Every decoder I've tried typically consumed at least 10% CPU utilization on my Windows K6-2 450, and 40-60% utilization on my Linux powered 200MHz Cyrix machine.
This is enough that I need either dedicated hardware, or I need to upgrade my machines to use Ogg properly.
MP3s on the same hardware is nearly imperceptable on Linux, and for some reason spikes to around 0.5% on my Windows machine.
The WORST/(most discerning?) MP3 players on Windows spike to 10% on me.
I just can't use Ogg. Find me a decoder which will run under at most 3% utilization on a 200MHz machine and I'll start encoding everything with it.
As for audio quality, I'm no audiophile, but there is this one opening rift which I've encoded in both Ogg and MP3, and on the worst pair of speakers I own, they're both pretty rough. I mean, playing the CD directly through the same speakers on an analog cable was noticably better, and to make sure it wasn't my soundcard, I tried the source WAV file, still sharp. I have to submit it to the Ogg guys as it might be a very good rift to test against.
My technical incentive to go Ogg is pretty weak, as an open spec, I've recommended many technical people I know to give it a try. They like it. I just don't have sharp enough ears to pick up the differences between Ogg and MP3, unless I load a webpage in Mozilla and watch the memory thrashing beat my CPU into submission causing Oggs to stutter where MP3's play fine.
It is a lot harder than that. Computers are based on analogies, and those analogies are all flawed. Understanding how the analogies are flawed takes time.
On a daily basis I teach people how to do things on their computer.
Probably the most interesting was when I was showing one woman a DOS prompt. I was typing a command and getting a result.
She was baffled by this. The last computer she used did not have a command-line interface. She had trouble putting a CLI into her idea of how a computer works -- her last computer used punch cards.
So when I type, where does it go in memory?
You mean it doesn't process it until I hit "Enter?"
How does it handle the 'backspace' key?
When I tried to explain directory trees, she was amazed by this concept of files. Operating systems blew her away as a very wasteful idea.
I guess that's what happens when you have to take a college course to use a computer, work with them for a few years, then step away from them for 20 years.
I managed to get her started so that she could teach herself again, but it was interesting to watch her fail to understand a concept, not because it was elementary, but because it was too high-level.
That's at least one example where you have to choose your teaching methods very carefully. Teaching adults is not the same as teaching children.
Re:Felten dismissal not as bad as it sounds
on
DMCA 2, Freedom 0
·
· Score: 2
That's how I read it. It sounds as though the case cannot be heard unless it is absolutely clear that the particular statute affects the plaintif.
I think I might have the plaintif and defendant mixed up, but you know what I mean.
Because it CAN be interpreted that the DMCA does not apply because none of the applications are "commercial", then the DMCA cannot be challenged.
They even got into why this is the case, and I can't disagree with the reason. The constitution does not want the legal system tied up with abstract debates of law, only current pressing matters.
It sounds painfully obvious that this case would fail in hindsight. I wonder what the EFF thought they could accomplish. I mean to have a constitutional argument thrown out because the constitution says not to engage in legal bickering seems... well, like the legal team hasn't read the constitution.
Of course that IS hindsight, and I am not a Lawyer, so there may be something that I'm missing which will appear painfully obvious later.
One could say that to support freedom, they must support the freedom to oppress. Then I guess it could be said that the government is free to outlaw this, and people are free to rebel against the government, but the government is free to lock them up, just as these people are free to run.
Wait a minute... we are 'free.' We are restricted only by limit of power we have in society.
I suppose what we really need is not absolute freedom, but we need to impose our free will on the development of software such that the person who consumes the software faces as little hindrance as possible to the empowerment which software brings them.
Whereas Microsoft et al. is imposing their will on the development of software such that the person who comsumes the software is minimally satisfied while driving maximum profits.
At the same time, the government imposes its will on corporate citizen Microsoft such that their power in society is bolstered. They must balance the power they gain from Microsoft, against the power of Microsoft to bring them more power.
Power is not directly in the form of money. But money can buy power. For Microsoft, thousands of people around the world depend on them to put food on their table. Which the government sees it in its best interest to not exercise its freedom to impede them... today. But the government can control software, it can control these tools of communication.
Free software may put food on some people's tables, but no amount of government control over corporations can influence its development.
If the software is free, and the people are free, the tools to communicate will be free.
People will have the choice whether or not to put commercial software on their machines.
The government will still be free to oppose the freedom of citizens, but they have one less covert way to do it.
Re:I switched from Gtk-- to Qt
on
GTK-- vs. QT
·
· Score: 2
I'm not saying that Stallman wouldn't like it. But isn't it ironic that the GPL is being used as a tool to create a market for the commercial version of the toolkit?
As an end-user however, QT is superior. I've tried to learn Gtk--, but I couldn't wrap my head around the lack of documentation and the obtuse artifacts left over from the C origins of Gtk+.
I hope they clean it up. The next time I delve into it, I will be trying to document-as-I-go.
If somebody can understand how to create a reliable and quick UI in pure C, that's good for them. I can't touch it until it is wrapped in C++, and I am not skilled enough to do it myself. I really think you need somebody who eats, sleeps, dreams and breathes both Gtk and C++ to be able to write an effective wrapper.
Re:I switched from Gtk-- to Qt
on
GTK-- vs. QT
·
· Score: 3, Informative
As an extra plus, Qt is GPL and therefore more gnulitically correct than Gtk--, which is only LGPL.
The LGPL was written specifically to get around the 'viral' aspects of the GPL. Meaning that while Gtk-- gives you the option to GPL your product, QT does not. With QT you MUST use the GPL... unless you pay Troll Tech an arbitrary, although currently quite reasonable sum.
I've been hacking with this idea in my head. It seems to make the most sense. It is a sort-of multidimensional file system, where every file has to be placed in the dimensions in which it belongs. The tree is used only as a single representation of a single dimension.
There are three reasons I can think for this.
Package management (checking out program configs etc. without surfing the whole directory hierarchy)
System maintinance (splitting volumes, managing space and performance tweaking)
User friendliness!!! ( user's can hit rm -rf and never have to worry about messing anything up! )
I figure if MS does something like this, it would save them from their drive-letter hell, and solve one of their greatest disadvantages when compared to UNIX... the impact to such a scheme to UNIX would be minimal.
Database systems would probably be the best place to start looking for methods to do this sort of thing.
Internet Explorer 5 still runs on a 386 with Windows 3.1 and 8 MB of RAM. Slow yes, but quite usable, and think about what the Internet used to be when such machines were common... Animated Gif's were cool and high-tech.
Odd that it is MORE usable than Mozilla under Linux on a P200 w. 48MB of RAM. Unless of course you open more than one window... then the 386 just can't deal with the RAM requirements. The Mozilla machine can open at least two or three before it drives the swap too hard.
I really hope they get the memory usage down. I don't think it will be THAT important for long. RAM is cheap and systems are getting faster, but no matter how you look at it Internet Explorer or even Netscape 4 is far more lean.
I have a feeling that Mozilla is not out to compete with those browsers though... it is out to set a new standard... it just looks like a browser.
This is a very simple equation. It just requires keeping more than one fact in one's mind at a time.
The majority of users want Windows
Profit margins are thin
You can save money shipping Windows on every PC
If you don't ship Windows, you can't compete in the majority of the marketplace
If you do ship Windows, you can't be competative without shipping any OS but Windows
It is not illegal to have a monopoly. It is illegal to leverage your monopoly to expand it and crush up-and-comming competition.
It got absurd when MS tacked "If you ship Windows, you must ship IE" and "If you ship Windows, you must not ship Netscape" onto the end of the equation.
Since it is going to a native UNIX environment, what about using Cygwin? Has anybody used this in a production environment which demands high-reliability?
For a GUI you could always use a web browser. I expect remote administration is probably a plus if it is going to eventually be running on a UNIX box... not that X doesn't provide similar functionality.
Of course the usual caution must apply that what the customer plans 1.5 years from now (i.e. going to UNIX) is not necessarily what they'll do... you could very well be stuck with Cygwin forever.
On the other hand you could introduce a false key, such that any encrypted data you send has two possible plaintexts.
Yes, they could probably assign a probability that some other message is also encoded in the cyphertext, but could they prove it?
Also isn't there something about law enforcement not being able to break the law in order to defend it? If a "don't copy bit" is set in the cyphertext, I wonder if you could argue that law enforcement violated the DMCA (or the local analogous law) by creating a backup copy of the potential evidence.
Heat pipes generally consist of a pipe, a working fluid, and a wick. They work by vaporizing a liquid at the evaporator
(cooling the chip with the latent heat of vaporization) The vapor flows along the heat pipe until it reaches the condenser.
The vapor condenses back to a liquid, releasing the latent heat. This heat is removed by fans or natural convection. The
condensed lqiuid is then pulled back to the evaporator using some combination of gravitational forces and surface
tension forces
So you're saying that this graceful, passive operation can move enough heat to cool a CPU, but is efficient enough to fit in a 2x2x3" cube and can outperform a chunk of aluminum with a fan?
Oddly, it seems to perform as well as a chunk of aluminum with a fan.... but wait... it happens to be a chunk of aluminum, with two fans.
Technically you didn't say whether you agreed or disagreed with my opinion, so there is little I can respond with.
What I was saying was that you can't cram something like this into such a small space and expect to achieve a magical balance where the fans are cooling the vapour in the coils so that it condenses back on the gently warm CPU.
If the system gets too hot, there will be no condensation, and if the 2"x2" heat source isn't near the boiling point of the fluid, I don't think you can pull enough heat away from it.
It is quite possible to cool a CPU like this, but I don't think the cooler would look anything like what these guys show. These guys don't even seem to indicate that the 'radiator' needs to be in any particular orientation.
I mean, you have a radiator which exposes the same surface area as a typical heat sync, but makes less effective contact with the heat source.
The fluid is probably not doing anything significant at all, the two fans gushing past the aluminum tubes is probably doing all the work.
I don't even think this thing is actively cooling. There doesn't seem to be any pump... they're relying on the thermal gradient to cause the vapourizing fluid to move to the cool side of the radiator and condense. It doesn't work that way. You need to have some way of forcing the fluid to move in one direction, you need to cause the liquid to vapourize by forcing it through a small opening, pulling heat from the CPU.
If you can somehow get around that technical wizardry, then you have to find fluids which vapourize at the temperature of the CPU, but condense at the temperature on the other side of the radiator... whatever wimpy thermal gradient that might be... the pressure of the system also remains constant because the whole system is operating passively of course.
In other words... if you have a CPU at 50 degrees C, and your cooling fluid vapourizes at 40 celcius, then the other side of your heat sync MUST remain lower than 40 celcius, otherwise you just have a bunch of tubes full of pressurized vapour. There is no reason for the cooling side to actually cool especially if the same area is exposed to the CPU as is exposed to the fans.
On the other hand, if your fluid vapourizes at 60C, it doesn't actually DO anything until the CPU reaches that temperature.
This is not to say that passive refrigerators do not exist, I just don't think they've built one. They've built a chunk of aluminum full of fluid with two fans blowing through it.
They should have run another benchmark: Drain the radiator.
Even if you throw chemical film away, it is still recoverable... landfill sites are goldmines of historical data.
On the other hand, who in their right mind would keep terrabytes of "worthless" digital stills perpetually?
For archival, you would be better off transferring these to film.
For future historians, you may even be better off transfering it to film then throwing it in a landfill site!
The most historically valuable photos more often than not has nothing to do with the subject matter.
As a really simple example, if digital technology existed in the 1950s, a photo of somebody smoking in a grocery store would have been deleted in favour of the photo of the sponsor's super-durable linoleum flooring. As would the shot of the grocery cart full of pork-rinds, the small child getting spanked in public, and maybe most interesting, the state of romaine lettuce in the 1950s as one small bit of data on agricultural development. Were 1950's apples as bright and shiny as apples in 2001?
How interesting are those 10-year-old commercials you accidentally captured while taping early episodes of the Simpsons? If you recorded it digitally, you would have snipped the commercials and cut out that gulf-war news broadcast you accidentally picked up at the end.
There was nothing terribly expensive about the physics laboratory equipment I worked with.
There are exceptions, such as specialty devices like the Michaelson-Morely apparatus, lasers with particular wavelengths, oscilloscopes, frequency analyizers... but none of that is going to be replaced by a general purpose computer.
You may be looking for entirely different kinds of experiments which can be done using computers and digital cameras or scanners... like "take this camera and use it to measure distance, speed and direction of motion", "determine the rate at which accuracy deteriorates", "move the camera or use two cameras to calcuate the distance of unknown objects, applying what was learned about the camera's accuracy and resolution to determine your confidence in the object's position" or "measure the colour response and accuracy of this scanner"
Other fun first year exercises might be to demonstrate the effect of various binary representations of numbers on the accuracy of data... all physics students need to know that stuff.
Forget about push-button dumps of information into Matlab or whatever. I hated when lab instructors would set up labs, you don't learn anything. It would be worse if I walked in and didn't even have to measure anything... just hit a button (god forbid touching the apparatus!), push the data into MatLab, follow the instructions, hope the OS doesn't crash, then hand in my results.
There is little to prevent Troll Tech from changing their licensing model from per-developer to per-unit sold.
Nobody would have to upgrade to their new toolkit, but don't think that would be considered having control over one's own commercial products.
It is clear that the Free version of QT is there only for the purpose of promoting QT. When QT is adopted, there will be lock-in to a commercial toolkit. TT can change the license on future revisions of QT to anything they want.
That is not hysteria or conspiracy theory, it is a fact. Yes, you're locked into Solaris too, but not only is it Sun's goal to sell Solaris to CUSTOMERS, but it is relatively easy to port from Solaris to another UNIX.
QT is sold to companies doing commerial development. There is a huge difference between for example, developing an app in Visual Basic, and including VBA in your application. One is a flat fee tool, the second is a per-unit-sold fee.
Gtk is not bound by such a potential restriction, period.
Why on earth would a commerical corporation give another company such complete control over their product?
Re:That would make no commercial sense for Sun.
on
No GNOME For Solaris 9
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Third party: "Hello, Sun? We like your operating system and would like to modify our application to fully intigrate with it."
Sun: "It is GPL."
Third Party: "But our application is commercial. Can't we link to the underlying libraries without being affected by the GPL."
Sun: "No, you can't do that, that would require the LGPL, like what Gtk has."
Third Party: "Why isn't Qt LGPL?"
Sun: "Because it is owned by Troll Tech. They charge flat fees for commerical development. You will have to contact them to find out the costs for developing commercial apps which take advantage of our GUI."
Third party: "What's to stop them from charging royalties in the future?"
Sun: "Nothing."
Third party: "uhhh... Thanks, bye."
This IMHO, is why Gnome has all the commercial support, and no matter how technically superior KDE is, as long as Troll Tech controls commercial development for the GUI, KDE will always be a fringe desktop environment.... even if that means that Linux never makes it to the desktop.
Just like Sun decided, the only option was their old GUI was CDE or Gnome.
Old CD players would spin down to single speed, they were also incapable of Ripping disks. In other words, they could not read an audio CD in digital form. I would be surprised if this were the case, but since Macs have pretty uniform hardware, it is possible that when 'playing' a disk, they're using a mode on the CDROM which is very similar to a conventional CD player.
I bet old CDROMs would be able to play these disks. i.e. ones which were incapable of reading an audio disk digitally or faster than 1x.
I have heard that there is a copy-protect bit in the CDROM format, but I have also heard that it was always used and always discarded.
Everybody seems to think that they've introduced bogus track information or something similar. I found it very interesting that the MD recorder would not record the digital stream from the disk... there must be a copy protection bit set in the digital stream... probably in addition to a screwed up disk.
It is always possible however that this is a scheme which has been on the back burner since day 1... waiting for a terrible law like the DMCA to prevent hardware manufacturers from conveniently ignoring the new copy-protect bit.
This could be technically trivial, but with the DMCA, no company with pockets deep enough to manufacture a product would dare manufacture one which could be capable of duplicating these disks.
As others have mentioned, Pro-bono == for the public good == free.
If there is a lawyer out there, they certainly know whether the following is true or not. I've heard that the bar association, or some other aspect of a Lawyer's accreditation requires a certain percentage or flat amount of pro-bono work.
This is not to say that that this is the only reason this lawyer would take the case... issues of celebrity and higher legal fees aside, it seems very plausible to me that there are lawyers out there who enjoy the practice of law as much as some of us enjoy programming computers all day.
Considering the number of bad lawyers out there, and the general attitude we've all heard -- "I want to be a lawyer to make lots of money" or "I want to be a computer programmer to make lots of money", we all know at least what the latter means...
A crappy programmer...
At that thought... if this fellow is a geek-lawyer, he was probably a frightening child. He probably falls asleep with law books and talks about law all day too.
Microsoft demands that you have a license for all your applications. Microsoft gives you a Certificate of Authenticity, they give you original media, they give you an End User License agreement... which one of these constitute a license?
I don't think a single one does. The EULA tells you your rights. The Certificate just prevents counterfeiting.
A receipt represents evidence that you purchased the software from an authorized dealer. The EULA guarantees that you cannot resell that software and break the train of proof-of-license which the receipt provides. If you could sell software, people could shuffle silly paper licenses around whenever an audit occurs... there would be no way to proove that anybody owned anything at any particular time.
From what I hear, an OEM license isn't even valid unless you can prove that the software was purchased at the same time as your CPU, HDD and Motherboard.
There was an old Star Trek episode like this. Rather than risking all out nuclear war, people built computer-simulations. When a nuclear warhead penetrated a nuclear missile shield, the people at ground zero would have to report to a disintegration chamber.
I'm sure there were many other sci-fi authors blithering on about similar subjects.
If I recall, as always, Kirk slept with their women, and threw their world into chaos.
Slashdot Mirror
Every decoder I've tried typically consumed at least 10% CPU utilization on my Windows K6-2 450, and 40-60% utilization on my Linux powered 200MHz Cyrix machine.
This is enough that I need either dedicated hardware, or I need to upgrade my machines to use Ogg properly.
MP3s on the same hardware is nearly imperceptable on Linux, and for some reason spikes to around 0.5% on my Windows machine.
The WORST/(most discerning?) MP3 players on Windows spike to 10% on me.
I just can't use Ogg. Find me a decoder which will run under at most 3% utilization on a 200MHz machine and I'll start encoding everything with it.
As for audio quality, I'm no audiophile, but there is this one opening rift which I've encoded in both Ogg and MP3, and on the worst pair of speakers I own, they're both pretty rough. I mean, playing the CD directly through the same speakers on an analog cable was noticably better, and to make sure it wasn't my soundcard, I tried the source WAV file, still sharp. I have to submit it to the Ogg guys as it might be a very good rift to test against.
My technical incentive to go Ogg is pretty weak, as an open spec, I've recommended many technical people I know to give it a try. They like it. I just don't have sharp enough ears to pick up the differences between Ogg and MP3, unless I load a webpage in Mozilla and watch the memory thrashing beat my CPU into submission causing Oggs to stutter where MP3's play fine.
It is a lot harder than that. Computers are based on analogies, and those analogies are all flawed. Understanding how the analogies are flawed takes time.
On a daily basis I teach people how to do things on their computer.
Probably the most interesting was when I was showing one woman a DOS prompt. I was typing a command and getting a result.
She was baffled by this. The last computer she used did not have a command-line interface. She had trouble putting a CLI into her idea of how a computer works -- her last computer used punch cards.
When I tried to explain directory trees, she was amazed by this concept of files. Operating systems blew her away as a very wasteful idea.
I guess that's what happens when you have to take a college course to use a computer, work with them for a few years, then step away from them for 20 years.
I managed to get her started so that she could teach herself again, but it was interesting to watch her fail to understand a concept, not because it was elementary, but because it was too high-level.
That's at least one example where you have to choose your teaching methods very carefully. Teaching adults is not the same as teaching children.
That's how I read it. It sounds as though the case cannot be heard unless it is absolutely clear that the particular statute affects the plaintif.
I think I might have the plaintif and defendant mixed up, but you know what I mean.
Because it CAN be interpreted that the DMCA does not apply because none of the applications are "commercial", then the DMCA cannot be challenged.
They even got into why this is the case, and I can't disagree with the reason. The constitution does not want the legal system tied up with abstract debates of law, only current pressing matters.
It sounds painfully obvious that this case would fail in hindsight. I wonder what the EFF thought they could accomplish. I mean to have a constitutional argument thrown out because the constitution says not to engage in legal bickering seems... well, like the legal team hasn't read the constitution.
Of course that IS hindsight, and I am not a Lawyer, so there may be something that I'm missing which will appear painfully obvious later.
Hey, even with the control in that new-fangled PC position, that's not too bad.
Thanks
Except you keep running up to the ESC key.
One could say that to support freedom, they must support the freedom to oppress. Then I guess it could be said that the government is free to outlaw this, and people are free to rebel against the government, but the government is free to lock them up, just as these people are free to run.
Wait a minute... we are 'free.' We are restricted only by limit of power we have in society.
I suppose what we really need is not absolute freedom, but we need to impose our free will on the development of software such that the person who consumes the software faces as little hindrance as possible to the empowerment which software brings them.
Whereas Microsoft et al. is imposing their will on the development of software such that the person who comsumes the software is minimally satisfied while driving maximum profits.
At the same time, the government imposes its will on corporate citizen Microsoft such that their power in society is bolstered. They must balance the power they gain from Microsoft, against the power of Microsoft to bring them more power.
Power is not directly in the form of money. But money can buy power. For Microsoft, thousands of people around the world depend on them to put food on their table. Which the government sees it in its best interest to not exercise its freedom to impede them... today. But the government can control software, it can control these tools of communication.
Free software may put food on some people's tables, but no amount of government control over corporations can influence its development.
If the software is free, and the people are free, the tools to communicate will be free.
People will have the choice whether or not to put commercial software on their machines.
The government will still be free to oppose the freedom of citizens, but they have one less covert way to do it.
I'm not saying that Stallman wouldn't like it. But isn't it ironic that the GPL is being used as a tool to create a market for the commercial version of the toolkit?
As an end-user however, QT is superior. I've tried to learn Gtk--, but I couldn't wrap my head around the lack of documentation and the obtuse artifacts left over from the C origins of Gtk+.
I hope they clean it up. The next time I delve into it, I will be trying to document-as-I-go.
If somebody can understand how to create a reliable and quick UI in pure C, that's good for them. I can't touch it until it is wrapped in C++, and I am not skilled enough to do it myself. I really think you need somebody who eats, sleeps, dreams and breathes both Gtk and C++ to be able to write an effective wrapper.
The LGPL was written specifically to get around the 'viral' aspects of the GPL. Meaning that while Gtk-- gives you the option to GPL your product, QT does not. With QT you MUST use the GPL... unless you pay Troll Tech an arbitrary, although currently quite reasonable sum.
I've been hacking with this idea in my head. It seems to make the most sense. It is a sort-of multidimensional file system, where every file has to be placed in the dimensions in which it belongs. The tree is used only as a single representation of a single dimension.
There are three reasons I can think for this.
I figure if MS does something like this, it would save them from their drive-letter hell, and solve one of their greatest disadvantages when compared to UNIX... the impact to such a scheme to UNIX would be minimal.
Database systems would probably be the best place to start looking for methods to do this sort of thing.
Internet Explorer 5 still runs on a 386 with Windows 3.1 and 8 MB of RAM. Slow yes, but quite usable, and think about what the Internet used to be when such machines were common... Animated Gif's were cool and high-tech.
Odd that it is MORE usable than Mozilla under Linux on a P200 w. 48MB of RAM. Unless of course you open more than one window... then the 386 just can't deal with the RAM requirements. The Mozilla machine can open at least two or three before it drives the swap too hard.
I really hope they get the memory usage down. I don't think it will be THAT important for long. RAM is cheap and systems are getting faster, but no matter how you look at it Internet Explorer or even Netscape 4 is far more lean.
I have a feeling that Mozilla is not out to compete with those browsers though... it is out to set a new standard... it just looks like a browser.
This is a very simple equation. It just requires keeping more than one fact in one's mind at a time.
It is not illegal to have a monopoly. It is illegal to leverage your monopoly to expand it and crush up-and-comming competition.
It got absurd when MS tacked "If you ship Windows, you must ship IE" and "If you ship Windows, you must not ship Netscape" onto the end of the equation.
And please stop abusing the word "FUD".
Since it is going to a native UNIX environment, what about using Cygwin? Has anybody used this in a production environment which demands high-reliability?
For a GUI you could always use a web browser. I expect remote administration is probably a plus if it is going to eventually be running on a UNIX box... not that X doesn't provide similar functionality.
Of course the usual caution must apply that what the customer plans 1.5 years from now (i.e. going to UNIX) is not necessarily what they'll do... you could very well be stuck with Cygwin forever.
On the other hand you could introduce a false key, such that any encrypted data you send has two possible plaintexts.
Yes, they could probably assign a probability that some other message is also encoded in the cyphertext, but could they prove it?
Also isn't there something about law enforcement not being able to break the law in order to defend it? If a "don't copy bit" is set in the cyphertext, I wonder if you could argue that law enforcement violated the DMCA (or the local analogous law) by creating a backup copy of the potential evidence.
So you're saying that this graceful, passive operation can move enough heat to cool a CPU, but is efficient enough to fit in a 2x2x3" cube and can outperform a chunk of aluminum with a fan?
Oddly, it seems to perform as well as a chunk of aluminum with a fan.... but wait... it happens to be a chunk of aluminum, with two fans.
Technically you didn't say whether you agreed or disagreed with my opinion, so there is little I can respond with.
What I was saying was that you can't cram something like this into such a small space and expect to achieve a magical balance where the fans are cooling the vapour in the coils so that it condenses back on the gently warm CPU.
If the system gets too hot, there will be no condensation, and if the 2"x2" heat source isn't near the boiling point of the fluid, I don't think you can pull enough heat away from it.
It is quite possible to cool a CPU like this, but I don't think the cooler would look anything like what these guys show. These guys don't even seem to indicate that the 'radiator' needs to be in any particular orientation.
I mean, you have a radiator which exposes the same surface area as a typical heat sync, but makes less effective contact with the heat source.
The fluid is probably not doing anything significant at all, the two fans gushing past the aluminum tubes is probably doing all the work.
I don't even think this thing is actively cooling. There doesn't seem to be any pump... they're relying on the thermal gradient to cause the vapourizing fluid to move to the cool side of the radiator and condense. It doesn't work that way. You need to have some way of forcing the fluid to move in one direction, you need to cause the liquid to vapourize by forcing it through a small opening, pulling heat from the CPU.
If you can somehow get around that technical wizardry, then you have to find fluids which vapourize at the temperature of the CPU, but condense at the temperature on the other side of the radiator... whatever wimpy thermal gradient that might be... the pressure of the system also remains constant because the whole system is operating passively of course.
In other words... if you have a CPU at 50 degrees C, and your cooling fluid vapourizes at 40 celcius, then the other side of your heat sync MUST remain lower than 40 celcius, otherwise you just have a bunch of tubes full of pressurized vapour. There is no reason for the cooling side to actually cool especially if the same area is exposed to the CPU as is exposed to the fans.
On the other hand, if your fluid vapourizes at 60C, it doesn't actually DO anything until the CPU reaches that temperature.
This is not to say that passive refrigerators do not exist, I just don't think they've built one. They've built a chunk of aluminum full of fluid with two fans blowing through it.
They should have run another benchmark: Drain the radiator.
Kryotech has this done right.
Office XP will be bundled with new computers and soon will be the only MS Office suite available to small to medium businesses.
Large businesses usually have premium Microsoft licenses which permit them among other things to buy an XP license and install 2000...
Even if you throw chemical film away, it is still recoverable... landfill sites are goldmines of historical data.
On the other hand, who in their right mind would keep terrabytes of "worthless" digital stills perpetually?
For archival, you would be better off transferring these to film.
For future historians, you may even be better off transfering it to film then throwing it in a landfill site!
The most historically valuable photos more often than not has nothing to do with the subject matter.
As a really simple example, if digital technology existed in the 1950s, a photo of somebody smoking in a grocery store would have been deleted in favour of the photo of the sponsor's super-durable linoleum flooring. As would the shot of the grocery cart full of pork-rinds, the small child getting spanked in public, and maybe most interesting, the state of romaine lettuce in the 1950s as one small bit of data on agricultural development. Were 1950's apples as bright and shiny as apples in 2001?
How interesting are those 10-year-old commercials you accidentally captured while taping early episodes of the Simpsons? If you recorded it digitally, you would have snipped the commercials and cut out that gulf-war news broadcast you accidentally picked up at the end.
There was nothing terribly expensive about the physics laboratory equipment I worked with.
There are exceptions, such as specialty devices like the Michaelson-Morely apparatus, lasers with particular wavelengths, oscilloscopes, frequency analyizers... but none of that is going to be replaced by a general purpose computer.
You may be looking for entirely different kinds of experiments which can be done using computers and digital cameras or scanners... like "take this camera and use it to measure distance, speed and direction of motion", "determine the rate at which accuracy deteriorates", "move the camera or use two cameras to calcuate the distance of unknown objects, applying what was learned about the camera's accuracy and resolution to determine your confidence in the object's position" or "measure the colour response and accuracy of this scanner"
Other fun first year exercises might be to demonstrate the effect of various binary representations of numbers on the accuracy of data... all physics students need to know that stuff.
Forget about push-button dumps of information into Matlab or whatever. I hated when lab instructors would set up labs, you don't learn anything. It would be worse if I walked in and didn't even have to measure anything... just hit a button (god forbid touching the apparatus!), push the data into MatLab, follow the instructions, hope the OS doesn't crash, then hand in my results.
There is little to prevent Troll Tech from changing their licensing model from per-developer to per-unit sold.
Nobody would have to upgrade to their new toolkit, but don't think that would be considered having control over one's own commercial products.
It is clear that the Free version of QT is there only for the purpose of promoting QT. When QT is adopted, there will be lock-in to a commercial toolkit. TT can change the license on future revisions of QT to anything they want.
That is not hysteria or conspiracy theory, it is a fact. Yes, you're locked into Solaris too, but not only is it Sun's goal to sell Solaris to CUSTOMERS, but it is relatively easy to port from Solaris to another UNIX.
QT is sold to companies doing commerial development. There is a huge difference between for example, developing an app in Visual Basic, and including VBA in your application. One is a flat fee tool, the second is a per-unit-sold fee.
Gtk is not bound by such a potential restriction, period.
Why on earth would a commerical corporation give another company such complete control over their product?
Third party: "Hello, Sun? We like your operating system and would like to modify our application to fully intigrate with it."
Sun: "It is GPL."
Third Party: "But our application is commercial. Can't we link to the underlying libraries without being affected by the GPL."
Sun: "No, you can't do that, that would require the LGPL, like what Gtk has."
Third Party: "Why isn't Qt LGPL?"
Sun: "Because it is owned by Troll Tech. They charge flat fees for commerical development. You will have to contact them to find out the costs for developing commercial apps which take advantage of our GUI."
Third party: "What's to stop them from charging royalties in the future?"
Sun: "Nothing."
Third party: "uhhh... Thanks, bye."
This IMHO, is why Gnome has all the commercial support, and no matter how technically superior KDE is, as long as Troll Tech controls commercial development for the GUI, KDE will always be a fringe desktop environment.... even if that means that Linux never makes it to the desktop.
Just like Sun decided, the only option was their old GUI was CDE or Gnome.
Old CD players would spin down to single speed, they were also incapable of Ripping disks. In other words, they could not read an audio CD in digital form. I would be surprised if this were the case, but since Macs have pretty uniform hardware, it is possible that when 'playing' a disk, they're using a mode on the CDROM which is very similar to a conventional CD player.
I bet old CDROMs would be able to play these disks. i.e. ones which were incapable of reading an audio disk digitally or faster than 1x.
I have heard that there is a copy-protect bit in the CDROM format, but I have also heard that it was always used and always discarded.
Everybody seems to think that they've introduced bogus track information or something similar. I found it very interesting that the MD recorder would not record the digital stream from the disk... there must be a copy protection bit set in the digital stream... probably in addition to a screwed up disk.
It is always possible however that this is a scheme which has been on the back burner since day 1... waiting for a terrible law like the DMCA to prevent hardware manufacturers from conveniently ignoring the new copy-protect bit.
This could be technically trivial, but with the DMCA, no company with pockets deep enough to manufacture a product would dare manufacture one which could be capable of duplicating these disks.
As others have mentioned, Pro-bono == for the public good == free.
If there is a lawyer out there, they certainly know whether the following is true or not. I've heard that the bar association, or some other aspect of a Lawyer's accreditation requires a certain percentage or flat amount of pro-bono work.
This is not to say that that this is the only reason this lawyer would take the case... issues of celebrity and higher legal fees aside, it seems very plausible to me that there are lawyers out there who enjoy the practice of law as much as some of us enjoy programming computers all day.
Considering the number of bad lawyers out there, and the general attitude we've all heard -- "I want to be a lawyer to make lots of money" or "I want to be a computer programmer to make lots of money", we all know at least what the latter means...
A crappy programmer...
At that thought... if this fellow is a geek-lawyer, he was probably a frightening child. He probably falls asleep with law books and talks about law all day too.
Microsoft demands that you have a license for all your applications. Microsoft gives you a Certificate of Authenticity, they give you original media, they give you an End User License agreement... which one of these constitute a license?
I don't think a single one does. The EULA tells you your rights. The Certificate just prevents counterfeiting.
A receipt represents evidence that you purchased the software from an authorized dealer. The EULA guarantees that you cannot resell that software and break the train of proof-of-license which the receipt provides. If you could sell software, people could shuffle silly paper licenses around whenever an audit occurs... there would be no way to proove that anybody owned anything at any particular time.
From what I hear, an OEM license isn't even valid unless you can prove that the software was purchased at the same time as your CPU, HDD and Motherboard.
There was an old Star Trek episode like this. Rather than risking all out nuclear war, people built computer-simulations. When a nuclear warhead penetrated a nuclear missile shield, the people at ground zero would have to report to a disintegration chamber.
I'm sure there were many other sci-fi authors blithering on about similar subjects.
If I recall, as always, Kirk slept with their women, and threw their world into chaos.
Then you need the network admins to either assign you a subnet, or you have to deal with NAT... and you have an extra box.