Somehow, I doubt that there are any money problems.
Computer animation has gotten to the point where even cheesy "B" movies can afford some decent (although not entirely realistic) animation. And I saw the "Disney" logo on the preview -- they have a few bucks to burn. This is a sci-fi movie where special effects are par for the course. If they can have plummeting whales, strange planets, and spaceships, then there is no reason that they can't have a 2nd head.
I fully expect a 2nd head to be in the final release of the movie, and I shall hold my breath until I turn blue if it is not there.
You should get a microcontroller. Those suckers are tiny microprocessors with boatload of I/O. Most have some sort of A/D, too.
You can program the microcontroller to read off all of its input port, and dump the data to a serial port. Then, you just have to make Linux open up a serial port and watch the data pour in.
You could also use the microcontroller to drive things, too. Have the PC send serial data, and the microcontroller acts on it.
Microchip makes some ones that are good for beginners, just add assembly or C. Parallax makes some that are programmed in BASIC. Fun stuff!
Well, can you blame them? We gave the world Microsoft, McDonalds, Britney Spears, and the Jackson family. I am surprised that they are not bombing us right now!
I agree. If this sort of thing curbs piracy, then maybe the four-letter organizations will calm down about DRM.
Shutting down a torrent sites which feature copyrighted movies and music annoys those who just want something for nothing. DRM hurts everybody, and especially every geek.
It is a given that the MPAA, RIAA, etc. are going to do SOMETHING. I would rather have them do this than add copy protection to every A/D converter made.
Any sort of shield would also do bad things to the radiation pattern, which would ruin your signal quality. And phones generally are able to throttle down their power when they are very close to the tower. So, a shield might just make the phone throw out MORE radio energy in order to overcome the loss associated with the shiled.
Well, they DID suggest using one of those earbuds or headset device.
Soooooooo, instad of holding the phones up to our heads, and giving ourselves a brain tumor, we are to leave the phone clipped to our belts or in our pockes, dangrously close to our reproductive organs. This will optimize the chances of a baby with other than the usual two eyes, ears, arms, legs, etc.
And do you know how long the typical teenage girl talks on her cell phone?
The clerics in obscure level 50 corners of all MUD games are FBI agents. Did you not know that??
Suddenly, working for the FBI is sounding a lot more attractive.
"I AM working, boss. I am interrogating this dragon to see if it knows anything. It could be an enemy bot! Pow. Take that! Let's see how you like my fireball!"
This is what face-to-face meetings and couriers are for.
It would not take a rocket scientist to rig up a device which listens to static on the radio and spits out a truly random string of ones and zeros. Fill a CD with this stuff, and you have a perfect one-time-pad good for sending up to 650MB of data -- encrypted so that even Uncle Sam can't crack it. As long as only two copes of the key exist, you keep one and send one with a trusted courier to deliver. This is 100% secure as long as you trust the courier and have good physical security around the CDs.
I am sorry, sir, but I am going to have to ask you to hand over your geek card. And I am afraid that it would be better for everybody if you were to just use AOL.
Yes, schematics of the BOARD were available in the advanced programmer's reference guide.
But the schematics just show how the board itself is wired up. Yup, this pin of this chip goes to that pin of that chip. You now have about 10% or less of the design. All of the magic happens IN the chips themselves. THAT was the hard part. There is a free core or two for the processor (assuming that it is accurate). However, the sound and video chips are an entirely different story. Those must have been a pain in the butt.
The article was "New York Time," not "EE Times." The average joe does not even have the faintest idea what an FPGA is. Clearly, this was written more for the "human interest" and "uneducated woman makes good" type of thing, rather than being a technical article.
And FPGA sofware is free for the downloading from FPGA vendors. Low-end FPGAs can be had for under $10 now (in large quantities).
I get the understanding that the cassette drive is emulated. Then, there is a giant chunk of ROM which emulates the data stored on the cassette. Obviously, since silicon is used, you can have software think that it is a cassette, but still run a LOT faster.
To me a neat trick would to have the clock speed up ten times whenever the cassette motor is engaged. That would REALLY make the thing fly. I wonder if she did something like this?
OK. Point taken. Designing this sort of thing from home is easily possible with only $5000 or so to start with. This assumes buying a functional, but old used logic analyzer and a cheap analog scope.
If you skip the logic analyzer, you can get started for around $1000 or less.
The Xilinx Spartan family has some very nice FPGAs clocking in at well under $10 right now. So, for small low-speed things like this, they are perfect!
And as far as the "all this girl had to do" line, no way. All she had to do was:
1) Implement a 6502 processor. There is a free core or two floating around, which she likely used. Still not exactly trivial, though.
2) Reverse-engineer and implement the DRAM circuitry. The design does not use DRAM, but you still need to emulate certain portions of the hardware for timing reasons. When DRAM refreshes, the processor has to snooze.
3) Reverse-engineer and implement the SID sound chip. Fairly major headache.
4) Reverse-engineer and implement the video circuitry. Major headache. This system even had hardware sprites.
5) Reverse-engineer and implement the different hardware ports.
6) Include a bridge that would allow a PC keyboard to emulate a C64 keyboard.
7) Emulate a cassette drive and load it with warez.
8) Implement the analog bits of the video and sound circuitry. Maybe somebody else did this.
In short, I am impressed.
I have been through an ASIC tape-out. It costs in the neighborhood of $100K. MUCH cheaper to go with a cheap FPGA and serial-EEPROM for stuff like this. Once you get well over 10,000 units shipped, it is time to start looking at an ASIC. Until then, a cheap FPGA is probably your best bet.
Nope. Not in space. I can tell that you haven't sailed;)
The ONLY reason that a sailboat works is that it had a large keel (or centerboard or daggerboard, depending upon the model). This means that the boat can only go easily forward or backward, and there is almost no sideways motion. It is this and this alone that allows for tacking to occur. Remove the keel, and you are at the mercy of the wind.
In space, a keel is not possible. Therefore, all thrust is away from the sun. I am afraid that there is no known way around this.
picture a very long, flexible solar power-cell rolled up around a spacecraft for launch, then unrolled and made rigid in space (piezoelectricity?).
Piezoelectricity is not a good way to make it rigid. All that you really have to do is to put a couple of small hollow "channels" on either side of the strip. Puff in a little air, and the channels would blow up like little baloons, holding the thing rigid. In a vacuum, it would take almost no air.
And for spacecraft that return to Earth, the material could just burn up on re-entry, so you would not have to mess with re-folding it (assuming that it is not terribly expensive)
Gaming is the one thing that, in my opinion, open-source cannot conquer.
How many hours per YEAR do you spend with your OS? How many hours with a word processor, web browser, or spreadsheet? The average geek needs all of those things. It is worth the effort to make those essential tools. And if a geek makes it, then he can use it. The last RPG that I played lasted all of 80 hours. I doubt that I will ever touch it again. I will just buy another one.
This is the reason that nobody can truly monopolize game creation: you only need ONE word processor, ONE web browser, and ONE operating system. But games have a high turnover rate. I would not be surprised to find people who buy more than one game a month.
So, let's assume that an awesome FOSS game came out. People would download, play, and conquer. Within two months, they are back at Best Buy looking for another game to play.
One more thing: If somebody make a game, they would likely not play it for fun, since they already know all of the quests, plot twists, etc. The only exception would be multi-player games where the challenge comes from beating other peple, instead of beating the game.
And don't forget that a word processor is a matter of programming. Making a game also involves: 2D art, 3D art, voice acting, music, and writing talent. No one person can possibly have ALL of the skills needed to make a modern game by themselves. Since you now have a lot more diverse skill mix, it becomes harder to recruit talent and to manage everything.
For all of these reaons, FOSS might be able to generate a respectable title or two, but it will NEVER replace commercial games.
and I've yet to have a Nintendo gaming product die on me in over 20 years.
Then you must not live in America, where the original NES was released with that awful front-loading cartridge slot. After much use, the "fingers" of the connector get bent out of shape and do not work. At my local flea market, there is a guy who sells old game systems. He actually has to replace the connector on any NES units that he sells.
I am not bashing Nintendo. But I am saying that sometimes things happen, even to the best of them. But in all fairness, the NES issue only shows up after the unit itself is a few years old. The PSP issue showed up after the unit is a few hours old.
Since you have access to the source, you can change things to make it a little more fair.
In Angband, I once created an "engineer" class that was a combination warrior and mage (just like real engineers). Some would call it "cheating," but I think of it as "creative winning." Long live engineers!
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Somehow, I doubt that there are any money problems.
Computer animation has gotten to the point where even cheesy "B" movies can afford some decent (although not entirely realistic) animation. And I saw the "Disney" logo on the preview -- they have a few bucks to burn. This is a sci-fi movie where special effects are par for the course. If they can have plummeting whales, strange planets, and spaceships, then there is no reason that they can't have a 2nd head.
I fully expect a 2nd head to be in the final release of the movie, and I shall hold my breath until I turn blue if it is not there.
If it isn't too much, you could always print -> scan -> OCR.
Cheesy and crude, but for 20 pages or so, probably the easiest option.
You should get a microcontroller. Those suckers are tiny microprocessors with boatload of I/O. Most have some sort of A/D, too.
You can program the microcontroller to read off all of its input port, and dump the data to a serial port. Then, you just have to make Linux open up a serial port and watch the data pour in.
You could also use the microcontroller to drive things, too. Have the PC send serial data, and the microcontroller acts on it.
Microchip makes some ones that are good for beginners, just add assembly or C. Parallax makes some that are programmed in BASIC. Fun stuff!
A palm with wi-fi for $12? Where? If that were true, I would buy three or four.
And it is also bigger and doesn't take AAA batteries. And the link that you provided shows that the card costs closer to $120.00
It IS a nice setup, but not even in the same class as the device being reviewed.
Well, can you blame them? We gave the world Microsoft, McDonalds, Britney Spears, and the Jackson family. I am surprised that they are not bombing us right now!
I agree. If this sort of thing curbs piracy, then maybe the four-letter organizations will calm down about DRM.
Shutting down a torrent sites which feature copyrighted movies and music annoys those who just want something for nothing. DRM hurts everybody, and especially every geek.
It is a given that the MPAA, RIAA, etc. are going to do SOMETHING. I would rather have them do this than add copy protection to every A/D converter made.
Any sort of shield would also do bad things to the radiation pattern, which would ruin your signal quality. And phones generally are able to throttle down their power when they are very close to the tower. So, a shield might just make the phone throw out MORE radio energy in order to overcome the loss associated with the shiled.
Well, they DID suggest using one of those earbuds or headset device.
Soooooooo, instad of holding the phones up to our heads, and giving ourselves a brain tumor, we are to leave the phone clipped to our belts or in our pockes, dangrously close to our reproductive organs. This will optimize the chances of a baby with other than the usual two eyes, ears, arms, legs, etc.
And do you know how long the typical teenage girl talks on her cell phone?
Suddenly, working for the FBI is sounding a lot more attractive.
"I AM working, boss. I am interrogating this dragon to see if it knows anything. It could be an enemy bot! Pow. Take that! Let's see how you like my fireball!"
This is what face-to-face meetings and couriers are for.
It would not take a rocket scientist to rig up a device which listens to static on the radio and spits out a truly random string of ones and zeros. Fill a CD with this stuff, and you have a perfect one-time-pad good for sending up to 650MB of data -- encrypted so that even Uncle Sam can't crack it. As long as only two copes of the key exist, you keep one and send one with a trusted courier to deliver. This is 100% secure as long as you trust the courier and have good physical security around the CDs.
I am sorry, sir, but I am going to have to ask you to hand over your geek card. And I am afraid that it would be better for everybody if you were to just use AOL.
Yes, schematics of the BOARD were available in the advanced programmer's reference guide.
But the schematics just show how the board itself is wired up. Yup, this pin of this chip goes to that pin of that chip. You now have about 10% or less of the design. All of the magic happens IN the chips themselves. THAT was the hard part. There is a free core or two for the processor (assuming that it is accurate). However, the sound and video chips are an entirely different story. Those must have been a pain in the butt.
The article was "New York Time," not "EE Times." The average joe does not even have the faintest idea what an FPGA is. Clearly, this was written more for the "human interest" and "uneducated woman makes good" type of thing, rather than being a technical article.
And FPGA sofware is free for the downloading from FPGA vendors. Low-end FPGAs can be had for under $10 now (in large quantities).
I get the understanding that the cassette drive is emulated. Then, there is a giant chunk of ROM which emulates the data stored on the cassette. Obviously, since silicon is used, you can have software think that it is a cassette, but still run a LOT faster.
To me a neat trick would to have the clock speed up ten times whenever the cassette motor is engaged. That would REALLY make the thing fly. I wonder if she did something like this?
OK. Point taken. Designing this sort of thing from home is easily possible with only $5000 or so to start with. This assumes buying a functional, but old used logic analyzer and a cheap analog scope.
If you skip the logic analyzer, you can get started for around $1000 or less.
The Xilinx Spartan family has some very nice FPGAs clocking in at well under $10 right now. So, for small low-speed things like this, they are perfect!
And as far as the "all this girl had to do" line, no way. All she had to do was:
1) Implement a 6502 processor. There is a free core or two floating around, which she likely used. Still not exactly trivial, though.
2) Reverse-engineer and implement the DRAM circuitry. The design does not use DRAM, but you still need to emulate certain portions of the hardware for timing reasons. When DRAM refreshes, the processor has to snooze.
3) Reverse-engineer and implement the SID sound chip. Fairly major headache.
4) Reverse-engineer and implement the video circuitry. Major headache. This system even had hardware sprites.
5) Reverse-engineer and implement the different hardware ports.
6) Include a bridge that would allow a PC keyboard to emulate a C64 keyboard.
7) Emulate a cassette drive and load it with warez.
8) Implement the analog bits of the video and sound circuitry. Maybe somebody else did this.
In short, I am impressed.
I have been through an ASIC tape-out. It costs in the neighborhood of $100K. MUCH cheaper to go with a cheap FPGA and serial-EEPROM for stuff like this. Once you get well over 10,000 units shipped, it is time to start looking at an ASIC. Until then, a cheap FPGA is probably your best bet.
Nope. Not in space. I can tell that you haven't sailed ;)
The ONLY reason that a sailboat works is that it had a large keel (or centerboard or daggerboard, depending upon the model). This means that the boat can only go easily forward or backward, and there is almost no sideways motion. It is this and this alone that allows for tacking to occur. Remove the keel, and you are at the mercy of the wind.
In space, a keel is not possible. Therefore, all thrust is away from the sun. I am afraid that there is no known way around this.
Piezoelectricity is not a good way to make it rigid. All that you really have to do is to put a couple of small hollow "channels" on either side of the strip. Puff in a little air, and the channels would blow up like little baloons, holding the thing rigid. In a vacuum, it would take almost no air.
And for spacecraft that return to Earth, the material could just burn up on re-entry, so you would not have to mess with re-folding it (assuming that it is not terribly expensive)
Gaming is the one thing that, in my opinion, open-source cannot conquer.
How many hours per YEAR do you spend with your OS? How many hours with a word processor, web browser, or spreadsheet? The average geek needs all of those things. It is worth the effort to make those essential tools. And if a geek makes it, then he can use it. The last RPG that I played lasted all of 80 hours. I doubt that I will ever touch it again. I will just buy another one.
This is the reason that nobody can truly monopolize game creation: you only need ONE word processor, ONE web browser, and ONE operating system. But games have a high turnover rate. I would not be surprised to find people who buy more than one game a month.
So, let's assume that an awesome FOSS game came out. People would download, play, and conquer. Within two months, they are back at Best Buy looking for another game to play.
One more thing: If somebody make a game, they would likely not play it for fun, since they already know all of the quests, plot twists, etc. The only exception would be multi-player games where the challenge comes from beating other peple, instead of beating the game.
And don't forget that a word processor is a matter of programming. Making a game also involves: 2D art, 3D art, voice acting, music, and writing talent. No one person can possibly have ALL of the skills needed to make a modern game by themselves. Since you now have a lot more diverse skill mix, it becomes harder to recruit talent and to manage everything.
For all of these reaons, FOSS might be able to generate a respectable title or two, but it will NEVER replace commercial games.
Sooooo. I don't need to get a pilot's license. I just need to buy a better airplane!
Then you must not live in America, where the original NES was released with that awful front-loading cartridge slot. After much use, the "fingers" of the connector get bent out of shape and do not work. At my local flea market, there is a guy who sells old game systems. He actually has to replace the connector on any NES units that he sells.
I am not bashing Nintendo. But I am saying that sometimes things happen, even to the best of them. But in all fairness, the NES issue only shows up after the unit itself is a few years old. The PSP issue showed up after the unit is a few hours old.
The world is going to end. I am married and have two kids.
Since you have access to the source, you can change things to make it a little more fair.
In Angband, I once created an "engineer" class that was a combination warrior and mage (just like real engineers). Some would call it "cheating," but I think of it as "creative winning." Long live engineers!
So, geeks with a wife and kids should not even begin to look at a MMORPG, huh?
Exactly my point. If you want to buy your kid Grand Theft Auto, then feel free. I won't stop you.
Thank you for being on my side.