I'll cede your points, but at the same time I can't help but see it as either excessive geekiness (where the owning and configuring is 99% of it, using it never happens much) or some kind of "lifestyle computing" where supercool IT guys in Prada outfits sit around coffeeshops managing servers.
And you could also tell someone on the phone what to type and where to click.
I guess my point is that with all the scrolling and tedius UI efforts, why bother? I guess maybe if you're a supersecret agent preventing the world from blowing up, fine, but does the office DB need to be worked on that bad that often?
I mean, do you really find yourself able to do very much from a Palm screen on a PC? The ssh connection might be valuable if you had one of those folding keyboards or a thumboard on the machine itself, but with just the stylus, what can you really do?
Since many are hooked to the internet 24/7, I'd love to see IMDB integration with Tivo -- have the details screen for a program show you an IMDB page (or IMDB data) for the given movie, with the ability to browse around and then pick selections for future wishlists, etc.
Can you buy anything with this and do any cable companies even support it (ie, issuing the cards)? I know it's a real standard, but it's not here yet that I know about.
It would enable a free-standing HD Tivo I could use with my HD cable service, since they could use the DirecTivo trick of recording the raw signal straight to disk, in addition to ditching the hated cable box.
I've always wondered why you couldn't use a similar system in a residential area. We have a lake behind our house that's about a mile around and about 8 feet deep on average; couldn't we (at least the immediate lakeshore residents, if not a larger amount of neighbors) use the lake water to augment our air conditioners?
You'd dump warm water back in, but this could be augmented somewhat by holding tanks and underground piping that cooled it back to ground temperature. If the lake was man-made, the environmental effect would be essentially nil, and you'd only have to worry about thermal calculations.
This might not make sense for retrofitting, but what about for new developments? People like lake/park areas, and there's no reason that a cooling pond couldn't be framed in a naturalistic setting.
I suppose it all comes back to commercial viability; it'd take a more expensive air conditioner capable of combining water cooling with electrical compressor cooling, the "community" would be responsible for the cooling pond and piping, and the electrical savings might not matter.
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What wars did we fight over banking specifically or usury generally?
IIRC, there's some Lyndon LaRouche-esque conspiracy linking the Windsors and the "global financial system", which might imply that US involvement in WWI/WWII could have been attributed to some fight over banking.
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[...]and that is something that Ashcroft should pay attention to (instead of all this patriot act and dmca crap).
Absolutely. It's sad that the government is so unwilling to do put any meaingful resources towards keeping markets free from fraud and corruption; allowing markets to be dominated by fraud and corruption will do more to undermine America than all the terrorists put together.
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I've always found the credit card companies and banks ability to shift the financial responsibility onto merchants and users for their insecure system to be one of the greatest ripoffs in history. Merchants in particular take it up the dirt road -- chargebacks, penalties AND rate increases! And zero incentive for the people who created and control the system to do anything about it.
I hate to say "they should pass a law", but they SHOULD pass a law that pushes the cost of CC fraud back onto banks and the CC companies themselves. This would provide a much bigger incentive.
What's even better is that once the new bankruptcy bill goes into force, not only will banks not have to bear the burden of fraud, they won't have to bear the burden of irresponsible lending, either.
One of the longest running complaints about Windows isn't just that the security is so horrible, its that the system isn't transparent and the documentation is awful. The concise version of their documentation is dumbed down to gradeschool levels, and the meatier documentation is lost in a sea of useless details spread over a half-dozen MS Press books, MSDN articles and KB articles, the latter of which are sometimes "private" and don't turn up in searches!
Even an insecure design can be made more secure if the system itself is transparent and/or the documentation is good. If the system isn't transparent AND the documentation is bad, then you're really doomed -- you don't know what to fix or how to fix it. Add in the mix that default installs often have every service and privilege enabled by default, and you're fucked, as we've seen.
UNIX too suffers from some abyssmal documentation, but is aided by transparency -- most processes serve a single function and most have a simple, readable, easily editable, and often heavily commented configuration file that controls their behavior.
There was a NYT article on European vacation habits the other week, and I think they said that European labor practices generally were contributing to a decline in European productivity, not an increase to it.
To paraphrase a character from "Slacker" -- "I may live badly, but at least I don't have to work to do it."
From a historical perspective, isn't bitching about OS upgrades or hardware upgrades kind of like complaining about cars in the 1920s and 1930s? The technology is a rapidly moving target -- it's not like other appliances, and the expectation that a 6 year old computer should work as well as it did when new, despite changes in the computing world, strikes me as naive as expecting a 1920 car to work as well as a 1930 car.
Sure, MS made a bunch of mistakes; some were true mistakes, some were compromises made to advance MS, some were legitimate engineering compromises. But when released, it's not like the technology didn't work or primarily do what it was supposed to (hence Jane's essentially uninterrupted use of it).
But to think you can use an OS largely designed in the mid 90s on the public internet without problems isn't just naive, it's stupid.
What if you merged a flash device with a battery-backed RAM drive? Keep all your ordinary I/O interface with the RAM drive and then periodically mirror RAM to flash with a single write cycle?
It still wouldn't last forever, but it might be a lot more practical for ordinary use; although you might consider just mirroring it to a HDD as well.
Secondly, why don't more people move back to city and thus not need cars as much?
I live in the city (Minneapolis), which compared with many other cities its size and age is very nice (lots of parklands, lakes, bike paths, etc).
In reference to your main point, transit here sucks. We have buses and a new LRT line, but you can't get anywhere on them.
The buses are decent for downtown commuting if you live close to a bus line, but other than that they're a complete waste of time. The only express routes are to downtown, and only arranged around workday hours; everything else is a local -- a 7 mile trip will take you an hour or more.
LRT holds promise, but the existing line serves nothing; it's supposed to get to the airport and the Mall of America by the end of the year, but I'm not quite sure who will ride between downtown and the mall/airport but the low-wage slaves that staff many businesses out there. That they spent $700 million dollars to provide a train line for minimum wage workers has the Republicans vowing death before another dime is spent on it. Advocates planning line extensions have fucking stops every couple of blocks, which is both insanely expensive and totally ineffecient. I'll be retired before we have any kind of rail system like we used to have circa 1940 (hundreds of miles of electric trolley lines, killed off by the bus people).
They could fix the bus system by running expresses on the existing lines that only stop every 10 blocks, but since the primary ridership are old people and others who can't walk, people shoot this down and insist on every block stoppage, and then wonder why nobody wants to be on a bus for an hour to go 7 miles.
Biking is nice on the paths, but suicidal on the streets.
But besides the futility of mass transit, there are other things that drive people to the suburbs:
SCHOOLS! The school system in Minneapolis is fucked, plain and simple. It's overburdened with Somali and Hispanic immigrants, as well as all the impoverished kids. It's a bloated bureaucracy that has become a fiefdom/political base for black politicos who fight tooth and nail anyone who wants to trim it. I plan on using open enrollment to send my son to a suburban school system.
TAXES! My property taxes have increased 8-12 percent every year for the last 5 years. THIS MUST STOP NOW. I don't get raises like that and never have. I don't know what they have to stop doing, but they need to stop doing it as I cannot continue to pay taxes at this clip.
Crime is OK; the black neighborhoods have been a bloodbath this summer, but I can only laugh when one week the self-appointed "community leaders" decry profiling, police harassment, traffic stops, etc and then the next week bitch that the cops aren't doing anything. This could grow even further out of hand and become a real problem, but I'm not that worried.
...when are we going to see inexpensive MPEG encoder chips becoming standard on PCs? I'd love to have hardware encoding in my PC that would let me turn an hour of DV-AVI into MPEG2 in 20 minutes, but I could live with something that did it even in real time.
The hardware can't be that expensive given that it shows up in $300 set-top boxes. You can buy cards that do this (and usually a bunch of other things), but they're almost always really expensive.
Is it a licensing thing? Even that doesn't add up given set-top DVD recorders that make essentially unlimited MPEG2 encodings.
It actually works that way, too. I bought a new mainboard and CPU. Had to buy a case, because my old one wouldn't support the new mainboard. I thought it would stop there, but I couldn't resist a new DVD-R drive. Since the new motherboard supported SATA, shit, I might as well get a SATA drive, too.
Thank god the board has sound and NIC, or I'd have bought those too. The only thing I really DIDN'T buy was a new graphics card. The "server" did need it.
[...]especially if that contracting allows them a certain amount of use of their own judgement in what needs to be worked on.
If I was paying for contract workers, their expertise would be desirable, but at the end of the day I expect them to implement/fix/improve what *I* want, not what they think it needs. I'd expect that their own judgement would get them close to finished product, but I wouldn't allow their judgement to dictate control of the project.
My guess is not. I have a hard time seeing any organization, even one as presumably benevolent as the BBC, giving money to an OSS project without expecting a certain set of deliverables.
This implies that the OT developers would be "taking orders" from the BBC, and I'd guess that wouldn't work out well (cf "herding cats"), either from an accountability perspective or from a poltical perspective. I'm assuming (perhaps incorrectly) that involvement in Ogg projects is at least partially motivated by all the political reasons many people use Ogg instead of MP3. Yes, I'm fully aware that a lot of people proffer golden-eared quality reasons as well -- but given the lack of broad-based compatibile players, political motivation would have to be at least as compelling a motivation.
Anyway, the BBC probably has a whole set of goals (and perhaps ownership rationales distinct from OSS) that made the Ogg starting point unworkable, in addition to the likelihood that the developers would suddenly welcome their new overlords.
Either I wasn't clear, or it didn't make sense. The treadmill is on a turntable. The belt of the treadmill is embedded with spheres which can rotate in any direction (and with very little energy).
The purpose of the sphere-embedded surface that makes up the treadmill belt is so that when the treadmill's turntable turns, the user on the belt's inertia causes it to NOT rotate; this allows the treadmill belt to align with the direction the user's motion.
You'd need a large surface area so that turntable movement could be slow enough so as to not be noticable and get time to compensate, but fast enough that when you turned the turntable and the lack of friction on the spherical surface coupled with the user's inertia kept them from rotating as well.
The spherical surface would need to be lockable somehow so that the spheres weren't always slippery.
It might never work for really rapid movement (such as running) or lots of erratic changes it direction. It should work for "ordinary" movements like walking relatively straight paths with simple turns.
I have no idea if this would work, but what came to mind for me would be having the VR floor consist of a treadmill on a turntable. Since the treadmill can only go in one direction, the treadmill belt would be embedded with spheres.
As you walked, the treadmill would walk with you to leave you close to the center. If you changed directions, the treadmill would rotate to compensate for your directions, and the spheres would allow the treadmill to be rotated without turning your orientation. I think it would help if the spheres could somehow be locked (perhaps magnetically) so that you wouldn't lose traction.
I think if the room was big enough, the treadmill could be rotated slowly enough to not be noticable yet still compensate for more erratic movements and changes in direction.
I didn't like any of the DLP (which pretty much meant Samsung) sets image quality. They suffer from the rainbow problem (move your head and you see a rainbow color effect) and some other image issues related to the use of a single DLP chip and the color wheel.
I also thought that the image was way too overprocessed -- it looked like a video image that had been transcoded between compression formats one too many times, particularly on standard-def content.
Side-by-side with the GWIII, the GWIII offered a better *looking* picture, even if the black levels weren't as ideal as the Samsung DLPs.
DLP would be a lot better if they used three DLP chips and ditched the color wheel. I don't know if that would be enough, or if Samsung would also have to significantly upgrade their video processing system as well. Sony appears to have them beat on that element as well.
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I'll cede your points, but at the same time I can't help but see it as either excessive geekiness (where the owning and configuring is 99% of it, using it never happens much) or some kind of "lifestyle computing" where supercool IT guys in Prada outfits sit around coffeeshops managing servers.
Oh well, if it turns your crank, do it!
And you could also tell someone on the phone what to type and where to click.
I guess my point is that with all the scrolling and tedius UI efforts, why bother? I guess maybe if you're a supersecret agent preventing the world from blowing up, fine, but does the office DB need to be worked on that bad that often?
I mean, do you really find yourself able to do very much from a Palm screen on a PC? The ssh connection might be valuable if you had one of those folding keyboards or a thumboard on the machine itself, but with just the stylus, what can you really do?
There's a ton of missing features right now on Tivo -- batch save to VCR, and so on.
Instead of adding a bunch of "intraweb" integration, why not make it much more featureful at what it primarily is *for*?
Since many are hooked to the internet 24/7, I'd love to see IMDB integration with Tivo -- have the details screen for a program show you an IMDB page (or IMDB data) for the given movie, with the ability to browse around and then pick selections for future wishlists, etc.
What devices can current accept cable card?
Can you buy anything with this and do any cable companies even support it (ie, issuing the cards)? I know it's a real standard, but it's not here yet that I know about.
It would enable a free-standing HD Tivo I could use with my HD cable service, since they could use the DirecTivo trick of recording the raw signal straight to disk, in addition to ditching the hated cable box.
I've always wondered why you couldn't use a similar system in a residential area. We have a lake behind our house that's about a mile around and about 8 feet deep on average; couldn't we (at least the immediate lakeshore residents, if not a larger amount of neighbors) use the lake water to augment our air conditioners?
You'd dump warm water back in, but this could be augmented somewhat by holding tanks and underground piping that cooled it back to ground temperature. If the lake was man-made, the environmental effect would be essentially nil, and you'd only have to worry about thermal calculations.
This might not make sense for retrofitting, but what about for new developments? People like lake/park areas, and there's no reason that a cooling pond couldn't be framed in a naturalistic setting.
I suppose it all comes back to commercial viability; it'd take a more expensive air conditioner capable of combining water cooling with electrical compressor cooling, the "community" would be responsible for the cooling pond and piping, and the electrical savings might not matter.
What wars did we fight over banking specifically or usury generally?
IIRC, there's some Lyndon LaRouche-esque conspiracy linking the Windsors and the "global financial system", which might imply that US involvement in WWI/WWII could have been attributed to some fight over banking.
[...]and that is something that Ashcroft should pay attention to (instead of all this patriot act and dmca crap).
Absolutely. It's sad that the government is so unwilling to do put any meaingful resources towards keeping markets free from fraud and corruption; allowing markets to be dominated by fraud and corruption will do more to undermine America than all the terrorists put together.
I've always found the credit card companies and banks ability to shift the financial responsibility onto merchants and users for their insecure system to be one of the greatest ripoffs in history. Merchants in particular take it up the dirt road -- chargebacks, penalties AND rate increases! And zero incentive for the people who created and control the system to do anything about it.
I hate to say "they should pass a law", but they SHOULD pass a law that pushes the cost of CC fraud back onto banks and the CC companies themselves. This would provide a much bigger incentive.
What's even better is that once the new bankruptcy bill goes into force, not only will banks not have to bear the burden of fraud, they won't have to bear the burden of irresponsible lending, either.
One of the longest running complaints about Windows isn't just that the security is so horrible, its that the system isn't transparent and the documentation is awful. The concise version of their documentation is dumbed down to gradeschool levels, and the meatier documentation is lost in a sea of useless details spread over a half-dozen MS Press books, MSDN articles and KB articles, the latter of which are sometimes "private" and don't turn up in searches!
Even an insecure design can be made more secure if the system itself is transparent and/or the documentation is good. If the system isn't transparent AND the documentation is bad, then you're really doomed -- you don't know what to fix or how to fix it. Add in the mix that default installs often have every service and privilege enabled by default, and you're fucked, as we've seen.
UNIX too suffers from some abyssmal documentation, but is aided by transparency -- most processes serve a single function and most have a simple, readable, easily editable, and often heavily commented configuration file that controls their behavior.
Stupid People + Education + Information = Exceptional People.
No, no, you missed it:
The answer should be "Exceptionally Dangerous People".
There was a NYT article on European vacation habits the other week, and I think they said that European labor practices generally were contributing to a decline in European productivity, not an increase to it.
To paraphrase a character from "Slacker" -- "I may live badly, but at least I don't have to work to do it."
From a historical perspective, isn't bitching about OS upgrades or hardware upgrades kind of like complaining about cars in the 1920s and 1930s? The technology is a rapidly moving target -- it's not like other appliances, and the expectation that a 6 year old computer should work as well as it did when new, despite changes in the computing world, strikes me as naive as expecting a 1920 car to work as well as a 1930 car.
Sure, MS made a bunch of mistakes; some were true mistakes, some were compromises made to advance MS, some were legitimate engineering compromises. But when released, it's not like the technology didn't work or primarily do what it was supposed to (hence Jane's essentially uninterrupted use of it).
But to think you can use an OS largely designed in the mid 90s on the public internet without problems isn't just naive, it's stupid.
What if you merged a flash device with a battery-backed RAM drive? Keep all your ordinary I/O interface with the RAM drive and then periodically mirror RAM to flash with a single write cycle?
It still wouldn't last forever, but it might be a lot more practical for ordinary use; although you might consider just mirroring it to a HDD as well.
Secondly, why don't more people move back to city and thus not need cars as much?
I live in the city (Minneapolis), which compared with many other cities its size and age is very nice (lots of parklands, lakes, bike paths, etc).
In reference to your main point, transit here sucks. We have buses and a new LRT line, but you can't get anywhere on them.
The buses are decent for downtown commuting if you live close to a bus line, but other than that they're a complete waste of time. The only express routes are to downtown, and only arranged around workday hours; everything else is a local -- a 7 mile trip will take you an hour or more.
LRT holds promise, but the existing line serves nothing; it's supposed to get to the airport and the Mall of America by the end of the year, but I'm not quite sure who will ride between downtown and the mall/airport but the low-wage slaves that staff many businesses out there. That they spent $700 million dollars to provide a train line for minimum wage workers has the Republicans vowing death before another dime is spent on it. Advocates planning line extensions have fucking stops every couple of blocks, which is both insanely expensive and totally ineffecient. I'll be retired before we have any kind of rail system like we used to have circa 1940 (hundreds of miles of electric trolley lines, killed off by the bus people).
They could fix the bus system by running expresses on the existing lines that only stop every 10 blocks, but since the primary ridership are old people and others who can't walk, people shoot this down and insist on every block stoppage, and then wonder why nobody wants to be on a bus for an hour to go 7 miles.
Biking is nice on the paths, but suicidal on the streets.
But besides the futility of mass transit, there are other things that drive people to the suburbs:
SCHOOLS! The school system in Minneapolis is fucked, plain and simple. It's overburdened with Somali and Hispanic immigrants, as well as all the impoverished kids. It's a bloated bureaucracy that has become a fiefdom/political base for black politicos who fight tooth and nail anyone who wants to trim it. I plan on using open enrollment to send my son to a suburban school system.
TAXES! My property taxes have increased 8-12 percent every year for the last 5 years. THIS MUST STOP NOW. I don't get raises like that and never have. I don't know what they have to stop doing, but they need to stop doing it as I cannot continue to pay taxes at this clip.
Crime is OK; the black neighborhoods have been a bloodbath this summer, but I can only laugh when one week the self-appointed "community leaders" decry profiling, police harassment, traffic stops, etc and then the next week bitch that the cops aren't doing anything. This could grow even further out of hand and become a real problem, but I'm not that worried.
...when are we going to see inexpensive MPEG encoder chips becoming standard on PCs? I'd love to have hardware encoding in my PC that would let me turn an hour of DV-AVI into MPEG2 in 20 minutes, but I could live with something that did it even in real time.
The hardware can't be that expensive given that it shows up in $300 set-top boxes. You can buy cards that do this (and usually a bunch of other things), but they're almost always really expensive.
Is it a licensing thing? Even that doesn't add up given set-top DVD recorders that make essentially unlimited MPEG2 encodings.
Very funny!
It actually works that way, too. I bought a new mainboard and CPU. Had to buy a case, because my old one wouldn't support the new mainboard. I thought it would stop there, but I couldn't resist a new DVD-R drive. Since the new motherboard supported SATA, shit, I might as well get a SATA drive, too.
Thank god the board has sound and NIC, or I'd have bought those too. The only thing I really DIDN'T buy was a new graphics card. The "server" did need it.
[...]especially if that contracting allows them a certain amount of use of their own judgement in what needs to be worked on.
If I was paying for contract workers, their expertise would be desirable, but at the end of the day I expect them to implement/fix/improve what *I* want, not what they think it needs. I'd expect that their own judgement would get them close to finished product, but I wouldn't allow their judgement to dictate control of the project.
My guess is not. I have a hard time seeing any organization, even one as presumably benevolent as the BBC, giving money to an OSS project without expecting a certain set of deliverables.
This implies that the OT developers would be "taking orders" from the BBC, and I'd guess that wouldn't work out well (cf "herding cats"), either from an accountability perspective or from a poltical perspective. I'm assuming (perhaps incorrectly) that involvement in Ogg projects is at least partially motivated by all the political reasons many people use Ogg instead of MP3. Yes, I'm fully aware that a lot of people proffer golden-eared quality reasons as well -- but given the lack of broad-based compatibile players, political motivation would have to be at least as compelling a motivation.
Anyway, the BBC probably has a whole set of goals (and perhaps ownership rationales distinct from OSS) that made the Ogg starting point unworkable, in addition to the likelihood that the developers would suddenly welcome their new overlords.
Heh, if I have to hang a "Cineplex Odeon" sign outside my window and charge my visitors $7.50 per ticket, maybe I could afford one...
Either I wasn't clear, or it didn't make sense. The treadmill is on a turntable. The belt of the treadmill is embedded with spheres which can rotate in any direction (and with very little energy).
The purpose of the sphere-embedded surface that makes up the treadmill belt is so that when the treadmill's turntable turns, the user on the belt's inertia causes it to NOT rotate; this allows the treadmill belt to align with the direction the user's motion.
You'd need a large surface area so that turntable movement could be slow enough so as to not be noticable and get time to compensate, but fast enough that when you turned the turntable and the lack of friction on the spherical surface coupled with the user's inertia kept them from rotating as well.
The spherical surface would need to be lockable somehow so that the spheres weren't always slippery.
It might never work for really rapid movement (such as running) or lots of erratic changes it direction. It should work for "ordinary" movements like walking relatively straight paths with simple turns.
I have no idea if this would work, but what came to mind for me would be having the VR floor consist of a treadmill on a turntable. Since the treadmill can only go in one direction, the treadmill belt would be embedded with spheres.
As you walked, the treadmill would walk with you to leave you close to the center. If you changed directions, the treadmill would rotate to compensate for your directions, and the spheres would allow the treadmill to be rotated without turning your orientation. I think it would help if the spheres could somehow be locked (perhaps magnetically) so that you wouldn't lose traction.
I think if the room was big enough, the treadmill could be rotated slowly enough to not be noticable yet still compensate for more erratic movements and changes in direction.
I didn't like any of the DLP (which pretty much meant Samsung) sets image quality. They suffer from the rainbow problem (move your head and you see a rainbow color effect) and some other image issues related to the use of a single DLP chip and the color wheel.
I also thought that the image was way too overprocessed -- it looked like a video image that had been transcoded between compression formats one too many times, particularly on standard-def content.
Side-by-side with the GWIII, the GWIII offered a better *looking* picture, even if the black levels weren't as ideal as the Samsung DLPs.
DLP would be a lot better if they used three DLP chips and ditched the color wheel. I don't know if that would be enough, or if Samsung would also have to significantly upgrade their video processing system as well. Sony appears to have them beat on that element as well.