Archaic. None of the "remotes" that I use in my living room are keyboards.
When I hear "remote," I think "something simple and dedicated that I can hold in one hand to easily control remotely-located things." I don't think "something with at least 60 buttons, some of which are actually useful, that takes up too much room on the coffee table, and functions only as a basic input for a single device."
Huh? I'm not talking about the remote being a keyboard, I'm talking about the remote identifying itself as a keyboard. It's the equivalent of bar-code scanners that you plug into a keyboard port and that "type" whatever you scan with them.
Keyboards have some buttons that are very good for remote control functions, like "up" and "down" and "left" and "right" and "enter" and "escape" and "pause/play" and "fast forward". Make a handheld stick with just those buttons, and have it pair over bluetooth as a keyboard, and that remote would then work with an Apple TV, an Ouya, a Fire TV, a Linux box running MythTV, a Windows box running Steam in big picture mode, et cetera, et cetera. That's what I'm talking about.
Neat. Now how easily does it switch between presentations, AppleTV and Ouya? Does it change inputs on the TV and/or AVR? Turn things on and back off again? Turn the volume up and down?
No? Oh. I'd consider that a lousy remote, then.
I see. There are features in a remote that I'm so uninterested in that I don't even think of them, that you consider absolutely essential. (Though a subset of those are easy. They could all be easy given specific device choices which I'm not going to assume.)
Is there any such thing as a "standard" Bluetooth remote?
Well, the device presents itself as bluetooth using the HID profile. That's a start.
Given that, I'd consider any remote that presents itself as a keyboard with well-defined keys to be extremely standard. (Remember, media control keys like "play/pause" and "fast forward" are well-defined and widely supported on keyboards already.)
Further, I'd consider any remote that presents itself as a gamepad with well-defined buttons to be extremely standard.
A remote that presented itself as a trackpad with standard buttons wouldn't be too bad either.
(I in fact often carry a bluetooth device that's remote-sized and is a full keyboard with integrated two-button trackpad and built-in laser pointer. It's hard to beat for presentations, and also controls my AppleTV and my Ouya very nicely.)
That said...if you want custom integration, Bluetooth is overkill. These things are implicitly already on the network. Just use IP.
That would currently require a bunch of one-off solutions, as there isn't a "standard wifi HID profile" to use. Myself, I'd rather have an app on my phone that presented itself to the world as a bluetooth keyboard or gamepad that I could then use even with devices that didn't have IP at all.
I know this isn't what you meant by "not wanting to give up our remotes," but am I the only one annoyed by Amazon for going with a bluetooth remote?
I don't know enough to answer that yet.
I would not really prefer IR.
If the bluetooth in use is extremely standard, so that other devices and even software can be used to "emulate" it, then I'm delighted, as I'll (eventually) be able to integrate the box with other stuff.
If it's doing something grossly nonstandard, that just happens to be implemented on top of bluetooth, then I'll be annoyed.
Specifically: Why do movie studios allow Netflix to send out DVDs to their subscribers by mail, but not to allow the same option in the form of "virtual DVDs" that you could "check out" through their website, and stream them while they're checked out to you?
As far as I know, they don't "allow Netflix to send out DVDs". Content owners have in the past tried to forbid media rentals, but failed. They don't "allow" Netflix to do this -- they simply have no legal standing to prevent it. They likely would if they could.
If these systems are still using XP today, my bet is that they only rely on a small, stable, well-established subset of what we consider today's Windows API. It really wouldn't surprise me at all if a whole bunch of the software involved built flawlessly with winelib.
What's a desktop operating system doing on an ATM anyway?
The same thing a desktop CPU is doing in both servers and embedded applications.
Economies of scale and network effects (eg. huge development tool ecosystem) provide some advantages that grow over time, and eventually overcome the advantages of other solutions.
The same thing relates to why an Android phone runs (essentially) the same kernel as an OS Oracle sells to run their database servers on, and why an iPhone runs the same kernel as a Mac Pro.
Sometimes someone innocent is given a life sentence, and that fact comes out later. They can be freed, but the amount of damage done to them is still high. Could the reverse of the proposed idea be used to lessen that damage?
(The idea would be to use it on everyone. If they're guilty and never released, so what? But might it be a way to minimize damage when mistakes are made?)
It's like, imagine you're a bank robber and you've got two banks in town. One is an old-school bank that has thwarted dozens of bank robbers in the past and routinely. They hire people specifically to worry about bank robbers. On the other side of town, there's this new hip young bank that's getting money thrown at them like mad. They used to just take all the money home with them at the end of the night, but now they've got this new "cold storage" place to put money they're not using at the moment. They're known to be idiotic fools, everything thinks the whole thing is a fly-by-night operation, and they don't even have a safe.
You intended this to be a metaphor for attacking traditional financial institutions versus attacking Bitcoin exchanges, right?
I think that you'll find that Windows 8.1 will perform like shit on those machines... Not only because all of the rendering will be software-based.
Huh. Windows 7 certainly runs very well on some of them, with hardware-accelerated rendering and everything. Why would the rendering in Windows 8.1 switch to software-based?
If someone is still using Snow Leopard for software purposes, it's probably best done in a VM now. Lots of new features and performance in Lion and later assuming you have at least a 5 year old machine or later.
I agree, but the normal release of Snow Leopard is not licensed for running in a VM. If you run it in a VM, you're violating your license. (This is the reason I own a copy of Snow Leopard Server -- that is licensed for running in a VM.)
Further: not all apps that run under Snow Leopard will run in on a VM -- for one example, some that depend on OpenGL will refuse to run. (Diablo 2 happens to be an example. I tried it out of curiosity, using the latest release of VMWare Fusion.)
Are there Macs that can run Snow Leopard but cannot run Lion?
Yes, and my house has two of them. Snow Leopard was the last version of the OS that supported 32-bit processors.
We've got a MacBook Pro and Mac Mini in our house with 32-bit processors. They're still perfectly adequate machines for light usage, in terms of performance, but they won't run any MacOS newer than Snow Leopard at all.
(What's hilarious to me is, they can run Windows 8.1. I'll probably end up putting either Windows or Ubuntu on them before too much longer.)
Snow Leopard is also the last version of the OS to support executing PowerPC binaries under the Rosetta engine, and some people keep it around for that reason. (Example: it's the last version of MacOS that will still play the MacOS version of Diablo 2, which, while complied for OS X, was never compiled for Intel processors.)
If things better than Google Glass are made so innocuous it's imperceptible, then society won't accept it, but be ignorant of it.
Some time after that becomes the case (and it will), society will accept it. It's simply going to be so commonplace for such stuff to be posted publicly to the internet that the rage is just going to burn itself out. (It might take a generation for this to occur, but it will.)
If the IDE is helping you catch typos and quickly dig out references like method names, that's one thing.
If the IDE is providing so much scaffolding for your project, "wizards" and such, that you don't actually understand what's going on, that's another thing.
So, this is supposed to be a decently-made budget handset for less affluent markets, running AOSP? That sounds to me like the perfect target for a CyanogenMod port...
I've seen 3rd party lenses that contract the space requirements, didn't need it myself, but they exist.
I actually tried one that a member of the Xbox team recommended. It very much did not work for me. YMMV, I suppose. That wouldn't have covered all of my complaints anyway, even if it had worked.
So I don't really game console, but I hear Child of Eden was maybe the only game that used Kinect right, and it's pretty much an abstract musical game that lets you shoot lasers from your hands.
I think it's worth noting that the Kinect support in "Child of Eden" is optional. I got the game, and played it Kinect-style for a little while, but ended up getting too tired too quickly to get very far.
Fortunately, you can also play with a standard controller, as if it were just an updated version of "Rez". And that's the only way I play it now.
First, the requirements for a space to use it fully are absurd. I do not have a tiny living room, but the way it's laid out, I can't use the amount of floor space that Kinect games "want" me to. The optimum viewing distance from my TV is taken up by a couch and an easy chair, and there's an actual wall right behind them.
Second, Microsoft got so excited about using the Kinect for non-game purposes that they virtually destroyed other modes of interaction. The home screen and tabs and so on for the 360 are now so optimized for the Kinect that they're more awkward to navigate with a standard controller. Sure, the "home" UI started to degrade back when the "NXE" was introduced, but the newer tile-based scheme is even more terrible. (In particular, navigating lists now involves list items that are very large so they're easy to "hit" with the Kinect, which ends up meaning far fewer items per "page".)
(Basically, the Kinect did to the XB360 for controller users what touch screens did to Windows 8 for keyboard-and-mouse users, if you follow my meaning.)
The Kinect is still physically attached to my 360, but it's turned off almost all the time now. The only time it's turned on is when my nephew comes over and wants to play "Kinectimals" (the only Kinect-based game I use that I think is actually improved by the peripheral -- I might add "Dance Central" to that, but that game is too impacted by the floor space requirements discussed above, so it's impractical for me to play).
All that said, I'd still have considered the XB1, Kinect and all, if it had come with solid backwards compatibility. But it didn't, and so I have absolutely no investment that the XB1 could leverage. Starting from a clean slate, the Kinect is, for me, a huge strike against the XB1, based on my extended experience of actually having used the original version.
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Huh? I'm not talking about the remote being a keyboard, I'm talking about the remote identifying itself as a keyboard. It's the equivalent of bar-code scanners that you plug into a keyboard port and that "type" whatever you scan with them.
Keyboards have some buttons that are very good for remote control functions, like "up" and "down" and "left" and "right" and "enter" and "escape" and "pause/play" and "fast forward". Make a handheld stick with just those buttons, and have it pair over bluetooth as a keyboard, and that remote would then work with an Apple TV, an Ouya, a Fire TV, a Linux box running MythTV, a Windows box running Steam in big picture mode, et cetera, et cetera. That's what I'm talking about.
I see. There are features in a remote that I'm so uninterested in that I don't even think of them, that you consider absolutely essential. (Though a subset of those are easy. They could all be easy given specific device choices which I'm not going to assume.)
You and I will not like the same remotes.
...do not rely on monitoring system that treats a complete lack of information as a complete absence of incidents.
Well, the device presents itself as bluetooth using the HID profile. That's a start.
Given that, I'd consider any remote that presents itself as a keyboard with well-defined keys to be extremely standard. (Remember, media control keys like "play/pause" and "fast forward" are well-defined and widely supported on keyboards already.)
Further, I'd consider any remote that presents itself as a gamepad with well-defined buttons to be extremely standard.
A remote that presented itself as a trackpad with standard buttons wouldn't be too bad either.
(I in fact often carry a bluetooth device that's remote-sized and is a full keyboard with integrated two-button trackpad and built-in laser pointer. It's hard to beat for presentations, and also controls my AppleTV and my Ouya very nicely.)
That would currently require a bunch of one-off solutions, as there isn't a "standard wifi HID profile" to use. Myself, I'd rather have an app on my phone that presented itself to the world as a bluetooth keyboard or gamepad that I could then use even with devices that didn't have IP at all.
I don't know enough to answer that yet.
I would not really prefer IR.
If the bluetooth in use is extremely standard, so that other devices and even software can be used to "emulate" it, then I'm delighted, as I'll (eventually) be able to integrate the box with other stuff.
If it's doing something grossly nonstandard, that just happens to be implemented on top of bluetooth, then I'll be annoyed.
...I want to punch someone.
(I blame "The Tao of Physics" for instilling this basic drive in me.)
As far as I know, they don't "allow Netflix to send out DVDs". Content owners have in the past tried to forbid media rentals, but failed. They don't "allow" Netflix to do this -- they simply have no legal standing to prevent it. They likely would if they could.
At least that's my understanding of things.
If these systems are still using XP today, my bet is that they only rely on a small, stable, well-established subset of what we consider today's Windows API. It really wouldn't surprise me at all if a whole bunch of the software involved built flawlessly with winelib.
Anyone know if that's how they're going about it?
The same thing a desktop CPU is doing in both servers and embedded applications.
Economies of scale and network effects (eg. huge development tool ecosystem) provide some advantages that grow over time, and eventually overcome the advantages of other solutions.
The same thing relates to why an Android phone runs (essentially) the same kernel as an OS Oracle sells to run their database servers on, and why an iPhone runs the same kernel as a Mac Pro.
What about doing the reverse, for life sentences?
Sometimes someone innocent is given a life sentence, and that fact comes out later. They can be freed, but the amount of damage done to them is still high. Could the reverse of the proposed idea be used to lessen that damage?
(The idea would be to use it on everyone. If they're guilty and never released, so what? But might it be a way to minimize damage when mistakes are made?)
...is probably "I'll only need to run this program once, so it's not worth putting much effort into".
Number two is probably "when I come back to work on this later, I'll remember what I was thinking".
Anyone with a metered internet connection. Which is a depressingly large set of people, and signs are that it's going to get larger.
You intended this to be a metaphor for attacking traditional financial institutions versus attacking Bitcoin exchanges, right?
(It certainly works as a metaphor for that.)
Don't make me laugh -- I used to be an APL programmer.
Huh. Windows 7 certainly runs very well on some of them, with hardware-accelerated rendering and everything. Why would the rendering in Windows 8.1 switch to software-based?
I agree, but the normal release of Snow Leopard is not licensed for running in a VM. If you run it in a VM, you're violating your license. (This is the reason I own a copy of Snow Leopard Server -- that is licensed for running in a VM.)
Further: not all apps that run under Snow Leopard will run in on a VM -- for one example, some that depend on OpenGL will refuse to run. (Diablo 2 happens to be an example. I tried it out of curiosity, using the latest release of VMWare Fusion.)
To my surprise, so does iWork. I was able to open up a bunch of my old AppleWorks documents and spreadsheets in Pages and Numbers.
Yes, and my house has two of them. Snow Leopard was the last version of the OS that supported 32-bit processors.
We've got a MacBook Pro and Mac Mini in our house with 32-bit processors. They're still perfectly adequate machines for light usage, in terms of performance, but they won't run any MacOS newer than Snow Leopard at all.
(What's hilarious to me is, they can run Windows 8.1. I'll probably end up putting either Windows or Ubuntu on them before too much longer.)
Snow Leopard is also the last version of the OS to support executing PowerPC binaries under the Rosetta engine, and some people keep it around for that reason. (Example: it's the last version of MacOS that will still play the MacOS version of Diablo 2, which, while complied for OS X, was never compiled for Intel processors.)
Some time after that becomes the case (and it will), society will accept it. It's simply going to be so commonplace for such stuff to be posted publicly to the internet that the rage is just going to burn itself out. (It might take a generation for this to occur, but it will.)
If the IDE is helping you catch typos and quickly dig out references like method names, that's one thing.
If the IDE is providing so much scaffolding for your project, "wizards" and such, that you don't actually understand what's going on, that's another thing.
(I've seen both.)
Well, if you want to rip out the extra points of integration Nokia added to Microsoft services, CM might prove to be the simpler way to get that.
Is there some reason I'm unaware of for avoiding CM?
So, this is supposed to be a decently-made budget handset for less affluent markets, running AOSP? That sounds to me like the perfect target for a CyanogenMod port...
...was when someone commented that Sun Microsystems was worth about one third of a chat service.
I actually tried one that a member of the Xbox team recommended. It very much did not work for me. YMMV, I suppose. That wouldn't have covered all of my complaints anyway, even if it had worked.
I think it's worth noting that the Kinect support in "Child of Eden" is optional. I got the game, and played it Kinect-style for a little while, but ended up getting too tired too quickly to get very far.
Fortunately, you can also play with a standard controller, as if it were just an updated version of "Rez". And that's the only way I play it now.
In my case, it comes from owning one for my 360.
First, the requirements for a space to use it fully are absurd. I do not have a tiny living room, but the way it's laid out, I can't use the amount of floor space that Kinect games "want" me to. The optimum viewing distance from my TV is taken up by a couch and an easy chair, and there's an actual wall right behind them.
Second, Microsoft got so excited about using the Kinect for non-game purposes that they virtually destroyed other modes of interaction. The home screen and tabs and so on for the 360 are now so optimized for the Kinect that they're more awkward to navigate with a standard controller. Sure, the "home" UI started to degrade back when the "NXE" was introduced, but the newer tile-based scheme is even more terrible. (In particular, navigating lists now involves list items that are very large so they're easy to "hit" with the Kinect, which ends up meaning far fewer items per "page".)
(Basically, the Kinect did to the XB360 for controller users what touch screens did to Windows 8 for keyboard-and-mouse users, if you follow my meaning.)
The Kinect is still physically attached to my 360, but it's turned off almost all the time now. The only time it's turned on is when my nephew comes over and wants to play "Kinectimals" (the only Kinect-based game I use that I think is actually improved by the peripheral -- I might add "Dance Central" to that, but that game is too impacted by the floor space requirements discussed above, so it's impractical for me to play).
All that said, I'd still have considered the XB1, Kinect and all, if it had come with solid backwards compatibility. But it didn't, and so I have absolutely no investment that the XB1 could leverage. Starting from a clean slate, the Kinect is, for me, a huge strike against the XB1, based on my extended experience of actually having used the original version.