I wrote a Pi calculating program, that worked in base Pi. It didn't take long at all to compute pi, and it is a great source of random binary. The answer I got was "10". Now, simply take one of those digits 8 times, and you have a completely random byte.
Yes. The wireless signal goes to a nearby basestation, where it enters the regular phone network. Tapping is pretty much as easy as for a regular phone. If they want to do more sophisticated things, like data tapping, or tapping nextel style walkie talkie features, they have to get the assistance of the service provider, but it is still not hard. Where there is data, there is a way.
HD TiVo directly records the MPEG2 streams from DirectTV's satilites to disk. It does not encode the video itself like old TiVos. This worked fine, but now that DirectTV is going to MPEG4, the TiVos will no longer work at all. TiVo is either going to have to come out with a more flexible solution, or a new propriatary solution that can handle the MPEG4 streams.
Just what we need, another old closed source OS going open! What better way to distract people who might otherwise be helping a project with some consumer and enterprise merrit, like Linux!
"Auto-drive" would work great, even with todays technology. The problem is that everyone would have to switch at the same time. The practical logic and rules of driving are relatively simple. A system that followed them would be simple and hence reliable. However, things get a lot more complicated with "defensive driving". Instead of basing movement on your destination, speed, and passenger comfort, you have to be able to avoid people driving through red lights, cutting you off, swerving through four lanes of traffic on the highway, ect... As such, to make an auto-drive system safe, either every single person has to switch to it at once, and always use it, or it would have to be endowed with artificial intelligence exceeding that of a normal human driver. Both are impossible.
The last two months, thats right. Since then OurMedia has been announced, along with a bunch of other services. So I guess it is 1998 again. Break out your Tamagatchis and your Backstreet Boys albums, to play on your brand new PENTIUM IIIs!!!
I do some work in a TV studio, and they are always having tape problems, even with their expensive equiptment. The best tapes, used only in the best equiptment, often fail and wear out. The tape medium is a rather unstable chemical mixture that degrades. Also, tapes may not die if you drop them, but the reader/recorders are horribly delicate. If you open up one of those mobile news vans, you will find a significant amount of the equiptment in there is to fixed the @#$%$@ tape decks again and again.
I am in a band, and I am also in charge of our website. When I wanted to publish a music video just two months ago, there was NOWHERE that would host it for me. I ended up having to apply for a membership to an independant film online community, and encode my video down to a teeny postage stamp sized thing. If I were doing it today, there are half a dozen site that would host it for free, in high quality DIVX glory.
For a 3 SCSI hard drive server, the cost would be more than 10 cents per bracket. I would also need to buy several fans. It is still a great idea, my only concerns are that the vibration of the poorly mounted fan could make noise and possibly have an effect on the drives lifetime. Also, it takes up a lot of space, unless the fanned drive is in the bottom bracket of your hard drive tray, it might take up the whole tray.
Is it just me, or does using tape storage seem horribly unreliable. I have some bad memories of backing up my 486SX's gargantuan 540 MB hard drive onto 100MB tapes. The process often took 2-3 days, because about 50% of the time, writing to tape would fail, necessitating starting the whole tape over again. How could tape be reliable enough to run space probes and other things that handle huge temperature extremes and tons of radiation?
Radiation in space is usually not high enough to cause extensive phyiscal damage to processors in the short term. However, some kinds of radiation can cause random electrical noise on the processor, screwing up calculations. The larger the components, and the fewer of them there are, the less likely this is to happen. Of course, like all government agencies, NASA is very cautious about waiting to see how well components work. This is one of the reasons cell phones are not allowed on airplanes, the FAA has taken 10 years "just to be sure" nothing bad could happen. Also, NASA tends to use "hardened" processors, which have special shielding, as well as a mesh of wire that helps ground random electrical noise. These processors have to be specially designed and made by manufacturers based on existing designs, then rigorously tested by the company and NASA. Even if they start with a cutting edge design, by the time it is NASA tested and certified it is several years old and several generations out of date.
Radio waves travel at 2.98 x 10 ^ 8 meters per second. Figure he was 11 km max above the earth, and that is not a very long time to figure out how to operate the computer.
Notice the "fly by wire". This is not fly by RF. Although it is true that an RF field can generate current in a wire, the ammount of current generated by a 1W cellphone 5 feet from the wire is unmeasurable. Planes are over-engineered. They are designed to withstand lightning strikes, and major failures of all kinds of systems. They are certainly designed to handle a little bit of RF radiation. The meason the goverment keeps radio frequency devices off planes is the old fear that they will interfere with communications. This has been proven untrue many times, and right now the government is slowly grinding its cogs in the processor of allowing cellphones. I would assume that bluetooth and WiFi would also be included in that.
Nobody has mentioned performance. The modular PC has a 1 GHz Transmetia Processor, 256MB of RAM, and a 16MB Graphics Acclerator. Do those specs sound like something you would want to pay $2000 for? A 1GHZ Transmetia doesn't beat a 650 MHz PIII in some measures of performance, 256 MB of RAM is barely enough to run XP smoothly, let alone multitask, and the 16 MB graphics adapter is a relic from another age, probably not even DirectX 7.0 compliant. That is one slow system, especially for big bucks. Now, if you plan to only use the Handheld PC Shell, the specs are about what you would find on similar products, but in a desktop or laptop configuration, the thing is just not powerful enough to justify it. Plus, because of the modular nature of the device, the handheld shell is bigger than its competitors. This may be the first modular design on the market, but it seems horribly impracticle to me. What we need is a nice P4 in there, that will underclock to 600MHz in a handheld, 2.0 Ghz in a laptop, and run at a full 3.6 GHz in a desktop. Heat wouldn't be a problem in any of them, because the underclocked processor would run cool enough to work with the heating solution in each of the docks. Make the graphics adapter part of the dock, so that a handheld could include a low power, low performace adapter for its SVGA screen, and the desktop dock could have a PCI-E 16X slot for a GeForce 6xxx or ATi X8xx. Why not have a flash drive for the OS and some important files on the modular device, and have full harddrives on the docks. That way a handheld could have full flash shock resistance, and laptop could have a small slow 2.5" 60 GB drive for work files and music, and the desktop could have a 400 GB SATA disk for storage of recorded TV shows. I guess everyone will eventually figure out that putting everything but the monitor and input devices in the modular piece justs doesn't make much sense.
Only a programming god could write a new version tracker in the week after he got rid of his old solution. On the other hand, if programming gods exist, the Linus is a candidate.
I'm hoping that Marcomedia will learn to make their software more stable. I use Dreamweaver MX and Flash on Windows XP and OS X 10.3 often. The MX definitely stands for "save often". I am forced to use this software, because basically it is the most powerful software available for what I need to do, but it is not pleasant, and slow going. Adobe has some experience making at least moderately stable software, and their UIs are decent too, unlike Macromedia. Hopefully this should help them. Also, imagine if Dreamweaver, Flash, and Photoshop could all communicate easily amoungst eachother!
According to the contract, then, he has violated his user agreement half a dozen times already:
1. No server devices: That is what he made, an always on device that posts things to the internet and acts as a wireless gateway for other devices.
2. No webcams: Pretty self explanitory, he has a webcam.
3. No telemetry: He is using the device as a very complicated web based mapping locator, streaming teletry data up and down.
4. Substitute for dedicated data connections: He has said that he has often used it at work instead of his supplied land line connection.
Those are just the clear violations. There are dozens of others that layers could read between the lines to find. I don't think he is too concerned with that agreement.
He could make some money off of this if he wanted. Silk screen a logo on his car, and set up a paypal based payment system, and he could rent the thing out to functions. Forget the car, put it all in one box, plug it into the wall at your outdoor wedding, and voila, Uncle Mirv can be there by webcam! Either that, or he could be nice, and get rid of the WEP, and drive around giving free (although brief) highspeed internet access to the masses.
Re:Most will migrate eventually to DirecTV.
on
Voom No More
·
· Score: 0
Great, and while I am watching all those local High Def channels, I can run Duke Nukem Forever on my computer running MS Longhorn!
Lets forget about the large and small buisnesses who are also not using Linux. I think the problems that face all of them are similar, except in terms of scale. Maybe if we make Linux as full featured, fast, and compatable as Windows, but more stable and open source, then people will come around. As is, to switch to Linux, you have to A. Reformat your hard drive, B. Learn a whole new way of doing things, because installing programs in Linux is not easy, C. Give up hope of your hardware ever working right, because Linux drivers are not available for many major devices, and for many more, driver installation is incredibly complicated for someone who does not know Linux. I am the vice president of a very small IT company. I tried to switch my personal machine to Linux a few years ago. I am very computer literate, as that is what I make my living doing. I tried 4 linux distros, and was utterly confused by all of them. Some crashed constantly, while others did not support parts of my hardware. Many had a lot of trouble installing packages. Open source community. Stop fragmenting yourself. Make Linux as easy to use AND install things on as Windows.
Most premeditated homicides I have heard of get 25 to life. The only homicides I have heard of to get less than 9 years are the ones resulting from accidents involving drunken teenagers.
It costs a lot more than that. It is not just some friendly workman burning you a CD. They are legally responsible for distributing a linux distrobution with their product. This might violate an agreement with Microsoft, and would probably violate something with the Linux distro about non-commercial free use. They don't want to get sued. Also, the people who run the phones are not usually very computer literate, and are under tremendous pressure to get you off the phone within 2 minutes without costing the company money. If you want a laptop with no OS, try one of the smaller companies, like ABS, that will custom build you computers, and OSes are usually extra anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
I wrote a Pi calculating program, that worked in base Pi. It didn't take long at all to compute pi, and it is a great source of random binary. The answer I got was "10". Now, simply take one of those digits 8 times, and you have a completely random byte.
Yes. The wireless signal goes to a nearby basestation, where it enters the regular phone network. Tapping is pretty much as easy as for a regular phone. If they want to do more sophisticated things, like data tapping, or tapping nextel style walkie talkie features, they have to get the assistance of the service provider, but it is still not hard. Where there is data, there is a way.
HD TiVo directly records the MPEG2 streams from DirectTV's satilites to disk. It does not encode the video itself like old TiVos. This worked fine, but now that DirectTV is going to MPEG4, the TiVos will no longer work at all. TiVo is either going to have to come out with a more flexible solution, or a new propriatary solution that can handle the MPEG4 streams.
Just what we need, another old closed source OS going open! What better way to distract people who might otherwise be helping a project with some consumer and enterprise merrit, like Linux!
"Auto-drive" would work great, even with todays technology. The problem is that everyone would have to switch at the same time. The practical logic and rules of driving are relatively simple. A system that followed them would be simple and hence reliable. However, things get a lot more complicated with "defensive driving". Instead of basing movement on your destination, speed, and passenger comfort, you have to be able to avoid people driving through red lights, cutting you off, swerving through four lanes of traffic on the highway, ect... As such, to make an auto-drive system safe, either every single person has to switch to it at once, and always use it, or it would have to be endowed with artificial intelligence exceeding that of a normal human driver. Both are impossible.
The last two months, thats right. Since then OurMedia has been announced, along with a bunch of other services. So I guess it is 1998 again. Break out your Tamagatchis and your Backstreet Boys albums, to play on your brand new PENTIUM IIIs!!!
Sorry, typo, I meant 110km.
I do some work in a TV studio, and they are always having tape problems, even with their expensive equiptment. The best tapes, used only in the best equiptment, often fail and wear out. The tape medium is a rather unstable chemical mixture that degrades. Also, tapes may not die if you drop them, but the reader/recorders are horribly delicate. If you open up one of those mobile news vans, you will find a significant amount of the equiptment in there is to fixed the @#$%$@ tape decks again and again.
I am in a band, and I am also in charge of our website. When I wanted to publish a music video just two months ago, there was NOWHERE that would host it for me. I ended up having to apply for a membership to an independant film online community, and encode my video down to a teeny postage stamp sized thing. If I were doing it today, there are half a dozen site that would host it for free, in high quality DIVX glory.
For a 3 SCSI hard drive server, the cost would be more than 10 cents per bracket. I would also need to buy several fans. It is still a great idea, my only concerns are that the vibration of the poorly mounted fan could make noise and possibly have an effect on the drives lifetime. Also, it takes up a lot of space, unless the fanned drive is in the bottom bracket of your hard drive tray, it might take up the whole tray.
Oh shall the wonders of modern science never cease?
Of all the things to be morally opposed to...
Is it just me, or does using tape storage seem horribly unreliable. I have some bad memories of backing up my 486SX's gargantuan 540 MB hard drive onto 100MB tapes. The process often took 2-3 days, because about 50% of the time, writing to tape would fail, necessitating starting the whole tape over again. How could tape be reliable enough to run space probes and other things that handle huge temperature extremes and tons of radiation?
Radiation in space is usually not high enough to cause extensive phyiscal damage to processors in the short term. However, some kinds of radiation can cause random electrical noise on the processor, screwing up calculations. The larger the components, and the fewer of them there are, the less likely this is to happen. Of course, like all government agencies, NASA is very cautious about waiting to see how well components work. This is one of the reasons cell phones are not allowed on airplanes, the FAA has taken 10 years "just to be sure" nothing bad could happen. Also, NASA tends to use "hardened" processors, which have special shielding, as well as a mesh of wire that helps ground random electrical noise. These processors have to be specially designed and made by manufacturers based on existing designs, then rigorously tested by the company and NASA. Even if they start with a cutting edge design, by the time it is NASA tested and certified it is several years old and several generations out of date.
Radio waves travel at 2.98 x 10 ^ 8 meters per second. Figure he was 11 km max above the earth, and that is not a very long time to figure out how to operate the computer.
Notice the "fly by wire". This is not fly by RF. Although it is true that an RF field can generate current in a wire, the ammount of current generated by a 1W cellphone 5 feet from the wire is unmeasurable. Planes are over-engineered. They are designed to withstand lightning strikes, and major failures of all kinds of systems. They are certainly designed to handle a little bit of RF radiation. The meason the goverment keeps radio frequency devices off planes is the old fear that they will interfere with communications. This has been proven untrue many times, and right now the government is slowly grinding its cogs in the processor of allowing cellphones. I would assume that bluetooth and WiFi would also be included in that.
Nobody has mentioned performance. The modular PC has a 1 GHz Transmetia Processor, 256MB of RAM, and a 16MB Graphics Acclerator. Do those specs sound like something you would want to pay $2000 for? A 1GHZ Transmetia doesn't beat a 650 MHz PIII in some measures of performance, 256 MB of RAM is barely enough to run XP smoothly, let alone multitask, and the 16 MB graphics adapter is a relic from another age, probably not even DirectX 7.0 compliant. That is one slow system, especially for big bucks. Now, if you plan to only use the Handheld PC Shell, the specs are about what you would find on similar products, but in a desktop or laptop configuration, the thing is just not powerful enough to justify it. Plus, because of the modular nature of the device, the handheld shell is bigger than its competitors. This may be the first modular design on the market, but it seems horribly impracticle to me. What we need is a nice P4 in there, that will underclock to 600MHz in a handheld, 2.0 Ghz in a laptop, and run at a full 3.6 GHz in a desktop. Heat wouldn't be a problem in any of them, because the underclocked processor would run cool enough to work with the heating solution in each of the docks. Make the graphics adapter part of the dock, so that a handheld could include a low power, low performace adapter for its SVGA screen, and the desktop dock could have a PCI-E 16X slot for a GeForce 6xxx or ATi X8xx. Why not have a flash drive for the OS and some important files on the modular device, and have full harddrives on the docks. That way a handheld could have full flash shock resistance, and laptop could have a small slow 2.5" 60 GB drive for work files and music, and the desktop could have a 400 GB SATA disk for storage of recorded TV shows. I guess everyone will eventually figure out that putting everything but the monitor and input devices in the modular piece justs doesn't make much sense.
Only a programming god could write a new version tracker in the week after he got rid of his old solution. On the other hand, if programming gods exist, the Linus is a candidate.
I'm hoping that Marcomedia will learn to make their software more stable. I use Dreamweaver MX and Flash on Windows XP and OS X 10.3 often. The MX definitely stands for "save often". I am forced to use this software, because basically it is the most powerful software available for what I need to do, but it is not pleasant, and slow going. Adobe has some experience making at least moderately stable software, and their UIs are decent too, unlike Macromedia. Hopefully this should help them. Also, imagine if Dreamweaver, Flash, and Photoshop could all communicate easily amoungst eachother!
According to the contract, then, he has violated his user agreement half a dozen times already: 1. No server devices: That is what he made, an always on device that posts things to the internet and acts as a wireless gateway for other devices. 2. No webcams: Pretty self explanitory, he has a webcam. 3. No telemetry: He is using the device as a very complicated web based mapping locator, streaming teletry data up and down. 4. Substitute for dedicated data connections: He has said that he has often used it at work instead of his supplied land line connection. Those are just the clear violations. There are dozens of others that layers could read between the lines to find. I don't think he is too concerned with that agreement.
He could make some money off of this if he wanted. Silk screen a logo on his car, and set up a paypal based payment system, and he could rent the thing out to functions. Forget the car, put it all in one box, plug it into the wall at your outdoor wedding, and voila, Uncle Mirv can be there by webcam! Either that, or he could be nice, and get rid of the WEP, and drive around giving free (although brief) highspeed internet access to the masses.
Great, and while I am watching all those local High Def channels, I can run Duke Nukem Forever on my computer running MS Longhorn!
Lets forget about the large and small buisnesses who are also not using Linux. I think the problems that face all of them are similar, except in terms of scale. Maybe if we make Linux as full featured, fast, and compatable as Windows, but more stable and open source, then people will come around. As is, to switch to Linux, you have to A. Reformat your hard drive, B. Learn a whole new way of doing things, because installing programs in Linux is not easy, C. Give up hope of your hardware ever working right, because Linux drivers are not available for many major devices, and for many more, driver installation is incredibly complicated for someone who does not know Linux. I am the vice president of a very small IT company. I tried to switch my personal machine to Linux a few years ago. I am very computer literate, as that is what I make my living doing. I tried 4 linux distros, and was utterly confused by all of them. Some crashed constantly, while others did not support parts of my hardware. Many had a lot of trouble installing packages. Open source community. Stop fragmenting yourself. Make Linux as easy to use AND install things on as Windows.
Most premeditated homicides I have heard of get 25 to life. The only homicides I have heard of to get less than 9 years are the ones resulting from accidents involving drunken teenagers.
It costs a lot more than that. It is not just some friendly workman burning you a CD. They are legally responsible for distributing a linux distrobution with their product. This might violate an agreement with Microsoft, and would probably violate something with the Linux distro about non-commercial free use. They don't want to get sued. Also, the people who run the phones are not usually very computer literate, and are under tremendous pressure to get you off the phone within 2 minutes without costing the company money. If you want a laptop with no OS, try one of the smaller companies, like ABS, that will custom build you computers, and OSes are usually extra anyway.