Geez, read the paragraph in the post after the one you quoted:
Sure, the CE companies might put it on a few of their very high end items just for PR purposes. But never on the stuff that makes up the bulk of their revenue.
I don't think that big-screen TVs and HDTV VCRs count as mainstream products yet. When HAVi is available on the 27" CRT TVs and $200 VCRs then we'll talk.
But don't get me wrong, I think that electronics interoperability is extremely cool and actually useful. But my original post wasn't about interoperability being bad, it was about the consumer electronics companies not really wanting it to succeed.
HAVi isn't really so much about the A/V connectors (as you point out, they're somewhat standardized already). It's about signalling. That is, communications between the devices about the data streams (the audio and video). Sure, they imagine that the data streams themselves will also be sent over the same wires, but as you point out, that isn't reall necessary.
To pick a somewhat dumb example (but playing off the one in the article post), it's about your HAVi telephone telling your HAVi audio receiver that a telephone call has arrived so please lower the currently playing sound by 50% and play the telephone ring code and the HAVi phone telling the HAVi TV to display caller ID information. And all this happening regardless of who the vendors of all that equipment is.
Don't hold your breath waiting for this. The consumer electronics (CE) companies like to talk a good game about interoperability but the truth is that they really don't want it. Each company wants you to buy all your electronics from them exclusively and seriously don't want you mixing and matching.
Don't believe me, check out this from the HAVi website charter page:
"The Organization is promoting the development of products based on the the HAVi 1.0 final specification, completed in December 1999."
So there has been a standard for almost four years, but how many HAVi enabled electronics devices do you see down at your local Generic Big Box Electronics Store? Zero would be a reasonable estimate.
Sure, the CE companies might put it on a few of their very high end items just for PR purposes. But never on the stuff that makes up the bulk of their revenue.
Yeah, but I don't think that Brain is talking about AI, at least in the sense of human like thinking.
The robot janitor, for example, that Brain suggests will eliminate jobs for all human janitors won't require AI (unless you include computer vision as AI). Just a complicated program that can see surfaces and has a database about what tools to apply to the surfaces for what durations to make them clean.
Why should a company which is based in the U.S. be allowed to benefit from the infrastructure here while offshoring jobs?
Why should all U.S. citizens have to pay more for the goods and services they want to buy just to prop up industries that can't compete with the world?
What people forget is that that is the flip side of protectionism, higher prices (and sometimes higher taxes, depending on how the protectionism is done).
Now, the pain of higher prices is spread over the whole society but the pain of industries closing is focused on a small group, so maybe it's acceptable. I'm not trying to make the arguement one way or the other.
But don't pretend that protectionism doesn't cost. We're simply trading one problem for another. There's no such thing as a free lunch.
The problem with the government doing online currency, at least in the US, is that by law any currency that comes from the Treasury Department MUST be accepted as legal tender in ALL transactions.
There is, however, no Federal statute mandating that a private business, a person or an organization must accept currency or coins as for payment for goods and/or services. Private businesses are free to develop their own policies on whether or not to accept cash...
Yeah, I'm aware of the problems the rebel alliance had with adapting their equipment to the frigid environment of Hoth. I guess that the point I was trying to get is that we don't have anything to suggest that wings, in the SW universe, offer any advantage in in maneuverability either in space or in a planet's atmosphere as compared to whatever technology it is that provides non-winged craft their maneuvering.
Actually, I lean towards the explaination that most of the wings seen on the SW spacecraft served other purposes and weren't actually wings (in the lift/maneuvering sense). For example, the purpose of the wings on the X-wing is to separate those long pointy things at the end of them as far as possible from the main body of the ship, which we might suppose provided some combat advantage.
Well, we can rule out wings in space for maneuverability because the Falcon is shown to be at least as maneuverable as any other ship in space (e.g. asteroid field in Empire and Endor battle in Jedi).[1]
As to atmospheric flight and battle maneuverability, there are unfortunately few examples to work with. But I think a telling point is that in the main atmospheric battle, Hoth, the Rebel Alliance didn't use X-wings (or any other of the space fighters). They used the snow speeders that had very small wings (and seemed to use those airbreak things for maneuvering). So I'm not sure that the movies bear out the idea that winged space fighters are winged for flight/maneuverability reasons, either in space or in an atmosphere.
[1] Of course, we're not going to bother with the problematic real physics problems with this whole thread. This is Star Wars physics.
Like most/. readers I've read a whole lot about this SCO thing. And like most/. readers I don't think that SCO has much chance of success and there probably won't be any long term impact to Linux.
But, like most/. readers, I'm pretty tired of reading about it.
So I ask you, when is this going to be resolved?
Let's assume that SCO doesn't drop their claims and IBM doesn't buy them out. I don't know much about the US legal system when it comes to these kinds of cases, so I don't know how these types of cases usually last or what the procedures are.
Is this going to be resolved in, say, August? Or is this going to be like the MS trial and we'll still be reading about it two years from now?!
While PCI Express will probably replace PCI, the transition will probably be very long.
As the Anandtech authors point out, there were still ISA slots on motherboards 10 years after the introduction of PCI. So I would expect that you'll still be able to use your PCI cards in new computers five years from now.
Well, I'd agree with you but it's useful to over-generalize and divide MS Office users into two groups:
1. People who use MS Office as a document creation system.
2. People who use MS Office as an application development system.
I think that anyone who is honest in their evaluation of OOo will say that OOo can replace MS Office for type 1 (document) people, but really can't be used as a replacement for type 2 (application) people. And if you're thinking of trying OOo, you need to decide what type you're in and if you're in type 2, you probably shouldn't bother.
And, if you're in type 2, you might never switch over. I'm not sure if the OOo people have any intention of making OOo the application development tool that MS Office has become. I think that they're focusing more on the document creation angle.
I'm surprised that no-one has written a really destructive outlook virus yet. That is, one that, when run, first does all the usual tricks to propigate itself, then, say, waits an hour, then starts deleting everything it can on the computer.
I mean, I understand the appeal of installing backdoors ("1 0wnz j00", etc), but you'd think that someone would have released a really destructive version by now.
Will it act as a regular hard drive?
on
Neuros Review
·
· Score: 1
Does anyone know if the Neuros can be used as a regular USB hard drive as well? That is, I plug it in and it appears to my OS as just another drive that I can copy any file to (or from).
Or can I only put music files on it using the proprietary interface/sync program?
This is one of my requirements for any portable device. If I just bought a 20GB portable hard drive, I want to be able to put any damn file I want on it and not have to use a particular program to do it.
Re:claimed "iPod killer" features, no proof
on
Neuros Review
·
· Score: 1
How about MyFi as a killer feature? Broadcast your music to an available fm station.
Well, having it built in is nice, but separate devices that connect to any headphone jack and broadcast FM have been available for a while. So simply building it into the device is nice, but isn't really a killer feature. Here's a review of one of them.
Even with all this, it manages to pour billions of dollars in the government's coffers (that's so much taxes we won't have to pay).
Just to make a technical point, profits made by a government owned corporation that are funnelled back into the general government revenues (rather than re-invested in the corporation) are, in fact, taxes.
Re:JDO vs EJB Entity Beans?
on
Java Data Objects
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
JDO and Torque are both the same sorts of tools, Object-Relational Mapping (O-RM) tools. In the Java world there are also about a few dozen other O-RM tools (Apache Jakarta hosts two different ones even). (Note, we could split hairs here. JDO is an API specification, there are several vendors implementing it.)
However, the difference between JDO and all the other ones is that JDO, for better or worse, is now the "standard" O-RM interface. Standard in the sense that it's the one Sun is promoting through the JCP. As such, it's probably the one in the long run that is going to dominate.
I'm not entirely happy about that. Like yourself, we use Torque on our projects. But we're seriously considering changing to JDO (once the JDO implementations have stabilized, and maybe wait 'til JDO 1.1). Why? Implementation independance, tools support, potential employee skills availability. All the usual reasons why one might choose a "standard" interface over a "non-standard" one.
I think that another factor is that these are volunteer reviews (ie. they don't get paid).
This matters because in general people don't finish books that they don't like. If I'm a third of the way through a really bad book I'm not going to say "well, I'm going to finish this books so I can write a bad review of it". No, I'm going to throw it in the trash and never think about it again.
On the other hand, on sites where the reviewer is getting paid, they'll stick with the book through the end and do the review because, well, because they're getting paid to do that.
So, in general, the average review score with volunteer reviews is higher than the average review score with paid reviews.
Oh sure, there's bound to be issues, but there is with any multi-player game feature. I think that multi-person ships will probably only work well with established groups of friends. I can't see jumping in with four strangers. (Particularly because the ship itself will probably represent a shared in-game expense.)
It's just that the "Crew of the " is such a large part of the usual SF setting that I don't see why all these games are ignoring it.
I mean, imagine if, when the Star Wars Galaxies space ship expansion is released (in 2053, probably), the players are all expected to fly around in formation in X-wings and TIE fighters? (Or single player star destroyers!)
One thing that has been sorely missing from space multi-player games has been the option for several players to be the crew of a ship. In all the one's I've seen, once you leave the planet/station/whatever, it's everyone in their one-person space ship.
Now, I'm not in the beta for Eve, but from the previews it looks like Eve follows this trend and only has one-person ships. Can a beta tester confirm/correct this?
Now, don't get me wrong, it can be fun to fly around in formation and all. But the usual SF template for this sort of thing is a small group that's the crew of a ship (the Falcon, the Enterprise, Moya, etc).
Now, I guess that the reason for this is technical. Having one-man ships makes the coding similar to wandering around the landscape in a fantasy game, but with one more dimension. While multi-person ships would add a whole new level of interaction to be coded.
But I wish some company would break out and make multi-player ships. I've got four friends would would love to be sitting around the mess table while the ship cruises to Alpha Something III, when the proximity alert goes off and we all run to our battle stations and man the helm, the guns, the engines, the sensors.
Slashdot Mirror
Geez, read the paragraph in the post after the one you quoted:
Sure, the CE companies might put it on a few of their very high end items just for PR purposes. But never on the stuff that makes up the bulk of their revenue.
I don't think that big-screen TVs and HDTV VCRs count as mainstream products yet. When HAVi is available on the 27" CRT TVs and $200 VCRs then we'll talk.
But don't get me wrong, I think that electronics interoperability is extremely cool and actually useful. But my original post wasn't about interoperability being bad, it was about the consumer electronics companies not really wanting it to succeed.
HAVi isn't really so much about the A/V connectors (as you point out, they're somewhat standardized already). It's about signalling. That is, communications between the devices about the data streams (the audio and video). Sure, they imagine that the data streams themselves will also be sent over the same wires, but as you point out, that isn't reall necessary.
To pick a somewhat dumb example (but playing off the one in the article post), it's about your HAVi telephone telling your HAVi audio receiver that a telephone call has arrived so please lower the currently playing sound by 50% and play the telephone ring code and the HAVi phone telling the HAVi TV to display caller ID information. And all this happening regardless of who the vendors of all that equipment is.
Don't hold your breath waiting for this. The consumer electronics (CE) companies like to talk a good game about interoperability but the truth is that they really don't want it. Each company wants you to buy all your electronics from them exclusively and seriously don't want you mixing and matching.
Don't believe me, check out this from the HAVi website charter page:
"The Organization is promoting the development of products based on the the HAVi 1.0 final specification, completed in December 1999."
So there has been a standard for almost four years, but how many HAVi enabled electronics devices do you see down at your local Generic Big Box Electronics Store? Zero would be a reasonable estimate.
Sure, the CE companies might put it on a few of their very high end items just for PR purposes. But never on the stuff that makes up the bulk of their revenue.
Yeah, but I don't think that Brain is talking about AI, at least in the sense of human like thinking.
The robot janitor, for example, that Brain suggests will eliminate jobs for all human janitors won't require AI (unless you include computer vision as AI). Just a complicated program that can see surfaces and has a database about what tools to apply to the surfaces for what durations to make them clean.
Why should a company which is based in the U.S. be allowed to benefit from the infrastructure here while offshoring jobs?
Why should all U.S. citizens have to pay more for the goods and services they want to buy just to prop up industries that can't compete with the world?
What people forget is that that is the flip side of protectionism, higher prices (and sometimes higher taxes, depending on how the protectionism is done).
Now, the pain of higher prices is spread over the whole society but the pain of industries closing is focused on a small group, so maybe it's acceptable. I'm not trying to make the arguement one way or the other.
But don't pretend that protectionism doesn't cost. We're simply trading one problem for another. There's no such thing as a free lunch.
The problem with the government doing online currency, at least in the US, is that by law any currency that comes from the Treasury Department MUST be accepted as legal tender in ALL transactions.
Sorry, wrong. Here's the US Treasury FAQ page for this question.
Here's the main point:
There is, however, no Federal statute mandating that a private business, a person or an organization must accept currency or coins as for payment for goods and/or services. Private businesses are free to develop their own policies on whether or not to accept cash...
Okay. And I came upon this at the official star wars site entry for X-wings:
"The wings not only serve as stabilizer surfaces in air travel, but also distribute deflector shield energy and serve as weapons mounts."
Distribute deflector field energy even! Very useful things.
Anyway I've got to go. Thanks for the geek-out.
Yeah, I'm aware of the problems the rebel alliance had with adapting their equipment to the frigid environment of Hoth. I guess that the point I was trying to get is that we don't have anything to suggest that wings, in the SW universe, offer any advantage in in maneuverability either in space or in a planet's atmosphere as compared to whatever technology it is that provides non-winged craft their maneuvering.
Actually, I lean towards the explaination that most of the wings seen on the SW spacecraft served other purposes and weren't actually wings (in the lift/maneuvering sense). For example, the purpose of the wings on the X-wing is to separate those long pointy things at the end of them as far as possible from the main body of the ship, which we might suppose provided some combat advantage.
Well, we can rule out wings in space for maneuverability because the Falcon is shown to be at least as maneuverable as any other ship in space (e.g. asteroid field in Empire and Endor battle in Jedi).[1]
As to atmospheric flight and battle maneuverability, there are unfortunately few examples to work with. But I think a telling point is that in the main atmospheric battle, Hoth, the Rebel Alliance didn't use X-wings (or any other of the space fighters). They used the snow speeders that had very small wings (and seemed to use those airbreak things for maneuvering). So I'm not sure that the movies bear out the idea that winged space fighters are winged for flight/maneuverability reasons, either in space or in an atmosphere.
[1] Of course, we're not going to bother with the problematic real physics problems with this whole thread. This is Star Wars physics.
Have you seen the movies? All the ships can take off and land from the ground.
Ever notice that the space shuttle has wings?
Counter example: The Millenium Falcon takes off and lands from the ground but it doesn't have wings.
So we can conclude that wings are not necessary for atmospheric flight or landing in the Star Wars universe.
So the real questions is why do some ships in SW have wings and some don't?
Like most /. readers I've read a whole lot about this SCO thing. And like most /. readers I don't think that SCO has much chance of success and there probably won't be any long term impact to Linux.
/. readers, I'm pretty tired of reading about it.
But, like most
So I ask you, when is this going to be resolved?
Let's assume that SCO doesn't drop their claims and IBM doesn't buy them out. I don't know much about the US legal system when it comes to these kinds of cases, so I don't know how these types of cases usually last or what the procedures are.
Is this going to be resolved in, say, August? Or is this going to be like the MS trial and we'll still be reading about it two years from now?!
While PCI Express will probably replace PCI, the transition will probably be very long.
As the Anandtech authors point out, there were still ISA slots on motherboards 10 years after the introduction of PCI. So I would expect that you'll still be able to use your PCI cards in new computers five years from now.
People often complain about ratings inflation in
How can the author give such a negative review then rate the book at 5 out of 10?
What does a book have to do to rate a 2, kill someone?
Well, I'd agree with you but it's useful to over-generalize and divide MS Office users into two groups:
1. People who use MS Office as a document creation system.
2. People who use MS Office as an application development system.
I think that anyone who is honest in their evaluation of OOo will say that OOo can replace MS Office for type 1 (document) people, but really can't be used as a replacement for type 2 (application) people. And if you're thinking of trying OOo, you need to decide what type you're in and if you're in type 2, you probably shouldn't bother.
And, if you're in type 2, you might never switch over. I'm not sure if the OOo people have any intention of making OOo the application development tool that MS Office has become. I think that they're focusing more on the document creation angle.
I'm surprised that no-one has written a really destructive outlook virus yet. That is, one that, when run, first does all the usual tricks to propigate itself, then, say, waits an hour, then starts deleting everything it can on the computer.
I mean, I understand the appeal of installing backdoors ("1 0wnz j00", etc), but you'd think that someone would have released a really destructive version by now.
Does anyone know if the Neuros can be used as a regular USB hard drive as well? That is, I plug it in and it appears to my OS as just another drive that I can copy any file to (or from).
Or can I only put music files on it using the proprietary interface/sync program?
This is one of my requirements for any portable device. If I just bought a 20GB portable hard drive, I want to be able to put any damn file I want on it and not have to use a particular program to do it.
How about MyFi as a killer feature? Broadcast your music to an available fm station.
Well, having it built in is nice, but separate devices that connect to any headphone jack and broadcast FM have been available for a while. So simply building it into the device is nice, but isn't really a killer feature. Here's a review of one of them.
Even with all this, it manages to pour billions of dollars in the government's coffers (that's so much taxes we won't have to pay).
Just to make a technical point, profits made by a government owned corporation that are funnelled back into the general government revenues (rather than re-invested in the corporation) are, in fact, taxes.
JDO and Torque are both the same sorts of tools, Object-Relational Mapping (O-RM) tools. In the Java world there are also about a few dozen other O-RM tools (Apache Jakarta hosts two different ones even). (Note, we could split hairs here. JDO is an API specification, there are several vendors implementing it.)
However, the difference between JDO and all the other ones is that JDO, for better or worse, is now the "standard" O-RM interface. Standard in the sense that it's the one Sun is promoting through the JCP. As such, it's probably the one in the long run that is going to dominate.
I'm not entirely happy about that. Like yourself, we use Torque on our projects. But we're seriously considering changing to JDO (once the JDO implementations have stabilized, and maybe wait 'til JDO 1.1). Why? Implementation independance, tools support, potential employee skills availability. All the usual reasons why one might choose a "standard" interface over a "non-standard" one.
I think that another factor is that these are volunteer reviews (ie. they don't get paid).
This matters because in general people don't finish books that they don't like. If I'm a third of the way through a really bad book I'm not going to say "well, I'm going to finish this books so I can write a bad review of it". No, I'm going to throw it in the trash and never think about it again.
On the other hand, on sites where the reviewer is getting paid, they'll stick with the book through the end and do the review because, well, because they're getting paid to do that.
So, in general, the average review score with volunteer reviews is higher than the average review score with paid reviews.
Huh? This guy is building *stained glass* computer cases and you're pointing out that he's not being very practical by including a lava lamp?
In the past 18 hours, 275,000 new AAC encoded songs appears on Kazaa.
Yeah, why doesn't someone license the Traveller setting rather than making up some dumb backstory that nobody reads anyway?
Oh sure, there's bound to be issues, but there is with any multi-player game feature. I think that multi-person ships will probably only work well with established groups of friends. I can't see jumping in with four strangers. (Particularly because the ship itself will probably represent a shared in-game expense.)
It's just that the "Crew of the " is such a large part of the usual SF setting that I don't see why all these games are ignoring it.
I mean, imagine if, when the Star Wars Galaxies space ship expansion is released (in 2053, probably), the players are all expected to fly around in formation in X-wings and TIE fighters? (Or single player star destroyers!)
One thing that has been sorely missing from space multi-player games has been the option for several players to be the crew of a ship. In all the one's I've seen, once you leave the planet/station/whatever, it's everyone in their one-person space ship.
Now, I'm not in the beta for Eve, but from the previews it looks like Eve follows this trend and only has one-person ships. Can a beta tester confirm/correct this?
Now, don't get me wrong, it can be fun to fly around in formation and all. But the usual SF template for this sort of thing is a small group that's the crew of a ship (the Falcon, the Enterprise, Moya, etc).
Now, I guess that the reason for this is technical. Having one-man ships makes the coding similar to wandering around the landscape in a fantasy game, but with one more dimension. While multi-person ships would add a whole new level of interaction to be coded.
But I wish some company would break out and make multi-player ships. I've got four friends would would love to be sitting around the mess table while the ship cruises to Alpha Something III, when the proximity alert goes off and we all run to our battle stations and man the helm, the guns, the engines, the sensors.