Slashdot Mirror

Rokr is limited to 100 songs. No matter how much memory you put in it. http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000570057877/

The third comment on this page (if they know anything) says that the 2GB modules in the Nano are made of 4 500MB chips, so these new 16Gb (2GB) chips would allow for 8 and 16GB Nanos.

I'm getting a Nokia N91 when it comes out. Has a 2MP camera, 4GB HD, Wifi, Bluetooth. The interface looks good enough, especially since I'm already used to the Series 60 platform on my 3650. I have installed mp3 software for that phone too, though I've been using it with only a 512 MMC. Definitely good enough for me, and looks much better than this apple thing.

The answer is dynamic reconfiguration. With smart cells you can have much greater flexibility. Consider M-Tran, a self-reconfigurable modular robot. These designs are (potentially) much better than centralised systems, because you can reconfigure them any way you want. Want to add a new antenna on your spaceship. Ask some cells to prepare for holding it, passing over their current functions to some neighbouring cells.

Yes, you can have a central database, but then you need to waste a lot of system resources on communications. Waste, because for many functions/decisions you don't need to consult the central authority. This isn't a problem when you only have 10-100 smart units (sensors or actuators), but what when you have 10000-100000 of them? Design of such system is a choice between computing and communications. When the number of units is small, you choose a centralised design, when it's huge, you distribute the processing.

Think again what they are designing. They are designing skin. Do skin cells in your body consult the brain (or the spinal cord) to decide whether and how to heal a scratch? Would that make sense? Does that make sense for a spacecraft?

Besides this phone being bulky and ugly, I think it's silly that they forcibly limited its capacity to 100 songs regardless of memory card size: http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000570057877/ I understand Apple's iTunes/iPod efforts are limited by the contracts they sign with the record companies. Lucky for me Palm has no such shackles, and my Treo 650 holds as many songs as I can squeeze into a standard SD card. The 1Gb one I have now handles about 200, and as soon as 2Gb cards get cheaper I'll easily double my storage.

I cannot say either way if this is accurate, but the few people i know who "nerd out" constantly over the newest and greatest pda/phone stuff.. all agree the various spyshots of the new treo running Win are authentic.

I have seen a few of these shots, and they look authentic to me, but since i'm not the ub-erphone-nerd (just a casual Treo600 user ;) I can't say with certainty.

Engaget (linked from TFA) has another FA that says it's real tho.. here.

I think they're talking about getting back together.

http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000290056433/

Synergy makes a lot of sense. Not trusting ANY company seems to make even more sense.

George W. Bush IS himself a mac user.

Which means he'd better fire the FEMA director for this one... as a fellow Mac using Republican, I would expect no less! Either that, or beat him with his iPod.

Hummer Laptop

GP could be referring to the Game Boy Micro which is a really small GBA. It also lacks the functionallity of playing the GB/GBC games like the DS.

Speaking of which, shouldn't the iPod Nano be called the iPod Micro? I mean they just skipped a SI measurement didn't they?

I'll just wait for the iPod Fempto.

Almost like you could give 'em a little nudge and they'd start working again!

Well. You can.

Any truth to the rumour that Lexmark hopes to use Blu-Ray in their new laser printers (and possibly inkjets too!), and the laser will be part of the cartridge?
I LOVE cross-posting!

#37:

This would be the first case I can think of in which an electronics company actually destroyed somebody else's physical property for exercising their rights as a property owner.

It's true that Sony still retains the copyrights to the software inside the machine, but you're not stealing that software by hacking the machine, just replacing it. It's no different than uninstalling Windows from your PC and installing Linux instead - should Microsoft be able to remotely destroy your PC in such a case?

#7:

I guess the concept of ownership is so last century..... Now, instead of owning the equipment that we purchaced from a company, we get to belong to the company that we purchaced the equipment from! YAY! Who needs the CIA anymore when we've got Sony and Toshiba spying on us to make sure we do not violate Copyright laws!

Whats next? If a someone who has children orders an adult Pay Per View before 11 PM your set top box will notify child services that you may be abusing you children? You may say no way but it could happen the way things are going!

Between 'em, these two posters say it all.

On top of that, consumers should expect punishment for tinkering with their Blu-ray players, as many have done with current DVD players, for instance to remove regional coding. The new, Internet-connected and secure players will report any "hack" and the device can be disabled remotely.

It would be worthy of advertising for a cell phone company to include virus scanning software like this on their phones from the start. Though people have grown used to computers being unreliable, cell phones are becoming more and more the same, and people are soon going to stop putting up with it. A friend has replaced her Motorola twice already this year due to software failure.

OK so its FRIDAY night and here I am commenting about pr0n making accessories, instead of getting some.
sheesh!

  I have to akxs, cause maybe I am missing something, but how is a journalist in the field, going to be able to upload to a remote server, when you have to first instal client software on whatever machine you are downloading to?

Also what initiates the downloads?
The camera or the desktop?
If its the camera I cannot wait to see the tiny interface for connecting.
first a list of access points, then a list of clients. oh but don't most access point use NAT?
I guess you first have to set up the access points to allow a particular port to open for that service to go trough?
and so you should first walk around the neighborhood and make sure that the persons know you might be doing this. (especially in Florida where you will go to jail for using someone else's bandwidth.

hmm this seems a little complicated, but I realize its the future.

I hope it uses Bonjour or rendezvous whatever that is called now.

hmmm, what about Linux and OSX support?

I think I will stick to the bluetooth ROB-1 cam that sony makes.
(http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000833035337/)
A little bluetooth camera that connects to sony cell phones which can then send the image to others, and moves by itself, would make much more sense to use for that journalist in Gaza getting the beat down from Israeli military goons, or the guy watching some random LA cops use some black guy as a punching bag?

Why don't you try a bic pen?

From the wikipedia article you linked to:

"Possibly the first use of the term podcasting was as a synonym for audioblogging or weblog-based amateur radio in an article by Ben Hammersley in The Guardian on February 12, 2004." Adam Curry didn't event the word, but he did help popularize it.

What's interesting in light of all the talk these days over the term "podcast" is that many of the people who were doing it back in 2004 resisted people calling it "podcasting"! In fact there was an ongoing bet between the original hosts of the Engadget podcast as to whether or not the word "podcast" would stick or not. Well. The rest is history.

AJAX anyone?

Here is more info/price on the Nintendo media player http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000537028472/

dupe

Maybe apple insisted on a click wheel with numbers in it (like touch button rotary... :) )

http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000887049175/ mod up and share, cheers

According to Engadget, it will.

Actually it will: http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000577056585/

Nice, but apparently it'll only hold 100 songs. And if that is true, it is not nearly enough capacity to make me switch from carrying both an MP3 player and a mobile.

Actually, the PC client is free. All others (DoCoMo Flash Lite, Symbian, etc.) are not free. (in some cases they seem to be free to the user, but are actually paid for by the device manufacturer, especially in cases where porting work is done)

I see that you have been fooled by the marketing gimmicks. Let me clarify for you, so you don't get duped into thinking you're buying HD, when you actually are not.

Look at that link you provided and go to the line that says "Native" resolution. Notice that it says 1024x768. That means there is an array of mirrors on the DLP chip that is 1024 mirrors wide by 768 mirrors tall. Each one of these mirrors can display one pixel (ie, the color reflected off that mirror is the color of the pixel on the screen**). So the full 1024wide x 768tall represents the full picture on the screen. You can never get any more pixels in the width or any more pixels in the height, because you don't have any more mirrors on the DLP chip to give you those pixels.

Now, let's look at a 720p signal. A 720p signal is (digitally) 1280 pixels wide x 720 pixels tall. So, if you lay the 720p signal directly onto the mirrors on the DLP chip, 256 pixels would be hanging off the side, with no mirror to display them on the screen. The DLP chip is 1024 mirrors (pixels) wide, and the signal is 1280 pixels wide. Even though the signal is sending you more than 1024 pixels in width, it is physically impossible to display more than 1024 of those pixels ... you just can't, there are no mirrors to display them. So, what do we do, and what does the projector do?

The projector uses an internal scaler to remove some pixels, and remix the colors on other pixels. So, the scaler takes a 1280x720 signal, removes a bunch of pixels, remixes a bunch of other pixels, and gives you a new signal: 1024x576***. Hooray, this new signal is small enough to be displayed within our 1024x768 mirrors on our DLP chip. Sure, we are wasting some mirrors on the top and bottom (we need to retain the original aspect ratio so that the signal doesn't appear squished), but at least we can display the signal. These wasted pixels are the black bars on top and bottom that you see on the screen.

So you might ask, why is this not HD? Well, it's not HD because you've compressed the signal and lost some of the information from the original 720p (HD) signal. Heck, if you compress the signal even further, you can get a 853 x 480 signal (480p). Or you can compress even further and get a 64x36 pixel signal ... is that HD? Hell no. You could barey discern one blob from another in that signal.

So there you have it, hope this helps you out in your quest for HD. Just because it says it can display 1080i, doesn't mean the native resolution is 1920x1080. DLP projectors that can actually (truthfully) display a 1080i signal cost a minimum of $20,000.

**Well, it's actually more complicated than that because the mirrors only reflect white light from the lamp, but then it passes through the color wheel at the right time to project the proper color. But for simplicity of a resolution discussion, we'll leave the color wheel for some other time.

***This is called a WSVGA resolution, do a search for projectors with it ... oddly enough there are a bunch projectors at this resolution ... I wonder why?

More links:

Discussion on why broadcasters are using "i" signals versus "p" signals, ie 1080i, 720p, 480p. Note: DVDs are a 480i signal.

More information on HDTV and broadcasting than you probably care to know.

A

Too bad, since the Rio Karma is still the best disk-based player on the market, by far.

I was hoping to abuse my Best Buy replacement plan to get this when it hit the market. But now I'm either going to have to either upgrade to an iRiver or kiss the $30 I spent for the replacement plan goodbye. Sigh.

p.s. Yes, I have no qualms about screwing Best Buy.

Have no fear, bro, technology is here

For those unaware - Spatz-Tech's DVIMAGIC, while sold and marketed as a DVI amplifier, is attracting attention among the consumer crowd as an HDCP stripper. The device is placed between your playback device (e.g. computer, cable box, HD-DVD player, etc) and your display device. The DVIMAGIC then pretends to be a secure device. Once the DVIMAGIC convinces the playback device to send the signal, it receives the signal, decrypts the signal, and sends a bit-perfect copy of the signal out the other end to your monitor. The result is a pristine restriction-free copy of your content.

This: http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000230050640/ is a similar device. They work fine- for now. But when they are used for piracy, their keys will be revoked, and they will become $400 paperweights.

So, no hardware supports is officially yet, but with Vista you can watch it on you pc (under reduced resolution anyway)...

no hardware save almost all HDTVs made these days, as well as the HD-DVD and (rumored) BluRay. this is much bigger than just PCs - your TVs, cable boxes, cable cards, etc, will all include HDCP of some sort (and most TVs with HDMI input already do support it.)

of course, you could go shopping before the MPAA starts with the lawsuits...

...sunglasses I just got of the blackmarket are nothing but a hoax ? My brain does that already ?
Arthur, give me back my money !

You're right, it would be ridiculous for a teenager to convince mom and dad to pay $399 to demonstrate this technology, but a 130B$ company like IBM realizes that at some point, portable-multi-gig-usb-drive-tech will become commodity priced. Sooner than some expect, we will see 1-gig usb drives as toys in cereal boxes - pre-loaded with spongebob movies AND flash games. In the meantime, early adopters like us will foot some of the research bill (as well as do some of the research and development).

You're right, it would be ridiculous for a teenager to convince mom and dad to pay $399 to demonstrate this technology, but a 130B$ company like IBM realizes that at some point, portable-multi-gig-usb-drive-tech will become commodity priced. Sooner than some expect, we will see 1-gig usb drives as toys in cereal boxes - pre-loaded with spongebob movies AND flash games. In the meantime, early adopters like us will foot some of the research bill (as well as do some of the research and development).

The articles have screenshots in them, but I didn't expect anyone to read that.

http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000070054245/
http://www.uneasysilence.com/os-x-proven-hacked-an d-running-on-an-ordinary-pc/

I too spoke with a representative at LW about this.

The thumb-print sensor allows you to authenticate yourself without typing in your password, so it is possible (as long as what you're doing doesn't require you to type in any passwords anywhere) to safely operate the device on a host with a keystroke logger. All of the network traffic between the BlackDog and its daemon running on the host is encrypted with SSH.

One of the niches they are hoping to full with the device is a "dongle" with licenced software installed. The licencee of the proprietary-ware could then access it on any computer as long as he/she carries the dongle with them. It also would prevent password/keycode sharing between colleagues.

One of my co-workes pointed out that this is similar to the "SoulPad" concept:

http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000383053938/

except without the host boot/shutdown steps.

From Engadget:

"With the codec and video expertise of our favorite geek friend, Craig, we tried to convert a video into MPEG-4 format with a 480x272 resolution, which is the native resolution of the PSP LCD. A 480x272 video file should be of higher quality than a stretched 320x240 pixel picture, but unfortunately, all of our attempts failed, no matter what we tried. We would always end up with Incompatible Data or Corrupted Data displayed on our PSP, though it played perfectly on a Windows box."

I know the Japanese Robotic Mall Security guard was being made fun of here at /. but this is really cool - though it would be a nice step to see that hand attached to an arm attached to a humanoid robot who would actually have to go for the ball and not just have it thrown at it.

But all the Robotic news seems to be coming out of Japan lately, is anything being done in the US that compares?

Note: Not asking because I think the US should be in the lead but that it should compete for the benefit of all, definitely the US had the first industrial robot back in 1962 AFAIK:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_robot

And it's rather sad to think we're lagging in this on the R/D side in new frontiers. Unless this should be the extent of it:

http://robots.engadget.com/entry/0657766019921755/

Along these same lines, wasn't there a story/rumor a few months ago about possibly having a copy of the iTunes Music/Movie Store on the PS3?

That looks like it goes back to May 2005. Stranger thing have happened.

Georgia Tech uses this device for some intro Physics Classes and some CS Classes.

The device we use iPRS uses just a simple infrared signal. In a class with 300+ Students there are several readers mounted in different parts of the room since the device has a relatively short range.

• No more than one person can submit an answer at any time (thus you have to keep trying to send it until it goes through, you see your name/number change color).
• You have the possibility to change you answer a certain number of times.
• The software is available in the lecture pc's and easily analyzable.
• The device will send a short message that includes: ID # of the Reader & Answer specified

The PRS response was required as part of the grade for the class (10%). A group of us (CS Majors) started thinking on ideas on how to around this. The first solution we implemented (Before we were able to translate the IR message into clear text) involved "recording" each of the answers from our group, thus one person sitting in the class could answer for all of us through his laptop. We later switched to an IR-Equipped Ipod.

That was ok but the person answering did not always answer the correct question (answering correctly gave you extra points). We were later able to decode the messages from the IR signal. And that's where things got fun.

We placed a laptop sitting nearby one of the "sensors" (end of white strip, on wall) and just analyze all the data coming live. We had about 30-60 seconds to answer thus we could analyze the data up to 25 - 55 seconds, estimate what the most "popular" answer was and then submit all of ours answers at the last second. That gave us almost 100% accuracy since whenever the class erred, the professor would step back, re-explain the problem and then see if the answer was right.

We used iPods, laptops and a CS-classroom-issued-Ipaq. The ipaq would eventually analyze the data through it's own high speed IR port and then send out our "responses" through a mp3 file (that came out of the IR device).

Also: the system is usecure, it is easy to skew the statistics by introducing new users to the system or to overwrite your ex gf's answer.

Although there was very little benefit, beating the system felt good!

Launch titles? market share? no.. looking at this, I would guess it is because it is not even close to finished.

How they can show us "in game movies" at E3 when they don't even have an OS is a question I'm also interested in.

The Bill Gates quotes are a bit more ambiguous as you'd expect from someone whose had so long to develop a diplomatic voice as Bill, they just detail a partnership with Toshiba. I found this Balmer interview at Engadget a lot more revealing as to probable direction - an excerpt:

Look, for us to say we're going to go through a whole generation without an HD capacity drive--I think that would be naive to assume that we'll be sitting here at the end of the Xbox 360 generation and no such device will have shipped. On the other hand, we haven't announced anything, Sony's announced something, and who knows? You know, they could have announced support for Beta instead of VHS. We're trying to watch and really be agile on our feet, relative to the issues between HD DVD and Blu-ray.

I tried to include a little context at the end that backpedals a little - but just after that in a followup question he again says:

I just think it's just wrong-minded to think that somehow we'd go a whole generation without this. We're not going to be sitting here five years saying, "Oh jeez, we don't have HD DVD-type storage."

Now that quotes says to me that Microsoft realizes damn well the shortfall they will face against the PS3 in pure storage space for games, which is just another factor leading me to believe we will see 360 games for that format. There's simply no way big publishers can resist all that juicy space, and in turn no way Microsoft can resist big publishers to that degree. They are still very dependent on them.

The 360 is lacking HDMI, trumpeting Hi-Def on a console with only an analog signal just seems wrong. Component Hi-Def is basically VGA where HDMI is basically DVI.

MS has said that they may include HDMI sometime in the future. HDMI is currently planned to be a requirment for Hi-Def HD-DVD players, so it makes sense that whenever the 360 gets it's HD-DVD drive it will also be upgraded to output digital HDTV(HDMI) and support 1080p.

1080p isn't really higher resolution than 1080i, but it should look prettier. I personally want HDMI so that I can easily hook stuff up to my DVI monitor.

Actually a recent study has shown that cellular RF has caused microbubbles to form in the lenses of eyes. http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000363052092/ so taking the news that 30-45% of medical studies are flawed, you have a 30% to 45% chance of your cell phones making you blind. And I always thought it was self abuse...

Obviously you're not an ipod owner. I was unlucky enough to win an ipod mini as a door prize to a campus event. There was a problem with the firmware and I tried to download a recent copy to replace it. Unfortunately, their firmware restoration software only works with windows (2000 or XP) and OS X, neither of which I have access to. If I could download a copy of the firmware, i could easily restore it, but they make it quite challenging to get a hold of the firmware because users were hacking it to put in custom icons. So, in order to protect their firmware-driven business model from the horrible hax0rz who were patching their firmware with hello kitty icons, apple has decided to treat everyone as a criminal, making the firmware impossible to download, even for people with legitimate uses.

Microsoft SCEO Steve Balmer interview on Engadget: "It's a little bit like the discussion about HD DVD type storage. Will we have it? Sure. It's not like by the next generation there won't be a way to get massive storage on an Xbox. You'll get it." http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000597043723/

Palm is already working on porting PalmOS to Linux anyway, so it's kind of a moot point:

http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000610023038/

This was also posted on Engadger. You can read some of the comments on there. You could just kick people who aren't buying anything out of the store.

http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000563046382/ "Posted Jun 11, 2005, 4:25 PM ET" Old news. There was a link to video of the robot and it looked like a talking plastic doll, not really human like other than the shape.

Network Features:

        * Internet Browser - Probably the biggest thing yet to come to the PSP, a web browser. The browser supports standard 4.01 HTML, but will not support Flash streaming. Although some minor bugs, you will be able to connect to any website through your wireless hotspot.
        * New Network Menu - This is the new icon that will be installed on your PSP, it will act as the shortcut to the web browser.

Video Features:

        * Jump Function - Jump function added (UMD Video & UMD Music)
        * A-B Function - This allows you to repeat one portion of the clip.
        * 4x3 size - A new size to watch videos in
        * Mute - Mute function added for videos, even though a general mute function came with the original system.
        * MP4 (AVC) playback - New playback format.

Music Features:

        * ATRAC3plus playback - Now you can put ATRAC3plus files on your PSP.
        * MP4 AAC & WAVE Support - This version will allow you to play MP4 audio (MP4's AAC format) as well as Linear PCM WAVE files.

Photo Features:

        * Wallpaper Feature - Another big feature for the PSP, can you guess it? You got it, a personalized wallpaper feature.
        * Photo Sharing - You can now share images with a friend using the wireless ad-hoc connection (local)
        * New Formats - The PSP can now read TIFF, GIF and BMP files.

Setting Features:

        * New Character SetTheme Setting
        * Internet Browser Restriction Setting - Set security settings for your web browser.
        * WPA Support - Don't like WEP? isn't secure enough for you? you can now access the net with WPA-PSK (TKIP.)Web Support on Keypad

Source

Sony also released a ceramic white version of the PSP.