Centrino requires Intel WiFi. It would actually be better if they didn't go for the Centrino cert, as the Intel networking hardware doesn't have working Linux support yet (why, Intel?) and these guys definitely want a Linux market.
DSPs are great, when you need a DSP. There's a reason they don't put general-purpose DSPs in computers anymore, though; modern systems (in theory at least) have cycles to spare, so they can do all that work in the CPU.
Now is this good or bad? One can debate that. Though I suspect that a lot of general-purpose DSP chips out there would get a little lost running on a motherboard bus... maybe integrate one into a northbridge or something...
This is not true. The Pentium-M/Banias is a P6, and it was designed by the same Israeli design team that produced the ill-fated Timna chip. I think Banias was given to them because Intel knew that an overclocked P6 (a Tualatin at least) could spank a Pentium 4, and the Israeli team knew more about the P6 architecture than anyone else in the company. Banias borrows some ideas from the P4, but it's essentially a Pentium Pro milked as far as it can possibly go, which puts it as the direct successor to the Pentium III.
The Pippin was underpowered and undermarketed, though. If Apple tried again using the hardware they have now, they might have a decent shot at doing it; they're having too much fun with the iPod though.
Hasbro has kind of a cool product. It's a portable video player for kids. It happens that their media is close enough to a publicly available format that they're more or less interchangeable.
Consider two things: first, geeks like to play. They want to know how the toys work. That was what doomed the CueCat from the start -- the device, by and large, was utterly useless to all but a small segment of the population, but it still had some technical interest. Therefore people were more than willing to tear that sucker apart. When they got inside, there were some ugly issues -- the serial number, specifically -- that turned out to be not so innocent. Exit Digital Convergence and its malleably named founder.
Second, consider the matter of pop culture. Granted Nickelodeon is a cut above what's out there for kids; I can think of far worse things out there than Spongebob for child consumption. But there's a lot of useless pap out there. Fact is that Hasbro has put a new medium out there, and it's sufficiently interesting to make third-party content creation tools for it.
And if the execs at Hasbro have half a functioning brain between them, they'll get on the ball and create such tools themselves, or at least do what Lego did when people started hacking Mindstorms and not get in the way. It will be very good for their business if they do.
Pixelvision rocked. A good friend of mine and I both had them as kids. We did have fun with those, and I rather wish Fisher-Price still made them.
Oh, well. With digital camcorders down in the $400 range these days and standard audiotape becoming rather a rarity these days, the PXL-2000 isn't as compelling as it used to be (microtape is a possibility, though I found out to my chagrin last night that microcassettes are probably unacceptably fragile for such an application).
Actually, I find a trip around Toys-Backwards "R"-Us to be rather depressing these days; cool toys are hard to find. Even the educational computer toys are dumbed down -- the ones they have out now don't have the programming capability the first ones of ten years or so ago had. Hasbro has an Easy-Bake Oven for boys now (yay!) but it's the insufferably lame-ass Queasy-Bake Cookerator (boo!) -- a guaranteed doomed-to-fail marketing angle. Walkie-talkies exist, but they're tricky to find. And I'm not sure what I think about the proliferation of karaoke machines -- can someone point me towards some good open source CD+G authoring tools? Then I'll be impressed.
In Boston, any bar that doesn't serve Sam Adams isn't worth the trouble of visiting. Guinness, Bass Ale, and frequently Harpoon IPA are almost always available in anyplace that isn't a total dive as well.
IANAL (but who is around here?), but I think as long as it doesn't involve hacking BIOS code it shouldn't be. If there's a clean-room BIOS involved, in theory there's no case. The EULA only covers the software -- they couldn't license the hardware, simply because it doesn't work that way.
Now whether it violates the DMCA is another story entirely...
I think you've got it inside out -- if this is the EULA clause you're talking about it refers only to the software (i.e. that little fleck of Win2K and the BIOS). I see nothing about hardware here.
And why, exactly, is it wrong to buy an Xbox and mod it so you can do whatever you want with it? Yes, what these people are doing does, in some sense, qualify as extortion -- I'd rather see them just release the exploit and watch Microsoft go down in flames the way the much-less-deserving Dreamcast did. That said...
Get this through your skull. The system is a Celeron 733 with an enhanced nForce Northbridge. Its controller bus is USB-based, electrically compatible except for an easily-ignored power line for the rumble pack in the controller. Its software is a drastically cut-down Win2K kernel. It is in every meaningful respect a PC except for the lack of a keyboard, and it doesn't take a mod chip to prove it.
It is indeed a case of "my hardware, I should be able to do what I want with it." While what these anonymous folk are doing is rather shady, it does make sense. I rather hope they don't get caught...
Er... My box, my choice of OS. "Illegal" don't enter into it -- not for the end user modding the system, at any rate. Whether this is the case for those releasing the exploit is another story entirely.
Frankly, I'm looking forward to this -- I have some interesting ideas I'd like to play with, and they require being able to run on an unmodded Xbox to be worth the trouble (nothing that hasn't been done before; it's just that an Xbox running Linux is probably the cheapest way to do it). I'm skeptical, mind you, so I'll wait until the extortionists call Microsoft's bluff before I believe it, but the idea has a lot of potential.
Geez... Halle Berry vs. the frumpy-but-still-hot LARPer down the street... I'd take both, dontcha know.
Seriously, though. As much as I find the G5 case hideous (whoever said it looked like a cheese grater is dead on), I still want what's under that hood. It's about time we had something approaching parity in the Mac world... and to think I'll actually be stuck downgrading from an iMac to a beige G3/266 when I finally get out of the parental basement... makes me sad...
I have a fluctuating interest in constructed languages like Esperanto and Elvish (some of you might remember var'aq, my computer language based on a certain well-known scifi conlang), and at one point I read this article that made an excellent point about how there is such an incredible number of languages intended as lingua francas for international communication, yet only Esperanto has ever even come close to achieving its goal since the auxlang world is so competitive.
I wonder if I don't see this in the window manager world. It's one thing to make your own wm just for hack value, and I'm sure that's the case for many people. But there does seem to be a profusion of window managers that seem to exist simply as vanity projects for those who want to knock the big guys like KDE and Sawfish off the throne...
I would ask for several features (the rest can be handled by other software of course):
1. Title bars, with close buttons (and optional resize buttons). 2. The ability to have colors and patterns on the title bars. 3. Windowshading. 4. Configurable border widths (some people might like something a bit wider than one pixel).
SFX aren't necessary, and things like drag-and-drop should be handled by X anyway. It's interesting, but a bit too minimalist for me.
It's also Microsoft's very own Dylan... nice idea, but zero chance of any uptake (and at least Dylan was just Lisp with real syntax -- does anyone really want the bondage and discipline approach of ML?)
I actually worked with ML in college for a while (SML, though, not any form of CAML). It's tough to get your head around, and the requirement that interdependent functions be defined together seems rather broken conceptually. It's a very elegant language, mind you, but it's a pain in the ass to actually use.
Not that I actually know what I'm talking about, but I thought ATM was quite successful in certain niches? IIRC my DSL connection is basically ATM mingled with an analog signal... (Now ATM as an end-user networking architecture -- that has been a resounding failure. But I was under the impression that The Phone Company (TM) uses it quite a bit.)
Actually, I believe Japan (and possibly China -- not too sure about that though) uses NTSC as well, though there's some slight differences in the way Japanese signals are handled that would make a picture from a Japanese signal look darker on an American TV.
RFCs are usually written after-the-fact -- I think "Request For Comment" is just a legacy name. (Or did you forget that the ISO standard for networking is *cough* OSI?)/brian
Actually, you're wrong -- virtually every MiniDV unit I've seen will shoot either letterboxed or pseudo-anamorphic, though you do take a hit on resolution because the process seems largely to involve using a smaller section of the CCD. I have a public-access TV show and experimented with letterboxing one episode (didn't work out too well, mainly because my cameraman is used to shooting 4:3 and seems to need some practice with 16:9, but it's not his fault). It's not hard, though it's not really worth it in the short run, as community TV isn't exactly on the cutting edge of technology (I had to hunt down an SVHS VCR to use as a mastering deck!).
Also, JVC does have one "consumer" (I use that term loosely as it's priced over $3K) HD camcorder available, or soon to be -- records MPEG-2 onto MiniDV media. I've heard it's not particularly good (weak color correction being the big failing) but I would still give one a try if I was offered one.../Brian
Slashdot Mirror
Er... maybe that's why they gave Timna to the Israelis, but my statement about Banias (and Dothan, the follow-on) stands.
Centrino requires Intel WiFi. It would actually be better if they didn't go for the Centrino cert, as the Intel networking hardware doesn't have working Linux support yet (why, Intel?) and these guys definitely want a Linux market.
DSPs are great, when you need a DSP. There's a reason they don't put general-purpose DSPs in computers anymore, though; modern systems (in theory at least) have cycles to spare, so they can do all that work in the CPU.
Now is this good or bad? One can debate that. Though I suspect that a lot of general-purpose DSP chips out there would get a little lost running on a motherboard bus... maybe integrate one into a northbridge or something...
This is not true. The Pentium-M/Banias is a P6, and it was designed by the same Israeli design team that produced the ill-fated Timna chip. I think Banias was given to them because Intel knew that an overclocked P6 (a Tualatin at least) could spank a Pentium 4, and the Israeli team knew more about the P6 architecture than anyone else in the company. Banias borrows some ideas from the P4, but it's essentially a Pentium Pro milked as far as it can possibly go, which puts it as the direct successor to the Pentium III.
The Pippin was underpowered and undermarketed, though. If Apple tried again using the hardware they have now, they might have a decent shot at doing it; they're having too much fun with the iPod though.
Consider this:
Hasbro has kind of a cool product. It's a portable video player for kids. It happens that their media is close enough to a publicly available format that they're more or less interchangeable.
Consider two things: first, geeks like to play. They want to know how the toys work. That was what doomed the CueCat from the start -- the device, by and large, was utterly useless to all but a small segment of the population, but it still had some technical interest. Therefore people were more than willing to tear that sucker apart. When they got inside, there were some ugly issues -- the serial number, specifically -- that turned out to be not so innocent. Exit Digital Convergence and its malleably named founder.
Second, consider the matter of pop culture. Granted Nickelodeon is a cut above what's out there for kids; I can think of far worse things out there than Spongebob for child consumption. But there's a lot of useless pap out there. Fact is that Hasbro has put a new medium out there, and it's sufficiently interesting to make third-party content creation tools for it.
And if the execs at Hasbro have half a functioning brain between them, they'll get on the ball and create such tools themselves, or at least do what Lego did when people started hacking Mindstorms and not get in the way. It will be very good for their business if they do.
Pixelvision rocked. A good friend of mine and I both had them as kids. We did have fun with those, and I rather wish Fisher-Price still made them.
Oh, well. With digital camcorders down in the $400 range these days and standard audiotape becoming rather a rarity these days, the PXL-2000 isn't as compelling as it used to be (microtape is a possibility, though I found out to my chagrin last night that microcassettes are probably unacceptably fragile for such an application).
Actually, I find a trip around Toys-Backwards "R"-Us to be rather depressing these days; cool toys are hard to find. Even the educational computer toys are dumbed down -- the ones they have out now don't have the programming capability the first ones of ten years or so ago had. Hasbro has an Easy-Bake Oven for boys now (yay!) but it's the insufferably lame-ass Queasy-Bake Cookerator (boo!) -- a guaranteed doomed-to-fail marketing angle. Walkie-talkies exist, but they're tricky to find. And I'm not sure what I think about the proliferation of karaoke machines -- can someone point me towards some good open source CD+G authoring tools? Then I'll be impressed.
Go to www.quackwatch.org. Laetrile is thoroughly debunked there.
Does that mean the first expected title will be Duke Nukem forever?
In Boston, any bar that doesn't serve Sam Adams isn't worth the trouble of visiting. Guinness, Bass Ale, and frequently Harpoon IPA are almost always available in anyplace that isn't a total dive as well.
Settle down. Have yourself a bowl of grits and let's watch some old Yakov Smirnov tapes.
IANAL (but who is around here?), but I think as long as it doesn't involve hacking BIOS code it shouldn't be. If there's a clean-room BIOS involved, in theory there's no case. The EULA only covers the software -- they couldn't license the hardware, simply because it doesn't work that way.
Now whether it violates the DMCA is another story entirely...
I think you've got it inside out -- if this is the EULA clause you're talking about it refers only to the software (i.e. that little fleck of Win2K and the BIOS). I see nothing about hardware here.
And why, exactly, is it wrong to buy an Xbox and mod it so you can do whatever you want with it? Yes, what these people are doing does, in some sense, qualify as extortion -- I'd rather see them just release the exploit and watch Microsoft go down in flames the way the much-less-deserving Dreamcast did. That said...
Get this through your skull. The system is a Celeron 733 with an enhanced nForce Northbridge. Its controller bus is USB-based, electrically compatible except for an easily-ignored power line for the rumble pack in the controller. Its software is a drastically cut-down Win2K kernel. It is in every meaningful respect a PC except for the lack of a keyboard, and it doesn't take a mod chip to prove it.
It is indeed a case of "my hardware, I should be able to do what I want with it." While what these anonymous folk are doing is rather shady, it does make sense. I rather hope they don't get caught...
Er... My box, my choice of OS. "Illegal" don't enter into it -- not for the end user modding the system, at any rate. Whether this is the case for those releasing the exploit is another story entirely.
Frankly, I'm looking forward to this -- I have some interesting ideas I'd like to play with, and they require being able to run on an unmodded Xbox to be worth the trouble (nothing that hasn't been done before; it's just that an Xbox running Linux is probably the cheapest way to do it). I'm skeptical, mind you, so I'll wait until the extortionists call Microsoft's bluff before I believe it, but the idea has a lot of potential.
Geez... Halle Berry vs. the frumpy-but-still-hot LARPer down the street... I'd take both, dontcha know.
Seriously, though. As much as I find the G5 case hideous (whoever said it looked like a cheese grater is dead on), I still want what's under that hood. It's about time we had something approaching parity in the Mac world... and to think I'll actually be stuck downgrading from an iMac to a beige G3/266 when I finally get out of the parental basement... makes me sad...
Oh, go pour hot grits down your linkport.
I wonder if I don't see this in the window manager world. It's one thing to make your own wm just for hack value, and I'm sure that's the case for many people. But there does seem to be a profusion of window managers that seem to exist simply as vanity projects for those who want to knock the big guys like KDE and Sawfish off the throne...
I would ask for several features (the rest can be handled by other software of course):
1. Title bars, with close buttons (and optional resize buttons).
2. The ability to have colors and patterns on the title bars.
3. Windowshading.
4. Configurable border widths (some people might like something a bit wider than one pixel).
SFX aren't necessary, and things like drag-and-drop should be handled by X anyway. It's interesting, but a bit too minimalist for me.
It's also Microsoft's very own Dylan... nice idea, but zero chance of any uptake (and at least Dylan was just Lisp with real syntax -- does anyone really want the bondage and discipline approach of ML?)
I actually worked with ML in college for a while (SML, though, not any form of CAML). It's tough to get your head around, and the requirement that interdependent functions be defined together seems rather broken conceptually. It's a very elegant language, mind you, but it's a pain in the ass to actually use.
Not that I actually know what I'm talking about, but I thought ATM was quite successful in certain niches? IIRC my DSL connection is basically ATM mingled with an analog signal... (Now ATM as an end-user networking architecture -- that has been a resounding failure. But I was under the impression that The Phone Company (TM) uses it quite a bit.)
Actually, I believe Japan (and possibly China -- not too sure about that though) uses NTSC as well, though there's some slight differences in the way Japanese signals are handled that would make a picture from a Japanese signal look darker on an American TV.
RFCs are usually written after-the-fact -- I think "Request For Comment" is just a legacy name. (Or did you forget that the ISO standard for networking is *cough* OSI?) /brian
Though admittedly "Digital Copyright Millennium Act" is perfectly accurate...
/Brian
(mod self -1, Silly)
Actually, you're wrong -- virtually every MiniDV unit I've seen will shoot either letterboxed or pseudo-anamorphic, though you do take a hit on resolution because the process seems largely to involve using a smaller section of the CCD. I have a public-access TV show and experimented with letterboxing one episode (didn't work out too well, mainly because my cameraman is used to shooting 4:3 and seems to need some practice with 16:9, but it's not his fault). It's not hard, though it's not really worth it in the short run, as community TV isn't exactly on the cutting edge of technology (I had to hunt down an SVHS VCR to use as a mastering deck!).
/Brian
Also, JVC does have one "consumer" (I use that term loosely as it's priced over $3K) HD camcorder available, or soon to be -- records MPEG-2 onto MiniDV media. I've heard it's not particularly good (weak color correction being the big failing) but I would still give one a try if I was offered one...