Love getting into petty arguments. Rolling around in the mud makes me look as petty as the person I am rolling around in the mud with, and as often as not the other person enjoys it as well.
Presence is usally indicated by one of two things, often both available in clients for various IM services. Either the user establishes a presence, or presence is automatically calculated.
Most current IM clients, AIM, Yahoo, ICQ and many Jabber clients for sure, (I don't know about MSN, or some of the others out there) allow you to use a pull down list to indicate if you are available to chat, on the phone, away in a meeting, gone for the night, sleeping, napping, etc, including allowing you to set a custom away message such as "don't bother me I am an ignoramous who doesn't know that I can just exit this program."
Some allow you to be on line without advertizing that you are online by going into an invisable mode.
Many also provide an indication of whethere you are actively at your computer or not, by looking at the keyboard and mouse activity and noting that neither have been used in x min (x being user configurable in many cases) and degrading your presence to idle, or inactive as the case may be.
This may also apply specifically to your client application as well, so you could be considered idle because the IM client has not been active for 15 min, even if you have been busy writing your current novel.
If you want to say that finger on it's own has these features, I would probably disagree. Granted finger will tell you when the user was last logged on, but it has the disadvantage of having had a great big security hole in it that means that as of 1998 or earlier nearly every ISP and proactive system administrator has disabled remote finger.
Oh, Windows since at least windows 95, and I believe back into w4wg 3.1 has had an application like talk using the SMB protocol. Linux users can use the application LinPopUp to send popup messages to windows users, or other LinPopUp users. Windows NT users can access this facility via the NET SEND command. Novel users have a similar command available to them, and their popup message sending facility would let you know if the user was logged in.
All of this works wonderfully for users on their respective systems, however they rarely interoperate, and even more rarely do they interact with other message services such as e-mail, text paging or messaging, irc, the current IM clients, and so on.
XMPP is designed to provide a method of performing that interaction. If you wanted to build the tools that would interact with an XMPP enabled service, you could possibly use finger to find out presence information from one of your buddies IM clients, and use talk to send a text message to them.
I on the other hand would rather use a client that is designed to talk to one or more IM service providers, and works well with it. I would rather use a client with more features than sjabber, though there are situations where sjabber would be quite appropriate. (I do have a WYSE terminal I use for managing my linux servers. I think sjabber would be fine running in a gnuterm session.)
The other problem with talk is that if the user is behind a firewall, the firewall has to have a hole in it to allow talk, finger, and other services through to the user's workstation. That may be ok with you, I don't know if there are all that many others who are in agreement with you.
talk is fine, but has no presence capabilities, The only way that you will know if your buddy is online and able to take a message is if he or she responds to your message.
For many people this would be sufficient. Some people would rather have some more features such as presence, or higher level formatting, or the ability to check their callander, or have an avatar send a page to their cell phone reminding you to pick up some eggs and milk as the refrigerator reports that you are low on both.
While I feel talk is fine for most of the systems I use, I don't think it will talk to my cell phone, or my pager. I suppose that both could be upgraded to support it, but why bother?
There are a couple dozen free and comercial jabber clients available. You are not restricted in which client you use. Clients exist that run on any platform that supports perl, or java. Other clients exist that will only run on a Gnome or KDE desktop. Or only Windows.
Take a look at the list of clients available under the client list at jabber.org or even some of the links under that.
Don't sell the comercial server short either. The evaluation copy may expire in a month, however it does support some features that are not in the open/free version of the server.
Considering that the real start to this was Microsoft's attempt to interoperate with AOL, using the open standards AOL published (and later stoped useing) to allow independent client developers to talk to AIM servers, I think there is a desire at some of the IM server platforms to interoperate.
Obviously there are problems that will still need to be adressed, however that is what the working group is attempting to address.
As far as I am concerned, knowing that one of my buddies is online, and being able to send an IM to them, regardless of the service or client either of us are using would be a major step forward.
Not exactly sure how this helps wireless, this is IM stuff. Wireless is a part of IM, however I would hesitate to claim that it is specifically significant to wireless.
What this is really directed at is getting IM clients to be able to interoperate. Initially this was going to be done in the protocol that AOL was drawing up, however they dropped development on that and have been somewhat antagonistic towards interoperating with other IM providers.
From a business perspective having half a dozen IM clients (yahoo, aol, icq, msn, jabber, etc.) on different desktops, that don't interoperate is a bit of a pain to support. Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL would very much prefer that businesses would standardize on their own service, however if you have to work with outside vendors you have no gaurantee, that that vendor will use the same service, or that you will be able to interoperate with it.
You might be able to set up your own gateway using jabber, or a couple of other servers, however one of the ways that AOL uses to "protect their users" is to only allow so many users at a time connect from the same IP address. If more than that connect, they block the IP address. That might be OK if you are a mom and pop operation with only four or five people useing your connection, but fails rappidly when you look at it from the perspective of a large bank or multinational corporation.
From what I understand, this working group is attempting to lay out the protocols necessary to allow gateways between IM services to exist. Theory being that you could use your Yahoo IM client to talk to your cousin using an AIM client, who is talking to his buddy over in the MSN world. Asside from the same level of requirement to know what service the remote user is on.
At the moment, with variations on the theme such as jabber, you have to have an account on the remote system even if you are only establishing a connection to a jabber server.
Then again, I could be wrong. Perhaps this will only help wireless users.
If your ADSL router stops routing, your internal private IP network will remain a parallel network until your ADSL router is brought back up.
Your ADSL router provides either IP Masqurading, or IP NAT features for your internal network. The mesh network gateways will provide the same capabilities. If you connect to the mesh before the AP that you use establishes a connection to a gateway, your host will connect through to the internet (once the gateway has been propigated) through a proxy service running on the AP that you connect to.
I did not see any handoff protocols specified (for mobile users with iPaqs, Zaurus and laptop users who do move around.) in the document, however it is possible that was specified in one of the protocols identified, and just not highlighted.
Been watching both Starhunter and Firefly of late. Neither are Star Trek worlds. Both have holes I think you could drive a truck through, on an icy road, sideways, and recover.
In a variation on the ST world, I am still a fan of Andromeda.
Of course none of these are on the SciFi channel. Perhaps this is the one instance where Harlan Ellison (drat I remembered his name) is right and the pronuciation of SciFi is Skiffy, and for this channel has nothing to do with Science Fiction.
There are a few who like the idea of Xfiles on the Skiffy channel, I have never really followed the show however.
Point of contention. The reason that you are doing a fsck, chkdisk, or other hard disk test is because the system needs to validate the integrity of the data on the hard disk. System files may have been open, only partially written to, or other problems may exist.
The assumption being made with journaling is that the data in the journal is that which should have been written to disk, but the system has no verification that it was. If you take the transactions in the journal, and repeat them, the system will have it's integrity insured and it is reasonable to assume that the system will operate as expected.
The side effect of your buisness surviving or failing that I contrived was a contrived example. There are certainly many other methods of doing that process. Perhaps the best example would be to use a known good UPS to backup the system, and do a clean powerdown when local power fails. Of course that mitigates the need for a journaling file system in that case, as the hard drive will be in a clean state when it powers up, not requiring a long fsck or chkdsk.
Perhaps Quake would be a better example of where it may not make sense to have a 10-15% hit on your system. Yes if a bug causes your system to crash, leaving the dirty bit set, it will take a long time to get back into the action. The question becomes is Quake, Doom, EQ, or other interactive gameplay buggy enough that taking a 10-15% hit on performance is worth Journaling? I would think that if you were a developer, or creating Hacks for the games it may make sense, however for general gameplay I would be somewhat surprised. Especially on the Macintosh.
One cure for that would be to boot a custom configuration with small partitions for gameplay, and large partitions for general OS use, but I doubt that anyone is really interested in doing that.
Then again, I could be wrong. I wasn't even aware that the Macintosh required "too many regular boots." One of these days I will have to go out and get a system capable of running OS X and see for myself. (Or wait for Apple to release the x86 varient of OS X.)
Both. It depends upon the journaling method used. BFS for example only journaled system information. User data was allowed to become corrupted because a user's data file being corrupt is unlikely to bring the system down.
If you go through the documentation for the various journaling filesystems, XFS, ext3, jfs, Reiser (sp?) others, you will find that each implementation takes a different tactic when it decides what gets journaled, and what does not.
A document you are editing, is almost never journaled, unless it is happening as part of a background save process, or as part of you saving the document to disk specifically.
As for why Journaling matters, I recomend going to Google and asking it for the tutorial on ext3. The tutorial has links to even more depth on the issue. As a quick overview, when you edit files in most applications, the process of saving involves two steps, write data to disk, update whatever form of table is in use on the disk with what updates have been made. For example, a file now uses sectors 5200,5201, and 5209 rather than just 5200 and 5201 as it was originally written.
If the power goes out between when the data was written, and when the tables were updated, the data is effectively lost, as the system will only know about the fact that data was written to 5200 and 5201.
Journaling has several implementations, however one of the most common is to log what data is being written to the hard disk, then when all the tables are updated, flushing that information out of the journal.
If the power fails, the system opens the journal file, and starts the process of writing the data in the journal file to the hard disk again.
Why might this be worth a 10-15%? This will be different for different users, but a fairly simple (if contrived) example is if you are running a commercial web site. If I decide to purchase 1000 units of roduct XXZ from your web site, without knowing that a thunder storm is moving through your community, I place my order, get a confirmation number back, and think all is well. Unbeknownst to me, your web server dies after generating the confirmation, while writing the record to the hard disk.
If my purchase is important to your business, say for example the money has been handled as part of the confirmation, and I would not be happy about you not shipping the product I paid for, you might think it worth a 10-15% performance penalty to insure that my purchase gets recorded properly when your power comes back up.
At the same time, if you spend your time on the computer reading slashdot, playing Everquest, and crunching DES keys, perhaps journaling isn't worth the 10-15% hit.
I may be wrong here as well, but I believe the 10-15% hit being reported is for disk intensive transactions, not for processor performance.
.. with hardware detection each time it loaded,... and was portable, meaning it could be moved between different hardware platforms easily.
When a motherboard failed on me, I was able to take the hard drive out, and install it in another box, with all different hardware, and the system booted cleanly (with the exception of the network card which ahd to be re-configured.) to a working desktop.
I Honestly think that with two workstations that have hardware tha BeOS supports, you could use a removable drive tray system to take your hard disk back and forth with you between work and home. My experience is that the workstation would look the same on each platform.
I will acknowledge that moving it from a 233mhz K6 to a 1GHZ P3 would have a performance impact, as would moving from a 14" CRT to a 17" LCD impact the user's view. When it comes to a user needing to get work done, those are incidental, unless the change prevents you from getting work done.
I still do use BeOS on at least two systems. One for my multi-media center to stream my music, the other for my old desktop. My current "primary system" is a laptop usually running Mandrake 9.0. For some reason it ain't playing my MP3 files, even though it is perfectly happy to use the sound system to anounce to me that I have e-mail.
Why do I still use BeOS there? because it works and I really do not see a good reason to move those systems to any other operating system. Might that change? Possibly. At the same time by the time I need to make that decision, OpenBeOS may be an available binary install that I can use. If so, I would be happy to go with that.
I have used DOS 3.1, 3,3, 4.01, 5.0, 6.0, 7.0 and a couple of open source varients, most Windows varients, several linux distributions including slackware, debian, redhat, caldera, corel, and Mandrake, OS/2 2.1, 3.0, 4.0 and BeOS 4.5.2, 5.0, 5.1 and 5.2 . I have even gotten Plan 9 (one of the early releases) to boot, though not to a production state by any means, and several Macintosh versions.
Of all of these, _Only_ BeOS installed without a hitch onto any of my hardware, and made use of almost all of the attached peripherals. The world ain't perfect. The closest OS implementation I have seen to "perfect" would be BeOS.
Could it have used more hardware support? Sure! The APIs have been out there, I suspect that more than a few people would welcome your efforts to help out with more than a complaint that you don't think it supports your Voodoo 5 card. I think that is true even going forward.
As most people understand it, hot-wiring a car is preparation for stealing that car. However if the keyswitch is broken, and you don't have the time or money to replace that keyswitch, there is no law that prevents you from hot-wiring your own car. It may look strange, but it is not illegal. This is circumventing the security system on the ignition of your car, and it is not preparation for a crime.
The question then becomes "Is a CD/DVD more like a car, or a piece of software?" The reason for this question is that so far as I know, CDs and DVDs do not come with an end user licence agreement. A copyright notice is not an EULA, though it may be part of one. If a product is not covered by a EULA, then I do not know of any way that you can prevent a purchaser from legitimately using the contents of the CD in any way that they choose. You may restrict their ability to "re-distribute" the contents, that is part of the copyright, but if someone wants to convert their old record player into a device that can read a CD or DVD, (which requires knowledge I do not posess) a copyright notice is not sufficient to prevent this.
Other examples of things that can be used in "preparing a crime" include screwdrivers and paperclips, (which can be used in concert to pick a variety of locks) Pry bars (which can pry open windows) rocks (which can break windows) and many other devices which also have legitimate uses.
The fact that I posses these tools, does not imply that I have prepared for a crime, and is not sufficient on it's own to put me in jail. It may be enough for someone to start asking questions. In some countries that may be grounds for arrest, but not in the US.
I still have not seen the question of expired copyrights being adressed. What steps are being taken to verify that when a copyright expires, putting a creative work into the public domain, that that work will be available? Are DRM tools being developed that check to see if a copyright is expired?
Does your DVD player have the inteligence to know that 95 years after a work was copywritten by RCA that there are no longer any restrictions on who may distribute that work?
A Futurist's job, in almost all cases is to take a look at what is going on today, compare it to what has gone on before, and suggest trends that are likely to continue into the future. They are fully ready to recognize that what they suggest may not come to pass.
As an example, a Futurist would look at sales in computers of various types, and observe that desktop sales are flat or decreasing, laptop sales are increasing slowly, and servers are relatively flat, with perhaps a slight increase in a few areas. Said Futurist would then look at why those figures are happening, and perhaps note that laptops today are far more powerful than the best desktops of five years ago, businesses are buying servers because they need to increase capacity. Desktop (tower/mini-tower) systems draw too much power, have more power than most are ever used for, and still cost more than they are worth to most people. Based upon those observations, a Futurist might suggest that "desktops" are going to be religated to two people, those who stress their machines, (gamers and hobbiests) Laptop sales will increase, and get less expensive. And Servers are going to become more flexible, with dynamic increases in capacity and power becoming selling points.
As most will probably point out, none of the above seems to be particularly rocket science. Any good economics student could probably make the same analysis, and provide the same report. It is not Prophecy and so on.
Do Futurists get things wrong? Are we wearing paper clothing as Alvin Tofler predicted in Future Shock? Yes, Futurists get things wrong. Though the paper clothing statement is probably a lot closer to reality than most people think. It is not unususal to find clothing made out of recycled materials. I have seen shoes and jackets that have been made out of recycled softdrink bottles. While I do not know where to get them myself, there are booties worn over shoes in some environments (hospitals for the most part) that are made of paper. Specifically because they are created and destroyed, and when destroyed take any biological hazards with them rather than putting them in the ocean and on our beaches.
So while I am not aware of any high fashion shows presenting paper clothing, I do think that the Toflers got it at least partially right.
At the other end of the "prediction" group are the people who make their predictions about your life based upon how you are reacting to them. I understand the money can be good, though there are occasional hazzards to be navigated.
Futurists are neither soothsayers, nor doom sayers. They are researchers and analysts. Generally they are not afraid of making some bold statements about the future. They will coach those statements with "I could be wrong" or other qualifiers. And when they are wrong, if asked they should generally be ready to point out that they considered it to be a reasonable probability.
Any business that hires a futurist probably is looking for the trends they should try to move into, rather than a specific product to start promoting. Once they have reason to believe a trend is likely, they can start making strategic and subsequently tactical decisions on how to participate, or avoid that trend.
With the earlier analysis, Zookd Computers, Inc. _may_ decide that making inexpensive (to produce) laptops will be likely to return a much larger profit over the long term than trying to sell top of the line traditional workstations. And while they will continue to make some of the traditional workstations, providing some very good platforms will tend to promote their hLnb laptop line as a reasonable replacement for standard desktops. Not to mention they work really well with their extreamly popular hOnc Mp3 player.
Fencehole Computers will look at what Zookd Computers is doing, and pick one product and make a similar computer with a significantly poorer feature set, and try to sell them for just about the same price that Zookd is selling their hLzb desktop units for.
Lled will look at Fencehole and just shake their head as they come out with more powerful servers, and reasonable laptops, and find some anoying kid to hawk them on every channel they can buy ad space from.
Then again maybe I am just reading too much into the earlier analysis.
-Rusty
Re:And what did Sikorsky do for a living?
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The Coming Air Age
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Wasn't it the head of IBM who said "Three computers should be able to handle all the processing required of the entire country"? Of course this is the same company that told a certain presidential hopefull that he had sold his year's quota of computers within the first two weeks....
One of the sources of noise in a computer is the exhaust fan on the power supply. Many ATX cases also have a secondary exhaust fan below the power supply on tower format cases. These fans are the loudest source of noise on most systems, though they are generally a constant source, so they are not likely to be as noticed.
Because of the nature of sound, unless you build a noise canceling system around the powersupply and case exhaust fans, in addition to insulating your case, you are unlikely to significantly improve the noise around your system.
You also need to consider that some souces of noise, for example a high speed CD-ROM drive are going to generate noise, and are not easily insulated, without taking out the necessary feature of being able to insert and remove CDs.
For an entertainment center, you may want to custom build a case that has noise damping built in, as well as using slower speed hard drive and CD-Rom drives.
But that's just my opinion, I've been wrong before.
They are canceling it because it is too expensive to create. It is much cheaper to put together dreck like John Edwards, or show old B horor movies that will draw a far smaller audience, than it is to be creative.
I am also with the people who have commented that season 4 wasn't worth the time I spent watching it.
Granted that while a 2-liter ain't what I would grab while gaming, I have a personal fondness for DCR as well.
I have tried Pepsi Blue, and have decided it really isn't worth my money. I wouldn't go quite as far as the reviewer did, but then I have never been accused of having a particularly good nose.
I would suspect that most of the reason that DCR didn't get included was the commonality of the cherry flavor in comparison to the Dr. Pepper contenstant.
One thing to take into consideration is that just because the server in question is Jabber, does not mean that all of the users need to be running jabber clients.
If the Central Dispatchers are using Jabber clients, and have accounts on the various consumer accounts such as YM, MSN-IM, AIM, etc, and the phone that an officer is carrying has a client for one of these (my own cell phone is capable of either msn or Yahoo Messenger) the officer can be in communication with the Central Dispatchers, who can relay messages to other systems if needed.
This does require the use of transports that may not always work, (Yahoo and AOL are both having fun trying to kick cross platform users off their networks.)
Web enabled phones could also use ICQ, or other potential clients, including web enabled IRC gateways.
Jabberd also runs on a variety of OS platforms as well, including NT, Solaris, BSD, as well as Linux. I would be surprised if no-one has taken te BSD source and confirmed that it will run under MacOS X as well. So just abou any platforms that are coming out of service, or are not being fully utilized can have a jabberd server running, interoperating with other jabberd servers.
Of course other people have different ideas and opinions. We can't all be me.
For $39.95 a month, I get a line that has _No_ per minute charges. I can call my dad in state, and talk to my uncle who is not always coherent. I can call up my kids living with their mother out of state, and spend as much time on the phone with them as I want, such as a couple of hours a weekend. I can call up the support line for my Agenda PDA, and hang out on hold until they open in the morning. I can call up work and let them try to figure out how I got to SF, CA in the 20 min it took me to get home from work in Down Town MPLS.
That $39.95 includes voicemail that can be picked up by a windows PC (drat, running Linux, so have to use the phone, or install Windows Media Player via CodeWeaver I suppose.)
While a POTS line is fine for local calls (I understand that there are some locations where a call across the street is billed per minute) in my area, Most of my family is a LD/Per Min call away.
I see Sprint is offering a 4500 min 39.95 deal, with 350 any time minutes, I suspect the rest is night/weekend minutes. While 4500 min is over three days of phone use, 350 min is five hours and 50 min. If you happen to have used all five hours and 50 min of those minutes, you are up to paying per min charges again, even if you have not touched the other 4150 min.
I have also had problems in my area ordering Pizza with my cell phone, and I won't even bother with my VoIP phone. Your milage may vary.
My total phone bill went down significantly after adding Vonage to my set of options, and droping my cell and POTS service to minimal requirements. What happens in your case remains to be seen.
- spits out positions of the fingertips accurate to 1 cubic mm or so within a cubic meter in your 'work area' (ie: a volume sitting above a traditional keyboard's location at a desk) - tethered or wireless, as the case may be (wireless is an extra cost, of course, but not THAT much extra - it's mainly the short battery life that sucks for this) - 60 Hz or better refresh rate for each of the sensed positions - serial or USB input stream, similar to a 2D mouse's, only with a LOT more coordinates... this is emminently compressible data, too, should bandwidth prove an issue (though there's always FireWire and USB2.0, I guess)
Not to dampen your intentions, I think they are admirable, however I do have a couple of notes on this for you. A meter is a bit arbitrary, and will give you problems with limits and data bandwidth.
For example, most people work en an environment where reaching a meter above their keyboard is only done when they are about to impart excessive forces on the keyboard in frustration. Unless you are doing something that requires position sensitive gogles as well, you are probably going to be better off working with half a meter vertically.
On the other hand reaching out to each side is not particularly unusual, and will easily exceed one meter side to side for most people. A range of either a meter and a half, or two meters would be safer.
This resolution of 1 cubic mm is also going to be expensive. I would think that it would make much more sense to vector track the hands, perhaps with a palm sensor which would give rough estimates of direction and speed while moving, then provide more accurate positioning data once stopped relative to the earlier movement. A surgon using such a glove is going to consider one millimeter to be aufull sloppy if he has to make an incision. At the same time, when reaching out towards the ends of our reaches, we are less interested in that 1 mm sensitivity. With a little bit of thought, you could use this area as broader spectrum navigation. Similar to using edge detection to move from one virtual screen to another, if you cross the edge of the sensors range, your virtual working area changes. If you are doing distance surgury, reaching into some areas would activate instrument changes.
Also of note is that the fingertips are rarely more than 150 mm from the center of your palm. You could easily use different resolutions for different fingers as well. As an example, you could use a sensitivity of 1 mm for your thumb, and.1 mm resolution for your index finger. You could also reduce the number of sensors required by recognizing that the ring finger is rarely as strong as the rest of the fingers, and eliminate that sensor. (for most movements, other than typing and musical instruments, the ring finger acts in concert with the pinkey.)
For purposes of the calculations of bandwidth I will use the dimensions you have provided however. You are free to use whatever of the ideas I have noted to finetune these. (given the fact that the fingers on each hand are always close together, you could compress the information by giving one finger's position at 10 bits x, 10 bits y, 10 bits z, then offset the remaining fingers from that position with 7 bits per dimension.
In any case, if you give each dimension a seprate holder, the smallest number of bits you can send per sample is 300. (10 bits per direction, [2^10=1024] three dimensions per finger, 10 fingers) multiply this by 60 samples per second, and you are running 18kbps. Even if you ad overhead, such as a stop bit every dimension, and a start bit for every sample, the bandwidth requirements are not high. At least not by modern communications standards anyway. The problem is that we do not have that many devices that are both moving (which will cause wire and fibres to ultimately breakdown) and sensing their environment that use this kind of bandwidth.
I suspect that whatever solution you put together will be regularly susceptible to failure due the the multiple moving parts required to track the hands of the user. You might be able to find a way to do it with fingertip and palm sensors that wirelessly communicate with each other, or that each communicate with a base station of some sort. One example would be a two camera system working with florescent fingertips that the user would wear. Similar in effect to a motion capture system.
You are not reading this wrong, the author has miss-stated the situation. What he intended to state was Over the years Sharp has never joined the PalmOS or WinCE/PocketPC bandwagons -- opting for an operating system they have built internally or farmed out to one of their subsidiaries and not re-distributed.
They are far from the only company to do that. I doubt that the setback thermostat, your microwave, your car or your TV uses an open source operating system, or even wince/poktpc or PalmOS. None of them really need that power or overhead.
This may change in the future, though I have no proof one way or the other.
Slashdot Mirror
Love getting into petty arguments. Rolling around in the mud makes me look as petty as the person I am rolling around in the mud with, and as often as not the other person enjoys it as well.
Presence is usally indicated by one of two things, often both available in clients for various IM services. Either the user establishes a presence, or presence is automatically calculated.
Most current IM clients, AIM, Yahoo, ICQ and many Jabber clients for sure, (I don't know about MSN, or some of the others out there) allow you to use a pull down list to indicate if you are available to chat, on the phone, away in a meeting, gone for the night, sleeping, napping, etc, including allowing you to set a custom away message such as "don't bother me I am an ignoramous who doesn't know that I can just exit this program."
Some allow you to be on line without advertizing that you are online by going into an invisable mode.
Many also provide an indication of whethere you are actively at your computer or not, by looking at the keyboard and mouse activity and noting that neither have been used in x min (x being user configurable in many cases) and degrading your presence to idle, or inactive as the case may be.
This may also apply specifically to your client application as well, so you could be considered idle because the IM client has not been active for 15 min, even if you have been busy writing your current novel.
If you want to say that finger on it's own has these features, I would probably disagree. Granted finger will tell you when the user was last logged on, but it has the disadvantage of having had a great big security hole in it that means that as of 1998 or earlier nearly every ISP and proactive system administrator has disabled remote finger.
Oh, Windows since at least windows 95, and I believe back into w4wg 3.1 has had an application like talk using the SMB protocol. Linux users can use the application LinPopUp to send popup messages to windows users, or other LinPopUp users. Windows NT users can access this facility via the NET SEND command. Novel users have a similar command available to them, and their popup message sending facility would let you know if the user was logged in.
All of this works wonderfully for users on their respective systems, however they rarely interoperate, and even more rarely do they interact with other message services such as e-mail, text paging or messaging, irc, the current IM clients, and so on.
XMPP is designed to provide a method of performing that interaction. If you wanted to build the tools that would interact with an XMPP enabled service, you could possibly use finger to find out presence information from one of your buddies IM clients, and use talk to send a text message to them.
I on the other hand would rather use a client that is designed to talk to one or more IM service providers, and works well with it. I would rather use a client with more features than sjabber, though there are situations where sjabber would be quite appropriate. (I do have a WYSE terminal I use for managing my linux servers. I think sjabber would be fine running in a gnuterm session.)
The other problem with talk is that if the user is behind a firewall, the firewall has to have a hole in it to allow talk, finger, and other services through to the user's workstation. That may be ok with you, I don't know if there are all that many others who are in agreement with you.
-Rusty
talk is fine, but has no presence capabilities, The only way that you will know if your buddy is online and able to take a message is if he or she responds to your message.
For many people this would be sufficient. Some people would rather have some more features such as presence, or higher level formatting, or the ability to check their callander, or have an avatar send a page to their cell phone reminding you to pick up some eggs and milk as the refrigerator reports that you are low on both.
While I feel talk is fine for most of the systems I use, I don't think it will talk to my cell phone, or my pager. I suppose that both could be upgraded to support it, but why bother?
-Rusty
There are a couple dozen free and comercial jabber clients available. You are not restricted in which client you use. Clients exist that run on any platform that supports perl, or java. Other clients exist that will only run on a Gnome or KDE desktop. Or only Windows.
Take a look at the list of clients available under the client list at jabber.org or even some of the links under that.
Don't sell the comercial server short either. The evaluation copy may expire in a month, however it does support some features that are not in the open/free version of the server.
-Rusty
Considering that the real start to this was Microsoft's attempt to interoperate with AOL, using the open standards AOL published (and later stoped useing) to allow independent client developers to talk to AIM servers, I think there is a desire at some of the IM server platforms to interoperate.
Obviously there are problems that will still need to be adressed, however that is what the working group is attempting to address.
As far as I am concerned, knowing that one of my buddies is online, and being able to send an IM to them, regardless of the service or client either of us are using would be a major step forward.
-Rusty
Not exactly sure how this helps wireless, this is IM stuff. Wireless is a part of IM, however I would hesitate to claim that it is specifically significant to wireless.
What this is really directed at is getting IM clients to be able to interoperate. Initially this was going to be done in the protocol that AOL was drawing up, however they dropped development on that and have been somewhat antagonistic towards interoperating with other IM providers.
From a business perspective having half a dozen IM clients (yahoo, aol, icq, msn, jabber, etc.) on different desktops, that don't interoperate is a bit of a pain to support. Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL would very much prefer that businesses would standardize on their own service, however if you have to work with outside vendors you have no gaurantee, that that vendor will use the same service, or that you will be able to interoperate with it.
You might be able to set up your own gateway using jabber, or a couple of other servers, however one of the ways that AOL uses to "protect their users" is to only allow so many users at a time connect from the same IP address. If more than that connect, they block the IP address. That might be OK if you are a mom and pop operation with only four or five people useing your connection, but fails rappidly when you look at it from the perspective of a large bank or multinational corporation.
From what I understand, this working group is attempting to lay out the protocols necessary to allow gateways between IM services to exist. Theory being that you could use your Yahoo IM client to talk to your cousin using an AIM client, who is talking to his buddy over in the MSN world. Asside from the same level of requirement to know what service the remote user is on.
At the moment, with variations on the theme such as jabber, you have to have an account on the remote system even if you are only establishing a connection to a jabber server.
Then again, I could be wrong. Perhaps this will only help wireless users.
-Rusty
If your ADSL router stops routing, your internal private IP network will remain a parallel network until your ADSL router is brought back up.
Your ADSL router provides either IP Masqurading, or IP NAT features for your internal network. The mesh network gateways will provide the same capabilities. If you connect to the mesh before the AP that you use establishes a connection to a gateway, your host will connect through to the internet (once the gateway has been propigated) through a proxy service running on the AP that you connect to.
I did not see any handoff protocols specified (for mobile users with iPaqs, Zaurus and laptop users who do move around.) in the document, however it is possible that was specified in one of the protocols identified, and just not highlighted.
After all, I could be wrong.
-Rusty
Been watching both Starhunter and Firefly of late. Neither are Star Trek worlds. Both have holes I think you could drive a truck through, on an icy road, sideways, and recover.
In a variation on the ST world, I am still a fan of Andromeda.
Of course none of these are on the SciFi channel. Perhaps this is the one instance where Harlan Ellison (drat I remembered his name) is right and the pronuciation of SciFi is Skiffy, and for this channel has nothing to do with Science Fiction.
There are a few who like the idea of Xfiles on the Skiffy channel, I have never really followed the show however.
Your opinions may differ.
-Rusty
Point of contention. The reason that you are doing a fsck, chkdisk, or other hard disk test is because the system needs to validate the integrity of the data on the hard disk. System files may have been open, only partially written to, or other problems may exist.
The assumption being made with journaling is that the data in the journal is that which should have been written to disk, but the system has no verification that it was. If you take the transactions in the journal, and repeat them, the system will have it's integrity insured and it is reasonable to assume that the system will operate as expected.
The side effect of your buisness surviving or failing that I contrived was a contrived example. There are certainly many other methods of doing that process. Perhaps the best example would be to use a known good UPS to backup the system, and do a clean powerdown when local power fails. Of course that mitigates the need for a journaling file system in that case, as the hard drive will be in a clean state when it powers up, not requiring a long fsck or chkdsk.
Perhaps Quake would be a better example of where it may not make sense to have a 10-15% hit on your system. Yes if a bug causes your system to crash, leaving the dirty bit set, it will take a long time to get back into the action. The question becomes is Quake, Doom, EQ, or other interactive gameplay buggy enough that taking a 10-15% hit on performance is worth Journaling? I would think that if you were a developer, or creating Hacks for the games it may make sense, however for general gameplay I would be somewhat surprised. Especially on the Macintosh.
One cure for that would be to boot a custom configuration with small partitions for gameplay, and large partitions for general OS use, but I doubt that anyone is really interested in doing that.
Then again, I could be wrong. I wasn't even aware that the Macintosh required "too many regular boots." One of these days I will have to go out and get a system capable of running OS X and see for myself. (Or wait for Apple to release the x86 varient of OS X.)
-Rusty
there isn't much talke about MLMs in EQ...
Then again, since I don't play the game, I could be wrong. Are people really loosing hundreds or millions in pp's to MLM scams?
-Rusty
Both. It depends upon the journaling method used. BFS for example only journaled system information. User data was allowed to become corrupted because a user's data file being corrupt is unlikely to bring the system down.
If you go through the documentation for the various journaling filesystems, XFS, ext3, jfs, Reiser (sp?) others, you will find that each implementation takes a different tactic when it decides what gets journaled, and what does not.
A document you are editing, is almost never journaled, unless it is happening as part of a background save process, or as part of you saving the document to disk specifically.
Then again, I have been wrong before.
-Rusty
As for why Journaling matters, I recomend going to Google and asking it for the tutorial on ext3. The tutorial has links to even more depth on the issue. As a quick overview, when you edit files in most applications, the process of saving involves two steps, write data to disk, update whatever form of table is in use on the disk with what updates have been made. For example, a file now uses sectors 5200,5201, and 5209 rather than just 5200 and 5201 as it was originally written.
If the power goes out between when the data was written, and when the tables were updated, the data is effectively lost, as the system will only know about the fact that data was written to 5200 and 5201.
Journaling has several implementations, however one of the most common is to log what data is being written to the hard disk, then when all the tables are updated, flushing that information out of the journal.
If the power fails, the system opens the journal file, and starts the process of writing the data in the journal file to the hard disk again.
Why might this be worth a 10-15%? This will be different for different users, but a fairly simple (if contrived) example is if you are running a commercial web site. If I decide to purchase 1000 units of roduct XXZ from your web site, without knowing that a thunder storm is moving through your community, I place my order, get a confirmation number back, and think all is well. Unbeknownst to me, your web server dies after generating the confirmation, while writing the record to the hard disk.
If my purchase is important to your business, say for example the money has been handled as part of the confirmation, and I would not be happy about you not shipping the product I paid for, you might think it worth a 10-15% performance penalty to insure that my purchase gets recorded properly when your power comes back up.
At the same time, if you spend your time on the computer reading slashdot, playing Everquest, and crunching DES keys, perhaps journaling isn't worth the 10-15% hit.
I may be wrong here as well, but I believe the 10-15% hit being reported is for disk intensive transactions, not for processor performance.
Then again, I could be wrong.
-Rusty
When a motherboard failed on me, I was able to take the hard drive out, and install it in another box, with all different hardware, and the system booted cleanly (with the exception of the network card which ahd to be re-configured.) to a working desktop.
I Honestly think that with two workstations that have hardware tha BeOS supports, you could use a removable drive tray system to take your hard disk back and forth with you between work and home. My experience is that the workstation would look the same on each platform.
I will acknowledge that moving it from a 233mhz K6 to a 1GHZ P3 would have a performance impact, as would moving from a 14" CRT to a 17" LCD impact the user's view. When it comes to a user needing to get work done, those are incidental, unless the change prevents you from getting work done.
I still do use BeOS on at least two systems. One for my multi-media center to stream my music, the other for my old desktop. My current "primary system" is a laptop usually running Mandrake 9.0. For some reason it ain't playing my MP3 files, even though it is perfectly happy to use the sound system to anounce to me that I have e-mail.
Why do I still use BeOS there? because it works and I really do not see a good reason to move those systems to any other operating system. Might that change? Possibly. At the same time by the time I need to make that decision, OpenBeOS may be an available binary install that I can use. If so, I would be happy to go with that.
I have used DOS 3.1, 3,3, 4.01, 5.0, 6.0, 7.0 and a couple of open source varients, most Windows varients, several linux distributions including slackware, debian, redhat, caldera, corel, and Mandrake, OS/2 2.1, 3.0, 4.0 and BeOS 4.5.2, 5.0, 5.1 and 5.2 . I have even gotten Plan 9 (one of the early releases) to boot, though not to a production state by any means, and several Macintosh versions.
Of all of these, _Only_ BeOS installed without a hitch onto any of my hardware, and made use of almost all of the attached peripherals. The world ain't perfect. The closest OS implementation I have seen to "perfect" would be BeOS.
Could it have used more hardware support? Sure! The APIs have been out there, I suspect that more than a few people would welcome your efforts to help out with more than a complaint that you don't think it supports your Voodoo 5 card. I think that is true even going forward.
Later.
-Rusty
Nothing that is not wrong with Fortran...
As most people understand it, hot-wiring a car is preparation for stealing that car. However if the keyswitch is broken, and you don't have the time or money to replace that keyswitch, there is no law that prevents you from hot-wiring your own car. It may look strange, but it is not illegal. This is circumventing the security system on the ignition of your car, and it is not preparation for a crime.
The question then becomes "Is a CD/DVD more like a car, or a piece of software?" The reason for this question is that so far as I know, CDs and DVDs do not come with an end user licence agreement. A copyright notice is not an EULA, though it may be part of one. If a product is not covered by a EULA, then I do not know of any way that you can prevent a purchaser from legitimately using the contents of the CD in any way that they choose. You may restrict their ability to "re-distribute" the contents, that is part of the copyright, but if someone wants to convert their old record player into a device that can read a CD or DVD, (which requires knowledge I do not posess) a copyright notice is not sufficient to prevent this.
Other examples of things that can be used in "preparing a crime" include screwdrivers and paperclips, (which can be used in concert to pick a variety of locks) Pry bars (which can pry open windows) rocks (which can break windows) and many other devices which also have legitimate uses.
The fact that I posses these tools, does not imply that I have prepared for a crime, and is not sufficient on it's own to put me in jail. It may be enough for someone to start asking questions. In some countries that may be grounds for arrest, but not in the US.
I still have not seen the question of expired copyrights being adressed. What steps are being taken to verify that when a copyright expires, putting a creative work into the public domain, that that work will be available? Are DRM tools being developed that check to see if a copyright is expired?
Does your DVD player have the inteligence to know that 95 years after a work was copywritten by RCA that there are no longer any restrictions on who may distribute that work?
-Rusty
A Futurist's job, in almost all cases is to take a look at what is going on today, compare it to what has gone on before, and suggest trends that are likely to continue into the future. They are fully ready to recognize that what they suggest may not come to pass.
As an example, a Futurist would look at sales in computers of various types, and observe that desktop sales are flat or decreasing, laptop sales are increasing slowly, and servers are relatively flat, with perhaps a slight increase in a few areas. Said Futurist would then look at why those figures are happening, and perhaps note that laptops today are far more powerful than the best desktops of five years ago, businesses are buying servers because they need to increase capacity. Desktop (tower/mini-tower) systems draw too much power, have more power than most are ever used for, and still cost more than they are worth to most people. Based upon those observations, a Futurist might suggest that "desktops" are going to be religated to two people, those who stress their machines, (gamers and hobbiests) Laptop sales will increase, and get less expensive. And Servers are going to become more flexible, with dynamic increases in capacity and power becoming selling points.
As most will probably point out, none of the above seems to be particularly rocket science. Any good economics student could probably make the same analysis, and provide the same report. It is not Prophecy and so on.
Do Futurists get things wrong? Are we wearing paper clothing as Alvin Tofler predicted in Future Shock? Yes, Futurists get things wrong. Though the paper clothing statement is probably a lot closer to reality than most people think. It is not unususal to find clothing made out of recycled materials. I have seen shoes and jackets that have been made out of recycled softdrink bottles. While I do not know where to get them myself, there are booties worn over shoes in some environments (hospitals for the most part) that are made of paper. Specifically because they are created and destroyed, and when destroyed take any biological hazards with them rather than putting them in the ocean and on our beaches.
So while I am not aware of any high fashion shows presenting paper clothing, I do think that the Toflers got it at least partially right.
At the other end of the "prediction" group are the people who make their predictions about your life based upon how you are reacting to them. I understand the money can be good, though there are occasional hazzards to be navigated.
Futurists are neither soothsayers, nor doom sayers. They are researchers and analysts. Generally they are not afraid of making some bold statements about the future. They will coach those statements with "I could be wrong" or other qualifiers. And when they are wrong, if asked they should generally be ready to point out that they considered it to be a reasonable probability.
Any business that hires a futurist probably is looking for the trends they should try to move into, rather than a specific product to start promoting. Once they have reason to believe a trend is likely, they can start making strategic and subsequently tactical decisions on how to participate, or avoid that trend.
With the earlier analysis, Zookd Computers, Inc. _may_ decide that making inexpensive (to produce) laptops will be likely to return a much larger profit over the long term than trying to sell top of the line traditional workstations. And while they will continue to make some of the traditional workstations, providing some very good platforms will tend to promote their hLnb laptop line as a reasonable replacement for standard desktops. Not to mention they work really well with their extreamly popular hOnc Mp3 player.
Fencehole Computers will look at what Zookd Computers is doing, and pick one product and make a similar computer with a significantly poorer feature set, and try to sell them for just about the same price that Zookd is selling their hLzb desktop units for.
Lled will look at Fencehole and just shake their head as they come out with more powerful servers, and reasonable laptops, and find some anoying kid to hawk them on every channel they can buy ad space from.
Then again maybe I am just reading too much into the earlier analysis.
-Rusty
Wasn't it the head of IBM who said "Three computers should be able to handle all the processing required of the entire country"? Of course this is the same company that told a certain presidential hopefull that he had sold his year's quota of computers within the first two weeks....
...which is loudly proclaming the death of TiVo, claiming setup is too hard.... Go to the bottom of the Slate page, and you will find:
©2002 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
Terms of Use Advertise TRUSTe Approved Privacy Statement GetNetWise
For some reason I have the feeling that there is a bit of garbage floating around somewhere in one or both of these articles.
-Rusty
One of the sources of noise in a computer is the exhaust fan on the power supply. Many ATX cases also have a secondary exhaust fan below the power supply on tower format cases. These fans are the loudest source of noise on most systems, though they are generally a constant source, so they are not likely to be as noticed.
Because of the nature of sound, unless you build a noise canceling system around the powersupply and case exhaust fans, in addition to insulating your case, you are unlikely to significantly improve the noise around your system.
You also need to consider that some souces of noise, for example a high speed CD-ROM drive are going to generate noise, and are not easily insulated, without taking out the necessary feature of being able to insert and remove CDs.
For an entertainment center, you may want to custom build a case that has noise damping built in, as well as using slower speed hard drive and CD-Rom drives.
But that's just my opinion, I've been wrong before.
-Rusty
They are canceling it because it is too expensive to create. It is much cheaper to put together dreck like John Edwards, or show old B horor movies that will draw a far smaller audience, than it is to be creative.
I am also with the people who have commented that season 4 wasn't worth the time I spent watching it.
That's just my opinion, yours is yours.
-Rusty
Granted that while a 2-liter ain't what I would grab while gaming, I have a personal fondness for DCR as well.
I have tried Pepsi Blue, and have decided it really isn't worth my money. I wouldn't go quite as far as the reviewer did, but then I have never been accused of having a particularly good nose.
I would suspect that most of the reason that DCR didn't get included was the commonality of the cherry flavor in comparison to the Dr. Pepper contenstant.
Then again, your milage may vary..
-Rusty
One thing to take into consideration is that just because the server in question is Jabber, does not mean that all of the users need to be running jabber clients.
If the Central Dispatchers are using Jabber clients, and have accounts on the various consumer accounts such as YM, MSN-IM, AIM, etc, and the phone that an officer is carrying has a client for one of these (my own cell phone is capable of either msn or Yahoo Messenger) the officer can be in communication with the Central Dispatchers, who can relay messages to other systems if needed.
This does require the use of transports that may not always work, (Yahoo and AOL are both having fun trying to kick cross platform users off their networks.)
Web enabled phones could also use ICQ, or other potential clients, including web enabled IRC gateways.
Jabberd also runs on a variety of OS platforms as well, including NT, Solaris, BSD, as well as Linux. I would be surprised if no-one has taken te BSD source and confirmed that it will run under MacOS X as well. So just abou any platforms that are coming out of service, or are not being fully utilized can have a jabberd server running, interoperating with other jabberd servers.
Of course other people have different ideas and opinions. We can't all be me.
-Rusty
No, more like...
Do you deliver to Hyw 169, on Cedar Lake?
Is that in Alameda?
No, St. Louis Park, MN
No, we only deliver in the SF area...
Oh, sorry, wrong phone...
-Rusty
For $39.95 a month, I get a line that has _No_ per minute charges. I can call my dad in state, and talk to my uncle who is not always coherent. I can call up my kids living with their mother out of state, and spend as much time on the phone with them as I want, such as a couple of hours a weekend. I can call up the support line for my Agenda PDA, and hang out on hold until they open in the morning. I can call up work and let them try to figure out how I got to SF, CA in the 20 min it took me to get home from work in Down Town MPLS.
That $39.95 includes voicemail that can be picked up by a windows PC (drat, running Linux, so have to use the phone, or install Windows Media Player via CodeWeaver I suppose.)
While a POTS line is fine for local calls (I understand that there are some locations where a call across the street is billed per minute) in my area, Most of my family is a LD/Per Min call away.
I see Sprint is offering a 4500 min 39.95 deal, with 350 any time minutes, I suspect the rest is night/weekend minutes. While 4500 min is over three days of phone use, 350 min is five hours and 50 min. If you happen to have used all five hours and 50 min of those minutes, you are up to paying per min charges again, even if you have not touched the other 4150 min.
I have also had problems in my area ordering Pizza with my cell phone, and I won't even bother with my VoIP phone. Your milage may vary.
My total phone bill went down significantly after adding Vonage to my set of options, and droping my cell and POTS service to minimal requirements. What happens in your case remains to be seen.
-Rusty
- spits out positions of the fingertips accurate to 1 cubic mm or so within a cubic meter in your 'work area' (ie: a volume sitting above a traditional keyboard's location at a desk) ... this is emminently compressible data, too, should bandwidth prove an issue (though there's always FireWire and USB2.0, I guess)
.1 mm resolution for your index finger. You could also reduce the number of sensors required by recognizing that the ring finger is rarely as strong as the rest of the fingers, and eliminate that sensor. (for most movements, other than typing and musical instruments, the ring finger acts in concert with the pinkey.)
- tethered or wireless, as the case may be (wireless is an extra cost, of course, but not THAT much extra - it's mainly the short battery life that sucks for this)
- 60 Hz or better refresh rate for each of the sensed positions
- serial or USB input stream, similar to a 2D mouse's, only with a LOT more coordinates
Not to dampen your intentions, I think they are admirable, however I do have a couple of notes on this for you. A meter is a bit arbitrary, and will give you problems with limits and data bandwidth.
For example, most people work en an environment where reaching a meter above their keyboard is only done when they are about to impart excessive forces on the keyboard in frustration. Unless you are doing something that requires position sensitive gogles as well, you are probably going to be better off working with half a meter vertically.
On the other hand reaching out to each side is not particularly unusual, and will easily exceed one meter side to side for most people. A range of either a meter and a half, or two meters would be safer.
This resolution of 1 cubic mm is also going to be expensive. I would think that it would make much more sense to vector track the hands, perhaps with a palm sensor which would give rough estimates of direction and speed while moving, then provide more accurate positioning data once stopped relative to the earlier movement. A surgon using such a glove is going to consider one millimeter to be aufull sloppy if he has to make an incision. At the same time, when reaching out towards the ends of our reaches, we are less interested in that 1 mm sensitivity. With a little bit of thought, you could use this area as broader spectrum navigation. Similar to using edge detection to move from one virtual screen to another, if you cross the edge of the sensors range, your virtual working area changes. If you are doing distance surgury, reaching into some areas would activate instrument changes.
Also of note is that the fingertips are rarely more than 150 mm from the center of your palm. You could easily use different resolutions for different fingers as well. As an example, you could use a sensitivity of 1 mm for your thumb, and
For purposes of the calculations of bandwidth I will use the dimensions you have provided however. You are free to use whatever of the ideas I have noted to finetune these. (given the fact that the fingers on each hand are always close together, you could compress the information by giving one finger's position at 10 bits x, 10 bits y, 10 bits z, then offset the remaining fingers from that position with 7 bits per dimension.
In any case, if you give each dimension a seprate holder, the smallest number of bits you can send per sample is 300. (10 bits per direction, [2^10=1024] three dimensions per finger, 10 fingers) multiply this by 60 samples per second, and you are running 18kbps. Even if you ad overhead, such as a stop bit every dimension, and a start bit for every sample, the bandwidth requirements are not high. At least not by modern communications standards anyway. The problem is that we do not have that many devices that are both moving (which will cause wire and fibres to ultimately breakdown) and sensing their environment that use this kind of bandwidth.
I suspect that whatever solution you put together will be regularly susceptible to failure due the the multiple moving parts required to track the hands of the user. You might be able to find a way to do it with fingertip and palm sensors that wirelessly communicate with each other, or that each communicate with a base station of some sort. One example would be a two camera system working with florescent fingertips that the user would wear. Similar in effect to a motion capture system.
Oh, well, best of luck to you in your venture...
-Rusty
You are not reading this wrong, the author has miss-stated the situation. What he intended to state was Over the years Sharp has never joined the PalmOS or WinCE/PocketPC bandwagons -- opting for an operating system they have built internally or farmed out to one of their subsidiaries and not re-distributed.
They are far from the only company to do that. I doubt that the setback thermostat, your microwave, your car or your TV uses an open source operating system, or even wince/poktpc or PalmOS. None of them really need that power or overhead.
This may change in the future, though I have no proof one way or the other.
-Rusty