this whole story seems little more than gloating and hardly worthy of a/. post
This isn't gloating, it's war. We can gloat when the litigious bastards are out of business completely.
Slashdot is read by zillions of people who can not only sell their SCO, but also advise others to do so. Slashdot is also read by all kinds of mainstream journalists who might not otherwise notice what SCO is up to. One could argue it's been a damned effective campaign so far. Were it not for/. clearing up the FUD, their stock would probably still be flying high on rampant speculation.
Computers are not mostly metal, but rather fiberglass (PCBs) and plastics (enclosures, chip casings) which burn, rather than melt. Recycling is more complicated that just "melt it all down and extract each imgredient".
1. Video Out (how cool would an S-VIDEO port on there be). Hook up an S-VIDEO --> RCA adapter, and hook it into any TV, and play full screen. Oh how life would change.
I imagine the goal here is to get you to also buy a PS2 for home.
2. WiFi instead of IrDA.
A wifi interface probably costs $10 in their volumes, sucks tons of power, and also has certain IO requirements that may not easily be met by their processor. IRDA, however, costs just a few cents, uses very little power, and is a fairly simple serial interface that's easy to glue onto most processors. If the goal is to link two PSPs together, this is a much more reasonable and cost-effective interface than WIFI.
Maybe they WANT people to leak their secret birthday key. It's a great way to offer a deal without leaving money on the table by giving the discount to everyone, including those who'd buy anyway, without the discount.
We have all kinds of promo codes and they get leaked from time to time, but we never disable them. Unless you lose money by them circumventing the system, there's no reason to deny a sale to someone who wouldn't buy at all without the discount.
The tech industry seems really starved for ideas lately.
Binary file formats are hard. Let's use XML because it's easier. No wait... let's represent that XML in a more efficeint binary format. Ah yeah that's the ticket - the best of both worlds!
Now let me just fire up my code-morphing processor which, through emulation ahieves x86 compatibility with "low" power consumption. Never mind it's slower overall and has worse MIPS/mW than an underclocked x86 - look Ma, we *inveted* something!!!!
There are some real technical problems out there... why are people chasing non-problems like XML?
we'll have almost 2^10 times the computing power we do today. That's a huge number!!
No it's not. It's the expected number, and even if we don't get there as soon as expected, it really has no impact on the ideas they're talking about.
For example: brain-like computing; we could throw a million times the MIPS at the crude ideas we have today, and still be no closer to realizing "thinking machines". I believe that current AI research is moving in the wrong direction by about 180 degrees. We're not trying to replicate thinking, we're trying to simulate it. This is an area ripe for a fundamental breakthrough, and I don't believe that it's being held back by CPU speed.
PS please look up "moore's law". Moore prediceted memory density, not CPU/IO performance to which it is most often applied these days.
What keeps me out of the market is the way the damn things are always ringing all the time, and the way that just having the opportunity to make a call keeps me constantly thinking about who I could/should be calling right now instead of enjoying life a little bit in between business.
I would really like it if somebody made a cell phone that did not do anything. Then I could still be cool and have a cell phone, but without all the hassle, and without having to make silly excuses like "I forgot to charge it".
Do I miss those days? Not a chance. [...] If you thought dialup today is bad, try operating on the common standard of the day, 1200 baud modems, as in 120 characters per second, as in, yes it took several seconds to fill an 80x25 text screen which most people had in the form of MS-DOS (forget GUI desktops, they weren't common place for quite some time to come).
Wow, technology must have been really boring for you back then.
I remember thinking "HOLY CRAP a whole page a text sent across the country in less time than it takes to read it??? This is going to change everything!!!" and "wow it can draw stuff on the screen" and "wow it can make sounds" and "wow I can hook up a relay here and control the lights!".
I'm glad you're finally content with the state of things.
The rest of us are just as thrilled as ever and we're going to keep pushing ahead.
Once again, I find myself wondering what Google's endgame is.
Great businesses don't have "endgames". Microsoft has no "endgame" - their goal is to have all the money. It's not something you can ever finish, but that doesn't mean you can't make it your goal.
Google's goal seems to be having ALL the information. There's a hell of a lot of info on the phone lines so it makes sense to go there once you've got a handle on the web.
America... America... America, FUCK YEAH! Coming again, to save the mother fucking day yeah, America, FUCK YEAH! Freedom is the only way yeah, Terrorist your game is through cause now you have to answer too, America, FUCK YEAH! So lick my butt, and suck on my balls, America, FUCK YEAH! What you going to do when we come for you now, it's the dream that we all share; it's the hope for tomorrow
FUCK YEAH!
McDonalds, FUCK YEAH! Wal-Mart, FUCK YEAH! The Gap, FUCK YEAH! Baseball, FUCK YEAH! NFL, FUCK, YEAH! Rock and roll, FUCK YEAH! The Internet, FUCK YEAH! Slavery, FUCK YEAH!
Now, I'm not any expert on audio compression, but shouldn't the bass be the easiest to store faithfully?
It's no different from the rest of spectrum; it's a matter of what people can hear.
Realize that everyone's hearing is different, and furthermore, everyone can easily fool themselves unless they're doing double-blind testing. One easy way to find out what you can/can't hear is to put an MP3 and an AIFF of the same song together in a playlist, and then just hit ffwd a few times (with your eyes closed, and without counting) until you have no idea which one you're listening to. Then try to figure out which one it is by listening carefully - try to identify what sounds different. Then look at the screen to see which one you're really listening to. The results will surprise you - you might find that mp3's bass precision is far better than you've been led to believe.
I can consistently hear distortion in 128kbps MP3 for noisy, transient sounds. The best example is an audience clapping in unison on a live recording. Everything else sounds pretty good to me, but then I probably blew my ears out listening to 15" subwoofers in my Honda when I was a youngun.
Anyway regarding bass: a few people can reliably detect differences of a fraction of a Hz in the low frequencies. For most it's just "boom boom boom," which is why ported/bandpass cheap-loud-efficient subwoofers sell so much better than the sealed not-as-loud-but-more-precise-and-way-less-efficien t designs.
Now the thing to understand about lossy compression is it's all based on psycho-acoustics, which basically translates to "what the mind hears".
The first thing you learn if you study signal processing is the time vs frequency domains, and that signals can be represented in either space. MP3 works in the frequency domain (i.e., what you see on a spectrum analyzer as opposed to an oscilloscope). Our ears also work in the frequency domain (little hairs tuned to differenct frequencies) unlike a microphone, which responds directly to sound pressure level.
The trick that makes mp3 work is to identify which components of the frequency spectrum our brain really cares about for a given signal. It turns out that only a small fraction of the information is perceptible to most people. Smaller freq componets right next to a big freq component are hard to perceive. These are thrown out by mp3. Also very small variations in pitch during a short period of time are not perceptible. And so you build a model of what we can/can't hear, and you use this mdoel to reduce the amount of data that you include from the original signal.
MP3 cuts the signal into 27ms frames. Each of these frames has 32 subbands - a set of frequency components that are used to reconstruct the original signal. Yes, you could spend more of this data describing lower frequencies more accurately, but most people would then notice a lot more distortion in the vocal range. There's nothing "easier" about encoding any particular frequency - the challenge, generally speaking, is to develop a good psychoacoustic model to decide which frequency components to include.
I wish I were joking here, but this is the reality. The tech world is so fscked right now I have to wonder what they're putting in Silicon Valley's water supply.
There's more to it than that... my understanding is that when you lease "dark fiber" it means that when you get it, the fiber is _still_ dark from end-to-end, i.e. there is no mux/demux equipment or any telco "value add" services associated with it. It's sort of like the "alarm circuit" that telecoms used to sell, which was a "dry copper" pair from one location to another with no telecom switch or repeaters on the line. It's not just "unused" fiber - it's fiber that you get to signal on however you want (within some power limits I'm sure).
This means you provide the equipment, potentially giving you vastly more bandwidth than the telecom could sell you on that fiber. It also means you can upgrade your equipment later for faster speeds. It also means less points of failure on the line because its just optics all the way through.
Dark fiber usually isn't sold by the telecoms. Usually you'll have to get it from companys such as the railway and sewer owners - the guys who oversee the cables themselves, not the higher level services.
The disadvantage of dark fiber compared to a telcom OCx circuit are 1) you can't get channelized services eg split this DS3 into a few DS1 to this locations, and few DS1s to that location, a couple DS1s for ISDN PRI, etc etc. 2) you have less flexibility in choosing the endpoints - your choices are limited to big data centers where the vendors are willing/able to provide dark dervice 3) you don't get to deal with the really nice helpful people at the phone company
Flac is very much like run length encoding, in fact run length (ie DC signal) is one of block types.
FLAC says take this starting point and extend it for X samples by applying one of four very simple formulae to generate each subsequent sample. Then take that signal and add this residual signal to it (which has a very small amplitude so can be expressed in a small number of bits) and you've got the output signal.
It is WAY WAY simpler than a lossy codec, and thinking of it as having the RLE concept at its core is a perfectly reasonable way to understand it.
The dumbass had one hand on the Negative battery terminal and the other hand insainely close to the Positive one. I had to look twice...afterall...no one is that dumb rite?
Have you ever used jumper cables?
Hooooooowwweeee man let me tell you they make those cables thick for a reason. I was hookin em up once and acidentally touched both conectors at the same time - now let me tell you 14VDC may not sound like much but coming off a really big car battery... it was enough to put me in the hospital for a week with severe nerve damage.
Stay away from those car batteries man!!!! Take em to a certified mechanic who knows about electricity!
Slashdot Mirror
There is the occasional moron who thinks I'm a carpool lane violator and turns on the high beams behind me
He's flashing them because you're holding up the fast lane in your slow-ass CNG car, not because he thinks it's just you in the car!
Anyway, I saw a sticker on a cab in San Francisco that said "This car runs on natural gas - carpool lane ok". You'd be fine with just that.
this whole story seems little more than gloating and hardly worthy of a /. post
/. clearing up the FUD, their stock would probably still be flying high on rampant speculation.
This isn't gloating, it's war. We can gloat when the litigious bastards are out of business completely.
Slashdot is read by zillions of people who can not only sell their SCO, but also advise others to do so. Slashdot is also read by all kinds of mainstream journalists who might not otherwise notice what SCO is up to. One could argue it's been a damned effective campaign so far. Were it not for
Computers are not mostly metal, but rather fiberglass (PCBs) and plastics (enclosures, chip casings) which burn, rather than melt. Recycling is more complicated that just "melt it all down and extract each imgredient".
1. Video Out (how cool would an S-VIDEO port on there be). Hook up an S-VIDEO --> RCA adapter, and hook it into any TV, and play full screen. Oh how life would change.
I imagine the goal here is to get you to also buy a PS2 for home.
2. WiFi instead of IrDA.
A wifi interface probably costs $10 in their volumes, sucks tons of power, and also has certain IO requirements that may not easily be met by their processor. IRDA, however, costs just a few cents, uses very little power, and is a fairly simple serial interface that's easy to glue onto most processors. If the goal is to link two PSPs together, this is a much more reasonable and cost-effective interface than WIFI.
3. Drop Memory Stick Duo and use Compact Flash.
Yep, Sony's dumb.
Maybe they WANT people to leak their secret birthday key. It's a great way to offer a deal without leaving money on the table by giving the discount to everyone, including those who'd buy anyway, without the discount.
We have all kinds of promo codes and they get leaked from time to time, but we never disable them. Unless you lose money by them circumventing the system, there's no reason to deny a sale to someone who wouldn't buy at all without the discount.
This is simply a way to reference binary data from within an XML document and to have that binary data included in the same payload (using MIME).
And you find this less absurd?!?
My wife left me, my friends all left me. Even my dog, he left me too. I had to do something.
Your life is a country song. For better results, try playing it backwards.
I got my wife back, my car back, my house back, and a full bottle of whiskey at the end!
The tech industry seems really starved for ideas lately.
Binary file formats are hard.
Let's use XML because it's easier.
No wait... let's represent that XML in a more efficeint binary format.
Ah yeah that's the ticket - the best of both worlds!
Now let me just fire up my code-morphing processor which, through emulation ahieves x86 compatibility with "low" power consumption. Never mind it's slower overall and has worse MIPS/mW than an underclocked x86 - look Ma, we *inveted* something!!!!
There are some real technical problems out there... why are people chasing non-problems like XML?
How much is that in degrees Celcius? :)
we'll have almost 2^10 times the computing power we do today. That's a huge number!!
No it's not. It's the expected number, and even if we don't get there as soon as expected, it really has no impact on the ideas they're talking about.
For example: brain-like computing; we could throw a million times the MIPS at the crude ideas we have today, and still be no closer to realizing "thinking machines". I believe that current AI research is moving in the wrong direction by about 180 degrees. We're not trying to replicate thinking, we're trying to simulate it. This is an area ripe for a fundamental breakthrough, and I don't believe that it's being held back by CPU speed.
PS please look up "moore's law". Moore prediceted memory density, not CPU/IO performance to which it is most often applied these days.
What keeps me out of the market is the way the damn things are always ringing all the time, and the way that just having the opportunity to make a call keeps me constantly thinking about who I could/should be calling right now instead of enjoying life a little bit in between business.
I would really like it if somebody made a cell phone that did not do anything. Then I could still be cool and have a cell phone, but without all the hassle, and without having to make silly excuses like "I forgot to charge it".
Never seen video footage [...] Renowned Mac user Scott Knaster kept that Betamax video tape for 21 years
And he never watched it?!?! What about the camera man? Was he blind?
I'm afraid to watch this - I heard about that world's funniest joke. Sounds like they've taken special precautions here.
Stop whining.
Do I miss those days? Not a chance. [...] If you thought dialup today is bad, try operating on the common standard of the day, 1200 baud modems, as in 120 characters per second, as in, yes it took several seconds to fill an 80x25 text screen which most people had in the form of MS-DOS (forget GUI desktops, they weren't common place for quite some time to come).
Wow, technology must have been really boring for you back then.
I remember thinking "HOLY CRAP a whole page a text sent across the country in less time than it takes to read it??? This is going to change everything!!!" and "wow it can draw stuff on the screen" and "wow it can make sounds" and "wow I can hook up a relay here and control the lights!".
I'm glad you're finally content with the state of things.
The rest of us are just as thrilled as ever and we're going to keep pushing ahead.
Once again, I find myself wondering what Google's endgame is.
Great businesses don't have "endgames". Microsoft has no "endgame" - their goal is to have all the money. It's not something you can ever finish, but that doesn't mean you can't make it your goal.
Google's goal seems to be having ALL the information. There's a hell of a lot of info on the phone lines so it makes sense to go there once you've got a handle on the web.
America...
America...
America, FUCK YEAH!
Coming again, to save the mother fucking day yeah,
America, FUCK YEAH!
Freedom is the only way yeah,
Terrorist your game is through cause now you have to answer too,
America, FUCK YEAH!
So lick my butt, and suck on my balls,
America, FUCK YEAH!
What you going to do when we come for you now,
it's the dream that we all share; it's the hope for tomorrow
FUCK YEAH!
McDonalds, FUCK YEAH!
Wal-Mart, FUCK YEAH!
The Gap, FUCK YEAH!
Baseball, FUCK YEAH!
NFL, FUCK, YEAH!
Rock and roll, FUCK YEAH!
The Internet, FUCK YEAH!
Slavery, FUCK YEAH!
FUCK YEAH!
Starbucks, FUCK YEAH!
Disney world, FUCK YEAH!
Porno, FUCK YEAH!
Valium, FUCK YEAH!
Reeboks, FUCK YEAH!
Fake Tits, FUCK YEAH!
Sushi, FUCK YEAH!
Taco Bell, FUCK YEAH!
Rodeos, FUCK YEAH!
Bed bath and beyond (Fuck yeah, Fuck yeah)
Liberty, FUCK YEAH!
White Slips, FUCK YEAH!
The Alamo, FUCK YEAH!
Band-aids, FUCK YEAH!
Las Vegas, FUCK YEAH!
Christmas, FUCK YEAH!
Immigrants, FUCK YEAH!
Columbine, FUCK YEAH!
Demarcates, FUCK YEAH!
Republicans (republicans)
(fuck yeah, fuck yeah)
Sportsmanship
Books
This is already possible. Haven't you ever been to a county fair?
Now, I'm not any expert on audio compression, but shouldn't the bass be the easiest to store faithfully?
n t designs.
It's no different from the rest of spectrum; it's a matter of what people can hear.
Realize that everyone's hearing is different, and furthermore, everyone can easily fool themselves unless they're doing double-blind testing. One easy way to find out what you can/can't hear is to put an MP3 and an AIFF of the same song together in a playlist, and then just hit ffwd a few times (with your eyes closed, and without counting) until you have no idea which one you're listening to. Then try to figure out which one it is by listening carefully - try to identify what sounds different. Then look at the screen to see which one you're really listening to. The results will surprise you - you might find that mp3's bass precision is far better than you've been led to believe.
I can consistently hear distortion in 128kbps MP3 for noisy, transient sounds. The best example is an audience clapping in unison on a live recording. Everything else sounds pretty good to me, but then I probably blew my ears out listening to 15" subwoofers in my Honda when I was a youngun.
Anyway regarding bass: a few people can reliably detect differences of a fraction of a Hz in the low frequencies. For most it's just "boom boom boom," which is why ported/bandpass cheap-loud-efficient subwoofers sell so much better than the sealed not-as-loud-but-more-precise-and-way-less-efficie
Now the thing to understand about lossy compression is it's all based on psycho-acoustics, which basically translates to "what the mind hears".
The first thing you learn if you study signal processing is the time vs frequency domains, and that signals can be represented in either space. MP3 works in the frequency domain (i.e., what you see on a spectrum analyzer as opposed to an oscilloscope). Our ears also work in the frequency domain (little hairs tuned to differenct frequencies) unlike a microphone, which responds directly to sound pressure level.
The trick that makes mp3 work is to identify which components of the frequency spectrum our brain really cares about for a given signal. It turns out that only a small fraction of the information is perceptible to most people. Smaller freq componets right next to a big freq component are hard to perceive. These are thrown out by mp3. Also very small variations in pitch during a short period of time are not perceptible. And so you build a model of what we can/can't hear, and you use this mdoel to reduce the amount of data that you include from the original signal.
MP3 cuts the signal into 27ms frames. Each of these frames has 32 subbands - a set of frequency components that are used to reconstruct the original signal. Yes, you could spend more of this data describing lower frequencies more accurately, but most people would then notice a lot more distortion in the vocal range. There's nothing "easier" about encoding any particular frequency - the challenge, generally speaking, is to develop a good psychoacoustic model to decide which frequency components to include.
I can tell you from experience that merely being "brainy" does not necessarily make somebody kind or caring.
True, but the dumb ones always have the nicest boobs, no?
Sell the box at a profit
Ludicrous - no VC will fund you!
Your competitors will underprice you!
Your IPO will fall flat on its face!
I wish I were joking here, but this is the reality. The tech world is so fscked right now I have to wonder what they're putting in Silicon Valley's water supply.
There's more to it than that... my understanding is that when you lease "dark fiber" it means that when you get it, the fiber is _still_ dark from end-to-end, i.e. there is no mux/demux equipment or any telco "value add" services associated with it. It's sort of like the "alarm circuit" that telecoms used to sell, which was a "dry copper" pair from one location to another with no telecom switch or repeaters on the line. It's not just "unused" fiber - it's fiber that you get to signal on however you want (within some power limits I'm sure).
This means you provide the equipment, potentially giving you vastly more bandwidth than the telecom could sell you on that fiber. It also means you can upgrade your equipment later for faster speeds. It also means less points of failure on the line because its just optics all the way through.
Dark fiber usually isn't sold by the telecoms. Usually you'll have to get it from companys such as the railway and sewer owners - the guys who oversee the cables themselves, not the higher level services.
The disadvantage of dark fiber compared to a telcom OCx circuit are 1) you can't get channelized services eg split this DS3 into a few DS1 to this locations, and few DS1s to that location, a couple DS1s for ISDN PRI, etc etc. 2) you have less flexibility in choosing the endpoints - your choices are limited to big data centers where the vendors are willing/able to provide dark dervice 3) you don't get to deal with the really nice helpful people at the phone company
Flac is very much like run length encoding, in fact run length (ie DC signal) is one of block types.
FLAC says take this starting point and extend it for X samples by applying one of four very simple formulae to generate each subsequent sample. Then take that signal and add this residual signal to it (which has a very small amplitude so can be expressed in a small number of bits) and you've got the output signal.
It is WAY WAY simpler than a lossy codec, and thinking of it as having the RLE concept at its core is a perfectly reasonable way to understand it.
He wanted to make sure he got it down pat.
The dumbass had one hand on the Negative battery terminal and the other hand insainely close to the Positive one. I had to look twice...afterall...no one is that dumb rite?
Have you ever used jumper cables?
Hooooooowwweeee man let me tell you they make those cables thick for a reason. I was hookin em up once and acidentally touched both conectors at the same time - now let me tell you 14VDC may not sound like much but coming off a really big car battery... it was enough to put me in the hospital for a week with severe nerve damage.
Stay away from those car batteries man!!!! Take em to a certified mechanic who knows about electricity!
What about fumes from the melting/burning rubber?
That's what makes you see the colors - duh!