Right, so, as I said, you can't write a DVD player in Java. You can write the GUI to control a DVD player in Java, but you can't write the DVD player itself in Java. You can't write it in C either. If you tried to write a DVD player in straight ANSI C, I don't think it would give you quality playback, even on a 1.4 GHz Athlon. Maybe on something more powerful, but I'd be surprised if any CPU can do everything (MPEG parsing, IDCT, motion compensation, deinterlacing, AC3 parsing and decoding, colrospace conversion) in software.
Oh, how were the Java DVD player people planning to get all that data to the screen? You'll need more native methods to make sure that data can be sent efficiently to the output device. Did I mention that there is no way to write a DVD player in Java without native methods?
As for the altivec extensions, they are syntactical extensions to the C language. So you can simply say vector aVector, bVector; vecmul(aVector, bVector). It's not really like programming in assembly.
Sure, and then your DVD player is written in assembly, not pure Java. Remember, pure Java means, in part, that it includes no native methods. Reference
You wouldn't be able to write a software DVD player in pure Java on today's CPUs and today's Java runtimes. Software DVD players rely on the CPU's vector or SIMD processing facilities, like MMX, SSE, and SSE2 on Intel, or AltiVec on PowerPC. Last I looked, there wasn't any way to access this stuff from Java. To take advantage of the hardware, the Java runtime would need to recognize computation loops, unroll them a bit, stuff the operands into right registers, and execute the desired operation. Even then, the C or assembly routines in use today are so fast because they get the instruction scheduling just exactly right. Without precise control over instruction scheduling, you'll stall the CPU and that's the last thing you want in a software DVD player.
AltiVec's C API is the highest-level vector API I've used. It has unambiguous and standard C syntax extensions for vector operations. Yet, we still don't have C compilers that can automatically vectorize code. I'm having trouble imagining a Java tool that could automatically vectorize code where Java has no way to express vector operations.
Maybe you could write a Java DVD player that was the equivalent of cat/dev/dvd/dev/hardware-mpeg2-decoder-device, but that's about the extent of what you could do in today's Java.
There wouldn't be any government IT people anywhere near this municipal network. We're talking about physical infrastructure: people with shovels and pipe wrenches.
Obviously you would need to setup the market for central office space so to discourage monopolization. I don't think that regular telcos would dominate because their service doesn't make much money at all. It's not as if a provider needs to have all of their equipment in the CO, anyway. They only need enough to hook into a fat pipe back to their own offices.
I live in SF too. We have a compact city which is perfect for this style of retrofitting. We are already used to XYZ Underground Corp. digging up the streets every week to lay yet another wire. We have the highest bus ridership in the nation, even though the buses don't have a schedule. We have a virtual absence of violent crime, compared to other cities of our density. Our road pavement barely rises to third-world quality, but that is mainly due to XYZ Corp, mentioned above, digging up the street and leaving a laughable repair afterwards.
You are right that such a thing should not be attempted until after the mayor is assasinated.
I've said this before on Slashdot, but I'm not tired of saying it yet. The trick to getting people in cities connected is for the people in the cities to own their network infrastructure via their government. Lay fiber all over the city, punch a connection into each home and business, and run the other end into central offices. Then, let the owner of the home or business hook the central office end of their wire up to whatever they want. Charge service providers rental space in the CO, but do not regulate what can be installed there, nor by whom.
I'm convinced that this is the ideal solution. No company should be allowed to own critical infrastructure. Only the people should be able to dictate what services they want hooked up to their network.
There *is* a lot of bloat in today's GNOME, far too much to run it on a terminal server. Can you imagine 230 people running Nautilus on the same machine, inside 3GB of RAM? Me neither!
I think that's great if the military is using environmentally friendly techniques these days. But, you can't mask the military's long, sad history of fucking places up. At Hunter's Point in San Francisco, the Navy used to sail decomissioned ships to sea, nuke them, tow them back to port, sandblast all the radioactive gunk off, then dump it all in the bay. Oh, nice! There are also many hundreds of barrels of radioactive crap from Hunter's Point barried in 50-gallon drums off the Farallon Islands, one of California's unique marine habitats and probably its best diving spot. If you grab a chart of the San Francisco Bay, there are many areas that are marked off-limits because of underwater live ammunition dumps.
The kicker about Hunter's Point is that the city is really having to lean on the Navy hard to get them to clean the place up. They only this year quietly admitted the existence of the radioactive goop. Before, we thought it was just PCBs!
You'be been living in a dream world if you ever thought that the computer industry was squeaky clean. Silicon Valley has the highest density of EPA Superfund sites in the USA. Check out this lovely map of Silicon Valley pollution. If you live in this neighborhood, you'll get cancer for sure. Computer production has never been clean. In fact, it's nearly as dirty as the military. The manufacturers have simply been able to put on a "clean" face for the world.
BS. You can buy very high gain directional or omnidirectional antennas and just plug them right in to any old Lucent or Cisco 802.11b card and go nuts. The antenna will run you a few hundred unless you use a decommissioned primestar antenna, in which case the cost is zilch. With line of sight, you can listen to 802.11b emissions from as far as 24 miles away.
Re:Paul Festa -- not MSNBC
on
Netscape 6.1
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
AFAIK IE 2.0 was the first release. It didn't even support tables.
Re:sweet god in heaven
on
Netscape 6.1
·
· Score: 3, Informative
It comes with some plugins, Java, and a dictionary.
The subject under discussion here is using ASN.1 as a transfer encoding for XML. You still have XML as text at each endpoint, and you can still use Perl, diff, and CVS to manipulate the data. You simply use ASN.1 to encode the data in flight to spare some bandwidth, and I don't see much to object to there.
Bruce, I had to flame the guy a few posts up from you, but he has a 6-digit slashdot userid. Nobody cares how obtuse the wire encoding is because here in the Cenozoic era, we have learned to walk upright and also to use labor-saving software to analyze our protocols. My favorite is ethereal but you might like to browse some others.
at least XML gives a clear description that I can use with a packet sniffer when trying to debug something.
Translated:
My debugging tools are inadequate, and my brain is inadequate for improving them.
You have a powerful, general-purpose computer at your disposal. Why should you care if the protocol can be inspected with the naked eye? Do you use an oscilloscope to pretty-print IP packets? No, you use ethereal! If XML is encoded using ASN.1, then the tools will be modified to decode ASN.1 before showing it to the human. Ethereal already knows about ASN.1 because it uses it to display LDAP traffic. If you don't like ethereal, try Unigone.
The major manufacturers are starting to put restrictions on the input and output devices they provide, but it's relatively easy to build your own digital-to-analog conversion unit with no restrictions. All the currently used digital audio formats and standards are well known. I know not everyone can build their own DAC, but it if the manufacturers won't make what you want, I guess you have to do it yourself.
What you said, twice. Don't even set it up so he has to log in. Get GDM, KDM, or XDM and configure them to automatically log in for him, and start his web browser. Never worry again.
I don't think that's true at all. MP3 was huge even when the only players where winplay and mp3dec. MP3 took off because it made sending high-quality audio across the Internet practical.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, how were the Java DVD player people planning to get all that data to the screen? You'll need more native methods to make sure that data can be sent efficiently to the output device. Did I mention that there is no way to write a DVD player in Java without native methods?
As for the altivec extensions, they are syntactical extensions to the C language. So you can simply say vector aVector, bVector; vecmul(aVector, bVector). It's not really like programming in assembly.
Sure, and then your DVD player is written in assembly, not pure Java. Remember, pure Java means, in part, that it includes no native methods. Reference
AltiVec's C API is the highest-level vector API I've used. It has unambiguous and standard C syntax extensions for vector operations. Yet, we still don't have C compilers that can automatically vectorize code. I'm having trouble imagining a Java tool that could automatically vectorize code where Java has no way to express vector operations.
Maybe you could write a Java DVD player that was the equivalent of cat /dev/dvd /dev/hardware-mpeg2-decoder-device, but that's about the extent of what you could do in today's Java.
Compress it
I don't understand your statements about Unix device drivers. A driver for BeOS is completely unlike a driver for any other operating system.
There wouldn't be any government IT people anywhere near this municipal network. We're talking about physical infrastructure: people with shovels and pipe wrenches.
Obviously you would need to setup the market for central office space so to discourage monopolization. I don't think that regular telcos would dominate because their service doesn't make much money at all. It's not as if a provider needs to have all of their equipment in the CO, anyway. They only need enough to hook into a fat pipe back to their own offices.
You are right that such a thing should not be attempted until after the mayor is assasinated.
I'm convinced that this is the ideal solution. No company should be allowed to own critical infrastructure. Only the people should be able to dictate what services they want hooked up to their network.
There *is* a lot of bloat in today's GNOME, far too much to run it on a terminal server. Can you imagine 230 people running Nautilus on the same machine, inside 3GB of RAM? Me neither!
The kicker about Hunter's Point is that the city is really having to lean on the Navy hard to get them to clean the place up. They only this year quietly admitted the existence of the radioactive goop. Before, we thought it was just PCBs!
You'be been living in a dream world if you ever thought that the computer industry was squeaky clean. Silicon Valley has the highest density of EPA Superfund sites in the USA. Check out this lovely map of Silicon Valley pollution. If you live in this neighborhood, you'll get cancer for sure. Computer production has never been clean. In fact, it's nearly as dirty as the military. The manufacturers have simply been able to put on a "clean" face for the world.
http://www.wwc.edu/~frohro/Airport/Primestar/Prime star.html
BS. You can buy very high gain directional or omnidirectional antennas and just plug them right in to any old Lucent or Cisco 802.11b card and go nuts. The antenna will run you a few hundred unless you use a decommissioned primestar antenna, in which case the cost is zilch. With line of sight, you can listen to 802.11b emissions from as far as 24 miles away.
AFAIK IE 2.0 was the first release. It didn't even support tables.
It comes with some plugins, Java, and a dictionary.
The subject under discussion here is using ASN.1 as a transfer encoding for XML. You still have XML as text at each endpoint, and you can still use Perl, diff, and CVS to manipulate the data. You simply use ASN.1 to encode the data in flight to spare some bandwidth, and I don't see much to object to there.
Bruce, I had to flame the guy a few posts up from you, but he has a 6-digit slashdot userid. Nobody cares how obtuse the wire encoding is because here in the Cenozoic era, we have learned to walk upright and also to use labor-saving software to analyze our protocols. My favorite is ethereal but you might like to browse some others.
Translated:
You have a powerful, general-purpose computer at your disposal. Why should you care if the protocol can be inspected with the naked eye? Do you use an oscilloscope to pretty-print IP packets? No, you use ethereal! If XML is encoded using ASN.1, then the tools will be modified to decode ASN.1 before showing it to the human. Ethereal already knows about ASN.1 because it uses it to display LDAP traffic. If you don't like ethereal, try Unigone.
Use your CPU, not your eyeballs!
The major manufacturers are starting to put restrictions on the input and output devices they provide, but it's relatively easy to build your own digital-to-analog conversion unit with no restrictions. All the currently used digital audio formats and standards are well known. I know not everyone can build their own DAC, but it if the manufacturers won't make what you want, I guess you have to do it yourself.
What you said, twice. Don't even set it up so he has to log in. Get GDM, KDM, or XDM and configure them to automatically log in for him, and start his web browser. Never worry again.
I don't think that's true at all. MP3 was huge even when the only players where winplay and mp3dec. MP3 took off because it made sending high-quality audio across the Internet practical.
If you have problems with a particular web site, try turning off TLS in the prefs. Some servers have problems with Mozilla's full support of SSL/TLS.
Actually, Microsoft Office costs at $479 for the standard version or $579 for the professional version.
The article says it has 4096 pixels across a width of 12 feet. That's 28 dpi.