> moving everyone to.NET and so I want to leave ASAP
So you stuck it out with crappy VB6 all these years for the sheer enjoyment of it, and now that they're finally moving to a half-way decent platform, you're bailing?
> Doesn't it seem odd to have to put two individual drives > into a system, both of which largely read the same format?
You have a point (except that it can be VERY convenient to have two drives for copying), but that's not really what this device addresses (and charges for). Its claim to fame is that it can also be a stand-alone DVD player. It's basically two devices:
1. An external USB2 burner and CD/DVD reader, in which case the built-in DVD decoder and TV output are mostly useless.
2. A stand-alone DVD player, in which case the built-in CD burner is completely useless.
It doesn't convince as either, because as an external burner it's too expensive--you can pick up MUCH cheaper units with better performance--and as a DVD player it has a very anemic feature set (and no on-device display and virtually no controls).
Having a CD burner inside your DVD player adds no value whatsoever other than saving a bit of space. Now if it had VIDEO IN and could burn a (S)VCD directly without PC intervention, that would be different. But as it is it's just a box that happens to have two different devices inside that cannot take advantage of each other in any particular way. No particular synergies at all.
> If somebody needs the joke explained - they are too stupid to appreciate it anyway.
True, all true, but nowadays on/. lesser than sledge hammer subtelty is often mistaken for earnest.
The East German secret service used this
on
Optical Cellphones
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Not an actual cell phone, but a point-to-point intercom involving binoculars and infrared transmissions. The voice was converted to (analog) IR light and transmitted through optics that created a very narrow beam. At the other end, the IR receiver was mounted in the eye piece of the binoculars and converted the light back to sound. The two devices had to be aimed very accurately at each other. That way a spy in the west could communicate with his pimp in the east across the border with very low probability of interception. They actually had this on the History Channel a few years back.
The sell phoane comes with a set of special specticals that you put on and look at you're conversashion partner, who has an identicle set up. The phoanes then comunnicate via lazers in the specticals, thats why you have to look at each other.
(creative spelling purely intentional in homage to the original article)
This is a VIRUS story, not a CANCER story. It's only incidental that this particular virus causes one type of cancer. If it were a CANCER story, it would mean that further development of the vaccine could someday also prevent other kinds of cancer, but it won't. It might someday prevent other kinds of VIRUS induced diseases, which is of course still a very useful thing, since our expertise with viruses is negligible compared to bacteria.
At first it looks like you know what you're talking about, but later on you disprove that. Still, it is true that merely moving a document format to XML doesn't guarantee any sort of compatibility. You can express the most obscure and proprietary document format in XML and not make it any less impenetrable. What is really needed is a standardized feature set of a word processing document and a set of tags to express its structure. This would however restrict compliant word processors to a common feature set and remove the lucrative opportunity for differentiation.
So, in addition to defining a lowest common denominator feature set, you would also have to standardize on an extension mechanism that would allow vendors to add new features to their products and allow for saving of these features into the document without breaking lowest common denominator compatibility with other applications. XML is particularly good at this sort of thing, because of the endless level of nesting it allows. Take something like smart tags or annotations, for example. You could save such information into the document as a set of new child elements of the text in question. Word processors that don't know anything about smart tags or annotations wouldn't understand the new element tags and would ignore them.
This is a relatively trivial example of mere text attributes, but more complex document features could affect the structure and integrity of the document itself. Take for example text frame linking--if a vendor added a particular mechanism for linking individual text frames together, a word processor that didn't understand those tags might parse and present the text in the wrong order. That's why a standardized feature extension mechanism would also have to address the issue of graceful failure, so that applications that don't understand some tags can display the document with reduced sophistication but still in valid fashion.
There's more to life than gaming. On an average business day I bet your average large corporation firewall adds more latency than satellite when everyone is refreshing their home pages on cnn.com or weatherchannel.com. Much of the day reading/. can be a serious pain, quite apart from the marginal posts. For the people that can't get anything else, 1-second delays ain't nothing.
I'm also such a contractor at the moment, working at a government agency. Government at least won't contract with individuals, they only work through a very small list of approved contracting agencies (at least in this state). Most of these contracting agencies here were started by ex-employees of the government agency they contract with, so there's a definite networking system in place. Basically, I would expect many larger companies to work the same way, so I wouldn't get my hopes up trying to get personal contracts with any significant company. The most likely candidates are probably small(er) companies, which will probably also pay less, so you'll need more concurrent contracts and more hours working.
I agree that theoretically free-for-all bandwidth is untenable and that some charge-per-use system would seem to make sense. But none of the pricing schemes I've ever seen make sense. If they start charging $0.20/MB after the first free GB/month, that means I couldn't even download one complete Linux distro per month (two or three CDs) for "free", and I think most people would agree that's hardly excessive bandwidth use. At $0.20/MB that would be around $13 per CD, so it would be cheaper to just order from CheapBytes. The sad thing is that those $0.20/MB are most likely FAR above the actual break-even point of the provider, so far as to actually make you bitter and cynical, which is exactly what we are around here.
> Given the current climate, a letter to the FTC with copies to > the FCC and SEC would probably trigger an investigation.
*Snort* Yeah, because only just last week the FCC was so vehemently opposed to the idea of Comcast purchasing AT&T--NOT! Did you even read what Michael Powell's thoughts on the matter were? The benefits are HUGE and the dangers MINOR--to whom, that is the question.
> HP and Palm would be slightly more moral choices.
Palm??? Is this the same Palm that's been sitting on its laurels since 1995 and only recently starting shaking up its hardware division? The only "innovation" prior to the new ARM devices were the low resolution color screens. Other than that a 2002 device is practically identical to the Palm Pilot 1000. If you want innovation, how about Sony, or even just Handspring?
> The size of all these things are just too big to carry around.
That's what mainly puts me off WinCE devices also (that, plus the lofty prices--I refuse to carry a $600 item in my pocket that could be ruined by slamming into a desk). I've become pretty pragmatic about OSs in general, and as long as there's a decent amount of software and good programming tools available, I don't really care what religion the device runs.
This should be the first handheld with TFT color, 32MB RAM and two expansion slots for under $200. Except for the porky-looking dimensions this should beat the pants off Palm or Sony. Maybe Sony will lower the price on the PEG-SJ30 to under $200 in response.
Here are the great throngs screaming Open Source, Open Source, and then they ditch Windows for Mac OS X. I guess Apple in their minds must be a more benevolent dictator; he's giving them cake to eat instead of bread. Guys, this is Steve Jobs we're talking about, and while he certainly has charisma, he (and Larry and Scott) would like nothing more than to be Bill Gates in terms of marketshare. Apple will flirt with OS until it's served its purpose (to drag all the OS-praising sheep from Windows over to the Mac), and then it's back to the dungeons and the flogging. Kind of like the Mac clone days.
That's only because this is a complete solution. You can get transmitter/receiver modules for these kinds of data rates quite cheaply--just pick up a copy of Circuit Cellar and browse the ads. You can find modules for under $20. Of course, the majority are more in the 50MHz range. What makes GENRIP special is that it lets you run IP transparently over these radio modems. Normally when you integrate these radios into a hardware design, you have to implement the entire network protocol from scratch, and most of the time that ends up NOT being IP, believe me.
> I'm really not too excited about ultra-tiny storage formats.
If it's too tiny for you, permanently attach it to a brick or a 2x4 or anything else you consider a handy size. Don't hobble everyone else with bulky formats just because you're prone to losing your keys. Given small things it's easy to make them larger, but it's much harder to make large things smaller.
> All I know is that I am done spending $2K for a computer.
Exactly, except I'm done even spending $1000 on a computer, except maybe a laptop. Even $800 is way too much for a toss-around-the-living-room device that the kids could trip over. Once they hit $300-$400 we're talking. Which is not an impossible price point at all, assuming an 800x600 display, a slower processor (maybe 500 MHz Mobile PII or Transmeta), WiFi and no rotating storage. If they sold it as a PC companion-type device, it could even boot off another PC and map a drive there for storage. Given that the main use I see for such a device is communications (browsing, email, maybe VoIP), this would be an entirely adequate and lightweight platform for that purpose. Make it run off some common brand of camcorder batteries, and you'd have a really cheap device.
> Then I realize Comcast is incompatible with Linux.
What the HELL are you talking about? I've had Comcast cable broadband for going on two years now, and I've never had a PC connected directly to the cable, only an SMC router. What that humble little router box can, Linux can anyday--which amounts to DHCP and nothing more.
> they can release their own crappy-quality leak
That's what I thought right away also. Leaking it first gives them a certain control over the quality of the leak, at least for a while. You would think that the mere availability of a crappy copy would reduce the motivation to create another better copy for a fair number of potential rippers.
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> moving everyone to .NET and so I want to leave ASAP
So you stuck it out with crappy VB6 all these years for the sheer enjoyment of it, and now that they're finally moving to a half-way decent platform, you're bailing?
> Doesn't it seem odd to have to put two individual drives
> into a system, both of which largely read the same format?
You have a point (except that it can be VERY convenient to have two drives for copying), but that's not really what this device addresses (and charges for). Its claim to fame is that it can also be a stand-alone DVD player. It's basically two devices:
1. An external USB2 burner and CD/DVD reader, in which case the built-in DVD decoder and TV output are mostly useless.
2. A stand-alone DVD player, in which case the built-in CD burner is completely useless.
It doesn't convince as either, because as an external burner it's too expensive--you can pick up MUCH cheaper units with better performance--and as a DVD player it has a very anemic feature set (and no on-device display and virtually no controls).
Having a CD burner inside your DVD player adds no value whatsoever other than saving a bit of space. Now if it had VIDEO IN and could burn a (S)VCD directly without PC intervention, that would be different. But as it is it's just a box that happens to have two different devices inside that cannot take advantage of each other in any particular way. No particular synergies at all.
> If somebody needs the joke explained - they are too stupid to appreciate it anyway.
/. lesser than sledge hammer subtelty is often mistaken for earnest.
True, all true, but nowadays on
Not an actual cell phone, but a point-to-point intercom involving binoculars and infrared transmissions. The voice was converted to (analog) IR light and transmitted through optics that created a very narrow beam. At the other end, the IR receiver was mounted in the eye piece of the binoculars and converted the light back to sound. The two devices had to be aimed very accurately at each other. That way a spy in the west could communicate with his pimp in the east across the border with very low probability of interception. They actually had this on the History Channel a few years back.
The sell phoane comes with a set of special specticals that you put on and look at you're conversashion partner, who has an identicle set up. The phoanes then comunnicate via lazers in the specticals, thats why you have to look at each other.
(creative spelling purely intentional in homage to the original article)
> since our expertise with viruses is negligible compared to bacteria.
By that I don't mean that bacteria know more than us about viruses, but that we're better at dealing with bacteria than with viruses. Duh!
This is a VIRUS story, not a CANCER story. It's only incidental that this particular virus causes one type of cancer. If it were a CANCER story, it would mean that further development of the vaccine could someday also prevent other kinds of cancer, but it won't. It might someday prevent other kinds of VIRUS induced diseases, which is of course still a very useful thing, since our expertise with viruses is negligible compared to bacteria.
At first it looks like you know what you're talking about, but later on you disprove that. Still, it is true that merely moving a document format to XML doesn't guarantee any sort of compatibility. You can express the most obscure and proprietary document format in XML and not make it any less impenetrable. What is really needed is a standardized feature set of a word processing document and a set of tags to express its structure. This would however restrict compliant word processors to a common feature set and remove the lucrative opportunity for differentiation.
So, in addition to defining a lowest common denominator feature set, you would also have to standardize on an extension mechanism that would allow vendors to add new features to their products and allow for saving of these features into the document without breaking lowest common denominator compatibility with other applications. XML is particularly good at this sort of thing, because of the endless level of nesting it allows. Take something like smart tags or annotations, for example. You could save such information into the document as a set of new child elements of the text in question. Word processors that don't know anything about smart tags or annotations wouldn't understand the new element tags and would ignore them.
This is a relatively trivial example of mere text attributes, but more complex document features could affect the structure and integrity of the document itself. Take for example text frame linking--if a vendor added a particular mechanism for linking individual text frames together, a word processor that didn't understand those tags might parse and present the text in the wrong order. That's why a standardized feature extension mechanism would also have to address the issue of graceful failure, so that applications that don't understand some tags can display the document with reduced sophistication but still in valid fashion.
There's more to life than gaming. On an average business day I bet your average large corporation firewall adds more latency than satellite when everyone is refreshing their home pages on cnn.com or weatherchannel.com. Much of the day reading /. can be a serious pain, quite apart from the marginal posts. For the people that can't get anything else, 1-second delays ain't nothing.
I'm also such a contractor at the moment, working at a government agency. Government at least won't contract with individuals, they only work through a very small list of approved contracting agencies (at least in this state). Most of these contracting agencies here were started by ex-employees of the government agency they contract with, so there's a definite networking system in place. Basically, I would expect many larger companies to work the same way, so I wouldn't get my hopes up trying to get personal contracts with any significant company. The most likely candidates are probably small(er) companies, which will probably also pay less, so you'll need more concurrent contracts and more hours working.
I agree that theoretically free-for-all bandwidth is untenable and that some charge-per-use system would seem to make sense. But none of the pricing schemes I've ever seen make sense. If they start charging $0.20/MB after the first free GB/month, that means I couldn't even download one complete Linux distro per month (two or three CDs) for "free", and I think most people would agree that's hardly excessive bandwidth use. At $0.20/MB that would be around $13 per CD, so it would be cheaper to just order from CheapBytes. The sad thing is that those $0.20/MB are most likely FAR above the actual break-even point of the provider, so far as to actually make you bitter and cynical, which is exactly what we are around here.
> Condalezza Rice and Michael Powell should get together
> and have the worlds stupidest politician.
Stupid? Hardly. Nefarious, more likely.
> Given the current climate, a letter to the FTC with copies to
> the FCC and SEC would probably trigger an investigation.
*Snort* Yeah, because only just last week the FCC was so vehemently opposed to the idea of Comcast purchasing AT&T--NOT! Did you even read what Michael Powell's thoughts on the matter were? The benefits are HUGE and the dangers MINOR--to whom, that is the question.
> HP and Palm would be slightly more moral choices.
Palm??? Is this the same Palm that's been sitting on its laurels since 1995 and only recently starting shaking up its hardware division? The only "innovation" prior to the new ARM devices were the low resolution color screens. Other than that a 2002 device is practically identical to the Palm Pilot 1000. If you want innovation, how about Sony, or even just Handspring?
> The size of all these things are just too big to carry around.
That's what mainly puts me off WinCE devices also (that, plus the lofty prices--I refuse to carry a $600 item in my pocket that could be ruined by slamming into a desk). I've become pretty pragmatic about OSs in general, and as long as there's a decent amount of software and good programming tools available, I don't really care what religion the device runs.
This should be the first handheld with TFT color, 32MB RAM and two expansion slots for under $200. Except for the porky-looking dimensions this should beat the pants off Palm or Sony. Maybe Sony will lower the price on the PEG-SJ30 to under $200 in response.
Here are the great throngs screaming Open Source, Open Source, and then they ditch Windows for Mac OS X. I guess Apple in their minds must be a more benevolent dictator; he's giving them cake to eat instead of bread. Guys, this is Steve Jobs we're talking about, and while he certainly has charisma, he (and Larry and Scott) would like nothing more than to be Bill Gates in terms of marketshare. Apple will flirt with OS until it's served its purpose (to drag all the OS-praising sheep from Windows over to the Mac), and then it's back to the dungeons and the flogging. Kind of like the Mac clone days.
> Check this out: Arrick's wireless links. $650.
That's only because this is a complete solution. You can get transmitter/receiver modules for these kinds of data rates quite cheaply--just pick up a copy of Circuit Cellar and browse the ads. You can find modules for under $20. Of course, the majority are more in the 50MHz range. What makes GENRIP special is that it lets you run IP transparently over these radio modems. Normally when you integrate these radios into a hardware design, you have to implement the entire network protocol from scratch, and most of the time that ends up NOT being IP, believe me.
> I'll be laughing at you with a large red brick hanging off my PDA.
:-)
Even with me looking for my data you'd hardly be the one laughing in that pose
> I'm really not too excited about ultra-tiny storage formats.
If it's too tiny for you, permanently attach it to a brick or a 2x4 or anything else you consider a handy size. Don't hobble everyone else with bulky formats just because you're prone to losing your keys. Given small things it's easy to make them larger, but it's much harder to make large things smaller.
> All I know is that I am done spending $2K for a computer.
Exactly, except I'm done even spending $1000 on a computer, except maybe a laptop. Even $800 is way too much for a toss-around-the-living-room device that the kids could trip over. Once they hit $300-$400 we're talking. Which is not an impossible price point at all, assuming an 800x600 display, a slower processor (maybe 500 MHz Mobile PII or Transmeta), WiFi and no rotating storage. If they sold it as a PC companion-type device, it could even boot off another PC and map a drive there for storage. Given that the main use I see for such a device is communications (browsing, email, maybe VoIP), this would be an entirely adequate and lightweight platform for that purpose. Make it run off some common brand of camcorder batteries, and you'd have a really cheap device.
> The benefits of this transaction are considerable, the potential harms negligible.
Seems more like the inverse of this is becoming true of the FCC.
> Then I realize Comcast is incompatible with Linux.
What the HELL are you talking about? I've had Comcast cable broadband for going on two years now, and I've never had a PC connected directly to the cable, only an SMC router. What that humble little router box can, Linux can anyday--which amounts to DHCP and nothing more.
> they can release their own crappy-quality leak That's what I thought right away also. Leaking it first gives them a certain control over the quality of the leak, at least for a while. You would think that the mere availability of a crappy copy would reduce the motivation to create another better copy for a fair number of potential rippers.