In an age when video cameras and recording devices are virtually everywhere, it's difficult to believe that it wasn't always possible to walk into a Wal-Mart or Best Buy store with $50 and leave with a new video recorder.
Yes, difficult to believe... if you're 16 years old. Jesus, it was less than 20 years ago that VCRs became ubiquitous.
The science of magnetically recording video images is so mature today that it's taken completely for granted,
Tell that to someone without a DVR... I was just digitizing VHS tapes the other day, and the memories came flooding back, of eaten tapes, tons of visual glitches, tapes deteriorating from age or repeated recordings, etc. Magnetic tape recording seems very iffy, even today.
That whole article is a waste of time. Extremely verbose and filled with hyperbole, and yet very little to say.
I strongly recomend the (defacement-proof link) Wikipedia Ampex article which I found infinitely more informative and concise than this article, when I was reading up on the history of broadcast a few weeks ago.
What you're talking about with Tivo is a very high-level thing, such as were they stored data on disk, using a database to organize it, etc. They didn't invent anything, they just put existing tools to work for them.
Tivo was the first successful use of mass market MPEG-2 recording.
Since when did "successful" or "mass market" have anything to do with patents?
They also, to the best of my knowledge, have honored the GPL and released their GPL tainted code back.
Good for them, but that's completely besides the point.
3) User interface - don't even try to tell me this is derivative of any VCR interface that exists today.
No, it's not like a VCR, it's much more like old computer menu systems. Besides, you don't patent an interface, it's just protected under standard copyright, just like Windows, Mac OS X, etc.
Tivo's GUI is 6 years old and it still works well.
Again, that has nothing to do with this at all. This is sounding more and more like your own little personal Tivo commercial, having nothing to do with patents or prior art.
4) 30-sec skip,
Something every single computer video player had, from Quicktime to WMP.
wish lists, filters, etc.
Have you ever heard of a database. This is all absolutely trivial to do on any sort of information you have available.
might be considered standard now but when Tivo implemented them, they were revolutionary to the TV market and pre-digital TV.
Good for Tivo. They moved digital into the living room, and all the people who had never used a computer before were amazed...
There's still nothing at all remotely patentable in this list.
But they don't reduce their outputs dramatically. They prefer to run more near full capacity.
Actually, they do reduce their output to almost nothing, at least around here (CA).
Of course they would prefer if they could run at full capacity 24/7, but that's not for technical reasons (which keep hydro plants operating) but because they simply want to make more money (as quickly as possible) on their power plant investment.
Of course they chose not to, because wind, hydro, and nuclear completely under-cuts them, up until you get power demand in-excess what those facilities are producing.
Well I don't know, but it seems plausible to me that in something the size of a PDA or phone, the size difference between CF and SD would be significant.
The tiniest of cell-phones, I can understand, but most that have SD slots are rather large to begin with, and an extra few MMs would hardly be noticable.
PDAs have been using CF cards for a long time. I have a couple myself with CF card slots, and they aren't any larger than modern PDAs.
Still, try to explain something like digital cameras to me. They need a lot of storage space, they are large enough that there's plenty of room for CF slots, the large majority used-to use CF cards, etc.
IIRC CF is faster, and at least as big, and maybe cheaper per MB though I'm not sure about that one.
Just walk into your nearest elecetronics store, or visit http://www.pricewatch.com/ . They really are 50% less for the same ammount of storage.
Don't tell me they can accurately predict such with their computer models and can't get me correct weather predictions 5-10 days out.
I can tell you exactly that. Those two fields are completely different subjects, and the larger is much easier to model.
Your local weather is affected by very small phenomenon, such as which direction the clouds and ground-level winds go, while those details are completely insignificant on a global scale.
It's the same as anything else. They can't tell you where and when a hurricane will form, but they can rather accurately tell you that there will be, eg. 24 tropical storms this year, and the average severity of them.
You've got that backwards. Steam plants (coal, gas, oil... burning anything) run 24/7 whereas hydro only works when it can (when the river height differences are great enough to make it more efficient) and when it's needed during peak hours. Dams don't run 24/7.
Coal/Gas/Oil plants can easily reduce the ammount of fuel they burn, dramatically reducing their output.
Hydro plants can also scale up/down their output, but they can never completely stop. If they stop, that means no water at all is flowing down-river, and environmentalists get mighty upset about thirsty plants and animals. So they waste quite a bit of power at night, since there's nobody to use it.
The Racoon Mountain facility you mention is just a completely different beast than 99% of hydro electric plants.
Pretty soon we'll be paying $10,000 for a 128MB card smaller than a grain of sand, which we'll constantly be losing, because it slips between the cells in our fingers...
I really, really, really don't get why companies are going this way. I can only assume the SD guys are giving hardware manufacturers a cut of the royalties...
Solar output power may be easy to measure, but strong but invisible irradiation from the cosmos, of an unknown source/nature not yet discovered, directed at our solar system, possibly from other stars, bodies in space, or "the aliens" (tm), for instance, is not easy to measure, and could in theory effect both earths and mars.
You're going very far out on a limb there. If it's enough energy to affect the tempurature of the globe, we'll notice it. There are so many dishes pointed at the sky it would be hard to miss.
Besides, there's that whole inverse square law that pretty well elminiates the possibility that we're recieving lots of power from far away.
Do you know some secret method for separating oxygen and hydrogen out of water that doesn't require energy? If so, please share it with me, I want to get rich:^)
Set it out in the sun. Sure, it's using energy, but energy that would have been effectively wasted, anyhow.
If it takes X amount of energy to run a normal train, but 4X to produce the fuel cell, then is that really a good thing?
More energy is still cheaper and more "green" if you are getting it from nuclear, hydro, wind, solar, etc. It's also trivially easy to charge them off-peak, when the energy is cheaper to produce because it's available in excess.
4X wouldn't be a good number, but even 2X would work-out just fine, and there's no reason to assume it's anywhere near that bad, anyhow.
Instead of burning gasoline, you burn coal (or whatever) in the power plants. Is the efficiency of a power plant really so much better than your car?
Yes, it certainly is. Even when you count the line losses, charger losses, battery losses, etc., you still come out ahead of burning gasoline directly. Besides that, your car doesn't have complex exhaust filtering and control systems, as power plants do. And, NIMBY should apply here, since the power plants can be far away from you, and polluting where there are far, far fewer people to be affected by it.
Electric cars would likely be charged at night, as well, when a much lower percentage of that power is comming from coal, and more is comming from hydro, wind, etc.
No statistics from me. I've posted them to/. plenty of times before, and don't feel like looking them up yet again.
Solar increas accounts for only a fract. So what is that fraction? 999/1000?
At most, less than 1/3rd, according to scientists.
Nobody knows the details, nobody knows how much humans are forcing the change.
That's funny, because scientists in the field are giving rather exact details, including how much is a result of human impact. How long have you been a climatologist?
Could be solar, could be us, could be a lot of things.
No, Solar output is easily measurable, so it's not hard to disprove you tin-foil-hat types. Start listing these other things it could be, so I can go through the list, and discount them one by one.
NONE offer PCMCIA support (rendering my 5GB HDD useless)
If you want to use PCMCIA devices, you don't want a PDA, you want a small laptop.
There's no way you're getting a tiny handheld with a big PCMCIA slot in it.
If you want VGA (640x480) resolution, the most RAM you'll get is 64MB
Who cares? I've lot way too much data to trust the RAM for storage. Plug-in a CF or SD card for all the storage you could want. (I'm still pissed SD is getting more popular, when CF is more than small enough, and 50% less expensive)
I'm glad she got fired but she managed to kill the PocketPC platform just as it was gaining steam.
There's nothing she could have done to change the buggy, unstable, inflexible, data-corrupting nature of WinCE, which has always been it's downfall.
Personally, I gave-up on PDAs, iPaqs, etc. The ultra-lightweight notebooks from Toshiba and others have far faster CPUs, better screens, far more storage, flexibility, etc., and some have extremely long battery life, too. The PocketPC idea tried to do everything, while doing nothing well. Palm had a good niche, but they got too ambitious, and went the same way.
Please Mr. Rhetoric, explain to me the cause for the global warming currently transpiring on Mars.
That would probably be increased solar output. However, increased solar activity can only possibly account for a tiny fraction of observed global warming on the earth.
You left a bad taste in our mouths with your nagware/adware supported POS software back in the day.
Real came out with one nice, friendly version of RealPlayer, to change their rep, but it was just a ploy. The latest version has plenty of pop-ups and intrusions that can't be shut-off, and is just simply the worse media player around.
Now, at the time, PCI-X was seen as an interim measure, but Dell skipped it, instead opting to use PCIe across their desktop range.
Bullshit. PCI-X has been around for a long damn time, and NOBODY comitted to it. EVERYBODY skipped it, except for select few high-end systems that really needed it, before PCI-XYZ came along to completely replace it.
So it's not really 100% bullshit - the guy has some valid points.
No, actually not. Dell isn't at the end of the pack in adopting new technologies, but they certainly aren't leading the way. USB2 was a no-brainer, as were LCDs, etc.
You could use your same points to argue that HP is the leader as well, or IBM, or Apple, or...
What's to stop the government from seizing both you and your computer, flying you out of the country, and then torturing you until you give up the password?
Well, the obvious one being that installing a pinhole camera, keystroke logger, or parking a tempest van outside would be infinitely cheaper and easier.
Too many applications link against libraries they don't even use, causing gratuitous references to them, and slower startup times.
A variation on this is what pisses me off most... Hundreds of apps only use maybe 1 or 2 fuctions from the kde/gnome libraries, and for those 1 or 2 fuctions, you get 100MBs of needless memory usage (if you don't happen to already be using that specific desktop environment).
Yes, but "easy" is the key word there. Computers make no distinction between playback and copying, so ANYTHING can be downloaded. It's just a question of how much hassle do you want to put people through.
I don't run 32-bit or linux binary compatability, which rules out quite a bit for me.
and no win32 codecs for mplayer.
It's quite easy to compile MPlayer as a 32-bit binary on AMD64. That will allow you to use the win32 dlls, and there's really very little reason NOT to.
Buy why so many sites don't default to mpeg or mpeg2 is totally beyond me.
Bitrate. Quality. MPEG-1+MP2 is a good choice if you really don't want to play license fees, but it's really rather low-tech, and you'll need about 50% larger files to get similar quality. MPEG-2, don't even get me started. It's terrible at low bitrates.
Standards, people -- standards!
Quicktime is actually my favorite, these days. They use standard MPEG-4 and h.264 video, with AAC audio. All of which is natively supported by MPlayer, and most other video players, despite the licensing issues. Why sites are still using Real and WMV when Quicktime is 100% standard and incredibly widely, compatible is beyond-me.
Open formats, like Theora, would be even better.
After years and years, Theora still isn't any improvement over VP3. I'd say stick with VP3, which has good encoding tools on Windows/Mac, and can be played-back in WMP and Quicktime with a widely-available plug-in. Also, vorbis audio can be put into a MOV container fairly easily.
It's a shame the Theora project has gone nowhere and accomplished nothing in the past 5 years. It really could have been a great codec. For now, I'd probably stick with MPEG-1+MP2 for compatibility, and recomend Quicktime to others.
Would you prefer 1 Flash plugin or 4 seperate video plugins?
I'd prefer 1 video plugin which will play it all, give me full control, allow me to download the videos if I chose, be open source and compatible with any OS/browser, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, difficult to believe... if you're 16 years old. Jesus, it was less than 20 years ago that VCRs became ubiquitous.
Tell that to someone without a DVR... I was just digitizing VHS tapes the other day, and the memories came flooding back, of eaten tapes, tons of visual glitches, tapes deteriorating from age or repeated recordings, etc. Magnetic tape recording seems very iffy, even today.
That whole article is a waste of time. Extremely verbose and filled with hyperbole, and yet very little to say.
I strongly recomend the (defacement-proof link) Wikipedia Ampex article which I found infinitely more informative and concise than this article, when I was reading up on the history of broadcast a few weeks ago.
Entirely different.
What you're talking about with Tivo is a very high-level thing, such as were they stored data on disk, using a database to organize it, etc. They didn't invent anything, they just put existing tools to work for them.
That's not patentable either.
I think tvguide.com has the prior art there...
Since when did "successful" or "mass market" have anything to do with patents?
Good for them, but that's completely besides the point.
No, it's not like a VCR, it's much more like old computer menu systems. Besides, you don't patent an interface, it's just protected under standard copyright, just like Windows, Mac OS X, etc.
Again, that has nothing to do with this at all. This is sounding more and more like your own little personal Tivo commercial, having nothing to do with patents or prior art.
Something every single computer video player had, from Quicktime to WMP.
Have you ever heard of a database. This is all absolutely trivial to do on any sort of information you have available.
Good for Tivo. They moved digital into the living room, and all the people who had never used a computer before were amazed...
There's still nothing at all remotely patentable in this list.
Actually, they do reduce their output to almost nothing, at least around here (CA).
Of course they would prefer if they could run at full capacity 24/7, but that's not for technical reasons (which keep hydro plants operating) but because they simply want to make more money (as quickly as possible) on their power plant investment.
Of course they chose not to, because wind, hydro, and nuclear completely under-cuts them, up until you get power demand in-excess what those facilities are producing.
The tiniest of cell-phones, I can understand, but most that have SD slots are rather large to begin with, and an extra few MMs would hardly be noticable.
PDAs have been using CF cards for a long time. I have a couple myself with CF card slots, and they aren't any larger than modern PDAs.
Still, try to explain something like digital cameras to me. They need a lot of storage space, they are large enough that there's plenty of room for CF slots, the large majority used-to use CF cards, etc.
Just walk into your nearest elecetronics store, or visit http://www.pricewatch.com/ . They really are 50% less for the same ammount of storage.
I can tell you exactly that. Those two fields are completely different subjects, and the larger is much easier to model.
Your local weather is affected by very small phenomenon, such as which direction the clouds and ground-level winds go, while those details are completely insignificant on a global scale.
It's the same as anything else. They can't tell you where and when a hurricane will form, but they can rather accurately tell you that there will be, eg. 24 tropical storms this year, and the average severity of them.
Coal/Gas/Oil plants can easily reduce the ammount of fuel they burn, dramatically reducing their output.
Hydro plants can also scale up/down their output, but they can never completely stop. If they stop, that means no water at all is flowing down-river, and environmentalists get mighty upset about thirsty plants and animals. So they waste quite a bit of power at night, since there's nobody to use it.
The Racoon Mountain facility you mention is just a completely different beast than 99% of hydro electric plants.
Pretty soon we'll be paying $10,000 for a 128MB card smaller than a grain of sand, which we'll constantly be losing, because it slips between the cells in our fingers...
I really, really, really don't get why companies are going this way. I can only assume the SD guys are giving hardware manufacturers a cut of the royalties...
I have to say, I'm absolutely stunned that somebody considered this post deserving of a +1 Insightful mod...
You're going very far out on a limb there. If it's enough energy to affect the tempurature of the globe, we'll notice it. There are so many dishes pointed at the sky it would be hard to miss.
Besides, there's that whole inverse square law that pretty well elminiates the possibility that we're recieving lots of power from far away.
No, I'm not an idiot, and I'm not talking about evaporation.
See: http://www.pureenergysystems.com/news/2004/07/09/
Set it out in the sun. Sure, it's using energy, but energy that would have been effectively wasted, anyhow.
More energy is still cheaper and more "green" if you are getting it from nuclear, hydro, wind, solar, etc. It's also trivially easy to charge them off-peak, when the energy is cheaper to produce because it's available in excess.
4X wouldn't be a good number, but even 2X would work-out just fine, and there's no reason to assume it's anywhere near that bad, anyhow.
Yes, it certainly is. Even when you count the line losses, charger losses, battery losses, etc., you still come out ahead of burning gasoline directly. Besides that, your car doesn't have complex exhaust filtering and control systems, as power plants do. And, NIMBY should apply here, since the power plants can be far away from you, and polluting where there are far, far fewer people to be affected by it.
Electric cars would likely be charged at night, as well, when a much lower percentage of that power is comming from coal, and more is comming from hydro, wind, etc.
No statistics from me. I've posted them to
At most, less than 1/3rd, according to scientists.
That's funny, because scientists in the field are giving rather exact details, including how much is a result of human impact. How long have you been a climatologist?
No, Solar output is easily measurable, so it's not hard to disprove you tin-foil-hat types. Start listing these other things it could be, so I can go through the list, and discount them one by one.
If you want to use PCMCIA devices, you don't want a PDA, you want a small laptop.
There's no way you're getting a tiny handheld with a big PCMCIA slot in it.
Who cares? I've lot way too much data to trust the RAM for storage. Plug-in a CF or SD card for all the storage you could want. (I'm still pissed SD is getting more popular, when CF is more than small enough, and 50% less expensive)
There's nothing she could have done to change the buggy, unstable, inflexible, data-corrupting nature of WinCE, which has always been it's downfall.
Personally, I gave-up on PDAs, iPaqs, etc. The ultra-lightweight notebooks from Toshiba and others have far faster CPUs, better screens, far more storage, flexibility, etc., and some have extremely long battery life, too. The PocketPC idea tried to do everything, while doing nothing well. Palm had a good niche, but they got too ambitious, and went the same way.
That would probably be increased solar output. However, increased solar activity can only possibly account for a tiny fraction of observed global warming on the earth.
Real came out with one nice, friendly version of RealPlayer, to change their rep, but it was just a ploy. The latest version has plenty of pop-ups and intrusions that can't be shut-off, and is just simply the worse media player around.
Bullshit. PCI-X has been around for a long damn time, and NOBODY comitted to it. EVERYBODY skipped it, except for select few high-end systems that really needed it, before PCI-XYZ came along to completely replace it.
No, actually not. Dell isn't at the end of the pack in adopting new technologies, but they certainly aren't leading the way. USB2 was a no-brainer, as were LCDs, etc.
You could use your same points to argue that HP is the leader as well, or IBM, or Apple, or...
Well, the obvious one being that installing a pinhole camera, keystroke logger, or parking a tempest van outside would be infinitely cheaper and easier.
The second one being your brain, and a rubber-hose: http://iq.org/~proff/rubberhose.org/current/src/d
Very easy to do... You just take any +5 post, and mod it -1 Troll. Then you need to mod it +1 Underrated.
Having two accounts with mod points at the same time is the only challenging part, and that's really trivially easy.
A variation on this is what pisses me off most... Hundreds of apps only use maybe 1 or 2 fuctions from the kde/gnome libraries, and for those 1 or 2 fuctions, you get 100MBs of needless memory usage (if you don't happen to already be using that specific desktop environment).
Yes, but "easy" is the key word there. Computers make no distinction between playback and copying, so ANYTHING can be downloaded. It's just a question of how much hassle do you want to put people through.
I'd prefer 1 video plugin which will play it all, give me full control, allow me to download the videos if I chose, be open source and compatible with any OS/browser, etc.
http://mplayerplug-in.sourceforge.net/