Re:This device doesn't impress me.
on
New Linux PVR Box
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· Score: 1
Thanks for replying. I learn a lot from debating a point of view.
If you throw out the idea the $35 box was a plan to force you into some other moneymaking scheme, that box is certainly the better buy. Your box is definitely a result of a more focused design of a PVR box than the box mentioned in the article, which is exactly what you state it was - a preliminary attempt at integrating the hardware and software for a linux-based PVR. But, still, I like the open-source aspects - and would actually pay extra for that. Much in the same vein that I paid extra for service manuals when I bought my first ( and only ) car. I definitely agree with you that a lot of work has to be done - we've barely scratched the surface of all there is to do. Your comment about making a grandma-friendly box is right on. I have long wondered whats keeping the boxes as complicated to install as they are - I figured the problem was Copyright Law, and once someone does an interface/driver a certain way, everyone else has gotta do it different so they don't step on any toes. As if the light bulb base got patented, and everybody selling light bulbs had to use an array of special sockets and adapters to comply with Copyright Law. Superfluous, complicated, but that would be what it took to be legal.
And, as far as your comment about already having all the code you want to deal with and could care less about the code in your DVR or car, you understandably have just about as much interest in debugging your DVR or car as I have in performing spectroscopy to verify the termite man put the correct stuff down. As I indicated, I really don't want to have to verify anything, but should I *need* to, I want that option available. It just keeps people honest. Personally, I would like to verify my termiticide application because of a swarm of ants which still cover my cat food bowl at night, said trail of ants going right into the crack in the slab between the patio and house, that I witnessed being given a sound soaking of what was presented to me as termiticide.
In the case of the DVR, I want verification/change rights because I want to protect myself against them making some change on their end which renders my box and investment therein useless. If they want to stop sending the program guide, fine, I'll stop sending in the fee for said service, but I expect the box to continue to function manually. I feel I paid for that hardware and I feel entitled to use it. If the box stops working, I want to know I can access whats left of it and run it plain vanilla mode, or use it for something else.
And I know what happens if I need support for something and they are gone. If it was something proprietary, forget it, best off bust the thing open and see if there's anything at all useful inside before you put it in the trash can. But I have many things the manufacturer has long since gone, yet I continue to use the product. I have a toaster older than I am, but it used standard parts. Even the nichrome wire on its heating coils was standard gauge, and I was able to fabricate one on the original mica insulator. I have also had to open up old unsupported software in a debugger (SoftIce/TurboDebugger) to remove code that was fouling up the printer ports and rendering a Zip drive useless. Sans source code, it was a lengthy process.
I guess proprietary would be fine if I knew the vendor would always support me, but that has not been the case with me. I need options in the case he does not want to support me. Quite possibly its because I speak as a small guy who has little monetary influence. So, what I lack in wealth, I try to make up in ingenuity. If they try to force me in a corner, I find some way of doing what needs to be done - without them.
My own preferences would be for everybody marketing music to flood the P2P network with low-res (128K) MP3's of their catalog. This "demo" version would include a DJ-style voiceover at the beginning and end of each song stating the song title and artist. This same information, along with links to where to purchase the entire works should be in the file header.
I.e, at the beginning of a song, the DJ voiceover would state something like "Coming up, here's (song title) by (author) on the (labelname) label." Toward the end of the song, the song volume mutes a bit and the voiceover states "This was... ". The voiceovers should be mixed with the opening and closing of the music so its not easily edited out, as well as saving time and bandwidth.
In short, when the customers queue up a bunch of these to listen to while they are working, the experience will be damn near identical to listening to the radio, except the customer called the play list. The artists can enjoy "Clear-Channel" style exposure for damn near free, while the consumer can free himself of "Clear-Channel" domination. The customer can choose what he wants to listen to, not be forced to conform to some corporate play list. The artists make it on their merit as artists, not on who they pay off to promote them. I think the present system is awful unfair to a lot of artists who have talent but not much money. Maybe the customer could even pull down a play list of suggested music for different tastes ( i.e. new age, trance, etc. ).
You know how music is. So subjective. What one likes, its blah to another.
The idea is that if someone likes something passing by, they are free to open the player window back up and flag it for replay, retrieve others by that artist, ones like it, or download/purchase the full clean track sans voiceovers.
Something has got to be done about ease of purchasing too from the payment standpoint.
I don't think there are that many of us out to do the labels in by cheating them, but I think there is a helluva lot of us out there who will do damn near anything necessary to sample the music before we commit to purchase, given the subjective nature of the product and the warlike animosity currently going on between the labels and their customers. Personally, I would *want* the DJ style voiceover because I may queue several hundred random songs I find, and have no interest in holding a display window open so I can monitor the current selection playing.. I am doing other work, and if I hear something I like, I would like to be told what it was. In addition, I feel the voice-over would "soil" the work sufficiently to encourage those that wanted the work for their serious collection to purchase it. After all, its in my best interest too that people support the artist.
If not, the artist will cease to exist. No one wants that.
Re:This device doesn't impress me.
on
New Linux PVR Box
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Dear VPN:
I think you have a lot of us "anti-capitalists" and our open-source fanaticism all wrong. For many of us, the sticking point is *not* price, whether it be music or video recorders. The value is in our own ability to maintain/upgrade/customize whatever we have, and have the confidence that if anything at all goes wrong, we aren't held hostage at bugpoint at someone else's mercy. That's a good way to get raped.
Its just a philosophy. Some of us are very uncomfortable with the idea that somebody else controls something we have. Its bad enough the government traces us and taxes us on our homes, cars, and jobs. But if there is anything the electrical power brokers in California have taught me, its don't let myself get cornered. Don't let businessmen ever get you in a spot where you have to do whatever they say in order to "protect" your investment. Our California governor Gray Davis made like a nice guy and gave in to all the guys who knew how to play him like a fiddle. Where did that get us? Was that Pro-Capitalism? Or was that greed and control gone horribly wrong?
I don't like the idea of being a sharecropper.
Nor do I want to try to build a long-term investment with ephemeral building blocks.
If its a nice box, well designed, open source, etc, its worth the price. I don't expect to be subsidized by someone else who had a plan to force me into other business with them. I consider myself honest, but I have every expectation they be honest with me. Open source to me means they are willing to be completely honest with me and are holding no surprises. Its all on the table, subject to any verification I feel I need to do. In most cases, I probably won't verify anything at all, but should something not work as I expect, I may have to verify something.
I wrote another post in another forum regarding my disappointment with a termite contractor. Nowhere did I say I was unhappy about price.. no, I was mostly lamenting on my inability to verify the quality and quantity of termiticide used. I have
no problem with paying the man for work done, but
when I have a fast one pulled on me, it really pisses me off. Do you think it would minimize the number of "fast ones" a termite contractor could pull on the public if he knew that the product he used could be verified? How would it look in a jury trial should one of his customers, who discovered his house had been "treated" with water asked the company to assume the costs of replacing the termite-damaged lumber in his house? Or, am I just being "anti-capitalist" here by suggesting that someone's work be open for verification?
I am delighted to see this in Linux, as I fundamentally do not trust Microsoft. Nor do I trust that mechanic who claims he's going to work on my car, but goes to great lengths to make damn sure I can not observe nor verify his work. And I don't trust that termite guy either. ( But if he had given me a sample in my jug, then upon my suspicion something's wrong, I sent it off to my friend, and he found pyrethrins in the proper strength, my opinion of that contractor today would be completely different. )
Not only is our fleet of space shuttles aging, so are the scientists and engineers who have actual hands-on experience designing this stuff.
Back in the sixties, during the "cold war", it was a matter of national importance that we "dominate" space and the funding was set appropriately. There was a lot of funding for training existing engineers and also encouraging students into the engineering field.
I lived through that. I still have many certificates and recognition papers from NASA that was awarded to me in High School ( I usually took the science fairs ). I don't see that any more, or at least not near the level of encouragement to get into engineering as I received.
Instead, as we passed from the Gene Krantz philosophies ( "Failure is *not* an option!") to the Dan Goldin business philosophy ("Faster, Better, Cheaper!"), it seems to me that Engineering has lost a helluva lot of its appeal, becoming much less a work of art and much more as mundane clerical work.
Personally, I have a hard time recommending any of my younger friends to go into Engineering unless its what their heart is driving them to do, as it did me. Engineering for me turned into a constant battle to justify my existence, eventually leading to my dismissal. Although I loved the artistry of design, there are a lot of starving artists out there. I never liked the idea of cutting corners to make something right now, but not made right. It went against the very core of my psyche to do so. I felt that when you were creating an artistic effort that would eventually be copied, possibly millions of times, one weighed the one-time cost of the effort of doing it right against the integral cost of fixing something not done right, integrated over all the things made that had to be fixed or replaced. My own analysis damn near always echoed those old cliches: " a stitch in time saves nine", "haste makes waste", and "if you don't have enough time to do it right, you must make enough time to do it over."
So we have these aging scientists and engineers who have actually done it, but many of us are now in completely different fields. I can show you engineers that used to build the systems in the 70's that are now working as greeters in Wal-Mart, or as countermen in hobby-electronics stores.
Although I loved working in the field myself, I can't see me trying to re-enter it as my experience is mostly with the older tools - tools I understood very intimately and had complete freedom to open up and re-code their algorithms if I discovered the mathematical functions inside did not accurately model what I was seeing in practice. The new stuff - I have no earthly idea how it works, or how to open it up and change it if need be. They would laugh me out of the building if I showed up with my trusty old Borland C++ compiler and VGA graphics packages.
Its going to be interesting, given the level of intimite knowledge required to do analysis of spaceflight sophistication, if the engineers they get can make enough time not only to understand the physics of the phenomena they are working with, and also keep abreast of the software packages they are allowed to use on the job. It took me over ten years before I felt I understood just some of the physics in my area, despite the fact during the entire time, I did not have to learn DOS over and over again, or have my previous tools fail to operate because I went from DOS 3.30 to DOS4.0... Or endlessly battle licensing issues.
The new guys have it a lot harder than I ever did.
Being a strong follower of Sam Walton's business philosophies, I am quite curious of who Wal-Mart chose. Knowing how critical computing is to the Wal-Mart operations, they would be using the very best technology out there. So, I put "www.walmart.com" in the search window and got this.
WTF??? running IIS on Solaris????
I didn't think this could happen! They had a link there for the faq which goes on to state:
Why do you report impossible operating system/server combinations ?
Webservers that operate behind a caching system, load balancer, reverse proxy server or a firewall may sometimes report the operating system of the intermediate machine. Hence reports of 'Microsoft/IIS on Linux' may indicate that either the web server is behind a Linux server that is acting as a reverse proxy, or has configured the Akamai caching system such that the first request
to the site goes to one of Akamai's servers [which run Linux], or as in the case of www.walmart.com has been configured to send a misleading signature.
I hate proprietary interfaces and laws protecting them. This is a bit offtopic but I think it illustrates the concept.
I just had my "annual treatment" for termites. The termite guy made a big showing going around my house with a hose connected to his truck which was supposedly dispensing termiticide. Yes, lots and lots of fluid came from the hose, soaking it in pretty good. He told me the termiticide was a pyrethrin based material. Ok. I asked for a jug of it while he had hose in hand for spot treatment should I find a spot missed. No way. He could not, by "law", dispense the material other than as directed. So, it all went onto the ground in front of me.
Ok, now he presents me with the form to sign regarding completion of the treatment. There is a spot on the form where the chemicals used and quantity are supposed to be filled in. But he leaves it blank, because there wasn't an active infestation that was specifically treated. Apparently, under "law", I do not need to be informed as to what chemical he sprayed all over my property.
Now, here's the part that infuriates me, the next day, I go out to feed my cats and there's ANTS all over my cat food bowl. Now I figured that strong fresh dose of termiticide would have done away with all those ants.
Had I been able to recover a sample of whatever he sprayed on my property, I could send it off to a chemist friend who has a gas chromatograph in his garage and ask him to run a spectra on it and look for pyrethrins. I strongly suspect the termite man just made a show of spraying water on my property. To add insult to injury, I destroyed much of my vegetable garden on his advice that the poisons would be absorbed into my edibles.
Its all this closed-source ( not the price, but the reassurance that I know what I am getting ) that concerns me so. I am *personally* responsible for the expenses of maintaining my house, it does me no good to try to blame someone else, so having some termite company to blame it on does not help me. I feel I have a right to know what chemicals and in which strength is placed on my property, and I feel I have a right to verify this.
I am getting really fed up with all these laws prohibiting the understanding ( possibly reverse engineering if the vendor is uncooperative ) of what I am receiving in return for money. This seems so unfair to me because the quality of the money can be so easily verified, but I am supposed to accept, by laws passed by Congress, the word of the vendor on what it is I am buying.
I know I am being a little hot-headed on this issue, but the problem is I am personally responsible. In a large business, it wouldn't make that much difference on whether or not lots of damage resulted from some delegate's failure to perform, as I could delegate the problem and wash my hands of it, while still retaining my employment status and retirement plans. ( This is the main reason in my mind why business executives would choose to go with some system that keeps them ignorant of its inner workings. ) On my level, when I am personally responsible, I want the ability to verify anything. It really cripes me to have my rights to verification annuled by law.
Hopefully, OSS will standardize an array of off-the-shelf^H^H^H^H^Hnet solutions that will make programming applications very similar to a trip to the hardware store. Sure, theres an abundant supply of hardware there, all ready to use... it just needs someone who knows what they are doing to assemble it in whatever arrangement it takes to do whats needed.
I get the idea OSS is just as threatening to the programmer as Home Depot is to the home handyman.
Well, if the "solar wind" does not exist or exert sufficient force, just what is it then that pushes the comet tails out so they do not trail the comet, but point directly away from the sun?
If you wanna check out what the goggles actually are, here's a link of one I am investigating for using in a similar effort on one of my contracting jobs...
The days of independent mechanics are numbered. They have for quite some time now, since it has been apparently deemed acceptable for manufacturers to encode proprietary service codes in their systems, and persuade Congress that it is not an "antitrust" action for locking competitors out by doing so. Worse yet, this same Congress passed the DMCA which makes it actually illegal to try to figure out how they made it so it can be fixed.
With a declining percentage of older open-architecture cars in the nation's fleet, we will see a declining percentage of independent repair businesses.
I fix my own car.. which is the primary reason I have no interest in the new cars, which can't be fixed without infringing on the laws passed by those clowns under the styrofoam "vote hats" which parade around every few years, exhorting how it I elect them, they will "fight" for me.
I see this system as a way of implementing "supervision" at the micro-micro-management level, keeping tabs of employee productivity down to the microsecond.
I could see where statistics, maintained by the system, would organize down to the very last microcent which employee was more productive than another. Given training will be no longer required, the employee can be ranked as easily as a solenoid valve, and replaced just as easily.
This is great news for the businessman, who will undoubtedly lobby ( and win ) any changes to employment law to maximize his profit, just as many IP/Copyright holders are doing now.
This is sad news indeed for the laborer. I guess his prime function in life is just to reproduce and make more laborers.
Ahhh, Ligand, the fascination on the universe.. the true common roots of all us geeks. To me, its my religion. Its where I find God... in physics. In biology ( especially biology ). In geology. In astronomy. Everywhere. God made it. What God is or how he made it I don't know, but its the biggest puzzle in the Universe to try to figure it out. He's left all the evidence laying around everywhere. He's even let us see the source code that makes us. ( well, actually a binary dump of it.. we get to build the disassembler). Who has time for games?
And as far as gravity assist goes, I was going to let gravity pull the liquids down to where the heat sources would be, while letting the "lid area" have the vapor pocket. ( we gotta have some sort of vapor pocket because the liquid phase is darned near incompressible, and if its volume changed with temperature, it could lead to an overpressure condition that would rupture the plumbing.) I guess if we really overloaded it, the vapor pocket area would overheat, but I am kinda counting on the whole lid area being pretty thermally conductive, while the majority of the heat would be generated under the keyboard area. The bubbles trying to rise would generate the necessary turbulence in the fluid to distribute the heat. We won't get homogeneity between the two phases ( liquid/gas ) because of gravity. The bubbles are gonna rise. I'm counting on this. This thing won't work in a zero G environment. Once vapor is formed in a zero G environment and gravity doesn't force it to move out of the way, then the poor thermal conductivity of the vapor just lets the hot spot get hotter and hotter, and doesn't help at all.
Any vapor produced would head upward, while the cooler fluid, assisted by gravity, stayed on the bottom part. Liquids conduct heat well, the vapor phase doesn't. And I did not want to depend on diffusion to get the heat transferred.. diffusion just doesn't work that fast most of the time. I don't think convection would be as efficient as we would like because of losses due to viscosity.
Note, the NEC system did not appear to involve any phase changes, and a very low power pump, so it goes to the best of my knowledge that they are just going to distribute heat, not try to "pump" it in the sense of making something yet colder than any existing part of the system. My comment was based on not using something as corrosive as water - as you noted, the freons are extremely stable, and wouldn't need much of it. Barring a leak, it would never wear out.
Much of my thought is from when I worked for a major oil company, and I had a representative from a company who makes "heat pipes" ( which are sealed pipes with a freon-like material inside so that the whole pipe is isothermal with very little thermal resistance ) gave us demos with a minature version of his product designed to look like a coffee stirrer. Once one of us tried to stir our coffee with it, he made his point. Once one end was in the hot coffee, forget holding onto the stirrer.
I thought this was what barcodes, or that square full of dots placed in just the right places was for. A tremendous amount of data can be placed in such an "image". This image can be quickly and inexpensively printed on the side of a box, even by a "inkjet" type apparatus that prints it onto the box as it goes by. The data encoded into that image can well be not only the product, but all data pertaining to that box of product.
Not only is it quick to print, its quick to scan too. A line-scanner can acquire the image at the destination and decode it into its digital description. What needs to be done as I see it is to standardize the format, so the data base is universal among all products.
Upon any transfer of the box, the box will be scanned out by the sending party and scanned in by the receiving party. At all times, the party that has the box should know everything they need to know about the box. The information encoded has everything to do with what's in the box. It has nothing to do with who buys the products in the box. So privacy issues are moot.
I would hope they are doing this already.
Having humans running around with pencils and clipboards is not the way to do this.
Quite insightful. I was wondering exactly what the problem was with CFC - so its a catalytic problem.. that sure makes the matters worse as the problem compound isn't consumed when it does its dirty.
The idea with the "heat pipe" is the entire "pool" of refrigerant is isopressure, hence it will be isothermal. The pressure of the entire system will rise and fall with whatever temperature the system is running at. Any localized hot spots initiate phase change to vapor, any spot cooler will condense. No pumps. And the "pool" actually looks like an interconnect network of tubing adjoining surfaces, some of which have heat coming into them, and some which have capacity to lose heat. The idea is to use gravity assist to get the liquid refrigerant into contact with the heat producing areas.. i.e. don't run the laptop upside-down or in a zero-gravity environment.
It looks like if Halon has a BP of -30 deg C at 1 atm., it wouldn't surprise me at all if its well over 100 PSI at room temperature.
I would be forced to use the pump if I wanted to drop the CPU temperature below the case temperature, but here I am assuming I can get away with running the CPU ( heatsink area ) at case temperature.
Looking at your user id number, I take it you are new to Slashdot. I hope you enjoy it here. A new person who can add insight into the stuff discussed here is always welcome.
I don't think its terror that this will be used for..
Its economic guerilla war.
The idea is not to hit the enemy where he has you way overpowered... instead you sneak behind his back and disable the machinery supporting his capacity to make war. Like not fighting powerful enemy soldiers in the trench, instead you kill off the supply line so the soldiers don't get fed.
I don't think they have all that much to worry about trying to destroy America by damaging its infrastructure though... I think Congress is doing a fine job of doing this already when you consider how fast this country [is losing || has lost] its manufacturing capacity. I think we are fast becoming a pig fed intravenuously by the rest of the world, and its once powerful muscles won't twitch once the economic metabolism has fallen below the threshold needed to support itself.
It seems to me another way to do this might be to make the cases out of aluminum ( all sides ) and during the molding process, fabricate a small channel along the corners to hold a quantity of a volatile freon type fluid, so as to fabricate a "heat pipe". Aluminum is a good conductor of heat.
If the thing were designed appropriately, you could have the freon doing a phase change from liquid to vapor where heat was being generated, then the vapor condensing back to liquid at the case. I'll betcha the major snafu will be the hinge. The idea is to make the whole case surface area isothermal.
The intention is to eliminate pumps by using wicking to transport the fluid to the hot spot, whereas the vapor travels by pressure.
Incidentally, has anyone looked to see if halon makes a halfway decent refrigerant? It looks neat that in the event of a fire, you could vent it to knock off the fire. Isn't halon another fluorocarbon? I haven't seen much spec on it for use as a refrigerant, but maybe another slashdotter has...and being I just posted the idea here, its now prior art....
I would think playing the business end of a small tesla coil over the item you need sanitized oughta do it.
These are very similar to the "stun gun" or the horizontal output circuit on a TV. Except they are about another order of magnitude more voltage.. expect the sparks to fly about six inches or so. But not much current in it. Its enough to wake you up, but not much more, but it oughta do wonders for PN junctions in the micron range.
Speculation, anyone?
Re:What happens to Farts in weightlessness ???????
on
Space Blog
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· Score: 2, Interesting
The other astronauts make you put your suit back on.;)
I understand in space, they don't pressure the vessel to atmospheric 14.7 psi, so if the pressure is lower, the diffusion should take place at a much faster rate. Not to say it won't be noticed, though.
I am kinda curious, HeghmoH, if PAL is prevalent where the power line frequency is 50Hz, and NTSC is prevalent where the power line frequency is 60Hz.
It makes a helluva lotta sense to have the screen refresh rates ( or harmonics thereof ) very close to the power line frequencies so that the visual artifacts generated by the beat frequency between it and the ripple of a poorly filtered ( i.e. cheap linear ) power supply would not be quite so noticeable.
No, I'm not from IBM, or use VM. Most of my background is in aerospace stuff during the moon days of the 70's, where I watched it go from paradise to pot when our motto changed from "failure is not an option" to "faster, better, cheaper".
A sequence of bytes representing digitally encoded video signal streams from the laser pickup of the DVD. There are supposedly standards for encoding this video onto the disk. These streams should be in a common format across all disks, as the CD "red book" format proposed by Philips is supposed to be across all audio CD's ( albeit some music producers do not record CD's to the standard format so as to foul up customer's players should they buy their disks from a music store instead of getting them off of P2P ).
Once the video stream is recovered/decrypted ( via DECSS or its ilk ), you can re-encode it in whatever format you wish... digital formats such as.mpg, divx,.vcd, whatever, or if you have the proper analog hardware, drop it out as RGB, NTSC, PAL, or whatever suits your fancy if you can implement the interface.
If you pop the DVD into an NTSC player, you will get the video delivered in NTSC format... it you pop that same DVD into a PAL player, you get the same content, but delivered in PAL format... etc.
I do not believe there are PAL or NTSC disks themselves; NTSC, PAL, SECAM, whatever are just the analog format the digital video is converted to so that it can be sent it to the monitor...
Anyway, thats the best of my understanding... please append my comment if I am in error.
It makes a helluva lotta sense to integrate a camera and a telephone.
A camera will generate huge files.
And its difficult to indefinitely store these huge files. Best to send them somewhere else thats better at storing things. Like some large hard drive somewhere... how to get it there? Phone it in. Bingo.
The more I see this, the more I want to wait for them to build a really nice camera/phone/recorder before I buy one. I don't feel I have any need for a separate phone/browser, camera, and audio recorder/player... if I could get one thingie that does all.
Personally, I feel like the camera-phone is one of those "marriages made in heaven". Its one of the few things out there I have much of an interest in. I do not have a cellphone yet, but offer me a neat cellphone with built in hi-res camera - I mean a good one - that lets me upload.jpg,.mp3, and.mpeg files to my account at my ISP, and I will probably get off my arse and open my wallet.
If you lace it with proprietary formats and insist on standards that only exist as long as some proprietary OS supports it, I will not consider such a thing worthy of a long term investment - you might as well put 'em as a premium in a cereal box.
I remember as a kid growing up, we had a bunch of people making a mess at the zoo. They were damaging the property, annoying the animals, and in general making a pretty good general pest of themselves.
The people spoke amongst themselves and the City Council and it came to be that the zoo would no longer be free. We would have ticket counters and an admission fee. We knew the troublemakers would go somewhere else if they had to pay to get in, and if they were caught misbehaving, they would have to pay again if they wanted back in. It worked. We hated to lose our "free" zoo, but it had to be.
I hate to think of internet mail-server routing services no longer being free, but we may well get pushed into this because it may be less expensive to deal with a payment system than it is to deal with spam.
At least one advantage I can think off right off the bat with a payment system is that someone pays... that means someone is accountable for what got sent, and if fraud is involved, there is a direct monetary theft involved. A shopping mall can haul you into court over a shoplifted candy bar. So even if the payment is not much, it *is* a payment and incurs accountability.
It really bugs me to be forced into this train of thought, as I would much rather consider infrastructures to be public property. But, like the zoo, a pricing strategy may have advantages for controlling unruly pests.
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If you throw out the idea the $35 box was a plan to force you into some other moneymaking scheme, that box is certainly the better buy. Your box is definitely a result of a more focused design of a PVR box than the box mentioned in the article, which is exactly what you state it was - a preliminary attempt at integrating the hardware and software for a linux-based PVR. But, still, I like the open-source aspects - and would actually pay extra for that. Much in the same vein that I paid extra for service manuals when I bought my first ( and only ) car. I definitely agree with you that a lot of work has to be done - we've barely scratched the surface of all there is to do. Your comment about making a grandma-friendly box is right on. I have long wondered whats keeping the boxes as complicated to install as they are - I figured the problem was Copyright Law, and once someone does an interface/driver a certain way, everyone else has gotta do it different so they don't step on any toes. As if the light bulb base got patented, and everybody selling light bulbs had to use an array of special sockets and adapters to comply with Copyright Law. Superfluous, complicated, but that would be what it took to be legal.
And, as far as your comment about already having all the code you want to deal with and could care less about the code in your DVR or car, you understandably have just about as much interest in debugging your DVR or car as I have in performing spectroscopy to verify the termite man put the correct stuff down. As I indicated, I really don't want to have to verify anything, but should I *need* to, I want that option available. It just keeps people honest. Personally, I would like to verify my termiticide application because of a swarm of ants which still cover my cat food bowl at night, said trail of ants going right into the crack in the slab between the patio and house, that I witnessed being given a sound soaking of what was presented to me as termiticide.
In the case of the DVR, I want verification/change rights because I want to protect myself against them making some change on their end which renders my box and investment therein useless. If they want to stop sending the program guide, fine, I'll stop sending in the fee for said service, but I expect the box to continue to function manually. I feel I paid for that hardware and I feel entitled to use it. If the box stops working, I want to know I can access whats left of it and run it plain vanilla mode, or use it for something else.
And I know what happens if I need support for something and they are gone. If it was something proprietary, forget it, best off bust the thing open and see if there's anything at all useful inside before you put it in the trash can. But I have many things the manufacturer has long since gone, yet I continue to use the product. I have a toaster older than I am, but it used standard parts. Even the nichrome wire on its heating coils was standard gauge, and I was able to fabricate one on the original mica insulator. I have also had to open up old unsupported software in a debugger (SoftIce/TurboDebugger) to remove code that was fouling up the printer ports and rendering a Zip drive useless. Sans source code, it was a lengthy process.
I guess proprietary would be fine if I knew the vendor would always support me, but that has not been the case with me. I need options in the case he does not want to support me. Quite possibly its because I speak as a small guy who has little monetary influence. So, what I lack in wealth, I try to make up in ingenuity. If they try to force me in a corner, I find some way of doing what needs to be done - without them.
I.e, at the beginning of a song, the DJ voiceover would state something like "Coming up, here's (song title) by (author) on the (labelname) label." Toward the end of the song, the song volume mutes a bit and the voiceover states "This was ... ". The voiceovers should be mixed with the opening and closing of the music so its not easily edited out, as well as saving time and bandwidth.
In short, when the customers queue up a bunch of these to listen to while they are working, the experience will be damn near identical to listening to the radio, except the customer called the play list. The artists can enjoy "Clear-Channel" style exposure for damn near free, while the consumer can free himself of "Clear-Channel" domination. The customer can choose what he wants to listen to, not be forced to conform to some corporate play list. The artists make it on their merit as artists, not on who they pay off to promote them. I think the present system is awful unfair to a lot of artists who have talent but not much money. Maybe the customer could even pull down a play list of suggested music for different tastes ( i.e. new age, trance, etc. ).
You know how music is. So subjective. What one likes, its blah to another.
The idea is that if someone likes something passing by, they are free to open the player window back up and flag it for replay, retrieve others by that artist, ones like it, or download/purchase the full clean track sans voiceovers.
Something has got to be done about ease of purchasing too from the payment standpoint.
I don't think there are that many of us out to do the labels in by cheating them, but I think there is a helluva lot of us out there who will do damn near anything necessary to sample the music before we commit to purchase, given the subjective nature of the product and the warlike animosity currently going on between the labels and their customers. Personally, I would *want* the DJ style voiceover because I may queue several hundred random songs I find, and have no interest in holding a display window open so I can monitor the current selection playing.. I am doing other work, and if I hear something I like, I would like to be told what it was. In addition, I feel the voice-over would "soil" the work sufficiently to encourage those that wanted the work for their serious collection to purchase it. After all, its in my best interest too that people support the artist. If not, the artist will cease to exist. No one wants that.
I think you have a lot of us "anti-capitalists" and our open-source fanaticism all wrong. For many of us, the sticking point is *not* price, whether it be music or video recorders. The value is in our own ability to maintain/upgrade/customize whatever we have, and have the confidence that if anything at all goes wrong, we aren't held hostage at bugpoint at someone else's mercy. That's a good way to get raped.
Its just a philosophy. Some of us are very uncomfortable with the idea that somebody else controls something we have. Its bad enough the government traces us and taxes us on our homes, cars, and jobs. But if there is anything the electrical power brokers in California have taught me, its don't let myself get cornered. Don't let businessmen ever get you in a spot where you have to do whatever they say in order to "protect" your investment. Our California governor Gray Davis made like a nice guy and gave in to all the guys who knew how to play him like a fiddle. Where did that get us? Was that Pro-Capitalism? Or was that greed and control gone horribly wrong?
I don't like the idea of being a sharecropper.
Nor do I want to try to build a long-term investment with ephemeral building blocks.
If its a nice box, well designed, open source, etc, its worth the price. I don't expect to be subsidized by someone else who had a plan to force me into other business with them. I consider myself honest, but I have every expectation they be honest with me. Open source to me means they are willing to be completely honest with me and are holding no surprises. Its all on the table, subject to any verification I feel I need to do. In most cases, I probably won't verify anything at all, but should something not work as I expect, I may have to verify something.
I wrote another post in another forum regarding my disappointment with a termite contractor. Nowhere did I say I was unhappy about price.. no, I was mostly lamenting on my inability to verify the quality and quantity of termiticide used. I have no problem with paying the man for work done, but when I have a fast one pulled on me, it really pisses me off. Do you think it would minimize the number of "fast ones" a termite contractor could pull on the public if he knew that the product he used could be verified? How would it look in a jury trial should one of his customers, who discovered his house had been "treated" with water asked the company to assume the costs of replacing the termite-damaged lumber in his house? Or, am I just being "anti-capitalist" here by suggesting that someone's work be open for verification?
I am delighted to see this in Linux, as I fundamentally do not trust Microsoft. Nor do I trust that mechanic who claims he's going to work on my car, but goes to great lengths to make damn sure I can not observe nor verify his work. And I don't trust that termite guy either. ( But if he had given me a sample in my jug, then upon my suspicion something's wrong, I sent it off to my friend, and he found pyrethrins in the proper strength, my opinion of that contractor today would be completely different. )
Back in the sixties, during the "cold war", it was a matter of national importance that we "dominate" space and the funding was set appropriately. There was a lot of funding for training existing engineers and also encouraging students into the engineering field.
I lived through that. I still have many certificates and recognition papers from NASA that was awarded to me in High School ( I usually took the science fairs ). I don't see that any more, or at least not near the level of encouragement to get into engineering as I received.
Instead, as we passed from the Gene Krantz philosophies ( "Failure is *not* an option!") to the Dan Goldin business philosophy ("Faster, Better, Cheaper!"), it seems to me that Engineering has lost a helluva lot of its appeal, becoming much less a work of art and much more as mundane clerical work.
Personally, I have a hard time recommending any of my younger friends to go into Engineering unless its what their heart is driving them to do, as it did me. Engineering for me turned into a constant battle to justify my existence, eventually leading to my dismissal. Although I loved the artistry of design, there are a lot of starving artists out there. I never liked the idea of cutting corners to make something right now, but not made right. It went against the very core of my psyche to do so. I felt that when you were creating an artistic effort that would eventually be copied, possibly millions of times, one weighed the one-time cost of the effort of doing it right against the integral cost of fixing something not done right, integrated over all the things made that had to be fixed or replaced. My own analysis damn near always echoed those old cliches: " a stitch in time saves nine", "haste makes waste", and "if you don't have enough time to do it right, you must make enough time to do it over."
So we have these aging scientists and engineers who have actually done it, but many of us are now in completely different fields. I can show you engineers that used to build the systems in the 70's that are now working as greeters in Wal-Mart, or as countermen in hobby-electronics stores.
Although I loved working in the field myself, I can't see me trying to re-enter it as my experience is mostly with the older tools - tools I understood very intimately and had complete freedom to open up and re-code their algorithms if I discovered the mathematical functions inside did not accurately model what I was seeing in practice. The new stuff - I have no earthly idea how it works, or how to open it up and change it if need be. They would laugh me out of the building if I showed up with my trusty old Borland C++ compiler and VGA graphics packages.
Its going to be interesting, given the level of intimite knowledge required to do analysis of spaceflight sophistication, if the engineers they get can make enough time not only to understand the physics of the phenomena they are working with, and also keep abreast of the software packages they are allowed to use on the job. It took me over ten years before I felt I understood just some of the physics in my area, despite the fact during the entire time, I did not have to learn DOS over and over again, or have my previous tools fail to operate because I went from DOS 3.30 to DOS4.0... Or endlessly battle licensing issues.
The new guys have it a lot harder than I ever did.
Being a strong follower of Sam Walton's business philosophies, I am quite curious of who Wal-Mart chose. Knowing how critical computing is to the Wal-Mart operations, they would be using the very best technology out there. So, I put "www.walmart.com" in the search window and got this.
WTF??? running IIS on Solaris????
I didn't think this could happen! They had a link there for the faq which goes on to state:
Interesting!!!I just had my "annual treatment" for termites. The termite guy made a big showing going around my house with a hose connected to his truck which was supposedly dispensing termiticide. Yes, lots and lots of fluid came from the hose, soaking it in pretty good. He told me the termiticide was a pyrethrin based material. Ok. I asked for a jug of it while he had hose in hand for spot treatment should I find a spot missed. No way. He could not, by "law", dispense the material other than as directed. So, it all went onto the ground in front of me.
Ok, now he presents me with the form to sign regarding completion of the treatment. There is a spot on the form where the chemicals used and quantity are supposed to be filled in. But he leaves it blank, because there wasn't an active infestation that was specifically treated. Apparently, under "law", I do not need to be informed as to what chemical he sprayed all over my property.
Now, here's the part that infuriates me, the next day, I go out to feed my cats and there's ANTS all over my cat food bowl. Now I figured that strong fresh dose of termiticide would have done away with all those ants.
Had I been able to recover a sample of whatever he sprayed on my property, I could send it off to a chemist friend who has a gas chromatograph in his garage and ask him to run a spectra on it and look for pyrethrins. I strongly suspect the termite man just made a show of spraying water on my property. To add insult to injury, I destroyed much of my vegetable garden on his advice that the poisons would be absorbed into my edibles.
Its all this closed-source ( not the price, but the reassurance that I know what I am getting ) that concerns me so. I am *personally* responsible for the expenses of maintaining my house, it does me no good to try to blame someone else, so having some termite company to blame it on does not help me. I feel I have a right to know what chemicals and in which strength is placed on my property, and I feel I have a right to verify this.
I am getting really fed up with all these laws prohibiting the understanding ( possibly reverse engineering if the vendor is uncooperative ) of what I am receiving in return for money. This seems so unfair to me because the quality of the money can be so easily verified, but I am supposed to accept, by laws passed by Congress, the word of the vendor on what it is I am buying.
I know I am being a little hot-headed on this issue, but the problem is I am personally responsible. In a large business, it wouldn't make that much difference on whether or not lots of damage resulted from some delegate's failure to perform, as I could delegate the problem and wash my hands of it, while still retaining my employment status and retirement plans. ( This is the main reason in my mind why business executives would choose to go with some system that keeps them ignorant of its inner workings. ) On my level, when I am personally responsible, I want the ability to verify anything. It really cripes me to have my rights to verification annuled by law.
Hopefully, OSS will standardize an array of off-the-shelf^H^H^H^H^Hnet solutions that will make programming applications very similar to a trip to the hardware store. Sure, theres an abundant supply of hardware there, all ready to use... it just needs someone who knows what they are doing to assemble it in whatever arrangement it takes to do whats needed.
I get the idea OSS is just as threatening to the programmer as Home Depot is to the home handyman.
Micro Optical Corporation
These use the heads-up overlay display technology.
With a declining percentage of older open-architecture cars in the nation's fleet, we will see a declining percentage of independent repair businesses.
I fix my own car.. which is the primary reason I have no interest in the new cars, which can't be fixed without infringing on the laws passed by those clowns under the styrofoam "vote hats" which parade around every few years, exhorting how it I elect them, they will "fight" for me.
I could see where statistics, maintained by the system, would organize down to the very last microcent which employee was more productive than another. Given training will be no longer required, the employee can be ranked as easily as a solenoid valve, and replaced just as easily.
This is great news for the businessman, who will undoubtedly lobby ( and win ) any changes to employment law to maximize his profit, just as many IP/Copyright holders are doing now.
This is sad news indeed for the laborer. I guess his prime function in life is just to reproduce and make more laborers.
And as far as gravity assist goes, I was going to let gravity pull the liquids down to where the heat sources would be, while letting the "lid area" have the vapor pocket. ( we gotta have some sort of vapor pocket because the liquid phase is darned near incompressible, and if its volume changed with temperature, it could lead to an overpressure condition that would rupture the plumbing.) I guess if we really overloaded it, the vapor pocket area would overheat, but I am kinda counting on the whole lid area being pretty thermally conductive, while the majority of the heat would be generated under the keyboard area. The bubbles trying to rise would generate the necessary turbulence in the fluid to distribute the heat. We won't get homogeneity between the two phases ( liquid/gas ) because of gravity. The bubbles are gonna rise. I'm counting on this. This thing won't work in a zero G environment. Once vapor is formed in a zero G environment and gravity doesn't force it to move out of the way, then the poor thermal conductivity of the vapor just lets the hot spot get hotter and hotter, and doesn't help at all.
Any vapor produced would head upward, while the cooler fluid, assisted by gravity, stayed on the bottom part. Liquids conduct heat well, the vapor phase doesn't. And I did not want to depend on diffusion to get the heat transferred.. diffusion just doesn't work that fast most of the time. I don't think convection would be as efficient as we would like because of losses due to viscosity.
Note, the NEC system did not appear to involve any phase changes, and a very low power pump, so it goes to the best of my knowledge that they are just going to distribute heat, not try to "pump" it in the sense of making something yet colder than any existing part of the system. My comment was based on not using something as corrosive as water - as you noted, the freons are extremely stable, and wouldn't need much of it. Barring a leak, it would never wear out.
Much of my thought is from when I worked for a major oil company, and I had a representative from a company who makes "heat pipes" ( which are sealed pipes with a freon-like material inside so that the whole pipe is isothermal with very little thermal resistance ) gave us demos with a minature version of his product designed to look like a coffee stirrer. Once one of us tried to stir our coffee with it, he made his point. Once one end was in the hot coffee, forget holding onto the stirrer.
I thought this was what barcodes, or that square full of dots placed in just the right places was for. A tremendous amount of data can be placed in such an "image". This image can be quickly and inexpensively printed on the side of a box, even by a "inkjet" type apparatus that prints it onto the box as it goes by. The data encoded into that image can well be not only the product, but all data pertaining to that box of product.
Not only is it quick to print, its quick to scan too. A line-scanner can acquire the image at the destination and decode it into its digital description. What needs to be done as I see it is to standardize the format, so the data base is universal among all products.
Upon any transfer of the box, the box will be scanned out by the sending party and scanned in by the receiving party. At all times, the party that has the box should know everything they need to know about the box. The information encoded has everything to do with what's in the box. It has nothing to do with who buys the products in the box. So privacy issues are moot.
I would hope they are doing this already.
Having humans running around with pencils and clipboards is not the way to do this.
Quite insightful. I was wondering exactly what the problem was with CFC - so its a catalytic problem.. that sure makes the matters worse as the problem compound isn't consumed when it does its dirty.
The idea with the "heat pipe" is the entire "pool" of refrigerant is isopressure, hence it will be isothermal. The pressure of the entire system will rise and fall with whatever temperature the system is running at. Any localized hot spots initiate phase change to vapor, any spot cooler will condense. No pumps. And the "pool" actually looks like an interconnect network of tubing adjoining surfaces, some of which have heat coming into them, and some which have capacity to lose heat. The idea is to use gravity assist to get the liquid refrigerant into contact with the heat producing areas.. i.e. don't run the laptop upside-down or in a zero-gravity environment.
It looks like if Halon has a BP of -30 deg C at 1 atm., it wouldn't surprise me at all if its well over 100 PSI at room temperature.
I would be forced to use the pump if I wanted to drop the CPU temperature below the case temperature, but here I am assuming I can get away with running the CPU ( heatsink area ) at case temperature.
Looking at your user id number, I take it you are new to Slashdot. I hope you enjoy it here. A new person who can add insight into the stuff discussed here is always welcome.
Its economic guerilla war.
The idea is not to hit the enemy where he has you way overpowered... instead you sneak behind his back and disable the machinery supporting his capacity to make war. Like not fighting powerful enemy soldiers in the trench, instead you kill off the supply line so the soldiers don't get fed.
I don't think they have all that much to worry about trying to destroy America by damaging its infrastructure though... I think Congress is doing a fine job of doing this already when you consider how fast this country [is losing || has lost] its manufacturing capacity. I think we are fast becoming a pig fed intravenuously by the rest of the world, and its once powerful muscles won't twitch once the economic metabolism has fallen below the threshold needed to support itself.
Right now, we are living on running up debt.
If the thing were designed appropriately, you could have the freon doing a phase change from liquid to vapor where heat was being generated, then the vapor condensing back to liquid at the case. I'll betcha the major snafu will be the hinge. The idea is to make the whole case surface area isothermal.
The intention is to eliminate pumps by using wicking to transport the fluid to the hot spot, whereas the vapor travels by pressure.
Incidentally, has anyone looked to see if halon makes a halfway decent refrigerant? It looks neat that in the event of a fire, you could vent it to knock off the fire. Isn't halon another fluorocarbon? I haven't seen much spec on it for use as a refrigerant, but maybe another slashdotter has...and being I just posted the idea here, its now prior art....
These are very similar to the "stun gun" or the horizontal output circuit on a TV. Except they are about another order of magnitude more voltage.. expect the sparks to fly about six inches or so. But not much current in it. Its enough to wake you up, but not much more, but it oughta do wonders for PN junctions in the micron range.
Speculation, anyone?
I understand in space, they don't pressure the vessel to atmospheric 14.7 psi, so if the pressure is lower, the diffusion should take place at a much faster rate. Not to say it won't be noticed, though.
It makes a helluva lotta sense to have the screen refresh rates ( or harmonics thereof ) very close to the power line frequencies so that the visual artifacts generated by the beat frequency between it and the ripple of a poorly filtered ( i.e. cheap linear ) power supply would not be quite so noticeable.
No, I'm not from IBM, or use VM. Most of my background is in aerospace stuff during the moon days of the 70's, where I watched it go from paradise to pot when our motto changed from "failure is not an option" to "faster, better, cheaper".
Once the video stream is recovered/decrypted ( via DECSS or its ilk ), you can re-encode it in whatever format you wish... digital formats such as .mpg, divx, .vcd, whatever, or if you have the proper analog hardware, drop it out as RGB, NTSC, PAL, or whatever suits your fancy if you can implement the interface.
If you pop the DVD into an NTSC player, you will get the video delivered in NTSC format... it you pop that same DVD into a PAL player, you get the same content, but delivered in PAL format... etc.
I do not believe there are PAL or NTSC disks themselves; NTSC, PAL, SECAM, whatever are just the analog format the digital video is converted to so that it can be sent it to the monitor...
Anyway, thats the best of my understanding... please append my comment if I am in error.
Neither do I.
Just *one* guy have his pacemaker fouled up and you will never see the end of the litigation.
A camera will generate huge files.
And its difficult to indefinitely store these huge files. Best to send them somewhere else thats better at storing things. Like some large hard drive somewhere... how to get it there? Phone it in. Bingo.
The more I see this, the more I want to wait for them to build a really nice camera/phone/recorder before I buy one. I don't feel I have any need for a separate phone/browser, camera, and audio recorder/player... if I could get one thingie that does all.
Personally, I feel like the camera-phone is one of those "marriages made in heaven". Its one of the few things out there I have much of an interest in. I do not have a cellphone yet, but offer me a neat cellphone with built in hi-res camera - I mean a good one - that lets me upload .jpg, .mp3, and .mpeg files to my account at my ISP, and I will probably get off my arse and open my wallet.
If you lace it with proprietary formats and insist on standards that only exist as long as some proprietary OS supports it, I will not consider such a thing worthy of a long term investment - you might as well put 'em as a premium in a cereal box.
The people spoke amongst themselves and the City Council and it came to be that the zoo would no longer be free. We would have ticket counters and an admission fee. We knew the troublemakers would go somewhere else if they had to pay to get in, and if they were caught misbehaving, they would have to pay again if they wanted back in. It worked. We hated to lose our "free" zoo, but it had to be.
I hate to think of internet mail-server routing services no longer being free, but we may well get pushed into this because it may be less expensive to deal with a payment system than it is to deal with spam.
At least one advantage I can think off right off the bat with a payment system is that someone pays... that means someone is accountable for what got sent, and if fraud is involved, there is a direct monetary theft involved. A shopping mall can haul you into court over a shoplifted candy bar. So even if the payment is not much, it *is* a payment and incurs accountability.
It really bugs me to be forced into this train of thought, as I would much rather consider infrastructures to be public property. But, like the zoo, a pricing strategy may have advantages for controlling unruly pests.