I'm more concerned with the charity loophole. The group "Lighthouse Credit Foundation" was busted by NY last year for calling people with automated messages (I average 3 calls a month from them myself) and no way to get off their lists. They claim they're exempt because they're a so-called charity offering debt relief.
I'm worried more companies will find a way to try and look like a charitable organization. Or worse yet, pay a charity to do their solicitations for them as a middle-man.
You're forgetting when Boies helped defend IBM from an antitrust lawsuit years ago. That lawsuit dragged on for something like 13 years, and in the end IBM won. Hell, I can remember when (the now named) IBM Global Services had to be spun off as "Integrated Systems Solutions Corporation" to avoid the antitrust lawsuits. Right after IBM won, ISSC quickly got renamed IGS and folded back into the company.
I almost wonder if they picked Boies just for that reason. Maybe they figure 13 years defending IBM will give him an edge trying to tackle IBM with a weak lawsuit.
These chips do not run nearly as hot as a Power4, which it was based off of. I don't have the exact specs with me now, but I seem to recall something in the 30-50W ballpark. Most of your power consumption on the Power4 is due to dual cores and the 3 L2 cache slices consuming most of the bottom half of the chip. This PowerPC chip is a single-core Power4 with some other memory differences.
It will be hotter than previous chips, and may require more cooling, but nowhere as bad as current x86 architectures.
How about a microwaved PC laptop?
on
Baked Apple
·
· Score: 1
Before I became an engineer, I worked as a Deskside Service Rep in one of the buildings on our site as an intern. The guy I worked with told me about the employee who won the "no common sense" award from our team.
The previous winter, the support guys started learning of people leaving their laptops in their cars over the winter. When they brought them inside for work the next day and booted them, condensation began to form everywhere. So an email went out telling people to let their laptops warm up to room temperature before turning them on, so that the ocndensation wouldn't short anything out.
Well one woman on the team was in a rush one morning and decided to expedite things by throwing her laptop in the microwave down the hall. It didn't fare as well as the baked Apple. Apparently when they opened it up and tried turning it on afterwards, they found that the LCD display had melted somehow and was running down the back of the screen.
Sad part is, they actually gave her a replacement laptop.
I used a TP600 at work for 2 years and had no problems with this. The only issue I had with the battery was with it only lasting an hour or so when I took it off AC power. I've since been upgraded to a T21 which does much better and lasts 2-3 hours off AC.
I'm an OOL customer too, and haven't had any major issues (other than an old HBO line filter being left on after their switch to fiber that screwed up my cable modem when I first used it).
As for the router, I talked with the tech who had to come over and remove the old filters, and he said they don't support the routers because they want to make you pay for another cable modem instead (duh), and they don't want to have to support umpteen million router phone calls.
OOL's policy on routers makes sense from their end, both from a customer support end and a monetary end. Some percentage of people are dumb enough to buy the second modem, so they get extra money right there. And they don't have to answer a lot of questions on various routers. As for disconnecting it when on the phone, that part probably makes sense because it removes an extra variable from the diagnosis.
I agree. The address he gives is for the company that publishes, among other things, EE Times and I think Tech Review. I'd love to see an article on this in EE Times.
Thanks, I forgot where I'd read about it previously. Now I feel dumb for not realizing I read about it here (duh).
This is maybe halfway there
on
Optical Camouflage
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I will admit that this works better than I expected from the video clips. But I think it's barely halfway towards the goal of personal optical camouflage. From what they describe, it requires an external display source, and applies a bluescreen style approach.
What they need to do is figure out a way to create a piece of clothing which *is* the display, and not merely a reflector or a bluescreen like what they have now. Maybe take this foldable display technology I've read about (mainly geared towards disposable displays), and attach it to fabric. Then make a uniform out of it. Then, you can determine the image behind the person and display it on the uniform.
They're already halfway there, since they can determine what's behind the person and display it on a special colored material. Now all they need is a fabric that can display images, and then they can transmit the background onto the uniform.
Actually, I read about some manufacturer of an external Firewire DVD-RW drive that made a piece of software for the Mac that would hack iDVD so that it would work with their drive.
It lasted until Apple found out and told them to stop altering their software. I can't recall the manufacturer, but I think I read about it in a MacWorld article last month.
Your opinion of hardcore fans
on
Ask William Shatner
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
One of the best Saturday Night Live shows I can remember was when you appeared on it as a host. I thought the skit of you at the Star Trek convention was excellent, BTW. Especially when you tore into the Trekkies who seem like the Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons.
Though your diatribe ("Get a life people") was brushed aside as the talk of the "Evil Kirk", what's your real opinion of the die hard fans? Granted many are a bit excessive, but do you appreciate the attention or do you find it annoying at all?
I have to agree on the KDE comment. At work, we have a version of KDE that runs on our RS/6000 workstations. I found it to be sluggish after a while and just seemed to be too feature-rich for work. So I ditched it and compiled a version of FVWM2 I downloaded and use that.
For basic development work, all I care about it some menus to launch terminals and a way to switch between sessions (I dunno what you call the feature of having multiple screens of windows).
Hell, I'd estimate less than 10% use KDE, another 10% use MWM or FVWM, and the rest use vanilla CDE. Sometimes the simpler solution is better in my opinion.
I use Windows at home just to take a break from UNIX at work.
At work I do microprocessor development on a $10K RS/6000 workstation (dual Power3 processors, 8GB of RAM) running AIX. So I spend most of my time in X doing design work (I go for the minimalistic FVWM2 for most of my work) and doing shell commands. For email, web, etc. I have a T21 Thinkpad running Win2K.
When I get home though, I just want to cruise the web, check my email, and fart around with some games. I don't want shell prompts or hassles like at work, I just want a simple Windows XP system to mess around with for an hour or 2 after work. Hell, after 8-12 hours in front of X, I just need a break (and a few system crashes every so often to remidn me I'm not at work). That being said though, I make sure to have Cygwin installed on my home PC and work laptop in case I need to get anything done, to makes things somewhat UNIX-ish.
I've screwed around with Linux at home, but I just felt it wasn't worth the hassle of installing, and plus it made me feel like I was back at work again.
I don't know, maybe I'll hit the middle road and settle down on a Mac one of these days though...
Apparently you've never been to an IBM site before. These sites have dozens or more buildings on them. Each building is numbered. Building 323 just happens to hold the fab.
2 Free Orielly online books with related topics
on
Perl & LWP
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I've found that 2 of the free books Oreilly offers on their website delve into this a little bit.
The primary reasons I pre-ordered the 4-DVD set were to see the extra footage, and also because only this one apparenty has DTS audio on it. So for those who like the audio quality of DTS, this one's for you.
IBM already has a microprocessor with a (albeit small) cluster of processor cores per chip. The IBM Power4 microprocessor has 2 cores per die, as shown in this picture. Current machines ship with 8 to 32-way systems, so divide by 4 to get the number of real chips. If you want to read more on the Power4, IBM dedicated an entire IBM Journal of Research and Development to the Power4, located here. The best article of the bunch is the one on circuit and physical design.
I agree this is a stupid patent, but I don't think it is quite as simple as "co.uk means the computer's in the UK". There's an extra portion to the patent which goes one step further, which is determining whether or not the digital content can be transmitted to the computer in it's current geo-political location. In essence, it sounds like a method to allow the implementation of national data filtering. For example, if it's illegal to view adult materials in a country, this patent covers any method which is used to determine that the client computer is in that nation, and then goes on to prevent the data from getting there.
Granted, that's my interpretation and I'm not a patent lawyer. On the flip side, I don't see how this patent could ever be used by someone, because I think it could be circumvented too easily. If you go solely on hostname, you could probably fake that out. If you're depending on the computer to verify this information via hardware or software, someone could get around this (like region-free DVD players).
I agree. I just grabbed their 2-CD album "The Altogether" to expand my collection with. The second CD has two really good songs, including a techno bagpipe song (Track 1) and a nice Dr. Who theme song remix (Track 5). I recommend this album if you like Orbital.
Judging by the two comments telling me I shouldn't be using == on floats, perhaps I should clarify that this is Skill, a scripting language used in VLSI design (I work in microprocessor design) using the Cadence Design System. It's based on a combination of C and Lisp/Scheme (i.e. list based with cdr, car, etc).
Under Skill, == is the only way to test equality as far as I know (according to the Skill Reference Manual published by Cadence). Skill doesn't have datatypes in general, so X can store a float or an int. Instead of float or int datatypes, it uses a numeric datatype. It doesn't matter. So you have no choice but to test equality on different numerical datatypes.
In my example, the problem is that I wanted to test what was going to be a float result against an integer multiple. Skill doesn't have typecasting though, so I can't do (int)X==1 or something like that. I suspect it auto-typecasted the int to a float (1.0 or something like that), which failed the test (1.0!=1.0000001). I can't get around it.
If you're hung up on ==, I should also point out that we ran into this when doing boundary conditions such as >,<,<=, and >=.
1 != 1 (precision)
on
Pet Bugs?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
My latest encounter with this bug was with Skill (a Scheme/Lisp derivative used in the Cadence VLSI design toolset). I've seen it in other languages as well.
In my latest encounter, I'd do a bunch of calculation in a design automation program for us at work to use on a chip design, and I couldn't figure out why my numerical tests kept failing. I'd have some variable X, and do a bunch of functions on it like multiplication and division, then test to see if it was equal to 1. But none met the condition. When I printed out a bunch of the variables as floats, I saw that the test 1==1 was failing. I was confused to say the least. At first we suspected it was something like miscomparing a float to an int, but since Skill doesn't have floats or ints like that, it wasn't the problem.
Turns out that it was a precision issue. It was really testing to see if 1==1.0000000000001 or something like that, because the * and / functions stored very precise values in memory, more than I'd care about. Ever since then we've always had to do something like atof(sprintf("%.3f",X)) to get the value without the extra precision. Stupid and very annoying.
Actually, my coy of the soundtrack played fine in my IBM laptop at work running Win2K. I was using Winamp to play it and I couldn't see any problems. I saw the Episode II soundtrack mentioned in the article, and I was kind of confused by it. Did they only protect a small sample of the CDs, or what?
I got mine at a local Best Buy with a "special" collector's card inside, so I'm wondering if they got a different batch than some of the other record stores. Anybody else have one that worked from a regular store?
*SPOILER WARNING*
If you read the novel about it, Annikan does have a step-brother named Owen. His mother remarries after he leaves Tatooine. Remember Uncle Owen from Episode IV, who Luke was living with? It really was his uncle, Annikan's step-brother.
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I'm more concerned with the charity loophole. The group "Lighthouse Credit Foundation" was busted by NY last year for calling people with automated messages (I average 3 calls a month from them myself) and no way to get off their lists. They claim they're exempt because they're a so-called charity offering debt relief.
I'm worried more companies will find a way to try and look like a charitable organization. Or worse yet, pay a charity to do their solicitations for them as a middle-man.
You're forgetting when Boies helped defend IBM from an antitrust lawsuit years ago. That lawsuit dragged on for something like 13 years, and in the end IBM won. Hell, I can remember when (the now named) IBM Global Services had to be spun off as "Integrated Systems Solutions Corporation" to avoid the antitrust lawsuits. Right after IBM won, ISSC quickly got renamed IGS and folded back into the company.
I almost wonder if they picked Boies just for that reason. Maybe they figure 13 years defending IBM will give him an edge trying to tackle IBM with a weak lawsuit.
And the ironic part is that the lawyer now facing them is the same lawyer who defended them during the 80s and 90s.
These chips do not run nearly as hot as a Power4, which it was based off of. I don't have the exact specs with me now, but I seem to recall something in the 30-50W ballpark. Most of your power consumption on the Power4 is due to dual cores and the 3 L2 cache slices consuming most of the bottom half of the chip. This PowerPC chip is a single-core Power4 with some other memory differences.
It will be hotter than previous chips, and may require more cooling, but nowhere as bad as current x86 architectures.
Before I became an engineer, I worked as a Deskside Service Rep in one of the buildings on our site as an intern. The guy I worked with told me about the employee who won the "no common sense" award from our team.
The previous winter, the support guys started learning of people leaving their laptops in their cars over the winter. When they brought them inside for work the next day and booted them, condensation began to form everywhere. So an email went out telling people to let their laptops warm up to room temperature before turning them on, so that the ocndensation wouldn't short anything out.
Well one woman on the team was in a rush one morning and decided to expedite things by throwing her laptop in the microwave down the hall. It didn't fare as well as the baked Apple. Apparently when they opened it up and tried turning it on afterwards, they found that the LCD display had melted somehow and was running down the back of the screen.
Sad part is, they actually gave her a replacement laptop.
I used a TP600 at work for 2 years and had no problems with this. The only issue I had with the battery was with it only lasting an hour or so when I took it off AC power. I've since been upgraded to a T21 which does much better and lasts 2-3 hours off AC.
I'm an OOL customer too, and haven't had any major issues (other than an old HBO line filter being left on after their switch to fiber that screwed up my cable modem when I first used it).
As for the router, I talked with the tech who had to come over and remove the old filters, and he said they don't support the routers because they want to make you pay for another cable modem instead (duh), and they don't want to have to support umpteen million router phone calls.
OOL's policy on routers makes sense from their end, both from a customer support end and a monetary end. Some percentage of people are dumb enough to buy the second modem, so they get extra money right there. And they don't have to answer a lot of questions on various routers. As for disconnecting it when on the phone, that part probably makes sense because it removes an extra variable from the diagnosis.
I agree. The address he gives is for the company that publishes, among other things, EE Times and I think Tech Review. I'd love to see an article on this in EE Times.
Thanks, I forgot where I'd read about it previously. Now I feel dumb for not realizing I read about it here (duh).
I will admit that this works better than I expected from the video clips. But I think it's barely halfway towards the goal of personal optical camouflage. From what they describe, it requires an external display source, and applies a bluescreen style approach.
What they need to do is figure out a way to create a piece of clothing which *is* the display, and not merely a reflector or a bluescreen like what they have now. Maybe take this foldable display technology I've read about (mainly geared towards disposable displays), and attach it to fabric. Then make a uniform out of it. Then, you can determine the image behind the person and display it on the uniform.
They're already halfway there, since they can determine what's behind the person and display it on a special colored material. Now all they need is a fabric that can display images, and then they can transmit the background onto the uniform.
Then we're talking about optical camouflage.
Who knew Ferengi were so dense?
Actually, I read about some manufacturer of an external Firewire DVD-RW drive that made a piece of software for the Mac that would hack iDVD so that it would work with their drive.
It lasted until Apple found out and told them to stop altering their software. I can't recall the manufacturer, but I think I read about it in a MacWorld article last month.
One of the best Saturday Night Live shows I can remember was when you appeared on it as a host. I thought the skit of you at the Star Trek convention was excellent, BTW. Especially when you tore into the Trekkies who seem like the Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons.
Though your diatribe ("Get a life people") was brushed aside as the talk of the "Evil Kirk", what's your real opinion of the die hard fans? Granted many are a bit excessive, but do you appreciate the attention or do you find it annoying at all?
I have to agree on the KDE comment. At work, we have a version of KDE that runs on our RS/6000 workstations. I found it to be sluggish after a while and just seemed to be too feature-rich for work. So I ditched it and compiled a version of FVWM2 I downloaded and use that.
For basic development work, all I care about it some menus to launch terminals and a way to switch between sessions (I dunno what you call the feature of having multiple screens of windows).
Hell, I'd estimate less than 10% use KDE, another 10% use MWM or FVWM, and the rest use vanilla CDE. Sometimes the simpler solution is better in my opinion.
I use Windows at home just to take a break from UNIX at work.
At work I do microprocessor development on a $10K RS/6000 workstation (dual Power3 processors, 8GB of RAM) running AIX. So I spend most of my time in X doing design work (I go for the minimalistic FVWM2 for most of my work) and doing shell commands. For email, web, etc. I have a T21 Thinkpad running Win2K.
When I get home though, I just want to cruise the web, check my email, and fart around with some games. I don't want shell prompts or hassles like at work, I just want a simple Windows XP system to mess around with for an hour or 2 after work. Hell, after 8-12 hours in front of X, I just need a break (and a few system crashes every so often to remidn me I'm not at work). That being said though, I make sure to have Cygwin installed on my home PC and work laptop in case I need to get anything done, to makes things somewhat UNIX-ish.
I've screwed around with Linux at home, but I just felt it wasn't worth the hassle of installing, and plus it made me feel like I was back at work again.
I don't know, maybe I'll hit the middle road and settle down on a Mac one of these days though...
Apparently you've never been to an IBM site before. These sites have dozens or more buildings on them. Each building is numbered. Building 323 just happens to hold the fab.
You can read online their book Web Client Programming With Perl which has a chapter or two on LWP, which I've found very useful.
And on a related note, you can also read CGI Programming on the World Wide Web which covers the CGI side.
I may take a look at this LWP book, or I may juststick with what the first book I mentioned has. It's worked for me so far.
The primary reasons I pre-ordered the 4-DVD set were to see the extra footage, and also because only this one apparenty has DTS audio on it. So for those who like the audio quality of DTS, this one's for you.
IBM already has a microprocessor with a (albeit small) cluster of processor cores per chip. The IBM Power4 microprocessor has 2 cores per die, as shown in this picture. Current machines ship with 8 to 32-way systems, so divide by 4 to get the number of real chips. If you want to read more on the Power4, IBM dedicated an entire IBM Journal of Research and Development to the Power4, located here. The best article of the bunch is the one on circuit and physical design.
I agree this is a stupid patent, but I don't think it is quite as simple as "co.uk means the computer's in the UK". There's an extra portion to the patent which goes one step further, which is determining whether or not the digital content can be transmitted to the computer in it's current geo-political location. In essence, it sounds like a method to allow the implementation of national data filtering. For example, if it's illegal to view adult materials in a country, this patent covers any method which is used to determine that the client computer is in that nation, and then goes on to prevent the data from getting there.
Granted, that's my interpretation and I'm not a patent lawyer. On the flip side, I don't see how this patent could ever be used by someone, because I think it could be circumvented too easily. If you go solely on hostname, you could probably fake that out. If you're depending on the computer to verify this information via hardware or software, someone could get around this (like region-free DVD players).
I agree. I just grabbed their 2-CD album "The Altogether" to expand my collection with. The second CD has two really good songs, including a techno bagpipe song (Track 1) and a nice Dr. Who theme song remix (Track 5). I recommend this album if you like Orbital.
Judging by the two comments telling me I shouldn't be using == on floats, perhaps I should clarify that this is Skill, a scripting language used in VLSI design (I work in microprocessor design) using the Cadence Design System. It's based on a combination of C and Lisp/Scheme (i.e. list based with cdr, car, etc).
Under Skill, == is the only way to test equality as far as I know (according to the Skill Reference Manual published by Cadence). Skill doesn't have datatypes in general, so X can store a float or an int. Instead of float or int datatypes, it uses a numeric datatype. It doesn't matter. So you have no choice but to test equality on different numerical datatypes.
In my example, the problem is that I wanted to test what was going to be a float result against an integer multiple. Skill doesn't have typecasting though, so I can't do (int)X==1 or something like that. I suspect it auto-typecasted the int to a float (1.0 or something like that), which failed the test (1.0!=1.0000001). I can't get around it.
If you're hung up on ==, I should also point out that we ran into this when doing boundary conditions such as >,<,<=, and >=.
My latest encounter with this bug was with Skill (a Scheme/Lisp derivative used in the Cadence VLSI design toolset). I've seen it in other languages as well.
In my latest encounter, I'd do a bunch of calculation in a design automation program for us at work to use on a chip design, and I couldn't figure out why my numerical tests kept failing. I'd have some variable X, and do a bunch of functions on it like multiplication and division, then test to see if it was equal to 1. But none met the condition. When I printed out a bunch of the variables as floats, I saw that the test 1==1 was failing. I was confused to say the least. At first we suspected it was something like miscomparing a float to an int, but since Skill doesn't have floats or ints like that, it wasn't the problem.
Turns out that it was a precision issue. It was really testing to see if 1==1.0000000000001 or something like that, because the * and / functions stored very precise values in memory, more than I'd care about. Ever since then we've always had to do something like atof(sprintf("%.3f",X)) to get the value without the extra precision. Stupid and very annoying.
Actually, my coy of the soundtrack played fine in my IBM laptop at work running Win2K. I was using Winamp to play it and I couldn't see any problems. I saw the Episode II soundtrack mentioned in the article, and I was kind of confused by it. Did they only protect a small sample of the CDs, or what?
I got mine at a local Best Buy with a "special" collector's card inside, so I'm wondering if they got a different batch than some of the other record stores. Anybody else have one that worked from a regular store?
*SPOILER WARNING* If you read the novel about it, Annikan does have a step-brother named Owen. His mother remarries after he leaves Tatooine. Remember Uncle Owen from Episode IV, who Luke was living with? It really was his uncle, Annikan's step-brother.