothing more than running the output through a ACD (analog->digital) inside the microprocessor and then referencing the binary input with a list of values to produce the barcode string. The fact of the matter is, it's a fairly complex process decoding barcodes, as there are a fair number of flavors, such as UPC-A, and UPC-E. Each format is a little (or a lot) different, and last time I checked into writing such a beast, I canned the idea pretty quickly. Also, try pricing out the "wedges" that decode the output of barcode wands sometime; they're not cheap. Anyway, my whole point is the difficult part of the CC design is not the electronics so much as the software running on the microcontroller.
However, an asynchronous design requires that the delay lines be very conservatively designed, as if the delay line was a little faster, and the logic a little slower, on the worst case critical path, the chip would fail completly, which results in a slower processor by design.
;-).
This is the same argument I've heard for using asychronous logic. The idea was, that the speed of the entire core is limited by the portion that can't accept a clock higher than N MHz. With asynchronous logic theoretically this allows each function block to work at their maximum speed, with the slow ones affecting only the operations that they're involved with.
I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, but that's the general idea of the counterpoint
Larry
I'd have to agree that anyone who says I am stealing by using Junkbuster is smoking something. However, I don't block everything indiscriminately... For a few select sites that I believe are genuinely worthwhile (and don't abuse my confidence by plastering ads within articles/along the sides), I purposely unblock the ads. Over time I have developed a very capable blocking file, but I feel that if you like a site that much, why not give them a break and show some support? I don't have enough cash to send out donations to them all, but this is my little way of saying "Thanks" for running a great site like slashdot.
There's a quote from the movie "The Princess Bride" that goes something like this: You keep using that word, but I do not think it means what you think it means.
That basically sums up what I think of Mr. Love's speech. Whatever he's trying to get at, I can't help but disagree. There are some people who will simply not use non GPL/Opensource (tm) software; I am not one of them. However, what he seems to be proposing is essentially moving partially or completely away from the thing that made Linux what it is today: the freedom to access and modify the source, with the stipulation those changes be returned to the community. I hope I never see the day when I can't run a Linux system without some closed-source pieces which may be yanked away at any given moment thanks to the UCITA.
I'd like to refute the argument that there is such a large difference between hardware and software... As the article mentioned (if people read it), this is all implemented in an FPGA-- easily under $100 for a part. I use Altera FPGAs and for less than $70 I built a board using an SMT-to-through-hole adapter board with the FPGA and a setup for downloading designs. The software is free off of Altera's website. Much like traditional programs, I compile under Linux (using wine), and then try the program via a download to the FPGA. It's no different than having to buy a computer to write software; there is always a cost of entry, but once it's paid it is free from there on out. For other people to use or develop your "program", they need to make a similar outlay.