I'm worried about getting drivers for whatever cool thing Intel makes with their DSPs. I hope that they will keep with their past practice of releasing most everything really necessary about their stuff to developers, but Intel could do something different for DSPs. If they make some awesome sound card or other thing that uses an Intel DSP and I don't have drivers for it, I might just get mad.
What will Intel do with a DSP? Same thing it did with the 8086. Make a functional core, then pile loads and loads of junk on top of it while keeping it compatible with release 0.001pre1. Then, once they think that there has been enough junk added on in the core, they halt all core development and start coming up with little add-ons that slightly increase the usability and performance of the DSP chip. Then they will up the clock speed of the dang thing without changing any of its internals and charge us more for the one that just so happens to run faster. We will have DSPs with a clock rate of 1 gigahertz or more, and people will finally realize that when you are working with audio, 1 gigahertz is a bit excessive. They will keep upping the speed anyway. And of course, someone will make an arcade emulator, an mp3 player, a text editor, and a web browser for the poor thing that wasn't supposed to do anything other than in the mp3 player category. And people will have fun. They will discover neat effects that are supposed to make their sound sound better, and when they hear the exact same thing, they will praise it to the ends of the earth. Then they find something that actually changes how it sounds, and they think it makes it sound worse. Then the crackers will find a way to exploit some malicious instruction, and Intel will give each one of the things a globally unique id. Then web advertisers or whatever will be able to figure out when you last replaced your sound card and in whose computer the old one went. They won't care, obviously. Oh, I almost forgot. What cool stuff can I do with one of these anyway? If it takes you longer than 2 seconds to answer that, I just wasted my time writing all of that LAME stuff.
Hmmm... I'll either say thanks or have forgotten about you when I do get into college. But still, you have to admit that you gain something through an in-class lecture. And you are almost guaranteed to understand your own notes better than those of someone you don't know, especially at midnight or 1:00 am the day before the big test. And I will say that I study for tests occasionally, but not like other people study. Thinking about it, the people that have to study now will really get burned in college. Poor kids, but I can't do anything about it.
You also say that your high school was bad. I think that mine gives me enough challenge, especially since I'm in all advanced (read tough) classes where possible.
(see subject)... Why do people go to college instead of getting their own books and stuff and learning the stuff themselves? For a degree. Now why do we want degrees? So employers will hire us. Why do they want people they hire to have degrees? Because that proves that they know something. And how do they learn that? That is the question in question. Notes are what a student writes down of what they think is the imporant information in the professor's lecture. Then they use this to study for tests. I'm not in college yet, but I'll tell you one thing: I never study for tests. It works wonderfully; I've gotten a grade lower than an A on something major maybe 2 or 3 times ever. So how do I get my information? By paying attention during class (not sleeping). If only college kids would actually concentrate on learning instead of finding ways not to do their own work, I think that the American populus would be more intelligent as a whole.
Just to break that long paragraph up, consider the value of taking notes yourself. There is something that goes on in your brain when you write something down on paper that contributes a whole lot to the process of learning that information. You can skim over notes that someone else took and not get anything out of them, but it you write it yourself, it gets imprinted somewhere deep in your memory banks. That process is known as learning. On the other side, let's say you could pick up something, read it, and have it instantly memorized for life. Now, do you understand it? Could you teach it? Unless this person was some amazing note-taker, [s]he must have missed something of the presentation. Maybe it was some crucial fact, maybe it was an illustration that made things crystal-clear in the minds of the students. Real students would care about understanding the data stream being routed into their minds, and many people need the human standing in the front of the room to understand that.
Feel free to disagree with me. Just don't let me hear it. Okay, that's mean. I should say: if you have anything intelligent to say, say it, otherwise keep your fingers off of that keyboard.
If this worked, I'd say go all out on the laptop idea you mentioned. The problem is that you don't get something for nothing. Notice that to get the electric power generation you need a heat gradient. The problem is, for the kinds of temperatures we're talking about, where are you going to get that heat gradient? Answer that, and I'll tell you exactly how you want to cool your processor. You don't want the power generation side because you don't get something for nothing. You can't get enough room-air cooling on the other side of this thing to eliminate the heat and also generate any reasonable amount of power. That is, unless you put a fan on it, which is exactly what you wanted to get rid of! These things are also not what is used on electric cars (unless they changed something drastic yesterday)... it is usually something much simpler--a DC generator (read, DC motor) on the other side of the drive shaft with a load on it works as electric brakes. This is incredibly simple considering that you already have a DC motor on the other end of the driveshaft, and it's the same motor that makes the thing go in the first place. They use this in metro trains, nothing new.
You know, have you ever noticed that a mouse is warmer after a tense person has been gripping it for any decent amount of time (if it's over an hour, it also has sweat on it)? Well why not get some extra energy from the heat? Before you go thinking, "Great idea(==money-making oppertunity!!!)", note that this is the same situation as above; what are you going to get the heat to transfer to so you can get the energy out of it? The mouse pad, if practical otherwise, is out of the question because you usually rest your wrist on it, and the wrist can get hotter than the palm. Anyway, it's not a very good heat-holding material, so it wouldn't absorb heat that readily.
We're going to get a new heating system for my house, and I was just thinking that maybe I could try out one of those thermoelectric thingys in the heating mode and use it like a heat pump, except much more efficient. There has to be a reason that no one has done that, though. Still, I might want to try it; anyone out there got some money to contribute to a research fund?
Rule #2,316: Never ask for money on Slashdot.
Never mind. I just wonder if I'm breaking some other rule:-?.
Don't get all hyped up; that was made up.
<i am="Kenneth Arnold">Hi!</i>
PS - I hope that "HTML" works--last time I tried that it got all messed up. When you preview ampersand-escaped stuff, the Comment text box has it un-ampersandized, so you have to re-ampersand it. Drives me insane. (So this is an experiment.) I'm just clicking Submit.
Re:Linux on Jeopardy (and other unimportant things
on
Linux on Jeopardy
·
· Score: 1
Well then I guess they were just lying. Oh well... Besides, anyone who hasn't heard about Linux already probably shouldn't (with a few exceptions), and most anyone who has ever run Linux knows how good it is and doesn't need anyone else to tell them that.
K.A.
Linux on Jeopardy (and other unimportant things)
on
Linux on Jeopardy
·
· Score: 1
It should have been there a long time ago...
I don't care about pronounciations. As long as I know what they're talking about or vice versa, I am happy. LILO is another one with a couple of possibilities, but don't tell me which one! I don't care! People know what I'm talking about.
Of course a question like this would only be asked on a Teen Tournament. Face it, teens are more likely to know / care about this stuff than their elders. Why? I dunno. I suspect that it might have something to relate to the time they have to mess around with such things or how angry they get at their other operating system when it crashes in the middle of writing a report. Just guesses, considering that these are among my reasons. Perhaps it is also because the word 'cool' is used much more often by teens than by adults, and they have to find something to describe with it. No holy OS wars because of this, please!
Speaking of publicity, my parents say that there was something about Linux on NPR, but I didn't hear it so I don't necessarily believe them. Somebody verify this. There was also a short interview with Red Hat's CEO, but I forget what network that was on. There's something for you to post about; I know you've been waiting a whole minute to find something. Why? Because you read this post! Okay, that was pointless.
So, hypothosize as to whether Microsoft will be broken up, think about whether they should be fined or slaped or chained in a basement. Regardless - these are the facts, these cannot be disagreed with.
I find it hard not to laugh. I cannot count how many people have disagreed with the facts, and you're saying that they cannot be disagreed with. LOL squared.
In people's minds there is a verdict. If my idea of how the public works is anywhere near true, the real verdict will be exactly what everyone has been thinking. So although there has been no verdict yet, it's pretty clear in most people's minds what that will be, so when people disagree with the verdict, they are not being totally stupid as you would have us think.
Okay, back to contesting the finding of facts... if you read the Byte article and accepted more than about 5 percent of it, than you are saying that the Finding of Fact is not factual. In fact (no pun intended), by your definition of "fact" the Finding of Facts has a lot of stuff that is not a fact. Back to the Byte article. About the OS/2 thing and the "facts" given about that: BS for the FoF. The author of that commentary gives us some facts - things that can be "verified" and "proved."
Some schoolchildren have learned about the difference between fact and opinion and BS today. Some definitions of 'fact', in fact, one I was given not so long ago, emphasizes that a FACT can be wrong and still be a FACT. The qualifying condition is whether or not it can be proved. I have heard a lot of Facts recently.
Some schoolchildren have learned about the difference between fact and opinion and BS today. So have many adults.
I'm confused. The first day I heard about this, I thought, "Hey, cool, they've busted MS!". Today I'm thinking, "Pick on Microsoft again. This is getting boring." Now, as I write this comment, I'm thinking the same stuff I get when I type 'cat/dev/hda1'. You got it, incoherent bits and pieces of junk. I think that I'm going into Emacs and typing M-x doctor now.
I don't think mentally insane people should post comments to Slashdot. Ergo, I should shut up before I become mentally insane. But then I shouldn't post to Slashdot, which means that you wouldn't see this comment, which means that I wouldn't be posting to Slashdot, which means that I wouldn't be shutting up because I never started, which means that I wouldn't be mentally insane, which means...
Call them softroMic.
Arnold Kenneth (or the other way around, I forget)
PS - I wonder if there has ever been anyone before me who has become crazy during the course of writing a comment and thus was crazy enough to submit his blabber? You are not getting what I am saying. I know it.
Not useless, in fact it satisfies the #2 reason for having a cell phone (making this up of course): for emergencies. What's #1, you ask. Tie between work and to call friends (and other means of fun). There are people who buy a cell phone, stick it in their glove compartment, and pay their bills every month even though they don't use it. This kind of phone is perfect for them. So I'm not going to bother asking if it has a cellular modem connection or if you can convert it to play Doom, because that deosn't matter. What matters is that it serves an important purpose well.
... a chance to eliminate the stupid PAL vs. NTSC vs. SECAM television incompatibility mess.
Just as a little tidbit of knowledge for you: the first COFDM tests were really just digitially-encoded PAL of about 9 seconds of a flyby of some castle. But what really cared was whether it could receive it at all, not what it received. And anyway, they eventually got in a video server and some pretty pictures.
So what you're saying is that pages need to be written in some other language. I'm thinking something based on either Perl or Scheme. Both of these have more than half-decent ways of expressing objects, but I like Scheme because you can bundle things up into little subunits. Hey -- that's what the Web needs. In both Perl and Scheme, all data is the same type, taken to a (good) extreme in Scheme, where even the data objects themselves are valid as data types -- i.e. you can put a function in a list with an atom in a vector and stuff all that in variable a. Web page: List. Header == association list, title=Page Title, etc. Body == another list of objects of a certain data type. Each can contain other types. Some examples: table, paragraph, image, hyperlink, video, form, script. I look at Slashdot and see how easily it could fit into that sort of scheme (no pun intended). Now, as you were saying about Turing-completeness, relax the idea that the whole page has to be a static list. Say instead that it is a program that returns such a beastie. Then you have your Turing-completeness. The only problem with Scheme is that there are so many different additions to the standard. I personally like the additions in the DrScheme package from Rice University. You just do (require-library 'x) and x is loaded. This is what we can use for web pages. Not to mention that it has a good GUI...
I don't know if XML is Turing-complete. I've never worked in it.
If you got problems with APM, recompile your kernel and disable APM support. (It can't be apmd because init killed that a long time before.) If your APM is otherwise working fine, just disable the "Power Down on Halt" option. Then your computer will be a little quieter. You might want to remount everything read-only (mount -o remount,ro) and try 'apm -s' and 'apm -S' to see if your APM is messed up. Could be BIOS settings.
I should stop trying to be a troubleshooter... well, I don't think LKCD would make any difference in this situation because you don't care. If it's a problem that happens when your computer should be dormant anyway, why bother trying to figure out what's wrong? Especially when there are better ways to go about doing that (fiddling with BIOS settings and such).
And what are md devices, anyway? And why should I care? It magically disappeared when I got a new kernel, so I don't care anymore.
Okay, who has a router like this and doesn't have enough money to go get himself a real mp3 player?
Okay, so it's fun. I agree that making something do what it wasn't designed to do is fun and cool. Practical purpose is a topic of debate when it comes to this particular instance. But still...
I guess the router still works as a router, which makes it neat. And hey, what in the world is really, truely useful anyway? Most people will admit that it's a very limited subset. How many sites on the Internet give useful information compared to the number put there mostly for entertainment? And, by the way, why were mp3's invented in the first place? What was the ground principle? To listen to music. Is that useful? I'll let you decide. And what are computer games?
From the very beginning of computing, there was a coolness factor. Nowadays that has become more diluted because, for the most part, people don't build their own computers from transistors, hack code out in assembly language, and jump up so high that you hit your head on the ceiling when you get a video driver to work. Okay, so I've never done such a thing, so that may be wrong. You should know what I mean. Anyway, these sorts of projects bring that coolness factor back, especially when your contraption gives you entertainment as its main purpose. I sometimes program in assembly language for the TI-83 (a Z80 processor), and it normally doesn't do anything really useful, but still it's fun.
I don't know if everyone out here knows how to modify the code for an embedded system's general-purpose timer or connect a DMA line to an input port or whatever it was, but I'm sure a good number of people reading this appreciate what comes out of the whole thing! (Pick a song, any song!) Now get the router to download the mp3 in real-time over the Internet, and it would be really useful as an entertainment device.
I bet he's the only guy on his block who has a pile of wires that plays mp3's! Who cares if it's only 8-bit!
The fact is that MP3's and 486's don't mix. I'm using a 486/66 as my Internet gateway, and it's slow at that simple task. I have a PIII/450 desktop, and if I start doing other stuff while I'm playing an mp3, the audio skips like mad. Sure, it depends on what else you might be doing at the time, but with a 486, just about anything could mess it up -- like, say, output to the sound card:-(. Basically, a single 486 is out of the question if you want to play mp3s at any decent quality (note that you can use downsampling or play it mono and it won't skip quite so much).
That's not to say a 486-based architecture is completely out of the question... Get 2 486's and either an SMP board for it (good luck finding that... I don't think that they made such a thing) or put them on two boards, make a tiny Beowulf cluster on them, which might increase the speed enough if you find a way to do it without too much overhead, and hack your mp3 player to take advantage of the speed by doing at least 2 work threads (or get somebody else's hack:-).
What I'd do if I had a spare 486 and ethernet card would be to use my desktop computer to decompress the mp3 I want and then stream it or otherwise transfer it to the computer that's a little closer to the stereo system. But that would be really bad in terms of wiring because I have no ethernet cables running anywhere near my stereo:-(.
Forget all that crap above... I would either do one of two things: use my computer to play it and redirect my sound card's output through my house speaker wiring (but you probably don't have any speaker wire going anywhere near your main computer) or (my best suggestion) say "Heck with it!" and play mp3s on your desktop computer. Who cares if it isn't through your $1000 stereo system... a good set of computer speakers can do the trick without noticible difference for 99% of us without all the hastle and at a greatly reduced risk of having a "significant other" in the household tell you to shut it off.
That was probably a lot more than anyone expected. What the heck...
Some sort of closing remark besides Sincerely, (who really is when they say that?)br> Kenenth
Since this discussion seems to have a lot to say about VB, I figured I might bring this up:
There is a VB to C/GTK converter that will handle most of the VB stuff. It's command line and therefore basically useless for development without VB for Windows. Search Freshmeat for this -- it's called vb2c. The guy doing it just made it for fun, but now, considering that we have "proof" that VB is the most popular language, it's useful.
I want to work on a VB GUI for Linux to complement this program; would anyone want to help me (or has this already been done)?
Kenneth Arnold
PS - I got interrupted while writing this so maybe someone has already posted something about vb2c. If so, just ignore this.
I know someone is going to bring this up (maybe someone already has while I was writing this), but there are an almost endless stream of modifications that can be made to this idea:
Color. (This has already been said, I know.)
Multi-color! Now there we go! Each needle a different random color, but some limitation on the availible colors so we only get normal-looking shades.
Blinking! On-off-on-off-on-off-etc-etc-etc. Of course it's biological, so it would probably be more like on-on-on-off-on-off-off-on.
But wait a second! That looks a lot like binary! Let's have a computer in our Christmas tree! And make it run Linux! Now, what can we make it do? (blank stare)
Okay, better computer idea: Make your computer control your Christmas tree. "I'm tired of green. Let's do purple. Now what RGB was that?"
Tunes built right into your tree! Special gene progams tree cells to synchronously play songs! Sings Jingle Bells, O Christmas Tree, and all your other Christmas favorites! All through the night, and over and over again! "I'M GONNA KILL THAT TREE!!!"
I'm sure I've missed a few wacky variations, so feel free to reply to this insert descriptive word here post!
Have a Merry Christmas with your light-up tree! Yeah, I know this is exactly two months early:-).
Kenneth Arnold
Where's the HTML tag that makes my post not stupid?
Remember, you can't get something for nothing. The energy for the light has to come from somewhere... if it's not the wall outlet, then it's the fertilizer. And which is more expensive? Granted, the tree-glows are much more efficient than the lights (heat factor), but still...
> The sad part is that these will probably be popular. I suppose that they will help prevent candle-causing house fires, and save on electricity. But Geeze!
Since when did house fires make candles? I'm going to find some burned-down house and collect all the candles! (I think he meant candle-caused.)
Kenneth Arnold
PS - Add one advantage: Save hours that could better be spent with the family (optional) or readingSlashdot!
How did this get approved in the first place? For one thing, a good number of people at the patent office had to actually have understood it. I've seen some legalese far more understandable than this (think the US Constitution, which was written 200 years ago and still understood by middle-school students, with or without the background knowledge given in class). Second, amazon would have had to prove that this technology had not been developed before by someone else, which would have meant an exhaustive search of the entire Internet, when, by one estimate, less than 1/4 of the Web is currently indexed by search engines. I don't see how this absurd patent actually got approved by the US Government.
Kenneth Arnold
Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer, so this may be completely wrong.
Moderate this up. (Yeah, I know, it's only been here for less than 2 hours.)
His article is cool, and that's a good enough reason to moderate his post up. And that he didn't notice that the default Slashdot style is HTML (so he did \n's instead of br's) is no reason not to; we can still understand it. It addresses issues talked about on the top of the list, and as I write this it's on the bottom.
The only problem is that when it does get to the top of the list, this post will be irrelevant. I think Slashdot should have a way for posters to delete their own messages (but keep any effect they have had so far on their karma). If anyone agrees with me, you can go e-mail one of the Big Guys (tm) about it. Of course, you couldn't do anything about the Anonymous Coward posts.
I still don't know what to think about the G4. Is it faster than the PIII because it has more (total) instructions? Does it just appear faster, or is it really? The test numbers given at the various review sites don't seem to give a good overall picture. The article confused me on this issue.
Still, the Velocity Engine, in theory as well as, it seems, in practice, is a very good idea (I think... Is this true?), so why didn't Intel or AMD or Cyrix have it a long time ago?
I have a whole bunch of opinions on this subject, but any opinions stated here are merely coincidental. Don't feel like you actually have to answer my questions either; I don't want to start another flame war.
Kenneth
PS - I'm debating whether or not to post this anonymously because of the flame bait issue. I guess I'll post as myself, trusting other users to be smart enough to keep their mouths shut.
I mean, they're making CPUs so darn complex these days it's hard to appreciate the real work that the processor is doing. Example: I haven't got a clue what the PIII under my hood is doing, and I don't want to, because it would involve so many complex subjects that my mind would either explode or doze off. Now the PISC as described in that article is my kind of chip (or maybe it's not a chip if I try to build it, but same idea of CPU). So what if it runs at 5 MHz? That could be fixed--just speed up the underlying circuits. And at 5 MHz, my brain might actually have a chance at keeping up with it. Skimming the page was enough to give me the idea that "I could build this thing," even though I have very little experience in actually building electronic circuits. I'm not a chip engineer, obviously, or an electrical engineer, and neither is the average computer user. The average computer user, however, might be interested to know that they actually have a shot at figuring out what that magical black (or grey) box in that case is doing.
Demystify the processor. But don't call it Pathetic. I'd call it Understandable. Unfourtunately it's even harder to pronounce UISC than CISC or RISC, so make it Technically-understandable Instruction Set Computer, or TISC (cm) (Cool Mark).
Kenneth Arnold
PS - If you are going to have a shot at looking at some neat technology, I thought that the K7 Article also on Ars Technica was pretty cool. It was well written and provided a good metaphor. Still, it barely scratched the surface at telling me what is really going on down there.
PPS - I could have said more, but my hard drive is making funny noises and I better investigate.
is what the Palm seems to be heading for (I say supercomputer in the general sense, not just in the processor). But it can't be. Look at the niche here. Let's do a quick laptop vs. handheld computer comparison (I will use Palms, but most of it applies to any handheld computer):
Laptops are super-fast, just a little slower than the desktops. Palms hit 33 mHZ last I checked, and it doesn't look like they'll get much faster. (There goes all of your ideas about playing MP3s with the hard drive)
Palms are tiny. Laptops are just small. (See next two items.
Laptops have a decent keyboard. You can type a research paper on them easily. There are fold-out-type keyboards for the Palm line (and the CEs), but it's not the same as having a full-sized keyboard.
Some of the newer laptops have awesome LCD displays that make me drool. Laptops have been color for a long time, and DV on the new screens looks great. They are just now getting color into the Palm line, and that's going to hinder it a lot (battery life especially, but probably weight and speed will be issues as well). And that still doesn't solve the problem of them being tiny; I like to be able to see at least half a page of my letter at a time without squinting or using a magnifying glass '-(. And try playing DV on them.
Some swear by one, some swear by the other, some swear by wierd stuff, and some, like me, don't care, but there are basically two types of screen-positional input (read: mouse) on laptops: trackpad and integrated mouse ball. I haven't seen a laptop with a touch screen; maybe there is one. Palms have touch screens with those sleek-looking styluses (is that the correct plural?). But no mouse (pardon my grammar). Accordingly, Palms have handwriting recognition, Graffiti. Some people have better luck with Graffiti than others. To me, it's more like writing on paper than typing is.
If there are any more aspects that I missed, feel free to reply to this message
There is obviously a different niche for these two classes of devices. One cannot reasonably expect to enter the realm of the other successfully. If the Palm becomes too bloated with all these extra features, I'd rathar just dump it and buy a laptop, especially with some of the advantages that I mentioned above. But you still can't beat carrying it in your pocket. There is only so much you can fit into that little package without making it bigger (and therefore not fit in your pocket anymore).
Please, guys, keep the palm in Palm, and the lap in laptop. ("Notebook" is a better term, when it is clear that you are referring to the size of the computer. Good luck getting a real notebook to run Linux:-)
Kenneth Arnold
PS - I want a laptop. Badly. Real PS - My sig is stupid. I'm changing it as soon as I sumbit this.
Microsoft programmers are awesome! Who else in the world could implement Billy's insiduous schemes in such purposely crappy software? Why don't you try it?
Seriously, I wouldn't mind an extremely localized 8.5 quake on a coastal residence near Redmond. You know, the one with the "smart" house and the automation systems? Don't tell me you don't know whose house I'm talking about.
On that topic, wouldn't it be funny if we found out that the fancy controls for his "smart" house run on Linux? Well, having a computer crash is bad, but having your house crash is worse!
One of the things I've noticed in my (few) years of life is that if the rule ain't there, no one can break it. If software is free, and the licence says you can sell it for free (like the GPL and a few others), then giving it to your friends isn't a crime at all. And in my experience a lot of free software can be better than its costly equivalents (think Linux vs. Win zzzzzz) and it's free to go with that. Being the recipient of all this cool stuff for $0.00 (connect time charges may apply, or not), I just say, "cool!".
Go get some games. C'mon, we haven't got all day! Well maybe we do, but still...
FYI: If anyone following this is too lazy to find the site themselves (and all too many of us are), the website in question is http://developer.soundblaster.com/linux .
Slashdot Mirror
I'm worried about getting drivers for whatever cool thing Intel makes with their DSPs. I hope that they will keep with their past practice of releasing most everything really necessary about their stuff to developers, but Intel could do something different for DSPs. If they make some awesome sound card or other thing that uses an Intel DSP and I don't have drivers for it, I might just get mad.
What will Intel do with a DSP? Same thing it did with the 8086. Make a functional core, then pile loads and loads of junk on top of it while keeping it compatible with release 0.001pre1. Then, once they think that there has been enough junk added on in the core, they halt all core development and start coming up with little add-ons that slightly increase the usability and performance of the DSP chip. Then they will up the clock speed of the dang thing without changing any of its internals and charge us more for the one that just so happens to run faster. We will have DSPs with a clock rate of 1 gigahertz or more, and people will finally realize that when you are working with audio, 1 gigahertz is a bit excessive. They will keep upping the speed anyway. And of course, someone will make an arcade emulator, an mp3 player, a text editor, and a web browser for the poor thing that wasn't supposed to do anything other than in the mp3 player category. And people will have fun. They will discover neat effects that are supposed to make their sound sound better, and when they hear the exact same thing, they will praise it to the ends of the earth. Then they find something that actually changes how it sounds, and they think it makes it sound worse. Then the crackers will find a way to exploit some malicious instruction, and Intel will give each one of the things a globally unique id. Then web advertisers or whatever will be able to figure out when you last replaced your sound card and in whose computer the old one went. They won't care, obviously. Oh, I almost forgot. What cool stuff can I do with one of these anyway? If it takes you longer than 2 seconds to answer that, I just wasted my time writing all of that LAME stuff.
Gotta go. Ken
Hmmm... I'll either say thanks or have forgotten about you when I do get into college. But still, you have to admit that you gain something through an in-class lecture. And you are almost guaranteed to understand your own notes better than those of someone you don't know, especially at midnight or 1:00 am the day before the big test. And I will say that I study for tests occasionally, but not like other people study. Thinking about it, the people that have to study now will really get burned in college. Poor kids, but I can't do anything about it.
You also say that your high school was bad. I think that mine gives me enough challenge, especially since I'm in all advanced (read tough) classes where possible.
Different people have different experiences.
Kenneth Arnold
(see subject)... Why do people go to college instead of getting their own books and stuff and learning the stuff themselves? For a degree. Now why do we want degrees? So employers will hire us. Why do they want people they hire to have degrees? Because that proves that they know something. And how do they learn that? That is the question in question. Notes are what a student writes down of what they think is the imporant information in the professor's lecture. Then they use this to study for tests. I'm not in college yet, but I'll tell you one thing: I never study for tests. It works wonderfully; I've gotten a grade lower than an A on something major maybe 2 or 3 times ever. So how do I get my information? By paying attention during class (not sleeping). If only college kids would actually concentrate on learning instead of finding ways not to do their own work, I think that the American populus would be more intelligent as a whole.
Just to break that long paragraph up, consider the value of taking notes yourself. There is something that goes on in your brain when you write something down on paper that contributes a whole lot to the process of learning that information. You can skim over notes that someone else took and not get anything out of them, but it you write it yourself, it gets imprinted somewhere deep in your memory banks. That process is known as learning. On the other side, let's say you could pick up something, read it, and have it instantly memorized for life. Now, do you understand it? Could you teach it? Unless this person was some amazing note-taker, [s]he must have missed something of the presentation. Maybe it was some crucial fact, maybe it was an illustration that made things crystal-clear in the minds of the students. Real students would care about understanding the data stream being routed into their minds, and many people need the human standing in the front of the room to understand that.
Feel free to disagree with me. Just don't let me hear it. Okay, that's mean. I should say: if you have anything intelligent to say, say it, otherwise keep your fingers off of that keyboard.
Kenenth Arnold
If this worked, I'd say go all out on the laptop idea you mentioned. The problem is that you don't get something for nothing. Notice that to get the electric power generation you need a heat gradient. The problem is, for the kinds of temperatures we're talking about, where are you going to get that heat gradient? Answer that, and I'll tell you exactly how you want to cool your processor. You don't want the power generation side because you don't get something for nothing. You can't get enough room-air cooling on the other side of this thing to eliminate the heat and also generate any reasonable amount of power. That is, unless you put a fan on it, which is exactly what you wanted to get rid of! These things are also not what is used on electric cars (unless they changed something drastic yesterday)... it is usually something much simpler--a DC generator (read, DC motor) on the other side of the drive shaft with a load on it works as electric brakes. This is incredibly simple considering that you already have a DC motor on the other end of the driveshaft, and it's the same motor that makes the thing go in the first place. They use this in metro trains, nothing new.
:-?.
You know, have you ever noticed that a mouse is warmer after a tense person has been gripping it for any decent amount of time (if it's over an hour, it also has sweat on it)? Well why not get some extra energy from the heat? Before you go thinking, "Great idea(==money-making oppertunity!!!)", note that this is the same situation as above; what are you going to get the heat to transfer to so you can get the energy out of it? The mouse pad, if practical otherwise, is out of the question because you usually rest your wrist on it, and the wrist can get hotter than the palm. Anyway, it's not a very good heat-holding material, so it wouldn't absorb heat that readily.
We're going to get a new heating system for my house, and I was just thinking that maybe I could try out one of those thermoelectric thingys in the heating mode and use it like a heat pump, except much more efficient. There has to be a reason that no one has done that, though. Still, I might want to try it; anyone out there got some money to contribute to a research fund?
Rule #2,316: Never ask for money on Slashdot.
Never mind. I just wonder if I'm breaking some other rule
Don't get all hyped up; that was made up.
<i am="Kenneth Arnold">Hi!</i>
PS - I hope that "HTML" works--last time I tried that it got all messed up. When you preview ampersand-escaped stuff, the Comment text box has it un-ampersandized, so you have to re-ampersand it. Drives me insane. (So this is an experiment.) I'm just clicking Submit.
Well then I guess they were just lying. Oh well... Besides, anyone who hasn't heard about Linux already probably shouldn't (with a few exceptions), and most anyone who has ever run Linux knows how good it is and doesn't need anyone else to tell them that.
K.A.
It should have been there a long time ago...
I don't care about pronounciations. As long as I know what they're talking about or vice versa, I am happy. LILO is another one with a couple of possibilities, but don't tell me which one! I don't care! People know what I'm talking about.
Of course a question like this would only be asked on a Teen Tournament. Face it, teens are more likely to know / care about this stuff than their elders. Why? I dunno. I suspect that it might have something to relate to the time they have to mess around with such things or how angry they get at their other operating system when it crashes in the middle of writing a report. Just guesses, considering that these are among my reasons. Perhaps it is also because the word 'cool' is used much more often by teens than by adults, and they have to find something to describe with it. No holy OS wars because of this, please!
Speaking of publicity, my parents say that there was something about Linux on NPR, but I didn't hear it so I don't necessarily believe them. Somebody verify this. There was also a short interview with Red Hat's CEO, but I forget what network that was on. There's something for you to post about; I know you've been waiting a whole minute to find something. Why? Because you read this post! Okay, that was pointless.
Kenneth Arnold
So, hypothosize as to whether Microsoft will be broken up, think about whether they should be fined or slaped or chained in a basement. Regardless - these are the facts, these cannot be disagreed with.
/dev/hda1'. You got it, incoherent bits and pieces of junk. I think that I'm going into Emacs and typing M-x doctor now.
I find it hard not to laugh. I cannot count how many people have disagreed with the facts, and you're saying that they cannot be disagreed with. LOL squared.
In people's minds there is a verdict. If my idea of how the public works is anywhere near true, the real verdict will be exactly what everyone has been thinking. So although there has been no verdict yet, it's pretty clear in most people's minds what that will be, so when people disagree with the verdict, they are not being totally stupid as you would have us think.
Okay, back to contesting the finding of facts... if you read the Byte article and accepted more than about 5 percent of it, than you are saying that the Finding of Fact is not factual. In fact (no pun intended), by your definition of "fact" the Finding of Facts has a lot of stuff that is not a fact. Back to the Byte article. About the OS/2 thing and the "facts" given about that: BS for the FoF. The author of that commentary gives us some facts - things that can be "verified" and "proved."
Some schoolchildren have learned about the difference between fact and opinion and BS today. Some definitions of 'fact', in fact, one I was given not so long ago, emphasizes that a FACT can be wrong and still be a FACT. The qualifying condition is whether or not it can be proved. I have heard a lot of Facts recently.
Some schoolchildren have learned about the difference between fact and opinion and BS today. So have many adults.
I'm confused. The first day I heard about this, I thought, "Hey, cool, they've busted MS!". Today I'm thinking, "Pick on Microsoft again. This is getting boring." Now, as I write this comment, I'm thinking the same stuff I get when I type 'cat
I don't think mentally insane people should post comments to Slashdot. Ergo, I should shut up before I become mentally insane. But then I shouldn't post to Slashdot, which means that you wouldn't see this comment, which means that I wouldn't be posting to Slashdot, which means that I wouldn't be shutting up because I never started, which means that I wouldn't be mentally insane, which means...
Call them softroMic.
Arnold Kenneth (or the other way around, I forget)
PS - I wonder if there has ever been anyone before me who has become crazy during the course of writing a comment and thus was crazy enough to submit his blabber? You are not getting what I am saying. I know it.
Not useless, in fact it satisfies the #2 reason for having a cell phone (making this up of course): for emergencies. What's #1, you ask. Tie between work and to call friends (and other means of fun). There are people who buy a cell phone, stick it in their glove compartment, and pay their bills every month even though they don't use it. This kind of phone is perfect for them. So I'm not going to bother asking if it has a cellular modem connection or if you can convert it to play Doom, because that deosn't matter. What matters is that it serves an important purpose well.
This isn't going to get moderated up, is it?
Kenneth
... a chance to eliminate the stupid PAL vs. NTSC vs. SECAM television incompatibility mess.
Just as a little tidbit of knowledge for you: the first COFDM tests were really just digitially-encoded PAL of about 9 seconds of a flyby of some castle. But what really cared was whether it could receive it at all, not what it received. And anyway, they eventually got in a video server and some pretty pictures.
Kenneth Arnold
Has anyone written a DLL wrapper for wine that would work like Ron says for other applications? E-mail me in response.
So what you're saying is that pages need to be written in some other language. I'm thinking something based on either Perl or Scheme. Both of these have more than half-decent ways of expressing objects, but I like Scheme because you can bundle things up into little subunits. Hey -- that's what the Web needs. In both Perl and Scheme, all data is the same type, taken to a (good) extreme in Scheme, where even the data objects themselves are valid as data types -- i.e. you can put a function in a list with an atom in a vector and stuff all that in variable a. Web page: List. Header == association list, title=Page Title, etc. Body == another list of objects of a certain data type. Each can contain other types. Some examples: table, paragraph, image, hyperlink, video, form, script. I look at Slashdot and see how easily it could fit into that sort of scheme (no pun intended). Now, as you were saying about Turing-completeness, relax the idea that the whole page has to be a static list. Say instead that it is a program that returns such a beastie. Then you have your Turing-completeness. The only problem with Scheme is that there are so many different additions to the standard. I personally like the additions in the DrScheme package from Rice University. You just do (require-library 'x) and x is loaded. This is what we can use for web pages. Not to mention that it has a good GUI...
I don't know if XML is Turing-complete. I've never worked in it.
Kenneth Arnold, Scheme programmer
If you got problems with APM, recompile your kernel and disable APM support. (It can't be apmd because init killed that a long time before.) If your APM is otherwise working fine, just disable the "Power Down on Halt" option. Then your computer will be a little quieter. You might want to remount everything read-only (mount -o remount,ro) and try 'apm -s' and 'apm -S' to see if your APM is messed up. Could be BIOS settings.
I should stop trying to be a troubleshooter... well, I don't think LKCD would make any difference in this situation because you don't care. If it's a problem that happens when your computer should be dormant anyway, why bother trying to figure out what's wrong? Especially when there are better ways to go about doing that (fiddling with BIOS settings and such).
And what are md devices, anyway? And why should I care? It magically disappeared when I got a new kernel, so I don't care anymore.
Kenneth
Okay, who has a router like this and doesn't have enough money to go get himself a real mp3 player?
Okay, so it's fun. I agree that making something do what it wasn't designed to do is fun and cool. Practical purpose is a topic of debate when it comes to this particular instance. But still...
I guess the router still works as a router, which makes it neat. And hey, what in the world is really, truely useful anyway? Most people will admit that it's a very limited subset. How many sites on the Internet give useful information compared to the number put there mostly for entertainment? And, by the way, why were mp3's invented in the first place? What was the ground principle? To listen to music. Is that useful? I'll let you decide. And what are computer games?
From the very beginning of computing, there was a coolness factor. Nowadays that has become more diluted because, for the most part, people don't build their own computers from transistors, hack code out in assembly language, and jump up so high that you hit your head on the ceiling when you get a video driver to work. Okay, so I've never done such a thing, so that may be wrong. You should know what I mean. Anyway, these sorts of projects bring that coolness factor back, especially when your contraption gives you entertainment as its main purpose. I sometimes program in assembly language for the TI-83 (a Z80 processor), and it normally doesn't do anything really useful, but still it's fun.
I don't know if everyone out here knows how to modify the code for an embedded system's general-purpose timer or connect a DMA line to an input port or whatever it was, but I'm sure a good number of people reading this appreciate what comes out of the whole thing! (Pick a song, any song!) Now get the router to download the mp3 in real-time over the Internet, and it would be really useful as an entertainment device.
I bet he's the only guy on his block who has a pile of wires that plays mp3's! Who cares if it's only 8-bit!
Senselessly,
Kenneth Arnold
Rock on, dudes!
I don't think you posted twice on purpose.
:-(. Basically, a single 486 is out of the question if you want to play mp3s at any decent quality (note that you can use downsampling or play it mono and it won't skip quite so much).
:-).
:-(.
The fact is that MP3's and 486's don't mix. I'm using a 486/66 as my Internet gateway, and it's slow at that simple task. I have a PIII/450 desktop, and if I start doing other stuff while I'm playing an mp3, the audio skips like mad. Sure, it depends on what else you might be doing at the time, but with a 486, just about anything could mess it up -- like, say, output to the sound card
That's not to say a 486-based architecture is completely out of the question... Get 2 486's and either an SMP board for it (good luck finding that... I don't think that they made such a thing) or put them on two boards, make a tiny Beowulf cluster on them, which might increase the speed enough if you find a way to do it without too much overhead, and hack your mp3 player to take advantage of the speed by doing at least 2 work threads (or get somebody else's hack
What I'd do if I had a spare 486 and ethernet card would be to use my desktop computer to decompress the mp3 I want and then stream it or otherwise transfer it to the computer that's a little closer to the stereo system. But that would be really bad in terms of wiring because I have no ethernet cables running anywhere near my stereo
Forget all that crap above... I would either do one of two things: use my computer to play it and redirect my sound card's output through my house speaker wiring (but you probably don't have any speaker wire going anywhere near your main computer) or (my best suggestion) say "Heck with it!" and play mp3s on your desktop computer. Who cares if it isn't through your $1000 stereo system... a good set of computer speakers can do the trick without noticible difference for 99% of us without all the hastle and at a greatly reduced risk of having a "significant other" in the household tell you to shut it off.
That was probably a lot more than anyone expected. What the heck...
Some sort of closing remark besides Sincerely, (who really is when they say that?)br>
Kenenth
Since this discussion seems to have a lot to say about VB, I figured I might bring this up:
There is a VB to C/GTK converter that will handle most of the VB stuff. It's command line and therefore basically useless for development without VB for Windows. Search Freshmeat for this -- it's called vb2c. The guy doing it just made it for fun, but now, considering that we have "proof" that VB is the most popular language, it's useful.
I want to work on a VB GUI for Linux to complement this program; would anyone want to help me (or has this already been done)?
Kenneth Arnold
PS - I got interrupted while writing this so maybe someone has already posted something about vb2c. If so, just ignore this.
I'm sure I've missed a few wacky variations, so feel free to reply to this insert descriptive word here post!
Have a Merry Christmas with your light-up tree! Yeah, I know this is exactly two months early
Kenneth Arnold
Where's the HTML tag that makes my post not stupid?
Remember, you can't get something for nothing. The energy for the light has to come from somewhere... if it's not the wall outlet, then it's the fertilizer. And which is more expensive? Granted, the tree-glows are much more efficient than the lights (heat factor), but still...
> The sad part is that these will probably be popular. I suppose that they will help prevent candle-causing house fires, and save on electricity. But Geeze!
Since when did house fires make candles? I'm going to find some burned-down house and collect all the candles! (I think he meant candle-caused.)
Kenneth Arnold
PS - Add one advantage: Save hours that could better be spent with the family (optional) or r e adi n g Slashdot!
How did this get approved in the first place? For one thing, a good number of people at the patent office had to actually have understood it. I've seen some legalese far more understandable than this (think the US Constitution, which was written 200 years ago and still understood by middle-school students, with or without the background knowledge given in class). Second, amazon would have had to prove that this technology had not been developed before by someone else, which would have meant an exhaustive search of the entire Internet, when, by one estimate, less than 1/4 of the Web is currently indexed by search engines. I don't see how this absurd patent actually got approved by the US Government.
Kenneth Arnold
Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer, so this may be completely wrong.
Moderate this up. (Yeah, I know, it's only been here for less than 2 hours.)
His article is cool, and that's a good enough reason to moderate his post up. And that he didn't notice that the default Slashdot style is HTML (so he did \n's instead of br's) is no reason not to; we can still understand it. It addresses issues talked about on the top of the list, and as I write this it's on the bottom.
The only problem is that when it does get to the top of the list, this post will be irrelevant. I think Slashdot should have a way for posters to delete their own messages (but keep any effect they have had so far on their karma). If anyone agrees with me, you can go e-mail one of the Big Guys (tm) about it. Of course, you couldn't do anything about the Anonymous Coward posts.
Kenneth Arnold
I still don't know what to think about the G4. Is it faster than the PIII because it has more (total) instructions? Does it just appear faster, or is it really? The test numbers given at the various review sites don't seem to give a good overall picture. The article confused me on this issue.
Still, the Velocity Engine, in theory as well as, it seems, in practice, is a very good idea (I think... Is this true?), so why didn't Intel or AMD or Cyrix have it a long time ago?
I have a whole bunch of opinions on this subject, but any opinions stated here are merely coincidental. Don't feel like you actually have to answer my questions either; I don't want to start another flame war.
Kenneth
PS - I'm debating whether or not to post this anonymously because of the flame bait issue. I guess I'll post as myself, trusting other users to be smart enough to keep their mouths shut.
Cool.
I mean, they're making CPUs so darn complex these days it's hard to appreciate the real work that the processor is doing. Example: I haven't got a clue what the PIII under my hood is doing, and I don't want to, because it would involve so many complex subjects that my mind would either explode or doze off. Now the PISC as described in that article is my kind of chip (or maybe it's not a chip if I try to build it, but same idea of CPU). So what if it runs at 5 MHz? That could be fixed--just speed up the underlying circuits. And at 5 MHz, my brain might actually have a chance at keeping up with it. Skimming the page was enough to give me the idea that "I could build this thing," even though I have very little experience in actually building electronic circuits. I'm not a chip engineer, obviously, or an electrical engineer, and neither is the average computer user. The average computer user, however, might be interested to know that they actually have a shot at figuring out what that magical black (or grey) box in that case is doing.
Demystify the processor. But don't call it Pathetic. I'd call it Understandable. Unfourtunately it's even harder to pronounce UISC than CISC or RISC, so make it Technically-understandable Instruction Set Computer, or TISC (cm) (Cool Mark).
Kenneth Arnold
PS - If you are going to have a shot at looking at some neat technology, I thought that the K7 Article also on Ars Technica was pretty cool. It was well written and provided a good metaphor. Still, it barely scratched the surface at telling me what is really going on down there.
PPS - I could have said more, but my hard drive is making funny noises and I better investigate.
There is obviously a different niche for these two classes of devices. One cannot reasonably expect to enter the realm of the other successfully. If the Palm becomes too bloated with all these extra features, I'd rathar just dump it and buy a laptop, especially with some of the advantages that I mentioned above. But you still can't beat carrying it in your pocket. There is only so much you can fit into that little package without making it bigger (and therefore not fit in your pocket anymore).
Please, guys, keep the palm in Palm, and the lap in laptop. ("Notebook" is a better term, when it is clear that you are referring to the size of the computer. Good luck getting a real notebook to run Linux
Kenneth Arnold
PS - I want a laptop. Badly.
Real PS - My sig is stupid. I'm changing it as soon as I sumbit this.
Microsoft programmers are awesome! Who else in the world could implement Billy's insiduous schemes in such purposely crappy software? Why don't you try it?
Seriously, I wouldn't mind an extremely localized 8.5 quake on a coastal residence near Redmond. You know, the one with the "smart" house and the automation systems? Don't tell me you don't know whose house I'm talking about.
On that topic, wouldn't it be funny if we found out that the fancy controls for his "smart" house run on Linux? Well, having a computer crash is bad, but having your house crash is worse!
Kenneth Arnold. (that is a sentence.)
One of the things I've noticed in my (few) years of life is that if the rule ain't there, no one can break it. If software is free, and the licence says you can sell it for free (like the GPL and a few others), then giving it to your friends isn't a crime at all. And in my experience a lot of free software can be better than its costly equivalents (think Linux vs. Win zzzzzz) and it's free to go with that. Being the recipient of all this cool stuff for $0.00 (connect time charges may apply, or not), I just say, "cool!".
Go get some games. C'mon, we haven't got all day! Well maybe we do, but still...
Kenneth Arnold
Kenneth Arnold