I love OSX and my powerbook, but if they were spending my tax dollars, my choice would be Sun's Java Desktop System or a home baked linux solution with Wine for legacy applications. OSX is pretty and looks great on my powerbook, but the OS and hardware cost is significantly higher than alternatives. Which is more likely to stand up to the schoolyard, a G4 Tibook running OSX or a Panasonic toughbook running Linux?
There is a difference. Think of these "branding" terms:
"Windows" Perfected by Xerox, Apple, Amiga and Sun before it was adopted and branded my Microsoft.
".Net"Sun was there, Netscape was there, Al Gore may have even involved in the beginnings of the internet. Microsoft was dragged kicking and screaming into "the Net" in the late 1990s, but that didn't stop Microsoft marketeers from trying to brand it when the NET hype-quotient reached a peak.
"Java"Invented by Sun, branded by Sun. Why shouldn't they call this a Java desktop? It's certainly a decent platform for running java client software, its less expensive than Microsoft based desktops and its unlikely Sun will actively try to break your Java client applications. Java is a decent technology for writing secure, stable applications. Sun shouldn't hide from this fact or let everyone else profit from it. Java will work even better when the desktop OS vendor isn't actively trying to break your applications.
As for speed, try one of the built-in Java apps or any well-written Java app before you post. I find ImageJ (http://rsb.info.nih.gov/ij) as fast as Gimp or Photoshop on other platforms.
There was an captive employee factor and some companies (illegally) abused this to underpay H1B's and treat them as indentured servents but recent changes in the law made these visas transferable and negated this factor.
H1B if enforced is actually a very good law. But we also need something which gives U.S. employees the same flexibility that H1B gives their employers. That is, if my job is exported overseas, I should have the right to follow that job and have a work visa in the target nation. Nations which export employees to the U.S. should be willing to import employees. The idea exchange which would take place would be benificial to all. You might think Americans wouldn't work in "sweatshop conditions", but working conditions can actually be better overseas. Ask a French employee how much vacation they get or how much notification is required before a layoff. The answer would make most Americans cry. Gross pay is the only benefit where American companies can compete globally, and then only companies in large U.S. cities. Vacation, flexibility, family friendliness, telecommuting and other worker right issues are better in almost every other first and second world nation. True capitalism would allow workers to flow to where they receive the best benefits to match their needs.
Interesting loophole. Because I doubt 80% of the U.S. will ever be able to receive digital T.V. Analog T.V. degrades very gradually. A station can be watchable for nearly 90 miles (in summer) with a good antenna or 10 miles with rabbit ears. A recognizable picture can be viewed even in cases where the FM sound dies and digital hasn't a prayer of making a watchable picture.
Someone will make a converter to keep your analog T.V. out of a landfill for a few years but the way things are going, the FCC may make such devices illegal under the DMCA. This is an excellent example of who gets priority in the U.S. government and who pays the bill.
The consumer:
Buys a new T.V., pays extra for something that makes it incompatible with his VCRs, DVD players, camcorders...
Buys new DVDs VCRs, camcorders...
Subscribes to cable or satellite because their new T.V. can no longer pick up the chicago station.
If on Satellite, adds a few $ per month to get the local stations.
Pays the environmental disposal fee to get rid of the old T.V. when it is obsoleted.
Hollywood and the Manufacturers:
Have another method of distributing the same movie already sold in Betamax, VHS, Laserdisk, DVD.
No longer worries about the analog copy protection hole .
Can sell you a new T.V., VCR, DVD player, Game Console, Camcorder and accessories.
I'm not a total luddite, I think we should convert to analog gradually on the consumers terms. Mandate full conversion 2 years after we go metric.
Those who live outside areas with rock solid analog over the air reception (> 20 miles from a major city, hills...) will have to subscribe to cable or satellite. Digital doesn't work in fringe reception areas. When T.V.s switched to varactor and PLL tuners, a similar drop in sensitivity occured. Perhaps this helped cable to become popular.
Unless you can find a company that specializes in Accessibility technology, modifying off the shelf technolgy that almost does the job is the best solution for reliability.
1) Magnetic reed switch. 2) Rare earth magnet (salvaged from broken Hard Drive or Hardware store "pick up" tool.) 3) Piezo sensor (from alarm such as above) 4) Bit of wire
Wire the reed switch in place of the alarm switch and place it within reach. Tape or somehow attach the magnet (or fragment of the magnet) to her hand.
Replace the reed switch with mercury switch salvaged out of an old wall switch, illuminated sneakers or washing machine and the mechanism becomes sensitive to tilt. But now you should use a circuit which can detect a change of state. From closed to open or from open to closed. Hmm, I don't remember which 7400 series device did this. But if you use a 7400 series device, you needn't use mercury in the switch, find out what environmentally friendly conductive liquid nike uses in their newer sneakers. (salt water?)
The Casio Wrist camera series of watches has a motion sensor which blanks the power hungry screen when it detects the watch hasn't been moved in a while.
If the alarm won't be used during the day, another solution that comes to mind is attaching a light to her hand and a photo sensor within reach.
1) White-light LED (perhaps the wearable kind, attached to a finger or wrist band?) 2) CDS Cell 3) Piezo Buzzer 4) Battery and wire
If the light is bright enough, you may be able to substitute a Solar Cell (e.g. Silicon) for the CDS cell and do without the battery.
The battery in the white light LED would have to be replaced every night. (2 or more for redundancy, they're fairly inexpensive.)
These solutions aren't the best, but they are very simple. Remember Emerson's rule: (Simplify)*3
This is an unfortunately difficult situation for your friends. Companies experienced with accessibility technology work hard on solutions that are useful, robust and try to provide the user with the maximum ability to interact with the outside world. Hopefully these ideas will help her communicate until someone comes up with a better solution.
Two examples, maybe useful? The data stream coming out of the DAC in a Magnetic Resonance Imaging device is almost always run through an FFT, then compressed using a simple Huffman or similar Run Length Encoding scheme.
I have some 2 Dimentional FFT's of images and filters from the 1980s. I tarred them, ran solaris "compress." They are on a mag tape sitting in an attic in Wisconsin.
Ah, I stand corrected. Here is the ByteRun1 RLE encoding described in the Electronic Arts ILBM spec from January 1986:
http://www.lightwave3d.com/developer/75lwsdk/docs/ filefmts/ilbm.html
Appendix C. ByteRun1 Run Encoding
The run encoding scheme byteRun1 is best described by psuedo code for the decoder Unpacker (called UnPackBits in the Macintosh toolbox):
UnPacker:
LOOP until produced the desired number of bytes
Read the next source byte into n
SELECT n FROM
[0..127] => copy the next n+1 bytes literally
[-1..-127] => replicate the next byte -n+1 times
-128 => noop
ENDCASE;
ENDLOOP;
In the inverse routine Packer, it's best to encode a 2 byte repeat run as a replicate run except when preceded and followed by a literal run, in which case it's best to merge the three into one literal run. Always encode 3 byte repeats as replicate runs.
Remember that each row of each scan line of a raster is separately packed.
I once worked in the medical imaging industry where lossless JPEG was required (you don't wan't your Dr. seeing any rectangular artifact "tumors.") As far as how long ago we used something that would be considered prior art, I would have to investigate.
http://www.dclunie.com/medical-image-faq/html/part 6.html
Didn't the Amiga used Run Length Encoding both for it's IFF/ILBM still images, audio and it's.anim files? Does anyone have Fred Fish disks 0-100? I have a copy of Amiga Dos 1.1
Ah but they do. The problem is that people now feel the need to illuminate every house, garage, barn, bilboard and tree regardless of how far away from "the city" you are. A brilliant display of northern lights appeared over a lake in the northern Wisconsin woods 1987. Recent auroras are no longer visible here because neighbors across the lake illuminate the underside of trees with spot lights. While searching for a dark sky to view Comet Hale Bopp from, I drove through miles of farm land with no village larger than 5000 people and did not find a dark sky. The milky way was not even easily visible from the middle of Lake Michigan because the lights of Chicago 100 miles to the southwest illuminated the sky. The international dark sky association estimates show that up to 2 Billion dollars is spent every year illuminate the night sky.
1) Ethanol has much more potential for a real economy than oil or "Zero emission" (i.e. coal burning) electric vehicles. In 1990 Deborah L. Bleviss and Peter Walzer published an article in Scientific American entitled, "Energy for Motor Vehicles." The conclusion was that alternative fuels such as ethanol and methanol would only be viable if gasoline prices approached $1.80/gallon. A few months later we entered the $61 billion Gulf War and gasoline prices began to rise to this break-even point.
Likewise "Zero Emission" electric vehicles are based on a false economy. California's "zero emissions" vehicle law conveniently ignores the fact that more energy is required to charge a battery than they release. Ethanol has
hundreds of times the energy storage density of the batteries used in the most advanced electric cars.
2) True there are probably better feed sources, R&D and scale economies will make these feasible.
3) Charles Schumer & Diane Feinstein and certain oil companies are pushing this misconception for political reasons. The often site a study by Pimentel but ignore others such as Keeny and Deluca, Marland and Turhollow(1991), Morris and Ahmed (1992), Ho (1989), Shapouri, Duffield and Graboski (1995)? Pimentel's study was the most pessimistic by almost a factor of two. The most recent of these studies "Estimating Net Energy Balance of Corn Ethanol"/AER-721
http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/aer721 concludes that when byproduct energy value is considered and modern production techniques are used, ethanol production has a net energy gain of 24% and it can extend petroleum imports by a factor of 7 to 1. None of these studies take into consideration the possibility that newer technology will make it possible to convert food and yard waste into
fuel. Nor do they consider the energy storage value of ethanol.
4) The best I have here is personal experience:
1968 Plymouth Fury was the first car I burned an ethanol blend in, it wasn't even designed for unleaded gas. 140,000 miles +
The upper half of the miles on these cars was on 10% ethanol:
1987 Chrysler LeBaron 178,000 miles +
Fathers 1988 Mazda 323 240,000 Miles +
Sister's 1990 Honda Accord 240,000 Miles +
Higher percentages may not be compatible with seals, gaskets and hoses fittings on some cars. But it is time we convince the car companies that we expect them to be able to use flexible fuels. We don't need to be digging up ANWAR and we don't need Sadaam's oil.
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I love OSX and my powerbook, but if they were spending my tax dollars, my choice would be Sun's Java Desktop System or a home baked linux solution with Wine for legacy applications. OSX is pretty and looks great on my powerbook, but the OS and hardware cost is significantly higher than alternatives. Which is more likely to stand up to the schoolyard, a G4 Tibook running OSX or a Panasonic toughbook running Linux?
There is a difference. Think of these "branding" terms:
"Windows" Perfected by Xerox, Apple, Amiga and Sun before it was adopted and branded my Microsoft.
".Net"Sun was there, Netscape was there, Al Gore may have even involved in the beginnings of the internet. Microsoft was dragged kicking and screaming into "the Net" in the late 1990s, but that didn't stop Microsoft marketeers from trying to brand it when the NET hype-quotient reached a peak.
"Java"Invented by Sun, branded by Sun. Why shouldn't they call this a Java desktop? It's certainly a decent platform for running java client software, its less expensive than Microsoft based desktops and its unlikely Sun will actively try to break your Java client applications. Java is a decent technology for writing secure, stable applications. Sun shouldn't hide from this fact or let everyone else profit from it. Java will work even better when the desktop OS vendor isn't actively trying to break your applications. As for speed, try one of the built-in Java apps or any well-written Java app before you post. I find ImageJ (http://rsb.info.nih.gov/ij) as fast as Gimp or Photoshop on other platforms.
There was an captive employee factor and some companies (illegally) abused this to underpay H1B's and treat them as indentured servents but recent changes in the law made these visas transferable and negated this factor.
H1B if enforced is actually a very good law. But we also need something which gives U.S. employees the same flexibility that H1B gives their employers. That is, if my job is exported overseas, I should have the right to follow that job and have a work visa in the target nation. Nations which export employees to the U.S. should be willing to import employees. The idea exchange which would take place would be benificial to all. You might think Americans wouldn't work in "sweatshop conditions", but working conditions can actually be better overseas. Ask a French employee how much vacation they get or how much notification is required before a layoff. The answer would make most Americans cry. Gross pay is the only benefit where American companies can compete globally, and then only companies in large U.S. cities. Vacation, flexibility, family friendliness, telecommuting and other worker right issues are better in almost every other first and second world nation. True capitalism would allow workers to flow to where they receive the best benefits to match their needs.
The consumer:
Buys a new T.V., pays extra for something that makes it incompatible with his VCRs, DVD players, camcorders...
Buys new DVDs VCRs, camcorders...
Subscribes to cable or satellite because their new T.V. can no longer pick up the chicago station.
If on Satellite, adds a few $ per month to get the local stations.
Pays the environmental disposal fee to get rid of the old T.V. when it is obsoleted.
Hollywood and the Manufacturers:
Have another method of distributing the same movie already sold in Betamax, VHS, Laserdisk, DVD.
No longer worries about the analog copy protection hole .
Can sell you a new T.V., VCR, DVD player, Game Console, Camcorder and accessories.
I'm not a total luddite, I think we should convert to analog gradually on the consumers terms. Mandate full conversion 2 years after we go metric.
Those who live outside areas with rock solid analog over the air reception (> 20 miles from a major city, hills...) will have to subscribe to cable or satellite. Digital doesn't work in fringe reception areas. When T.V.s switched to varactor and PLL tuners, a similar drop in sensitivity occured. Perhaps this helped cable to become popular.
Unless you can find a company that specializes in Accessibility technology, modifying off the shelf technolgy that almost does the job is the best solution for reliability.
1) Magnetic reed switch.
2) Rare earth magnet (salvaged from broken Hard Drive or Hardware store "pick up" tool.)
3) Piezo sensor (from alarm such as above)
4) Bit of wire
Wire the reed switch in place of the alarm switch and place it within reach. Tape or somehow attach the magnet (or fragment of the magnet) to her hand.
Replace the reed switch with mercury switch salvaged out of an old wall switch, illuminated sneakers or washing machine and the mechanism becomes sensitive to tilt. But now you should use a circuit which can detect a change of state. From closed to open or from open to closed. Hmm, I don't remember which 7400 series device did this. But if you use a 7400 series device, you needn't use mercury in the switch, find out what environmentally friendly conductive liquid nike uses in their newer sneakers. (salt water?)
The Casio Wrist camera series of watches has a motion sensor which blanks the power hungry screen when it detects the watch hasn't been moved in a while.
If the alarm won't be used during the day, another solution that comes to mind is attaching a light to her hand and a photo sensor within reach.
1) White-light LED (perhaps the wearable kind, attached to a finger or wrist band?)
2) CDS Cell
3) Piezo Buzzer
4) Battery and wire
If the light is bright enough, you may be able to substitute a Solar Cell (e.g. Silicon) for the CDS cell and do without the battery.
The battery in the white light LED would have to be replaced every night. (2 or more for redundancy, they're fairly inexpensive.)
These solutions aren't the best, but they are very simple. Remember Emerson's rule: (Simplify)*3
This is an unfortunately difficult situation for your friends. Companies experienced with accessibility technology work hard on solutions that are useful, robust and try to provide the user with the maximum ability to interact with the outside world. Hopefully these ideas will help her communicate until someone comes up with a better solution.
The author of such worms which cause or intends to cause death or injury could face life in prison.
Two examples, maybe useful?
The data stream coming out of the DAC in a Magnetic Resonance Imaging device is almost always run through an FFT, then compressed using a simple Huffman or similar Run Length Encoding scheme.
I have some 2 Dimentional FFT's of images and filters from the 1980s. I tarred them, ran solaris "compress." They are on a mag tape sitting in an attic in Wisconsin.
Ah, I stand corrected. Here is the ByteRun1 RLE encoding described in the Electronic Arts ILBM spec from January 1986: http://www.lightwave3d.com/developer/75lwsdk/docs/ filefmts/ilbm.html
Appendix C. ByteRun1 Run Encoding
The run encoding scheme byteRun1 is best described by psuedo code for the decoder Unpacker (called UnPackBits in the Macintosh toolbox):
UnPacker:
LOOP until produced the desired number of bytes
Read the next source byte into n
SELECT n FROM
[0..127] => copy the next n+1 bytes literally
[-1..-127] => replicate the next byte -n+1 times
-128 => noop
ENDCASE;
ENDLOOP;
In the inverse routine Packer, it's best to encode a 2 byte repeat run as a replicate run except when preceded and followed by a literal run, in which case it's best to merge the three into one literal run. Always encode 3 byte repeats as replicate runs.
Remember that each row of each scan line of a raster is separately packed.
I once worked in the medical imaging industry where lossless JPEG was required (you don't wan't your Dr. seeing any rectangular artifact "tumors.") As far as how long ago we used something that would be considered prior art, I would have to investigate. http://www.dclunie.com/medical-image-faq/html/part 6.html
Didn't the Amiga used Run Length Encoding both for it's IFF/ILBM still images, audio and it's .anim files? Does anyone have Fred Fish disks 0-100? I have a copy of Amiga Dos 1.1
Ah but they do. The problem is that people now feel the need to illuminate every house, garage, barn, bilboard and tree regardless of how far away from "the city" you are. A brilliant display of northern lights appeared over a lake in the northern Wisconsin woods 1987. Recent auroras are no longer visible here because neighbors across the lake illuminate the underside of trees with spot lights. While searching for a dark sky to view Comet Hale Bopp from, I drove through miles of farm land with no village larger than 5000 people and did not find a dark sky. The milky way was not even easily visible from the middle of Lake Michigan because the lights of Chicago 100 miles to the southwest illuminated the sky. The international dark sky association estimates show that up to 2 Billion dollars is spent every year illuminate the night sky.
Really folks, is this necessary?
1) Ethanol has much more potential for a real economy than oil or "Zero emission" (i.e. coal burning) electric vehicles. In 1990 Deborah L. Bleviss and Peter Walzer published an article in Scientific American entitled, "Energy for Motor Vehicles." The conclusion was that alternative fuels such as ethanol and methanol would only be viable if gasoline prices approached $1.80/gallon. A few months later we entered the $61 billion Gulf War and gasoline prices began to rise to this break-even point. Likewise "Zero Emission" electric vehicles are based on a false economy. California's "zero emissions" vehicle law conveniently ignores the fact that more energy is required to charge a battery than they release. Ethanol has hundreds of times the energy storage density of the batteries used in the most advanced electric cars. 2) True there are probably better feed sources, R&D and scale economies will make these feasible. 3) Charles Schumer & Diane Feinstein and certain oil companies are pushing this misconception for political reasons. The often site a study by Pimentel but ignore others such as Keeny and Deluca, Marland and Turhollow(1991), Morris and Ahmed (1992), Ho (1989), Shapouri, Duffield and Graboski (1995)? Pimentel's study was the most pessimistic by almost a factor of two. The most recent of these studies "Estimating Net Energy Balance of Corn Ethanol"/AER-721 http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/aer721 concludes that when byproduct energy value is considered and modern production techniques are used, ethanol production has a net energy gain of 24% and it can extend petroleum imports by a factor of 7 to 1. None of these studies take into consideration the possibility that newer technology will make it possible to convert food and yard waste into fuel. Nor do they consider the energy storage value of ethanol. 4) The best I have here is personal experience: 1968 Plymouth Fury was the first car I burned an ethanol blend in, it wasn't even designed for unleaded gas. 140,000 miles + The upper half of the miles on these cars was on 10% ethanol: 1987 Chrysler LeBaron 178,000 miles + Fathers 1988 Mazda 323 240,000 Miles + Sister's 1990 Honda Accord 240,000 Miles + Higher percentages may not be compatible with seals, gaskets and hoses fittings on some cars. But it is time we convince the car companies that we expect them to be able to use flexible fuels. We don't need to be digging up ANWAR and we don't need Sadaam's oil.