As someone who apparently skipped the Usenet generation - I'm actually not surprised and, to be honest, not that bothered. There are other, more important, things which should be phased out (plaintext FTP, plaintext SMTP, plaintext POP3) etc. I've never used Usenet in any significant amount and only ever found it full of more spam than an advertised hotmail account. The etiquette is all other the place (top-posters, multi-group postings etc.) with little to no control for the end user. The bandwidth required is substantial for even a basic set of related groups. And in the end, web-forums are more targetted, more controlled, better moderated, less spamified and more responsible for their content - even if that just means no 7-Zip-RAR'ed-uuencoded binaries.
The amount of hardware needed to run any effective binary-included news server is nowhere near practical. To be honest, if my ISP had the option, I'd opt-out of Usenet access entirely. If there were even a tiny cash incentive it would help but I know that my ISP has occasional trouble with Usenet and I'd gladly not have the facility available at all. I don't even know the news server address, I don't think I've ever typed it. My ISP are generally regarded as very techinical and open with their technical problems and only occasionally do I hear any users crying foul because the NNTP server has gone down.
Usenet had its time when the Internet was majority-good. If you want Usenet, travel back in time to then or buy access to it from somewhere with the hardware to provide all the filtering, storage, bandwidth required to provide that service. The rest of us will carry on ignoring it and/or hitting only the occasional link on Google Groups by accident.
I *deliberately* have not looked them up - and there was no way I was going to post a link. I veto companies that do this. I shouldn't have to chase information if you're insisting on saturating me with ads, giant letters and huge billboards. So if you can't even get the basic details on the sign/advert, then I see no reason to pay a company even the 0.0001 of a cent that my page-view "could" generate them in reward for them spending thousands of pounds on NOTHING in twenty-foot-high letters.
The advertising works both ways, you know - advertise in a poor way and I will REMEMBER, AVOID and DISCOURAGE other people from using your brand/product/service. Like, oh, I don't know, this post? I have no idea of what they do or sell - but if I ever come across their name now I will deliberately veto them on the basis of their wasteful and useless advertising.
The largest road in London (the M25 motorway that circles the entire city and has more cars on it than any other road in the UK) has a large warehouse by the side of it (Jct 27/28 if memory serves) which has, in twenty-foot-high letters:
Sericol. More than ink. Solutions.
written on it. What the hell do they sell? *Do* they in fact sell ink? Do they offer "ink solutions"? (whatever the hell they are) Do they sell printing? Do they process squid? I have no bloody idea. What if I just wanted ink? Sod it. It's easier to phone someone else.
About once a week, I'll see a building, advertisment or painted vehicle which is supposed to be drawing my attention to a company, product, or service and doesn't tell me what those products are. These are all examples that I've seen and which are complete copies of an advert, or sign on a van. Some of the product names have been changed because they were SO memorable that I can't remember the exact wording, website, logo etc.
Fred's Services Ltd. Call 0800XXXXXXX. (Services FOR WHAT? And they even paid to have a freefone number) Adventis. www.adventis.com (I made up the name/website) Patricks - Solutions for the modern world. (no services, no phone number, no website, nothing.) (Funny logo) - Ring 08XXXXXXXXX for our full range of services. (no, you bloody print them on the advert, or at least give me a vague idea).
I couldn't read TFA because its filtered here for some reason, but I have several problems with difficulty options and AI (which, obviously, go hand-to-hand in most games).
First, a lot of games program an absolutely brilliant AI to the best of their abilities, and then make it randomly "make mistakes" or be artificially and severely limited in its range of abilities. The classic example is snooker/pool games. The AI can do ANY shot absolutely perfectly, given a few seconds to calculate the physics. I know that even as far back as the first versions of Virtual Pool / Virtual Snooker there was no way to beat the top-end player because they could easily manage "147" and other perfect breaks and you wouldn't even get a shot to try to re-coup your loss. But the "basic" players in those games will quite happily miss a straight-line 8-ball pot because they have "been too good" lately, so they mess it up deliberately, and then when they are losing doing a four-cushion bounce shot with spin, jumping up on the rail to pot the ball, and end up in the exact position for the next ball. This just makes the human player feel alternately completely overwhelmed, or like there is no challenge. The fix is to make the AI aware of "difficult" shots versus "simple" shots and then to choose his shot and also adjust the scale of a random error occurring accordingly - an "amateur" trying a three ball curve shot will be miles off (and probably would never try it anyway), a "professional" trying a straight pot might be a pixel or two off but it would hardly matter. Some programs get this right, most don't.
The other problem with AI is when the AI isn't actually anywhere near intelligent - it just blindly does the same thing (I've seen some game "AI" code which is nothing more than "if" statements and lists of buildings/units to build in a set order) but because it's been "souped-up", by doing things at speeds vastly beyond human capabilities, or by being given a deliberate advantage (e.g. in terms of money, capacity, hit points, strength, numbers etc.). If the human player had that speed or those capabilities, it would whop the AI. Doubling the computers hit points does not make it a better player, and does not make up for terrible AI. The fix for this is to send both the human and computer inputs through the same input layer (so it is, in effect, "playing" the game itself) and make sure that it can't send commands through that any faster than the average human (or a slightly above-average human on slightly harder difficulty levels) and NEVER any faster than the best human. It is already capable of being pixel-perfect and spotting every enemy on the screen, so it makes up for the human's better pattern-matching abilities, but it shouldn't be able to react any faster than a human (to make up for the computer's much quicker response times) and so turns, shoots, etc. are "ordered" at the same rate as a human clicking a mouse.
The most frustrating problem, however, is an AI that just doesn't know how to react to a certain event. I just replayed Red Alert because it was released as freeware. In the first ten or so Allied levels, there is one mission, set inside a base with only infantry units on both sides, which relies on the human player discovering a Tanya at the other end of the map, not losing more than one or two infantry units and avoiding many groups of ten or twenty enemies that hunt them down on performing certain events. The only way to play it is to have a save/load button handy and to carefully take out every single enemy unit. The units never work this out and just follow their same set walking patterns.
Then in the next mission, the computer has "free reign" of a large map and just sends airborne-units and the occasional tank at you. Literally, once every five minutes or so a tank or two would wander towards a set point, where you obviously place your turrets and best units, and commits suicide. In later levels the computer even uses its special buildings to make the tank "invincible" for a fe
Personally, I find modern portable laptops abhorrent in their power consumption. Roll on the domination of the EEEPC (although it's not as power-efficient as you might think) and other small embedded laptops.
Back in the 80's Amstrad made a portable word-processor, spreadsheet, calculator, BBC BASIC-capable computer that you could run off a set of ordinary (non-rechargeable) AA's for several WEEKS of constant usage. There were no moving parts, no excessive heat, and it even printed to Centronics printers and serial ports, and could store data on JEIDA SRAM cards. What the hell happened that we've taken such an enormous step back all in the name of "being able to run Windows"? The ironic part is that most people would pick up the Notepad's functions much quicker, there's much less distractions and it'd do most of what some people use their laptops for (writing up dissertations, books, etc.).
Amstrad got a lot of things right with the Notepad. Unfortunately, it hit a market at the wrong time and was never really sensibly updated (the next version put a 720k floppy in but whacked the requirements up to D-cell batteries and you get less life out of it). Imagine if you could have the Notepad (hell, stick with the greyscale LCD screen if you want, just make it a little wider and a little taller) which used USB flash and could connect to Ethernet instead (wireless might be a stretch because that's quite power-hungry). Authors, casual users, word-processors would be using them everywhere you go. And with modern battery and CPU technology you could have an ultra-light one that worked for just as long as the Notepad did but with more going on in terms of raw CPU power.
My GP2X - a 2 x 200MHz ARM Linux-capable computer, with colour LCD screen can run for about 5 or 6 hours easily from a set of 2 x 2700mAh AA batteries - that's a total of 8.1 Wh, so that's 1.5W constant for "ordinary use" power consumption (which is capable of running a SNES emulator at full speed, or playing full-screen video on it's TV-out). Next to me is an old (1.5GHz single-core) laptop - apparently it has 60Wh batteries that can keep it running for about two or three hours in "extremely low" use (i.e. sitting on the Windows desktop/screensaver). That's about 24W at idle for a "clean" install (i.e. no antivirus etc.). Now I'm not saying that either of those devices are the most or least efficient devices I could find but if you are just typing up a plain text document, consuming 24 times as much power as is actually necessary to get the job done is an incredible waste, not to mention the extra calories it takes to lug the full laptop with all its batteries and chargers somewhere to do it. I love my GP2X partly because it takes plain, ordinary rechargeable AA batteries (it can run off Duracells or equivalent for a similar time but I don't buy one-shot batteries any more) - higher capacity ones are obviously better and are available just about everywhere now because of the advent of digital cameras.
People have laptops not to get work done on the move (because there's almost always a PC wherever you happen to go now, and there are much better alternatives to do it) but because they are a fashion item. Power-hungry, extremely heavy, hard to repair, expensive to buy, fragile... laptops are not a common-sense choice for most things. Even those people who work "in the field" would probably be better off in the long run with the old-fashioned "portable" PC's rather than an ordinary laptop. A lot of people I know have even bought laptops and then leave them permanently plugged in on their desk, because "it looks nicer".
It reminds me of the time a salesman from a large educational company came in to "price up" for the school I work at. He had a top-of-the-range tablet touchscreen PC and all the gubbins (remote control, Bluetooth dongle, mini-Projector in a bag etc.). What did the engineer from the same company who came in to fix the server have when he arrived the next week? An old IBM Thinkpad from the 300MHz era and
Tried it. It was horrible. It crashed on several particular DVD's (despite having the latest version, and the DVD's reading perfectly in everything else) and it couldn't handle some feature that I wanted (I can't remember what off-hand - possibly UOP's, I can't remember). I think also that it just didn't like my Slackware installation because I had lots of unexplained, simple crashes despite having all the prerequisites.
I spent hours looking for a native Linux program, mainly because I had used one on an older PC to do this the first time I heard it was possible. I spent several hours playing with vobcopy and friends trying to get it to do what I wanted, k9copy, a few others like DVD::Shrink etc. In the end, the dependency nightmare got the better of me and as I just wanted a one-click program that could do it simply I decided to go the "easy" route and just ran two point-and-click Windows programs in Wine instead. I hated myself for it, but the only point-and-click program (k9copy) just refused to run reliably. I was in no mood for debugging that day either.
DVD Decrypter, DVD Shrink. How hard is it, really?
I could teach my wife to do that in about five minutes. As an added bonus, it's free, it removes region protection, it removes UOP's (possibly the most annoying part of the DVD format to most people), keeps all the menus, shrinks it onto the cheaper single-layer DVD-R's with virtually zero visible difference and it doesn't have silly restrictions. A program with silly restrictions to stop a particular format from having silly restrictions?
I just backed up a couple of my boxsets using this because they were slightly damaged when we took them on holiday with us and I don't want to pay for them again if we do damage them. The majority of the time was spent looking at a little window wending its way through the DVD and swapping discs (I only had the one DVD-writer drive plugged in at the time and had to swap original for blank constantly).
I even did it using WINE because the PC with the writer was a home Linux server, and it worked perfectly. I very much doubt you could make it THAT much simpler, except possibly joining the two programs together and incurring the wrath of the DVD industry by doing so (does this software strip region-protection? It doesn't mention it).
I can't see anybody using this... people "in-the-know" enough to distinguish between DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD-RW, DVD+RW, DVD-RAM etc. and who know that this "is possible" are probably already doing it. I can't even get my parents to copy their CD's before they scratch them and that's a one-click operation. I can't see them doing it for their DVD's even if it's a one-click operation with this software. And, to be honest, I'd rather show them the "two-click" method that gets rids of the UOPS because that would astound them and they would kill to have that feature on their existing DVD's.
First, I don't understand the need for a shrinkable filesystem at all (I've only ever grown filesystems in my time as a systems administrator, and then it was just easier to move the whole thing to another drive rather than mess about - that's a rule that's held since the dark days of DOS and 20Mb harddrives, although there was a program called FIPS that could do amazing things with partitions for the time). I've never seen partitions or drives that ever needed to get smaller and the only thing that indicates is that you can't afford a larger hard drive and you've hit capacity and you don't want to delete those Windows games...
Second, if you're getting lost+found files on anything journalled, it's because you've not got "full" journalling switched on, you've not got the latest kernel, or you've hit an unusual bug. The first is most likely because you're probably running on a "middle-ground" option, like ext3 also has by default, which says "favour speed over safety". The reason for this will become clear the instant you run a "full" journalling system. It's incredibly slow to write, because everything gets written twice effectively. The "slow deletion using ext3" on MythTV things are a thing of the past - a thread does it in the background now and you never know it's happening.
Third, I don't see why the filesystem is that critical for, of all things, a MythTV box. It's hardly vital stuff we're talking about here. If you are THAT worried, you'd have a UPS on the thing and backups, or net-backup to a proper storage PC. You're obviously not. Thus, use whatever's available and if and when you decide on a replacment filesystem because something a) isn't supported, b) isn't suitable or c) disappears from the Linux kernel, then you can... shock, horror, copy the data to a new partition with a new filesystem on it then.
Fourth, if you are really that geeky that you can't have Reiser now because it's no longer fashionable (which is what it sounds like more than anything else, and you've come up with the "shrinkable" thing to try to bolster that position), then why not have a RAID (battery backed if you don't want to lose data, remember!). Or why not put DATA seperate to OS in different partitions, have a read-only OS partition (it's MythTV, you could boot it from a CD) and then the worst that will happen is you will lose the current-written file on the Data partition(which might be that program you wanted to record, but better than trashing the system).
I think you'll find that your information is a little out of date and mainly applies to older military satellites.
Anything "critical" wold be done with a better satellite or a cloud of smaller satellites that are impossible to "avoid". For instance, GPS demands that at least four satellites are in view at all times from every part of the globe to get an accurate fix. Satellites which are, on the whole, run, controlled or have interests from the US Government. I'm not saying that the GPS system is for primarily military "spying" purposes, but it shows that even the public satellite orbits are enough to basically see anything, anywhere, given the most basic of manoeuvring capability.
What makes you think that all of the "unheard of" satellites are any different, or in fewer numbers, or not able to move to look at anything interesting within a reasonable timeframe? It would be quite pointless, after all, to launch a modern multi-billion dollar military satellite if all that was required was public information / academic data gathered from worldwide telescopes to render them completely useless.
Even easier would be to, oh, I don't know, do things at night (yes, IR-capable satellites exist but it makes things harder straight away)? Or do things in large warehouses with a roof?
I did - with several PG texts. Alice shows the most "variability" of the ones I tried between the different scores. Are these same grading schemes designed to cope with pages of numbered T&C's? I don't know. The point is that the measures are useless unless used under certain conditions and no effort has been made to ensure those conditions were met.
It's a poor application of what are basically statistical formulae on the lengths of certain words. What if the ISP's name was "BT" compared to "International Communications"? What if one ISP uses the "hereafter referred to as THE COMPANY" trick and one states the company name each time? It's a totally bogus measure. I could easily form any conclusion I felt like by playing with this "experiment" and it would be hard to argue against it without a basic knowledge of statistics. However, the article's approach is completely rubbish and anyone who looks at what those grades measure can see it's a waste of time.
That said, most ISP T&C's don't follow the "plain English" doctrine more than "we use long words". They HAVE to use long words, the technical descriptions demand it most of the time. I could reword any of those T&C's to be MORE difficult to understand, despite being perfect English, and get a lower reading score.
If you're gonna quote numbers about something, know what the numbers mean and how they apply.
I don't believe it for a second - the measures used are dubious at best (try the Word readability macros and see for yourself - they do Fleisch-Kincaid scores too). At minimum, they have to be used properly. For instance, the single word text "communication" is so unutterably high on all the indices that it skews the results completely. And the text of Alice in Wonderland on Project Gutenberg scored:
Coleman Liau index : 28.19 Flesh Kincaid Grade level : 11.95 ARI (Automated Readability Index) : 21.61 SMOG : 11.68
So that's a hefty margin of error, removes all use of any average and says that you have to be a virtual genius to read Alice in Wonderland, or a 11th-grader. Mmm. Yes. Accurate measure.
Sadly, that's a very blinkered view of education. Teaching to a particular company's product... Urk. I'd rather my kid just bunked off school than do that. There's a difference between gaining a particular certification (I hesitate to call an MCSE a qualification because it's more a memory test of unnecessary trivialities than anything else) in a limited area and actually TEACHING a subject. Teacher's should not ever be teaching towards a particular product in any area. Bad teacher's do ("Today, we'll be doing computers. The thing we'll use is Word. The only other things that exist are Excel and Powerpoint. Don't ask me how Air Traffic Control works because that's probably just a very complicated Word macro."). Good teacher's don't.
If anything along those lines had been true of when I was at school, I would now be the proud owner of a BBC BASIC qualification, a Logo diploma and a Wordstar certification. Completely bloody useless. That's what the teachers thought we "needed" to know back then and fortunately they were soundly overruled and told to teach generics instead.
You'd flood the market with MCSE's (and thereby making that qualification even less use than it is now) and not provide them with anything else, thus within five years, when things inevitably move on, there'd be nothing to distinguish those who "can" and those who "did once under enormous by-rote instruction when they were a kid". What a horrible idea. You wouldn't help the kids ANY because I wouldn't touch someone who only has an MCSE without either relevant experience or some sort of relevant qualification (not a memory test), and certainly not a school-leaver. Plus, on a large-scale, MCSE's are pretty much out of date by the time they are awarded, let alone as something for the future (I swear MS change certain options just to push the MCSE takeup the next year).
By all means have vocational qualifications in computing - I always argue that there should be more of them. PC Repair. Communications cabling. But don't stick any vendor-specific nonsense into them, don't target them at a single use of commercial software, don't claim that they'll form a career for you, and for god's sake don't pretend that "certifications" are somehow a replacement for an academic or vocational qualification in the same area.
"Now I'm with UKonline (with LLU) and £20 gets me a soft cap (reputedly of 750GB/pm - which I never even vaguely approach) and no 'peak time' allowances or throttling."
Reputedly, nothing. They say quite plainly that they don't advertise any Fair Usage amount AT ALL (which to me is a million times worse than a low Fair Usage limit), so it's whatever they want it to be. "Unlimited" but we can cut you off at any time because our Fair Use Policy says we can for "excessive" users, but we don't define "excessive" in any way, shape or form? No thanks. At least PlusNet can hold a real claim of "unlimited in off-peak, decent usage allowance in peak" with actual numbers to back them up should you trip over (I have once or twice when I've done a lot of heavy downloading but you get an automated warning, another automated warning, then you get traffic shaped in peak periods - I never got past the first warning).
No UK ISP can afford 750Gb/pm for even one user - see the Plusnet take on the situation at the link in the parent post... it's just not viable. And don't forget - PlusNet are owned by BT now and have sucked in a lot of company's recently (the domain hosting outfit I was using for one - Parbin Ltd, that owned a lot of other stuff). They aren't a fly-by-night and they have a LOT of experience with the UK ISP situation.
If my maths is right, 750Gbytes/month is 2.5Mbits/s constantly 24 hours a day, 30 days a month. Nobody lets you even get CLOSE to that (I'd doubt you COULD do it on an ordinary household 8Mbps connection, what with variations in traffic etc.). You can't even do that from dedicated servers inside places like Telehouse Docklands without getting thrown off or hitting enormous bandwidth bills - you can pay thousands a month for a constant 10Mbps connection to the net. I don't believe it for a second. You'd get thrown off LONG before you ever hit that, without warning and without recourse to T&C's of UKOnline.
Plusnet let you do whatever you like overnight and limit you to 50Gb/month (less on newer/cheaper packages) cumulative over peak hours and that's a lot more than most ISP's for whom I've read the actual Terms & Conditions.
Personally, I'll stick with PlusNet who I know play the game, who I know state why all the time and who I know aren't letting BT owning them change anything - it's still the same staff, still the same equipment, still the same software, still the same customer service and they have denounced measures that BT itself is taking on, such as "warning" people who are seen to download copyrighted Torrents etc. - PlusNet don't want to play any part in that game despite what must be enormous pressure from their owners. PlusNet are my kind of ISP. You'll have to take their LLU (they do LLU too) connection in my local exchange from my cold, dead hands...
Well, London (and the UK in general) is just finding out that CCTV has pretty much zero effect on crime in local areas. They never cover everywhere, and in the areas they do cover the CCTV only provides evidence. It doesn't deter much, as was previously thought, but it assists in detection and conviction. We even have these fancy "follow the person through the crowds for the surrounding mile and work out where he went" cameras - they don't work as well as you think, even with a human operator and hours of recorded footage.
I worked in a school that had CCTV in every corridor, classroom, toilets (not inside the actual cubicle but the washareas) and outside. The locally assigned police officer visited about once a month to collect various CCTV on the cases that had occurred in school and were going to court.
The ever-present, heavily-advertised, constantly-recording, 30-day picture perfect records with precise timing and location info didn't do much to help him. It didn't stop gangs of kids coming back in on the holidays and kicking doors down (the kids wore hoods, fortunately the police were able to identify them based on "teacher's guesses" and a lot of clever questioning, rather than hard-and-fast "this is definitely X" CCTV evidence, or capturing them red-handed). It didn't stop theft of laptops from inside classrooms (and locked offices) at parent's evenings. It didn't stop bullying. It didn't stop teacher's from committing various acts (pushing a kid against a wall) which got them sacked and talking to a policeman. In fact, only about 1 in 10 things did we actually have useful camera footage for and once we confiscated a mobile phone from a student because it had better footage on it.
CCTV doesn't prevent. It provides evidence. Sketchy evidence. Good policework can take an initial guess and push it through to a conviction but if someone gets stroppy it's extremely difficult to prove that blob-in-a-hood-A was actually person A unless you catch them red-handed. It doesn't matter how much you spend on recording equipment and cameras, most of this stuff isn't seen with a human-eye, so why should a computer-eye do any better? Most crimes, people don't care that they are visible. If they do care, they do it somewhere they are not visible which isn't difficult even in an enclosed school, let alone an entire city.
That said, CCTV in public spaces is fine by me so long as it's 100% that it's only recording public spaces. Hell, I record the public alleyway beside my house just in case but that's technically not allowed because of some silly rule. But relying on CCTV to do anything but provide a slightly better hint at who committed X is a waste of time, unless you can track them perfectly until a police officer can grab them. Even then, it can be hard to prove that any wrongdoing occurred, depending on the crime.
Well, I caught on to PlusNet's tech-heavy staff very early on (back when they were just dial-up). They have the most tech-savvy staff I've spoken to at an ISP and all their policies are backed up with real data, technical explanations and no holding back on "we can't make a profit if we do X" explanations.
Because I got on their broadband early, for £20 a month (with some £0.50p more refunded because I referred a few people to them), I get to keep my old "Premier" account which let you do nearly 50Gb a month before anyone complains. And I have the same "non-peak traffic doesn't count" set-up as everyone else, so I can leave stuff downloading overnight quite happily.
And because they explain WHY they have these policies, because they are open with their traffic usage graphs (the amount of iPlayer traffic is quite astounding, to be honest), because they tell you exactly what size pipes they've got coming in and going out and when they add more, it makes me very reluctant to place any more burden on their poor tech's and overloaded pipes at peak hours. So they get their exisiting pipes made more use of doing the night (when they are just paying for them to do sod all) and they get less peak-time traffic so they don't have to buy new pipes to keep new customers.
And I get a decent peak-time allowance if I want, I get whatever speed broadband is available in my area, and I get to talk to people who know what they are doing first time. I had a complaint once about the latency of SSH changing - I got a very technical reply in seconds, a "sorry, it's something we switched on because most people don't need that low a latency" and an hour before it was fixed without me having to do anything. And when I phone them up or submit a technical issue, there is a 99% probability that the person who reads it understands it and a 100% probability that it gets passed on to a knowledgeable person who can fix it fast enough that I don't have to complain.
I can't possibly give up PlusNet because you can't even get the Premier accounts from them anymore. They even let me move house and keep the Premier account with it's high-cap and low price. Oh, and the wonderful ideas of "this is a local-rate dial-up number in case your broadband doesn't work or you're on holiday and you get the same static IP as your broadband when you use it" is fantastic.
- I chop off all the connectors from my expensive, official chargers and solder them to cheap multi-level adaptors? - I bought X, a thing which includes connectors for everything and lets you charge Watts of equipment simultaneously? - I run DC electric around my house in multi-voltage and have purchased specific connectors for every piece of equipment I own and hope I don't plug my phone into the wrong voltage?
I don't think that there is a sensible solution at the moment. I tend to have a charging area - where I keep all the chargers on a power strip which is plugged in whenever I need to charge anything. My wife and I often want to charge two similar items at the same time - for those cases I purchase an extra charger (usually from eBay or a boot sale) or use one mains charger and plug the supplied car-charger into a 220-12v adaptor I bought that has a "cigarette lighter" socket on it.
The other options don't really bear thinking about. Running DC electric around a house is an absolute nightmare so you're basically going to want to lump all the things needing charge near a suitable DC output - which could be the official chargers on a powerstrip, or a multi-voltage thing, like a PC PSU or similar multi-out DC supply if you have THAT many but I'd check the efficiency of using such a thing when a single mobile phone is plugged into it.
So you have to have all your charging equipment in one place, and you can either rig up some Heath Robinson solution to charge any peripheral with any connector via any voltage or you could just plug the mains adaptors that you already have into a £2.99 power strip. You can neaten it up by hiding the actual blocks out of site and rigging up a bit of polished wood that can hold all the various gadgets with the right connectors already in place through holes on it. But that's just poncing about.
You don't save much by doing anything different - in fact, the exact opposite when something goes wrong or doesn't work first time. Forget the whiners moaning about the power used by extra PSU's on the strips - plug in an energy monitor while they are all idle if you are that worried, but the easiest solution is "plug them all in when something is charging, take them all out when nothing is", which is facilitated by an amazing invention called the main switch on a power strip.
There is no magic solution. Even "wireless charging" is bound to be the same in 100 years - every bloody manufacturer will use a different field strength, frequency, polarisation etc. so that you have to buy their charger. Until someone (ISO, I'm looking at you) actually standardises on a DC supply to a house and countries enforce its use in law, you're stuck with it. The only DC standard I'm aware of is in cars and that actually WORKS to a degree - a car charger is a car charger and will work in basically every car in the world (24v supplies on lorries not included, but they do usually come with rather large warnings on the dash and you can get 24-12v convertors for just such an occasion).
Something tells me that a lot of people are going to be looking up Oort Cloud on Wikipedia in the next few minutes... the article summary is nice and scientificky but it hardly explains what's going on in simple terms - the article is actually more summarised than the summary!
Although the Wiz is the "official" successor, the successor in spirit (and with a much more open development process, and much more likely to actually get up-to-date source code published - the GP2X firmware versions aren't always open-sourced properly) is the Pandora... www.openpandora.org - which is due out at roughly the same time as the Wiz.
Most of the developers for the GP2X are actually putting their weight behind the Pandora first - I know, I'm a GP2X software porter of things like Simon Tatham's (of PuTTY fame) Portable Puzzle Collection... (Blatant advert: http://www.ledow.org.uk/gp2x/ for that particular one). This is mainly because GPH are notorious for poor information and stock-status. Most countries had trouble importing the GP2X before it was EOL'd anyway, and you don't get anything useful out of the company at all.
Well, I dunno whether you just worded your comment wrong but a two-second search on some major UK electronics manufacturers says you're wrong, even down to the datasheets. The first hit I got was:
which quite clearly is an IR LED that has GaAs in it. And I imagine IR LEDs are quite popular in, say, every remote control made in the last ten years?
Or were you trying to say that blue and white LED's don't use GaAs?
It's a big flaw. Someone big was bound to fall foul of it eventually. And to be honest, I can't say that I'm at all surprised. In fact, I'm expecting a lot more.
I bet that there are still hundreds of large companies that are vulnerable worldwide and I bet that translates to hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of affected people. For instance, last time I checked the whole LGfL (London Grid for Learning) was vulnerable - and they provide DNS / Internet connectivity for every school in London (several million users, hundreds if not thousands of schools) with little alternative because they have been mandated as the recommended solution and thus all "interesting" content is in their private network.
If they ARE still compromised (and several days after the release of the information, they were still showing up as vulnerable on all those DNS tests and today I got: Your name server, at ***.***.***.***, appears vulnerable to DNS Cache Poisoning. All requests came from the following source port: 32768), that's virtually every school, staff member and student in London (we're probably talking close on a million people because it includes Greater London Boroughs but I'm not sure of the exact figure) which are in trouble because they use the upstream DNS from LGfL as their basis.
Have we heard anything through official channels? Nope. Does everybody just trust LGfL to do their job transparently? Yep. Have they done it? Apparently not. Have they even heard of it? I don't know, but there have been zero advisories, zero visible configuration changes, that I can see.
Give it a few months, one of the students will download something and poison the whole of London's educational system and THEN maybe someone will bother to look into it.
When I heard about this flaw, the first thing I did was check all upstream servers that either my servers or my own home computers use - my cheap ISP (PlusNet) had apparently fixed the issue before I'd even caught wind of the "there may be a DNS problem" posts on Kaminsky's blog. Every other one just seems to be dragging their feet.
Although I agree in part with you, there are a number of problems with what you say.
".h264 and AAC both cost so little for the BBC and any partners that using OGG/OGM would actively cost them more due to the inferior video compression." "The BBC have made great strides with their own video codec even if it's not quite ready."
These two statements show the problem nicely. The BBC actually funds its own video codec specifically for archiving its video archives (which, eventually, it hopes to allow access to directly on the Internet - there's a quote somewhere if you look for it). This codec is already very good, completely free (and patent-free which is much more important for the BBC) and the cost to "finish it off" (which at this point is minor bug-fixing and bundling into a nice WMP-codec DLL / mplayer plugin etc.) is negligible to anything that they could buy - no matter how cheap. They could do it tomorrow.
However, all they ever seem to do is cut back on Dirac and spend on other technologies. If Dirac's a failure then, to paraphrase yourself, they "have an obligation to the license payer" to cut it. If it's not, they really should be using it in place of a pay-for patented codec. It was designed with this sort of thing in mind and, if memory serves, was designed so that multiple "quality levels" could be easily made from the same streams to allow streaming over a very slow connection and professional-quality distribution/archival. Hell, have Dirac in all downloads for the iPlayer software and use something else for the Flash streams. It would still save money. And there's an precedent...
"iPlayer eats insane amounts of bandwidth and if they can shrink videos down at all whilst maintaining quality it's in the BBC's best interests."
Yes. Then they add the Wii to it, but only in the codec it's compatible with, which takes up 4x the bandwidth of the normal iPlayer streams. Thus, this argument is dead on it's feet. They actually put out an entirely seperate encoded file just for Wii (the most popular games console ever?) on every single video they have, sucking up 4x the bandwidth each time they are used. They also realise that real-time Flash-based streaming is dependent on peak hours and thus puts a massive dent into their bandwidth bill to cope with that peak-time, non-peer-to-peer surge. The other day they put the entire movie of Chicken Run on BBC iPlayer Flash streams and I had it playing in the background.
But they can't write a Linux frontend (even if closed source) for already-existing code to solve this problem (and thus relegate real-time Flash streaming to a second-class method of delivery) or solve the "DRM problem" on Linux. Hell, speak to Nintendo and get iPlayer software bundled with the next Wii update - the more Wii use, more Wii's plugged into the TV all the time, the more bandwidth shared and the closer world Wii domination is.
"That's not even taking into account the number of consumer devices that have hardware.h264 decoding compared to Theora." "Would cost HW manufacturers a lot to add support for a format that's barely used."
Hardware-decoding is neither here nor there - modern PC's can brute force their way through any iPlayer stream without even breaking a sweat. Even consoles can handle the streams properly - my 600MHz Thinkpad on Linux without video acceleration laughs at the Flash streams and can play full-screen video of that type (800x600 DivX's, DVD's etc. don't worry it at all, even streamed over wireless). There aren't many (any?) HD streams available on iPlayer or broadband connections capable of making this an bottleneck.
However, what you say has an element of truth in that they would have to make a way to play those streams available to the non-techy public. Like, say, an iPlayer app. Hmmm...
"OSS types complained when the BBC made iPlayer windows only at first (even though they always said it was in development for more platforms) but the BBC still responded by speeding up the
18 years *assuming Japan stays still for those 18 years*. That's a pretty hefty error bar on the graph, there.
To put it in perspective, this is the equivalent of Japan still sitting on 1990 technology *today*. 1990 technology would be, according to a few quick googles, 8 years pre-v90 modems, 6 years before any 56k modem was invented and around the time that 14.4k was popular.
So, what these statistics are saying is that, the analogy for the broadband market in the US is that, if Japan had sat on their 14.4k modems since 1990 and not moved, the US would be about equivalent *now*.
Although you don't have the data available, it seems that 100 years or so to actually pull back that gap against the assumption that Japan *won't* sit on their "14.4k broadband" for the next 20 years, would *sound* about right. The US would have to make up 18 years of progress ON TOP of keeping up with every change that Japan makes.
Of course, this all relies on the figures being correct and that the growth fits that sort of curve in the first place.
It's incredibly easy, it really is. I have a computing degree, I work in IT support, I do programming on the side but I've *never* been taught electricity, electronics or anything vaguely related. After a few years of self-study, yes, I can do just about anything up to and including building something like a ZX Spectrum from parts (although I won't touch surface-mount devices because I'm the worst person in the world at fine motor control... typically geek-clumsy). But the stuff I'm talking about is all modular, simple stuff. I honestly started doing this sort of thing for myself and others - it's amazing what you can do with nothing more than some wire and a computer.
One of my first projects was to build a "burglar alarm" circuit for the local Scout group to "defuse" as part of a themed camp. It had keypad entry for a PIN, it had a bundle of coloured wires that had to be cut in sequence, it had sensors to detect if they tried to move it, it had a protection that would not allow the box to be opened. And it used batteries, wire, a small mercury switch (costs pence) for the motion sensors and some ingenuity. There were no chips or other electronics involved (if people are interested, it ran on batteries which were constantly short-circuited through a long length of wire but in which any "incorrect" action cut the short-circuit and allowed the batteries to power a small loud siren buzzer).
For the particular things I mentioned, though (i.e. real practical applications, not toys), Caller ID is nothing more than a common modem option (if you are in the UK, check the modem first because we have "odd" Caller-ID that isn't necessarily supported even by modems that claim it... US modems tend to just work if you're in the US). You can even do it on mobiles if you have the data cable - everything uses the AT instruction set so it just "appears" on a serial port as textual data.
On Linux, just "cat" or "fopen" the serial device that appears when you plug the data cable or modem in. On Windows, grab a serial library. Literally, when the phone rings, the modem will give out "RING" on the serial port and, if Caller-ID is supported/enabled on the phoneline/modem, you will get "NUMBER +441234567890" as well as TIME and DATE entries. You might need to send it an AT string to initialise it but you can easily look that up (usually ATZ is sufficient) and it won't do anything to your phoneline if you don't output any string to the serial port. A couple of lines of string-parsing code and either a speech synthesis library or a home-recorded audio file and you have an auto-announcing Caller ID setup.
Burglar alarms are incredibly simple - push 5 or 12V through a single wire of a two-core cable which goes through all the PIR's, door contacts (which are literally nothing more than a "reed switch" which is always near a magnet when the door is shut), "panic buttons" and anything else. Make each device join the "input" wire to the other "output" wire on the cable (daisy-chaining is also used and easier but requires a bit more effort). As soon as something "goes off" (door opens, PIR senses movement etc., panic button pressed) it will break the circuit (as if someone had cut the cable).
To detect when something happens, it's just a case of making sure you're still getting 5 or 12V at the "output" wire of the cable. If you buy any wired burglar alarm, you'll find that this is EXACTLY how it works. You can even usually pinch the components from any off-the-shelf burglar alarm and/or extend an alarm setup with your own devices (check voltages with a multimeter first).
Using the K8055 interface I described (£25 pre-assembled in the UK from Maplin's - a major high-street electronics store), or any similar A/D input for a PC, it's as simple as getting a length of cable, putting one end on an "output" from the PC (or just a 5v adaptor near the computer) running it to one side of an alarm-sensor, running another cable from the sensors "output" back to the PC on an "input".
I've yet to see a computer program itself. In fact, I've yet to see a computer do anything more than *exactly what it's told* by the programmer/operator. And it does things perfectly in the order you give it. From a limited set of instructions. Mmm. Damn, that sounds like procedural programming is still necessary to me.
However, we are quite likely to move onto more "unusual" languages, such as massively parallel ones for a start (which are still procedural, but just procedural across many "computers" simultaneously). Ignore the paradigms like OO etc. because they are just pretty ways to do procedural programming in shorthand. That's the human element, not any massive "change" in computing. The underlying code is and always will be procedural. Therefore, even if it's only the GCC team, someone will be hacking procedural code.
"Do you really think people are going to be hacking away at procedural code in 20 years?" Yes. People said this 20 years ago and it's still true. In fact, people were saying this nearly 30 years ago and it's still true. Possibly even 40.
The fact is that, without a massive change in the way computers work, procedural code is here to stay. When we get onto computers that don't operate on the basis of performing sets of a single operations one after the other, then procedural programming will die. This is basically the "quantum" era, although I suspect something else may well appear before we have that practically available to the masses. We are probably a lot more than 20 years away from quantum computing. Twenty years ago computing was identical is all but scale. In fact, the last "big change" was from hard-coded to "programmable" computers and that was DECADES ago.
Even then, the world's software will mostly work the same way - you still have to wait for the user before you can do anything etc. and so ordinary procedural code isn't going to go anywhere even then. What'll happen is that you'll have two different types of computer in one... an "ordinary" one to allow the user to talk to the "weird" one so it can get its answer straight away, or transmit that information securely. The fact is that you've got to change a significant proportion of the userbase, developer base and equipment away before procedural code dies entirely. In a world now entirely dependent on things to carry on working as they are. 20 years ain't enough time for that. In twenty years the basic home PC still hasn't changed its core instruction set, let alone the way it's programmed or works.
Slashdot Mirror
As someone who apparently skipped the Usenet generation - I'm actually not surprised and, to be honest, not that bothered. There are other, more important, things which should be phased out (plaintext FTP, plaintext SMTP, plaintext POP3) etc. I've never used Usenet in any significant amount and only ever found it full of more spam than an advertised hotmail account. The etiquette is all other the place (top-posters, multi-group postings etc.) with little to no control for the end user. The bandwidth required is substantial for even a basic set of related groups. And in the end, web-forums are more targetted, more controlled, better moderated, less spamified and more responsible for their content - even if that just means no 7-Zip-RAR'ed-uuencoded binaries.
The amount of hardware needed to run any effective binary-included news server is nowhere near practical. To be honest, if my ISP had the option, I'd opt-out of Usenet access entirely. If there were even a tiny cash incentive it would help but I know that my ISP has occasional trouble with Usenet and I'd gladly not have the facility available at all. I don't even know the news server address, I don't think I've ever typed it. My ISP are generally regarded as very techinical and open with their technical problems and only occasionally do I hear any users crying foul because the NNTP server has gone down.
Usenet had its time when the Internet was majority-good. If you want Usenet, travel back in time to then or buy access to it from somewhere with the hardware to provide all the filtering, storage, bandwidth required to provide that service. The rest of us will carry on ignoring it and/or hitting only the occasional link on Google Groups by accident.
Clear as mud isn't it?
And I would hope they DID have "strategically located" centres/managers - what's the alternative? Throw darts at a map?
I *deliberately* have not looked them up - and there was no way I was going to post a link. I veto companies that do this. I shouldn't have to chase information if you're insisting on saturating me with ads, giant letters and huge billboards. So if you can't even get the basic details on the sign/advert, then I see no reason to pay a company even the 0.0001 of a cent that my page-view "could" generate them in reward for them spending thousands of pounds on NOTHING in twenty-foot-high letters.
The advertising works both ways, you know - advertise in a poor way and I will REMEMBER, AVOID and DISCOURAGE other people from using your brand/product/service. Like, oh, I don't know, this post? I have no idea of what they do or sell - but if I ever come across their name now I will deliberately veto them on the basis of their wasteful and useless advertising.
I must say this a hundred times a year.
The largest road in London (the M25 motorway that circles the entire city and has more cars on it than any other road in the UK) has a large warehouse by the side of it (Jct 27/28 if memory serves) which has, in twenty-foot-high letters:
Sericol. More than ink. Solutions.
written on it. What the hell do they sell? *Do* they in fact sell ink? Do they offer "ink solutions"? (whatever the hell they are) Do they sell printing? Do they process squid? I have no bloody idea. What if I just wanted ink? Sod it. It's easier to phone someone else.
About once a week, I'll see a building, advertisment or painted vehicle which is supposed to be drawing my attention to a company, product, or service and doesn't tell me what those products are. These are all examples that I've seen and which are complete copies of an advert, or sign on a van. Some of the product names have been changed because they were SO memorable that I can't remember the exact wording, website, logo etc.
Fred's Services Ltd. Call 0800XXXXXXX. (Services FOR WHAT? And they even paid to have a freefone number)
Adventis. www.adventis.com (I made up the name/website)
Patricks - Solutions for the modern world. (no services, no phone number, no website, nothing.)
(Funny logo) - Ring 08XXXXXXXXX for our full range of services. (no, you bloody print them on the advert, or at least give me a vague idea).
I couldn't read TFA because its filtered here for some reason, but I have several problems with difficulty options and AI (which, obviously, go hand-to-hand in most games).
First, a lot of games program an absolutely brilliant AI to the best of their abilities, and then make it randomly "make mistakes" or be artificially and severely limited in its range of abilities. The classic example is snooker/pool games. The AI can do ANY shot absolutely perfectly, given a few seconds to calculate the physics. I know that even as far back as the first versions of Virtual Pool / Virtual Snooker there was no way to beat the top-end player because they could easily manage "147" and other perfect breaks and you wouldn't even get a shot to try to re-coup your loss. But the "basic" players in those games will quite happily miss a straight-line 8-ball pot because they have "been too good" lately, so they mess it up deliberately, and then when they are losing doing a four-cushion bounce shot with spin, jumping up on the rail to pot the ball, and end up in the exact position for the next ball. This just makes the human player feel alternately completely overwhelmed, or like there is no challenge. The fix is to make the AI aware of "difficult" shots versus "simple" shots and then to choose his shot and also adjust the scale of a random error occurring accordingly - an "amateur" trying a three ball curve shot will be miles off (and probably would never try it anyway), a "professional" trying a straight pot might be a pixel or two off but it would hardly matter. Some programs get this right, most don't.
The other problem with AI is when the AI isn't actually anywhere near intelligent - it just blindly does the same thing (I've seen some game "AI" code which is nothing more than "if" statements and lists of buildings/units to build in a set order) but because it's been "souped-up", by doing things at speeds vastly beyond human capabilities, or by being given a deliberate advantage (e.g. in terms of money, capacity, hit points, strength, numbers etc.). If the human player had that speed or those capabilities, it would whop the AI. Doubling the computers hit points does not make it a better player, and does not make up for terrible AI. The fix for this is to send both the human and computer inputs through the same input layer (so it is, in effect, "playing" the game itself) and make sure that it can't send commands through that any faster than the average human (or a slightly above-average human on slightly harder difficulty levels) and NEVER any faster than the best human. It is already capable of being pixel-perfect and spotting every enemy on the screen, so it makes up for the human's better pattern-matching abilities, but it shouldn't be able to react any faster than a human (to make up for the computer's much quicker response times) and so turns, shoots, etc. are "ordered" at the same rate as a human clicking a mouse.
The most frustrating problem, however, is an AI that just doesn't know how to react to a certain event. I just replayed Red Alert because it was released as freeware. In the first ten or so Allied levels, there is one mission, set inside a base with only infantry units on both sides, which relies on the human player discovering a Tanya at the other end of the map, not losing more than one or two infantry units and avoiding many groups of ten or twenty enemies that hunt them down on performing certain events. The only way to play it is to have a save/load button handy and to carefully take out every single enemy unit. The units never work this out and just follow their same set walking patterns.
Then in the next mission, the computer has "free reign" of a large map and just sends airborne-units and the occasional tank at you. Literally, once every five minutes or so a tank or two would wander towards a set point, where you obviously place your turrets and best units, and commits suicide. In later levels the computer even uses its special buildings to make the tank "invincible" for a fe
Personally, I find modern portable laptops abhorrent in their power consumption. Roll on the domination of the EEEPC (although it's not as power-efficient as you might think) and other small embedded laptops.
Back in the 80's Amstrad made a portable word-processor, spreadsheet, calculator, BBC BASIC-capable computer that you could run off a set of ordinary (non-rechargeable) AA's for several WEEKS of constant usage. There were no moving parts, no excessive heat, and it even printed to Centronics printers and serial ports, and could store data on JEIDA SRAM cards. What the hell happened that we've taken such an enormous step back all in the name of "being able to run Windows"? The ironic part is that most people would pick up the Notepad's functions much quicker, there's much less distractions and it'd do most of what some people use their laptops for (writing up dissertations, books, etc.).
Amstrad got a lot of things right with the Notepad. Unfortunately, it hit a market at the wrong time and was never really sensibly updated (the next version put a 720k floppy in but whacked the requirements up to D-cell batteries and you get less life out of it). Imagine if you could have the Notepad (hell, stick with the greyscale LCD screen if you want, just make it a little wider and a little taller) which used USB flash and could connect to Ethernet instead (wireless might be a stretch because that's quite power-hungry). Authors, casual users, word-processors would be using them everywhere you go. And with modern battery and CPU technology you could have an ultra-light one that worked for just as long as the Notepad did but with more going on in terms of raw CPU power.
My GP2X - a 2 x 200MHz ARM Linux-capable computer, with colour LCD screen can run for about 5 or 6 hours easily from a set of 2 x 2700mAh AA batteries - that's a total of 8.1 Wh, so that's 1.5W constant for "ordinary use" power consumption (which is capable of running a SNES emulator at full speed, or playing full-screen video on it's TV-out). Next to me is an old (1.5GHz single-core) laptop - apparently it has 60Wh batteries that can keep it running for about two or three hours in "extremely low" use (i.e. sitting on the Windows desktop/screensaver). That's about 24W at idle for a "clean" install (i.e. no antivirus etc.). Now I'm not saying that either of those devices are the most or least efficient devices I could find but if you are just typing up a plain text document, consuming 24 times as much power as is actually necessary to get the job done is an incredible waste, not to mention the extra calories it takes to lug the full laptop with all its batteries and chargers somewhere to do it. I love my GP2X partly because it takes plain, ordinary rechargeable AA batteries (it can run off Duracells or equivalent for a similar time but I don't buy one-shot batteries any more) - higher capacity ones are obviously better and are available just about everywhere now because of the advent of digital cameras.
People have laptops not to get work done on the move (because there's almost always a PC wherever you happen to go now, and there are much better alternatives to do it) but because they are a fashion item. Power-hungry, extremely heavy, hard to repair, expensive to buy, fragile... laptops are not a common-sense choice for most things. Even those people who work "in the field" would probably be better off in the long run with the old-fashioned "portable" PC's rather than an ordinary laptop. A lot of people I know have even bought laptops and then leave them permanently plugged in on their desk, because "it looks nicer".
It reminds me of the time a salesman from a large educational company came in to "price up" for the school I work at. He had a top-of-the-range tablet touchscreen PC and all the gubbins (remote control, Bluetooth dongle, mini-Projector in a bag etc.). What did the engineer from the same company who came in to fix the server have when he arrived the next week? An old IBM Thinkpad from the 300MHz era and
Tried it. It was horrible. It crashed on several particular DVD's (despite having the latest version, and the DVD's reading perfectly in everything else) and it couldn't handle some feature that I wanted (I can't remember what off-hand - possibly UOP's, I can't remember). I think also that it just didn't like my Slackware installation because I had lots of unexplained, simple crashes despite having all the prerequisites.
I spent hours looking for a native Linux program, mainly because I had used one on an older PC to do this the first time I heard it was possible. I spent several hours playing with vobcopy and friends trying to get it to do what I wanted, k9copy, a few others like DVD::Shrink etc. In the end, the dependency nightmare got the better of me and as I just wanted a one-click program that could do it simply I decided to go the "easy" route and just ran two point-and-click Windows programs in Wine instead. I hated myself for it, but the only point-and-click program (k9copy) just refused to run reliably. I was in no mood for debugging that day either.
DVD Decrypter, DVD Shrink. How hard is it, really?
I could teach my wife to do that in about five minutes. As an added bonus, it's free, it removes region protection, it removes UOP's (possibly the most annoying part of the DVD format to most people), keeps all the menus, shrinks it onto the cheaper single-layer DVD-R's with virtually zero visible difference and it doesn't have silly restrictions. A program with silly restrictions to stop a particular format from having silly restrictions?
I just backed up a couple of my boxsets using this because they were slightly damaged when we took them on holiday with us and I don't want to pay for them again if we do damage them. The majority of the time was spent looking at a little window wending its way through the DVD and swapping discs (I only had the one DVD-writer drive plugged in at the time and had to swap original for blank constantly).
I even did it using WINE because the PC with the writer was a home Linux server, and it worked perfectly. I very much doubt you could make it THAT much simpler, except possibly joining the two programs together and incurring the wrath of the DVD industry by doing so (does this software strip region-protection? It doesn't mention it).
I can't see anybody using this... people "in-the-know" enough to distinguish between DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD-RW, DVD+RW, DVD-RAM etc. and who know that this "is possible" are probably already doing it. I can't even get my parents to copy their CD's before they scratch them and that's a one-click operation. I can't see them doing it for their DVD's even if it's a one-click operation with this software. And, to be honest, I'd rather show them the "two-click" method that gets rids of the UOPS because that would astound them and they would kill to have that feature on their existing DVD's.
First, I don't understand the need for a shrinkable filesystem at all (I've only ever grown filesystems in my time as a systems administrator, and then it was just easier to move the whole thing to another drive rather than mess about - that's a rule that's held since the dark days of DOS and 20Mb harddrives, although there was a program called FIPS that could do amazing things with partitions for the time). I've never seen partitions or drives that ever needed to get smaller and the only thing that indicates is that you can't afford a larger hard drive and you've hit capacity and you don't want to delete those Windows games...
Second, if you're getting lost+found files on anything journalled, it's because you've not got "full" journalling switched on, you've not got the latest kernel, or you've hit an unusual bug. The first is most likely because you're probably running on a "middle-ground" option, like ext3 also has by default, which says "favour speed over safety". The reason for this will become clear the instant you run a "full" journalling system. It's incredibly slow to write, because everything gets written twice effectively. The "slow deletion using ext3" on MythTV things are a thing of the past - a thread does it in the background now and you never know it's happening.
Third, I don't see why the filesystem is that critical for, of all things, a MythTV box. It's hardly vital stuff we're talking about here. If you are THAT worried, you'd have a UPS on the thing and backups, or net-backup to a proper storage PC. You're obviously not. Thus, use whatever's available and if and when you decide on a replacment filesystem because something a) isn't supported, b) isn't suitable or c) disappears from the Linux kernel, then you can... shock, horror, copy the data to a new partition with a new filesystem on it then.
Fourth, if you are really that geeky that you can't have Reiser now because it's no longer fashionable (which is what it sounds like more than anything else, and you've come up with the "shrinkable" thing to try to bolster that position), then why not have a RAID (battery backed if you don't want to lose data, remember!). Or why not put DATA seperate to OS in different partitions, have a read-only OS partition (it's MythTV, you could boot it from a CD) and then the worst that will happen is you will lose the current-written file on the Data partition(which might be that program you wanted to record, but better than trashing the system).
I think you'll find that your information is a little out of date and mainly applies to older military satellites.
Anything "critical" wold be done with a better satellite or a cloud of smaller satellites that are impossible to "avoid". For instance, GPS demands that at least four satellites are in view at all times from every part of the globe to get an accurate fix. Satellites which are, on the whole, run, controlled or have interests from the US Government. I'm not saying that the GPS system is for primarily military "spying" purposes, but it shows that even the public satellite orbits are enough to basically see anything, anywhere, given the most basic of manoeuvring capability.
What makes you think that all of the "unheard of" satellites are any different, or in fewer numbers, or not able to move to look at anything interesting within a reasonable timeframe? It would be quite pointless, after all, to launch a modern multi-billion dollar military satellite if all that was required was public information / academic data gathered from worldwide telescopes to render them completely useless.
Even easier would be to, oh, I don't know, do things at night (yes, IR-capable satellites exist but it makes things harder straight away)? Or do things in large warehouses with a roof?
I did - with several PG texts. Alice shows the most "variability" of the ones I tried between the different scores. Are these same grading schemes designed to cope with pages of numbered T&C's? I don't know. The point is that the measures are useless unless used under certain conditions and no effort has been made to ensure those conditions were met.
It's a poor application of what are basically statistical formulae on the lengths of certain words. What if the ISP's name was "BT" compared to "International Communications"? What if one ISP uses the "hereafter referred to as THE COMPANY" trick and one states the company name each time? It's a totally bogus measure. I could easily form any conclusion I felt like by playing with this "experiment" and it would be hard to argue against it without a basic knowledge of statistics. However, the article's approach is completely rubbish and anyone who looks at what those grades measure can see it's a waste of time.
That said, most ISP T&C's don't follow the "plain English" doctrine more than "we use long words". They HAVE to use long words, the technical descriptions demand it most of the time. I could reword any of those T&C's to be MORE difficult to understand, despite being perfect English, and get a lower reading score.
If you're gonna quote numbers about something, know what the numbers mean and how they apply.
I don't believe it for a second - the measures used are dubious at best (try the Word readability macros and see for yourself - they do Fleisch-Kincaid scores too). At minimum, they have to be used properly. For instance, the single word text "communication" is so unutterably high on all the indices that it skews the results completely. And the text of Alice in Wonderland on Project Gutenberg scored:
Coleman Liau index : 28.19
Flesh Kincaid Grade level : 11.95
ARI (Automated Readability Index) : 21.61
SMOG : 11.68
So that's a hefty margin of error, removes all use of any average and says that you have to be a virtual genius to read Alice in Wonderland, or a 11th-grader. Mmm. Yes. Accurate measure.
Sadly, that's a very blinkered view of education. Teaching to a particular company's product... Urk. I'd rather my kid just bunked off school than do that. There's a difference between gaining a particular certification (I hesitate to call an MCSE a qualification because it's more a memory test of unnecessary trivialities than anything else) in a limited area and actually TEACHING a subject. Teacher's should not ever be teaching towards a particular product in any area. Bad teacher's do ("Today, we'll be doing computers. The thing we'll use is Word. The only other things that exist are Excel and Powerpoint. Don't ask me how Air Traffic Control works because that's probably just a very complicated Word macro."). Good teacher's don't.
If anything along those lines had been true of when I was at school, I would now be the proud owner of a BBC BASIC qualification, a Logo diploma and a Wordstar certification. Completely bloody useless. That's what the teachers thought we "needed" to know back then and fortunately they were soundly overruled and told to teach generics instead.
You'd flood the market with MCSE's (and thereby making that qualification even less use than it is now) and not provide them with anything else, thus within five years, when things inevitably move on, there'd be nothing to distinguish those who "can" and those who "did once under enormous by-rote instruction when they were a kid". What a horrible idea. You wouldn't help the kids ANY because I wouldn't touch someone who only has an MCSE without either relevant experience or some sort of relevant qualification (not a memory test), and certainly not a school-leaver. Plus, on a large-scale, MCSE's are pretty much out of date by the time they are awarded, let alone as something for the future (I swear MS change certain options just to push the MCSE takeup the next year).
By all means have vocational qualifications in computing - I always argue that there should be more of them. PC Repair. Communications cabling. But don't stick any vendor-specific nonsense into them, don't target them at a single use of commercial software, don't claim that they'll form a career for you, and for god's sake don't pretend that "certifications" are somehow a replacement for an academic or vocational qualification in the same area.
"Now I'm with UKonline (with LLU) and £20 gets me a soft cap (reputedly of 750GB/pm - which I never even vaguely approach) and no 'peak time' allowances or throttling."
Reputedly, nothing. They say quite plainly that they don't advertise any Fair Usage amount AT ALL (which to me is a million times worse than a low Fair Usage limit), so it's whatever they want it to be. "Unlimited" but we can cut you off at any time because our Fair Use Policy says we can for "excessive" users, but we don't define "excessive" in any way, shape or form? No thanks. At least PlusNet can hold a real claim of "unlimited in off-peak, decent usage allowance in peak" with actual numbers to back them up should you trip over (I have once or twice when I've done a lot of heavy downloading but you get an automated warning, another automated warning, then you get traffic shaped in peak periods - I never got past the first warning).
No UK ISP can afford 750Gb/pm for even one user - see the Plusnet take on the situation at the link in the parent post... it's just not viable. And don't forget - PlusNet are owned by BT now and have sucked in a lot of company's recently (the domain hosting outfit I was using for one - Parbin Ltd, that owned a lot of other stuff). They aren't a fly-by-night and they have a LOT of experience with the UK ISP situation.
If my maths is right, 750Gbytes/month is 2.5Mbits/s constantly 24 hours a day, 30 days a month. Nobody lets you even get CLOSE to that (I'd doubt you COULD do it on an ordinary household 8Mbps connection, what with variations in traffic etc.). You can't even do that from dedicated servers inside places like Telehouse Docklands without getting thrown off or hitting enormous bandwidth bills - you can pay thousands a month for a constant 10Mbps connection to the net. I don't believe it for a second. You'd get thrown off LONG before you ever hit that, without warning and without recourse to T&C's of UKOnline.
Plusnet let you do whatever you like overnight and limit you to 50Gb/month (less on newer/cheaper packages) cumulative over peak hours and that's a lot more than most ISP's for whom I've read the actual Terms & Conditions.
Personally, I'll stick with PlusNet who I know play the game, who I know state why all the time and who I know aren't letting BT owning them change anything - it's still the same staff, still the same equipment, still the same software, still the same customer service and they have denounced measures that BT itself is taking on, such as "warning" people who are seen to download copyrighted Torrents etc. - PlusNet don't want to play any part in that game despite what must be enormous pressure from their owners. PlusNet are my kind of ISP. You'll have to take their LLU (they do LLU too) connection in my local exchange from my cold, dead hands...
Well, London (and the UK in general) is just finding out that CCTV has pretty much zero effect on crime in local areas. They never cover everywhere, and in the areas they do cover the CCTV only provides evidence. It doesn't deter much, as was previously thought, but it assists in detection and conviction. We even have these fancy "follow the person through the crowds for the surrounding mile and work out where he went" cameras - they don't work as well as you think, even with a human operator and hours of recorded footage.
I worked in a school that had CCTV in every corridor, classroom, toilets (not inside the actual cubicle but the washareas) and outside. The locally assigned police officer visited about once a month to collect various CCTV on the cases that had occurred in school and were going to court.
The ever-present, heavily-advertised, constantly-recording, 30-day picture perfect records with precise timing and location info didn't do much to help him. It didn't stop gangs of kids coming back in on the holidays and kicking doors down (the kids wore hoods, fortunately the police were able to identify them based on "teacher's guesses" and a lot of clever questioning, rather than hard-and-fast "this is definitely X" CCTV evidence, or capturing them red-handed). It didn't stop theft of laptops from inside classrooms (and locked offices) at parent's evenings. It didn't stop bullying. It didn't stop teacher's from committing various acts (pushing a kid against a wall) which got them sacked and talking to a policeman. In fact, only about 1 in 10 things did we actually have useful camera footage for and once we confiscated a mobile phone from a student because it had better footage on it.
CCTV doesn't prevent. It provides evidence. Sketchy evidence. Good policework can take an initial guess and push it through to a conviction but if someone gets stroppy it's extremely difficult to prove that blob-in-a-hood-A was actually person A unless you catch them red-handed. It doesn't matter how much you spend on recording equipment and cameras, most of this stuff isn't seen with a human-eye, so why should a computer-eye do any better? Most crimes, people don't care that they are visible. If they do care, they do it somewhere they are not visible which isn't difficult even in an enclosed school, let alone an entire city.
That said, CCTV in public spaces is fine by me so long as it's 100% that it's only recording public spaces. Hell, I record the public alleyway beside my house just in case but that's technically not allowed because of some silly rule. But relying on CCTV to do anything but provide a slightly better hint at who committed X is a waste of time, unless you can track them perfectly until a police officer can grab them. Even then, it can be hard to prove that any wrongdoing occurred, depending on the crime.
Well, I caught on to PlusNet's tech-heavy staff very early on (back when they were just dial-up). They have the most tech-savvy staff I've spoken to at an ISP and all their policies are backed up with real data, technical explanations and no holding back on "we can't make a profit if we do X" explanations.
Because I got on their broadband early, for £20 a month (with some £0.50p more refunded because I referred a few people to them), I get to keep my old "Premier" account which let you do nearly 50Gb a month before anyone complains. And I have the same "non-peak traffic doesn't count" set-up as everyone else, so I can leave stuff downloading overnight quite happily.
And because they explain WHY they have these policies, because they are open with their traffic usage graphs (the amount of iPlayer traffic is quite astounding, to be honest), because they tell you exactly what size pipes they've got coming in and going out and when they add more, it makes me very reluctant to place any more burden on their poor tech's and overloaded pipes at peak hours. So they get their exisiting pipes made more use of doing the night (when they are just paying for them to do sod all) and they get less peak-time traffic so they don't have to buy new pipes to keep new customers.
And I get a decent peak-time allowance if I want, I get whatever speed broadband is available in my area, and I get to talk to people who know what they are doing first time. I had a complaint once about the latency of SSH changing - I got a very technical reply in seconds, a "sorry, it's something we switched on because most people don't need that low a latency" and an hour before it was fixed without me having to do anything. And when I phone them up or submit a technical issue, there is a 99% probability that the person who reads it understands it and a 100% probability that it gets passed on to a knowledgeable person who can fix it fast enough that I don't have to complain.
I can't possibly give up PlusNet because you can't even get the Premier accounts from them anymore. They even let me move house and keep the Premier account with it's high-cap and low price. Oh, and the wonderful ideas of "this is a local-rate dial-up number in case your broadband doesn't work or you're on holiday and you get the same static IP as your broadband when you use it" is fantastic.
What sort of answer are you expecting?
- I chop off all the connectors from my expensive, official chargers and solder them to cheap multi-level adaptors?
- I bought X, a thing which includes connectors for everything and lets you charge Watts of equipment simultaneously?
- I run DC electric around my house in multi-voltage and have purchased specific connectors for every piece of equipment I own and hope I don't plug my phone into the wrong voltage?
I don't think that there is a sensible solution at the moment. I tend to have a charging area - where I keep all the chargers on a power strip which is plugged in whenever I need to charge anything. My wife and I often want to charge two similar items at the same time - for those cases I purchase an extra charger (usually from eBay or a boot sale) or use one mains charger and plug the supplied car-charger into a 220-12v adaptor I bought that has a "cigarette lighter" socket on it.
The other options don't really bear thinking about. Running DC electric around a house is an absolute nightmare so you're basically going to want to lump all the things needing charge near a suitable DC output - which could be the official chargers on a powerstrip, or a multi-voltage thing, like a PC PSU or similar multi-out DC supply if you have THAT many but I'd check the efficiency of using such a thing when a single mobile phone is plugged into it.
So you have to have all your charging equipment in one place, and you can either rig up some Heath Robinson solution to charge any peripheral with any connector via any voltage or you could just plug the mains adaptors that you already have into a £2.99 power strip. You can neaten it up by hiding the actual blocks out of site and rigging up a bit of polished wood that can hold all the various gadgets with the right connectors already in place through holes on it. But that's just poncing about.
You don't save much by doing anything different - in fact, the exact opposite when something goes wrong or doesn't work first time. Forget the whiners moaning about the power used by extra PSU's on the strips - plug in an energy monitor while they are all idle if you are that worried, but the easiest solution is "plug them all in when something is charging, take them all out when nothing is", which is facilitated by an amazing invention called the main switch on a power strip.
There is no magic solution. Even "wireless charging" is bound to be the same in 100 years - every bloody manufacturer will use a different field strength, frequency, polarisation etc. so that you have to buy their charger. Until someone (ISO, I'm looking at you) actually standardises on a DC supply to a house and countries enforce its use in law, you're stuck with it. The only DC standard I'm aware of is in cars and that actually WORKS to a degree - a car charger is a car charger and will work in basically every car in the world (24v supplies on lorries not included, but they do usually come with rather large warnings on the dash and you can get 24-12v convertors for just such an occasion).
Something tells me that a lot of people are going to be looking up Oort Cloud on Wikipedia in the next few minutes... the article summary is nice and scientificky but it hardly explains what's going on in simple terms - the article is actually more summarised than the summary!
For reference, see the article itself or:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oort_cloud
Although the Wiz is the "official" successor, the successor in spirit (and with a much more open development process, and much more likely to actually get up-to-date source code published - the GP2X firmware versions aren't always open-sourced properly) is the Pandora... www.openpandora.org - which is due out at roughly the same time as the Wiz.
Most of the developers for the GP2X are actually putting their weight behind the Pandora first - I know, I'm a GP2X software porter of things like Simon Tatham's (of PuTTY fame) Portable Puzzle Collection... (Blatant advert: http://www.ledow.org.uk/gp2x/ for that particular one). This is mainly because GPH are notorious for poor information and stock-status. Most countries had trouble importing the GP2X before it was EOL'd anyway, and you don't get anything useful out of the company at all.
Forget the Wiz, open the box....
Well, I dunno whether you just worded your comment wrong but a two-second search on some major UK electronics manufacturers says you're wrong, even down to the datasheets. The first hit I got was:
http://www.farnell.com/datasheets/104589.pdf
which quite clearly is an IR LED that has GaAs in it. And I imagine IR LEDs are quite popular in, say, every remote control made in the last ten years?
Or were you trying to say that blue and white LED's don't use GaAs?
It's a big flaw. Someone big was bound to fall foul of it eventually. And to be honest, I can't say that I'm at all surprised. In fact, I'm expecting a lot more.
I bet that there are still hundreds of large companies that are vulnerable worldwide and I bet that translates to hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of affected people. For instance, last time I checked the whole LGfL (London Grid for Learning) was vulnerable - and they provide DNS / Internet connectivity for every school in London (several million users, hundreds if not thousands of schools) with little alternative because they have been mandated as the recommended solution and thus all "interesting" content is in their private network.
If they ARE still compromised (and several days after the release of the information, they were still showing up as vulnerable on all those DNS tests and today I got: Your name server, at ***.***.***.***, appears vulnerable to DNS Cache Poisoning. All requests came from the following source port: 32768), that's virtually every school, staff member and student in London (we're probably talking close on a million people because it includes Greater London Boroughs but I'm not sure of the exact figure) which are in trouble because they use the upstream DNS from LGfL as their basis.
Have we heard anything through official channels? Nope.
Does everybody just trust LGfL to do their job transparently? Yep.
Have they done it? Apparently not.
Have they even heard of it? I don't know, but there have been zero advisories, zero visible configuration changes, that I can see.
Give it a few months, one of the students will download something and poison the whole of London's educational system and THEN maybe someone will bother to look into it.
When I heard about this flaw, the first thing I did was check all upstream servers that either my servers or my own home computers use - my cheap ISP (PlusNet) had apparently fixed the issue before I'd even caught wind of the "there may be a DNS problem" posts on Kaminsky's blog. Every other one just seems to be dragging their feet.
Although I agree in part with you, there are a number of problems with what you say.
".h264 and AAC both cost so little for the BBC and any partners that using OGG/OGM would actively cost them more due to the inferior video compression."
"The BBC have made great strides with their own video codec even if it's not quite ready."
These two statements show the problem nicely. The BBC actually funds its own video codec specifically for archiving its video archives (which, eventually, it hopes to allow access to directly on the Internet - there's a quote somewhere if you look for it). This codec is already very good, completely free (and patent-free which is much more important for the BBC) and the cost to "finish it off" (which at this point is minor bug-fixing and bundling into a nice WMP-codec DLL / mplayer plugin etc.) is negligible to anything that they could buy - no matter how cheap. They could do it tomorrow.
However, all they ever seem to do is cut back on Dirac and spend on other technologies. If Dirac's a failure then, to paraphrase yourself, they "have an obligation to the license payer" to cut it. If it's not, they really should be using it in place of a pay-for patented codec. It was designed with this sort of thing in mind and, if memory serves, was designed so that multiple "quality levels" could be easily made from the same streams to allow streaming over a very slow connection and professional-quality distribution/archival. Hell, have Dirac in all downloads for the iPlayer software and use something else for the Flash streams. It would still save money. And there's an precedent...
"iPlayer eats insane amounts of bandwidth and if they can shrink videos down at all whilst maintaining quality it's in the BBC's best interests."
Yes. Then they add the Wii to it, but only in the codec it's compatible with, which takes up 4x the bandwidth of the normal iPlayer streams. Thus, this argument is dead on it's feet. They actually put out an entirely seperate encoded file just for Wii (the most popular games console ever?) on every single video they have, sucking up 4x the bandwidth each time they are used. They also realise that real-time Flash-based streaming is dependent on peak hours and thus puts a massive dent into their bandwidth bill to cope with that peak-time, non-peer-to-peer surge. The other day they put the entire movie of Chicken Run on BBC iPlayer Flash streams and I had it playing in the background.
But they can't write a Linux frontend (even if closed source) for already-existing code to solve this problem (and thus relegate real-time Flash streaming to a second-class method of delivery) or solve the "DRM problem" on Linux. Hell, speak to Nintendo and get iPlayer software bundled with the next Wii update - the more Wii use, more Wii's plugged into the TV all the time, the more bandwidth shared and the closer world Wii domination is.
"That's not even taking into account the number of consumer devices that have hardware .h264 decoding compared to Theora."
"Would cost HW manufacturers a lot to add support for a format that's barely used."
Hardware-decoding is neither here nor there - modern PC's can brute force their way through any iPlayer stream without even breaking a sweat. Even consoles can handle the streams properly - my 600MHz Thinkpad on Linux without video acceleration laughs at the Flash streams and can play full-screen video of that type (800x600 DivX's, DVD's etc. don't worry it at all, even streamed over wireless). There aren't many (any?) HD streams available on iPlayer or broadband connections capable of making this an bottleneck.
However, what you say has an element of truth in that they would have to make a way to play those streams available to the non-techy public. Like, say, an iPlayer app. Hmmm...
"OSS types complained when the BBC made iPlayer windows only at first (even though they always said it was in development for more platforms) but the BBC still responded by speeding up the
18 years *assuming Japan stays still for those 18 years*. That's a pretty hefty error bar on the graph, there.
To put it in perspective, this is the equivalent of Japan still sitting on 1990 technology *today*. 1990 technology would be, according to a few quick googles, 8 years pre-v90 modems, 6 years before any 56k modem was invented and around the time that 14.4k was popular.
So, what these statistics are saying is that, the analogy for the broadband market in the US is that, if Japan had sat on their 14.4k modems since 1990 and not moved, the US would be about equivalent *now*.
Although you don't have the data available, it seems that 100 years or so to actually pull back that gap against the assumption that Japan *won't* sit on their "14.4k broadband" for the next 20 years, would *sound* about right. The US would have to make up 18 years of progress ON TOP of keeping up with every change that Japan makes.
Of course, this all relies on the figures being correct and that the growth fits that sort of curve in the first place.
It's incredibly easy, it really is. I have a computing degree, I work in IT support, I do programming on the side but I've *never* been taught electricity, electronics or anything vaguely related. After a few years of self-study, yes, I can do just about anything up to and including building something like a ZX Spectrum from parts (although I won't touch surface-mount devices because I'm the worst person in the world at fine motor control... typically geek-clumsy). But the stuff I'm talking about is all modular, simple stuff. I honestly started doing this sort of thing for myself and others - it's amazing what you can do with nothing more than some wire and a computer.
One of my first projects was to build a "burglar alarm" circuit for the local Scout group to "defuse" as part of a themed camp. It had keypad entry for a PIN, it had a bundle of coloured wires that had to be cut in sequence, it had sensors to detect if they tried to move it, it had a protection that would not allow the box to be opened. And it used batteries, wire, a small mercury switch (costs pence) for the motion sensors and some ingenuity. There were no chips or other electronics involved (if people are interested, it ran on batteries which were constantly short-circuited through a long length of wire but in which any "incorrect" action cut the short-circuit and allowed the batteries to power a small loud siren buzzer).
For the particular things I mentioned, though (i.e. real practical applications, not toys), Caller ID is nothing more than a common modem option (if you are in the UK, check the modem first because we have "odd" Caller-ID that isn't necessarily supported even by modems that claim it... US modems tend to just work if you're in the US). You can even do it on mobiles if you have the data cable - everything uses the AT instruction set so it just "appears" on a serial port as textual data.
On Linux, just "cat" or "fopen" the serial device that appears when you plug the data cable or modem in. On Windows, grab a serial library. Literally, when the phone rings, the modem will give out "RING" on the serial port and, if Caller-ID is supported/enabled on the phoneline/modem, you will get "NUMBER +441234567890" as well as TIME and DATE entries. You might need to send it an AT string to initialise it but you can easily look that up (usually ATZ is sufficient) and it won't do anything to your phoneline if you don't output any string to the serial port. A couple of lines of string-parsing code and either a speech synthesis library or a home-recorded audio file and you have an auto-announcing Caller ID setup.
Burglar alarms are incredibly simple - push 5 or 12V through a single wire of a two-core cable which goes through all the PIR's, door contacts (which are literally nothing more than a "reed switch" which is always near a magnet when the door is shut), "panic buttons" and anything else. Make each device join the "input" wire to the other "output" wire on the cable (daisy-chaining is also used and easier but requires a bit more effort). As soon as something "goes off" (door opens, PIR senses movement etc., panic button pressed) it will break the circuit (as if someone had cut the cable).
To detect when something happens, it's just a case of making sure you're still getting 5 or 12V at the "output" wire of the cable. If you buy any wired burglar alarm, you'll find that this is EXACTLY how it works. You can even usually pinch the components from any off-the-shelf burglar alarm and/or extend an alarm setup with your own devices (check voltages with a multimeter first).
Using the K8055 interface I described (£25 pre-assembled in the UK from Maplin's - a major high-street electronics store), or any similar A/D input for a PC, it's as simple as getting a length of cable, putting one end on an "output" from the PC (or just a 5v adaptor near the computer) running it to one side of an alarm-sensor, running another cable from the sensors "output" back to the PC on an "input".
Using the commo
I've yet to see a computer program itself. In fact, I've yet to see a computer do anything more than *exactly what it's told* by the programmer/operator. And it does things perfectly in the order you give it. From a limited set of instructions. Mmm. Damn, that sounds like procedural programming is still necessary to me.
However, we are quite likely to move onto more "unusual" languages, such as massively parallel ones for a start (which are still procedural, but just procedural across many "computers" simultaneously). Ignore the paradigms like OO etc. because they are just pretty ways to do procedural programming in shorthand. That's the human element, not any massive "change" in computing. The underlying code is and always will be procedural. Therefore, even if it's only the GCC team, someone will be hacking procedural code.
"Do you really think people are going to be hacking away at procedural code in 20 years?" Yes. People said this 20 years ago and it's still true. In fact, people were saying this nearly 30 years ago and it's still true. Possibly even 40.
The fact is that, without a massive change in the way computers work, procedural code is here to stay. When we get onto computers that don't operate on the basis of performing sets of a single operations one after the other, then procedural programming will die. This is basically the "quantum" era, although I suspect something else may well appear before we have that practically available to the masses. We are probably a lot more than 20 years away from quantum computing. Twenty years ago computing was identical is all but scale. In fact, the last "big change" was from hard-coded to "programmable" computers and that was DECADES ago.
Even then, the world's software will mostly work the same way - you still have to wait for the user before you can do anything etc. and so ordinary procedural code isn't going to go anywhere even then. What'll happen is that you'll have two different types of computer in one... an "ordinary" one to allow the user to talk to the "weird" one so it can get its answer straight away, or transmit that information securely. The fact is that you've got to change a significant proportion of the userbase, developer base and equipment away before procedural code dies entirely. In a world now entirely dependent on things to carry on working as they are. 20 years ain't enough time for that. In twenty years the basic home PC still hasn't changed its core instruction set, let alone the way it's programmed or works.