...And if you got proficient at this -- tapping the receiver hook ten times per second -- then you were certain to kick ass on Konami's Track and Field...
On a regular US land line, the incoming signal that sets the phone ringing is 90 Volts peak-to-peak. This voltage more or less drives the coils on the ringer directly. Because it's a genuine electromagnetic affair, it sucks down tons of current -- far more than you're going to get out of a puny cell phone battery running through an inverter.
You're probably better off just playing a sound sample of an old-style ringer.
I watched the "progress" of Xanadu (later renamed Open Transmedia) from a large-ish distance for some 15 years. Nelson's central idea of "transclusion" -- to seamlessly and dynamically incorporate, within your work, any segment from any version of any other work (which itself may incorporate transclusions) -- was and still is very interesting. The World-Wide Web doesn't even begin to approach the power and flexibility of Nelson's model.
But always present within Nelson's talks was this pernicious issue of royalties. The person who writes an original work and places it on the Open Transmedia network could demand to receive a royalty every time someone read it, or when transcluded segments of it were read, as part of another document. When you take into account that transclusions can themselves contain transclusions, with no nesting limit or limits against circular references, it's easy to see that the billing algorithms and infrastructure alone was effectively an insoluble problem. The intractibility of the problem, along with Nelson's adamance on the point, is what kept me from investigating Open Transmedia more closely. I had always felt that, if Nelson had simply dropped the royalty "requirement", Open Transmedia would have become a hell of a lot simpler, and it might exist today.
The other thing that held Xanadu back was Nelson's persistent refusal to demonstrate what he claimed he had working in the lab. As near as I can tell (which is another way of my saying, "This is a wild guess"), Nelson hoped to earn money from patents on Xanadu's mechanisms and implementation, and feared early disclosure would reveal enough that potential rivals would be able to hack together a competing implementation before his system was complete. (Not an unreasonable position to take, especially given Microsoft's history of crufting together half-assed clone products and rushing them out the door to gain market share.) Despite what he may have had working in the lab, the popular perception gradually became that he had nothing.
Writing is Nelson's principal vocation, so it's easy to see why the issue of royalties and compensation was so important to him. It's my opinion that, had he been a bit more altruistic in Open Transmedia's design, it would exist today, and the Web would be a much more flexible, powerful medium.
Understand that this is solely my opinion, based largely on the relatively coarse, sporadic information I've collected over the years. There's a hell of a lot more detail here which I freely admit I'm missing.
By the way, Nelson hasn't been completely idle since Xanadu. Check out ZigZag sometime. You will either find it intensely fascinating, or completely confusing (I myself often zig-zag between the two views when thinking about ZigZag).
Despite the fact that, "contracts should be respected," and "R&D investments should be protected," this is still fairly wacked. But it's not nearly as wacked as Monsanto Terminator seeds. Do a Google search on it.
Intellectual "property" needs a fundamental re-think.
Given G4's announced program, Girls Gone Wired, I doubt G4 management has the intellect to recognize that such a program could actually work (product placement opportunities, human interest, leverages known formula -- exactly the sort of "safe" thing Hollywood producers like).
You forgot 'Leet Eye for the Lame Guy, where five gaming experts -- specializing in the fields of Strategy and Tactics, Hardware (product placement opportunity), System Configuration, Culture, and Health -- all descend on a llama, retrofit his system and connection and give him a foundation of m4d 5|<1llz to improve his game.
I must agree. My mother has no computer, and is starting to miss out on communications with the various groups she's a member of because they're all moving to email. But with all the malware floating around out there, there is simply no fscking way I was going to set her up with a Windows-based box. I've been flirting with the idea of creating a mom-ified Linux box for her, locked down and remotely administratable, but the idea of explaining multiple times why Linux won't run the copy of Quicken she just bought didn't appeal to me.
A Mac would have been nearly ideal, but I dismissed it because it was simply too expensive. That barrier has now been removed.
My mom may be getting her first computer this year.
The entire world population could live in Texas comfortably, and each family could have a relatively large plot of land,
Uh, no. Do the math.
Texas is 267,000 square miles. At 640 acres to the square mile, this yields 170,880,000 acres. There are 43560 square feet to an acre.
Current population of the Earth is estimated at somewhere north of 6.4 billion people. So, cramming 6,400,000,000 people on to 170,880,000 acres of land means every person gets roughly 1160 square feet to play with (completely ignoring, of course, the square footage needed for transportation, utilities, power generation, sewage treatment, etc. to serve all those people). Assuming you define a family as being four people, that's a whopping 1/10th of an acre.
Whoop-de-shit.
At our current level of technological and social development, it is ludicrous to believe any such thing could work.
They fobid women from having more than one child and force millions of Chineese women to have abortions. [... ]
I'm a white male, so clearly I'm about to offend the fairer half the population, but... How would you suggest China deal with its population explosion? A major news story recently highlighted the fact that China has just given birth to its 1,300,000,000th citizen. 1.3 billion people has very real consequences in terms of basic resource consumption (food, clean water, fuel/energy, etc.). China saw that, if they didn't do something, they were going to have very, very nasty problems down the line. So they're trying to get a handle on their population growth.
We who sit in our comfortably heated homes with an oil-guzzling SUV in the driveway and broadband internet going to our PDAs may tut-tut China's "barbaric" approach. But, in the final analysis, the only way to get the population count under control is to stop reproducing. How best to accomplish this? Government-issued procreation licenses? Mass sterilzation? File everyone into Carousel on their 30th birthday?
It's an icky problem, as it runs counter to our primal instincts. China's solution may not be the best, but then neither are any of the others. At the very least, they should be given some credit for having the courage to address the problem at all.
First, this is not an x86 processor they're talking about (though it's quite natural to assume that, given we're talking about Intel). This is one of Intel's X-Scale embedded processors, which is an ARM variant.
Second, the "security" features on the chip were not specified by Intel, they were specified by the ARM consortium. ARM merely establishes the uniform copy protection standard. A vendor may include it in their ARM offerings at their option.
These processors are targeted for use in "smart" phones. The copy protection features were demanded by the cell phone carriers, which in turn were demanded by their "content" partners who are looking to sell -- or worse, rent -- you copy-protected ringtones, UI skins, music clips, and movie previews for usurious sums.
Personally, I'd stick with the "stupid" phones for the time being and avoid all this childish rubbish.
Does anybody else picture "Dr. Orpheus" from the Venture Bros. cartoon when you read about this guy? [... ]
I think that's a disservice to Dr. Orpheus. Sollog just flails incoherently, whereas Orpheus actually delivers the paranormal goods (and has a kick-ass wardrobe as well).
(For those who have no idea what we're talking about, fire up your TiVo or equivalent and start recording The Venture Bros., part of Cartoon Network's Adult Swim lineup.)
If journalist A honestly thinks Halo sucked and journalists B, C and D think Halo is great, who is to say who is right? These are opinions, not facts, that we are working with here, [... ]
Um, what? There are plenty of metrics on which computer games may be evaluated that aren't subjective.
Your example of Halo is well-taken. I bought Halo for the PC and, overall, I would rate it as an average game. Why? Because its technical execution on the PC was quite flawed. Despite having a dual-1GHz Pentium 3 system with half a gig of RAM and an nVidia GeForce 5900, the framerate and responsiveness of the game was chunky as all hell. It's not like the geometry was all that complex, or that the machine was a slouch.
Are the graphics smooth? Are the controls responsive? Is the network play (if present) smooth and tolerant of dropped or delayed packets? Does it require unusual system specs? Does it benefit from custom peripherals (e.g. joystick, steering wheel, gaming pad, etc.)? Does it demand you place the CD in the drive to play it? Does it require you to install invasive spyware and provide personally identifiable information before the game will deign to run? These are all objective criteria, and are crucial for evaluating the purchase of a $50.00 product.
Hi! I'm Joe Beets! Say, what chance does a returning deceased war veteran have for that good-paying job, more sugar, and the free mule you've been dreaming of? Well, think it over.
Then take off your shoes.
Now you can see how increased spending opportunities means harder work for everyone, and more of it, too! So do your part today, Joe. Join in with millions of your neighbors and turn in your shoes.
Seconded. People with deep low-level experience remain in high demand, especially in the embedded space. I can't speak to the job market where he lives, but if this guy has done both low- and high-level development, there's a lot of good-paying work out there just waiting for him. And if he's really good and disciplined, he can probably find someone willing to let him work over the net, with only occasional visits to the office.
Well, if you're going to quote the entire sketch, then you also need to link to the CG video (alternate, evil IFilm link) that the developers of Summoner crufted together just for the hell of it.
Note: Uttering, "Where's the Cheetos," with the same accent and inflection as in the sketch is grounds for forcible expulsion from many gaming rooms.
Impossible Mission is just crying out for a modern day remake. [... ]
I've thought about this off and on for the past few years and, every time I do, I find myself confounded by the fact that Impossible Mission was inherently a 2D third-person game. You can see all the other robots in the room, wait patiently, and observe their motion patterns so you can plan your attack. If you were to attempt to write Impossible Mission using a super-deluxe vertex-shaded first-person engine, the character of the game would change completely.
Further, recall that the player in Impossible Mission was unarmed. You couldn't shoot the robots; you could only evade them. This is considerably easier to do from a third-person perspective than a first-person one. Jumping over some of the robots required a fair amount of finesse and good timing. (Without stereoscopy, you can't really judge distances all that well from a first-person perspective.)
So, yeah, an Impossible Mission remake would be great... If only we could figure out a way for the production values to keep from interefering with the game.
Schwab
Um... How Are You Going to Send It Anywhere?
on
7 Megapixel Camera Phone
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Has anyone checked the current cell carrier-imposed limits on MMS messages? Last I heard it was something below 200KiB (and probably as little as 75KiB). Now, unless you're taking a picture of an evenly-lit solid white wall, there aren't many seven megapixel images I can think of that will crunch down into 200KiB.
So unless the cell carriers are going to allow the phone to hook directly up to a PC (fat chance; they can't bill for that), seven megapixels seems a trifle huge for a phone.
Note to SkyWeb PR division: I downloaded and saw your video. Some notes:
Hire professional voice talent. Unless you have an employee with an exceptionally talented voice, you're better off farming this out. The result will be superior. (I'd nominate Harry Shearer, but then I've got an obscure sense of humor.)
Drop the soundtrack. Using the theme to the film Gone With The Wind is entirely inappropriate. (Gone With The Wind enjoys almost religious status in the deep south, and they will be deeply offended by its use as the background to a corporate promotional video. Hell, I'm an $(GOD)less heathen Californian, and I thought it was tacky.)
Get better animation. It's okay as it stands, but it might be cooler if you overlaid a synthetic SkyWeb system on top of a real city, so planners can get a more accurate feel for how it might impact their cityscape.
I find that the people who most strongly advocate sender-side blocking, like HashCash, invariably are network administrators who don't want "their" bandwidth wasted. Guess what: I'm a customer. It's my bandwidth. I really don't give a fuck if spammers are violating the sanctity of your precious network. [... ]
That's nice as far as it goes, but I think you may be failing to consider what happens behind that Bayesian filter hiding all the spam from you. Your bandwidth is being consumed by spammers; you just can't see it right now.
Unless something is done at the head end to choke spam off at the source, you may one day wake up to discover that half your bandwidth is being consumed with spam, which is dilligently and silently being thrown away by your email client with the Bayesian Filter Ultra-Deluxe.
The parent post is currently modded as "Troll". I must respectfully differ, owning to the fact that the Condor, indeed, looks like a toaster.
I first saw one of these things sitting on an end-cap in Fry's. The very first thought that ran through my head was, "It looks like a toaster." While I was poking at it to see what features it had, a person from behind me remarked, "What is that, a toaster?"
So, just for my own personal amusement, I stood there for a few minutes watching passers-by react to the Condor. I didn't approach or prompt anyone; I just stood idly by watching people. Of those who said anything, the overwhelming majority of them noted a resemblence to a toaster.
So, it looks like a toaster. And, personally, I think that's kinda cool. I think FIC should run with it.
15 devices on a 320MBps bus vs 12 devices each on their own 150MBps bus...
Ah, but is it really? It all depends on how the SATA board vendor implemented the buffers and channel multiplexers on the card. And you have no way of knowing what maximum throughput is without doing extensive benchmarks on the card. It's entirely possible for there to be a single 150MB/sec bottleneck on the card, allowing the vendor to claim 150MB/sec throughput, but severely limiting aggregate performance. Higher-end cards almost certainly won't suffer from such braindamage, but what about lower-end, more cheaply designed cards?
...a better comparison would of [sic] been a 3ware/broadcom RaidCore/Lsi logic SATA controllers (3ware and LSI has 12 port cards) PCI-X 64bit 66mhz and up
And how much do those controllers cost, relative to a SCSI-320 controller?
3Ware 8506-12 SATA controller (12-port): USD$628.00
I'm not saying this proves anything, other than more performance costs more money. PCI-X all by itself puts you in the upper stratosphere. But if you're trying to use SATA to achieve the same performance level as SCSI, you'll probably find you're not saving that much money.
Slashdot Mirror
...And if you got proficient at this -- tapping the receiver hook ten times per second -- then you were certain to kick ass on Konami's Track and Field...
Schwab
On a regular US land line, the incoming signal that sets the phone ringing is 90 Volts peak-to-peak. This voltage more or less drives the coils on the ringer directly. Because it's a genuine electromagnetic affair, it sucks down tons of current -- far more than you're going to get out of a puny cell phone battery running through an inverter.
You're probably better off just playing a sound sample of an old-style ringer.
Schwab
I watched the "progress" of Xanadu (later renamed Open Transmedia) from a large-ish distance for some 15 years. Nelson's central idea of "transclusion" -- to seamlessly and dynamically incorporate, within your work, any segment from any version of any other work (which itself may incorporate transclusions) -- was and still is very interesting. The World-Wide Web doesn't even begin to approach the power and flexibility of Nelson's model.
But always present within Nelson's talks was this pernicious issue of royalties. The person who writes an original work and places it on the Open Transmedia network could demand to receive a royalty every time someone read it, or when transcluded segments of it were read, as part of another document. When you take into account that transclusions can themselves contain transclusions, with no nesting limit or limits against circular references, it's easy to see that the billing algorithms and infrastructure alone was effectively an insoluble problem. The intractibility of the problem, along with Nelson's adamance on the point, is what kept me from investigating Open Transmedia more closely. I had always felt that, if Nelson had simply dropped the royalty "requirement", Open Transmedia would have become a hell of a lot simpler, and it might exist today.
The other thing that held Xanadu back was Nelson's persistent refusal to demonstrate what he claimed he had working in the lab. As near as I can tell (which is another way of my saying, "This is a wild guess"), Nelson hoped to earn money from patents on Xanadu's mechanisms and implementation, and feared early disclosure would reveal enough that potential rivals would be able to hack together a competing implementation before his system was complete. (Not an unreasonable position to take, especially given Microsoft's history of crufting together half-assed clone products and rushing them out the door to gain market share.) Despite what he may have had working in the lab, the popular perception gradually became that he had nothing.
Writing is Nelson's principal vocation, so it's easy to see why the issue of royalties and compensation was so important to him. It's my opinion that, had he been a bit more altruistic in Open Transmedia's design, it would exist today, and the Web would be a much more flexible, powerful medium.
Understand that this is solely my opinion, based largely on the relatively coarse, sporadic information I've collected over the years. There's a hell of a lot more detail here which I freely admit I'm missing.
By the way, Nelson hasn't been completely idle since Xanadu. Check out ZigZag sometime. You will either find it intensely fascinating, or completely confusing (I myself often zig-zag between the two views when thinking about ZigZag).
Schwab
Despite the fact that, "contracts should be respected," and "R&D investments should be protected," this is still fairly wacked. But it's not nearly as wacked as Monsanto Terminator seeds. Do a Google search on it.
Intellectual "property" needs a fundamental re-think.
Schwab
Given G4's announced program, Girls Gone Wired, I doubt G4 management has the intellect to recognize that such a program could actually work (product placement opportunities, human interest, leverages known formula -- exactly the sort of "safe" thing Hollywood producers like).
Schwab
That would be Portal and, yes, it is a complete and utter waste of 30 minutes of air time.
Schwab
You forgot 'Leet Eye for the Lame Guy, where five gaming experts -- specializing in the fields of Strategy and Tactics, Hardware (product placement opportunity), System Configuration, Culture, and Health -- all descend on a llama, retrofit his system and connection and give him a foundation of m4d 5|<1llz to improve his game.
Yes, I have been thinking about this...
Schwab
I must agree. My mother has no computer, and is starting to miss out on communications with the various groups she's a member of because they're all moving to email. But with all the malware floating around out there, there is simply no fscking way I was going to set her up with a Windows-based box. I've been flirting with the idea of creating a mom-ified Linux box for her, locked down and remotely administratable, but the idea of explaining multiple times why Linux won't run the copy of Quicken she just bought didn't appeal to me.
A Mac would have been nearly ideal, but I dismissed it because it was simply too expensive. That barrier has now been removed.
My mom may be getting her first computer this year.
Schwab
Uh, no. Do the math.
Texas is 267,000 square miles. At 640 acres to the square mile, this yields 170,880,000 acres. There are 43560 square feet to an acre.
Current population of the Earth is estimated at somewhere north of 6.4 billion people. So, cramming 6,400,000,000 people on to 170,880,000 acres of land means every person gets roughly 1160 square feet to play with (completely ignoring, of course, the square footage needed for transportation, utilities, power generation, sewage treatment, etc. to serve all those people). Assuming you define a family as being four people, that's a whopping 1/10th of an acre.
Whoop-de-shit.
At our current level of technological and social development, it is ludicrous to believe any such thing could work.
Schwab
I'm a white male, so clearly I'm about to offend the fairer half the population, but... How would you suggest China deal with its population explosion? A major news story recently highlighted the fact that China has just given birth to its 1,300,000,000th citizen. 1.3 billion people has very real consequences in terms of basic resource consumption (food, clean water, fuel/energy, etc.). China saw that, if they didn't do something, they were going to have very, very nasty problems down the line. So they're trying to get a handle on their population growth.
We who sit in our comfortably heated homes with an oil-guzzling SUV in the driveway and broadband internet going to our PDAs may tut-tut China's "barbaric" approach. But, in the final analysis, the only way to get the population count under control is to stop reproducing. How best to accomplish this? Government-issued procreation licenses? Mass sterilzation? File everyone into Carousel on their 30th birthday?
It's an icky problem, as it runs counter to our primal instincts. China's solution may not be the best, but then neither are any of the others. At the very least, they should be given some credit for having the courage to address the problem at all.
Donning asbestos shorts,
Schwab
Second, the "security" features on the chip were not specified by Intel, they were specified by the ARM consortium. ARM merely establishes the uniform copy protection standard. A vendor may include it in their ARM offerings at their option.
These processors are targeted for use in "smart" phones. The copy protection features were demanded by the cell phone carriers, which in turn were demanded by their "content" partners who are looking to sell -- or worse, rent -- you copy-protected ringtones, UI skins, music clips, and movie previews for usurious sums.
Personally, I'd stick with the "stupid" phones for the time being and avoid all this childish rubbish.
Schwab
I think that's a disservice to Dr. Orpheus. Sollog just flails incoherently, whereas Orpheus actually delivers the paranormal goods (and has a kick-ass wardrobe as well).
(For those who have no idea what we're talking about, fire up your TiVo or equivalent and start recording The Venture Bros. , part of Cartoon Network's Adult Swim lineup.)
Schwab
Um, what? There are plenty of metrics on which computer games may be evaluated that aren't subjective.
Your example of Halo is well-taken. I bought Halo for the PC and, overall, I would rate it as an average game. Why? Because its technical execution on the PC was quite flawed. Despite having a dual-1GHz Pentium 3 system with half a gig of RAM and an nVidia GeForce 5900, the framerate and responsiveness of the game was chunky as all hell. It's not like the geometry was all that complex, or that the machine was a slouch.
Are the graphics smooth? Are the controls responsive? Is the network play (if present) smooth and tolerant of dropped or delayed packets? Does it require unusual system specs? Does it benefit from custom peripherals (e.g. joystick, steering wheel, gaming pad, etc.)? Does it demand you place the CD in the drive to play it? Does it require you to install invasive spyware and provide personally identifiable information before the game will deign to run? These are all objective criteria, and are crucial for evaluating the purchase of a $50.00 product.
Schwab
Hi! I'm Joe Beets! Say, what chance does a returning deceased war veteran have for that good-paying job, more sugar, and the free mule you've been dreaming of? Well, think it over.
Then take off your shoes.
Now you can see how increased spending opportunities means harder work for everyone, and more of it, too! So do your part today, Joe. Join in with millions of your neighbors and turn in your shoes.
(From the Firesign Theater)
Seconded. People with deep low-level experience remain in high demand, especially in the embedded space. I can't speak to the job market where he lives, but if this guy has done both low- and high-level development, there's a lot of good-paying work out there just waiting for him. And if he's really good and disciplined, he can probably find someone willing to let him work over the net, with only occasional visits to the office.
Schwab
Well, if you're going to quote the entire sketch, then you also need to link to the CG video (alternate, evil IFilm link) that the developers of Summoner crufted together just for the hell of it.
Note: Uttering, "Where's the Cheetos," with the same accent and inflection as in the sketch is grounds for forcible expulsion from many gaming rooms.
Schwab
I've thought about this off and on for the past few years and, every time I do, I find myself confounded by the fact that Impossible Mission was inherently a 2D third-person game. You can see all the other robots in the room, wait patiently, and observe their motion patterns so you can plan your attack. If you were to attempt to write Impossible Mission using a super-deluxe vertex-shaded first-person engine, the character of the game would change completely.
Further, recall that the player in Impossible Mission was unarmed. You couldn't shoot the robots; you could only evade them. This is considerably easier to do from a third-person perspective than a first-person one. Jumping over some of the robots required a fair amount of finesse and good timing. (Without stereoscopy, you can't really judge distances all that well from a first-person perspective.)
So, yeah, an Impossible Mission remake would be great... If only we could figure out a way for the production values to keep from interefering with the game.
Schwab
Has anyone checked the current cell carrier-imposed limits on MMS messages? Last I heard it was something below 200KiB (and probably as little as 75KiB). Now, unless you're taking a picture of an evenly-lit solid white wall, there aren't many seven megapixel images I can think of that will crunch down into 200KiB.
So unless the cell carriers are going to allow the phone to hook directly up to a PC (fat chance; they can't bill for that), seven megapixels seems a trifle huge for a phone.
Schwab
Note to SkyWeb PR division: I downloaded and saw your video. Some notes:
Basically, it needs better production values.
Schwab
It looks cool, but what happens if your car breaks down? There doesn't appear to be an emergency exit walkway.
But that may be moot: If your car breaks down or comes to an abrupt halt, do you get smashed by the car behind you?
Make no mistake; I think it's cool as hell. But I'd want to know how their system, "handles exceptions."
Schwab
That's nice as far as it goes, but I think you may be failing to consider what happens behind that Bayesian filter hiding all the spam from you. Your bandwidth is being consumed by spammers; you just can't see it right now.
Unless something is done at the head end to choke spam off at the source, you may one day wake up to discover that half your bandwidth is being consumed with spam, which is dilligently and silently being thrown away by your email client with the Bayesian Filter Ultra-Deluxe.
Schwab
The parent post is currently modded as "Troll". I must respectfully differ, owning to the fact that the Condor, indeed, looks like a toaster.
I first saw one of these things sitting on an end-cap in Fry's. The very first thought that ran through my head was, "It looks like a toaster." While I was poking at it to see what features it had, a person from behind me remarked, "What is that, a toaster?"
So, just for my own personal amusement, I stood there for a few minutes watching passers-by react to the Condor. I didn't approach or prompt anyone; I just stood idly by watching people. Of those who said anything, the overwhelming majority of them noted a resemblence to a toaster.
So, it looks like a toaster. And, personally, I think that's kinda cool. I think FIC should run with it.
Schwab
Uh, Curious George W.? You won the election. Fair and square this time. So settle down...
Schwab
Ah, but is it really? It all depends on how the SATA board vendor implemented the buffers and channel multiplexers on the card. And you have no way of knowing what maximum throughput is without doing extensive benchmarks on the card. It's entirely possible for there to be a single 150MB/sec bottleneck on the card, allowing the vendor to claim 150MB/sec throughput, but severely limiting aggregate performance. Higher-end cards almost certainly won't suffer from such braindamage, but what about lower-end, more cheaply designed cards?
Schwab
And how much do those controllers cost, relative to a SCSI-320 controller?
(Source: Pricewatch)
I'm not saying this proves anything, other than more performance costs more money. PCI-X all by itself puts you in the upper stratosphere. But if you're trying to use SATA to achieve the same performance level as SCSI, you'll probably find you're not saving that much money.
Schwab