Whether or not CCLI is a member of the RIAA, they pay royalties into that system. There are plenty of Christian 'labels' and organizations that manage licenses for choruses, etc., but a large percentage of stuff we sing weekly is owned and managed by RIAA-owned companies.
You can also get a license to view any movie you want in your church for something like $200/yr (at least for my church's size), almost all of which most definitely goes straight into the MPAA's little laundering system.
Heh, I could probably go ask them, AFAIK they're here in Portland.
Both machines are running SMP kernels because Hyperthreading makes the single P4 processor look like two processors. If you don't run an SMP kernel, you don't get access to the second virtualized CPU.
God has filed suit against the scientists who have "decoded" the DNA of a mouse, citing the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions.
Re:Why do they all go to GTK/GNOME?
on
Mozilla 1.2 Unleashed
·
· Score: 3, Informative
> Ubercool and none of that stuff is working reliable. Gstreamer is crashing the hell out of my system. So who wants to deal with unfinished crap ?
Head over to irc.openprojects.net (or whatever they call it now) in the #gstreamer channel, and we'll see what we can do about finding and fixing whichever problems you're having. There are several known problems, i.e. with i386 glibc linuxthreads, that we're hunting for workarounds for, and can cause random crashes.
Heck, with things like this developing its a wonder anti-evolutionist 'creation science' people can show their faces in public!
Only true lunatics and those totally ignorant of basic science have ever claimed that evolution doesn't exist. Specifically micro-evolution. Any true scientist can point to hundreds, probably thousands, of fully documented, incontrovertible instances of micro-evolution. Bacteria evolving to become resistant to antibiotics is a perfect example.
Macro-evolution (proto-mammals flopping out of the ocean, etc.) on the other hand has no such scientifically incontrovertible proof. Every "link" between one species and another consists mostly of wishful thinking and fabrications by the scientists who expound on the theory that somehow random mutations over the last billion years can produce sentient homo sapiens. A basic grounding in mutation theory and common arithmetic shows the absurdity of it, to start.
The reality of the matter is that God can do whatever He wants, however He wants. If that involves some variant of macro-evolution, He'll make it work, natural laws or not (He who writes the laws can change/ignore them at will). However we came to this point (x,y,z species in the year 2002) is for Him to know and us to try to figure out. My disagreement with "strict" macro-evolutionary theory is that the science used to construct the theory is suspect at best, and total fabrication at worst.
The may be right, they may be wrong, since after all reality is what God says it is (think "The Matrix" and the black cat), but when it comes down to it, Ockham's Razor really says it all.
> Dunno if it can be done w/o special hardware though.
It can't. To get meter resolution, you need a 300MHz clock (1 meter per tick) with reasonably low jitter on each AP, all locked to each other with less than one tick difference across all APs receiving a given packet. That's an effective impossibility on its own (like I said, I've done a lot of research into that problem for a semi-related project).
Even if the chip rate of 802.11b is 11MHz (I'm not so sure, I'm pretty sure there are multiple bits transmitted at the same time), that only gives you a resolution of 30 meters, or about 100 feet.
However, from looking at their website it appears they are indeed using signal-strength calculations. I suspect their 1-meter number is resolution, not accuracy. There's not the *slightest* chance that they can accurately pull the position of someone to within a meter, when moving your laptop a few centimeters can *wildly* change the signal level on the various APs. I know, I've done it.
I saw a graph once, I wish I knew where, that showed the *measured* signal strength in a small cubicle room with a single door and simple desk. The interference patterns caused by reflections caused differences of 10's of decibels in repeating centimeter-sized patterns. Move a tiny bit and you could lose signal entirely. Use those numbers to try to correlate anything and you're smoking some serious crack.
I can think of several ways it might work, but all of them present significant challengs. Relying on relative signal level would be ludicrous, because signal level changes dramatically with card orientation, reflections, and whatever's in the middle. Heck, I get significant variance in signal level on the fixed links between the antenna on my roof and neighbor's sites.
Using a GPS-like timing comparison might do the trick, but it's set up backwards. With GPS you have a bunch of atomic clocks in orbit, and one device correlates the relative signal phase between them. With APs, you have to have extremely accurate timing across all the APs, which is a very hard problem (I've researched it...). Once you have that, you can compare reception times of a packet from the device being tracked, and triangulate. Problem is 1 meter accuracy represents some scary clock accuracy numbers across several APs with just an Ethernet between them.
If anyone can think of any other way to pull this off (WITHOUT modifying the client, and ideally without any special hardware, i.e. implementable in the HostAP driver), post them here.
One detail conveniently left out of the article is how much actual *power* is generated by this device. If a 1cc device produces only 10mA sustained, you're far better off with standard batteries for most anything except devices that actually *require* a long-running power source, and don't draw any significant amount of current. Consider this: I use 4 1700mAh AA cells in my digicam. They're, what, 3-4cc each? So at 10mA per MEMS device, you get only 160mA from that same volume.
The software for the original OGI'maBot2 (2nd gen, Timbot is 4th) was designed for teleoperation. The software was designed so that tradeoffs could be made between the quality of the video feed and its frame-rate. The tradeoff was based on the current speed of the vehicle, because a fixed frame rate at high speed means you're moving a large distance between frames. The actual contents of the frames don't have to be as sharp, you just need them more often.
The TimBot pushes more into the realm of autonomous vehicles. I suspect it's still using roughly the same code-base (the Quasar pipeline, upon which GStreamer is based, conceptually), so there's still video transmission going on, for failsafe if nothing else. The video is sent over 802.11b because OGI has (and has had for a long time) a campus-wide wireless cloud. This bot can range anywhere around campus, so x10 video doesn't work.
I would be interested to know what their failsafes are, onboard. One time I was driving OGI'maBot2 around several rooms away (took me 5+sec running to get there) when the computer died, leaving the motor running full-speed backwards. It backed *underneath* a desk, destroying an ISA slot on the motherboard (bent over). TimBot is a lot more compact and rugged-looking, but still susceptible.
I built the first two versions of this project, originally called "OGI'maBot", while I worked at the Oregon Graduate Institute (OGI). The first was a laptop on a trailer behind a manually controlled RC car. The second, OGI'maBot2, was an AT motherboard on top of a rally-truck RC chassis. The most expensive single part was the power converter to run the motherboard. The "TimBot" is the 4th iteration of the project AFAICT, the third one being somewhere in between.
You can get more info on the 2nd generation at http://www.omegacs.net/~omega/ogimabot2/, but please be kind, it's my home DSL line.
The software was very cool, the infrastructure directly led to the GStreamer project that I started while working there. I guess I should go back out there soon and have a closer look at this thing;-)
This keyboard seems to suffer from the rather fundamental issue of solving one problem while creating others (which they accuse all their competitors of repeatedly):
In order to use this keyboard, you have to counteract gravity. They have no built-in provision for anything like a wrist-rest, forcing the user to keep their arms elevated (much higher than a normal keyboard, btw, necessitating significant changes in desk, chair, and posture anyway) without any support. Even if you managed to kludge together a set of wrist rests that don't get in the way and feel horrible after 8 hours, you still have to fight gravity in your fingers. At all times while typing, your fingers have to be pulled upwards by your muscles in order to keep from falling to the next key down.
c) think it's easier to just say Linux (especially since the intended meaning is there
First of all, there no "think it is", it is easier to say Linux. Second, and you can ask Larry Wall to confirm this, the linguist that he is: language is about absolutely nothing but "intended meaning". When I say "dog", there is nothing in the letters d, o, g, and their relative ordering that mean "domesticated canine animal". Rather, the English language has imparted that intended meaning upon that combination of letters.
When a group of people speaking the same language all agree on using the same unique combination of letters to represent the same thing, that is what the word is.
Also, a corporate sponsored setup would have the potential to have a higher speed backbone in and out of the shop, and ultimately be able to provide better service than the free guys.
Not really. T-mobile has hooked up this node (and quite a few others from what I've heard, for cost reasons) to the 'Net with a satellite connection. That means ~400Kbps downstream and horrible latency.
The PTP node on the other hand is directly connected to two almost entirely idle load-balanced T1's.
It doesn't surprise me at all that Starbuck's didn't even know it was there.
Except for the part where several PTP members happened to be at Starbucks the day the T-mobile installers came. As I mention in my comment above, they talked for quite a while, with the T-mobile installers being made aware of a) the PTP node, b) how long it had been installed (some 6+ months by then, longer in testing), and c) what channel it was on.
As far as people not knowing about it, that is a problem we're trying to solve. If you saw the noon or 6:30 KGW news today you saw a piece about the node at the square and T-mobile's arrival. A week or two ago a half-dozen PTP members spent several hours handing out freshly-printed full-color trifolds explaining how to get online. Stickers are quite frequently placed at various locations, and promptly removed by Starbucks employees, but since it's not actually a public square, there's a limit to how much we can do legally.
The University, of course, would be laughed out of court by the FCC, as unregulated means unregulated. No lawyer would have to be hired, no money or significant time expended, just read the relevant sections out of the FCC regulations to the judge and go home.
No, this is a legitimate story. I'm a PTP member fairly involved in quite a number of projects (though I wasn't involved in this particular node), and here's what I know:
The T-mobile installers talked to several PTP members in Starbucks as they were installing the hardware. They were made aware of the PTP node, and which channel it was on, as well as how long it had been installed (since February 2001).
T-mobile uses channel 1 on all their sites, so this is actually not an intentional act on their part, but either laziness or "corporate policy".
Channel 1 is used by these companies because software searches for an AP from channel 1 upwards. Obviously, they want to be found first.
A TV news spot (link can probably be found on the PTP site soon, I captured/encoded it and let others mirror on faster machines) was also shot today at the square, with a half-dozen PTP members sitting there trying to surf. The clip shows the tmobile and www.personaltelco.net AP's flashing in and out, as they stomped on each other. Performance of both network (we presume, no one has wasted $30/mo on a T-mobile account) sucked badly.
And for the curious, the Pioneer Courthouse Square Starbucks node is fed by a *satellite* connection, meaning horrendous latencies. The PersonalTelco node at the same location is fed by dual T1's. Do the math on bandwidth and latency, and tell me if you want to spend $30/mo for T-mobile....
Hmm, it'd be great if they publicly advertised that little gem. If they build "desktop replacement" laptops that aren't designed to be used as laptops, maybe they should do what ECS or whoever did and leave out the battery. If they're going to advertise them as laptops, they should be built like laptops, IMO.
I had a Dell Inspiron 7500 for a couple years. Not only did the lid plastic crack in several places, but the hinges holding the entire LCD simply broke, three times. Dell finally got so sick of fixing my laptop they sent me a 8100 instead, which will be going back to them shortly, again, to fix a broken LCD connection that causes the screen to flash mostly green, but recently blue and red as well.
Unfortunately, the ability of a laptop to hold up to even normal use doesn't seem to be a feature that is ever dealt with in reviews, making it very hard to determine which brand or laptop to get without significant word-of-mouth data.
If you're referring to webcam or scientific-style cameras on the Firewire bus, they are supported by programs like Coriander through the libdc1394 interface and corresponding kernel drivers.
If you're talking about consumer-grade video camcords (aka MiniDV), you'll use the dv1394 interface and corresponding kernel modules, plus libdv [one of my projects] to decode the images (on a fast enough machine, about 700MHz PIII pegged still).
I haven't heard of any other types of firewire cameras, so if you have something that doesn't fit into one of these two categories, you got shafted IMO.
Depending on your processing requirements as far as data-flow, you may want to look at GStreamer, another of my projects, to plug together the DV device interface, DV decoder if necessary, and your processing components.
All of these are found on sourceforge under the names given, putting that many URLs into the comment when I'm this awake would be bad;-)
The company I worked for a while ago managed to not renew our project's domain, which apparently expired March 17. On the 21st I got one of these notices from NSI, the day before people started realizing the domain wasn't functioning.
The kicker is that when you do a dig(1) of the domain, it fails at the root nameserver, which is owned and operated by NSI. If you ask register.com, where the domain is held and the zone is served, it happily serves up the right address.
It's blindingly clear that these two things are related. NSI held a domain of mine they screwed up the transfer of for two years, with the zone being valid and the address working perfectly until they finally purged the domain. But if the domain is registered by a competitor, they kill the entry in their root servers within days. Perfectly timed to coincide with the arrival of their letter.
Slashdot Mirror
Whether or not CCLI is a member of the RIAA, they pay royalties into that system. There are plenty of Christian 'labels' and organizations that manage licenses for choruses, etc., but a large percentage of stuff we sing weekly is owned and managed by RIAA-owned companies.
You can also get a license to view any movie you want in your church for something like $200/yr (at least for my church's size), almost all of which most definitely goes straight into the MPAA's little laundering system.
Heh, I could probably go ask them, AFAIK they're here in Portland.
Both machines are running SMP kernels because Hyperthreading makes the single P4 processor look like two processors. If you don't run an SMP kernel, you don't get access to the second virtualized CPU.
God has filed suit against the scientists who have "decoded" the DNA of a mouse, citing the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions.
> Ubercool and none of that stuff is working reliable. Gstreamer is crashing the hell out of my system. So who wants to deal with unfinished crap ?
Head over to irc.openprojects.net (or whatever they call it now) in the #gstreamer channel, and we'll see what we can do about finding and fixing whichever problems you're having. There are several known problems, i.e. with i386 glibc linuxthreads, that we're hunting for workarounds for, and can cause random crashes.
This has been another episode of "mod down a post with which you disagree".
Heck, with things like this developing its a wonder anti-evolutionist 'creation science' people can show their faces in public!
Only true lunatics and those totally ignorant of basic science have ever claimed that evolution doesn't exist. Specifically micro-evolution. Any true scientist can point to hundreds, probably thousands, of fully documented, incontrovertible instances of micro-evolution. Bacteria evolving to become resistant to antibiotics is a perfect example.
Macro-evolution (proto-mammals flopping out of the ocean, etc.) on the other hand has no such scientifically incontrovertible proof. Every "link" between one species and another consists mostly of wishful thinking and fabrications by the scientists who expound on the theory that somehow random mutations over the last billion years can produce sentient homo sapiens. A basic grounding in mutation theory and common arithmetic shows the absurdity of it, to start.
The reality of the matter is that God can do whatever He wants, however He wants. If that involves some variant of macro-evolution, He'll make it work, natural laws or not (He who writes the laws can change/ignore them at will). However we came to this point (x,y,z species in the year 2002) is for Him to know and us to try to figure out. My disagreement with "strict" macro-evolutionary theory is that the science used to construct the theory is suspect at best, and total fabrication at worst.
The may be right, they may be wrong, since after all reality is what God says it is (think "The Matrix" and the black cat), but when it comes down to it, Ockham's Razor really says it all.
Looks like Microsoft has invented a new scam, coming soon to an email box near you!
> Dunno if it can be done w/o special hardware though.
It can't. To get meter resolution, you need a 300MHz clock (1 meter per tick) with reasonably low jitter on each AP, all locked to each other with less than one tick difference across all APs receiving a given packet. That's an effective impossibility on its own (like I said, I've done a lot of research into that problem for a semi-related project).
Even if the chip rate of 802.11b is 11MHz (I'm not so sure, I'm pretty sure there are multiple bits transmitted at the same time), that only gives you a resolution of 30 meters, or about 100 feet.
However, from looking at their website it appears they are indeed using signal-strength calculations. I suspect their 1-meter number is resolution, not accuracy. There's not the *slightest* chance that they can accurately pull the position of someone to within a meter, when moving your laptop a few centimeters can *wildly* change the signal level on the various APs. I know, I've done it.
I saw a graph once, I wish I knew where, that showed the *measured* signal strength in a small cubicle room with a single door and simple desk. The interference patterns caused by reflections caused differences of 10's of decibels in repeating centimeter-sized patterns. Move a tiny bit and you could lose signal entirely. Use those numbers to try to correlate anything and you're smoking some serious crack.
I can think of several ways it might work, but all of them present significant challengs. Relying on relative signal level would be ludicrous, because signal level changes dramatically with card orientation, reflections, and whatever's in the middle. Heck, I get significant variance in signal level on the fixed links between the antenna on my roof and neighbor's sites.
Using a GPS-like timing comparison might do the trick, but it's set up backwards. With GPS you have a bunch of atomic clocks in orbit, and one device correlates the relative signal phase between them. With APs, you have to have extremely accurate timing across all the APs, which is a very hard problem (I've researched it...). Once you have that, you can compare reception times of a packet from the device being tracked, and triangulate. Problem is 1 meter accuracy represents some scary clock accuracy numbers across several APs with just an Ethernet between them.
If anyone can think of any other way to pull this off (WITHOUT modifying the client, and ideally without any special hardware, i.e. implementable in the HostAP driver), post them here.
One detail conveniently left out of the article is how much actual *power* is generated by this device. If a 1cc device produces only 10mA sustained, you're far better off with standard batteries for most anything except devices that actually *require* a long-running power source, and don't draw any significant amount of current. Consider this: I use 4 1700mAh AA cells in my digicam. They're, what, 3-4cc each? So at 10mA per MEMS device, you get only 160mA from that same volume.
The software for the original OGI'maBot2 (2nd gen, Timbot is 4th) was designed for teleoperation. The software was designed so that tradeoffs could be made between the quality of the video feed and its frame-rate. The tradeoff was based on the current speed of the vehicle, because a fixed frame rate at high speed means you're moving a large distance between frames. The actual contents of the frames don't have to be as sharp, you just need them more often.
The TimBot pushes more into the realm of autonomous vehicles. I suspect it's still using roughly the same code-base (the Quasar pipeline, upon which GStreamer is based, conceptually), so there's still video transmission going on, for failsafe if nothing else. The video is sent over 802.11b because OGI has (and has had for a long time) a campus-wide wireless cloud. This bot can range anywhere around campus, so x10 video doesn't work.
I would be interested to know what their failsafes are, onboard. One time I was driving OGI'maBot2 around several rooms away (took me 5+sec running to get there) when the computer died, leaving the motor running full-speed backwards. It backed *underneath* a desk, destroying an ISA slot on the motherboard (bent over). TimBot is a lot more compact and rugged-looking, but still susceptible.
I built the first two versions of this project, originally called "OGI'maBot", while I worked at the Oregon Graduate Institute (OGI). The first was a laptop on a trailer behind a manually controlled RC car. The second, OGI'maBot2, was an AT motherboard on top of a rally-truck RC chassis. The most expensive single part was the power converter to run the motherboard. The "TimBot" is the 4th iteration of the project AFAICT, the third one being somewhere in between.
;-)
You can get more info on the 2nd generation at http://www.omegacs.net/~omega/ogimabot2/, but please be kind, it's my home DSL line.
The software was very cool, the infrastructure directly led to the GStreamer project that I started while working there. I guess I should go back out there soon and have a closer look at this thing
This keyboard seems to suffer from the rather fundamental issue of solving one problem while creating others (which they accuse all their competitors of repeatedly):
;-)
In order to use this keyboard, you have to counteract gravity. They have no built-in provision for anything like a wrist-rest, forcing the user to keep their arms elevated (much higher than a normal keyboard, btw, necessitating significant changes in desk, chair, and posture anyway) without any support. Even if you managed to kludge together a set of wrist rests that don't get in the way and feel horrible after 8 hours, you still have to fight gravity in your fingers. At all times while typing, your fingers have to be pulled upwards by your muscles in order to keep from falling to the next key down.
Besides, it looks stupid
Oh, I forgot... the GNU is never silent. :)
You must have talked to RMS in person at some point. Or rather, have been talked at by RMS.
c) think it's easier to just say Linux (especially since the intended meaning is there
First of all, there no "think it is", it is easier to say Linux. Second, and you can ask Larry Wall to confirm this, the linguist that he is: language is about absolutely nothing but "intended meaning". When I say "dog", there is nothing in the letters d, o, g, and their relative ordering that mean "domesticated canine animal". Rather, the English language has imparted that intended meaning upon that combination of letters.
When a group of people speaking the same language all agree on using the same unique combination of letters to represent the same thing, that is what the word is.
.Also, a corporate sponsored setup would have the potential to have a higher speed backbone in and out of the shop, and ultimately be able to provide better service than the free guys.
Not really. T-mobile has hooked up this node (and quite a few others from what I've heard, for cost reasons) to the 'Net with a satellite connection. That means ~400Kbps downstream and horrible latency.
The PTP node on the other hand is directly connected to two almost entirely idle load-balanced T1's.
It doesn't surprise me at all that Starbuck's didn't even know it was there.
Except for the part where several PTP members happened to be at Starbucks the day the T-mobile installers came. As I mention in my comment above, they talked for quite a while, with the T-mobile installers being made aware of a) the PTP node, b) how long it had been installed (some 6+ months by then, longer in testing), and c) what channel it was on.
As far as people not knowing about it, that is a problem we're trying to solve. If you saw the noon or 6:30 KGW news today you saw a piece about the node at the square and T-mobile's arrival. A week or two ago a half-dozen PTP members spent several hours handing out freshly-printed full-color trifolds explaining how to get online. Stickers are quite frequently placed at various locations, and promptly removed by Starbucks employees, but since it's not actually a public square, there's a limit to how much we can do legally.
The University, of course, would be laughed out of court by the FCC, as unregulated means unregulated. No lawyer would have to be hired, no money or significant time expended, just read the relevant sections out of the FCC regulations to the judge and go home.
No, this is a legitimate story. I'm a PTP member fairly involved in quite a number of projects (though I wasn't involved in this particular node), and here's what I know:
The T-mobile installers talked to several PTP members in Starbucks as they were installing the hardware. They were made aware of the PTP node, and which channel it was on, as well as how long it had been installed (since February 2001).
T-mobile uses channel 1 on all their sites, so this is actually not an intentional act on their part, but either laziness or "corporate policy".
Channel 1 is used by these companies because software searches for an AP from channel 1 upwards. Obviously, they want to be found first.
A TV news spot (link can probably be found on the PTP site soon, I captured/encoded it and let others mirror on faster machines) was also shot today at the square, with a half-dozen PTP members sitting there trying to surf. The clip shows the tmobile and www.personaltelco.net AP's flashing in and out, as they stomped on each other. Performance of both network (we presume, no one has wasted $30/mo on a T-mobile account) sucked badly.
And for the curious, the Pioneer Courthouse Square Starbucks node is fed by a *satellite* connection, meaning horrendous latencies. The PersonalTelco node at the same location is fed by dual T1's. Do the math on bandwidth and latency, and tell me if you want to spend $30/mo for T-mobile....
Except it has a hard drive, and he's.... jogging.
Hmm, it'd be great if they publicly advertised that little gem. If they build "desktop replacement" laptops that aren't designed to be used as laptops, maybe they should do what ECS or whoever did and leave out the battery. If they're going to advertise them as laptops, they should be built like laptops, IMO.
I had a Dell Inspiron 7500 for a couple years. Not only did the lid plastic crack in several places, but the hinges holding the entire LCD simply broke, three times. Dell finally got so sick of fixing my laptop they sent me a 8100 instead, which will be going back to them shortly, again, to fix a broken LCD connection that causes the screen to flash mostly green, but recently blue and red as well.
Unfortunately, the ability of a laptop to hold up to even normal use doesn't seem to be a feature that is ever dealt with in reviews, making it very hard to determine which brand or laptop to get without significant word-of-mouth data.
If you're referring to webcam or scientific-style cameras on the Firewire bus, they are supported by programs like Coriander through the libdc1394 interface and corresponding kernel drivers.
;-)
If you're talking about consumer-grade video camcords (aka MiniDV), you'll use the dv1394 interface and corresponding kernel modules, plus libdv [one of my projects] to decode the images (on a fast enough machine, about 700MHz PIII pegged still).
I haven't heard of any other types of firewire cameras, so if you have something that doesn't fit into one of these two categories, you got shafted IMO.
Depending on your processing requirements as far as data-flow, you may want to look at GStreamer, another of my projects, to plug together the DV device interface, DV decoder if necessary, and your processing components.
All of these are found on sourceforge under the names given, putting that many URLs into the comment when I'm this awake would be bad
You can find what appears to be the original fwd'd (anonymized) copy of the mail from the guy who first checked this out at this location.
The company I worked for a while ago managed to not renew our project's domain, which apparently expired March 17. On the 21st I got one of these notices from NSI, the day before people started realizing the domain wasn't functioning.
The kicker is that when you do a dig(1) of the domain, it fails at the root nameserver, which is owned and operated by NSI. If you ask register.com, where the domain is held and the zone is served, it happily serves up the right address.
It's blindingly clear that these two things are related. NSI held a domain of mine they screwed up the transfer of for two years, with the zone being valid and the address working perfectly until they finally purged the domain. But if the domain is registered by a competitor, they kill the entry in their root servers within days. Perfectly timed to coincide with the arrival of their letter.