OK, so winmodems have a few common bus interface chipsets. What I'm unsure of is what sits between the bus interface chips and the telco land lines. If the step xformers, DACs, etc, are different for each type of card (which I believe they are, to prevent copyright/patent infringement if for no other reason) then we are right back where we started. Any ideas about this?
Previous responses to your post have already established that Winmodems are little more than cards that translate line levels to bus friendly logic levels.
So, fine, why is it such a big deal to write a driver for these things, and why aren't there any out there?
Well, when you get right down to it, a driver is simply passive glue logic that allows the kernel to talk to a device. Often, fully functional drivers can be written for the simpler devices with a few hundred lines of code or less (This does not include the optimizations or kludges that are often required to get around quirky hardware or make it run at acceptable speeds). Most of the work required is in figuring out how to talk to a specific device.
But in the case of the winmodems, there's nothing much to talk to at all. The drivers for these things shouldn't even really be called drivers. They are fully functional hardware emulation routines that take the place of the microprocessors, UARTs, and EPROM chips that usually go into making up a modem.
Now, as an open source developer, I have no problem spending a liesurly Sunday afternoon or two banging away at some device that I want to work on my system. But this undertaking would amount to designing and implementing a fully functional hardware emulator. This requires a dedicated team, such as the one working on WINE (which, granted, is not a hardware emulator).
OK, so what, we need a team. There are lots of teams working on other things, why don't we throw one together for winmodems?
Simply, because one team is insufficient. In fact, each brand (possibly each modem) would require its own team. There are hundreds of different winmodems out there, each requiring its own specialized emulator, tailored to its own specific needs.
Well screw that I say:). I'd rather spend the extra $50 bucks on a real modem and not have to worry about slowing my machine down just because someone wants to make a rediculous profit.
Which they are. The Winmodem PCBs are worth maybe $3 US at most, and they only have to write the software emulation once (rather than putting a new processor on each board). You can do the math.
Here's to another shoddy product in the name of profit!;)
Don't put words in my mouth. Of course Slashdot is a place for opinions. I was talking about posts in reference to laws and legal issues; those are clearly posts where people opinions, including my own, are worth jack
I'm not putting words in your mouth. My entire post was meant to refute your assertion that people shouldn't post their opinions about laws and legal issues; peoples opinions in these areas are NOT worth jack, and they SHOULD post about them. Opinions are what eventually BECOME law. We can only hope that it is an opinion that most of us agree on. The more people have knowledge about an issue, the better for all of us.
if you're not a lawyer then just shut the hell up, because how you feel personally about an issue is totally irrelevent, and generally drivel.
Excuse me, but I think you should read that statement again. If what one feels personally about an issue is totally irrelevent, then what the hell are YOU posting for? What are any of us posting for? Slashdot is a forum for our opinions about things, and as my law student room mate notes as he reads this over my shoulder "Freedom of expression is the most important right because only through it can we expect truth to out" Poetic, Non?:)
Besides, he will be the first to note that law is not black and white, and it is only through the participation of (semi)enlightened individuals in open discussion that law may be interpreted correctly.
I personally am quite happy that the vast majority of posters here are not lawyers. Lawyers are excellent banks of legal knowledge, and quite good at pointing out flaws in legal ideas, but we are ultimatly the ones (the users and implementors of technology) that allow lawyers to understand technology and therefore codify technological laws. You wouldn't want to write an accounting (distribution tracking/medical monitoring/physics) software package without any knowledge of accounting, would you?
Anyway, I'm just tired of the number of posters who constantly complain that others shouldn't be posting. Speech is free, and so are the bytes that encode it. I want to see more posters, not less. If what they have to say is truly of no value, then they won't be marked up. So turn up your threshold, relax, sit back, and don't get your knickers in a knot.
There is nothing to get up in arms about here. I'm at U of T, and the engineering department alone has a huge chunk of bandwidth devoted to it's staff and students. The costs of maintaining such a wide pipe are not trivial. If a non academic application was consuming an appreciable percentage of that bandwidth, I would restrict it too. Apps like ICQ and IRC may waste time, but their network usage is negligable. Napster however, can actually interfere with academic applications.
OK, so I got the source, and as usual there was a long convoluted license. Fine, but what's really funny is the fact that they left these lines in the license:
f. disassemble, reverse engineer, decompile, modify (except as permitted by Section 3. hereinbelow) or alter the Software; g. translate the Software; h. reproduce or copy the Software (except as permitted by section 3. hereinbelow); i. publicly display the Software; j. prepare or develop derivative works based upon the Software;
Um, catch me if I'm wrong but f, g, are redundant; you can't decompile source code:)
Forgive me for bashing us techies (being one myself), but honestly, I believe that there is FAR more to understand within the various laws lawyers understand than in the technology we techies know.
I really think you ought to expand upon this statement, as it currently reads as if you are saying that the study of law is much more complex and multifaceted than the study of science and engineering. I'm not flaming you here because I don't think that's really what you are trying to say. At least I hope not.
I just spent 4 years in Engineering at University simply preparing for the next six I will probably be spending here. It bothers me just a little to be told that all this knowledge doesn't compare to what my room mate in the Law faculty has learned.
At this point, I know an awful lot about computers, but everything I've learned in my undergraduate degree has simply been groundwork in preparation for what I will be learning in Graduate School.
Both Law and Computing are complicated domains of study, and it is impossible for any one person to have in depth knowledge of every facet. Thats why there are VLSI specialists, OS specialists, and software specialists in the one domain, and corporate, constitutional, and criminal specialists in the other.
Like the post above, I can't tell if you are being sarcastic. This is the kind of attitude lots of Lusers have. I've spoken to people who suggest things like this to me. Until of course I whack them with my hickory stick. I believe in negative reinforcement;)
Um, the sad thing is, I can't tell if you were being sarcastic, or if you were honestly trying to describe the current user base. People ARE easily confused. They hate remotes because the buttons are all in different places for each one. Have you ever seen someone stand in front of an ATM with a tortured look of confusion on their face, because this one is a Citibank machine, not the Royal Bank kind their used to? And Dashboards are partially standardised. Lusers are lazy (not dumb), and want to be able to sit down and not have to engage their brains.
I am just wondering where they keep getting these huge figures on the costs of replacing one html document with another.
Well, don't you know that the salaries of all the SysAdmins, web designers, programmers, and consultants that happen to be working during the hour it takes them to fix the page all need to be paid. I mean, it's not as if they wouldn't have been there working anyway if the "hack" had never happened;)
Uh, I can't seem to figure out what you're trying to say. Are you flaming the last guy or do you agree with him? Part of your post seems to be telling him off for grouping all Brazilians together, which he didn't. Then the rest seems to be a rant against stupid public figures who subscribe to the kneejerk philosophy of government which is so popular today. That is what the previous poster means by they.
I would assume that your group has done research on the social implications of wearables in addition to practical design issues?
Are you kidding? The group is part of the Computer Engineering discipline in the faculty of Applied Science and Engineering, U of T. Do you think the words social and implications appear in the same sentence very often around here?;)
Actually, I'm just kidding, for a bunch of seriously hard core geeks, we tend to spend a lot of time examining the various different ways in which a particular modification or piece of equipment might be used. But unfortunatly, we could probably do with a few more history/society/sociology credits in our academic diets.
As is the usual case with technology, a truely thorough examination of its impact will probably have to wait until it starts having an impact. People rarely think before they invent...
In Jazz's case, scientists grew the embryo in an incubator for five days, then froze it for a week at minus 373 degrees.
Wow, that's one hell of a cold freezer you have there man. Even after you extracted all the molecular kinetic energy from that embryo, you made it even colder;)
The power issue is a good point, but switching CPU's only goes so far. A really powerful chip capable of serious number crunching is usually designed on the "power is irrelivant, speed is everything" model of chip design. The more transistors you pack onto the silicon, the more power your going to drain. So when it comes to wearables with real processing power, your going to need to carry along real batteries.
Here at UofT, we have wearables based on various flavours of X86, and the strong arm, and though the strong arm is a bit more battery friendly than the equivalent X86 chips, it's not that big a difference.
Batteries are old tech, we need to invent something better. Oh, and while we're at it, can we please hurry up with the fusion already?;)
Look, everything that people seem to think is bad about linux/windows/etc... when it comes to wearables is part of the interface, NOT the underlying architecture. The linux and windows kernels have been used in various diverse embedded applications before. This doesn't mean that the engine monitor in my car is running KDE. Why throw away a perfectly good kernel?
He's not putting words in your mouth, YOU SAID Linux and WinDoze and others currently avaiable are only suited for a desktop environment. Then in your responding post, you said I never said it was 'only' suited for a desktop environment, which seems to me to be a direct contradiction. Think, before you type.
I can envision going to CSE class and being able to try out code as the Prof. talks about it
Uh, no need to envision:) Check out the top picture on this web page. I was in the fall 1999 version of this course. But we havn't updated the page yet.
He works in the Computer Engineering department of the University of Toronto. Last year he formed his own research group called the Cyborg group. I'm one of them. I don't actually wear a wearcomp regularly because we have a limited number (of good ones), and because I'm more interested in coding for them than in figuring out what to do with them.
Steve does have rig on him nearly all the time, but he switches wearcomps depending on what he's doing. As for being a dork, I don't see why he's any more of one than the hundreds of people who post to slashdot every day (myself included).
Slashdot Mirror
OK, so winmodems have a few common bus interface chipsets. What I'm unsure of is what sits between the bus interface chips and the telco land lines. If the step xformers, DACs, etc, are different for each type of card (which I believe they are, to prevent copyright/patent infringement if for no other reason) then we are right back where we started. Any ideas about this?
So, fine, why is it such a big deal to write a driver for these things, and why aren't there any out there?
Well, when you get right down to it, a driver is simply passive glue logic that allows the kernel to talk to a device. Often, fully functional drivers can be written for the simpler devices with a few hundred lines of code or less (This does not include the optimizations or kludges that are often required to get around quirky hardware or make it run at acceptable speeds). Most of the work required is in figuring out how to talk to a specific device.
But in the case of the winmodems, there's nothing much to talk to at all. The drivers for these things shouldn't even really be called drivers. They are fully functional hardware emulation routines that take the place of the microprocessors, UARTs, and EPROM chips that usually go into making up a modem.
Now, as an open source developer, I have no problem spending a liesurly Sunday afternoon or two banging away at some device that I want to work on my system. But this undertaking would amount to designing and implementing a fully functional hardware emulator. This requires a dedicated team, such as the one working on WINE (which, granted, is not a hardware emulator).
OK, so what, we need a team. There are lots of teams working on other things, why don't we throw one together for winmodems?
Simply, because one team is insufficient. In fact, each brand (possibly each modem) would require its own team. There are hundreds of different winmodems out there, each requiring its own specialized emulator, tailored to its own specific needs.
Well screw that I say :). I'd rather spend the extra $50 bucks on a real modem and not have to worry about slowing my machine down just because someone wants to make a rediculous profit.
Which they are. The Winmodem PCBs are worth maybe $3 US at most, and they only have to write the software emulation once (rather than putting a new processor on each board). You can do the math.
Here's to another shoddy product in the name of profit! ;)
I'm not putting words in your mouth. My entire post was meant to refute your assertion that people shouldn't post their opinions about laws and legal issues; peoples opinions in these areas are NOT worth jack, and they SHOULD post about them. Opinions are what eventually BECOME law. We can only hope that it is an opinion that most of us agree on. The more people have knowledge about an issue, the better for all of us.
Excuse me, but I think you should read that statement again. If what one feels personally about an issue is totally irrelevent, then what the hell are YOU posting for? What are any of us posting for? Slashdot is a forum for our opinions about things, and as my law student room mate notes as he reads this over my shoulder "Freedom of expression is the most important right because only through it can we expect truth to out" Poetic, Non? :)
Besides, he will be the first to note that law is not black and white, and it is only through the participation of (semi)enlightened individuals in open discussion that law may be interpreted correctly.
I personally am quite happy that the vast majority of posters here are not lawyers. Lawyers are excellent banks of legal knowledge, and quite good at pointing out flaws in legal ideas, but we are ultimatly the ones (the users and implementors of technology) that allow lawyers to understand technology and therefore codify technological laws. You wouldn't want to write an accounting (distribution tracking/medical monitoring/physics) software package without any knowledge of accounting, would you?
Anyway, I'm just tired of the number of posters who constantly complain that others shouldn't be posting. Speech is free, and so are the bytes that encode it. I want to see more posters, not less. If what they have to say is truly of no value, then they won't be marked up. So turn up your threshold, relax, sit back, and don't get your knickers in a knot.
There is nothing to get up in arms about here. I'm at U of T, and the engineering department alone has a huge chunk of bandwidth devoted to it's staff and students. The costs of maintaining such a wide pipe are not trivial. If a non academic application was consuming an appreciable percentage of that bandwidth, I would restrict it too. Apps like ICQ and IRC may waste time, but their network usage is negligable. Napster however, can actually interfere with academic applications.
OK, so I got the source, and as usual there was a long convoluted license. Fine, but what's really funny is the fact that they left these lines in the license:
:)
f. disassemble, reverse engineer, decompile, modify (except as permitted by Section 3. hereinbelow) or alter the Software;
g. translate the Software;
h. reproduce or copy the Software (except as permitted by section 3. hereinbelow);
i. publicly display the Software;
j. prepare or develop derivative works based upon the Software;
Um, catch me if I'm wrong but f, g, are redundant; you can't decompile source code
I have a feeling the translator was a program. Ever use babelfish? ;)
I really think you ought to expand upon this statement, as it currently reads as if you are saying that the study of law is much more complex and multifaceted than the study of science and engineering. I'm not flaming you here because I don't think that's really what you are trying to say. At least I hope not.
I just spent 4 years in Engineering at University simply preparing for the next six I will probably be spending here. It bothers me just a little to be told that all this knowledge doesn't compare to what my room mate in the Law faculty has learned.
At this point, I know an awful lot about computers, but everything I've learned in my undergraduate degree has simply been groundwork in preparation for what I will be learning in Graduate School.
Both Law and Computing are complicated domains of study, and it is impossible for any one person to have in depth knowledge of every facet. Thats why there are VLSI specialists, OS specialists, and software specialists in the one domain, and corporate, constitutional, and criminal specialists in the other.
Like the post above, I can't tell if you are being sarcastic. This is the kind of attitude lots of Lusers have. I've spoken to people who suggest things like this to me. Until of course I whack them with my hickory stick. I believe in negative reinforcement ;)
Um, the sad thing is, I can't tell if you were being sarcastic, or if you were honestly trying to describe the current user base. People ARE easily confused. They hate remotes because the buttons are all in different places for each one. Have you ever seen someone stand in front of an ATM with a tortured look of confusion on their face, because this one is a Citibank machine, not the Royal Bank kind their used to? And Dashboards are partially standardised. Lusers are lazy (not dumb), and want to be able to sit down and not have to engage their brains.
How 'bout you find yourself a nice high cliff to take a good long walk off of, ya god damn anonymous coward.
Uh, what? I think your responding to the wrong post.
What sort of a problem are you having with chroot?
I am just wondering where they keep getting these huge figures on the costs of replacing one html document with another.
;)
Well, don't you know that the salaries of all the SysAdmins, web designers, programmers, and consultants that happen to be working during the hour it takes them to fix the page all need to be paid. I mean, it's not as if they wouldn't have been there working anyway if the "hack" had never happened
Uh, I can't seem to figure out what you're trying to say. Are you flaming the last guy or do you agree with him? Part of your post seems to be telling him off for grouping all Brazilians together, which he didn't. Then the rest seems to be a rant against stupid public figures who subscribe to the kneejerk philosophy of government which is so popular today. That is what the previous poster means by they.
OK, now I get ya. That's sort of what I thought you meant.
Bah, damn html tags... :)
I would assume that your group has done research on the social implications of wearables in addition to practical design issues?
;)
Are you kidding? The group is part of the Computer Engineering discipline in the faculty of Applied Science and Engineering, U of T. Do you think the words social and implications appear in the same sentence very often around here?
Actually, I'm just kidding, for a bunch of seriously hard core geeks, we tend to spend a lot of time examining the various different ways in which a particular modification or piece of equipment might be used. But unfortunatly, we could probably do with a few more history/society/sociology credits in our academic diets.
As is the usual case with technology, a truely thorough examination of its impact will probably have to wait until it starts having an impact. People rarely think before they invent...
Wow, that's one hell of a cold freezer you have there man. Even after you extracted all the molecular kinetic energy from that embryo, you made it even colder
The power issue is a good point, but switching CPU's only goes so far. A really powerful chip capable of serious number crunching is usually designed on the "power is irrelivant, speed is everything" model of chip design. The more transistors you pack onto the silicon, the more power your going to drain. So when it comes to wearables with real processing power, your going to need to carry along real batteries.
;)
Here at UofT, we have wearables based on various flavours of X86, and the strong arm, and though the strong arm is a bit more battery friendly than the equivalent X86 chips, it's not that big a difference.
Batteries are old tech, we need to invent something better. Oh, and while we're at it, can we please hurry up with the fusion already?
Look, everything that people seem to think is bad about linux/windows/etc... when it comes to wearables is part of the interface, NOT the underlying architecture. The linux and windows kernels have been used in various diverse embedded applications before. This doesn't mean that the engine monitor in my car is running KDE. Why throw away a perfectly good kernel?
He's not putting words in your mouth, YOU SAID Linux and WinDoze and others currently avaiable are only suited for a desktop environment. Then in your responding post, you said I never said it was 'only' suited for a desktop environment, which seems to me to be a direct contradiction. Think, before you type.
Uh, no need to envision :) Check out the top picture on this web page. I was in the fall 1999 version of this course. But we havn't updated the page yet.
He works in the Computer Engineering department of the University of Toronto. Last year he formed his own research group called the Cyborg group. I'm one of them. I don't actually wear a wearcomp regularly because we have a limited number (of good ones), and because I'm more interested in coding for them than in figuring out what to do with them.
Steve does have rig on him nearly all the time, but he switches wearcomps depending on what he's doing. As for being a dork, I don't see why he's any more of one than the hundreds of people who post to slashdot every day (myself included).
I wish we could moderate articles, because this one needs a big fat (Insightful) stamped on it.