I've been looking for a watch to replace my current one - it stores telephone numbers and appointments. The problem is that it has 6 buttons - entering any data into it takes several seconds, and there is no way to pull the data off. Every 18 months, you'll have to re-enter everything after changing the battery.
So, I start looking at the watches like Timex's DataMan watch, that can be programmed from a computer. However, the transfer is still one way - from computer to watch. I'd like to be able to pull the data up from the watch, too.
Now, Casio has such a watch - it uses IR to communicate to and from the computer (I don't know if it uses actual IRDA protocol or just some bastard protocol Casio came up with - but I know where I'd place my bets...). However, this watch does not come in a version with a calculator pad (back to several seconds to enter the data) and is only available on-line as far as I can tell (not a huge problem, but I'd like to try it before I buy it.)
Now, Casio is releasing watches with barometers, GPS, phones, pagers, cameras, and compasses, but do they actually release a watch that contains a set of useful features?
(No, I don't want a PDA. I want something small, strapped to my body in a convenient place, that does a very limited set of functions, not a device that I must carry in a large pocket and must remember to pick up in the morning.)
I've found that in many cases, using the nameserver your ISP hands you will result in a 1-2 second per lookup delay - most ISPs have horribly overloaded their DNS servers. Where I work, I was seeing 2-5 seconds per lookup. I brought this to the attention of our IT staff, and had them reconfigure our plant nameserver to do the lookup directly. Name lookups went from 2-5 seconds to <100 msec. Since we are a large shop with lots of clients, it makes sense.
Running your own caching nameserver will speed up your browsing, and if you use a real name server package, you can configure it to do the lookups itself rather than going through your ISP's servers. Thus, you can prevent them from screwing with your DNS, you can use alternate root servers if you so choose, and you get better response.
I'm somewhat shocked that Assimilation-XP doesn't have a caching nameserver....
It's a real shame that Bowie Poag took down the old "Story of Propaganda" when he moved his site around - that story fit this article perfectly. It asserted that Microsoft and Bill Gates were simply pawns in Jack Kennedy's plan to bring about the Free Software movement.
Come on Bowie, put Propaganda back up. If you don't have it anymore, may I have permission to put my local mirror online?
Jon, get this guy to write an article!
on
Message from Kabul
·
· Score: 2
Really, if this guy is for real, get him to write an article about his experiences. See if you can get him a digial camera to take pictures, and some way to get them out of Afganistan. Even if you just give him a way to mail you the disk, it would be worth it.
The best thing in the world, for the world, is for people there to get their experiences out!
I've had the misfortune to have done some work on Windows NT, and the question that I could not answer from skimming the article was, "Were the installs of Windows uniprocessor or multiprocessor?"
In Windows, the critical section code will become a single bit test and set instruction on an uniprocessor system (which, being a single machine instruction, is very fast), but a much more complicated operation on a mulitprocessor build.
Under Linux, you don't have to explicitly compile your program to support multiprocessor, so I would guess that Linux is using a more SMP friendly implementation of a mutex than a uniprocessor build of Windows.
Sorry, that was last millenium. This millenium, evolution is allowed in Kansas, and piss-poor settlements between convicted monopolists and incompetent federal agencies are not.
Go Carla, Go Carla, Go Carla (Stovall, that is...)
This limit is for a SINGLE IDE disk. Now, if you use Logical Volume Management (which is in the standard 2.4 kernel, no patches required) you can combine multiple disks into one.
Since my machine has 2 IDE controllers, with 2 buses each, and 2 drives per bus, you could make a system with 8 144 pB drives, put an XFS partition on it, and have 1152.92 pB of storage.
And for meaningless statistics sake: I make my MP3s (from CDs that I own, thankyouverymuch) at an average of 160 kb/sec. At that rate, the specified drive array would store 1826693 YEARS of MP3s. None of which would be Brittany Spears.
This sounds a lot like the basic concepts behind Flash Translation Layer - you take a pile of sectors that are slow to erase, and insert a layer that allows you to map logical sectors to physical sectors any way you want. Thus, when you need to "erase" or "re-write" a logical sector, you just change the mapping to a physical sector that hasn't been written to. You then do a background process of taking physical sectors that are "dirty" (written to) but unused and erase them.
Funny how this idea comes around - FTL, LVM, and now Mt. Rainier. Similar concepts, different applications.
I just saw the announcement on NBC. Funny, they completely ignored the fact that the states are not signing on, they completely ignored the fact that this "settlement" hasn't been approved yet, they protrayed it as a done deal, show's over, nothing to see here, these aren't the droids you are looking for, you can go about your business, move along.
Then, they had the audacity to say, "Oh, yeah, Microsoft is the MS in MS/NBC..."
Actually, a more apropos rendering of the DOJ's posture relative to Microsoft can be found on any Slashdot message list by browsing at -1. I'll give you a hint: the server is in the.cx domain.
The question I have is, are these Quicktime using a codec that non-Mac, non-Windows folks can view?
Also, the big argument about Quicktime is "Higher quality, lower bitrate". Does this hold true against MPEG4? DiVX;)?
If Pixar is USING Linux internally, why don't they support it more EXTERNALLY?
And the last question: how does Pixar convert from whatever format they use internally to QuickTime? Are any of these conversion tools available for Linux?
Maybe not the vidication everybody thinks it is
on
Da Vinci Bridge Built
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
This may not be the vindication everybody thinks it is.
First, the actual bridge is much smaller than the bridge that DaVinci envisioned. When you scale things down, they get stronger due to the cube/square law (strength varies as the square of size, mass as the cube - halving the size of an object reduces strength to a quarter, but reduces mass (and thus needed strength) to an eighth).
Second, the actual bridge is using laminated lumber, rather than the stone DaVinci specified. Wood is a very strong substance, and will flex rather than crumble like stone.
The project page is/.'ed, so I cannot see if they factored these into the design, and I didn't see the Nova special. Does anybody know if they took these factors into account?
Your experiences are quite a bit different from mine. On all the DSPs that I've worked with, the JTAG debugger was around US$1K or less.
True, the debugger program has to know what mask device you are working with, but that is usually a simple matter of selecting the correct mask when the debugger is launched.
Perhaps you are thinking of a full JTAG implementation, with full scan chain support et cetera. I am talking about a simple implementation like Motorola's Background debugging mode support.
Besides, if you thing JTAG is flaky, try using a bond-out pod. I've not seen bond-outs for CPUs faster than about 20MHz, and those were always "stand on one foot, hold tongue just right, think happy thoughts, and don't breath while debugging" affairs.
While I can certainly understand Linus wanting to encourage would-be kernel developers to learn "a gram of analysis is worth a kilo of debugging", I do wish he would consider one area in which a kernel debugger is invaluable - hardware integration.
"In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is." In hardware development, there is the theory of what the hardware documentation says the chip will do, and then there is the practice of what it actually does. DMA's don't, interrupts stick, registers report old data. Obviously, you START by writing a user space app that pokes at the hardware (and this is one area in which Linux is head and shoulders above WinNT - there is NO way for a user space app to access hardware in NT, while in Linux you simply have to be root), but when you finally need to hook interrupts, allocate DMA buffers, etc., you need a debugger that can look at these events.
Also, when porting to other CPUs, you sometimes need to see what is going on at the hardware level, and how it affects the drivers in the kernel.
Yes, allowing debugging without analysis is bad. But throwing us back to the stone knives and bear skins era just to encourage hardier folks is an overreaction. Sure, make a KDB kernel bitch and moan during startup. Make it only allow root access, not normal user access. Force all file systems to run in full sync mode. But please don't make debugging buggy hardware any harder than it needs to be.
(Now, if only AMD would add a JTAG debugger to the Athlon chip, I'd be a happy man.)
Interior, Microsoft Corporate Headquarters Flunky1: Sir, we are having a problem - customers are rejecting the new builds of WindowsAYBABTU because it requires twenty CD-ROMS and a five-day download over a cable modem. What shall we do?
Bill: What? My plans for world dominion are threatened? You know the litany:
Bill and Flunky1 together, in a sing-song voice: "Ease of use is king"
Bill: No matter, I have minions working on this very problem.
Bill turns to a large monitor on the wall, withdraws a remote control from his pocket, and presses a button on it. Man on screen: Matsushita Research...
Add a lockout on Slashdot for IE or for IP address in MS's range:
We're sorry, but you are using an incompatible web browser, and you will not be able to render Slashdot in all its glory. Please switch to a more compatible browser
Let the geeks at the collective sweat over that one. Oh, and get UF to do it as well, like you guys did that long-ago April day....
That's no lie! I'm surprised by the number of comments and moderations done on this little thread - I had no idea so many people were so passionate about this!
Yes, but the URL I provided wasn't the one I was looking for. I was looking for a URL that might have had the original document as a PDF or a scan.
My point was that, because I was unable to refine my search, Google took the most numerous link (the ESR link), and gave that to me.
To complete my point, go try and find a PDF of the original document, or a scan. The only scan I could find was rather crufy and not quite what I was looking for, and I had to search the rest to determine that no cleaner version was to be found. Those extra 40 non-related links just wasted my time.
While I was composing my last post, several people pointed out Google's advanced search feature. Close, and thanks for pointing it out, but not quite as nice as Alta Vista's for one reason: Alta Vista allows me to type in my search phrase, while Google makes me split it up across several fields.
Also, Google cannot handle searches like:
(Signetics near ("Write Only Memory" or "write-only memory")) or ("dark emitting diode") or ("light emitting resistor")
It's kind of like the difference between a GUI and a command line - Google's implementation is more like a GUI, while Alta Vista's is more like a command line.
I am sure that for most folks, Google's advanced search is easier to understand, and that is an important design goal. However, I'd still like the full power of Alta Vista's boolean parser available to me as a power user. Perhaps Google could implement an extra field where folks like me could enter a complex boolean phrase.
The only advantage Alta Vista has over Google is proper Boolean search terms. If Google would get that, I'd drop Alta Vista from my bookmarks in a Planck Interval.
However, the one thing that keeps me using Alta Vista can be demonstrated with this example:
Earlier today, a co-worker and I were discussing Signetic's ficticious write only memory .
I wanted to see if anybody had ever put a copy of that data sheet up.
Now, searching with Google and the terms Signetics "write only memory" gets me over 80 hits, the last 40 of which have NOTHING to do with my search at all - they just contain one or more of the words. Note the quotes - I was searching for the exact phrase "write only memory", a distinction lost upon Google.
Now, searching on Alta Vista with Signetics near "write only memory" yeilds 57 hits, all of which are direct references to what I am looking for (most of which are mirrors of ESR's jargon file entry). Adding and not ("jargon file") neatly removes those, leaving 43 hits.
Why cannot Google add boolean searching to their engine? Perhaps they could do an initial fetch as they do now, then refine it with a boolean search?
Question: does Grub understand an XFS filesystem mounted on an LVM volume?
Not that Lilo does, mind you - my boot volumes are ext2 on a physical partition, but it would be nice to avoid that.
Also, will RH7.2 support setting up an LVM system? Root on LVM?
I feel that LVM is a very important advance for Linux - the ability to bolt a new hard disk in, and automatically extend the free space on your main volume is a leap ahead of Windows Xtremely Painful.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been looking for a watch to replace my current one - it stores telephone numbers and appointments. The problem is that it has 6 buttons - entering any data into it takes several seconds, and there is no way to pull the data off. Every 18 months, you'll have to re-enter everything after changing the battery.
So, I start looking at the watches like Timex's DataMan watch, that can be programmed from a computer. However, the transfer is still one way - from computer to watch. I'd like to be able to pull the data up from the watch, too.
Now, Casio has such a watch - it uses IR to communicate to and from the computer (I don't know if it uses actual IRDA protocol or just some bastard protocol Casio came up with - but I know where I'd place my bets...). However, this watch does not come in a version with a calculator pad (back to several seconds to enter the data) and is only available on-line as far as I can tell (not a huge problem, but I'd like to try it before I buy it.)
Now, Casio is releasing watches with barometers, GPS, phones, pagers, cameras, and compasses, but do they actually release a watch that contains a set of useful features?
(No, I don't want a PDA. I want something small, strapped to my body in a convenient place, that does a very limited set of functions, not a device that I must carry in a large pocket and must remember to pick up in the morning.)
I've found that in many cases, using the nameserver your ISP hands you will result in a 1-2 second per lookup delay - most ISPs have horribly overloaded their DNS servers. Where I work, I was seeing 2-5 seconds per lookup. I brought this to the attention of our IT staff, and had them reconfigure our plant nameserver to do the lookup directly. Name lookups went from 2-5 seconds to <100 msec. Since we are a large shop with lots of clients, it makes sense.
Running your own caching nameserver will speed up your browsing, and if you use a real name server package, you can configure it to do the lookups itself rather than going through your ISP's servers. Thus, you can prevent them from screwing with your DNS, you can use alternate root servers if you so choose, and you get better response.
I'm somewhat shocked that Assimilation-XP doesn't have a caching nameserver....
It's a real shame that Bowie Poag took down the old "Story of Propaganda" when he moved his site around - that story fit this article perfectly. It asserted that Microsoft and Bill Gates were simply pawns in Jack Kennedy's plan to bring about the Free Software movement.
Come on Bowie, put Propaganda back up. If you don't have it anymore, may I have permission to put my local mirror online?
Really, if this guy is for real, get him to write an article about his experiences. See if you can get him a digial camera to take pictures, and some way to get them out of Afganistan. Even if you just give him a way to mail you the disk, it would be worth it.
The best thing in the world, for the world, is for people there to get their experiences out!
I've had the misfortune to have done some work on Windows NT, and the question that I could not answer from skimming the article was, "Were the installs of Windows uniprocessor or multiprocessor?"
In Windows, the critical section code will become a single bit test and set instruction on an uniprocessor system (which, being a single machine instruction, is very fast), but a much more complicated operation on a mulitprocessor build.
Under Linux, you don't have to explicitly compile your program to support multiprocessor, so I would guess that Linux is using a more SMP friendly implementation of a mutex than a uniprocessor build of Windows.
Sir, I have a proposal here for some experiments in our bird wind tunnel. Experiments on top speed, stall speed, and acrobatics.
Sounds interesting. Who's the request from?
A Mr. Seagull. Jonathan Livingstone Seagull.
</Humor>
Sorry, that was last millenium. This millenium, evolution is allowed in Kansas, and piss-poor settlements between convicted monopolists and incompetent federal agencies are not.
Go Carla, Go Carla, Go Carla (Stovall, that is...)
How about the following for TLD's:
.£ et. al. )
/.'s, let's pool our money and set this up!
.© - for example, riaa.©, mpaa.©
.® - for all the corporations to have product domains (kleenex.®, q-tip.®)
.$ - for all the make-money-quick spammers (they seem to be largly US, but if needed, we can localize them with
Come on fellow
This limit is for a SINGLE IDE disk. Now, if you use Logical Volume Management (which is in the standard 2.4 kernel, no patches required) you can combine multiple disks into one.
Since my machine has 2 IDE controllers, with 2 buses each, and 2 drives per bus, you could make a system with 8 144 pB drives, put an XFS partition on it, and have 1152.92 pB of storage.
And for meaningless statistics sake: I make my MP3s (from CDs that I own, thankyouverymuch) at an average of 160 kb/sec. At that rate, the specified drive array would store 1826693 YEARS of MP3s. None of which would be Brittany Spears.
Good! Perhaps in some small way I helped to convince Ms. Stovall to help offset that horrible evolution thing....
Does anybody have a list of who's in, who's out, and who's fence sitting? The news sites I've checked don't have a complete list.
Also, I've mailed and emailed my AG: have you?
This sounds a lot like the basic concepts behind Flash Translation Layer - you take a pile of sectors that are slow to erase, and insert a layer that allows you to map logical sectors to physical sectors any way you want. Thus, when you need to "erase" or "re-write" a logical sector, you just change the mapping to a physical sector that hasn't been written to. You then do a background process of taking physical sectors that are "dirty" (written to) but unused and erase them.
Funny how this idea comes around - FTL, LVM, and now Mt. Rainier. Similar concepts, different applications.
I just saw the announcement on NBC. Funny, they completely ignored the fact that the states are not signing on, they completely ignored the fact that this "settlement" hasn't been approved yet, they protrayed it as a done deal, show's over, nothing to see here, these aren't the droids you are looking for, you can go about your business, move along.
Then, they had the audacity to say, "Oh, yeah, Microsoft is the MS in MS/NBC..."
Actually, a more apropos rendering of the DOJ's posture relative to Microsoft can be found on any Slashdot message list by browsing at -1. I'll give you a hint: the server is in the .cx domain.
The question I have is, are these Quicktime using a codec that non-Mac, non-Windows folks can view?
;)?
Also, the big argument about Quicktime is "Higher quality, lower bitrate". Does this hold true against MPEG4? DiVX
If Pixar is USING Linux internally, why don't they support it more EXTERNALLY?
And the last question: how does Pixar convert from whatever format they use internally to QuickTime? Are any of these conversion tools available for Linux?
This may not be the vindication everybody thinks it is.
/.'ed, so I cannot see if they factored these into the design, and I didn't see the Nova special. Does anybody know if they took these factors into account?
First, the actual bridge is much smaller than the bridge that DaVinci envisioned. When you scale things down, they get stronger due to the cube/square law (strength varies as the square of size, mass as the cube - halving the size of an object reduces strength to a quarter, but reduces mass (and thus needed strength) to an eighth).
Second, the actual bridge is using laminated lumber, rather than the stone DaVinci specified. Wood is a very strong substance, and will flex rather than crumble like stone.
The project page is
Your experiences are quite a bit different from mine. On all the DSPs that I've worked with, the JTAG debugger was around US$1K or less.
True, the debugger program has to know what mask device you are working with, but that is usually a simple matter of selecting the correct mask when the debugger is launched.
Perhaps you are thinking of a full JTAG implementation, with full scan chain support et cetera. I am talking about a simple implementation like Motorola's Background debugging mode support.
Besides, if you thing JTAG is flaky, try using a bond-out pod. I've not seen bond-outs for CPUs faster than about 20MHz, and those were always "stand on one foot, hold tongue just right, think happy thoughts, and don't breath while debugging" affairs.
While I can certainly understand Linus wanting to encourage would-be kernel developers to learn "a gram of analysis is worth a kilo of debugging", I do wish he would consider one area in which a kernel debugger is invaluable - hardware integration.
"In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is." In hardware development, there is the theory of what the hardware documentation says the chip will do, and then there is the practice of what it actually does. DMA's don't, interrupts stick, registers report old data. Obviously, you START by writing a user space app that pokes at the hardware (and this is one area in which Linux is head and shoulders above WinNT - there is NO way for a user space app to access hardware in NT, while in Linux you simply have to be root), but when you finally need to hook interrupts, allocate DMA buffers, etc., you need a debugger that can look at these events.
Also, when porting to other CPUs, you sometimes need to see what is going on at the hardware level, and how it affects the drivers in the kernel.
Yes, allowing debugging without analysis is bad. But throwing us back to the stone knives and bear skins era just to encourage hardier folks is an overreaction. Sure, make a KDB kernel bitch and moan during startup. Make it only allow root access, not normal user access. Force all file systems to run in full sync mode. But please don't make debugging buggy hardware any harder than it needs to be.
(Now, if only AMD would add a JTAG debugger to the Athlon chip, I'd be a happy man.)
Interior, Microsoft Corporate Headquarters
Flunky1: Sir, we are having a problem - customers are rejecting the new builds of WindowsAYBABTU because it requires twenty CD-ROMS and a five-day download over a cable modem. What shall we do?
Bill: What? My plans for world dominion are threatened? You know the litany:
Bill and Flunky1 together, in a sing-song voice: "Ease of use is king"
Bill: No matter, I have minions working on this very problem.
Bill turns to a large monitor on the wall, withdraws a remote control from his pocket, and presses a button on it.
Man on screen: Matsushita Research...
Let the geeks at the collective sweat over that one. Oh, and get UF to do it as well, like you guys did that long-ago April day....
That's no lie! I'm surprised by the number of comments and moderations done on this little thread - I had no idea so many people were so passionate about this!
Yes, but the URL I provided wasn't the one I was looking for. I was looking for a URL that might have had the original document as a PDF or a scan.
My point was that, because I was unable to refine my search, Google took the most numerous link (the ESR link), and gave that to me.
To complete my point, go try and find a PDF of the original document, or a scan. The only scan I could find was rather crufy and not quite what I was looking for, and I had to search the rest to determine that no cleaner version was to be found. Those extra 40 non-related links just wasted my time.
While I was composing my last post, several people pointed out Google's advanced search feature. Close, and thanks for pointing it out, but not quite as nice as Alta Vista's for one reason: Alta Vista allows me to type in my search phrase, while Google makes me split it up across several fields.
Also, Google cannot handle searches like:
(Signetics near ("Write Only Memory" or "write-only memory")) or ("dark emitting diode") or ("light emitting resistor")
It's kind of like the difference between a GUI and a command line - Google's implementation is more like a GUI, while Alta Vista's is more like a command line.
I am sure that for most folks, Google's advanced search is easier to understand, and that is an important design goal. However, I'd still like the full power of Alta Vista's boolean parser available to me as a power user. Perhaps Google could implement an extra field where folks like me could enter a complex boolean phrase.
The only advantage Alta Vista has over Google is proper Boolean search terms. If Google would get that, I'd drop Alta Vista from my bookmarks in a Planck Interval.
However, the one thing that keeps me using Alta Vista can be demonstrated with this example:
Earlier today, a co-worker and I were discussing
Signetic's ficticious write only memory .
I wanted to see if anybody had ever put a copy of that data sheet up.
Now, searching with Google and the terms Signetics "write only memory" gets me over 80 hits, the last 40 of which have NOTHING to do with my search at all - they just contain one or more of the words. Note the quotes - I was searching for the exact phrase "write only memory", a distinction lost upon Google.
Now, searching on Alta Vista with Signetics near "write only memory" yeilds 57 hits, all of which are direct references to what I am looking for (most of which are mirrors of ESR's jargon file entry). Adding and not ("jargon file") neatly removes those, leaving 43 hits.
Why cannot Google add boolean searching to their engine? Perhaps they could do an initial fetch as they do now, then refine it with a boolean search?
Question: does Grub understand an XFS filesystem mounted on an LVM volume?
Not that Lilo does, mind you - my boot volumes are ext2 on a physical partition, but it would be nice to avoid that.
Also, will RH7.2 support setting up an LVM system? Root on LVM?
I feel that LVM is a very important advance for Linux - the ability to bolt a new hard disk in, and automatically extend the free space on your main volume is a leap ahead of Windows Xtremely Painful.