All the many cubic light-years of space, probably millions, in the shadow from a single point in the sky.
No, not really. The sun is most certainly much bigger than the planet. In eclipses, the moon is only able to cast a core shadow because it's so near to earth. At longer distances the core shadow would become smaller until there is no core shadow anymore. What remains is a partial shadow which only decreases brightness of the light source, but does not completely block out light.
I never thought it was processor features that were preventing color screens in palmtops
The processor is not a simple processor, it's an embedded controller - the Dragonball in this case. It includes serial ports, timer, LCD controller etc. That's why these Palms are so small (most of its features are in one chip) and so powersaving (same reason, one chip needs less power than many, even if it does a lot of things).
Therefore, if the used Dragonball does not support color LCDs, you can't have color LCDs without using a space and power consuming separate LCD controller. That was not an option so color LCDs only got possible through the advanced Dragonball.
USB 2.0 is never a replacement for FireWire
on
USB2 Specs Are In
·
· Score: 2
Hm, Intel is still trying. However, Texas Instruments (major implementor of 1394 chips) expects them to give up soon (end of this or next year) or be given up by hardware vendors. The move is to include 1394 on motherboards soon, USB 2.0 is vaporware.
As for the speeds: 1394 does 400Mbps now (you can buy slower chips, but they are more expensive and harder to come by because they are only still in production for US military use). USB 2.0 is said to have little more than 400Mbps sometime in the future. Given the technology it is also in doubt if they ever reach that.
Future 1394 (IEEE 1394.b) is in draft and partly implemented in experimental hardware. 1394.b specifies 100Mbps on 50 meter UTP5 cables, 3200Mbps on 100 meter optical cables or 4.5 meter conventional cables. It is interoperable with 1394.a, whereas USB 2.0 will be incompatible with USB 1 (AFAIK, I'm not sure). By the time 1394.b is in silicon with 3.2Gbps, USB 2.0 will probably just have reached 480 Mbps...
One killer application for 1394 are the video cameras of which more and more come with a 1394 port (aka i.Link on Sony devices). 1394 is very nice for that. You can plug your camera into a 1394 VCR and copy your material over or display them on a 1394 digital TV (in theory, I don't think there are many 1394 VCRs and TVs out there already). This is something USB just cannot do. Yes, it could in theory, but USB is PC centric. It requires a PC and moves all data through your PC. No possibility just to connect a digital VCR to a digital TV. You'd need a PC and a program running on the PC to copy the data. There is simply NO WAY that USB 2.0 would make it into video cameras or similar devices.
So 1394 would have to be supported in a multimedia environment anyway. When you have 1394 why bother with USB 2.0, which would do the same as 1394 only not as good?
USB 1 sure has its place in PC environments (it would be quite overkill to connect your mouse or keyboard through 1394). But trying to push some variant of USB as a competitor for 1394 is just silly, it's just that Intel wants the market share.
Also, for the FireWire "tax" by Apple, yes, some sort of it is still in effect. Chip vendors have to pay $.50 license fee per 1394 device (device, not port) to Apple, but that 50 cents won't bring it down.
There is the GNU/Lunix IEEE 1394 Subsystem, but does anyone know how well this works/had experience with using it or knows if it will be included in the kernel sometime?
Current IEEE 1394 developer and maintainer, at your service:-)
It works with asynchronous transfers. I'm currently working on updating the userspace raw1394/libraw interface. When I'm done I'll try to get it into Linux 2.3 again (even though it's in feature freeze, but this subsystem does not affect any other code in the kernel).
Isochronous transmissions are not yet supported and I know that this is important for the people who want to get pictures from their cameras. At least isochronous receiving should not be too hard to implement, that is around next on my todo list.
As for the supported hardware: AIC5800 (out of production AFAIK), PCILynx (hard to come by, obsolete), OHCI (the standard of the future, implemented in hardware by various chip manufacturers). A Sony chip also exists (e.g. in the Vaio laptops), but is not yet supported. My OHCI card (donated by ADS Technologies) for some reason doesn't work, but I'm concentrating on PCILynx for the time being.
Wouldn't this technology (slow/speedup?) the Earth's rotation in time?
Ye gods. Not really. It would more likely deform the ground on which it was built before it is strong enough to have an effect on earth rotation that is not lost in the noise.
OTOH, if you manage to get an instant volcano during a start (as a result of shooting your maglev rail into earth's core), THEN you should worry.
and that they are not releasing the software in a "box" like you would buy RedHat or Quake, but as a fully installed server-machine and all. I'm not sure if that changes anything, but I guess I can see why it could. If they are selling it as a "customized machine" with "customized software" it is a possibility that it doesn't exactly infringe on any copyrights
The mode of distribution hardly effects the copyright, whether it's on floppy, CD-ROM, tapes or harddisks. Or harddisks inside a customized machine.
besides that, the software isn't "really" Linux anyway...
It doesn't matter at all what the product is, if it is derived from a GPL'd program or just uses significant portions of code (more than a few lines) from a GPL'd program it must be put under GPL. With the exception of course when the copyright holders make an explicit exception through a contract or whatever.
This means if they didn't include the source, you must email/write/phone/fax/etc them and request the source code, they then must provide the source by ftp/http/email/letter/fax/etc.
They must supply the source in machine readable form. I wouldn't call a faxed printout machine readable. The letter would only be a possible way if it's accompanied by a CD/whatever with the source on it.
Linux security is all-or-nothing. Administrators cannot delegate administrative privileges: a user who needs any administrative capability must be made a full administrator, which compromises best security practices. In contrast, Windows NT allows an administrator to delegate privileges at an exceptionally fine-grained level.
Someone please tell them about sudo!
It could get even simpler in the future. Capability lists are in development, which can give / take away certain capabilities from programs without needing them to be root (uid==root is effectively just the everything capability).
That would for example allow to let certain users run with network configuring ability without installing suid binaries for them. And a lot things more.
I remember hearing about plans of such intercept missiles in the 80's. So they finally did it.
However the problems are still the same. The launched rocket needs only a few minutes to its target (from Russia that would be 8 minutes I think), so the launch has to be detected early enough. The anti-missile also takes its time to reach the incoming rocket. And for each incoming nuke you need an anti-missile.
The real problems are multi warhead missiles which launch into space and then release up to 10 nukes with individual targets. You would have to hit the missile before it releases its nukes otherwise you would have to destroy ten targets, and as said above it may be hard to reach the missile before it separates its nukes.
So this is not very feasible against big nuclear weapon powers like Russia, it only might prove effective against attacks from the smaller nations which only have few, single warhead missiles.
> I don't buy it. There are so many hurdles to overcome for clockless logic... I doubt there will be anything usable in that area for several years, if not decades.
There are already asynchronous chips. University of Manchester developed the Amulet2e, a ARM7 derivate, from 1993 to 1995. It is compatible to ARM-v4G instruction set.
The TITAC-2 worked with 1.5V to 6V in environment temperatures of -196C to 100C (-320F to 212F, if I calculated correctly).
Clocked chips have to be clocked slow enough for the worst case (a set of commands that take a really long time before the chip enters a stable state), that's why overclocked / overheated CPUs work fine most of the time but only sometimes crash. These async CPUs get faster when they get cooler. They always run as fast as is possible given the temparature and commands to execute.
Rumors tell that German company Hagenuk will employ the Amulet3 in commercial products this year.
If you want to know more about micro pipelines, null convention logic and dual rail encoding, look it up in c't 17/99 (if you have that issue or want to reorder it and can read German of course;-)
I mailed information on the ongoing works and where to find homepage, patches and mailing lists to the linux-kernel. The whole patch is 230kB uncompressed (and still growing), so I only sent it to Linus and not the list.
It doesn't mean that all simpler reproductive systems (some of which wouldn't even classify as life) evolved into one cellular life. It could mean that all other forms died out.
Let's not forget that it is extremely improbable that some chemical reactions create life by coincidence. It only happened because there were so many reactions going on in early earth's oceans and it took millions and millions of years.
Once something more complex can live and reproduce effectively it will take over the biosphere, draining the resources from other, not-yet-so-effective life forms. Mitochondria are probably one such other form (they have their own DNA and reproduce themselves), they survived by entering a symbiotic relationship with cellular life.
I am currently maintaining and developing the FireWire subsystem which hasn't made it into the dev kernels yet. I sent a patch to Linus two weeks ago, but he didn't reply, which basically means refused. Understandably, there were some missing features like a highlevel driver interface (highlevel drivers as in harddisk driver etc.), which I am working on now, and isochronous transmissions.
When I get that sorted out I will try again. As it does not change anything outside of its own directory apart from a few Makefiles, it could be accepted even into a feature freeze. The homepage for this all is ECLiPt, where you can also subscribe to mailing lists.
The Milky Way is 100,000 light years in diameter. It is in the part where we are 650 light years thick. So if you are going to divide into big chunks you can just as well leave away the third dimension. If you want more granularity the quadrants are way too big.
> To effectively control a airplane (spaceships are a little bit different, but for an airplane) you need 4 "range of motion" controls, and a whole bunch of buttons.
Then so be it. Hey, they control real spaceships with joysticks. Try to find pictures of the control consoles used in the Apollo mission spaceships (sorry, don't have an URL handy).
My point was that analog control is just a lot more accurate than digital button pressing. Not to mention that you can control a lot of functions with one hand staying on the joystick. As opposed to hitting different buttons. Even the simplest joystick gives you the equivalent of four buttons.
The number of jets don't really matter, because that has to be controlled by computer anyway. What I was talking about is how to tell the computer what to do.
> Controlling a Galaxy class starship with a joystick.
Hm. I think it's rather strange that they do *not* use more joysticks. For standard situations it's alright, punch in the coordinates and start the autopilot. But in battle situations? Does anyone like to control a combat flight simulator with keyboard alone? Probably a Galaxy class ship would be too big for fast maneuvers, but at least shuttles and fighters would be hard to control in battle by touching symbols.
Sure, the manual control == joystick in the movie was a bit ridiculous, but it was funny and Riker looked really cool using it:-)
To answer your question: it tries to access something for which there is no driver loaded. What device it is exactly depends on the number. Or if it's char not being block device is that it tries to mount a drive which in fact is not a drive.
Cassini passed earth on swing-by today, IIRC. Everything went fine (in spite of the total eclipse:-), and Cassini is now on its way away from earth. If it would be destroyed, nothing would fall on earth.
But they wouldn't reach escape velocity by accident. Sure they skipped off but earth's gravity would pull them back eventually, letting them burn up in an uncontrolled fall into the atmosphere (in the worst case).
Slashdot Mirror
Perl starts indexing at zero, but that's configurable IIRC...
No, not really. The sun is most certainly much bigger than the planet. In eclipses, the moon is only able to cast a core shadow because it's so near to earth. At longer distances the core shadow would become smaller until there is no core shadow anymore. What remains is a partial shadow which only decreases brightness of the light source, but does not completely block out light.
The processor is not a simple processor, it's an embedded controller - the Dragonball in this case. It includes serial ports, timer, LCD controller etc. That's why these Palms are so small (most of its features are in one chip) and so powersaving (same reason, one chip needs less power than many, even if it does a lot of things).
Therefore, if the used Dragonball does not support color LCDs, you can't have color LCDs without using a space and power consuming separate LCD controller. That was not an option so color LCDs only got possible through the advanced Dragonball.
Hm, Intel is still trying. However, Texas Instruments (major implementor of 1394 chips) expects them to give up soon (end of this or next year) or be given up by hardware vendors. The move is to include 1394 on motherboards soon, USB 2.0 is vaporware.
As for the speeds: 1394 does 400Mbps now (you can buy slower chips, but they are more expensive and harder to come by because they are only still in production for US military use). USB 2.0 is said to have little more than 400Mbps sometime in the future. Given the technology it is also in doubt if they ever reach that.
Future 1394 (IEEE 1394.b) is in draft and partly implemented in experimental hardware. 1394.b specifies 100Mbps on 50 meter UTP5 cables, 3200Mbps on 100 meter optical cables or 4.5 meter conventional cables. It is interoperable with 1394.a, whereas USB 2.0 will be incompatible with USB 1 (AFAIK, I'm not sure). By the time 1394.b is in silicon with 3.2Gbps, USB 2.0 will probably just have reached 480 Mbps...
One killer application for 1394 are the video cameras of which more and more come with a 1394 port (aka i.Link on Sony devices). 1394 is very nice for that. You can plug your camera into a 1394 VCR and copy your material over or display them on a 1394 digital TV (in theory, I don't think there are many 1394 VCRs and TVs out there already). This is something USB just cannot do. Yes, it could in theory, but USB is PC centric. It requires a PC and moves all data through your PC. No possibility just to connect a digital VCR to a digital TV. You'd need a PC and a program running on the PC to copy the data. There is simply NO WAY that USB 2.0 would make it into video cameras or similar devices.
So 1394 would have to be supported in a multimedia environment anyway. When you have 1394 why bother with USB 2.0, which would do the same as 1394 only not as good?
USB 1 sure has its place in PC environments (it would be quite overkill to connect your mouse or keyboard through 1394). But trying to push some variant of USB as a competitor for 1394 is just silly, it's just that Intel wants the market share.
Also, for the FireWire "tax" by Apple, yes, some sort of it is still in effect. Chip vendors have to pay $.50 license fee per 1394 device (device, not port) to Apple, but that 50 cents won't bring it down.
And 1394 doesn't need those silly hubs.
Current IEEE 1394 developer and maintainer, at your service :-)
It works with asynchronous transfers. I'm currently working on updating the userspace raw1394/libraw interface. When I'm done I'll try to get it into Linux 2.3 again (even though it's in feature freeze, but this subsystem does not affect any other code in the kernel).
Isochronous transmissions are not yet supported and I know that this is important for the people who want to get pictures from their cameras. At least isochronous receiving should not be too hard to implement, that is around next on my todo list.
As for the supported hardware: AIC5800 (out of production AFAIK), PCILynx (hard to come by, obsolete), OHCI (the standard of the future, implemented in hardware by various chip manufacturers). A Sony chip also exists (e.g. in the Vaio laptops), but is not yet supported. My OHCI card (donated by ADS Technologies) for some reason doesn't work, but I'm concentrating on PCILynx for the time being.
Ye gods. Not really. It would more likely deform the ground on which it was built before it is strong enough to have an effect on earth rotation that is not lost in the noise.
OTOH, if you manage to get an instant volcano during a start (as a result of shooting your maglev rail into earth's core), THEN you should worry.
The mode of distribution hardly effects the copyright, whether it's on floppy, CD-ROM, tapes or harddisks. Or harddisks inside a customized machine.
besides that, the software isn't "really" Linux anyway...
It doesn't matter at all what the product is, if it is derived from a GPL'd program or just uses significant portions of code (more than a few lines) from a GPL'd program it must be put under GPL. With the exception of course when the copyright holders make an explicit exception through a contract or whatever.
Any lawyers out there that could clarify?
That didn't really need a lawyer, I think.
They must supply the source in machine readable form. I wouldn't call a faxed printout machine readable. The letter would only be a possible way if it's accompanied by a CD/whatever with the source on it.
Linux security is all-or-nothing. Administrators cannot delegate administrative privileges: a user who needs any administrative capability must be made a full administrator, which compromises best security practices. In contrast, Windows NT allows an administrator to delegate privileges at an exceptionally fine-grained level.
Someone please tell them about sudo!
It could get even simpler in the future. Capability lists are in development, which can give / take away certain capabilities from programs without needing them to be root (uid==root is effectively just the everything capability).
That would for example allow to let certain users run with network configuring ability without installing suid binaries for them. And a lot things more.
I remember hearing about plans of such intercept missiles in the 80's. So they finally did it.
However the problems are still the same. The launched rocket needs only a few minutes to its target (from Russia that would be 8 minutes I think), so the launch has to be detected early enough. The anti-missile also takes its time to reach the incoming rocket. And for each incoming nuke you need an anti-missile.
The real problems are multi warhead missiles which launch into space and then release up to 10 nukes with individual targets. You would have to hit the missile before it releases its nukes otherwise you would have to destroy ten targets, and as said above it may be hard to reach the missile before it separates its nukes.
So this is not very feasible against big nuclear weapon powers like Russia, it only might prove effective against attacks from the smaller nations which only have few, single warhead missiles.
There are already asynchronous chips. University of Manchester developed the Amulet2e, a ARM7 derivate, from 1993 to 1995. It is compatible to ARM-v4G instruction set.
Comparison data (I wish I could use tables):
CPU: ARM 710 -- Amulet2e fab process: 600nm -- 500nm transistor count: 570,000 -- 454,000 cache size: 8kB -- 4kB speed: 23 MIPS -- 38 MIPS
Even though the cache is only half as big it's faster.
Another one is the TITAC-2 developed in Japan. It is based on the MIPS R2000 but is not binary compatible.
Comparison for that:
CPU: TITAC-2 -- MIPS R2000 transistor count: 496,000 -- 100,000 core voltage: 3.3V -- 5V power consumption / w/o cache: 2.11W / 1.02W -- - / 2W performance / w/o cache: 54.1 MIPS / 26.5 MIPS -- - / 12 MIPS
The TITAC-2 worked with 1.5V to 6V in environment temperatures of -196C to 100C (-320F to 212F, if I calculated correctly).
Clocked chips have to be clocked slow enough for the worst case (a set of commands that take a really long time before the chip enters a stable state), that's why overclocked / overheated CPUs work fine most of the time but only sometimes crash. These async CPUs get faster when they get cooler. They always run as fast as is possible given the temparature and commands to execute.
Rumors tell that German company Hagenuk will employ the Amulet3 in commercial products this year.
If you want to know more about micro pipelines, null convention logic and dual rail encoding, look it up in c't 17/99 (if you have that issue or want to reorder it and can read German of course ;-)
I mailed information on the ongoing works and where to find homepage, patches and mailing lists to the linux-kernel. The whole patch is 230kB uncompressed (and still growing), so I only sent it to Linus and not the list.
It doesn't mean that all simpler reproductive systems (some of which wouldn't even classify as life) evolved into one cellular life. It could mean that all other forms died out.
Let's not forget that it is extremely improbable that some chemical reactions create life by coincidence. It only happened because there were so many reactions going on in early earth's oceans and it took millions and millions of years.
Once something more complex can live and reproduce effectively it will take over the biosphere, draining the resources from other, not-yet-so-effective life forms. Mitochondria are probably one such other form (they have their own DNA and reproduce themselves), they survived by entering a symbiotic relationship with cellular life.
I am currently maintaining and developing the FireWire subsystem which hasn't made it into the dev kernels yet. I sent a patch to Linus two weeks ago, but he didn't reply, which basically means refused. Understandably, there were some missing features like a highlevel driver interface (highlevel drivers as in harddisk driver etc.), which I am working on now, and isochronous transmissions.
When I get that sorted out I will try again. As it does not change anything outside of its own directory apart from a few Makefiles, it could be accepted even into a feature freeze. The homepage for this all is ECLiPt, where you can also subscribe to mailing lists.
The Milky Way is 100,000 light years in diameter. It is in the part where we are 650 light years thick. So if you are going to divide into big chunks you can just as well leave away the third dimension. If you want more granularity the quadrants are way too big.
> To effectively control a airplane (spaceships are a little bit different, but for an airplane) you need 4 "range of motion" controls, and a whole bunch of buttons.
Then so be it. Hey, they control real spaceships with joysticks. Try to find pictures of the control consoles used in the Apollo mission spaceships (sorry, don't have an URL handy).
My point was that analog control is just a lot more accurate than digital button pressing. Not to mention that you can control a lot of functions with one hand staying on the joystick. As opposed to hitting different buttons. Even the simplest joystick gives you the equivalent of four buttons.
The number of jets don't really matter, because that has to be controlled by computer anyway. What I was talking about is how to tell the computer what to do.
> Controlling a Galaxy class starship with a joystick.
:-)
Hm. I think it's rather strange that they do *not* use more joysticks. For standard situations it's alright, punch in the coordinates and start the autopilot. But in battle situations? Does anyone like to control a combat flight simulator with keyboard alone? Probably a Galaxy class ship would be too big for fast maneuvers, but at least shuttles and fighters would be hard to control in battle by touching symbols.
Sure, the manual control == joystick in the movie was a bit ridiculous, but it was funny and Riker looked really cool using it
> How can you devide 3d space into only 4 quadrents?
Because our galaxy is basically flat and not much in 3D?
That's an interview, not a hotline.
To answer your question: it tries to access something for which there is no driver loaded. What device it is exactly depends on the number. Or if it's char not being block device is that it tries to mount a drive which in fact is not a drive.
>But what I'm wondering is, did they think they invented Linux themselves?
Not them, but the bureocrats accepting the trademark didn't know that Linux was the name of an existing OS, that's why it succeeded back then.
A few molecules of Pu inhaled would not suffice. I think it's around 1 or 2 milligrams.
Cassini passed earth on swing-by today, IIRC. Everything went fine (in spite of the total eclipse :-), and Cassini is now on its way away from earth. If it would be destroyed, nothing would fall on earth.
Custom made, cannot be bought. Look at imdb.com's info for Matrix, under the external links section. I think it was the FAQ link.
Also among the fighting styles uploaded into Neo's brain was "Drunken Boxing" :-)
But they wouldn't reach escape velocity by accident. Sure they skipped off but earth's gravity would pull them back eventually, letting them burn up in an uncontrolled fall into the atmosphere (in the worst case).