In my day, we only had half a broken pixel between ten of us. We would all share one pair of broken coke-bottle glasses to magnify it, so we could see, then our parents would beat us about the head with an IBM keyboard because they thought we were looking at porn.
I've got to agree, especially now that you can get OSX Server in a Mac Mini relatively cheaply. I tried Windows and Linux, but (as a parent) OSX was the easiest to set up and just get on with life. The caveat is that it's only easy if everything in your house is a Mac - you may or may not want to go down that route.
Better is not a pointless term if you are counting on reliability. Apple qualifies certain RAM modules because it know that they meet the timing requirements of its chipset. You buy the qualified RAMs, you have a better chance of getting something that works flawlessly.
The question we should ask is: "If Apple wants to keep the public perception that its computers are better quality than PCs, why does it make it more attractive for users to buy 3rd party RAM that may make it crash more often?"
Technologies like this need to be slapped to the ground until their efficiency dramatically improves.
What little benefit we get from the convenience of wireless power is outweighed by the inconvenience of having to move to higher ground as the waste power of a hundred million gadget chargers becomes heat.
The keyboards in the demo use the PS/2 protocol - a very simple serial protocol which should be a doddle to decode. Notice the large(ish) pause between each keystroke in the demo? That's to give the oscilloscope time to trigger and dump the waveform to the PC. USB keyboards would be harder to crack because you've got to decode the USB protocol and filter out the chatter - triggering on just the keystrokes would be tricky.
In 1994, I worked for a company called 'Keycorp' who made keyboards for banks and other POS equipment.
Among their products were the full-size K32S and the smaller K34S. These were secure keyboards which continually pulsed the keyswitch matrix in a random way and continually communicated with the host PC in an encrypted way. It wasn't possible to trigger on a keystoke because you couldn't tell them apart from the random noise.
The point is that even in 1994, people knew that keyboards could be tapped or wirelessly snooped. It's a shame that you can't buy those keyboards - they had real keyswitches, too!
The article doesn't mention Helium. This is fine and great for party balloons but eventually it escapes to the upper atmosphere and get blown away by the solar wind.
The largest source of Helium is the natural gas wells in North America where helium has been made by radioactive decay of heavier elements over a very long time.
We'll have to wait a long time before we can get any more and recycling it isn't a possibility.
It is the only truly legal way to get channel data in Australia (it doesn't scrape Yahoo's website) and it also managed to win Channel 9's lawsuit that tried to get them shut down.
Reminds me of a saying I heard once:
"A people shouldn't be scared of its government,
the government should be scared of its people" I can't remember the source (sorry).
Note: "scared of its people" is not meant as in the "they've got bombs" sense, but in the "they'll vote us out or protest" sense.
^^^ That's a caveat for any overlord who want to come and get me.
The new generation of ARM chips (the Cortex series) have "the ability to scale in speed from 600MHz to greater than 1GHz, [using] less than 300mW" link. Further down that page gets you a figure of <0.45mW per MHz (I'll assume "idle" modes reduce the 1,000MHz * 0.45 a bit).
The key point here is that you can get the best performance/watt around from ARM chips. AMD's Geode series has a 1.5-watt Geode LX900 (600MHz) and a 0.9-watt Geode LX800 (500MHz) (link). Note: AMD's site rates these at higher power (2.6W and 1.8W respectively) here.
ARM chips have always been more efficient than X86 chips and always will be due to CPU architecture and the way that every instruction is encoded. Each ARM opcode has got a 4-bit conditional field that governs whether that opcode is executed or not. In an IC, you've got quiescent power (always there from the moment you switch on) and dynamic power. Dynamic power comes from switching transistors on and off. If an instruction isn't executed, there is less switching and less power consumption.
With a "save the planet through electronic design" attitude, I'd love to see a large proportion of X86 desktops replaced with ARM-based machines. Especially when you consider that saving even 1 Watt per PC scales to many thousands of megawatts , especially when you see how many PCs are in use now.
As ARM CPU speeds increase beyond the point where you can have a modern, complex OS and good office software running at a comfortable speed to the user, isn't that a goal worth aiming for?
The practical sides of that dream are daunting. I'd be naive to think that the world will port its software just because it's a good idea to save electricity where possible. A fresh start would be bigger than Haiku in it's ambition. Is it worth it? I'd like to think so. What's 10 years of OS and application development that could make a good dent in global power consumption that would last forever?
Have a read of the development page here - the game used self-modifying code to protect itself based on the code itself, the program counter and the 1MHz timer. The code couldn't be moved, stopped or altered. If anything affected any of those systems then the game would fail to decrypt itself and run. I'm amazed that more hardware add-ons didn't break it (although Solidisk's RAM wasn't the only thing that broke it).
The mode splitting of Elite was very clever and Elite was a brilliant game, but for technical excellence, the award has to go to Exile.
Exile is a sideways-scrolling action/puzzle/adventure game which pushed the 8-bit micros and 32K of memory further than anything had ever done and possible has done since. It has great physics, tons of particle effects, great (and varied) graphics, neat sounds, a plot that didn't suck, smooth framerates, trick NPC AI and more. I only recently discovered that every graphic in the game came from a 128 x 113 pixel block in memory - absolutely staggering when you look at screenshots or play the game. The like above has a game development section that is worth a read.
Exile was also squeezed onto the Acorn Electron (the BBC's smaller cousin). This version played inside a window on the screen where the border looked like noise, but was actually game data or code!
How can Google claim a patent infringement if other companies are keeping their algorithms as secret as Google did?
Their pagerank algorithm was one of the keys to their success. Keeping it secret was one of the things that made Google work and it was a good secret - nobody completely knew how it worked. So why patent it? What's the point?
SBS and the ABC (the government funded stations) do not have a legislative quota for how much local programming they must show. They have self-imposed targets in relation to the amount of local content that they screen.
It is the commercial stations who are bound by legislation to show a certain amount of Australian content.
I grew up in the UK and enjoyed watching TV as most folk do. We'd mutter and grumble about the damn TV license and existence of detector vans, but paid for it and carried on with life.
I've since emigrated to Australia and here is where you see what effect the TV licence has: the BBC stations provide a benchmark of quality that the commercial stations have to match and they generally do. Well, compared to the Australian stations, they do.
Australian commercial stations treat the audience like a numbers game. They won't make a commitment to a series unless it keeps getting great ratings, and by 'commitment', I mean that they won't keep a series in prime time long enough for it to the story to mature and to catch on (examples: Farscape got booted to beyond midnight after about 4 episodes and you should have seen the backflip with The Sopranos series 4) or they'll decide to axe a show because the station owner doesn't like what he sees (example: Packer pulling the "Michallef" show because of a comment Michallef made).
They show movies, but intersperse them with so many adverts, animated station ID's, "what's next" scrolling banners and the like that you lose any sense of the 'magic' that a good movie can bring.
Maybe British TV has gone to hell since I left, but I doubt it can be as bad as commercial Australian TV.
A solution for viewing sanity is the PVR and here's where I link back to the posted topic: by taxing PCs, the British government ministers are looking to the future (2017) when TVs are computers in their own right and internet broadcasting is a much, much bigger phenomenon. Provided that the tax keeps the quality of programming high, then you can't complain - the money is going where it should and you don't end up with a crappy viewing experience.
Calendar web pages are a tricky problem for search engines because they usually have links in them to navigate forward/back a month or to view a particular day in more detail. Navigating in this way can look like a lot of different pages if the parameters are passed in a URL because the pages are dynamically generated ad-infinitum. The poor search engine will recursively rip through each month of the year until some subroutine in the search engine decides that the page has had enough and then it will do it all over again the next time it indexes the site.
I wrote a PHP calendar page three years ago and it had so many hits from recursive links that I had to put an entry in the 'robots.txt' file to stop it. Looking at my logs, it had scanned every month for about 20 years in the past and 20 years in the future.
Slashdot Mirror
echo car > /dev/null
Can I have my $10,000 now please?
It's sniffing for methane, after all
PPI: Price Per Inch?
In my day, we only had half a broken pixel between ten of us. We would all share one pair of broken coke-bottle glasses to magnify it, so we could see, then our parents would beat us about the head with an IBM keyboard because they thought we were looking at porn.
I've got to agree, especially now that you can get OSX Server in a Mac Mini relatively cheaply. I tried Windows and Linux, but (as a parent) OSX was the easiest to set up and just get on with life. The caveat is that it's only easy if everything in your house is a Mac - you may or may not want to go down that route.
This isn't nerdy at all... Have Slashdotters turned into bankers?
Which browser are they using for the ballot?
The question we should ask is: "If Apple wants to keep the public perception that its computers are better quality than PCs, why does it make it more attractive for users to buy 3rd party RAM that may make it crash more often?"
What little benefit we get from the convenience of wireless power is outweighed by the inconvenience of having to move to higher ground as the waste power of a hundred million gadget chargers becomes heat.
In 1994, I worked for a company called 'Keycorp' who made keyboards for banks and other POS equipment.
Among their products were the full-size K32S and the smaller K34S. These were secure keyboards which continually pulsed the keyswitch matrix in a random way and continually communicated with the host PC in an encrypted way. It wasn't possible to trigger on a keystoke because you couldn't tell them apart from the random noise.
The point is that even in 1994, people knew that keyboards could be tapped or wirelessly snooped. It's a shame that you can't buy those keyboards - they had real keyswitches, too!
The largest source of Helium is the natural gas wells in North America where helium has been made by radioactive decay of heavier elements over a very long time.
We'll have to wait a long time before we can get any more and recycling it isn't a possibility.
I have to agreee. Slashdot probably wasn't paid for it (imaging the scandal if it was!), but that posting read like one big advert.
It is the only truly legal way to get channel data in Australia (it doesn't scrape Yahoo's website) and it also managed to win Channel 9's lawsuit that tried to get them shut down.
Note: "scared of its people" is not meant as in the "they've got bombs" sense, but in the "they'll vote us out or protest" sense.
^^^ That's a caveat for any overlord who want to come and get me.
The key point here is that you can get the best performance/watt around from ARM chips. AMD's Geode series has a 1.5-watt Geode LX900 (600MHz) and a 0.9-watt Geode LX800 (500MHz) (link). Note: AMD's site rates these at higher power (2.6W and 1.8W respectively) here.
ARM chips have always been more efficient than X86 chips and always will be due to CPU architecture and the way that every instruction is encoded. Each ARM opcode has got a 4-bit conditional field that governs whether that opcode is executed or not. In an IC, you've got quiescent power (always there from the moment you switch on) and dynamic power. Dynamic power comes from switching transistors on and off. If an instruction isn't executed, there is less switching and less power consumption.
With a "save the planet through electronic design" attitude, I'd love to see a large proportion of X86 desktops replaced with ARM-based machines. Especially when you consider that saving even 1 Watt per PC scales to many thousands of megawatts , especially when you see how many PCs are in use now.
As ARM CPU speeds increase beyond the point where you can have a modern, complex OS and good office software running at a comfortable speed to the user, isn't that a goal worth aiming for? The practical sides of that dream are daunting. I'd be naive to think that the world will port its software just because it's a good idea to save electricity where possible. A fresh start would be bigger than Haiku in it's ambition. Is it worth it? I'd like to think so. What's 10 years of OS and application development that could make a good dent in global power consumption that would last forever?
I second everything in that post. The interview NDA, the secrecy, the technology - all true. The technology website is: www.memjet.com (link).
Have a read of the development page here - the game used self-modifying code to protect itself based on the code itself, the program counter and the 1MHz timer. The code couldn't be moved, stopped or altered. If anything affected any of those systems then the game would fail to decrypt itself and run. I'm amazed that more hardware add-ons didn't break it (although Solidisk's RAM wasn't the only thing that broke it).
Exile is a sideways-scrolling action/puzzle/adventure game which pushed the 8-bit micros and 32K of memory further than anything had ever done and possible has done since. It has great physics, tons of particle effects, great (and varied) graphics, neat sounds, a plot that didn't suck, smooth framerates, trick NPC AI and more. I only recently discovered that every graphic in the game came from a 128 x 113 pixel block in memory - absolutely staggering when you look at screenshots or play the game. The like above has a game development section that is worth a read.
Exile was also squeezed onto the Acorn Electron (the BBC's smaller cousin). This version played inside a window on the screen where the border looked like noise, but was actually game data or code!
Loved Nite Owl's paunch, though.
- You don't need to be super-strong, just hire lackeys that don't mind getting bumped off
- You need lots of gadgets
- You need a lair packed with gadgets that nobody understands
- You need a mad plan to take over the world
Sounds like Bill Gates beat us to it.Their pagerank algorithm was one of the keys to their success. Keeping it secret was one of the things that made Google work and it was a good secret - nobody completely knew how it worked. So why patent it? What's the point?
It is the commercial stations who are bound by legislation to show a certain amount of Australian content.
P.S. New Zealand content counts as "Australian".
"I was... erm... just holding it like you normally do. Honest! Can I keep my warranty?"
I've since emigrated to Australia and here is where you see what effect the TV licence has: the BBC stations provide a benchmark of quality that the commercial stations have to match and they generally do. Well, compared to the Australian stations, they do.
Australian commercial stations treat the audience like a numbers game. They won't make a commitment to a series unless it keeps getting great ratings, and by 'commitment', I mean that they won't keep a series in prime time long enough for it to the story to mature and to catch on (examples: Farscape got booted to beyond midnight after about 4 episodes and you should have seen the backflip with The Sopranos series 4) or they'll decide to axe a show because the station owner doesn't like what he sees (example: Packer pulling the "Michallef" show because of a comment Michallef made).
They show movies, but intersperse them with so many adverts, animated station ID's, "what's next" scrolling banners and the like that you lose any sense of the 'magic' that a good movie can bring. Maybe British TV has gone to hell since I left, but I doubt it can be as bad as commercial Australian TV.
A solution for viewing sanity is the PVR and here's where I link back to the posted topic: by taxing PCs, the British government ministers are looking to the future (2017) when TVs are computers in their own right and internet broadcasting is a much, much bigger phenomenon. Provided that the tax keeps the quality of programming high, then you can't complain - the money is going where it should and you don't end up with a crappy viewing experience.
I wrote a PHP calendar page three years ago and it had so many hits from recursive links that I had to put an entry in the 'robots.txt' file to stop it. Looking at my logs, it had scanned every month for about 20 years in the past and 20 years in the future.