And join a nearby Arduino user group! David Mellis just started one in Boston, which led me to purchase an Arduino last night!
The forums on the arduino site mention quite a few regional user's groups, maybe you can find one near you?
I wish I could subscribe to a mobile phone provider just like any other internet service provider.
Then I could choose whoever would charge me the least for the traffic, and I could do VoIP (or any standard TCP/IP traffic) with anyone on the internet without extra costs.
Have the "phone" companies switched to end-to-end data calls yet? If so, why are we forced to use them for voice calls? Shouldn't I be able to use my SIP provider?
90% of my phone calls are to people within thirty miles, a city-wide mesh network would handle that traffic for free... I want this option!
Ari Virtanen said on CNET "Once you put a SIM card in, it's automatically controlled by the operator."
I don't want to buy any hardware where I am not likely to control both ends of a connection. WiFi uses peers, but WiMAX uses a $15,000USD base station. I'm not likely to buy one of those ever.
So I'll skip out on GPRS, UMTS, WiMAX, or any other technology where I must talk to an expensive base station that will be controlled by a vendor.
I might buy a pocket widget that lets my Nokia 770 talk to the mobile phone network via bluetooth, but I don't want to be forced to buy that.
In Relating FFTW and Split-Radix Oleg describes how to generate an optimal FFT from Scheme in a single pass. The secret is not repeated optimization passes or in-depth CPU knowledge, but instead to know exactly which identities (i.e., axioms) contributed to the optimum solution.
I believe that in the future it will not be rare to generate optimal solutions, thus making choice of programming language a matter of personal taste or developer speed.
If you believe that you cannot change the laws and you choose civil disobedience, it should be done in public in front of the police station.
Disobeying the laws quietly at home is just cowardly.
Magnatune does sell non-DRM'd music. And it has a bunch of great stuff too.
I suggest starting at the top of the Best selling albums of all time list and working your way down. Not everything there does it for me, but I have bought at least ten magnatune albums.
Last week I purchased a $32 PDF copy of Richard Hamming's amazing book The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn from ebooks.com. I downloaded the PDF, and was unable to read it because the Linux version of Adobe Acrobat Reader 7 does not support the Adobe ebooks DRM standard (other choices were Microsoft DRM and something I've never heard of before). I've been trying to purchase this book for several years but it's out of print and used copies are easily $300 or more. I mailed the company hoping for some solution, but I was only offered a refund.
I really want to read this book. Do I get a refund or try to crack the DRM on something I just bought?
Of course, if I try to crack it, I can be arrested according to the DMCA....
I'm trying to find the consumer value here....
I started learning haXe last week. It's pretty cool.
haXe compiles to Flash, and JavaScript on the client-side and nekoVM on the server-side.
This is nice because I only need to know one language to build the whole solution.
haXe is a javascript-like language with some OCaml influences. It's implement in OCaml and is quite nifty.
Feel free to check out the Teach myself Flash tutorials I've been writing over the last few days.
To get back to the topic, I started with OpenLaszlo, but I don't really need such a simplistic solution, so I switched to haXe, where I can do everything Flash can do.
On the other hand, I'd rather use Scalable Vector Graphics and not have to use Flash at all! Firefox, please finish implementing SVG!
I'm not saying microkernels don't work, or that monolithic kernels do work.
I'm saying that the real thing that works or doesn't work is the people on the project, not the kernel structure, the abstraction, or whatever.
If you can get the right people into the correct roles, your project will succeed beyond your wildest dreams. All other considerations together have less of an effect than this factor.
As a fan of Haskell and type theory, I know and love the good points of being able to prove correctness.
The problem is that it doesn't match the way most people work right now.
Check out this brilliant paper by Alistair Cockburn (spoken as Co-burn) - Characterizing People as Non-Linear, First-Order Components in Software Development.
Over and over in this paper he says:
Problem 1. The people on the projects were not interested in learning our system.
Problem 2. They were successfully able to ignore us, and were still delivering software, anyway.
Alistair comes to an equally brilliant conclusion:
The fundamental characteristics of "people" have a first-order effect on software development, not a lower-order effect. Consequently, understanding this first-order effect should become a first-order research agenda item, and not neglected as a second-order item. I suggest that this field of study become a primary area in the field "software engineering" for the next 20-50 years.
In short, without Linus, microkernels may help. With Linus, a monolithic kernel works fine.
If you've ever worked on a software project with more than four people, didn't the personality and skills of the people involved make more of a difference than any methodology, abstraction, or even the language used? That's always been true in my experience.
Years before the web, FTP sites often included text files with the address of other FTP sites. It was a pain to download the file, open the file, find the address, copy the address, open an ftp application, and then paste the address. Gopher was easier, but the internet didn't explode into popularity until names included the address and the client was able to follow them directly.
In short, emailing bookmarks and copy'n'pasting bookmarks is a lot like the old FTP approach. An automatic peer to peer DNS is more like the web.
Actually, before the DNS system you hand edited your/etc/hosts file so you'd have nicknames for the ip addresses you used most often. That wasn't much fun either.
In any case, automatic migration of relevant information during a conversation is a Good Thing, a peer to peer DNS is just the first step.
I want a peer to peer DNS service that works like ant trails. You form connections to your peers, and names migrate according to requests.
For example, my peers would people from #haskell, people I know in person, my family, anyone I interact with.
When I look up the name 'slashdot' the request is sent to all (some?) of my peers. I'd get the number one result automaticaly (feeling lucky?) but be able to look at other results. Then I'd choose my definition of slashdot, and that would go into my local cache.
When a name is requested, its time-to-live is reset. If a name isn't requested for a long time, it expires. Locally created definitions would expire but still be saved, as the user may not agree with the community and wish to lock a definition.
New terms are created locally, then during a text chat someone else can look up that term in the originator's cache to see where it leads.
Then when they discuss the same thing with their friends, their friends get it from their cache.
Advantages:
Pull only system, so no spamming.
expiry system, so definitions of a term can evolve.
Creation of a name is essentially zero cost
lookup is totally distributed.
Disadvantages:
ICANN will hate me.
How to deal with ambiguity? LaTeX and latex are two different things.
Perfectly reversible computing does not produce heat.
Ever wondered what happens to bits that you erase out of memory or a register? They get dumped out of the chip and turn into heat.
Reversible logic reuses the electrical charge for your next computation, or for storing the next 1 that comes along.
On the downside, reversible hardware is much harder to design, but any addition of reverible logic on today's CPUs would decrease the amount of electricity needed and heat produced.
Electricity bills would be lower, and heat output would be smaller.
Laptops would last much longer, desktops wouldn't need a CPU cooler.
Even better, we could continue increasing the speed and diesize of CPUs.
One problem right now is that AMD, Intel, IBM, etc are perfectly able to produce a CPU that they have no hope of cooling. If reversible logic were used instead, you could have a 6GHz chip with the heat output of a 4.77 MHz 8086.
How can you implement something that you don't understand?
How can you fix something that you don't understand?
Once you've optimized the inner loop, the only way to improve your code is to change your abstractions, or change your implementation completely. That requires that you understand what you're doing. The more you understand it, the better your program can be.
I'd suggest test driven development, it interleaves design and implementation. Because, you can't implement something that you don't understand, and understanding often comes just after you wrote the code that requires or is required by the code you are about to write.
I'm using 6to4 right now, but it's not good enough! One of the greatest benefits of IPv6, true multicast support, does not work, since the underlying IPv4 layer does not support multicast.
Many applications could take advantage of multicast if it were available.
Some examples:
Bittorrent is a cheesy IPv4 emulation of multicast.
Game servers could multicast 'common' data and save roughly 50% of the total bandwidth used.
Mirror sites could multicast their updates. Debian, Redhat, and other mirrors would use a fraction of their current bandwidth.
If you went the bittorrent way, files could be sent via looping multicast, no more slashdotting the Id games servers.
Basically, any duplicate TCP/IP streams could be a single stream that gets replicated at the router. I want it now!
Think of it, even spam could be more efficient with multicast emails!
I agree with you. Do you (or anyone else) have suggestions for good programming blogs?
I like http://lamba-the-ultimate.org/, the blogs of Andy and Dave, authors of "The Pragmatic Programmer".
I like the idea of many simple CPUs on a die, but I want to extend that.
Why not go for a quilt architecture?
For example, what about using tiled hexagons and squares. The hexagons could be local memory, the squares could be the CPUs, the edges would be links to the next tile. The price of a single die would be set according to the number of flaws on the die.
Smaller CPUs are less likely to be dead because of a single flaw, so you'd get a higher yield.
You can fit more complete hexagons into a circular die than complete squares, so you'd get more CPUs.
I wonder why the CPU makers don't do this already?
I use saft, the simple asynchronous file transfer system. I don't know if it has a windows implementation, but it's great for sharing files with someone else directly.
Far far better is SFS, the self-certifying filesystem. It's more trouble to setup (unless you use Debian) but it allows you to create a secure NFS mount that can safely be mounted and used across the internet.
I've used it in the past to give read-only anonymous access to a directory, and I could still fly around the world and securely mount the SFS share somewhere else.
You probably don't want to mount an SFS share on insecure hardware that might have a keylogger, but it's a great way to have access to all your source code (and research papers in my case) from a friends house in another country.
From everything I've seen about Aspects, they look like a subset of Monads. Monads do the same sort of weaving of separated concerns, but as far as I can tell, monads are much easier to combine, have better granularity, simpler implementation, and a cleaner theoretical basis.
I realize I could be totally wrong, I never did finish reading all the papers on the Minimal Aspect Calculus article on lambda-the-ultimate.org.
Can you give me a better comparison between AOP and monads?
My preference is to get a list of features from the customer in the form of User Stories, and turn those directly into Acceptance Tests.
Tests tell you what to do, and when to stop.
I also put a rough estimate on the various user stories, and then let my client prioritize the stories so the work I do first is what they want most.
In many cases, clients don't know what they want until you don't give it to them. The best approach I've found for those cases is to whip up a tiny prototype to show to the clients and ask them what they like and don't like about that prototype.
Clients know what they want, but they rarely understand what's hard and what's easy when it comes to software.
So, I think design documents are best as a bunch of 3x5 cards holding user stories, along with matching acceptance tests.
I just bought a Network Walkman today, I'm happy to see that I can copy files into it with Linux, but at this point I'd like to know if I can initialize the Network Walkman with Linux. Any help?
If I can't get it working without Windows, I'll just take it back to the store. This is not enough reason to purchase a copy of Windows.
If I cannot initialize a Network Walkman with Linux, what flash-based 1GB players do work with only Linux?
Slashdot Mirror
I'd suggest that you buy an Arduino starter kit from Lady Ada's site, and try her Arduino tutorial.
And join a nearby Arduino user group!
David Mellis just started one in Boston, which led me to purchase an Arduino last night!
The forums on the arduino site mention quite a few regional user's groups, maybe you can find one near you?
I'll buy the FPGA OpenGraphics first release card. It's perfect for graphics, FPGA experimenting, signal analysis, etc. I can barely wait!
I wish I could subscribe to a mobile phone provider just like any other internet service provider.
Then I could choose whoever would charge me the least for the traffic, and I could do VoIP (or any standard TCP/IP traffic) with anyone on the internet without extra costs.
Have the "phone" companies switched to end-to-end data calls yet? If so, why are we forced to use them for voice calls? Shouldn't I be able to use my SIP provider?
90% of my phone calls are to people within thirty miles, a city-wide mesh network would handle that traffic for free... I want this option!
Is this impossible?
Ari Virtanen said on CNET "Once you put a SIM card in, it's automatically controlled by the operator."
I don't want to buy any hardware where I am not likely to control both ends of a connection. WiFi uses peers, but WiMAX uses a $15,000USD base station. I'm not likely to buy one of those ever.
So I'll skip out on GPRS, UMTS, WiMAX, or any other technology where I must talk to an expensive base station that will be controlled by a vendor.
I might buy a pocket widget that lets my Nokia 770 talk to the mobile phone network via bluetooth, but I don't want to be forced to buy that.
In Relating FFTW and Split-Radix Oleg describes how to generate an optimal FFT from Scheme in a single pass. The secret is not repeated optimization passes or in-depth CPU knowledge, but instead to know exactly which identities (i.e., axioms) contributed to the optimum solution. I believe that in the future it will not be rare to generate optimal solutions, thus making choice of programming language a matter of personal taste or developer speed.
If you believe that you cannot change the laws and you choose civil disobedience, it should be done in public in front of the police station.
Disobeying the laws quietly at home is just cowardly.
Magnatune does sell non-DRM'd music. And it has a bunch of great stuff too.
I suggest starting at the top of the Best selling albums of all time list and working your way down. Not everything there does it for me, but I have bought at least ten magnatune albums.
Last week I purchased a $32 PDF copy of Richard Hamming's amazing book The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn from ebooks.com. I downloaded the PDF, and was unable to read it because the Linux version of Adobe Acrobat Reader 7 does not support the Adobe ebooks DRM standard (other choices were Microsoft DRM and something I've never heard of before). I've been trying to purchase this book for several years but it's out of print and used copies are easily $300 or more. I mailed the company hoping for some solution, but I was only offered a refund.
I really want to read this book. Do I get a refund or try to crack the DRM on something I just bought?
Of course, if I try to crack it, I can be arrested according to the DMCA....
I'm trying to find the consumer value here....
I started learning haXe last week. It's pretty cool.
haXe compiles to Flash, and JavaScript on the client-side and nekoVM on the server-side.
This is nice because I only need to know one language to build the whole solution.
haXe is a javascript-like language with some OCaml influences. It's implement in OCaml and is quite nifty.
Feel free to check out the Teach myself Flash tutorials I've been writing over the last few days.
To get back to the topic, I started with OpenLaszlo, but I don't really need such a simplistic solution, so I switched to haXe, where I can do everything Flash can do.
On the other hand, I'd rather use Scalable Vector Graphics and not have to use Flash at all! Firefox, please finish implementing SVG!
I'm not saying microkernels don't work, or that monolithic kernels do work.
I'm saying that the real thing that works or doesn't work is the people on the project, not the kernel structure, the abstraction, or whatever.
If you can get the right people into the correct roles, your project will succeed beyond your wildest dreams. All other considerations together have less of an effect than this factor.
The problem is that it doesn't match the way most people work right now.
Check out this brilliant paper by Alistair Cockburn (spoken as Co-burn) - Characterizing People as Non-Linear, First-Order Components in Software Development. Over and over in this paper he says:
- Problem 1. The people on the projects were not interested in learning our system.
- Problem 2. They were successfully able to ignore us, and were still delivering software, anyway.
Alistair comes to an equally brilliant conclusion: In short, without Linus, microkernels may help. With Linus, a monolithic kernel works fine.If you've ever worked on a software project with more than four people, didn't the personality and skills of the people involved make more of a difference than any methodology, abstraction, or even the language used? That's always been true in my experience.
Years before the web, FTP sites often included text files with the address of other FTP sites. It was a pain to download the file, open the file, find the address, copy the address, open an ftp application, and then paste the address.
/etc/hosts file so you'd have nicknames for the ip addresses you used most often. That wasn't much fun either.
Gopher was easier, but the internet didn't explode into popularity until names included the address and the client was able to follow them directly.
In short, emailing bookmarks and copy'n'pasting bookmarks is a lot like the old FTP approach.
An automatic peer to peer DNS is more like the web.
Actually, before the DNS system you hand edited your
In any case, automatic migration of relevant information during a conversation is a Good Thing, a peer to peer DNS is just the first step.
For example, my peers would people from #haskell, people I know in person, my family, anyone I interact with.
When I look up the name 'slashdot' the request is sent to all (some?) of my peers. I'd get the number one result automaticaly (feeling lucky?) but be able to look at other results. Then I'd choose my definition of slashdot, and that would go into my local cache.
When a name is requested, its time-to-live is reset. If a name isn't requested for a long time, it expires. Locally created definitions would expire but still be saved, as the user may not agree with the community and wish to lock a definition.
New terms are created locally, then during a text chat someone else can look up that term in the originator's cache to see where it leads. Then when they discuss the same thing with their friends, their friends get it from their cache.
Advantages:
- Pull only system, so no spamming.
- expiry system, so definitions of a term can evolve.
- Creation of a name is essentially zero cost
- lookup is totally distributed.
Disadvantages:Perfectly reversible computing does not produce heat.
Ever wondered what happens to bits that you erase out of memory or a register? They get dumped out of the chip and turn into heat.
Reversible logic reuses the electrical charge for your next computation, or for storing the next 1 that comes along.
On the downside, reversible hardware is much harder to design, but any addition of reverible logic on today's CPUs would decrease the amount of electricity needed and heat produced.
Electricity bills would be lower, and heat output would be smaller.
Laptops would last much longer, desktops wouldn't need a CPU cooler.
Even better, we could continue increasing the speed and diesize of CPUs.
One problem right now is that AMD, Intel, IBM, etc are perfectly able to produce a CPU that they have no hope of cooling. If reversible logic were used instead, you could have a 6GHz chip with the heat output of a 4.77 MHz 8086.
How can you implement something that you don't understand?
How can you fix something that you don't understand?
Once you've optimized the inner loop, the only way to improve your code is to change your abstractions, or change your implementation completely. That requires that you understand what you're doing. The more you understand it, the better your program can be.
I'd suggest test driven development, it interleaves design and implementation. Because, you can't implement something that you don't understand, and understanding often comes just after you wrote the code that requires or is required by the code you are about to write.
I'm using 6to4 right now, but it's not good enough! One of the greatest benefits of IPv6, true multicast support, does not work, since the underlying IPv4 layer does not support multicast.
Many applications could take advantage of multicast if it were available.
Some examples:
Bittorrent is a cheesy IPv4 emulation of multicast.
Game servers could multicast 'common' data and save roughly 50% of the total bandwidth used.
Mirror sites could multicast their updates. Debian, Redhat, and other mirrors would use a fraction of their current bandwidth.
If you went the bittorrent way, files could be sent via looping multicast, no more slashdotting the Id games servers.
Basically, any duplicate TCP/IP streams could be a single stream that gets replicated at the router. I want it now!
Think of it, even spam could be more efficient with multicast emails!
I agree with you. Do you (or anyone else) have suggestions for good programming blogs?
I like http://lamba-the-ultimate.org/, the blogs of Andy and Dave, authors of "The Pragmatic Programmer".
I like the idea of many simple CPUs on a die, but I want to extend that.
Why not go for a quilt architecture?
For example, what about using tiled hexagons and squares. The hexagons could be local memory, the squares could be the CPUs, the edges would be links to the next tile.
The price of a single die would be set according to the number of flaws on the die.
Smaller CPUs are less likely to be dead because of a single flaw, so you'd get a higher yield.
You can fit more complete hexagons into a circular die than complete squares, so you'd get more CPUs.
I wonder why the CPU makers don't do this already?
I use saft, the simple asynchronous file transfer system. I don't know if it has a windows implementation, but it's great for sharing files with someone else directly.
Far far better is SFS, the self-certifying filesystem. It's more trouble to setup (unless you use Debian) but it allows you to create a secure NFS mount that can safely be mounted and used across the internet.
I've used it in the past to give read-only anonymous access to a directory, and I could still fly around the world and securely mount the SFS share somewhere else. You probably don't want to mount an SFS share on insecure hardware that might have a keylogger, but it's a great way to have access to all your source code (and research papers in my case) from a friends house in another country.
From everything I've seen about Aspects, they look like a subset of Monads. Monads do the same sort of weaving of separated concerns, but as far as I can tell, monads are much easier to combine, have better granularity, simpler implementation, and a cleaner theoretical basis.
I realize I could be totally wrong, I never did finish reading all the papers on the Minimal Aspect Calculus article on lambda-the-ultimate.org.
Can you give me a better comparison between AOP and monads?
My preference is to get a list of features from the customer in the form of User Stories, and turn those directly into Acceptance Tests.
Tests tell you what to do, and when to stop.
I also put a rough estimate on the various user stories, and then let my client prioritize the stories so the work I do first is what they want most.
In many cases, clients don't know what they want until you don't give it to them. The best approach I've found for those cases is to whip up a tiny prototype to show to the clients and ask them what they like and don't like about that prototype.
Clients know what they want, but they rarely understand what's hard and what's easy when it comes to software.
So, I think design documents are best as a bunch of 3x5 cards holding user stories, along with matching acceptance tests.
I just took back my NW-E407 and ordered an iRiver, much thanks for the advice.
I also bought the NW-E407 model.
I wonder if iRiver ships to Sweden?
Anyway, thanks for the info!
I just bought a Network Walkman today, I'm happy to see that I can copy files into it with Linux, but at this point I'd like to know if I can initialize the Network Walkman with Linux. Any help?
If I can't get it working without Windows, I'll just take it back to the store. This is not enough reason to purchase a copy of Windows.
If I cannot initialize a Network Walkman with Linux, what flash-based 1GB players do work with only Linux?
I admire Mark for spending money to make the world a better place, rather than spending it to make only his own life a better place.
I admire his efforts to organize schools to teach children and make the future a better place too.
This is the real spirit of open source, giving what you can in hopes it benefits others, improves the world, and in the long run benefits all of us.
Maybe I'll get rich one day and I can do the same.