That's one of the great things about the Arduino - most of the hardware "magic" is really just the built-in capabilities of the Atmel AVR micro-controller. If you don't need to use a "shield" (daughterboard), there's plenty of simpler (and cheaper) clones for more specific purposes. They just need to be programmed with the Arduino bootloader (which they usually are) and the Arduino IDE will program it just fine.
They have pinyin. As well as being a romanisation of Madarin Chinese, it's also used to teach children pronunciation of Chinese characters and as a computer input method.
I recently upgraded my ancient Athlon XP desktop system with an AMD 785G-based motherboard and an Athlon II x2 250 processor. The on-board RS880 (HD 4200 equivalent) graphics works pretty well (I don't need much). It took me a little hunting to figure out which X.org driver to use (the "radeonhd" driver is older and now unmaintained). It was also sluggish and didn't play video until I installed the firmware package - thankfully I found a message in the X log file complaining about not being able to load the firmware file. I now run a custom 2.6.35 kernel with KMS too. Interesting things are happening with Linux graphics at the moment.
not running a real OS (as in full Windows, Linux or OS X)
From the first link:
It runs a browser based OS running on embedded Linux that sounds almost like Chrome OS in some ways.
Personally, I'm liking the look of the Always Innovating Touch Book. It's much more open, in both the hardware and software. On the downside, that means it's not as polished and ready for mainstream use as the other netbooks/smartbooks.
AFAIK, WAAS and other Satellite Based Augmentation Systems (SBAS) are basically differential-GPS done on a large scale. The position of the satellites doesn't matter, they're simply being used to distribute the correction data on a global scale. Other systems are ground-based and limited in their range.
Also, the usefulness of WAAS/SBAS is greatly diminished since selective available (SA) has been off for over a decade. One disadvantage is that it takes longer for an SBAS-using receiver to get a fix since it has to wait for the correction data to reach it.
I have access to a Coolscan V ED. It's great for 35 mm strips and mounted slides. But I have to use an ordinary Epson flatbed for my medium format photos (shot with a Pentacon Six). The difference between the Coolscan and flatbed is noticeable - much better Dmax, lower noise, and larger gamut. Plus it's so much easier to stick a strip of 35 mm film in the front of the Coolscan than setting it up in one of the film holders for the flatbed.
You think [digital photography] is just a "fad" and we will go back to using film?
No. But I think it has definitely been overhyped. Over the lest several years many photographers have "gone back" to shooting film because they've found digital not living up to the hype. I know the photography world will never go back entirely to film - the mainstream market never will. But there has been a bit of a swing back to film in the professional and enthusiast market.
I clearly acknowledge there are advantages to digital. I can see that photographing events (sporting, news, etc) pretty much requires digital nowadays because of the need/expectation for fast turn-around. And the ability to check every shot is very important to other types of photography, particularly for weddings (you don't fuck up wedding photos).
But film is a tried-and-true medium which still has some advantages over digital. Film cameras can be very simple and are generally much more rugged than digital cameras. Many are all-mechanical designs that don't require any batteries, others only need a battery for the light meter. That's very useful when you're travelling, especially to remote locations. And film offers a huge amount of variability in appearance. Not only do you get to choose a type and emulsion, but in B&W you influence the result by your choice of developer and how you use it (e.g concentration, agitation, etc). You might be able to imitate many of these effects in Photoshop and the like (or maybe not), but it's not the same.
Yes, I admit I am a bit of a film bigot. But I'm not entirely unreasonable. Some digital cameras have started to interest me in the last few years.
This digital back would not create lossy, 8-bit JPEG. It would store some sort of raw format (DNG?), either uncompressed or using lossless compression (e.g LZ/LZW), and with 16-bit components.
Two problems. The sensor is barely what could be called "medium format". The article says these sensors are 36.7 x 49 mm. That's basically twice the size of the standard 35 mm frame (36 x 24 mm). Even 6x4.5 is bigger than that.
The other problem is bigger - price. For $14K you could get several medium format film cameras and lenses (e.g Hasselblad/Zeiss, Mamiya, Fuji, Bronica, etc), a very good film scanner (e.g Hasselblad Flextight X5), a big server to store your scans on, plus a fridge full of film.
You'd only go the digital route if you need fast turn-around. For everything else, I'd rather go the film option, thanks.
I sure don't want to go back to the Bad Old Days where FF on Linux couldn't view the same media as FF on Windows.
That's currently the situation with plugins. They're pieces of object code, so you're dependent on the plugin developer to provide you with a version for your OS/architecture. For example, Flash (something that HTML 5 and the video tag could replace) is (AFAIK) only available on three mainstream platforms - Win/x86, OSX/x86, and Linux/x86. There's a beta version for x86-64 and special versions (Lite?) for embedded devices, but that's pretty much it. As for the Quicktime plugin, there's no Linux or *BSD support at all (mainly because there's no QT on those platforms), although there's plugins that use VLC or totem, etc instead.
Now, lets look at Firefox. The Debian iceweasel package (Firefox without the branding) is listed as being available for 14 architectures (not counting the unofficial 68k port that languishes at 2.0). That includes x86-64 for your latest AMD64/Intel64 machines, armel for your portable ARM devices, powerpc for your old G3/G4/G5 PowerMacs, and a bunch of other architectures too. None of those are supported by Adobe or the many other companies that have, over the years, tried to lock us into their proprietary software with binary-only plugins. So I'm siding with Mozilla for some very practical reasons. Theora's not the best out there, but I'd prefer the web to be open to all.
I'll admit that Theora isn't the greatest video codec. But it's been explained many times that Mozilla simply can't use MPEG-4 AVC/h.264 because of the patents involved.
Mozilla and wider Open Source world has three options: (not mutually exclusive)
Work to kill software patents so they can use AVC/h.264 and other codecs that come after it.
Make Theora better.
Make something better than Theora, but free of patents.
But no amount of whinging will make them use AVC/h.264. It's simply not an option at the moment.
Um, excuse me? What SoC are you talking about? With some simple googling, here's two videos - 1, 2 - showing 3D demos running on the OMAP3-powered Beagle Board. The linked news item (TFA) even mentions an OpenGL ES 'engine' for Evas being contributed by Samsung. 3D drivers are certainly available for the PowerVR GPU in the OMAP3 (albeit binary-only), and Enlightenment would seem to be able to use 3D acceleration.
I may be wrong on this, but I seem to remember our Australian building code requiring a minimum amount of ventilation for any room that will be occupied by people, and the same may apply in other countries. So you have a few options - usually a window or an exhaust fan. People tend to favour windows (note the lower case 'w'). So I'm guessing there aren't many rooms in homes that don't have windows (again, lower case 'w'), for strictly legal reasons.
...will easily be able to trick people into giving personal information (ie account numbers, CC numbers, ect.)
I don't know why the emails would ask for personal information. I can however see this as a great opportunity for virus emails: The government has noticed your computer is infected and sending out spams. Now run this attached executable to remove it.
I have devices that will play some videos, but not all.
They're called profiles. You can't expect cheap, battery-powered devices to be able to decode High Profile content. It really gets the usable bitrate down, but boy does it use a lot of processing power to decode!
Oh, and to nitpick - x264 is VideoLAN's encoder. The codec is called MPEG-4 AVC in the MPEG world, and h.264 in the ITU world.
Then they made several attempts to change platforms to various Intel chips, and released Windows NT workstations. People didn't take them seriously after that.
in browser stats Apple has -nearly half- of browser marketshare for smartphones
As another posted noted, those stats are only for the US. The US has been slow to take up mobile phones for several reasons, so it's not representative of the global market.
But anyway. I'd like to quickly address the assumption that mobile web browser stats can be used as a way to measure mobile phone market share. I have a Nokia 5220, a simple GSM/EDGE phone with an S40 interface. I rarely use the built-in (WAP?) browser because the screen is small and loading modern web/wap pages over EDGE is still quite slow. And it sometimes runs out of memory on complex pages. But I do however have quite a few Java apps that use the Internet to send and receive various bits of data. Through these apps I use up most of the credit on my pre-paid account. So just because the iPhone has shown up on some web browser stats probably doesn't mean as much as you think.
And when you say "CDMA", you are presumably meaning IS-95. CDMA is just a multiplexing method that is used by IS-95 (2G), CDMA2000 (3G), and UMTS/W-CDMA; the 3G evolution of GSM. It's also used by GPS.
Yes, but nothing I could do (or find) would get Windows to recognize a USB thumbdrive. UDF on the whole device - nope. UDF on partition - nope, and what partition 'type' do you use? There isn't a type allocated for UDF nor ISO 9660. Perhaps we need one of those special thumbdrives that reports itself as an optical drive (with packet writing?) instead of a fixed disk.
Slashdot Mirror
When does a multibillion-dollar corporation not get what they want?
When the standards body is headquartered in Europe?
That's one of the great things about the Arduino - most of the hardware "magic" is really just the built-in capabilities of the Atmel AVR micro-controller. If you don't need to use a "shield" (daughterboard), there's plenty of simpler (and cheaper) clones for more specific purposes. They just need to be programmed with the Arduino bootloader (which they usually are) and the Arduino IDE will program it just fine.
So you think that as soon as we run out of fossil fuels, all the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will magically disappear?
They have pinyin. As well as being a romanisation of Madarin Chinese, it's also used to teach children pronunciation of Chinese characters and as a computer input method.
Here:
apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-radeon firmware-linux-nonfree
I recently upgraded my ancient Athlon XP desktop system with an AMD 785G-based motherboard and an Athlon II x2 250 processor. The on-board RS880 (HD 4200 equivalent) graphics works pretty well (I don't need much). It took me a little hunting to figure out which X.org driver to use (the "radeonhd" driver is older and now unmaintained). It was also sluggish and didn't play video until I installed the firmware package - thankfully I found a message in the X log file complaining about not being able to load the firmware file. I now run a custom 2.6.35 kernel with KMS too. Interesting things are happening with Linux graphics at the moment.
Who said anything about copyright infringement? This is for personal use. There's no distribution to other parties involved.
Here's what I use:
Notice a pattern there?
For Debian users, add the debian-multimedia repository and install x264, faac, and gpac (for the MP4Box tool).
not running a real OS (as in full Windows, Linux or OS X)
From the first link:
Personally, I'm liking the look of the Always Innovating Touch Book. It's much more open, in both the hardware and software. On the downside, that means it's not as polished and ready for mainstream use as the other netbooks/smartbooks.
AFAIK, WAAS and other Satellite Based Augmentation Systems (SBAS) are basically differential-GPS done on a large scale. The position of the satellites doesn't matter, they're simply being used to distribute the correction data on a global scale. Other systems are ground-based and limited in their range.
Also, the usefulness of WAAS/SBAS is greatly diminished since selective available (SA) has been off for over a decade. One disadvantage is that it takes longer for an SBAS-using receiver to get a fix since it has to wait for the correction data to reach it.
I have access to a Coolscan V ED. It's great for 35 mm strips and mounted slides. But I have to use an ordinary Epson flatbed for my medium format photos (shot with a Pentacon Six). The difference between the Coolscan and flatbed is noticeable - much better Dmax, lower noise, and larger gamut. Plus it's so much easier to stick a strip of 35 mm film in the front of the Coolscan than setting it up in one of the film holders for the flatbed.
Yikes, I didn't think it was that much. So how about a Nikon Coolscan 9000 instead - around $2K (or less?) from memory.
No. But I think it has definitely been overhyped. Over the lest several years many photographers have "gone back" to shooting film because they've found digital not living up to the hype. I know the photography world will never go back entirely to film - the mainstream market never will. But there has been a bit of a swing back to film in the professional and enthusiast market.
I clearly acknowledge there are advantages to digital. I can see that photographing events (sporting, news, etc) pretty much requires digital nowadays because of the need/expectation for fast turn-around. And the ability to check every shot is very important to other types of photography, particularly for weddings (you don't fuck up wedding photos).
But film is a tried-and-true medium which still has some advantages over digital. Film cameras can be very simple and are generally much more rugged than digital cameras. Many are all-mechanical designs that don't require any batteries, others only need a battery for the light meter. That's very useful when you're travelling, especially to remote locations. And film offers a huge amount of variability in appearance. Not only do you get to choose a type and emulsion, but in B&W you influence the result by your choice of developer and how you use it (e.g concentration, agitation, etc). You might be able to imitate many of these effects in Photoshop and the like (or maybe not), but it's not the same.
Yes, I admit I am a bit of a film bigot. But I'm not entirely unreasonable. Some digital cameras have started to interest me in the last few years.
This digital back would not create lossy, 8-bit JPEG. It would store some sort of raw format (DNG?), either uncompressed or using lossless compression (e.g LZ/LZW), and with 16-bit components.
Two problems. The sensor is barely what could be called "medium format". The article says these sensors are 36.7 x 49 mm. That's basically twice the size of the standard 35 mm frame (36 x 24 mm). Even 6x4.5 is bigger than that.
The other problem is bigger - price. For $14K you could get several medium format film cameras and lenses (e.g Hasselblad/Zeiss, Mamiya, Fuji, Bronica, etc), a very good film scanner (e.g Hasselblad Flextight X5), a big server to store your scans on, plus a fridge full of film.
You'd only go the digital route if you need fast turn-around. For everything else, I'd rather go the film option, thanks.
That's currently the situation with plugins. They're pieces of object code, so you're dependent on the plugin developer to provide you with a version for your OS/architecture. For example, Flash (something that HTML 5 and the video tag could replace) is (AFAIK) only available on three mainstream platforms - Win/x86, OSX/x86, and Linux/x86. There's a beta version for x86-64 and special versions (Lite?) for embedded devices, but that's pretty much it. As for the Quicktime plugin, there's no Linux or *BSD support at all (mainly because there's no QT on those platforms), although there's plugins that use VLC or totem, etc instead.
Now, lets look at Firefox. The Debian iceweasel package (Firefox without the branding) is listed as being available for 14 architectures (not counting the unofficial 68k port that languishes at 2.0). That includes x86-64 for your latest AMD64/Intel64 machines, armel for your portable ARM devices, powerpc for your old G3/G4/G5 PowerMacs, and a bunch of other architectures too. None of those are supported by Adobe or the many other companies that have, over the years, tried to lock us into their proprietary software with binary-only plugins. So I'm siding with Mozilla for some very practical reasons. Theora's not the best out there, but I'd prefer the web to be open to all.
I'll admit that Theora isn't the greatest video codec. But it's been explained many times that Mozilla simply can't use MPEG-4 AVC/h.264 because of the patents involved.
Mozilla and wider Open Source world has three options: (not mutually exclusive)
But no amount of whinging will make them use AVC/h.264. It's simply not an option at the moment.
Um, excuse me? What SoC are you talking about? With some simple googling, here's two videos - 1, 2 - showing 3D demos running on the OMAP3-powered Beagle Board. The linked news item (TFA) even mentions an OpenGL ES 'engine' for Evas being contributed by Samsung. 3D drivers are certainly available for the PowerVR GPU in the OMAP3 (albeit binary-only), and Enlightenment would seem to be able to use 3D acceleration.
How many homes don't have windows?
I may be wrong on this, but I seem to remember our Australian building code requiring a minimum amount of ventilation for any room that will be occupied by people, and the same may apply in other countries. So you have a few options - usually a window or an exhaust fan. People tend to favour windows (note the lower case 'w'). So I'm guessing there aren't many rooms in homes that don't have windows (again, lower case 'w'), for strictly legal reasons.
...will easily be able to trick people into giving personal information (ie account numbers, CC numbers, ect.)
I don't know why the emails would ask for personal information. I can however see this as a great opportunity for virus emails: The government has noticed your computer is infected and sending out spams. Now run this attached executable to remove it.
...better than H264/MPEG 4 part 10 ASP
Er, what? MPEG-4 part 10 is AVC a.k.a h.264. MPEG-4 part 2 is SP/ASP.
I have devices that will play some videos, but not all.
They're called profiles. You can't expect cheap, battery-powered devices to be able to decode High Profile content. It really gets the usable bitrate down, but boy does it use a lot of processing power to decode!
Oh, and to nitpick - x264 is VideoLAN's encoder. The codec is called MPEG-4 AVC in the MPEG world, and h.264 in the ITU world.
Then they made several attempts to change platforms to various Intel chips, and released Windows NT workstations. People didn't take them seriously after that.
There, I fixed it for you.
in browser stats Apple has -nearly half- of browser marketshare for smartphones
As another posted noted, those stats are only for the US. The US has been slow to take up mobile phones for several reasons, so it's not representative of the global market.
But anyway. I'd like to quickly address the assumption that mobile web browser stats can be used as a way to measure mobile phone market share. I have a Nokia 5220, a simple GSM/EDGE phone with an S40 interface. I rarely use the built-in (WAP?) browser because the screen is small and loading modern web/wap pages over EDGE is still quite slow. And it sometimes runs out of memory on complex pages. But I do however have quite a few Java apps that use the Internet to send and receive various bits of data. Through these apps I use up most of the credit on my pre-paid account. So just because the iPhone has shown up on some web browser stats probably doesn't mean as much as you think.
According to Harold Welte, some African operators are setting up their GSM equipment to skip every second TDMA time slot, resulting in an almost 70 Km (~43 mi) range at the expense of halving the capacity of a cell. It's an interesting "hack", although not the best solution for high-population areas.
And when you say "CDMA", you are presumably meaning IS-95. CDMA is just a multiplexing method that is used by IS-95 (2G), CDMA2000 (3G), and UMTS/W-CDMA; the 3G evolution of GSM. It's also used by GPS.
Yes, but nothing I could do (or find) would get Windows to recognize a USB thumbdrive. UDF on the whole device - nope. UDF on partition - nope, and what partition 'type' do you use? There isn't a type allocated for UDF nor ISO 9660. Perhaps we need one of those special thumbdrives that reports itself as an optical drive (with packet writing?) instead of a fixed disk.