I just taught a C programming class using the ADuC microcontroller from Analog Devices. ARM based device with ADCs, DACs, and a bunch of digital IO, plus the software, and you can get it all for about 20 bucks.
How about sailing? My fiance and I race Hobie cat sailboats. It gets us outside, and since we are travelling to regattas, they are like mini vacations every two weeks. Plus, there is a ton of friends to meet up with again.
In addition it is a very geek friendly sport with a lot of things to tweak and upgrade on the boat to make it go just that much faster.
Well, let me see. It could be because your Aibo is approximately an order of magnitude more expensive than this. To tell the truth, I am amazed at the functionality you can get for $200 dollars. I saw one of these things at Brookstone, and it just looks like it starts with a basic spiral pattern. It was demoed in the middle of the store, so I am not sure what happens when it gets to things like chair legs and such. Probably just senses them with the bump sensors, and shoots off on another direction.
The arena that this is being overlooked in is the embedded software community. Currently, to use the AltiVec instructions, I believe you are locked into using operating systems such as WindRiver's VxWorks. This will not make such a big effect on the mac community, since as previously pointed out, most of the Mac users are fanatics and not likely to change. However, there are an immmense number of PPC based embedded systems out there that could benefit from this, not only performance wise, but also not having to pay X thousands of dollars for each license of VxWorks. I for one can't wait to see how this works out.
The SSSCA also creates new federal felonies, punishable by five years in prison and fines of up to $500,000. Anyone who distributes copyrighted material with "security measures" disabled or has a network-attached computer that disables copy protection is covered.
This means that breaking security measures now is a felony with a huge fine and prison term. Do not pass go, go straight to jail. I believe (IANAL) that this means that anyone with old software/hardware that does not protect/honor the copyright protections and is connected to a network is automatically commiting a felony. In addition, anyone using Napster, Gnutella, et. al. is also committing a felony.
The major problem with what the tech industry is talking about is embedding the DRM in hardware. Consider if they were to put a filter chip to handle the copy protection in your ethernet card, and every network card made in the US had to have this chip. Besides the fact that it would make the card more expensive, there would be no software work around (if done correctly). They could require the same chip to be used in sound cards, so that even if you were to get the files placed on your computer, they could not be played, since they would be "filtered" at the sound card. Finally, if they were to place this at the input and output to the hard drive, there would be no way to get at the data to remove any copy protection.
This is a very scary technology proposal indeed. I for one don't want anyone to tell me what I can or can't do with my equipment, regardless of whether or not I have the desire to pirate content.
Next, I would expect for Ethernet cables and hardware to be siezed, since that is mostly (for the home user anyways) used to download pirated MP3s and pron.
Not sure where I read this, but the US military is looking at using this type of technology for its next generation soldier equipment to provide networking between grunts, as well as planes, tanks, etc. (I can just see the jokes about Beowulf clusters.)
Would be real useful for distributing tactical information, commands, and battlefield conditions.
It may be a big thing, but think about it this way: When you go out and buy a new CD, and peel off the wrapper, do you bother to look at it to see if the CD logo is on it? I don't. The consumer is not going to care one iota about this, so long as it plays in device X when he/she puts it in there and presses the play button. The real thing to look at is the fact that the music company is addressing this by incorporating a player to handle their encrypted music formats, so that to Joe Consumer, they can put the disk in their computer, and it plays, no questions asked. Maybe not the CD audio track, but Joe isn't going to know that.
The year is 1903, the location: Kitty Hawk, North Carolina and YOU ARE THERE!
We see the Wright Brothers standing near the first ever airplane, moments before it takes off for the first ever powered flight. As they begin to board the craft, a reporter informs them that their invention will be used to kill thousands of people, destroy a building, and drastically alter the fabric of the nation that they love so much. They also are told about the untold number of deaths caused by warplanes, including dropping the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as all the other armed conflicts that used this wonderful invention. Finally they are told about the numbers of people that will die as passenger planes crash into hills, oceans, and fields all across the world.
Instead of flying the plane, they decide that the risks are too great, and scrap the whole invention. Upon hearing the details about the possible future of the machine, congress legislates that it is illegal to develop, own, or operate such manned flying machines...
American Pie from Don McLean? You have got to be kidding. This is utterly ridiculous, especially considering all the stuff that didn't make the list. (Danzig and Henry Rollins come to mind)
Also, New York, New York, by Frank Sinatra? Sometimes people go too far in the knee jerk reactions. Hopefully they will get a clue (or be given one) and realize how crazy this is.
What can be done about terrorism
on
More On Tragedy
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· Score: 1
The planes diverted from their courses and the air traffic controllers could see the planes, but not do anything about the fact that they were travelling out of their approved flight paths. They even knew about the hijackings in the case of the plane that crashed in PA.
One thing that I have never seen mentioned anywhere that could definitely prevent this sort of disaster from happening again is to implement a remote control system for all passenger airliners. In the situation of a hijacking, either the pilots, or ground staff (air traffic controller) switch the plane over to remote operations. At this point, the pilots cannot regain control of the plane until it is landed and reset by the FAA. There are already sizable planes that are remote controlled, and owned by the military. With todays flight control systems, I don't think it would be too difficult as they are all controlled by wire, and communicate extensively with ground operations somewhere anyways.
Just a thought, but it would definitely be nice. Perhaps deter a few terrorists, if they knew that they could not maintain flight control of an aircraft.
Perhaps it is more a case of the following. The best way to motivate a great many geeks is to say that something cannot be done. There are so many negative comments here saying it is impossible, making it all the more fun (challenging) to work on. How many times has it been said that it is impossible to build a tranistor smaller than "X", only to have it happen a short time later.
It definitely will be difficult, but there's nothing wrong with "fighting the good fight"
All that would have been required to insulate the PC from the handheld device is a simple little ferrite bead. (Read iron donut) around the wires. The ESD shock travels up both wires simultaneously, and by using the bead, it is all but rejected. This is quite common and you can see it if you look at monitor cables. In fact, I believe that my digital camera has a similar device on its serial interface cable.
Another thing of note. The article said that the interviewees were taken from national video game
events. The reason that they are at those events
is because they are good at gaming. To draw a parallel, it would be saying that all athletes have a high level of concentration and drive, based on interviews conducted at the Olympics. To get statistically valid results, a wider sample set should probably be taken, including all the people who just play for fun and never compete, as well as examining a control group.
So Microsoft wants to use open standards like XML, UDDI and WSDL. Presumably, Microsoft will have to open the public interface to calling their services. If they don't open the interface, Palm, Mac, and Linux couldn't invoke these services.
I think that you are missing another piece of the puzzle there. Microsoft's global plan (or at least according to all good linux zealots) is that in 5 or 10 years, there will be no Mac, Linux, or Palm. They are active in all of those arenas, with WinXP or the latest flavor on Desktops, Win2K on servers and WinCE on Pocket PC devices. They won't need to publish the interfaces because there will not be anything else left to use them. In addition, by not publishing now, they help drive those devices out of the market by inducing compatability issues.
At E3, I got a chance to talk to the CEO/Inventor about this device and actually try it out. It was cool to use, and wasn't that hard to adapt to. He said that it worked by "sense memory" where the body remembers how actions are performed. However, everything is remembered in a mirror image sense, i.e. the left side is a mirror of the right. So, in this case, it actually messed me up to look at the keyboard, but touch typing was relatively easy to pick up, and felt pretty natural.
Another day, another lawsuit
on
Launchcast Sued
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· Score: 1
I think it would be interesting to know how many companies that the RIAA is currently suing. Seems like everyday another announcement is posted. Isn't it nice to see that your entertainment dollars are being used in such a manner.
It seems like every time, that the old speed record has been broken, the SR71 will admit to having already gone that fast. Wonder if it will happen again this time. If you look around, the specs for that plane say something like Mach 3.1+, making its real top speed a classified number.
There are lunchbox sized computers, with an ATX style motherboard, and slots to add cards. There is a drop down keyboard on the front, with an LCD screen mounted behind of it. Something like that
would have the power of a desktop, and still be
somewhat portable.
This site is one possible vendor. Check it out.
BSI Computers
This has already happened to some extent. Sony
has made it so that their PS2 will not work if
DVD movies are played through a VCR, by monkeying with the video signal. I am not sure if the same thing happens when playing the games, but this would be a pretty effective method of preventing copies of the DVDs from being made.
Interesting too, that Sony incorporates this tech into their PS2 and at the same time, they make quite a few movies.
Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, copyright of an image is automatically owned by the creator at the time it's created, noted Bart Lazar, a privacy and copyright attorney with Seyfarth, Shaw, Fairweather & Geraldson in Chicago.
Wouldn't it be an interesting turn of events if M$ was sued for copyright violations under the DMCA?
I remember seeing some posts about this one on here earlier, and it hasn't been released on video yet, but it was definitely worth the ticket price. Princess Mononoke gets my vote. Grave of the Fireflies is another fav, but very tragic.
Slashdot Mirror
I just taught a C programming class using the ADuC microcontroller from Analog Devices. ARM based device with ADCs, DACs, and a bunch of digital IO, plus the software, and you can get it all for about 20 bucks.
In addition it is a very geek friendly sport with a lot of things to tweak and upgrade on the boat to make it go just that much faster.
Well, let me see. It could be because your Aibo is approximately an order of magnitude more expensive than this. To tell the truth, I am amazed at the functionality you can get for $200 dollars. I saw one of these things at Brookstone, and it just looks like it starts with a basic spiral pattern. It was demoed in the middle of the store, so I am not sure what happens when it gets to things like chair legs and such. Probably just senses them with the bump sensors, and shoots off on another direction.
Funny... I don't ever recall signing any contracts. What about the people that channel surf during commercials? Are they stealing programming too?
The arena that this is being overlooked in is the embedded software community. Currently, to use the AltiVec instructions, I believe you are locked into using operating systems such as WindRiver's VxWorks. This will not make such a big effect on the mac community, since as previously pointed out, most of the Mac users are fanatics and not likely to change. However, there are an immmense number of PPC based embedded systems out there that could benefit from this, not only performance wise, but also not having to pay X thousands of dollars for each license of VxWorks. I for one can't wait to see how this works out.
Have you read all the article?
The SSSCA also creates new federal felonies, punishable by five years in prison and fines of up to $500,000. Anyone who distributes copyrighted material with "security measures" disabled or has a network-attached computer that disables copy protection is covered.
This means that breaking security measures now is a felony with a huge fine and prison term. Do not pass go, go straight to jail. I believe (IANAL) that this means that anyone with old software/hardware that does not protect/honor the copyright protections and is connected to a network is automatically commiting a felony. In addition, anyone using Napster, Gnutella, et. al. is also committing a felony.
This is a very scary technology proposal indeed. I for one don't want anyone to tell me what I can or can't do with my equipment, regardless of whether or not I have the desire to pirate content.
Next, I would expect for Ethernet cables and hardware to be siezed, since that is mostly (for the home user anyways) used to download pirated MP3s and pron.
Not sure where I read this, but the US military is looking at using this type of technology for its next generation soldier equipment to provide networking between grunts, as well as planes, tanks, etc. (I can just see the jokes about Beowulf clusters.)
Would be real useful for distributing tactical information, commands, and battlefield conditions.
It may be a big thing, but think about it this way: When you go out and buy a new CD, and peel off the wrapper, do you bother to look at it to see if the CD logo is on it? I don't. The consumer is not going to care one iota about this, so long as it plays in device X when he/she puts it in there and presses the play button. The real thing to look at is the fact that the music company is addressing this by incorporating a player to handle their encrypted music formats, so that to Joe Consumer, they can put the disk in their computer, and it plays, no questions asked. Maybe not the CD audio track, but Joe isn't going to know that.
The truth?
There is no clock.
We see the Wright Brothers standing near the first ever airplane, moments before it takes off for the first ever powered flight. As they begin to board the craft, a reporter informs them that their invention will be used to kill thousands of people, destroy a building, and drastically alter the fabric of the nation that they love so much. They also are told about the untold number of deaths caused by warplanes, including dropping the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as all the other armed conflicts that used this wonderful invention. Finally they are told about the numbers of people that will die as passenger planes crash into hills, oceans, and fields all across the world.
Instead of flying the plane, they decide that the risks are too great, and scrap the whole invention. Upon hearing the details about the possible future of the machine, congress legislates that it is illegal to develop, own, or operate such manned flying machines...
Just imagine.
Also, New York, New York, by Frank Sinatra? Sometimes people go too far in the knee jerk reactions. Hopefully they will get a clue (or be given one) and realize how crazy this is.
One thing that I have never seen mentioned anywhere that could definitely prevent this sort of disaster from happening again is to implement a remote control system for all passenger airliners. In the situation of a hijacking, either the pilots, or ground staff (air traffic controller) switch the plane over to remote operations. At this point, the pilots cannot regain control of the plane until it is landed and reset by the FAA. There are already sizable planes that are remote controlled, and owned by the military. With todays flight control systems, I don't think it would be too difficult as they are all controlled by wire, and communicate extensively with ground operations somewhere anyways.
Just a thought, but it would definitely be nice. Perhaps deter a few terrorists, if they knew that they could not maintain flight control of an aircraft.
It definitely will be difficult, but there's nothing wrong with "fighting the good fight"
All that would have been required to insulate the PC from the handheld device is a simple little ferrite bead. (Read iron donut) around the wires. The ESD shock travels up both wires simultaneously, and by using the bead, it is all but rejected. This is quite common and you can see it if you look at monitor cables. In fact, I believe that my digital camera has a similar device on its serial interface cable.
Just my 2 cents.
I think that you are missing another piece of the puzzle there. Microsoft's global plan (or at least according to all good linux zealots) is that in 5 or 10 years, there will be no Mac, Linux, or Palm. They are active in all of those arenas, with WinXP or the latest flavor on Desktops, Win2K on servers and WinCE on Pocket PC devices. They won't need to publish the interfaces because there will not be anything else left to use them. In addition, by not publishing now, they help drive those devices out of the market by inducing compatability issues.
At E3, I got a chance to talk to the CEO/Inventor about this device and actually try it out. It was cool to use, and wasn't that hard to adapt to. He said that it worked by "sense memory" where the body remembers how actions are performed. However, everything is remembered in a mirror image sense, i.e. the left side is a mirror of the right. So, in this case, it actually messed me up to look at the keyboard, but touch typing was relatively easy to pick up, and felt pretty natural.
I think it would be interesting to know how many companies that the RIAA is currently suing. Seems like everyday another announcement is posted. Isn't it nice to see that your entertainment dollars are being used in such a manner.
It seems like every time, that the old speed record has been broken, the SR71 will admit to having already gone that fast. Wonder if it will happen again this time. If you look around, the specs for that plane say something like Mach 3.1+, making its real top speed a classified number.
There are lunchbox sized computers, with an ATX style motherboard, and slots to add cards. There is a drop down keyboard on the front, with an LCD screen mounted behind of it. Something like that would have the power of a desktop, and still be somewhat portable. This site is one possible vendor. Check it out. BSI Computers
Interesting too, that Sony incorporates this tech into their PS2 and at the same time, they make quite a few movies.
Wouldn't it be an interesting turn of events if M$ was sued for copyright violations under the DMCA?
I remember seeing some posts about this one on here earlier, and it hasn't been released on video yet, but it was definitely worth the ticket price. Princess Mononoke gets my vote. Grave of the Fireflies is another fav, but very tragic.