Ok... I'm off topic, but this is the place to say it. I've told everyone, consistently, and for a long time now...
I will not support, learn, tolerate, or any way enable or support either Windows XP or this ".NET" crap. We're a Microsoft shop, using NT and 2000 for servers, and 98 for workstations. We will NOT "upgrade", EVER.
It does what we want, albeit imperfectly. The new bugs and security holes (and hardware requirements) are more trouble then they are worth.
Unless you've got a generator running contiunously, or a battery based online UPS for the entire building, you can't assume the power is truely uninterruptable. I'd put UPS on everything as a matter of course, so when you get that few second outage when the generators kick in, you don't lose everything.
I use ThumbsPlus to keep a database of my images. It does a nice job, has a slideshow mode, and a bunch of other features. The most valuable part is that it can associate keywords with the images, and can keep them in an Access97 compatable format.
The fact is that you really can't search for images with current technology, you can only search on the text that describes them. (Which once again brings GREP, etc. back into the picture).
Layout sucks, it's overrated, and is just a pain in the ass, (on the web, at least) for those of use who like to keep our monitors set to 1600x1200.
"The goal is to enable searching not only by file name, but by file content."
You can achieve this goal by the following process:
1. Store all of your documents in a simple, text based format, and not in some overly complex propriatary format such as ".DOC", ".PDF", etc.
1. This text based format is known as "American Standard Code for Information Interchange" (AKA "ASCII")
2. If you require more complex presentation of information, you might want to use something called HyperText Markup Language. (Which doesn't do much markup these days... but I digress)
3. There is a program built in to Windows 98 and above called "Find" (usually accessed by hitting F3), and in other environments known as "grep" which can search by content.
Use the tools you have, you won't have to "upgrade" to the latest bugs, and the computer remains useful.
I bet the laser creates an acoustic shock wave is transversing the lead, reflecting back, and hittle the already excited atoms again, 50 microseconds later.
Yes, the 810 (and later) series chip sets include a hardware random number generator, based on thermal noise. They have done quite a few things to make sure that it holds up well as a good source of randomness. Intel has a FAQ on the hardware, and how to use it.
It's done all the time, but lasers are used with telescopes to allow enough bandwidth to do ALL of a cable signal, for example.
In theory you could bounce a very low bandwidth signal off the face of the moon, using a single LED and a photodetector, if you have enough time to wait for it to average out to more than noise.
You could do all of that, adding chips along the way, but the fact is that the LED will already have a current limiting resistor in series with it, so all you really need is the appropriate value capacitor in parallel with the LED.
If you would have read the article, you would know that there might indeed be full 100Mbit data coming out of those LEDs. Nobody cares where the signal comes from to drive the LEDs, as long as it looks right.
You can't just trust your eyes to determine there isn't a high bandwidth signal. That's the whole point of this story, and thread.
Interrupt lines can be plentiful in a PC, even the 8088 was capable of supporting 254 of them... (reset and NMI taking the other two vectors)... the original IBM PC hardware specs started us in this road to hell. When PCI came along, they brought in the ability to do level or edge triggered interrupts, which makes devices of the same priority able to share an IRQ without much grief, which is good. This could let you have 4 comm ports on a single IRQ, for example. What it's NOT good for is for putting everything on one line.
If a device only generates an interrupt every second or two, but the CPU takes 500mSec to service that interrupt, that means that everything else using that IRQ is left out in the cold for that time. (This is the Interrupt Latency)... even a 1Ghz P4 won't be able to play sound without breaking up if this happens... which is just plain stupid.
Video, Network, and Disk devices obviously have different requirements and should each have their own interrupt. This insane sharing of IRQs should end.
I stopped buying Dell at work because they went XP happy. I'm NEVER going to buy a computer with XP on it. If I can't get it to run 98, it's useless. Only a complete dipshit would try to share an interrupt for all the system devices. ACPI sucks, my 400Mhz Win2K server can't play sound as reliably as my old 90Mhz Pentium could because of this crap.
I too once took comfort in the idea that the internet routes around censorship, and have had the rude awakening. The structure of the internet is a tree, not a net, with central nodes (NAPs in the US) which negate the idea of redundancy. Top this with routing policies determined manually, arbitrarily, with money being the optimization imperative, and you see that the internet is NOT robust. One router could take out a NAP, and possibly a big chunk of the whole thing.
The DNS system is yet another structural weakness. Once people give up on OpenNIC, only corporations, or those who bow down to them, will have names on the internet.
After reading about how the Chinese got Cisco, et al to cooperate in the Great Firewall, I had the realization: War is just a matter of lining up all the smart people on both sides, the side with the most driven and smart people will win.
Corporations have the money, the political system, and the societal controls in place to back them up. They use money to recruit the smart people they need, it's a very powerful incentive.
You can think of this as a war, but the problem is that the situation can't be reasonably boiled down to that. We get our resources from them, in all but a very small percentage of the cases. We're not operating in a war mode, thus we aren't even a definable group.
If this is a war, the corporations have assimilated the internet, and they will not let control go. They want their liebensraum, and will not be denied.
I had this idea back in 1982 when I was in college, and keep waiting for someone to actually do it. If you could have a 1024x1024 array of 1 bit processors (state machines, actually), you could pipe data through at the clock rate of the chip, which back then I thought could be 10 Mhz, using CMOS.
I'd still like to have even that modest potential, which would allow MAC (Multiply ACcumulate) operations at 10MSPS, for digital radio projects, etc. If you decided you need a different feature, just reprogram the fabric.
With today's technology, I don't see why you couldn't have a 4096x4096 grid with 4 way interconnects, running with at least a 1 GHz clock. This could do real time FFT, etc, straight from RF to anything. You could implement a crossbar switch in software for at least 32 streams (being conservative) at the clock rate, in software, with plenty of capacity to spare.
Processor fabric is a powerful concept, but Intel will never implement it, it's too much of a threat to them and their Von Neuman architecture. Someone else has to do it.
When the program thinks its smarter than I am, and trys to keep me from doing things that I want because it knows better. (This is a vague nonspecific emotion thing, but it tops my list)
Modes... never use modes if you can avoid it
Windows applications that pop up a dialog box that gets lost behind windows.... thus inadvertently creating a mode that you can't get out of (because alt-tab can't get you there)
If you offer resizable windows... try them out at at LEAST 1600x1200 pixels, and make sure they still use the screen space.
An application shouldn't need an install program... you should be able to copy the files to a new folder, and the first time it runs, it should just work... no registry crap, etc.
Don't put any DLL files anywhere else on the system, it's not bloat to keep your own DLLs, it's safer these days.
Copying a program's directory should allow you to move a program from one computer to another, with all options intact.
You should be able to operate the program with just the keyboard. A possible exception for paint programs.
Make sure the tab order is the same as the visual order on the display.
Context sensitive help should not merely repeat the error message, it should explain the issue.
A few buzzwords, the prefix NANO, and we're all supposed to swoon in awe of them...
Well, I say BULLSHIT... Unless they cut the crap, put up some details and explain themselves, I'm just going to have to assume this is yet another adventure in security through obscurity. We all know how well that works.
I've always wanted a 2D spectral photometer... you could look for all sorts of interesting things with it, mostly just seeing what things are really made of. It would be trivial to spot plant health by looking at the 700nm line. You could look for various things in the environment quite easily. I imagine that it would be trivial to spot the different response curves of makup as opposed to uncoated skin. So many ideas... so little likelyhood of actually getting one.
It goes in the wish list, along with my personal KiloWatt, and personal MegaWatt, and the 10k*10k pixel CCD camera.
I suspect the picture is a little more interesting than things. What is probably acutally going on is that there are three diffraction layers being formed in the silicon with different thicknesses to trap the different wavelengths of light. It could be the easiest to trap out the blue light on the top, probably because it would be the thinnest, and therefor mean the other photons could go through unimpeded.
If I'm right in my assumption, it should be possible to build an arbitrary stack of layers (with reduced efficiency) for any color ranges you care to deal with. It might be possible to make a camera that has a special layer to pick up the 700nm wavelength that chlorophyll absorbs line to determine plant health for use in agriculture.
I suppose it could be stacked the other way, but that would probably be a much larger engineering challenge.
I have a Nikon Coolpix 995, and the key is to dump the cheap SanDisk film, and get some Lexar 8x or faster CompactFlash. My shot times went down from about 8 seconds to less than 2.
This is revolutionary. There is no alignment issue to worry about with this chip, the automatic gain and channel amplifiers will all be right next to each other, so the color accuracy is going to be phenominal. I would like to see the response curves for the different layers. The business about absorbing colors at different depths in the silicon sounds like typical marketing oversimplification, but gives enough of a clue to be useful. I can see this being extended down into a multispectral (including near infared) sensor in a generation or two, which would be even cooler yet.
This thing could also make one heck of a nice nightvision system, if used properly... so we could all have nice color pictures at night, just like the military folks have had for a long time. (Green screens are just for the media to consume).
Why does all this extraneous crap like USB drivers get tossed into the Linux kernel? Why can't the kernel just do the important things, like supporting virtualization of the processor, at let device drivers do all the dirty work?
A T1 is the way to go, but it isn't a technical reason, but a practical business reason. We've lost 3 DSL links in the past 6 months, due to vendors going away. We're getting a fractional T1 as a backup for our DSL, for 3 times the cost, only because we don't want to be off the internet if it happens again. I'd much rather have two DSL lines, I especially miss Teligent, with their nice fast, reliable fixed wireless that completely bypassed Ameritech.
Now its back to the old days, SBC/Ameritech is the monopoly again, and things are going down hill, all over again, due to corporate greed, and monopolization.
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I will not support, learn, tolerate, or any way enable or support either Windows XP or this ".NET" crap. We're a Microsoft shop, using NT and 2000 for servers, and 98 for workstations. We will NOT "upgrade", EVER.
It does what we want, albeit imperfectly. The new bugs and security holes (and hardware requirements) are more trouble then they are worth.
--Mike--
--Mike--
--Mike--
The future is being suppressed.
The fact is that you really can't search for images with current technology, you can only search on the text that describes them. (Which once again brings GREP, etc. back into the picture).
Layout sucks, it's overrated, and is just a pain in the ass, (on the web, at least) for those of use who like to keep our monitors set to 1600x1200.
--Mike--
You can achieve this goal by the following process:
1. Store all of your documents in a simple, text based format, and not in some overly complex propriatary format such as ".DOC", ".PDF", etc.
1. This text based format is known as "American Standard Code for Information Interchange" (AKA "ASCII")
2. If you require more complex presentation of information, you might want to use something called HyperText Markup Language. (Which doesn't do much markup these days... but I digress)
3. There is a program built in to Windows 98 and above called "Find" (usually accessed by hitting F3), and in other environments known as "grep" which can search by content.
Use the tools you have, you won't have to "upgrade" to the latest bugs, and the computer remains useful.
--Mike--
They should try thicker/thinner films.
--Mike--
--Mike--
In theory you could bounce a very low bandwidth signal off the face of the moon, using a single LED and a photodetector, if you have enough time to wait for it to average out to more than noise.
--Mike--
--Mike--
Another twit who didn't read the article.
You can't just trust your eyes to determine there isn't a high bandwidth signal. That's the whole point of this story, and thread.
--Mike--
If a device only generates an interrupt every second or two, but the CPU takes 500mSec to service that interrupt, that means that everything else using that IRQ is left out in the cold for that time. (This is the Interrupt Latency)... even a 1Ghz P4 won't be able to play sound without breaking up if this happens... which is just plain stupid.
Video, Network, and Disk devices obviously have different requirements and should each have their own interrupt. This insane sharing of IRQs should end.
--Mike--
--Mike--
The DNS system is yet another structural weakness. Once people give up on OpenNIC, only corporations, or those who bow down to them, will have names on the internet.
After reading about how the Chinese got Cisco, et al to cooperate in the Great Firewall, I had the realization:
War is just a matter of lining up all the smart people on both sides, the side with the most driven and smart people will win.
Corporations have the money, the political system, and the societal controls in place to back them up. They use money to recruit the smart people they need, it's a very powerful incentive.
You can think of this as a war, but the problem is that the situation can't be reasonably boiled down to that. We get our resources from them, in all but a very small percentage of the cases. We're not operating in a war mode, thus we aren't even a definable group.
If this is a war, the corporations have assimilated the internet, and they will not let control go. They want their liebensraum, and will not be denied.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
--Mike--
I'd still like to have even that modest potential, which would allow MAC (Multiply ACcumulate) operations at 10MSPS, for digital radio projects, etc. If you decided you need a different feature, just reprogram the fabric.
With today's technology, I don't see why you couldn't have a 4096x4096 grid with 4 way interconnects, running with at least a 1 GHz clock. This could do real time FFT, etc, straight from RF to anything. You could implement a crossbar switch in software for at least 32 streams (being conservative) at the clock rate, in software, with plenty of capacity to spare.
Processor fabric is a powerful concept, but Intel will never implement it, it's too much of a threat to them and their Von Neuman architecture. Someone else has to do it.
--Mike--
- When the program thinks its smarter than I am, and trys to keep me from doing things that I want because it knows better. (This is a vague nonspecific emotion thing, but it tops my list)
- Modes... never use modes if you can avoid it
- Windows applications that pop up a dialog box that gets lost behind windows.... thus inadvertently creating a mode that you can't get out of (because alt-tab can't get you there)
- If you offer resizable windows... try them out at at LEAST 1600x1200 pixels, and make sure they still use the screen space.
- An application shouldn't need an install program... you should be able to copy the files to a new folder, and the first time it runs, it should just work... no registry crap, etc.
- Don't put any DLL files anywhere else on the system, it's not bloat to keep your own DLLs, it's safer these days.
- Copying a program's directory should allow you to move a program from one computer to another, with all options intact.
- You should be able to operate the program with just the keyboard. A possible exception for paint programs.
- Make sure the tab order is the same as the visual order on the display.
- Context sensitive help should not merely repeat the error message, it should explain the issue.
There's more... but it's time for work.--Mike--
A few buzzwords, the prefix NANO, and we're all supposed to swoon in awe of them...
Well, I say BULLSHIT... Unless they cut the crap, put up some details and explain themselves, I'm just going to have to assume this is yet another adventure in security through obscurity. We all know how well that works.
--Mike--
It goes in the wish list, along with my personal KiloWatt, and personal MegaWatt, and the 10k*10k pixel CCD camera.
--Mike--
If I'm right in my assumption, it should be possible to build an arbitrary stack of layers (with reduced efficiency) for any color ranges you care to deal with. It might be possible to make a camera that has a special layer to pick up the 700nm wavelength that chlorophyll absorbs line to determine plant health for use in agriculture.
I suppose it could be stacked the other way, but that would probably be a much larger engineering challenge.
--Mike--
--Mike--
This thing could also make one heck of a nice nightvision system, if used properly... so we could all have nice color pictures at night, just like the military folks have had for a long time. (Green screens are just for the media to consume).
--Mike--
--Mike--
--Mike--
--Mike--
Now its back to the old days, SBC/Ameritech is the monopoly again, and things are going down hill, all over again, due to corporate greed, and monopolization.
--Mike--