It seems ludicrous for Adobe to even hint at OpenSource when they have the entire protocol for their consumer grade printer language locked up beyond the reach of the OpenSource community.
Lets see a nice fat PDF document describing the PrintGear imaging model and network protocol so we can have cheap high quality printers for OpenSource systems. Until Adobe provides that information they are just a barrier to transition.
The cgi program (nabber) sends a message out the serial port to the RCX over the IR to begin a cycle. There is no feedback to the computer, it just knows that its a 3 second cycle so it waits a total of 8 seconds to capture a nice settling time.
The ball positioning is done by using the RCX optical sensor to watch the white dot of the 8 ball.
Re:Is this a new trend among movie makers?
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The movie makers know all about influencing the professional critics. They must find it frustrating to have a sizable portion of the reviewing community outside their control.
They will learn to influence the internet opinion as well. The faked fan sites are only the beginning. In a $15million marketing budget there is plenty of room to hire 100 professional internet hype generators for a month. They can hang out on all the hot forums, channels, and newsgroups and sow the carefully crafted and orchestrated hype in the weeks before and after the opening.
Re:Hit reload dumbassm does too dumbass
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As long as we are being senselessly rude and uncivil...
It works fine in IE 4.0 Macintosh. Its only IE for windows that is missing suitable support.
Now perhaps we can apologize to the gentle readers and continue the normal civilized, informed discussions which have been Slashdot's hallmark.
Re:You CAN make the 8 ball work under IE windows.
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Well this is just the sort of nerd audience that can help the 8 ball work under IE instead of just carp about it.
What it needs is a Java applet that will read a stream of jpeg images and display them on the screen. Ought to be 5 minutes work for someone that knows what they are doing.
Grab yourself a copy of the data stream, http://8ball.federated.com/8ball-bin/nph-nabber, (a couple lines of text, jpeg, lines of text, jpeg...) and send me the Java. I will credit you on the page and you will be loved all round the world by the destiny denied IE windows users.
I'll promise to keep the images at 320x240 if that makes life easier.
Re:8-ball page is fake. - is not
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Your ISP is caching the response despite admonitions from the 8 ball against such actions.
If you are using Netscape or IE Macintosh you should hit Shift Reload, this usually gets your ISP to bypass their cache.
The 8 ball attempts to play at a speed that matches your link. Some ISPs have proxy servers that will read at their speed and forward at your speed. For those people they will get a time dilation effect since the 8 ball sends frames at a speed matching the ISP but the client can only accept them at a much slower rate.
Its an 8 second cycle, if it takes longer on your machine then you have time dilation.
Re:I love the 8-ball - is so
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Well, speaking as the creator of the public 8 ball site...
Is so!
The spin and shake takes 3 seconds, I allow an additional 5 for settling, but it usually settles much faster. The first second of shaking is a 360 degree roll, the remaining two are jiggling back and forth through about 70 degrees, so the destiny icosahedron is already up by the glass when the shaking stops, it just has to get off the edge.
And for fingers, the 8 ball does need to get dusted now and again and sometimes when people are in front of my desk talking to me they will give it a jostle when its on an edge. Destiny assistants.
I'm glad the 8 ball could be of assistance with your, uh, question.
Re:I love the 8-ball (8ball apologizes)
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Yes, we at the 8ball are getting slashdotted pretty heavily. It apologizes for the inconvenience.
The 8-ball cycle time can handle 400+ desitinys per hour, needless to say it is pegged. 36 minutes after slashdot posting the queue was 65 people deep, the system load went over the watchdog limit and the ever vigilant watchdog rebooted the server. Bad dog. Bad.
The 8-ball is going to start shunning people at a queue depth of 30 to protect itself.
I use GD as a lightweight portable drawing system and never encode a GIF or read a GIF. (I encode as jpeg usually, too many old non-png browsers around.) There just doesn't seem to be an alternative around. GGI is not portable to windows or mac, X is huge and not easily portable. I need something I can tack on to my programs to draw a JPEG or PNG so I can show the user a graph or picture or whatnot. You can see over at the Public 8-Ball that I create my queue position messages with GD and then JPEG encode the frame buffer for transmission. I don't worry about the CPU speed, 15 frames/second is easy on the PII-266. You can click the how its done picture and find all the source code plus rantings at Unisys. Those of you with IE can thank Unisys for making the 8ball unavailable to you. I had realtime animated GIF creation in place for the video, but its too slow without compressing and I don't feel inclined to hire a lawyer and negotiate a license for a license. IE Windows can't handle the mime type for the jpeg movies I use now.
-40 heck, I'd settle for room temperatures under 100F. The building management shuts off the AC on weekends, I lost a 5 way stripe set and my Sunday to the heat. How about temperature tolerant computer gear?
I just checked the troughput between a pair of my computers. I did this with a test program that used read and write calls to transfer the data and did nothing else with it. The data transfer ran at 10Mbytes/second with a 12% cpu load on a PII-266. configuration info at end Extrapolating to a modern 500MHz system, that would be something like a 6% cpu load. I suppose there are niches where the differense might matter, but with three 10Mbyte/sec transfers the PCI bus will choke anyway and we are looking at the difference between 18%cpu for network and 6%cpu for network. I guess if you are stuck with a server OS where the TCP stack is a pig and you can't fix it then maybe this is a reasonable optimization, but I sure wouldn't bother with it for linux. Footnote:It turns out the sending data to/dev/null is more expensive than the ethernet transfer. Configuration of Receiver: DellXPS PII-266, Kingston 10/100mbit card(dec21140), Linux 2.2.6, tulip driver. Configuration of Sender: Gateway PII-300, Kingston 10/100mbit card(dec21140), Linux 2.2.1, tulip driver. I'm not sure if Kingston still makes these, we buy equivalent cards for $13 now. Configuration of Network: Half duplex 100mbit ethernet with about 50 machines hanging on it. Mostly idle during test. Procedural Note: I did run the test many times and exclude the slow outliers, both of these machines have operational services that I did not wish to disable, so many test runs were ruined by other loads on the machines. Open Benchmark In order to preserve my credibility I will offer to allow anyone to run my tests exactly as I have in order to verify my results. No changes which may improve the results will be permitted.;-)
Turing's monument should be a long bronze tape marked off into cells, each of which can be toggled between two states. Then all monuments will be possible.
Well, speaking as someone with VirtualIO glasses and netwinders...
You need better resolution than VirtualIO to use a computer. You can crank the font size on the console enough to be legible (not clear, just legible enough to tell lowercase characters apart) you only get 53 characters across the screen.
Lots of programs are unhappy with that screen size.
Now, when I can get a REAL 640x480 for not a lot of money I'll be ready to use it, but VirtualIO isn't it.
Its a magic 8ball (fortune telling device for those unfamiliar) shaken by a mindstorms cradle, watched by a video camera, all displayed for you in your browser.
Sadly IE Windows will not work. Come with netscape or IE Macintosh. (It uses the multipart/x-mixed-replace mime type for the video.)
Can't mirror. Its an interactive site. You get to run the thing and watch it on a video camera in your browser. Only one person can run it at a time. It takes 8 seconds to run, so that should be about 3 solid days to handle the slashdot pulse.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Note to design team:Ottomans will come into contact with feet. :-)
Lets see a nice fat PDF document describing the PrintGear imaging model and network protocol so we can have cheap high quality printers for OpenSource systems. Until Adobe provides that information they are just a barrier to transition.
The ball positioning is done by using the RCX optical sensor to watch the white dot of the 8 ball.
They will learn to influence the internet opinion as well. The faked fan sites are only the beginning. In a $15million marketing budget there is plenty of room to hire 100 professional internet hype generators for a month. They can hang out on all the hot forums, channels, and newsgroups and sow the carefully crafted and orchestrated hype in the weeks before and after the opening.
It works fine in IE 4.0 Macintosh. Its only IE for windows that is missing suitable support.
Now perhaps we can apologize to the gentle readers and continue the normal civilized, informed discussions which have been Slashdot's hallmark.
What it needs is a Java applet that will read a stream of jpeg images and display them on the screen. Ought to be 5 minutes work for someone that knows what they are doing.
Grab yourself a copy of the data stream, http://8ball.federated.com/8ball-bin/nph-nabber, (a couple lines of text, jpeg, lines of text, jpeg...) and send me the Java. I will credit you on the page and you will be loved all round the world by the destiny denied IE windows users.
I'll promise to keep the images at 320x240 if that makes life easier.
If you are using Netscape or IE Macintosh you should hit Shift Reload, this usually gets your ISP to bypass their cache.
Its an 8 second cycle, if it takes longer on your machine then you have time dilation.
Is so!
The spin and shake takes 3 seconds, I allow an additional 5 for settling, but it usually settles much faster. The first second of shaking is a 360 degree roll, the remaining two are jiggling back and forth through about 70 degrees, so the destiny icosahedron is already up by the glass when the shaking stops, it just has to get off the edge.
And for fingers, the 8 ball does need to get dusted now and again and sometimes when people are in front of my desk talking to me they will give it a jostle when its on an edge. Destiny assistants.
I'm glad the 8 ball could be of assistance with your, uh, question.
The 8-ball cycle time can handle 400+ desitinys per hour, needless to say it is pegged. 36 minutes after slashdot posting the queue was 65 people deep, the system load went over the watchdog limit and the ever vigilant watchdog rebooted the server. Bad dog. Bad.
The 8-ball is going to start shunning people at a queue depth of 30 to protect itself.
I use GD as a lightweight portable drawing system and never encode a GIF or read a GIF. (I encode as jpeg usually, too many old non-png browsers around.) There just doesn't seem to be an alternative around. GGI is not portable to windows or mac, X is huge and not easily portable. I need something I can tack on to my programs to draw a JPEG or PNG so I can show the user a graph or picture or whatnot.
You can see over at the Public 8-Ball that I create my queue position messages with GD and then JPEG encode the frame buffer for transmission. I don't worry about the CPU speed, 15 frames/second is easy on the PII-266. You can click the how its done picture and find all the source code plus rantings at Unisys.
Those of you with IE can thank Unisys for making the 8ball unavailable to you. I had realtime animated GIF creation in place for the video, but its too slow without compressing and I don't feel inclined to hire a lawyer and negotiate a license for a license. IE Windows can't handle the mime type for the jpeg movies I use now.
virtual i/o handles this with frame multiplexing. The even and odd frames go to different eyes.
Just last night I saw a 30 second TV ad for DIVX by circuit city. I guess the marketers don't know its dead yet.
-40 heck, I'd settle for room temperatures under 100F. The building management shuts off the AC on weekends, I lost a 5 way stripe set and my Sunday to the heat.
How about temperature tolerant computer gear?
The man pages for dump on linux used to say it could not handle multivolume dumps. I note that at least in Debian 2.1 this is no longer true.
I've personally restored my 20GB 6 way stripe set twice from dumps under linux from a single (large) tape with no problems.
I just checked the troughput between a pair of my computers. I did this with a test program that used read and write calls to transfer the data and did nothing else with it. /dev/null is more expensive than the ethernet transfer. ;-)
The data transfer ran at 10Mbytes/second with a 12% cpu load on a PII-266. configuration info at end
Extrapolating to a modern 500MHz system, that would be something like a 6% cpu load. I suppose there are niches where the differense might matter, but with three 10Mbyte/sec transfers the PCI bus will choke anyway and we are looking at the difference between 18%cpu for network and 6%cpu for network.
I guess if you are stuck with a server OS where the TCP stack is a pig and you can't fix it then maybe this is a reasonable optimization, but I sure wouldn't bother with it for linux.
Footnote:It turns out the sending data to
Configuration of Receiver: DellXPS PII-266, Kingston 10/100mbit card(dec21140), Linux 2.2.6, tulip driver.
Configuration of Sender: Gateway PII-300, Kingston 10/100mbit card(dec21140), Linux 2.2.1, tulip driver.
I'm not sure if Kingston still makes these, we buy equivalent cards for $13 now.
Configuration of Network: Half duplex 100mbit ethernet with about 50 machines hanging on it. Mostly idle during test.
Procedural Note: I did run the test many times and exclude the slow outliers, both of these machines have operational services that I did not wish to disable, so many test runs were ruined by other loads on the machines.
Open Benchmark In order to preserve my credibility I will offer to allow anyone to run my tests exactly as I have in order to verify my results. No changes which may improve the results will be permitted.
Turing's monument should be a long bronze tape marked off into cells, each of which can be toggled between two states.
Then all monuments will be possible.
Well, speaking as someone with VirtualIO glasses and netwinders...
You need better resolution than VirtualIO to use a computer. You can crank the font size on the console enough to be legible (not clear, just legible enough to tell lowercase characters apart) you only get 53 characters across the screen.
Lots of programs are unhappy with that screen size.
Now, when I can get a REAL 640x480 for not a lot of money I'll be ready to use it, but VirtualIO isn't it.
ok, here it is.
The Public 8 Ball
Its a magic 8ball (fortune telling device for those unfamiliar) shaken by a mindstorms cradle, watched by a video camera, all displayed for you in your browser.
Sadly IE Windows will not work. Come with netscape or IE Macintosh. (It uses the multipart/x-mixed-replace mime type for the video.)
Enjoy.
Can't mirror. Its an interactive site. You get to run the thing and watch it on a video camera in your browser. Only one person can run it at a time. :-)
It takes 8 seconds to run, so that should be about 3 solid days to handle the slashdot pulse.
Ok, I can't take a slashdot during the week, but I'll post another mindstorms/linux site on Friday afternoon. Check this thread then.