Problem with video tech so far is that you have to settle in to watch it: fire up the home theater, point & click several times on your laptop, open & hold the awkward portable DVD player... watching videos requires setup time and awkward movement-unfriendly positions. The technology forces you to not move, coupled with set-up/down time.
Contrast that with a video iPod: iPod audio is right there - in pocket, instant on/off. iPod video will likewise be right there - in-hand and running practically instantly... perfect for intermediate "dead time", especially when commuting. Spending 10 minutes on a bus? Waiting for an airplane? 5 minutes early for a meeting? Unexpectedly waiting an hour for someone? No time to watch that movie, but have 15 minutes a day to kill? One second flat from bored to watching something interesting. Enough storage to actually store several interesting things. Yeah, the screen will be small - but it's right there, unlike your laptop which has to be hauled out of your backpack, or your >15" TV which is in your living room and definitely not on the bus or in the elevator with you.
The use is plain: many applications make keys do something other than the immutable icons stamped onto normal keyboards. Instead of looking up key function mapping in a separate manual or help file, the function is just right there on the keys.
Heck, most of the time the "A" key doesn't produce "A", it produces "a"... how much more so a zillion other applications which do things other than what's immutably marked on the keys.
Yes it's useful for FPS games (and more). I don't do games much - part of why (aside from time) being the dorking around trying to figure out and remember which key is which, and that changing from game to game. Ditto for other complex applications with lots of obscure key assignments: I don't want to stop, find the "key help" screen, look up the function and key I want, close that window, remember where I was, and remember what that key was for more than 3 seconds - I just want to look at the keyboard and see a fitting icon on the appropriate key.
Naw, it just runs a tyrrany protection racket at a cost of >10,000,000 innocent lives. Rwanda, Congo, Zimbambwe, Iraq, North Korea, Cuba, Columbia, Palestine, Etheopia, and plenty others all get official polite recognition & protection for their violently oppressive governments, and respond to ongoing wholesale gov't slaughter of citizens with "Stop! or we'll say 'Stop!' again!"
Nearly all our computers are running DRAM, which suffers the same problem: bits disappear within a fraction of a second, unless refreshed periodically. It's just a technical problem which can/will be overcome if the payoff is high enough.
Gee whiz, this technology has, on the whole, been around for over a decade. The Virtual iGlasses did this way back when with the same resolution (in stereo!) and optional head-tracking. I'll grant that these are about 1/4th the weight and size, and run on less power - but I seriously expected we'd have near 10x the pixels displayed from a 1cc unit clipped to my glasses frame by now, and that for about $100.
Optics just hasn't kept up with computing. Some breakthrough is needed to give a 1" display a 3' eye relief just 1/2" from the eye - and do it in 0.5oz.
Head-mounted displays are just stuck on something. Lots 'o bucks to whoever figures out and solves it.
most of the time the download is in lieu of actually watching TV
"The monk was a Labour saving device. Like a dishwasher washes dishes, saving you the bother of doing them yourself, the monk believes things for you.
This [particular] one, however developed a fault, and started believing all sorts of silly things."
Douglas Noel Adams - Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
Now we have BitTorrent watching TV/movies for you, saving you from actually having to do so. Many geeks, however develop a fault, and start downloading all sorts of silly things they won't watch.
I thought Google pledged to not do anything 'evil'.
They haven't - so everyone stop whining.
They're investing in R&D, not deploying anything yet. Google just said "hey, let's see what can be done" and you guys have already convicted them.
Just because data-over-powerlines has some problems with radio interference now doesn't mean Google won't fund solving that problem in sync with their "do no evil" policy.
Powerlines run friggin' everywhere - let's see what can be done to improve their usefulness. The telephone and cable TV infrastructure has been rebuilt more than once - why not the power grid?
My notebook & router spontainiously disconnect occasionally, persuading the computer to connect to my neighbor's WAP. The only indication is a brief "connected to wireless network" message.
Don't make me legally liable for what common products are doing standard out-of-the-box according to accepted norms - especially when my neighbor never notices a thing.
My wireless router works great when it's up. Unfortunately, the connection suffers intermittent brief outages (dunno why).
When my notebook loses the connection to MY router, it just automatically looks around for other unsecured wireless connections (several in adjacent apartments), asks "may I connect?", gets the reply "sure you may", and connects. All I see - if I see anything - is a short-lived small balloon stating "connected to wireless router".
Nearly all routers are pre-configured to accept any connection request. An increasing number of computers are pre-configured (or trivially configured) to connect wherever possible. Don't tell me it's not legal when open auto-connect is how the routers and adapters work out of the box.
To re-invoke the land tresspass analogy: Most real tresspass laws require you go through significant lengths to inform people to stay out: post specifically-worded "POSTED" signs at certain intervals, erect fencing, etc. - and even then, one must practically detain the tresspasser (putting you on legal thin ice), call the cops, etc. to get anywhere close to really forcing them off. In rural areas, owned land is often large enough and ill-defined enough that determining boundaries is nearly impossible. There's a general sense of "stay out unless permission granted", but that quickly evaporates in light of "ask who? it'll take me far longer to get permission than to simply cross without a trace."
Likewise for open wireless networks. No WEP = no "POSTED" signs. With auto-request and auto-approval, it's like wandering into a forest before even realizing you're on someone else's property - and all indications point to them not caring or implicitly approving.
Already tried & failed
on
P2P and TV
·
· Score: 4, Informative
We'll make another 6 episodes as long as the actors and the audience can agree on a price for more. We'll stop when they can't agree.
Stephen King tried it. He started a new book and gave the first chapter away for free, putting subsequent chapters up for sale; when enough people bought a chapter he would write & publish the next one (all on-line). It was a dismal failure: the second chapter was bought by few and re-distributed by many; as a result, chapter three was never published. Author and audience couldn't agree on merely chapter 2.
I've been looking, and seem to be missing something very small and very important.
I need (!) to get Linux (DSL is fine) onto a bootable CF card via Windows XP. I've got the DSL.iso file, can extract all files if needed, but I need to know how to use XP to make the CF card bootable. Any suggestions?
(Problem is my diskless notebook computer goes BSOD when it hits the Win2k login screen. Yes, I've tried all that. I just want to boot DSL from the PCMCIA card slot, extract what files I need, and convert the machine to Linux. No, it won't boot from any USB device, and I don't have a PCMCIA-based CD or floppy drive. My only hope is it will boot from a CF card.)
It's a chicken-and-egg problem: so long as $50 games won't include a few lines of code supporting head-tracking, people won't spend >$500 on a VR headset; pity game companies won't spend the few dollars needed to jumpstart the headset market.
I was so thrilled by VR I bought a headset. Magic Carpet 2 was great (although the controls were not real VR-friendly). And that's where it ended, still siting in a box in a closet - because nothing else supported it.
The problem - the ONLY problem as far as I could see - was that practically no real game would support it. Even current FPS games, with full 3D 360-degree motion range stereoscopic-supporting perfectly suited for VR, won't bother to include even minimal head-tracking support. Aside from Magic Carpet 2, only lame demos took VR seriously.
Just have a developer spend an extra day adding basic head-tracking to a game like Quake 3 or Half-Life 2 and I'm sure VR will start to return.
Code is more important than comments. It's what you're actually writing purposefully - so write it clearly in the language which other programmers understand. If we both know C++, why must we drench your program in English translations of what has already been written in a language we both know?
Obfuscated or clever coding, obscure enough to require comments, is rarely needed. If someone needs a comment to understand what you've coded, you probably can de-obfuscate the code better and make it more readable (and thus probably less buggy). On the whole, code should explain itself as the ultimate detailed documentation of what the computer must do; context, decomposition, and meaningful naming does far more in most cases to explain what is happening than translating that linguistic expression into another language.
Write code for other programmers. They know the language - write in a manner which they can understand in that language. Doing so largely eliminates the need to subsequently translate that into another language.
Yes, comments are occasionally necessary. Some things just make more sense when expressed in another language. Most of the time, just write clearly in whatever language is most appropriate; for programmers, get literate in C++, Java, SmallTalk, whatever.
Nikon's plugin costs $100. While that's a pittance compared to the cost of the camera, it's an extra cost I probably can't afford after buying a camera that expensive.
Standardized RAW files don't make sense precisely because they are "raw".
Each camera, particularly as technologies progress, has its own peculiar nuances regarding how the image is captured. It's up to the manufacturer to decide the appropriate way to store that data in a "raw" format. Complying with a standard for unprocessed data will add unnecessary bulk and/or change data values (wrecking the point of "raw" image files).
I don't want a standard RAW format; I want the camera to give its data unmodified. If I need a camera-specific driver to interpret that data into a useable form, fine. If I want the camera to produce standardized formats, pick TIFF or JPG or such from it's menu. There is a place for standards; unprocessed data is not it. I want the unprocessed data unprocessed.
Why does a cell phone NEED so many buttons though?
A couple years ago there was a cell phone, billed as "disposable", which had only a couple buttons on it: one for on/voice-dial, one for hangup/off (maybe another for volume). Don't think it lasted long, and likely did voice dialing via automatic connection thru a 1-800 number, and was cheaply made, but did at least keep the buttons to a minimum.
Implementing the same functionality in a well-built phone would not be hard, allowing costs for really good numeric voice recognition. Press & hold one button for voice-to-DTMF, plus recognition of "hang up". Not unreasonable...
With a 3D IMAX theater locally, I've been wondering why movies are not being produced in 3D. Maybe some people just don't see the effect, maybe some are tired of "wow! look! 3D! let's shove something in your face!" cheesy movies. When it is done right, and not in-your-face about it, 3D is magnificent. The Polar Express was amazing, plunging the viewer into the scenes without being gratuitous about it (the 3D effect more than made up for the objected-to eerie realism of motion capture).
With for computer-generated animations, there is no excuse for not releasing 3D IMAX upscaled movies. The Incredibles was amazing; simply re-rendering 2 inches to the right would have made it incredible.
While "dimentionalizing" existing 2D classics (Star Wars included) may be debatable just as "colorizing" was, I'm thrilled to see high-end directors taking 3D seriously - both to see good movies with real visual depth, and to finally push 3D viewing into the home.
Network Walkman(TM) Digital Music Player
NW-E107 US$149.95 - Up to 70 hours of continuous playback on one "AAA" battery - Backlit LCD Display - Plays Back in ATRAC3(TM) Audio Format and MP3 Files - 1GB Built-in Memory - Compatible with Sony's Connect(TM) Online Music Store
Same memory, same price, same basic features, longer battery life, display, user-replaceable battery.
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Problem with video tech so far is that you have to settle in to watch it: fire up the home theater, point & click several times on your laptop, open & hold the awkward portable DVD player ... watching videos requires setup time and awkward movement-unfriendly positions. The technology forces you to not move, coupled with set-up/down time.
... perfect for intermediate "dead time", especially when commuting.
Contrast that with a video iPod:
iPod audio is right there - in pocket, instant on/off.
iPod video will likewise be right there - in-hand and running practically instantly
Spending 10 minutes on a bus? Waiting for an airplane? 5 minutes early for a meeting? Unexpectedly waiting an hour for someone? No time to watch that movie, but have 15 minutes a day to kill?
One second flat from bored to watching something interesting. Enough storage to actually store several interesting things.
Yeah, the screen will be small - but it's right there, unlike your laptop which has to be hauled out of your backpack, or your >15" TV which is in your living room and definitely not on the bus or in the elevator with you.
The use is plain: many applications make keys do something other than the immutable icons stamped onto normal keyboards. Instead of looking up key function mapping in a separate manual or help file, the function is just right there on the keys.
... how much more so a zillion other applications which do things other than what's immutably marked on the keys.
Heck, most of the time the "A" key doesn't produce "A", it produces "a"
Should Saddam have been left in power, ensuring the termination of a million more?
Like 20 years of UN "Stop! or we'll say 'Stop!' again!" resolutions did any good.
Yes it's useful for FPS games (and more). I don't do games much - part of why (aside from time) being the dorking around trying to figure out and remember which key is which, and that changing from game to game. Ditto for other complex applications with lots of obscure key assignments: I don't want to stop, find the "key help" screen, look up the function and key I want, close that window, remember where I was, and remember what that key was for more than 3 seconds - I just want to look at the keyboard and see a fitting icon on the appropriate key.
Ask and ye shall receive: Blank keyboard available from ThinkGeek! (pity it's not Bluetooth-enabled)
Naw, it just runs a tyrrany protection racket at a cost of >10,000,000 innocent lives. Rwanda, Congo, Zimbambwe, Iraq, North Korea, Cuba, Columbia, Palestine, Etheopia, and plenty others all get official polite recognition & protection for their violently oppressive governments, and respond to ongoing wholesale gov't slaughter of citizens with "Stop! or we'll say 'Stop!' again!"
Nearly all our computers are running DRAM, which suffers the same problem: bits disappear within a fraction of a second, unless refreshed periodically. It's just a technical problem which can/will be overcome if the payoff is high enough.
BBC has been pushing more and more toward internet-based content.
Like their recent move to eliminate their "cult TV" website?
Gee whiz, this technology has, on the whole, been around for over a decade. The Virtual iGlasses did this way back when with the same resolution (in stereo!) and optional head-tracking. I'll grant that these are about 1/4th the weight and size, and run on less power - but I seriously expected we'd have near 10x the pixels displayed from a 1cc unit clipped to my glasses frame by now, and that for about $100.
Optics just hasn't kept up with computing. Some breakthrough is needed to give a 1" display a 3' eye relief just 1/2" from the eye - and do it in 0.5oz.
Head-mounted displays are just stuck on something. Lots 'o bucks to whoever figures out and solves it.
So is someone going to write an i86 (or whatever processor) emulator to run on a CGoL Turing Machine? then port Linux to it?
(Only half kidding...)
Now we have BitTorrent watching TV/movies for you, saving you from actually having to do so. Many geeks, however develop a fault, and start downloading all sorts of silly things they won't watch.
I thought Google pledged to not do anything 'evil'.
They haven't - so everyone stop whining.
They're investing in R&D, not deploying anything yet. Google just said "hey, let's see what can be done" and you guys have already convicted them.
Just because data-over-powerlines has some problems with radio interference now doesn't mean Google won't fund solving that problem in sync with their "do no evil" policy.
Powerlines run friggin' everywhere - let's see what can be done to improve their usefulness.
The telephone and cable TV infrastructure has been rebuilt more than once - why not the power grid?
My notebook & router spontainiously disconnect occasionally, persuading the computer to connect to my neighbor's WAP. The only indication is a brief "connected to wireless network" message.
Don't make me legally liable for what common products are doing standard out-of-the-box according to accepted norms - especially when my neighbor never notices a thing.
My wireless router works great when it's up. Unfortunately, the connection suffers intermittent brief outages (dunno why).
When my notebook loses the connection to MY router, it just automatically looks around for other unsecured wireless connections (several in adjacent apartments), asks "may I connect?", gets the reply "sure you may", and connects. All I see - if I see anything - is a short-lived small balloon stating "connected to wireless router".
Nearly all routers are pre-configured to accept any connection request.
An increasing number of computers are pre-configured (or trivially configured) to connect wherever possible.
Don't tell me it's not legal when open auto-connect is how the routers and adapters work out of the box.
To re-invoke the land tresspass analogy:
Most real tresspass laws require you go through significant lengths to inform people to stay out: post specifically-worded "POSTED" signs at certain intervals, erect fencing, etc. - and even then, one must practically detain the tresspasser (putting you on legal thin ice), call the cops, etc. to get anywhere close to really forcing them off. In rural areas, owned land is often large enough and ill-defined enough that determining boundaries is nearly impossible. There's a general sense of "stay out unless permission granted", but that quickly evaporates in light of "ask who? it'll take me far longer to get permission than to simply cross without a trace."
Likewise for open wireless networks. No WEP = no "POSTED" signs. With auto-request and auto-approval, it's like wandering into a forest before even realizing you're on someone else's property - and all indications point to them not caring or implicitly approving.
We'll make another 6 episodes as long as the actors and the audience can agree on a price for more. We'll stop when they can't agree.
Stephen King tried it. He started a new book and gave the first chapter away for free, putting subsequent chapters up for sale; when enough people bought a chapter he would write & publish the next one (all on-line). It was a dismal failure: the second chapter was bought by few and re-distributed by many; as a result, chapter three was never published. Author and audience couldn't agree on merely chapter 2.
I've been looking, and seem to be missing something very small and very important.
.iso file, can extract all files if needed, but I need to know how to use XP to make the CF card bootable. Any suggestions?
I need (!) to get Linux (DSL is fine) onto a bootable CF card via Windows XP. I've got the DSL
(Problem is my diskless notebook computer goes BSOD when it hits the Win2k login screen. Yes, I've tried all that. I just want to boot DSL from the PCMCIA card slot, extract what files I need, and convert the machine to Linux. No, it won't boot from any USB device, and I don't have a PCMCIA-based CD or floppy drive. My only hope is it will boot from a CF card.)
It's a chicken-and-egg problem: so long as $50 games won't include a few lines of code supporting head-tracking, people won't spend >$500 on a VR headset; pity game companies won't spend the few dollars needed to jumpstart the headset market.
I was so thrilled by VR I bought a headset. Magic Carpet 2 was great (although the controls were not real VR-friendly). And that's where it ended, still siting in a box in a closet - because nothing else supported it.
The problem - the ONLY problem as far as I could see - was that practically no real game would support it. Even current FPS games, with full 3D 360-degree motion range stereoscopic-supporting perfectly suited for VR, won't bother to include even minimal head-tracking support. Aside from Magic Carpet 2, only lame demos took VR seriously.
Just have a developer spend an extra day adding basic head-tracking to a game like Quake 3 or Half-Life 2 and I'm sure VR will start to return.
Code is more important than comments. It's what you're actually writing purposefully - so write it clearly in the language which other programmers understand. If we both know C++, why must we drench your program in English translations of what has already been written in a language we both know?
Obfuscated or clever coding, obscure enough to require comments, is rarely needed. If someone needs a comment to understand what you've coded, you probably can de-obfuscate the code better and make it more readable (and thus probably less buggy). On the whole, code should explain itself as the ultimate detailed documentation of what the computer must do; context, decomposition, and meaningful naming does far more in most cases to explain what is happening than translating that linguistic expression into another language.
Write code for other programmers. They know the language - write in a manner which they can understand in that language. Doing so largely eliminates the need to subsequently translate that into another language.
Yes, comments are occasionally necessary. Some things just make more sense when expressed in another language. Most of the time, just write clearly in whatever language is most appropriate; for programmers, get literate in C++, Java, SmallTalk, whatever.
Nikon's plugin costs $100. While that's a pittance compared to the cost of the camera, it's an extra cost I probably can't afford after buying a camera that expensive.
Standardized RAW files don't make sense precisely because they are "raw".
Each camera, particularly as technologies progress, has its own peculiar nuances regarding how the image is captured. It's up to the manufacturer to decide the appropriate way to store that data in a "raw" format. Complying with a standard for unprocessed data will add unnecessary bulk and/or change data values (wrecking the point of "raw" image files).
I don't want a standard RAW format; I want the camera to give its data unmodified. If I need a camera-specific driver to interpret that data into a useable form, fine. If I want the camera to produce standardized formats, pick TIFF or JPG or such from it's menu. There is a place for standards; unprocessed data is not it. I want the unprocessed data unprocessed.
Terraserver, MapQuest, and others had sattelite imagery years ago. Some have since discontinued it (not sure why), but Google is hardly the first.
Why does a cell phone NEED so many buttons though?
A couple years ago there was a cell phone, billed as "disposable", which had only a couple buttons on it: one for on/voice-dial, one for hangup/off (maybe another for volume). Don't think it lasted long, and likely did voice dialing via automatic connection thru a 1-800 number, and was cheaply made, but did at least keep the buttons to a minimum.
Implementing the same functionality in a well-built phone would not be hard, allowing costs for really good numeric voice recognition. Press & hold one button for voice-to-DTMF, plus recognition of "hang up". Not unreasonable...
With a 3D IMAX theater locally, I've been wondering why movies are not being produced in 3D. Maybe some people just don't see the effect, maybe some are tired of "wow! look! 3D! let's shove something in your face!" cheesy movies. When it is done right, and not in-your-face about it, 3D is magnificent. The Polar Express was amazing, plunging the viewer into the scenes without being gratuitous about it (the 3D effect more than made up for the objected-to eerie realism of motion capture).
With for computer-generated animations, there is no excuse for not releasing 3D IMAX upscaled movies. The Incredibles was amazing; simply re-rendering 2 inches to the right would have made it incredible.
While "dimentionalizing" existing 2D classics (Star Wars included) may be debatable just as "colorizing" was, I'm thrilled to see high-end directors taking 3D seriously - both to see good movies with real visual depth, and to finally push 3D viewing into the home.
Same memory, same price, same basic features, longer battery life, display, user-replaceable battery.
i rule?
If you have to ask, you don't.