In what sense? In the "completely ironic and false" sense, the "Bill Clintonesque 'Define the word is' sense"? The "I don't know what I'm talking about but I like to hear my own voice" sense? The "I'm a/. troll" sense? Or the "WindRiver AstroTurf" sense?
In my own experience (see my other comment in this thread) WRS has had terrible support, been generally clueless, and provided little or no value added to the world.
Unfortunately, most hardware vendors support Microsoft because MS has the largest share of the market and they know it will pay to support MS with drivers.
Linux is not in that state, save for (perhaps) networking devices. Has RedHat considered helping to fund driver development for other forms of hardware? I'm thinking mostly of 3D accelerated video cards (by helping to fund the DRI group), but other items (scanners, USB->IDE interfaces, etc.) would be nice too.
but instead of spending X millions on a bunch of bs, they should look to consolidate it all
Put it this way:
but instead of spending X millions of programmer-hours, we should consolidate on one kernel
Competition is good. Sometimes it may seem inefficient, but in reality that redundancy is insuring that we don't get stuck at some local maximum and truely go for the global maximum.
I have the misfortune to have specified VxWorks for a project I am designing. I am sorry, but I trust Wind River about as far as I can throw them.
First, full disclosure. My project isn't the typical embedded project - it's large, it runs the X windows system, it uses TCL/TK, it has a good-sized hard disk. This is not exactly what VxWorks is targeting, and many of my problems stem from that. For a small project, it's probably good.
OK, now for the dirt.
1) I have NEVER, NOT ONCE, gotten any significant help on a problem from Wind River. This does not mean that they didn't try, but in the end every problem I ran into I ended up solving myself. For instance, when I was first building the system, I built it to load from IDE hard disk. I found out, after weeks of wasted effort and several calls back and forth to Wind River that the networking stack was disabled if you weren't booting from the network, unless you turned on an option that was not documented.
2) We purchased the RtX server that Wind River sells. It turns out the X server won't work with the latest version of VxWorks. The version of VxWorks it does work with does not support DNS nor DHCP.
3) The IDE driver doesn't use DMA, and the system does not understand partitions. I had to write the code to parse the partition table of the hard disk. And the lack of DMA sucks when you are trying to log a large amount of data to the hard disk.
4) The VxWorks file system is DOS. They have a hack to support long file names, but that hack isn't VFAT. So, you cannot simultainously have long file names and compatiblility with any other OS.
5) When we signed up with Wind River, we asked them as to when and if they were going to support development using Linux as a host. Since they already support Solaris, this SHOULDN'T be rocket science. We were told "within 6 months". That was two years ago. Guess what.
6) The DOS file system has bugs where it tries to free() a static buffer. I don't have the source, I cannot fix the bug. RMS has a good point here.
7) The X server only supports 256 color mode. The server is derived from XFree, but since XFree isn't under GPL, Wind River doesn't distribute the source. Therefor, I cannot build it to support TrueColor. I cannot change the keysyms (which would be damn useful since I have keys that a standard X server doesn't have.)
8) On the StrongArm platform, they claim to support that chip, but they don't enable the on-chip cache, nor do they give you a good place to do so. Therefor, the chip runs at half speed.
9) Their implementation of the TCP stack has bugs. They pass your driver a buffer you are to place the packet into, but they don't tell you that because of a bug in the driver, you have to place the packet at bufferstart+2.
10) Their debugger does not run reliably on a network with a lot of traffic.
Given my experiences with Wind River, I don't feel warm and fuzzy about their purchase of ANYTHING. As soon as I can convince management (and that won't be long) I will be porting my project over to Linux.
Sorry, when you said "steel" I assumed they'd be punching holes, since trying to write to that with a mag head would be a galloping BITCH. Well, that does make it a wee more complicated. However, if you could find some old heads from somewhere (maybe use parts of an 8 track tape system? or maybe a cassette) it might still be something doable.
Why not try using a regular flatbed scanner? Scan each section of the tape, and write some code to read it?
Alternatively, why not build a reader? Go to your local college of engineering, and see if you can interest them in making this an undergrad project.
A stepping motor to move the tape, some LEDs and phototransistors to read it, a printer port, and some code. Fun for all: mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, and computer engineers.
One downside to this sort of split is exactly the sort of horror stories you hear about DSL. You have the DSL provider, the telephony provider, and the local loop provider, all pointing at the other guy and saying "His fault, not mine!"
As for providing incentive to upgrade the plant: that's easy. Better service == higher fees. You want to have 10 Mbps DSL, pay up! If not, then take the 384kbps DSL and pay less.
More money for higher speed leads to more investment on infrastructure.
The problem is if a baby Bell runs fiber to your house, a competing local exchange carrier (e.g. Bubba's Barbeque and Telephone) can demand the Bell provide him with access to that fiber BELOW the baby Bell's cost. He can require them to do the maintainance, fix it when his brother Jethro takes it out with a backhoe, and all Bubba has to do is collect the money. Now, with rules like that, why would the baby Bell spend the money running the fiber, when Bubba will be the one getting all the profit and all they get is the shaft.
I have friends who work for the baby Bells. I get an earful anytime this sort of subject comes up.
I agree with this. The whole "must-carry link" idea is terrible: your right to freedom of speech does not obligate me to listen! If I choose to ignore you, how DARE you try to force your opinion on me!
In meat space, if someone tries to force me to listen to them, I can walk away, tell them to shut up, even kick them in the crotch if that is what it takes. Online, I can add them to my killfile (which I do sincerely wish the/. crew would add). How dare this person suggest I be FORCED not to do this!
There is a big difference between/. style moderation (there are enough divergent opinions among the moderators that any well expressed view will likely be moderated up) and the "groupthink" this article fears. Yes, I know there are certain alledged groupthinks here on/., but consider: how often do Pro-Windows, Pro-BSD, Pro-Mac views show up and get moderated up, in defiance to the alleged Linux groupthink. How often to pro-gun views get moderated up (or anti-gun). For a site that is allegedly "groupthink" run, a surprising diversity of opinions grace these pages...
Personally, I like CVS, but one thing I wish it did handle was recording in the metadata whether a file was CR/LF translated on checkout or not.
I am in the unfortunate position of having to do development under Windows and Linux, and if you check out a source tree with the Windows port of CVS, all your text files have LF->CRLF translation applied. If you then try to check them in from Linux, the Linux CVS client will NOT strip the CR's out, and every line of the file is "touched".
Worse yet, if you then check them back out under Windows, you get CRCRLF...
Yes, it would be nice if I didn't have to do this sort of thing. It would be nice if I had a million dollars and didn't have to work for a living, too.
No atomic operations? That does not agree with my experience: if I do a "cvs commit" on a directory, all the files go in at once or they don't go in at all.
Directory renames I'll give you. It would be nice if CVS would allow file/directory renames.
Disconnected checking? This only tells you what the state of the system was when you last updated, i.e. when last you checked out. How is this much better than CVS?
Setting up a staging area is awkward? How so?
mkdir integration
cd integration
cvs checkout
cvs update -j mybranch
cvs update -j hisbranch
...
make
test
cvs commit -m "Merged mybranch and hisbranch"
The price doesn't seem that out of the ballpark to me. The bill of material on this looks to be just about the same as a regular laptop, with the possible exception of whatever they are using to do the handwriting input. The IR link to the keyboard adds about $30 to the BOM, counting the extra battery for the keyboard.
Depending upon how they do the stylus, that could be the main factor on the cost delta from a standard laptop.
Normally, I don't respond to AC's - I feel if you don't care enough to log in, I don't care enough to respond. However, you raise a good point.
The way I see it, either a) the tags are meaningless or b) they aren't. Now, if the moderation tags are meaningless, then why have them? Why not just have +1, 0, -1?
If there is some reason to have the tags, it is so that, eventually, Taco et. al. can use that extra data. I feel that if moderators are incorrectly filing a moderation, then that should be noted so that the system can identify the poor moderators and remove them. Even Taco himself, in IRC, has stated that the/, crew are considering using the metamoderation data to filter moderators, and considering how bad moderation has become, I feel this is a good thing.
Now, to judge by how certain moderators have been moderating my posts, I think my comment has touched a nerve among the trolls. I think they realise that an improvement in the moderation system's selection of moderators would remove them from the view of the public, and without public visibility, they will fade away.
Therefor, while the moderation and metamoderation FAQs may disagree with me, I feel they are in error./. is under a continuing DDoS attack, and the fact that it is based around troll posts rather than ICMPs or SYNs doesn't change that fact.
Running around, viewing the world in 3-D from your character's perspective, shooting each other over a network in real time? Hey, MidiMaze was doing that long before Wolf-3D was a gleam on Carmak's CRT!
I remember dragging my system, and my Midi cables, over to a friends house in 87 to play MidiMaze. The first LAN party!
Perhaps it's losing my DSL line, perhaps I don't get out enough, but until this story I'd never even heard of these guys.
However, asking people for money isn't a problem. After all, that's how RMS funded much of his work: asking people to pay him to punch Emacs off to a tape for them. They COULD have downloaded it, or found somebody with a tape and copied it.
However, does anybody have any personal experience with these guy's distro?
Most human senses run about 80 dB of dynamic range, with about a 40 dB "AGC" (automatic gain control). For example, your eye has the iris and the changing levels of visual purple to change the sensitivity, but an any given time you could see about a 80 dB range. Furthur, our senses are logrithmic.
For folks who aren't used to working in dB: 80 dB means a ten to the eighth change: about 100 million to one. For example, full sunlight ia about 1000 watts per sqare meter. However, you can see quite well in a room lit by a single 1 watt lightbulb, which is putting about ten milliwatts per square meter of wall (assuming a fairly large room).
Way back when, researchers found that, for a change to be perceptible, it had to be about a percent change. In other words, if I give you a one kilogram mass to hold, and then hand you a one mass of 1001 grams, you probably won't be able to tell the difference, but if I give you a 1010 gram mass, you will. Researchers at Bell labs decided to make a unit to measure this, and called it the Bel (modest, aren't they?) However, a Bel was defined as log10(change) and that was just a little bit coarse, so in true metric fashion they used tenths of a Bel, or deci-bels (which is why decibel is properly written dB, not db).
Now, in graphics cards they use a linear mapping of values: 128 is twice as bright as 64 and a little more than half a bright as 255. If they were to make the color scale logrithmic (10 is ten times a bright as 1, 20 is ten times a bright as 10, etc.), they would do much better at matching the eye's response. However, this makes the math of working with the data MUCH more complicated, so they just add bits.
(In fact, this sort of mapping is actually used in the telephony system: the 8 bits used to represent the voice signal are mapped to a log response, to better get the dynamic range to represent a whisper to a shout.)
Naww, I want a Linux computer on my Swiss Army Knife, along with a Photon Light LED, a garage door opener, an X10 tranmitter, a 3G phone, GPS receiver, and a Portasol soldering iron.
It seems to me this shares the same problems as simple light rail systems such as are already deployed in Washington DC, New York, Boston, London, etc.
Consider: You have to drive to a centralized station to enter the system, and you depart from a similar centralized station. Now, there are one of two possible scenarios:
The places people want to go are near to the station. Then why don't you just WALK where you are going, and avoid having to find a parking place.
The places people want to go are NOT withing walking distance. Now, imagine the traffic near one of these terminus points. You've not SOLVED the problem, you've MOVED and CONCENTRATED it.
Consider a city like LA: spread out all over the place, no centralized industrial area. Yes, you could use a system like this to reduce traffic on the I5, but you still have miles to go from the station to where you are going. You will have a traffic jam at the terminus, you will still have parking problems. The only advantage is that the cars can be electricly powered since their independant range is reduced. OK, save one little problem - LA HASN"T ANY JUICE TO POWER THE CARS!
What many people overlook is that many American cities are very spread out, having no centralized industrial area and no centralized residential area. Many of the standard masstrans solutions that work in Europe don't work in the US for that reason.
Now, an idea the Europeans have that I wish would catch on here in the US is the RO-RO train: Roll On, Roll Off (say it in a Pat Morita voice...) You drive your car on the train, then you go into the train and cover some serious miles. Then, you reclaim your car, and on you go. It's a five hour drive from where I sit to Dallas - If I could hop onto a train, roll the five hours in a mode where I could sleep/eat/surf/work/whatever, and arrive in Dallas ready to go, I'd be all over it. Let alone how nice it would be when going to the coasts (20 hr), the Black Hills (14 hr), or the southwest (14 hr).
However, the problem is that train service in the US is being slowly castrated with a dull knife. Certain organizations want all freight to run by truck, and without freight to subsidise passenger service, passenger rail is dying a slow an painful death in the US.
I'm a ham as well, so of course I've hear of this. However, the context of the discussion was that Canada is considering allowing the use of jammers: broadband signal generators. Therfor, the FCC had nothing to do with it, nor did illegallity since the regonal controlling authority was going to be allowing it.
Now, I'd much rather have the theater owners running narrow band microcells than broadband jammers if they are going to run anything. You will also not that my suggestion did not involve blocking the system, rather just controlling it.
Remember, it's the jackasses that yap away on their cell phones in [theathers|their cars|airplanes|...] that are creating the drive for legislation that will prevent you and I from using our HT's in those situations.
No Faraday cage needed! It's pretty easy to limit the range on a low power transmitter like this. One method is the "leaky co-ax" trick: you run co-ax around the place you want the signal, but at intervals along the co-ax you have a slit in the shield. This slit acts like an antenna and radiats the signal. Since the antenna is small, and the power low, the signal won't go very far, but since the co-ax runs all over, it doesn't have to.
You also don't need to shield the system from the local (big) cell site: you can am just the control channel (a great deal easier than jamming the whole band).
Microcell systems are currently available: they are used in places where you need cellular coverage in a limited space such as underground installations, or large metal buildings. T'ain't cheap, but that's largely because there is a lack of volume. The guts of one don't have to be that complex - I'd estimate a bill of materials of about $700 at today's prices.
A far nicer (or nastier, depending upon your point of view) would be to set up a "microcell" site: a very low power, short range and limited cell site. Cell phones will lock onto the microcell as it has the best signal, and will go into roaming mode. You can then allow incoming calls, but limit the duration to 30 seconds. You can also block outgoing calls, save those to 911.
Now for the nasty bit: You can also charge the begeezus out of anybody dumb enough to use the system. Hit a few people with a $50 bill for yakking during a movie and they will shut up....
Man on screen: "I love sunsets...."
Woman on screen: "Are you going to talk through the movie?"
Audience: "OF FUCKING COURSE! THIS IS ROCKY HORROR!"
A floating point operation is usually taken to mean a floating point multiply followed by a floating point addition, also known as a Multiply/Accumulate Cycle (MAC).
A MAC is a very important operation in digital signal processing. For example, to implement a digital lowpass filter (to remove tape hiss, for example), you define a finite impulse response filter (FIR filter) of some number of taps. You might need 256 taps to implement the needed low pass filter (this is a shot from the hip, the actual number of taps may be more or less). That means for every sample of audio (88.2kSamples/second for stereo audio) you need to do 256 MACs, or 22.6MFLOPS.
Slashdot Mirror
In what sense? In the "completely ironic and false" sense, the "Bill Clintonesque 'Define the word is' sense"? The "I don't know what I'm talking about but I like to hear my own voice" sense? The "I'm a /. troll" sense? Or the "WindRiver AstroTurf" sense?
In my own experience (see my other comment in this thread) WRS has had terrible support, been generally clueless, and provided little or no value added to the world.
Unfortunately, most hardware vendors support Microsoft because MS has the largest share of the market and they know it will pay to support MS with drivers.
Linux is not in that state, save for (perhaps) networking devices. Has RedHat considered helping to fund driver development for other forms of hardware? I'm thinking mostly of 3D accelerated video cards (by helping to fund the DRI group), but other items (scanners, USB->IDE interfaces, etc.) would be nice too.
Wuss. Be a man, admit your mistake, and clean it up, that's what I say. That's why I am working on my plans to to migrate my project.
Put it this way:
Competition is good. Sometimes it may seem inefficient, but in reality that redundancy is insuring that we don't get stuck at some local maximum and truely go for the global maximum.
I have the misfortune to have specified VxWorks for a project I am designing. I am sorry, but I trust Wind River about as far as I can throw them.
First, full disclosure. My project isn't the typical embedded project - it's large, it runs the X windows system, it uses TCL/TK, it has a good-sized hard disk. This is not exactly what VxWorks is targeting, and many of my problems stem from that. For a small project, it's probably good.
OK, now for the dirt.
1) I have NEVER, NOT ONCE, gotten any significant help on a problem from Wind River. This does not mean that they didn't try, but in the end every problem I ran into I ended up solving myself. For instance, when I was first building the system, I built it to load from IDE hard disk. I found out, after weeks of wasted effort and several calls back and forth to Wind River that the networking stack was disabled if you weren't booting from the network, unless you turned on an option that was not documented.
2) We purchased the RtX server that Wind River sells. It turns out the X server won't work with the latest version of VxWorks. The version of VxWorks it does work with does not support DNS nor DHCP.
3) The IDE driver doesn't use DMA, and the system does not understand partitions. I had to write the code to parse the partition table of the hard disk. And the lack of DMA sucks when you are trying to log a large amount of data to the hard disk.
4) The VxWorks file system is DOS. They have a hack to support long file names, but that hack isn't VFAT. So, you cannot simultainously have long file names and compatiblility with any other OS.
5) When we signed up with Wind River, we asked them as to when and if they were going to support development using Linux as a host. Since they already support Solaris, this SHOULDN'T be rocket science. We were told "within 6 months". That was two years ago. Guess what.
6) The DOS file system has bugs where it tries to free() a static buffer. I don't have the source, I cannot fix the bug. RMS has a good point here.
7) The X server only supports 256 color mode. The server is derived from XFree, but since XFree isn't under GPL, Wind River doesn't distribute the source. Therefor, I cannot build it to support TrueColor. I cannot change the keysyms (which would be damn useful since I have keys that a standard X server doesn't have.)
8) On the StrongArm platform, they claim to support that chip, but they don't enable the on-chip cache, nor do they give you a good place to do so. Therefor, the chip runs at half speed.
9) Their implementation of the TCP stack has bugs. They pass your driver a buffer you are to place the packet into, but they don't tell you that because of a bug in the driver, you have to place the packet at bufferstart+2.
10) Their debugger does not run reliably on a network with a lot of traffic.
Given my experiences with Wind River, I don't feel warm and fuzzy about their purchase of ANYTHING. As soon as I can convince management (and that won't be long) I will be porting my project over to Linux.
Sorry, when you said "steel" I assumed they'd be punching holes, since trying to write to that with a mag head would be a galloping BITCH. Well, that does make it a wee more complicated. However, if you could find some old heads from somewhere (maybe use parts of an 8 track tape system? or maybe a cassette) it might still be something doable.
Why not try using a regular flatbed scanner? Scan each section of the tape, and write some code to read it?
Alternatively, why not build a reader? Go to your local college of engineering, and see if you can interest them in making this an undergrad project.
A stepping motor to move the tape, some LEDs and phototransistors to read it, a printer port, and some code. Fun for all: mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, and computer engineers.
One downside to this sort of split is exactly the sort of horror stories you hear about DSL. You have the DSL provider, the telephony provider, and the local loop provider, all pointing at the other guy and saying "His fault, not mine!"
As for providing incentive to upgrade the plant: that's easy. Better service == higher fees. You want to have 10 Mbps DSL, pay up! If not, then take the 384kbps DSL and pay less.
More money for higher speed leads to more investment on infrastructure.
The problem is if a baby Bell runs fiber to your house, a competing local exchange carrier (e.g. Bubba's Barbeque and Telephone) can demand the Bell provide him with access to that fiber BELOW the baby Bell's cost. He can require them to do the maintainance, fix it when his brother Jethro takes it out with a backhoe, and all Bubba has to do is collect the money. Now, with rules like that, why would the baby Bell spend the money running the fiber, when Bubba will be the one getting all the profit and all they get is the shaft.
I have friends who work for the baby Bells. I get an earful anytime this sort of subject comes up.
(couldn't resist that bit of irony...)
/. crew would add). How dare this person suggest I be FORCED not to do this!
/. style moderation (there are enough divergent opinions among the moderators that any well expressed view will likely be moderated up) and the "groupthink" this article fears. Yes, I know there are certain alledged groupthinks here on /., but consider: how often do Pro-Windows, Pro-BSD, Pro-Mac views show up and get moderated up, in defiance to the alleged Linux groupthink. How often to pro-gun views get moderated up (or anti-gun). For a site that is allegedly "groupthink" run, a surprising diversity of opinions grace these pages...
I agree with this. The whole "must-carry link" idea is terrible: your right to freedom of speech does not obligate me to listen! If I choose to ignore you, how DARE you try to force your opinion on me!
In meat space, if someone tries to force me to listen to them, I can walk away, tell them to shut up, even kick them in the crotch if that is what it takes. Online, I can add them to my killfile (which I do sincerely wish the
There is a big difference between
Personally, I like CVS, but one thing I wish it did handle was recording in the metadata whether a file was CR/LF translated on checkout or not.
I am in the unfortunate position of having to do development under Windows and Linux, and if you check out a source tree with the Windows port of CVS, all your text files have LF->CRLF translation applied. If you then try to check them in from Linux, the Linux CVS client will NOT strip the CR's out, and every line of the file is "touched".
Worse yet, if you then check them back out under Windows, you get CRCRLF...
Yes, it would be nice if I didn't have to do this sort of thing. It would be nice if I had a million dollars and didn't have to work for a living, too.
No atomic operations? That does not agree with my experience: if I do a "cvs commit" on a directory, all the files go in at once or they don't go in at all.
Directory renames I'll give you. It would be nice if CVS would allow file/directory renames.
Disconnected checking? This only tells you what the state of the system was when you last updated, i.e. when last you checked out. How is this much better than CVS?
Setting up a staging area is awkward? How so?
mkdir integration
cd integration
cvs checkout
cvs update -j mybranch
cvs update -j hisbranch
...
make
test
cvs commit -m "Merged mybranch and hisbranch"
Could you give a little more detail?
The price doesn't seem that out of the ballpark to me. The bill of material on this looks to be just about the same as a regular laptop, with the possible exception of whatever they are using to do the handwriting input. The IR link to the keyboard adds about $30 to the BOM, counting the extra battery for the keyboard.
Depending upon how they do the stylus, that could be the main factor on the cost delta from a standard laptop.
Windows already uses quantum effects. Just looking at it will make it crash....
</Humor>
Normally, I don't respond to AC's - I feel if you don't care enough to log in, I don't care enough to respond. However, you raise a good point.
/, crew are considering using the metamoderation data to filter moderators, and considering how bad moderation has become, I feel this is a good thing.
/. is under a continuing DDoS attack, and the fact that it is based around troll posts rather than ICMPs or SYNs doesn't change that fact.
The way I see it, either a) the tags are meaningless or b) they aren't. Now, if the moderation tags are meaningless, then why have them? Why not just have +1, 0, -1?
If there is some reason to have the tags, it is so that, eventually, Taco et. al. can use that extra data. I feel that if moderators are incorrectly filing a moderation, then that should be noted so that the system can identify the poor moderators and remove them. Even Taco himself, in IRC, has stated that the
Now, to judge by how certain moderators have been moderating my posts, I think my comment has touched a nerve among the trolls. I think they realise that an improvement in the moderation system's selection of moderators would remove them from the view of the public, and without public visibility, they will fade away.
Therefor, while the moderation and metamoderation FAQs may disagree with me, I feel they are in error.
Running around, viewing the world in 3-D from your character's perspective, shooting each other over a network in real time? Hey, MidiMaze was doing that long before Wolf-3D was a gleam on Carmak's CRT!
I remember dragging my system, and my Midi cables, over to a friends house in 87 to play MidiMaze. The first LAN party!
Perhaps it's losing my DSL line, perhaps I don't get out enough, but until this story I'd never even heard of these guys.
However, asking people for money isn't a problem. After all, that's how RMS funded much of his work: asking people to pay him to punch Emacs off to a tape for them. They COULD have downloaded it, or found somebody with a tape and copied it.
However, does anybody have any personal experience with these guy's distro?
Most human senses run about 80 dB of dynamic range, with about a 40 dB "AGC" (automatic gain control). For example, your eye has the iris and the changing levels of visual purple to change the sensitivity, but an any given time you could see about a 80 dB range. Furthur, our senses are logrithmic.
For folks who aren't used to working in dB: 80 dB means a ten to the eighth change: about 100 million to one. For example, full sunlight ia about 1000 watts per sqare meter. However, you can see quite well in a room lit by a single 1 watt lightbulb, which is putting about ten milliwatts per square meter of wall (assuming a fairly large room).
Way back when, researchers found that, for a change to be perceptible, it had to be about a percent change. In other words, if I give you a one kilogram mass to hold, and then hand you a one mass of 1001 grams, you probably won't be able to tell the difference, but if I give you a 1010 gram mass, you will. Researchers at Bell labs decided to make a unit to measure this, and called it the Bel (modest, aren't they?) However, a Bel was defined as log10(change) and that was just a little bit coarse, so in true metric fashion they used tenths of a Bel, or deci-bels (which is why decibel is properly written dB, not db).
Now, in graphics cards they use a linear mapping of values: 128 is twice as bright as 64 and a little more than half a bright as 255. If they were to make the color scale logrithmic (10 is ten times a bright as 1, 20 is ten times a bright as 10, etc.), they would do much better at matching the eye's response. However, this makes the math of working with the data MUCH more complicated, so they just add bits.
(In fact, this sort of mapping is actually used in the telephony system: the 8 bits used to represent the voice signal are mapped to a log response, to better get the dynamic range to represent a whisper to a shout.)
Naww, I want a Linux computer on my Swiss Army Knife, along with a Photon Light LED, a garage door opener, an X10 tranmitter, a 3G phone, GPS receiver, and a Portasol soldering iron.
Then, I'd be set.
Consider: You have to drive to a centralized station to enter the system, and you depart from a similar centralized station. Now, there are one of two possible scenarios:
Consider a city like LA: spread out all over the place, no centralized industrial area. Yes, you could use a system like this to reduce traffic on the I5, but you still have miles to go from the station to where you are going. You will have a traffic jam at the terminus, you will still have parking problems. The only advantage is that the cars can be electricly powered since their independant range is reduced. OK, save one little problem - LA HASN"T ANY JUICE TO POWER THE CARS!
What many people overlook is that many American cities are very spread out, having no centralized industrial area and no centralized residential area. Many of the standard masstrans solutions that work in Europe don't work in the US for that reason.
Now, an idea the Europeans have that I wish would catch on here in the US is the RO-RO train: Roll On, Roll Off (say it in a Pat Morita voice...) You drive your car on the train, then you go into the train and cover some serious miles. Then, you reclaim your car, and on you go. It's a five hour drive from where I sit to Dallas - If I could hop onto a train, roll the five hours in a mode where I could sleep/eat/surf/work/whatever, and arrive in Dallas ready to go, I'd be all over it. Let alone how nice it would be when going to the coasts (20 hr), the Black Hills (14 hr), or the southwest (14 hr).
However, the problem is that train service in the US is being slowly castrated with a dull knife. Certain organizations want all freight to run by truck, and without freight to subsidise passenger service, passenger rail is dying a slow an painful death in the US.
I'm a ham as well, so of course I've hear of this. However, the context of the discussion was that Canada is considering allowing the use of jammers: broadband signal generators. Therfor, the FCC had nothing to do with it, nor did illegallity since the regonal controlling authority was going to be allowing it.
Now, I'd much rather have the theater owners running narrow band microcells than broadband jammers if they are going to run anything. You will also not that my suggestion did not involve blocking the system, rather just controlling it.
Remember, it's the jackasses that yap away on their cell phones in [theathers|their cars|airplanes|...] that are creating the drive for legislation that will prevent you and I from using our HT's in those situations.
No Faraday cage needed! It's pretty easy to limit the range on a low power transmitter like this. One method is the "leaky co-ax" trick: you run co-ax around the place you want the signal, but at intervals along the co-ax you have a slit in the shield. This slit acts like an antenna and radiats the signal. Since the antenna is small, and the power low, the signal won't go very far, but since the co-ax runs all over, it doesn't have to.
You also don't need to shield the system from the local (big) cell site: you can am just the control channel (a great deal easier than jamming the whole band).
Microcell systems are currently available: they are used in places where you need cellular coverage in a limited space such as underground installations, or large metal buildings. T'ain't cheap, but that's largely because there is a lack of volume. The guts of one don't have to be that complex - I'd estimate a bill of materials of about $700 at today's prices.
A far nicer (or nastier, depending upon your point of view) would be to set up a "microcell" site: a very low power, short range and limited cell site. Cell phones will lock onto the microcell as it has the best signal, and will go into roaming mode. You can then allow incoming calls, but limit the duration to 30 seconds. You can also block outgoing calls, save those to 911.
Now for the nasty bit: You can also charge the begeezus out of anybody dumb enough to use the system. Hit a few people with a $50 bill for yakking during a movie and they will shut up....
Man on screen: "I love sunsets...."
Woman on screen: "Are you going to talk through the movie?"
Audience: "OF FUCKING COURSE! THIS IS ROCKY HORROR!"
A floating point operation is usually taken to mean a floating point multiply followed by a floating point addition, also known as a Multiply/Accumulate Cycle (MAC).
A MAC is a very important operation in digital signal processing. For example, to implement a digital lowpass filter (to remove tape hiss, for example), you define a finite impulse response filter (FIR filter) of some number of taps. You might need 256 taps to implement the needed low pass filter (this is a shot from the hip, the actual number of taps may be more or less). That means for every sample of audio (88.2kSamples/second for stereo audio) you need to do 256 MACs, or 22.6MFLOPS.
"Mrs. Tweedy, Mrs. Tweedy! I tell ya, those particles, they're organized!"
Did this go through anybody else's head when the read "Collider Run II"?