Please go read this definition of the word "penultimate". Or, did you in fact want to install some other distro, but settled for Gentoo for some reason?;^) English sure is a big and complex language...
Many microcontroller families now have parts that include support for USB, as an on-board peripheral. With one of these, building your own USB device shouldn't be too hard. I say "shouldn't", because I have yet to try it out for myself.
I've looked a bit on the PIC16C745
part from Microchip. It has on-board USB support, but only for "interrupt" transfers (suitable for e.g. a mouse or keyboard, but not for something requiring data streaming). It's fairly cheap ($5.45 in ones from DigiKey), too. Of course, it's a one-time-programmable part, which isn't very good for experimentation. It's also available in a EPROM version, for $11.74), though. And you'd need to learn the PIC instruction set, and get the required programmer hardware... Still, I think it looks like at least a possible way to get in to doing your own USB devices.
There are USB-enabled micros from other manufacturers as well, but I haven't looked into them in any detail. Search the web.
Interesting you should mention Doom III... If you go read the actual announcement post (why wasn't this linked in the story itself, btw?), you'll soon see the follow-up from a certain Timothee Besset... With a very, shall we say, relevant company name in his e-mail address. Heh. There's hope, at least.
I wonder how big the chances are that a driver for the 8500 generation of hardware is any use on the upcoming "R300" chip, though. It would be so annoying if, once there is a driver, it's one generation behind. *Sigh*.
Right. Because the guys at Ace's only know about, and use, Quake benchmarking. Oh yes. If you were to show them, for instance, some SPECmarks, they wouldn't understand anything. So, I wonder who built this and stuck it on their site?! What a hack! Perhaps these benchmarks, which do not originate with Ace's are from Quake because that was what was available to run? It's not as if the Hammer is out in all that many reviewer's hands, yet...
Uh? From the respective pages: specifications
* Ink volume: 19 ml
* Page yield: 450 pages based on 15% coverage
and:
specifications
* Ink volume: 38 ml
* Page yield: 970 pages based on 15% coverage
Now, maybe it's because I'm European or something, here, but to me it's pretty easy to see that the large cart's 38 ml is actually more than the budget one's 19. Hopefully, I'm not unique with this ability.;^)
(Currently missing a galaxy and lightspeed simulator.)
Simulating lightspeed is easy, since it's a constant (don't believe it when blasphemous Slashdot articles try telling you otherwise). Just think "2,999,792,458 meters per second", and you're there. See? Thinking in c is easy, it's even easier than C.
Heh. Most people frequenting this place who know about the Turing test, probably know that as well. Or, they should just reread Cryptonomicon one more time.
It might be true that Compaq don't "openly" offer a Linux-based handheld solution, but please don't forget about handhelds.org, the community site for Linux-on-iPAQ. That site is sponsored by Compaq, and the Linux distro they distribute (Familiar) is neat.
First, do you even realise how stupid it sounds when you talk about countries other than the US (I presume) to people from those countries as being "foreign"? At least you quoted it, so maybe you do... Anyway, here in Sweden, I've yet to see a computer with anything but English texts in its BIOS. I don't know if the actual BIOS code needs to contain anything country-specific for the keyboard mapping to be right, though. I would suspect that's a "DOS-era" question, and that typical real modern operating systems are smart enough to handle the issue by themselves.
I know. I keep the sig as a silent protest against the sig-bashing bugs of Slashcode. I can fix it in the prefs until my face is blue, it's still b0rken when I post. There.
Um, from taking the massive effort of actually reading the article, I can tell you this: the device is worn by the person watching. Not attached to the TV. Besides, your ability to associate the motion detection with something that is "put on the TV" makes my mind create weird images of how you watch TV...
The PS2's CPU, the Emotion Engine, has 128-bit wide general registers, 32 of them to be specific (GPR00-GPR31). It has a 128-bit wide internal bus. However, most common MIPS-inherited instructions only act on the lower 32 bits of the registers; there is a special class of "parallel" instructions that work much like MMX, i.e. they act on parts of each register in parallel. Clear?
And the 2560-bit wide thing is inside the Graphics Synthesiser, between the rasterizer and the memory. It has 4 MB of frame buffer, implemented on the same chip (embedded DRAM), which is why the bus can be that big. It gives for nice-looking bandwidth numbers, if nothing else.;^)
There are ideas, yeah. They just seem to be, well, hidden in vapor. Or something. They're in the often-publicized, seldom-seen category of fun stuff. I wish that'd change, and soon.
Could be true for a possibly extra-magic "boot keyboard" (if the BIOS is set to do keyboard emulation), but that's certainly not true in general. I've sometimes amused myself by plugging in a cheap USB keyboard into my little 4-port USB hub, with the machine running, and just typing away on it. All without disconnecting my regular name brand PS/2 keyboard, of course. Oh, and that's under Linux, too, if anyone was still having doubts about USB capabilities there. Now, if only said name brand actually had a USB model available here...;^)
d) bluetooth is i think 7 megabits, which is faster than serial/paralell's 116500 bps
Bzzzt. I'm too lazy to actually download the specs right now, but from prior reading I'm fairly confident in saying that the theoretical max bandwidth is more like one megabit per second. In practice I think it maxes out around 720 kbps, which should still be able to at least beat the serial port, so at least you're correct in that respect. Just wanted to point this out.
Yeah. As the author of the gentoo filemanager, I really wish the headline here would have included the phrase "Gentoo Linux", to make it clear. Not that the risk for confusion outside my own head is, er, overwhelmingly large, or anything. Incidentally, I just released 0.11.23 of gentoo-the-filemanager-for-GTK+ yesterday, if someone would like to try it out...
Its based on their GScube arch which is nothing like the current PS2's arch.
Only if consisting of multiple instances of the PS2's Graphics Synthesizer rendering subsystem in parallel is "nothing like" the PS2. Reading the first sentence of the second google hit supplies this clue. For free.
So, er, run it by me again, will you? How is a site where a guy posts in-depth replies to spam e-mail "no-geeky"? I couldn't even begin to explain why this is funny to many people I know...;^)
So, of course, can X11 users thanks to xodo (link to archive on ibiblio, couldn't find an official home page. There are RPM and DEB varities, too, plus a special version for KDE. So, if you're into this sort of thing, there's no need to switch to The Other OS just to get your dose.;^)
Am I completely mistaken, or is there no device with the following features:
Small form factor
No fan
10/100 Ethernet jack
Built-in amplifier
Plenty of analog (and digital) audio outputs
...that just listens to (unicast or broadcast) raw audio packets, sent over UDP, and converts them to analog, amplifies suitably, and emits them through analog outputs? Sure, it would waste more bandwidth than streaming and buffering a compressed stream, but it would, as I see it, have the following things going for it:
Very simple on-board software; no codedcs required
Automatically future-proof: if your computer can decode and transmit it, you'll hear it
Fairly low hardware requirements, no signal processing
Simple interface; a volume knob might be all you need.
It seems to me such a device could be useful... Oh, and about the bandwidth: a full CD-quality stream is, as everyone knows, roughly 170 KB/s, or 1.6 Mbps. On a 10 Mbps net, that's rather heavy, but on a 100 Mbps LAN, I wouldn't care much. I mean, it's only for internal LAN use, afterall. So, am I nuts, or would such a box (which I imagine could be produced in the $50-$60 range) be good for anything? Is it already out there, and I've just missed it?
Any body else find this passage depressing?
Hell yeah! It's easy to figure out what they mean by "impractical military vehicle". Or maybe I'm just imagining it's a reference to my dream car? He had one, and got rid of it? Noooo!;^) If I had one, I'd back it into that journo's Fiat, just to teach him some respect.
Heh, no, of course I wouldn't. Just kidding, I'm a nice guy. And I hate dealing with auto insurance issues.
Slashdot Mirror
Please go read this definition of the word "penultimate". Or, did you in fact want to install some other distro, but settled for Gentoo for some reason? ;^) English sure is a big and complex language...
Many microcontroller families now have parts that include support for USB, as an on-board peripheral. With one of these, building your own USB device shouldn't be too hard. I say "shouldn't", because I have yet to try it out for myself. I've looked a bit on the PIC16C745 part from Microchip. It has on-board USB support, but only for "interrupt" transfers (suitable for e.g. a mouse or keyboard, but not for something requiring data streaming). It's fairly cheap ($5.45 in ones from DigiKey), too. Of course, it's a one-time-programmable part, which isn't very good for experimentation. It's also available in a EPROM version, for $11.74), though. And you'd need to learn the PIC instruction set, and get the required programmer hardware... Still, I think it looks like at least a possible way to get in to doing your own USB devices. There are USB-enabled micros from other manufacturers as well, but I haven't looked into them in any detail. Search the web.
Interesting you should mention Doom III... If you go read the actual announcement post (why wasn't this linked in the story itself, btw?), you'll soon see the follow-up from a certain Timothee Besset... With a very, shall we say, relevant company name in his e-mail address. Heh. There's hope, at least.
I wonder how big the chances are that a driver for the 8500 generation of hardware is any use on the upcoming "R300" chip, though. It would be so annoying if, once there is a driver, it's one generation behind. *Sigh*.
Right. Because the guys at Ace's only know about, and use, Quake benchmarking. Oh yes. If you were to show them, for instance, some SPECmarks, they wouldn't understand anything. So, I wonder who built this and stuck it on their site?! What a hack! Perhaps these benchmarks, which do not originate with Ace's are from Quake because that was what was available to run? It's not as if the Hammer is out in all that many reviewer's hands, yet...
Uh? From the respective pages: ;^)
specifications
* Ink volume: 19 ml
* Page yield: 450 pages based on 15% coverage
and: specifications
* Ink volume: 38 ml
* Page yield: 970 pages based on 15% coverage
Now, maybe it's because I'm European or something, here, but to me it's pretty easy to see that the large cart's 38 ml is actually more than the budget one's 19. Hopefully, I'm not unique with this ability.
600,000 x $50 = 30,000,000 million revenue. ;^)
Whoa. Whenever I multiply those two numbers, I just don't get the same result. What's the trick, here?
(Currently missing a galaxy and lightspeed simulator.)
Simulating lightspeed is easy, since it's a constant (don't believe it when blasphemous Slashdot articles try telling you otherwise). Just think "2,999,792,458 meters per second", and you're there. See? Thinking in c is easy, it's even easier than C.
Heh. Most people frequenting this place who know about the Turing test, probably know that as well. Or, they should just reread Cryptonomicon one more time.
It might be true that Compaq don't "openly" offer a Linux-based handheld solution, but please don't forget about handhelds.org, the community site for Linux-on-iPAQ. That site is sponsored by Compaq, and the Linux distro they distribute (Familiar) is neat.
when some other esteemed editor reposts this, it'll be the Periodic Periodic Table Table story, and I will be even happier. ;^)
First, do you even realise how stupid it sounds when you talk about countries other than the US (I presume) to people from those countries as being "foreign"? At least you quoted it, so maybe you do... Anyway, here in Sweden, I've yet to see a computer with anything but English texts in its BIOS. I don't know if the actual BIOS code needs to contain anything country-specific for the keyboard mapping to be right, though. I would suspect that's a "DOS-era" question, and that typical real modern operating systems are smart enough to handle the issue by themselves.
I know. I keep the sig as a silent protest against the sig-bashing bugs of Slashcode. I can fix it in the prefs until my face is blue, it's still b0rken when I post. There.
Um, from taking the massive effort of actually reading the article, I can tell you this: the device is worn by the person watching. Not attached to the TV. Besides, your ability to associate the motion detection with something that is "put on the TV" makes my mind create weird images of how you watch TV...
At least one chain of really-big supermarkets here in Sweden use this system, too. So it's spreading, yeah. Haven't tried if myself though.
The PS2's CPU, the Emotion Engine, has 128-bit wide general registers, 32 of them to be specific (GPR00-GPR31). It has a 128-bit wide internal bus. However, most common MIPS-inherited instructions only act on the lower 32 bits of the registers; there is a special class of "parallel" instructions that work much like MMX, i.e. they act on parts of each register in parallel. Clear?
;^)
And the 2560-bit wide thing is inside the Graphics Synthesiser, between the rasterizer and the memory. It has 4 MB of frame buffer, implemented on the same chip (embedded DRAM), which is why the bus can be that big. It gives for nice-looking bandwidth numbers, if nothing else.
There are ideas, yeah. They just seem to be, well, hidden in vapor. Or something. They're in the often-publicized, seldom-seen category of fun stuff. I wish that'd change, and soon.
Could be true for a possibly extra-magic "boot keyboard" (if the BIOS is set to do keyboard emulation), but that's certainly not true in general. I've sometimes amused myself by plugging in a cheap USB keyboard into my little 4-port USB hub, with the machine running, and just typing away on it. All without disconnecting my regular name brand PS/2 keyboard, of course. Oh, and that's under Linux, too, if anyone was still having doubts about USB capabilities there. Now, if only said name brand actually had a USB model available here... ;^)
d) bluetooth is i think 7 megabits, which is faster than serial/paralell's 116500 bps
Bzzzt. I'm too lazy to actually download the specs right now, but from prior reading I'm fairly confident in saying that the theoretical max bandwidth is more like one megabit per second. In practice I think it maxes out around 720 kbps, which should still be able to at least beat the serial port, so at least you're correct in that respect. Just wanted to point this out.
Yeah. As the author of the gentoo filemanager, I really wish the headline here would have included the phrase "Gentoo Linux", to make it clear. Not that the risk for confusion outside my own head is, er, overwhelmingly large, or anything. Incidentally, I just released 0.11.23 of gentoo-the-filemanager-for-GTK+ yesterday, if someone would like to try it out...
Its based on their GScube arch which is nothing like the current PS2's arch.
Only if consisting of multiple instances of the PS2's Graphics Synthesizer rendering subsystem in parallel is "nothing like" the PS2. Reading the first sentence of the second google hit supplies this clue. For free.
So, er, run it by me again, will you? How is a site where a guy posts in-depth replies to spam e-mail "no-geeky"? I couldn't even begin to explain why this is funny to many people I know... ;^)
Feel free to jump in the time machine any time, and speed forward to join the rest of us... Maxtor already did that, with ATA/133.
So, of course, can X11 users thanks to xodo (link to archive on ibiblio, couldn't find an official home page. There are RPM and DEB varities, too, plus a special version for KDE. So, if you're into this sort of thing, there's no need to switch to The Other OS just to get your dose. ;^)
- Very simple on-board software; no codedcs required
- Automatically future-proof: if your computer can decode and transmit it, you'll hear it
- Fairly low hardware requirements, no signal processing
- Simple interface; a volume knob might be all you need.
It seems to me such a device could be useful... Oh, and about the bandwidth: a full CD-quality stream is, as everyone knows, roughly 170 KB/s, or 1.6 Mbps. On a 10 Mbps net, that's rather heavy, but on a 100 Mbps LAN, I wouldn't care much. I mean, it's only for internal LAN use, afterall. So, am I nuts, or would such a box (which I imagine could be produced in the $50-$60 range) be good for anything? Is it already out there, and I've just missed it?Any body else find this passage depressing? ;^) If I had one, I'd back it into that journo's Fiat, just to teach him some respect.
Heh, no, of course I wouldn't. Just kidding, I'm a nice guy. And I hate dealing with auto insurance issues.
Hell yeah! It's easy to figure out what they mean by "impractical military vehicle". Or maybe I'm just imagining it's a reference to my dream car? He had one, and got rid of it? Noooo!