hercules using arm?
on
Palm OS Spinoff
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
The story mentions that at least one future Palm is going to be using an ARM processor (Hercules 1.0). i guess that means we'll finally see linux on genuine Palm(tm) hardware, at the expense of have a cool processor name like the Dragonball VZ.
It also brings up interesting prospects for the future of Palm OS. If Palm's OS division is making a Palm OS for an ARM processor, will we start to see Palm OS as an option on iPaq's and th like? It's just my personal opinion, but I like Palm's interface more than WinCE, but right now, the hardware that runs it is slower. I guess we'll see.
i became a fan of.ogg this summer, just because i thought it sounded better on my altec lansings. so when i came to school this fall, i couldn't resist challenging my audiophile next door neighbor/old roomate/good friend to test it.
i'd just gotten a wynton marsalis cd from amazon, so _carnival of venice_ was used as the testing track. i made a 256k.ogg, he made a 256k.mp3 with whatever encoder it is he prefers, and then we both decoded them back to.wav, and made a 3-track cd (the 3rd track being the song uncompressed).
we did a blind test, kinda. put the cd in his player and set it on random. it was obvious that one track was better than the others (cd) and one was a lot worse than the others (mp3). the ogg sounded remarkably like the cd track, though there were some small things that allowed us to differentiate.
i'm not sure i'd be able to do so well on the same test using my computer speakers, of course. but the difference is certainly there.
test stereo setup:
CD Player: NAD 512
Integrated Amplifier: NAD 314
Speakers: Acoustic Energy Aesprit 300
Interconnects: Kimber Kable PBJ
Speaker Cables: Kimber Kable 4VS
of course, there are problems in the test in that we only tested one track, so the findings are only representative for the wynton marsalis genre. but it made me a fan of.ogg.
i encourage everyone to try something similar and draw your own conclusions.
i've no idea what they originally called it, but the difference in those choices is just a natural progression of our language. when a word like that is introduced to our culture, it's originally separated by a space, then the space becomes a hyphen, then the separation disappears altogether. so in common use, it went:
e mail -> e-mail -> email
i suppose capitalization goes away as time goes by, too, but that wasn't covered in my linguistics elective.
I remember very clearly that a good number of people were angry with Cyrix when they found out that their 5x86 200 wasn't running at 200 MHz -- rather it only scored the same as a Pentium 200 in some benchmark. I'd think a company like AMD would remember that, but it looks like the old "those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it" adage is correct.
I still love AMD's product, but this new marketing is a shame, imo.
"Internet access will be the primary mover for these free networks. Sharing a cable modem or a DSL line might annoy some folks [broadband providers], but it's probably legal," said Phil Belanger, vice president of wireless business development at Wayport Inc. in Austin, Texas, a for-profit provider of 802.11b services at airports and hotels."
If the person who's sharing their connection to their ISP has agreed to an AUP prohibiting redistribution of service, account sharing, or wasteful behavior, I'd think such a system would run into legal issues. Granted, it'd be hard to stop, but I (not being a lawyer) have to think that guy's statement to be blantantly wrong.
chris
some things we've done
on
Dorm Storm?
·
· Score: 2
I work for residential student computing at uiuc.edu. We go through the same thing every fall, except with more students moving in (I think) and less Novell.
This summer, in particular, we've started some new programs to help students get their ethernet connection working on their own.
Last year, we put booklets in every room describing how to cable for a single computer or multiple machines with a hub [1]. It also covers driver installation for MacOS, Win9x/ME, and Win2k, as well as physical installation of the card.
That worked pretty well, so it's happening again. In addition, we've shot a video covering many of the same topics that'll be looped on a dorm-only cable channel for the first few days (making dvd's is fun!). It's also available on cd, in.mpg files so that people can watch it in their rooms if the looping cable thing doesn't work, or they bring their computer after we give the channel to other programs.
But there's still no substitute for competent people. We keep people in the computer labs for most of the day every day between move-in and the start of classes. They loan out hubs and sell cables, and also (hopefully) diagnose problems and tell people how to fix them without needing to go up to the room. If that doesn't work, they either take one of our people up to their room to take a look (if that wouldn't abandon the lab) or fill out a form on our website, so somone can call them and check out the problem whenever they're free.
It's always fun -- lots of hours for everyone.
[1] the uiuc dorms were wired before there was an ethernet standard, so the network jacks use the 4 middle pins. we have custom cables in every room that inevitably get plugged in backwards and thus don't work.
Re:I hope they put more focus on the "fun" part
on
Quake 4 Announced
·
· Score: 2
Oh yeah, and they better make it run faster on an the Athlon than the P4, or all the/. armchair CPU architects out there are really going to be pissed:-)
That's a difference in compiler optimizations. By the time this is released, id might be using a compiler that allows the P4's deep pipelining to be a good thing.
johnc has noted that he's developing the new engine on a geforce3, and it will probably get around 30 fps on a geforce3 when the game's finally released.
finger johnc@idsoftware.com for the details.
it'll be a while before anything's released, though, so it's not unrealistic to use a geforce3 as the baseline card.
I sit in an Aeron at work, and it's great! Truly comfortable for sitting on one's ass for many hours straight.
Of course, there's no way in hell I'd pay the $700 for one of these at home . . . but the laid-off VP whose office I lifted this one from doesn't seem to mind.
I just bought one new for my dorm room, and in my mind, at least, it makes perfect sense. I spend a lot of time sitting at my computer, whether making money, working on programming assignments, or just reading the web. Given the amount of time spent in it, it's easy to justify paying $731 (after tax and leather armrests) for one, just like I justified a $600 monitor last summer.
Someone with a full time job would probably have a tougher time justifying one for home, but I'm sure you can do it if you work hard enough:)
i found it better to just download one big installer with everything from the nightly builds directory:
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/nightly/lates t
apparently, my browser is a more reliable downloader than their installer, because (in win32 at least) the 8.5 MB windows installer came down fast with no problems.
OSX Server doesn't ned ungodly amounts of RAM to get a load of machines to NetBoot from it. Those machines are running the OS, the server just dishes out the files.
right. but to do it quickly for the show, the server actually loaded up MacOS for each machine. in the topic of this story, it was nothing like what they were actually advertising.
Everyone remember when Steve Jobs impressed MacWorld by booting a big wall of macs from a single OS X server? turns out that they were using a forked version of OS X that was abandoned right after the show, so those features aren't present in today's version. But more than that, rumour has it that the OS X server machine was using PC hardware to accomodate ungodly amounts of RAM so it could run a copy of MacOS for each one of the machines.
How long before there is a version of Linux for the Gamecube? Anyone have any hardware specs?
NetBSD will probably beat linux, as always. It's written expressly for portability, so there are fewer quirks to work out moving everything (drivers and supporting programs, not just the kernel) to a new platform.
for reference, this is the full big ugly string:
set prompt="%{\033]0;%n@%m:%~\007%}%{\033[0;30m%}%B%n% b@%{\033[0;34m%}%B%m%b%{\033[0;37m%}:%~ %B>%b "
The first escape sequence sets the window title to user@host:/path
%{\033]0;%n@%m:%~\007%}
then the rest of the prompt sets the colors for the text on the console (user@host:/path > ).
%{\033[0;30m%}%B%n%b@%{\033[0;34m%}%B%m%b%{\033[ 0; 37m%}:%~ %B>%b
%B and %b are bold, not bold, and the %{\033[0; m%} parts denote a change in color. this page has a listing of the color codes (and lots of other fun stuff!): http://pdv.cs.tu-berlin.de/MinMax/vt100codes.txt
incidentally, if you're logging into the console of a machine you can just use the second part for the prompt without the window title escape. i do that through a switch statement that checks the $TERM variable, but i'm sure there are better ways.
You can load your command prompt with tons of worthless crap.
it's the worthless crap that keeps me from typing shutdown -r now on an important machine when i think i'm just ssh'd to my completely unimportant linux box to try out the kernel i compiled last night. nothing like taking down the radius server at an isp:)
i decided i needed a cooler prompt this past semester. so instead of attending to college, i came up with these:
in tcsh:
set prompt="%{\033]0;%n@%m:%~\007%}%{\033[0;30m%}%B%n% b@%{\033[0;34m%}%B%m%b%{\033[0;37m%}:%~ %B>%b "
that sets the window title to user@host:/path along with coloring the prompt. it's not advisable to use at the console. you can just cut off the first part to remove the window title code.
in bash:
export PS1="\[\033]0;\u@\h:\w\007\]\[\e[30;1m\]\u\[\e[0m\ ]@\[\e[34;1m\]\h\[\e[0m:\]\w\[\e[31;1m\] #\[\e[0m\] "
exact same thing, except with more slashes.
anyway, that's what i like using. i'm looking forward to seeing some other suggestions once the moderators go through here.
Google gave a talk for ACM here last semester (got a t-shirt, woohoo!). The speaker described how they're used. They have thousands of linux boxes, and they're used to store websites (to be searched and cached copies) and to do searching on the pages they have (I think that's how it went). I got the impression that linux is used because it's free (important with thousands of licenses), it's reliable, and they found it a good platform for the searching backend software.
an interesting side note: they found that when one of the linux boxes stops working, it's more cost effective to replace it than to fix the problem (hardware, at least). google throws out a lot of good hardware because of that. the lecture hall was begging for a student donation program of some sort when the google guy mentioned that:)
Having taken the class, I'm surprised that there's this much worry about the issue. I released my MP's for it under the GPL and nobody cared. Due to the size of most of the popular (or required, like this one) classes at uiuc, programming assignments have very strict rules for what needs to be done. The assignments are generally more fill-in-the-blank than anything else. Students have to complete a method to do the specified behavior, or maybe write something simple from scratch. But nothing is complex enough to bring out some programming genius worthy of a patent or controversy over the licensing.
Any projects I've seen that would require consideration of this sort have been funded by a corporation for a senior project, or just done in the student's spare time.
This is all fun to talk about, but I don't think it really matters.
isn't this exactly what happened in Cryptonomicon?
That aside, there are some obvious questions (IMO). Is there really a need for a service such as this? I can buy stuff online from other countries with my credit cards. The vendors get their currency of choice, while I pay my card off in dollars. I recently made a purchase at amazon.co.uk and never once found myself thinking "this would be so much easier with an online standard." But maybe things like that are just hacks to get us through until there's a viable uniform currency available.
ck
supernova isn't the right term
on
Star In A Jar
·
· Score: 1
a co-worker of mine and i were discussing this story and he pointed out something i thought interesting.
small supernovas are known as novas. so wouldn't something on this scale be a piconova or maybe a femtonova?
That gives you the sound, but not the *feeling* of the music.
I'm not one of the people discussed in the article, but I roomed with a guy who had a pair of $500 headphones (with their own amp) hooked up to his computer. He was always bitching about things like that. Apparently, he has a nice room that's built underground apart from the rest of the house, which allows better appreciation of nice equipment than a dorm room.
Slashdot Mirror
that scene was awesome!
// disable alien shields
if(shields == 1)
{
shields = 0;
}
virus writing 101.
The story mentions that at least one future Palm is going to be using an ARM processor (Hercules 1.0). i guess that means we'll finally see linux on genuine Palm(tm) hardware, at the expense of have a cool processor name like the Dragonball VZ.
It also brings up interesting prospects for the future of Palm OS. If Palm's OS division is making a Palm OS for an ARM processor, will we start to see Palm OS as an option on iPaq's and th like? It's just my personal opinion, but I like Palm's interface more than WinCE, but right now, the hardware that runs it is slower. I guess we'll see.
i became a fan of .ogg this summer, just because i thought it sounded better on my altec lansings. so when i came to school this fall, i couldn't resist challenging my audiophile next door neighbor/old roomate/good friend to test it.
.ogg, he made a 256k .mp3 with whatever encoder it is he prefers, and then we both decoded them back to .wav, and made a 3-track cd (the 3rd track being the song uncompressed).
.ogg.
i'd just gotten a wynton marsalis cd from amazon, so _carnival of venice_ was used as the testing track. i made a 256k
we did a blind test, kinda. put the cd in his player and set it on random. it was obvious that one track was better than the others (cd) and one was a lot worse than the others (mp3). the ogg sounded remarkably like the cd track, though there were some small things that allowed us to differentiate.
i'm not sure i'd be able to do so well on the same test using my computer speakers, of course. but the difference is certainly there.
test stereo setup:
CD Player: NAD 512
Integrated Amplifier: NAD 314
Speakers: Acoustic Energy Aesprit 300
Interconnects: Kimber Kable PBJ
Speaker Cables: Kimber Kable 4VS
of course, there are problems in the test in that we only tested one track, so the findings are only representative for the wynton marsalis genre. but it made me a fan of
i encourage everyone to try something similar and draw your own conclusions.
Was it intended to be named:
a)Email
b)E Mail
c)e-mail
d)email
i've no idea what they originally called it, but the difference in those choices is just a natural progression of our language. when a word like that is introduced to our culture, it's originally separated by a space, then the space becomes a hyphen, then the separation disappears altogether. so in common use, it went:
e mail -> e-mail -> email
i suppose capitalization goes away as time goes by, too, but that wasn't covered in my linguistics elective.
chris
I just know that one day some sick bastard will bring his ti-book to an x-ray technician who'll be started to find a gerbil shoved up his PCMCIA slot.
Richard Gere? Wouldn't that more likely be something Brodie's cousin Walter would do?
I remember very clearly that a good number of people were angry with Cyrix when they found out that their 5x86 200 wasn't running at 200 MHz -- rather it only scored the same as a Pentium 200 in some benchmark. I'd think a company like AMD would remember that, but it looks like the old "those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it" adage is correct.
I still love AMD's product, but this new marketing is a shame, imo.
from the article:
"Internet access will be the primary mover for these free networks. Sharing a cable modem or a DSL line might annoy some folks [broadband providers], but it's probably legal," said Phil Belanger, vice president of wireless business development at Wayport Inc. in Austin, Texas, a for-profit provider of 802.11b services at airports and hotels."
If the person who's sharing their connection to their ISP has agreed to an AUP prohibiting redistribution of service, account sharing, or wasteful behavior, I'd think such a system would run into legal issues. Granted, it'd be hard to stop, but I (not being a lawyer) have to think that guy's statement to be blantantly wrong.
chris
I work for residential student computing at uiuc.edu. We go through the same thing every fall, except with more students moving in (I think) and less Novell.
.mpg files so that people can watch it in their rooms if the looping cable thing doesn't work, or they bring their computer after we give the channel to other programs.
This summer, in particular, we've started some new programs to help students get their ethernet connection working on their own.
Last year, we put booklets in every room describing how to cable for a single computer or multiple machines with a hub [1]. It also covers driver installation for MacOS, Win9x/ME, and Win2k, as well as physical installation of the card.
That worked pretty well, so it's happening again. In addition, we've shot a video covering many of the same topics that'll be looped on a dorm-only cable channel for the first few days (making dvd's is fun!). It's also available on cd, in
But there's still no substitute for competent people. We keep people in the computer labs for most of the day every day between move-in and the start of classes. They loan out hubs and sell cables, and also (hopefully) diagnose problems and tell people how to fix them without needing to go up to the room. If that doesn't work, they either take one of our people up to their room to take a look (if that wouldn't abandon the lab) or fill out a form on our website, so somone can call them and check out the problem whenever they're free.
It's always fun -- lots of hours for everyone.
[1] the uiuc dorms were wired before there was an ethernet standard, so the network jacks use the 4 middle pins. we have custom cables in every room that inevitably get plugged in backwards and thus don't work.
Oh yeah, and they better make it run faster on an the Athlon than the P4, or all the /. armchair CPU architects out there are really going to be pissed :-)
That's a difference in compiler optimizations. By the time this is released, id might be using a compiler that allows the P4's deep pipelining to be a good thing.
johnc has noted that he's developing the new engine on a geforce3, and it will probably get around 30 fps on a geforce3 when the game's finally released.
finger johnc@idsoftware.com for the details.
it'll be a while before anything's released, though, so it's not unrealistic to use a geforce3 as the baseline card.
I just bought one brand new for my dorm room. $731 after all the options, leather armrests, my choice of color, and tax.
So the price has dropped, thankfully.
I sit in an Aeron at work, and it's great! Truly comfortable for sitting on one's ass for many hours straight.
:)
Of course, there's no way in hell I'd pay the $700 for one of these at home . . . but the laid-off VP whose office I lifted this one from doesn't seem to mind.
I just bought one new for my dorm room, and in my mind, at least, it makes perfect sense. I spend a lot of time sitting at my computer, whether making money, working on programming assignments, or just reading the web. Given the amount of time spent in it, it's easy to justify paying $731 (after tax and leather armrests) for one, just like I justified a $600 monitor last summer.
Someone with a full time job would probably have a tougher time justifying one for home, but I'm sure you can do it if you work hard enough
i found it better to just download one big installer with everything from the nightly builds directory:
s t
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/nightly/late
apparently, my browser is a more reliable downloader than their installer, because (in win32 at least) the 8.5 MB windows installer came down fast with no problems.
OSX Server doesn't ned ungodly amounts of RAM to get a load of machines to NetBoot from it. Those machines are running the OS, the server just dishes out the files.
right. but to do it quickly for the show, the server actually loaded up MacOS for each machine. in the topic of this story, it was nothing like what they were actually advertising.
Everyone remember when Steve Jobs impressed MacWorld by booting a big wall of macs from a single OS X server? turns out that they were using a forked version of OS X that was abandoned right after the show, so those features aren't present in today's version. But more than that, rumour has it that the OS X server machine was using PC hardware to accomodate ungodly amounts of RAM so it could run a copy of MacOS for each one of the machines.
I always thought that was funny.
chris
How long before there is a version of Linux for the Gamecube? Anyone have any hardware specs?
NetBSD will probably beat linux, as always. It's written expressly for portability, so there are fewer quirks to work out moving everything (drivers and supporting programs, not just the kernel) to a new platform.
chris
for reference, this is the full big ugly string:% b@%{\033[0;34m%}%B%m%b%{\033[0;37m%}:%~ %B>%b "
[ 0; 37m%}:%~ %B>%b
set prompt="%{\033]0;%n@%m:%~\007%}%{\033[0;30m%}%B%n
The first escape sequence sets the window title to user@host:/path
%{\033]0;%n@%m:%~\007%}
then the rest of the prompt sets the colors for the text on the console (user@host:/path > ).
%{\033[0;30m%}%B%n%b@%{\033[0;34m%}%B%m%b%{\033
%B and %b are bold, not bold, and the %{\033[0; m%} parts denote a change in color. this page has a listing of the color codes (and lots of other fun stuff!): http://pdv.cs.tu-berlin.de/MinMax/vt100codes.txt
incidentally, if you're logging into the console of a machine you can just use the second part for the prompt without the window title escape. i do that through a switch statement that checks the $TERM variable, but i'm sure there are better ways.
chris
You can load your command prompt with tons of worthless crap.
:)
it's the worthless crap that keeps me from typing shutdown -r now on an important machine when i think i'm just ssh'd to my completely unimportant linux box to try out the kernel i compiled last night. nothing like taking down the radius server at an isp
chris
i decided i needed a cooler prompt this past semester. so instead of attending to college, i came up with these:
% b@%{\033[0;34m%}%B%m%b%{\033[0;37m%}:%~ %B>%b "
\ ]@\[\e[34;1m\]\h\[\e[0m:\]\w\[\e[31;1m\] #\[\e[0m\] "
in tcsh:
set prompt="%{\033]0;%n@%m:%~\007%}%{\033[0;30m%}%B%n
that sets the window title to user@host:/path along with coloring the prompt. it's not advisable to use at the console. you can just cut off the first part to remove the window title code.
in bash:
export PS1="\[\033]0;\u@\h:\w\007\]\[\e[30;1m\]\u\[\e[0m
exact same thing, except with more slashes.
anyway, that's what i like using. i'm looking forward to seeing some other suggestions once the moderators go through here.
chris
That sounds like the same guy (and mostly the same topics). Good call.
chris
Google gave a talk for ACM here last semester (got a t-shirt, woohoo!). The speaker described how they're used. They have thousands of linux boxes, and they're used to store websites (to be searched and cached copies) and to do searching on the pages they have (I think that's how it went). I got the impression that linux is used because it's free (important with thousands of licenses), it's reliable, and they found it a good platform for the searching backend software.
:)
an interesting side note: they found that when one of the linux boxes stops working, it's more cost effective to replace it than to fix the problem (hardware, at least). google throws out a lot of good hardware because of that. the lecture hall was begging for a student donation program of some sort when the google guy mentioned that
chris
Having taken the class, I'm surprised that there's this much worry about the issue. I released my MP's for it under the GPL and nobody cared. Due to the size of most of the popular (or required, like this one) classes at uiuc, programming assignments have very strict rules for what needs to be done. The assignments are generally more fill-in-the-blank than anything else. Students have to complete a method to do the specified behavior, or maybe write something simple from scratch. But nothing is complex enough to bring out some programming genius worthy of a patent or controversy over the licensing.
Any projects I've seen that would require consideration of this sort have been funded by a corporation for a senior project, or just done in the student's spare time.
This is all fun to talk about, but I don't think it really matters.
chris
--
sigdashes for mdog
isn't this exactly what happened in Cryptonomicon?
That aside, there are some obvious questions (IMO). Is there really a need for a service such as this? I can buy stuff online from other countries with my credit cards. The vendors get their currency of choice, while I pay my card off in dollars. I recently made a purchase at amazon.co.uk and never once found myself thinking "this would be so much easier with an online standard." But maybe things like that are just hacks to get us through until there's a viable uniform currency available.
ck
a co-worker of mine and i were discussing this story and he pointed out something i thought interesting.
small supernovas are known as novas. so wouldn't something on this scale be a piconova or maybe a femtonova?
chris
That gives you the sound, but not the *feeling* of the music.
I'm not one of the people discussed in the article, but I roomed with a guy who had a pair of $500 headphones (with their own amp) hooked up to his computer. He was always bitching about things like that. Apparently, he has a nice room that's built underground apart from the rest of the house, which allows better appreciation of nice equipment than a dorm room.
I'd take the live performers.