Or never even convert, perhaps. If close enough to a DC power source, the power could arrive in DC form. I'm unsure if large scale generation (ie hydroelectric) is DC in the initial stages, but if so, there'd be no conversion required at all. (IIRC, AC is best for long distances and DC better for shorter and is safer).
At the recent linuxworld in sf, I noticed some dc power supplies being pushed in the rack pc sector. I guess the lack of conversion from AC to DC saves a bit of juice, which makes a difference in large colocation centers. Combined with dc conversion on the motherboard, it would just be a matter of hooking up 12V DC direct to the board, which would be much nicer on the equipment and save a bit of power.
small hydrolic engine (1 or more), low horsepower, high efficiency with high output, to generator to small electric cache to large spinning disc moved by electromagnetics tied to drivetrain, regenerative braking. no need for many batteries, as power can be generated on demand... cache large enough for bursts. gearless spinning disc provides constant accelleration, high torque (higher than in wheel) high efficiency and stability... gyro action of discs paired with maglev shocks, or similar, should keep chassis constantly level regardless of terrain. should easly do 100mpg+ with performance as good if not better than current highend. modular/standard engine/generator blocks could interface at the electrical level, and scale to the task at hand, from small commuter to semi hauler. hydrolic engines have less wear and much greater power output.
what would be nice is a better train system, especially for package transport... ideally subterranian maglev, bored by nuclear sufficient worms, but that's a bit far out there.
Optical or tape, with indexes/caches sitting on hard drives. Spinning drives don't make too much sense for large scale data archiving. A smart storage management system can keep your r-o archives as if they were rw, via versioning, caching, etc. If you have a petabyte of OLTM, perhaps it would be different... but that's unlikely.
Ok, yes, but there is alot of excellent hardworking people out there who deserve recognition, and with the current system, the way this works is for the artists to grab the change that slips thru the hands of the studio. Not enough, surely. Studio bullshit, formulaic crap but some excellence. What is needed is a fair redistribution reward system, a fair funding system and shunning studio cash grabs and techniques (ie theatre lockin, drowing low budget story focus with piles and piles of cash, etc). Most is already happening, and we as the knowledgable geeks might just be able to make a system that helps both legitimate producers and those who enjoy and relate to the productions. Circumvent the industry and expose a better way. Throwing the baby out with the bathwater is not a good idea.
Yes, I'm sure VMWare is aware of the coming hardware virtualization (and of increased competition, especially from virtual pc)... they've certainly pushed up advertising. They've made a great product, certainly. They chose a hard problem and pulled it off. Not really worth the cash for me personally (basically only used for cross platform installers), but I could see it being quite useful in a larger shop. If there is a lesson for developers from the VMWare (and other devs having the rug yanked from under them) is not to put all your eggs in one basket... agility and diversity. In a GNU-like fashion, small interoperating applications and services can approach and often out-maneuver larger projects. If this increased competion and possible irrelevance does spell an end (or drastic diminishing) of VMWare, they should be proud of what they have done... many people learnt much from that project, surely... too bad it wasn't a bit more open.
You raise good points. However, the training button (tho theorhetical) might have the effect of stripping the audience of challenge. We are an echo of experience, and without changing and growing thru exposure tend to stagnate. The statis of mire can be seen more an more in mass culture, with the challenging (be it offensive or supporting) becoming more rare, and when it does occur, it is seen as exceptional. Another parrallel can be seen in western cleanliness... where sterile environments do not provide the stimulus required for immune system growth. The gut reaction may be to open the floodgates, which in a weakend, unprepared state may do more harm than good. Perhaps overanalyzed, but the collective expression of individuals should never be silenced at the whim of a small group, especially a self serving monolith of limited exposure. If anything will 'fix' the issue, it will be time. People will see over time the vacuity of sensationalism and seek and encourage alternatives, but, to have that choice made for you is far more damaging than any exposure might be.
I bought a tyan thunder k8we board about a year ago, dropped in two high efficiency 246's, 3G RAM and installed gentoo and have been loving it ever since. Best computer I've ever had, bar none. Fast for development, fast for services, fast for games. I never bog it down, even with 6 or 7 active tasks going. The hypertransport is great. There's quite a bit of an upgrade path, too... with the new dual core opterons reaching 2.6GHz/core or 10.2GHz in a 2 way smp box. Yow. Not exactly cheap for those processors, tho. Buying the kit off ebay'll save a good bit and allow for customization, tho it won't come pre-assembled, of course.
Some excellent suggestions so far. Let me first say I love working in java and there are no better tools out there, but, I'd think hard about the migration. It's going to take alot of time, much more than you or they might expect, and alot of foresight, situation analysis and learning before progress is seen. Double the estimate, then double again, in my experience. If the code is really rotten, a migration might make sense.
A plan of attack might be: Get atleast one dedicated, experienced java head and allocate a team of current employees to work with the new guy. New guy brings employees up to speed on java and tools and team brings new guy up to speed with existing codebase. Have the java team rewrite a good chunk of code, then throw it away... be brutal. Write it again, with the team up to speed, then move onto other pieces. Management usually hate funding R&D, but they have no choice if they want results. Choose what to tackle gingerly... something tough and important but not mission critical. After the first pass, sit back and breakdown what needs to be re-implemented and re-architect with hindsight, if possible. For working standalone code/services, think of a corba (ick), jni or some other c++ - java compatability layer.
If I, as a solo developer, were to decide to move the last 6 years of my code to another language, I wouldn't do it. Too much work... sure, I'd learn a bunch, but it'd take be years to get to the point where I am now. That being said, my current codebase is java in eclipse, and any stale code is as easy as possible to refactor.
The tools are great, but if you're not careful, you'll just make a broken c++ codebase become a broken java codebase. The prerequisite to good code is experience, and there's only one long, hard way to get that.
Sure, interoperability and ease of use (application installation/enhancement) could be a bit clearer. There are going to be problems with some of the hardware out there, and there is definately a learning curve. The community is great, the software is fast, the ideas are plentiful and there are solutions for nearly anything. When I'm on a windows box, I feel trapped in a sandbox littered with dog shit. It's ok if you watch out for the shit and only want to play in the sand, but anything more and I'll find myself wanting a return to linux. Bash scripting, gnome, kino, gimp, openoffice, firefox, emerge, etc, etc, etc. Linux is so much more complete, it's no wonder there's a bit of a learning curve. Devote a weekend and an old harddrive and don't look back.
I would say game modding would be a fine way to introduce a class to computers and programming. Start in a simple class wide world and have the kids add to it using simple toolkit. Explore others work, comment, improve, then start on scripting and perhaps more complex scripting. Save the world and give it to the kids. Sure, it's no assembly, c or java, but it's a good start, and one that might show them of the potential... get them interested enough to want to learn how things work on the inside.
It would shatter if dropped, so a breakage overhead was factored in. The packaging improved, breakage went down, fees stayed. CD's came about, breakage dropped again, fees remained. Now with digital, there's no breakage and still fees. Of course, with digital, the whole duplication, distribution, production and publicity thing is best done by cheap devices connected to interconnected routers, and the monolithic scammers are sure to fade away.
Reminds me of having to keep my nothing insured for fire and theft when I stopped driving (without insurance my premiums would go back to rates of when I was a new driver, when I drive again). I'm comforted by the knowledge that if the laws of physics suddenly change and my nothing explodes I'll only have to cover the deductible. Perhaps I should file a claim just to have them have to try to disprove physics.
Remarkable that inventiveness ever was given the representation by those who repress with threats. Such things do far more damage that emulation. Imitation is the highest form of flattery and threats only taint the works.
Yeah, totally. Thanks for the response, tho. I've dl'd the data and have made a.gz to sql importer, which I've yet to fully run... 300M of compressed ascii takes ages to import... 600k+ actors alone. When done and validated, should mean a local imdb cache which should be faster than imdb. I plan an exception handler which queries and fetches from imdb when the data is not available locally, and then to create lightweight pda-friendly dynamic pages for presentation of data. May go live with the 'mobile imdb'... I'm sure there'd be demand tho I'd have to get clearance from imdb.
If you were to save the stream to disk, then run a black frame detector, the algo for trimming commercials is this:
find black frame, if another black is back or forward 30s,60s,90s +/-5s, then you're in a commercial block at black frame A. START=A, Scan back from START set reseting on black frame within preceeding 15s. END=A, scan forward finding black frames at 30s,60s,90s +/-5s, resetting END. Scan forward from END, resetting until no black frame in subsequent 15s. [START,END] is a commercial block. Repeat for other frames. Invert the blocks and join. Avidemux2 does this nicely.
The Networks have been drowning us in hair shampoo for far too long. There is far too much out there for them to expect people to deal with their insulting crap for much longer.
Well, I've been collecting data from various sources lately, and most is still in 'data' form, ie no real revelevant difference one set of bits to the next. I've been on a push to surface the interactions between the data, but to even get to that point, there is alot of data massaging to do.. decompression, format interchange, subject recognition, etc. In theory, once the data is in an understood format it can be searched and indexed and the searches mined. It requires a general idea of where to go with the idea, then combination leading to a certain interrelated knowledge network, which is of more benefit than a single point. Data interrelationship is important, but hardly present today. Open and extensible metadata tied to exchanged data is vital to bridging systems providing the foundataions for greater useful data... a metadata system interchange. Right now the links are simple... one way and (usually) in a context which only a human can understand.
I've built a tv app that grabs xmltv data and throws it into a db, presents listings and a higher level 'remote control' via web pages on a zaurus (with channel changes via an ir transmitter). As I watch, what I watch is noted, and every half hour what I have noted is matched against what is currently on. It's very simple, only a join, but the results are usually quite relevant. The lesson being that relevant results only come from intentful interaction. I plan on carrying forward the simple mining... spidering out across credits, intersecting with imdb info and recommendations, moderation of selections, etc. I expect the results to be quite person-centric, but a mining of distributed relevancy could lead to better results (ie intersecting preferences of many watchers). That might contradict the problem of seeing outside the bubble... suggestions are usually the result of personal decision, and are therefor skewed towards the person.. something relevant and unusual is a beautiful thing.
There's also no money in it... trying to sell a new idea to a suit most often results in the death of the idea... skewed to benefit the uninventive status quo, tho there are exceptions, I guess. That often kills even the idea of attempting a feat that requires the acquisition and maintenance of terabytes of data to be useful. AFAIC profit driven crap is just that... inane drivel from a self-serving path. There's promise, surely, and challenge even moreso, but whether there is societal acceptance or encouragement of such un-triviality is another question. The internet is young tho, and if you think there's alot of data now, you ain't seen nothing yet.
OpenZaurus linux distro runs just fine on 64MB+ memory (ram/cf/sd), on a 266MHz arm processor. How much more slimmer can it get? Seems to do ok on a WRT-54G also.
If it doesn't work in all cases it doesn't work, and it doesn't. Inventor invents something patents to make money, patents drive price up and delay, consumers avoid higher priced item, lower priced items with equivalent functionality come to market perhaps even in advance of the patented, grabbed up by consumers. Inventor both broke and alientated, patent office workers overworked. There's no stopping a good idea, nor should there be... what there should be is recognition and reward of good ideas by a knowledgable consumership.
I built a homebrew pvr, wrote the code myself... it presents, schedules, suggests and other functions. As basically any other pvr does. I've never used a tivo, or any other non-open pvr... but I bet I infringed a patent or two along the way. Products produced with openness in mind enocurage a knowledgable community... we are after all in it for the long run.
Single bed sized covered rectangle, 400lbs of magnesium in 1' of water, little gavity, no light, no sound, no taste, no smell, only boundless drift. Magnesium salt increases water density to buoancy point.. impossible to sink, no matter how hard you try. Quite an awesome experience. Float centres are few and far between. A listing of some can be found here.
Slashdot Mirror
Or never even convert, perhaps. If close enough to a DC power source, the power could arrive in DC form. I'm unsure if large scale generation (ie hydroelectric) is DC in the initial stages, but if so, there'd be no conversion required at all. (IIRC, AC is best for long distances and DC better for shorter and is safer).
At the recent linuxworld in sf, I noticed some dc power supplies being pushed in the rack pc sector. I guess the lack of conversion from AC to DC saves a bit of juice, which makes a difference in large colocation centers. Combined with dc conversion on the motherboard, it would just be a matter of hooking up 12V DC direct to the board, which would be much nicer on the equipment and save a bit of power.
what would be nice is a better train system, especially for package transport... ideally subterranian maglev, bored by nuclear sufficient worms, but that's a bit far out there.
Optical or tape, with indexes/caches sitting on hard drives. Spinning drives don't make too much sense for large scale data archiving. A smart storage management system can keep your r-o archives as if they were rw, via versioning, caching, etc. If you have a petabyte of OLTM, perhaps it would be different... but that's unlikely.
Ok, yes, but there is alot of excellent hardworking people out there who deserve recognition, and with the current system, the way this works is for the artists to grab the change that slips thru the hands of the studio. Not enough, surely. Studio bullshit, formulaic crap but some excellence. What is needed is a fair redistribution reward system, a fair funding system and shunning studio cash grabs and techniques (ie theatre lockin, drowing low budget story focus with piles and piles of cash, etc). Most is already happening, and we as the knowledgable geeks might just be able to make a system that helps both legitimate producers and those who enjoy and relate to the productions. Circumvent the industry and expose a better way. Throwing the baby out with the bathwater is not a good idea.
Yes, I'm sure VMWare is aware of the coming hardware virtualization (and of increased competition, especially from virtual pc)... they've certainly pushed up advertising. They've made a great product, certainly. They chose a hard problem and pulled it off. Not really worth the cash for me personally (basically only used for cross platform installers), but I could see it being quite useful in a larger shop. If there is a lesson for developers from the VMWare (and other devs having the rug yanked from under them) is not to put all your eggs in one basket... agility and diversity. In a GNU-like fashion, small interoperating applications and services can approach and often out-maneuver larger projects. If this increased competion and possible irrelevance does spell an end (or drastic diminishing) of VMWare, they should be proud of what they have done... many people learnt much from that project, surely... too bad it wasn't a bit more open.
You raise good points. However, the training button (tho theorhetical) might have the effect of stripping the audience of challenge. We are an echo of experience, and without changing and growing thru exposure tend to stagnate. The statis of mire can be seen more an more in mass culture, with the challenging (be it offensive or supporting) becoming more rare, and when it does occur, it is seen as exceptional. Another parrallel can be seen in western cleanliness... where sterile environments do not provide the stimulus required for immune system growth. The gut reaction may be to open the floodgates, which in a weakend, unprepared state may do more harm than good. Perhaps overanalyzed, but the collective expression of individuals should never be silenced at the whim of a small group, especially a self serving monolith of limited exposure. If anything will 'fix' the issue, it will be time. People will see over time the vacuity of sensationalism and seek and encourage alternatives, but, to have that choice made for you is far more damaging than any exposure might be.
| Desk | Desk | Desk | Unquestioned beurocratic self justification!
There's non-drm on allofmp3.
I bought a tyan thunder k8we board about a year ago, dropped in two high efficiency 246's, 3G RAM and installed gentoo and have been loving it ever since. Best computer I've ever had, bar none. Fast for development, fast for services, fast for games. I never bog it down, even with 6 or 7 active tasks going. The hypertransport is great. There's quite a bit of an upgrade path, too... with the new dual core opterons reaching 2.6GHz/core or 10.2GHz in a 2 way smp box. Yow. Not exactly cheap for those processors, tho. Buying the kit off ebay'll save a good bit and allow for customization, tho it won't come pre-assembled, of course.
Some excellent suggestions so far. Let me first say I love working in java and there are no better tools out there, but, I'd think hard about the migration. It's going to take alot of time, much more than you or they might expect, and alot of foresight, situation analysis and learning before progress is seen. Double the estimate, then double again, in my experience. If the code is really rotten, a migration might make sense. A plan of attack might be: Get atleast one dedicated, experienced java head and allocate a team of current employees to work with the new guy. New guy brings employees up to speed on java and tools and team brings new guy up to speed with existing codebase. Have the java team rewrite a good chunk of code, then throw it away... be brutal. Write it again, with the team up to speed, then move onto other pieces. Management usually hate funding R&D, but they have no choice if they want results. Choose what to tackle gingerly... something tough and important but not mission critical. After the first pass, sit back and breakdown what needs to be re-implemented and re-architect with hindsight, if possible. For working standalone code/services, think of a corba (ick), jni or some other c++ - java compatability layer. If I, as a solo developer, were to decide to move the last 6 years of my code to another language, I wouldn't do it. Too much work... sure, I'd learn a bunch, but it'd take be years to get to the point where I am now. That being said, my current codebase is java in eclipse, and any stale code is as easy as possible to refactor. The tools are great, but if you're not careful, you'll just make a broken c++ codebase become a broken java codebase. The prerequisite to good code is experience, and there's only one long, hard way to get that.
Sure, interoperability and ease of use (application installation/enhancement) could be a bit clearer. There are going to be problems with some of the hardware out there, and there is definately a learning curve. The community is great, the software is fast, the ideas are plentiful and there are solutions for nearly anything. When I'm on a windows box, I feel trapped in a sandbox littered with dog shit. It's ok if you watch out for the shit and only want to play in the sand, but anything more and I'll find myself wanting a return to linux. Bash scripting, gnome, kino, gimp, openoffice, firefox, emerge, etc, etc, etc. Linux is so much more complete, it's no wonder there's a bit of a learning curve. Devote a weekend and an old harddrive and don't look back.
SoulSeek is centralized, for auth and search relaying, anyway. Server code has never been opened or dupe'd afaik.
but big label artists are still being boned.
I would say game modding would be a fine way to introduce a class to computers and programming. Start in a simple class wide world and have the kids add to it using simple toolkit. Explore others work, comment, improve, then start on scripting and perhaps more complex scripting. Save the world and give it to the kids. Sure, it's no assembly, c or java, but it's a good start, and one that might show them of the potential... get them interested enough to want to learn how things work on the inside.
It would shatter if dropped, so a breakage overhead was factored in. The packaging improved, breakage went down, fees stayed. CD's came about, breakage dropped again, fees remained. Now with digital, there's no breakage and still fees. Of course, with digital, the whole duplication, distribution, production and publicity thing is best done by cheap devices connected to interconnected routers, and the monolithic scammers are sure to fade away. Reminds me of having to keep my nothing insured for fire and theft when I stopped driving (without insurance my premiums would go back to rates of when I was a new driver, when I drive again). I'm comforted by the knowledge that if the laws of physics suddenly change and my nothing explodes I'll only have to cover the deductible. Perhaps I should file a claim just to have them have to try to disprove physics.
Remarkable that inventiveness ever was given the representation by those who repress with threats. Such things do far more damage that emulation. Imitation is the highest form of flattery and threats only taint the works.
Yeah, totally. Thanks for the response, tho. I've dl'd the data and have made a .gz to sql importer, which I've yet to fully run... 300M of compressed ascii takes ages to import... 600k+ actors alone. When done and validated, should mean a local imdb cache which should be faster than imdb. I plan an exception handler which queries and fetches from imdb when the data is not available locally, and then to create lightweight pda-friendly dynamic pages for presentation of data. May go live with the 'mobile imdb'... I'm sure there'd be demand tho I'd have to get clearance from imdb.
find black frame, if another black is back or forward 30s,60s,90s +/-5s, then you're in a commercial block at black frame A. START=A, Scan back from START set reseting on black frame within preceeding 15s. END=A, scan forward finding black frames at 30s,60s,90s +/-5s, resetting END. Scan forward from END, resetting until no black frame in subsequent 15s. [START,END] is a commercial block. Repeat for other frames. Invert the blocks and join. Avidemux2 does this nicely.
The Networks have been drowning us in hair shampoo for far too long. There is far too much out there for them to expect people to deal with their insulting crap for much longer.
I've built a tv app that grabs xmltv data and throws it into a db, presents listings and a higher level 'remote control' via web pages on a zaurus (with channel changes via an ir transmitter). As I watch, what I watch is noted, and every half hour what I have noted is matched against what is currently on. It's very simple, only a join, but the results are usually quite relevant. The lesson being that relevant results only come from intentful interaction. I plan on carrying forward the simple mining... spidering out across credits, intersecting with imdb info and recommendations, moderation of selections, etc. I expect the results to be quite person-centric, but a mining of distributed relevancy could lead to better results (ie intersecting preferences of many watchers). That might contradict the problem of seeing outside the bubble... suggestions are usually the result of personal decision, and are therefor skewed towards the person.. something relevant and unusual is a beautiful thing.
There's also no money in it... trying to sell a new idea to a suit most often results in the death of the idea... skewed to benefit the uninventive status quo, tho there are exceptions, I guess. That often kills even the idea of attempting a feat that requires the acquisition and maintenance of terabytes of data to be useful. AFAIC profit driven crap is just that... inane drivel from a self-serving path. There's promise, surely, and challenge even moreso, but whether there is societal acceptance or encouragement of such un-triviality is another question. The internet is young tho, and if you think there's alot of data now, you ain't seen nothing yet.
OpenZaurus linux distro runs just fine on 64MB+ memory (ram/cf/sd), on a 266MHz arm processor. How much more slimmer can it get? Seems to do ok on a WRT-54G also.
If it doesn't work in all cases it doesn't work, and it doesn't. Inventor invents something patents to make money, patents drive price up and delay, consumers avoid higher priced item, lower priced items with equivalent functionality come to market perhaps even in advance of the patented, grabbed up by consumers. Inventor both broke and alientated, patent office workers overworked. There's no stopping a good idea, nor should there be... what there should be is recognition and reward of good ideas by a knowledgable consumership. I built a homebrew pvr, wrote the code myself... it presents, schedules, suggests and other functions. As basically any other pvr does. I've never used a tivo, or any other non-open pvr... but I bet I infringed a patent or two along the way. Products produced with openness in mind enocurage a knowledgable community... we are after all in it for the long run.
Single bed sized covered rectangle, 400lbs of magnesium in 1' of water, little gavity, no light, no sound, no taste, no smell, only boundless drift. Magnesium salt increases water density to buoancy point.. impossible to sink, no matter how hard you try. Quite an awesome experience. Float centres are few and far between. A listing of some can be found here.
Who clears this crap. Military begets military. If money mean effort, $6B is alot of kids taught to love to learn.
...another reason to have groceries delivered.