1) The thing requires the eye to be alive. Won't work with a goughed out eye anyway.
2) In comment to the guy talking about now someone will wait until you scan your eye and then shoot you or some such nonsense, WHERE ARE YOU LIVING? That happens all the time anyway.
This is so much more secure than an ATM card... the biggest valid problem I've heard with it was the fact that a parent doesn't have the option of telling their kid "go get me $40" or having a friend do it.
These, BTW, aren't anything new, its just the non-testing installation of it thats new. There've been a bunch of banks around the country doing it for a year or so on a testing basis, or at least so I remember reading last year.
Re:Warning! Rocky shores ahead!
on
Linux 2.3.0
·
· Score: 3
Spend the $100 and buy VMWare...
Being able to boot development Linux kernels in it, and have it read the drives from a virtual file means you can easily back up things, and its no big deal if it corrupts stuff.:)
Certainly quite a good idea for people actually doing kernel development.
Audiophiles have been known to love old and outdated technology?
I doubt that. If you look at the specs on that "old" technology so many high end audiophiles like (phonographs, tube amps) -- the specs on them are *nothing* like what was available in the respective technology's heyday. They are ultramodern versions of outdated technology.:) Kinda like souping up your 1.5 mhz Atari 800 to run at 500mhz.
Either way these things sound like crap. Technology no one liked when it was new people will likely still not be liked now.:)
21st century? What a joke. How come we keep getting essentially nothing but ads for lousy tech on here so often?
I've heard units like these before and they sound like crap. Beyond the inherant fact that wallboard doesn't conduct sound that well and tends to be a very dampening surface, you'd have problems with resonance in the airspace behind the wallboard, problems with the point that the wallboard touches the joists in the walls.
The only thing this sort of technology has ever been even remotely good at is providing a bit of rumble to people in their cars -- and even then, no serious auto audiophile would come near them.
A company called Aura makes/made them for cars. Bass-only because they're at least smart enough not to claim that heavy surfaces like that can conduct and transmit cleanly the higher frequencies into the air.
I think you make a good point -- the "taser" effect they're shooting for needs a circuit to do any good. With a normal taser, if you're missed by one of the probes, you're probably not going down.
I wonder how they take care of that? Two lasers creating two conductive paths? I'd think the ionized air would stick around long enough outside the beam to short the circuit. I can't imagine they're hoping someone is going to be barefoot, or grounding themselves some other way...
Sounds like something that would make a hell of a security system -- two ionized beam paths in in a doorway, far enough apart not to short themselves, but close enough to give a good zap going through.
I'd bet these are more hazardous than they sound. I can't imagine the shock would do much through clothing, so they've got to aim for exposed skin -- ie, the face. I'd bet you'd have a hell of a lawsuit on your hands if a cop zapped you in the face with one of them and you ended up with blindness or seizures as a result.
(Mental note: wear goggles and a wetsuit next time I'm crossin' the cops!);)
I think this article is interesting in how different it is from all the other articles out there on the PS2. Most have said Sony's target price was $300, without DVD playback capability (or rather with it purposefully disabled).
$300 seems low, but Sony's never been a company to sell their game machines for the profit -- they make their profit by being the only publisher of the games.
Everything I've read indicated that the lack of DVD playback was purely a pricing issue -- they didn't want to cut into their $300-$500 low-end DVD player sales. So maybe this higher price (although I'd hope not *that* high) is the result of a guess on their part that they may sell more of them at a bit higher price that includes the DVD support than without it, without hurting their $300 DVD player market.
I for one hope they have the DVD support. Sure, some people may then have two, but how many people have more than one CD player? Lots I'd guess.
Just because USB 2.0 isn't ratified doesn't mean that can't possibly have test implementations of it.
And there doesn't seem to be any sort of inconsistancy with the FSB rates. They're exactly what every media story has mentioned for the associated chips, 200mhz for the K7 and 133 for the PIII.
They're much better than that. Hell, they'll admit they're much better than that. A few weeks ago on Good Morning America (a morning show on the ABC network for you non-US people), there was a gentleman who was showing the spy-sat pictures of the gravesites. He said several interesting things. First off he said they'd signficantly blurred the images to hide what the satellites were capable of imaging (because he was saying they could actually count the bodies, even though the images he was showing couldn't). And he gave an example of a quality he could admit they had -- and held his hands apart about 18 inches or so, and said they could see both hands from orbit.
Do the math. Figure 18 inches apart is half a meter. To see its *two* objects that far apart -- and differentiate them, you'd need twice that resolution.
So the military is willing to admit to 1/4 meter resolution satellites. That's a hell of a lot more detailed than 1+ meter images that this non-military satellite had, and no comparison to the crap on the terraserver website. And you know they wouldn't admit to the best quality they had.
That's not the problem. If Rob could send that 1 meg file in anything close to 5 seconds, there'd be no problem. The issue is the number of httpd processes that can be running at a time (on most servers somewhere around 100 with Apache), and the fact that it takes two or three minutes to grab that file over a modem. If you want to do the math, this is the right math:
Minute #1: 50 new users on modems Minute #2: Those first 50 users (still) + 50 more
Oops, 100 users, we can't fork that many httpd processes. Some have to wait!
Minute #3: Half those first minute users are done, they've got good 56k connections... maybe a dozen or two people can get back in and start transfers...
See the problem? You get stuck, its like a traffic jam -- once it gets started it takes ages for it to correct itself. 12 connections per second over the course of a minute to 56k modem users comes just under the point where a T3 would begin to be saturated.
Its important to remember that its not just number of connections that causes web performance problems, its the number of connections from slow users. Slashdot's problem is not hit-rate... look at the stats for the last 24 hours -- if anything the hit rate seems low. Its the time it takes the processes to free up.
Ach, you're right. My bad, I forgot about that. Stupid, especially since I've set up networks like that before, although not to solve that problem... I never thought about using it that way, when you're not actually even aiming to cache the page itself, just the sending of the page.
I usually design network architectures for high volume of small hits not large hits, which is why I hadn't thought that through. Good bit to file away in the back of my head though!
5MB seems high for apache -- you sure thats taking into account the shared code between apache processes? I'd figured the overhead at more like a meg and a half... but then, I'm not running mod_perl in any of my servers.
That doesn't work -- the pages aren't static between users right now. Notice if you're logged in, your username shows up on the page, and there are a multitude of combinations of settings that can make pages show up differently. The only fix is to restructure the page URLs, content, and options to allow cacheable pages, or use Sybase or something like that and multiple front end servers that can handle dynamic pages...
The problem isn't the OS, the problem is users on modems downloading large files. The way Slashdot's pages are put together, a caching proxy in front of the server (like cachedot) doesn't work, because even pages that really don't need any variance (or much variance) in content among users still have differences that keep caching from happening. My username (tgd) shows up on the page, even though it doesn't really need to be there.
Best way to improve performance other than using a more robust database and multiple servers that can generate dynamic pages is to restrict the number of possible combinations that a subpage can fall into, get rid of the stuff thats different between two users who have the same page settings (ie, get rid of the user-specific stuff), and make sure whatever differentiates it is in the PATH_INFO part of the URL so it caches, and the caching proxy doesn't think its a form submission. I bet Slashdot's got enough clout to get a donation of little ones from Corel or some place like that to throw Squid on.
Only the homepage really needs to be different per-user. The rest of the site should be comment pages in various combinations (for each of the sort methods, and a handful of comment options... moderator pages could be served by bypassing the cache servers... Even if every page was served to the proxy with a two or three minute timeout, you'd get good performance, and could spread the load on long-download pages among a few more servers... getting a few hundred simultaneous downloads instead of 70 (which seems low anyway... Apache can usually grok more than that, although maybe the mod_perl stuff can't...)
There was a discussion yesterday on the autoLinux mailing list about in-home MP3 players.
One of the things we discussed on there was building lower-cost ($200-$300) units using embedded biscuit PC's with slow 486 processors and external decoders (for sound quality), and essentially sticking the linux kernel configured to boot via NFS into the flash.
No harddrive, and keep the MP3's and software on the network. A lot of us have pretty big networks at home, seems a good way to keep all the MP3's together, and use them from multiple locations.
You could also fit it in a much smaller case. One of the people on the list mentioned those PC-on-a-SIMM devices as a possible host.
I think its a good idea to pull it. Mozilla's got quite a bit of feature bloat for a product that doesn't even really work yet. Seems silly to add yet another thing to take the focus off turning it into a real product. That's probably not *why* they did it, but its a good reason, IMHO.
Although M4 does render pages nicely. Too bad the UI is still broken, and its rendering fonts so small as to be unreadable most of the time.
There was an article posted here on Slashdot a month or two ago about doing it. Its probably using the same technology. (Ie, a holographic lens over an LCD screen to divert segments of the image to each eye) Alternately they might be doing it the old fashioned way, having a plastic lens over the screen like you'd see on those 3-D baseball cards.
I'd guess its the former. Using head tracking you could shift position of the holographic lens to keep the images meeting the proper eyes as the position of the head changes. Having experimented with those plastic lenses over monitors before, that's definately an issue -- you'll get the correct image at certain "sweet spots", but they alternate with areas where the image gets reversed. Looking at it in one of those spots gives me a headache.
I think its interesting that they kept saying that three "jupiter-sized" planets were around the star, when in fact its three jupiter-massed planets. Without knowing what they're made of (which they can't do yet -- can't get spectral readings from stuff that close to the star AFAIK), they can't really say what *size* they are.
As gas giants seem to be of the same general origin as stars, but without the mass or energy to sustain or start a fusion process, I'd think it'd be a lot more interesting if these jupiter *massed* planets were (because of their proximity to the star) actually much smaller, but more massive solid planets, or at least more substantially solid planets.
Seems that would tell us something that we don't know -- how common rocky planetary formation happens.
Its too bad that image is so blurry. Looks neat, though. I wonder what that flip-up thing was on the right, it almost looks like an LCD panel.
I think Sony's going to end up with a great system here. Especially if they decide to include the ability to play DVD movies. (Which several places I've read have said they may choose not to, even though all the hardware is there...)
Even better would be if they played DVD video and DVD audio discs, but given Sony's stance on DVD Audio, I'd guess that's not very likely.:)
I wonder how capable it'll be, given those hardware specs, to function as a client into more immersive universal VR game/interaction spaces. Seems to me the real thing holding back the beginning of "worlds" like described in fiction books like Snow Crash and such is front-end hardware powerful enough and widespread enough to provide the interface.
Yes its possible. Pretty easy to set up too, once you've got vgetty working with your voicemodem. You need a voicemodem that works with Linux and vgetty though (most voicemodems these days seem to be winmodems...)
I shied away from dynamic DNS and just e-mail the number to my pcs phone.
One tip -- make sure you have an activity timeout on it, so if you dial it up accidently, or you (for whatever reason) don't get the dynamic DNS to update or get the e-mail that you can still cause it to disconnect.
Throw a secure webserver on there, and just make some simple CGI's to trigger a delay to bring the machine back off the network.
On my system I've got an X10 automation setup too, so I can remotely turn on other systems in my apartment. (Useful if I'm a bonehead and leave a file I need at home...)
I was very impressed with the Festival software. Anyone looking for speech synthesis should definately take a peek at it. Text-to-speech isn't quite as nice in it as the speech synthesis itself, but its not bad.
Its a system-hog though. I tried to use it to read e-mails to me through my voice system (see my other posting in here about it), but I found it took several minutes per message to put the audio together... Hardly worth it. Hell, my system is so slow, even using say to generate timestamps is too slow.:)
I've currently got an old 486/50 DX running Linux 2.2.5 at home that handles voicemail for me using mgetty and some custom shell scripts. (Unfortunately I was never able to get get vgetty perl module working... its very old and there's almost no docs for it...)
Its pretty slick. People calling can leave voice messages or faxes. I've got it set up so either one gets packaged up in a mime attachment to my e-mail and queued to send to me. Next time the system is online it sends them off. If they sit there more than two hours it'll dial itself up and send them and get back offline. Also archives them so I can get them through a web browser on any systems in my apartment, or I can just hit the reset switch on the front of the system (which is plugged into the parallel port) and it plays any new messages for me. The turbo light blinks when I've got new messages.
I can also control all the X10 stuff in my apartment (mostly useful for options #1 -- turn off all the halogen lights, and #2 -- turn of coffee pot, both reducing the chances that my spacing out one morning will result in my apartment burning down);)
Last thing I can do is use it to cause my network to dial up. The system handles my masquerading and internet access as well as voicemail, so when it dials up my entire network is online, then it e-mails the IP address it got to my PCS phone. Secure SLL webpage on that IP address lets me control all those devices directly (especially turning on other PCs), check my messages, or disconnect the network...
The real limiting factor I'd see in using it as an IVR system is more limited support of multi-line voice products, and the poor documentation and difficult programming for vgetty. I'm not sure there are any options other than vgetty.
Using vgetty in combination with packages like HylaFAX gives you easy ability to do fax-on-demand and other services like that.
I also used a system with three 14.4k voicemodems and vgetty as a way of validating information on a system that required the user give their true phone number. User was e-mailed a code to punch in after storing their supposed phone number and that code in a database. The voice system would use caller id and compare the code they entered with the code matching that number in the database. Match? Voila! Flag is set, account is activated.
Worked great, client never used it though. C'est la vie.
Okay this is easy. I'm assuming you're talking about dolby surround sound -- like what you get off TV and movies, the left, right, center and mono rear arrangement rather than the Dolby Digital 5.1 arrangement... doing the latter means having a licensed AC3 encoder.
Doing the former is a piece of cake. Surround sound is based on a simple concept of pulling two additional channels from the left and right channels. Center is easy -- anything that runs in the left and right channel at the same time, same amplitude, and so on, goes to the center channel. That's why you can turn the center channel off on a surround sound receiver and not really lose much.
The rear is just as simple. The rear is any sound thats identical in the left and right except the phase. Ie, one's the inverse of the other. So, to play sounds out your soundcard moving around the room, starting at the rear you'd output data like this: (assuming a mono source, where X is the 16 bit value for the current sample)
Left | Right ----------------- Left X | 0 Center X | X Right 0 | X Rear 65535-X| X
Does that make sense? You simply want to invert the data stream on one of the channels to send it to the rear.
Because Wine as an emulator is a worthless project. First time I ran wine was probably back in 1996 or 1997. It ran Solitaire. I installed a version a few weeks ago. Still ran Solitaire. Still doesn't run anything else.
Wine is borderline useful for taking existing Windows source code and getting it to run -- that's why Corel's interested in it. It'll *never* be able to run current-generation Windows applications. Why do you think WABI disappeared? Its too complex and difficult to emulate Windows -- its better to just run windows and emulate the PC. Microsoft or Anti-Microsoft, a windows license isn't that expensive if you really need to use it.
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Braile buttons or not, there's not very many ATM machines usable by the blind anyway.
I've never heard one voice prompt me...
Ugh, there's a lot of silly comments in here.
1) The thing requires the eye to be alive. Won't work with a goughed out eye anyway.
2) In comment to the guy talking about now someone will wait until you scan your eye and then shoot you or some such nonsense, WHERE ARE YOU LIVING? That happens all the time anyway.
This is so much more secure than an ATM card... the biggest valid problem I've heard with it was the fact that a parent doesn't have the option of telling their kid "go get me $40" or having a friend do it.
These, BTW, aren't anything new, its just the non-testing installation of it thats new. There've been a bunch of banks around the country doing it for a year or so on a testing basis, or at least so I remember reading last year.
Spend the $100 and buy VMWare...
:)
Being able to boot development Linux kernels in it, and have it read the drives from a virtual file means you can easily back up things, and its no big deal if it corrupts stuff.
Certainly quite a good idea for people actually doing kernel development.
Audiophiles have been known to love old and outdated technology?
:) Kinda like souping up your 1.5 mhz Atari 800 to run at 500mhz.
:)
I doubt that. If you look at the specs on that "old" technology so many high end audiophiles like (phonographs, tube amps) -- the specs on them are *nothing* like what was available in the respective technology's heyday. They are ultramodern versions of outdated technology.
Either way these things sound like crap. Technology no one liked when it was new people will likely still not be liked now.
21st century? What a joke. How come we keep getting essentially nothing but ads for lousy tech on here so often?
I've heard units like these before and they sound like crap. Beyond the inherant fact that wallboard doesn't conduct sound that well and tends to be a very dampening surface, you'd have problems with resonance in the airspace behind the wallboard, problems with the point that the wallboard touches the joists in the walls.
The only thing this sort of technology has ever been even remotely good at is providing a bit of rumble to people in their cars -- and even then, no serious auto audiophile would come near them.
A company called Aura makes/made them for cars. Bass-only because they're at least smart enough not to claim that heavy surfaces like that can conduct and transmit cleanly the higher frequencies into the air.
I think you make a good point -- the "taser" effect they're shooting for needs a circuit to do any good. With a normal taser, if you're missed by one of the probes, you're probably not going down.
;)
I wonder how they take care of that? Two lasers creating two conductive paths? I'd think the ionized air would stick around long enough outside the beam to short the circuit. I can't imagine they're hoping someone is going to be barefoot, or grounding themselves some other way...
Sounds like something that would make a hell of a security system -- two ionized beam paths in in a doorway, far enough apart not to short themselves, but close enough to give a good zap going through.
I'd bet these are more hazardous than they sound. I can't imagine the shock would do much through clothing, so they've got to aim for exposed skin -- ie, the face. I'd bet you'd have a hell of a lawsuit on your hands if a cop zapped you in the face with one of them and you ended up with blindness or seizures as a result.
(Mental note: wear goggles and a wetsuit next time I'm crossin' the cops!)
I think this article is interesting in how different it is from all the other articles out there on the PS2. Most have said Sony's target price was $300, without DVD playback capability (or rather with it purposefully disabled).
$300 seems low, but Sony's never been a company to sell their game machines for the profit -- they make their profit by being the only publisher of the games.
Everything I've read indicated that the lack of DVD playback was purely a pricing issue -- they didn't want to cut into their $300-$500 low-end DVD player sales. So maybe this higher price (although I'd hope not *that* high) is the result of a guess on their part that they may sell more of them at a bit higher price that includes the DVD support than without it, without hurting their $300 DVD player market.
I for one hope they have the DVD support. Sure, some people may then have two, but how many people have more than one CD player? Lots I'd guess.
Just because USB 2.0 isn't ratified doesn't mean that can't possibly have test implementations of it.
And there doesn't seem to be any sort of inconsistancy with the FSB rates. They're exactly what every media story has mentioned for the associated chips, 200mhz for the K7 and 133 for the PIII.
Go back and reread the article.
Point 4:
They're much better than that. Hell, they'll admit they're much better than that. A few weeks ago on Good Morning America (a morning show on the ABC network for you non-US people), there was a gentleman who was showing the spy-sat pictures of the gravesites. He said several interesting things. First off he said they'd signficantly blurred the images to hide what the satellites were capable of imaging (because he was saying they could actually count the bodies, even though the images he was showing couldn't). And he gave an example of a quality he could admit they had -- and held his hands apart about 18 inches or so, and said they could see both hands from orbit.
Do the math. Figure 18 inches apart is half a meter. To see its *two* objects that far apart -- and differentiate them, you'd need twice that resolution.
So the military is willing to admit to 1/4 meter resolution satellites. That's a hell of a lot more detailed than 1+ meter images that this non-military satellite had, and no comparison to the crap on the terraserver website. And you know they wouldn't admit to the best quality they had.
That's not the problem. If Rob could send that 1 meg file in anything close to 5 seconds, there'd be no problem. The issue is the number of httpd processes that can be running at a time (on most servers somewhere around 100 with Apache), and the fact that it takes two or three minutes to grab that file over a modem. If you want to do the math, this is the right math:
Minute #1: 50 new users on modems
Minute #2: Those first 50 users (still) + 50 more
Oops, 100 users, we can't fork that many httpd processes. Some have to wait!
Minute #3: Half those first minute users are done, they've got good 56k connections... maybe a dozen or two people can get back in and start transfers...
See the problem? You get stuck, its like a traffic jam -- once it gets started it takes ages for it to correct itself. 12 connections per second over the course of a minute to 56k modem users comes just under the point where a T3 would begin to be saturated.
Its important to remember that its not just number of connections that causes web performance problems, its the number of connections from slow users. Slashdot's problem is not hit-rate... look at the stats for the last 24 hours -- if anything the hit rate seems low. Its the time it takes the processes to free up.
Ach, you're right. My bad, I forgot about that. Stupid, especially since I've set up networks like that before, although not to solve that problem... I never thought about using it that way, when you're not actually even aiming to cache the page itself, just the sending of the page.
I usually design network architectures for high volume of small hits not large hits, which is why I hadn't thought that through. Good bit to file away in the back of my head though!
5MB seems high for apache -- you sure thats taking into account the shared code between apache processes? I'd figured the overhead at more like a meg and a half... but then, I'm not running mod_perl in any of my servers.
That doesn't work -- the pages aren't static between users right now. Notice if you're logged in, your username shows up on the page, and there are a multitude of combinations of settings that can make pages show up differently. The only fix is to restructure the page URLs, content, and options to allow cacheable pages, or use Sybase or something like that and multiple front end servers that can handle dynamic pages...
The problem isn't the OS, the problem is users on modems downloading large files. The way Slashdot's pages are put together, a caching proxy in front of the server (like cachedot) doesn't work, because even pages that really don't need any variance (or much variance) in content among users still have differences that keep caching from happening. My username (tgd) shows up on the page, even though it doesn't really need to be there.
Best way to improve performance other than using a more robust database and multiple servers that can generate dynamic pages is to restrict the number of possible combinations that a subpage can fall into, get rid of the stuff thats different between two users who have the same page settings (ie, get rid of the user-specific stuff), and make sure whatever differentiates it is in the PATH_INFO part of the URL so it caches, and the caching proxy doesn't think its a form submission. I bet Slashdot's got enough clout to get a donation of little ones from Corel or some place like that to throw Squid on.
Only the homepage really needs to be different per-user. The rest of the site should be comment pages in various combinations (for each of the sort methods, and a handful of comment options... moderator pages could be served by bypassing the cache servers... Even if every page was served to the proxy with a two or three minute timeout, you'd get good performance, and could spread the load on long-download pages among a few more servers... getting a few hundred simultaneous downloads instead of 70 (which seems low anyway... Apache can usually grok more than that, although maybe the mod_perl stuff can't...)
There was a discussion yesterday on the autoLinux mailing list about in-home MP3 players.
One of the things we discussed on there was building lower-cost ($200-$300) units using embedded biscuit PC's with slow 486 processors and external decoders (for sound quality), and essentially sticking the linux kernel configured to boot via NFS into the flash.
No harddrive, and keep the MP3's and software on the network. A lot of us have pretty big networks at home, seems a good way to keep all the MP3's together, and use them from multiple locations.
You could also fit it in a much smaller case. One of the people on the list mentioned those PC-on-a-SIMM devices as a possible host.
I think its a good idea to pull it. Mozilla's got quite a bit of feature bloat for a product that doesn't even really work yet. Seems silly to add yet another thing to take the focus off turning it into a real product. That's probably not *why* they did it, but its a good reason, IMHO.
Although M4 does render pages nicely. Too bad the UI is still broken, and its rendering fonts so small as to be unreadable most of the time.
There was an article posted here on Slashdot a month or two ago about doing it. Its probably using the same technology. (Ie, a holographic lens over an LCD screen to divert segments of the image to each eye) Alternately they might be doing it the old fashioned way, having a plastic lens over the screen like you'd see on those 3-D baseball cards.
I'd guess its the former. Using head tracking you could shift position of the holographic lens to keep the images meeting the proper eyes as the position of the head changes. Having experimented with those plastic lenses over monitors before, that's definately an issue -- you'll get the correct image at certain "sweet spots", but they alternate with areas where the image gets reversed. Looking at it in one of those spots gives me a headache.
I think its interesting that they kept saying that three "jupiter-sized" planets were around the star, when in fact its three jupiter-massed planets. Without knowing what they're made of (which they can't do yet -- can't get spectral readings from stuff that close to the star AFAIK), they can't really say what *size* they are.
As gas giants seem to be of the same general origin as stars, but without the mass or energy to sustain or start a fusion process, I'd think it'd be a lot more interesting if these jupiter *massed* planets were (because of their proximity to the star) actually much smaller, but more massive solid planets, or at least more substantially solid planets.
Seems that would tell us something that we don't know -- how common rocky planetary formation happens.
How about:
Software person 3: writes a perl script to remove all the newlines
:)
Which is the bigger pain in the ass, that's the question!
Its too bad that image is so blurry. Looks neat, though. I wonder what that flip-up thing was on the right, it almost looks like an LCD panel.
:)
:)
I think Sony's going to end up with a great system here. Especially if they decide to include the ability to play DVD movies. (Which several places I've read have said they may choose not to, even though all the hardware is there...)
Even better would be if they played DVD video and DVD audio discs, but given Sony's stance on DVD Audio, I'd guess that's not very likely.
I wonder how capable it'll be, given those hardware specs, to function as a client into more immersive universal VR game/interaction spaces. Seems to me the real thing holding back the beginning of "worlds" like described in fiction books like Snow Crash and such is front-end hardware powerful enough and widespread enough to provide the interface.
Seems the world is changing pretty quickly.
I just hope they have Gran Tourismo for it.
Yes its possible. Pretty easy to set up too, once you've got vgetty working with your voicemodem. You need a voicemodem that works with Linux and vgetty though (most voicemodems these days seem to be winmodems...)
I shied away from dynamic DNS and just e-mail the number to my pcs phone.
One tip -- make sure you have an activity timeout on it, so if you dial it up accidently, or you (for whatever reason) don't get the dynamic DNS to update or get the e-mail that you can still cause it to disconnect.
Throw a secure webserver on there, and just make some simple CGI's to trigger a delay to bring the machine back off the network.
On my system I've got an X10 automation setup too, so I can remotely turn on other systems in my apartment. (Useful if I'm a bonehead and leave a file I need at home...)
I was very impressed with the Festival software. Anyone looking for speech synthesis should definately take a peek at it. Text-to-speech isn't quite as nice in it as the speech synthesis itself, but its not bad.
:)
Its a system-hog though. I tried to use it to read e-mails to me through my voice system (see my other posting in here about it), but I found it took several minutes per message to put the audio together... Hardly worth it. Hell, my system is so slow, even using say to generate timestamps is too slow.
Its very possible.
;)
I've currently got an old 486/50 DX running Linux 2.2.5 at home that handles voicemail for me using mgetty and some custom shell scripts. (Unfortunately I was never able to get get vgetty perl module working... its very old and there's almost no docs for it...)
Its pretty slick. People calling can leave voice messages or faxes. I've got it set up so either one gets packaged up in a mime attachment to my e-mail and queued to send to me. Next time the system is online it sends them off. If they sit there more than two hours it'll dial itself up and send them and get back offline. Also archives them so I can get them through a web browser on any systems in my apartment, or I can just hit the reset switch on the front of the system (which is plugged into the parallel port) and it plays any new messages for me. The turbo light blinks when I've got new messages.
I can also control all the X10 stuff in my apartment (mostly useful for options #1 -- turn off all the halogen lights, and #2 -- turn of coffee pot, both reducing the chances that my spacing out one morning will result in my apartment burning down)
Last thing I can do is use it to cause my network to dial up. The system handles my masquerading and internet access as well as voicemail, so when it dials up my entire network is online, then it e-mails the IP address it got to my PCS phone. Secure SLL webpage on that IP address lets me control all those devices directly (especially turning on other PCs), check my messages, or disconnect the network...
The real limiting factor I'd see in using it as an IVR system is more limited support of multi-line voice products, and the poor documentation and difficult programming for vgetty. I'm not sure there are any options other than vgetty.
Using vgetty in combination with packages like HylaFAX gives you easy ability to do fax-on-demand and other services like that.
I also used a system with three 14.4k voicemodems and vgetty as a way of validating information on a system that required the user give their true phone number. User was e-mailed a code to punch in after storing their supposed phone number and that code in a database. The voice system would use caller id and compare the code they entered with the code matching that number in the database. Match? Voila! Flag is set, account is activated.
Worked great, client never used it though. C'est la vie.
Okay this is easy. I'm assuming you're talking about dolby surround sound -- like what you get off TV and movies, the left, right, center and mono rear arrangement rather than the Dolby Digital 5.1 arrangement... doing the latter means having a licensed AC3 encoder.
Doing the former is a piece of cake. Surround sound is based on a simple concept of pulling two additional channels from the left and right channels. Center is easy -- anything that runs in the left and right channel at the same time, same amplitude, and so on, goes to the center channel. That's why you can turn the center channel off on a surround sound receiver and not really lose much.
The rear is just as simple. The rear is any sound thats identical in the left and right except the phase. Ie, one's the inverse of the other. So, to play sounds out your soundcard moving around the room, starting at the rear you'd output data like this: (assuming a mono source, where X is the 16 bit value for the current sample)
Left | Right
-----------------
Left X | 0
Center X | X
Right 0 | X
Rear 65535-X| X
Does that make sense? You simply want to invert the data stream on one of the channels to send it to the rear.
The real question is why half the readers can remember that, but the posters can't?
Because Wine as an emulator is a worthless project. First time I ran wine was probably back in 1996 or 1997. It ran Solitaire. I installed a version a few weeks ago. Still ran Solitaire. Still doesn't run anything else.
Wine is borderline useful for taking existing Windows source code and getting it to run -- that's why Corel's interested in it. It'll *never* be able to run current-generation Windows applications. Why do you think WABI disappeared? Its too complex and difficult to emulate Windows -- its better to just run windows and emulate the PC. Microsoft or Anti-Microsoft, a windows license isn't that expensive if you really need to use it.