what really killed the minidisc was the introduction of the iPod and other MP3 players
Nope, Minidiscs were dead long before that. CD-Burners are what killed it. It was cheap and easy to burn your MP3 collection to an audio CD you could play anywhere, so that's what people did. Then with the advent of portable CD players which could play regular MP3 files burned to CD-R, MiniDisc was doomed.
Several years ago I bought a portable minidisc player. Battery life was terrible. I literally had to carry a couple of AA batteries with me at all times. But even worse was getting music onto the player. There were only two choices -- a program made by Sony that was a complete piece of shit, or, a plugin for Realplayer.
Battery-life for Sony's MiniDisc players/recorders was always about 4-5X better than Sony's portable CD players. If you're complaining about battery life, it's because you're comparing devices from entirely different generations. Go find one of Sony's earliest CD players with (3 second!) skip protections. As I recall, battery life was 2-4 hours. No doubt your Minidisc does far better.
But even worse was getting music onto the player. There were only two choices -- a program made by Sony that was a complete piece of shit, or, a plugin for Realplayer.
You mean for USB transfers... You could just hit the "record" button and connect it to your sound-card via analog or digital cables. And there certainly were 3rd party programs put together because Sony's software sucked so badly.
And, for added amusement, transferring songs onto the player from my computer was very slow because they all had to be converted into Sony's propriietary, DRM infested ATRAC format.
ATRAC and Minidiscs pre-date MP3s. It's actually a based on MP2, and a very good quality format. If Minidiscs could even play MP3s directly, the battery life you think was "horrible" would have leap-frogged to "god-awful".
So shortly after Sony enters the music business as a content producer suddenly their latest offerings for playing music are loaded with DRM. Almost none of the competing technologies were loaded with similar DRM.
The "Audio Home Recording Act" of 1992 was the cause, as it MANDATED copy production in CONSUMER products that could make digital recordings. This timing coincides with the introduction of MiniDiscs, DCC tapes, and shortly after DAT tapes. There are NO competing products that lack copy protection. Even stand-alone CD recorders (not computer drives) have built-in copy protection like SCMS found on Minidiscs, DATs, and DCC. The only blame Sony has, in this, is not FIGHTING against this legislation harder, though they had ample resources to do so, and were more interested than any other manufacturer, with the possible exception of Philips.
There are two exceptions, which is why we aren't completely inundated with SCMS today.
The first is that the law only applies to "consumer" products. If you purchase more expensive studio DAT recorders, you can get away without SCMS. The same is true of Minidisc, though, there were Tascam units that would ignore SCMS and allow unlimited copying.
The second is computers. Apparently, they don't qualify under the act as consumer audio recording devices, so if you make your recording devices stupid enough, and require a computer to shift the bits around, then you don't need to implement copy protection.
What are the alternatives? I cannot find any comparable tech blogs that aren't dumbed down.
I've almost completely stopped reading/. in favor of ArsTechnica. The editors and articles are certainly far better, and there's plenty of original content, rather than just a paragraph excerpt. On the negative side, they don't have a very good comment system, which would be conducive to interesting discussions... Still though, there's enough smart people over there that chime-in with better insights than the crap you'll find on/. these days.
Second, there's Popular Science. They do a far better job covering the up and coming technological advancements, which/. at least used-to have stories about... You know... before it was all global warming trolling by the editors. PS is a good place to stay updated on developments in carbon nanotubes, battery tech, etc. If that's too dumbed-down for you, an alternative is sciencemag.
Hacker news in an interesting one, but their unwillingness to post even a basic summary makes them useless for me. And they post far too many stories a day to makes discussion possible, and the sheer volume naturally lowers the article signal/noise ratio and quality.
This kind of crap is why I hardly read slashdot anymore, after 15 years of daily reading and tens of thousands of comments...
Could a potential adversary fire off older weapons that are not as accurate, causing a defensive response that exhausts all available missile interceptors so more advanced weapons with better accuracy can deliver the crushing blow?
Sure! That could happen... if our missile defense systems are designed by morons.
Otherwise, no, that wouldn't happen, because a defensive system will be perfectly capable of distinguishing between threats and dummies. Hell, the hard part of missile defense systems is making sure they don't accidentally take out friendly jets, so they'll already be designed with the kind of intelligence they need to make this distinction.
In addition, it could be a completely non-nonsensical question depending on the defense system used... If we're talking about lasers, anything with a nuclear generator has unlimited ammo. If we're talking about rail-guns, then the ammo is extremely tiny, and a huge amount can be carried aboard-ship.
If we're talking about current CIWS systems, then in the list of all the limitations the system has, the need to CARRY ENOUGH AMMO doesn't even make the top-5 actual concerns.
And let's not forget that the DEPLOYMENT of such systems might just be fairly important... Ships can START MOVING when they're being inundated with incoming missiles. They can CALL FOR HELP and get it. They can LAUNCH AN OFFENSIVE ATTACK against the source of these incoming missiles as soon as the barrage is spotted lifting off, over the horizon.
No. The current status of renewable energy (geothermal, hydroelectric, wind, solar, etc.) can in no way support our current consumption habits.
Solar power can EASILY supply vastly more power than humanity is currently using, and more than it is projected to use for thousands of years into the future.
Maintenance costs are significant. You can't just leave the equipment there and believe it'll keep working. Lines break all the time and need personel to go out and fix themm quickly. Network equipment like routers need hot backups and service contracts, which are only available for 3 years at a time or so, meaning all your network equipment is getting replaced every, say, 5 years, just like servers.
Changing the "signaling" would give you a small one-time boost, not something you can just keep doing to get infinite bandwidth. And with those higher speed links, your network equipment needs to be able to route the increasing throughput without dropping too many of them.
And let's not forget the good old "back hoe" analogy... when it's obvious someone made a mistake and cut your lines, you can force them to pay for the repair costs, but more often than not it's not traceable and obivous, so your ISP ends up eating the costs.
as long as 100% of the available bandwidth isn't used it doesn't matter if some users consume more than others
It costs MORE MONEY to build your infrastructure with faster pipes, or upgrade existing ones. You can do some tricks with peak/off-peak bandwidth shaping, but really, higher usage always costs more.
What if, instead of this encoding, they used twelve time slots for each pixel and, by either sending or not sending a pulse, transmitted a small amount of information with each (non)pulse?
Doesn't work that simply or easily over an unreliable medium... A BIRD flying by at the wrong time could turn a string of ones into zeros. Plus there are similar issues of clock-sync... With a long run of zeros, is your timing precise enough on both ends to ensure that you know EXACTLY how many zeros there were supposed to be in that time period of no signal? Maybe it was 200 zeros, maybe it was 199?
But it's probably more of an issue that sending "zeros" at all, ever, wasn't an option. They were piggy-backing on a laser being used for other purposes, they couldn't shut it off for however long they wanted... They could only modify the routine slightly, to test of a proof of concept. And with a proof of concept, a visual representation is a lot easier to comprehend (see the photo before reed-solomon ECC) than a lot of statistics...
Since we don't have data caps whatsoever, even on most mobile broadband - connections, does that mean we're somehow being unfair? Incompetent? Both, even?
If a very small percentage of people are using-up a rather large percentage of the available bandwidth, then yes, that's unfair. The average prices across the board must be higher to subsidize those few, while others who want modest service have to pay higher prices.
Now, once the price of a megabyte of data gets cheap enough, the cost of all that equipment to meter each customer, and the billing infrastructure to charge them different rates, plus the extra support personnel to deal with angry customers becomes the larger cost, and flat rates for service are cheaper for everyone, and only the rare, occasional massive service abuser needs to be tracked down and punished.
With modest-speed wired connections, that has long been the case, but changed when bandwidth heavy services like high-def video streaming really took off in a big way, and the networks had to be upgraded to avoid the impending congestion collapse. That's reignited the debate.
With wireless, we've never reached that point. People may decide to save money by tethering their cell phone to their home network, and proceed to watch streaming videos, and download obscene amounts of data. Sprint is the only hold-out that isn't throttling or charging customers for going over a quota, and as a consequence, people with their service complain about having a great signal to the nearest cell tower, while internet speeds from it are so slow that even browsing the web is painfully slow, never mind streaming music.
I can't say what the difference is between the US and Finland. It could well be cultural, geographical, terrain or regulatory (making it far cheaper to upgrade network infrastructure), population density, or any of hundreds of other issues.
The US should have been building the fiber lines based around a munipal/county model much the way most water/sewer systems work where the city/county government installs and maintains the lines and then leases out that line to whatever ISP the customer wants.
Water and sewer line technology hasn't changed in centuries. But over a decade ago, before fibre really took off, you would have been advocating municipalities develop cities' data infrastructure with coax lines or regular analog phone lines, and we'd be stuck with the greater expense of maintaining that infrastructure. In fact, that was about the time technology came along to allow phone, TV, and internet on the same line, so you might have been advocating muni's build 3 sets of lines...
And what's more, technology has already advanced to the point that fibre isn't the obvious option any more. Most people have cell phones with internet access, many have tablets with cellular data plans, and most everyone has a laptop or other device that has WiFi, and they want to be able to use it everywhere they go... So today, instead of fibre to the home, it looks like fibre to the block with something like WiFi to distribute it to homes is both more economical and convenient for people.
But then the wireless service you're paying for only works around your city, so maybe we should really be going for fibre to the neighborhood, and cellular protocols (4G LTE) to the home, with roaming agreements... Sounds great, now, but a while ago it would have been the slower WiMax, instead, and when 4.5G technologies come along, people will be upset at the slow speeds their muni's are providing. Or maybe things will go the other way, and once the 802.11 auto-negotiation standards go through, WiFi APs will form a faster, seamless and more reliable network than cellular technologies. It's a gamble, which ever way you go.
And besides all that, once we've pulled that far back from fibre to the home, there's no need for a monopoly, natural or otherwise, any more, and people are going to question why cities are spending money on this, rather than just giving tax breaks and franchising agreements to ensure their areas have good and fast cellular coverage...
And in addition, you're faced with the problems of each muni' having varying degrees of competency, corruption, and the taxpayers being on the hook no matter how badly they screw up... If Verizon/AT&T over-reaches and can't make a profit on their FTTH service, needs to charge insane rates, and can't turn a profit on it, most people just don't pay their prices, and their investors eat it, not me. Once they've failed, they'll drop the prices down to reasonable levels to salvage whatever money they can out of it, and the public gets the benefit of it. Honestly, if it's such a good idea, form a non-profit org to do it, let them negotiate a reasonable franchise agreement, and let them succeed or fail, rather than dipping into government funds at the expense of schools, police, roads, etc.
Besides, internet may be a necessity, but very high-speed or even very reliable internet isn't needed by everyone (though it may be hard to believe for folks on an IT-centric site like/.), and there's an ever-increasing number of options for those people. If I wasn't streaming video, or using my home system as a modest server for light work-related purposes, my web browsing needs could be entirely met by WiFi tethering of my ~$25/mo cell phone's 3G data service from Ting.
I had a 25MHz, x486 netbook with about 100MBytes of HDD, built by compaq in the mid 90s. I upgraded it to 20MBytes of RAM and a big fast hard drive in the early 2000s, and added a PCMCIA WiFi card along-side my 100BaseTx card.
It ran quite nicely with Linux or FreeBSD. Of course I would put the HDD in a modern computer to install the OS, mainly because I had nothing else to boot from in there. I didn't keep it as a paperweight, either... It had serial ports, which made it perfect for console connections to Cisco routers, switches, Unix servers, and whatnot. SSH was cpu-hungry, but plenty fast enough, which was how the netBook got most of its use. Links was pretty good for web browsing, before the world switched to CSS and nobody told Links how to render it (like Dillo as well). It could run X, even old Gnome from Slackware 3.3, but that was painful. X was to low-res to be particularly useful to me, and screen was a fine substitute.
It was a great system because of its size, alone. So easy to carry around, a perfectly good keyboard, and so worthless I never feared dropping it, or leaving it out where it might be stolen. And in some ways better than anything you can buy today, at any price... Namely, it had a trackball for the pointer, which is vastly superior to the pointing devices found on any laptop today. Not to mention built-in RS-232 port that worked with devices that won't talk to USB converters.
In the mid 00's I bought a real laptop from Sotec/Averatec. It was heavy, hot, un-ergonomic, trackpads are a nightmare, and had no end of trouble with it. Not worth jack, yet set me back a grand. I actually threw the nice new laptop in a drawer, and went back to using the 486!
Around the same time I was experimenting with PDAs. Psion's 5MX with full keyboard had an amazing form-factor, and let me write-up entire documents with full formatting and embedded graphs, and print directly with IRDA to a nearby laserjet. I so wanted it to be a workable replacement, but the screen resolution was a bit too low, the terminal emulators weren't good enough, the CPU was on the slow side even for text, no good SSH clients existed for the platform, and they never sold ethernet or wifi adapters for the device, so it was a non-starter. Still, the month of life on 2xAAs, servicable keyboard, and pocket-size were very compelling.
My 486 netbook didn't stop being used until Asus repeated history, and gave me something cheap, with a decent keyboard, ethernet, wifi, light weight and compact size. I have two of them, so I'm set for quite a while.
Tablets aren't going to cut it, nor are smartphones. They don't have the basic expansion ports I've needed for the past two decades, and getting the basic utils going is more effort than it should be.
However, I'd really like to see ARM netBooks... Longer battery life, lower weight, cost, etc., so long as they have basic expansion options. Since Linux/BSD is open source, compiling for different CPUs is pretty easy... I just have to wait for a worthwhile device to come along.
Netbooks aren't a fad... they just outgrew their target market, and then crashed on the glut of supply with minimal demand. I'll keep buying, as will many others, if any company out there keeps making them, with reasonable specs.
That said... BRING BACK THE TRACKBALL ON NETBOOKS!!!
country number two would raise our reletive position in the rankings (but not our absolute position).
Not true. You missed the point. If your country were larger, it would encompass "country number two", and your average scores would drop. eg. Merge Canada and Mexico. Merge Germany and the Czech Republic. etc.
We could as a nation prioritize economic wellbeing for all rather than for the few at the top.
That's all fine and well, but misunderstanding statistics isn't a good basis for making new policies.
Yes, here in Europe every country has an African country on its border to compensate
Germany borders the Czech Republic, Italy borders Slovenia, as does Austria. Go a little further east and the disparity is far more significant. Nordic countries border Russia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, etc.
And there's simply no denying European countries are smaller than US states, often quite drastically smaller. That's a huge sampling bias. Canada may do well on tests, but they're only 1/10th the population of the US. Let's lump them in with Mexico and watch their average test scores drop drastically.
The smaller your sample size, the better the chance of extremes.
And there's the key. Our scores ARE abysmal, it's just that much of the blame goes to our failure to address the socio-economic divide rather than to our educational system.
Actually, it's the other way around. Other countries get the benefit of being smaller... Industrialized country #1 is 1/10th the size of the US, and has lots of rich people, but their neighboring country (#2), with the slums and poorly educated children, doesn't get counted against country #1's scores. And hey, country #2 may be so badly off that they don't even get counted as industrialized, and aren't ranked at all! Everybody wins!
Now in the US, if you were to divide it up by state, you'd find some do extremely well compared to other countries, while others do extremely poorly. If we follow the model of the rest of the world, we can just throw them out to create their own country, and stop being a drain on the rest of us, and lowering our average scores all-around.
If nobody has jobs anymore we better transition to an economy where everything the robots produce is free.
Not free, but extremely inexpensive... They will drive prices down to the point that someone making sandwiches can afford new cars, TVs, etc.
You'll notice that we don't have hundreds of accountants in corporate offices anymore, having been mostly replaced by a few computers instead, yet the people who might have become accountants aren't sitting around waiting for work and starving...
People redirect their abilities to new tasks when the world changes. The pain is only in the short-term. Long-term, people are able to buy more things, while doing less work to get them.
They claim that limiting magazine sizes or assault rifles would not be effective in stopping bad guys from slaughtering tons of people, but then they also demand unlimited magazine sizes and an unassailable right to buy assault rifles because they are required for effective personal defense.
I don't know any gun nuts who claim they NEED assault weapons to defend themselves. They want them because they want them, end of story. You probably don't NEED the SUV you drive, or your 70" HDTV either, but a ban on them wouldn't be a good idea. As far as effectiveness, I'd bet on a repeating shotgun with buckshot being able to take down more people in less time than an assault rifle.
That the assault weapons ban was ineffective is pretty convincingly proven by the studies that have been performed.
More fundamentally, gun supporters tacitly assume that nothing should be done regarding guns unless it is a perfect solution
And fundamentally, gun-control advocates tacitly assume that any and every empty anti-gun law should be passed, no matter how ineffective it is at it's stated goal, yet unnecessarily onerous to those who wish to stay within the law.
If I could pay $20 for a crappy low-end phone that ran Android that would last 6 months, I'd seriously consider it. At that rate, I'd spend $40/yr. which is under half the price I pay now for a cheap Virgin phone (which I buy outright).
The Alcatel Venture costs $40, and will probably last for a year. If nothing else, you can buy it some place that'll give you a 3-year extended warranty for $15 more....
Perhaps the learning curve to do this on android is higher than it is on the pi
No, there's existing Android apps that will perform most commonly desired functions, like this one. The learning curve to do this on Android is EXTREMELY low.
Also where does one find android phones cheap? Where does one get batteries once the current ones expire?
Amazon.com sells a brand new Alcatel Lucent for $40 w/free shipping. Personally, I'd look for higher-end phones with cracked screens on eBay, which sell for little more than the cost of shipping.
Amazon.com also sells replacement batteries for many models of cell phones, even less popular ones. But that's not strictly necessary, as you can run a cell phone off of a few rechargeable AAs if you are so inclined.
As far as I see there is nothing wrong with using the tools that you are familiar with, interested in, and have laying around over something that you are not familiar with, have no interest in and would have to go out and purchase.
No, there's nothing wrong with that, but it doesn't make it a practical usage, which is why I chimed-in to say so.
Ummmm, I'm reminded of Perl's slogan, theres more than one way to do it.
Perl is a mess. Probably not the project to idolize or draw life lessons from.
An old android cell phone isn't a general purpose device. Thus it has limits that the Pi was designed to eliminate.
That's just circular logic, with no basis in fact.
And Android phone is every bit a "general purpose" device by any definition. You don't get root access by default, but that doesn't make it cease to be a "general purpose" computer.
Please don't buy a Pi because that means there's one more available for the rest of us.
No problem there. I haven't yet thought of any purpose where the Pi is a cheaper or better fit than some other easily available commercial device. I'm sure there's SOMETHING out there that it's good at, but I haven't found it, and none of the Pi evangelizers seem to be able to list anything, either.
H.264 has an in-loop deblocking filter built-in to the codec. Turn that up when encoding and viewers never be able to see macroblocks. However, it's computationally complex, so decoders may shut that off on non-reference frames for an easy speed-up that people don't know. The deblocking filter works so well that it is better than non-block based codecs like Dirac/Snow/M-JPEG2000.
Going to uncompressed (or losslessly compressed) formats is completely unnecessary, and a HUGE waste of space and bandwidth people will never see.
If someone is trying to say how useful a Raspberry Pi is, it had better be an example where there aren't other products which do the job cheaper, better, and faster all around.
If you are doing it just because you like to experiment or "play", I don't have the slightest objection, as long as you're up-front about it, and don't pretend it's a practical usage case.
I don't have an old Android phone. What now, o' wise one?
A BRAND NEW Alcatel Venture costs under $40, with free shipping, from Amazon.com right NOW. That should be less expensive than a Pi + webcam.
Personally, I'd buy a much higher-end phone with cracked screen off of eBay for little more than the cost of shipping, but I know that option doesn't appeal to everyone...
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Nope, Minidiscs were dead long before that. CD-Burners are what killed it. It was cheap and easy to burn your MP3 collection to an audio CD you could play anywhere, so that's what people did. Then with the advent of portable CD players which could play regular MP3 files burned to CD-R, MiniDisc was doomed.
Battery-life for Sony's MiniDisc players/recorders was always about 4-5X better than Sony's portable CD players. If you're complaining about battery life, it's because you're comparing devices from entirely different generations. Go find one of Sony's earliest CD players with (3 second!) skip protections. As I recall, battery life was 2-4 hours. No doubt your Minidisc does far better.
You mean for USB transfers... You could just hit the "record" button and connect it to your sound-card via analog or digital cables. And there certainly were 3rd party programs put together because Sony's software sucked so badly.
ATRAC and Minidiscs pre-date MP3s. It's actually a based on MP2, and a very good quality format. If Minidiscs could even play MP3s directly, the battery life you think was "horrible" would have leap-frogged to "god-awful".
The "Audio Home Recording Act" of 1992 was the cause, as it MANDATED copy production in CONSUMER products that could make digital recordings. This timing coincides with the introduction of MiniDiscs, DCC tapes, and shortly after DAT tapes. There are NO competing products that lack copy protection. Even stand-alone CD recorders (not computer drives) have built-in copy protection like SCMS found on Minidiscs, DATs, and DCC. The only blame Sony has, in this, is not FIGHTING against this legislation harder, though they had ample resources to do so, and were more interested than any other manufacturer, with the possible exception of Philips.
There are two exceptions, which is why we aren't completely inundated with SCMS today.
The first is that the law only applies to "consumer" products. If you purchase more expensive studio DAT recorders, you can get away without SCMS. The same is true of Minidisc, though, there were Tascam units that would ignore SCMS and allow unlimited copying.
The second is computers. Apparently, they don't qualify under the act as consumer audio recording devices, so if you make your recording devices stupid enough, and require a computer to shift the bits around, then you don't need to implement copy protection.
I've almost completely stopped reading /. in favor of ArsTechnica. The editors and articles are certainly far better, and there's plenty of original content, rather than just a paragraph excerpt. On the negative side, they don't have a very good comment system, which would be conducive to interesting discussions... Still though, there's enough smart people over there that chime-in with better insights than the crap you'll find on /. these days.
Second, there's Popular Science. They do a far better job covering the up and coming technological advancements, which /. at least used-to have stories about... You know... before it was all global warming trolling by the editors. PS is a good place to stay updated on developments in carbon nanotubes, battery tech, etc. If that's too dumbed-down for you, an alternative is sciencemag.
Hacker news in an interesting one, but their unwillingness to post even a basic summary makes them useless for me. And they post far too many stories a day to makes discussion possible, and the sheer volume naturally lowers the article signal/noise ratio and quality.
This kind of crap is why I hardly read slashdot anymore, after 15 years of daily reading and tens of thousands of comments...
Sure! That could happen... if our missile defense systems are designed by morons.
Otherwise, no, that wouldn't happen, because a defensive system will be perfectly capable of distinguishing between threats and dummies. Hell, the hard part of missile defense systems is making sure they don't accidentally take out friendly jets, so they'll already be designed with the kind of intelligence they need to make this distinction.
In addition, it could be a completely non-nonsensical question depending on the defense system used... If we're talking about lasers, anything with a nuclear generator has unlimited ammo. If we're talking about rail-guns, then the ammo is extremely tiny, and a huge amount can be carried aboard-ship.
If we're talking about current CIWS systems, then in the list of all the limitations the system has, the need to CARRY ENOUGH AMMO doesn't even make the top-5 actual concerns.
And let's not forget that the DEPLOYMENT of such systems might just be fairly important... Ships can START MOVING when they're being inundated with incoming missiles. They can CALL FOR HELP and get it. They can LAUNCH AN OFFENSIVE ATTACK against the source of these incoming missiles as soon as the barrage is spotted lifting off, over the horizon.
Slashdot... news for 5-year olds.
Solar power can EASILY supply vastly more power than humanity is currently using, and more than it is projected to use for thousands of years into the future.
Maintenance costs are significant. You can't just leave the equipment there and believe it'll keep working. Lines break all the time and need personel to go out and fix themm quickly. Network equipment like routers need hot backups and service contracts, which are only available for 3 years at a time or so, meaning all your network equipment is getting replaced every, say, 5 years, just like servers.
Changing the "signaling" would give you a small one-time boost, not something you can just keep doing to get infinite bandwidth. And with those higher speed links, your network equipment needs to be able to route the increasing throughput without dropping too many of them.
And let's not forget the good old "back hoe" analogy... when it's obvious someone made a mistake and cut your lines, you can force them to pay for the repair costs, but more often than not it's not traceable and obivous, so your ISP ends up eating the costs.
It costs MORE MONEY to build your infrastructure with faster pipes, or upgrade existing ones. You can do some tricks with peak/off-peak bandwidth shaping, but really, higher usage always costs more.
Shame on you for reading Slashdot, and all the inflamatory and trolling article summaries this place has turned in to.
CmdrTaco knew what was coming after /.'s change of ownership before us. We should all follow his good example and get the hell out of here.
I recomend ArsTechnica, PopularScience, and HackerNews. None of which has a good discussion forums, but I'm open to suggestions for others.
Doesn't work that simply or easily over an unreliable medium... A BIRD flying by at the wrong time could turn a string of ones into zeros. Plus there are similar issues of clock-sync... With a long run of zeros, is your timing precise enough on both ends to ensure that you know EXACTLY how many zeros there were supposed to be in that time period of no signal? Maybe it was 200 zeros, maybe it was 199?
But it's probably more of an issue that sending "zeros" at all, ever, wasn't an option. They were piggy-backing on a laser being used for other purposes, they couldn't shut it off for however long they wanted... They could only modify the routine slightly, to test of a proof of concept. And with a proof of concept, a visual representation is a lot easier to comprehend (see the photo before reed-solomon ECC) than a lot of statistics...
If a very small percentage of people are using-up a rather large percentage of the available bandwidth, then yes, that's unfair. The average prices across the board must be higher to subsidize those few, while others who want modest service have to pay higher prices.
Now, once the price of a megabyte of data gets cheap enough, the cost of all that equipment to meter each customer, and the billing infrastructure to charge them different rates, plus the extra support personnel to deal with angry customers becomes the larger cost, and flat rates for service are cheaper for everyone, and only the rare, occasional massive service abuser needs to be tracked down and punished.
With modest-speed wired connections, that has long been the case, but changed when bandwidth heavy services like high-def video streaming really took off in a big way, and the networks had to be upgraded to avoid the impending congestion collapse. That's reignited the debate.
With wireless, we've never reached that point. People may decide to save money by tethering their cell phone to their home network, and proceed to watch streaming videos, and download obscene amounts of data. Sprint is the only hold-out that isn't throttling or charging customers for going over a quota, and as a consequence, people with their service complain about having a great signal to the nearest cell tower, while internet speeds from it are so slow that even browsing the web is painfully slow, never mind streaming music.
I can't say what the difference is between the US and Finland. It could well be cultural, geographical, terrain or regulatory (making it far cheaper to upgrade network infrastructure), population density, or any of hundreds of other issues.
Water and sewer line technology hasn't changed in centuries. But over a decade ago, before fibre really took off, you would have been advocating municipalities develop cities' data infrastructure with coax lines or regular analog phone lines, and we'd be stuck with the greater expense of maintaining that infrastructure. In fact, that was about the time technology came along to allow phone, TV, and internet on the same line, so you might have been advocating muni's build 3 sets of lines...
And what's more, technology has already advanced to the point that fibre isn't the obvious option any more. Most people have cell phones with internet access, many have tablets with cellular data plans, and most everyone has a laptop or other device that has WiFi, and they want to be able to use it everywhere they go... So today, instead of fibre to the home, it looks like fibre to the block with something like WiFi to distribute it to homes is both more economical and convenient for people.
But then the wireless service you're paying for only works around your city, so maybe we should really be going for fibre to the neighborhood, and cellular protocols (4G LTE) to the home, with roaming agreements... Sounds great, now, but a while ago it would have been the slower WiMax, instead, and when 4.5G technologies come along, people will be upset at the slow speeds their muni's are providing. Or maybe things will go the other way, and once the 802.11 auto-negotiation standards go through, WiFi APs will form a faster, seamless and more reliable network than cellular technologies. It's a gamble, which ever way you go.
And besides all that, once we've pulled that far back from fibre to the home, there's no need for a monopoly, natural or otherwise, any more, and people are going to question why cities are spending money on this, rather than just giving tax breaks and franchising agreements to ensure their areas have good and fast cellular coverage...
And in addition, you're faced with the problems of each muni' having varying degrees of competency, corruption, and the taxpayers being on the hook no matter how badly they screw up... If Verizon/AT&T over-reaches and can't make a profit on their FTTH service, needs to charge insane rates, and can't turn a profit on it, most people just don't pay their prices, and their investors eat it, not me. Once they've failed, they'll drop the prices down to reasonable levels to salvage whatever money they can out of it, and the public gets the benefit of it. Honestly, if it's such a good idea, form a non-profit org to do it, let them negotiate a reasonable franchise agreement, and let them succeed or fail, rather than dipping into government funds at the expense of schools, police, roads, etc.
Besides, internet may be a necessity, but very high-speed or even very reliable internet isn't needed by everyone (though it may be hard to believe for folks on an IT-centric site like /.), and there's an ever-increasing number of options for those people. If I wasn't streaming video, or using my home system as a modest server for light work-related purposes, my web browsing needs could be entirely met by WiFi tethering of my ~$25/mo cell phone's 3G data service from Ting.
I had a 25MHz, x486 netbook with about 100MBytes of HDD, built by compaq in the mid 90s. I upgraded it to 20MBytes of RAM and a big fast hard drive in the early 2000s, and added a PCMCIA WiFi card along-side my 100BaseTx card.
It ran quite nicely with Linux or FreeBSD. Of course I would put the HDD in a modern computer to install the OS, mainly because I had nothing else to boot from in there. I didn't keep it as a paperweight, either... It had serial ports, which made it perfect for console connections to Cisco routers, switches, Unix servers, and whatnot. SSH was cpu-hungry, but plenty fast enough, which was how the netBook got most of its use. Links was pretty good for web browsing, before the world switched to CSS and nobody told Links how to render it (like Dillo as well). It could run X, even old Gnome from Slackware 3.3, but that was painful. X was to low-res to be particularly useful to me, and screen was a fine substitute.
It was a great system because of its size, alone. So easy to carry around, a perfectly good keyboard, and so worthless I never feared dropping it, or leaving it out where it might be stolen. And in some ways better than anything you can buy today, at any price... Namely, it had a trackball for the pointer, which is vastly superior to the pointing devices found on any laptop today. Not to mention built-in RS-232 port that worked with devices that won't talk to USB converters.
In the mid 00's I bought a real laptop from Sotec/Averatec. It was heavy, hot, un-ergonomic, trackpads are a nightmare, and had no end of trouble with it. Not worth jack, yet set me back a grand. I actually threw the nice new laptop in a drawer, and went back to using the 486!
Around the same time I was experimenting with PDAs. Psion's 5MX with full keyboard had an amazing form-factor, and let me write-up entire documents with full formatting and embedded graphs, and print directly with IRDA to a nearby laserjet. I so wanted it to be a workable replacement, but the screen resolution was a bit too low, the terminal emulators weren't good enough, the CPU was on the slow side even for text, no good SSH clients existed for the platform, and they never sold ethernet or wifi adapters for the device, so it was a non-starter. Still, the month of life on 2xAAs, servicable keyboard, and pocket-size were very compelling.
My 486 netbook didn't stop being used until Asus repeated history, and gave me something cheap, with a decent keyboard, ethernet, wifi, light weight and compact size. I have two of them, so I'm set for quite a while.
Tablets aren't going to cut it, nor are smartphones. They don't have the basic expansion ports I've needed for the past two decades, and getting the basic utils going is more effort than it should be.
However, I'd really like to see ARM netBooks... Longer battery life, lower weight, cost, etc., so long as they have basic expansion options. Since Linux/BSD is open source, compiling for different CPUs is pretty easy... I just have to wait for a worthwhile device to come along.
Netbooks aren't a fad... they just outgrew their target market, and then crashed on the glut of supply with minimal demand. I'll keep buying, as will many others, if any company out there keeps making them, with reasonable specs.
That said... BRING BACK THE TRACKBALL ON NETBOOKS!!!
Not true. You missed the point. If your country were larger, it would encompass "country number two", and your average scores would drop. eg. Merge Canada and Mexico. Merge Germany and the Czech Republic. etc.
That's all fine and well, but misunderstanding statistics isn't a good basis for making new policies.
Germany borders the Czech Republic, Italy borders Slovenia, as does Austria. Go a little further east and the disparity is far more significant. Nordic countries border Russia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, etc.
And there's simply no denying European countries are smaller than US states, often quite drastically smaller. That's a huge sampling bias. Canada may do well on tests, but they're only 1/10th the population of the US. Let's lump them in with Mexico and watch their average test scores drop drastically.
The smaller your sample size, the better the chance of extremes.
Actually, it's the other way around. Other countries get the benefit of being smaller... Industrialized country #1 is 1/10th the size of the US, and has lots of rich people, but their neighboring country (#2), with the slums and poorly educated children, doesn't get counted against country #1's scores. And hey, country #2 may be so badly off that they don't even get counted as industrialized, and aren't ranked at all! Everybody wins!
Now in the US, if you were to divide it up by state, you'd find some do extremely well compared to other countries, while others do extremely poorly. If we follow the model of the rest of the world, we can just throw them out to create their own country, and stop being a drain on the rest of us, and lowering our average scores all-around.
Not free, but extremely inexpensive... They will drive prices down to the point that someone making sandwiches can afford new cars, TVs, etc.
You'll notice that we don't have hundreds of accountants in corporate offices anymore, having been mostly replaced by a few computers instead, yet the people who might have become accountants aren't sitting around waiting for work and starving...
People redirect their abilities to new tasks when the world changes. The pain is only in the short-term. Long-term, people are able to buy more things, while doing less work to get them.
I don't know any gun nuts who claim they NEED assault weapons to defend themselves. They want them because they want them, end of story. You probably don't NEED the SUV you drive, or your 70" HDTV either, but a ban on them wouldn't be a good idea. As far as effectiveness, I'd bet on a repeating shotgun with buckshot being able to take down more people in less time than an assault rifle.
That the assault weapons ban was ineffective is pretty convincingly proven by the studies that have been performed.
And fundamentally, gun-control advocates tacitly assume that any and every empty anti-gun law should be passed, no matter how ineffective it is at it's stated goal, yet unnecessarily onerous to those who wish to stay within the law.
FWIW: I do not, and never have owned any gun.
You "never put it together", when the FIRST LINE of the second article says:
"A week ago, you read the other side of the same question"
And also includes a link to the first article?
-1 Illiteracy
The Alcatel Venture costs $40, and will probably last for a year. If nothing else, you can buy it some place that'll give you a 3-year extended warranty for $15 more....
No, there's existing Android apps that will perform most commonly desired functions, like this one. The learning curve to do this on Android is EXTREMELY low.
Amazon.com sells a brand new Alcatel Lucent for $40 w/free shipping. Personally, I'd look for higher-end phones with cracked screens on eBay, which sell for little more than the cost of shipping.
Amazon.com also sells replacement batteries for many models of cell phones, even less popular ones. But that's not strictly necessary, as you can run a cell phone off of a few rechargeable AAs if you are so inclined.
No, there's nothing wrong with that, but it doesn't make it a practical usage, which is why I chimed-in to say so.
Perl is a mess. Probably not the project to idolize or draw life lessons from.
That's just circular logic, with no basis in fact.
And Android phone is every bit a "general purpose" device by any definition. You don't get root access by default, but that doesn't make it cease to be a "general purpose" computer.
No problem there. I haven't yet thought of any purpose where the Pi is a cheaper or better fit than some other easily available commercial device. I'm sure there's SOMETHING out there that it's good at, but I haven't found it, and none of the Pi evangelizers seem to be able to list anything, either.
H.264 has an in-loop deblocking filter built-in to the codec. Turn that up when encoding and viewers never be able to see macroblocks. However, it's computationally complex, so decoders may shut that off on non-reference frames for an easy speed-up that people don't know. The deblocking filter works so well that it is better than non-block based codecs like Dirac/Snow/M-JPEG2000.
Going to uncompressed (or losslessly compressed) formats is completely unnecessary, and a HUGE waste of space and bandwidth people will never see.
I phrased the question that way because I don't EXPECT to get an answer.
I am very open to getting an intelligent response that I had simply never thought of, but I think that's pretty unlikely.
If someone is trying to say how useful a Raspberry Pi is, it had better be an example where there aren't other products which do the job cheaper, better, and faster all around.
If you are doing it just because you like to experiment or "play", I don't have the slightest objection, as long as you're up-front about it, and don't pretend it's a practical usage case.
A BRAND NEW Alcatel Venture costs under $40, with free shipping, from Amazon.com right NOW. That should be less expensive than a Pi + webcam.
Personally, I'd buy a much higher-end phone with cracked screen off of eBay for little more than the cost of shipping, but I know that option doesn't appeal to everyone...