Before podcasts were even called podcasts, I loved listening to Rob and his friends chat about the stories in their geeky, witty and hilarious hosting style. I felt like part of the gang and re-listened to most episodes a few times on my old Diamond Rio 500 on the way too and from University. Thanks for making geeks hip, social and fun!
Faith is the antithesis of what science strives to be. Faiths asks you to believe something for the sake of belief; without evidence or critical analysis. It claims truths without proof. The scientific method attempts to find proof by continuously questioning, testing and disproving all other possibilities till evidence supports a theory.
If your religion is faith based, as most are, you are denying the basic tenants of science, curiosity, critical thinking, and the socratic method. You cannot claim to be a scientist.
Faith has helped intelligent people justify belief in unknowable things since primates evolved. Oh wait...
"Faith is a cop-out. It is intellectual bankruptcy. If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits." --Dan Barker, former evangelist, author, critic
As someone who has climbed the world round, it is important to find out what means of communication the area you are in use first. If you don't want to research much, sat phones and SPOT are awesome. For instance, in many parts of the Alaska Range, rangers monitor family radio transmissions and broadcast weather updates on their channel. Those little radios have gotten pretty good range over the years and are used to coordinate rescues all over Denali, Mt. Forker and Huntington. There is also line of sight CDMA phone access in many parts of the states where GSM fails leaving the european climbers begging to use your phone from time to time. SPOT beacons are great though. There are 3 levels of message you can broadcast as you probably know. The mid-one is akin to saying "I'm in trouble, here's where I am but don't alert the authorities". If you're absolutely concerned with being able to consult a doctor or ranger at any time, get a sat phone. You don't have to depend on Globalstar either. Iridium is still functional and outside of North America, Thuraya is fantastic. I've used BGAN for data access in the deepest, darkest parts of the world but at $6/mb, you'll want to keep it to emails. I've also rented Iridium phones for use in Nepal. They are light, cheap-ish, rugged and still completely functional despite ownership changes. You can rent or own cheap handsets and buy minutes when you need them. If you have global rescue insurance through a club like the American Alpine Club (AAC), you can initiate an insured rescue call from a sat phone anywhere in the world or just call friends and family when you are lonely.
Most importantly though, don't rely on technology to get you out of a jam. Avy beacons fail, GPSs die, radios don't reach people on the other end. They are all wonderful, life saving tools but odds are you won't need any of that stuff. Read the Wilderness First Responder medical book, read Freedom of the Hills, etc. Go prepared. A vast majority of the time, you'll be able to get yourself and other people help without 'calling' anyone.
I regularly travel to London and Oxford on business and have been a tourist there as well. If you have a netbook, it'll be perfect. A laptop is also fine. You'll want it for researching stuff to do on the fly. Couch-surfing, pub-crawls, restaurants, etc. Internet Cafe's with actual computers are a dying breed. Most places expect you'll have your own hardware. There is no "region code" to change on your wireless. It'll work fine. Your laptop (and most any electronic) power supply already handles the 240V 50Hz power out there. It'll say on the power supply. All you need is a plug adaptor; a very passive, cheap device. If you bring a phone, make sure it is tri or better, quad band GSM and if you plan to use your US carrier, make sure to call them and add international use (free to add, expensive to use) so they don't block your phone from logging in out there.
Be your own tourist. Some people here are telling you to go museums and what not. Tourists will tell you what bus tour is best. Forget all that. If you like to walk around town, the city is certainly walk/tubeable, even in winter. If you don't like museums much here, you won't there. If you're in to history, you'll love the place. Things like the Tower of London are a thousand years old. If you like pubs, there are some great, historical ones a tube ride away (e.g. The Hollybush pub in Hampstead). Like any metropolitan city, there is great fashion, food, arts and entertainment.
Other things to be aware of. Hotel ratings are not like they are in the states. A three star hotel out there is awful with leaky plumbing and old furniture. Some of the hostels are actually quite nice though if you bring ear plugs. Look right before stepping in to the street. If you get a chance to drive and you like it out here, it is a blast out there! Oxford and Kent aren't far. Flights on discount airlines like Ryanair are cheap if you want to hop up to Scotland or Ireland. Don't over plan or overpack.
Funny you mention it (as did the OP). I've done contract software work on a few HDTVs and they do in fact take quite a while to boot. You don't notice it because when you turn off the TV, it only turns off the LCD and bulb, it never shuts down the embedded computer. In order to make the TV appear to power up quickly like a conventional non-digital TV, it never shuts down unless you physically unplug it. I can tell you specifically, the Mitsubishi DLP TVs (and most other TVs) have a full up MIPS based PC (with PCI slots filled with USB cards, MPEG decoder cards, etc). They boot VxWorks off flash and can take over 15 seconds to boot. When one of those Mitsu TVs is "off", they are burning around 75 watts running the computer! POS.
Here here. I'm sure some people will acuse you or me of being an ass but it is true. My time is better spent on other things than family and friend Windows support. In the last few years, I've convinced my brother, my girlfriend, her parents and several other friends to buy Macs. Not only do I not have to support them much, but they figure out how to do way more all by themselves (e.g. put photo's online). They think their new OS X machines are great and thank ME. And I was just being selfish in the first place... =)
Next they'll sue people who make simple ftp servers on the same grounds, then the IETF for coming up with file transfer protocols, then anyone having anything to do with routable networks like DARPA and while we're at at it, why not just sue the people who melt sand to make fiber optics and mine the copper that makes our cables for not explicitly "failing to block access to copyright works". Shoot, we should just sue people for existing.
You are missing the point. Most simple block device systems address 32 bits. Granted, some hard drive busses use up to 48 bits to address but the reality is most OSes/drivers use 32 bit addressing because it is damn easy to work with on 32 bit systems. This means with 512 byte blocks, you can address 512*(2^32) bytes of storage. 2199023255552 bytes or 2 petabytes. The thinking is that this will eventually be an impediment and that making the minimal addressable unit 8 times the size will give you 16 petabytes of addressable space.
I'm writing drivers for the new CE-ATA bus. The spec makers tried to do force this change on the new drives but the drive makers, fortunately, made it optional.
Adapting disk drivers to existing block drivers deal with the difference in the interim can be a pain in the ass, requiring extra buffer copies for non-aligned block data. I really don't see the benifit. By the time a 2 petabyte block device or drive comes out, most CPUs will probably be 64 bit making bit extended arithmetic in drivers uncessary and I'm betting most drive interfaces will be 48 to 64 bit addressable (e.g. EIDE is 48 bit today)
Most of my fellow engineers think this change is half baked.
There is no noticeable heat difference. My fan rarely comes on. I'm not sure about battery life since we're rarely are away from power. We mostly buy beastly, power-house x86 laptops for the sake of having a portable desktop machine so if there is a tradeoff, it is worth it. I doubt it makes much difference unless you are doing highly disk intensive activities where the drive can't spin down and you're probably not doing that if you're on battery.
I'll echo the other poster's claim; it doesn't seem to make any difference on my buddy's 15" Powerbook but then the powerbooks I've seen tend to have amazing battery life.
Yup, we put them in all of our software development laptops at work. Even small project compiles with a few dozen header file checks per source file and a few dozen source file, a 7,200 RPM drive nearly halves the compile time over a 4800 or 5400 RPM drive! (that and disabling any real time virus protection you have going on can make a 20 minute compile in to a 7 minute compile!)
You are absolutely correct. I was looking for someone to post this argument before doing it myself. Thanks! Mod this guy up!
TCP doesn't use round trip time to calculate a link speed. In fact, it doesn't just the opposite. It uses a sliding window method so it can send many packets before any one has ACKed. This is done to soften the blow that round trip times will have on your send rates!
TCP regulates its send rates by slowly sending faster and faster, then when a packet is dropped, it drops its rate fast. Slow increases and exponential backoffs make for VERY efficient link utilization on reliable networks with many active nodes whether it be a fast office LAN or world wide network.
Their method appears to just spray data without paying attention to what other nodes are doing. It sounds like it is much better suited for point to point communications on unreliable networks. E.g. cellular data networks, packets get dropped much more frequently because of interference rather than congestions. TCP might back off too quickly in this condition because it is optimized to deal with congestion. Their protocol might be great for that first/last hop between your cell phone and the cell tower but otherwise, it undermines the great balance that TCP achieves on our amazing little internet.
It has been widely publicizedthat Apple does not profit much from the iTunes Music Store and it is more of an enabler to selling iPods with a hefty profit margin. If this really is the case, isn't it a good thing that the iPod can use more formats? I'm sure Apple is just using this press to make noise for itself but they seem to be contradicting themselves in grand public fashion. (This from an iPod, powerbook and iMac toting,.Mac, iTMS using Apple lover)
I wish you were right about deciding whether the law makes sense or not. The libertarian in me would have thrown out both cases I have been a juror for. I'm curious if you've been on a jury and had a different experience from me. Every time I've been in the jury pool or assigned to a case, the judges' direct and clear instructions were to AVOID deciding if the law was good or bad but instead, decide only whether or not the person in question had broken the law. This seems like a direct contradiction to your statement.
Actually, technically, Hindu is not a religion either. Nor is Buddhism. Hindu is just the western Asians called the people east of the Sindhu river. Also, none of the Brahma, Vishnu or Shiva groupings of philosophers ever claimed to be deities (except for those that think Jesus was a Vishnu). They never asked to be followed or worshiped, only shared the wisdom that they had. That SOME people have turned these great philosophies in to religions is a disappointing commentary on the mindlessness of society in general. The Hindu philosophers would be upset to find they had been made in to religious icons.
Not to knit-pick but "mp3" files can be mpeg2-layer3 as well, since mpeg1-layer3 only covered a few standard bit rates; mpeg2-layer3 filled in the rest. As far as DVDs using mpeg1-layer3? I've never seen one that does. Every disk I've owned uses ACC for multi channel audio multiplexed with mpeg2 video. Did you just pull that DVD audio == mp3 out of your butt or do you actually have a DVD that uses it??
The one pointed to the inside of the case is so you can run an extension cable through to the front of the case to allow a firewire port on the front of your box. Not to allow internal firewire devices though I suppose you could use it for that. Of course, all the firewire drives out there are ATA/ATAPI with ATA to firewire bridges so why not just use your internal ATA in the first place. Firewire is for video and external expansion drives...
Gee, my company's error.h and types.h are similar. Oh wait, every god-damn company I've ever worked for has similar.h files because this is basic, common interface shit. Its like saying "we patented the play, pause, record and rewind buttons on our model of VCR, the rest of you fuckers with tape, CD and DVD players on the market better pay us for this inovative interface!" I don't know whether to laugh or cry over this.
I like the car and gun analogies; I was about to post a similar car analogy but people here are over simplifying. People are often prosecuted for gross negligence that can lead to other crimes. If you leave your keys in your car and someone steals it and runs someone down, you are not responsible. If you leave your car running, walk away and you see children around and they steal it and kill themselves or someone else, it can be proven that you were grossly negligent. Same goes for handing a gun to someone who is psychotic and threatening to kill someone. You didn't pull the trigger but you were well aware of the risk associated with handing the gun over. 2nd degree man slaughter.
If someone connects their freshly installed windows machine directly to the internet with no security patches, they should expect to have their ass handed to them. Its like running naked through a tukish prison and saying you didn't know your bunghole would be in danger.
I don't have any correctional advice but I'd say don't panic, if it is important enough for you to change your habbits, they will change. Your story sounds exactly the same as mine. I graduated with a computer engineering degree 1.5 years ago. I was thrilled that in my last year, i could take graduate level, evening classes because I could go to bed later, and later. I found that it was only on a deadline between midnight and 6AM that I could work at home. None of my friends were up, nothing good on TV and/. and all had been read for the day. Yeah, I was pissed that I couldn't discipline myself to work normal hours but I never had motivation to change because that was acceptable in college.
Fastforward 18 months, I was able to pull off this graduation thing and find an awesome embedded software job where I'm required to be in the office by 10:00AM. I thought it would be hard but I value the job and what it affords me so much that I don't want to screw it up by not hitting deadlines or sleeping in. My body is on a new sleep schedule (though I force myself to go to bed by 2AM sometimes); and I'm totally satisfied. Of course, I still make trips to/. and kuroshin and personal email during the day but I make it quick and make sure I get my work done. There is room to improve but what it takes is finding enough motivation to keep you focused. Find a significant other that keeps normal hours, get a job you really like, accept projects with firm deadlines... stuff like that.
I'm an embedded programmer, I compile for MANY different target platforms and BSPs. I use my Powerbook as my IDE and CVS environment full time, cross compiling for any platform that uses a GNU compiler (which is most ARM, MIPS and x86 platforms) and serial debugging/printf connection if its needed. I can cross compile to many systems and those than I can't, I have a headless clunker box and VNC or I use VirtualPC to compile or debug on the occasion tools are only available for Windows/PC (just like I used net meeting and my windows laptop if a customer provided me with a fully configured host platform). In the embedded space, tools are never made for the exact host platform you're using so you learn to be flexible anyway. I imagine if you are only in the x86 PC Windows space, you could do all of your dev on the Mac and use VPC for testing if your Apps aren't processor or I/O intensive.
I installed debian over 3 years ago on my B&W G3. The biggest gotchas were figuring out how to get the old skool open firmware to book off of other partitions (thanks Everything2 for that info) and realizing I had to use a PPC kernel fork if I wanted the latest and greatest (I belive the above poster mentions the benh fork). Now with the new world ROM, getting it to book its a snap. You select the icon and boot. Also, I've run in to less trouble with Debian on the Mac because of the unified hardware. Apple only uses a very small number of ethernet, video and audio controllers as well as a standard OHCI USB controller which makes things a snap. I had accelerated XFree running in nothing flat. Maybe I've been lucky with my G3 and my TiBook and all the lessons learned using Debian on x86 hardware but it wasn't difficult at all. Of course, its nothing like installing the latest Libranet. =)
Um, you could have put the powerbook in target disk mode (hold down t at bootup till you see a firewire icon). Then the powerbook acts as a simple firewire hard drive. BTW, it would still take a hell of a lot longer than 30 seconds. Asuming you could utilize a whoping %50 of the theoretical max of the link speed on the raw data layer (200Mbps/25MBps) it would still take at least 10 minutes.
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Before podcasts were even called podcasts, I loved listening to Rob and his friends chat about the stories in their geeky, witty and hilarious hosting style. I felt like part of the gang and re-listened to most episodes a few times on my old Diamond Rio 500 on the way too and from University. Thanks for making geeks hip, social and fun!
Faith is the antithesis of what science strives to be. Faiths asks you to believe something for the sake of belief; without evidence or critical analysis. It claims truths without proof. The scientific method attempts to find proof by continuously questioning, testing and disproving all other possibilities till evidence supports a theory.
If your religion is faith based, as most are, you are denying the basic tenants of science, curiosity, critical thinking, and the socratic method. You cannot claim to be a scientist.
Faith has helped intelligent people justify belief in unknowable things since primates evolved. Oh wait...
"Faith is a cop-out. It is intellectual bankruptcy. If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits."
--Dan Barker, former evangelist, author, critic
Google Voice is not an option. As of right now, Facebook will not send an SMS to a Google Voice number.
Most importantly though, don't rely on technology to get you out of a jam. Avy beacons fail, GPSs die, radios don't reach people on the other end. They are all wonderful, life saving tools but odds are you won't need any of that stuff. Read the Wilderness First Responder medical book, read Freedom of the Hills, etc. Go prepared. A vast majority of the time, you'll be able to get yourself and other people help without 'calling' anyone.
Be your own tourist. Some people here are telling you to go museums and what not. Tourists will tell you what bus tour is best. Forget all that. If you like to walk around town, the city is certainly walk/tubeable, even in winter. If you don't like museums much here, you won't there. If you're in to history, you'll love the place. Things like the Tower of London are a thousand years old. If you like pubs, there are some great, historical ones a tube ride away (e.g. The Hollybush pub in Hampstead). Like any metropolitan city, there is great fashion, food, arts and entertainment.
Other things to be aware of. Hotel ratings are not like they are in the states. A three star hotel out there is awful with leaky plumbing and old furniture. Some of the hostels are actually quite nice though if you bring ear plugs. Look right before stepping in to the street. If you get a chance to drive and you like it out here, it is a blast out there! Oxford and Kent aren't far. Flights on discount airlines like Ryanair are cheap if you want to hop up to Scotland or Ireland. Don't over plan or overpack.
Funny you mention it (as did the OP). I've done contract software work on a few HDTVs and they do in fact take quite a while to boot. You don't notice it because when you turn off the TV, it only turns off the LCD and bulb, it never shuts down the embedded computer. In order to make the TV appear to power up quickly like a conventional non-digital TV, it never shuts down unless you physically unplug it. I can tell you specifically, the Mitsubishi DLP TVs (and most other TVs) have a full up MIPS based PC (with PCI slots filled with USB cards, MPEG decoder cards, etc). They boot VxWorks off flash and can take over 15 seconds to boot. When one of those Mitsu TVs is "off", they are burning around 75 watts running the computer! POS.
Here here. I'm sure some people will acuse you or me of being an ass but it is true. My time is better spent on other things than family and friend Windows support. In the last few years, I've convinced my brother, my girlfriend, her parents and several other friends to buy Macs. Not only do I not have to support them much, but they figure out how to do way more all by themselves (e.g. put photo's online). They think their new OS X machines are great and thank ME. And I was just being selfish in the first place... =)
Next they'll sue people who make simple ftp servers on the same grounds, then the IETF for coming up with file transfer protocols, then anyone having anything to do with routable networks like DARPA and while we're at at it, why not just sue the people who melt sand to make fiber optics and mine the copper that makes our cables for not explicitly "failing to block access to copyright works". Shoot, we should just sue people for existing.
I'm writing drivers for the new CE-ATA bus. The spec makers tried to do force this change on the new drives but the drive makers, fortunately, made it optional.
Adapting disk drivers to existing block drivers deal with the difference in the interim can be a pain in the ass, requiring extra buffer copies for non-aligned block data. I really don't see the benifit. By the time a 2 petabyte block device or drive comes out, most CPUs will probably be 64 bit making bit extended arithmetic in drivers uncessary and I'm betting most drive interfaces will be 48 to 64 bit addressable (e.g. EIDE is 48 bit today)
Most of my fellow engineers think this change is half baked.
I'm not big boned... I'm just full of fuel!
I'll echo the other poster's claim; it doesn't seem to make any difference on my buddy's 15" Powerbook but then the powerbooks I've seen tend to have amazing battery life.
Yup, we put them in all of our software development laptops at work. Even small project compiles with a few dozen header file checks per source file and a few dozen source file, a 7,200 RPM drive nearly halves the compile time over a 4800 or 5400 RPM drive! (that and disabling any real time virus protection you have going on can make a 20 minute compile in to a 7 minute compile!)
TCP doesn't use round trip time to calculate a link speed. In fact, it doesn't just the opposite. It uses a sliding window method so it can send many packets before any one has ACKed. This is done to soften the blow that round trip times will have on your send rates!
TCP regulates its send rates by slowly sending faster and faster, then when a packet is dropped, it drops its rate fast. Slow increases and exponential backoffs make for VERY efficient link utilization on reliable networks with many active nodes whether it be a fast office LAN or world wide network.
Their method appears to just spray data without paying attention to what other nodes are doing. It sounds like it is much better suited for point to point communications on unreliable networks. E.g. cellular data networks, packets get dropped much more frequently because of interference rather than congestions. TCP might back off too quickly in this condition because it is optimized to deal with congestion. Their protocol might be great for that first/last hop between your cell phone and the cell tower but otherwise, it undermines the great balance that TCP achieves on our amazing little internet.
It has been widely publicized that Apple does not profit much from the iTunes Music Store and it is more of an enabler to selling iPods with a hefty profit margin. If this really is the case, isn't it a good thing that the iPod can use more formats? I'm sure Apple is just using this press to make noise for itself but they seem to be contradicting themselves in grand public fashion. (This from an iPod, powerbook and iMac toting, .Mac, iTMS using Apple lover)
I wish you were right about deciding whether the law makes sense or not. The libertarian in me would have thrown out both cases I have been a juror for. I'm curious if you've been on a jury and had a different experience from me. Every time I've been in the jury pool or assigned to a case, the judges' direct and clear instructions were to AVOID deciding if the law was good or bad but instead, decide only whether or not the person in question had broken the law. This seems like a direct contradiction to your statement.
Actually, technically, Hindu is not a religion either. Nor is Buddhism. Hindu is just the western Asians called the people east of the Sindhu river. Also, none of the Brahma, Vishnu or Shiva groupings of philosophers ever claimed to be deities (except for those that think Jesus was a Vishnu). They never asked to be followed or worshiped, only shared the wisdom that they had. That SOME people have turned these great philosophies in to religions is a disappointing commentary on the mindlessness of society in general. The Hindu philosophers would be upset to find they had been made in to religious icons.
Not to knit-pick but "mp3" files can be mpeg2-layer3 as well, since mpeg1-layer3 only covered a few standard bit rates; mpeg2-layer3 filled in the rest. As far as DVDs using mpeg1-layer3? I've never seen one that does. Every disk I've owned uses ACC for multi channel audio multiplexed with mpeg2 video. Did you just pull that DVD audio == mp3 out of your butt or do you actually have a DVD that uses it??
The one pointed to the inside of the case is so you can run an extension cable through to the front of the case to allow a firewire port on the front of your box. Not to allow internal firewire devices though I suppose you could use it for that. Of course, all the firewire drives out there are ATA/ATAPI with ATA to firewire bridges so why not just use your internal ATA in the first place. Firewire is for video and external expansion drives...
I'm sure this will be posted a billion times on /. but here is what Linux said in response.
http:/ /marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=107212899 108511
hehe
Gee, my company's error.h and types.h are similar. Oh wait, every god-damn company I've ever worked for has similar .h files because this is basic, common interface shit.
Its like saying "we patented the play, pause, record and rewind buttons on our model of VCR, the rest of you fuckers with tape, CD and DVD players on the market better pay us for this inovative interface!"
I don't know whether to laugh or cry over this.
If someone connects their freshly installed windows machine directly to the internet with no security patches, they should expect to have their ass handed to them. Its like running naked through a tukish prison and saying you didn't know your bunghole would be in danger.
Fastforward 18 months, I was able to pull off this graduation thing and find an awesome embedded software job where I'm required to be in the office by 10:00AM. I thought it would be hard but I value the job and what it affords me so much that I don't want to screw it up by not hitting deadlines or sleeping in. My body is on a new sleep schedule (though I force myself to go to bed by 2AM sometimes); and I'm totally satisfied. Of course, I still make trips to /. and kuroshin and personal email during the day but I make it quick and make sure I get my work done. There is room to improve but what it takes is finding enough motivation to keep you focused. Find a significant other that keeps normal hours, get a job you really like, accept projects with firm deadlines... stuff like that.
I'm an embedded programmer, I compile for MANY different target platforms and BSPs. I use my Powerbook as my IDE and CVS environment full time, cross compiling for any platform that uses a GNU compiler (which is most ARM, MIPS and x86 platforms) and serial debugging/printf connection if its needed. I can cross compile to many systems and those than I can't, I have a headless clunker box and VNC or I use VirtualPC to compile or debug on the occasion tools are only available for Windows/PC (just like I used net meeting and my windows laptop if a customer provided me with a fully configured host platform). In the embedded space, tools are never made for the exact host platform you're using so you learn to be flexible anyway. I imagine if you are only in the x86 PC Windows space, you could do all of your dev on the Mac and use VPC for testing if your Apps aren't processor or I/O intensive.
I installed debian over 3 years ago on my B&W G3. The biggest gotchas were figuring out how to get the old skool open firmware to book off of other partitions (thanks Everything2 for that info) and realizing I had to use a PPC kernel fork if I wanted the latest and greatest (I belive the above poster mentions the benh fork). Now with the new world ROM, getting it to book its a snap. You select the icon and boot. Also, I've run in to less trouble with Debian on the Mac because of the unified hardware. Apple only uses a very small number of ethernet, video and audio controllers as well as a standard OHCI USB controller which makes things a snap. I had accelerated XFree running in nothing flat. Maybe I've been lucky with my G3 and my TiBook and all the lessons learned using Debian on x86 hardware but it wasn't difficult at all. Of course, its nothing like installing the latest Libranet. =)
Um, you could have put the powerbook in target disk mode (hold down t at bootup till you see a firewire icon). Then the powerbook acts as a simple firewire hard drive. BTW, it would still take a hell of a lot longer than 30 seconds. Asuming you could utilize a whoping %50 of the theoretical max of the link speed on the raw data layer (200Mbps/25MBps) it would still take at least 10 minutes.