It's been awhile since I checked, but the PC original joystick
port is extremely primative. You charge some capacitors,
then discharge them through the joysticks resistors [~1k IIRC] and
measure the time to some cut-off voltage in software! Slow to read,
and very CPU intensive. Maybe some modern chipsets do better.
Like this, I'd expect PC joysticks are a severe handicap for modern games
[USB should be _much_ better].
Your biggest problem is going to be
getting thermisters in the right resistance and wattage range. IIRC,
most thermisters are in the 10-100k range, and aren't good for many
volts [Watts]. Self-heating!
As another poster has commented,
why are you worried? A 486 certainly only needs a passive heatsink
(if that) and you could probably lose the PSU fan without overheating
if the Linux box is fairly idle due to idle-at-HLT powersavings.
I'm sorry if I made it sound like an MS only move. It is not,
but I firmly believe that it is being pushed forward by MS, and
the others are going along for the ride. Perhaps because they fear
support for their products being left off on MS's future products, or
perhaps because they want to pay some lip service to DRM/SCI/... ,
or perhaps because they don't want to be left behind. But the
others are not driving Pd.
Of course value is what it's all about.
If Pd can host a killer app, then it's likely to succeed. But what
killer app? Especially if people need to replace their machines?
Broadband doesn't have enough bandwidth for video, nor really enough
penetration for music.
I read the articles & FAQ. I still don't see why consumers will
accept Pd where they rejected ISN.
Just because MS assembles a
consortium doesn't mean consumers will accept it. Intel failed
not because customers bought AMD more than they otherwise would
have, but because their loyal Intel customers just delayed buying.
How does a consortium change that response? Corporations are _not_
all-powerful. They just try to appear that way.
Hasn't this sort of hardware solution cratered dismally just recently? How does Palladium differ from Intel's Pentium!!! serial number debacle?
Why does Bin Gates think his effort will fly when Intel's didn't? People just won't buy his stuff any more than they did Intel's! This is a market economy -- people vote with their dollars [euros,yen,etc].
Your boss is right in wanting speed. And I'd certainly use more
memory if it got me speed. RAM is cheap, and users don't mind
getting more if their problem gets bigger. That's a predicatable
consequence.
The real issue becomes that LUTs aren't
always fast. And bigger ones are slower because of the lower
probability of a cache hit. DRAM has horrible latency, 120-180ns
that corresponds to 120-360 CPU clocks. You can do alot of calcs
in that time! Also the LUT can flood out cache to incur more
cache misses.
I hope you are not right about big user
data being fatal. It should never be. The pgm might
get into swapping or thrashing and run real slow, but crashing
is not acceptable. And how does your pgm perform when swapping?
It will always be slower, but some go into light swapping while
other pgms get into heavy thrashing.
Please understand that the EU is quite different from the US.
In most countries (except the UK), there is no judicial presumption
of innocence. Free speech does not prohibit prior restraint
[chilling effect]. Privacy does not include privacy from police
and other authorities.
I dislike the European plan. But I also
recognize it's a different place with very different attitudes of
both police and populace. EU member nations are also free _not_
to enact the plan in their countries. I expect that a number,
including the UK, will not.
Is this another one of those high-profile pronouncements with a small-type retraction later?
Will the RIAA and fellow-travellers publicise both, or will they just grab the headline?
I would hope that authors and organizations have more respect for their reputations than to play this game.
As another poster has said, it depends very much on circulation/readership.
If you don't have enough quality posters, your blog will die.
The Internet is a wonderful thing in many ways, one important one being
that it enables widespread individuals to congregate based on their interests,
not geography. It enables the dilute to concentrate and achieve a critical mass for community. It does so by erasing distance barriers and discussing items of widespread interest.
You propose swimming upstream, forgoing the distance erasure and concentrating
on local issues. I doubt Berkeley has a large enough interested population to make this work. Most likely, the blog will be taken over by a cabal. SanFranciso or the BayArea might have a population large enough.
It would be nice to stop snoops. Unfortunately, that's not very likely. The only restraint that endures is self-restraint.
So how about a reciprocal notification requirement: Any agency that monitors your traffic is required to notify you of what and how they monitored within 30 days of having done so ?
If it would jeopardize an ongoing criminal investigation, then the agency could petition a judge for extentions based on evidence collected. Otherwise, pfft! Once charges are filed, of course, they are required to disclose all evidence.
This notification requirement should have a noticable chilling effect on snoops who work in secrecy and dread being called upon to justify their snooping. They might be
tempted skip notifications, but suitable penalties could be levied (disqualification of evidence, wiretap). Auditing would be necessary.
Doh! Who's surprised by this finding? I'm a small open source developer [cpuburn],
and I imagine that most open source is written by induhviduals who have real problems
they have to solve as part of the job, school or hobby. One person. So they write a pgm to solve
it. Then publish it as open source because doing so is cheap, easy and "The Right Thing" to do. Open-source is not written infor-profit software project houses made [in]famous by Microsoft. UNIX and other Linux-like OSes encourage small pgms because many small pgms can be built up into large functionality very easily [at least on the CLI].
From a project management perspective, small is much better because there are fewer interprosonal interfaces and less communication time needed. Heirarchical layering is only partically effective at reducing communications overhead. Architectural isolation works better. On my own project, most of the open source input has been commentary on programs or bugs, plus one big orthogonal contribution [MS-Win32 GUI]. This works. Different people hacking on different parts of the same pgm wouldn't.
Where open-source gets weak is large GUI projects like office suites. Here, more people seem required, and it's a bit harder to assemble and manage a team of people who all have developing GUI office apps as a goal. Plus there's alot of communication overhead. The best that could be done would be via architectural compartimentalization, or better yet, if a series of tools analogous to the CLI pipeline/script could be made for the GUI world.
Agreed ICANN s#x, with a cabalistic, incestuous leadership selection process.
But like any despot, they are limited by what people will tolerate.
Yes, they can play games with the 3ltr TLDs. Big deal -- the only ones
who should care are the owners of those TLDs, and they _do_ care bigtime.
Some smaller.com owners like EToy might get shafted, but then they should migrate to
more friendly registrars.
IP numbers are a bigger deal, but they are mostly sewn-up by the networks of
ISPs. They also much less contentious, but potentially more troublesome.
The Internet is a cooperative structure, and such centralized control doesn't fit.
ISP admins will decide what DNS they use, and howthey route packets. Not ICANN.
Excuse me for my general cluelessness, but since when are file formats protected by copyright, patent or trademark?
They might be trade secrets, but that is a very different thing.
I suppose in the current corrupt state of patents, someone might be able to get a patent on a particular way of
storing data. Audio/Video codecs might have more justification. Copyright is not available -- the datafile
is a mixture of works of the format creators and the data providers.
As a simple matter of prudence, just say NO! Why trust your important data to some proprietary format you
cannot unlock if the company goes belly up or otherwise becomes unwilling to provide? Isn't the suffering
of MS-Word users enough warning?
Sorry to disagree with you, but flat billing makes perfect sense
when costs are similarly flat. Or more precisely, when the extra
costs of variable billing are higher than those variable costs billed.
You seem to think it would be extremely cheap to meter broadband internet
usage. It is not. All the routers would have to be replaced, or at
least some very powerful snooping loggers attached. These would have to
be fairly detailed records in case someone disputed their bill. This
is certainly 'way more cost than the amount the large peered broadband
ISPs pay to their GSP.
The irony is that the market driven capitalistic system has driven
true marginal costs down so low that the cost of capital and other
fixed costs predominate. As a result, there is cutthroat competition
or conversely collusion and monopoly building. The system is it's
own undoing.
It's elemenary organic chemistry. An amino acid is nothing more
than an alpha amino carboxylic acid. R - CHNH2 - COOH . R can be
any of an infinite number radicals, but interestingly only 20 or
22 are found in life. And only the levorotary form at the amine
carbon is found.
Nor is it obvious why certain radicals are
vital, and most are not. Some of the common radicals are missing in
the vital amino acids. Hydrogen and methyl are there, but ethyl,
propyl and higher n-alkanes are not. Yet isopropyl, and both 1 &
2-methylpropyl are. Wierd. Perhaps it has something to do with the
way exclusionary mechanisms to keep undesirably amino acids out
of the protein building machinery.
From an information-theory
viewpoint, why are the DNA sequences largely incompressible? Are the
three-base pair codons (6 binary digits each) equally probable?
Those codons could be decoded into 64 possibilities, yet we have only
22 amino acids. Are some of the codons used for amino acid pairs?
Or else we've got alot of missing acids. Untils those codons are
themselves decoded (and any bigrams, tridgrams, etc), we should
expect surprises. And what of the great expanse of alleged junk?
Does nature have a signal-to-noise ratio approaching that of
USENET?:)
Expost facto incentives like retroactive copyright extention
obviously cannot influence creation. Even long copyright periods do little.
I can add some quantification by running the numbers. A
publisher is investing when they buy a copyright, and expects
a return on their investment, usually expressed as a percentage
per annum to compare with other investments like bonds or stocks.
Consider a publisher who wants a 10% return rate, and is willing
to pay 100 for a 20 year copyright on a given work. Then 25yrs is
only 106, 40yrs 115, 100yrs and forever 117. But tastes change,
and work may become irrelevant by events, so sales 20 years hence
are very uncertain. The usual way of coping with the risk is to
increase the rate of return. So try 30%, with 100 still for 20 years
then even 100 years is only worth 100.5!
Note that these analyses
assume flat sales through the period, like for established continual
sellers. For heavily front-loaded sales like most modern works,
the premia fall by a large factor (5-10 times). And more for risky
(high rates of return required) authors.
OK, I'll call you crazy since you requested it. If you think the DMCA is a joke, please talk to Dmitri Skylarov.
And yes, a paperclip could be considered a circumvention device. It enables you to unlock some CD drive drawers so you can keep trying low level circumvention hacks.
OK, so some people around the World don't much like the ideas of some other people. I can see that Bill O'Rielly might upset some people. But they should understand that some others really do feel like that. If this journalist thinks the USA is represented by the NYT, then she's seriously misleading herself.
The world may not be as nice a place as political correctness would have you believe. But then, it is not. Get over it, and work at overcoming differences if thats your thing. Nothing worse than not addressing something that could be addressed because you think it doesn't need to be. Wasted opportunity.
If nothing else, information helps you know your opponent. This is always a good thing. So is a critical mind, unnumbed by state-controlled or editorially sanitized press.
OK -- I can buy the judge's implied [unstated] argument that Congress gave "Fair Use" via legislation, and can take it away the same way with the DMCA. However much we might like
fair use to be a Constituational Right [9th?], it doesn't appear to be.
But what I find really scary is the Judge's stated rationale that speech is conduct! Short of fraud and inciting violence, it is not, and never shall be. The fundamental purpose of the 1st Ammendment is to make this clear and to keep meddlesome officials from interfering with speech they don't like.
This is in for Appeal.
Separated in TIME and inv-sqr law
on
Rare Earth
·
· Score: 2
I have a beef with SETI. I can more-or-less accept the Drake Equation, but I have a few additional factors: First, an ET civilization probably wouldn't broadcast for a long time. Second, it'd have to be powerful and nearby. Both drastically reduce the probability of contacting ET, even if there are thousands of ET civilizations.
Civilizations develop or die. They're not static. We've been using radio for less than 100 years, and are already stopping using it in any observable pattern (digital spread-spectrum). Our broadcast/beacon program lasted less than 10 years out of the 3-4 billion that there's been life on Earch. Et may be more patient and change slower, but by how many orders of magnitude?
The inverse-square-law really kills. Don't worry about RF emissions attracting aliens. They don't make it past Jupiter with any S/N.
An important benchmark is that Voyager 5 used ~5 Watts power with a directional antenna to the most powerful receiving array on Earth and couldn't get more than 110 baud past Neptune's orbit. Give ET a 10 MW transmitter with 100x greater efficiency, and he's still got to be close, ~10 light-years.
I don't believe we're alone, but I do believe we're separated by unfathomable gulfs of time and distance. Even if we did discover faster-than-light travel, there's still the phasing of civilizations development and the huge number of rejects.
This sounds interesting. I definitely want the GigE to hog the bus -- there's no other way. The only other really active device on the PCI bus should be the EIDE, and they should have at least two 512byte buffers, so could wait ~500 PCI clocks (20 MB/s disk).
But I thought there was a register (oddly named latency) that governed how long a busmaster could burst when someone else wanted the bus.
I bought a pair of DLink DGE500T's about 6 months ago, just to see what I could wring out of them.
I got about 32 MByte/s one-way with `ttcp` [UDP] between a 1.2GHz K7 and 2*500 Celeron (BP-6)
through a plain crossover cable.
Not bad, but only 25% of wirespeed (125 MByte/sec). I figured the main limit was the PCI bus,
which would only burst at 133 MByte/s, and I strongly suspected that the bursts were too short
to achieve anything like this speed. I have yet to play with the PCI latency timer.
One thing for sure -- it isn't the CPU speed or Linux network stacks. The K7 will run both
ends of ttcp through the localhost loopback at 570 MByte/s, and the BP6 around 200 MB/s.
You don't like broken CD formats, do you? Nor do I. So I let BestBuy know with this letter
It is my understanding from comments made by Mr Lenzmeier,
your COO, that BestBuy supports broken CD formats
[aka copy protected].
Thank you for the notice, but I must now cease all music
purchases at BestBuy because your products do not fit
my needs. I listen to CDs on my computer and sometimes
make fairuse copies for my own use on other media.
Furthermore, your support for broken CD formats is
contrary to my interests and I am compelled to stop
supporting you. I have purchased a great deal of
electronic equipment in your stores, and must now find
alternative suppliers. This will be troublesome
for me, but your policy leaves me no choice.
Please advise me if and when you change your policies.
Look -- I don't much like IRC. Too broken and choppy for my taste, and not enough time to write anything meaningful [long].
But it's just another Internet tool like email, USENET or WWW. It can be used for good or ill just like anthing else. I don't think it's any more secure from monitoring than any other protocol. Anon [mixmaster] email actually seems the least traceable.
I think this is just a slander-by-association: someone doesn't find IRC participants "nice" [=like them] so choses to consider all IRC participants gulity by association. Might as well consider all email users evil, same logical fallacy.
Slashdot Mirror
Your biggest problem is going to be getting thermisters in the right resistance and wattage range. IIRC, most thermisters are in the 10-100k range, and aren't good for many volts [Watts]. Self-heating!
As another poster has commented, why are you worried? A 486 certainly only needs a passive heatsink (if that) and you could probably lose the PSU fan without overheating if the Linux box is fairly idle due to idle-at-HLT powersavings.
Of course value is what it's all about. If Pd can host a killer app, then it's likely to succeed. But what killer app? Especially if people need to replace their machines? Broadband doesn't have enough bandwidth for video, nor really enough penetration for music.
Just because MS assembles a consortium doesn't mean consumers will accept it. Intel failed not because customers bought AMD more than they otherwise would have, but because their loyal Intel customers just delayed buying. How does a consortium change that response? Corporations are _not_ all-powerful. They just try to appear that way.
Why does Bin Gates think his effort will fly when Intel's didn't? People just won't buy his stuff any more than they did Intel's! This is a market economy -- people vote with their dollars [euros,yen,etc].
The real issue becomes that LUTs aren't always fast. And bigger ones are slower because of the lower probability of a cache hit. DRAM has horrible latency, 120-180ns that corresponds to 120-360 CPU clocks. You can do alot of calcs in that time! Also the LUT can flood out cache to incur more cache misses.
I hope you are not right about big user data being fatal. It should never be. The pgm might get into swapping or thrashing and run real slow, but crashing is not acceptable. And how does your pgm perform when swapping? It will always be slower, but some go into light swapping while other pgms get into heavy thrashing.
I dislike the European plan. But I also recognize it's a different place with very different attitudes of both police and populace. EU member nations are also free _not_ to enact the plan in their countries. I expect that a number, including the UK, will not.
I would hope that authors and organizations have more respect for their reputations than to play this game.
The Internet is a wonderful thing in many ways, one important one being that it enables widespread individuals to congregate based on their interests, not geography. It enables the dilute to concentrate and achieve a critical mass for community. It does so by erasing distance barriers and discussing items of widespread interest.
You propose swimming upstream, forgoing the distance erasure and concentrating on local issues. I doubt Berkeley has a large enough interested population to make this work. Most likely, the blog will be taken over by a cabal. SanFranciso or the BayArea might have a population large enough.
So how about a reciprocal notification requirement: Any agency that monitors your traffic is required to notify you of what and how they monitored within 30 days of having done so ? If it would jeopardize an ongoing criminal investigation, then the agency could petition a judge for extentions based on evidence collected. Otherwise, pfft! Once charges are filed, of course, they are required to disclose all evidence.
This notification requirement should have a noticable chilling effect on snoops who work in secrecy and dread being called upon to justify their snooping. They might be tempted skip notifications, but suitable penalties could be levied (disqualification of evidence, wiretap). Auditing would be necessary.
From a project management perspective, small is much better because there are fewer interprosonal interfaces and less communication time needed. Heirarchical layering is only partically effective at reducing communications overhead. Architectural isolation works better. On my own project, most of the open source input has been commentary on programs or bugs, plus one big orthogonal contribution [MS-Win32 GUI]. This works. Different people hacking on different parts of the same pgm wouldn't.
Where open-source gets weak is large GUI projects like office suites. Here, more people seem required, and it's a bit harder to assemble and manage a team of people who all have developing GUI office apps as a goal. Plus there's alot of communication overhead. The best that could be done would be via architectural compartimentalization, or better yet, if a series of tools analogous to the CLI pipeline/script could be made for the GUI world.
Yes, they can play games with the 3ltr TLDs. Big deal -- the only ones who should care are the owners of those TLDs, and they _do_ care bigtime. Some smaller .com owners like EToy might get shafted, but then they should migrate to
more friendly registrars.
IP numbers are a bigger deal, but they are mostly sewn-up by the networks of ISPs. They also much less contentious, but potentially more troublesome.
The Internet is a cooperative structure, and such centralized control doesn't fit. ISP admins will decide what DNS they use, and howthey route packets. Not ICANN.
I suppose in the current corrupt state of patents, someone might be able to get a patent on a particular way of storing data. Audio/Video codecs might have more justification. Copyright is not available -- the datafile is a mixture of works of the format creators and the data providers.
As a simple matter of prudence, just say NO! Why trust your important data to some proprietary format you cannot unlock if the company goes belly up or otherwise becomes unwilling to provide? Isn't the suffering of MS-Word users enough warning?
You seem to think it would be extremely cheap to meter broadband internet usage. It is not. All the routers would have to be replaced, or at least some very powerful snooping loggers attached. These would have to be fairly detailed records in case someone disputed their bill. This is certainly 'way more cost than the amount the large peered broadband ISPs pay to their GSP.
The irony is that the market driven capitalistic system has driven true marginal costs down so low that the cost of capital and other fixed costs predominate. As a result, there is cutthroat competition or conversely collusion and monopoly building. The system is it's own undoing.
Nor is it obvious why certain radicals are vital, and most are not. Some of the common radicals are missing in the vital amino acids. Hydrogen and methyl are there, but ethyl, propyl and higher n-alkanes are not. Yet isopropyl, and both 1 & 2-methylpropyl are. Wierd. Perhaps it has something to do with the way exclusionary mechanisms to keep undesirably amino acids out of the protein building machinery.
From an information-theory viewpoint, why are the DNA sequences largely incompressible? Are the three-base pair codons (6 binary digits each) equally probable? Those codons could be decoded into 64 possibilities, yet we have only 22 amino acids. Are some of the codons used for amino acid pairs? Or else we've got alot of missing acids. Untils those codons are themselves decoded (and any bigrams, tridgrams, etc), we should expect surprises. And what of the great expanse of alleged junk? Does nature have a signal-to-noise ratio approaching that of USENET? :)
I can add some quantification by running the numbers. A publisher is investing when they buy a copyright, and expects a return on their investment, usually expressed as a percentage per annum to compare with other investments like bonds or stocks.
Consider a publisher who wants a 10% return rate, and is willing to pay 100 for a 20 year copyright on a given work. Then 25yrs is only 106, 40yrs 115, 100yrs and forever 117. But tastes change, and work may become irrelevant by events, so sales 20 years hence are very uncertain. The usual way of coping with the risk is to increase the rate of return. So try 30%, with 100 still for 20 years then even 100 years is only worth 100.5!
Note that these analyses assume flat sales through the period, like for established continual sellers. For heavily front-loaded sales like most modern works, the premia fall by a large factor (5-10 times). And more for risky (high rates of return required) authors.
And yes, a paperclip could be considered a circumvention device. It enables you to unlock some CD drive drawers so you can keep trying low level circumvention hacks.
other people. I can see that Bill O'Rielly might upset some people.
But they should understand that some others really do feel like that.
If this journalist thinks the USA is represented by the NYT, then
she's seriously misleading herself.
The world may not be as nice
a place as political correctness would have you believe. But then,
it is not. Get over it, and work at overcoming differences if thats
your thing. Nothing
worse than not addressing something that could be addressed because
you think it doesn't need to be. Wasted opportunity.
If nothing
else, information helps you know your opponent. This is always a
good thing. So is a critical mind, unnumbed by state-controlled
or editorially sanitized press.
But what I find really scary is the Judge's stated rationale that speech is conduct! Short of fraud and inciting violence, it is not, and never shall be. The fundamental purpose of the 1st Ammendment is to make this clear and to keep meddlesome officials from interfering with speech they don't like.
This is in for Appeal.
Civilizations develop or die. They're not static. We've been using radio for less than 100 years, and are already stopping using it in any observable pattern (digital spread-spectrum). Our broadcast/beacon program lasted less than 10 years out of the 3-4 billion that there's been life on Earch. Et may be more patient and change slower, but by how many orders of magnitude?
The inverse-square-law really kills. Don't worry about RF emissions attracting aliens. They don't make it past Jupiter with any S/N. An important benchmark is that Voyager 5 used ~5 Watts power with a directional antenna to the most powerful receiving array on Earth and couldn't get more than 110 baud past Neptune's orbit. Give ET a 10 MW transmitter with 100x greater efficiency, and he's still got to be close, ~10 light-years.
I don't believe we're alone, but I do believe we're separated by unfathomable gulfs of time and distance. Even if we did discover faster-than-light travel, there's still the phasing of civilizations development and the huge number of rejects.
But I thought there was a register (oddly named latency) that governed how long a busmaster could burst when someone else wanted the bus.
I got about 32 MByte/s one-way with `ttcp` [UDP] between a 1.2GHz K7 and 2*500 Celeron (BP-6) through a plain crossover cable.
Not bad, but only 25% of wirespeed (125 MByte/sec). I figured the main limit was the PCI bus, which would only burst at 133 MByte/s, and I strongly suspected that the bursts were too short to achieve anything like this speed. I have yet to play with the PCI latency timer.
One thing for sure -- it isn't the CPU speed or Linux network stacks. The K7 will run both ends of ttcp through the localhost loopback at 570 MByte/s, and the BP6 around 200 MB/s.
Sorry, no email addr. It was a webform.
But it's just another Internet tool like email, USENET or WWW. It can be used for good or ill just like anthing else. I don't think it's any more secure from monitoring than any other protocol. Anon [mixmaster] email actually seems the least traceable.
I think this is just a slander-by-association: someone doesn't find IRC participants "nice" [=like them] so choses to consider all IRC participants gulity by association. Might as well consider all email users evil, same logical fallacy.
Some domains will get banned, and some sites will go down. The Internet carries on. Packets still get through.
Yes, Trojans are bad. Hijackable Trojans are worse. Enough good reason to avoid them without hysteria.