This Inquirer story says that ATI will be beginning a big "Linux driver push" in the next couple of weeks - a driver based upon their Catalyst drivers, supposesly giving a speed boost to DoomIII.
Personally, I'd just like drivers that don't segv under Xorg 6.8.0
Teletext to HTTP gateways?
on
Ceefax Turns 30
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Are there any Teletext to HTTP gateways? It would seem a natural way to widen the exposure of the information.
Will they stop at Fish, or continue on to Mostly Harmless?
I, for one, was deeply dissapointed with Mostly Harmless - it felt very mean-spirited, like DNA was saying "Alright, I want to do other work now, and you bastards won't let me, so I'll kill EVERYBODY off - THERE! Now can I write other stuff?"
Even Sir Conan-Doyle's termination of his main character wasn't so mean-spirited - Holmes died fighting Moriarity - he wasn't simply wiped from existance!
In order to roll the meter back, all that is necessary is for the current to "run backwards".
However, in order to do this *safely* you must:
a) Take the DC from the panels and convert it to AC. b) Make sure that AC is in phase with the utility. c) Make sure that if the utility power goes away, so does your AC onto the mains.
This is what makes feeding power back onto the line complicated - you cannot just hook your panels up to the mains.
It used to be hard to do this, especially for a naturally DC source like solar. Wind generators could use an induction generator, where the generator's field windings are energised from the power company, which gives you the synchronization, but also means that if the winds drop down, your generator becomes a motor and your wind generator becomes a fan - AND if the power company goes down, so do you.
With modern switching power supplies, it is much easier to take a DC panel, boost it to 300VDC, then chop that into 220VAC and feed it back onto the lines while monitoring the lines to insure that the power company is still there. However, it still takes pretty meaty transistors to do the switching - and that adds monitary cost and reduces efficiency.
However, IF you buy the gear do to so, the power companies are REQUIRED to buy power back from you, exactly for the reason of encouraging people to feed the grid.
Could you post a more specific link to the fix, please?
And do they list the exact symptoms for the problem? My Multia will boot, will run the embedded firmware tests, but during the Linux install the system barfs - like it is having memory or disk corruption.
I'm excluding assholes in my preferences, still I see your crap. Why?
YOU clicked on the story to post this drivel, so you brought this upon yourself, so kindly go Superglue your mouth, anus (same thing), and fingers together so that we won't have to hear from you again.
Perhaps because they are talking about Colorado State University, not the state of Colorado, and it is commonplace to abbreviate university names of the form "$foo State University" as "$foo State" or even to abbreviate $foo.
If you would like to see a very good comparison between the US and the USSR space race, starting all the way back in WWII Germany, you should go to The Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center in Hutchinson, KS. The Hall of Space exhibit starts with the German slave camps building the V1 and V2 rocket, and goes all the way through to Apollo/Soyuez.
It is one of the few places on Earth where you can see an intact V1 and V2 rocket.
So, was your $500 camera's imaging element rad-hard?
No? Hope you like pictures with lots of spurious pixels in them.
Were the microcontrollers rad-hard?
No? Hope you like your sat crashing every five mintes.
Were the batteries rated to go from +100C in the sun to -100C in the shadow? In vacuum?
No? Oh well, with no imaging element and no computer you don't need them anyway.
Was your sat vibration and acceleration rated?
No? Too bad it shook itself apart on launch.
Building space rated hardware IS HARD. Look at the problems Amsat had launching Phase-4D - and they had a HELL of a lot more talent working on it than your average Red Green with his duct taped camcorder.
Their mission? Install three antennas and replace a 2-foot-square Russian pump panel. But of course, because it isn't a part or our Mission to Mars, it is still too dangerous work on the Hubble Telescope, which after all, is only used for science."
OK, pay attention people. The ISS spacewalk presents very little risk of a dead (astro|cosmo)naut - at worst the guy turns around and goes back into the ISS.
A shuttle mission to the ISS has a fallback position if the shuttle is found to not be re-entry worthy - park at the ISS and wait for a rescue mission.
A mission to Hubble has no such fallback - there is no way a shuttle in an orbit suitable to rendevous with Hubble can rendevous with the ISS. Should the shuttle not be re-entry worthy there is no fallback position - no ISS, no LEM, no option. You have several astronauts on orbit who are going to die. Slowly. Publicly.
Yes, Hubble is important to science. Is it important enough to sacrifice three to five astronauts?
It just keeps getting better: Vladimir Dergachev of the GATOS project (support for the tuner on ATI All-in-Wonder video cards) just announced that he now has write access to the X.org CVS - so he can finally merge GATOS into the mainline X code!
Just think: A day in which support for the tuner on ATI cards is simply in the X server, rather than taking a great deal of pain and suffering to get working!
(Of course, this only applies to cards supported by GATOS, the older cards. But perhaps, just perhaps, if enough people bring pressure to bear upon ATI, then ATI will use the GATOS code to support the newer cards as well.)
I've said this before, but I feel it bears repeating.
There is a difference between "being busy" and "being productive", and too damn many people don't know the difference.
I work with a guy who cannot go five minutes without being on the phone. He will be on business trips and call me to tell me how well a demo went. If there were no problems I really DON'T need to be interrupted in my work - it can wait until you get back, Rob. He will call me as he is driving in to work (a 10 minute drive) to tell me he wants to talk to me when he gets in.
He is the sort of person who feels that, if he is not talking to someone, writing a proposal, reading a proposal, etc., that he is not being productive.
Now, when he and I travel, I use the time waiting in the airport to review in my mind the things that will need to happen when we get to the customer, or long-range design plans, or just plain relax - so that when I need to work, I can do so at 100%.
All these people "hypertasking" - driving down the road making business calls that they have to "follow up on" because they cannot make proper notes, or don't have access to their information - in other words, wasting time. Wait until you can make the call, and resolve the issue with one call.
In short, be smart-lazy. Go read Heinlein's "The man who was too lazy to fail" in Time Enough For Love and be like him. When you do something, do it so as to spend as little work as possible to achive as much gain as possible. Sometimes, putting something off till tomorrow is better than doing it today (if putting it off will allow you to solve it once and for all, and trying to do it today means revisiting it tomorrow anyway).
People bitch about not having any "free time", yet every study done shows that we actually do have more "leasure time", but we fill it with so much crap that we have no "free time" left. If you feel overworked, if you feel like you have no free time, then examine all the things you do, and ask yourself "Do I *really* need to be doing this now, or am I just trying to be busy?"
The nasty thing is, that not only do I not have the Xv of the video card, but as I had said, my seperate HDTV capture card, which ALSO presents an Xv interface, is ALSO not showing up.
I.E. the ATI driver is preventing ANY Xv devices from showing up - even those that are NOT its own.
I updated my old ATI 7500 All in Wonder to a 9600 AIW, thinking that "ATI tries to support the community - they are releasing some specs to the DRI developers, if not for the newest boards."
First, the proprietary drivers do not work with Xorg - only XFree.
Second, they will lock up solid if you are running 4K kernel stacks - you need to have 8K stacks. Ven then, while their glxgears program runs, I cannot run UT2003 - as soon as I try to launch the game the monitor shuts down and the system locks.
Third, for reasons unknown I've lost all Xv support - so video playback sucks and I can no longer access my PCHDTV card.
Fourth, GATOS and the proprietary drivers don't mix - so you cannot use the tuner section at all.
I've asked one of the ATI developers who hangs out on the DRI mailing list to push for ATI deploying a Bugzilla-like tracking system, and to support the tuner in the proprietary drivers (since all they need to do is make the tuners an Xv subsystem).
So, let us all/. ATI into realising that they need to support us BETTER - after all, telling people "Sorry, our drivers don't work with DirectX 9.0, you have to downgrade to DirectX 8.0" would not fly, so why should we be told to downgrade from XFree80 4.4 or Xorg to XFree86 4.3?
As I read the article, they took the CAT scans, then used the data to reconstruct the face in the same way as they reconstruct the faces of skulls now - that is, by using a model of how deep the skin and muscle is on the skull.
In other words, if you could "see through" the wrappings on the mummy, his face would NOT look like the image in the article - it would be dried out and, well, mummified-looking.
Let me recast this article into a different problem domain to highlight the flaw in the analysis:
The open source development model will never be useful in the cellular telephone market, because a) lots of work are needed to create a phone, b) speciallized skillsets (RF design, signal processing, protocol) are needed, c) large amounts of testing are needed.
Now, does that mean that no open source is used in phones? BZZZT! Wrong. Some phones are using Linux as the kernel.
My point is that while we aren't likely to see a DOOM III level game emerge completely from the FLOSS community, we WILL see FLOSS being used in games - Vorbis for game music comes to mind.
So FLOSS *IS* a competitive advantage for games as it is for ALL software - it is just not the whole story.
Helmets are expensive, and if you fall down and skid on one, it really screws the paint up, and that costs a lot to fix.
So this guy figgers (sic) that he'll just skid on his skull - bone and skin grow back, and it's not like it is a vital organ or anything....
It's like the squids you see riding the donorcycles wearing nothing but cut-offs and sunglasses - getting your cloths torn up (in non-cool-group approved ways) is expensive, but skin is cheap.
Slashdot Mirror
(From a rejected story I submitted)
This Inquirer story says that ATI will be beginning a big "Linux driver push" in the next couple of weeks - a driver based upon their Catalyst drivers, supposesly giving a speed boost to DoomIII.
Personally, I'd just like drivers that don't segv under Xorg 6.8.0
Are there any Teletext to HTTP gateways? It would seem a natural way to widen the exposure of the information.
Look at the "CPU ID" list - ValveIsGreat?
True, it is only one entry, but is this a remnant of test data, or has somebody hacked Steam?
And speaking of "hacking" - has anybody run Steam under Wine? I know I completed both OpFor and BlueShift under Wine. How would that confuse things?
Where will they stop making episodes?
Will they stop at Fish, or continue on to Mostly Harmless?
I, for one, was deeply dissapointed with Mostly Harmless - it felt very mean-spirited, like DNA was saying "Alright, I want to do other work now, and you bastards won't let me, so I'll kill EVERYBODY off - THERE! Now can I write other stuff?"
Even Sir Conan-Doyle's termination of his main character wasn't so mean-spirited - Holmes died fighting Moriarity - he wasn't simply wiped from existance!
I find it disturbing that you know the URL for something like this - what, looking for lunch?
In order to roll the meter back, all that is necessary is for the current to "run backwards".
.
However, in order to do this *safely* you must:
a) Take the DC from the panels and convert it to AC
b) Make sure that AC is in phase with the utility.
c) Make sure that if the utility power goes away, so does your AC onto the mains.
This is what makes feeding power back onto the line complicated - you cannot just hook your panels up to the mains.
It used to be hard to do this, especially for a naturally DC source like solar. Wind generators could use an induction generator, where the generator's field windings are energised from the power company, which gives you the synchronization, but also means that if the winds drop down, your generator becomes a motor and your wind generator becomes a fan - AND if the power company goes down, so do you.
With modern switching power supplies, it is much easier to take a DC panel, boost it to 300VDC, then chop that into 220VAC and feed it back onto the lines while monitoring the lines to insure that the power company is still there. However, it still takes pretty meaty transistors to do the switching - and that adds monitary cost and reduces efficiency.
However, IF you buy the gear do to so, the power companies are REQUIRED to buy power back from you, exactly for the reason of encouraging people to feed the grid.
/me runs over to NetBSD's site.
Could you post a more specific link to the fix, please?
And do they list the exact symptoms for the problem? My Multia will boot, will run the embedded firmware tests, but during the Linux install the system barfs - like it is having memory or disk corruption.
I'm excluding assholes in my preferences, still I see your crap. Why?
YOU clicked on the story to post this drivel, so you brought this upon yourself, so kindly go Superglue your mouth, anus (same thing), and fingers together so that we won't have to hear from you again.
Perhaps because they are talking about Colorado State University, not the state of Colorado, and it is commonplace to abbreviate university names of the form "$foo State University" as "$foo State" or even to abbreviate $foo.
If you would like to see a very good comparison between the US and the USSR space race, starting all the way back in WWII Germany, you should go to The Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center in Hutchinson, KS. The Hall of Space exhibit starts with the German slave camps building the V1 and V2 rocket, and goes all the way through to Apollo/Soyuez.
It is one of the few places on Earth where you can see an intact V1 and V2 rocket.
Could somebody explain the meaning and significance of the term "zero-time match"?
So, was your $500 camera's imaging element rad-hard?
No? Hope you like pictures with lots of spurious pixels in them.
Were the microcontrollers rad-hard?
No? Hope you like your sat crashing every five mintes.
Were the batteries rated to go from +100C in the sun to -100C in the shadow? In vacuum?
No? Oh well, with no imaging element and no computer you don't need them anyway.
Was your sat vibration and acceleration rated?
No? Too bad it shook itself apart on launch.
Building space rated hardware IS HARD. Look at the problems Amsat had launching Phase-4D - and they had a HELL of a lot more talent working on it than your average Red Green with his duct taped camcorder.
But that cannot happen, because Our Fearless Leader Who Is Always Right has said that there is no significant abuse of moderation.
Anybody who says Our Fearless Leader Who Is Always Right is wrong is an enemy of the state, and must be denied moderation privileges.
Please turn yourself in for ReEducation immediately.
Not a chance.
It has already happened - DRI is now a part of X.org.
That's one of the reasons Vlad getting write is great - now DRI and GATOS will be one, as well.
(Not a chance - it's a certainty. A play on words.)
OK, pay attention people. The ISS spacewalk presents very little risk of a dead (astro|cosmo)naut - at worst the guy turns around and goes back into the ISS.
A shuttle mission to the ISS has a fallback position if the shuttle is found to not be re-entry worthy - park at the ISS and wait for a rescue mission.
A mission to Hubble has no such fallback - there is no way a shuttle in an orbit suitable to rendevous with Hubble can rendevous with the ISS. Should the shuttle not be re-entry worthy there is no fallback position - no ISS, no LEM, no option. You have several astronauts on orbit who are going to die. Slowly. Publicly.
Yes, Hubble is important to science. Is it important enough to sacrifice three to five astronauts?
It just keeps getting better: Vladimir Dergachev of the GATOS project (support for the tuner on ATI All-in-Wonder video cards) just announced that he now has write access to the X.org CVS - so he can finally merge GATOS into the mainline X code!
Just think: A day in which support for the tuner on ATI cards is simply in the X server, rather than taking a great deal of pain and suffering to get working!
(Of course, this only applies to cards supported by GATOS, the older cards. But perhaps, just perhaps, if enough people bring pressure to bear upon ATI, then ATI will use the GATOS code to support the newer cards as well.)
I've said this before, but I feel it bears repeating.
There is a difference between "being busy" and "being productive", and too damn many people don't know the difference.
I work with a guy who cannot go five minutes without being on the phone. He will be on business trips and call me to tell me how well a demo went. If there were no problems I really DON'T need to be interrupted in my work - it can wait until you get back, Rob. He will call me as he is driving in to work (a 10 minute drive) to tell me he wants to talk to me when he gets in.
He is the sort of person who feels that, if he is not talking to someone, writing a proposal, reading a proposal, etc., that he is not being productive.
Now, when he and I travel, I use the time waiting in the airport to review in my mind the things that will need to happen when we get to the customer, or long-range design plans, or just plain relax - so that when I need to work, I can do so at 100%.
All these people "hypertasking" - driving down the road making business calls that they have to "follow up on" because they cannot make proper notes, or don't have access to their information - in other words, wasting time. Wait until you can make the call, and resolve the issue with one call.
In short, be smart-lazy. Go read Heinlein's "The man who was too lazy to fail" in Time Enough For Love and be like him. When you do something, do it so as to spend as little work as possible to achive as much gain as possible. Sometimes, putting something off till tomorrow is better than doing it today (if putting it off will allow you to solve it once and for all, and trying to do it today means revisiting it tomorrow anyway).
People bitch about not having any "free time", yet every study done shows that we actually do have more "leasure time", but we fill it with so much crap that we have no "free time" left. If you feel overworked, if you feel like you have no free time, then examine all the things you do, and ask yourself "Do I *really* need to be doing this now, or am I just trying to be busy?"
The nasty thing is, that not only do I not have the Xv of the video card, but as I had said, my seperate HDTV capture card, which ALSO presents an Xv interface, is ALSO not showing up.
I.E. the ATI driver is preventing ANY Xv devices from showing up - even those that are NOT its own.
Then you are lucky, because several people have the same problem as I do - the driver segfaulting at startup under Xorg.
What version of Xorg are you running?
I updated my old ATI 7500 All in Wonder to a 9600 AIW, thinking that "ATI tries to support the community - they are releasing some specs to the DRI developers, if not for the newest boards."
/. ATI into realising that they need to support us BETTER - after all, telling people "Sorry, our drivers don't work with DirectX 9.0, you have to downgrade to DirectX 8.0" would not fly, so why should we be told to downgrade from XFree80 4.4 or Xorg to XFree86 4.3?
/. story will be, as the bard put it, ".. a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing".
First, the proprietary drivers do not work with Xorg - only XFree.
Second, they will lock up solid if you are running 4K kernel stacks - you need to have 8K stacks. Ven then, while their glxgears program runs, I cannot run UT2003 - as soon as I try to launch the game the monitor shuts down and the system locks.
Third, for reasons unknown I've lost all Xv support - so video playback sucks and I can no longer access my PCHDTV card.
Fourth, GATOS and the proprietary drivers don't mix - so you cannot use the tuner section at all.
I've asked one of the ATI developers who hangs out on the DRI mailing list to push for ATI deploying a Bugzilla-like tracking system, and to support the tuner in the proprietary drivers (since all they need to do is make the tuners an Xv subsystem).
So, let us all
Of course, past experience suggests that this
As I read the article, they took the CAT scans, then used the data to reconstruct the face in the same way as they reconstruct the faces of skulls now - that is, by using a model of how deep the skin and muscle is on the skull.
In other words, if you could "see through" the wrappings on the mummy, his face would NOT look like the image in the article - it would be dried out and, well, mummified-looking.
Let me recast this article into a different problem domain to highlight the flaw in the analysis:
The open source development model will never be useful in the cellular telephone market, because a) lots of work are needed to create a phone, b) speciallized skillsets (RF design, signal processing, protocol) are needed, c) large amounts of testing are needed.
Now, does that mean that no open source is used in phones? BZZZT! Wrong. Some phones are using Linux as the kernel.
My point is that while we aren't likely to see a DOOM III level game emerge completely from the FLOSS community, we WILL see FLOSS being used in games - Vorbis for game music comes to mind.
So FLOSS *IS* a competitive advantage for games as it is for ALL software - it is just not the whole story.
One of the things I loved about Mad Max was that no matter how scummy the bikers were, they ALL wore helments!
Helmets are expensive, and if you fall down and skid on one, it really screws the paint up, and that costs a lot to fix.
So this guy figgers (sic) that he'll just skid on his skull - bone and skin grow back, and it's not like it is a vital organ or anything....
It's like the squids you see riding the donorcycles wearing nothing but cut-offs and sunglasses - getting your cloths torn up (in non-cool-group approved ways) is expensive, but skin is cheap.
Should your friend ever decide that he needs to give that computer a new home, send it here.