Check out http://www.plaintree.com - they use eye safe LEDs for transmission, with speeds up to 155 MBPS, or T1/E1 at ranges to 3KM. They are using this at the Ottawa airport. They have been in business since 1988.
This much I know. They have some built in ready to run config scripts for most German ISPs, including dial-up, cable and DSL. (From a somebody which runs SuSE on their server) Too bad they were useless to me, as I live in Canada.
Used to be known as the "voice of doom" during WW2. He was the CBC radio announcer who used to read off the list of the reported dead every day. He was one of those rare personalities you could immediately identify with your eyes shut, from voice alone.
One rather interesting use for the batteries: Electroplating gold or silver onto base metals such as lead. This would be the next best thing to the legendary philosopher's stone, and one can imagine ancient Iraqi traders raking in a fortune selling gold plated leaden objects to unsuspecting buyers.
I also use hotmail, and their filters are not as good as Yahoo's, because you cannot filter on message content, only header. I get an average of two spams a day in my hotmail account. I wish MS/hotmail would improve their inbox filtering, but I am glad to see them doing something about the problem.
I have no problem siding with the Borg on this one!
Is unfortunate proof that altruism breaks down on a large scale. This is the fundamental flaw of socialism - humans evolved from simian ancestors, who basically lived in small tribal groups. We are altruistic up to a maximum of about 75 or so individuals, then it breaks down.
I have seen videotape of a psychology experiment, where an individual feigned a serious medical problem and keeled over in the middle of the street. When the test subject tried this on a busy urban thoroughfare, large passing crowds actually stepped over the guy. But in a small village, shopkeepers rushed out onto the street to try and help him.
There was a famous murder case in NYC where over 100 neighbours heard a woman begging for help as she was having her life snuffed out over a sadistic killer over a period of time. Nobody reported it or tried to intervene, they all assumed somebody else would do something about it. This resulted in the passage of a law, which as I recall was the subject of the final Seinfeld episode.
OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplex) is more resistant to multipath effects. In conventional spread spectrum, data is pumped rapidly through a single carrier, modulated by a spreading code. With OFDM, the data is modulated and sent across a large number of closely spaced RF carriers at the same time. Sort of like parallel, as opposed to serial transmission. Because the bits are sent in parallel, they can individually be sent at a much slower rate, while still yielding the same overall transmission throughput. Because each bit is "on the air" for a longer period of time, there are less problems with multipath effects.
In the virtual world, eating McDonalds hamburgers COULD be good for you! Just imagine - If McDonalds paid the GMs for the priviledge, eating at a virtual McD's would increase all your stats 10% for a few hours after ever meal. Using Colgate toothpaste really would make you better looking. And if your sim drinks Bud Light, your sim really would become irresistable to the opposite sex for a few hours!
This has potential even in games like Ultma Online, where wearing Levis under your armour might convey you some mild form of magical protection. Wearing Nike's lets your character run 10% faster. Just think of the possibilities...
Eventually, companies who have signed on and committed themselves to the standard which is losing the most market share will throw it wide open, and give it away, dropping all licencing fees. And the world will be a better place for it. Such was the case with Netscape/Mozilla, Star Office, and some versions of OS/2. They realize that once they have lost the market share, they are not going to make money hand over fist with licencing fees, but have already made a committment to the technology. It also takes some of the wind out of the sails for their market leading rival(s). If I can't make money off this, damned if they will......
This sort of practice in no small way, contributes to the success of open source/freeware in the marketplace.
If they are having problems with VLIW compilers, they could always purchase the technology from TI. The compiler they have for their C6x line of DSPs generates awesome code - For one of their demo apps (granted, a very simple function) I was able to beat it with hand tuned assembly, but just barely.
I remember hearing once that MS deliberately slowed the Mac implementation of MS-Office before, by sprinkling in a few strategic nops and delay loops to make it run more sluggish under the Mac OS than under a similarly equipped x86 Windows machine. I am sure that they could find a way to ensure that even if they were forced to include Java support, they could find a way to cripple it, thus obeying the letter of the judgement while avoiding its intent.
Remember how they used the DMCA as a club against the bnet.d project?
I loved their earlier games, I have Warcraft, Diablo, Diablo 2, and Starcraft (all legit, the only reason why I still have a PC at home with windows) but I will not in good conscience buy another.
How do you force somebody to reveal an idea? What if after losing the court case he told Alcatel that his secret technique really invoved running the data through a pseudo-random number generator while shaking a vooodo stick?
Asynchronous hardware design is very, very difficult - Lots of pitfalls with static and dynamic hazards, to the extent that they beat the idea into of you in school that any asynchronous design was a bad idea.
But I always believed that asynchronous design was the logical way to go - all you needed was enough computing power to resolve all of the various hazard and glitch issues. It makes sense for information to travel as fast as it can, instead of as fast as the system clock will allow.
Processors will be qualified in terms of benchmark performance, instead of MHz, which is a dubious benchmark anyway. I think the marketing guys will have to get creative though...
This could be the beginning of the end for/. They may just decide it isn't worth it and divest all non core businessess, the way corel divested their linux business and spun off rebel.com to die an ignoble death. (Though I heard somebody is picking up a tiny piece of the Rebel.com corpse)
But methinks/. better be prepared to go it alone in a few months time if the worst comes to pass. That would indeed be a sad day, but a lot of other once famous online portals have folded their tent and gone 404...
Solid state drives have much lower storage capacity per $ as compared with conventional cached hard drives, have a niche in places where spinning platters cannot go for reasons of reliability, vibration or high G forces - spacecraft, aircraft, (especially fighters and flight data recorders) tanks, rockets, etc.
I used to work on military and avionics projects where conventional spinning hard drives could not be used. You wouldn't want to send a hard drive on an interplanetary mission, it would certainly be non functional by the time it got there.
Other more mundane applications for solid state memories are in digital cameras, (both still and video) and palmtop computers. They may also make sense in places such as remote seismographs where small blocks of compressed data are written to disk every few minutes, where you wouldn't want to be spinning up and down a HDD.
Has anybody tried actually compiling a kernel with Watcom? Does it compile? If so, how does the resultant code compare with old faithful?
I know there are some really cool optimization techniques that the gcc authours would love to use, but are covered by patents. A kernel compile would be an interesting side by side comparison of the generated code quality.
Since I am not a kernel, I don't worry too much about compile time, as long as it finishes sometime within the hour on a 1 GHz machine.
I wonder if this will be released under a GPL license? If so, when this puppy gets into the pulic domain, there will be anything worth merging into gcc, or vice versa? Or whether the two compilers themselves will ultimately be merged into one product?
Slashdot Mirror
Check out http://www.plaintree.com - they use eye safe LEDs for transmission, with speeds up to 155 MBPS, or T1/E1 at ranges to 3KM. They are using this at the Ottawa airport. They have been in business since 1988.
This much I know. They have some built in ready to run config scripts for most German ISPs, including dial-up, cable and DSL. (From a somebody which runs SuSE on their server) Too bad they were useless to me, as I live in Canada.
Used to be known as the "voice of doom" during WW2. He was the CBC radio announcer who used to read off the list of the reported dead every day. He was one of those rare personalities you could immediately identify with your eyes shut, from voice alone.
One rather interesting use for the batteries: Electroplating gold or silver onto base metals such as lead. This would be the next best thing to the legendary philosopher's stone, and one can imagine ancient Iraqi traders raking in a fortune selling gold plated leaden objects to unsuspecting buyers.
Yessssss!!!!
I also use hotmail, and their filters are not as good as Yahoo's, because you cannot filter on message content, only header. I get an average of two spams a day in my hotmail account. I wish MS/hotmail would improve their inbox filtering, but I am glad to see them doing something about the problem.
I have no problem siding with the Borg on this one!
All my slashdot articles are appearing doubled, there must be something wrong with my video card.
Is unfortunate proof that altruism breaks down on a large scale. This is the fundamental flaw of socialism - humans evolved from simian ancestors, who basically lived in small tribal groups. We are altruistic up to a maximum of about 75 or so individuals, then it breaks down.
I have seen videotape of a psychology experiment, where an individual feigned a serious medical problem and keeled over in the middle of the street. When the test subject tried this on a busy urban thoroughfare, large passing crowds actually stepped over the guy. But in a small village, shopkeepers rushed out onto the street to try and help him.
There was a famous murder case in NYC where over 100 neighbours heard a woman begging for help as she was having her life snuffed out over a sadistic killer over a period of time. Nobody reported it or tried to intervene, they all assumed somebody else would do something about it. This resulted in the passage of a law, which as I recall was the subject of the final Seinfeld episode.
OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplex) is more resistant to multipath effects. In conventional spread spectrum, data is pumped rapidly through a single carrier, modulated by a spreading code. With OFDM, the data is modulated and sent across a large number of closely spaced RF carriers at the same time. Sort of like parallel, as opposed to serial transmission. Because the bits are sent in parallel, they can individually be sent at a much slower rate, while still yielding the same overall transmission throughput. Because each bit is "on the air" for a longer period of time, there are less problems with multipath effects.
In the virtual world, eating McDonalds hamburgers COULD be good for you! Just imagine - If McDonalds paid the GMs for the priviledge, eating at a virtual McD's would increase all your stats 10% for a few hours after ever meal. Using Colgate toothpaste really would make you better looking. And if your sim drinks Bud Light, your sim really would become irresistable to the opposite sex for a few hours!
This has potential even in games like Ultma Online, where wearing Levis under your armour might convey you some mild form of magical protection. Wearing Nike's lets your character run 10% faster. Just think of the possibilities...
Eventually, companies who have signed on and committed themselves to the standard which is losing the most market share will throw it wide open, and give it away, dropping all licencing fees. And the world will be a better place for it. Such was the case with Netscape/Mozilla, Star Office, and some versions of OS/2. They realize that once they have lost the market share, they are not going to make money hand over fist with licencing fees, but have already made a committment to the technology. It also takes some of the wind out of the sails for their market leading rival(s). If I can't make money off this, damned if they will......
This sort of practice in no small way, contributes to the success of open source/freeware in the marketplace.
If they are having problems with VLIW compilers, they could always purchase the technology from TI. The compiler they have for their C6x line of DSPs generates awesome code - For one of their demo apps (granted, a very simple function) I was able to beat it with hand tuned assembly, but just barely.
I remember hearing once that MS deliberately slowed the Mac implementation of MS-Office before, by sprinkling in a few strategic nops and delay loops to make it run more sluggish under the Mac OS than under a similarly equipped x86 Windows machine. I am sure that they could find a way to ensure that even if they were forced to include Java support, they could find a way to cripple it, thus obeying the letter of the judgement while avoiding its intent.
Now I know what Saddam Hussein did with Lego when he was a boy!
So what is to stop microsoft from slipping something into the EULA prohibiting Office 11 from being used on a "potentially viral" GPLed OS?
Remember how they used the DMCA as a club against the bnet.d project?
I loved their earlier games, I have Warcraft, Diablo, Diablo 2, and Starcraft (all legit, the only reason why I still have a PC at home with windows) but I will not in good conscience buy another.
How do you force somebody to reveal an idea? What if after losing the court case he told Alcatel that his secret technique really invoved running the data through a pseudo-random number generator while shaking a vooodo stick?
Asynchronous hardware design is very, very difficult - Lots of pitfalls with static and dynamic hazards, to the extent that they beat the idea into of you in school that any asynchronous design was a bad idea.
But I always believed that asynchronous design was the logical way to go - all you needed was enough computing power to resolve all of the various hazard and glitch issues. It makes sense for information to travel as fast as it can, instead of as fast as the system clock will allow.
Processors will be qualified in terms of benchmark performance, instead of MHz, which is a dubious benchmark anyway. I think the marketing guys will have to get creative though...
This could be the beginning of the end for /. They may just decide it isn't worth it and divest all non core businessess, the way corel divested their linux business and spun off rebel.com to die an ignoble death. (Though I heard somebody is picking up a tiny piece of the Rebel.com corpse)
/. better be prepared to go it alone in a few months time if the worst comes to pass. That would indeed be a sad day, but a lot of other once famous online portals have folded their tent and gone 404...
But methinks
(Hoping I am dead wrong on this)
Solid state drives have much lower storage capacity per $ as compared with conventional cached hard drives, have a niche in places where spinning platters cannot go for reasons of reliability, vibration or high G forces - spacecraft, aircraft, (especially fighters and flight data recorders) tanks, rockets, etc.
I used to work on military and avionics projects where conventional spinning hard drives could not be used. You wouldn't want to send a hard drive on an interplanetary mission, it would certainly be non functional by the time it got there.
Other more mundane applications for solid state memories are in digital cameras, (both still and video) and palmtop computers. They may also make sense in places such as remote seismographs where small blocks of compressed data are written to disk every few minutes, where you wouldn't want to be spinning up and down a HDD.
How does it stack up against Star Office 6.0 Beta?
A side by side feature comparison would be nice...
Has anybody tried actually compiling a kernel with Watcom? Does it compile? If so, how does the resultant code compare with old faithful?
I know there are some really cool optimization techniques that the gcc authours would love to use, but are covered by patents. A kernel compile would be an interesting side by side comparison of the generated code quality.
Since I am not a kernel, I don't worry too much about compile time, as long as it finishes sometime within the hour on a 1 GHz machine.
I wonder if this will be released under a GPL license? If so, when this puppy gets into the pulic domain, there will be anything worth merging into gcc, or vice versa? Or whether the two compilers themselves will ultimately be merged into one product?