| Monday
December 20, 1999
Opening a new alt.mail
topic in infantry and branch of service.
Be sure to see Sunday 19th
Mail on many topics.
So we'll go no more a-roving...
According to Alan MacRobert of _Sky &; Telescope_
(in an article in the 12/20 Boston Globe), the mail going around about the
exceptionally bright moon is (mostly) an Internet myth:
o Wednesday's moon will be about 19% brighter than
usual: detectable to the naked eye only if you had both moons
side-by-side.
o There were brighter moons several times this century, e.g.
January 15, 1930, and January 4, 1912. o The story originated in the Old
Farmer's Almanac, but was unnoticed until somebody put it out on the net.
Fascinating. I presume the astronomical
events are true, but the perceptions won't be as large. Sigh. Well, the
heart outwears the breast...
It appears that
competition is finally starting to lower the cost of registering domain
names. Has anyone registered a domain with any of the alternative
registrars? I see that CORE (http://www.joker.com) is registering .com
domain names for $37 for the first two years and $19 annually thereafter.
-- Robert Bruce Thompson thompson@ttgnet.com http://www.ttgnet.com
I have sent my renewals in to the
Internic in the usual manner, although their arrogant manner annoys me.
It's not enough money to worry about, but perhaps with competition they
may think of giving some "service" for collecting the money.
They have the most arrogantly ignorant on-line registration
"service" I can imagine, with everything having to be EXACTLY
their way. Time they got some competition.
Jerry,
I have a Yamaha SCSI CRW4416 CD writer on my Linux
box at work (one of the perks of being an MIS guy), and I've gotten lots
of use out of it over the past couple of months.
The CD writer has worked out well for me -
especially when I'm making new Red Hat CDs. I bought a copy of 6.1 solely
so I could have access to Red Hat's priority FTP update site, and I grab
the latest RPMs as soon as they become available. Then I run a little
script which replaces old RPMs with new ones (I have the full install tree
on my hard drive), then creates a new ISO CD image which I can burn onto a
CD-RW whenever I need to install Linux outside the company (onsite
installs are always done via the network).
I do this sort of thing via the command line, since
it's the fastest way (for me) - but packages like xcdroast let you do all
this via a GUI.
I don't know about IDE CD writing under Linux, but
I'll probably find out, since someone donated such a device to my church,
and it will go into the Linux server there (that's the only computer with
the horsepower to do that - everything else is old, donated equipment, and
the fastest desktop is a 60 MHz Pentium).
BTW, I think Diamond Multimedia is getting a clue
about Linux. Why? Well, my employer recently bought a Dell Precision 410
system for one of our engineering people, and I got to set it up -
including Linux, at her request. This computer has a Diamond FireGL1 video
card (which retails for about $1000), and drivers are available only for
NT AND Linux (beta, but it seems to work pretty nicely at 1600 by 1200 on
a 21 inch monitor) - NOT Win9x.
Calvin Dodge
p.s. I'm enjoying the military discussions on your
web site
I have been enough under the weather that I won't
be trying this for a few days. Thanks.
I have had cdr support in linux for a long time. At
work I use a combination of a dvd drive and a 4x ide writer. At home the
combination is a 48x ide cdrom with an ide 2x hp writer. In both cases it
works great. I will admit that getting this combination to work is not the
easiest.
If I remember right( last time I set this up was 4
months ago) I installed the rpm file of a program called xcdroast and
recompiled my kernel. It is all laid out in the cdr howto at http://www.cc.gatech.edu/linux/LDP/HOWTO/CD-Writing-HOWTO.html
. If you decide you want to get this to work, just email me some details
about your setup like distribution, what device the cdrom is going to be,
and kernel. I can then send you some detailed instructions.
CDR support in linux is better than in windows. I
have never had a buffer underrun in linux. The programs are a little less
friendly but more powerful.
Piotr CS System Support, University of Georgia.
misztal@cs.uga.edu |
SAMe: A Caution
Jerry,
There is one fact about taking supplemental SAMe
that you need to be aware of. SAMe is broken down in the body to
homocysteine. If the body has enough cofactors (these include folic acid,
and B-6) to metabolize the homocysteine properly, than there is no
problem. However elevated levels of homocysteine are much worse than
elevated cholesterol in the damage to blood vessels and accelerated
atherosclerosis that they produce. The best way to make sure your
homocysteine is not elevated is to have a blood test to measure it (any
elevation above normal is bad). A minimum supplement regimen to prevent
elevated homocysteine would include 25 mg of most of the B vitamins (it is
important to not just take one or two but all the B vitamins) and 400
micrograms of folic acid. Better would be 50 mg of most of the B Vitamins
and 800-1600 mg of folic acid. Some people might have elevated levels of
homocysteine even with this regimen, so the safest bet is get the blood
test.
Public Disclaimer: Please consult with your
physician before starting/changing any vitamin regimen, as vitamins can
interact with medications you may be taking.
Scott La Pidus, M.D. AScottLP@aol.com
Thank you. I always take a B-100 with 800 folic
acid as well as my usual immune protectors with SAMe. And I don't
recommend that anyone try what I do; I merely report. I do seem to have
recovered from this local flu about as well as anyone else, and given my
age, that's not bad thing, especially since I got a few thousand words
written while under it, so something must be going right...
Thanks again
In last weeks mail we
looked at digital movies. A continuing discussion:
Digital Movies: What Ebert overlooked.
Dear Dr. Pournelle,
I, too, read Mr. Ebert's condemnation of digital
projection. While I have not yet had the opportunity to see a digitally
projected film myself, I can see one glaring omission in Mr. Ebert's
consideration of the topic.
Mr. Ebert's objections fail to consider the abysmal
quality of today's multiplex projectionists.
In many theaters in the U.S. and Canada, there are
no longer any full-time projectionists. In the old days, a knowledgeable
projectionist would run two projectors, swapping reels and carefully
maintaining the machines. If there were any problems, the projectionist
could fix them.
Today, the projectors are automated, and many
theatre chains have done away with the projectionist. Instead, there's a
"film technician" who comes in to set up new films, or move
films to a different theater. This technician may need to cover several
theaters in one city. Maintenance becomes an on-call issue. The theater
owners figure that automation means all they need is a manager (or even a
popcorn pusher) to flip the switch at the right time.
As a result, the quality of today's movie
presentations is abysmal and getting worse. Hairs and dirt on the film?
Commonplace, in my experience, even on brand new films. I've seen plenty
of films that are terribly scratched up within a week of release. I've
seen films whose soundtracks were mangled by poor threading. I've stopped
complaining about the "digital sound" trailers that are so old
and so worn that the sound drops out entirely halfway through, because the
soundtrack is almost gone.
Yes, we now have digital sound for film -- but it's
a hack, and not a very good one. The most reliable digital film sound is
probably DTS -- but that requires CD-ROMs to be shipped with the film,
just like the old Victrola days with wax records. Often, the CDs are
missing by the second run. Dolby Digital and SDDS have to make due with
the leftover bits of film near the sprocket holes, where they are very
subsceptible to damage if the film isn't properly handled. Between the
extra stress that the automated "platter" system puts on the
film, the lack of daily skilled maintenance, and the hurried film tech,
those on-the-film soundtracks often have a lifetime measured in weeks.
It gets worse as the multiplex gets greedier.
Sometimes, if a multiplex wants to run a popular movie in more than one
theater, they will not get two prints of the film, but rather
"chain" one print. That means taking the film off of the
automated platter, running it through one projector, then through a second
projector in the second room (possibly crossing a hallway in the process)
and finally back to the platter. That's a lot of stress for a thin strip
of acetate -- and lots of rollers to gouge the film.
Finally, multiplexes have started building bigger
and bigger auditoriums, with stadium seating and room for huge opening day
crowds. In more and more cases, the screen has become so large that it is
no longer possible to get a sufficiently bright projected image. There's
only so much light you can pump through a 35mm piece of film before the
heat causes it to melt. That's one reason why 70mm film was invented, and
why it remains popular in "special venues" with large screens:
you can put more light through it without melting it, because of the
larger surface area.
Mr. Ebert apparently discounted all of these
real-world problems of film. Yes, in an ideal world, we would all be movie
critics who get to see pristine copies of films lovingly tended by a union
projectionist. However, most of us are at the mercy of the major cinema
chains, and we have to live with dim, scarred, garbled presentations.
Digital cinema, even in its current embryonic state,
addresses these problems. Digital projection, especially with DLP, is very
bright. The micromirrors on a DLP chip can handle a lot more heat than
35mm film. Digital projection is not subject to scratches and torn
sprockets and framing problems. Digital projection doesn't suffer if you
"chain" the film. Digital projection has an integrated digital
soundtrack that isn't inherently prone to failure.
I understand Mr. Ebert's dismay at film being
replaced with something that has been called, at best, "as good
as" film in terms of optimal image quality. However, I would gladly
put up with "as good as film" if it meant that I could still see
"as good as film" after a movie had been playing for six weeks,
or in a second-run theater. With film, I know that I have to go the first
weekend if I want to see the movie before it gets all beat up.
That, in itself, makes digital projection desirable
and likely to eventually kill celluloid. It's also a sure bet that the
resolution will improve to best 35mm film by the time that the projectors
become widespread.
As for Mr. Ebert's arguments about bandwidth, I see
no reason why films could not be shipped on DLT, 8mm AIT, or even 12"
optical platters. Consider that a single-sided DVD can hold about 9Gb of
data, and its predecessor (CD-ROM) held only 650Mb. One more generation of
refinement in that technology ought to take care of the cinematic movie
storage problem handily.
-- Rob Levandowski robl@macwhiz.com
I saw Tarzan with digital projection and I had no
objections or qualms about the quality whatever. This was in Burbank. I
did a short column on the coming effect of digital in general (bits is
bits) for Intellectual
Capital a few months ago, and I think it will have a great impact on
the entertainment industry. You raise interesting points.
Continuing from
last week:
> The real question on the JAVA Apps is, are Microsoft's portable
> apps slower than anyone else's? And are other people's as fast >
as the Microsoft non-portable? And finally, does anyone else make >
"Windows Only" apps and if so are they as fast as Microsoft's
> "Windows only"? You see where I am headed.
In the benchmarking which I did, Microsoft's Visual
J ran portable apps as fast as anybody. The problem is, that it's too much
bother to make the portable apps in Visual J.
I haven't seen anybody else producing non-portable
code.
The situation, as I see it, goes something like
this:
The main attraction of Java, to many users, is it's
portability. In some cases that reflects a real need to operate on
multiple systems. In many cases it's simply a desire for non-Microsoft
operating systems to be made more viable. One of the biggest proponents of
Java is Sun. Sun would like to sell many more desktop units, but finds it
hard to compete as there are so many Windows-based apps in thge
marketplace. We get a Catch-22 effect (RIP Mr Keller) where developers
won't write Sun software as there aren't enough customers, but customers
won't switch to Sun as there aren't enough apps. If Java becomes the
language of choice for developers, then developers can sell software to
Sun customers (good for the developers) and Sun can sell more hardware
(good for Sun). The whole deal is good for everybody, except Microsoft who
will lose sales.
Now Microsoft, who are seldom slow in analyzing the
market, release their own version of Java which is just for Windows
computers. This offers developers the advantages of developing in Java
(which are considered by some to be quite significant), but without the
poor performance which has dogged portable Java. There are many
non-sinister reasons why this is a good move for Microsoft; and if it
foils that nasty drift away from Windows-based computers then so much the
better.
Sun, not unexpectedly, are suing Microsoft. They
claim that what Microsoft is selling is a different product from their
copyrighted "Java" product - so Microsoft ought not use the
name.
I guess that by the time the courts resolve that,
the battle will probably have been decided in the marketplace.
Depending on your personal philosophy, you can read
this as "another example of manipulative behavior" or "some
pretty clever marketing".
I'd personally like to see more vigorous competition
in the OS market, so I'd like to see portable Java succeed - if only to
spur Microsoft into working harder on the Desktop market. (They've
recently neglected that pretty badly as they concentrate on the Server
market). However I'll avoid joining the "Microsoft==Anti-Christ"
chorus for the foreseeable future.
Michael Smith emmenjay@zip.com.au Emmenjay
Consulting Pty Ltd http://www.zip.com.au/~emmenjay/
Just when you've made it foolproof, along comes a
better class of fool.
I agree completely that the marketplace will
decide the issue. Thanks!
What's the brand and URL for
the SCSI cables you feel are head and shoulders above the rest? I used to
have it noted somewhere, but now can't find it...
Thanks.
Tony Rairden First Quality Musical Supplies
www.fqms.com
Granite
Digital
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