...would be the shiznit. I'm working on it right now...had the Win2K box fired up to check some digital photos I took of the early stages, checked/., and found this article. I'm working on setting up an Apple II+ as a programmable temperature controller/logger for the refrigerator I use for fermenting and lagering. At this point, I have a Dallas DS18B20 temperature sensor tied to the computer's joystick port through a little bit of glue logic (a 74F00 and 74F125). I've written the routines to read/write bits on the 1-Wire bus and reset the bus; the most I've gotten so far is for the reset routine to tell me if any 1-Wire devices are on the bus. Routines to read/write bytes will probably be the only other assembly-language bits I need; the rest ought to be programmable from BASIC. I'll also have a DS2417 real-time clock on the bus, and a relay (switched through a transistor) on an annunciator output to switch the compressor on and off.
Plus, your steel car rusts out in 10 years and they get to sell you a new one.
It only rusts if you don't take care of it, or if it's of shoddy manufacture to begin with. An '84 323 my dad used to have while we were in England started developing small rust spots after less than two years, even though it was treated just the same as every other vehicle he's owned...washed regularly, washed more frequently when it's snowing, etc. (It was purchased new, so it wasn't a matter of buying someone else's problems.) OTOH, I have a '77 Cutlass Supreme with no rust anywhere...the paint's still in decent shape, too.
Actually, though, hybrid engines can be relatively clean, and are especially safe.
Science@NASA put up an article last Friday about a hybrid rocket under development that uses paraffin as fuel. The technology is presented as a potential throttleable replacement for the Shuttle SRBs.
The Shuttle is the ONLY American Manned Space Vehicle that did NOT have an Emergency Egress or Emergency Escape System at the time of construction.
Didn't Columbia have a couple of ejection seats on the flight deck? They may have been removed at some point, but I'd swear it had them through at least the first few flights. The model I built years ago has a couple of small hatches above the seats.
(A little bit of googling turned up this link, which mentioned that Columbia's ejection seats were the same basic type as those used on the SR-71. This link says that the seats were removed sometime in the mid-80s as part of its conversion from a test vehicle to an operational shuttle.)
You can't fast forward through the FBI warning and I have seen a few DVDs (Disney I think) that FORCE you to watch the previews by disabling FF during them.
It's nice to have a DVD player that gives Hollyweird the finger...hit PBC a couple of times, hit Play, and you're taken straight to the movie.
If you're iteratively processing stuff (transcoding, editing, mixing, etc) it's way better to do the lossy step only once than each time. Just 'cause 1 iteration may be unaudible doesn't mean 5 will be. (indeed, transcoding is one of the best ways to bring out compression artifacts!)
I'd like to use a lossless audio codec for video capture and editing for this reason. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear that any of these lossless compressors are set up so they'll work as audio codecs inside video editors. I can use Huffyuv to compress video without loss; why aren't FLAC and its competitors available as ACM codecs so that content compressed with them can get stuffed inside a WAV or AVI?
Until then, I guess I'll just have to stick with uncompressed audio...when 1 hour of Huffyuv-compressed D1 video takes 20-25GB, the 605MB that one hour of CD-quality audio takes isn't much by comparison.
How does that make the palm FASTER? I.e. when decoding videos or playing mp3:s.
Those aren't the primary functions of a PDA. You use it mainly to take notes, keep addresses, etc. The faster you can get in, look up an address, and shut down, the better. Keeping that info in memory instead of having to look it up in a file has to be at least a little faster.
(That said, AeroPlayer rocks. Somebody put up a (leaked) patch that fixes the Tungsten T audio problem; with the patch in place, AeroPlayer sounds as good as any other MP3 player. For you Ogg zealots, it supports that format too.)
I picked up a Tungsten T a while back, thinking it'd make a decent MP3 player with the addition of some memory. AeroPlayer works fairly well, but a bug in the firmware makes it sound like ass...it sounds like you're listening through a cheap transistor radio. (There's a low-pass filter that's set too low.) Messages in this forum indicate that that the problem goes away with patched firmware, but no patch is available. The latest word is that an update should be available around the time that RealPlayer becomes available; that was supposed to happen last month.
The specs of this new gadget don't sound too different from the Tungsten T...they exchanged Bluetooth and the 5-way navigation pad for GPS and twice as much memory. It's likely to have the same audio problem, unless Palm is supplying Garmin with a fixed version of Palm OS.
Because everything east of of the Mississippi starts with a W and everything West of it starts with a K.
There are a handful of exceptions here and there...KDKA (Pittsburgh, IIRC) is probably the oldest counterexample. For the most part, though, what you said is true enough.
It is a web borwsing platform. Just as desktop applications are built on an operating system, so are web sites built on browsers.
Real websites are built to standards, not on browsers that occasionally take liberties with those standards.
So one cannot expect that a web site will work in the same way on all browsers.
Why not? A site that works fine in $BROWSER_X but is a mess in $BROWSER_Y is a pretty sh*tty website. I'm not claiming that a site will render identically between two browsers...compare Mozilla for Win32 and Mozilla for Linux (the latter tends to choose font sizes that are too small). However, identical rendering isn't even the stated goal of HTML. (It's somewhat addressed by CSS, but even there you should expect some variability.) It is not at all unreasonable to expect a website to be functional when accessed with any browser. The path you'd take would only lead to further balkanization of the Web.
Doesn't the XBox only come with something like a 10GB hard drive? How in the world would that work out for PVRs? Last I checked, you needed a serious amount of storage space in order to make a decent PVR (along the lines of 60 to 80GB). Also, apparently, you are required to purchase seperate hardware and add it in somehow in order to get video input.
You forgot to mention that the only ports available to add stuff on to an Xbox (such as the TV tuner that would be needed for PVR functionality) are USB ports. Video quality will blow chunks unless the plan is to put some sort of hardware-based compression outside the box. Even if (for instance) an MPEG-2 compressor is included in the capture device, asking USB to take in a 6-Mbps MPEG-2 stream (equivalent to TiVo's best quality) and write it to disk with no data loss is tempting fate in a way I'd not want to try. Asking it to do that while doing software decompression and playback of a previously-recorded stream is even more foolish. Unless Microsoft stuck a PCI interface in there somewhere that can be tapped to accept a TV-tuner card (or at least a FireWire card), I don't see this project going anywhere useful.
So is this designed to be used with Palladium products? It sounds like it's a mixed mode CD with some control information in the data tracks that is read by Palladium-enabled applications or OSes to control what the user can do with it.
The impression I got was that it might be even simpler: a multisession CD. Stick CDDA tracks in the first session, which will be picked up by an audio-CD player. Stick WMA (or other crippled-format) files in the second session, which is what CD-ROM drives will see.
Could Microsoft actually be so stupid as to think such a scheme could work? There is software available to read from earlier sessions (most CD-burning software lets you import from any previous session when you go to add a new session). Still, from the limited information in the article, I think they might be aiming for something like this...admittedly, it is something that the average drooling AOLer wouldn't know how to work around.
Actually, the International Space Station's name was originally supposed to be Alpha (which of course isn't a Greco-Roman reference like Appolo, Gemini, Mercury, or Prometheus).
Back when Reagan first mentioned it, the station's name was to be Freedom. A few design scalebacks and a couple of administrations later, it became Alpha, and then ISS not long after that.
Did the Apple II bus architecture even have a name?
IIRC, no.
I could never quite get over the fact that certain slots could only be used for certain devices.
You could put a floppy controller somewhere other than slot 6 if you wanted, and it would work just fine. You could do the same with most devices. If your card had firmware in the $Cx00-$CxFF space, you were supposed to use no JMPs/JSRs within that space so that your code would work in any slot. However, established convention was to have certain types of devices in certain slots, especially since many (most?) programs were hard-coded to expect the printer to be in slot 1, the 80-column card in slot 3, etc. That the Apple II looked in higher-numbered slots first when it booted meant that disk controllers tended to go in the higher-numbered slots (6 for 5.25", 5 for 3.5", and 7 for SCSI, IDE, or other hard-disk controllers). The exception was the IIGS, which let you pick any slot as a boot device. (I have a SCSI card in slot 1 as a result...it was in slot 7 before, but LocalTalk won't work if a card is in slot 7.)
That's it, I'm going to boycott PCI. Only ISA, EISA, MCA, and AGP for me. Now, does anyone have a link to a motherboard manufacturer for a PIV that only has ISA slots?
Screw ISA...give me Apple II expansion slots! Just think: you could hook up a Disk II and set up your emulator to talk to it. Instead of wasting time playing Solitaire and Minesweeper, you could be wasting time playing Taipan and Lode Runner! VGA, SCSI, and IDE cards are available, too...what more could you want?
Just for those of you who are not old enough or, like me, not American enough to immediately understand what exactly is an Speak and Spell...
They were available outside the States. I remember seeing a TV commercial for it in England in the mid-80s. The funny part of the commercial was the word chosen...it went something like this
S&S: Please spell "color." Kid: [punches in C-O-L-O-R] S&S: That is incorrect...try again. Kid: [punches in C-O-L-O-U-R] S&S: That is correct.
They localized it for that market...IIRC, it spoke with a somewhat Brit accent. I don't know if it was sold in any non-English-speaking countries, though I'd think that the type of speech synthesis employed ought to work at least for most Western languages.
The key word was *utilizes*. Order a Dell today, and they keyboard will come with a PS/2 keyboard and mouse. Order a Mac 3 years ago and you got a USB keyboard.
Given the problems I run into with USB devices even today, I'm not sure that "one interface to rule them all" is a hot idea. IIRC, Mac users threw a sh*tfit when Steve Jobs made them throw out all their ADB/serial/LocalTalk/SCSI devices.
How long was it before USB became the default way to plug in printers (is it yet?)
It isn't. In my case at least, my printers are going from parallel to Ethernet. Print servers that let any computer print without being dependent on any other computer are a Good Thing (TM).:-)
(My comment about USB isn't trollish. On two occasions (once with a webcam and once with a flash reader), I've had USB devices refuse to properly install if they were plugged in before the driver had been installed. If a device is plugged in and the driver isn't present, the system should prompt for a driver disk. It did, but then in each case the driver failed to install. Subsequent attempts to install the driver failed, too...the only way to get the devices to work was to nuke the system, install the driver, and then plug in the device. That is just plain bad design. Maybe it's more a function of sh*tty drivers than anything else, but I've only seen it happen with USB devices...never with ISA, PCI, PC Card/CardBus, serial, parallel, SCSI, or FireWire.)
Unfortunately the rippers for tivo to avoid the D->A conversion requires a linux box.
Video goes straight from my TiVo to my Win2K box...read my page for details.
(I've looked into TiVo ripping under Linux...while I can rip the video, convert the tyStream to MPEG-2, create an SVCD from an MPEG file, and burn it, I'm running into trouble finding a decent, reasonably easy-to-use non-linear editor and MPEG-2 encoder. The biggest problem I've seen is that the programs I've run across often don't have few (if any) common file formats that they accept and you rarely get the ability to pipe from one program into another. You end up creating huge (20-30GB/hr) temporary files with uncompressed video. Compare this to using DVD2AVI, Avisynth, and TMPGEnc...you can go from 2.5GB of MPEG-2 video & audio streams to an 800MB MPEG-2 program stream with no commercials, with only a 600MB WAV file and a ~1K Avisynth script as intermediate files.)
Slashdot Mirror
...would be the shiznit. I'm working on it right now...had the Win2K box fired up to check some digital photos I took of the early stages, checked /., and found this article. I'm working on setting up an Apple II+ as a programmable temperature controller/logger for the refrigerator I use for fermenting and lagering. At this point, I have a Dallas DS18B20 temperature sensor tied to the computer's joystick port through a little bit of glue logic (a 74F00 and 74F125). I've written the routines to read/write bits on the 1-Wire bus and reset the bus; the most I've gotten so far is for the reset routine to tell me if any 1-Wire devices are on the bus. Routines to read/write bytes will probably be the only other assembly-language bits I need; the rest ought to be programmable from BASIC. I'll also have a DS2417 real-time clock on the bus, and a relay (switched through a transistor) on an annunciator output to switch the compressor on and off.
It only rusts if you don't take care of it, or if it's of shoddy manufacture to begin with. An '84 323 my dad used to have while we were in England started developing small rust spots after less than two years, even though it was treated just the same as every other vehicle he's owned...washed regularly, washed more frequently when it's snowing, etc. (It was purchased new, so it wasn't a matter of buying someone else's problems.) OTOH, I have a '77 Cutlass Supreme with no rust anywhere...the paint's still in decent shape, too.
Science@NASA put up an article last Friday about a hybrid rocket under development that uses paraffin as fuel. The technology is presented as a potential throttleable replacement for the Shuttle SRBs.
How, exactly, is this any different from 3.5" floppies from other sources? Write something today and you're lucky to be able to read it next week.
Welcome to my foes list, asshole.
Didn't Columbia have a couple of ejection seats on the flight deck? They may have been removed at some point, but I'd swear it had them through at least the first few flights. The model I built years ago has a couple of small hatches above the seats.
(A little bit of googling turned up this link, which mentioned that Columbia's ejection seats were the same basic type as those used on the SR-71. This link says that the seats were removed sometime in the mid-80s as part of its conversion from a test vehicle to an operational shuttle.)
It's nice to have a DVD player that gives Hollyweird the finger...hit PBC a couple of times, hit Play, and you're taken straight to the movie.
I'd like to use a lossless audio codec for video capture and editing for this reason. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear that any of these lossless compressors are set up so they'll work as audio codecs inside video editors. I can use Huffyuv to compress video without loss; why aren't FLAC and its competitors available as ACM codecs so that content compressed with them can get stuffed inside a WAV or AVI?
Until then, I guess I'll just have to stick with uncompressed audio...when 1 hour of Huffyuv-compressed D1 video takes 20-25GB, the 605MB that one hour of CD-quality audio takes isn't much by comparison.
Those aren't the primary functions of a PDA. You use it mainly to take notes, keep addresses, etc. The faster you can get in, look up an address, and shut down, the better. Keeping that info in memory instead of having to look it up in a file has to be at least a little faster.
(That said, AeroPlayer rocks. Somebody put up a (leaked) patch that fixes the Tungsten T audio problem; with the patch in place, AeroPlayer sounds as good as any other MP3 player. For you Ogg zealots, it supports that format too.)
The specs of this new gadget don't sound too different from the Tungsten T...they exchanged Bluetooth and the 5-way navigation pad for GPS and twice as much memory. It's likely to have the same audio problem, unless Palm is supplying Garmin with a fixed version of Palm OS.
There are a handful of exceptions here and there...KDKA (Pittsburgh, IIRC) is probably the oldest counterexample. For the most part, though, what you said is true enough.
Real websites are built to standards, not on browsers that occasionally take liberties with those standards.
Why not? A site that works fine in $BROWSER_X but is a mess in $BROWSER_Y is a pretty sh*tty website. I'm not claiming that a site will render identically between two browsers...compare Mozilla for Win32 and Mozilla for Linux (the latter tends to choose font sizes that are too small). However, identical rendering isn't even the stated goal of HTML. (It's somewhat addressed by CSS, but even there you should expect some variability.) It is not at all unreasonable to expect a website to be functional when accessed with any browser. The path you'd take would only lead to further balkanization of the Web.
You forgot to mention that the only ports available to add stuff on to an Xbox (such as the TV tuner that would be needed for PVR functionality) are USB ports. Video quality will blow chunks unless the plan is to put some sort of hardware-based compression outside the box. Even if (for instance) an MPEG-2 compressor is included in the capture device, asking USB to take in a 6-Mbps MPEG-2 stream (equivalent to TiVo's best quality) and write it to disk with no data loss is tempting fate in a way I'd not want to try. Asking it to do that while doing software decompression and playback of a previously-recorded stream is even more foolish. Unless Microsoft stuck a PCI interface in there somewhere that can be tapped to accept a TV-tuner card (or at least a FireWire card), I don't see this project going anywhere useful.
Umm...last time I checked, the "g" in "gift" is a soft "g." A hard "g" would be the "g" in "gene."
(Pronouncing "gigabyte" with a hard "g" would be nasty. So's Doc's pronunciation of "1.21 gigawatts" in Back to the Future.)
The impression I got was that it might be even simpler: a multisession CD. Stick CDDA tracks in the first session, which will be picked up by an audio-CD player. Stick WMA (or other crippled-format) files in the second session, which is what CD-ROM drives will see.
Could Microsoft actually be so stupid as to think such a scheme could work? There is software available to read from earlier sessions (most CD-burning software lets you import from any previous session when you go to add a new session). Still, from the limited information in the article, I think they might be aiming for something like this...admittedly, it is something that the average drooling AOLer wouldn't know how to work around.
http://www.apple.com/switch/ads/ellenfeiss.html
Back when Reagan first mentioned it, the station's name was to be Freedom. A few design scalebacks and a couple of administrations later, it became Alpha, and then ISS not long after that.
IIRC, no.
You could put a floppy controller somewhere other than slot 6 if you wanted, and it would work just fine. You could do the same with most devices. If your card had firmware in the $Cx00-$CxFF space, you were supposed to use no JMPs/JSRs within that space so that your code would work in any slot. However, established convention was to have certain types of devices in certain slots, especially since many (most?) programs were hard-coded to expect the printer to be in slot 1, the 80-column card in slot 3, etc. That the Apple II looked in higher-numbered slots first when it booted meant that disk controllers tended to go in the higher-numbered slots (6 for 5.25", 5 for 3.5", and 7 for SCSI, IDE, or other hard-disk controllers). The exception was the IIGS, which let you pick any slot as a boot device. (I have a SCSI card in slot 1 as a result...it was in slot 7 before, but LocalTalk won't work if a card is in slot 7.)
Screw ISA...give me Apple II expansion slots! Just think: you could hook up a Disk II and set up your emulator to talk to it. Instead of wasting time playing Solitaire and Minesweeper, you could be wasting time playing Taipan and Lode Runner! VGA, SCSI, and IDE cards are available, too...what more could you want?
lynx -dump http://goatse.cx/hello.jpg >hello.jpg
i=0; while [ $i -lt 500 ]; do cp hello.jpg hello$i.jpg; i=`expr $i + 1`; done
They were available outside the States. I remember seeing a TV commercial for it in England in the mid-80s. The funny part of the commercial was the word chosen...it went something like this
They localized it for that market...IIRC, it spoke with a somewhat Brit accent. I don't know if it was sold in any non-English-speaking countries, though I'd think that the type of speech synthesis employed ought to work at least for most Western languages.
"But I read it on the Internet...it must be true!"
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
Given the problems I run into with USB devices even today, I'm not sure that "one interface to rule them all" is a hot idea. IIRC, Mac users threw a sh*tfit when Steve Jobs made them throw out all their ADB/serial/LocalTalk/SCSI devices.
It isn't. In my case at least, my printers are going from parallel to Ethernet. Print servers that let any computer print without being dependent on any other computer are a Good Thing (TM). :-)
(My comment about USB isn't trollish. On two occasions (once with a webcam and once with a flash reader), I've had USB devices refuse to properly install if they were plugged in before the driver had been installed. If a device is plugged in and the driver isn't present, the system should prompt for a driver disk. It did, but then in each case the driver failed to install. Subsequent attempts to install the driver failed, too...the only way to get the devices to work was to nuke the system, install the driver, and then plug in the device. That is just plain bad design. Maybe it's more a function of sh*tty drivers than anything else, but I've only seen it happen with USB devices...never with ISA, PCI, PC Card/CardBus, serial, parallel, SCSI, or FireWire.)
Ouch...further proof it's due for some revision. :-|
Video goes straight from my TiVo to my Win2K box...read my page for details.
(I've looked into TiVo ripping under Linux...while I can rip the video, convert the tyStream to MPEG-2, create an SVCD from an MPEG file, and burn it, I'm running into trouble finding a decent, reasonably easy-to-use non-linear editor and MPEG-2 encoder. The biggest problem I've seen is that the programs I've run across often don't have few (if any) common file formats that they accept and you rarely get the ability to pipe from one program into another. You end up creating huge (20-30GB/hr) temporary files with uncompressed video. Compare this to using DVD2AVI, Avisynth, and TMPGEnc...you can go from 2.5GB of MPEG-2 video & audio streams to an 800MB MPEG-2 program stream with no commercials, with only a 600MB WAV file and a ~1K Avisynth script as intermediate files.)