Linux Music at the brink of "plausible promise"
on
Linux as A Musician's OS?
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· Score: 5, Informative
One of the marvelous things about most Linux based music apps is that they run on any architecture. This might seem like a no brainer to some, but as someone that has struggled with 64 bit issues on another (to be unnammed) platform, Linux+Music on x86_64 is pretty impressive. What's even more impressive, to me, is how Ingo's RT patch is working on x86_64 these days. I've had a week of solid uptime since the 2.6.21-rt1 patch.
Rosegarden: Pretty good.
Ardour: The 2.0 release (just out last week) is AWESOME! Get it!
CSound: I like to leave my programming mind behind when I'm working on music.
Sooperlooper: very cool
Freewheeling: also cool
Music distros this summer ought to be pretty good - with new releases scheduled for many of the music distributions.
What bothers me the most these days is plugins and soft synths. There are not enough plugins, the ones we have (like swh-plugins, tap-plugins, caps-plugins, and cmt) aren't heavily optimized for modern architectures (I just spent a weekend working on that) and not enough people out there do dsp programming (myself included) to really gain critical mass for the "perfect EQ" or the "perfect reverb". Still, the plugin solutions are adaquate, just not generally something to rave about. If you know a dsp programmer bored in his day job, show him 64 studio or Studio to go and try to enlist his/her help!
Soft Synths are coming along. Linuxsampler is very nice. Bristol is coming along. There are quite a few more.
I think Linux music is on the brink of plausible promise. I've got 16 tracks of live audio working almost flawlessly right now.
... but only after you have a good grip on algorithms and on processor architecture.
There are many tricks one can do in assembly that simply can't be done in a higher level language.
Jumping directly into the center of a loop - Aggressively and effectively using registers - Developing compilers - Doing bit manipulation - using barely language supported features like "find first bit" or popcount - are all things that can often be best done in assembly.
Big today is vector arithmetic.
Grokking assembly helps is knowing what can be fast in your language, and what can't be. For example, in looking at some gcc generated X86_64 assembly code recently I found that floor and ceil were still function calls on that processor. As was lrint (even though SSE has a rounding mode).
The two places where assembly is used a lot these days is in accelerating vectorized code, and in low level hardware bringup. If you are interested in developing code for a new processor or SOC, you aren't going to be writing in java at first, but painful, tedious assembly, poked directly into the processor via jtag.
Lastly - in the general case, if you don't know how your hardware really works, you don't know how to program effectively for it.
Sure, in today's day and age, you shouldn't set out to code an entire visicalc-alike in assembly - but profiling your code to find hot spots - and knowing when and to use assembly to fix them, IS important.
Examples:
Extensive oprofiling of ardour 2's core routines showed several that would benefit from being rewritten in assembly, or something much closer to assembly. Result? Ardour now scales 2-3x better under high workloads than it did before (and those core routines STILL dominate the runtime)
Now, if the question is: "would being a competent assembly language programmer be a help in the job market?"
Whew. I read this whole thread and without someone suggesting removable battery packs for EV, I grew worried. Finally - the very last message - suggested it.
Why is it that the average slashdot reader can envision charging systems requiring truly dangerous/absurd amounts of voltage/amperage... but can't imagine a system that could swap out a 1 ton battery pack in five minutes?
I'd be much happier with charging stations that charged up 1 ton battery packs overnight (and during the day to meet demand).
How much volume underneath the ground is currently occupied by fuel tanks that could instead be used for batteries, charging?
Ever notice how many service bays are shuttered across america these days? Ever see how fast someone can get a car on a lift and change a tire?
Ever notice how fuel actually GETS to the service station? Those big tanker trucks, yes? Wouldn't it make sense to load up a truck with a bunch of batteries and take them to a central station to be recharged?
Heck we could start using the railroads again. Drive up to a train terminal, with one train full of fresh batteries and the other waiting for old batteries. Each stack of batteries on the railroad car on a spring + lift - drive over the railroad car, you "squat" to deposit your dead battery, get towed to the next (just like in a carwash). Done.
(incidentally I really like the above idea. I shoulda patented it instead of posting it on slashdot)
All we need is:
A standard size for such batteries. (several sizes is ok, but one to start would be a good idea). Everybody is designing a custom enclosure for their battery packs and that's not useful.
A standard foolproof way to latch them in place. Zillions of these exist.
Good ways to keep (and/or monitor) them for damage. Arguably SUV's as they stand higher off the road, are actually a better choice than the low-slung performance cars in this respect.
Various people competing to create ways to further automate the swap-out.
ESR's argument is flawed about the need to transition to a 4GB+ architecture as well. I don't agree with his "drop dead date" of 2008, but push the date back to about 2012, as things like PAE are more adaquate than emm386 was to keep users and single programs satisfied on the x86 architecture. No individual binary I run ever gets bigger than 600MB in size today, which leaves plenty of headroom for x86 to continue in place.
On the other hand, 2GB is the new 640k, and I agree with the paper that by 2008 4GB will be a comfort zone, and cerrtainly by 2012 8 and 12GB will start putting real pressure on the 32 bit architectures. And, more importantly, at the moment, Linux has a competitive amount of market share in the 64 bit market, enough to, perhaps, tilt it towards a Linux Desktop. I'd certainly like to see more working towards this goal.
What ESR proposes in his Codex idea seems to have potential. I propose much the same thing in my blog today...
Well, personally I think this is governmental revenge for the telescope more or less proving there is no water on the moon.
Can't have that! Why keep going to the moon if there's no water there? Answer - cut any research that proves otherwise.
Arecibo has been darn useful for analyzing the characteristics of near earth objects as well. I'd hate to see it shut down.
Mining the Sky - by John Lewis The premier book on asteroid mining is now sadly out of date with recent developments in asteroid exploration - it holds absurdly low estimates on near earth asteroid population, and doesn't include the results of the latest research and space probes (such as deep impact).
This book would benefit greatly from being turned into a wiki.
Yea, well, there's a slight flaw in the ointment.
Every java program I ever saw that was worth a damn linked to tons of external C libraries that did the real work.
Dawn deserved to die for many reasons. I was glad when it got killed.
Maybe the problems have been solved, maybe not, but these still stand:
The hardware is over 15 years old and troublesome. The original proposal and cost savings in funding this mission is that it reused hardware from a previous mission. That proposal was 9 years ago!
Ion engines don't work well past mars. The mission takes over 9 years, because of that. The Dawn folk have the gall to pr this "as an extended test of the ion engine technology."
They are WAY over budget. At least another 30 mil for the project itself is required, plus the launch fees, which were well above 60 mil. Then the loooong wait while the probe labors towards the belt.
Long duration missions like this are a jobs program, like the Pluto mission. A lot more use science... and a lot more data... could be returned by doing a mission to the near earth asteroids instead... for cheaper... using the same hardware.
Prometheus, they say, brought God's fire down to Man,
And we've caught it, tamed it, trained it since our history began.
Now we're going back to Heaven just to look Him in the eye,
And there's a thunder 'crost the land, and a fire in the sky.
Gagarin was the first, back in 1961,
When like Icarus undaunted, he climbed to reach the Sun.
And he knew he might not make it, for it's never hard to die,
But he lifted off the pad and rode a fire in the sky.
Yet a higher goal was calling, and we vowed to reach it soon,
And we gave ourselves a decade to put fire on the Moon.
And Apollo told the world we can do it if we try,
And there was one small step and a fire in the sky.
Now two decades past Gagarin, 20 years to the day,
Came a shuttle named Columbia to open up the way.
And they said "She's just a truck", but she's a truck that's aiming high!
See her big jets burn. See her fire in the sky.
Yet the gods do not give lightly of the gifts that they have made
And with Challenger and seven, once again the price was paid.
Though a nation watched her falling, all the world could do was cry
As they passed from us to glory, riding fire in the sky.
I was sitting at the top of a flight of stairs when I saw Challenger explode. I slowly slid down the stairs, and then watched the video again and again, again, until every frame was burned into my memory.
And although the last words on the black box might have been "uh, oh", the last words heard over the air were: "Go for 104 percent".
Then there was this horrible "Snick!" as the radio went dead.
There's a sample of the last sounds from the shuttle on this song.
I saw Richard Feynman's eloquent demonstration of why the boosters failed, and watched him be ignored by the other members of the commission. I learned of the group of engineers at Thiokol that were overrulled by their management to give the "Go" to this mission...
I visualize these moments in time every time I am given management directives that attempt to contravene physical law, and to this day I stay true to my profession as an engineer, and do the right thing by the physics. It's the only way I can sleep at night.
There are other ways to build your "hoover" to gain that all-important difference between zero pressure and some pressure. You can go magnetic, and suck grains of metallic materials into your device's maw. You can go for sublimation and send heat or light down its throat. You might be able to use a catalytic reaction, or a biochemical reaction.
You can also attach your rocket to the biggest solid boulder you can find and leave it at that.
While asteroids may be weak compositionally, they contain large amounts of carbon - with suitable in-situ manufacture it would be possible to build a giant (albiet small compared to a space elevator) buckyball web (carbon nanotube) around the rock itself and haul that around on a tether.
yes, "hoovering" would work, given that the density of the asteroid you are "hoovering" from is greater than 0... you would, in this case, have your "hoover" bare centimeters from or actually inside the asteroid (which is probably largely dust, anyway). I'm not saying that the suction will be will be great, but the overall effect ought to be more potent than gravity.
Nice illustration of the miniscule strength of gravity relevant to tonnage, and how over long periods of time, it's possible to use gravity assists for just about anything. It is important to understand how weak - but persistent - and wonderful - interactions with gravity can be. The Grand Tour that Voyager went on, for example, or the Interplanetary Superhighway, or Lissajous orbits....
The spacecraft design with the angled rockets is wasteful, but if you are getting the fuel from the asteroid, the fuel is effectively unlimited. But: if you are getting fuel from the asteroid, you should be able to keep the spacecraft attached to the asteroid by the "hoover"ing effect of sucking up the raw material you are ejecting to the sides!! - a force far, far more potent than gravity would be.
Alternatives: You could focus mirrors one side of the asteroid and take advantage of the outgassing...
I HATE to take a contrarian perspective here, because, on the whole, I agree that all Linux drivers should be open sourced.
But the problems that embedded vendors face in using Linux for new designs are difficult. Notably - it's legally impossible to use TI's line of hybrid ARM/DSP processors without some sort of binary shim between the kernel and the DSP.
You can (and I DO) argue that TI should open up their licensing to be GPL compatible, but they haven't. The alternative processors in this space are not as powerful, and thus the hardware guys are stuck between a rock and a hard place. I'm sure they are pushing TI equally hard about making their processor code GPL compatible as well.
The second problem is the language barrier between traditional (and japanese speaking!) embedded developers and mainstream kernel developers. Embedded developers often have different priorities.
An embedded developer wants:
reliability
stability over time
low power consumption
suspend/resume & fast boot
low memory use
just the features of the embedded device enabled
and, lastly,
adaquate performance.
Most of the time, the people that drive the next design are the hardware people - they get a spec, they figure out what is the cheapest processor that can meet that spec, they do the design, then "it's a small matter of software development" to actually make the product work. The software guys get short shrift during the early phases, and then they get stuck with the resulting hardware, and then it's the fault of the software guys who can't make it work...
I've had this happen to me twice in recent years. I (as the software guy) chose a processor that had an easy to use software interface, enough power to handle all the tasks without a lot of headache - and was overrulled by the hardware guys that chose a TI processor that cost about 4 dollars less - (and made the software job impossibly difficult. I left. The products failed.). When you have a spreadsheet that has hundreds of lines for the hardware costs and a single line for the software development cost, this is what happens.
None of this is specifically relevant to the debate at present, I'm just trying to show the rock and hard place you can get into in the hope that other hardware manufacturers listen to their software guys during the hardware development process.
Hear, Hear!
The railroad for this bill was at full steam and at least is now temporarily off the tracks.
It's not about free speech, but about paid-for political speech - anyone remember the scandals about secret payoffs to bloggers from last election?
Passing this bill as is would lead to political splogging on an intense scale. Yuck.
There
is a lot of debate surrounding the efforts of Google and Microsoft to
scan the books of the world and make them available electronically. I
say Scan Them All!
I say don't stop with what is sitting on the library shelves of the
world, but start a World Wide Effort to get every scrap of information
that resides on paper and make it electronic. Books, Magazines,
Brochures, Handouts, Catalogues, and the entire output of every local
copy shop on the planet. All those announcements about bake sales,
rummage sales, and lost pet posters. I don't know if any of this will
be significant, but I do know that if it is available, somebody a lot
smarter than you or I will be able to see things that we don't.
Index and make it all searchable. Collate and store copies of
everything on the Internet as well. Devote a ton of money to create
electronic libraries to spider, update and back it all up. Create Root
Servers to do nothing but collect and update this effort.
The debate surrounding this effort revolves around the Straightjacket
of Copyright. We need to repeal current extensions and bring Copyright
back to sanity. I am a proponent of 14 Years.
Owners and Holders
Copyright in it's original form, was a deal between the author, and
the government that the author was a member of. Simply stated, You got
a Limited Monopoly, in the case of the US, 14 years originally, to make
your best deal with someone to create and market copies of your work.
In return, at the end of this period, the work became Public Domain ,
forming a part of the intellectual capital of the society that granted
you copyright.
Copyright originally covered the printed word, as the printing press
was the first duplication device capable of making copies, that were
for the sake of discussion, true copies. Ownership belonged to the
creator. This has not changed, but the assignment of rights of
duplication, the lunacy of copyright extensions, has transformed what
was a simple bargain into an swirling vortex of intellectual capital
kidnapping. Not only are the owners rights being trampled, but the
ability of society to promote further growth of the Public Domain, our
end of the bargain, which is yeast for future creators, to ferment new
thought, ideas, to promote the intellectual, spiritual and emotional
growth of our societies, is being held hostage by Copyright Holders,
also known as Publishers.
In order to get 'published', you need to make a deal with a
Publisher. Publishers are in the business of making copies of things to
sell to make money. Fair enough, if it were a simple arrangement of
sharing the risk of producing your work, in sufficient quantity to
cover the costs of production, distribution, and enough sales to
produce a profit which you would share.
This is not how it works.
It doesn't matter if it is a novel, text book, a song, play, map,
photo, or motion picture, you have to assign your rights to the
publisher, which gives them the power to control every aspect of your
work. There are very few exceptions to this arrangement and the terms
of these arrangement are never equitable to the creators.
The whole cycle of creation, publication and compensation has been
one of the most inefficient business processes ever devised by mankind.
As a creator, you have to search out a publisher, which puts you at a
disadvantage in the first place, being put in the position of begging
for attention from an industry whose primary focus is the largest
quantity at the lowest possible cost. Your chances of publication, are
so small as to make the lottery look much more attractive for making a
living.
In addition to the gauntlet of submission, rejection, submission,
review, and acceptance of your work for publication, is the hydra
headed monster of subsid
>SCO used to be so damned cool, too. I remember when >they had to send out memos to the staff to wear shoes >and be fully clothed when they were going to have an >outsider visitor.
Those were the good ole days... when the suits (in 91) moved engineering away from its hot tub, everybody started getting tense, until now we have this situation.
From the NYT: "A Senate panel approved legislation on Thursday to complete the slow transition from analog to digital television by 2009, a change of enormous importance to the television, cable and wireless telephone industries."
The title of the article? "A Bill Advancing Digital TV" - when this bill actually pushes back digital TV deployment from 2006 to 2009. The bill is pitched as a way of distributing the wealth to be gained from reselling the analog spectrum - with a 3b sop to "consumers" - but what it really does is defer that for at least another 3 years!
Nay, I say! - let analog go dark as has been planned for over 10 years! It's time to let that spectrum be used for other things, past time.
I was pleased to beat slashdot to this story by a few hours on my blog...
When I heard this story, this went through my head:
If I got one of these converter thingies, was I also required to plug it in and turn it on? Couldn't I just get a coupon for something else, instead? I need a new toaster.
I can think of a lot better uses for 40 bucks a taxpayer... like pay for some better hurricane prediction software, and maybe a couple more high-resolution weather satellites.
And, what could 3 billion do for American broadband... which has slipped to less than 14th among the developed nations?
3 Billion... So that 70 million of the perceived population can tune in. Sure. Like all of them want to tune in. Maybe some would just like a nicer fishing hole, a couple music lessons, or a local library? Maybe most?
Jeeze, what could 3 billion do to distribute 100 dollar laptops? Thats... 30 million... 100 dollar... laptops. With a mesh network that size the last mile... and the coffeeshop mile... and the park in the middle of nowhere mile... all come free.
Ah... the tax and spend Republican senate was as usual, spending money it didn't have, on a subsidy for a dying industry, for a president that doesn't know what a veto is.
I miss the days when all we cared about was who was blowing who in the big house.
I wondered if these well meaning misguided senators counted me among the 70 million that would miss broadcast tv if it went dark in 2006. As if I'd care about missing 3 simultaneous 1024x768 episodes of COPS, or reruns of Survivor in surround sound.
Write your senators! Tell them you want to see analog broadcast die on schedule and a million new technologies take its place. Kill Analog TV in 2006! Let it go the way of the horse and buggy!
From http://www.picketwyre.com/~mye/i_am_not_a_consumer .html">Mye Laande's rant: Do yourself a favor - everytime you see or hear the word "consumer" used in a sentence this week, substitute "citizen", and watch your attitudes change.
Next invasion of a country will be to protect intellectually property rights. The marines will go in, followed shortly thereafter by the lawyers.
Come to think of it, sending in the lawyers inot the beach would solve a lot of problems for both sides - the enemy military gets in some worthwhile target practice - and our side ends up with less lawyers.
google could save 4b on the purchase price of skype and buy digium to get asterisk instead - which interoperates with all the major voice protocols (sip, iax, h323, mgcp but not skype at present). Asterisk is approaching version 1.2 at a breakneck clip.
Slashdot Mirror
Rosegarden: Pretty good.
Ardour: The 2.0 release (just out last week) is AWESOME! Get it!
CSound: I like to leave my programming mind behind when I'm working on music.
Sooperlooper: very cool
Freewheeling: also cool
Music distros this summer ought to be pretty good - with new releases scheduled for many of the music distributions.
What bothers me the most these days is plugins and soft synths. There are not enough plugins, the ones we have (like swh-plugins, tap-plugins, caps-plugins, and cmt) aren't heavily optimized for modern architectures (I just spent a weekend working on that) and not enough people out there do dsp programming (myself included) to really gain critical mass for the "perfect EQ" or the "perfect reverb". Still, the plugin solutions are adaquate, just not generally something to rave about. If you know a dsp programmer bored in his day job, show him 64 studio or Studio to go and try to enlist his/her help!
Soft Synths are coming along. Linuxsampler is very nice. Bristol is coming along. There are quite a few more.
I think Linux music is on the brink of plausible promise. I've got 16 tracks of live audio working almost flawlessly right now.
Jumping directly into the center of a loop - Aggressively and effectively using registers - Developing compilers - Doing bit manipulation - using barely language supported features like "find first bit" or popcount - are all things that can often be best done in assembly. Big today is vector arithmetic.
Grokking assembly helps is knowing what can be fast in your language, and what can't be. For example, in looking at some gcc generated X86_64 assembly code recently I found that floor and ceil were still function calls on that processor. As was lrint (even though SSE has a rounding mode).
The two places where assembly is used a lot these days is in accelerating vectorized code, and in low level hardware bringup. If you are interested in developing code for a new processor or SOC, you aren't going to be writing in java at first, but painful, tedious assembly, poked directly into the processor via jtag.
Lastly - in the general case, if you don't know how your hardware really works, you don't know how to program effectively for it.
Sure, in today's day and age, you shouldn't set out to code an entire visicalc-alike in assembly - but profiling your code to find hot spots - and knowing when and to use assembly to fix them, IS important.
Examples:
Extensive oprofiling of ardour 2's core routines showed several that would benefit from being rewritten in assembly, or something much closer to assembly. Result? Ardour now scales 2-3x better under high workloads than it did before (and those core routines STILL dominate the runtime)
Now, if the question is: "would being a competent assembly language programmer be a help in the job market?"
Beats me. Isn't helping me out at all.
IMHO everybody should learn some assembly for at least one processor at some point before exiting college, preferably in the first or second year.
Whew. I read this whole thread and without someone suggesting removable battery packs for EV, I grew worried. Finally - the very last message - suggested it.
Why is it that the average slashdot reader can envision charging systems requiring truly dangerous/absurd amounts of voltage/amperage... but can't imagine a system that could swap out a 1 ton battery pack in five minutes?
I'd be much happier with charging stations that charged up 1 ton battery packs overnight (and during the day to meet demand).
How much volume underneath the ground is currently occupied by fuel tanks that could instead be used for batteries, charging?
Ever notice how many service bays are shuttered across america these days? Ever see how fast someone can get a car on a lift and change a tire?
Ever notice how fuel actually GETS to the service station? Those big tanker trucks, yes? Wouldn't it make sense to load up a truck with a bunch of batteries and take them to a central station to be recharged?
Heck we could start using the railroads again. Drive up to a train terminal, with one train full of fresh batteries and the other waiting for old batteries. Each stack of batteries on the railroad car on a spring + lift - drive over the railroad car, you "squat" to deposit your dead battery, get towed to the next (just like in a carwash). Done.
(incidentally I really like the above idea. I shoulda patented it instead of posting it on slashdot)
All we need is:
A standard size for such batteries. (several sizes is ok, but one to start would be a good idea). Everybody is designing a custom enclosure for their battery packs and that's not useful.
A standard foolproof way to latch them in place. Zillions of these exist.
Good ways to keep (and/or monitor) them for damage. Arguably SUV's as they stand higher off the road, are actually a better choice than the low-slung performance cars in this respect.
Various people competing to create ways to further automate the swap-out.
Etc.
Killer app differs for different folk. For me, it's Ardour2.
ESR's argument is flawed about the need to transition to a 4GB+ architecture as well. I don't agree with his "drop dead date" of 2008, but push the date back to about 2012, as things like PAE are more adaquate than emm386 was to keep users and single programs satisfied on the x86 architecture. No individual binary I run ever gets bigger than 600MB in size today, which leaves plenty of headroom for x86 to continue in place.
On the other hand, 2GB is the new 640k, and I agree with the paper that by 2008 4GB will be a comfort zone, and cerrtainly by 2012 8 and 12GB will start putting real pressure on the 32 bit architectures. And, more importantly, at the moment, Linux has a competitive amount of market share in the 64 bit market, enough to, perhaps, tilt it towards a Linux Desktop. I'd certainly like to see more working towards this goal.
What ESR proposes in his Codex idea seems to have potential. I propose much the same thing in my blog today...
Well, personally I think this is governmental revenge for the telescope more or less proving there is no water on the moon. Can't have that! Why keep going to the moon if there's no water there? Answer - cut any research that proves otherwise. Arecibo has been darn useful for analyzing the characteristics of near earth objects as well. I'd hate to see it shut down.
Mining the Sky - by John Lewis The premier book on asteroid mining is now sadly out of date with recent developments in asteroid exploration - it holds absurdly low estimates on near earth asteroid population, and doesn't include the results of the latest research and space probes (such as deep impact).
This book would benefit greatly from being turned into a wiki.
Yea, well, there's a slight flaw in the ointment. Every java program I ever saw that was worth a damn linked to tons of external C libraries that did the real work.
Dawn deserved to die for many reasons. I was glad when it got killed.
Maybe the problems have been solved, maybe not, but these still stand:
The hardware is over 15 years old and troublesome. The original proposal and cost savings in funding this mission is that it reused hardware from a previous mission. That proposal was 9 years ago!
Ion engines don't work well past mars. The mission takes over 9 years, because of that. The Dawn folk have the gall to pr this "as an extended test of the ion engine technology."
They are WAY over budget. At least another 30 mil for the project itself is required, plus the launch fees, which were well above 60 mil. Then the loooong wait while the probe labors towards the belt.
Long duration missions like this are a jobs program, like the Pluto mission. A lot more use science... and a lot more data... could be returned by doing a mission to the near earth asteroids instead... for cheaper... using the same hardware.
Prometheus, they say, brought God's fire down to Man,
And we've caught it, tamed it, trained it since our history began.
Now we're going back to Heaven just to look Him in the eye,
And there's a thunder 'crost the land, and a fire in the sky.
Gagarin was the first, back in 1961,
When like Icarus undaunted, he climbed to reach the Sun.
And he knew he might not make it, for it's never hard to die,
But he lifted off the pad and rode a fire in the sky.
Yet a higher goal was calling, and we vowed to reach it soon,
And we gave ourselves a decade to put fire on the Moon.
And Apollo told the world we can do it if we try,
And there was one small step and a fire in the sky.
Now two decades past Gagarin, 20 years to the day,
Came a shuttle named Columbia to open up the way.
And they said "She's just a truck", but she's a truck that's aiming high!
See her big jets burn. See her fire in the sky.
Yet the gods do not give lightly of the gifts that they have made
And with Challenger and seven, once again the price was paid.
Though a nation watched her falling, all the world could do was cry
As they passed from us to glory, riding fire in the sky.
I was sitting at the top of a flight of stairs when I saw Challenger explode. I slowly slid down the stairs, and then watched the video again and again, again, until every frame was burned into my memory.
And although the last words on the black box might have been "uh, oh", the last words heard over the air were: "Go for 104 percent".
Then there was this horrible "Snick!" as the radio went dead.
There's a sample of the last sounds from the shuttle on this song.
I saw Richard Feynman's eloquent demonstration of why the boosters failed, and watched him be ignored by the other members of the commission. I learned of the group of engineers at Thiokol that were overrulled by their management to give the "Go" to this mission...
I visualize these moments in time every time I am given management directives that attempt to contravene physical law, and to this day I stay true to my profession as an engineer, and do the right thing by the physics. It's the only way I can sleep at night.
Still, I remain haunted.
Good idea... but I've been talking about it for years, and Chris Hall of the spacecraft blog has actually done the math....
You can also attach your rocket to the biggest solid boulder you can find and leave it at that.
While asteroids may be weak compositionally, they contain large amounts of carbon - with suitable in-situ manufacture it would be possible to build a giant (albiet small compared to a space elevator) buckyball web (carbon nanotube) around the rock itself and haul that around on a tether.
yes, "hoovering" would work, given that the density of the asteroid you are "hoovering" from is greater than 0... you would, in this case, have your "hoover" bare centimeters from or actually inside the asteroid (which is probably largely dust, anyway). I'm not saying that the suction will be will be great, but the overall effect ought to be more potent than gravity.
Space Tractor - now that's phrasology that must get the Russians all excited
The spacecraft design with the angled rockets is wasteful, but if you are getting the fuel from the asteroid, the fuel is effectively unlimited. But: if you are getting fuel from the asteroid, you should be able to keep the spacecraft attached to the asteroid by the "hoover"ing effect of sucking up the raw material you are ejecting to the sides!! - a force far, far more potent than gravity would be.
Alternatives: You could focus mirrors one side of the asteroid and take advantage of the outgassing...
Or you could (my preference) just mine the asteroid down to nothing long before impact...
After all, covering that 400 million dollar launch cost would be a lot easier if we just shipped a few billion dollars worth of materials back to LEO!
But the problems that embedded vendors face in using Linux for new designs are difficult. Notably - it's legally impossible to use TI's line of hybrid ARM/DSP processors without some sort of binary shim between the kernel and the DSP.
You can (and I DO) argue that TI should open up their licensing to be GPL compatible, but they haven't. The alternative processors in this space are not as powerful, and thus the hardware guys are stuck between a rock and a hard place. I'm sure they are pushing TI equally hard about making their processor code GPL compatible as well.
The second problem is the language barrier between traditional (and japanese speaking!) embedded developers and mainstream kernel developers. Embedded developers often have different priorities.
An embedded developer wants: reliability stability over time low power consumption suspend/resume & fast boot low memory use just the features of the embedded device enabled and, lastly, adaquate performance. Most of the time, the people that drive the next design are the hardware people - they get a spec, they figure out what is the cheapest processor that can meet that spec, they do the design, then "it's a small matter of software development" to actually make the product work. The software guys get short shrift during the early phases, and then they get stuck with the resulting hardware, and then it's the fault of the software guys who can't make it work...
I've had this happen to me twice in recent years. I (as the software guy) chose a processor that had an easy to use software interface, enough power to handle all the tasks without a lot of headache - and was overrulled by the hardware guys that chose a TI processor that cost about 4 dollars less - (and made the software job impossibly difficult. I left. The products failed.). When you have a spreadsheet that has hundreds of lines for the hardware costs and a single line for the software development cost, this is what happens.
None of this is specifically relevant to the debate at present, I'm just trying to show the rock and hard place you can get into in the hope that other hardware manufacturers listen to their software guys during the hardware development process.
Hear, Hear! The railroad for this bill was at full steam and at least is now temporarily off the tracks. It's not about free speech, but about paid-for political speech - anyone remember the scandals about secret payoffs to bloggers from last election? Passing this bill as is would lead to political splogging on an intense scale. Yuck.
There is a lot of debate surrounding the efforts of Google and Microsoft to scan the books of the world and make them available electronically. I say Scan Them All!
I say don't stop with what is sitting on the library shelves of the world, but start a World Wide Effort to get every scrap of information that resides on paper and make it electronic. Books, Magazines, Brochures, Handouts, Catalogues, and the entire output of every local copy shop on the planet. All those announcements about bake sales, rummage sales, and lost pet posters. I don't know if any of this will be significant, but I do know that if it is available, somebody a lot smarter than you or I will be able to see things that we don't.
Index and make it all searchable. Collate and store copies of everything on the Internet as well. Devote a ton of money to create electronic libraries to spider, update and back it all up. Create Root Servers to do nothing but collect and update this effort.
The debate surrounding this effort revolves around the Straightjacket of Copyright. We need to repeal current extensions and bring Copyright back to sanity. I am a proponent of 14 Years.
Owners and Holders
Copyright in it's original form, was a deal between the author, and the government that the author was a member of. Simply stated, You got a Limited Monopoly, in the case of the US, 14 years originally, to make your best deal with someone to create and market copies of your work. In return, at the end of this period, the work became Public Domain , forming a part of the intellectual capital of the society that granted you copyright.
Copyright originally covered the printed word, as the printing press was the first duplication device capable of making copies, that were for the sake of discussion, true copies. Ownership belonged to the creator. This has not changed, but the assignment of rights of duplication, the lunacy of copyright extensions, has transformed what was a simple bargain into an swirling vortex of intellectual capital kidnapping. Not only are the owners rights being trampled, but the ability of society to promote further growth of the Public Domain, our end of the bargain, which is yeast for future creators, to ferment new thought, ideas, to promote the intellectual, spiritual and emotional growth of our societies, is being held hostage by Copyright Holders, also known as Publishers.
In order to get 'published', you need to make a deal with a Publisher. Publishers are in the business of making copies of things to sell to make money. Fair enough, if it were a simple arrangement of sharing the risk of producing your work, in sufficient quantity to cover the costs of production, distribution, and enough sales to produce a profit which you would share.
This is not how it works.
It doesn't matter if it is a novel, text book, a song, play, map, photo, or motion picture, you have to assign your rights to the publisher, which gives them the power to control every aspect of your work. There are very few exceptions to this arrangement and the terms of these arrangement are never equitable to the creators.
The whole cycle of creation, publication and compensation has been one of the most inefficient business processes ever devised by mankind. As a creator, you have to search out a publisher, which puts you at a disadvantage in the first place, being put in the position of begging for attention from an industry whose primary focus is the largest quantity at the lowest possible cost. Your chances of publication, are so small as to make the lottery look much more attractive for making a living.
In addition to the gauntlet of submission, rejection, submission, review, and acceptance of your work for publication, is the hydra headed monster of subsid
>SCO used to be so damned cool, too. I remember when >they had to send out memos to the staff to wear shoes >and be fully clothed when they were going to have an >outsider visitor. Those were the good ole days... when the suits (in 91) moved engineering away from its hot tub, everybody started getting tense, until now we have this situation.
The title of the article? "A Bill Advancing Digital TV" - when this bill actually pushes back digital TV deployment from 2006 to 2009. The bill is pitched as a way of distributing the wealth to be gained from reselling the analog spectrum - with a 3b sop to "consumers" - but what it really does is defer that for at least another 3 years!
Nay, I say! - let analog go dark as has been planned for over 10 years! It's time to let that spectrum be used for other things, past time.
I was pleased to beat slashdot to this story by a few hours on my blog...
When I heard this story, this went through my head:
If I got one of these converter thingies, was I also required to plug it in and turn it on? Couldn't I just get a coupon for something else, instead? I need a new toaster.
I can think of a lot better uses for 40 bucks a taxpayer... like pay for some better hurricane prediction software, and maybe a couple more high-resolution weather satellites.
And, what could 3 billion do for American broadband... which has slipped to less than 14th among the developed nations?
3 Billion... So that 70 million of the perceived population can tune in. Sure. Like all of them want to tune in. Maybe some would just like a nicer fishing hole, a couple music lessons, or a local library? Maybe most?
Jeeze, what could 3 billion do to distribute 100 dollar laptops? Thats... 30 million... 100 dollar... laptops. With a mesh network that size the last mile... and the coffeeshop mile... and the park in the middle of nowhere mile... all come free.
Ah... the tax and spend Republican senate was as usual, spending money it didn't have, on a subsidy for a dying industry, for a president that doesn't know what a veto is.
I miss the days when all we cared about was who was blowing who in the big house.
I wondered if these well meaning misguided senators counted me among the 70 million that would miss broadcast tv if it went dark in 2006. As if I'd care about missing 3 simultaneous 1024x768 episodes of COPS, or reruns of Survivor in surround sound.
Write your senators! Tell them you want to see analog broadcast die on schedule and a million new technologies take its place. Kill Analog TV in 2006! Let it go the way of the horse and buggy!
From http://www.picketwyre.com/~mye/i_am_not_a_consumer .html">Mye Laande's rant: Do yourself a favor - everytime you see or hear the word "consumer" used in a sentence this week, substitute "citizen", and watch your attitudes change.
Next invasion of a country will be to protect intellectually property rights. The marines will go in, followed shortly thereafter by the lawyers. Come to think of it, sending in the lawyers inot the beach would solve a lot of problems for both sides - the enemy military gets in some worthwhile target practice - and our side ends up with less lawyers.
Hayabusa includes the Minerva hopper - gravity on asteroids is so slight that you can get around on springs - no rockets or NASA rovers required. That's the key - that's why planetary exploration makes so little sense - when you can get to an asteroid and mine it - and return for a small fraction of the delta-V required to get back from the moon, or Mars.
google could save 4b on the purchase price of skype and buy digium to get asterisk instead - which interoperates with all the major voice protocols (sip, iax, h323, mgcp but not skype at present). Asterisk is approaching version 1.2 at a breakneck clip.