Slashdot Mirror
Interoperable Remote Controls
Lord Prox writes "From the HAVi website:
"Ever dreamed of how your ideal home could function in the new millennium? A TV with voice recognition capability? Or connected to a video telephone link so that the TV is muted and calls are answered automatically by a voice command? How about a video camera that automatically displays a picture on the TV screen when a visitor arrives; or starts a recording if the same thing happens unexpectedly during the night?"
Apparently 8 of the leading consumer electronics companies are trying to get rid of all those remotes and do some cooperation over IEEE 1394. Whitepapers and FAQ available."
I did it!
Now look, i don't want to start a holy war here, but what the hell is the deal with you SPARC fanatics?
Hear me out, I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of SPARC (w/2GB of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running Win95, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this machine, the same operation would take about 2 minutes! If that!.
In addition, during this damm file transfer, Mozilla will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even Emacs is straining to keep up as I type this.
Ok so i won't bore you with the toilet roll list of other problems ive had that I've encountered, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a SPARC machine that has run faster than its Wintel counterpart, despite the SPARCs' faster chip architecture. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 300 mhz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that SPARC is a superior box when they have to deal with this bullshit.
SPARC addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a SPARC over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - Horror/Sci Fi writer Bob Hope was found dead in his Maine home this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon.
" Horror/Sci Fi writer Bob Hope was found dead in his Maine home this morning"
How sad. I recall enjoying great works of his such as "Thanks for the Misery" and "Bob Hope's Shining Celebrity Roque Classic"
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Random is the New Order.
Not as new as you I see :P
See the Pictures of the Flood of '08