I haven't had too much as far as good experiences with snes9x - zsnes is a lot easier to configure and has a lot of neat features.
But I agree that they really should have maintained C versions of all code for their emulator, especially in modern times when CPUs are more than fast enough to emulate an SNES without any assembly. As a result of the horrible dependence on assembly, ZSNES under Linux is missing a lot of features the Windows version has (such as HQ4X scaling, Linux only had HQ2X as of the last WIP I tried, which was only 1-2 months ago.)
Arecibo is not only a radio telescope, but a VERY large and powerful radar facility for both atmospheric and planetary studies.
In fact, Arecibo was originally going to be built only for radar purposes. Then it became realized that with only little modification (small increase in cost) it could also be used for radio astronomy, thus greatly increasing the funding available.
One of the original purposes Arecibo was conceived for was ionospheric studies in the UHF band (approx 432 MHz). That's the primary use for the 432 MHz line feed (which Brosnan and the other dude fought on a replica of). In addition there is a high-power (Multi-megawatt CW, modulated with a pseudorandom sequence that provides pulse compression, making it the equivalent of a pulsed radar with a peak power in the GW range) microwave transmitter at either 2.4 GHz or 10 GHz (I can't remember, it's been a long time since my RF Circuits and Antennas and Radar classes, both taught by professors who use the Arecibo facility for research.) that is used for planetary radar, one example being mapping of the surface of Venus.
Radio astronomy was originally a secondary consideration in Arecibo's construction, one that has brought in so much additional funding that it has wound up becoming the facility's primary use.
BTW, the 432 MHz antenna is so complex because the Arecibo dish is actually spherical and not parabolic, and as a result has a focal line and not a focal point. For the microwave bands, they compensate for this with a very weird multiple-reflector feed arrangement that brings everything to a focal point, but for UHF they needed the line feed, which was apparently VERY tough to design and took multiple tries to get right.
I'm pretty sure that in the case of Goldeneye, Arecibo's transmitters were shut down.
Also, for the final fight scene on the UHF antenna (the weird slotted one with discs hanging downwards), that was staged on a set and not actually shot on Arecibo's UHF antenna. That thing is *damn fragile* and two humans hanging off of it would most likely have destroyed it.
#1 reason I don't care about the results of this study:
Any damage done by microwave radiation is non-ionizing. Basically, instead of "flipping bits" in your DNA directly, microwave radiation causes heating, which can increase the probability of protein denaturing, transcription errors, etc. if singificant enough.
Thing is - Isolated cells in a culture don't really have a way to transport away excess heat. Meanwhile, in reality, we have our blood constantly flowing through our tissues to provide temperature regulation. It's only when power levels get too high for our body to compensate for the heating (microwave ovens, high-power microwave transmitters) that damage occurs.
I used to work at a company that built RF power amplifiers for cellular base stations. We were routinely around field strengths significantly higher than that around a cell phone. Some of my coworkers there had been in the RFPA business since the first cellular telephone call was made. If RF exposure of the levels experienced from modern cell phones caused DNA damage, many of my coworkes would have been dead instead of grey-haired old men. Most of them (including myself) have suffered far more tissue damage from soldering irons than from RF.
"Her hobby produced a chameleon computer called the C-1. Changing its basic software could make it mimic not only a Commodore 64, but ultimately more than nine other popular home computers of the early 1980's, including the Atari, TI, Vic and Sinclair."
Best Buy happens to be selling just such a device that is designed to play old Atari games. It's sold by Atari but I wonder if they are using her design.
I usually make up for low upload bandwidth with extra upload time. I make a point of keeping my ratio (when I can) 1:1 or above. To avoid pissing off my ISP, I do this by capping my UL bandwidth at 6 kilobytes/sec (a fraction of my upstream) and just leave it running much longer.
What pisses off ISPs the most is people who saturate their upstream with lengthy bursts at peak bandwidth.
tvtorrents.com (NOT related to tvtorrents.net, the site for the EFNet #tvtorrents channel) uses ratio enforcement, blocking users whose ratio gets too bad. 1 credit used per KB downloaded, 1 credit gained per KB uploaded, 1.5 if you're seeding a complete file. The end result is that until a set of DDoS attacks took the site down for over a month, torrents that tvtorrents.com carried were FAR faster than ones obtained from whatever #tvtorrents' site was. Unfortunately, many of the old tvt.com users have left and now the site is kind of dead. Even Enterprise takes a few days to get seeded, and Enterprise episodes used to be tvt.com's most popular downloads.
Unfortunately due to leechers who repeatedly signed up for new accounts to get around being blocked for leeching, it became hard for tvt.com to attract new users, which is probably why it never recovered. Some other method needs to be given to give people incentive to rack up a good ratio but without making things difficult for new users who have yet to rack up a good ratio.
For anyone who actully gives a crap about performance and feature support, free drivers aren't an option and never will be thanks to patent issues.
For example, the reason UT2K3 only worked with NVidia cards for quite a while (until the binary ATI drivers were released) was because to achieve acceptable quality/performance, UT2K3's developers HAD to use S3 Texture Compression, which is patented and the patent licenses ATi and NV have don't allow them to include S3TC support in open-source drivers. That's just one example of why free drivers will not be an option for a long time.:(
So "dark fiber" is not really the correct word here. BTW, I have NEVER seen the article's definition for dark fiber used before, I have always seen it used to describe the excess unlit fiber that is always installed when someone runs fiber. As many earlier posters pointed out, in most situations (especially long-haul ones that involve digging), the cost of running 100 fibers instead of one is insignificant compared to the cost of digging a hole to install the fiber in.
Even with great advances in PDA CPU power and PDA-based web browsers, Palm's PQAs were king as far as ease of use when it came to quickly looking up info.
When Palm.Net was shut down, the PQA gateways were too. As a result, existing Palm-based devices became much less functional. (Using the web browser on my Kyocera 6035 is nowhere near as convenient/fast/easy as PQAs were and is much slower.)
Palm should have open-sourced the PQA gateway software and released a small update for PalmOS allowing the user to set their PQA gateway in the same manner as WAP gateways for WAP browsers.
The feature I liked most about my smartphone no longer works, and none of the current breed of smartphones can really compare in both design and features that *I* actually use.:( Almost all of the current smartphones are PDAs first and then phones, and as a result utterly suck as phones. (I've heard numerous complaints about awful sound quality with the new Treos, and I just don't like their design in general.)
Yeah, his problems sound like a classic "no external antenna" situation.
When using a handheld GPS inside a car, his reliability problems are typical no matter where you are because of the metal roof. For good GPS reception in a car, you NEED an external antenna.
The tracker for EFNet's #tvtorrents (now at www.tvtorrents.net) seems to move every 3-4 months due to someone DDoSing the tracker.
tvtorrents.com basically died as a result of frequent DDoSing. It's still up, but only a fraction of the people that used it still do because there was a point in time where the site would be down for 1-2 weeks at a time. Too bad, tvtorrents.com's ratio enforcement resulted in really nice download rates, typically 4-5 times faster than #tvtorrents' tracker, and FAR better than Suprnova (I've only encountered ONE torrent on Suprnova so far that actually worked.)
The article makes it sound like the system relies partially on security-through-obscurity (the w0zNet thing), but that doesn't sound like something Wozniak would ever think of trying to rely on... He's just too brilliant for that.
I wouldn't be surprised if in addition to a decent amount of obscurity, the system also has plenty of true security, i.e. it would be secure even if every detail of how the system works was known.
Also, the whole GPS thing doesn't make much sense to me. Too easy to spoof an incorrect GPS location at the access point, and most of the time, the dongle itself wouldn't be receiving GPS signals (most office buildings are constructed mainly from metal, the end result is most RF signals don't penetrate the walls. Cell phones barely worked in most areas of the last place I worked, no way GPS receivers would have.)
A highly directional antenna pointed close to the horizon might be able to pull it off.
It definately won't work in your car.
Try www.worldspace.com - WorldSpace and XM used to be the same company (or one owned the other), now they are independent companies, although some of XM's programming is still done by WorldSpace. (For example, XM 82 - The System is a WorldSpace channel that XM carries.)
When you subscribe, you give them your Radio ID. (Basically a serial number for your radio.)
They then have the satellites periodically broadcast an "Activate radio ID xyz123" inside their data stream for a few hours/days. The radio is then activated.
When your sub runs out, they begin periodically broadcasting "Deactivate radio ID xyz123" messages for for at least a few months.
I've heard that a few people have been able to get free service by activating for a month, then cancelling and leaving the radio off for 5-6 months. Apparently the deactivation signals for any given radio are only sent for a few months. But it's a gamble - XM could send a deactivation signal again at any time.
You may stand to make more by offering Wi-Fi for free rather than charging it.
For example, if I drank coffee (I don't), I would pick a coffee shop with free Wi-Fi over a Starbucks that wanted to charge me. Thus the Wi-Fi becomes a loss leader.
Yes, DV is also a compressed format, although it uses FAR less compression than MPEG does.
Most importantly is that it does not do difference frame encoding, each frame is compressed completely independently of all others. DV is basically a Motion JPEG variant. Not the most efficient compression algorithm, but good if you need to edit your video since you can split the video at any frame. (As opposed to MPEG, which requires you to recompress the video if you want to split anywhere other than a keyframe.)
Even the editors can't be bothered to RTFA nowadays.
These cameras aren't HD.
In fact their quality is lower than that of standard MiniDV camcorders.
DV video is captured at 720x480 (interlaced or progressive depending on the camera, only the high-end ones are progressive) using a variant of Motion JPEG. The compression is pretty light, so the quality is high. DV video from a good camera (good optics and CCD) is slightly better than DVD quality.
This camera records DVD-quality/bitrate MPEG-2 (more compressed than DV) and its tiny optics dictate even lower quality no matter what the compression technique is. DVD is NOT HD.
JVC DOES have actual HD-capable cameras, but the cameras linked to are not them, and they are best described as "prosumer", a term used often in photography circles to describe equipment that is WAY too expensive for your average consumer, but not nearly as expensive as the true professional stuff. (The JVC HD cameras cost a few thousand dollars each, and use tapes as their media.)
We can't even achieve a controlled deuterium or tritium based reaction.
IIRC, the heavier an element is the harder it is to get it to fuse. (Probably the main thing is the number of protons, which translates to increased electrostatic repulsion between the nuclei.)
Honestly, He3 doesn't seem to be that big of a deal to me. Hydrogen isotope based reactions are going to be easier to achieve, and while they produce some radiation, the radiation problem of hydrogen fusion is insignificant compared to that of fission waste.
And it's even easier to obtain deuterium than it is to get He3 even if you remove the logistical issues of getting to the moon and back - Deuterium is plentiful in *sea water*.
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Except that the C is so closely tied into the assembly code that it's impossible to tweak the C code without totally reworking the ASM.
I've tried... The C code depends too much on large chunks of ASM.
I haven't had too much as far as good experiences with snes9x - zsnes is a lot easier to configure and has a lot of neat features.
But I agree that they really should have maintained C versions of all code for their emulator, especially in modern times when CPUs are more than fast enough to emulate an SNES without any assembly. As a result of the horrible dependence on assembly, ZSNES under Linux is missing a lot of features the Windows version has (such as HQ4X scaling, Linux only had HQ2X as of the last WIP I tried, which was only 1-2 months ago.)
One aspect of the review mentioned the Indeo codec for one of the devices.
There was also no mention whatsoever of hardware MPEG2 encoding.
If it doesn't encode MPEG2 in hardware, it's not worth buying. Period.
FALSE.
Arecibo is not only a radio telescope, but a VERY large and powerful radar facility for both atmospheric and planetary studies.
In fact, Arecibo was originally going to be built only for radar purposes. Then it became realized that with only little modification (small increase in cost) it could also be used for radio astronomy, thus greatly increasing the funding available.
One of the original purposes Arecibo was conceived for was ionospheric studies in the UHF band (approx 432 MHz). That's the primary use for the 432 MHz line feed (which Brosnan and the other dude fought on a replica of). In addition there is a high-power (Multi-megawatt CW, modulated with a pseudorandom sequence that provides pulse compression, making it the equivalent of a pulsed radar with a peak power in the GW range) microwave transmitter at either 2.4 GHz or 10 GHz (I can't remember, it's been a long time since my RF Circuits and Antennas and Radar classes, both taught by professors who use the Arecibo facility for research.) that is used for planetary radar, one example being mapping of the surface of Venus.
Radio astronomy was originally a secondary consideration in Arecibo's construction, one that has brought in so much additional funding that it has wound up becoming the facility's primary use.
BTW, the 432 MHz antenna is so complex because the Arecibo dish is actually spherical and not parabolic, and as a result has a focal line and not a focal point. For the microwave bands, they compensate for this with a very weird multiple-reflector feed arrangement that brings everything to a focal point, but for UHF they needed the line feed, which was apparently VERY tough to design and took multiple tries to get right.
I'm pretty sure that in the case of Goldeneye, Arecibo's transmitters were shut down.
Also, for the final fight scene on the UHF antenna (the weird slotted one with discs hanging downwards), that was staged on a set and not actually shot on Arecibo's UHF antenna. That thing is *damn fragile* and two humans hanging off of it would most likely have destroyed it.
#1 reason I don't care about the results of this study:
Any damage done by microwave radiation is non-ionizing. Basically, instead of "flipping bits" in your DNA directly, microwave radiation causes heating, which can increase the probability of protein denaturing, transcription errors, etc. if singificant enough.
Thing is - Isolated cells in a culture don't really have a way to transport away excess heat. Meanwhile, in reality, we have our blood constantly flowing through our tissues to provide temperature regulation. It's only when power levels get too high for our body to compensate for the heating (microwave ovens, high-power microwave transmitters) that damage occurs.
I used to work at a company that built RF power amplifiers for cellular base stations. We were routinely around field strengths significantly higher than that around a cell phone. Some of my coworkers there had been in the RFPA business since the first cellular telephone call was made. If RF exposure of the levels experienced from modern cell phones caused DNA damage, many of my coworkes would have been dead instead of grey-haired old men. Most of them (including myself) have suffered far more tissue damage from soldering irons than from RF.
"Her hobby produced a chameleon computer called the C-1. Changing its basic software could make it mimic not only a Commodore 64, but ultimately more than nine other popular home computers of the early 1980's, including the Atari, TI, Vic and Sinclair."
Best Buy happens to be selling just such a device that is designed to play old Atari games. It's sold by Atari but I wonder if they are using her design.
I usually make up for low upload bandwidth with extra upload time. I make a point of keeping my ratio (when I can) 1:1 or above. To avoid pissing off my ISP, I do this by capping my UL bandwidth at 6 kilobytes/sec (a fraction of my upstream) and just leave it running much longer.
What pisses off ISPs the most is people who saturate their upstream with lengthy bursts at peak bandwidth.
Best fix for this is ratio enforcement.
tvtorrents.com (NOT related to tvtorrents.net, the site for the EFNet #tvtorrents channel) uses ratio enforcement, blocking users whose ratio gets too bad. 1 credit used per KB downloaded, 1 credit gained per KB uploaded, 1.5 if you're seeding a complete file. The end result is that until a set of DDoS attacks took the site down for over a month, torrents that tvtorrents.com carried were FAR faster than ones obtained from whatever #tvtorrents' site was. Unfortunately, many of the old tvt.com users have left and now the site is kind of dead. Even Enterprise takes a few days to get seeded, and Enterprise episodes used to be tvt.com's most popular downloads.
Unfortunately due to leechers who repeatedly signed up for new accounts to get around being blocked for leeching, it became hard for tvt.com to attract new users, which is probably why it never recovered. Some other method needs to be given to give people incentive to rack up a good ratio but without making things difficult for new users who have yet to rack up a good ratio.
For anyone who actully gives a crap about performance and feature support, free drivers aren't an option and never will be thanks to patent issues.
:(
For example, the reason UT2K3 only worked with NVidia cards for quite a while (until the binary ATI drivers were released) was because to achieve acceptable quality/performance, UT2K3's developers HAD to use S3 Texture Compression, which is patented and the patent licenses ATi and NV have don't allow them to include S3TC support in open-source drivers. That's just one example of why free drivers will not be an option for a long time.
Yeah. So far the only function I regularly use that seems to be missing is psd() - pwelch() is similar but just isn't quite the same.
So "dark fiber" is not really the correct word here. BTW, I have NEVER seen the article's definition for dark fiber used before, I have always seen it used to describe the excess unlit fiber that is always installed when someone runs fiber. As many earlier posters pointed out, in most situations (especially long-haul ones that involve digging), the cost of running 100 fibers instead of one is insignificant compared to the cost of digging a hole to install the fiber in.
Even with great advances in PDA CPU power and PDA-based web browsers, Palm's PQAs were king as far as ease of use when it came to quickly looking up info.
:( Almost all of the current smartphones are PDAs first and then phones, and as a result utterly suck as phones. (I've heard numerous complaints about awful sound quality with the new Treos, and I just don't like their design in general.)
When Palm.Net was shut down, the PQA gateways were too. As a result, existing Palm-based devices became much less functional. (Using the web browser on my Kyocera 6035 is nowhere near as convenient/fast/easy as PQAs were and is much slower.)
Palm should have open-sourced the PQA gateway software and released a small update for PalmOS allowing the user to set their PQA gateway in the same manner as WAP gateways for WAP browsers.
The feature I liked most about my smartphone no longer works, and none of the current breed of smartphones can really compare in both design and features that *I* actually use.
Yeah, his problems sound like a classic "no external antenna" situation.
When using a handheld GPS inside a car, his reliability problems are typical no matter where you are because of the metal roof. For good GPS reception in a car, you NEED an external antenna.
BIOS needs to support booting from USB.
Pretty rare in all but the most recent systems.
I love my RS 15-2116
There's a good One For All remote available at Wally World for $18 that's almost equivalent to the 2116 minus the LCD display. (The 2116 is $30.)
The 2116's feel is great in your hand, plus it's an amazingly flexible remote when combined with JP1.
The tracker for EFNet's #tvtorrents (now at www.tvtorrents.net) seems to move every 3-4 months due to someone DDoSing the tracker.
tvtorrents.com basically died as a result of frequent DDoSing. It's still up, but only a fraction of the people that used it still do because there was a point in time where the site would be down for 1-2 weeks at a time. Too bad, tvtorrents.com's ratio enforcement resulted in really nice download rates, typically 4-5 times faster than #tvtorrents' tracker, and FAR better than Suprnova (I've only encountered ONE torrent on Suprnova so far that actually worked.)
The article makes it sound like the system relies partially on security-through-obscurity (the w0zNet thing), but that doesn't sound like something Wozniak would ever think of trying to rely on... He's just too brilliant for that.
I wouldn't be surprised if in addition to a decent amount of obscurity, the system also has plenty of true security, i.e. it would be secure even if every detail of how the system works was known.
Also, the whole GPS thing doesn't make much sense to me. Too easy to spoof an incorrect GPS location at the access point, and most of the time, the dongle itself wouldn't be receiving GPS signals (most office buildings are constructed mainly from metal, the end result is most RF signals don't penetrate the walls. Cell phones barely worked in most areas of the last place I worked, no way GPS receivers would have.)
A highly directional antenna pointed close to the horizon might be able to pull it off.
It definately won't work in your car.
Try www.worldspace.com - WorldSpace and XM used to be the same company (or one owned the other), now they are independent companies, although some of XM's programming is still done by WorldSpace. (For example, XM 82 - The System is a WorldSpace channel that XM carries.)
When you subscribe, you give them your Radio ID. (Basically a serial number for your radio.)
They then have the satellites periodically broadcast an "Activate radio ID xyz123" inside their data stream for a few hours/days. The radio is then activated.
When your sub runs out, they begin periodically broadcasting "Deactivate radio ID xyz123" messages for for at least a few months.
I've heard that a few people have been able to get free service by activating for a month, then cancelling and leaving the radio off for 5-6 months. Apparently the deactivation signals for any given radio are only sent for a few months. But it's a gamble - XM could send a deactivation signal again at any time.
Even in a major metropolitan area, the selection of FM stations can't come even close to comparing to XM.
I have a Roady (The Roady2 is $120 or so, same price I paid for my original Roady 9 months or so ago), and I LOVE it.
You may stand to make more by offering Wi-Fi for free rather than charging it.
For example, if I drank coffee (I don't), I would pick a coffee shop with free Wi-Fi over a Starbucks that wanted to charge me. Thus the Wi-Fi becomes a loss leader.
Yes, DV is also a compressed format, although it uses FAR less compression than MPEG does.
Most importantly is that it does not do difference frame encoding, each frame is compressed completely independently of all others. DV is basically a Motion JPEG variant. Not the most efficient compression algorithm, but good if you need to edit your video since you can split the video at any frame. (As opposed to MPEG, which requires you to recompress the video if you want to split anywhere other than a keyframe.)
Even the editors can't be bothered to RTFA nowadays.
These cameras aren't HD.
In fact their quality is lower than that of standard MiniDV camcorders.
DV video is captured at 720x480 (interlaced or progressive depending on the camera, only the high-end ones are progressive) using a variant of Motion JPEG. The compression is pretty light, so the quality is high. DV video from a good camera (good optics and CCD) is slightly better than DVD quality.
This camera records DVD-quality/bitrate MPEG-2 (more compressed than DV) and its tiny optics dictate even lower quality no matter what the compression technique is. DVD is NOT HD.
JVC DOES have actual HD-capable cameras, but the cameras linked to are not them, and they are best described as "prosumer", a term used often in photography circles to describe equipment that is WAY too expensive for your average consumer, but not nearly as expensive as the true professional stuff. (The JVC HD cameras cost a few thousand dollars each, and use tapes as their media.)
We can't even achieve a controlled deuterium or tritium based reaction.
IIRC, the heavier an element is the harder it is to get it to fuse. (Probably the main thing is the number of protons, which translates to increased electrostatic repulsion between the nuclei.)
Honestly, He3 doesn't seem to be that big of a deal to me. Hydrogen isotope based reactions are going to be easier to achieve, and while they produce some radiation, the radiation problem of hydrogen fusion is insignificant compared to that of fission waste.
And it's even easier to obtain deuterium than it is to get He3 even if you remove the logistical issues of getting to the moon and back - Deuterium is plentiful in *sea water*.