These exist, however only in high end cars. BMW's, Mercedes, Licoln, Chrysler, etc. It is sometimes as simple as a little analog gauge next to the turbo boost indicator, it swings around showing instantaneous mpg. Accelerate and it drops down, then slowly climbs back up as you level off. As the trans (or you) shift gears, it also jumps around. The problem is the only people who have these gauges are people who likely don't care much about their next fuel bill. Unless of course the only reason they can afford these luxury cars are cut-rate lease deals.
The potential for business use of embedded OSes is just staggering, however, and Microsoft [as opposed to Sony, or Ericsson] has tradtionally made their money in business [not consumer] sales.
I wonder what the true breakdown is for Sony if you look a bit higher up in their electronics division. Sony has quite a few products which will never see a consumers hands, whereas Microsoft has very few. Windows Server, SQL Server, etc. Even their development tools are available in some stores off the shelf.
Sony's high end video cameras, where Betamax lives, sell very well to studios. Panasonic is their main competitor, along with JVC, and Canon is coming up right on their heals with their affordable "proffessional" DV1 line. It may not be truely a Pro camera, but it sure comes damned close.
The few "on board" firewire ports I've tried in PC's suck big time, even on expensive name brand motherboards. $15 PCI addon cards seem to be the way to go.
I think the point is, that windows should have this functionality, since UNIX has had it for ages. Deleting an in-use file doesn't free the space until the last handle on the file disappears, but it does free the filename.
When I first heard of Linux I thought how cool it would be if the bootloader let you dump out of the kernel, and reload the new one, without resetting the hardware/bios. Then I heard about OpenFirmware. (Alpha, Sun, Mac, etc)
I must say though, the most recent "direct x security patch" didn't make me reboot my windows computer, which surprised me greatly. I think one major problem is, say, video drivers that need a reboot. I bet most users who are upgrading their video drivers are doing so because a game told them to, etc. They would blindly click OK to any box that pops up and miss the "We need to shutdown video for up to a minute while these drivers install and reinitialize, hold on..." and wonder why their screen went blank. CTR+ALT+DEL? Nothing. Reset switch? Worked like a charm. To the average user video isn't a seperate service, it isn't even a serperate idea.
Inflation works both ways though, the money is less useful to the company, and the consumer. $20 today buys you a stack of blank cds. $20 tomorrow buys you half a stack. Any company worth the floorspace will adjust their prices for inflation. Regardless, 1% of $20 is still 20 cents annualy. Make a seperate sub-account on the books for gift cards, and shave the interest off the top as income/payment for the physical card. When the time comes 7 years later or what ever, give the money to the state and add $1.40 to your bottom line income.
I have a really bad habit of installing Mozilla for people who have IE/OE related woes and never getting a call back from them again. I do make sure and "leave" a couple extra business cards though, and eventually their friends start calling.
Better yet, the other day I got a lead on a car dealership that needs a new "on-call" tech guy, plus a network overhaul. All this from a little spyware prevention lesson.
Theories have holes though. Disk I/O and network bandwidth drag computers/games to a halt. I guess the updates could be queue'd for reboot, long as you show on the screen they are being done so the user doesn't reboot thinking it's frozen. (Like fs checks and conversions)
Or they could be so socially competent that they realize time is money, and so offer to pay someone for their trouble. This is a hard and often awkward thing to do with a friend. Small problems can be easy to compensate for with a simple "I'll treat" the next time you go to lunch. Larger problems though and you realize it's going to take your techie friend a good hour or two of their time to fix, how are you going to pay them? Can you trust your friend to cut you off and send you to a shop when you can't clear your conscience of not compensating them?
Not everyone has the family friend who will fix the long hard problems for free because they honestly don't care. Why risk souring a friendship when $60-100 at a computer shop will fix the problem?
Contract law 101 if I recall correctly, you cannot agree to a contract you havn't seen, nor can you sign a paper saying you agree to a new contract you havn't seen.
Another reason is if I were doing something, such as playing a game, or burning a cd, etc, and my computer started patching, I would be pissed, so would many people. Waiting for idle time wouldn't work too well either, since a lot of "XP Home" users who don't understand updating, also aren't going to be leaving their computers on 24/7.
FreeBSD just seems how it *should* be. The filesystem and startup environment isn't static, but doesn't make wholesale changes.
I am a big supporter of FreeBSD for this major reason. When people ask why BSD over Linux I tell them it feels better, and that feeling is half of knowing how to use, and fix, a computer. Used and installed many a linux, Slackware was my first love, worked with redhat a bit remotely, worked (unknowingly) with FreeBSD remotely and everything seemed better in a kind of inexplicable way. Friend told me to try out FreeBSD and I just liked it, and realized it was what I had been using before. I do still admin a linux machine, and both myself and my boss kind of groan over having to do anything to it.
FreeBSD's installer could be improved, though. sysinstall needs to be reinvented and perhaps have picobsd merged into it. I'd love to be able to install a variable-sized FreeBSD for firewall or appliance-type installs.
sysinstall could use some minor functionality improvments definitly, but I love it how it is, and most anything it does can be done by hand with little more effort and maybe a little digging once you get a base system up and running. I would love a stock kernel with minimal bells, but BPF and the other socket stuffs built in for ipfw2. I have setup one or two "setit-and-forgetit" firewall/nat computers at friends houses with little to no expertise in computer, let alone FreeBSD etc and so far no problems or complaints. Multiple power outages, network outages etc, but their computers keep chugging along. I spot check it every few months when I happen to be over there and none of the filesystems are growing, etc. I love it.
I wasn't aware that you could pump gas anywhere in the US w/o paying for it first? Pay at the pump makes it really easy to demand that, and I don't see any reason why not to, as no company is required to let you "consume first pay later". Most restaurants let you, many, many other places do not.
I remember travelling to Cortes Island in Candada a year or 2 ago with my girlfriend. The gas pumps on the island were pump first pay later, and it took me a minute to realise this, because they trust the people on the island.
Constant harassment is something I define as "no way to tell it to piss off". It takes some like 3-4 boots and clicks to tell it that I don't want to see it anymore. Namely that damnable tour icon. This is for every user account that gets made, every install that gets done. Maybe I need to move away from doing XP installs for people.
Happliy running Virus Scanner Free for 3 or 4 years now. Don't do stupid things on the internet and you don't need a virus scanner. Firewall? External or don't bother, a $75 (whatever) NetGear will do just fine, so will that old pentium + some bsd/linux discs.
DON'T install software thats too good to be true free. DON'T use IE. DON'T install hack and cracks for your latest downloaded game. Buy it at the store and go on with life. Got spyware? Use SpyBot/AdAware/SpywareBlaster. Use Eudora to read your email, or webmail. DON'T open attachments, or use common sense, does your friend so-and-so really know how to zip a file? Much less put a password on it?
Don't forget the ever harder Right Click desktop->Properties->appearance->Windows Classic. It almost doubles the amount of time it takes to get windows xp running twice as fast.
The thing that drives me nuts is the constant harassment when you first install Windows XP for taking a tour and signing up for a.NET passport.
The problem I always had with split screen screen (err..) was that its many keypresses to get from top to bottom so to say. I find when I have (say) 3 terminals open it is easier to simply knock my mouse "at" the terminal I want, and let the mouse cursor auto-focus the window a quarter second later.
That being said I love WindowMaker + rxvt (or your terminal of choice). I do use screen heavily though, for anything I might want to come back to later.
In the bill payment section it warns of complications when using IE. It's in big red print.
If you currently use Internet Explorer 6.0 and experience problems requesting a Click-to-Pay Payment, you may need to download a software update from Microsoft®.
The warning used to say that they hope there is an update soon. I never said they prefered it, but obviously they don't require it. Chevron's website worked fine in Mozilla with editing of the User-Agent header, but browser detection disabled the website.
There is one website I need to visit which requires IE, so I use IE solely for that purpose.
Why not show that company competition? Call them up, tell them you can't do business with them because their website is horribly broken. Have a competitors name ready. Chevron didn't listen, and I now buy gas from a cheaper local non-chain gas station. (Which is probably using Chevron gas, but who knows, could be Arco) Either way, after a year of petitioning them and being told flat out "too bad" I cancelled my credit card with them and went my merry way.
By the way, Citibank (Washington Mutuals CC provider) has a warning on their website about how IE might not render their site correctly because it (IE) is broken. *Every* problem I have emailed them about has been fixed in under a week, and this was a year ago the last time I had a problem. Most of them were funky DHTML/Javascript menus and such where a backround wasn't rendering, or a click wouldn't go through. Statefarm, Cingular, Washingtonmutual, and Citibank all work in Mozilla, so I will continue to give them my patronage.
If they would stop charging a "Service fee" for using the kiosk. The kiosk HAS to be cheaper than the person behind the register, it doesn't cost $6/hour to keep it there. Get in get out be done, but they slap a $3 fee onto an already overpriced ticket and people would rather wait in line. This being said I realized I've only seen one movie in the theatre in the past 6 months, LoTR. The price has driven me to rentals and other entertainment.
It might be something to do with the fact that the terminals run windows. It may also be because the few times I was at the movies before that they were crashed out with either STOP errors or bios hardware failures.
The same goes for the California DMV, which CHARGES for you to "go online and renew!" which they tout everywhere you look. Again, surely a website is cheaper to maintain than a unionized employee.
There is new technology available today which allows you to connect to a corporate (or home, etc) network in a secure way which gives you a presence on that network, it's called VPN, or SSH, or pcAnywhere, or Timbuktu, or SMTP-AUTH, or oh never mind.
Some of those options require another computer to be there answering to your beck and call, others just a computer with powerful multi-user virtualization (FreeBSD? Linux? OS X?). VPN gives you local presence on the network, allowing you to do all sorts of cool things. SMTP-AUTH would let you send email from anywhere into your corporate network, where it would then validate SPF checks.
Your IT department should easily be able to accomodate this on a laptop for a roaming user. I work for the public school system and we have both VPN, SSH, and dialup access to anyone who cares to ask for it (VPN is restricted to administrators, though, sorry students).
These security precautions should have been in place before you left the office, otherwise I could just send email as your company anyways.
Such as this fine DVD I just bought from another country! It is an international standard, I have a DVD Player, let me just pop this in and watch it.
ERROR: Disc in wrong region, would you like to switch your dvd player? You can only do this three times before getting arrested.
Remember, a "regionless dvd player" is illegal. You aren't licensed to watch your movie in countries other than where you bought it. What about on a plane over international waters? What region is that?
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These exist, however only in high end cars. BMW's, Mercedes, Licoln, Chrysler, etc. It is sometimes as simple as a little analog gauge next to the turbo boost indicator, it swings around showing instantaneous mpg. Accelerate and it drops down, then slowly climbs back up as you level off. As the trans (or you) shift gears, it also jumps around. The problem is the only people who have these gauges are people who likely don't care much about their next fuel bill. Unless of course the only reason they can afford these luxury cars are cut-rate lease deals.
The potential for business use of embedded OSes is just staggering, however, and Microsoft [as opposed to Sony, or Ericsson] has tradtionally made their money in business [not consumer] sales.
I wonder what the true breakdown is for Sony if you look a bit higher up in their electronics division. Sony has quite a few products which will never see a consumers hands, whereas Microsoft has very few. Windows Server, SQL Server, etc. Even their development tools are available in some stores off the shelf.
Sony's high end video cameras, where Betamax lives, sell very well to studios. Panasonic is their main competitor, along with JVC, and Canon is coming up right on their heals with their affordable "proffessional" DV1 line. It may not be truely a Pro camera, but it sure comes damned close.
The few "on board" firewire ports I've tried in PC's suck big time, even on expensive name brand motherboards. $15 PCI addon cards seem to be the way to go.
I think the point is, that windows should have this functionality, since UNIX has had it for ages. Deleting an in-use file doesn't free the space until the last handle on the file disappears, but it does free the filename.
When I first heard of Linux I thought how cool it would be if the bootloader let you dump out of the kernel, and reload the new one, without resetting the hardware/bios. Then I heard about OpenFirmware. (Alpha, Sun, Mac, etc)
I must say though, the most recent "direct x security patch" didn't make me reboot my windows computer, which surprised me greatly. I think one major problem is, say, video drivers that need a reboot. I bet most users who are upgrading their video drivers are doing so because a game told them to, etc. They would blindly click OK to any box that pops up and miss the "We need to shutdown video for up to a minute while these drivers install and reinitialize, hold on..." and wonder why their screen went blank. CTR+ALT+DEL? Nothing. Reset switch? Worked like a charm. To the average user video isn't a seperate service, it isn't even a serperate idea.
Inflation works both ways though, the money is less useful to the company, and the consumer. $20 today buys you a stack of blank cds. $20 tomorrow buys you half a stack. Any company worth the floorspace will adjust their prices for inflation. Regardless, 1% of $20 is still 20 cents annualy. Make a seperate sub-account on the books for gift cards, and shave the interest off the top as income/payment for the physical card. When the time comes 7 years later or what ever, give the money to the state and add $1.40 to your bottom line income.
This could be automated. Easily.
I have a really bad habit of installing Mozilla for people who have IE/OE related woes and never getting a call back from them again. I do make sure and "leave" a couple extra business cards though, and eventually their friends start calling.
Better yet, the other day I got a lead on a car dealership that needs a new "on-call" tech guy, plus a network overhaul. All this from a little spyware prevention lesson.
Theories have holes though. Disk I/O and network bandwidth drag computers/games to a halt. I guess the updates could be queue'd for reboot, long as you show on the screen they are being done so the user doesn't reboot thinking it's frozen. (Like fs checks and conversions)
Or they could be so socially competent that they realize time is money, and so offer to pay someone for their trouble. This is a hard and often awkward thing to do with a friend. Small problems can be easy to compensate for with a simple "I'll treat" the next time you go to lunch. Larger problems though and you realize it's going to take your techie friend a good hour or two of their time to fix, how are you going to pay them? Can you trust your friend to cut you off and send you to a shop when you can't clear your conscience of not compensating them?
Not everyone has the family friend who will fix the long hard problems for free because they honestly don't care. Why risk souring a friendship when $60-100 at a computer shop will fix the problem?
Contract law 101 if I recall correctly, you cannot agree to a contract you havn't seen, nor can you sign a paper saying you agree to a new contract you havn't seen.
Another reason is if I were doing something, such as playing a game, or burning a cd, etc, and my computer started patching, I would be pissed, so would many people. Waiting for idle time wouldn't work too well either, since a lot of "XP Home" users who don't understand updating, also aren't going to be leaving their computers on 24/7.
People patch sendmail?
FreeBSD just seems how it *should* be. The filesystem and startup environment isn't static, but doesn't make wholesale changes.
I am a big supporter of FreeBSD for this major reason. When people ask why BSD over Linux I tell them it feels better, and that feeling is half of knowing how to use, and fix, a computer. Used and installed many a linux, Slackware was my first love, worked with redhat a bit remotely, worked (unknowingly) with FreeBSD remotely and everything seemed better in a kind of inexplicable way. Friend told me to try out FreeBSD and I just liked it, and realized it was what I had been using before. I do still admin a linux machine, and both myself and my boss kind of groan over having to do anything to it.
FreeBSD's installer could be improved, though. sysinstall needs to be reinvented and perhaps have picobsd merged into it. I'd love to be able to install a variable-sized FreeBSD for firewall or appliance-type installs.
sysinstall could use some minor functionality improvments definitly, but I love it how it is, and most anything it does can be done by hand with little more effort and maybe a little digging once you get a base system up and running. I would love a stock kernel with minimal bells, but BPF and the other socket stuffs built in for ipfw2. I have setup one or two "setit-and-forgetit" firewall/nat computers at friends houses with little to no expertise in computer, let alone FreeBSD etc and so far no problems or complaints. Multiple power outages, network outages etc, but their computers keep chugging along. I spot check it every few months when I happen to be over there and none of the filesystems are growing, etc. I love it.
I wasn't aware that you could pump gas anywhere in the US w/o paying for it first? Pay at the pump makes it really easy to demand that, and I don't see any reason why not to, as no company is required to let you "consume first pay later". Most restaurants let you, many, many other places do not.
I remember travelling to Cortes Island in Candada a year or 2 ago with my girlfriend. The gas pumps on the island were pump first pay later, and it took me a minute to realise this, because they trust the people on the island.
Constant harassment is something I define as "no way to tell it to piss off". It takes some like 3-4 boots and clicks to tell it that I don't want to see it anymore. Namely that damnable tour icon. This is for every user account that gets made, every install that gets done. Maybe I need to move away from doing XP installs for people.
Happliy running Virus Scanner Free for 3 or 4 years now. Don't do stupid things on the internet and you don't need a virus scanner. Firewall? External or don't bother, a $75 (whatever) NetGear will do just fine, so will that old pentium + some bsd/linux discs.
DON'T install software thats too good to be true free. DON'T use IE. DON'T install hack and cracks for your latest downloaded game. Buy it at the store and go on with life. Got spyware? Use SpyBot/AdAware/SpywareBlaster. Use Eudora to read your email, or webmail. DON'T open attachments, or use common sense, does your friend so-and-so really know how to zip a file? Much less put a password on it?
Don't forget the ever harder Right Click desktop->Properties->appearance->Windows Classic. It almost doubles the amount of time it takes to get windows xp running twice as fast.
.NET passport.
The thing that drives me nuts is the constant harassment when you first install Windows XP for taking a tour and signing up for a
Minor point, but I thought it was 2-pair RJ-11 that we have now? With RJ-45 being the 4-pair ethernet style adapter?
The problem I always had with split screen screen (err..) was that its many keypresses to get from top to bottom so to say. I find when I have (say) 3 terminals open it is easier to simply knock my mouse "at" the terminal I want, and let the mouse cursor auto-focus the window a quarter second later.
That being said I love WindowMaker + rxvt (or your terminal of choice). I do use screen heavily though, for anything I might want to come back to later.
Where do you bank, out of sheer curiosity? Where do you work is a different question entirely.
In the bill payment section it warns of complications when using IE. It's in big red print.
If you currently use Internet Explorer 6.0 and experience problems requesting a Click-to-Pay Payment, you may need to download a software update from Microsoft®.
The warning used to say that they hope there is an update soon. I never said they prefered it, but obviously they don't require it. Chevron's website worked fine in Mozilla with editing of the User-Agent header, but browser detection disabled the website.
There is one website I need to visit which requires IE, so I use IE solely for that purpose.
Why not show that company competition? Call them up, tell them you can't do business with them because their website is horribly broken. Have a competitors name ready. Chevron didn't listen, and I now buy gas from a cheaper local non-chain gas station. (Which is probably using Chevron gas, but who knows, could be Arco) Either way, after a year of petitioning them and being told flat out "too bad" I cancelled my credit card with them and went my merry way.
By the way, Citibank (Washington Mutuals CC provider) has a warning on their website about how IE might not render their site correctly because it (IE) is broken. *Every* problem I have emailed them about has been fixed in under a week, and this was a year ago the last time I had a problem. Most of them were funky DHTML/Javascript menus and such where a backround wasn't rendering, or a click wouldn't go through. Statefarm, Cingular, Washingtonmutual, and Citibank all work in Mozilla, so I will continue to give them my patronage.
If they would stop charging a "Service fee" for using the kiosk. The kiosk HAS to be cheaper than the person behind the register, it doesn't cost $6/hour to keep it there. Get in get out be done, but they slap a $3 fee onto an already overpriced ticket and people would rather wait in line. This being said I realized I've only seen one movie in the theatre in the past 6 months, LoTR. The price has driven me to rentals and other entertainment.
It might be something to do with the fact that the terminals run windows. It may also be because the few times I was at the movies before that they were crashed out with either STOP errors or bios hardware failures.
The same goes for the California DMV, which CHARGES for you to "go online and renew!" which they tout everywhere you look. Again, surely a website is cheaper to maintain than a unionized employee.
Then use Linux, you damn hippie!
Both studios are using Renderman compliant renderers, so that's not the issue
It seems to me the previous comment said that both studios were using the renderman protocol...
Not "Renderman" as a rendering engine.
There is new technology available today which allows you to connect to a corporate (or home, etc) network in a secure way which gives you a presence on that network, it's called VPN, or SSH, or pcAnywhere, or Timbuktu, or SMTP-AUTH, or oh never mind.
Some of those options require another computer to be there answering to your beck and call, others just a computer with powerful multi-user virtualization (FreeBSD? Linux? OS X?). VPN gives you local presence on the network, allowing you to do all sorts of cool things. SMTP-AUTH would let you send email from anywhere into your corporate network, where it would then validate SPF checks.
Your IT department should easily be able to accomodate this on a laptop for a roaming user. I work for the public school system and we have both VPN, SSH, and dialup access to anyone who cares to ask for it (VPN is restricted to administrators, though, sorry students).
These security precautions should have been in place before you left the office, otherwise I could just send email as your company anyways.
Such as this fine DVD I just bought from another country! It is an international standard, I have a DVD Player, let me just pop this in and watch it.
ERROR: Disc in wrong region, would you like to switch your dvd player? You can only do this three times before getting arrested.
Remember, a "regionless dvd player" is illegal. You aren't licensed to watch your movie in countries other than where you bought it. What about on a plane over international waters? What region is that?