It is probably quite worth considering now because "if" a country would feel that adoption of their geographical domain is enough to include the content inside whatever censorship rules they have set up, then how does this affect the taxation of profits from a commercial web-site? Do you pay taxes in the registered location of the domain of your web-site or the location of the server, the location of your bank, your country of residence or the registered location of your business? Are there any restrictions on the having all of these locations in different countries? From the technical point of view in terms of running your business over the internet it makes absolutely no difference where everything is.
Free hosting of open source projects is "A Good Thing" and should be encouraged as much as possible, but one thought occurred to me which is that according to the government page:
"
Christmas Island's full title is the Territory of Christmas Island. This is because it is an external territory of Australia. It is not autonomous, and falls under the authority of the Governor General of Australia and Australian Law."
Now, does that mean that all domains hosted under the.cx domain are subject to Australian regulations concerning content? Does the usage of a particular country's domain force you to abide by their rules, even if the servers are not physically located in the country in question?
I would assume that when your game renders its 2d projection for the 3d image, it will do two passes with the virtual camera positions slightly offset to give the two images for each eye. These images would then be combined into a single image using techniques such as "column interleaved, field sequential/row interleaved, side-by-side, top-and-bottom, and cross-eyed". Their software would then split it into it's two seperate images and deal with passing these two images to the hardware.
Hopefully there would be a slightly lower level drive the screen at which would then permit decent framerates, because this route would involve excessive amounts of needless conversion from one format to another (it was just the only obvious way I could see from the information on the website).
Off course, in an ideal world, you'd take your G400 and you would connect each output....
They say on their products page that they are using a 60Hz refresh rate which is using "LCD technology, which is inherently flicker-free".
Apparently the revie w in Machine Design says that "The screen uses a liquid-crystal display and an illumination plate. The LCD generates translucent colors while the plate carries light lines or pencil-thin light generators that run the height of the unit and are spaced on a two-pixel pitch. The plate also holds lenticular lenses that direct light at a slight angle. The LCDs are wired so that every other column displays image information intended for a viewer's left eye and the other columns for the right. In the current design, both halves of a stereo pair are displayed simultaneously. Several people can view stereo images at once.".
This sort of makes more sense if you see the diagrams on the page, but I would have thought that it would require you to be pretty much directly in front of the screen and viewing it at a perpendicular angle, (from a certain distance) otherwise you are going to start receiving the wrong information to each eye.
However, once you have it calibrated for your eye seperation, I see no reason why you shouldn't get really strong stereoscopic images. When's the next trade show near Brussels so I can try it out?
Interesting side point: The press on this form of 3d vision on their web site dates back to 1994 so it's not exactly cutting edge (unless they've recently undergone a quantum leap forwards and I haven't picked up on this from the site).
[offtopic]I find it slightly sad that whenever a story concerning non-US localised things that not only do the trolls feel it time to put on their racist bigot heads and start spouting stuff that is racist, offensive and basically fundamentally wrong, but also that people feel it necessary to sink down to their level and get involved with the fight. Leave them to it, thats what I say.[/offtopic]
Still, on a slightly lighter note, here is some stuff on the other problem that Africa faces beyond software and hardware costs which is connectivity. If you don't have a pipe then your computing options are extremely limited. If you look at The Project for Information Access and Connectivity (especially the Internet Status at Feasibility Study Universities table) you will see that most large universities are still trying to get by on a 64k (or worse) internet connection. Not totally optimal.
However, there does seem to be quite a strong move to address this problem, namely the Africa One submarine fibre optic cable project. This is a 30,000 km fibre-optic ring that will encircle the continent "by the year 2000" (I don't know of the current status although it is seems that Lucent is now involved) with 32 main pipes from the ring into coastal landing points.
Once this system is in place and local governments (hopefully) see the benefits of extending the pipes in-land then we should see a massive increase in the African Internet population and yes I am pretty sure that Linux will be one of the technologies that makes this possible.
I've been a little bit confused about the speed issues in java recently. I've been working as a java programmer for a couple of years and I've found that for a lot of things, java is not significantly slower than other languages. It all depends how you use the language.
I was very happy recently to pick up a copy of java 2 performance and idiom guide by Craig Larman and Rhett Guthrie (fatbrain) . The book is aimed at:
"Our intended audience is software engineers who have been recently introduced to Java, have a basic understanding of the language and libraries, and are ready for the next step: A deeper insight into how experienced developers use common language and library features in Java, and how to design Java systems with adequate performance."
Note the word design. If you want your application to work fast in a particular language then you have to design your structure in a way that optimises the strengths of the language. Java has garbage collection which is great and makes your life easier but if you create loads of objects, your program will run like a pig. Yes java has (virtually) invisible network communications over RMI but be aware of the overload of serialising all your objects, and the creation of a new thread for handling each function call and therefore use large-grained remote communication. And so on and so on. If you start your code design with the target language in mind, then unless you are doing either very low level or very computationally intensive operations then java gives fine performance (and yes I know that swing is a bit of a problem...)
As such I would highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in writing large, stable and fast applications while being aware of the design choices that they are making.
The book is not only available in printed form, but Bruce Eckel has a web site on the book and related subjects, including the full text in both html (downloadable zip or browsable) and indexed pdf format. However, it's not small and I would recommend going for the paper version if you like it.
I would go for "Thinking in Java" by Eckel, Bruce, available from Fatbrain.com at this page as it is one of the few books to really show you why you should follow the advice rather than yet another rehash of the java api (when are people going to realise that we don't want to pay money for a printout of the standard javadoc).
Slightly off-topic, but none the less also deeply disturbing (but for sanity rather than humanitarian reasons) is Quake in telnet!! Now I've seen everything and I'm scared...
A friend of mine who works in a company called Planetary Visions recently did a project called "Millenium classic: world atlas" which features some rather nice images of the complete surface of the world (without clouds).
The interesting thing was (if my memory of the brief talk we had at christmas wasn't fogged by too many substances) that the problem of removing the clouds from the images was not the clouds themselves (just take multiple exposures on different days and remove the lightest elements of each one above a certain threshold) but rather the shadows of the clouds which added all sorts of unexpected blotchiness to the resulting images and which therefore had to be removed pretty much manually (not having a nice easily identifiable colour to latch onto with a filter).
did a little bit of searching about what this whole airbus thing is about and found this article on Echelon which says:-
NSA: America's Fortress of Spies Part one of The Sun's NSA series, Baltimore Sun, 1995 "From a commercial communications satellite, NSA lifted all the faxes and phone calls between the European consortium Airbus, the Saudi national airline and the Saudi government. The agency found that Airbus agents were offering bribes to a Saudi official. It passed the information to U.S. officials pressing the bid of Boeing Co. and McDonnell Douglas Corp., which triumphed last year in the $6 billion competition."
and then I found this article which is far too long to quote here but includes some interesting points including:-
It's also fascinating to see that the UK didn't react when the NSA eaves dropped on the Airbus consortium (partly composed by a British industry) for the benefit of one of its American competitors . Even when her interests are concerned, the UK doesn't hesitate to serve her big brother or hypocritically close her eyes...
and then I noticed another rather strange thing in the same article, namely:-
Echelon members :
USA: NSA National security Agency
Great-Britain: GCHQ Government communications head quarters
Canada: CSE Communications security establishment
Australia: DSD Defense signals directorate
New Zealand: GCSB Government Communications Security Bureau
How come the French are only hassling the UK and the US? It all seems a bit confused to me...
I also heard (but cannot track down any links at this point) that the methods used to extract the information about the airbus negotiations used the NSA backdoor keys into the Lotus Notes 'secure' email system. Maybe in the light of the recent story about commission policy and the fact that there is a directive currently being worked on concerning the legalities of encryption in the EU may well lead to some interesting policies in the future for NSA 'enhanced' exported software. (here is an essay detailing some of the issues being considered)
Do you have any plans to make more general versions of the empeg that are easily adaptable for other purposes than playing tunes in cars? If you didn't have the audio pre-amp stuff then roughly how much power does it pull and what sort of portable batteries would be needed to make it truly mobile (rather than hooking up to a car battery)?
The next stage is to provide a second level of indirection to your secure browsing so that you remove even the details of where you are going to. For example anonymizer.com provide a service where all your web surfing behaviour is only between you and them via encrypted requests that are then redirected to the site that you want to really see. The authorities will then only know the number and approximate size of your page hits, but no definitive information can be gleaned from this.
There was another site that I saw recently, but I forget the URL that had a sequence of servers providing this service and which would scramble routing information between servers thereby making it very difficult to backtrack along packet paths any further than the first 'secure' server.
Once you extend this to cover all common protocols coupled with strong encryption in both directions (on top of whatever normal encryption that would be used between you and the client if you where surfing normally) then you arrive at a situation where snooping is very difficult.
Of course the authorities could then put these servers on a black-list and block traffic to them, but what if there was an open-source module that could be optionally compiled into any sympathetic server in the world that would provide this service? Every time that they would block one site, there would be hundreds more available offering the same service...
Or maybe looking for this...
on
GPL for Books?
·
· Score: 2
Here is a copy of the Open Content License for IDG Books who are building The Essential Open Book Project. This is aimed at being a community generated "living guide to the planning, installation, and operation of a Linux system". I haven't been following this project for a while, but it does seem to be moving with rough drafts for several chapters and hierarchical structure mapped out for the majority of the book.
If you want to work with ProAudio, yet get a little bit nervous of the stability of Windows then I would take a serious look at BeOS as an audio platform.
Apparently there is more stuff at http://www.be.com/beware but their web server doesn't feel too responsive.
Can't seem to find any confirmed drivers for the Mark of the Unicorn hardware as yet, but various rumours seem to be floating about concerning imminent support...
SLab Direct to Disk Recording Studio. 64 track mixing with 64-16-8-4-2 configuration, user designable desk, floating point mixing. Per track digital dynamics and digital filters. Stereo bus groupings, VU metering, continuous controller recording (mixdown sessions). 16 Effects send busses with stereo effects API, FX chaining, signal level trimming, bus/FX bypass. Includes echo, reverb, flange, phase, chorus, leslie, valve, compressor, limitor, stereographic EQ, etc.
Full tape spooling with location memories, SMPTE counters. Up to 16 IO channels (8 Stereo devs), with IO noise reduction processing, audio data compression to disk, audio metronome, micro-adjustable speed, punch in/out. TCL/TK 8.0 based "drag and drop" user interface. MultiProcessing/shared memory mix engine.
Kernel requires SYSV_IPC, OSS/Linux 3.9.2m/k2.0.35 advised for full duplex.
Does anyone know if there is any midi integration into the audio direct to disk functionality? I had a quick scan, but couldn't find any immediate information on the official web site.
Sorry to be so long posting a reply, got seperated from my web connection - most traumatic...
Anyway, I don't know of any examples on line at present, but I'll try and get in touch with Zoe who did the original thing and get a scan and mail it to you. All very trippy and most amusing.
expose a complete film with the lens cap on. The film is therefore at the end of its roll, yet no light has hit any frames yet.
point the camera at some moving item, for example a person doing semaphore stylee things, with the camera on a tripod (it's probably a good idea to have the person against a neutral dark background)
take off the lens cap!!!
trigger the camera in long-exposure mode
while you have the shutter open, wind the film back to the beginning at an uneven speed stopping occasionally.
develop the complete film print, joining the adjacent prints into one single long picture.
What you will have is a single image with an uneven version of time across the image. When the film was moving fast then you get a pretty much blurred version of the image, but at the points where you stop the film movement you have frozen exposures of the object. If the object has a clearly developed movement from start to finish then you get a nice mix of space vs time.
Like I said pretty off-topic, but quite an amusing thing to do in these long winter evenings. Thanks to Zoe Millington for coming up with the idea.
Nice. I wish that it where true. Or rather I hope that it is true. But something wierd seems to happen to people when they see personal profit margins in front of them - maybe its something to do with not actually really being involved in a company because they only intend to own shares for a short period of time and therefore they are not really "responsible" for the actions of the company. It's sort of like "green consumers" who are very happy to buy their "approved" green products unless it actually incoveniences their lives and then they somehow develop temporary amnesia...
Slashdot Mirror
It is probably quite worth considering now because "if" a country would feel that adoption of their geographical domain is enough to include the content inside whatever censorship rules they have set up, then how does this affect the taxation of profits from a commercial web-site? Do you pay taxes in the registered location of the domain of your web-site or the location of the server, the location of your bank, your country of residence or the registered location of your business? Are there any restrictions on the having all of these locations in different countries? From the technical point of view in terms of running your business over the internet it makes absolutely no difference where everything is.
- Temperature: 77 F (25 C)
- Dew Point: 73 F (23 C)
- Relative Humidity: 88%
I don't know about you but this doesn't seem to be the most appropriate conditions for keeping your servers fine and funky...Hopefully there would be a slightly lower level drive the screen at which would then permit decent framerates, because this route would involve excessive amounts of needless conversion from one format to another (it was just the only obvious way I could see from the information on the website).
Off course, in an ideal world, you'd take your G400 and you would connect each output....
Apparently the revie w in Machine Design says that "The screen uses a liquid-crystal display and an illumination plate. The LCD generates translucent colors while the plate carries light lines or pencil-thin light generators that run the height of the unit and are spaced on a two-pixel pitch. The plate also holds lenticular lenses that direct light at a slight angle. The LCDs are wired so that every other column displays image information intended for a viewer's left eye and the other columns for the right. In the current design, both halves of a stereo pair are displayed simultaneously. Several people can view stereo images at once.".
This sort of makes more sense if you see the diagrams on the page, but I would have thought that it would require you to be pretty much directly in front of the screen and viewing it at a perpendicular angle, (from a certain distance) otherwise you are going to start receiving the wrong information to each eye.
However, once you have it calibrated for your eye seperation, I see no reason why you shouldn't get really strong stereoscopic images. When's the next trade show near Brussels so I can try it out?
Interesting side point: The press on this form of 3d vision on their web site dates back to 1994 so it's not exactly cutting edge (unless they've recently undergone a quantum leap forwards and I haven't picked up on this from the site).
Still, on a slightly lighter note, here is some stuff on the other problem that Africa faces beyond software and hardware costs which is connectivity. If you don't have a pipe then your computing options are extremely limited. If you look at The Project for Information Access and Connectivity (especially the Internet Status at Feasibility Study Universities table) you will see that most large universities are still trying to get by on a 64k (or worse) internet connection. Not totally optimal.
However, there does seem to be quite a strong move to address this problem, namely the Africa One submarine fibre optic cable project. This is a 30,000 km fibre-optic ring that will encircle the continent "by the year 2000" (I don't know of the current status although it is seems that Lucent is now involved) with 32 main pipes from the ring into coastal landing points.
Once this system is in place and local governments (hopefully) see the benefits of extending the pipes in-land then we should see a massive increase in the African Internet population and yes I am pretty sure that Linux will be one of the technologies that makes this possible.
If you want Netscape as a "texture" on one wall then you should look at this which is a demo for 3Dwm that seems to be shaping up quite nicely.
In terms of zombie processes REALLY becoming zombies then you definately want to be playing with Doom as a tool for system administration.
I was very happy recently to pick up a copy of java 2 performance and idiom guide by Craig Larman and Rhett Guthrie (fatbrain) . The book is aimed at:
Note the word design. If you want your application to work fast in a particular language then you have to design your structure in a way that optimises the strengths of the language. Java has garbage collection which is great and makes your life easier but if you create loads of objects, your program will run like a pig. Yes java has (virtually) invisible network communications over RMI but be aware of the overload of serialising all your objects, and the creation of a new thread for handling each function call and therefore use large-grained remote communication. And so on and so on. If you start your code design with the target language in mind, then unless you are doing either very low level or very computationally intensive operations then java gives fine performance (and yes I know that swing is a bit of a problem...)As such I would highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in writing large, stable and fast applications while being aware of the design choices that they are making.
:-)
The book is not only available in printed form, but Bruce Eckel has a web site on the book and related subjects, including the full text in both html (downloadable zip or browsable) and indexed pdf format. However, it's not small and I would recommend going for the paper version if you like it.
I would go for "Thinking in Java" by Eckel, Bruce, available from Fatbrain.com at this page as it is one of the few books to really show you why you should follow the advice rather than yet another rehash of the java api (when are people going to realise that we don't want to pay money for a printout of the standard javadoc).
:-)
The interesting thing was (if my memory of the brief talk we had at christmas wasn't fogged by too many substances) that the problem of removing the clouds from the images was not the clouds themselves (just take multiple exposures on different days and remove the lightest elements of each one above a certain threshold) but rather the shadows of the clouds which added all sorts of unexpected blotchiness to the resulting images and which therefore had to be removed pretty much manually (not having a nice easily identifiable colour to latch onto with a filter).
NSA: America's Fortress of Spies Part one of The Sun's NSA series, Baltimore Sun, 1995
"From a commercial communications satellite, NSA lifted all the faxes and phone calls between the European consortium Airbus, the Saudi national airline and the Saudi government. The agency found that Airbus agents were offering bribes to a Saudi official. It passed the information to U.S. officials pressing the bid of Boeing Co. and McDonnell Douglas Corp., which triumphed last year in the $6 billion competition."
and then I found this article which is far too long to quote here but includes some interesting points including:-
It's also fascinating to see that the UK didn't react when the NSA eaves dropped on the Airbus consortium (partly composed by a British industry) for the benefit of one of its American competitors . Even when her interests are concerned, the UK doesn't hesitate to serve her big brother or hypocritically close her eyes...
and then I noticed another rather strange thing in the same article, namely:-
Echelon members :
How come the French are only hassling the UK and the US? It all seems a bit confused to me...
I also heard (but cannot track down any links at this point) that the methods used to extract the information about the airbus negotiations used the NSA backdoor keys into the Lotus Notes 'secure' email system. Maybe in the light of the recent story about commission policy and the fact that there is a directive currently being worked on concerning the legalities of encryption in the EU may well lead to some interesting policies in the future for NSA 'enhanced' exported software. (here is an essay detailing some of the issues being considered)
small world...
There was another site that I saw recently, but I forget the URL that had a sequence of servers providing this service and which would scramble routing information between servers thereby making it very difficult to backtrack along packet paths any further than the first 'secure' server.
Once you extend this to cover all common protocols coupled with strong encryption in both directions (on top of whatever normal encryption that would be used between you and the client if you where surfing normally) then you arrive at a situation where snooping is very difficult.
Of course the authorities could then put these servers on a black-list and block traffic to them, but what if there was an open-source module that could be optionally compiled into any sympathetic server in the world that would provide this service? Every time that they would block one site, there would be hundreds more available offering the same service...
Here is a copy of the Open Content License for IDG Books who are building The Essential Open Book Project. This is aimed at being a community generated "living guide to the planning, installation, and operation of a Linux system". I haven't been following this project for a while, but it does seem to be moving with rough drafts for several chapters and hierarchical structure mapped out for the majority of the book.
- List of commercial software
- List of freeware
- Apparently there is more stuff at http://www.be.com/beware but their web server doesn't feel too responsive.
Can't seem to find any confirmed drivers for the Mark of the Unicorn hardware as yet, but various rumours seem to be floating about concerning imminent support...Wave editor, cut/copy/paste/fade/reverse/etc, n-undo backout edit support, sample loop previewing, freehand wave painting, zero cross detection, metronomic bar/beat and SMPTE frame selection editing.
Full tape spooling with location memories, SMPTE counters. Up to 16 IO channels (8 Stereo devs), with IO noise reduction processing, audio data compression to disk, audio metronome, micro-adjustable speed, punch in/out. TCL/TK 8.0 based "drag and drop" user interface. MultiProcessing/shared memory mix engine.
Kernel requires SYSV_IPC, OSS/Linux 3.9.2m/k2.0.35 advised for full duplex.
Does anyone know if there is any midi integration into the audio direct to disk functionality? I had a quick scan, but couldn't find any immediate information on the official web site.
http://beast.gtk.org, also heard good things about SLab but haven't used it myself.
sourceforge.net, nice hardware specs too...
Anyway, I don't know of any examples on line at present, but I'll try and get in touch with Zoe who did the original thing and get a scan and mail it to you. All very trippy and most amusing.
- take an slr camera
- expose a complete film with the lens cap on. The film is therefore at the end of its roll, yet no light has hit any frames yet.
- point the camera at some moving item, for example a person doing semaphore stylee things, with the camera on a tripod (it's probably a good idea to have the person against a neutral dark background)
- take off the lens cap!!!
- trigger the camera in long-exposure mode
- while you have the shutter open, wind the film back to the beginning at an uneven speed stopping occasionally.
- develop the complete film print, joining the adjacent prints into one single long picture.
What you will have is a single image with an uneven version of time across the image. When the film was moving fast then you get a pretty much blurred version of the image, but at the points where you stop the film movement you have frozen exposures of the object. If the object has a clearly developed movement from start to finish then you get a nice mix of space vs time.Like I said pretty off-topic, but quite an amusing thing to do in these long winter evenings. Thanks to Zoe Millington for coming up with the idea.
time will see...