I'll second the AOL advice. Yes, of course they suck for any self-respecting semi-computer-literate person, but they do have more local dial-up numbers than anybody else.
Besides, what better way to hurt them than to use them for free? If more people actually started using them for just the free hours, just watch how quickly they'd stop that deal. That's the best way to get at them, baby!
And Brits love ranting against the EU and all its heavy-handed big-brother tactics. Yet in the recent past it's been mainly Brittain initiating big-brother efforts, with many of the other EU countries being less than thrilled. What about the public video surveillance system deployed in some London burb, I believe?
Well, one of the biggest reasons for why you don't see ethernet peripherals is the overhead of packet processing. Your $8 ethernet card is only the beginning of a long journey through one or more protocol stacks--TCP/IP, IPX etc. TCP/IP in particular is a very demanding protocol to process, so in addition to the ethernet chipset you need pretty much an entire computer to do all the processing. In the past that was technologically simply unfeasible, and while some manufacturers did sell such devices (HP's JetDirect for example), the cost was prohibitive for more trivial devices, or low margin devices.
Nowadays we're getting to where an entire TCP/IP stack can be embedded in a chipset and can be combined with an ethernet chipset for not very much. At the other end you simply supply a serial bitstream pretty much, and don't have to worry about the details. However, for the kinds of applications you're talking about, this technological advance is simply too late. We already have USB etc, so ethernet printers are not really necessary for the low end anymore. However, a lot more devices WILL show up on IP networks, stuff you'd have never expected on a network. It's all about this craze to connect every electronic gizmo via IP. It won't be too long before you can buy light switches with their own IP address (v6 probably), at what prices I don't want to know. Talk about DOS attacks on your light switch when you want to catch some sleep.
Your sig is very poignant indeed, especially given the context. The phrase "For that matter, neigher did Goddard" was plain sarcasm, meaning that he never got the engineering right, and his rockets never did too much in the way of, uh, flying. Yeah, I have a time machine in my garage, too, and the Smithsonian is more than welcome to come pick it up. But does it work?
Yeah, and Da Vinci invented the first helicopter. Whether both these discoveries did anybody any good can be read in the history books. As they say, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, or in this case, the proof of the concept is in the engineering.
While Newton figured out the conservation of momentum thingie, he knew nothing of turbo pumps, or cooling technologies, or combustion. For that matter, neither did Goddard. I think the man is getting WAY too much credit for never having gotten one of his designs to work decently. Probably an American coping mechanism for the fact that rocket propulsion is the OTHER propulsion technology they missed.
While Goddard is supposed to have inspired a lot of the people that went on to develop successful designs, it was they that solved the vexing engineering problems of how to build a reliable turbo pump, how to keep the nozzle cool, and the whole guidance thing. These engineering problems can't be dismissed as mere details--a lot of people had correct notions of how to build a rocket, but very few could translate these notions into metal that flew.
But yes, in the end we're all here because we're standing on the shoulders of giants, just to keep some perspective.
I remember reading in 1991 or so in Byte that GeoWorks was fully object-oriented with extreme code reuse. That's one of the reasons it offered so much functionality in so little space. Alas, they promised a development system for the longest time, but never delivered. People were lining up to get into GeoWorks development. Heck, it looked SO much sharper than Windows 3.1, with a lot of the Motif look cloned, and tear-off menus and all kinds of other stuff. It looked up to date even by todays standards. They seriously shot themselves in the foot by not delivering development tools. At their brief peak of popularity Windows wasn't that entrenched yet, and they could have had a serious shot at never letting Microsoft happen. But, in the word(s) of Jerry Pournelle, alas...
> If you don't mind me asking, how did you set up > your server (I'm planning on putting together > something similar for home). Linux/apache/mysql/mpg123 > with multiple sound cards and amps? Any advice > on multiple sound cards (which type) with Linux?
Actually, while I like Linux, I'm not comfortable programming it. I know you can throw together a graphical UI in TCL/TK without X and all, but I don't know how yet and don't have the time to learn. I used what I'm familiar with: Delphi on Windows 95. Delphi let me put together a very attractive GUI and all the peripheral shnick shnack required in no time at all. Also, plain old Win95 950A boots in no time at all on a Cyrix PR200+ and my Delphi UI is up and running in 15 seconds or so. Just pare down Windows to the bare essentials, and you can fit it in 80M or less, MP3 app included. While I'm no Windows fan, it makes a fair bit of sense for me in this situation. Besides, I WORSHIP Delphi, and until Kylix is up and running, I'll stick with Windows.
Note, I said I'm using a 486 for SERVING up the music, not for PLAYING it. The good ol' 486 can't handle MP3 playback, bless its heart. Instead, I make cheap Pentium-level music players. All you need is a P100 or above. P100-level CPU (Intel, Cyrix, AMD)............$20 Motherboard...................................$1 5 RAM (8M - 16M)................................$20 HD (120M; Lord, where do you even find one?)..$30 TV out Video card.............................$25 Sound card (duh!).............................$15 NIC...........................................$1 0 Case, PS......................................$20
You look for surplus stuff as much as possible and can get the price down to below $100. It's also nice to have an IR remote, so price that in as well. Besides, any self-respecting geek has much of this stuff lying around the house anyway, so my machine cost me far less than this.
I don't currently serve up the music from one machine. The above would be hooked up to the stereo system, but other computers on the network with their own sound cards and speakers can stream their own music from the server. Currently I'm using Microsoft Networking with FS access to the music files, but one day it would be nice to move to a TCP/IP based serving system. First things first...
As several people already mentioned, there are downsides to not "caching" your data locally. If the access provider for any reason yanks the data, you're out of luck. When the year 10,000 strikes and all computers go berserk and the UniverseNet goes down, you won't be able to play Strauss' "Also Sprach Zarathustra". More realistically, I've experienced personally relying on web content to be there rather than making a local copy, and one day, poof! it was gone, never to return. No thanks!
Also, the privacy issues. I'll NEVER EVER NEVER use a remote storage server for my private data. If the world should ever move to Network Computing, I'll get out of computing altogether. I'll become a farmer, live off the earth, join a militia, that sort of thing.
I firmly believe in the net as a distribution medium, yes I do. But never as the main data store. Call be conservative and narrow minded, but that's me!
We've had printed books for 500 years now, and one of their nagging little problems is the lack of copy protection. If they were invented today, they'd never make it in the marketplace. Yet strangely books have thrived and proliferated like no other medium. Even though for several decades copying of entire books has been readily possible. The copyright in each book might point a wagging finger in your direction, but that's about the extent of it. People in that industry have had the common sense to leave good enough alone, and it's been a market that has regulated itself remarkably well.
Now along come these young wipper-snappers from the West Coast, driving their fancy cars bought with money made off the backs of a teenage market. Easy money, and as they say, easy come, easy go. These guys live such ostentatious lifestyles that their very existence depends on a healthy profit from each CD. Suddenly they're taking the moral high ground, preaching ethics to a world that has done just fine for centuries. Printing a copyright notice on each CD isn't enough anymore. They have to take proactive measures to make this copyright self-enforcing. Implicit trust in the population just doesn't cut it anymore. We have all this fancy smart technology nowadays, there simple HAVE to be technological ways of making rules and laws self-enforcing. Traffic lights that will uproot themselves and follow you home and punish you for crossing on red. Cars that drive themselves to the nearst police station when you break traffic laws. Bibles that automatically smack you over the head when you sin.
What we're getting to is a world without any trust. Trust begets responsibility. Conversely, lack of trust begets defiance and irresponsible behaviour. This is Parenting 101, but I guess too many of our leaders missed out on that one. The more you rely on rules, the more rules you will require. In the end human beings will regress to a mindless state meandering around and being bounced into proper behaviour like a ball in a pinball machine. While I'm far from advocating anarchy, I think this is the wrong path to take.
Ok, major rant here, complete waste of time and potential sleep really. Still, when I look back on this when I'm 64 I'll feel better about having said it.
What do you mean, "tried"? They DID hold it back, they killed the bitch. You only see DAT in studios and purist's homes anymore.
The duplication argument has always been rather flimsy. Sure, analog looks bad today, but in its heyday it was the way to go. In 1984 nobody complained about the quality of video tape, consequently movie studios were equally afraid of analog piracy. Except they could do less about VHS then than they seem to be able to do about DVD now. Is it just me, or does the power of the entertainment industry really grow by the hour?
Regarding market forces and falling prices of CDs, bull$hit! Market forces should have dictated a long time ago that CDs should be way cheaper, yet strangely they're not. I mean, who really walks into Media Play and plonks down $18 for a CD, when you can get the same thing for $12 or less online? Yet they've retailed for $18 for the last ten or more years. Just check out Europe, where the cost of CDs has exceeded the pain threshold. Cheapo labels such as Naxxos (sp?) have made arguably quality classical music available for a fraction of the price of the big labels, and they sell like hotcakes. But you don't see Deutsche Grammophone going down in price, do you?
Personally, I think the problem is a recalcitrant generation of executives that simply can't smell the coffee. They're used to their set margins on which they've grown rich for half a generation, they can't envision a world in which they don't clear $10 on a CD.
Consequently I think CDs will eventually become irrelevant. Heck, I think most prerecorded media will become irrelevant. MP3 is only the tip of the iceberg. I firmly believe music servers will become the mainstay of the future stereo system. Get the music on that hard drive, and you can access it from anywhere in the house. 200 CD monster changers were a nice try, but not the answer. I want to get my CD on the network and NEVER touch it again. The big holdup is still the lack of widespread experience with the concept. Most people simply have never browsed a list of several thousand tracks from a few hundred CDs, clicked on one, and it started playing instantly. No walking up to the shelf, finding the CD, undusting it, ejecting and inserting the tray, waiting for the CD to spin up and track, etc etc. Once sufficient numbers of people experience this, the avalanche will start.
I have over three hundred CDs on the network at home. I can play the music from any of the desktops, or from a laptop anywhere in the house or outside via a wireless network. No storage duplication here, no multiple CDs to buy. A simple 486 machine with a cheapo 18G HD can serve up several simultaneous 128K streams. Once my Internet pipe is wide enough to allow me quick downloads of entire albums from an online vendor, I'll never touch another CD. Why would I want to go back to discrete physical media?
THAT'S what the media companies are scared of. Today it's music. Give it another 5 years and 500GB and 1TB drives, and we'll do the same with video. Suddenly the market for shiny disks is gone, and all that "protection" revenue is lost. And we're surprised the industry is up in arms about the digital revolution?
That is the mother of all SF sagas. IA was so much scientist that his stories are throughly enjoyable from a technological viewpoint as well. I believe no other SF writings come close to the Trilogy or the Robot books. The universe created is so vast and rich, both spacially and temporally, that the reader feels really small and insignificant, yet feels a part of this universe. The Trilogy would be a much worthier replacement for the Star Wars series, as much as we might have enjoyed that one. True, the scope was much larger, and the storyline far from simplistic enough for the target audience, yet it would have created something to be less ashamed of for linking.
On the other hand, who could have done such a monumental work sufficient justice without raping it for the benefit of cheap thrills and large ticket sales? Maybe with the ever decreasing price of computing power smaller production houses can one day take on the task without compromising the original work or its cinematic potential.
Re:When will age of single monolithic CPU end?
on
News on Pentium IV
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· Score: 1
> Could a 150 pound eucaryotic cell ever be > equivalent in abilities to a human? Of course > not! It's a stupid idea!
Uh, actually, several have made it to VP, a few even to President status, though I won't name any names. We all know who they are.
Scott McNealy and Bill Gates have much more in common than is healthy for a grown man. I read an interview with McNealy in a German magazine a month or so ago, and I couldn't believe what a pompous ass the guy really is. He was talking about his Java Everywhere "vision", and when the interviewer brought up security concerns regarding personal privacy (or lack thereof), McNealy totally lambasted him. He went on about how Europeans are such unreasonable freaks about personal privacy and how they want to regulate every last aspect of life. He went on a serious rant against Europeans well beyond the scope of the interview. Since ECMA is a European body, I wouldn't be surprised if that played some part in Sun's decision to withdraw Java. Pure speculation, but McNealy strikes me as the kind of capricious guy that would let personal feelings dictate the course of an entire company.
Uh, hate to break this to you, but the x86 is one of the most commonly used embedded platforms. Go get a few embedded magazines (you know what I mean) and check out the ads: there are more ads for x86 SBCs than all the others combined. Maybe not in your set-top box, but just about anywhere else: traffic lights, all kinds of industrial machinery and robots, etc.
Normal windshields don't reflect sufficient light to work well, so you stick a mostly transparent film with tiny embedded reflective particles onto the inside of the windshield. This is done on most cars with HUDs, just check it out. There's nothing special about the windshield itself. The problem is the distortion introduced by the curvature of the glass. With conventional HUDs in cars that's not a problem since the display only consists of simple large digits which are recognizable anyway. With entire images it might become annoying. One possible solution is to compensate for the curvature in software, by distorting the displayed image such that the net effect is a reasonably even image. That is done in many systems, including the Hubble space telescope, 3D camera systems, etc. It might be a little tricky to do in real time, but not at all impossible.
The advantage of this approach is that you could sell an off-the-shelf system. Simply stick the reflector film on the windshield, stick the LCD on the dash, select the car make and model in the software setup (which sets the correct distortion compensation parameters for your windshield curvature), and you're ready to go. All for $499 at Pep Boys. Yeah right!
Well, the German definition of porn is rather different from the US one. What Germans call porn Americans call XXX porn. What Americans usually call porn--run of the mill tittie stuff and a butt cheek here and there--in Germany is normally considered educational material and enjoyed by the whole family in the Bild newspaper around the kitchen table.
Ok, I can't take it anymore, Karma points be damned. Regarding your.sig: if your spelling were the only problem, I could MAYBE live with that. But your entire stream-of-consciousness style of writing is short circuiting my brain cells, and they are revolting in the form of this reply.
Just to let you know, most humans have a linguistic preprocessor, a sort of Pretty Print if you will, that allows them to arrange random thoughts into linear, formatted output compatible with most other people's I/O standards. USE IT!
> A sore point with me: my income is in US$ but I carry debt in UKP...
Ouch! I'm in an analogous situation: I carry debt in US$, and am thus reluctant to move back to Germany until I shake off a substantial amount. Despite my (American) wife liking Europe a lot since the last few visits and wanting to move there. We thought of England as an alternative--what are the IT job prospects there? And earning potential?
A very well stated rendition of the facts. The "compromised freedom" of speech thing in Germany is arguably a bad thing, but who can blame them, I guess, after all that happened. After living in the US for going on eight years, I can honestly say that there is a considerably higher percentage of radical elements in this country than in Germany. Yet, of course, Germany wouldn't get away with harboring even a small fraction of these, simply because it IS Germany. The price it must pay for its history.
Your second paragraph hits the heart of the matter regarding our flourishing economy. Bill loves bragging about the hundreds of thousands of jobs created since he entered office, yet nobody points out that most of these jobs are service positions, often below the minimum wage at McDonald's et al. Personally, as an average earner in the IT industry, I haven't benefitted at all from our economic boom. The truth is, if you have no stake in the stock market, you have no gain in our current boom.
OK, *NOW* I see what they mean by "you can't moderate topics you post in". Of course, I had no idea they'd remove the moderations rather than prevent me from posting. Well, you live and learn--so far, that's the only thing I've learned today. I'll go sprinkle some moderation fairy dust elsewhere...
OK, *NOW* I see what they mean by "you can't moderate topics you post in". Of course, I had no idea they'd remove the moderations rather than prevent me from posting. Well, you live and learn--so far, that's the only thing I've learned today.
Could you post a copy of your dictionary online under the GPL, we could give it a shot at debugging it!
Re:this guy is spot on...moderators score 1? WTF
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Bringing CAD to Linux
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· Score: 1
Heeee. Not a bad idea, except Slashdot is slower than--ok, I'm running out of analogies, but I'm happy enough when it finally shows up. Never mind changing the login. I leave that to masochists.
Yeah, whatever. You seem to not have taken in a single thing I said. I never criticized Linux in any shape or form. I just said that it has no prayer at becoming a leading CAD platform because CAD users are married to the software and not to the number of features. It doesn't matter that a better, more stable CAD package might be available on Linux some day. If it doesn't work excatly the same as what people are used to, they'll have to spend YEARS becoming proficient with it. CAD skills are a serious investment that you don't just throw away. It's not like a word processor where you pick any and can pound out a document in a couple of days.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll second the AOL advice. Yes, of course they suck for any self-respecting semi-computer-literate person, but they do have more local dial-up numbers than anybody else.
Besides, what better way to hurt them than to use them for free? If more people actually started using them for just the free hours, just watch how quickly they'd stop that deal. That's the best way to get at them, baby!
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
And Brits love ranting against the EU and all its heavy-handed big-brother tactics. Yet in the recent past it's been mainly Brittain initiating big-brother efforts, with many of the other EU countries being less than thrilled. What about the public video surveillance system deployed in some London burb, I believe?
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
Well, one of the biggest reasons for why you don't see ethernet peripherals is the overhead of packet processing. Your $8 ethernet card is only the beginning of a long journey through one or more protocol stacks--TCP/IP, IPX etc. TCP/IP in particular is a very demanding protocol to process, so in addition to the ethernet chipset you need pretty much an entire computer to do all the processing. In the past that was technologically simply unfeasible, and while some manufacturers did sell such devices (HP's JetDirect for example), the cost was prohibitive for more trivial devices, or low margin devices.
Nowadays we're getting to where an entire TCP/IP stack can be embedded in a chipset and can be combined with an ethernet chipset for not very much. At the other end you simply supply a serial bitstream pretty much, and don't have to worry about the details. However, for the kinds of applications you're talking about, this technological advance is simply too late. We already have USB etc, so ethernet printers are not really necessary for the low end anymore. However, a lot more devices WILL show up on IP networks, stuff you'd have never expected on a network. It's all about this craze to connect every electronic gizmo via IP. It won't be too long before you can buy light switches with their own IP address (v6 probably), at what prices I don't want to know. Talk about DOS attacks on your light switch when you want to catch some sleep.
Your sig is very poignant indeed, especially given the context. The phrase "For that matter, neigher did Goddard" was plain sarcasm, meaning that he never got the engineering right, and his rockets never did too much in the way of, uh, flying. Yeah, I have a time machine in my garage, too, and the Smithsonian is more than welcome to come pick it up. But does it work?
Yeah, and Da Vinci invented the first helicopter. Whether both these discoveries did anybody any good can be read in the history books. As they say, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, or in this case, the proof of the concept is in the engineering.
While Newton figured out the conservation of momentum thingie, he knew nothing of turbo pumps, or cooling technologies, or combustion. For that matter, neither did Goddard. I think the man is getting WAY too much credit for never having gotten one of his designs to work decently. Probably an American coping mechanism for the fact that rocket propulsion is the OTHER propulsion technology they missed.
While Goddard is supposed to have inspired a lot of the people that went on to develop successful designs, it was they that solved the vexing engineering problems of how to build a reliable turbo pump, how to keep the nozzle cool, and the whole guidance thing. These engineering problems can't be dismissed as mere details--a lot of people had correct notions of how to build a rocket, but very few could translate these notions into metal that flew.
But yes, in the end we're all here because we're standing on the shoulders of giants, just to keep some perspective.
I remember reading in 1991 or so in Byte that GeoWorks was fully object-oriented with extreme code reuse. That's one of the reasons it offered so much functionality in so little space. Alas, they promised a development system for the longest time, but never delivered. People were lining up to get into GeoWorks development. Heck, it looked SO much sharper than Windows 3.1, with a lot of the Motif look cloned, and tear-off menus and all kinds of other stuff. It looked up to date even by todays standards. They seriously shot themselves in the foot by not delivering development tools. At their brief peak of popularity Windows wasn't that entrenched yet, and they could have had a serious shot at never letting Microsoft happen. But, in the word(s) of Jerry Pournelle, alas...
> If you don't mind me asking, how did you set up
1 5 1 0
5 5
> your server (I'm planning on putting together
> something similar for home). Linux/apache/mysql/mpg123
> with multiple sound cards and amps? Any advice
> on multiple sound cards (which type) with Linux?
Actually, while I like Linux, I'm not comfortable programming it. I know you can throw together a graphical UI in TCL/TK without X and all, but I don't know how yet and don't have the time to learn. I used what I'm familiar with: Delphi on Windows 95. Delphi let me put together a very attractive GUI and all the peripheral shnick shnack required in no time at all. Also, plain old Win95 950A boots in no time at all on a Cyrix PR200+ and my Delphi UI is up and running in 15 seconds or so. Just pare down Windows to the bare essentials, and you can fit it in 80M or less, MP3 app included. While I'm no Windows fan, it makes a fair bit of sense for me in this situation. Besides, I WORSHIP Delphi, and until Kylix is up and running, I'll stick with Windows.
Note, I said I'm using a 486 for SERVING up the music, not for PLAYING it. The good ol' 486 can't handle MP3 playback, bless its heart. Instead, I make cheap Pentium-level music players. All you need is a P100 or above.
P100-level CPU (Intel, Cyrix, AMD)............$20
Motherboard...................................$
RAM (8M - 16M)................................$20
HD (120M; Lord, where do you even find one?)..$30
TV out Video card.............................$25
Sound card (duh!).............................$15
NIC...........................................$
Case, PS......................................$20
Total........................................$1
You look for surplus stuff as much as possible and can get the price down to below $100. It's also nice to have an IR remote, so price that in as well. Besides, any self-respecting geek has much of this stuff lying around the house anyway, so my machine cost me far less than this.
I don't currently serve up the music from one machine. The above would be hooked up to the stereo system, but other computers on the network with their own sound cards and speakers can stream their own music from the server. Currently I'm using Microsoft Networking with FS access to the music files, but one day it would be nice to move to a TCP/IP based serving system. First things first...
As several people already mentioned, there are downsides to not "caching" your data locally. If the access provider for any reason yanks the data, you're out of luck. When the year 10,000 strikes and all computers go berserk and the UniverseNet goes down, you won't be able to play Strauss' "Also Sprach Zarathustra". More realistically, I've experienced personally relying on web content to be there rather than making a local copy, and one day, poof! it was gone, never to return. No thanks!
Also, the privacy issues. I'll NEVER EVER NEVER use a remote storage server for my private data. If the world should ever move to Network Computing, I'll get out of computing altogether. I'll become a farmer, live off the earth, join a militia, that sort of thing.
I firmly believe in the net as a distribution medium, yes I do. But never as the main data store. Call be conservative and narrow minded, but that's me!
We've had printed books for 500 years now, and one of their nagging little problems is the lack of copy protection. If they were invented today, they'd never make it in the marketplace. Yet strangely books have thrived and proliferated like no other medium. Even though for several decades copying of entire books has been readily possible. The copyright in each book might point a wagging finger in your direction, but that's about the extent of it. People in that industry have had the common sense to leave good enough alone, and it's been a market that has regulated itself remarkably well.
Now along come these young wipper-snappers from the West Coast, driving their fancy cars bought with money made off the backs of a teenage market. Easy money, and as they say, easy come, easy go. These guys live such ostentatious lifestyles that their very existence depends on a healthy profit from each CD. Suddenly they're taking the moral high ground, preaching ethics to a world that has done just fine for centuries. Printing a copyright notice on each CD isn't enough anymore. They have to take proactive measures to make this copyright self-enforcing. Implicit trust in the population just doesn't cut it anymore. We have all this fancy smart technology nowadays, there simple HAVE to be technological ways of making rules and laws self-enforcing. Traffic lights that will uproot themselves and follow you home and punish you for crossing on red. Cars that drive themselves to the nearst police station when you break traffic laws. Bibles that automatically smack you over the head when you sin.
What we're getting to is a world without any trust. Trust begets responsibility. Conversely, lack of trust begets defiance and irresponsible behaviour. This is Parenting 101, but I guess too many of our leaders missed out on that one. The more you rely on rules, the more rules you will require. In the end human beings will regress to a mindless state meandering around and being bounced into proper behaviour like a ball in a pinball machine. While I'm far from advocating anarchy, I think this is the wrong path to take.
Ok, major rant here, complete waste of time and potential sleep really. Still, when I look back on this when I'm 64 I'll feel better about having said it.
> Remember how they tried to hold back DAT?
What do you mean, "tried"? They DID hold it back, they killed the bitch. You only see DAT in studios and purist's homes anymore.
The duplication argument has always been rather flimsy. Sure, analog looks bad today, but in its heyday it was the way to go. In 1984 nobody complained about the quality of video tape, consequently movie studios were equally afraid of analog piracy. Except they could do less about VHS then than they seem to be able to do about DVD now. Is it just me, or does the power of the entertainment industry really grow by the hour?
Regarding market forces and falling prices of CDs, bull$hit! Market forces should have dictated a long time ago that CDs should be way cheaper, yet strangely they're not. I mean, who really walks into Media Play and plonks down $18 for a CD, when you can get the same thing for $12 or less online? Yet they've retailed for $18 for the last ten or more years. Just check out Europe, where the cost of CDs has exceeded the pain threshold. Cheapo labels such as Naxxos (sp?) have made arguably quality classical music available for a fraction of the price of the big labels, and they sell like hotcakes. But you don't see Deutsche Grammophone going down in price, do you?
Personally, I think the problem is a recalcitrant generation of executives that simply can't smell the coffee. They're used to their set margins on which they've grown rich for half a generation, they can't envision a world in which they don't clear $10 on a CD.
Consequently I think CDs will eventually become irrelevant. Heck, I think most prerecorded media will become irrelevant. MP3 is only the tip of the iceberg. I firmly believe music servers will become the mainstay of the future stereo system. Get the music on that hard drive, and you can access it from anywhere in the house. 200 CD monster changers were a nice try, but not the answer. I want to get my CD on the network and NEVER touch it again. The big holdup is still the lack of widespread experience with the concept. Most people simply have never browsed a list of several thousand tracks from a few hundred CDs, clicked on one, and it started playing instantly. No walking up to the shelf, finding the CD, undusting it, ejecting and inserting the tray, waiting for the CD to spin up and track, etc etc. Once sufficient numbers of people experience this, the avalanche will start.
I have over three hundred CDs on the network at home. I can play the music from any of the desktops, or from a laptop anywhere in the house or outside via a wireless network. No storage duplication here, no multiple CDs to buy. A simple 486 machine with a cheapo 18G HD can serve up several simultaneous 128K streams. Once my Internet pipe is wide enough to allow me quick downloads of entire albums from an online vendor, I'll never touch another CD. Why would I want to go back to discrete physical media?
THAT'S what the media companies are scared of. Today it's music. Give it another 5 years and 500GB and 1TB drives, and we'll do the same with video. Suddenly the market for shiny disks is gone, and all that "protection" revenue is lost. And we're surprised the industry is up in arms about the digital revolution?
That is the mother of all SF sagas. IA was so much scientist that his stories are throughly enjoyable from a technological viewpoint as well. I believe no other SF writings come close to the Trilogy or the Robot books. The universe created is so vast and rich, both spacially and temporally, that the reader feels really small and insignificant, yet feels a part of this universe. The Trilogy would be a much worthier replacement for the Star Wars series, as much as we might have enjoyed that one. True, the scope was much larger, and the storyline far from simplistic enough for the target audience, yet it would have created something to be less ashamed of for linking.
On the other hand, who could have done such a monumental work sufficient justice without raping it for the benefit of cheap thrills and large ticket sales? Maybe with the ever decreasing price of computing power smaller production houses can one day take on the task without compromising the original work or its cinematic potential.
> Could a 150 pound eucaryotic cell ever be
> equivalent in abilities to a human? Of course
> not! It's a stupid idea!
Uh, actually, several have made it to VP, a few even to President status, though I won't name any names. We all know who they are.
Scott McNealy and Bill Gates have much more in common than is healthy for a grown man. I read an interview with McNealy in a German magazine a month or so ago, and I couldn't believe what a pompous ass the guy really is. He was talking about his Java Everywhere "vision", and when the interviewer brought up security concerns regarding personal privacy (or lack thereof), McNealy totally lambasted him. He went on about how Europeans are such unreasonable freaks about personal privacy and how they want to regulate every last aspect of life. He went on a serious rant against Europeans well beyond the scope of the interview. Since ECMA is a European body, I wouldn't be surprised if that played some part in Sun's decision to withdraw Java. Pure speculation, but McNealy strikes me as the kind of capricious guy that would let personal feelings dictate the course of an entire company.
Uh, hate to break this to you, but the x86 is one of the most commonly used embedded platforms. Go get a few embedded magazines (you know what I mean) and check out the ads: there are more ads for x86 SBCs than all the others combined. Maybe not in your set-top box, but just about anywhere else: traffic lights, all kinds of industrial machinery and robots, etc.
Normal windshields don't reflect sufficient light to work well, so you stick a mostly transparent film with tiny embedded reflective particles onto the inside of the windshield. This is done on most cars with HUDs, just check it out. There's nothing special about the windshield itself. The problem is the distortion introduced by the curvature of the glass. With conventional HUDs in cars that's not a problem since the display only consists of simple large digits which are recognizable anyway. With entire images it might become annoying. One possible solution is to compensate for the curvature in software, by distorting the displayed image such that the net effect is a reasonably even image. That is done in many systems, including the Hubble space telescope, 3D camera systems, etc. It might be a little tricky to do in real time, but not at all impossible.
The advantage of this approach is that you could sell an off-the-shelf system. Simply stick the reflector film on the windshield, stick the LCD on the dash, select the car make and model in the software setup (which sets the correct distortion compensation parameters for your windshield curvature), and you're ready to go. All for $499 at Pep Boys. Yeah right!
Well, the German definition of porn is rather different from the US one. What Germans call porn Americans call XXX porn. What Americans usually call porn--run of the mill tittie stuff and a butt cheek here and there--in Germany is normally considered educational material and enjoyed by the whole family in the Bild newspaper around the kitchen table.
Ok, I can't take it anymore, Karma points be damned. Regarding your .sig: if your spelling were the only problem, I could MAYBE live with that. But your entire stream-of-consciousness style of writing is short circuiting my brain cells, and they are revolting in the form of this reply.
Just to let you know, most humans have a linguistic preprocessor, a sort of Pretty Print if you will, that allows them to arrange random thoughts into linear, formatted output compatible with most other people's I/O standards. USE IT!
> A sore point with me: my income is in US$ but I carry debt in UKP...
Ouch! I'm in an analogous situation: I carry debt in US$, and am thus reluctant to move back to Germany until I shake off a substantial amount. Despite my (American) wife liking Europe a lot since the last few visits and wanting to move there. We thought of England as an alternative--what are the IT job prospects there? And earning potential?
A very well stated rendition of the facts. The "compromised freedom" of speech thing in Germany is arguably a bad thing, but who can blame them, I guess, after all that happened. After living in the US for going on eight years, I can honestly say that there is a considerably higher percentage of radical elements in this country than in Germany. Yet, of course, Germany wouldn't get away with harboring even a small fraction of these, simply because it IS Germany. The price it must pay for its history.
Your second paragraph hits the heart of the matter regarding our flourishing economy. Bill loves bragging about the hundreds of thousands of jobs created since he entered office, yet nobody points out that most of these jobs are service positions, often below the minimum wage at McDonald's et al. Personally, as an average earner in the IT industry, I haven't benefitted at all from our economic boom. The truth is, if you have no stake in the stock market, you have no gain in our current boom.
OK, *NOW* I see what they mean by "you can't moderate topics you post in". Of course, I had no idea they'd remove the moderations rather than prevent me from posting. Well, you live and learn--so far, that's the only thing I've learned today.
I'll go sprinkle some moderation fairy dust elsewhere...
OK, *NOW* I see what they mean by "you can't moderate topics you post in". Of course, I had no idea they'd remove the moderations rather than prevent me from posting. Well, you live and learn--so far, that's the only thing I've learned today.
I had and I did :-)
warefare, peanust [sic] ?
Could you post a copy of your dictionary online under the GPL, we could give it a shot at debugging it!
Heeee. Not a bad idea, except Slashdot is slower than--ok, I'm running out of analogies, but I'm happy enough when it finally shows up. Never mind changing the login. I leave that to masochists.
Yeah, whatever. You seem to not have taken in a single thing I said. I never criticized Linux in any shape or form. I just said that it has no prayer at becoming a leading CAD platform because CAD users are married to the software and not to the number of features. It doesn't matter that a better, more stable CAD package might be available on Linux some day. If it doesn't work excatly the same as what people are used to, they'll have to spend YEARS becoming proficient with it. CAD skills are a serious investment that you don't just throw away. It's not like a word processor where you pick any and can pound out a document in a couple of days.