I've consulted for video applications for a while now, and I found the best solution is:
* Relatively fast PC - Athlon XP1800+ or faster roughly.
* Decent video in card - ATI All-In-Wonder Card (even the non-Radeon AIWs are good for this).
* Good DVD Burner - Pioneer DVR-105 or DVR-A05 that burns DVD-R. Don't worry about the +/- debate, -R media is cheaper and has virtually the same compatibility as +R.
* Easy software - Sonic MyDVD is great software that you can capture from and burn to DVD in one app. Plus, if you buy the A05 above it usually comes with this software in a bundle.
* (the trick) Solid long-lasting archival media - Mitsui Gold Archive DVD-R for longevity.
I cannot stress the last one enough. It's so easy to get a great system only to flounder on the choice of media because the goal is to keep the videos. The best DVD-R media generally are Mitsui, Verbatim, and TDK. I wouldn't trust anything else. Just capture in 640x480, and you can burn up to two hours at a time. If you want to get really fancy, you can delve into more advanced software, cut bitrates to get additional time, and do ultra slick menus.
You do understand there is a whole other world outside the borders of the USA that is successfull Social Democracy (virtually EVERYONE else). Not everyone believes that CoOperation is unworkable. Some of us get by very well with collectivism. Further, Social Democracies (like Canada for instance..) is Socially Progressive with Freedom most would envy.
Canada has freedom most would envy? Give me a break. The Canadian tax rate is at least 20% higher rate if you include sales and additional income taxes than most of the US (tax free day is at the end of June in Canada vs. April in the US), and salaries are 30-50% lower when adjusted for currency differences. Canada's unemployment rate is consistently at least 3% more than that of the US and its per-capita productivity is 2/3 that of the US. The Canadian health care system is buckling under the pressure of shrinking budgets to the point where it takes months and sometimes over a year to see specialists or to get necessary surgeries. Education is really not that much better than most places in the US (e.g. granting HS diplomas in Nova Scotia even though the kids don't pass basic english and math exams). A Canadian gun registry has cost taxpayers over a billion dollars is still not working and has not prevented the crimes it intended to prevent and likely never will. Not only that, but the Auditor General has claimed that there are over 34000 illegal immigrants with deportation orders that the Canadian government has no clue as to there whereabouts. (And you're surprised about 9/11?). The city of Edmonton, Alberta, wrote 200,000 speeding tickets in 2001 for a total of $14,000,000 in revenue through automated enforcement (that's an average of one ticket for every three people per year) with no corresponding reduction in traffic fatalities - making it a money grab and a tool for the scofflaws with money to continue speeding and endangering people.
In case you didn't know, there is a hefty 59 cent per CD tax because the poor Canadian musicians who can't play worth crap can have their interests represented by associations representing music most Canadians don't want to listen to and redistribute the money to them supposedly. Presumption of guilt before innocence, right? Of course, those protections don't extend to folks making software that can be copied onto CDs, but hey, Canada is more fair, right?
Not only is your opinion uninformed, it is obvious you have never lived or worked in Canada. Social democracies encourage people to rely on the government for everything instead of themselves, particularly when it comes to what's right and wrong in IP law. Not to say the US IP law is great, but it sure doesn't get as rosy as you'd like to think elsewhere.
No, not if they fit. It seems like a ridiculous assertion.
Yet this is precisely the same problem we have here with VFP and WINE. Erosion of rights in using a product. Maybe in future EULAs, Microsoft will prevent the use of the install CD case to hold open doors in offices with BSD servers.
The industries that exploit aspects of human nature or vital necessity are the ones that are the most successful. This is why rebates are work. Companies know that people are typically lazy and don't fill out the rebate forms. People make mistakes. Mail gets lost. Someone fails to send in an original receipt. There's only a certain percentage of these that get fulfilled, which means the companies pocket the difference.
Then there are the deals that are "too good to be true" like the $20 product - $20 rebate, and you end up paying the sales tax. Who gives away free product? Let's face it - people are looking for the best deal, but can you with any reliability get something for nothing? There should be some alarm bells going off.
In addition, the civil liability for non-fulfillment is minimal for the company offering the rebate and/or the fulfillment house, because they are in another state, or a lawsuit becomes more trouble than it's worth for the consumer. Of course, this isn't the case for large-scale issues, but organizations like the FTC are typically slow to act and/or have a full plate with other more serious cases.
In short, the more people tolerate rebate programs, the more they will proliferate. You will need skills and time to be able to get the money back that you would've had in your pocket. It's no skin off a company's back. But it's money out of your pocket.
Oh, and btw, I sent in a rebate for two Lexar memory sticks, but - surprise - they only processed my rebate for one, even though I highlighted the quantity of 2 on my Amazon.com receipt. Caveat emptor, folks...
It would be relatively easy to integrate an existing image sensor into the bottom of a laptop with a slim feeder.
Of course, OLED and other display technologies will likely make LCD screens obsolete due to their durability and ease of replacablitity in 5-10 years. The difference with that technology is that the research was directed towards a goal with clear benefits versus existing technology. I should know, since it's the thing I'm most paranoid with in a laptop. Not to mention that LCDs are major consumers of power on a laptop. They are the bottleneck to the future.
The best thing that can happen now is for this case to go to the Supreme Court, where it could get national publicity. This is obviously a ridiculous decision simply because it precludes fair use of a product. I mean, what's next? Getting arrested for reverse-engineering the recipe for Krispy Kreme donuts and selling them as my own? You can't have it both ways.
More specifically as regards N2H2, if the inherent security of an application can be compromised by reverse-engineering, then it isn't truly secure. Of course, OpenSSH is both secure and open source, so the argument of securing the source is ridiculous.
As the details of this lawsuit are revealed in court, Mr. Moore may find himself the target of other problems. If it's revealed in court that he committed a criminal act, such as criminal conspiracy or being an accessory to fraud like what the FTC is chasing down these days, the judge could very well refer the case to a DA for criminal charges. Even in the article, Symantec accuses him of advertising warez. Mr. Uy, the anti-spammer, would do himself well in his counter-defense to bring up any such activities.
Make no mistake, the entertainment value of this case could have far-reaching implications. Mr. Moore will also find out quickly that dissemnation of publically-accessible information is protected free speech. The golden rule rides again...
I've dealt with several wireless startups in my career. I feel the analogy of the dot-com bubble is quite accurate. Let me explain why...
One of the more prominent start-ups involved in building gear was requesting an ASIC (application-specific IC) engagement from my company to implement some of their functionality. They were asking about how fast we could run a certain type of embedded processor in one of our processes technologies. Keep in mind that these are guys with supposedly years of ASIC and system-building experience. When I turned the question around to them that it was more relevant for us to provide a solution with a certain amount of floating point performance, MIPS, multiply-accumulates per second, I/D cache size, etc., they kept saying that they weren't sure, but that clock speed was paramount. Yeah, right...
To top it off, they wouldn't give us any details of their end application. Was it 802.11a/b/g? 802.16? On-board multipath antenna signal processing? They also said if we asked too many questions we'd be out of the running for an ASIC bid. In other words, there was little substance to what they were dealing with. Yet, they were supposedly one of the most promising companies out there.
Then I took a stroll through the Bluetooh forum a few months ago in San Jose, CA. I saw a lot of folks involved in wireless IP not just for Bluetooth but for 802.11. Based on this, and my experiences with companies as described above, my verdict on wireless is as follows:
1. There are too many players who don't know what they are really doing, and who have no focused strategy. They're just getting into wireless because it is the industry's newest buzzword. That's at all levels of the value chain (semiconductors, box builders, and service providers).
2. There are far far too many players in the semiconductor aspect of wireless. From soft/hard IP providers to chipsets, it's a confusing soup whose interoperability is unconfirmed, and who are jockeying for position on issues such as range, power consumption, and how integrated they are (both from the baseband+PHY perspective and from the driver/software stack perspective). In some cases, the IP hasn't been tested or even implemented in an FPGA, yet they're on the show floor peddling their wares. There'll be a major shake-up in this area not only because of oversaturation of players, but because of oversaturation of silicon suppliers, where profit margins of the manufacturers are being pushed almost endlessly downwards due to overcapacity in semiconductor manufacturing and desperation of some companies to stay in business. Most of these players should disappear and leave us with hopefully two or three good standard chipsets per major standard group. Those looking at integreated wireless ASICs with PHY are only dreaming for the next several years.
3. In the system arena (commercial/residential wireless APs, repeaters), everyone is jumping on the bandwagon. Yet, as shown by the company I described above, there is a headlong march to get these products out without looking at some of the fundamentals such as interoperability. Heck, I had a friend yesterday whose Linksys PC card wouldn't link to her Netgear AP. That's a tiny example, but we could potentially be facing some of this type of problem.
4. In the service provider arena, there are some revenue opportunities. The end market, however, needs to have greater uptake of compatible wireless gear. That's going to be very difficult. There's only a limited amount of bandwidth available in the already-crowded space. For example, 2.4GHz is for 802.11b/g, and that's already crowded with devices from cordless phones to microwave ovens that could be potential sources of interference. If wireless is to be successful commercially, as a service, I think we'll either have to piggy-back on the 3G networks, or set up a standard that doesn't use frequencies fully opened up by the FCC. Of course, you know what that could mean (the big fis
Paypal has had it coming to them for a long time. A stiff penalty may wake them up somewhat. The real question is, will Paypal's policies improve sufficiently to correct their behavior and unethical withholding of funds?
I hate to be a cynic in this case, but probably not. The magnitude of the average consumer's problem is likely far larger than the Patriot act allegations.
No matter how much we humans think we can figure out about our world and the universe, there's always some phenomenon that we don't account for yet we plod forward anyway. This is not to say that humans are not contributing to global warming, but we should be looking more into the natural physical phenomena that could be contributing to a problem that affects us.
And no, this isn't an excuse for the rabid dogs on either side of the environmental debate to start jumping up and down either for or against human contributions to global warming, nor is it our only problem. I hope this discussion doesn't turn into this, though I fear it will.
"Among the interesting benefits of fuel cells over batteries is the ability to swap cells without having to power down the device."
This isn't a specific benefit of fuel cells. Anyone can have a diode-switched dual supply with the backup powered off a much smaller lower-capacity device like a small battery.
Seriously, the main reason to use XPde is to familiarize people already using Windows with a Linux environment. One guy I know, a complete anti-Linux zealot, got that way because his old crappy copy of Slackware didn't have all the drivers ready for his NIC. When he tried to fix things, he go so frustrated in not understanding the/etc confs (which are NOT that obvious to a non-*nix user) that he just gave up. Maybe, just maybe, he would've had half a chance if his distro included XPde or an XPde-like interface.
I had also made a previous post regarding how to improve Linux, and that was to basically migrate to the DLL and registry paradigms of Windows. The dependencies of packages you have to compile are ridiculous. Compiling is cool for those of us who have nothing better to do or want to modify or repair code. The rest of us just want a usable system. If I can't double-click on an RPM to install it, I don't even want to bother 99.9% of the time.
But I will put forth the most profound part of the equation. With a solid distro of Linux, XPde and WINE, one could potentially eliminate the need for Windows altogether for the biggest majority of users, particularly business users. Even if you wanted to use Evolution instead of Outlook and OpenOffice instead of MS Office, the amount of training for corporate organizations would be greatly reduced vs. moving people to an out-and-out Gnome or KDE GUI where people don't know what's going on. Particularly if Mandrake, with its outstanding installer, can integrate XPde and WINE, this could be the big break all the Linux geeks have been looking for. And the best part is that you don't have to give up your cron tab or ability to script operations easily in the back end when you want to. That's also partly the power of OSX (evolutionary gui, BSD back end), though there are other issues there that I won't get into.
One last thing - does anyone know whether the daemons are viewable as the equivalent of "System Services" in XPde?
"You know what one of those things will do? Suck the paint off your house and give your family a permanent orange afro..."
Loss of jobs and a nightmare thread of thought
on
U.S. Jobs Jumping Ship
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I know I may get modded down for this, but I'll stand up for this particular point. If one looks back at all of the technological innovation in the past 50 years, the vast majority of it has come from within the United States. Telecom, semiconductors, software, you name it - if it was commercially viable, that commercial viability pretty much originated here. Now that the expertise is being outsourced, what will sustain further development of it here?
If you look at all the new grads coming out, they have been told time and again that technology is their ticket to success. They've been pushed through universities like cattle, but they never expected the slaughterhouse to be right at the exit. Now that there's a glut, economics is dictating huge competition driving down salaries. Tech suddenly isn't as sexy any more, and people are flocking to jobs at more traditional companies. Tech companies keep outsourcing more and more.
But let's move this one step further. People coming into university see this. They stop coming in. Innovation and research starts slowing down. Nanotech and biotech research vaporizes because the capital base that is partly cross-subsidizing it vaporizes slowly. There is no killer application driving the tech economy. We can do with what we already have.
What we may end up with is the majority of our technological manufacturing and knowledge base outside the United States. The United States (and, to a large extent, the rest of the Western world) could become dependent on foreign technology the same way it is dependent on foreign oil. Yes, many of these jobs being outsourced are staying within the foreign subsidiaries US companies, but the bulk of the knowledge is not on US soil. Those workers can walk away at any time without recourse for the US companies.
My point is that there are very serious implications for everyone's life in general. If the majority of the expertise and manufacturing ends up outsourced to what are effectively third world countries, we could be subjected to embargoes by cartels in the same way OPEC has power today. It could even impact national security, since overall research into technology could stagnate and the pool of available scientists and engineers dwindles.
If you think it can't happen, think again. It already has in large part. If not for cooperative trade agreements, many of the bulk goods coming into the United States would disappear overnight, from Tommy jeans to Sony TVs. This means that there may be greater reliance on the US military to protect us. Unfortunately, many of these countries possess big weapons that they didn't have 50 years ago. The US won't be able to push them around like they have already, and this will cause a loss of control.
So what can we do about this? We need to vigorously publicize the nightmare stories of outsourcing. We need to show homegrown successes. We need to get these people waking up before we end up hanging ourselves by our own rope. We need to prove that we are better than those working in third world countries. We need to show what made the United States a great country - hard work, perserverance, and a good brain.
OR
We had better give up now and accept a much lower standard of living, and all of the shock it will create. It will be either one scenario or the other. But not both.
All digital data is synchronized to a clock, be it source-synchronous (i.e. clock comes with data), which is the case with DDR, or recovered clock (i.e. clock information is based on rate of change of incoming data). Whatever scheme you get, you will still have a clock inside at some point.
Traditionally, the memory elements or registers on a chip will ignore incoming data until the clock signal undergoes a positive transition, i.e. logic low to logic high. At that point, assuming the data has been stable for a long enough period of time before and after the clock edge, it will be captured. However, since there is only one positive edge per clock cycle, data can only be captured on that edge.
In a double-pumped scheme, what you have is a set of 2:1 multiplexors that go to two different sets of registers. One is sensitive to positive edges, the other is sensitive to negative edges, i.e. logic high to logic low transitions. If you simply wiggle the data out faster, and you have a double-pumped scheme with a small FIFO buffer, you can recover data twice as fast as a single edged scheme. On the interface itself, there are special low skew low insertion delay clock distribution schemes that enable this to happen without too many problems.
In a quad-pumped scheme, you actually have two separate clocks that are 90 degrees out of phase with each other. In effect, you have two positive and then two negative edges to work with internally now. You wiggle data out at 4x the single data rate, and have 4:1 multiplexers to the registers, plus (again) a careful layout of the internal clocks.
The area overhead in such schemes is minimal (~10% for DDR) and really takes advantage of the speed of on-chip devices. It does take some special consideration, but from the perspective of increased die size, it's not a problem. Power, however, is significantly increased for both I/O (SSTL-2 type stuff) and for core devices because of the data rates, and that is also a consideration during design of not only the power distribution, but also the package/module design and the board design.
And, FYI, Rambus uses multiple serial/deserialization (SERDES) that wiggles data between a pair of signals (positive and negative) whose voltage differential is recovered, not for individual levels, which (supposedly but not actually) simplifies matters. Transmitting data via this differential is actually much faster than a single-ended scheme like DDR currently is (single ended meaning all I/O refer to a common ground (and voltage reference)). Then they even IIRC get into exotic schemes like multi-level differential (i.e. steppings between 0 millivolts differential and full swing). I could be wrong about the latter though...
I'm not necessarily saying to exactly copy the registry, but its paradigm. Redundancy also helps, and if you know anything about Windows, there is always a backup copy of the registry, as well as system restore features for any major point of change in the life of the OS install since Win2k. When I'm sitting there trying to figure out where to put everything I need to run the application and store its data, there is not one single standard in the *NIX world. That's the essence of this. And I never said that Windows does it perfectly. I'm just saying that something along those lines has to happen for the sake of sanity. Your/home partition is your doing, and not a commonality across it. Whatever way it's done, it has to be standardized.
1. Unified and universal standardized library structure similar to Windows DLLs and APIs(yeah I know it's there, but it's neither standard in location or type, nor is it universal). This could also help accelerate audio and gaming library acceleration development.
2. Copying the Windows registry paradigm for system and program information. One should not only be able to install programs and have their components registered, but also cleanly uninstall and/or install over existing versions in the same way. You can also standardize automatic upgrades for existing programs and kernel patches over the 'net using a similar tool.
3. GUI the hell out of every system tool there is and make sure that GUI is strictly standardized with integrated help and unified. It's getting there but it's not there yet.
4. Include copies of software with each distribution compatible to at least some extent with their Windows equivalents (e.g. XMMS, OpenOffice) though this is pretty frequent these days.
5. (Most important, and likely most difficult) Get all current developers to start working under this framework to the greatest extent possible. Whether it's open source, closed source, free software, or whatever else, a common framework is critical no matter who is developing.
That, to me, is what's essentially different between Windows and Linux on the desktop. It's a chicken-and-egg to get more developers of Windows-only software, but the only way to get them on the bandwagon is to cut a standard here and today. This is a lot more ambitious than, say, POSIX compliance. But this is what it's going to take, not just copying the binary into/usr/local/bin. These changes are also necessary for future progression in server-side OS distros as well IMHO, but server penetration of *NIXES is (fortunately) much further along.
It's obviously not acceptable for you to have a baseline ethical standard above yours. The intended source of a lot of these stem cells is embryonic in many cases. Whether or not this is the case here, it cannot be discounted that the ongoing source of them - abortions - is an ethically questionable practice. If you question that, give yourself a long hard look in the mirror, and tell me if you would rather exist or not, especially given the work you do to spread your message.
I have no problem with experimenting with non-embryonic stem cells, provided that they are not eventually used to create new human beings. But I do have a problem with folks purposely attempting to push people's buttons, though, because it focuses on the people, not the issues and the beliefs they represent. That, unfortunately, detracts from any argument you make.
P.S. Religion isn't the evil thing that people make it out to be relative to a few official atheists like Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot and Mao who caused well over 100 Million deaths between various purges and WWII in this century. Better to have some common moral compass, even if a bit misguided at times, than have no common moral compass and be subject to the whim of one man. That's what society is about and has sustained us for so long.
"I shouldn't be allowed to work before coffee- I posted this at like 8:20"
For a minute there, I thought he said he posted this on 420...
Biggest problem with macroevolution...
on
Shapes of Time
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· Score: 1
...the initial conditions cannot be satisfied. I really don't want to start a religious flame war here so please don't reply if that's what you intend.
The issue here is that, like many complex physical systems, you require initial conditions to define the evolutionary starting point which macroevolution doesn't consider. It is, however, adept at describing the physical system itself. I believe that the nature of this must be metaphysical in nature. What mechanism is unknown, but again, just MHO.
Slashdot Mirror
I've consulted for video applications for a while now, and I found the best solution is:
* Relatively fast PC - Athlon XP1800+ or faster roughly.
* Decent video in card - ATI All-In-Wonder Card (even the non-Radeon AIWs are good for this).
* Good DVD Burner - Pioneer DVR-105 or DVR-A05 that burns DVD-R. Don't worry about the +/- debate, -R media is cheaper and has virtually the same compatibility as +R.
* Easy software - Sonic MyDVD is great software that you can capture from and burn to DVD in one app. Plus, if you buy the A05 above it usually comes with this software in a bundle.
* (the trick) Solid long-lasting archival media - Mitsui Gold Archive DVD-R for longevity.
I cannot stress the last one enough. It's so easy to get a great system only to flounder on the choice of media because the goal is to keep the videos. The best DVD-R media generally are Mitsui, Verbatim, and TDK. I wouldn't trust anything else. Just capture in 640x480, and you can burn up to two hours at a time. If you want to get really fancy, you can delve into more advanced software, cut bitrates to get additional time, and do ultra slick menus.
What happens when it blue screens? Or I lock it up?
In case you didn't know, there is a hefty 59 cent per CD tax because the poor Canadian musicians who can't play worth crap can have their interests represented by associations representing music most Canadians don't want to listen to and redistribute the money to them supposedly. Presumption of guilt before innocence, right? Of course, those protections don't extend to folks making software that can be copied onto CDs, but hey, Canada is more fair, right?
Not only is your opinion uninformed, it is obvious you have never lived or worked in Canada. Social democracies encourage people to rely on the government for everything instead of themselves, particularly when it comes to what's right and wrong in IP law. Not to say the US IP law is great, but it sure doesn't get as rosy as you'd like to think elsewhere.
...they'll be suing the individual investors of tobacco companies for wrongful death due to an individuals cancer.
Asininity at its finest. But hey, the more they keep digging, the deeper they get.
No, not if they fit. It seems like a ridiculous assertion.
Yet this is precisely the same problem we have here with VFP and WINE. Erosion of rights in using a product. Maybe in future EULAs, Microsoft will prevent the use of the install CD case to hold open doors in offices with BSD servers.
Dumb? Yeah. But where will it stop?
The industries that exploit aspects of human nature or vital necessity are the ones that are the most successful. This is why rebates are work. Companies know that people are typically lazy and don't fill out the rebate forms. People make mistakes. Mail gets lost. Someone fails to send in an original receipt. There's only a certain percentage of these that get fulfilled, which means the companies pocket the difference.
Then there are the deals that are "too good to be true" like the $20 product - $20 rebate, and you end up paying the sales tax. Who gives away free product? Let's face it - people are looking for the best deal, but can you with any reliability get something for nothing? There should be some alarm bells going off.
In addition, the civil liability for non-fulfillment is minimal for the company offering the rebate and/or the fulfillment house, because they are in another state, or a lawsuit becomes more trouble than it's worth for the consumer. Of course, this isn't the case for large-scale issues, but organizations like the FTC are typically slow to act and/or have a full plate with other more serious cases.
In short, the more people tolerate rebate programs, the more they will proliferate. You will need skills and time to be able to get the money back that you would've had in your pocket. It's no skin off a company's back. But it's money out of your pocket.
Oh, and btw, I sent in a rebate for two Lexar memory sticks, but - surprise - they only processed my rebate for one, even though I highlighted the quantity of 2 on my Amazon.com receipt. Caveat emptor, folks...
Encryption isn't foolproof, but I'm sure someone could put their VoIP data or other teleconference calls over secure connections.
But if you don't think it's already happening, I've got several white pachiderms for sale...
Seriously, someone should start letting people mod stories that are posted up and down. Like a meta-meta-moderation.
It would be relatively easy to integrate an existing image sensor into the bottom of a laptop with a slim feeder.
Of course, OLED and other display technologies will likely make LCD screens obsolete due to their durability and ease of replacablitity in 5-10 years. The difference with that technology is that the research was directed towards a goal with clear benefits versus existing technology. I should know, since it's the thing I'm most paranoid with in a laptop. Not to mention that LCDs are major consumers of power on a laptop. They are the bottleneck to the future.
...technology for its own sake is a useless technology. Is it any wonder why the high-tech industry has been decimated lately?
The best thing that can happen now is for this case to go to the Supreme Court, where it could get national publicity. This is obviously a ridiculous decision simply because it precludes fair use of a product. I mean, what's next? Getting arrested for reverse-engineering the recipe for Krispy Kreme donuts and selling them as my own? You can't have it both ways.
More specifically as regards N2H2, if the inherent security of an application can be compromised by reverse-engineering, then it isn't truly secure. Of course, OpenSSH is both secure and open source, so the argument of securing the source is ridiculous.
As the details of this lawsuit are revealed in court, Mr. Moore may find himself the target of other problems. If it's revealed in court that he committed a criminal act, such as criminal conspiracy or being an accessory to fraud like what the FTC is chasing down these days, the judge could very well refer the case to a DA for criminal charges. Even in the article, Symantec accuses him of advertising warez. Mr. Uy, the anti-spammer, would do himself well in his counter-defense to bring up any such activities.
Make no mistake, the entertainment value of this case could have far-reaching implications. Mr. Moore will also find out quickly that dissemnation of publically-accessible information is protected free speech. The golden rule rides again...
I've dealt with several wireless startups in my career. I feel the analogy of the dot-com bubble is quite accurate. Let me explain why...
One of the more prominent start-ups involved in building gear was requesting an ASIC (application-specific IC) engagement from my company to implement some of their functionality. They were asking about how fast we could run a certain type of embedded processor in one of our processes technologies. Keep in mind that these are guys with supposedly years of ASIC and system-building experience. When I turned the question around to them that it was more relevant for us to provide a solution with a certain amount of floating point performance, MIPS, multiply-accumulates per second, I/D cache size, etc., they kept saying that they weren't sure, but that clock speed was paramount. Yeah, right...
To top it off, they wouldn't give us any details of their end application. Was it 802.11a/b/g? 802.16? On-board multipath antenna signal processing? They also said if we asked too many questions we'd be out of the running for an ASIC bid. In other words, there was little substance to what they were dealing with. Yet, they were supposedly one of the most promising companies out there.
Then I took a stroll through the Bluetooh forum a few months ago in San Jose, CA. I saw a lot of folks involved in wireless IP not just for Bluetooth but for 802.11. Based on this, and my experiences with companies as described above, my verdict on wireless is as follows:
1. There are too many players who don't know what they are really doing, and who have no focused strategy. They're just getting into wireless because it is the industry's newest buzzword. That's at all levels of the value chain (semiconductors, box builders, and service providers).
2. There are far far too many players in the semiconductor aspect of wireless. From soft/hard IP providers to chipsets, it's a confusing soup whose interoperability is unconfirmed, and who are jockeying for position on issues such as range, power consumption, and how integrated they are (both from the baseband+PHY perspective and from the driver/software stack perspective). In some cases, the IP hasn't been tested or even implemented in an FPGA, yet they're on the show floor peddling their wares. There'll be a major shake-up in this area not only because of oversaturation of players, but because of oversaturation of silicon suppliers, where profit margins of the manufacturers are being pushed almost endlessly downwards due to overcapacity in semiconductor manufacturing and desperation of some companies to stay in business. Most of these players should disappear and leave us with hopefully two or three good standard chipsets per major standard group. Those looking at integreated wireless ASICs with PHY are only dreaming for the next several years.
3. In the system arena (commercial/residential wireless APs, repeaters), everyone is jumping on the bandwagon. Yet, as shown by the company I described above, there is a headlong march to get these products out without looking at some of the fundamentals such as interoperability. Heck, I had a friend yesterday whose Linksys PC card wouldn't link to her Netgear AP. That's a tiny example, but we could potentially be facing some of this type of problem.
4. In the service provider arena, there are some revenue opportunities. The end market, however, needs to have greater uptake of compatible wireless gear. That's going to be very difficult. There's only a limited amount of bandwidth available in the already-crowded space. For example, 2.4GHz is for 802.11b/g, and that's already crowded with devices from cordless phones to microwave ovens that could be potential sources of interference. If wireless is to be successful commercially, as a service, I think we'll either have to piggy-back on the 3G networks, or set up a standard that doesn't use frequencies fully opened up by the FCC. Of course, you know what that could mean (the big fis
Paypal has had it coming to them for a long time. A stiff penalty may wake them up somewhat. The real question is, will Paypal's policies improve sufficiently to correct their behavior and unethical withholding of funds?
I hate to be a cynic in this case, but probably not. The magnitude of the average consumer's problem is likely far larger than the Patriot act allegations.
No matter how much we humans think we can figure out about our world and the universe, there's always some phenomenon that we don't account for yet we plod forward anyway. This is not to say that humans are not contributing to global warming, but we should be looking more into the natural physical phenomena that could be contributing to a problem that affects us.
And no, this isn't an excuse for the rabid dogs on either side of the environmental debate to start jumping up and down either for or against human contributions to global warming, nor is it our only problem. I hope this discussion doesn't turn into this, though I fear it will.
"Among the interesting benefits of fuel cells over batteries is the ability to swap cells without having to power down the device."
This isn't a specific benefit of fuel cells. Anyone can have a diode-switched dual supply with the backup powered off a much smaller lower-capacity device like a small battery.
Seriously, the main reason to use XPde is to familiarize people already using Windows with a Linux environment. One guy I know, a complete anti-Linux zealot, got that way because his old crappy copy of Slackware didn't have all the drivers ready for his NIC. When he tried to fix things, he go so frustrated in not understanding the /etc confs (which are NOT that obvious to a non-*nix user) that he just gave up. Maybe, just maybe, he would've had half a chance if his distro included XPde or an XPde-like interface.
I had also made a previous post regarding how to improve Linux, and that was to basically migrate to the DLL and registry paradigms of Windows. The dependencies of packages you have to compile are ridiculous. Compiling is cool for those of us who have nothing better to do or want to modify or repair code. The rest of us just want a usable system. If I can't double-click on an RPM to install it, I don't even want to bother 99.9% of the time.
But I will put forth the most profound part of the equation. With a solid distro of Linux, XPde and WINE, one could potentially eliminate the need for Windows altogether for the biggest majority of users, particularly business users. Even if you wanted to use Evolution instead of Outlook and OpenOffice instead of MS Office, the amount of training for corporate organizations would be greatly reduced vs. moving people to an out-and-out Gnome or KDE GUI where people don't know what's going on. Particularly if Mandrake, with its outstanding installer, can integrate XPde and WINE, this could be the big break all the Linux geeks have been looking for. And the best part is that you don't have to give up your cron tab or ability to script operations easily in the back end when you want to. That's also partly the power of OSX (evolutionary gui, BSD back end), though there are other issues there that I won't get into.
One last thing - does anyone know whether the daemons are viewable as the equivalent of "System Services" in XPde?
"You know what one of those things will do? Suck the paint off your house and give your family a permanent orange afro..."
I know I may get modded down for this, but I'll stand up for this particular point. If one looks back at all of the technological innovation in the past 50 years, the vast majority of it has come from within the United States. Telecom, semiconductors, software, you name it - if it was commercially viable, that commercial viability pretty much originated here. Now that the expertise is being outsourced, what will sustain further development of it here?
If you look at all the new grads coming out, they have been told time and again that technology is their ticket to success. They've been pushed through universities like cattle, but they never expected the slaughterhouse to be right at the exit. Now that there's a glut, economics is dictating huge competition driving down salaries. Tech suddenly isn't as sexy any more, and people are flocking to jobs at more traditional companies. Tech companies keep outsourcing more and more.
But let's move this one step further. People coming into university see this. They stop coming in. Innovation and research starts slowing down. Nanotech and biotech research vaporizes because the capital base that is partly cross-subsidizing it vaporizes slowly. There is no killer application driving the tech economy. We can do with what we already have.
What we may end up with is the majority of our technological manufacturing and knowledge base outside the United States. The United States (and, to a large extent, the rest of the Western world) could become dependent on foreign technology the same way it is dependent on foreign oil. Yes, many of these jobs being outsourced are staying within the foreign subsidiaries US companies, but the bulk of the knowledge is not on US soil. Those workers can walk away at any time without recourse for the US companies.
My point is that there are very serious implications for everyone's life in general. If the majority of the expertise and manufacturing ends up outsourced to what are effectively third world countries, we could be subjected to embargoes by cartels in the same way OPEC has power today. It could even impact national security, since overall research into technology could stagnate and the pool of available scientists and engineers dwindles.
If you think it can't happen, think again. It already has in large part. If not for cooperative trade agreements, many of the bulk goods coming into the United States would disappear overnight, from Tommy jeans to Sony TVs. This means that there may be greater reliance on the US military to protect us. Unfortunately, many of these countries possess big weapons that they didn't have 50 years ago. The US won't be able to push them around like they have already, and this will cause a loss of control.
So what can we do about this? We need to vigorously publicize the nightmare stories of outsourcing. We need to show homegrown successes. We need to get these people waking up before we end up hanging ourselves by our own rope. We need to prove that we are better than those working in third world countries. We need to show what made the United States a great country - hard work, perserverance, and a good brain.
OR
We had better give up now and accept a much lower standard of living, and all of the shock it will create. It will be either one scenario or the other. But not both.
All digital data is synchronized to a clock, be it source-synchronous (i.e. clock comes with data), which is the case with DDR, or recovered clock (i.e. clock information is based on rate of change of incoming data). Whatever scheme you get, you will still have a clock inside at some point.
Traditionally, the memory elements or registers on a chip will ignore incoming data until the clock signal undergoes a positive transition, i.e. logic low to logic high. At that point, assuming the data has been stable for a long enough period of time before and after the clock edge, it will be captured. However, since there is only one positive edge per clock cycle, data can only be captured on that edge.
In a double-pumped scheme, what you have is a set of 2:1 multiplexors that go to two different sets of registers. One is sensitive to positive edges, the other is sensitive to negative edges, i.e. logic high to logic low transitions. If you simply wiggle the data out faster, and you have a double-pumped scheme with a small FIFO buffer, you can recover data twice as fast as a single edged scheme. On the interface itself, there are special low skew low insertion delay clock distribution schemes that enable this to happen without too many problems.
In a quad-pumped scheme, you actually have two separate clocks that are 90 degrees out of phase with each other. In effect, you have two positive and then two negative edges to work with internally now. You wiggle data out at 4x the single data rate, and have 4:1 multiplexers to the registers, plus (again) a careful layout of the internal clocks.
The area overhead in such schemes is minimal (~10% for DDR) and really takes advantage of the speed of on-chip devices. It does take some special consideration, but from the perspective of increased die size, it's not a problem. Power, however, is significantly increased for both I/O (SSTL-2 type stuff) and for core devices because of the data rates, and that is also a consideration during design of not only the power distribution, but also the package/module design and the board design.
And, FYI, Rambus uses multiple serial/deserialization (SERDES) that wiggles data between a pair of signals (positive and negative) whose voltage differential is recovered, not for individual levels, which (supposedly but not actually) simplifies matters. Transmitting data via this differential is actually much faster than a single-ended scheme like DDR currently is (single ended meaning all I/O refer to a common ground (and voltage reference)). Then they even IIRC get into exotic schemes like multi-level differential (i.e. steppings between 0 millivolts differential and full swing). I could be wrong about the latter though...
I'm not necessarily saying to exactly copy the registry, but its paradigm. Redundancy also helps, and if you know anything about Windows, there is always a backup copy of the registry, as well as system restore features for any major point of change in the life of the OS install since Win2k. When I'm sitting there trying to figure out where to put everything I need to run the application and store its data, there is not one single standard in the *NIX world. That's the essence of this. And I never said that Windows does it perfectly. I'm just saying that something along those lines has to happen for the sake of sanity. Your /home partition is your doing, and not a commonality across it. Whatever way it's done, it has to be standardized.
1. Unified and universal standardized library structure similar to Windows DLLs and APIs(yeah I know it's there, but it's neither standard in location or type, nor is it universal). This could also help accelerate audio and gaming library acceleration development.
/usr/local/bin. These changes are also necessary for future progression in server-side OS distros as well IMHO, but server penetration of *NIXES is (fortunately) much further along.
2. Copying the Windows registry paradigm for system and program information. One should not only be able to install programs and have their components registered, but also cleanly uninstall and/or install over existing versions in the same way. You can also standardize automatic upgrades for existing programs and kernel patches over the 'net using a similar tool.
3. GUI the hell out of every system tool there is and make sure that GUI is strictly standardized with integrated help and unified. It's getting there but it's not there yet.
4. Include copies of software with each distribution compatible to at least some extent with their Windows equivalents (e.g. XMMS, OpenOffice) though this is pretty frequent these days.
5. (Most important, and likely most difficult) Get all current developers to start working under this framework to the greatest extent possible. Whether it's open source, closed source, free software, or whatever else, a common framework is critical no matter who is developing.
That, to me, is what's essentially different between Windows and Linux on the desktop. It's a chicken-and-egg to get more developers of Windows-only software, but the only way to get them on the bandwagon is to cut a standard here and today. This is a lot more ambitious than, say, POSIX compliance. But this is what it's going to take, not just copying the binary into
It's obviously not acceptable for you to have a baseline ethical standard above yours. The intended source of a lot of these stem cells is embryonic in many cases. Whether or not this is the case here, it cannot be discounted that the ongoing source of them - abortions - is an ethically questionable practice. If you question that, give yourself a long hard look in the mirror, and tell me if you would rather exist or not, especially given the work you do to spread your message.
I have no problem with experimenting with non-embryonic stem cells, provided that they are not eventually used to create new human beings. But I do have a problem with folks purposely attempting to push people's buttons, though, because it focuses on the people, not the issues and the beliefs they represent. That, unfortunately, detracts from any argument you make.
P.S. Religion isn't the evil thing that people make it out to be relative to a few official atheists like Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot and Mao who caused well over 100 Million deaths between various purges and WWII in this century. Better to have some common moral compass, even if a bit misguided at times, than have no common moral compass and be subject to the whim of one man. That's what society is about and has sustained us for so long.
"I shouldn't be allowed to work before coffee- I posted this at like 8:20" For a minute there, I thought he said he posted this on 420...
...the initial conditions cannot be satisfied. I really don't want to start a religious flame war here so please don't reply if that's what you intend.
The issue here is that, like many complex physical systems, you require initial conditions to define the evolutionary starting point which macroevolution doesn't consider. It is, however, adept at describing the physical system itself. I believe that the nature of this must be metaphysical in nature. What mechanism is unknown, but again, just MHO.