Breeders already have cats that are missing the allergen causing protein from their saliva.
Bengal Cats and Siberian-Russians are two such breeds, and several unofficial subbreeds also fit the bill.
Google if you want breed info, but Bengals are a short haired, very outgoing breed with great social skills and tons of energy. The also play fetch and are suprisingly clever. Siberian-Russians are a long haired breed who behave more like traditional cats, in that they can be fat and lazy all the way through to hyper.
We all like to lament the loss of Soundstorm, with it's hardware audio mixing and on the fly dolby digital encoding, but it died for two reasons, one major, one minor.
The big one was marketing. Nvidia failed, on every level, to market and push the Soundstorm APU. It wasn't advertised, it's features and abilities were no explained, and info about it was buried deep within the then current nvidia web page. Nobody knew what it was, and while everyone understood 5.1 sound on a motherboard, no one understood why nvidias was better. And by no one, I include motherboard reviewers, who would talk about the dual channel features and onboard firewire of the nforce chipset, but completely overlook the sound, failing to even mention it in most cases. This feedback lead motherboard manufacturers to question the premium nvidia charged for the solution, and often opt for the cheaper AC'97 chipsets they had in stock instead. Nvidia never published benchmark and review guidelines for the soundstorm, so nobody ever cared about it. They needed to push it's excellence as a gaming and home theater chipset, and it's ability to blend digitally with home audio setups, and never did.
The second reason is, in fact, Creative Labs. To understand, some technical details of the soundstorm are needed. The Soundstorm APU is a semi-custom DSP, not a dedicated audio solution. It runs a customized version of the Sensaura 3D engine, doing all the work on APU that is normally left to Sensaura versions that run within the drivers of other soundcard makers. Additionally, the final mix stage of this engine has had the Dolby Digital Live encoder added, allowing the 5.1 output to be packed into an AC-3 stream. In other words, Nvidia was dependent on Sensaura technology. Now, guess who just bought Sensaura? That's right! Creative Labs. Do you think they'll be licensing their new acquisition to the one company that actually competes with them? Now, they'll keep licensing it to other AC'97 makers, because who wouldn't want a cut of every motherboard ever made, and the opportunity to make more when they buy a creative soundcard to replace it?
So, it's dead. Replacing the Sensaura engine with an in house solution isn't possible, as there is to much contamination of IP, nvidia would have to hire all new dev's and engineers to clean room it. Licensing from Creative will be prohibitively expensive, and motherboard makers aren't interested in it anyway.
Why not make a PCI version? Well, the PCI bus can't handle 64 16bit/48Khz audio streams, that's more bandwitdth than PCI has. It worked fine on soundstorm, thanks to the fast north-southbridge link. You could produce a PCIe 1x card version, but nvidia would have to re-engineer a good deal of the chip to do so, and then we are back to licensing anyway.
Nvidia never made Soundstorm enough of a brand to be worth noticeing, and then killed it when the costs got to high and the support got to difficult. Strangely, drivers for the soundstorm have finally matured, with the most recent 4.31 audio producing decent sound and having wide compatibility. Ah well, looks like our next hope is the highly DRM protected Intel HDA standard. At elast it offers realtime dolby digital. Sort of.
As a job hunting System Admin. in Toronto, I can tell you the job market is pretty crappy. Unless you already have a job lined up, don't hold your breath for a sysadmin position.
You should also note that jobs in Canada are much more political than jobs in the U.S. Office politics plays a bigger role, and you better be good at the game to get anywhere.
Copyrights might have been extended by Congress, but they can still lapse if they aren't defended comensurate to their value.
Thus, Microsoft has no choice but to make the best effort it can to track and notify people who have acquired its source code without a license. If they didn't, they risk a court case where a defendent could say that Microsoft failed to protect and enforce thier copyright, and the court would have a very good chance of saying the material had thus moved into the public domain.
This has happened in the past, and will again. Microsoft isn't chasing anyone down to prosecute them, it's unlikely they've been monetarily impacted by any single downloader, but they must vigorously defend their copyright and trade secrets, or they lose them.
Unlimited Access can be construed to refer to time, not bandwidth. Thus, ISP's claiming unlimited access aren't offering no download caps.
Think of it this way
Access buys you the key to a car, which is parked in your driveway. You can get into the car through any door, and for as long as you want. You have unlimited access to the car. You are not, however, allowed to drive it anywhere, you do not have unlimited usage.
Rogers Cable (Ontario, Canada) is trying to implement this type of soft cap, and it's not working too well for them. The major issue is they won't define the caps, and people are being cutoff for completely arbitrary amounts of usage. The other huge problem is that they specifically advertise 'Unlimited Usage' (consumers having wised up to the 'access' wording) and this is quite contrary to it.
They have suspended people, only to reconnect them when asked. This lead to a good exodus of people, and recently Rogers have been calling people saying 'all is forgiven' and asking them to return, saying the caps are completely gone.
Whether this proves true or not is yet to be seen.
I'm going to be completely pessimistic here, and say that it won't happen.
We have no confirmation that Bush will announce any such plan, and while republicans love to spend money, especially on handouts for big business, this one may be a bit steep.
Additionally, should he announce this, NASA is in no shape to accomplish it. The agency is bloated, outmoded, and far to political. It's long since ceased to be a research and engineering agency, and is now a political animal, intent purely on justifying its budget to congress. It may still be capable of science, but only for political end, and no longer seems able to do science for science's sake.
The only hope, strangely, comes from the military. The recent JSF development program proved that project can still be done with efficiency and transparency, and any hope for space must rest on the same idea (and, if possible, the same team). Both Boeing and Lockheed-Martin both worked with the JSF Development committee, so it wouldn't be a radical change for them. It would be the end of NASA, though the name might survive.
I can see no other way to accomplishing this. Any furtherance of NASA as the entity it is today is doomed to bog down in a hell of bloated management and endless waste. I doubt such radical steps will be taken though, and I must therefore pronounce any American moon mission doomed.
When heated suddenly, the conversion of water to steam produces a great deal of expansion, and therefor thrust. Much more so than just heating air or using combustion end products. This also draws heat away from the engine itself, and helps keep things cool(er).
This 'water -> steam = expansion' is the most ancient of tricks for turning heat into mechnaical force, and there is no reason to give it up now.
1. Sun offers 'big name' support contract for Linux.
2. Fortune 1000 companies require this type of backing on any new 'deployment'.
3. Sun now has an 'in' for their sales and support team.
4. Eventually, the solution to further growth will be something linux is 'unable' to do.
5. Experience with Sun, means Solaris is a natural upgrade choice.
6. Profit!
Sun doesn't care at all, they'd support windows if they could figure out some way to convince people that Solaris was the natural upgrade path from that. Linux will always have the 'hobby' stigma attached (mainly becuase Sun will always be whispering in the right ears. After all, they have access.) and thus Solaris is an easy sell, along with the dedicated, lock in hardware for it. Sun can't lose, even if they cna't upsell the client, they have still made a truckload of money on the support contract.
Grow up everyone, Sun isn't run by technologists, and doesn't give alick about Linux (or Solaris for that matter). What they want is money, and this is a means to that end. It may align with some peoples goals to promote Linux, but don't get confused about what Sun is really doing.
Actually, Rogers capped the downstream rate at 1500kbits/sec, and the upstream rate at 190kbits a second, down from the old @Home setting on 3000kbit down, 400kbit up. This is just about half. Actually getting these speeds aren't really possible, Rogers doesn't have the infrastructure to support it.
Having said that, Rogers plans to introduce *byte* caps, where there is a monthly limit on the amount of data you transfer in January of 2003, with billing for overusage beginning in March. It'll probably mimic the Sympatico caps, for anyone who cares.
This actually done by the service provider deliberately. Happens a lot with cable providers as well. This is a more subtle attempt to punish those who actually use their upstream, though the very low upstreams we are seeing all over the place is another facet of this.
I know you think I'm trolling or wrong, but try it yourself, especially if you are an ex-@home user, who had they entire network set up like this. Uploads will kill downloads, every time. The exact method varies from equipement to equipement, but the most common method is to have the modem itself forward ACK's at a lower priority than other packets. When the upstream is idle, tyhis is fine, but upload something, and your downstream goes to heck.
For the conspiracy lovers out there, this goes hand in hand with the aforementioned disparity in upstream and downstream rates. The *only* reason this is setup like this is to prevent you, the end user, from providing content that might compete with the ISP's partners. There is no technical reason why the upstream has to be slower, it's purely a business decision on the part of the ISP.
People may wonder how this type of outsourced programming works, and I'll run down a few examples here.
One is the fixed API method. A function or functions are needed that perform X on data Y. This requirement is simply farmed out, and code is produced that does this. This code is then integrated into the larger code by the contracting company. In essence, this is the grunt work of programming, and it's where India started, and where China will likely start too.
Another is code upgrade. Legacy code in one language is handed to a programming team, and the requirement that it be ported to new language X on system Y is given. India does a lot of this now, and their technology parks have a plethora of older hardware to mimic these legacy systems for developers to work with. The advantage here is that Indian's speak english fluently and reading native code with it's comments and documentation presents no problem at all for them. A legacy of British Colonialism that the Indians have turned to their advantage. I don't see the Chinese doing well here very quickly, as periodic reviews will be done in english, and communication could be a total headache.
The third is the requirement style. Software must perform X,Y,Z and run on systems A,B,C. This is becoming more common. In this case, the entire software suite, from the core to the interface is handled by the Indian company. This is where India finds itself today, and it's pretty good at it. I've reviewed some results from projects like these, and the coding style is uniform, properly commented and compact. It's also a unique kind of style, and takes some getting used to, but any given company will produce the same style each time, so it's certainly very acceptable. On average I'd say it's less buggy, BUT!, I only see the end result, it may have been hell just weeks before, and I never saw it. This is somewhere the Chinese could do well, as a final pass to translate comments isn't terribly hard, but
The last style is market need. This is where a perceived need is seen, and software is made to meet this need unsolicited. This I haven't seen very much, but as they become more aware of our market, India will certainly begin to try it's hand at this. China may never bother, as their own market is probably going to be big enough to consume any supply for a long time, and the very different cultures make the risk greater than a lot of companies may want to take.
It's debatable wether China will ever catch India, the difference in style of education and culture may be to great. China may end up with the widget API market, and may end up serving the Indian markets need for this, oddly enough, but wether they can break the language barrier enough to work directly with english commented and documented code is something I can't predict. It's one of thoise moments where paradigm shift actually means something.
Alright, while the story above is 'correct', it's something like reading chapter 6 of a 12 chapter novel, and claiming to understand everything. Alot more has been going on than is shown here.
In the beginning, as it were, was the F card. This card was a dumb eeprom, and was hacked so fast it must have made DTV's head spin. The video stream at this time was un-encrypted, and you merely had to convince your receiver to show the channels. This lasted about a year or two, and then a new card began appearing, this was the H series card. This card had a dedicated ASIC on it for decryptiing scrambled content. It was also a 'smart' smartcard, in that it tried to think about commands that were sent to it, and had some basic functions (read, write, compare, etc) that could be called on. Eventually, DTV mailed out new cards to all valid F card owners, and completely removed the older card from service. They also switched to an encrypted video stream, and that was the end of the F card.
This new H card was trickier to deal with, but at this time Hughes, who owned DTV, had made another mistake. This was the same card used in some european digital satellite systems, and a great deal of information was alreayd available on it. Hacking it (and these people were hackers, in that they had to reverse engineer a 'black box' device only by watching how DTV interacted with it, even if they used their knowledge for less than stellar purposes.) took less time than DTV would have thought. This is what went on for the years leading up to this story, in that the hackers would enable some new security hole, and DTV would send down an update to close it. Eventually though, DTV realized that there were an unlimited number of holes that could be opened, due to a flaw in the memory checking on the card, (large values would roll back over to zero) and that the programming hardware needed to work with these card had become cheap enough to be a mass market. About this time, DTV went quiet, and the community that hadgrown up around priating DTV satellite signals began to get fat and lazy. When DTV started up again, this time patching the firmware in the receivers to test the H cards unique ID against a list of known bad ID's, and to lock out bad cards if they were found, alot of people were caught by surprise. It was easy enough to overcome this problem, in that you could copy a valid, subscribed cards ID onto an unsubscribed card. Called cloning, this technique had definciecies that had been known for some time, in that part of the cards unique ID was stored into a write once area of the cards EPROM, and couldn't be changed, only masked.
Since DTV seemed to have stopped sending down card updates, cloning became popular. In fact, it became the way of doing things. Looking back, it is easy to see how DTV set everyone up for this, allowing cloning to become rampant, because they knew how to kill it.
When DTV started up the updates again, some of the original hackers warned heavily against cloning, saying this was tge beggining of the end. Most people, however, were content to simply update to the latest way of activating their cloned card, and content to ignore the number of updates piling up on their card. Once the updates were complete, those early hackers really began to scream about what was going to happen, but still no one listened. And, in the end, it did happen.
What DTV did was send down a packet of information, that said:
Take this address, and store it in this new location. Then, using the basic features of the card, compare that adress we just stored to an adress at this memory location. If they match, do nothing. If they don't match, set this memory pointer to location X, instead of location Y, where X is a specific part of WRITE ONCE memory. Another packet came along, and said, write some stuff to this memory location (the 'GAME OVER' in this case). If the memory pointer had changed to a write once area, too bad. If not, it was harmless. What was the card comparing? the ID reported by the card and the ID actually valid for the card.
This type of kill was instant and deadly. It was also 100% safe, in that anyone using a clonned card was garunteed to be priating the service, and the packet would not, under any circumstance, hurt a valid subscribers H series card. It was so deadly because the area written too is part of the cards boot process. When it first receives power, the card no longer starts in a valid state, instead spitting out useless garbage. There is no way to write to this memory location again, and there is no way to change the cards boot process, because it happens before the interface comes up.
I don't believe a magic bullet killed kennedy, but this magic bullet certainly killed all these cards.
Well, all is not lost, because a while back, DTV ran out of valid ID's for a H series card, and had to make a new card, dubbed HU. This card is much trickier and much smarter than the H card, but it may also have flaws that can be exploited. Only time will tell, but in a sort of ironic twist, this is again a card from europe. Maybe the american hackers will get another helping hand from oversees, and maybe not. Primitive hacks for it have already started appearing, and the game of tit for tat is already being played out, as DTV shuts down early HU hacks. Don't hold your breath though, the card has remained unhacked in europe for some time.
I hope this clears up some mystery. AS DTV did well this time, but they've made huge mistakes int h past that onlye ncouraged hackers to use their knwoledge to priate the system, it was, if you will, a sort of contempt. It was so easy, it was like DTV was daring you to do it.
You find them in the actual books, which while not explicit, are quite 'friendly', with plenty going on. If you can, pick up Winters Heart, which really does have, well... that would be a soiler, now woudn't it?
FlaskMPEG (http://go.to/flaskmpeg) is a project written by Alberto Vigata and whose source code is available under the GPL http://www.citeweb.com/flaskmpeg/docs/gpl.html
(As an aside, Alberto has been extremely busy of late, and the project has gone a little stale, but it is by no means abandoned, and he has collaberated with several authors to forward the development of FlaskMPEG, though it is slow going)
Intel has taken this source code, produced a modified binary, and distributed that binary to a third party (Dr. Thomas Pabst). Now, the question is, where is the source code? They are obligated under the terms of the GPL to release it, and so far they havene't. Additionaly, they hint that they don't want it distributed, by asking Dr. Pabst not to make the recompiled version of FlaskMPEG available. Is this a violation of the GPL? Probably. Will Intel get away with it? I'd like to see them not, but they probably will.
I'm surprised no one commented on this before, Slasdot goers a usually more on the up than this.
P.S. The DiVX codec is *not* SSE/SEE2 or 3DNow! optimized, though it does have MMX optimizations. How do I know this for sure? Because DiVX is just a copy of the Microsoft MPEG4v3 codec that has been modified with an assembler/debugger to allow the playback of MPEG4v3 streams inside an AVI, and to stamp streams it creates with the FourCC code of DIV3 instead of MPG4. It wouldn't have been needed at all if Microsoft hadn't artificially restricted the codec from creating or playing back AVI files, instead tying it to the ASF format, and therefor to a Windows only platform. Can we say 'Embrace and Extend (just enough to break compatibility)'? I knew you could...
The complete must see list...
on
Essential Anime
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· Score: 1
Movie: Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, Classic Miyazaki) Princess Mononoke (Miyazaki again) Ghost in the Shell (Must see) Akira (classic and amazing) Wings of Honnemaeise. (Race to space) My Neighbour Totoro (Miyazaki can do no wrong.;) Kiki's Delivery Service. (Guess who?) Tenchi Muyo: Tenchi in Love Tenchi Muyo: Tenchi in Love II Slayers: The Motion Picture End of Evangelion (Watch series first!)
TV Series The Vision of Escaflowne (Tenkuu no Escaflowne) Neon Genesis Evangelion (Shin Sekei Evangelion) Dual: Parallel Trouble Adventure Berserk! Bubble Gum Crisis: Tokyo 2040 Steel Angel Kurumi (Kotetsu Tenshi Kurumi) I want to be an Angel (Tenshi ni Narumon) Battle Atheletes Victory El Hazard: The Wanderers El Hazard: The Alternative World Shoujo Kakumei Utena Violinist of Hamlin Maze Gundam Wing Tenchi Muyo! Card Captor Sakura (CardCaptors) Rouroni Kenshin Slayers Slayers Next Slayers Try Fushigi Yuugi (Mysterious Play) Ranma 1/2 Blue Submarine #6 Weiss Kreuz (White Cross) His and Her Circumstances (Kareshi Kannojo no Jihou) Key the Metal Idol Saber Marionettes J
OAV Mahou Tsukai Tai (Magic Users Club) Bubble Gum Crisis: Tokyo 2032 Battle Athletes Daiundokai. El Hazard El Hazard II You're Under Arrest Oh! My Goddess Gunbuster Riding Bean Macross Plus
Hentai Legend of the Overfiend Venus 5 F^3 End of Summer Ogenki Clinic (Feel Good Clinic) La Blue Girl Cool Devices Private Psycho Lesson
There exists many, MANY more very good anime series, OAV's and movies out there, this is a short list. Check the Anime Web Turnpike for huges lists of stuff. (www.anipike.com)
Other stuff of note:
A prequel to The Matrix has been scripted, they are currently searching for an animation studio to produce it. Yes, it will be a genuine anime.
You can get lists of all the anime on american TV at www.animeontv.com
CN has picked up Tenchi (OAV and TV Series) for this fall. Kids WB! has picked up CardCaptors (Card Captor Sakura).
While GoHip isn't too great, there is already a company out there called Aureate, who bribe shareware and trial program vendors to install a few files on your system, along with the main program. These files (look for advert.dll) sit around as IE and Netscape plugins, and spy on everything you do, from personal registry information to every url you click on.
I could post a list of exactly which vendors install this thing, but it's too long. (GetRight and Globlascape Cute** probably being the most ocmmon source). If I were you, and using any windows based o/s, I'd look for advert.dll. Deleting it only partially solves the problem, but it's betetr than nothing.
In the Mobile Multi Media Protype labs, we made everything you can do today look cramped and useless.
Bieng that I cna't talk about it becuase of the NDA I signed, let me toss out a few things I cna say.
1. Current handsets (terminals) won't go any faster than 14.4 If you are hoping some sort of network upgrade will allow that, expect to buy a new phone to go with it. (1XRtt is the current favoured 3G protocol, though you'll probably see WCDMA and an upgrade to iDen as well.)
2. The Q Phone is the shape of things to come, though in and of itself, it's got nothing next gen in it.
3. The underlying protocol for faster wireless access still hasn't been decided, and don't expect it to make an appearance soon.
4. New, faster terminals will be expensive.
5. The FCC (and CRTC) are incredibly slow, lumbering beasts. Don't count on anything getting approved anytime soon.
5. Small Windows CE devices are the current champs at web surfing, as most have a fully HTML compliant web browser and color displays. The Cleo is probably the best at this, though the Sharp Mobilon + Camera is the funnest. PalmOS has a lot of catching up to do on the web browser and email front.
6. No one get too hyped, surfing in a car is impossible, and surfing on the bus is boring. The first roll out of these type of things will sell best to people who go and play Solitare and Hearts online all the time.
Slashdot Mirror
Breeders already have cats that are missing the allergen causing protein from their saliva.
Bengal Cats and Siberian-Russians are two such breeds, and several unofficial subbreeds also fit the bill.
Google if you want breed info, but Bengals are a short haired, very outgoing breed with great social skills and tons of energy. The also play fetch and are suprisingly clever. Siberian-Russians are a long haired breed who behave more like traditional cats, in that they can be fat and lazy all the way through to hyper.
We all like to lament the loss of Soundstorm, with it's hardware audio mixing and on the fly dolby digital encoding, but it died for two reasons, one major, one minor.
The big one was marketing. Nvidia failed, on every level, to market and push the Soundstorm APU. It wasn't advertised, it's features and abilities were no explained, and info about it was buried deep within the then current nvidia web page. Nobody knew what it was, and while everyone understood 5.1 sound on a motherboard, no one understood why nvidias was better. And by no one, I include motherboard reviewers, who would talk about the dual channel features and onboard firewire of the nforce chipset, but completely overlook the sound, failing to even mention it in most cases. This feedback lead motherboard manufacturers to question the premium nvidia charged for the solution, and often opt for the cheaper AC'97 chipsets they had in stock instead. Nvidia never published benchmark and review guidelines for the soundstorm, so nobody ever cared about it. They needed to push it's excellence as a gaming and home theater chipset, and it's ability to blend digitally with home audio setups, and never did.
The second reason is, in fact, Creative Labs. To understand, some technical details of the soundstorm are needed. The Soundstorm APU is a semi-custom DSP, not a dedicated audio solution. It runs a customized version of the Sensaura 3D engine, doing all the work on APU that is normally left to Sensaura versions that run within the drivers of other soundcard makers. Additionally, the final mix stage of this engine has had the Dolby Digital Live encoder added, allowing the 5.1 output to be packed into an AC-3 stream. In other words, Nvidia was dependent on Sensaura technology. Now, guess who just bought Sensaura? That's right! Creative Labs. Do you think they'll be licensing their new acquisition to the one company that actually competes with them? Now, they'll keep licensing it to other AC'97 makers, because who wouldn't want a cut of every motherboard ever made, and the opportunity to make more when they buy a creative soundcard to replace it?
So, it's dead. Replacing the Sensaura engine with an in house solution isn't possible, as there is to much contamination of IP, nvidia would have to hire all new dev's and engineers to clean room it. Licensing from Creative will be prohibitively expensive, and motherboard makers aren't interested in it anyway.
Why not make a PCI version? Well, the PCI bus can't handle 64 16bit/48Khz audio streams, that's more bandwitdth than PCI has. It worked fine on soundstorm, thanks to the fast north-southbridge link. You could produce a PCIe 1x card version, but nvidia would have to re-engineer a good deal of the chip to do so, and then we are back to licensing anyway.
Nvidia never made Soundstorm enough of a brand to be worth noticeing, and then killed it when the costs got to high and the support got to difficult. Strangely, drivers for the soundstorm have finally matured, with the most recent 4.31 audio producing decent sound and having wide compatibility. Ah well, looks like our next hope is the highly DRM protected Intel HDA standard. At elast it offers realtime dolby digital. Sort of.
AOL will probably be able to charge for this and get away with it, but charging for the basics won't ever work, there are too many free competitors.
They better improve the software a whole lot though.
As a job hunting System Admin. in Toronto, I can tell you the job market is pretty crappy. Unless you already have a job lined up, don't hold your breath for a sysadmin position.
You should also note that jobs in Canada are much more political than jobs in the U.S. Office politics plays a bigger role, and you better be good at the game to get anywhere.
Thus, Microsoft has no choice but to make the best effort it can to track and notify people who have acquired its source code without a license. If they didn't, they risk a court case where a defendent could say that Microsoft failed to protect and enforce thier copyright, and the court would have a very good chance of saying the material had thus moved into the public domain.
This has happened in the past, and will again. Microsoft isn't chasing anyone down to prosecute them, it's unlikely they've been monetarily impacted by any single downloader, but they must vigorously defend their copyright and trade secrets, or they lose them.
Canada saw this long ago.
Unlimited Access can be construed to refer to time, not bandwidth. Thus, ISP's claiming unlimited access aren't offering no download caps.
Think of it this way
Access buys you the key to a car, which is parked in your driveway. You can get into the car through any door, and for as long as you want. You have unlimited access to the car. You are not, however, allowed to drive it anywhere, you do not have unlimited usage.
Rogers Cable (Ontario, Canada) is trying to implement this type of soft cap, and it's not working too well for them. The major issue is they won't define the caps, and people are being cutoff for completely arbitrary amounts of usage. The other huge problem is that they specifically advertise 'Unlimited Usage' (consumers having wised up to the 'access' wording) and this is quite contrary to it.
They have suspended people, only to reconnect them when asked. This lead to a good exodus of people, and recently Rogers have been calling people saying 'all is forgiven' and asking them to return, saying the caps are completely gone.
Whether this proves true or not is yet to be seen.
I'm going to be completely pessimistic here, and say that it won't happen.
We have no confirmation that Bush will announce any such plan, and while republicans love to spend money, especially on handouts for big business, this one may be a bit steep.
Additionally, should he announce this, NASA is in no shape to accomplish it. The agency is bloated, outmoded, and far to political. It's long since ceased to be a research and engineering agency, and is now a political animal, intent purely on justifying its budget to congress. It may still be capable of science, but only for political end, and no longer seems able to do science for science's sake.
The only hope, strangely, comes from the military. The recent JSF development program proved that project can still be done with efficiency and transparency, and any hope for space must rest on the same idea (and, if possible, the same team). Both Boeing and Lockheed-Martin both worked with the JSF Development committee, so it wouldn't be a radical change for them. It would be the end of NASA, though the name might survive.
I can see no other way to accomplishing this. Any furtherance of NASA as the entity it is today is doomed to bog down in a hell of bloated management and endless waste. I doubt such radical steps will be taken though, and I must therefore pronounce any American moon mission doomed.
Sorry.
When heated suddenly, the conversion of water to steam produces a great deal of expansion, and therefor thrust. Much more so than just heating air or using combustion end products. This also draws heat away from the engine itself, and helps keep things cool(er).
This 'water -> steam = expansion' is the most ancient of tricks for turning heat into mechnaical force, and there is no reason to give it up now.
1. Sun offers 'big name' support contract for Linux.
2. Fortune 1000 companies require this type of backing on any new 'deployment'.
3. Sun now has an 'in' for their sales and support team.
4. Eventually, the solution to further growth will be something linux is 'unable' to do.
5. Experience with Sun, means Solaris is a natural upgrade choice.
6. Profit!
Sun doesn't care at all, they'd support windows if they could figure out some way to convince people that Solaris was the natural upgrade path from that. Linux will always have the 'hobby' stigma attached (mainly becuase Sun will always be whispering in the right ears. After all, they have access.) and thus Solaris is an easy sell, along with the dedicated, lock in hardware for it. Sun can't lose, even if they cna't upsell the client, they have still made a truckload of money on the support contract.
Grow up everyone, Sun isn't run by technologists, and doesn't give alick about Linux (or Solaris for that matter). What they want is money, and this is a means to that end. It may align with some peoples goals to promote Linux, but don't get confused about what Sun is really doing.
No thanks. Come back when it has decent sound and an OLED display.
(Also, this story has been up for hours without one comment. I guess no one cares at all)
Actually, Rogers capped the downstream rate at 1500kbits/sec, and the upstream rate at 190kbits a second, down from the old @Home setting on 3000kbit down, 400kbit up. This is just about half. Actually getting these speeds aren't really possible, Rogers doesn't have the infrastructure to support it.
Having said that, Rogers plans to introduce *byte* caps, where there is a monthly limit on the amount of data you transfer in January of 2003, with billing for overusage beginning in March. It'll probably mimic the Sympatico caps, for anyone who cares.
This actually done by the service provider deliberately. Happens a lot with cable providers as well. This is a more subtle attempt to punish those who actually use their upstream, though the very low upstreams we are seeing all over the place is another facet of this.
I know you think I'm trolling or wrong, but try it yourself, especially if you are an ex-@home user, who had they entire network set up like this. Uploads will kill downloads, every time. The exact method varies from equipement to equipement, but the most common method is to have the modem itself forward ACK's at a lower priority than other packets. When the upstream is idle, tyhis is fine, but upload something, and your downstream goes to heck.
For the conspiracy lovers out there, this goes hand in hand with the aforementioned disparity in upstream and downstream rates. The *only* reason this is setup like this is to prevent you, the end user, from providing content that might compete with the ISP's partners. There is no technical reason why the upstream has to be slower, it's purely a business decision on the part of the ISP.
People may wonder how this type of outsourced programming works, and I'll run down a few examples here.
One is the fixed API method. A function or functions are needed that perform X on data Y. This requirement is simply farmed out, and code is produced that does this. This code is then integrated into the larger code by the contracting company. In essence, this is the grunt work of programming, and it's where India started, and where China will likely start too.
Another is code upgrade. Legacy code in one language is handed to a programming team, and the requirement that it be ported to new language X on system Y is given. India does a lot of this now, and their technology parks have a plethora of older hardware to mimic these legacy systems for developers to work with. The advantage here is that Indian's speak english fluently and reading native code with it's comments and documentation presents no problem at all for them. A legacy of British Colonialism that the Indians have turned to their advantage. I don't see the Chinese doing well here very quickly, as periodic reviews will be done in english, and communication could be a total headache.
The third is the requirement style. Software must perform X,Y,Z and run on systems A,B,C. This is becoming more common. In this case, the entire software suite, from the core to the interface is handled by the Indian company. This is where India finds itself today, and it's pretty good at it. I've reviewed some results from projects like these, and the coding style is uniform, properly commented and compact. It's also a unique kind of style, and takes some getting used to, but any given company will produce the same style each time, so it's certainly very acceptable. On average I'd say it's less buggy, BUT!, I only see the end result, it may have been hell just weeks before, and I never saw it. This is somewhere the Chinese could do well, as a final pass to translate comments isn't terribly hard, but
The last style is market need. This is where a perceived need is seen, and software is made to meet this need unsolicited. This I haven't seen very much, but as they become more aware of our market, India will certainly begin to try it's hand at this. China may never bother, as their own market is probably going to be big enough to consume any supply for a long time, and the very different cultures make the risk greater than a lot of companies may want to take.
It's debatable wether China will ever catch India, the difference in style of education and culture may be to great. China may end up with the widget API market, and may end up serving the Indian markets need for this, oddly enough, but wether they can break the language barrier enough to work directly with english commented and documented code is something I can't predict. It's one of thoise moments where paradigm shift actually means something.
Alright, while the story above is 'correct', it's something like reading chapter 6 of a 12 chapter novel, and claiming to understand everything. Alot more has been going on than is shown here. In the beginning, as it were, was the F card. This card was a dumb eeprom, and was hacked so fast it must have made DTV's head spin. The video stream at this time was un-encrypted, and you merely had to convince your receiver to show the channels. This lasted about a year or two, and then a new card began appearing, this was the H series card. This card had a dedicated ASIC on it for decryptiing scrambled content. It was also a 'smart' smartcard, in that it tried to think about commands that were sent to it, and had some basic functions (read, write, compare, etc) that could be called on. Eventually, DTV mailed out new cards to all valid F card owners, and completely removed the older card from service. They also switched to an encrypted video stream, and that was the end of the F card. This new H card was trickier to deal with, but at this time Hughes, who owned DTV, had made another mistake. This was the same card used in some european digital satellite systems, and a great deal of information was alreayd available on it. Hacking it (and these people were hackers, in that they had to reverse engineer a 'black box' device only by watching how DTV interacted with it, even if they used their knowledge for less than stellar purposes.) took less time than DTV would have thought. This is what went on for the years leading up to this story, in that the hackers would enable some new security hole, and DTV would send down an update to close it. Eventually though, DTV realized that there were an unlimited number of holes that could be opened, due to a flaw in the memory checking on the card, (large values would roll back over to zero) and that the programming hardware needed to work with these card had become cheap enough to be a mass market. About this time, DTV went quiet, and the community that hadgrown up around priating DTV satellite signals began to get fat and lazy. When DTV started up again, this time patching the firmware in the receivers to test the H cards unique ID against a list of known bad ID's, and to lock out bad cards if they were found, alot of people were caught by surprise. It was easy enough to overcome this problem, in that you could copy a valid, subscribed cards ID onto an unsubscribed card. Called cloning, this technique had definciecies that had been known for some time, in that part of the cards unique ID was stored into a write once area of the cards EPROM, and couldn't be changed, only masked. Since DTV seemed to have stopped sending down card updates, cloning became popular. In fact, it became the way of doing things. Looking back, it is easy to see how DTV set everyone up for this, allowing cloning to become rampant, because they knew how to kill it. When DTV started up the updates again, some of the original hackers warned heavily against cloning, saying this was tge beggining of the end. Most people, however, were content to simply update to the latest way of activating their cloned card, and content to ignore the number of updates piling up on their card. Once the updates were complete, those early hackers really began to scream about what was going to happen, but still no one listened. And, in the end, it did happen. What DTV did was send down a packet of information, that said: Take this address, and store it in this new location. Then, using the basic features of the card, compare that adress we just stored to an adress at this memory location. If they match, do nothing. If they don't match, set this memory pointer to location X, instead of location Y, where X is a specific part of WRITE ONCE memory. Another packet came along, and said, write some stuff to this memory location (the 'GAME OVER' in this case). If the memory pointer had changed to a write once area, too bad. If not, it was harmless. What was the card comparing? the ID reported by the card and the ID actually valid for the card. This type of kill was instant and deadly. It was also 100% safe, in that anyone using a clonned card was garunteed to be priating the service, and the packet would not, under any circumstance, hurt a valid subscribers H series card. It was so deadly because the area written too is part of the cards boot process. When it first receives power, the card no longer starts in a valid state, instead spitting out useless garbage. There is no way to write to this memory location again, and there is no way to change the cards boot process, because it happens before the interface comes up. I don't believe a magic bullet killed kennedy, but this magic bullet certainly killed all these cards. Well, all is not lost, because a while back, DTV ran out of valid ID's for a H series card, and had to make a new card, dubbed HU. This card is much trickier and much smarter than the H card, but it may also have flaws that can be exploited. Only time will tell, but in a sort of ironic twist, this is again a card from europe. Maybe the american hackers will get another helping hand from oversees, and maybe not. Primitive hacks for it have already started appearing, and the game of tit for tat is already being played out, as DTV shuts down early HU hacks. Don't hold your breath though, the card has remained unhacked in europe for some time. I hope this clears up some mystery. AS DTV did well this time, but they've made huge mistakes int h past that onlye ncouraged hackers to use their knwoledge to priate the system, it was, if you will, a sort of contempt. It was so easy, it was like DTV was daring you to do it.
You find them in the actual books, which while not explicit, are quite 'friendly', with plenty going on. If you can, pick up Winters Heart, which really does have, well... that would be a soiler, now woudn't it?
FlaskMPEG (http://go.to/flaskmpeg) is a project written by Alberto Vigata and whose source code is available under the GPL http://www.citeweb.com/flaskmpeg/docs/gpl.html
(As an aside, Alberto has been extremely busy of late, and the project has gone a little stale, but it is by no means abandoned, and he has collaberated with several authors to forward the development of FlaskMPEG, though it is slow going)
Intel has taken this source code, produced a modified binary, and distributed that binary to a third party (Dr. Thomas Pabst). Now, the question is, where is the source code? They are obligated under the terms of the GPL to release it, and so far they havene't. Additionaly, they hint that they don't want it distributed, by asking Dr. Pabst not to make the recompiled version of FlaskMPEG available. Is this a violation of the GPL? Probably. Will Intel get away with it? I'd like to see them not, but they probably will.
I'm surprised no one commented on this before, Slasdot goers a usually more on the up than this.
P.S. The DiVX codec is *not* SSE/SEE2 or 3DNow! optimized, though it does have MMX optimizations. How do I know this for sure? Because DiVX is just a copy of the Microsoft MPEG4v3 codec that has been modified with an assembler/debugger to allow the playback of MPEG4v3 streams inside an AVI, and to stamp streams it creates with the FourCC code of DIV3 instead of MPG4. It wouldn't have been needed at all if Microsoft hadn't artificially restricted the codec from creating or playing back AVI files, instead tying it to the ASF format, and therefor to a Windows only platform. Can we say 'Embrace and Extend (just enough to break compatibility)'? I knew you could...
Movie: ;)
Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, Classic Miyazaki)
Princess Mononoke (Miyazaki again)
Ghost in the Shell (Must see)
Akira (classic and amazing)
Wings of Honnemaeise. (Race to space)
My Neighbour Totoro (Miyazaki can do no wrong.
Kiki's Delivery Service. (Guess who?)
Tenchi Muyo: Tenchi in Love
Tenchi Muyo: Tenchi in Love II
Slayers: The Motion Picture
End of Evangelion (Watch series first!)
TV Series
The Vision of Escaflowne (Tenkuu no Escaflowne)
Neon Genesis Evangelion (Shin Sekei Evangelion)
Dual: Parallel Trouble Adventure
Berserk!
Bubble Gum Crisis: Tokyo 2040
Steel Angel Kurumi (Kotetsu Tenshi Kurumi)
I want to be an Angel (Tenshi ni Narumon)
Battle Atheletes Victory
El Hazard: The Wanderers
El Hazard: The Alternative World
Shoujo Kakumei Utena
Violinist of Hamlin
Maze
Gundam Wing
Tenchi Muyo!
Card Captor Sakura (CardCaptors)
Rouroni Kenshin
Slayers
Slayers Next
Slayers Try
Fushigi Yuugi (Mysterious Play)
Ranma 1/2
Blue Submarine #6
Weiss Kreuz (White Cross)
His and Her Circumstances (Kareshi Kannojo no Jihou)
Key the Metal Idol
Saber Marionettes J
OAV
Mahou Tsukai Tai (Magic Users Club)
Bubble Gum Crisis: Tokyo 2032
Battle Athletes Daiundokai.
El Hazard
El Hazard II
You're Under Arrest
Oh! My Goddess
Gunbuster
Riding Bean
Macross Plus
Hentai
Legend of the Overfiend
Venus 5
F^3
End of Summer
Ogenki Clinic (Feel Good Clinic)
La Blue Girl
Cool Devices
Private Psycho Lesson
There exists many, MANY more very good anime series, OAV's and movies out there, this is a short list. Check the Anime Web Turnpike for huges lists of stuff. (www.anipike.com)
Other stuff of note:
A prequel to The Matrix has been scripted, they are currently searching for an animation studio to produce it. Yes, it will be a genuine anime.
You can get lists of all the anime on american TV at www.animeontv.com
CN has picked up Tenchi (OAV and TV Series) for this fall. Kids WB! has picked up CardCaptors (Card Captor Sakura).
While GoHip isn't too great, there is already a company out there called Aureate, who bribe shareware and trial program vendors to install a few files on your system, along with the main program. These files (look for advert.dll) sit around as IE and Netscape plugins, and spy on everything you do, from personal registry information to every url you click on.
I could post a list of exactly which vendors install this thing, but it's too long. (GetRight and Globlascape Cute** probably being the most ocmmon source). If I were you, and using any windows based o/s, I'd look for advert.dll. Deleting it only partially solves the problem, but it's betetr than nothing.
In the Mobile Multi Media Protype labs, we made everything you can do today look cramped and useless.
;)
Bieng that I cna't talk about it becuase of the NDA I signed, let me toss out a few things I cna say.
1. Current handsets (terminals) won't go any faster than 14.4 If you are hoping some sort of network upgrade will allow that, expect to buy a new phone to go with it. (1XRtt is the current favoured 3G protocol, though you'll probably see WCDMA and an upgrade to iDen as well.)
2. The Q Phone is the shape of things to come, though in and of itself, it's got nothing next gen in it.
3. The underlying protocol for faster wireless access still hasn't been decided, and don't expect it to make an appearance soon.
4. New, faster terminals will be expensive.
5. The FCC (and CRTC) are incredibly slow, lumbering beasts. Don't count on anything getting approved anytime soon.
5. Small Windows CE devices are the current champs at web surfing, as most have a fully HTML compliant web browser and color displays. The Cleo is probably the best at this, though the Sharp Mobilon + Camera is the funnest. PalmOS has a lot of catching up to do on the web browser and email front.
6. No one get too hyped, surfing in a car is impossible, and surfing on the bus is boring. The first roll out of these type of things will sell best to people who go and play Solitare and Hearts online all the time.
That's all I can say.