I read through the article, and it looked like just a normal embedded chip with extra RAM hooked in for the displays. I wouldn't be suprized if the extra CPU on the PC is used to refresh the displays often.
Ugh.
I think a OLED full keyboard would be cool, but maybe if they used a double-USB device scheme it would be better: USB Keyboard and small USB storage for storing GIF files of each key.
I don't get the marketing calls since signing up. The political calls are mostly robo-called (automated system calling, wait for a pickup, wait 10 seconds, play the message). We got that in Maryland, and I'm half tempted to bill for time.
I did get one from the Martin O'Malley campaign, being a democrat in Maryland, from an actual human. She asked "Are you going to support O'Malley for govenor?"(sp?) I told her "In the primaries because I have no choice, but forget it in the general. He's still got work to do in Baltimore (he's mayor there currently), cleaning up the mess that it is, and currently voters are thinking he's trying to escape the problems. So he's not going to get it from me come the elections."
It really says something when the "It's scheduled to go up" post appears when it's launching, and the "It's in orbit" post is 12 hours late, after all the comments in the former post say "It's in orbit already. Had your coffee yet?"
I was watching MSNBC's shuttle coverage with 2 minutes left on the clock until launch when Cowboy Neal's "scheduled" post hit the front page. As Richard Hammond of BBC's Top Gear would say, "Oh no this is bad..."
May I propose a "This is going to happen within X hours/in the future" option for the submit on logged-in users, sorta like what Pud does for F*ed Company? That way they can get more priority, those who abuse it get banned from using it, and makes things work better.
Wait, multiple companies tossing out storage like it's nothing, and the base price is a broadband connection?!?
Yet flash drives are comming down in price?
I mean, why would you need to waste bandwidth (which as noted can be expensive in some civilized nations) to pull in and work on files, when you can plug in a USB thumb drive with all your files in, or that spare 20 gig 2.5" drive, or a portable 3.5" drive, and work off of that? There are already distros out there that will boot off of USB drives. Why bother getting online when you don't need to be? What if you can't get online (no Wifi hotspot in the Nevada desert, and you forgot your EVDO card, plus Iridium is too expensive)?
Forget the Internet. Let's build up the Sneakernet.
There are many reasons, some of them explained above: The writing is crap, the acting is terrible, the producers are PHB's, and the biz just wants to justify paying the technical expense of doing these movies as well as the huge salaries of the actors.
There's also other reasons, however they lie in the major theaters that show the movies:
Take Spirited Away. A local theater I worked at (note former, of course) carried it. However, they handled it badly. It was shoved into a small theater, always sold out to anime fans, and ran over it's reported run time. These concerns were reported to the theater management who ignored them until the run was over. If this was an indication on the major theaters, Disney was surely scamed into thinking the movie was a flop (when of course it won an Oscar).
Take Cowboy Bebop: Knocking on Heaven's Door. My theater didn't carry it -- infact, I doubt it ever carried any anime that wasn't G or PG rated. I saw this in a hole-in-the-wall 3 screen theater that could of easily fit into the lobby of the 24-screen MegaTheater. The message is simple: Most theaters ether think animation has to be for kids, or not shown at all.
Take Roberto Benini's Pinoccio (and I know I'm screwing up the names). Please, take it and shoot it out of it's misery. He's basically made a live action version of the usually animated classic, filmed in Italian, and dubbed it in English like a cheap cheezy kung-fu flick. I'd rather watch DBZ Reruns than this movie. The local MegaTheater had it, and folks wanted their money back! The theater was constantly empty and half the time the movie wasn't shown to save electricity.
The simple point is, not only can you trust most movies to be the worst out there, you can trust the theaters to treat the good ones so badly it's no wonder they do better on DVDs. It makes me glad half the time I save the trouble and rent it through a RedBox system at my local McDonalds.
Okay, same criticsm to the OS, in comparison to Windows.
Pro for Linux: Doesn't crash as often, has fine-grained seperation between OS and UI, is much faster and for a professional, better to maintain. Has actual user seperation, limiting damage by viruses. Holes are plugged faster.
Con for Linux: OpenGL card support isn't quite up to par in all but NVidia chipsets. Need binary drivers, which sometimes lag behind OSS UI's, for faster performance in video. Only a few mainstream games (including id Software's lineup, Unreal Tornament, and Second Life). Half the ports for games are done by Icculus! Different distros force game makers to package their own dependencies.
Pro for Windows: Recognizable, established UI. More games as they're primarily targeted for Windows.
Con for Windows: Higher upkeep and vigilence required. Requires broadband. WinXP slower than Win2K unless you trim the fat, and yet also buggier. Remember Service Pack 2! Remember how slow Microsoft was for patching vunerablities! Vista is becoming more and more like Unix... but they should just follow Apple's lead. DirectX is worse than OpenGL, according to John Romero of id Software. Requires external utilities to secure against malware and maintain HD's. Initially cheap, but costs more as more utilities are needed. Possibly a minor cause for male pattern baldness (as a result of tearing one's hair out).
Do I really want to run an OS that'll have a likelyhood of crashing while I'm playing World of Warcraft? Or an OS that's so rock-solid stable that I can burn CD's, play audio, surf the web, SSH into work to build another site, and be on Second Life, and not have any problems with all three?
It's a Centrino based system. Which means Intel Pentium M or Celeron Pentium M at 1.6 GHz or better and SpeedStep, Intel chipset, Intel WiFi. All supported, so we're good. Everything lines up nicely with much of everything... but there's a few bits that it falls on:
First, the graphics card isn't ATI or NVidia. It's Intel. That means no native OpenGL support and thus you can't play most Linux games, including Second Life. The graphics memory is also shared with main memory, which means it's going to be slower than anything dedicated. Those two alone is worth ditching the laptop for.
Second, the screen's only 1024x768. That means for most websites you need to expand Firefox full screen. My HP Omnibook 6000 has older ATI graphics and that's 1400x1050 -- enough screen real estate to run Firefox at 1024x900, a few aterms, and KDE... or KDE and Gimp at the same time. Even OpenOffice.org benifits from more room.
Third, there doesn't seem to be any word on doubling up on 9-cell batteries on Asus site. Remember, happiness is two batteries in the PC and 4+ hours of runtime.
This laptop? Not worth it. Go on Nextag or Pricewatch or maybe PriceGrabber, and search for NVidia based laptops.
This is very true. I've gone through GC's website -- there's no p2p money xfer. There's no concept a bank that there is with Paypal. It's only a vendor service that you can use Paypal (after a fashion) to pay with.
Paypal killer? Yeah right. More like an iBill (and other credit card processor) killer.
They did, however, threaten in private to the site's creators to take away the next band Disney World trip if the site was not taken down. (It was down the next day.)
That puts the school in a very legal grey area. I very much suggest consulting a lawyer.
First, each virtual island is run on each server, aka a sim. All the users that are in the sim are handled by that sim's server. We've run over 100 users per sim in a conference setting, more by splitting the area over four sims, without too much delay. It's not like all "three people per sim" are spread out, they're may be some sims that don't have anyone in there and can be powered down a bit.
Each user's assets (how the person looks, any attachments to make him/her look freaky/tools and programs) are stored on another set of servers -- from what I remember on earlier reports, they're Linux servers running MySQL slaved together.
This may be different than WoW (although they don't have that much customability and half the graphics can be offloaded to the PC via the CD/DVD), but definetly different than Puzzle Pirates (just four servers? What would you expect for a non-3D enviroment).
I've seen the two designs that came one-two... and they're not quite space efficent.
Take the winner and compare with the origional. The origional is tight... some say too tight. There is little or no spacing around the non-story text (titles, menus, etc).
The winner is very like the origional, except that the spacing around the titles, menus, basically everything that isn't story text, is very loose. The spacing is much much larger, and wastes screen estate IMO. It's unfortunately also rather plain, plainer than the origional.
Now take the runner-up. It takes all the browser width, which is popular in most sites now. It has a better spacing around the non-story text, but still could use some tightening up. It also looks much better -- it has the shiner look.
I think being tighter (more like Google's GMail) yet stylish, will help.
I've set up a PPTP VPN using a Ubuntu 5.10 server and PoPToP. All you need is to port forward the PPTP port to the set-up server.
Windows has the client native to the system. Linux can compile PPP and the PPTP client, and w/kernel 2.6.15+ you don't need to patch the kernel to get MPPE encrypton/compression. Solaris, alas, needs some patching. I googled this:
You may be stuck, unless you're willing to switch to Ubuntu. I've tried them all, and only PPTP on a Ubuntu server or a recompiled Debian kernel w/the MPPE patches (or the latest 2.6.15+ kernel) works very well. I'm not sure how Debian is reacting that 2.6.x is standard now, but it's slow to change away from 2.4. Ubuntu is better in that reguard (it's base is 2.6 with patches).
You need a filesystem that can be "burned" to a medium, yet have error correction capability.
Journaling doesn't do this. Journaling is for when you get a power surge in the middle of a write, you can get some of the data back. Currently no regular FS can do that.
Slashdot Mirror
I read through the article, and it looked like just a normal embedded chip with extra RAM hooked in for the displays. I wouldn't be suprized if the extra CPU on the PC is used to refresh the displays often.
Ugh.
I think a OLED full keyboard would be cool, but maybe if they used a double-USB device scheme it would be better: USB Keyboard and small USB storage for storing GIF files of each key.
The October 2006 issue of LJ has an article on Linux-based robotics. Grab a copy at your book megastore.
Do you know what chip is used for the USB slave/host? An SLH811?
I don't get the marketing calls since signing up. The political calls are mostly robo-called (automated system calling, wait for a pickup, wait 10 seconds, play the message). We got that in Maryland, and I'm half tempted to bill for time.
I did get one from the Martin O'Malley campaign, being a democrat in Maryland, from an actual human. She asked "Are you going to support O'Malley for govenor?"(sp?) I told her "In the primaries because I have no choice, but forget it in the general. He's still got work to do in Baltimore (he's mayor there currently), cleaning up the mess that it is, and currently voters are thinking he's trying to escape the problems. So he's not going to get it from me come the elections."
Blu-ray: 50 gigs of data.
1DVD/2HD: 34.7 gigs of data.
Yeah, While compatible, I'd go blu-ray for the sheer volume.
It really says something when the "It's scheduled to go up" post appears when it's launching, and the "It's in orbit" post is 12 hours late, after all the comments in the former post say "It's in orbit already. Had your coffee yet?"
I was watching MSNBC's shuttle coverage with 2 minutes left on the clock until launch when Cowboy Neal's "scheduled" post hit the front page. As Richard Hammond of BBC's Top Gear would say, "Oh no this is bad..."
May I propose a "This is going to happen within X hours/in the future" option for the submit on logged-in users, sorta like what Pud does for F*ed Company? That way they can get more priority, those who abuse it get banned from using it, and makes things work better.
It's launched, tank's seperated, Atlantis is in space.
...I guess that they'll have to rip up the New Mexico Salt Flats so noone else can give it a go.
Wait, multiple companies tossing out storage like it's nothing, and the base price is a broadband connection?!?
Yet flash drives are comming down in price?
I mean, why would you need to waste bandwidth (which as noted can be expensive in some civilized nations) to pull in and work on files, when you can plug in a USB thumb drive with all your files in, or that spare 20 gig 2.5" drive, or a portable 3.5" drive, and work off of that? There are already distros out there that will boot off of USB drives. Why bother getting online when you don't need to be? What if you can't get online (no Wifi hotspot in the Nevada desert, and you forgot your EVDO card, plus Iridium is too expensive)?
Forget the Internet. Let's build up the Sneakernet.
There's also other reasons, however they lie in the major theaters that show the movies:
The simple point is, not only can you trust most movies to be the worst out there, you can trust the theaters to treat the good ones so badly it's no wonder they do better on DVDs. It makes me glad half the time I save the trouble and rent it through a RedBox system at my local McDonalds.
I stand corrected. I knew it was one of the more progressive folk over at id.
Okay, same criticsm to the OS, in comparison to Windows.
Pro for Linux: Doesn't crash as often, has fine-grained seperation between OS and UI, is much faster and for a professional, better to maintain. Has actual user seperation, limiting damage by viruses. Holes are plugged faster.
Con for Linux: OpenGL card support isn't quite up to par in all but NVidia chipsets. Need binary drivers, which sometimes lag behind OSS UI's, for faster performance in video. Only a few mainstream games (including id Software's lineup, Unreal Tornament, and Second Life). Half the ports for games are done by Icculus! Different distros force game makers to package their own dependencies.
Pro for Windows: Recognizable, established UI. More games as they're primarily targeted for Windows.
Con for Windows: Higher upkeep and vigilence required. Requires broadband. WinXP slower than Win2K unless you trim the fat, and yet also buggier. Remember Service Pack 2! Remember how slow Microsoft was for patching vunerablities! Vista is becoming more and more like Unix... but they should just follow Apple's lead. DirectX is worse than OpenGL, according to John Romero of id Software. Requires external utilities to secure against malware and maintain HD's. Initially cheap, but costs more as more utilities are needed. Possibly a minor cause for male pattern baldness (as a result of tearing one's hair out).
Do I really want to run an OS that'll have a likelyhood of crashing while I'm playing World of Warcraft? Or an OS that's so rock-solid stable that I can burn CD's, play audio, surf the web, SSH into work to build another site, and be on Second Life, and not have any problems with all three?
Let's get things straight. R Cubed says it's based on the Asus Z33A series of laptops. So let's compare the full Z33A specs on the "ultraportable" as Asus compares. http://usa.asus.com/products4.aspx?modelmenu=2&mod el=606&l1=5&l2=64&l3=0
It's a Centrino based system. Which means Intel Pentium M or Celeron Pentium M at 1.6 GHz or better and SpeedStep, Intel chipset, Intel WiFi. All supported, so we're good. Everything lines up nicely with much of everything... but there's a few bits that it falls on:
First, the graphics card isn't ATI or NVidia. It's Intel. That means no native OpenGL support and thus you can't play most Linux games, including Second Life. The graphics memory is also shared with main memory, which means it's going to be slower than anything dedicated. Those two alone is worth ditching the laptop for.
Second, the screen's only 1024x768. That means for most websites you need to expand Firefox full screen. My HP Omnibook 6000 has older ATI graphics and that's 1400x1050 -- enough screen real estate to run Firefox at 1024x900, a few aterms, and KDE... or KDE and Gimp at the same time. Even OpenOffice.org benifits from more room.
Third, there doesn't seem to be any word on doubling up on 9-cell batteries on Asus site. Remember, happiness is two batteries in the PC and 4+ hours of runtime.
This laptop? Not worth it. Go on Nextag or Pricewatch or maybe PriceGrabber, and search for NVidia based laptops.
This is very true. I've gone through GC's website -- there's no p2p money xfer. There's no concept a bank that there is with Paypal. It's only a vendor service that you can use Paypal (after a fashion) to pay with.
Paypal killer? Yeah right. More like an iBill (and other credit card processor) killer.
Yeah, where's the MP3?
That puts the school in a very legal grey area. I very much suggest consulting a lawyer.
That's not how SL is scaled.
First, each virtual island is run on each server, aka a sim. All the users that are in the sim are handled by that sim's server. We've run over 100 users per sim in a conference setting, more by splitting the area over four sims, without too much delay. It's not like all "three people per sim" are spread out, they're may be some sims that don't have anyone in there and can be powered down a bit.
Each user's assets (how the person looks, any attachments to make him/her look freaky/tools and programs) are stored on another set of servers -- from what I remember on earlier reports, they're Linux servers running MySQL slaved together.
This may be different than WoW (although they don't have that much customability and half the graphics can be offloaded to the PC via the CD/DVD), but definetly different than Puzzle Pirates (just four servers? What would you expect for a non-3D enviroment).
I've seen the two designs that came one-two... and they're not quite space efficent.
Take the winner and compare with the origional. The origional is tight... some say too tight. There is little or no spacing around the non-story text (titles, menus, etc).
The winner is very like the origional, except that the spacing around the titles, menus, basically everything that isn't story text, is very loose. The spacing is much much larger, and wastes screen estate IMO. It's unfortunately also rather plain, plainer than the origional.
Now take the runner-up. It takes all the browser width, which is popular in most sites now. It has a better spacing around the non-story text, but still could use some tightening up. It also looks much better -- it has the shiner look.
I think being tighter (more like Google's GMail) yet stylish, will help.
Depends on the NAT router. Dlink's I've found are bad, while Linksys routers are fairly good.
I showed my father the service manual picture. He said (and I quote) "Holy moley! Nobody uses that much thermal grease!"
Yep, Apple fucked up this one.
I've set up a PPTP VPN using a Ubuntu 5.10 server and PoPToP. All you need is to port forward the PPTP port to the set-up server.
Windows has the client native to the system. Linux can compile PPP and the PPTP client, and w/kernel 2.6.15+ you don't need to patch the kernel to get MPPE encrypton/compression. Solaris, alas, needs some patching. I googled this:
http://mcarpenter.free.fr/Dev/pptp.php
All works fairly well.
You may be stuck, unless you're willing to switch to Ubuntu. I've tried them all, and only PPTP on a Ubuntu server or a recompiled Debian kernel w/the MPPE patches (or the latest 2.6.15+ kernel) works very well. I'm not sure how Debian is reacting that 2.6.x is standard now, but it's slow to change away from 2.4. Ubuntu is better in that reguard (it's base is 2.6 with patches).
Well, we now know one way to block a light-link: Put a spaceship in the path of the link.
I can't wait until they use quantum tunneling.
Wait a minute!!!! Microsoft wants to recreate the Linux-running Sharm SL-3x00s? The ones with the hard drives in them?
And what about the Sony Picturebooks, with the Transmeta processor?
Done before...
So lets get this straight:
You need a filesystem that can be "burned" to a medium, yet have error correction capability.
Journaling doesn't do this. Journaling is for when you get a power surge in the middle of a write, you can get some of the data back. Currently no regular FS can do that.