It explains it in really small words for the intellectually challanged.
BTW -- this reminds me of a book I read like ten years ago, "The Second Creation" I think, that talked about early particle collider research where the researchers would actually stand between the magnetic coils while they were developing the technology, and the enormous magnetic fields would actually start to "polarize" the water in their brains, and they'd see all sorts of wierd hallucinations.
You misread the article... it said they operate near microwave frequencies, not microwave ovens. There's a lot more microwave frequencies than the one that happens to snag the hydrogen atoms and heat them up.
I don't think this should be terribly suprising to anyone -- there's been reports and suspicion about it for a while now.
The article didn't tell much about HOW they reached those conclusions. The higher incidence of brain tumors for example. This was reported a few years ago, and was deemed non-conclusive, because the sample sets weren't isolated enough to determine that the cell phones were the causative factor. (Ie, if executives are typically using cellphones the most, and they spend most of their time in front of computers, you can't conclusively say one set of factors are the cause vs another). I seem to recall the biggest criticism was that the results then were just statistical results in a set of people who used them a large amount of time, which doesn't prove anything.
The microcell growth I believe is the result, if I recall correctly, of exposure to higher frequency microwaves, at higher power levels. Ditto with the genetic damage.
One other thing to keep in mind is that you undergo a significant amount of genetic damage every day -- and the biochemistry in your cells is designed to correct it when it happens. (basically its not a problem unless you happen to tweak both halves of the DNA strand at precisely the same spot in the squence and happen to hit a gene at the same time... a very rare occurance, otherwise simply walking to your car would cause a fatal skin cancer. (There's actually a medical condition where cells in the skin are unable to properly repair the constant damage from the sun, and sufferers of it -- like half a dozen in the US -- could die even from a few minutes in the sun)
Also keep in mind the prevalance in our environment of dangerous carcinogens, pesticides in the food, the weakening of antibiotics, etc... its a dangerous world we're building for ourselves, so even if a miniscule increase in danger from extended use is proven, in the grand scheme if things it may not really matter. I'm personally not too concerned about it.
That said, I do get off it when my head starts to heat up.:)
3) Your neighbor can control your stuff if you're hanging off the same transformer on the pole. Happens all the time in apartments, and I lived in a house once that was wired that way. I've never had a neighbor with X10 units, but I had a friend who did.
4) No set levels for dim and bright
#4 confused me when I first got it. The modules keep TWO states, on/off and brightness. So a 20% dim followed by an OFF then an ON won't turn the unit to full brightness, only to 20%. Changes are relative too, so two requests to set the brightness to 20 in a row end up at 40% not 20%. This means to make sure a light is at a preset level you have to send an OFF, then a command to turn the unit down the max amount -- even if its not all the way up -- then a brighten to the correct level followed by an ON.
Once you've got it figured out its not that tough, and the Windows software seems to do it automatically, but if you're using heyu or something you need to take that into account yourself.
Ack, forgot to mention something. This unit is almost certainly not compatible with any of the linux software, because the older two units did not have serial pass-through on them. I have a CP290 unit which works, and was the predecessor to this one. The protocols changed between the CP290 and the one before that, so it probably happened this time, if not at least to support how ever its doing the "passthrough"
NOT all X10 controllers work under Linux. A bunch of people posted on here about how there is X10 control software, and didn't mention that each one is controller-specific.
This is also NOT a good deal. This is perhaps $40 worth of stuff for $6. They often have deals for $50 that include a dozen or so control modules, and you certainly can't do much with just one. You're going to spend more money buying more modules than buying one of their other "deals".
That said, I'm going to buy one because I don't have a good hand-held controller. I've been using X10 stuff with one of their older control units that actually does work with Linux for several years. Let me repeat again, the linux software may not work with this unit.
You can do some pretty slick stuff with it though. The multi-remote that came with the package I bought works with one of my TV's and VCR's -- and I have perl scripts that are triggered by X10 events to check my voicemail, bring my network link up and down, and stuff like that. Nice webpage on a secure server lets me control the important things like all the halogen lights and my coffee pot, to keep from burnin my place down.
The coffee pot is the most useful. At noon at work when I can't remember if I shut it off I can call into my (also linux driven) voicemail, punch in a pass code and get to an IVR prompt that lets me control the X10 devices in my house (air conditioners, lights, coffee pot, and the three of the PCs on my network so I can turn them on, punch in the "connect to internet" code, and get files off them from remote...)
If you really want to play with home automation (and X10 is OLD technology, most new automated homes use MUCH higher tech stuff these days -- this is poor man's home automation) get one of their larger packages. As I said mine was around $50 or something, and included the computer interface, infared remote, keychain remote, motion sensor (computer tells me if I've got e-mail when I walk into the room), like six or eight light units, two or three appliance units, and a wall switch.
I've done that too a half dozen times for servers.
I burn the root system on a CD, boot from that. It mounts the CD as / (and/usr is sitting on/),/etc comes off a write-protected floppy disc, and everything else mounts from the drives in the system. Its a little slower to boot up, and a bit more of a pain to upgrade the core software, but at a buck a pop its nice to know that even in a worst-case scenario, I would be able to still use the system after a reboot. Upside was even a major problem on the system could usually be fixed with a reboot and restore from tape without having to get at the machine (they were colocated at the time...)
So I'm sure it would work for workstations too. I ran across an overley filesystem a while back that I experimented with for embedded Linux applications, where a flash partition was mounted with the overlay filesystem, so files could still be "updated". Never got it working right, but I didn't spend a lot of time trying. Might be a good solution to a CD-Rom based install as well, I'm not sure if you can mount an overlay over NFS or another technique.
I admitted in my content that I was generally talking around my ass... but what I was saying was from a generalized understanding I put together over several years of participating in, and developing research on learning and memory, including a period of time academically studying the evolution of intelligence.
Whereas your response is based on assumptions you make based on false interpretations of your experiences. You claim there is not an experience that causes you to remember what printf is. That's blatently incorrect. Your are able to associate the meaning of printf in that context because of prior experience you've had either with that concept or with concepts related to that. That's why its easy to pick up a third and fourth language when a brain has developed the proper pathways that allow it to associate with multiple languages. That's why its easy to pick up new programming languages. But that's also why you may know fifteen programming languages but be unable to learn a foreign language at all -- because you learn based on prior associations you've made and you don't have those between unrelated areas of knowledge.
In that vein however, some researchers believe that an unusual ability to create those linkages between non-related contexts are one of the causes of extremely high intelligence, partly caused by genetics, but usually among those researchers its attributed to wide-ranging stimulation during the first nine to twenty-four months of live (the first nine being particularly important because unlike every other mammal species, the human brain continues to grow for 9 months after birth).
There can't be differing ways of storing information in the brain because there is only a single construct within the brain -- the only differentiation between areas coming from the points at which there are larger interconnects within the brain, points where there are larger concentrations of neurons that are not necessarily in physical contact with each other (which is why some scientists think the folds in the brain are related to overall species intelligence), and the insertion points of external sensory nerves.
You however, most likely, do not remember nearly the detail you think you do. Very few people naturally develop the ability to do that, although it can be learned. Take for example someone asks what your significant other looks like. The odds are you will pick out and describe certain elemental details, color of the eyes, color of the hair, shape of the nose, but if someone asked if there was a mark below their ear last time you saw them you might not be able to answer that -- because you are reconstructing an image of that person in your head from individual elements you remember -- elements that may or may not be correct.
The more you pay attention to and use those snippets if information, the more other nerve pathways will utilize those elements and other memories will get locked to them. That's why you can remember the phone numbers of the houses you grew up in -- because of all the other memories associated with those specific memories. That's why you can completely forget a long-past romantic rendezvous, yet a fragrance or some sound can suddently bring that back -- because you triggered the "matrix" of nerve firings that held that experience in the context of another memory -- ane externally stimulated memories are FAR more capable of doing that than internally stimulated memories, because of the areas of the brain they tend to reside in and the relatively stronger impulses you tend to get from external sources.
That's why relaxation and meditation help focus -- because they tend to quiet and control those externally triggered cognitive events and allow more attention to fall on internally triggered ones. (And is also why under hypnosis you are both capable of digging up memories more easily AND creating memories easily).
You'll find in lingustics as well that most people do not have a concurrently available vocabulary of thousands of words, in fact 5000 words is a lot even for an adult, you don't need nearly that to get along in society. But the availability of a word at a given instant is largely related to its association with other concepts and word streams. People with larger vocabularies are often more capable of utilizing a larger wordset because they typically are making an effort to use less common words (even if they won't fess up to it).
If you were going to pick out a point of my original posting that was over-generalized to a point of absurdity, there are points that are far more obsurd than the one you picked. The one you picked is in fact one of the most easily documented points I made, and one of the most widely understood scientifically. The methods that cause it to be true are not as well understood, but its validity is not widely doubted.
Right... What I maent to say (and didn't make clear) was that the impulse is not electrical at any point, its a chemical single, which is why the time for the impulse to reach the brain is noticeably longer than the time for the "knee jerk" reaction to pull your hand away.
If it was electrical, than even at a miniscule percentage of the speed of light the nerve impulses would arrive far faster than they do.
An interesting side point is that there are a lot of factors that affect the speed of nerve transmission. Researchers have found that high-contrast visual ranges tend to lead to much faster nerve impulse rates and response times, and low contrast visual scenes tend to slow down the impulses. (Which from a practical standpoint means people are not as capable of judging visually the speeds they're travelling at in low-contrast situations like driving in fog...)
This is sort of a silly question for Slashdot, since most people are going to be talking out their asses.
That said, (and talking more around my ass, than out it), there isn't any sort of storage figure. Researchers do not have much understanding about how we remember things, but it IS fairly certain that there is no relationship to the way computers store information (ie, the concept of terabytes, etc).
Generally the brain remembers certain aspects of an experience -- wether an external experience, or an internal one. Its believed that the act of experiencing something, or recalling it later starts changing the relative levels at which nerves will fire and accept the chemical impulses from neighboring neurons. (Before anyone starts talking about electrical impuses, those are only conducted within the nerve cell not between nerve cells and its not an electrical impulse as much as a chemical shift within the nerve that changes the electrical potential of the local region while the signal travels down the length of the nerve -- thats why you can have your hand off a hot stove before you actually feel its hot)
So a memory is generally a tangles mess of restimulations of fragments of what happened. Thats why with few exceptions, most people can't really remember details very well, and everyone is prone to manipulating memories. (ie, you read an interesting tale when you're young, later in life you're sure it happened to you or that someone TOLD you it happened to them, and not that you read it) Things like that happen a disturbingly large amount of the time, with everyone. Luckily such errors don't often affect anything serious.. I mean who cares where you heard a story?
That's why things like memory and attention span and personality can be manipulated chemically -- because you can control the way those experiences link up with each other and how the brain reacts to those experiences.
One of the most interesting things I think people find when they really start studying how the brain learns, and stores its experiences is how little actually comes from the senses or memory. (For example, how the brain can only distinguish general colors and shapes beyond a half-dozen degrees off center in your field of view, but you're constantly fooled into thinking you can see more than you really can)
The question with the brain then is how discret these fragments of memories and experiences are, how many times they can crossconnect with others to produce memories without those crossconnects getting so blurred that you get confused about the truth of what you're remembering, and the number of different fragments that make up a given memory.
Most likely no one will have any idea about the answers to those questions until there is a better understanding how a "neural network" arrangement can store and rerecognize patterns of nerve impulses when the "matrix" used is numbering in the millions of cells at a time...
The government can't make every little problem disappear, but its pretty damn good at making a lot of them appear.
The government wouldn't have had to protect us from the NSI problem if it hadn't caused it in the first place. The registration should've gone from the government funded organization directly to a non-profit organization.
Controversial? Yes. But I really don't think any of this is NSI's fault. They're a company, and a company at the verge of losing their monopoly and thus their massive profits.
The real fault here lies (as is usually the case) with the U.S. Government. They're the ones who allowed a private company to turn public databases into a propriatary internal corporate database. They're the ones that allowed a company granted a legal monopoly to take the facilities that were payed for and developed with taxpayer money and file for a public offering.
They're the ones who didn't forsee these problems.
But I doubt anyone should be suprised. This is a government that has shown time and time again to the US public and the world at large that it is grossly inept at dealing with change at the pace that the new information economy requires.
Some people put the blame on the administration, or congress, but the real problem is the hundreds of thousands of redundant government workers. Policies aren't decided by congresspeople or Presidents -- most of them hardly know that the box next to their monitor isn't called a hard drive. The problem comes from the people working under them that either don't understand the issues or deliberately manipulate the issues to said elected figureheads in order to protect their own interests.
Could be worse, there are other industries that are even more poorly impacted by government incompetance that represent greater problems for the general public than the information industries. Medical research for one.
So NSI may be manipulative, and using tactics that would make any elected official proud to spread FUD and keep control of name registrations, but does anyone blame them? They were taught to do that and told to do that by the people who suck up our tax dollars. Lets put the blame where its due.
Wildly over priced? A 256k DSK here (if you're lucky enough to live in the few percent of exchanges in CT that have it), it'll cost you at least five or six times that.
If it works at all.
I know a ton of people who would gladly pay $350 a month or more for a 256k circuit, but the only option is frame-relay at $100 more than that for a 56k.
Its the equivalent of a 52" monitor *two meters* away. In terms of relative distance, that's not any closer than I sit to my 21" monitor... It might actually appear to be a hair closer. You might sweep your eyes back and forth across four feet of space, but that's not very far seven feet away!
You're right though, this is not a 3-D unit, nor is it immersive. I don't think there's a big market for those right now.
I think the HMD's that can be switched to an overlay mode where you can see through them are a lot more useful. I hate people sneakin up on me while I'm working, it'd be even worse with one of these!
Something like this might be useful anywhere that you want to block out distractions... maybe stock traders -- put on your headset phone and one of these and shut the world out... Sitting on an airplane watching movies would be good, don't have to see that annoying kid jumping up and down in front of you. Probably would improve productivity in any high-distraction environment (call centers, tech support, and a bunch like that...)
I'm not sure why its worth posting on Slashdot without 3-d or immersion capabilities, since there's probably 30 companies selling units just like this one...
There's lots of TV cards supported. I've never seen one that could do hardware-based MPEG2 (or MPEG2 quality) compression at full 720x512 resolution at 30fps. Such hardware exists -- its used for PC-based video editing and production systems, but none of the ones I've ever seen are supported under Linux.
My guess is the TiVo uses a hardware MPEG2 solution. I didn't think prices had come down that far on MPEG2 encoders, but aparently they have. (Last time I priced one it was around $18k, and that was only a few years ago...)
I want one on a PCI card.:)
Re:No Linux sucks with this
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Actually its a Dual Pentium II 350 system with a half gig RAM.
But that's irrelavent. I didn't say a thing about watching video, I was asking about hardware assisted or pure software MPEG2 codecs, preferably a full hardware encoding solution. Obviously the Tivo has custom MPEG hardware tied into the unit -- I don't think you could get a PowerPC chip with the kind of power you need for software MPEG2 encoding and still get a drive and crap for $500.
The piece of hardware you'd need to duplicate this functionality on your home Linux system is that hardware MPEG2 encoding/decoding hardware. You can get crap to do MPEG1, but anyone who's ever watched MPEG1 against MPEG2 knows that MPEG1 is barely useful for this sort of an appplication.
I'm guessing since noone has ever jumped out with an answer to my question any of the times I've asked it on here, such a beast either doesn't exist or isn't very common.
Okay, I've asked this three or four times in various threads on Slashdot, and twice submitted Ask Slashdot questions. Maybe this time an answer will present itself.
Does anyone know of ANY video hardware supported under Linux that supports any sort of medium to high bitrate video codecs? Any hardware that can do MPEG2? Or software?
And its not now. In fact it specifically says that XMMS is best used with OSS or an OSS-compatible sound system. I could be mistaken, but I don't remember that being there before.
And in response to the other reply mentioning it being a good business tactic, I don't think it really is. A good business tactic, in my book, is doing everything you can to make your product the best one available. 4Front has never really been a company like that -- I've never had anything but trouble with their software, whereas when I decided nine months or so ago to switch my systems to the ALSA driver the only complexity I had was getting rid of OSS/Free.
Its definately a Microsoft tactic to do something else to push focus on your software when a potential competitor is doing a better job creating a similar product.
I downloaded the source for XMMS. I think its a perfect example that I got the ESD support, the Gnome support and the software in there, but not the ALSA support.
I think my point was a legitimate one. If the ALSA support is buggy, why wouldn't the developers try to fix it. Bet that won't happen now.
Anyone else other than me see this as a microsoft-like tactic to keep 4Front's relavence in the marketplace for their OpenSound system? With some of the talk kicking around about the base sound support in Linux 2.3 changing over to ALSA (a far superior -- and free -- system IMHO), maybe they just want to try to keep control of things.
Maybe someone should submit patches to XMMS giving it native ALSA support...
That's a good point, especially since you can likely get a 14 gig drive (which should hold 20 CDs) for a lot less than four or five CD changer drives.
Re:1600x1200: what is that in lines per millimeter
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That's just about exactly right. With consumer grade film shot with mid to upper level consumer equipment will give you about 1800x1200 resolution. Even drum scanning any higher, you'll just scan blur. Sometimes, on some film scanners, you'll get a better image by scanning at twice that, and reducing it in software, particularly on inexpensive scanners where you may get more noise in the darks.
Good professional-grade film, and higher-end fixed-length lenses can give results that hold up to 2400dpi scanning, or about twice that. (3600x2400 or so)
You need a *very* good lens, *very* good film, and a rock-solid tripod to get an image that sharp. Its usually not necessary, unless you're trying to print a sharp 11x14 image from a 35mm shot.
The "lines per millimeter" reading is the most lines per millimeter you can have and still discern them as separate lines. So you've effectively got almost twice that resolution, 50 LPM is able to store 100LPM of information, alternating light and dark. (In practical terms its often less than that, because the tests rarely expect full dark and full light across the range, so even 50% more detail than the LPM number indicates can still give that amount of resolution)
One thing most people miss about digital cameras is that the resolution is *really* 1/3 what they're thinking it is.
A 1600x1200 shot is actually 533x1200 full color, since they tell you the number of sensors on the chip, and don't tell you about the RGB mask in front of it.
That's why you often get wierd edges in high contrast areas in a digital camera image.
I use digital shots for stuff that's going online. Anything more and I'll do a 1200 or 2400 dpi scan, depending on how I shot the image (and if I have that kind of resoltion).
This is a typical example of the government getting involved where it shouldn't.
Its one thing for the government to require competitive access to a company's network if that network's installation was subsidized by the government. Requiring a telco to share its lines with CLEC's and things like that is okay -- because taxes payed for a lot of the copper.
There's not a dime of government money that goes to pay for these networks. ATT payed for it, ATT should be able to do whatever they please with it.
Now, I live in an area where my cable company has upgraded their system to fiber. I can get digital cable and all that. But no Internet access. None planned (so they're saying.) Would it be nice if another company could force Comcast to open their lines so I can get it through them? Yes. Certainly. But if Comcast knows BEFORE putting the network in that they have to do that, and can't recoup the costs of the upgrade, why would they do it?
Sure, digital cable is a nice plus, but there's no competition here or in most of the country for cable service. They upgraded the system because of the added services BEYOND cable they can offer. Initially those will probably be more pay-per-view channels and the like, and someday will be Internet access and other stuff.
Local telephone service has been a charity most of the century. Cable isn't. Unless the government is going to subsidize these networks and regulate the industry again, how can anyone expect a ruling like this to help the majority of the country that hasn't gotten upgraded networks?
This seems like a good idea, but how many people really watch movies on their PC? Or have their PC close enough to their TV to be able to play the movies out to the TV? It seems more of a novelty to me for anyone but space-constrained college students with expensive new computers.
I doubt there'd be a big enough market to justify it. I think the switch to software decoding under Windows was largely because most people don't want to spend even fifty or a hundred extra bucks for a decoder card they're not going to get much use out of. Sure, someday DVD games or other applictations might use DVD-Video, but I doubt the game or application maker will assume hardware decoding, they'll license and bundle the software with it.
What would be more useful (and I submitted an Ask Slashdot question two weeks ago that never showed up...) would be an MPEG2 encoder and decoder card, letting Linux be able to function like those new digital "VCR"'s, either in an embedded setting or on, for example, my server that handles my voicemail and e-mail. It'd be nice to bring up one page that listed all my new e-mails, voicemails, and recorded TV shows.:)
The number of people who'd want one of those might not be that much higher than a decoder card by itself, but you never know.
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Before this argument gets any stupider, everyone involved should do their research a bit better. For once an AC is right...
c iences/ physics/PhysicsInitiative/Physics2000/microwaves/i ndex.htm.
Check out this URL:
http://www.colorado.edu/UCB/AcademicAffairs/ArtsS
It explains it in really small words for the intellectually challanged.
BTW -- this reminds me of a book I read like ten years ago, "The Second Creation" I think, that talked about early particle collider research where the researchers would actually stand between the magnetic coils while they were developing the technology, and the enormous magnetic fields would actually start to "polarize" the water in their brains, and they'd see all sorts of wierd hallucinations.
You misread the article... it said they operate near microwave frequencies, not microwave ovens. There's a lot more microwave frequencies than the one that happens to snag the hydrogen atoms and heat them up.
I don't think this should be terribly suprising to anyone -- there's been reports and suspicion about it for a while now.
:)
The article didn't tell much about HOW they reached those conclusions. The higher incidence of brain tumors for example. This was reported a few years ago, and was deemed non-conclusive, because the sample sets weren't isolated enough to determine that the cell phones were the causative factor. (Ie, if executives are typically using cellphones the most, and they spend most of their time in front of computers, you can't conclusively say one set of factors are the cause vs another). I seem to recall the biggest criticism was that the results then were just statistical results in a set of people who used them a large amount of time, which doesn't prove anything.
The microcell growth I believe is the result, if I recall correctly, of exposure to higher frequency microwaves, at higher power levels. Ditto with the genetic damage.
One other thing to keep in mind is that you undergo a significant amount of genetic damage every day -- and the biochemistry in your cells is designed to correct it when it happens. (basically its not a problem unless you happen to tweak both halves of the DNA strand at precisely the same spot in the squence and happen to hit a gene at the same time... a very rare occurance, otherwise simply walking to your car would cause a fatal skin cancer. (There's actually a medical condition where cells in the skin are unable to properly repair the constant damage from the sun, and sufferers of it -- like half a dozen in the US -- could die even from a few minutes in the sun)
Also keep in mind the prevalance in our environment of dangerous carcinogens, pesticides in the food, the weakening of antibiotics, etc... its a dangerous world we're building for ourselves, so even if a miniscule increase in danger from extended use is proven, in the grand scheme if things it may not really matter. I'm personally not too concerned about it.
That said, I do get off it when my head starts to heat up.
Nah, most motherboards use flash ram for the BIOS. Just gotta create the image, and use the mobo's flash utility to store it.
You're hosed if it doesn't work though!
I'd add two more problems to the list:
3) Your neighbor can control your stuff if you're hanging off the same transformer on the pole. Happens all the time in apartments, and I lived in a house once that was wired that way. I've never had a neighbor with X10 units, but I had a friend who did.
4) No set levels for dim and bright
#4 confused me when I first got it. The modules keep TWO states, on/off and brightness. So a 20% dim followed by an OFF then an ON won't turn the unit to full brightness, only to 20%. Changes are relative too, so two requests to set the brightness to 20 in a row end up at 40% not 20%. This means to make sure a light is at a preset level you have to send an OFF, then a command to turn the unit down the max amount -- even if its not all the way up -- then a brighten to the correct level followed by an ON.
Once you've got it figured out its not that tough, and the Windows software seems to do it automatically, but if you're using heyu or something you need to take that into account yourself.
Ack, forgot to mention something. This unit is almost certainly not compatible with any of the linux software, because the older two units did not have serial pass-through on them. I have a CP290 unit which works, and was the predecessor to this one. The protocols changed between the CP290 and the one before that, so it probably happened this time, if not at least to support how ever its doing the "passthrough"
NOT all X10 controllers work under Linux. A bunch of people posted on here about how there is X10 control software, and didn't mention that each one is controller-specific.
This is also NOT a good deal. This is perhaps $40 worth of stuff for $6. They often have deals for $50 that include a dozen or so control modules, and you certainly can't do much with just one. You're going to spend more money buying more modules than buying one of their other "deals".
That said, I'm going to buy one because I don't have a good hand-held controller. I've been using X10 stuff with one of their older control units that actually does work with Linux for several years. Let me repeat again, the linux software may not work with this unit.
You can do some pretty slick stuff with it though. The multi-remote that came with the package I bought works with one of my TV's and VCR's -- and I have perl scripts that are triggered by X10 events to check my voicemail, bring my network link up and down, and stuff like that. Nice webpage on a secure server lets me control the important things like all the halogen lights and my coffee pot, to keep from burnin my place down.
The coffee pot is the most useful. At noon at work when I can't remember if I shut it off I can call into my (also linux driven) voicemail, punch in a pass code and get to an IVR prompt that lets me control the X10 devices in my house (air conditioners, lights, coffee pot, and the three of the PCs on my network so I can turn them on, punch in the "connect to internet" code, and get files off them from remote...)
If you really want to play with home automation (and X10 is OLD technology, most new automated homes use MUCH higher tech stuff these days -- this is poor man's home automation) get one of their larger packages. As I said mine was around $50 or something, and included the computer interface, infared remote, keychain remote, motion sensor (computer tells me if I've got e-mail when I walk into the room), like six or eight light units, two or three appliance units, and a wall switch.
I've done that too a half dozen times for servers.
/usr is sitting on /), /etc comes off a write-protected floppy disc, and everything else mounts from the drives in the system. Its a little slower to boot up, and a bit more of a pain to upgrade the core software, but at a buck a pop its nice to know that even in a worst-case scenario, I would be able to still use the system after a reboot. Upside was even a major problem on the system could usually be fixed with a reboot and restore from tape without having to get at the machine (they were colocated at the time...)
I burn the root system on a CD, boot from that. It mounts the CD as / (and
So I'm sure it would work for workstations too. I ran across an overley filesystem a while back that I experimented with for embedded Linux applications, where a flash partition was mounted with the overlay filesystem, so files could still be "updated". Never got it working right, but I didn't spend a lot of time trying. Might be a good solution to a CD-Rom based install as well, I'm not sure if you can mount an overlay over NFS or another technique.
I admitted in my content that I was generally talking around my ass... but what I was saying was from a generalized understanding I put together over several years of participating in, and developing research on learning and memory, including a period of time academically studying the evolution of intelligence.
Whereas your response is based on assumptions you make based on false interpretations of your experiences. You claim there is not an experience that causes you to remember what printf is. That's blatently incorrect. Your are able to associate the meaning of printf in that context because of prior experience you've had either with that concept or with concepts related to that. That's why its easy to pick up a third and fourth language when a brain has developed the proper pathways that allow it to associate with multiple languages. That's why its easy to pick up new programming languages. But that's also why you may know fifteen programming languages but be unable to learn a foreign language at all -- because you learn based on prior associations you've made and you don't have those between unrelated areas of knowledge.
In that vein however, some researchers believe that an unusual ability to create those linkages between non-related contexts are one of the causes of extremely high intelligence, partly caused by genetics, but usually among those researchers its attributed to wide-ranging stimulation during the first nine to twenty-four months of live (the first nine being particularly important because unlike every other mammal species, the human brain continues to grow for 9 months after birth).
There can't be differing ways of storing information in the brain because there is only a single construct within the brain -- the only differentiation between areas coming from the points at which there are larger interconnects within the brain, points where there are larger concentrations of neurons that are not necessarily in physical contact with each other (which is why some scientists think the folds in the brain are related to overall species intelligence), and the insertion points of external sensory nerves.
You however, most likely, do not remember nearly the detail you think you do. Very few people naturally develop the ability to do that, although it can be learned. Take for example someone asks what your significant other looks like. The odds are you will pick out and describe certain elemental details, color of the eyes, color of the hair, shape of the nose, but if someone asked if there was a mark below their ear last time you saw them you might not be able to answer that -- because you are reconstructing an image of that person in your head from individual elements you remember -- elements that may or may not be correct.
The more you pay attention to and use those snippets if information, the more other nerve pathways will utilize those elements and other memories will get locked to them. That's why you can remember the phone numbers of the houses you grew up in -- because of all the other memories associated with those specific memories. That's why you can completely forget a long-past romantic rendezvous, yet a fragrance or some sound can suddently bring that back -- because you triggered the "matrix" of nerve firings that held that experience in the context of another memory -- ane externally stimulated memories are FAR more capable of doing that than internally stimulated memories, because of the areas of the brain they tend to reside in and the relatively stronger impulses you tend to get from external sources.
That's why relaxation and meditation help focus -- because they tend to quiet and control those externally triggered cognitive events and allow more attention to fall on internally triggered ones. (And is also why under hypnosis you are both capable of digging up memories more easily AND creating memories easily).
You'll find in lingustics as well that most people do not have a concurrently available vocabulary of thousands of words, in fact 5000 words is a lot even for an adult, you don't need nearly that to get along in society. But the availability of a word at a given instant is largely related to its association with other concepts and word streams. People with larger vocabularies are often more capable of utilizing a larger wordset because they typically are making an effort to use less common words (even if they won't fess up to it).
If you were going to pick out a point of my original posting that was over-generalized to a point of absurdity, there are points that are far more obsurd than the one you picked. The one you picked is in fact one of the most easily documented points I made, and one of the most widely understood scientifically. The methods that cause it to be true are not as well understood, but its validity is not widely doubted.
Right... What I maent to say (and didn't make clear) was that the impulse is not electrical at any point, its a chemical single, which is why the time for the impulse to reach the brain is noticeably longer than the time for the "knee jerk" reaction to pull your hand away.
If it was electrical, than even at a miniscule percentage of the speed of light the nerve impulses would arrive far faster than they do.
An interesting side point is that there are a lot of factors that affect the speed of nerve transmission. Researchers have found that high-contrast visual ranges tend to lead to much faster nerve impulse rates and response times, and low contrast visual scenes tend to slow down the impulses. (Which from a practical standpoint means people are not as capable of judging visually the speeds they're travelling at in low-contrast situations like driving in fog...)
This is sort of a silly question for Slashdot, since most people are going to be talking out their asses.
That said, (and talking more around my ass, than out it), there isn't any sort of storage figure. Researchers do not have much understanding about how we remember things, but it IS fairly certain that there is no relationship to the way computers store information (ie, the concept of terabytes, etc).
Generally the brain remembers certain aspects of an experience -- wether an external experience, or an internal one. Its believed that the act of experiencing something, or recalling it later starts changing the relative levels at which nerves will fire and accept the chemical impulses from neighboring neurons. (Before anyone starts talking about electrical impuses, those are only conducted within the nerve cell not between nerve cells and its not an electrical impulse as much as a chemical shift within the nerve that changes the electrical potential of the local region while the signal travels down the length of the nerve -- thats why you can have your hand off a hot stove before you actually feel its hot)
So a memory is generally a tangles mess of restimulations of fragments of what happened. Thats why with few exceptions, most people can't really remember details very well, and everyone is prone to manipulating memories. (ie, you read an interesting tale when you're young, later in life you're sure it happened to you or that someone TOLD you it happened to them, and not that you read it) Things like that happen a disturbingly large amount of the time, with everyone. Luckily such errors don't often affect anything serious.. I mean who cares where you heard a story?
That's why things like memory and attention span and personality can be manipulated chemically -- because you can control the way those experiences link up with each other and how the brain reacts to those experiences.
One of the most interesting things I think people find when they really start studying how the brain learns, and stores its experiences is how little actually comes from the senses or memory. (For example, how the brain can only distinguish general colors and shapes beyond a half-dozen degrees off center in your field of view, but you're constantly fooled into thinking you can see more than you really can)
The question with the brain then is how discret these fragments of memories and experiences are, how many times they can crossconnect with others to produce memories without those crossconnects getting so blurred that you get confused about the truth of what you're remembering, and the number of different fragments that make up a given memory.
Most likely no one will have any idea about the answers to those questions until there is a better understanding how a "neural network" arrangement can store and rerecognize patterns of nerve impulses when the "matrix" used is numbering in the millions of cells at a time...
The government can't make every little problem disappear, but its pretty damn good at making a lot of them appear.
The government wouldn't have had to protect us from the NSI problem if it hadn't caused it in the first place. The registration should've gone from the government funded organization directly to a non-profit organization.
Controversial? Yes. But I really don't think any of this is NSI's fault. They're a company, and a company at the verge of losing their monopoly and thus their massive profits.
The real fault here lies (as is usually the case) with the U.S. Government. They're the ones who allowed a private company to turn public databases into a propriatary internal corporate database. They're the ones that allowed a company granted a legal monopoly to take the facilities that were payed for and developed with taxpayer money and file for a public offering.
They're the ones who didn't forsee these problems.
But I doubt anyone should be suprised. This is a government that has shown time and time again to the US public and the world at large that it is grossly inept at dealing with change at the pace that the new information economy requires.
Some people put the blame on the administration, or congress, but the real problem is the hundreds of thousands of redundant government workers. Policies aren't decided by congresspeople or Presidents -- most of them hardly know that the box next to their monitor isn't called a hard drive. The problem comes from the people working under them that either don't understand the issues or deliberately manipulate the issues to said elected figureheads in order to protect their own interests.
Could be worse, there are other industries that are even more poorly impacted by government incompetance that represent greater problems for the general public than the information industries. Medical research for one.
So NSI may be manipulative, and using tactics that would make any elected official proud to spread FUD and keep control of name registrations, but does anyone blame them? They were taught to do that and told to do that by the people who suck up our tax dollars. Lets put the blame where its due.
Wildly over priced? A 256k DSK here (if you're lucky enough to live in the few percent of exchanges in CT that have it), it'll cost you at least five or six times that.
If it works at all.
I know a ton of people who would gladly pay $350 a month or more for a 256k circuit, but the only option is frame-relay at $100 more than that for a 56k.
Its the equivalent of a 52" monitor *two meters* away. In terms of relative distance, that's not any closer than I sit to my 21" monitor... It might actually appear to be a hair closer. You might sweep your eyes back and forth across four feet of space, but that's not very far seven feet away!
You're right though, this is not a 3-D unit, nor is it immersive. I don't think there's a big market for those right now.
I think the HMD's that can be switched to an overlay mode where you can see through them are a lot more useful. I hate people sneakin up on me while I'm working, it'd be even worse with one of these!
Something like this might be useful anywhere that you want to block out distractions... maybe stock traders -- put on your headset phone and one of these and shut the world out... Sitting on an airplane watching movies would be good, don't have to see that annoying kid jumping up and down in front of you. Probably would improve productivity in any high-distraction environment (call centers, tech support, and a bunch like that...)
I'm not sure why its worth posting on Slashdot without 3-d or immersion capabilities, since there's probably 30 companies selling units just like this one...
There's lots of TV cards supported. I've never seen one that could do hardware-based MPEG2 (or MPEG2 quality) compression at full 720x512 resolution at 30fps. Such hardware exists -- its used for PC-based video editing and production systems, but none of the ones I've ever seen are supported under Linux.
:)
My guess is the TiVo uses a hardware MPEG2 solution. I didn't think prices had come down that far on MPEG2 encoders, but aparently they have. (Last time I priced one it was around $18k, and that was only a few years ago...)
I want one on a PCI card.
Actually its a Dual Pentium II 350 system with a half gig RAM.
But that's irrelavent. I didn't say a thing about watching video, I was asking about hardware assisted or pure software MPEG2 codecs, preferably a full hardware encoding solution. Obviously the Tivo has custom MPEG hardware tied into the unit -- I don't think you could get a PowerPC chip with the kind of power you need for software MPEG2 encoding and still get a drive and crap for $500.
The piece of hardware you'd need to duplicate this functionality on your home Linux system is that hardware MPEG2 encoding/decoding hardware. You can get crap to do MPEG1, but anyone who's ever watched MPEG1 against MPEG2 knows that MPEG1 is barely useful for this sort of an appplication.
I'm guessing since noone has ever jumped out with an answer to my question any of the times I've asked it on here, such a beast either doesn't exist or isn't very common.
Okay, I've asked this three or four times in various threads on Slashdot, and twice submitted Ask Slashdot questions. Maybe this time an answer will present itself.
Does anyone know of ANY video hardware supported under Linux that supports any sort of medium to high bitrate video codecs? Any hardware that can do MPEG2? Or software?
MPEG1 doesn't really hack it.
And its not now. In fact it specifically says that XMMS is best used with OSS or an OSS-compatible sound system. I could be mistaken, but I don't remember that being there before.
And in response to the other reply mentioning it being a good business tactic, I don't think it really is. A good business tactic, in my book, is doing everything you can to make your product the best one available. 4Front has never really been a company like that -- I've never had anything but trouble with their software, whereas when I decided nine months or so ago to switch my systems to the ALSA driver the only complexity I had was getting rid of OSS/Free.
Its definately a Microsoft tactic to do something else to push focus on your software when a potential competitor is doing a better job creating a similar product.
I downloaded the source for XMMS. I think its a perfect example that I got the ESD support, the Gnome support and the software in there, but not the ALSA support.
I think my point was a legitimate one. If the ALSA support is buggy, why wouldn't the developers try to fix it. Bet that won't happen now.
Anyone else other than me see this as a microsoft-like tactic to keep 4Front's relavence in the marketplace for their OpenSound system? With some of the talk kicking around about the base sound support in Linux 2.3 changing over to ALSA (a far superior -- and free -- system IMHO), maybe they just want to try to keep control of things.
Maybe someone should submit patches to XMMS giving it native ALSA support...
That's a good point, especially since you can likely get a 14 gig drive (which should hold 20 CDs) for a lot less than four or five CD changer drives.
That's just about exactly right. With consumer grade film shot with mid to upper level consumer equipment will give you about 1800x1200 resolution. Even drum scanning any higher, you'll just scan blur. Sometimes, on some film scanners, you'll get a better image by scanning at twice that, and reducing it in software, particularly on inexpensive scanners where you may get more noise in the darks.
Good professional-grade film, and higher-end fixed-length lenses can give results that hold up to 2400dpi scanning, or about twice that. (3600x2400 or so)
You need a *very* good lens, *very* good film, and a rock-solid tripod to get an image that sharp. Its usually not necessary, unless you're trying to print a sharp 11x14 image from a 35mm shot.
The "lines per millimeter" reading is the most lines per millimeter you can have and still discern them as separate lines. So you've effectively got almost twice that resolution, 50 LPM is able to store 100LPM of information, alternating light and dark. (In practical terms its often less than that, because the tests rarely expect full dark and full light across the range, so even 50% more detail than the LPM number indicates can still give that amount of resolution)
One thing most people miss about digital cameras is that the resolution is *really* 1/3 what they're thinking it is.
A 1600x1200 shot is actually 533x1200 full color, since they tell you the number of sensors on the chip, and don't tell you about the RGB mask in front of it.
That's why you often get wierd edges in high contrast areas in a digital camera image.
I use digital shots for stuff that's going online. Anything more and I'll do a 1200 or 2400 dpi scan, depending on how I shot the image (and if I have that kind of resoltion).
This is a typical example of the government getting involved where it shouldn't.
Its one thing for the government to require competitive access to a company's network if that network's installation was subsidized by the government. Requiring a telco to share its lines with CLEC's and things like that is okay -- because taxes payed for a lot of the copper.
There's not a dime of government money that goes to pay for these networks. ATT payed for it, ATT should be able to do whatever they please with it.
Now, I live in an area where my cable company has upgraded their system to fiber. I can get digital cable and all that. But no Internet access. None planned (so they're saying.) Would it be nice if another company could force Comcast to open their lines so I can get it through them? Yes. Certainly. But if Comcast knows BEFORE putting the network in that they have to do that, and can't recoup the costs of the upgrade, why would they do it?
Sure, digital cable is a nice plus, but there's no competition here or in most of the country for cable service. They upgraded the system because of the added services BEYOND cable they can offer. Initially those will probably be more pay-per-view channels and the like, and someday will be Internet access and other stuff.
Local telephone service has been a charity most of the century. Cable isn't. Unless the government is going to subsidize these networks and regulate the industry again, how can anyone expect a ruling like this to help the majority of the country that hasn't gotten upgraded networks?
This device has nothing to do with reading DVD's, its about playing back the MPEG2 data stored on them.
That's two very differnet beasts. Supporting UFS under Linux is a matter of time -- UFS isn't propriatary, its just a matter of someone doing it.
This device takes a data stream read from the video file on that UFS filesystem and decodes it into video frames.
I don't see that being useful for anything but multimedia games/applications and watching movies.
Believe me, support for DVD-R or DVD-RW is something I'd be wholeheartedly in support of. But that's not DVD-Video.
Also, MPEG2 encoding is considerably more complex than the decoding.
This seems like a good idea, but how many people really watch movies on their PC? Or have their PC close enough to their TV to be able to play the movies out to the TV? It seems more of a novelty to me for anyone but space-constrained college students with expensive new computers.
:)
I doubt there'd be a big enough market to justify it. I think the switch to software decoding under Windows was largely because most people don't want to spend even fifty or a hundred extra bucks for a decoder card they're not going to get much use out of. Sure, someday DVD games or other applictations might use DVD-Video, but I doubt the game or application maker will assume hardware decoding, they'll license and bundle the software with it.
What would be more useful (and I submitted an Ask Slashdot question two weeks ago that never showed up...) would be an MPEG2 encoder and decoder card, letting Linux be able to function like those new digital "VCR"'s, either in an embedded setting or on, for example, my server that handles my voicemail and e-mail. It'd be nice to bring up one page that listed all my new e-mails, voicemails, and recorded TV shows.
The number of people who'd want one of those might not be that much higher than a decoder card by itself, but you never know.