I should imagine these quoted lifetimes are for active pixels, otherwise they might die in the warehouse before they ever get to you. Your phone display will be blank, or the phone powered off for the vast bulk of the time.
My imagination also foretells an awful lot or red, green and brown menus and other on-screen display with these phones:)
-Andy
Vendors just passing on Credit Card Company buck
on
A Matter Of Trust?
·
· Score: 3
A couple of months ago all the major credit card groups including Mastercard and Visa imposed a new law on companies generating a high level of chargebacks. If more than 1.5% of your transactions are charged back, usually through fraud, then you have to pay large financial penalties to the credit card company.
I dare say the very large online companies like Amazon and so on have different terms, but that is how it is for the smaller companies.
As someone who had my company credit card details ripped off and used by some prick in Indonesia to order ''Buffy the Vampire Slayer'' merchandise from a US-based website, I don't think it's such a bad thing. But really the Credit Card companies should be providing crypto to the customer in the form of so-called smartcards rather than squeezing the vendors.
>Generally, by adding a second processor >you see a 50% increase in overall >system performance
This simply isn't true if you are running a single instance of a single main application, and there are only background OS tasks competing for the cycles. If your OS supports thread/CPU affinity, you will see one CPU go to 100% utilization, and the other sit at around 2 - 3 % servicing the OS tasks. If your OS does not use affinity and tries to spread the thread between CPUs each timeslice you will see both your CPU's utilization at 52% or so.
If your machine was heavily loaded and your app was slowed because it was already competing for cycles with other processes, then what you said is true, but I don't think that's what the original question was looking at.
Briefly, multiple CPUs will only help if there are multiple threads of your app running simultaneously. Assuming that is possible for you, then you will at best see something like a 75% or so performance improvement with the two processors going at it. Two more additional processors might deliver another 50% of the single processor throughput each. Of course, if you algorithm and data fits entirely within the 32K L1 caches, you will get nearly 100% improvement with each processor, but is that likely?
The question is a little broken, though, because in this day and age the trailing edge processors (eg, Celeron-400) are so cheap that you would be better staging your machine to use, say, three drops of trailing edge processor(s) on a BX PC100 motherboard, and upgrading as Intel and AMD update their price lists. You should bear in mind that the fastest CPUs are only double the speed of the modern trailing edge ones (I mean here Celerons, not AMD K2s), yet cost five, six times the price or more.
I am sure plenty of people will disagree, but nowadays the CPU is more or less a consumable (especially if you have other Slot 1 motherboards that can get the hand-me-downs).
I read this article yesterday and was pleased to see a downloadable 6502 in VHDL and DES encoder on another linked site from the article (http://www.free-ip.com/).
The site that got the most discussion in the article about the RISC core seemed to me to be mostly vapour. Click those links on the left of the site (eagerly reproduced in an earlier post) and you'll see most of them are in the pre-discussion phase, let alone coding.
Bruce Perens or somesuch said it best a few months ago, put out your code first before the vapour.
I am deisgning a USB device in VHDL and I downloaded some of the Device Class specifications previously - it sucks that the otherwise very open (there are no licensing fees to create USB devices, and you can download the protocol specification from the website for free; they also run a very active and useful Developers Webboard for free) USB site should clam up on the critically important Device Class specs like this.
The Device Class specifications outline standard ways to use the USB protocol for, say, Modem devices, or Mass Storage Devices. If you make your hardware compliant with these Device Class specification ''APIs'' then you don't actually need to write a device driver! The major OSs write inbuilt support for the defined Device Classes, and your new Modem or whatever is recognized as being compliant with the ''APIs'' and ''just works''.
It is a bit numb to publish the physical and transport layer specifications for free but not the higher level ones! I wonder what made them decide to change?
Anyone concerned should email admin@usb.org (this is the correct address from the website) and request that the Linux implementation efforts are allowed a complimentary membership as they are not-for-profit.
On the battery life issue, I saw a small battery-powered 'robot vacuum cleaner' on the BBC's Tomorrow's World a couple of years ago, which learnt the topology of the room, but most importantly, the location of the power sockets. When it's ''low power'' light came on, it went directly to the power socket and recharged itself. That seemed to me to be the single most important breakthrough in robotics for the last few decades:)
Now they just need to get it to have a second battery on charge and just swap them when its battery gets low and battery capacity will cease to matter much.
Q3A is the only game I have on my machine (after I finally tired of Q2 earlier in the year), and if you look at it with an open mind it really is a simulator of death, gore, bloodsmears, injury, damage and aggression.
If it has any effect on the players, though, it is in the form of catharsis; look at the chat that goes on between people playing. And compare it to most American movies: there is a similar level of explosions/intestines per hour, and nobody raises an eyebrow.
That explains why all the donkeys are so happy in Texas.
A friend in Florida told me the locals call Disney there ''The Rat''.
You're right, they just assemble components, but the case of that new hires LCD, nobody else has it yet. I decided to move to using a notebook as my main machine several months ago, not least because sitting close to a 21" display most of the day every day makes me nervous that the lead they put in CRT glass is not stopping the X-Rays and/or escaping accellerated electrons from eating my DNA. But I used to have 1600x1200 and now I have 1024x768.
Their UK web order tracking has been ''down for routine maintenence'' for a week now. I wonder how long it has to be down before it is extraordinary maintenence.
When I bought my current laptop I ordered it by credit card and had it the next day.
I ordered an Inspiron 7500 with the new cool 1400x1050 15" LCD 11 days ago over the Internet, and it took them from that Tuesday until the following Monday to debit my credit card.
While I was trying to use their order tracking page, it threw up Visual Basic (hmmm) exceptions, variously Out Of Memory and some other ones I forget, returned to the browser in HTML by their server. I called and waited out the queue for 6 minutes, only to be told by the customer service muppet that the problem must be at my end, ''because no-one else has reported any problems''.
They are quoting delivery expected on 13 Decemeber, but I find it hard to have much faith. The worst thing is Dell running TV ads in the UK at the moment where the sleek, rich Michael Dell oozes on about how customer service is so important to him.
In short, bad vibes, frustration, and poor service, and that's before they even debited my card!
You know he sold ''Bowie Bonds'' a couple of years ago and raised some dozens of millions of pounds from investors willing to pay him now for the rights to the income from his back catalog sales in the future. If you think about that it doesn't exactly show great faith on his part in the longevity of his music.
No wonder he doesn't give a flying fuck, the lost money is not coming out of his pocket.
Personally I think he's just a prancing mong, and you (the poster of the parent article) ought to get more cynical before you get eaten alive.
If you have never tried listening to Opera, give it a go. Wagner's Ring Cycle, normally written off because of its extreme length, is perfect for long coding sessions.
If you have not met Napster, give it a try at http://www.napster.com. They are working on a _nix port, but at the moment it requires Windows. They claim to have had 13 Terabytes of searchable MP3s available at one point. This kind of self-aggregating searchable democracy is the future for all media forms. Hooray!
Napster also has a feature where you can list the directory of another user's MP3s; this is really powerful if you find a user with a song you like, you can find out what else he or she likes and try that out.
That guy who listened to NPR, it is very good (although a pale imitation of the BBC's Radio 4); but I find it impossible to concentrate on speech while writing or designing code. Trying to split my attention like that sets my teeth on edge and makes purple veins come out on my head.
Freeserve in the UK uses a customized version of IE4 which has been scripted with the 'phone number to call, and a special registration account name and password. It then uses normal HTML to complete the registration.
After registering this way you can dialup from any OS to your freeserve account, even though they too only claim to support Windows (for support reasons as pointed out before).
So I should try the software to register, then start nosing around the DUN properties to find out what 'phone number it calls, etc.
Zilog got started by kicking sand in the face of the Intel 8080/8085, then Intel all but wiped them out during the late 80s and 90s with the ludicrously successful 8051 core. This is second-sourced by dozens of semiconductor manufacturers, and supported by many modern optimizing C compilers.
Zilog is a sad shell of its former self, having tried to diversify into DSPs and suchlike, but its a tough market and they don't have the volume.
This announcement is just another tired attempt to pimp their legacy product portfolio by sticking the work Internet in a press release and 'e' before the product name. Boy, It's not like their based-on-a-20-year-old-core Big Idea is even shipping yet, not until 2000.
... and the guy who said its cool because it is available in VHDL, unless you already have spare configurable logic in your design, the necessary gates are probably >10x the price of the silicon CPU.
A friend of mine who did a lot of sonar DSP once told me that 16 bits is generally enough for any job, so long as its the *right* 16 bits at each stage of the computation.
Surely it is possible to make a 32-bit integer MP3 decoder?
This seems pretty numb... what's up with someone making a CD with an executable stub constaining a PSX-native MP3 decoder, that plays back through the standard PSX audio-out?
You can apparaently burn standard CDs to be readable on PSX, I read on USENET when researching which CDR to buy.
This guy has lost sight that people use computers for their function. It shouldn't matter to Joe Public whether, eg, his email app is running on Windows, Linux or trained mammals so long as it does compliant email.
When Linux+KDE or Gnome is a tick-the-box PREINSTALLED, PRECONFIGURED option from most major computer vendors then the newbies will find themselves able to get their work done without bothering Pablo.
But I think the newbies are telling Pablo something important about the OS he has given over a lot of expensive brainspace to learn about: the shell prompt is the wrong layer for people who don't want or need to hack but to get their work done.
This would be excellent - I have sent off two or three stories that interested the hell out of me that never made it fast the Tacofilter, for example that TI patented a MP3-player built into headphones the other week. Surely other readers have sent in nuggets that slipped through the sifting pan we call Taco.
BUT it should not be a seperate page... the STORIES should be moderated and graded the same excellent way as the comments. ALL stories that get sent in should 'appear' on the main page with, say, 0 grade to start with and the Tacomammals and the moderators can promote them past users' filter levels as they see fit. Maybe Taco should have special powers to promote the stories he likes to 5 so folks can see the 'old' slashdot editorial filter if they want. Now there's a use for those CPU cycles.
Slashdot is really breaking new ground here and y'all doing an excellent job.
On your point 4, the cool Slashdot Light option is working now (select from the preferences thing), and this removes all the tables & nearly all the icons. Boy, that loads fast.
Having different files doing the same job, in different paths in different distributions is nutty. No-one should waste time trying to defend this.
When I upgraded samba I was surprised to see that the genuine samba make throws everything in/usr/local/samba, yet my original SuSE distribution had installed the old ones (binaries from rpm) somewhere else. What was the point of that? Some guy in SuSE had actually spent time shifting 'em about, making his distribution fragile to the first time I needed to upgrade samba without going back to SuSE for a new rpm.
Perhaps rather than make a clean break to conform to the standard, filesystem links can be used to good effect to 'upgrade' old distributions' layouts to conformance without much pain.
But things like different configuration file formats are just *wanton* and one way or another will get weeded out by evolutionary forces.
One other thing, the standard clearly needs at least two levels to it. The first, core, level should talk about where files ought to live, format of configuration files, which standard-C libraries must be available and so on: issues relevant to even the smallest embedded Linux application. The guy who replied to this thread above me cursing his HDD space getting eaten with (hated by him) Gnome has a good point if your microwave or settop box is running Linux from flash. The second level could address X-Windows and window manager issues in systems where that's appropriate.
The guy way above who said that you shouldn't be frightened of these kind of genuinely open, changeable and debated standards was right: the thing is to standardize to core of things without tying people's hands to innovate and remain complient. You need to standardize a virtual base class and let people derive!
Slashdot Mirror
I should imagine these quoted lifetimes are for active pixels, otherwise they might die in the warehouse before they ever get to you. Your phone display will be blank, or the phone powered off for the vast bulk of the time.
:)
My imagination also foretells an awful lot or red, green and brown menus and other on-screen display with these phones
-Andy
A couple of months ago all the major credit card groups including Mastercard and Visa imposed a new law on companies generating a high level of chargebacks. If more than 1.5% of your transactions are charged back, usually through fraud, then you have to pay large financial penalties to the credit card company.
I dare say the very large online companies like Amazon and so on have different terms, but that is how it is for the smaller companies.
As someone who had my company credit card details ripped off and used by some prick in Indonesia to order ''Buffy the Vampire Slayer'' merchandise from a US-based website, I don't think it's such a bad thing. But really the Credit Card companies should be providing crypto to the customer in the form of so-called smartcards rather than squeezing the vendors.
-Andy
This is what is behind the tightening of
>Generally, by adding a second processor
>you see a 50% increase in overall
>system performance
This simply isn't true if you are running a single instance of a single main application, and there are only background OS tasks competing for the cycles. If your OS supports thread/CPU affinity, you will see one CPU go to 100% utilization, and the other sit at around 2 - 3 % servicing the OS tasks. If your OS does not use affinity and tries to spread the thread between CPUs each timeslice you will see both your CPU's utilization at 52% or so.
If your machine was heavily loaded and your app was slowed because it was already competing for cycles with other processes, then what you said is true, but I don't think that's what the original question was looking at.
-Andy
Briefly, multiple CPUs will only help if there are multiple threads of your app running simultaneously. Assuming that is possible for you, then you will at best see something like a 75% or so performance improvement with the two processors going at it. Two more additional processors might deliver another 50% of the single processor throughput each. Of course, if you algorithm and data fits entirely within the 32K L1 caches, you will get nearly 100% improvement with each processor, but is that likely?
The question is a little broken, though, because in this day and age the trailing edge processors (eg, Celeron-400) are so cheap that you would be better staging your machine to use, say, three drops of trailing edge processor(s) on a BX PC100 motherboard, and upgrading as Intel and AMD update their price lists. You should bear in mind that the fastest CPUs are only double the speed of the modern trailing edge ones (I mean here Celerons, not AMD K2s), yet cost five, six times the price or more.
I am sure plenty of people will disagree, but nowadays the CPU is more or less a consumable (especially if you have other Slot 1 motherboards that can get the hand-me-downs).
-Andy
I read this article yesterday and was pleased to see a downloadable 6502 in VHDL and DES encoder on another linked site from the article (http://www.free-ip.com/).
The site that got the most discussion in the article about the RISC core seemed to me to be mostly vapour. Click those links on the left of the site (eagerly reproduced in an earlier post) and you'll see most of them are in the pre-discussion phase, let alone coding.
Bruce Perens or somesuch said it best a few months ago, put out your code first before the vapour.
-Andy
um... I think you're the one getting confused. See http://www.usb.org/developers/docs.html where it says:
USB Device Class Specifications
(USB-IF member username and password required)
If you click on the link you are indeed prompted for a member username and password.
-Andy
I am deisgning a USB device in VHDL and I downloaded some of the Device Class specifications previously - it sucks that the otherwise very open (there are no licensing fees to create USB devices, and you can download the protocol specification from the website for free; they also run a very active and useful Developers Webboard for free) USB site should clam up on the critically important Device Class specs like this.
The Device Class specifications outline standard ways to use the USB protocol for, say, Modem devices, or Mass Storage Devices. If you make your hardware compliant with these Device Class specification ''APIs'' then you don't actually need to write a device driver! The major OSs write inbuilt support for the defined Device Classes, and your new Modem or whatever is recognized as being compliant with the ''APIs'' and ''just works''.
It is a bit numb to publish the physical and transport layer specifications for free but not the higher level ones! I wonder what made them decide to change?
Anyone concerned should email admin@usb.org (this is the correct address from the website) and request that the Linux implementation efforts are allowed a complimentary membership as they are not-for-profit.
-Andy
The morning after tying one on, you could now help your liver out with ''hair of the CAT'' :)
On the battery life issue, I saw a small battery-powered 'robot vacuum cleaner' on the BBC's Tomorrow's World a couple of years ago, which learnt the topology of the room, but most importantly, the location of the power sockets. When it's ''low power'' light came on, it went directly to the power socket and recharged itself. That seemed to me to be the single most important breakthrough in robotics for the last few decades :)
Now they just need to get it to have a second battery on charge and just swap them when its battery gets low and battery capacity will cease to matter much.
Q3A is the only game I have on my machine (after I finally tired of Q2 earlier in the year), and if you look at it with an open mind it really is a simulator of death, gore, bloodsmears, injury, damage and aggression.
If it has any effect on the players, though, it is in the form of catharsis; look at the chat that goes on between people playing. And compare it to most American movies: there is a similar level of explosions/intestines per hour, and nobody raises an eyebrow.
-Andy
haha
That explains why all the donkeys are so happy in Texas.
A friend in Florida told me the locals call Disney there ''The Rat''.
You're right, they just assemble components, but the case of that new hires LCD, nobody else has it yet. I decided to move to using a notebook as my main machine several months ago, not least because sitting close to a 21" display most of the day every day makes me nervous that the lead they put in CRT glass is not stopping the X-Rays and/or escaping accellerated electrons from eating my DNA. But I used to have 1600x1200 and now I have 1024x768.
Their UK web order tracking has been ''down for routine maintenence'' for a week now. I wonder how long it has to be down before it is extraordinary maintenence.
-Andy
When I bought my current laptop I ordered it by credit card and had it the next day.
I ordered an Inspiron 7500 with the new cool 1400x1050 15" LCD 11 days ago over the Internet, and it took them from that Tuesday until the following Monday to debit my credit card.
While I was trying to use their order tracking page, it threw up Visual Basic (hmmm) exceptions, variously Out Of Memory and some other ones I forget, returned to the browser in HTML by their server. I called and waited out the queue for 6 minutes, only to be told by the customer service muppet that the problem must be at my end, ''because no-one else has reported any problems''.
They are quoting delivery expected on 13 Decemeber, but I find it hard to have much faith. The worst thing is Dell running TV ads in the UK at the moment where the sleek, rich Michael Dell oozes on about how customer service is so important to him.
In short, bad vibes, frustration, and poor service, and that's before they even debited my card!
Yeah, He's a genius alright... sheesh
You know he sold ''Bowie Bonds'' a couple of years ago and raised some dozens of millions of pounds from investors willing to pay him now for the rights to the income from his back catalog sales in the future. If you think about that it doesn't exactly show great faith on his part in the longevity of his music.
No wonder he doesn't give a flying fuck, the lost money is not coming out of his pocket.
Personally I think he's just a prancing mong, and you (the poster of the parent article) ought to get more cynical before you get eaten alive.
These guys should check out http://www.expertsexchange.com - this has been going for at least a couple of years and has *the traffic*.
Wading through those empty categories at infomarco with just the whistling wind and the odd tumbleweed gave me the spooks.
I see rich patent lawyers.
-Andy
If you have never tried listening to Opera, give it a go. Wagner's Ring Cycle, normally written off because of its extreme length, is perfect for long coding sessions.
If you have not met Napster, give it a try at http://www.napster.com. They are working on a _nix port, but at the moment it requires Windows. They claim to have had 13 Terabytes of searchable MP3s available at one point. This kind of self-aggregating searchable democracy is the future for all media forms. Hooray!
Napster also has a feature where you can list the directory of another user's MP3s; this is really powerful if you find a user with a song you like, you can find out what else he or she likes and try that out.
That guy who listened to NPR, it is very good (although a pale imitation of the BBC's Radio 4); but I find it impossible to concentrate on speech while writing or designing code. Trying to split my attention like that sets my teeth on edge and makes purple veins come out on my head.
-Andy
Freeserve in the UK uses a customized version of IE4 which has been scripted with the 'phone number to call, and a special registration account name and password. It then uses normal HTML to complete the registration.
After registering this way you can dialup from any OS to your freeserve account, even though they too only claim to support Windows (for support reasons as pointed out before).
So I should try the software to register, then start nosing around the DUN properties to find out what 'phone number it calls, etc.
Zilog got started by kicking sand in the face of the Intel 8080/8085, then Intel all but wiped them out during the late 80s and 90s with the ludicrously successful 8051 core. This is second-sourced by dozens of semiconductor manufacturers, and supported by many modern optimizing C compilers.
Zilog is a sad shell of its former self, having tried to diversify into DSPs and suchlike, but its a tough market and they don't have the volume.
This announcement is just another tired attempt to pimp their legacy product portfolio by sticking the work Internet in a press release and 'e' before the product name. Boy, It's not like their based-on-a-20-year-old-core Big Idea is even shipping yet, not until 2000.
... and the guy who said its cool because it is available in VHDL, unless you already have spare configurable logic in your design, the necessary gates are probably >10x the price of the silicon CPU.
A friend of mine who did a lot of sonar DSP once told me that 16 bits is generally enough for any job, so long as its the *right* 16 bits at each stage of the computation.
Surely it is possible to make a 32-bit integer MP3 decoder?
This seems pretty numb... what's up with someone making a CD with an executable stub constaining a PSX-native MP3 decoder, that plays back through the standard PSX audio-out?
You can apparaently burn standard CDs to be readable on PSX, I read on USENET when researching which CDR to buy.
This guy has lost sight that people use computers for their function. It shouldn't matter to Joe Public whether, eg, his email app is running on Windows, Linux or trained mammals so long as it does compliant email.
When Linux+KDE or Gnome is a tick-the-box PREINSTALLED, PRECONFIGURED option from most major computer vendors then the newbies will find themselves able to get their work done without bothering Pablo.
But I think the newbies are telling Pablo something important about the OS he has given over a lot of expensive brainspace to learn about: the shell prompt is the wrong layer for people who don't want or need to hack but to get their work done.
This would be excellent - I have sent off two or three stories that interested the hell out of me that never made it fast the Tacofilter, for example that TI patented a MP3-player built into headphones the other week. Surely other readers have sent in nuggets that slipped through the sifting pan we call Taco.
BUT it should not be a seperate page... the STORIES should be moderated and graded the same excellent way as the comments. ALL stories that get sent in should 'appear' on the main page with, say, 0 grade to start with and the Tacomammals and the moderators can promote them past users' filter levels as they see fit. Maybe Taco should have special powers to promote the stories he likes to 5 so folks can see the 'old' slashdot editorial filter if they want. Now there's a use for those CPU cycles.
Slashdot is really breaking new ground here and y'all doing an excellent job.
On your point 4, the cool Slashdot Light option is working now (select from the preferences thing), and this removes all the tables & nearly all the icons. Boy, that loads fast.
How does Jenni keep her place so tidy?
Windows users must *close* the audio CD autoplay app that comes up by default, not merely stop it.
Great idea no buts!
The guy's app fails on my Win98 laptop with 'Error Reading TOC'
Having different files doing the same job, in different paths in different distributions is nutty. No-one should waste time trying to defend this.
/usr/local/samba, yet my original SuSE distribution had installed the old ones (binaries from rpm) somewhere else. What was the point of that? Some guy in SuSE had actually spent time shifting 'em about, making his distribution fragile to the first time I needed to upgrade samba without going back to SuSE for a new rpm.
When I upgraded samba I was surprised to see that the genuine samba make throws everything in
Perhaps rather than make a clean break to conform to the standard, filesystem links can be used to good effect to 'upgrade' old distributions' layouts to conformance without much pain.
But things like different configuration file formats are just *wanton* and one way or another will get weeded out by evolutionary forces.
One other thing, the standard clearly needs at least two levels to it. The first, core, level should talk about where files ought to live, format of configuration files, which standard-C libraries must be available and so on: issues relevant to even the smallest embedded Linux application. The guy who replied to this thread above me cursing his HDD space getting eaten with (hated by him) Gnome has a good point if your microwave or settop box is running Linux from flash. The second level could address X-Windows and window manager issues in systems where that's appropriate.
The guy way above who said that you shouldn't be frightened of these kind of genuinely open, changeable and debated standards was right: the thing is to standardize to core of things without tying people's hands to innovate and remain complient. You need to standardize a virtual base class and let people derive!