Then you could take the output files from this compression scheme, which would be pretty uncompressable by traditional methods, and run THEM through the very same compression scheme, and make them smaller still. Repeat ad infinitum, and reduce all the data in the universe to one small file.
Better yet: To use your 10 bits example, feed every one of the 1024 combinations into the decompression program, and one of them is guaranteed to represent all the data in the universe. That's only a handful of combinations, we should be able to check them all before dinner. When someone decompresses the right 10-bit code, call me, since my phone number must be in the data somewhere.
Yeah, I was looking at an SV24 and some gel-cells to replace my aging laptop. Only problem is, the on-board video doesn't have a digital output, and I'll be damned if I'm gonna run an LCD panel with analog input.
ion. I used the plural "mirrors" to indicate that but I guess additional clarification was needed. Yes, I know CDs dangling from the inside mirror are dangerous and illegal. A friend of mine got an "obstructed view" ticket for his fuzzy dice. It was thrown out after he showed the judge 18 Polaroids of larger decorations hanging inside the city's cop cars.
Just as soon as I pay my stack of traffic tickets.;)
Seriously tho, I didn't think about this. The defendant has to appear in the court where the case is brought, which depends on the plaintiff's location. Muahahaha.
there's a whole bucketload of ignoramii who won't hear about this unless we tell them.
SPREAD THE WORD. Evangelize at your local record store. Bring it up in conversation. Dangle CDs from your car mirrors and prepare a 10-second explanation that you can deliver at stoplights. Tell your aunt blabbermouth, make sure she's got the facts straight, then let gossipnet take over.
Buy them and return them, once at every record store in town. Buy some online and return those too. Smack 'em with refused credit card payments for defective merchandise. Make a minor scene in the record store, and ask them to please warn future purchasers that it might not play in their device. (Then pull the clerk aside and apologize -- it's not their fault, after all)
UMich has one too. It's very cool, but the computers to support it are kept on raised flooring with monks that tend them. The cool thing about this project is that it uses commodity hardware as much as possible.
(Hey Andrew, remember that conversation we had about synchronizing the output of several 3d cards? Looks like they did it!)
So where's the energy density?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
The microwave energy beam, which could pass through rain and clouds, would have the intensity of about 20 percent of noontime sunlight...
Okay, so if this thing is so much weaker than sunlight, why wouldn't we just use terrestrial solar cells to receive existing sunlight rather than some receiving station for funky microwave power?
Come on! In order to be even slightly useful, the energy beam coming back would have to be terribly intense, which would make it terribly dangerous. Even noontime sunlight can be nasty, ask a suburban sidewalk ant or any pale-skinned swimwear-clad human.
We'll stand around and dance Thriller.
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· Score: 2
But seriously, we'll just have to wait until it overheats itself and blows up, taking him with it.
And owners of these cars will be YET ANOTHER class of consumers that get shat on by the recording industry's misguided attempts to alienate their customer base.
It's 2:00, I'm at work, and I'm karma-whoring. Yeah.
"I bought Tommy on vinyl LP the week it came out. When I got a car with a tape deck, I bought it again on tape so I could listen to it in the car. Now that my vehicle has a CD player, I'll be damned if I'm going to pay for that music a third time! Long live piracy!" -- My father, as Underture.mp3 downloaded in the next room.
Fuck the RIAA, the DMCA, and their little dog too! Honest people occasionally make copies too.
Oh, and my other pet peeve: When I, a loyal fan, buy a CD when it comes out, only to discover that a month later, a "collector's edition" is released with 3 additional tracks, the industry must be out of their mind to think they'll take me to the bank for a second time! Helloooo, Gnutella! Gooooodbye, customer loyalty!
I don't see why the mp3-cd players are so stupid. Years ago, I had a portable CD player that would buffer 40 seconds of audio for skip protection. If an mp3-cd player were equipped with the same size buffer, it should be able to hold about 400 seconds of audio without being able to see the disc.
I'm sure even insane rollerbladers coast for 20 seconds out of every 400, that should be plenty for the device to refill its buffer. Besides, RAM is cheap! An mp3-cd player should be able to spin the disc up when you select a song, buffer the whole song in RAM, spin the disc down, and save power while playing it.
I guess what I'm asking for is a solid-state player bolted to a CD-reading back end for mass storage.
How tricky is it to get at the drive in the Archos? Is it just a few screws, or a big hassle?
I'm asking because my laptop doesn't have USB, so I'd need to use the IDE interface if I wanted to access the Archos' drive while I was on the road.
I'm seriously considering purchasing an Archos Recordable, since I really want to make _stereo_ recordings of stuff, and none of my laptops have more than a mono mic input.
and it's portable, too. You can't take your cable modem out of town and use it in an El Cheapo motel room!
My MediaOne cable modem was horrible. For the 3 months I had it, it was literally down more often than it was up. I spent more time on dialup than on cable during those months, and I'm glad I didn't cancel my dialup ISP in anticipation!
When it was working, the speed was as advertised. No complaints there.
Then MediaOne took it upon themselves to portscan my machine. They found FTP open, which I'd set up the previous day so I could get to some files from a friend's house. Anonymous access was disabled, I made sure of that. They then proceeded to try standard guest and visitor logins, which of course didn't work. Then MediaOne (this is all in my logs, coming from their machines!) started guessing common words, one of which worked. Well duh, I hadn't exactly locked the box down like Fort Knox. I just wanted to set myself up a little remote file dump! So MediaOne gets in, notices I have some MP3s on my drive, and proceeds to yank the plug.
I get a nice letter in the mail a week later, saying I've been terminated for violating the service agreement. Because they hacked _my_ machine. The RIAA has like-minded friends already if they plan to move in this direction.
Needless to say, I've been on a POTS line with a v.90 modem ever since. The account goes with me when I travel, it's never down for more than 5 minutes at a time, and in the extremely rare event that my favorite POP is busy, there are two more within my local calling area. Cable just can't offer that reliability or portability.
Not that phone lines are perfect! The Ameritech bozo who installed my line "buried" it so poorly that it got hit by a lawn mower. The resulting splices in the line keep me down to about 33.6 most days, slower if it rains, but it always gets me to my mail, at least.
The city of East Detroit finally changed its name to Eastpointe, when the residents got sick of having their TAX FORMS delivered to Detroit instead. The school district is still called ED of course, giving rise (ha!) to all sorts of Viagra jokes.
I bought a used HP camera and had the same experience. They'll gladly ship me a CD, for a fee, but I don't have a credit card anyway. I bought the camera in cash and now I can't get drivers for it.
My HP CD-writer was even worse. Not only were there no drives, but they couldn't agree on whether it was capable of burning CD-Text information. Ahead, makers of Nero, insisted that the 7200 drive could do it, with the most recent drivers. HP denied the capability and the existence of any such drivers.
My GF's HP desktop came with a crappy Winmodem. No big deal that it was a Winmodem, she runs Windows and has CPU cycles to spare. But the line side of the modem's electronics wouldn't make a connection over her phone line, where my laptop's modem did just fine. HP blamed the telco, the telco blamed the computer. HP refused to exchange the modem for one that functioned as advertised.
Needless to say, whenever anyone near me talks about purchasing a [camera, scanner, computer, printer, toothbrush], I warn them severely against going with HP.
My experience with Panasonic has been better. I bought a used Toughbook and had some questions about drivers, system behavior, BIOS updates, and so on. I received a prompt and polite email back within 6 hours, containing concise answers to every one of my questions, and they didn't even care when or where I'd purchased the machine. I'll be a repeat Panasonic customer, for sure.
Video drivers are even worse. The last video card I owned with truly stable drivers was my Trident VESA Local Bus card that ran in my 486. Virtual screen, rock solid drivers, and simple installation. Every PCI or, heaven forbid, AGP card I've tried since then has had serious stability issues, and it's been nearly impossible to remove the drivers when switching to a different card. No more Matroxes or Diamonds for me.
Ricochet is already there, but their devices are dormant until someone buys the company. If someone could figure out a way to hack the Ricochet repeaters back into service in the interim, we'd have a huge network of free repeaters already sprinkled around metropolitan areas.
Well, the problem with ping times is going to get worse before it gets better. CSMA/CD networks are inherently horrible at that sort of thing, and 802.11b is a wireless implementation of the Ethernet CSMA/CD standard.
The way to lower latency is TDMA, and the problem is that it requires some sort of intelligence to figure out who gets which timeslots. Proxim's Symphony wireless LAN cards use TDMA to provide better support for streaming media and so on.
I stand behind 802.11b as an open standard, compared to Proxim's proprietary approach. But from a usability standpoint, the ATM-like TDMA approach is better. You're not likely to be an LPB if you're connecting through a NAN unless it implements some latency fixes. (In the interim, the Cisco/Aironet cards (and others?) support a reduced-preamble mode which cuts down on the latency of an 802.11b link.)
In order to make feasible NAN's with low latency, someone's going to have to figure out a way to allocate TDMA timeslots in an anarchic network. This gets really hairy when there are more nodes and bandwidth than timeslots, since a given timeslot might be reused several times across the geographic area across which your data travels. The intelligence to perform graceful time slot interchange, and manage the assignments to keep latency to a minimum for sensitive connections, won't be trivial.
I haven't personally tried this, but I'm about to start:
These folks have CD and/or tape decks in their cars, right? They drive to work just like most of the rest of us. I'm going to formulate my thoughts on the issues, write them down notecard-style, and then dictate a brief spoken-word piece explaining a bit of background, then my view on each.
I figure, an hour or two to come up with good points on the issues, another 20 minutes to outline them, 1-2 hours to record and edit the voice files. They don't have to be perfect. 10 minutes to burn the sucker, during which time I hand-write the jewel case label on nice stationery. Lick a stamp, wham bam, a week later they're listening to my intelligent(?) explanations of the issues during what would otherwise be wasted time.
From The Home Front, Issue 1, track listing:
1: Don't hum that tune, it's protected!
2: Hackers, today's Salem Witches.
3: Only outlaws will have privacy.
4: Love your freedom? Thank a vet. NO on SSSCA!
5: Vivaldi, the four seasons, spring. (instr.)
6: Protect our parks and woods, please!
7: Potholes on Interstate 94. (instr.)
8: Guest artist: Larry's Shocks And Struts
7: Until next time...
I don't know if it'll work, but it's certainly worth a shot. Maybe the inside of the jewel case insert could be a quick-reference to the various bills and issues, and my positions on them, and a very brief set of memory-jogging keywords as to why.
This is something uniquely hackish. Most constituents don't have CD burners yet, we have a few months before the mainstream lobbyists catch on. Hackers tend to be intelligent and a lot are well-spoken, this just might work.
I always wondered what the fuck circular polarization was. So you don't really need those curlicue antennae, you could just make two antennae, orient them 90 degrees from each other, and then set one a quarter wavelength behind the other, right?
There's a huge difference between nailed-up connections and packet-level switching. I mean, hell, a punched-down copper jumper is about as sophisticated as the "optical switches" they have now.
When we get optical logic that can examine packet headers at high speeds, we'll see some development. But for right now, the bottleneck is the silicon chip at the end of the strand of glass.
in Newark, NJ. Nobody was using it for data back then of course, but squeezing 1.544 megabits/sec onto a copper pair, in order to move voice circuits around, is nothing new.
I wish the Slashdot team knew a bit more about telecom, they'd accept fewer of these stories and say fewer stupid things about them. "Chronically overloaded backbone" my ass, there are millions of miles of dark fiber out there. The glass isn't the problem, it's the silicon, the greenbacks, and the red tape that make things suck.
Slashdot Mirror
Then you could take the output files from this compression scheme, which would be pretty uncompressable by traditional methods, and run THEM through the very same compression scheme, and make them smaller still. Repeat ad infinitum, and reduce all the data in the universe to one small file.
Better yet: To use your 10 bits example, feed every one of the 1024 combinations into the decompression program, and one of them is guaranteed to represent all the data in the universe. That's only a handful of combinations, we should be able to check them all before dinner. When someone decompresses the right 10-bit code, call me, since my phone number must be in the data somewhere.
Yeah, I was looking at an SV24 and some gel-cells to replace my aging laptop. Only problem is, the on-board video doesn't have a digital output, and I'll be damned if I'm gonna run an LCD panel with analog input.
You should check out the review of the FV24 motherboard and the review of the whole system.
Plunk a high-end PCI sound card in this baby, and you're all set. Also, 3.5" drives are way cheaper than 2.5", although not as shock-resistant.
ion. I used the plural "mirrors" to indicate that but I guess additional clarification was needed. Yes, I know CDs dangling from the inside mirror are dangerous and illegal. A friend of mine got an "obstructed view" ticket for his fuzzy dice. It was thrown out after he showed the judge 18 Polaroids of larger decorations hanging inside the city's cop cars.
Just as soon as I pay my stack of traffic tickets. ;)
Seriously tho, I didn't think about this. The defendant has to appear in the court where the case is brought, which depends on the plaintiff's location. Muahahaha.
there's a whole bucketload of ignoramii who won't hear about this unless we tell them.
SPREAD THE WORD. Evangelize at your local record store. Bring it up in conversation. Dangle CDs from your car mirrors and prepare a 10-second explanation that you can deliver at stoplights. Tell your aunt blabbermouth, make sure she's got the facts straight, then let gossipnet take over.
Buy them and return them, once at every record store in town. Buy some online and return those too. Smack 'em with refused credit card payments for defective merchandise. Make a minor scene in the record store, and ask them to please warn future purchasers that it might not play in their device. (Then pull the clerk aside and apologize -- it's not their fault, after all)
UMich has one too. It's very cool, but the computers to support it are kept on raised flooring with monks that tend them. The cool thing about this project is that it uses commodity hardware as much as possible.
(Hey Andrew, remember that conversation we had about synchronizing the output of several 3d cards? Looks like they did it!)
Okay, so if this thing is so much weaker than sunlight, why wouldn't we just use terrestrial solar cells to receive existing sunlight rather than some receiving station for funky microwave power?
Come on! In order to be even slightly useful, the energy beam coming back would have to be terribly intense, which would make it terribly dangerous. Even noontime sunlight can be nasty, ask a suburban sidewalk ant or any pale-skinned swimwear-clad human.
But seriously, we'll just have to wait until it overheats itself and blows up, taking him with it.
And owners of these cars will be YET ANOTHER class of consumers that get shat on by the recording industry's misguided attempts to alienate their customer base.
It's 2:00, I'm at work, and I'm karma-whoring. Yeah.
I wonder what Data runs?
Have you looked at the Terapin Mine? It looks like a general-purpose device if I've ever seen one!
"I bought Tommy on vinyl LP the week it came out. When I got a car with a tape deck, I bought it again on tape so I could listen to it in the car. Now that my vehicle has a CD player, I'll be damned if I'm going to pay for that music a third time! Long live piracy!" -- My father, as Underture.mp3 downloaded in the next room.
Fuck the RIAA, the DMCA, and their little dog too! Honest people occasionally make copies too.
Oh, and my other pet peeve: When I, a loyal fan, buy a CD when it comes out, only to discover that a month later, a "collector's edition" is released with 3 additional tracks, the industry must be out of their mind to think they'll take me to the bank for a second time! Helloooo, Gnutella! Gooooodbye, customer loyalty!
I don't see why the mp3-cd players are so stupid. Years ago, I had a portable CD player that would buffer 40 seconds of audio for skip protection. If an mp3-cd player were equipped with the same size buffer, it should be able to hold about 400 seconds of audio without being able to see the disc.
I'm sure even insane rollerbladers coast for 20 seconds out of every 400, that should be plenty for the device to refill its buffer. Besides, RAM is cheap! An mp3-cd player should be able to spin the disc up when you select a song, buffer the whole song in RAM, spin the disc down, and save power while playing it.
I guess what I'm asking for is a solid-state player bolted to a CD-reading back end for mass storage.
How tricky is it to get at the drive in the Archos? Is it just a few screws, or a big hassle?
I'm asking because my laptop doesn't have USB, so I'd need to use the IDE interface if I wanted to access the Archos' drive while I was on the road.
I'm seriously considering purchasing an Archos Recordable, since I really want to make _stereo_ recordings of stuff, and none of my laptops have more than a mono mic input.
and it's portable, too. You can't take your cable modem out of town and use it in an El Cheapo motel room!
My MediaOne cable modem was horrible. For the 3 months I had it, it was literally down more often than it was up. I spent more time on dialup than on cable during those months, and I'm glad I didn't cancel my dialup ISP in anticipation!
When it was working, the speed was as advertised. No complaints there.
Then MediaOne took it upon themselves to portscan my machine. They found FTP open, which I'd set up the previous day so I could get to some files from a friend's house. Anonymous access was disabled, I made sure of that. They then proceeded to try standard guest and visitor logins, which of course didn't work. Then MediaOne (this is all in my logs, coming from their machines!) started guessing common words, one of which worked. Well duh, I hadn't exactly locked the box down like Fort Knox. I just wanted to set myself up a little remote file dump! So MediaOne gets in, notices I have some MP3s on my drive, and proceeds to yank the plug.
I get a nice letter in the mail a week later, saying I've been terminated for violating the service agreement. Because they hacked _my_ machine. The RIAA has like-minded friends already if they plan to move in this direction.
Needless to say, I've been on a POTS line with a v.90 modem ever since. The account goes with me when I travel, it's never down for more than 5 minutes at a time, and in the extremely rare event that my favorite POP is busy, there are two more within my local calling area. Cable just can't offer that reliability or portability.
Not that phone lines are perfect! The Ameritech bozo who installed my line "buried" it so poorly that it got hit by a lawn mower. The resulting splices in the line keep me down to about 33.6 most days, slower if it rains, but it always gets me to my mail, at least.
The city of East Detroit finally changed its name to Eastpointe, when the residents got sick of having their TAX FORMS delivered to Detroit instead. The school district is still called ED of course, giving rise (ha!) to all sorts of Viagra jokes.
I bought a used HP camera and had the same experience. They'll gladly ship me a CD, for a fee, but I don't have a credit card anyway. I bought the camera in cash and now I can't get drivers for it.
My HP CD-writer was even worse. Not only were there no drives, but they couldn't agree on whether it was capable of burning CD-Text information. Ahead, makers of Nero, insisted that the 7200 drive could do it, with the most recent drivers. HP denied the capability and the existence of any such drivers.
My GF's HP desktop came with a crappy Winmodem. No big deal that it was a Winmodem, she runs Windows and has CPU cycles to spare. But the line side of the modem's electronics wouldn't make a connection over her phone line, where my laptop's modem did just fine. HP blamed the telco, the telco blamed the computer. HP refused to exchange the modem for one that functioned as advertised.
Needless to say, whenever anyone near me talks about purchasing a [camera, scanner, computer, printer, toothbrush], I warn them severely against going with HP.
My experience with Panasonic has been better. I bought a used Toughbook and had some questions about drivers, system behavior, BIOS updates, and so on. I received a prompt and polite email back within 6 hours, containing concise answers to every one of my questions, and they didn't even care when or where I'd purchased the machine. I'll be a repeat Panasonic customer, for sure.
Video drivers are even worse. The last video card I owned with truly stable drivers was my Trident VESA Local Bus card that ran in my 486. Virtual screen, rock solid drivers, and simple installation. Every PCI or, heaven forbid, AGP card I've tried since then has had serious stability issues, and it's been nearly impossible to remove the drivers when switching to a different card. No more Matroxes or Diamonds for me.
Ricochet is already there, but their devices are dormant until someone buys the company. If someone could figure out a way to hack the Ricochet repeaters back into service in the interim, we'd have a huge network of free repeaters already sprinkled around metropolitan areas.
Well, the problem with ping times is going to get worse before it gets better. CSMA/CD networks are inherently horrible at that sort of thing, and 802.11b is a wireless implementation of the Ethernet CSMA/CD standard.
The way to lower latency is TDMA, and the problem is that it requires some sort of intelligence to figure out who gets which timeslots. Proxim's Symphony wireless LAN cards use TDMA to provide better support for streaming media and so on.
I stand behind 802.11b as an open standard, compared to Proxim's proprietary approach. But from a usability standpoint, the ATM-like TDMA approach is better. You're not likely to be an LPB if you're connecting through a NAN unless it implements some latency fixes. (In the interim, the Cisco/Aironet cards (and others?) support a reduced-preamble mode which cuts down on the latency of an 802.11b link.)
In order to make feasible NAN's with low latency, someone's going to have to figure out a way to allocate TDMA timeslots in an anarchic network. This gets really hairy when there are more nodes and bandwidth than timeslots, since a given timeslot might be reused several times across the geographic area across which your data travels. The intelligence to perform graceful time slot interchange, and manage the assignments to keep latency to a minimum for sensitive connections, won't be trivial.
I haven't personally tried this, but I'm about to start:
These folks have CD and/or tape decks in their cars, right? They drive to work just like most of the rest of us. I'm going to formulate my thoughts on the issues, write them down notecard-style, and then dictate a brief spoken-word piece explaining a bit of background, then my view on each.
I figure, an hour or two to come up with good points on the issues, another 20 minutes to outline them, 1-2 hours to record and edit the voice files. They don't have to be perfect. 10 minutes to burn the sucker, during which time I hand-write the jewel case label on nice stationery. Lick a stamp, wham bam, a week later they're listening to my intelligent(?) explanations of the issues during what would otherwise be wasted time.
From The Home Front, Issue 1, track listing:
1: Don't hum that tune, it's protected!
2: Hackers, today's Salem Witches.
3: Only outlaws will have privacy.
4: Love your freedom? Thank a vet. NO on SSSCA!
5: Vivaldi, the four seasons, spring. (instr.)
6: Protect our parks and woods, please!
7: Potholes on Interstate 94. (instr.)
8: Guest artist: Larry's Shocks And Struts
7: Until next time...
I don't know if it'll work, but it's certainly worth a shot. Maybe the inside of the jewel case insert could be a quick-reference to the various bills and issues, and my positions on them, and a very brief set of memory-jogging keywords as to why.
This is something uniquely hackish. Most constituents don't have CD burners yet, we have a few months before the mainstream lobbyists catch on. Hackers tend to be intelligent and a lot are well-spoken, this just might work.
I don't personally have any experience with Erbium-doped fiber amplifiers, but someone here must...
Do EDFA's clobber polarization or not?
I always wondered what the fuck circular polarization was. So you don't really need those curlicue antennae, you could just make two antennae, orient them 90 degrees from each other, and then set one a quarter wavelength behind the other, right?
Yeah, mod BOTH of those up.
There's a huge difference between nailed-up connections and packet-level switching. I mean, hell, a punched-down copper jumper is about as sophisticated as the "optical switches" they have now.
When we get optical logic that can examine packet headers at high speeds, we'll see some development. But for right now, the bottleneck is the silicon chip at the end of the strand of glass.
in Newark, NJ. Nobody was using it for data back then of course, but squeezing 1.544 megabits/sec onto a copper pair, in order to move voice circuits around, is nothing new.
I wish the Slashdot team knew a bit more about telecom, they'd accept fewer of these stories and say fewer stupid things about them. "Chronically overloaded backbone" my ass, there are millions of miles of dark fiber out there. The glass isn't the problem, it's the silicon, the greenbacks, and the red tape that make things suck.