So how long before they begin to be used in baseball games? The catcher's job is not a nice one, seems to be a good candidate for replacement by a robot.
Well I kinda doubt that you can watch much video on it, although maybe if it was a dedicated task without any other processes running... it's only something like a Geode running at 200Mhz, but I forget exactly.
I just use the built-in browser, haven't loaded much custom software on it (being QNX rather than Linux, there just isn't as much available). But just having a browser in unlikely places is very useful - I can google or look up recipes or display movie times when we're trying to decide what to do for the evening or find things quickly on yp.yahoo.com or get a map and directions. For home-automation I haven't gotten much farther than some PHP scripts which present buttons to turn lights on and off, so far. (Cron jobs are running the pool pump and certain lights every day, but I don't have a UI for changing that.) At one point I had PHP controlling the volume on the server's sound card, and then had the server's audio out going to an amp that had speakers in the kitchen, so I could start up XMMS on the server and then remote-control the volume. But I planned to have a much better remote-controlled jukebox some day, just haven't gotten around to it. The Audrey's audio output is not really that great to play through a bigger stereo - there is some hiss all the time, and if you hook up the phone jack to a phone line, the noise gets worse, and it puts noise on the phone line, too. I had hoped to use one for music all by itself in the bedroom but it's not good enough, so I got a Rio Receiver instead (and that turned into such a drawn-out hacking process that it's still not useful yet).
I had a vgetty-based voicemail system working for a while, and was using php scripts to permit browsing voice messages and playing them on the audrey. But now I'm trying to switch to asterisk and do voip so that stuff's all going to change.
I also had some php/rrd/digitemp temperature graphs. Need to get that going again but now I'm using owfs instead of digitemp - much better for dealing with multiple sensors on the same one-wire bus.
Realistically if you just want to do home-automation without programming it yourself (like I do) just get MisterHouse. I think you can use it from any plain old browser.
The Audrey browser does have an old version of Flash FWIW, but not Java.
(Yes the article did mention it.) It's the best thing since CorelDraw and happens to be free, cross-platform, and uses pure standards-compliant SVG. And does alpha very well - something Corel didn't do in the early days.
I still have to use Dia sometimes though for more structured drawings. Somebody ought to work on building something like Visio but using Inkscape as a basis. The programs probably shouldn't be merged, because they are for different kinds of drawings; but the Dia/Visio thing should have all the power of Inkscape and add draggable templates, smart connectors etc.
Yeah no kidding. And he still had to get an external drive as well, which of course is almost as big as the whole mini.:-0
Having a keyboard and mouse right out there on the kitchen counter doesn't make a lot of sense.
He could've at least built the display into the wall, or hung it on the wall.
Another idea I saw elsewhere is to put a glass panel in the countertop and put the display underneath. Of course, that's primarily useful for reading recipes or doing web stuff but not for watching TV.
I have an Audrey in my kitchen, mounted to a drop down knife shelf that came with the house and is mounted under the cabinet. It folds up under the cabinet, out of reach of grease splatters. It's a good location and works very well. I use it for recipes, checking the weather, home automation stuff etc. The keyboard is infrared, very small and also stows nicely on the shelf when it is folded up. Of course I don't need a mouse - the buttons, touchscreen and channel knob provide plenty of interactivity.
I could easily use it for Gentoo's working directories for doing compilation. Or/tmp, obviously.
If this idea catches on though, Linux ought to have a new driver to automatically cache hot files on cards like this, rather than the user having to decide which part of the filesystem to mount there.
Yes of course it is faster to just have the RAM on the motherboard, but you run out of slots eventually and another level of cache doesn't hurt anything.
As I said in another thread there should also be a version that uses 72-pin SIMMs in larger quantities, because there are so many lying around unused these days.
The backup could be a large supercapacitor rather than battery, so it won't degrade over time. If they used LiIon, its useful life will probably only be about 3 years before you have to replace the battery to survive long power outages.
2. Imagine how fast your system would be if you took the memory off the card and installed it on your motherboard, thus eliminating the need for a swap file.
Yeah but motherboards never have enough slots, and this card can use RAM which isn't fast enough for your motherboard.
is a solid-state drive to use up big piles of obsolete 72-pin SIMMs, hundreds at once. It could be a big rack-mount thing (size doesn't matter) with ethernet or scsi.
Alternatively just a motherboard that has really a lot of slots so it would be possible to make a really big RAMdisk. Anybody seen motherboards with more than 8 or 12 SIMM slots?
Or are there SIMM converters that permit plugging multiple SIMMs into one slot? There used to be 30-to-72-pin converters but I haven't been able to find any to combine 72-pin SIMMs.
No, outlawing guns is analogous to outlawing violent games, and not what I was talking about. But showing a repeated pattern of extremely violent behavior within those games, where there are choices and you consistently take the most violent choice, could be a bad sign of what kind of person you are. I don't think either the games or the guns should be outlawed outright.
This guy's point is that you can choose how to play the game - it doesn't have to be as violent as it can be. But, I think that people who have violent tendencies will be attracted to such games, and will learn such techniques much faster and more completely than they can in the real world. As technology advances it's impossible to avoid having better simulations, but the implications for society are still scary even if you rule out the idea that violent games make good people into bad people. The bad people can just be worse than they would otherwise be. Then in the real world, it's kindof like being on PCP, reducing the fear barrier, because they've already been there and done everything virtually. Violence is nothing new but intensifying everyone's bad habits just brings it more to a head, and we have to figure out how to get more control over people like that if we're going to continue to live in a peaceful society. I'm not sure what the ideal mechanism is. I suppose when genetic engineering becomes mature, we will be able to modify our kids' tendencies to be more pacifist, assuming that there is a genetic component to that, not just upbringing...
Also a very good point that the parents are really to blame, because upbringing is such a huge part of one's future behavior.
Eric Raymond has a piece on why he thinks having guns and doing target practice are good for a man - just to have the realization that you wield a lot of power over life and death, and to have more respect for life. But again, everyone already has tendencies toward violence or pacifism, and having experience with guns will probably just intensify those pre-existing feelings. Just like with games. IMO gun ownership and violent games are both basic rights and neither one should be prohibited, but somehow we've got to figure out how to deal with the real root cause of violence.
As for me I simply don't like those games and my upbringing taught me that "fuck yeah" moments are a kind of sin, so I try to avoid them; and the only time I have that kind of feeling is when there is some kind of indignation behind it, that the violence is restoring something that was very wrong in the first place. I hate waste and destruction of all kinds, especially the pointless kind. Consequently I am a pack rat, because to me throwing something out is a kind of violence, and I respect inanimate objects almost as much as I do living things. And I think if more people had this attitude the world would be a better place, and we could forget about environmental problems. Environmental decay comes from a bad attitude, just as violence does. But this is unnatural for most people. Humans are mostly self-centered pigs.
So then killing cops in games could be considered a future crime, like in Minority Report? I mean, really, you could use some statistics from those games to find the most dangerous people - those whose violence (and worse types of violence) seems to be always increasing, as opposed to those who just try it out and then "evolve" to less violent ways to play the game. (In cases where there really is a non-violent way to achieve the goal that is presented.) I'm not saying society should definitely do this, but it's an interesting thing to think about. As games go more and more online maybe the FBI will be watching.
Heck the demise of the dot-com boom is enough to explain that, and in just the right time period too.
It remains to be seen if outsourcing means the US is getting out of the programming business, or just that the boring jobs are getting outsourced only to be replaced with more creative ones. And short-term small changes like this can be adequately explained by the business cycle.
Sounds kindof like "new math". You know, they could redefine the rules one normally uses with numbers...Could be useful for benchmarks, Netcraft surveys, time-warping their release dates, etc.:-)
Well you are just restating my point, and I definitely am not the type that likes to run low-res on a large display. But a pair of $600 LCDs is still a lot of money, and to actually get 1600x1200 on them you'd have to run analog right? because there is the problem that DVI doesn't (usually?) support higher resolution than 1280x1024. Apple is using dual DVI connections to get around that. 1280 is an awfully low barrier for digital video, and I hate to spend a lot of money on something that's already obsolete.
So far I'm not that impressed
on
Makers of MAKE
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
It's definitely a geekier magazine than most, but none of the stuff seems that unique. Many of the projects are stuff I already read about here on Slashdot or elsewhere on the net; many are oversimplified; many are not explained well enough. It was also funny that they had that article about yak-shaving, but the proposed solutions weren't that inspiring, and then the rest of the magazine is devoted to many ways of yak-shaving that they hoped would be as diverting as possible.
Of course it tries to be many things to many people. There are so many varieties of geekery, so their coverage of any one variety is cursory. Maybe for the type of geeks that have never done anything outside the software area, it's something to get their feet wet.
Popular Science sometimes finds some real, inspiring news that I didn't already read on the net. That is nice. I used to like Electronics Now back in the late 80's and early 90's; they had some really unique projects. EE Times is also an excellent industry news source, but I quit subscribing to the paper version now that it's 100% online and free. With Make, I hope that it just hasn't found its stride yet, not that it's going to be permanently just fluff.
But their MS leash is too short, alas...
on
Dell We'd Sell Mac OS X
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Notice how _every_ Dell web page reminds you that Dell recommends Windows XP. Like even if you want to just buy some flash or KVM cables or a monitor or something you feel like they are asking "would you like some XP with that?" Can't imagine that this behavior is voluntary on their part.
Well, the point of a birthday is to celebrate the anniversary of the instant at which you were born. So the most correct thing to do would be store that event as a time rather than a date, and then if you are in a different time zone at the time, it doesn't matter, because it's stored as an event in UTC, and will show up on the correct day which corresponds to the correct time at that other point on Earth where you were actually born. Unfortunately we're not accustomed to sharing this level of detail with friends - just the date, not the time. As long as you don't live very far from where you born, it's close enough. So this problem is partially cultural, and if you accept the fact that you are already tolerating some uncertainty, it's hard to decide which is the "right" approach to do in software. I mean, I was born on one day in Arizona, but if I then move to China, and live there for the rest of my life (neglecting the lack of any good reason for me to move to China...) do I move my birthdate to accommodate the fact that it's across the date line? Logically I should, but this isn't the custom. If all of my friends are in Arizona and care to continue celebrating my birthday in my absense, it makes more sense for them to celebrate it on my birthdate as it exists in my birth timezone, not on a different day just because I now live in China and choose to use the local clocks to decide which date is my birthday.
My wife is from a time zone 9-10 hours away depending on their DST, which we don't have in Arizona, so we think of New Years as two separate events - when it's midnight in her country, and when it's midnight here. It's more important for her to drink a toast at her "home" midnight, and imagine her family doing so simultaneously, but it happens to be mid-afternoon here.
So if you just give a birthdate to software, without a specific time, it could just assume that it was at 12 noon (smack in the middle of the day) at the home time zone of that person, and then adjust accordingly for your own time zone. It's as reasonable an assumption as any.
A little competition improves any product. And Linux seriously needs a bit more competition on the usability front. If geeks end up liking MacOS better than Linux, what will likely come out of this is an OS that has the best of both - whether it's based on Linux or the Darwin core. There is no reason that free GUIs can't be as good or better. (And the rest of the OS is free anyway in Darwin, so no need to re-invent that.) But, the two most annoying things about that process are that 1.) most Linux developers are copycats - if they've fallen in love with MacOS, they will copy everything to the last detail, without trying to improve it much. 2.) Apple likes to sue copycats.
The solution to both problems is the same - innovate!
The quad
(disclaimer: found this randomly on pricewatch, don't work for them)
I have 2 21" CRTs at 1280x1024 and don't see any reason to upgrade to LCD until I can have higher resolution than that, on both displays. Or I could just get one of those $3000 Apple displays, and have a bigger desktop all in one piece, with no divider down the middle.:-)
These guys could at least try to get the dividers ultra-thin.
Another alternative, which I would go for if I was ultra-rich, would be to use a bunch of projectors, with the images seamlessly merged into one big high-res display. About 12 of them, a 4 x 3 array, would be nice.
Slashdot Mirror
So how long before they begin to be used in baseball games? The catcher's job is not a nice one, seems to be a good candidate for replacement by a robot.
Well I kinda doubt that you can watch much video on it, although maybe if it was a dedicated task without any other processes running... it's only something like a Geode running at 200Mhz, but I forget exactly.
I just use the built-in browser, haven't loaded much custom software on it (being QNX rather than Linux, there just isn't as much available). But just having a browser in unlikely places is very useful - I can google or look up recipes or display movie times when we're trying to decide what to do for the evening or find things quickly on yp.yahoo.com or get a map and directions. For home-automation I haven't gotten much farther than some PHP scripts which present buttons to turn lights on and off, so far. (Cron jobs are running the pool pump and certain lights every day, but I don't have a UI for changing that.) At one point I had PHP controlling the volume on the server's sound card, and then had the server's audio out going to an amp that had speakers in the kitchen, so I could start up XMMS on the server and then remote-control the volume. But I planned to have a much better remote-controlled jukebox some day, just haven't gotten around to it. The Audrey's audio output is not really that great to play through a bigger stereo - there is some hiss all the time, and if you hook up the phone jack to a phone line, the noise gets worse, and it puts noise on the phone line, too. I had hoped to use one for music all by itself in the bedroom but it's not good enough, so I got a Rio Receiver instead (and that turned into such a drawn-out hacking process that it's still not useful yet).
I had a vgetty-based voicemail system working for a while, and was using php scripts to permit browsing voice messages and playing them on the audrey. But now I'm trying to switch to asterisk and do voip so that stuff's all going to change.
I also had some php/rrd/digitemp temperature graphs. Need to get that going again but now I'm using owfs instead of digitemp - much better for dealing with multiple sensors on the same one-wire bus.
Realistically if you just want to do home-automation without programming it yourself (like I do) just get MisterHouse. I think you can use it from any plain old browser.
The Audrey browser does have an old version of Flash FWIW, but not Java.
(Yes the article did mention it.) It's the best thing since CorelDraw and happens to be free, cross-platform, and uses pure standards-compliant SVG. And does alpha very well - something Corel didn't do in the early days.
I still have to use Dia sometimes though for more structured drawings. Somebody ought to work on building something like Visio but using Inkscape as a basis. The programs probably shouldn't be merged, because they are for different kinds of drawings; but the Dia/Visio thing should have all the power of Inkscape and add draggable templates, smart connectors etc.
Yeah no kidding. And he still had to get an external drive as well, which of course is almost as big as the whole mini. :-0
Having a keyboard and mouse right out there on the kitchen counter doesn't make a lot of sense.
He could've at least built the display into the wall, or hung it on the wall.
Another idea I saw elsewhere is to put a glass panel in the countertop and put the display underneath. Of course, that's primarily useful for reading recipes or doing web stuff but not for watching TV.
I have an Audrey in my kitchen, mounted to a drop down knife shelf that came with the house and is mounted under the cabinet. It folds up under the cabinet, out of reach of grease splatters. It's a good location and works very well. I use it for recipes, checking the weather, home automation stuff etc. The keyboard is infrared, very small and also stows nicely on the shelf when it is folded up. Of course I don't need a mouse - the buttons, touchscreen and channel knob provide plenty of interactivity.
I could easily use it for Gentoo's working directories for doing compilation. Or /tmp, obviously.
If this idea catches on though, Linux ought to have a new driver to automatically cache hot files on cards like this, rather than the user having to decide which part of the filesystem to mount there.
Yes of course it is faster to just have the RAM on the motherboard, but you run out of slots eventually and another level of cache doesn't hurt anything.
As I said in another thread there should also be a version that uses 72-pin SIMMs in larger quantities, because there are so many lying around unused these days.
The backup could be a large supercapacitor rather than battery, so it won't degrade over time. If they used LiIon, its useful life will probably only be about 3 years before you have to replace the battery to survive long power outages.
It could emulate an IDE device but actually run much faster rather than dealing with that SATA bottleneck. As well as not tying up the SATA connector.
Yeah but motherboards never have enough slots, and this card can use RAM which isn't fast enough for your motherboard.
is a solid-state drive to use up big piles of obsolete 72-pin SIMMs, hundreds at once. It could be a big rack-mount thing (size doesn't matter) with ethernet or scsi.
Alternatively just a motherboard that has really a lot of slots so it would be possible to make a really big RAMdisk. Anybody seen motherboards with more than 8 or 12 SIMM slots?
Or are there SIMM converters that permit plugging multiple SIMMs into one slot? There used to be 30-to-72-pin converters but I haven't been able to find any to combine 72-pin SIMMs.
Bugger when your tea flops. Especially a high tea.
...is don't mix uppers and downers, right?
Why doesn't NASA just burn some CDs with all this data before they get rid of the computer?
No, outlawing guns is analogous to outlawing violent games, and not what I was talking about. But showing a repeated pattern of extremely violent behavior within those games, where there are choices and you consistently take the most violent choice, could be a bad sign of what kind of person you are. I don't think either the games or the guns should be outlawed outright.
This guy's point is that you can choose how to play the game - it doesn't have to be as violent as it can be. But, I think that people who have violent tendencies will be attracted to such games, and will learn such techniques much faster and more completely than they can in the real world. As technology advances it's impossible to avoid having better simulations, but the implications for society are still scary even if you rule out the idea that violent games make good people into bad people. The bad people can just be worse than they would otherwise be. Then in the real world, it's kindof like being on PCP, reducing the fear barrier, because they've already been there and done everything virtually. Violence is nothing new but intensifying everyone's bad habits just brings it more to a head, and we have to figure out how to get more control over people like that if we're going to continue to live in a peaceful society. I'm not sure what the ideal mechanism is. I suppose when genetic engineering becomes mature, we will be able to modify our kids' tendencies to be more pacifist, assuming that there is a genetic component to that, not just upbringing...
Also a very good point that the parents are really to blame, because upbringing is such a huge part of one's future behavior.
Eric Raymond has a piece on why he thinks having guns and doing target practice are good for a man - just to have the realization that you wield a lot of power over life and death, and to have more respect for life. But again, everyone already has tendencies toward violence or pacifism, and having experience with guns will probably just intensify those pre-existing feelings. Just like with games. IMO gun ownership and violent games are both basic rights and neither one should be prohibited, but somehow we've got to figure out how to deal with the real root cause of violence.
As for me I simply don't like those games and my upbringing taught me that "fuck yeah" moments are a kind of sin, so I try to avoid them; and the only time I have that kind of feeling is when there is some kind of indignation behind it, that the violence is restoring something that was very wrong in the first place. I hate waste and destruction of all kinds, especially the pointless kind. Consequently I am a pack rat, because to me throwing something out is a kind of violence, and I respect inanimate objects almost as much as I do living things. And I think if more people had this attitude the world would be a better place, and we could forget about environmental problems. Environmental decay comes from a bad attitude, just as violence does. But this is unnatural for most people. Humans are mostly self-centered pigs.
So then killing cops in games could be considered a future crime, like in Minority Report? I mean, really, you could use some statistics from those games to find the most dangerous people - those whose violence (and worse types of violence) seems to be always increasing, as opposed to those who just try it out and then "evolve" to less violent ways to play the game. (In cases where there really is a non-violent way to achieve the goal that is presented.) I'm not saying society should definitely do this, but it's an interesting thing to think about. As games go more and more online maybe the FBI will be watching.
So you mean the reason it's impossible to read a paper prescription is that they're writing in Grafitti?
Bummer.
Heck the demise of the dot-com boom is enough to explain that, and in just the right time period too.
It remains to be seen if outsourcing means the US is getting out of the programming business, or just that the boring jobs are getting outsourced only to be replaced with more creative ones. And short-term small changes like this can be adequately explained by the business cycle.
This dude has subwoofer envy, I think.
Sounds kindof like "new math". You know, they could redefine the rules one normally uses with numbers...Could be useful for benchmarks, Netcraft surveys, time-warping their release dates, etc. :-)
Well you are just restating my point, and I definitely am not the type that likes to run low-res on a large display. But a pair of $600 LCDs is still a lot of money, and to actually get 1600x1200 on them you'd have to run analog right? because there is the problem that DVI doesn't (usually?) support higher resolution than 1280x1024. Apple is using dual DVI connections to get around that. 1280 is an awfully low barrier for digital video, and I hate to spend a lot of money on something that's already obsolete.
It's definitely a geekier magazine than most, but none of the stuff seems that unique. Many of the projects are stuff I already read about here on Slashdot or elsewhere on the net; many are oversimplified; many are not explained well enough. It was also funny that they had that article about yak-shaving, but the proposed solutions weren't that inspiring, and then the rest of the magazine is devoted to many ways of yak-shaving that they hoped would be as diverting as possible.
Of course it tries to be many things to many people. There are so many varieties of geekery, so their coverage of any one variety is cursory. Maybe for the type of geeks that have never done anything outside the software area, it's something to get their feet wet.
Popular Science sometimes finds some real, inspiring news that I didn't already read on the net. That is nice. I used to like Electronics Now back in the late 80's and early 90's; they had some really unique projects. EE Times is also an excellent industry news source, but I quit subscribing to the paper version now that it's 100% online and free. With Make, I hope that it just hasn't found its stride yet, not that it's going to be permanently just fluff.
Notice how _every_ Dell web page reminds you that Dell recommends Windows XP. Like even if you want to just buy some flash or KVM cables or a monitor or something you feel like they are asking "would you like some XP with that?" Can't imagine that this behavior is voluntary on their part.
Well, the point of a birthday is to celebrate the anniversary of the instant at which you were born. So the most correct thing to do would be store that event as a time rather than a date, and then if you are in a different time zone at the time, it doesn't matter, because it's stored as an event in UTC, and will show up on the correct day which corresponds to the correct time at that other point on Earth where you were actually born. Unfortunately we're not accustomed to sharing this level of detail with friends - just the date, not the time. As long as you don't live very far from where you born, it's close enough. So this problem is partially cultural, and if you accept the fact that you are already tolerating some uncertainty, it's hard to decide which is the "right" approach to do in software. I mean, I was born on one day in Arizona, but if I then move to China, and live there for the rest of my life (neglecting the lack of any good reason for me to move to China...) do I move my birthdate to accommodate the fact that it's across the date line? Logically I should, but this isn't the custom. If all of my friends are in Arizona and care to continue celebrating my birthday in my absense, it makes more sense for them to celebrate it on my birthdate as it exists in my birth timezone, not on a different day just because I now live in China and choose to use the local clocks to decide which date is my birthday.
My wife is from a time zone 9-10 hours away depending on their DST, which we don't have in Arizona, so we think of New Years as two separate events - when it's midnight in her country, and when it's midnight here. It's more important for her to drink a toast at her "home" midnight, and imagine her family doing so simultaneously, but it happens to be mid-afternoon here.
So if you just give a birthdate to software, without a specific time, it could just assume that it was at 12 noon (smack in the middle of the day) at the home time zone of that person, and then adjust accordingly for your own time zone. It's as reasonable an assumption as any.
A little competition improves any product. And Linux seriously needs a bit more competition on the usability front. If geeks end up liking MacOS better than Linux, what will likely come out of this is an OS that has the best of both - whether it's based on Linux or the Darwin core. There is no reason that free GUIs can't be as good or better. (And the rest of the OS is free anyway in Darwin, so no need to re-invent that.) But, the two most annoying things about that process are that 1.) most Linux developers are copycats - if they've fallen in love with MacOS, they will copy everything to the last detail, without trying to improve it much. 2.) Apple likes to sue copycats.
The solution to both problems is the same - innovate!
I have 2 21" CRTs at 1280x1024 and don't see any reason to upgrade to LCD until I can have higher resolution than that, on both displays. Or I could just get one of those $3000 Apple displays, and have a bigger desktop all in one piece, with no divider down the middle. :-)
These guys could at least try to get the dividers ultra-thin.
Another alternative, which I would go for if I was ultra-rich, would be to use a bunch of projectors, with the images seamlessly merged into one big high-res display. About 12 of them, a 4 x 3 array, would be nice.