I thought the reason C&C was great was because of the far-out units. Pile 5 engineers into an APC, drive the APC over some crates until it becomes cloaked, then skate into the enemy base unseen with 5 engineers. Sell all the buildings and you win.
At least, that's the main strategy I usually employed.
Bloomberg exists for Solaris, and it doesn't use most Microsoft interfaces. The user interface for Bloomberg is a weird text and graphics terminal that reminds one of a 1980s Textronics terminal. Free software cannot be foreign to Bloomberg, as the Bloomberg application embeds Gecko from the Mozilla project. Little effort would be needed to run Bloomberg on a Linux machines, and because Bloomberg distributes controlled hardware to some customers, they have a good channel to slip in Linux without anyone taking notice.
I observe growing Linux use in finance. My firm uses Linux for everything but accounting and desktops, and many large firms use Linux in their servers. A Bloomberg terminal running Linux should be well accepted.
The biggest problem with Disney's worldview -- and by association the worldview of the RIAA, MPAA, Vivendi, et al -- is that they assume no private person can create anything. All art comes from the generous people at Disney. There are no independent aritsts.
People like Macs in part because they can rip, mix, and burn their purchased CD collection, or tote it around on their iPods. They also like Macs because they come with the tools necessary to put your own videos on DVD and send them to your pals. The latter is a power Disney does not want you to have. All video entertainment must come from the corporate empire. None of it must come from regular people.
The 386-based RIM devices have been around fo years, and so far nobody is running Unix on it. I'd say it will still be a while.
They make it easy to load software onto the device, which comes with a serial cradle and DOS software to load data onto the flash disk. That part would be a piece of cake. But probably the display controller is funky and who knows about the Mobitex comms.
There's still a long, long way to go before house prices are reasonable here. I haven't noticed purchase or rental prices falling much. "Charming shithole: $650,000." In "Noe Valley" of course which means "Bayview" if a realtor says it. The landlords are still kidding themselves, but once residential vacancy gets up around 10%, things will start to crumble. Look at the massive investments in buildings like the "Paramount" at Mission and Third: more than 500 units, almost all empty, with stupid asking prices for an ugly building in a boring neighborhood. That's still the mindset of the landlords around here. Ugh.
The new DVD player can show movies on the external monitor attached to my PowerBook G4. That was the only remaining regression OS X had versus OS 9 on my machine. I'm a happy sometimes-OSX user now:)
The Multia makes a terrific network appliance. With its 2 PCMCIA slots, PCI slot, network port, and SCSI port, it's absolutely packed with ability. It can be an 802.11b access point, 802.11b bridge, file+print server, NAT router and firewall, DNS cache, HTTP cache, and ssh gateway all at the same time. It's an insane little machine.
Multia buyer's note: don't buy one that isn't working. Finding parity SIMMs is a pain and many samples suffer from thermal problems. Don't buy one unless you've seen it boot.
Whoa there. You just pointed out three HUGE companies entering the aircraft market, which strengthens the point that the barriers to entry are high. Bombardier manufacturers at least part of every passenger rail car currently deployed. They have been in the aircraft business since 1989 IIRC, their revenues just on aircraft exceed $10bn Canadian annually. I believe they are the thrid largest civil aircraft company after Boeing and Airbus. Their R&D efforts are funded significantly by Canadian tax revenue. So, all it took for Bombardier to break into the aircraft industry was to leverage a strong position in the rail market and get the backing of a major national government.
Embraer is a $6bn company that has been around for over 30 years. Again, it took no small resources to break into the commercial aircraft business: they funded that effort with their cash cows in suppyling and repairing military aircraft in the world's forgotten air forces.
It is also strange to say that Fairchild is some kind of up-and-coming civil aviation company. Both Fairchild and Dornier have been around since before WWII. Their chief product was developed with R&D money from Daimler Benz, and they are now owned by the largest insurance company in Europe. Also I believe they have not delivered any aircraft to major customers since their reentry into the market.
It may be that Boeing and Airbus are not invincible, that the age of the large jet has passed, and that a company with few resources and a big idea could come along and knock those Goliaths over. But, the three huge companies you mentioned don't qualify for the role of David.
I saw Toy Story 2 in a DLP theater here in San Francisco and also at a film theater in Phoenix. The difference was that DLP has a tremendous, gorgeous, absent black that no film could possibly hope to match. It's hard to say what the shadow detail might have been on a live action movie, but I'd be inclined to believe DLP would have superior shadow detail... it certainly has serious dynamic range. And of course, the DLP version lacked visual artifacts altogether and produced no sound.
The visual quality of Episode II will most likely be limited by the source equipment Lucas used rather than the projection system.
I'll tell you what's hard about it: it makes no sense. URLs must be handled by URL handlers, not by MIME type handlers. The content of the response to a URL is not known until the request is actually performed. The type might be text/html or it might be application/octet-stream or perhaps image/png or anything else. Similarly, a program that understands text/html might not know how to make HTTP requests, FTP requests, Gopher request, and so forth. Therefore the association of a URL handler by MIME type is nonsense. URL handlers should be speicified based on URL scheme.
Trees are going to clobber 802.11a, but they practically kill 802.11b as well. Fortunately for 802.11a outdoor deployment, 1W power is allowed in the upper band.
Excuse your ignorance, but 802.11a has better range than 802.11b. At the limit of 802.11b range, 802.11a will still work up to about 6mbps. At any distance from the access point, 802.11a provides faster access than 802.11b.
Say it with me kids: 802.11a has better range than 802.11b.
Looks like the Athlon kicked its ass. 3.5GB DDR vs 1GB PC133: Athlon wins. 2xAthlon CPU vs 2xG4: Athlon wins by a LONG LONG WAY. 1U vs 2U: Athlon wins again.
Consider the size, also. You can get dual athlon machines in 1U cases. Leaving room for networking switches, that's 80 CPUs, 160GB main memory, and perhaps 5.7TB storage per rack. The only form factor for a PowerMac is that enormous plastic case. I'll be generous and say you could fit a PowerMac in a 19" rack on its side, and it will take 4U. That's ten PowerMacs per rack, or 20 2nd-rate DSPs errr CPUs, 15GB main memory, and 1TB storage per rack. Doesn't sound like a really practical cluster to me: you can't even stack those Macs up!
Nevermind that the Athlon has a superior CPU bus and a fast DDR memory bus, while the Mac has a shared CPU bus and a rather pathetic 800MB/s PC133 memory bus.
Re:Incompetence
on
Apollo 1
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Anyone interested in the Challenger failure and the debate between the engineers at Morton Thiokole and NASA, there is an excellent treatment in Visual Explanations by Edward Tufte. Chapter 2 deals with the Challenger and explains how and why the people at Thiokol, who knew the O-ring would fail, were unable to convince the people at NASA through a series of confusing charts and misinformation.
Re:Maybe improve DVD playback?
on
Lindows Reviewed
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Xine is better than any DVD player I used on Windows. It takes up very little CPU time, it looks great (including deinterlacing), the audio sync is exact, and (BONUS) it doesn't force you to sit through the stupid FBI/Interpol warnings and Coca-Cola commercials.
they'll probably start by O/S fingerprinting the NAT enabled hardware gateways you can get at buy.com for $150.
That would be a distinctly stupid thing to do. So, anyone who has a laptop computer and an 802.11b access point that NATs is automatically some kind of AUP-violating scofflaw? I guess those millions of Apple AirPorts already deployed don't matter to them?
Find all the Linux boxes; these will have a higher incidence of NAT because Linux actually packages this feature.
Last I looked, Windows comes with "Internet Connection Sharing" and a control panel to turn it on with one button click. Linux requires daunting knowledge of IP networking and the iptables tools.
This whoel subject is completely stupid. What if I have roommates who all use one computer via serial terminals? NCD terminals? That isn't NAT because I only have one host, but dozens of people can use those services via getty or X11. So WTF is the difference?
Actually they do not. Telco and cable plants operate as a natural monopoly, supported, regulated, and historically funded by the local municipal authority. The right to freely set your terms of service ends when you use the government to back your business.
That these telcos and such were able to come correct and just advertise the services the actually offer and bill for them in a reasonable and deterministic way. An honest DSL provider would not sell you a 384->1500Kbps line and then bitch about you having more than one machine. The honest provider would sell you a service with a 384 kbps base rate for $x/month and $y/megabyte transfered above your base rate up to your burst limit at 1500kbps. For people who want their bill to be the same all the time, they would sell flat rate services at different speeds.
This is never going to happen of course, because this sort of service provision implies not only limits on the customer but also performance requirements on the part of the telco. I think we are stuck with "52 times faster than an ordinary modem" marketing and bad service forever.
These analysts are called in the business "the sell side". They are not analyzing stocks, they are selling them. Their job is to make every stock appear at least somewhat attractive, so their firm can make a load off people buying and selling it. A neutral rating of "hold" from the sell side really means "this company is worth 1.6 bags of dog shit." A rating of "sell" is extremely rare for most of the bigger houses. To get a rating of "sell", you are usually indicted in some criminal conspiracy, or your stock is already at record lows.
Vorbis and flac
on
Non-MP3 Codecs?
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I'm writing a new application and I have chosen the supported audio formats based on practical concerns: license, patent status, and API. MP3 is nice but technically you need to a license from the patent holder to make an encoder. Vorbis has no such limitation so I use it. I use flac for the same reason. Its license agrees with mine.
Another consideration is the straightforwardness of the API for the library you intend to use. Vorbis has a somewhat reasonble API with a liberal addition of quirks. Also you can easily add metadata to Vorbis files. Ever tried adding metadata to an MP3 file? ID3v1.1 is trivial but ID3v2 has a 95,000 line reference implementation. Uh? UH?
Any application has to support PCM audio also, since most music collections are primarily on CD.
The iPod comes with a wall brick that can charge the computer directly, and most Apple computers have deep sleep modes which aare very nearly off but the FireWire ports still have power. Apple users don't tend to actually turn their machines OFF.
The problem is that these portable players all use ASIC MP3 decoders. They do the job accurately and without drawing much power. There are no existing Ogg Vorbis ASIC decoders, so you would need to do it in software with a relatively beefy CPU, which in turn means significantly reduced battery life.
USB2 is pretty pointless for non-computer devices. IEEE1394 devices can talk to each other, point-to-point. For example, you can have a 1394 camera interfacing directly with a 1394 editing console which in turn interfaces with a 1394 VTR. USB and USB2 devices require a computer to run the show. Thus you would plug your USB2 camera, if there will be such a thing, into your computer and your VTR into your computer, and use them. If you don't have a computer arbitrating USB traffic, the USB devices are useless.
It looks like it has approximately the same interface as the iPod, is as big as a paperback book, and interfaces over USB. USB is 12Mbps. It would take 3.9 hours to populate a 20GB disk.
This thing is no iPod killer. The great thing about the iPod is that I can put it in my pocket, and the firewire interface is so fast that I don't need to put ALL of my MP3s on it: it takes only seconds to load a fresh collection.
Slashdot Mirror
At least, that's the main strategy I usually employed.
I observe growing Linux use in finance. My firm uses Linux for everything but accounting and desktops, and many large firms use Linux in their servers. A Bloomberg terminal running Linux should be well accepted.
People like Macs in part because they can rip, mix, and burn their purchased CD collection, or tote it around on their iPods. They also like Macs because they come with the tools necessary to put your own videos on DVD and send them to your pals. The latter is a power Disney does not want you to have. All video entertainment must come from the corporate empire. None of it must come from regular people.
The 386-based RIM devices have been around fo years, and so far nobody is running Unix on it. I'd say it will still be a while.
They make it easy to load software onto the device, which comes with a serial cradle and DOS software to load data onto the flash disk. That part would be a piece of cake. But probably the display controller is funky and who knows about the Mobitex comms.
There's still a long, long way to go before house prices are reasonable here. I haven't noticed purchase or rental prices falling much. "Charming shithole: $650,000." In "Noe Valley" of course which means "Bayview" if a realtor says it. The landlords are still kidding themselves, but once residential vacancy gets up around 10%, things will start to crumble. Look at the massive investments in buildings like the "Paramount" at Mission and Third: more than 500 units, almost all empty, with stupid asking prices for an ugly building in a boring neighborhood. That's still the mindset of the landlords around here. Ugh.
The new DVD player can show movies on the external monitor attached to my PowerBook G4. That was the only remaining regression OS X had versus OS 9 on my machine. I'm a happy sometimes-OSX user now :)
Multia buyer's note: don't buy one that isn't working. Finding parity SIMMs is a pain and many samples suffer from thermal problems. Don't buy one unless you've seen it boot.
Whoa there. You just pointed out three HUGE companies entering the aircraft market, which strengthens the point that the barriers to entry are high. Bombardier manufacturers at least part of every passenger rail car currently deployed. They have been in the aircraft business since 1989 IIRC, their revenues just on aircraft exceed $10bn Canadian annually. I believe they are the thrid largest civil aircraft company after Boeing and Airbus. Their R&D efforts are funded significantly by Canadian tax revenue. So, all it took for Bombardier to break into the aircraft industry was to leverage a strong position in the rail market and get the backing of a major national government.
Embraer is a $6bn company that has been around for over 30 years. Again, it took no small resources to break into the commercial aircraft business: they funded that effort with their cash cows in suppyling and repairing military aircraft in the world's forgotten air forces.
It is also strange to say that Fairchild is some kind of up-and-coming civil aviation company. Both Fairchild and Dornier have been around since before WWII. Their chief product was developed with R&D money from Daimler Benz, and they are now owned by the largest insurance company in Europe. Also I believe they have not delivered any aircraft to major customers since their reentry into the market.
It may be that Boeing and Airbus are not invincible, that the age of the large jet has passed, and that a company with few resources and a big idea could come along and knock those Goliaths over. But, the three huge companies you mentioned don't qualify for the role of David.
The visual quality of Episode II will most likely be limited by the source equipment Lucas used rather than the projection system.
I'll tell you what's hard about it: it makes no sense. URLs must be handled by URL handlers, not by MIME type handlers. The content of the response to a URL is not known until the request is actually performed. The type might be text/html or it might be application/octet-stream or perhaps image/png or anything else. Similarly, a program that understands text/html might not know how to make HTTP requests, FTP requests, Gopher request, and so forth. Therefore the association of a URL handler by MIME type is nonsense. URL handlers should be speicified based on URL scheme.
Trees are going to clobber 802.11a, but they practically kill 802.11b as well. Fortunately for 802.11a outdoor deployment, 1W power is allowed in the upper band.
Say it with me kids: 802.11a has better range than 802.11b.
2xAthlon 1900+, 3.5GB memory, 292GB hot swap 10KRPM SCSI disks, dual ethernet controllers, 1U rack chassis: $9071 at penguin computing.
2xG4 1000, 1.0GB memory, 292GB hot swap unknown rotational speed SCSI disks, 1 ethernet controller, 2U rack chassis: $8687 at GVS.
Looks like the Athlon kicked its ass. 3.5GB DDR vs 1GB PC133: Athlon wins. 2xAthlon CPU vs 2xG4: Athlon wins by a LONG LONG WAY. 1U vs 2U: Athlon wins again.
Nevermind that the Athlon has a superior CPU bus and a fast DDR memory bus, while the Mac has a shared CPU bus and a rather pathetic 800MB/s PC133 memory bus.
Anyone interested in the Challenger failure and the debate between the engineers at Morton Thiokole and NASA, there is an excellent treatment in Visual Explanations by Edward Tufte. Chapter 2 deals with the Challenger and explains how and why the people at Thiokol, who knew the O-ring would fail, were unable to convince the people at NASA through a series of confusing charts and misinformation.
Xine is better than any DVD player I used on Windows. It takes up very little CPU time, it looks great (including deinterlacing), the audio sync is exact, and (BONUS) it doesn't force you to sit through the stupid FBI/Interpol warnings and Coca-Cola commercials.
That would be a distinctly stupid thing to do. So, anyone who has a laptop computer and an 802.11b access point that NATs is automatically some kind of AUP-violating scofflaw? I guess those millions of Apple AirPorts already deployed don't matter to them?
Last I looked, Windows comes with "Internet Connection Sharing" and a control panel to turn it on with one button click. Linux requires daunting knowledge of IP networking and the iptables tools.
This whoel subject is completely stupid. What if I have roommates who all use one computer via serial terminals? NCD terminals? That isn't NAT because I only have one host, but dozens of people can use those services via getty or X11. So WTF is the difference?
Actually they do not. Telco and cable plants operate as a natural monopoly, supported, regulated, and historically funded by the local municipal authority. The right to freely set your terms of service ends when you use the government to back your business.
This is never going to happen of course, because this sort of service provision implies not only limits on the customer but also performance requirements on the part of the telco. I think we are stuck with "52 times faster than an ordinary modem" marketing and bad service forever.
These analysts are called in the business "the sell side". They are not analyzing stocks, they are selling them. Their job is to make every stock appear at least somewhat attractive, so their firm can make a load off people buying and selling it. A neutral rating of "hold" from the sell side really means "this company is worth 1.6 bags of dog shit." A rating of "sell" is extremely rare for most of the bigger houses. To get a rating of "sell", you are usually indicted in some criminal conspiracy, or your stock is already at record lows.
Another consideration is the straightforwardness of the API for the library you intend to use. Vorbis has a somewhat reasonble API with a liberal addition of quirks. Also you can easily add metadata to Vorbis files. Ever tried adding metadata to an MP3 file? ID3v1.1 is trivial but ID3v2 has a 95,000 line reference implementation. Uh? UH?
Any application has to support PCM audio also, since most music collections are primarily on CD.
The iPod comes with a wall brick that can charge the computer directly, and most Apple computers have deep sleep modes which aare very nearly off but the FireWire ports still have power. Apple users don't tend to actually turn their machines OFF.
The problem is that these portable players all use ASIC MP3 decoders. They do the job accurately and without drawing much power. There are no existing Ogg Vorbis ASIC decoders, so you would need to do it in software with a relatively beefy CPU, which in turn means significantly reduced battery life.
USB2 is pretty pointless for non-computer devices. IEEE1394 devices can talk to each other, point-to-point. For example, you can have a 1394 camera interfacing directly with a 1394 editing console which in turn interfaces with a 1394 VTR. USB and USB2 devices require a computer to run the show. Thus you would plug your USB2 camera, if there will be such a thing, into your computer and your VTR into your computer, and use them. If you don't have a computer arbitrating USB traffic, the USB devices are useless.
This thing is no iPod killer. The great thing about the iPod is that I can put it in my pocket, and the firewire interface is so fast that I don't need to put ALL of my MP3s on it: it takes only seconds to load a fresh collection.