Public access cable in NYC is usually the most interesting thing on TV. It's not really comparable to public access cable in other cities - many of the shows are well-produced. Some are certainly bizarre, but even the worst are better than 90% of commercial TV.
Amen to that. I think that if I start a hacker group, I'll call it Bob. Or maybe Alowishus.
Aloysius. It's Aloysius not "Alowishus," thus making Aloysius the most hilariously spelled name in addition to being the second-most hilariously pronounced name (behind only Dick Butkus.)
The Asterix comics are based on stereotypes. The same thing could be said about the French, Italians, Belgians, Corsicans, Spaniards, Greeks, Arabs, English, Swiss, Germans, etc...
That's not also racist? Asterix is all crap stereotypes - it is racist trash. (Perhaps ethnist would be a better word? I mean racist in the sense of stereotyping people by their origin, not just skin colour.)
You are thinking about Tintin which is sometimes racist.
Tintin is also racist, but I am talking about Asterix and Obelix.
FYI, it is a (apparently not so) well known fact that Asterix and Obelix have add more to the knowledge of classical history then classical education. You can actually learn stuff from Asterix.
Right, like how Africans are big-lipped, easily-cowed savages. Asterix and Obelix is racist trash - there's a reason you don't see it much in the US outside foreign language courses (and even there one only sees the most sanitized version).
The manufacturer already knows which VIN goes to who. The bank knows the VIN of the car since it issues the loan. Your state government knows the VIN of your car when you register it. Your insurance company knows your VIN and everything about your car from it. Everytime you bring your car to the dealer they they note the work done by your VIN so the manufacturer can notice any major problems. So how is this going to take away from your privacy?
Because the RFID tags can be read remotely, making it possible, effectively, to read your VIN remotely. Of course your state already has your VIN - that's what creates the privacy bugaboo. If the RFID in the tires is associated with the VIN, a sensor in or near the roadway could read the VIN of passing cars. There are existing RFID systems that can identify vehicles remotely (e.g. EZPass toll collection systems), but EZPass is optional and obvious (in that one has to sign up for EZPass, and the tag is mounted in the windscreen area). This is an RFID tag embedded in a tire - it's not like you sign up for it seperately. THAT'S the issue.
The problem is the NTSC and PAL standards, which are a completely different on how the colour component of the picture works. If you don't sort this out, you'll be watching black and white. To fix it, you need either a multi-standard television, capable of using PAL and NTSC, or a DVD player and TV that has component video (e.g. RGB) which doesn't use PAL/NTSC to encode the colour information.
No.
The important difference between PAL and NTSC discs is the frame (really, field) rate of the encoded MPEG2 stream: ~59.9 fps for NTSC, 50 for PAL.
Also, the type of component outputs available differ depending on region - US component outputs are explicitly NTSC (Luma [y], and two Chroma channels [Cr, Cb]), not RGB. This is a requirement of DVDCCA licensing, actually. Why? RGB signals can't carry macrovision! Seriously, that's why no US (non-computer) DVD player has an RGB output.
RGB output exists on just about every DVD player in the UK, though, through the SCART output. Why? Got me. I guess most or all UK VCRs can't record the RGB signal. Neither can US VCRs, so who knows what logic's at work here.
Anyhow, all region-free DVD players I've seen in the US will perform the necessary frame rate conversion for you - my cheap Apex player certainly does.
Appropriately enough, I use the region-free capabilities of my DVD player for watching... Futurama, which is only available on DVD in Region 2.
I don't know that it wasn't nvidia - I just doubt that it was, based on the cooling requirements. Those opteron systems had some pretty fancy cooling to dissipate a lot of heat in a 1U case. I could be wrong, of course.
Are these really the first Linux graphics drivers for Hammer? Surely XFree86 and other graphics systems like the kernel framebuffer are already being ported?
They are not the first. I saw at least one Opteron-based 1U system running XFree in the AMD booth at SC2002, just a few weeks ago. No idea what the video/driver subsystems were like (maybe fbdev?).
Wouldn't be surprised if this was the first x86-64 driver to support hardware accelleration though.
This research is outdated; It is based on the older Ricochet system that used 900 MHz unlicensed spectrum for both client-to-poletop and poletop-to-poletop backhaul. The newer system puts poletop-to-poletop communications over the unlicensed 2.4GHz ISM band and/or the 2.5 GHz licensed wireless data services spectrum.
The newer system gives the poletops more bandwidth and keeps the poletop-to-poletop backhaul from stepping on the client radio transmissions.
Real-world maximum TCP and UDP throughput on the newer system approached 300kbps by my measurements. (That's going from a client radio directly to a wired poletop w/ no p-t-p backhaul.) More typical speeds were between 128-160kbps.
I found Ricochet generally more than adequate for 64kbps shoutcast/icecast streams. Under good conditions, 96kbps streams were rock steady - not bad! I frequently used Ricochet to listen to my old college radio station (some 3000 miles away) when I lived in Berkeley.
I hope to see the system come back; it worked well, (better than advertised) and provided something like the wireless equivalent of an ISDN line, more or less, for a flat $70/month, which was reasonable to me. At $45 it's a no-brainer.
IIRC, there used to be a very strong pro-NT camp at Digital Domain. They were tireless and strident in their belief that anything Unix could do, NT could do better, claiming that the success of Titanic, for example, was due to NT. Or some such rot.
Ah, memories...
My stint at D2 was brief, largely on account of a certain NT-fanatic manager. Often I would find little presents from this guy on my desk - once I got a photocopied article from NT World suggesting that the future of systems administration was Windows NT-only environments and XLNT. Yes, he was snowed by some astroturf review of a commercial re-implementation of the VMS DCL scripting langauge.
This guy ended up driving away most of the systems staff, including myself, over a very short time period. The VP interviewed in the article made tossing this guy out one of his first acts - unfortunately, I was already gone by then; I'm sure d2's a better place to work now.
Cray's pushing the X1 right now. SGI does have a lot of O300 and O3000-series hardware including the 3900 (which is just an Origin 3000 using super-dense CPU bricks - 16 cpus per 4u, compared to the previous 4).
I've been hanging out at SC2002 all day, and I can tell you that nearly every booth on the show floor is showcasing Linux. Of course all the Linux cluster vendors have it, but so does sgi, Sun, IBM, Intel, AMD, HP, Compaq (separate booths - guess the merger isn't *really* done yet), and all the smaller vendors, to say nothing of all the research labs, etc.
Large linux systems and clusters are really all the rage right now in SC circles. I think the only booths I saw here not using Linux were the Apple booth (though they did have one gorgeous brand-new G4 running Xfree and twm, the sick bastards!) and the Japanese manufacturers NEC and Fujitsu (off in their own worlds, as always).
Linux isn't a big surprise to the SC set, though - this is a group that's used to UNIX. Hell, Microsoft doesn't even have a booth here, and they were at the last LinuxWorld conference.
You must be talking about music CD's, because I buy a lot of CD's that contain computer code that cost upwards of 100 dollars, I've even seen some of these CD's that go for upwards of 10,000 dollars. This leads me to believe I'm not paying for a CD...
Right - you're not buying anything. You're licensing data, subject to contractual restrictions (EULA). A music CD purchase is not subject to such contractual restrictions. Granted, buying an audio CD does not give one the copyright to the sound recording, but it is most definitely a sale of goods (in the legal sense).
Point is, the contract one agrees to with software specifies that you haven't purchased anything, but have merely licensed some code and data. Clauses restricting resale, etc are commonplace - contrast with an audio CD where the first sale doctrine applies. Why? Audio CDs are goods that are sold, not licensed. (Unless they are licensed for a specific purpose and are provided under contract - but we're talking mass-market CD sales.)
Why not use AMD anyway? There are xeon motherboards with chipsets like the Intel E7500 and ServerWorks GC-HE that have greater memory bandwidth and PCI bandwidth than the AMD 760MPX. For many problems in scientific computing, memory bandwidth is what is important, not CPU speed.
I'd also add that a lot more time has been put into optimizing compilers for intel processors than for AMD. The differences really come out in computationally intensive situations.
Actually, the late 1800's was when technology affected human lives (at least in America) the most.
Even discounting the effects of the automobile, airplane, and computer, the 20th century brought us widespread vaccination and antibiotics. I think those are at least as important to most people as the railroad and telegraph were.
I predict the de-evolution of the human species in the next one hundered years due to this product as the smart people refuse to leave their homes and breed. The top inteligencia will die off and leave only the sub-humans behind. Repeat and Rinse until we decide to head back into the trees again.
<GENERAL BOY>In the past, this information has been surpressed - but now every man, woman, and mutant shall know the truth about de-evolution!</GENERAL BOY>
It's practically high school economics, if not something that can be conveyed to middle school kids. Debt is sometimes excellent financial policy. Debt is not automatically stupid, though a failure to understand that while claiming intellectual superiority is undoubtedly stupid.
Paying off debt absolutely trumps saving right now. There is no investment vehicle making returns in the 6.5-8.5% range, which is what most college loans run - so one is better off applying extra cash to paying down that debt as quickly as possible. (It goes without saying that eliminating credit card debt should be priority 1 for anyone unfortunate enough to be carrying it.)
IMO, only the extraordinarily naive would be investing in stocks right now - maybe when the DJIA hits 5000. I'm betting the indices keep dropping over the next year or so, then take a good 5 years (or more) to work its way back up to late-2000 levels.
No one should be allowed to run for re-election if they *EVER* voted in a bill that became an unconstitutional law. The president should be impeached (even if he doesn't get kicked out) for signing a new law which violates the highest in this country. [...] At the very least congress-persons should be suspended for a period immediately after.
Worst idea I've heard all day. What makes you think the selection of nominees for the US Supreme Court is an objective and meritocratic process, not a political one?
Your idea is a recipe for one-party rule; the party that controls both the presidency and senate when a critical mass of supreme court appointments are made would become forever dominant - as the Supreme Court could (with the help of some well-funded partisan activists to file suits) just boot members of the opposition party out of office willy-nilly.
I'm not one of those people that believes the judiciary has too much power - but this would be going too far.
The reasons we chose Solaris are... Sun's hardware (really stable with a nice hardware-monitoring from the OS => we can detect a Power supply failure before it has some productive consequences)
I've got eight (nine?) words for you: 400 MHz UltraSPARC II with 8 meg ecache.
I'm guessing you started working with Sun hardware sometime after that particular debacle.
The most stable hardware I've had the pleasure of working with was (pre-Compaq) DEC AlphaServers. I recall one particularly hard-working pair that had some 637 days of uptime (basically, they had been working non-stop since they were first built) - the only reason we had to reboot them was to apply Y2K patches. No cache-coherency problems there.
I got caught last year and had to pay (about) $30 to go to a "computer usage" workshop for an hour. 20 minutes of the hour were spent watching an episode of Futorama.
Fascinating! I'm sure News Corporation, and its subsidiary, 20th Century Fox Television, would LOVE to know that the University of Central Florida is publicly exhibiting their intellectual property for profit.
You really want a commercial GPS nav unit with voice prompting. You might be able to kludge something in Linux, but it won't work well, won't have an easy and low-distraction interface, and will take your eyes off the road. Commercial products (not PC software, but GPS nav systems from Alpine & others) have pretty good datasets and voice prompting, etc.
A PC in the car makes sense as a jukebox, but you should really consider just getting an off-the-shelf mapping system. (A side benefit to this is that you may be able to use the video input to the head unit for the map as a monitor for your pc)
Just as Johnson & Johnson lost its grip on "Band-Aid" which is now a synonym for bandage.
If you think so, just try marketing a bandage called "Band-Aid" - Johnson & Johnson's well-funded legal department would be on your ass directly. Similarly, Kimberly-Clark ain't gonna let you sell "Kleenex" facial tissues. Xerox won't let you market "Xerox" machines. The Thermos company will lay the legal hurt on you if you try to sell vacuum insulated bottles by that name.
The only former trademarks I can think of that have actually lost their protection are "Asprin" and "Heroin," which were both US trademarks belonging to Bayer AG until 1919 when the IP rights to these two "wonder drugs" were ceded in the Treaty of Versailles, NOT because they became generic terms. Aspirin became a generic term because the trademark was stripped, not the other way around.
Thanks for filling in my faulty memory - On further reflection, I think there was a guy from Magi there - at least, I distinctly remember a person in that discussion talking about coding for an S/360 mainframe. Maybe there was more that one FX guy at the roundtable, or I could be pulling Tim McGovern's name from somewhere else.
I bet that cray assembly is a pain - I really can't even imagine how to begin approaching the problems of hand-coding and -optimization for a large vector processor like the Cray.
Disney actually has a few 70mm prints of TRON (complete w/ remastered multi-channel digital soundtrack). They were struck in 1999, for some reason, and shown at the El Capitan (a one-screen Hollywood movie palace owned by Disney). They looked gorgeous, although they did reveal the limits of the source material. (Fun factoids: the scenes with live actors inside the computer were filmed in 70mm black and white, then blown up to cel size for rotoscoping/effects work, and re-shot on an animation stand. The computer animation was rendered on an IBM System 360 mainframe with custom software by Abel Systems.)
OT: Before the screening there was a little round-table discussion and Q/A session with Steven Lisburger (writer/director), Bruce Boxleitner (who played Alan/Tron), Cindy Morgan (who played Lora/Yori), and one of the Abel systems people who made all those computer animated sequences possible - I think it was Tim McGovern. The director mentioned that he always thought of TRON as "the Bill Gates story" - i.e. the plucky young programmer breaking the shackles of centralized control (IBM). He said a lot of other stuff I didn't care about - I always hated the actual plot and acting of the film - but at least the Abel Systems guy got to talk a bit about doing CGI in 1982.
What happened to an actual geosynchronous satelite, a lunar probe, or even an amateur manned space shot?
Remember that we are talking "amateur" as in "amateur radio," not in the more general context of "non-professional." AMSAT as an organization is concerned with launching satellites for the use of amateur radio operators, not with putting a man in space or a probe on the moon.
I might also point out that the reason why there are no AMSATs in geostationary orbit has more to do with the fact that (useful) geostationary orbital slots are a scarce resource than anything else. AMSAT 3-D was launched into a geosynchronous transfer orbit (presumably as a piggyback on something else going to geosync) but its final orbit is highly elliptical, a useful orbit that is not at all scarce.
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Public access cable in NYC is usually the most interesting thing on TV. It's not really comparable to public access cable in other cities - many of the shows are well-produced. Some are certainly bizarre, but even the worst are better than 90% of commercial TV.
-Isaac
Aloysius. It's Aloysius not "Alowishus," thus making Aloysius the most hilariously spelled name in addition to being the second-most hilariously pronounced name (behind only Dick Butkus.)
-Isaac
That's not also racist? Asterix is all crap stereotypes - it is racist trash. (Perhaps ethnist would be a better word? I mean racist in the sense of stereotyping people by their origin, not just skin colour.)
Tintin is also racist, but I am talking about Asterix and Obelix.
-Isaac
Right, like how Africans are big-lipped, easily-cowed savages. Asterix and Obelix is racist trash - there's a reason you don't see it much in the US outside foreign language courses (and even there one only sees the most sanitized version).
-Isaac
-Isaac
No.
The important difference between PAL and NTSC discs is the frame (really, field) rate of the encoded MPEG2 stream: ~59.9 fps for NTSC, 50 for PAL.
Also, the type of component outputs available differ depending on region - US component outputs are explicitly NTSC (Luma [y], and two Chroma channels [Cr, Cb]), not RGB. This is a requirement of DVDCCA licensing, actually. Why? RGB signals can't carry macrovision! Seriously, that's why no US (non-computer) DVD player has an RGB output. RGB output exists on just about every DVD player in the UK, though, through the SCART output. Why? Got me. I guess most or all UK VCRs can't record the RGB signal. Neither can US VCRs, so who knows what logic's at work here.
Anyhow, all region-free DVD players I've seen in the US will perform the necessary frame rate conversion for you - my cheap Apex player certainly does.
Appropriately enough, I use the region-free capabilities of my DVD player for watching... Futurama, which is only available on DVD in Region 2.
-Isaac
I don't know that it wasn't nvidia - I just doubt that it was, based on the cooling requirements. Those opteron systems had some pretty fancy cooling to dissipate a lot of heat in a 1U case. I could be wrong, of course.
They are not the first. I saw at least one Opteron-based 1U system running XFree in the AMD booth at SC2002, just a few weeks ago. No idea what the video/driver subsystems were like (maybe fbdev?).
Wouldn't be surprised if this was the first x86-64 driver to support hardware accelleration though.
-Isaac
This research is outdated; It is based on the older Ricochet system that used 900 MHz unlicensed spectrum for both client-to-poletop and poletop-to-poletop backhaul. The newer system puts poletop-to-poletop communications over the unlicensed 2.4GHz ISM band and/or the 2.5 GHz licensed wireless data services spectrum.
The newer system gives the poletops more bandwidth and keeps the poletop-to-poletop backhaul from stepping on the client radio transmissions.
Real-world maximum TCP and UDP throughput on the newer system approached 300kbps by my measurements. (That's going from a client radio directly to a wired poletop w/ no p-t-p backhaul.) More typical speeds were between 128-160kbps.
I found Ricochet generally more than adequate for 64kbps shoutcast/icecast streams. Under good conditions, 96kbps streams were rock steady - not bad! I frequently used Ricochet to listen to my old college radio station (some 3000 miles away) when I lived in Berkeley.
I hope to see the system come back; it worked well, (better than advertised) and provided something like the wireless equivalent of an ISDN line, more or less, for a flat $70/month, which was reasonable to me. At $45 it's a no-brainer.
-Isaac
Ah, memories...
My stint at D2 was brief, largely on account of a certain NT-fanatic manager. Often I would find little presents from this guy on my desk - once I got a photocopied article from NT World suggesting that the future of systems administration was Windows NT-only environments and XLNT. Yes, he was snowed by some astroturf review of a commercial re-implementation of the VMS DCL scripting langauge.
This guy ended up driving away most of the systems staff, including myself, over a very short time period. The VP interviewed in the article made tossing this guy out one of his first acts - unfortunately, I was already gone by then; I'm sure d2's a better place to work now.
-Isaac
Cray's pushing the X1 right now. SGI does have a lot of O300 and O3000-series hardware including the 3900 (which is just an Origin 3000 using super-dense CPU bricks - 16 cpus per 4u, compared to the previous 4).
I've been hanging out at SC2002 all day, and I can tell you that nearly every booth on the show floor is showcasing Linux. Of course all the Linux cluster vendors have it, but so does sgi, Sun, IBM, Intel, AMD, HP, Compaq (separate booths - guess the merger isn't *really* done yet), and all the smaller vendors, to say nothing of all the research labs, etc.
Large linux systems and clusters are really all the rage right now in SC circles. I think the only booths I saw here not using Linux were the Apple booth (though they did have one gorgeous brand-new G4 running Xfree and twm, the sick bastards!) and the Japanese manufacturers NEC and Fujitsu (off in their own worlds, as always).
Linux isn't a big surprise to the SC set, though - this is a group that's used to UNIX. Hell, Microsoft doesn't even have a booth here, and they were at the last LinuxWorld conference.
-Isaac
I'd also add that a lot more time has been put into optimizing compilers for intel processors than for AMD. The differences really come out in computationally intensive situations.
-Isaac
Even discounting the effects of the automobile, airplane, and computer, the 20th century brought us widespread vaccination and antibiotics. I think those are at least as important to most people as the railroad and telegraph were.
-Isaac
<GENERAL BOY>In the past, this information has been surpressed - but now every man, woman, and mutant shall know the truth about de-evolution!</GENERAL BOY>
<BOOJI BOY>Oh, Dad! We're all Devo!</BOOJI BOY>
Paying off debt absolutely trumps saving right now. There is no investment vehicle making returns in the 6.5-8.5% range, which is what most college loans run - so one is better off applying extra cash to paying down that debt as quickly as possible. (It goes without saying that eliminating credit card debt should be priority 1 for anyone unfortunate enough to be carrying it.)
IMO, only the extraordinarily naive would be investing in stocks right now - maybe when the DJIA hits 5000. I'm betting the indices keep dropping over the next year or so, then take a good 5 years (or more) to work its way back up to late-2000 levels.
-Isaac
Worst idea I've heard all day. What makes you think the selection of nominees for the US Supreme Court is an objective and meritocratic process, not a political one?
Your idea is a recipe for one-party rule; the party that controls both the presidency and senate when a critical mass of supreme court appointments are made would become forever dominant - as the Supreme Court could (with the help of some well-funded partisan activists to file suits) just boot members of the opposition party out of office willy-nilly.
I'm not one of those people that believes the judiciary has too much power - but this would be going too far.
-Isaac
I've got eight (nine?) words for you: 400 MHz UltraSPARC II with 8 meg ecache.
I'm guessing you started working with Sun hardware sometime after that particular debacle.
The most stable hardware I've had the pleasure of working with was (pre-Compaq) DEC AlphaServers. I recall one particularly hard-working pair that had some 637 days of uptime (basically, they had been working non-stop since they were first built) - the only reason we had to reboot them was to apply Y2K patches. No cache-coherency problems there.
-Isaac
Fascinating! I'm sure News Corporation, and its subsidiary, 20th Century Fox Television, would LOVE to know that the University of Central Florida is publicly exhibiting their intellectual property for profit.
I wonder if UCF has a license for that material?
-Isaac
You really want a commercial GPS nav unit with voice prompting. You might be able to kludge something in Linux, but it won't work well, won't have an easy and low-distraction interface, and will take your eyes off the road. Commercial products (not PC software, but GPS nav systems from Alpine & others) have pretty good datasets and voice prompting, etc.
A PC in the car makes sense as a jukebox, but you should really consider just getting an off-the-shelf mapping system. (A side benefit to this is that you may be able to use the video input to the head unit for the map as a monitor for your pc)
-Isaac
If you think so, just try marketing a bandage called "Band-Aid" - Johnson & Johnson's well-funded legal department would be on your ass directly. Similarly, Kimberly-Clark ain't gonna let you sell "Kleenex" facial tissues. Xerox won't let you market "Xerox" machines. The Thermos company will lay the legal hurt on you if you try to sell vacuum insulated bottles by that name.
The only former trademarks I can think of that have actually lost their protection are "Asprin" and "Heroin," which were both US trademarks belonging to Bayer AG until 1919 when the IP rights to these two "wonder drugs" were ceded in the Treaty of Versailles, NOT because they became generic terms. Aspirin became a generic term because the trademark was stripped, not the other way around.
-Isaac
Thanks for filling in my faulty memory - On further reflection, I think there was a guy from Magi there - at least, I distinctly remember a person in that discussion talking about coding for an S/360 mainframe. Maybe there was more that one FX guy at the roundtable, or I could be pulling Tim McGovern's name from somewhere else.
I bet that cray assembly is a pain - I really can't even imagine how to begin approaching the problems of hand-coding and -optimization for a large vector processor like the Cray.
-Isaac
Disney actually has a few 70mm prints of TRON (complete w/ remastered multi-channel digital soundtrack). They were struck in 1999, for some reason, and shown at the El Capitan (a one-screen Hollywood movie palace owned by Disney). They looked gorgeous, although they did reveal the limits of the source material. (Fun factoids: the scenes with live actors inside the computer were filmed in 70mm black and white, then blown up to cel size for rotoscoping/effects work, and re-shot on an animation stand. The computer animation was rendered on an IBM System 360 mainframe with custom software by Abel Systems.)
OT:
Before the screening there was a little round-table discussion and Q/A session with Steven Lisburger (writer/director), Bruce Boxleitner (who played Alan/Tron), Cindy Morgan (who played Lora/Yori), and one of the Abel systems people who made all those computer animated sequences possible - I think it was Tim McGovern. The director mentioned that he always thought of TRON as "the Bill Gates story" - i.e. the plucky young programmer breaking the shackles of centralized control (IBM). He said a lot of other stuff I didn't care about - I always hated the actual plot and acting of the film - but at least the Abel Systems guy got to talk a bit about doing CGI in 1982.
-Isaac
Remember that we are talking "amateur" as in "amateur radio," not in the more general context of "non-professional." AMSAT as an organization is concerned with launching satellites for the use of amateur radio operators, not with putting a man in space or a probe on the moon.
I might also point out that the reason why there are no AMSATs in geostationary orbit has more to do with the fact that (useful) geostationary orbital slots are a scarce resource than anything else. AMSAT 3-D was launched into a geosynchronous transfer orbit (presumably as a piggyback on something else going to geosync) but its final orbit is highly elliptical, a useful orbit that is not at all scarce.
-Isaac