The parent should be modded up. MS doesn't care about end users, they're just sore that at least the RIAA has been dissing a their DRM solution for a long time. A mandated solution would end up being a solution open to all OS/system vendors and wouldn't make MS a red cent, and in fact could threaten their OS monopoly by giving an even foothold to other OSs in the realm of digital media.
An MS DRM solution would be unavailable or crippled on other platforms without hefty licensing fees.
I'm sad that Bill didn't get an opportunity to blow 10+ billion building a system that might have failed, but I'm also glad that he didn't *succeed*. Who wants to live in a world with desktops and the network they might connect on wholly dominated by Gates?
I think this is an excellent argument for shipping something functional but not perfect in volume and fixing it over time versus spending a long time developing a more perfect version of it.
How hard would it have been for Intel to have done USB2 the first time? Probably not that hard. How long? A lot longer. USB support would probably be a "new" thing in Windows *XP* or Win2k SP2 add-on if we had to wait for them to make what USB2 delivers in a USB1 release.
By the time USB3 is out, it will probably be exceed Firewire 2 in every respect because they've had time to iterate over it instead of trying to make it perfect the first time.
Don't get me wrong, I hate to see non-functional systems released but sometimes doing *something* part-way is better than doing nothing while you try to make it perfect.
25% at best doesn't cut it, neither does expecting the next generation to do 50%.
I'm not sure how you can use the engine on the Hauppage cards (if its just a direct pipe from the capture portion of the card or general purpose engine that can compress a stream sent from the CPU), but full hardware assist would rock for editing MPEG2 streams on the fly without decoding to AVI and then back to MPEG2.
Doing MPEG2 totally (or even mostly) in software sucks on my dual PIII669 box, with the one advantage that you get total control over the encoding process. I'd kind of wonder how tweakable the MPEG2 output is from a $150 card.
Heh, well, I was operating under the assumption that grandparents get by with what we all consider junk equipment (P166, Win95A, etc etc). I didn't think that the grandparents would be dead by the time analog went off the air....
The person who holds the patents - even if they are valid - did not do the difficult thing which is set up a successful company around the idea.
The natural argument that occurs to me is that I may come up with lots of ideas that would be highly impractical to start a company and sell. Let's say for laughs that I design a new CPU or a new airplane. I could spend the next 20 years just trying to figure out how to get a fab built or a production line running and never actually make & sell the gizmo that I designed.
However, the design is impractical for me to build, not impractical for Intel or Boeing to build. So instead of me forming a successful business around making my design, I license my patents to someone who really can make and market my designs.
I see your point, though, and would argue that perhaps patents shouldn't be licensable, only sellable and only enforcable by the owner of the patent IF they are actually using the idea in their trade after some grace period of for "development of trade", ie the time between desinging the thing and actually getting it to market.
So if I come up with a great new CPU design and patent it, I have some grace period where I get enforcement of the design without having to market my CPU. I can either start making CPUs or sell the patent outright. Whoever I sell it to has to start making my design or they can't enforce the patent.
This would clear some egregious uses of patents; the supression of innovative designs and the profiteering of patent holders who don't actually contribute anything to the economy. Wouldn't affect patenting of obvious designs (eg, 1-click) but it could really help software patents, since you'd actually have to be *making* software that did something, not just blocking someone else from doing so.
Future budgeting and planning likely includes fines and penalties as operating costs factored against income from illegal behavior. If you can make $50 and get fined $5, you net $45. Do it.
Think of places where bribery is the norm; business that operate in those places factor in the costs of bribes as part of the cost of doing business.
I think the government needs to make the fines triple the gains, not tax deductable and include fines for corporate officers as well. If you made $100 illegally, you now pay $300 to the government plus the 20% on the $100 you would have paid anyway. Ouch.
This happened last month in the New York area. Crashed through some woman's house. I read it in the NY Post, featuring pictures of the ice chunk. Check it out.
Since the airlines use some kind of blue dye in their toilets the ice was blue, which I'd imagine prevents me from pissing in a coffee can, freezing it and asking the airlines for money.
I seem to recall the article (sorry, the above link is only a free preview) mentioning that airlines "weren't supposed to do this until they got out over open water" (paraphrasing). As if it was standard operating procedure to eject the holding tanks out in the middle of nowhere in the ocean; who knows, maybe on a 747 doing the Kennedy to Johannesburg route you *have* to eject the crap at some point to avoid overflowing tanks.
Or a better scheme. Mixing node addresses with network addresses makes for some amusing and clever binary math, but also makes it difficult to efficiently with addresses.
Since much of the node space is "lost" in trying to save subnets, I hate to say it, but I kind of like the idea of splitting network and node into seperate components, ala IPX. Even if you went with the size of IPX addresses (32 bits address, 48 bits node) we'd have far fewer addressing problems than we do now, and everybody would have a lot more addresses at their disposal. DSL users that get a single IP now would effectively have an entire 48 bit network at their disposal; businesses that get an entire class C could effective have a class B address (254) with a node count of 254 * 2 ^ 48, I'd wager higher than the internet as a whole.
A new concept of "flexible node routing" could be introduced to allow for routers to actually route on node addresses for places that were assigned a network number but would like to internally divide their node numbers into a network:node component internally.
Part of the problem with IP now is not the limit of IP addresses, but the limit of 253 nodes per subnet. With modern switches, there's little reason *not* to run 500-1000 nodes per subnet. Its less hassle and makes for simpler and more flexible topologies, not to mention faster and less expensive connections between cores and leaf nets.
Oh well, the simple solution would have been to just have tagged an extra 8 or 16 bits and made an IP address a little longer.
This has been my position all along. There's a lot of obstacles to going after unsolicited commercial email. The Direct Marketing Association quickly gets involved, since overly harsh penalties can excessively punish people that want to direct market to known consumers but screw up somehow. They have lobbying ability and tend to stifle legilslative debate.
And then there's the entire problem of *enforcement*. If I'm running a bulk emailing operation out of my basement and its now illegal, why don't I just rent a couple of systems in some foreign country where its not illegal that doesn't bother with a lot of American laws?
I'm far more convinced that if you put the effort into enforcing the current anti-fraud laws *now* on the books it would decimate the business that spammers need to stay spamming. The problem isn't UCE, the problem is fraud is going on unchecked on a massive scale and no one seems interested in stopping it.
It's too bad they want to aim for the Junior High crowd with a PG-13 rating. The movie *should* be at least as violent as Alien{s,3,4} and the hell/horror component should be very high.
Even if they aim for a PG-13 audience, they should also aim to keep the "where are these things coming from and why?" aspect of the story a mystery -- it adds interest and keeps you glued, hoping they can solve the mystery.
Most people that I run into in the corporate IT world all know/love/use NAT (network address translation). However, as much as NAT conserves IP addresses and provides a measure of inbound-connection security, I've also seen it be the cause many problems because too many sites that have to interconnect are running overlapping IP space. This isn't even counting the number of tools or protocols that have been broken by NAT (even if they're "fixed" in smarter versions of NAT that know layer 3 or 4 protocols; eg traceroute, ftp).
Since the IP protocols were originally built around the idea of unique addresses, I'm wondering if you think NAT has been a beneficial kludge or a curse. Do you think IP should have been had a built-in NAT mechanism allowing for a more protocol-friendly NAT?
Will the (eventual) adoption of the larger address space of IPv6 lead to the elimination of NAT? Should it?
What about client VPN is easy with IPSec? The extra client software? The simple OS configuration?
I can walk a remote user through a VPN setup with the 2K PPTP setup in under 5 minutes with my eyes closed. I'm not sure I can walk myself through the 2K ipsec setup without some external docs to setup.
I'll grant you its simple with tunneled mode between two router-like devices, but client end nodes?
Also, I think most of the security vulnerabilities of PPTP were specific to an older, unpatched MS client or server. I don't think a modern (2k/XP) PPTP stream is particularly vulnerable.
I was trying to build on the idea of the previous poster's 3D cube-surface environments.
I'm not sure that dimensionally distorting (ie, simulating peripheral vision) a desktop or set of windows buys you much, especially at standard display resolutions. Maybe having MRTG graphs or something would be meaningful, but not stuff you'd need to read or interact with.
Probably all the same value could be accomplished by having a massive desktop (10240 x 7680) and then having a zoom rectangle you could move around. A second physical monitor with a (resizable) view of the entire thing would be nice, as well.
We already have extra-large virtual desktops, I think all we lack is a way to zoom in and out on them. Sounds like an OS X Aqua thing.
What would make this even better would be a way to easily rotate the "cube" representing your screen: you could have six applications open, each maximized on one plane, then just rotate the cube with a joystick to quickly switch around, or position it such that you can view parts of 2 or 3 apps at once.
This would be better accomplished by placing the viewer inside of an N sided polygon with each inner face of the polygon representing a different desktop/environment/etc. By being inside the polygon you could zoom out and see many more desktops simultaneously. Adjusting the width of your field of view ('fish-eye') would allow you to see probably at least half of the inside of the polygon.
A conventional wheelmouse would be all that would be necessary in navigation mode; the wheel would zoom and the mouse's 2D axis would move you the other dimensions.
Another idea would be being inside of a sphere and the inner surface of the sphere being a very large rectangular desktop mapped onto the sphere. You'd adjust the working frame to display as rectangular but the rest of the display would curve away showing more information on the other windows.
I'm not sure that any of these ideas would be meaningful even with a depth-enhanced LCDs without seriously high resolution.
Have these researchers for a moment stopped to consider that hours spent glued to some machine instead of interacting with ones peers is the cause of "anxieties", "anger", and "aggression"?
As one other poster noted, how do you know that interacting with peers who ridicule, hit, hurt or otherwise harm isn't the cause of this?
I'm also inclined to believe that *life* is the cause of anxiety, anger and agression. People have been scared, mad and killing people for a hell of lot longer than video games or the polite notion of peers has been around. Just trying to keep a roof over your head, food in your belly and the bad guys from taking your stuff makes you scared, angry and ready to kill.
I'd go one step further and argue that Apple buy into VMWare and use what they have already done to provide X86-on-X86. It's not "emulation" as much as it is a virtual machine. It's probably only a philosophical argument whether you'd expect x86 Apps to run in an x86 environment "window" or whether you'd expect to double-click on an application and have that app window appear natively alongside OSX applications. I'd argue for the total Windows/x86 VM environment, since that way you're just needing to emulate hardware bits and not try to do the WINE-style OS call translation (which is hard to do, and leaves you farther behind when people start wanting to run newer OSs whose function calls aren't known).
I'd also argue that the VMware capability be a permanent addition to the operating environment, not a temporary kludge to satisfy some interim changeout period. A native-OS supported VM mechanism could also support 68k or even PPC applications (much harder, I acknowledge) or people wanting to utilize a seperate x86-specific OS or environment.
I guess they could, but then you're presuming that there's a standard of interoperability even among a single vendor for application interaction (and an OS model that's stable they can follow!).
I guess this has been looked at by every major software vendor that's done it and they all have chosen to solve the problem by intergrating the functionality of calendaring and messaging. It's one program to install and support and a lot of shared stuff (directory access, etc etc).
Given the level of object-orientation and dynamic libraries, I'd speculate that in most gropupware apps the calendar aspects of the application and the messaging aspects are probably close to a seperate applications anwyay (probably missing some wrapper code to make them truly standalone).
I agree generally, but in a setting where you have collaborative calendaring how am I supposed to invite you to a meeting? Write an email and have you stick it on your calendar program seperately? Or use the unified application to check my calendar, schedule the meeting and send a notice to each person, who can then accept/reject and have it put on their calendars automatically?
There's also the notion that internally these programs and their servers work by passing messages; in many ways its already email internally.
sure, they've got their mcse, but they can't seem to tie that knowledge into how things work on their platform of choice. bizarre.
Usually they can't tie into how things work elsewhere, either; they lack the vision or ability or whatever to mentally pull it together. But that's just a human trait you find in many places, most "real" professions screen for it as a strength (lawyers, doctors, even skilled trades like electricians).
In some cases, even half-talented Windows admins are kind of locked into an idiot-light-only world. MS doesn't document how their systems work very well and its difficult to get reliable runtime diagnostic data to figure it out. System log entries of "An error of 0x234fbbffff occured during re-entry" don't help at all when that error code is only de-referenced in some developer documentation.
There's a profit angle, but Hollyweird has had a long-running battle with 'mainstream' America over the general level of sex/violence/immorality in popular entertainment. It doesn't mean that movies are any more or less sexual/violent/immoral than people as a whole are, but that has been the source of the greatest conflict with Congress, who they rely on for the laws that protect their business models.
Anyway, the Directors Guild is being used to make this fight because they're generally anti-editing anyway (funny how they never bitch when they get rich for TV, airline and foreign versions...). It would be catastrophic for the film industry to fight the social conservatives over this issue with much of their intellectual property and business model protection legislation hanging in the balance...of a nearly evenly split lawmaking apparatus where family-conservative legislators will be able to use muscle to influence Hollywood.
I'd expect that the Directors will lose the fight when the studios announce they will start selling "made for TV" versions of popular movies through select wholesale outlets. The Directors will get an extra buck which will quiet them and it will wholly undermine the legitimacy of the physical editing of unedited content when pre-edited is available.
End result? Fair Use is eroded a little further, Hollywood makes peace with its legislative allies, and Armani-clad Directors will sit in their bigger, better homes doing a better grade of coke, bitching about their artistic freedom and the social conservatives get to pinch legitimately artistic visions even further, as Hollywood will want to ensure that any movie made can be easily and coherently edited to G levels.
b) this in fact isn't useless, not because it actually solves energy problems, but it rather points to environmental issues someone needs to address...
What's the proportion of energy used to *make* all the comms gear they have vs. the energy it actually takes to power it? 100:1?
In other words, what's the total energy cost of the product (production, distribution, use) and what percentage are you actually saving? Is it the equivilent of not running the A/C in your 400-cubic-inch-V8-powered SUV because it gives you a tiny payback in gas mileage?
From what I've read there is no mandate that the cable companies have to switch anything. They will have to receive DTV signals, since analog will go away, but they don't have to DELIVER them. Smaller cable companies may just choose to continue to deliver NTSC quality signals derived from the DTV ones, inother words they perform the set top box function.
I wonder how often this will happen. Most cable cos that I'm aware of now are going digital, even rinkydink small town ones due to the cost/availability of equipment for expanding their capacity or just general upgrading. But even then the bandwidth allocated to a given channel stream may actually be less than a given DTV stream, even at vanilla NTSC standards. Which means in my mind a degredation of picture quality.
The thing I imagine will be even more prevelant will be downconverting high def content to lower resolutions to fit smaller channel bandwidth slots, and I'd just bet that this will really clobber picture quality in the same way that audio kinda tanks when you run it through a bunch of different codecs or compression cycles.
The whole converter box crap is why I haven't bothered with the digital cable we have here. It's $5 more per month to get digital cable (including one box) and you get a LOT more channels (of shit, I'm sure). But since I have 3 TVs, if I want digital in all rooms it's like another $20 more on top of it all.
Ideally a standard digital cable standard that makers can build into TVs should be developed.
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The parent should be modded up. MS doesn't care about end users, they're just sore that at least the RIAA has been dissing a their DRM solution for a long time. A mandated solution would end up being a solution open to all OS/system vendors and wouldn't make MS a red cent, and in fact could threaten their OS monopoly by giving an even foothold to other OSs in the realm of digital media.
An MS DRM solution would be unavailable or crippled on other platforms without hefty licensing fees.
I'm sad that Bill didn't get an opportunity to blow 10+ billion building a system that might have failed, but I'm also glad that he didn't *succeed*. Who wants to live in a world with desktops and the network they might connect on wholly dominated by Gates?
I think this is an excellent argument for shipping something functional but not perfect in volume and fixing it over time versus spending a long time developing a more perfect version of it.
How hard would it have been for Intel to have done USB2 the first time? Probably not that hard. How long? A lot longer. USB support would probably be a "new" thing in Windows *XP* or Win2k SP2 add-on if we had to wait for them to make what USB2 delivers in a USB1 release.
By the time USB3 is out, it will probably be exceed Firewire 2 in every respect because they've had time to iterate over it instead of trying to make it perfect the first time.
Don't get me wrong, I hate to see non-functional systems released but sometimes doing *something* part-way is better than doing nothing while you try to make it perfect.
25% at best doesn't cut it, neither does expecting the next generation to do 50%.
I'm not sure how you can use the engine on the Hauppage cards (if its just a direct pipe from the capture portion of the card or general purpose engine that can compress a stream sent from the CPU), but full hardware assist would rock for editing MPEG2 streams on the fly without decoding to AVI and then back to MPEG2.
Doing MPEG2 totally (or even mostly) in software sucks on my dual PIII669 box, with the one advantage that you get total control over the encoding process. I'd kind of wonder how tweakable the MPEG2 output is from a $150 card.
Heh, well, I was operating under the assumption that grandparents get by with what we all consider junk equipment (P166, Win95A, etc etc). I didn't think that the grandparents would be dead by the time analog went off the air....
The person who holds the patents - even if they are valid - did not do the difficult thing which is set up a successful company around the idea.
The natural argument that occurs to me is that I may come up with lots of ideas that would be highly impractical to start a company and sell. Let's say for laughs that I design a new CPU or a new airplane. I could spend the next 20 years just trying to figure out how to get a fab built or a production line running and never actually make & sell the gizmo that I designed.
However, the design is impractical for me to build, not impractical for Intel or Boeing to build. So instead of me forming a successful business around making my design, I license my patents to someone who really can make and market my designs.
I see your point, though, and would argue that perhaps patents shouldn't be licensable, only sellable and only enforcable by the owner of the patent IF they are actually using the idea in their trade after some grace period of for "development of trade", ie the time between desinging the thing and actually getting it to market.
So if I come up with a great new CPU design and patent it, I have some grace period where I get enforcement of the design without having to market my CPU. I can either start making CPUs or sell the patent outright. Whoever I sell it to has to start making my design or they can't enforce the patent.
This would clear some egregious uses of patents; the supression of innovative designs and the profiteering of patent holders who don't actually contribute anything to the economy. Wouldn't affect patenting of obvious designs (eg, 1-click) but it could really help software patents, since you'd actually have to be *making* software that did something, not just blocking someone else from doing so.
Future budgeting and planning likely includes fines and penalties as operating costs factored against income from illegal behavior. If you can make $50 and get fined $5, you net $45. Do it.
Think of places where bribery is the norm; business that operate in those places factor in the costs of bribes as part of the cost of doing business.
I think the government needs to make the fines triple the gains, not tax deductable and include fines for corporate officers as well. If you made $100 illegally, you now pay $300 to the government plus the 20% on the $100 you would have paid anyway. Ouch.
...is hardware MPEG capture. Decode they seem to have, capture would be ideal. The $149 Hauppage WinTV-PVRs have it.
By the time Analog goes off the air, your grandpa won't want this card or the system it works in let alone you.
This happened last month in the New York area. Crashed through some woman's house. I read it in the NY Post, featuring pictures of the ice chunk. Check it out.
Since the airlines use some kind of blue dye in their toilets the ice was blue, which I'd imagine prevents me from pissing in a coffee can, freezing it and asking the airlines for money.
I seem to recall the article (sorry, the above link is only a free preview) mentioning that airlines "weren't supposed to do this until they got out over open water" (paraphrasing). As if it was standard operating procedure to eject the holding tanks out in the middle of nowhere in the ocean; who knows, maybe on a 747 doing the Kennedy to Johannesburg route you *have* to eject the crap at some point to avoid overflowing tanks.
Or a better scheme. Mixing node addresses with network addresses makes for some amusing and clever binary math, but also makes it difficult to efficiently with addresses.
Since much of the node space is "lost" in trying to save subnets, I hate to say it, but I kind of like the idea of splitting network and node into seperate components, ala IPX. Even if you went with the size of IPX addresses (32 bits address, 48 bits node) we'd have far fewer addressing problems than we do now, and everybody would have a lot more addresses at their disposal. DSL users that get a single IP now would effectively have an entire 48 bit network at their disposal; businesses that get an entire class C could effective have a class B address (254) with a node count of 254 * 2 ^ 48, I'd wager higher than the internet as a whole.
A new concept of "flexible node routing" could be introduced to allow for routers to actually route on node addresses for places that were assigned a network number but would like to internally divide their node numbers into a network:node component internally.
Part of the problem with IP now is not the limit of IP addresses, but the limit of 253 nodes per subnet. With modern switches, there's little reason *not* to run 500-1000 nodes per subnet. Its less hassle and makes for simpler and more flexible topologies, not to mention faster and less expensive connections between cores and leaf nets.
Oh well, the simple solution would have been to just have tagged an extra 8 or 16 bits and made an IP address a little longer.
This has been my position all along. There's a lot of obstacles to going after unsolicited commercial email. The Direct Marketing Association quickly gets involved, since overly harsh penalties can excessively punish people that want to direct market to known consumers but screw up somehow. They have lobbying ability and tend to stifle legilslative debate.
And then there's the entire problem of *enforcement*. If I'm running a bulk emailing operation out of my basement and its now illegal, why don't I just rent a couple of systems in some foreign country where its not illegal that doesn't bother with a lot of American laws?
I'm far more convinced that if you put the effort into enforcing the current anti-fraud laws *now* on the books it would decimate the business that spammers need to stay spamming. The problem isn't UCE, the problem is fraud is going on unchecked on a massive scale and no one seems interested in stopping it.
It's too bad they want to aim for the Junior High crowd with a PG-13 rating. The movie *should* be at least as violent as Alien{s,3,4} and the hell/horror component should be very high.
Even if they aim for a PG-13 audience, they should also aim to keep the "where are these things coming from and why?" aspect of the story a mystery -- it adds interest and keeps you glued, hoping they can solve the mystery.
Most people that I run into in the corporate IT world all know/love/use NAT (network address translation). However, as much as NAT conserves IP addresses and provides a measure of inbound-connection security, I've also seen it be the cause many problems because too many sites that have to interconnect are running overlapping IP space. This isn't even counting the number of tools or protocols that have been broken by NAT (even if they're "fixed" in smarter versions of NAT that know layer 3 or 4 protocols; eg traceroute, ftp).
Since the IP protocols were originally built around the idea of unique addresses, I'm wondering if you think NAT has been a beneficial kludge or a curse. Do you think IP should have been had a built-in NAT mechanism allowing for a more protocol-friendly NAT?
Will the (eventual) adoption of the larger address space of IPv6 lead to the elimination of NAT? Should it?
What about client VPN is easy with IPSec? The extra client software? The simple OS configuration?
I can walk a remote user through a VPN setup with the 2K PPTP setup in under 5 minutes with my eyes closed. I'm not sure I can walk myself through the 2K ipsec setup without some external docs to setup.
I'll grant you its simple with tunneled mode between two router-like devices, but client end nodes?
Also, I think most of the security vulnerabilities of PPTP were specific to an older, unpatched MS client or server. I don't think a modern (2k/XP) PPTP stream is particularly vulnerable.
I was trying to build on the idea of the previous poster's 3D cube-surface environments.
I'm not sure that dimensionally distorting (ie, simulating peripheral vision) a desktop or set of windows buys you much, especially at standard display resolutions. Maybe having MRTG graphs or something would be meaningful, but not stuff you'd need to read or interact with.
Probably all the same value could be accomplished by having a massive desktop (10240 x 7680) and then having a zoom rectangle you could move around. A second physical monitor with a (resizable) view of the entire thing would be nice, as well.
We already have extra-large virtual desktops, I think all we lack is a way to zoom in and out on them. Sounds like an OS X Aqua thing.
What would make this even better would be a way to easily rotate the "cube" representing your screen: you could have six applications open, each maximized on one plane, then just rotate the cube with a joystick to quickly switch around, or position it such that you can view parts of 2 or 3 apps at once.
This would be better accomplished by placing the viewer inside of an N sided polygon with each inner face of the polygon representing a different desktop/environment/etc. By being inside the polygon you could zoom out and see many more desktops simultaneously. Adjusting the width of your field of view ('fish-eye') would allow you to see probably at least half of the inside of the polygon.
A conventional wheelmouse would be all that would be necessary in navigation mode; the wheel would zoom and the mouse's 2D axis would move you the other dimensions.
Another idea would be being inside of a sphere and the inner surface of the sphere being a very large rectangular desktop mapped onto the sphere. You'd adjust the working frame to display as rectangular but the rest of the display would curve away showing more information on the other windows.
I'm not sure that any of these ideas would be meaningful even with a depth-enhanced LCDs without seriously high resolution.
Have these researchers for a moment stopped to consider that hours spent glued to some machine instead of interacting with ones peers is the cause of "anxieties", "anger", and "aggression"?
As one other poster noted, how do you know that interacting with peers who ridicule, hit, hurt or otherwise harm isn't the cause of this?
I'm also inclined to believe that *life* is the cause of anxiety, anger and agression. People have been scared, mad and killing people for a hell of lot longer than video games or the polite notion of peers has been around. Just trying to keep a roof over your head, food in your belly and the bad guys from taking your stuff makes you scared, angry and ready to kill.
I'd go one step further and argue that Apple buy into VMWare and use what they have already done to provide X86-on-X86. It's not "emulation" as much as it is a virtual machine. It's probably only a philosophical argument whether you'd expect x86 Apps to run in an x86 environment "window" or whether you'd expect to double-click on an application and have that app window appear natively alongside OSX applications. I'd argue for the total Windows/x86 VM environment, since that way you're just needing to emulate hardware bits and not try to do the WINE-style OS call translation (which is hard to do, and leaves you farther behind when people start wanting to run newer OSs whose function calls aren't known).
I'd also argue that the VMware capability be a permanent addition to the operating environment, not a temporary kludge to satisfy some interim changeout period. A native-OS supported VM mechanism could also support 68k or even PPC applications (much harder, I acknowledge) or people wanting to utilize a seperate x86-specific OS or environment.
I guess they could, but then you're presuming that there's a standard of interoperability even among a single vendor for application interaction (and an OS model that's stable they can follow!).
I guess this has been looked at by every major software vendor that's done it and they all have chosen to solve the problem by intergrating the functionality of calendaring and messaging. It's one program to install and support and a lot of shared stuff (directory access, etc etc).
Given the level of object-orientation and dynamic libraries, I'd speculate that in most gropupware apps the calendar aspects of the application and the messaging aspects are probably close to a seperate applications anwyay (probably missing some wrapper code to make them truly standalone).
I agree generally, but in a setting where you have collaborative calendaring how am I supposed to invite you to a meeting? Write an email and have you stick it on your calendar program seperately? Or use the unified application to check my calendar, schedule the meeting and send a notice to each person, who can then accept/reject and have it put on their calendars automatically?
There's also the notion that internally these programs and their servers work by passing messages; in many ways its already email internally.
sure, they've got their mcse, but they can't seem to tie that knowledge into how things work on their platform of choice. bizarre.
Usually they can't tie into how things work elsewhere, either; they lack the vision or ability or whatever to mentally pull it together. But that's just a human trait you find in many places, most "real" professions screen for it as a strength (lawyers, doctors, even skilled trades like electricians).
In some cases, even half-talented Windows admins are kind of locked into an idiot-light-only world. MS doesn't document how their systems work very well and its difficult to get reliable runtime diagnostic data to figure it out. System log entries of "An error of 0x234fbbffff occured during re-entry" don't help at all when that error code is only de-referenced in some developer documentation.
There's a profit angle, but Hollyweird has had a long-running battle with 'mainstream' America over the general level of sex/violence/immorality in popular entertainment. It doesn't mean that movies are any more or less sexual/violent/immoral than people as a whole are, but that has been the source of the greatest conflict with Congress, who they rely on for the laws that protect their business models.
Anyway, the Directors Guild is being used to make this fight because they're generally anti-editing anyway (funny how they never bitch when they get rich for TV, airline and foreign versions...). It would be catastrophic for the film industry to fight the social conservatives over this issue with much of their intellectual property and business model protection legislation hanging in the balance...of a nearly evenly split lawmaking apparatus where family-conservative legislators will be able to use muscle to influence Hollywood.
I'd expect that the Directors will lose the fight when the studios announce they will start selling "made for TV" versions of popular movies through select wholesale outlets. The Directors will get an extra buck which will quiet them and it will wholly undermine the legitimacy of the physical editing of unedited content when pre-edited is available.
End result? Fair Use is eroded a little further, Hollywood makes peace with its legislative allies, and Armani-clad Directors will sit in their bigger, better homes doing a better grade of coke, bitching about their artistic freedom and the social conservatives get to pinch legitimately artistic visions even further, as Hollywood will want to ensure that any movie made can be easily and coherently edited to G levels.
b) this in fact isn't useless, not because it actually solves energy problems, but it rather points to environmental issues someone needs to address...
What's the proportion of energy used to *make* all the comms gear they have vs. the energy it actually takes to power it? 100:1?
In other words, what's the total energy cost of the product (production, distribution, use) and what percentage are you actually saving? Is it the equivilent of not running the A/C in your 400-cubic-inch-V8-powered SUV because it gives you a tiny payback in gas mileage?
From what I've read there is no mandate that the cable companies have to switch anything. They will have to receive DTV signals, since analog will go away, but they don't have to DELIVER them. Smaller cable companies may just choose to continue to deliver NTSC quality signals derived from the DTV ones, inother words they perform the set top box function.
I wonder how often this will happen. Most cable cos that I'm aware of now are going digital, even rinkydink small town ones due to the cost/availability of equipment for expanding their capacity or just general upgrading. But even then the bandwidth allocated to a given channel stream may actually be less than a given DTV stream, even at vanilla NTSC standards. Which means in my mind a degredation of picture quality.
The thing I imagine will be even more prevelant will be downconverting high def content to lower resolutions to fit smaller channel bandwidth slots, and I'd just bet that this will really clobber picture quality in the same way that audio kinda tanks when you run it through a bunch of different codecs or compression cycles.
The whole converter box crap is why I haven't bothered with the digital cable we have here. It's $5 more per month to get digital cable (including one box) and you get a LOT more channels (of shit, I'm sure). But since I have 3 TVs, if I want digital in all rooms it's like another $20 more on top of it all.
Ideally a standard digital cable standard that makers can build into TVs should be developed.