Personally, i've always seen true user friendliness as a sacrifice to power.
Then you've obviously not spent much time working with NeXTSTEP. As I'm sure many other people here will point out (or have already), NeXT was very user friendly, and yet very powerful.
[My mother] neither wants nor needs most of the benefits that it provides
She doesn't need true multitasking? She doesn't need a computer that crashes the instant a single program goes Tango Uniform? She doesn't need a system that makes it simple to send a fax, from any application, by simply clicking a single button on the Print Panel?
Truthfully, we can all benefit from the power of a UNIX system. Just think of all the problems in DOS--er, Windows. Can your mother benefit from losing those problems, while gaining ease-of-use? That's what it's all about.
My biggest problem, with both the Linux community and (especially) the Windows consumer community at large, is that it doesn't need to be like this. Computers can be powerful and easy at the same time. I know, I was there. Truly computer-illiterate secretaries who'd been using IBM Selectrics for 30 years were comfortable, and very productive, with NeXTSTEP. As were three-star generals and other high-level bueraucrats. Any OS that can provide a usable system to those two kinds of users deserves a gold medal.
The point is: It can be better. NeXT knew that. I wish that the Linux community would truly recognize that, as well. And as long as Steve doesn't screw the company into the ground like did at Apple before, and NeXT after, we could be looking at a true renaissance in personal computing.
Firstly, it's not unconstitutional, since he's advocating this at a federal level. The constitution requires that states cannot impose tarrifs upon one another (as you mentioned), but certainly doesn't say anything about the Federal government not being allowed to charge a sales tax. (at least, I can't remember any such language off the top of my head).
Only the selling location can have sales tax applied.
How I wish this were the case. If so, then I'd just have to pay whatever taxes are appropriate for wherever the seller is, and they'd all move to Delaware (no sales tax). But, how do you define where the seller is? Their corporate headquarters? Their servers? Their shipping point? Tough to decide there. The general rule of thumb has been that you pay sales tax only when you're located within a state in which the seller has a physical presence.
Unfortunately, this has not always been the case, and the Supreme Court, if I recall correctly, has actually allowed states to charge a "Use Tax" on items bought outside the state. Many states do this (I know for a fact that Maryland and Viriginia both do, though it's kind of hidden away). [I just did some searches at findlaw.com, looking for "interstate tax" and "interstate sales tax" and similar search terms on US Supreme Court decisions. Some interesting reading, but not anything that I can understand well enough to cite here. Check it out.....]
It is illegal for states to apply taxes to items brought in from other states, because that's a tarrif
(see previous remark). I agree with you wholeheartedly, but I know that at least some level of use tax has been approved. I'd like to figure out exactly what it was that the court said was okay, because I'd like to know how they countered the tarrif argument. I have a similar view on "commuter taxes" (taxing people who live outside a city but work within it), but I don't think there've been any rulings on that one.
Bottom line: It certainly seems like you shouldn't have to pay taxes to your local state, if you bought something out of state (either by phone, web, or even in person on a trip), but such taxes are a regular, and apparently legal, practice. A standard federal sales tax like this would go a long way to clearing up a lot of those ambiguities, and would actually generate more income, even for states with Use Taxes on the books, since reporting for Use Tax is generally voluntary.
I purchased Office 97 Pro a few years back (granted, I got a student discount 'cause I was taking a graduate course, but I still paid $150+ for it).
Why? Because it's what everyone else uses. We use it at work, friends use it at home, etc., etc. I'd tried for years to get compatible applications for my NeXT, and never succeeded much, so...gotta bite the bullet. And, truthfully, it's a damned good set of programs. Once you get past the occasional heinous bug.
I've played with StarOffice, and it just wasn't there yet (this was over a year ago, I think). Dunno about the Corel offerings.
From the article: "This is extremely difficult to do. It's a theoretical attack," said security expert Steve Gibson, of Gibson Research Corp. in Laguna Hills, Calif. "It's weird that they're talking about something like this. It's as old as the hills."
What if the reverse engineering were done overseas, say in (just as an example) Norway
I didn't mean to say that I agreed with (or conceded to) MPAA's or Xing's (it was a Xing player, right?) shrinkwrap-license-prohibiting-reverse-engineering . I was just trying to point out that some other "agreeably" illegal activity must be engaged in before use of the perl script became actual circumvention of CSS.
Whether or not what was done to get Xing keys (which, if I recall correctly, is the only part of the "Trade Secret" argument MPAA is using) is illegal shouldn't (IMHO) affect the status of this script.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the entire DeCSS system developed originally? That the only part that was "stolen" was the Xing master key, accidentally left unencrypted in the windows program? So MPAAs argument for trade secret theft only applies to the use of those Xing keys, right? Or could they argue that DeCSS could not have been developed without aid of those keys, and so it's a derivitave work, and so tainted by the theft of the secret?
And if so, at what point, after analysis, review, scholarly discussion, and seminars, does the CSS algorithm (and various ways to implement it) pass beyond any trade secret protection, again reducing DeCSS to a key availability issue?
It looks like this won't automagically decode "any" DVD, but requires you to know the key first. Therefore, without a specific key given to you by the content providers, you're not actually able to decode the content. Does that mean that this script actually is not in violation of DMCA or other such MPAA devices? It's not actually a "circumvention" device, it's the actual decryption device, that requires secret keys to operate.
Once you write brute-force wrapper around it to bludgeon out keys, or something to derive a title key from a disk key, utilizing secrets stolen by illegally reverse-engineering other stuff, then are you violating MPAA plans?
Okay, let me get this straight: We're reducing the HDTV spec (read the article: 1280x720 max resolution, instead of 1920x1080 for real HDTV) in order to allow it to be transmitted over NTSC-like signals?
How is this different from saddling all of today's computers with crap left over from 1980's systems?
People here have complained about being forced to buy a new TV by 2006. Why is that such a bad idea? The average buyer gets a new set every 7 years, I think that's part of why they figured that people would be able to switch by '06. "It's too expensive" people say -- well, it's cheaper today than it was a year ago, and as people buy it, it'll get cheaper. But if we allow backwards compatibility, we get cheapened signals, continued reliance on a 50+ year old standard, and STILL don't necessarily get cheaper HDTV sets.
I'm just confused. It seems to me that we've fought long and hard for a standard, and now people are trying to change that standard before it's even had a chance to gain momentum. What if all manufactures had stopped making normal DVD players when DIVX was announced? Would DVDs be anywhere nearly as successful as they are now? (I know it's not exactly the same thing, it's late and I'm rambling...)
Rather than trying to find new ways to send yet another different standard to the user, shouldn't the industry focus on getting cheaper chipsets and TVs on the market so that HDTV really takes off? I mean, geez!
So, basically, these are self-acting/modifying magnetic loops? In a sense, it's a single-turn coil that collapses on itself, and the motion of the collapse is used to fire the projectile.
I'd always assumed that a railgun was more solenoid-like -- a long coil with many windings, and a magnetized firing slug that pushes the projectile out. Maybe implemented as lots of smaller coils, computer-controlled to fire at just the right moments.
Granted, this design is way simpler and super-elegant, but does the math show this as being much more efficient? (I'm certain it must, or they'd be doing a different design). It just wasn't what I'd figured it'd be...
On a more specific note, what happens to the armature as it reaches the end of the gun? Does it fly off, trailing the projectile, or do they have some means of capturing it before it exits (sending the projectile off by itself)? If so, how do you keep it from vaporizing itself? Or is the armature itself the projectile?
Finally, does anyone have a mirror set up yet? I can read all the MIT pages, but the snakeden pages seem slashdotted....
This is all very interesting, but I still wonder (as do many of the other threads here today) whether the best use of voice recognition technology isn't in dictation and interactive control, rather than actual window/widget control.
For example, use the Star Trek test. They've got very powerful computers (nevermind that they can be infected with weird space-borne contaigons), but what do they use voice controls for? Asking questions, controlling their environment, etc. When they need to program a new subroutine for the deflector dish, though, they use the keyboard.
Which brings up another question: Has anyone done any serious investigation into context-modifiable keyboards? My understanding on Star Trek is that their keyboards change their layouts depending on who's there, and what they're doing. I've always thought something like that would be fantastic, say, for switching into Quake or a flight sim -- make your keyboard LOOK like a control panel, so you don't have to remember that "." is strafe or whatever...
As for voice control, I'd really like to be able to control house systems (see my ÜberTiVo posting under the Set Top Box thread). To say "Play 1812" and have the system start playing it for me. Or "Where's my dinner?" and have the computer tell me to cook it myself (hey, gotta be realistic here). Or to just start rambling on, stream-of-conciousness, in a rant or rave about what's really annoying or cool, so I can edit it down to a letter later. That is what I think we need, and it's more on the application side than on the OS side.
Of course, we may already have good solutions for this, I just haven't been able to play with them yet...:(
I'm building a new house (or, rather, we're paying a big builder boatloads of bucks for a new house), and one of the things I really hope to set up is what I've been calling an UberTiVo. (anyone know how to do a U-Umlaut in an HTML form field?)
What I've got buzzing around, in the back of my head, is something like this:
Kick-ass machine with lots of horsepower (multi-processor, all kinds of RAM, etc.)
Big RAID array of IDE drives (like one of those great boxes that turns 8 IDEs into a single SCSI device)
Multiple TV tuner cards (including HDTV - has anyone got a good, full-resolution, linux-compatible HDTV tuner card yet? I mean one I can actually buy TODAY, not just something seen at CES).
Multiple Video output cards (VGA/S-Video/Composite)
Multiple Audio output cards
(That shouldn't be too expensive, right?)
Then, this box would be connected to various rooms via Coax (for video) and line-level shielded audio (for audio). Or send the audio through a multi-zone amplifier to wall-mounted speakers. Or something like that. You'd control it via infrared control, repeated from the viewing room back to the box through wireless or wired IR repeaters.
What would I do with this box? Everything.
Multi-input TiVo-like capabilities (record from as many inputs as you've got tuners)
MP3 player (with a great TV-based on-screen menu)
Video on demand system (just rip DVDs to the RAID array and build a menu around it like for MP3s)
Web surfing (gotta get the keyboard/mouse down somehow)
Gaming (PS/2, MAME, Doom, etc.)
Could be way cool. Way, way cool. Of course, a lot of things that I'm thinking about here have significant infrastructure problems -- like, say, how do you distribute HD (TV, not disk) signals through a house?
In the end, I think the plan I'm settling on involves a big UberTiVo box with multiple inputs, but feeding some massively cool RAID server (that way, I can just use a bunch of really cheap separate computers with one tuner each, if it becomes too difficult to handle more than one input per box). Then use very simple set-top boxes (the little "bookshelf" form factor) with Composite out (or just run VGA straight to an HDTV monitor), sound (to cheap speakers or an in-room stereo), and wireless keyboard and/or game controllers. If I'm really lucky, I can get this sucker to run w/out a fan, too.
Then, everything just talks back to the main server over 100-meg ethernet. (that part's easy!)
Anyone else tackling something like this? From this approach? Or from an approach I should be aware of? I'd love to share ideas....
david.
Re:Reminds me of...A BIG mistake by Apple
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OS X on x86?
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My 33-MHz 68040 Next Turbo -- not retired. (runs my laser printer and occasionally is used for PostScript editing).
Re:It might be interesting-
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OS X on x86?
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I'm by no means a programmer, but it would seem to me a lot of work to port existing apps over to OSX on x86
Under NeXTSTEP, most cross-processor porting consisted of the following grueling steps:
Step 1: Open the app in Project Builder.
Step 2: Check "Intel," "NeXT," "Sparc," and "HP," then hit "Compile."
A nerd is someone whose life revolved around computers and technology. A geek is someone whose life revolves around computers and technology, and likes it
Good...but try this one:
"A geek knows he's a geek and revels in it. A nerd is a geek who thinks he's normal."
I'd prefer to use the term "improbable" in that case
Okay, that part was improbable, but the part where you saw a satellite with a massive radio reflector dish point towards the earth and get VISUAL images was just too much for me. I mean, sure, technically light is just EM radiation, but I'm pretty sure that a mesh RF dish won't work for collecting a visual image.
DirecTV has a feedback form right on their main page. I just went there and posted this complaint and request for information.
Your comment or question:
I currently have Cable TV, but plan to move to Satellite when our new house is completed early next year. However, an article at E-Town ( http://www.e-town.com/news/article.jhtml;$sessioni d$H1OHSLYAABGNNTYPVYXSFEQ?articleID=3944 ) says that DirecTV is now requiring installation of devices that can allow for remote disabling of HDTV-quality analog output. This, to me, is totally unacceptable -- anyone who pays for a signal, especially for an HD-quality signal via DirecTV, should be able to view that signal at full resolution with no restrictions.
Discussion is raging about this issue at Slashdot ( http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=01%2F01%2F23%2 F2032213&cid=&pid=0&startat=&threshold=1&mode=nest ed&commentsort=3&op=Change), and it may behoove your company to read and contribute to the discussion there, especially if people are misinformed.
However, if we are NOT misinformed, and Hughes/DirecTV feels it is their right to restrict how your customers view contenty they've already paid for, then I can promise you that your company will no longer be my choice for a satellite provider.
Thank you for your time.
I don't expect to hear anything, but if they get/.ed through this kind of customer feedback chain, then maybe they'll say something publicly or set the record straight. It's worth a shot.
Fessenden wanted to work for Thomas Edison, who basically told him to screw off
Tesla had the same experience. He arrived in America, went to Edison, who told him, basically, to screw off. They met again (as competitors) when people were trying to decide whether to adopt AC or DC current for electrical distribution networks. Tesla was trumpeting his AC model, with simple generators, motors, and transformers, as well as better distribution characteristics, while Edison was pushing DC for city-wide distribution. Edison even went so far as to hire local kids to steal neighborhood pets so he could electrocute them in an AC-based rig, to show the dangers of AC power.
To put it in a more modern perspective (though I may be reaching a bit here), Edison was Bill Gates, and Tesla was Steve Jobs. One was a much better promotor, marketer, and perhaps engineer, while the other was a more powerful visionary, thinker, and inventor.
If we managed that in say ten years, 20 billion should carry us another decade beyond that if we're lucky. What do you propose we do when we're at 120 billion in 40 years from now?
If we achieve "near-immortality," then the birth rate WILL decrease. It simply will, that's been fairly well documented as standards of living increase. And there's still attrition through accidents, suicides, people who couldn't get to the hospital in time for the replacement heart during a major MI, etc.
I'm watching it now, and it is the same trailer that was out in May. It's still an incredible trailer (even at 25 MB, but that's why we've got multiple T1s at work, right?), and I can't wait to actually see it in a theater.
Still, I'd like to see a new one, and I'd love to find a movie poster (they *still* don't have one online).
The best site I've found so far for movie information is www.theonering.net -- lots of good information, and easy to browse through.
In an admittedly short search, I couldn't find any current movement to enact a federal single subject law or constitutional ammendment. This sort of thing is not new; I am, frankly, surprised that there isn't more of an outcry for federal single subject rules. I guess the people who work the system for a living don't want it to change.
You've hit the point right there, I think. I've been wondering out loud for some time now whether or not I have the answer for that last problem -- the fact that half of our biggest institutional problems will never be solved because it negatively affects those in power.
If memory serves, a constitutional amendment requires 2/3 majority of both houses, but does not require presidential signature. Then, it requires 3/4 of the states to approve it. So, by design, getting an amendment passed and ratified is very difficult, especially if it affects congress in any way. (quick trivia quiz -- what's the last amendment to be added to the US constitution? One restricting congressional pay-raises to take effect the following term. How'd that get passed? It was part of the original bill of rights, but took over 200 years to get ratified. Most modern amendments include "drop dead" language if not ratified in some short number of years).
However, there is still hope (and here's where my memory may be failing). A majority of states may vote for a Constitutional Convention, in which amendments may be proposed, voted on, and (immediately, I think) ratified.
I have yet to hear anyone of any authority or voice advocate such a move, so I may be way off on this one. But it seems to me that this would be a fantastic avenue for issues with broad public support but little chance of congressional action, for example, Campaign Finance, Line-Item Veto, Same-Subject Legislation, or Term Limits. Unfortunately, it could also be a fast track for less constitutionally-appropriate, but popular, "hot button" issues like Internet Porn or Flag Burning.
Maybe this warrants a/. discussion in and of itself? Maybe (in a broader sense)/. needs a "Politics" section (or a sister "PolDot" site)? I'm really curious to hear others' thoughts on this one...
david.
Slashdot Mirror
Then you've obviously not spent much time working with NeXTSTEP. As I'm sure many other people here will point out (or have already), NeXT was very user friendly, and yet very powerful.
[My mother] neither wants nor needs most of the benefits that it provides
She doesn't need true multitasking? She doesn't need a computer that crashes the instant a single program goes Tango Uniform? She doesn't need a system that makes it simple to send a fax, from any application, by simply clicking a single button on the Print Panel?
Truthfully, we can all benefit from the power of a UNIX system. Just think of all the problems in DOS--er, Windows. Can your mother benefit from losing those problems, while gaining ease-of-use? That's what it's all about.
My biggest problem, with both the Linux community and (especially) the Windows consumer community at large, is that it doesn't need to be like this. Computers can be powerful and easy at the same time. I know, I was there. Truly computer-illiterate secretaries who'd been using IBM Selectrics for 30 years were comfortable, and very productive, with NeXTSTEP. As were three-star generals and other high-level bueraucrats. Any OS that can provide a usable system to those two kinds of users deserves a gold medal.
The point is: It can be better. NeXT knew that. I wish that the Linux community would truly recognize that, as well. And as long as Steve doesn't screw the company into the ground like did at Apple before, and NeXT after, we could be looking at a true renaissance in personal computing.
Firstly, it's not unconstitutional, since he's advocating this at a federal level. The constitution requires that states cannot impose tarrifs upon one another (as you mentioned), but certainly doesn't say anything about the Federal government not being allowed to charge a sales tax. (at least, I can't remember any such language off the top of my head).
Only the selling location can have sales tax applied.
How I wish this were the case. If so, then I'd just have to pay whatever taxes are appropriate for wherever the seller is, and they'd all move to Delaware (no sales tax). But, how do you define where the seller is? Their corporate headquarters? Their servers? Their shipping point? Tough to decide there. The general rule of thumb has been that you pay sales tax only when you're located within a state in which the seller has a physical presence.
Unfortunately, this has not always been the case, and the Supreme Court, if I recall correctly, has actually allowed states to charge a "Use Tax" on items bought outside the state. Many states do this (I know for a fact that Maryland and Viriginia both do, though it's kind of hidden away). [I just did some searches at findlaw.com, looking for "interstate tax" and "interstate sales tax" and similar search terms on US Supreme Court decisions. Some interesting reading, but not anything that I can understand well enough to cite here. Check it out.....]
It is illegal for states to apply taxes to items brought in from other states, because that's a tarrif
(see previous remark). I agree with you wholeheartedly, but I know that at least some level of use tax has been approved. I'd like to figure out exactly what it was that the court said was okay, because I'd like to know how they countered the tarrif argument. I have a similar view on "commuter taxes" (taxing people who live outside a city but work within it), but I don't think there've been any rulings on that one.
Bottom line: It certainly seems like you shouldn't have to pay taxes to your local state, if you bought something out of state (either by phone, web, or even in person on a trip), but such taxes are a regular, and apparently legal, practice. A standard federal sales tax like this would go a long way to clearing up a lot of those ambiguities, and would actually generate more income, even for states with Use Taxes on the books, since reporting for Use Tax is generally voluntary.
I purchased Office 97 Pro a few years back (granted, I got a student discount 'cause I was taking a graduate course, but I still paid $150+ for it).
Why? Because it's what everyone else uses. We use it at work, friends use it at home, etc., etc. I'd tried for years to get compatible applications for my NeXT, and never succeeded much, so...gotta bite the bullet. And, truthfully, it's a damned good set of programs. Once you get past the occasional heinous bug.
I've played with StarOffice, and it just wasn't there yet (this was over a year ago, I think). Dunno about the Corel offerings.
So, is this really a big deal?
(btw - fp.)
I didn't mean to say that I agreed with (or conceded to) MPAA's or Xing's (it was a Xing player, right?) shrinkwrap-license-prohibiting-reverse-engineering . I was just trying to point out that some other "agreeably" illegal activity must be engaged in before use of the perl script became actual circumvention of CSS.
Whether or not what was done to get Xing keys (which, if I recall correctly, is the only part of the "Trade Secret" argument MPAA is using) is illegal shouldn't (IMHO) affect the status of this script.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the entire DeCSS system developed originally? That the only part that was "stolen" was the Xing master key, accidentally left unencrypted in the windows program? So MPAAs argument for trade secret theft only applies to the use of those Xing keys, right? Or could they argue that DeCSS could not have been developed without aid of those keys, and so it's a derivitave work, and so tainted by the theft of the secret?
And if so, at what point, after analysis, review, scholarly discussion, and seminars, does the CSS algorithm (and various ways to implement it) pass beyond any trade secret protection, again reducing DeCSS to a key availability issue?
Once you write brute-force wrapper around it to bludgeon out keys, or something to derive a title key from a disk key, utilizing secrets stolen by illegally reverse-engineering other stuff, then are you violating MPAA plans?
...I've tried to clean up the code a bit, undid the little compression trick they did ('x' == 'pack+'), and still can't make heads or tails of it.
Would anyone care to explain exactly how this works, in english (or should I just wait until the notes from the seminar are online)?
How is this different from saddling all of today's computers with crap left over from 1980's systems?
People here have complained about being forced to buy a new TV by 2006. Why is that such a bad idea? The average buyer gets a new set every 7 years, I think that's part of why they figured that people would be able to switch by '06. "It's too expensive" people say -- well, it's cheaper today than it was a year ago, and as people buy it, it'll get cheaper. But if we allow backwards compatibility, we get cheapened signals, continued reliance on a 50+ year old standard, and STILL don't necessarily get cheaper HDTV sets.
I'm just confused. It seems to me that we've fought long and hard for a standard, and now people are trying to change that standard before it's even had a chance to gain momentum. What if all manufactures had stopped making normal DVD players when DIVX was announced? Would DVDs be anywhere nearly as successful as they are now? (I know it's not exactly the same thing, it's late and I'm rambling...)
Rather than trying to find new ways to send yet another different standard to the user, shouldn't the industry focus on getting cheaper chipsets and TVs on the market so that HDTV really takes off? I mean, geez!
I'll tell you later.
(ever notice that they never did tell you? and, even better, why haven't they released it on DVD!)
I'd always assumed that a railgun was more solenoid-like -- a long coil with many windings, and a magnetized firing slug that pushes the projectile out. Maybe implemented as lots of smaller coils, computer-controlled to fire at just the right moments.
Granted, this design is way simpler and super-elegant, but does the math show this as being much more efficient? (I'm certain it must, or they'd be doing a different design). It just wasn't what I'd figured it'd be...
On a more specific note, what happens to the armature as it reaches the end of the gun? Does it fly off, trailing the projectile, or do they have some means of capturing it before it exits (sending the projectile off by itself)? If so, how do you keep it from vaporizing itself? Or is the armature itself the projectile?
Finally, does anyone have a mirror set up yet? I can read all the MIT pages, but the snakeden pages seem slashdotted....
For example, use the Star Trek test. They've got very powerful computers (nevermind that they can be infected with weird space-borne contaigons), but what do they use voice controls for? Asking questions, controlling their environment, etc. When they need to program a new subroutine for the deflector dish, though, they use the keyboard.
Which brings up another question: Has anyone done any serious investigation into context-modifiable keyboards? My understanding on Star Trek is that their keyboards change their layouts depending on who's there, and what they're doing. I've always thought something like that would be fantastic, say, for switching into Quake or a flight sim -- make your keyboard LOOK like a control panel, so you don't have to remember that "." is strafe or whatever...
As for voice control, I'd really like to be able to control house systems (see my ÜberTiVo posting under the Set Top Box thread). To say "Play 1812" and have the system start playing it for me. Or "Where's my dinner?" and have the computer tell me to cook it myself (hey, gotta be realistic here). Or to just start rambling on, stream-of-conciousness, in a rant or rave about what's really annoying or cool, so I can edit it down to a letter later. That is what I think we need, and it's more on the application side than on the OS side.
Of course, we may already have good solutions for this, I just haven't been able to play with them yet... :(
...if you don't know the secret handshake?
-----
Who controls the British crown?
Who keeps the metric system down? We do! We do!
What I've got buzzing around, in the back of my head, is something like this:
(That shouldn't be too expensive, right?)
Then, this box would be connected to various rooms via Coax (for video) and line-level shielded audio (for audio). Or send the audio through a multi-zone amplifier to wall-mounted speakers. Or something like that. You'd control it via infrared control, repeated from the viewing room back to the box through wireless or wired IR repeaters.
What would I do with this box? Everything.
Could be way cool. Way, way cool. Of course, a lot of things that I'm thinking about here have significant infrastructure problems -- like, say, how do you distribute HD (TV, not disk) signals through a house?
In the end, I think the plan I'm settling on involves a big UberTiVo box with multiple inputs, but feeding some massively cool RAID server (that way, I can just use a bunch of really cheap separate computers with one tuner each, if it becomes too difficult to handle more than one input per box). Then use very simple set-top boxes (the little "bookshelf" form factor) with Composite out (or just run VGA straight to an HDTV monitor), sound (to cheap speakers or an in-room stereo), and wireless keyboard and/or game controllers. If I'm really lucky, I can get this sucker to run w/out a fan, too.
Then, everything just talks back to the main server over 100-meg ethernet. ( that part's easy!)
Anyone else tackling something like this? From this approach? Or from an approach I should be aware of? I'd love to share ideas....
david.
My 33-MHz 68040 Next Turbo -- not retired. (runs my laser printer and occasionally is used for PostScript editing).
Under NeXTSTEP, most cross-processor porting consisted of the following grueling steps:
<chuckle>there's no step three....
Yesterday, we were discussing how we can hack new DirecTV tuners to allow HDTV resolution on analog ports.
Does anyone else appreciate the irony of both events happening in the same week?
Haven't found a mirror for the VISS data, tho.
Good...but try this one:
"A geek knows he's a geek and revels in it. A nerd is a geek who thinks he's normal."
Okay, that part was improbable, but the part where you saw a satellite with a massive radio reflector dish point towards the earth and get VISUAL images was just too much for me. I mean, sure, technically light is just EM radiation, but I'm pretty sure that a mesh RF dish won't work for collecting a visual image.
Your comment or question:
I don't expect to hear anything, but if they getTesla had the same experience. He arrived in America, went to Edison, who told him, basically, to screw off. They met again (as competitors) when people were trying to decide whether to adopt AC or DC current for electrical distribution networks. Tesla was trumpeting his AC model, with simple generators, motors, and transformers, as well as better distribution characteristics, while Edison was pushing DC for city-wide distribution. Edison even went so far as to hire local kids to steal neighborhood pets so he could electrocute them in an AC-based rig, to show the dangers of AC power.
To put it in a more modern perspective (though I may be reaching a bit here), Edison was Bill Gates, and Tesla was Steve Jobs. One was a much better promotor, marketer, and perhaps engineer, while the other was a more powerful visionary, thinker, and inventor.
If we achieve "near-immortality," then the birth rate WILL decrease. It simply will, that's been fairly well documented as standards of living increase. And there's still attrition through accidents, suicides, people who couldn't get to the hospital in time for the replacement heart during a major MI, etc.
Who is John Galt?
:( )
(of course, I finally get to read this long after the discussion has died down.
I'm watching it now, and it is the same trailer that was out in May. It's still an incredible trailer (even at 25 MB, but that's why we've got multiple T1s at work, right?), and I can't wait to actually see it in a theater.
Still, I'd like to see a new one, and I'd love to find a movie poster (they *still* don't have one online).
The best site I've found so far for movie information is www.theonering.net -- lots of good information, and easy to browse through.
This sort of thing is not new; I am, frankly, surprised that there isn't more of an outcry for federal single subject rules. I guess the people who work the system for a living don't want it to change.
You've hit the point right there, I think. I've been wondering out loud for some time now whether or not I have the answer for that last problem -- the fact that half of our biggest institutional problems will never be solved because it negatively affects those in power.
If memory serves, a constitutional amendment requires 2/3 majority of both houses, but does not require presidential signature. Then, it requires 3/4 of the states to approve it. So, by design, getting an amendment passed and ratified is very difficult, especially if it affects congress in any way. (quick trivia quiz -- what's the last amendment to be added to the US constitution? One restricting congressional pay-raises to take effect the following term. How'd that get passed? It was part of the original bill of rights, but took over 200 years to get ratified. Most modern amendments include "drop dead" language if not ratified in some short number of years).
However, there is still hope (and here's where my memory may be failing). A majority of states may vote for a Constitutional Convention, in which amendments may be proposed, voted on, and (immediately, I think) ratified.
I have yet to hear anyone of any authority or voice advocate such a move, so I may be way off on this one. But it seems to me that this would be a fantastic avenue for issues with broad public support but little chance of congressional action, for example, Campaign Finance, Line-Item Veto, Same-Subject Legislation, or Term Limits. Unfortunately, it could also be a fast track for less constitutionally-appropriate, but popular, "hot button" issues like Internet Porn or Flag Burning.
Maybe this warrants a /. discussion in and of itself? Maybe (in a broader sense) /. needs a "Politics" section (or a sister "PolDot" site)? I'm really curious to hear others' thoughts on this one...
david.