In close-up dogfighting it didn't refresh often enough and got a bit blocky and clunky-feeling. But, y'know, everyone else was playing 2d things like castle wolfenstein.
They also support my contention that the worst indi movies are *far* worse than the worst Hollywood movies. I watch a lot of movies and most of them are better than these examples. My point was, and is, that if you go to a Hollywood movie, there will be some sort of plot, there will be sound, most of which is intentional, there will be directing, there will be editing, the cameraman won't be shaking like a leaf, there won't be drunks walking onscreen in the middle of the film, in most cases the person playing the lead actor will be the same from the beginning to the end of the movie (unless there's a good reason within the movie to change) and you probably won't have people clearly forgetting their lines and hear someone yelling them from the background. I've seen all those in indi movies, but I haven't in Hollywood movies.
I see your Adventures Of Pluto Nash and raise you the Turkish Star Wars. Or, as I said in another post here, the scifi movie shot in Death Valley that my then-gf was in, shot by some kids with a VHS video camera.
I haven't seen Pluto Nash, I admit. But I bet nowhere in it does the soundtrack get overwhelmed by a passing airplane, or cut out entirely, or break up to be replaced by feedback. I bet the cameraman doesn't get his fingers in front of the camera lens, and you can't see the cameraman's shadow obviously in the picture. The props probably aren't visibly being pulled by string (as was the case with K9 in some episodes of Dr. Who.) Probably the main character doesn't have a blue shirt in a shot that swings to focus on someone else, and when it swings back the main character is wearing a yellow shirt. I've seen all these happen in indi films.
That's what money gets you. It doesn't make good content, but it does help to ameliorate awful production.
I think it might've been as late as 1988 when my brother and I had F18 interceptor networked on our amigas: head-to-head networked air combat flightsim, with excellent color, speed, and stereo sound, when a lot of people were still using black-and-white Macs that went 'beep'. My friends in college were literally unable to believe such things existed until they saw it.
Those are some very good choices. Any others? coz with titles like that, I'd be very interested in what else you're watching. The French movies "Red" and "Blue" are two of my favorites. I also loved the first El Mariachi movie, the one actually made in Mexico. It has drama, action, comedy, romance, and tragedy, even though it's definitely not written with me in mind. I was also struck by DiCaprio's acting in "what's eating gilbert grape" and Pitt's acting in "snatch", although I wouldn't call either great movies.
Okay, I'm not going to argue the quality/budget ratio thing: you're right. What I will argue is how much that matters. People pay to see quality movies, not the best movie that could be made on $50, or any threshhold. That's what YouTube is for: movies for the people, with near-zero production cost. I hope that some day that's a valid production technique for movies people will pay for. There are amazingly good low-cost movies -- 'y tu mama tambien' comes to mind -- that Hollywood could stand to learn from, but as I argued elsewhere in this thread, Hollywood's metric for 'good' is 'popular' so they'll make any editorial concessions necessary to increase viewership, and as a result they release neutered movies. I'm not sure they'll ever produce what I think are good movies. So we get to a point where we're secretly arguing about what we mean when we say 'good' movies, and as much as I hate to admit it, Hollywood's definition is hard to argue against, given their assumptions. A lot of people want to see spectacle, and a lot of people unconsciously associate spectacle with quality, and for them, Hollywood consistently churns out pretty good movies.
Sorry I can't find a cite (I'm at work and don't have time to do the research) but I am fairly sure that at least one person on death row was convicted of killing a police officer who broke into the wrong house without identifying himself and was shot by the homeowner. I further believe this was in a state that had a make-my-day style law.
Aw, c'mon. Good Will Hunting had about five good lines. ("How about them apples?" Every geek has to love that moment.) Even Jersey Girl, which was so bad I wanted to puke drano, had one scene that enriched my life. (The Sweeney Todd bit in amidst all the Cats talent show material: that was beautiful.)
I'm sticking by my original contention. I've been to the Seattle Film Festival and watched hour-long movies of the shoes of people walking down Broadway. My ex-gf was in a scifi film made in Death Valley by a couple of kids with a VHS camcorder and I couldn't stand to watch it even though it was my girlfriend and she took her shirt off. Have you ever seen the Turkish Star Wars? At least that had a budget of $40,000, but it was still unbelievably bad. At least when I was watching King Kong and Waterworld I was thinking "Wowie, this stinks, but I wonder how they did that effect?" rather than just "aaaaah the cameraman's finger is over the lens and the actor's previous job must have been beating llamas: god, please, take me now."
The part that's harder to gauge is how editorial compromises affect the Hollywood stuff, and that's why my characterization might not be completely accurate. I can think of half a dozen Hollywood movies off the top of my head that, if just slightly rewritten, would've been *really* good movies -- for my definition of good -- but would've left a lot of people walking out of the studio feeling uncomfortable. Which is my definition of good, frankly. Hollywood has to knock off the rough corners, and by so doing, changes the movie's message. Some examples: Amy Homes wrote a terrific book called "The Safety Of Objects" -- creepy, beautiful, haunting, and really unsettling, like most of her stuff. They turned it into a terrible movie because all the creepy and unsettling parts got yanked out. If you're not willing to make those editorial sacrifices, you lose a lot of audience. In a word, you don't sell out. So the question is: what makes a 'good' movie? It's possible that my definition of 'good' necessarily means 'unpopular' and Hollywood's definition absolutely must mean 'popular' -- but who am I to say that a popular movie isn't good, just because it caters to the widest possible audience? 'Titanic' could have been more unsettling and upsetting. Would that have made it a better movie? Well, what do we mean by 'better'? There are a lot of great movies that looked very much like duds when they came out in the theatres because lots of people hated them and told lots of other people, but twenty years down the road, those movies are acknowledged as being superb.
I guess what I'm saying is in large part agreeing with you: that at the very top end of movies, Hollywood gets all the background material -- sets, reasonably good acting, excellent filming, excellent sound, reasonably good editing, fairly good direction -- right, so it's down to the content, which might be neutered or might let something good slip through. In contrast, small independent films have wildly variable quality on *all* those and it's very difficult for them to get *all* those points right, so what carries them is the exceptional quality of the content.
Now that I think about it, it's almost like two wholly different metrics. Hollywood takes lots of production genius, then subtracts, from this nearly superb creation, a whole bunch of content, like a sculptor in marble, so what they end up with is something less than they should be doing. A small-time indi takes a chunk of uncompromised content, and to that adds actors, direction, filming, editing, like a sculptor in clay, so what they end up with is something that's the sum of a whole bunch of subsystems, heaped upon the quality of the original content.
>The quality/budget ratio of independent films lends credence to this theory.
I'm not trying to be snide here, but I suspect you haven't seen very many independent films. Most of them *suck* *incredibly*, but the very best 0.1% are quite good indeed, competitive with the best stuff coming out of Hollywood. I think it's something like a Boltzmann distribution -- Hollywood has a very steep curve, so there's not a lot of difference between their very best movies and their worst. Bollywood's best are about as good, but their worst are much worse. Chinese films, at their best, are superb, but the worst ones I've seen have been nearly unwatcheable. Then you go to an independent film competition -- I'm not talking Sundance, I'm talking some local art scene competition -- and you begin thinking to yourself "I'd pay $30 to not have to watch the rest of this."
Money doesn't guarantee a movie will be good, but it does heavily indicate the movie won't be appallingly bad.
I think what you're predicting will happen for a while, but since the content-providers are highly motivated to work towards DRM, they'll produce more content, and entire content-delivery systems, that'll only work on the high-end, limiting systems. SecondLife will only run on ATI or Nvidia graphics boards. Until recently, Flash9 only ran on Win/Mac. WMA10 or whatever it is only runs on Windows. I may be wrong with some of those -- I don't use Windows or Mac so I haven't kept very good track, but I know a fair number of things don't function or only function with lots of workarounds on my linux system, and eventually if whole new areas of media only run on a subset of hardware the content providers trust, we're screwed until people can provide liberated workarounds, and that is going to become increasingly difficult (especially as more material moves to net-connection requirements, meaning remote verification and encrypted channels of confirmation.) One question is: if individuals keep producing sufficient content to maintain the interest of joe sixpack, there will still be a demand for connectivity to an unregulated net with nonstandardized content. As long as that happens, we have a chance of keeping freed hardware viable. If everyone just wants to stream the latest Sony/NBC videos, well, probably within five years we'll buy completely locked-down hardware that only connects to approved content provider material, whether Internet or TV or whatever -- because essentially it'll all be the same material.
In all honesty, I sort of like the idea of people having these dedicated media servers that only run approved material, but beside them, old or import machines that connect to this greynet full of user-created material. There are billions of us and only a few big companies: we can outproduce them on quantity, and for any given specific interest, in quality. Individuals can't crank out stuff with broad-market appeal *and* high quality because that costs huge amounts of money, but for any subset of interests, enthusiasts can make better material than the big companies can afford to produce.
I don't have to reinstall every two months, maybe more like every 4 -- or I did while I was still using Windows. (I gave up on that about two years ago because it was making me insane.)
My gf cruises a lot of porn sites and spends a lot of time downloading warez and music. We were constantly getting crap on the system that'd screw the browser or keep popping up junk. (Last two years, same behavior, on linux: never a single problem.)
I spend a lot of time running prototype USB hardware, weird stuff mostly based off FTDI USB chips and drivers and PIC USB chips and drivers, but a lot of other things, and every couple weeks the drivers would die and then other USB-related things would start misbehaving. I'd try to reinstall the drivers and things would get worse. (Last two years, same behavior, on linux: never a single problem.)
The motherboard onboard IDE controller is flaky, so I put in a replacement IDE controller on a PCI card, and boot/run off that. Sometimes Windows would load, sometimes it wouldn't. Likewise onboard audio/video are both substandard so I have PCI audio and AGP video cards. Sometimes Windows would be happy with those for a while and then suddenly decide it couldn't play sound anymore and nothing I could figure out would make it start working again. Now, to be fair, the Linux side has occasionally had some sound problems, but I think that's mostly amaroK not Kaffeine, so I think it's a specific piece of software, not the whole OS. But Linux has never had a problem with booting off the add-on IDE card, and while the video card driver doesn't work perfectly in linux (no commercial version) it does work as well as it did with Windows and the official commercial original-equipment manufacturer driver.
Yeah, our IT department has stated categorically that we won't be moving to Vista for at least three years, and we're a fortune 500 company. I guess we'll just keep reusing our XP licenses, and maybe buying a whole bunch of new ones to use as needed?
In case you should ever want to do such things: put the nozzle in a mostly sealed environment -- let's say a thermos -- with wires running in. Use resistive heating elements to crank it up to heat (there are resistive elements designed to operate submerged in molten glass, way worse conditions than this) and drop some dry ice in there. The heat will melt the dry ice (even faster than it's already subliming) which will displace the oxygen. Since it's considerably heavier than oxygen, it'll tend to stay in the thermos. It's fairly easy to make high-temp low-oxygen environment cheaply, depending on how 'low-oxygen' your demands are. I've built sintering furnaces that work well at similar temps, although I generally pipe a little bit of argon in to displace oxygen rather than using dry ice.
He's running EMC? How's that working for him? What front-end software does he use to produce the g-code, do you know? Is he running a mill? I ask because I'm in the process of building a bunch of CNC-type stuff and would love to hear how EMC is going for him, since it's what I'll probably end up using.
The company I work for is making controllable-color LED's (by making tricolor LED drivers.) We have a sayings: any cheap LED can be a white LED... for a tenth of a second.
I have to admit a lot of fondness for GPIB since my dad helped design it and I have a rack of equipment that he subsequently designed around it. In 1982, it beat the hell out of anything else on the market.
What I'd really like, rather than usb or rs232, is ethernet. Our newer tektronix scopes have a network jack on the back and somewhere inside their weird little insides, a webserver, so I can run the scope from anywhere in the building and get data out of it. That's amazingly useful. No drivers, no special cables, no limits on how many instruments I can work with, just pure functionality.
All memory chips and many analog or mixed-signal chips are modified after fab but before they're packaged. In the case of memory, they test the chip, find the bad cells, and use a laser to burn those areas/connections out, and then burn in duplicate extra sectors. Once the chip meets the required memory size and performance, all the remaining spares are burnt out, so the chip acts to specifications. Similarly, analog and mixed-signal chips are laser-trimmed for performance and accuracy. There's an enormous business in making the laser trimming systems and test systems.
I've built my own ADC's and stuff, but I question their accuracy and it's a *lot* of work to get one built that works nicely. I've built a couple 12-bit ADC's that output parallel to something like the sparkfun usb interface (16 lines of IO) and that's functional. But it's really nice to have a rugged, precalibrated multimeter that, out of the box, already has its voltage, amperage, and such calibrated and ready to go. What I've ended up doing is buying GPIB-equipped multimeters on ebay, and that works. But I often have situations where I'd like to be running five or six -- measuring efficiency on dual or triple-channel switching power supply chips, for instance -- so I don't have enough RS232's without kludging things onto the computer. GPIB works beautifully, as would USB, given their extensibility.
I like your idea of the point decoding of the LCD. I'll have to think about that and see if I can come up with an easy implementation. That'd be a lot simpler with LED readouts, which a couple of my power supplies have. What a great idea! Thanks.
I'd love to have a reasonably accurate OCR to read LCD screens. It would make for a vastly cheaper automated test equipment market when I can use a cheap webcam and some cheap digital power supplies and handheld voltmeters to do mass measurements of power conversion efficiency and characterization. Right now, that's all done via GPIB or ethernet, either of which options adds about $600 onto instruments that already cost a minimum of $600. I have played with using GOCR, with my multimeter face-down on the scanner, but even with huge easy-to-read displays, the scanner/ocr accuracy is nothing to write home about.
Oh, man, you're actually going to respond with a well-thought-out and interesting set of arguments, *and* you know what you're talking about, probably better than I do. Now I actually have to *think* about a response.
I agree with you on a lot of things. My basic differences sum up as: 1. For a given real estate, at some point the complexity will exceed the real estate. This is much less of a problem for soundboards, for which, for various reasons (I'd suggest 'tradition' is a big one) people accept a square meter of surface area devoted to controls. It's a big problem for equipment designed for automated test environments, where you get a two-slot half-rack faceplate and everything has to fit on that. 30 buttons is comfortable; 50 would be extremely cramped. The machine has more capability than 50 buttons can access. 2. Without regard to #1, it is impossible, by definition, to have hard-wired buttons on equipment with extensible/programmable functionality. From these, we get software-defined buttons. For instance, your Mac, or my Tektronix 7000-series scope, where functions are assigned by either the manufacturer or the user to a bit of virtual real-estate, and clicking there leads you somewhere useful. I suggest -- no, I claim -- that there is no difference between software-defined buttons and menus. They do the same thing: allow assignment of functionality to a sequence of actions. Many (most) software-defined buttons I've used institute menus on top of the software-defined buttons, although that's as easily done via a mouse.
For the person who is designing the equipment, there's a requirement of anticipation of usage. Let's take a scope for example: it makes sense to have an autoset button because that's going to get a lot of use. I don't think it makes sense to have a button for 'set a trigger for when channel A goes above 5 volts and channel B has been below 2 volts for more than 30ms', for instance. I don't even think it makes sense to have a button specifically for implementations of the trigger function -- the trigger button should have an associated menu, or series of softkeys, to access that. (Several of the machines I use have functions that are simply not accessible through *any* sequence of buttons, only via some sort of network connection, because they're sufficiently obscure and specific that it's reasonably anticipated that only automated interfaces will ever need those functions.)
A good design, but one of complexity sufficient to require basically a full computer within the system, would allow users to redefine keys to do what they want. If I'm constantly setting trigger to ch A > 5V when ch B 0v for 30ms, and that's all I ever do, it'd sure be nice to have a macro that sets that functionality and assigns it to a softkey, but I still think it'd be silly to have a button just to do that and only to do that.
The best of all, in my opinion, is a learning system. My computers are running a derivative of debian and are set up with a probabalistic menu. When I was using my damned stinking ipod I was using amaroK a lot, but now that I'm sufficiently fed up with both of them I'm using Kaffeine for playing music, and Kaffeine has risen up above amaroK in the menu structure to reflect that. It'd be really nice to have that on test&measurement equipment. Example: I do a lot of semiconductor parameter analysis with IC's that have built-in FET's. Many programmable resistive loads have the power lead shorted to ground when the supply is off or running but not trying to supply power. If my IC is hooked up to the resistive load and powered up, the FET is seeing a dead short, which burns it out within milliseconds. The resistive loads can be programmed to have the output open-circuit, and to do that is painful (push 'config' then 'output' then 'output status' then change 'output status' to 'high-impedance'.) That's really annoying, and hard to remember. It'd be nice if, since I do that every time I use the machine, it would remember and start comi
>For some reason, paranoia seems to be cool among Web geeks
I loved that line. It made me think of a bunch of other similar ones:
For some reason, fresh vegetables to be cool among health-conscious consumers. For some reason, helmets seem to be cool among motorcycle racers. For some reason, shoes seem to be cool among people who walk. For some reason, breathing seems to be cool among people who are still alive...
Which is to say, by implication, that it's not paranoia when there *are* people out to get you, and lots and lots of them. We read about it every day. It's always charming to see such naivete, the way it's cute to see a kid try and eat a worm, but you don't actually let the kid eat the worm unless you're sort of a bastard.
ME. The geek cred *alone* would be worth it, and given what I put on my website (build your own spotwelder! melt aluminum in a homebuilt gas-fired foundry!) I actually deserve it.
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In close-up dogfighting it didn't refresh often enough and got a bit blocky and clunky-feeling. But, y'know, everyone else was playing 2d things like castle wolfenstein.
They also support my contention that the worst indi movies are *far* worse than the worst Hollywood movies. I watch a lot of movies and most of them are better than these examples. My point was, and is, that if you go to a Hollywood movie, there will be some sort of plot, there will be sound, most of which is intentional, there will be directing, there will be editing, the cameraman won't be shaking like a leaf, there won't be drunks walking onscreen in the middle of the film, in most cases the person playing the lead actor will be the same from the beginning to the end of the movie (unless there's a good reason within the movie to change) and you probably won't have people clearly forgetting their lines and hear someone yelling them from the background. I've seen all those in indi movies, but I haven't in Hollywood movies.
I see your Adventures Of Pluto Nash and raise you the Turkish Star Wars. Or, as I said in another post here, the scifi movie shot in Death Valley that my then-gf was in, shot by some kids with a VHS video camera.
I haven't seen Pluto Nash, I admit. But I bet nowhere in it does the soundtrack get overwhelmed by a passing airplane, or cut out entirely, or break up to be replaced by feedback. I bet the cameraman doesn't get his fingers in front of the camera lens, and you can't see the cameraman's shadow obviously in the picture. The props probably aren't visibly being pulled by string (as was the case with K9 in some episodes of Dr. Who.) Probably the main character doesn't have a blue shirt in a shot that swings to focus on someone else, and when it swings back the main character is wearing a yellow shirt. I've seen all these happen in indi films.
That's what money gets you. It doesn't make good content, but it does help to ameliorate awful production.
I think it might've been as late as 1988 when my brother and I had F18 interceptor networked on our amigas: head-to-head networked air combat flightsim, with excellent color, speed, and stereo sound, when a lot of people were still using black-and-white Macs that went 'beep'. My friends in college were literally unable to believe such things existed until they saw it.
Those are some very good choices. Any others? coz with titles like that, I'd be very interested in what else you're watching.
The French movies "Red" and "Blue" are two of my favorites. I also loved the first El Mariachi movie, the one actually made in Mexico. It has drama, action, comedy, romance, and tragedy, even though it's definitely not written with me in mind. I was also struck by DiCaprio's acting in "what's eating gilbert grape" and Pitt's acting in "snatch", although I wouldn't call either great movies.
Okay, I'm not going to argue the quality/budget ratio thing: you're right. What I will argue is how much that matters. People pay to see quality movies, not the best movie that could be made on $50, or any threshhold. That's what YouTube is for: movies for the people, with near-zero production cost. I hope that some day that's a valid production technique for movies people will pay for. There are amazingly good low-cost movies -- 'y tu mama tambien' comes to mind -- that Hollywood could stand to learn from, but as I argued elsewhere in this thread, Hollywood's metric for 'good' is 'popular' so they'll make any editorial concessions necessary to increase viewership, and as a result they release neutered movies. I'm not sure they'll ever produce what I think are good movies. So we get to a point where we're secretly arguing about what we mean when we say 'good' movies, and as much as I hate to admit it, Hollywood's definition is hard to argue against, given their assumptions. A lot of people want to see spectacle, and a lot of people unconsciously associate spectacle with quality, and for them, Hollywood consistently churns out pretty good movies.
Sorry I can't find a cite (I'm at work and don't have time to do the research) but I am fairly sure that at least one person on death row was convicted of killing a police officer who broke into the wrong house without identifying himself and was shot by the homeowner. I further believe this was in a state that had a make-my-day style law.
Aw, c'mon. Good Will Hunting had about five good lines. ("How about them apples?" Every geek has to love that moment.) Even Jersey Girl, which was so bad I wanted to puke drano, had one scene that enriched my life. (The Sweeney Todd bit in amidst all the Cats talent show material: that was beautiful.)
I'm sticking by my original contention. I've been to the Seattle Film Festival and watched hour-long movies of the shoes of people walking down Broadway. My ex-gf was in a scifi film made in Death Valley by a couple of kids with a VHS camcorder and I couldn't stand to watch it even though it was my girlfriend and she took her shirt off. Have you ever seen the Turkish Star Wars? At least that had a budget of $40,000, but it was still unbelievably bad. At least when I was watching King Kong and Waterworld I was thinking "Wowie, this stinks, but I wonder how they did that effect?" rather than just "aaaaah the cameraman's finger is over the lens and the actor's previous job must have been beating llamas: god, please, take me now."
The part that's harder to gauge is how editorial compromises affect the Hollywood stuff, and that's why my characterization might not be completely accurate. I can think of half a dozen Hollywood movies off the top of my head that, if just slightly rewritten, would've been *really* good movies -- for my definition of good -- but would've left a lot of people walking out of the studio feeling uncomfortable. Which is my definition of good, frankly. Hollywood has to knock off the rough corners, and by so doing, changes the movie's message.
Some examples: Amy Homes wrote a terrific book called "The Safety Of Objects" -- creepy, beautiful, haunting, and really unsettling, like most of her stuff. They turned it into a terrible movie because all the creepy and unsettling parts got yanked out. If you're not willing to make those editorial sacrifices, you lose a lot of audience. In a word, you don't sell out.
So the question is: what makes a 'good' movie? It's possible that my definition of 'good' necessarily means 'unpopular' and Hollywood's definition absolutely must mean 'popular' -- but who am I to say that a popular movie isn't good, just because it caters to the widest possible audience? 'Titanic' could have been more unsettling and upsetting. Would that have made it a better movie? Well, what do we mean by 'better'? There are a lot of great movies that looked very much like duds when they came out in the theatres because lots of people hated them and told lots of other people, but twenty years down the road, those movies are acknowledged as being superb.
I guess what I'm saying is in large part agreeing with you: that at the very top end of movies, Hollywood gets all the background material -- sets, reasonably good acting, excellent filming, excellent sound, reasonably good editing, fairly good direction -- right, so it's down to the content, which might be neutered or might let something good slip through. In contrast, small independent films have wildly variable quality on *all* those and it's very difficult for them to get *all* those points right, so what carries them is the exceptional quality of the content.
Now that I think about it, it's almost like two wholly different metrics. Hollywood takes lots of production genius, then subtracts, from this nearly superb creation, a whole bunch of content, like a sculptor in marble, so what they end up with is something less than they should be doing. A small-time indi takes a chunk of uncompromised content, and to that adds actors, direction, filming, editing, like a sculptor in clay, so what they end up with is something that's the sum of a whole bunch of subsystems, heaped upon the quality of the original content.
>The quality/budget ratio of independent films lends credence to this theory.
I'm not trying to be snide here, but I suspect you haven't seen very many independent films. Most of them *suck* *incredibly*, but the very best 0.1% are quite good indeed, competitive with the best stuff coming out of Hollywood. I think it's something like a Boltzmann distribution -- Hollywood has a very steep curve, so there's not a lot of difference between their very best movies and their worst. Bollywood's best are about as good, but their worst are much worse. Chinese films, at their best, are superb, but the worst ones I've seen have been nearly unwatcheable. Then you go to an independent film competition -- I'm not talking Sundance, I'm talking some local art scene competition -- and you begin thinking to yourself "I'd pay $30 to not have to watch the rest of this."
Money doesn't guarantee a movie will be good, but it does heavily indicate the movie won't be appallingly bad.
*I* can't help it that she sits around all the time downloading asian girl-on-girl porn. I'm not saying I *mind*.
I think what you're predicting will happen for a while, but since the content-providers are highly motivated to work towards DRM, they'll produce more content, and entire content-delivery systems, that'll only work on the high-end, limiting systems. SecondLife will only run on ATI or Nvidia graphics boards. Until recently, Flash9 only ran on Win/Mac. WMA10 or whatever it is only runs on Windows. I may be wrong with some of those -- I don't use Windows or Mac so I haven't kept very good track, but I know a fair number of things don't function or only function with lots of workarounds on my linux system, and eventually if whole new areas of media only run on a subset of hardware the content providers trust, we're screwed until people can provide liberated workarounds, and that is going to become increasingly difficult (especially as more material moves to net-connection requirements, meaning remote verification and encrypted channels of confirmation.) One question is: if individuals keep producing sufficient content to maintain the interest of joe sixpack, there will still be a demand for connectivity to an unregulated net with nonstandardized content. As long as that happens, we have a chance of keeping freed hardware viable. If everyone just wants to stream the latest Sony/NBC videos, well, probably within five years we'll buy completely locked-down hardware that only connects to approved content provider material, whether Internet or TV or whatever -- because essentially it'll all be the same material.
In all honesty, I sort of like the idea of people having these dedicated media servers that only run approved material, but beside them, old or import machines that connect to this greynet full of user-created material. There are billions of us and only a few big companies: we can outproduce them on quantity, and for any given specific interest, in quality. Individuals can't crank out stuff with broad-market appeal *and* high quality because that costs huge amounts of money, but for any subset of interests, enthusiasts can make better material than the big companies can afford to produce.
I don't have to reinstall every two months, maybe more like every 4 -- or I did while I was still using Windows. (I gave up on that about two years ago because it was making me insane.)
My gf cruises a lot of porn sites and spends a lot of time downloading warez and music. We were constantly getting crap on the system that'd screw the browser or keep popping up junk. (Last two years, same behavior, on linux: never a single problem.)
I spend a lot of time running prototype USB hardware, weird stuff mostly based off FTDI USB chips and drivers and PIC USB chips and drivers, but a lot of other things, and every couple weeks the drivers would die and then other USB-related things would start misbehaving. I'd try to reinstall the drivers and things would get worse. (Last two years, same behavior, on linux: never a single problem.)
The motherboard onboard IDE controller is flaky, so I put in a replacement IDE controller on a PCI card, and boot/run off that. Sometimes Windows would load, sometimes it wouldn't. Likewise onboard audio/video are both substandard so I have PCI audio and AGP video cards. Sometimes Windows would be happy with those for a while and then suddenly decide it couldn't play sound anymore and nothing I could figure out would make it start working again. Now, to be fair, the Linux side has occasionally had some sound problems, but I think that's mostly amaroK not Kaffeine, so I think it's a specific piece of software, not the whole OS. But Linux has never had a problem with booting off the add-on IDE card, and while the video card driver doesn't work perfectly in linux (no commercial version) it does work as well as it did with Windows and the official commercial original-equipment manufacturer driver.
Yeah, our IT department has stated categorically that we won't be moving to Vista for at least three years, and we're a fortune 500 company. I guess we'll just keep reusing our XP licenses, and maybe buying a whole bunch of new ones to use as needed?
In case you should ever want to do such things: put the nozzle in a mostly sealed environment -- let's say a thermos -- with wires running in. Use resistive heating elements to crank it up to heat (there are resistive elements designed to operate submerged in molten glass, way worse conditions than this) and drop some dry ice in there. The heat will melt the dry ice (even faster than it's already subliming) which will displace the oxygen. Since it's considerably heavier than oxygen, it'll tend to stay in the thermos. It's fairly easy to make high-temp low-oxygen environment cheaply, depending on how 'low-oxygen' your demands are. I've built sintering furnaces that work well at similar temps, although I generally pipe a little bit of argon in to displace oxygen rather than using dry ice.
He's running EMC? How's that working for him? What front-end software does he use to produce the g-code, do you know? Is he running a mill? I ask because I'm in the process of building a bunch of CNC-type stuff and would love to hear how EMC is going for him, since it's what I'll probably end up using.
The company I work for is making controllable-color LED's (by making tricolor LED drivers.) We have a sayings: any cheap LED can be a white LED... for a tenth of a second.
I have to admit a lot of fondness for GPIB since my dad helped design it and I have a rack of equipment that he subsequently designed around it. In 1982, it beat the hell out of anything else on the market.
What I'd really like, rather than usb or rs232, is ethernet. Our newer tektronix scopes have a network jack on the back and somewhere inside their weird little insides, a webserver, so I can run the scope from anywhere in the building and get data out of it. That's amazingly useful. No drivers, no special cables, no limits on how many instruments I can work with, just pure functionality.
All memory chips and many analog or mixed-signal chips are modified after fab but before they're packaged. In the case of memory, they test the chip, find the bad cells, and use a laser to burn those areas/connections out, and then burn in duplicate extra sectors. Once the chip meets the required memory size and performance, all the remaining spares are burnt out, so the chip acts to specifications. Similarly, analog and mixed-signal chips are laser-trimmed for performance and accuracy. There's an enormous business in making the laser trimming systems and test systems.
I've built my own ADC's and stuff, but I question their accuracy and it's a *lot* of work to get one built that works nicely. I've built a couple 12-bit ADC's that output parallel to something like the sparkfun usb interface (16 lines of IO) and that's functional. But it's really nice to have a rugged, precalibrated multimeter that, out of the box, already has its voltage, amperage, and such calibrated and ready to go. What I've ended up doing is buying GPIB-equipped multimeters on ebay, and that works. But I often have situations where I'd like to be running five or six -- measuring efficiency on dual or triple-channel switching power supply chips, for instance -- so I don't have enough RS232's without kludging things onto the computer. GPIB works beautifully, as would USB, given their extensibility.
I like your idea of the point decoding of the LCD. I'll have to think about that and see if I can come up with an easy implementation. That'd be a lot simpler with LED readouts, which a couple of my power supplies have. What a great idea! Thanks.
I'd love to have a reasonably accurate OCR to read LCD screens. It would make for a vastly cheaper automated test equipment market when I can use a cheap webcam and some cheap digital power supplies and handheld voltmeters to do mass measurements of power conversion efficiency and characterization. Right now, that's all done via GPIB or ethernet, either of which options adds about $600 onto instruments that already cost a minimum of $600. I have played with using GOCR, with my multimeter face-down on the scanner, but even with huge easy-to-read displays, the scanner/ocr accuracy is nothing to write home about.
Oh, man, you're actually going to respond with a well-thought-out and interesting set of arguments, *and* you know what you're talking about, probably better than I do. Now I actually have to *think* about a response.
I agree with you on a lot of things. My basic differences sum up as:
1. For a given real estate, at some point the complexity will exceed the real estate. This is much less of a problem for soundboards, for which, for various reasons (I'd suggest 'tradition' is a big one) people accept a square meter of surface area devoted to controls. It's a big problem for equipment designed for automated test environments, where you get a two-slot half-rack faceplate and everything has to fit on that. 30 buttons is comfortable; 50 would be extremely cramped. The machine has more capability than 50 buttons can access.
2. Without regard to #1, it is impossible, by definition, to have hard-wired buttons on equipment with extensible/programmable functionality.
From these, we get software-defined buttons. For instance, your Mac, or my Tektronix 7000-series scope, where functions are assigned by either the manufacturer or the user to a bit of virtual real-estate, and clicking there leads you somewhere useful.
I suggest -- no, I claim -- that there is no difference between software-defined buttons and menus. They do the same thing: allow assignment of functionality to a sequence of actions. Many (most) software-defined buttons I've used institute menus on top of the software-defined buttons, although that's as easily done via a mouse.
For the person who is designing the equipment, there's a requirement of anticipation of usage. Let's take a scope for example: it makes sense to have an autoset button because that's going to get a lot of use. I don't think it makes sense to have a button for 'set a trigger for when channel A goes above 5 volts and channel B has been below 2 volts for more than 30ms', for instance. I don't even think it makes sense to have a button specifically for implementations of the trigger function -- the trigger button should have an associated menu, or series of softkeys, to access that. (Several of the machines I use have functions that are simply not accessible through *any* sequence of buttons, only via some sort of network connection, because they're sufficiently obscure and specific that it's reasonably anticipated that only automated interfaces will ever need those functions.)
A good design, but one of complexity sufficient to require basically a full computer within the system, would allow users to redefine keys to do what they want. If I'm constantly setting trigger to ch A > 5V when ch B 0v for 30ms, and that's all I ever do, it'd sure be nice to have a macro that sets that functionality and assigns it to a softkey, but I still think it'd be silly to have a button just to do that and only to do that.
The best of all, in my opinion, is a learning system. My computers are running a derivative of debian and are set up with a probabalistic menu. When I was using my damned stinking ipod I was using amaroK a lot, but now that I'm sufficiently fed up with both of them I'm using Kaffeine for playing music, and Kaffeine has risen up above amaroK in the menu structure to reflect that. It'd be really nice to have that on test&measurement equipment. Example: I do a lot of semiconductor parameter analysis with IC's that have built-in FET's. Many programmable resistive loads have the power lead shorted to ground when the supply is off or running but not trying to supply power. If my IC is hooked up to the resistive load and powered up, the FET is seeing a dead short, which burns it out within milliseconds. The resistive loads can be programmed to have the output open-circuit, and to do that is painful (push 'config' then 'output' then 'output status' then change 'output status' to 'high-impedance'.) That's really annoying, and hard to remember. It'd be nice if, since I do that every time I use the machine, it would remember and start comi
>For some reason, paranoia seems to be cool among Web geeks
I loved that line. It made me think of a bunch of other similar ones:
For some reason, fresh vegetables to be cool among health-conscious consumers.
For some reason, helmets seem to be cool among motorcycle racers.
For some reason, shoes seem to be cool among people who walk.
For some reason, breathing seems to be cool among people who are still alive...
Which is to say, by implication, that it's not paranoia when there *are* people out to get you, and lots and lots of them. We read about it every day. It's always charming to see such naivete, the way it's cute to see a kid try and eat a worm, but you don't actually let the kid eat the worm unless you're sort of a bastard.
>how many people would pay for an .unsafe tld?
ME. The geek cred *alone* would be worth it, and given what I put on my website (build your own spotwelder! melt aluminum in a homebuilt gas-fired foundry!) I actually deserve it.