HDTV in the United States uses ATSC, which is a transport stream for MPEG-2. Most cable companies still use MPEG-2, though I believe the satellite companies have switched.
While this only means a $2 reduction in the cost to make a TV, it also means a $2 reduction in the cost of streaming devices capable of playing TV signals. That's significant when you're talking about a Roku stick, which is why they skipped the license fee and don't support it. That means you can't use a Roku as a frontend for MythTV without transcoding your recordings, and you can't use a Roku as a frontend for a HDPrime networked cable card tuner.
All that can change now. I don't know if existing hardware that Roku uses can support MPEG-2, but if it does, then they could add support with just a software update. The same with all the other similar devices that may not have supported MPEG-2 in the past.
Are trading card packs different except for being physical objects? You buy a pack of cards with a chance of getting a rare card. It's the exact same idea.
What about mystery minifig LEGO collector series? While you might be able to feel which figure you're getting, it's designed to be a surprise, so you don't know what you're getting. It's not quite the same thing, but it's close.
Are we going to ban all mystery sales?
Perhaps that's a good idea, but let's think this through.
Or perhaps we treat online sales differently as they cater more to the gambling mentality due to being instantly available at any time. It may not be fair, but it is addressing a practical problem in a practical way.
This allows scientists to study new forms of matter. This means better calibrating the models that predicted this, and a better understanding of exactly what is going on. Whether this particular form of matter is ever useful or not, the improved understanding may lead to forms of matter that are quite useful.
Yup, me too. I run twm with a few patches I wrote.
One thing I find extremely frustrating is apps that are heavily integrated with a desktop environment to the point where you have to install almost the entire environment just to run one app, and good luck if you want to play with its configuration settings.
It would be great if the Gnome and KDE applications were designed to work well with their respective desktops, and also to work reasonably well on their own. This is exactly why we have toolkits like gtk.
This might be a great startup idea. Create a company that provides benefits with several standard packages. Companies could buy into a package for their employees. If an employee leaves, he could continue to pay his own portion of the package (optionally changing to a cheaper or more expensive package), but unlike Cobra, it would be the full benefits and could continue indefinitely. If starting a new job with another company that uses the same benefits company, there would be no changes in benefits.
I could see this mostly being a mix of small businesses and contract employees, but it could also be larger companies and government agencies if the system worked well enough.
The one thing that the Echo and Google Home both fail at is playing the music I already own from my own server. Both want to sell you a subscription to their music service. Sure, I can use them as dumb bluetooth speakers, but then I don't have the voice control, defeating the purpose. I was hoping that Apple would make their Home Pod work with your local iTunes server, which would be a compelling feature for me, but from the page at apple.com, it doesn't indicate that this is allowed. Instead, they're focusing on their music service.
I would, but it's too clunky to have to use the wake word again. If she were automatically listening for a brief time after giving a response, then I would probably do so routinely.
First, the firmware developers are a completely different team from the vehicle designers.
Second, the FM radio has been working for a month now. Tesla has dropped AM radio starting with the Model X because too many people complained about poor reception due to interference from the inverters or motors. We could go on at great length as to whether this is a reasonable decision--there are dozens of threads on the topics on the Tesla discussion boards.
They need to keep their design team working on new things. The design of the Model 3 is done. Sure, their designers will be doing some tweaks, but they need to be doing interesting stuff, or they'll move on to other companies where they can.
You can't run a successful company for the long term by focusing exclusively on the current product, even when the survival of the company depends on the success of the current product. You have to keep the product pipeline running.
Obviously our world is full of clocks that can't handle that now, but it did occur to me that it would be cool to just say something like, Sunset is always at 8:00pm in the center of the timezone. Clocks shift at 3am to make that work for the next day. Sure, that means sunrise at 1:30pm in the winter, but at least we can still enjoy our evenings. Who cares if it's dark out when we're at work?
Maybe in a few decades, all our clocks will use NTP, and something like this could really be done (though I don't see people going for it).
So the idea presented in the summary probably wouldn't be popular enough to work, but there is a similar idea that would potentially work. The key idea in all of this is that transportation costs in electric self-driving cars are low enough to do things that would be crazy now.
So what could work is businesses offering free rides to and from their businesses. You want to shop at Amazon Whole Foods? They'll send you a car. Want groceries from Price Chopper, you'll have to figure out how to get there yourself. This can be another tool for big stores to force the little guys out.
Of course, what they're looking at right now is letting you shop online and then having the merchandise delivered to you, but there's no reason they can't deliver you to the merchandise.
I just tried to do this exact thing on Monday. Try as I might, I couldn't get the songs to upload. All the web-based tutorials showed upload icons on the Amazon Music app, but it simply wasn't there on my system. Even Amazon's help pages still said it should work.
I have an Echo, and I just wanted to add a few CDs to it so that we could listen to them. The 250-song limit was already extremely restrictive.
What I really want is the ability to stream from my own server. This is a feature that Apple is likely to push, since I believe they've always supported in-house iTunes servers (I'm not really in the Apple ecosystem, so I might be mistaken). If Apple does add this feature and make a big push next year, I hope it forces Amazon and Google to follow suit.
Wireless charging is convenient, and it can extend the life of your phone if you would otherwise run into charging port issues. I switched to wireless charging when my phone complained of a wet charging port, since it bypasses the water detection.
The power loss is minimal for a device like my phone that doesn't really use that much power. You're much better off worrying about other ways of saving power. Turning off a light when you're not in the room can save a ton more power. Switching just a single bulb to LED saves far more power. Consider a smart powerstrip that kills power to auxiliary devices when you turn your TV off (sound bar, DVD player, cable box, Roku stick adapter, etc.).
There are tons of ways to be more efficient. Don't harass someone for ignoring one minor inefficiency in favor of convenience.
Amazon has a special PDF that you print out and set where you want to have your packages delivered, then send them a photo of it. The robot in the delivery vehicle will place the package exactly where the paper was in the photo. It must be within 3 feet of your driveway, but they're working on expanding that for drone-deliverable packages. Soon light-weight packages will be deliverable to your back porch or even a balcony.
[This post brought to you by the years 2019 and 2022. You get the idea--there are plenty of solutions that they can easily implement once they have the self-driving part done.]
It's nice that they've gotten the language support to roll out in additional countries, but I wish they would put a bit more work into improving the device.
The use of skills is very clunky. It feels like I'm coding when I'm talking to it. Skills should be able to register questions that they can answer, so if Alexa gets a question she doesn't handle natively, the first active skill that does can be triggered. So instead of "Alexa, ask," it would just be "Alexa,."
The inability to stream music from a local server is really annoying. I have a huge library, and as it is now, I can either pay to upload it to the cloud (they let you do a small portion free), or I can pay for their streaming service. Google Home is no better, again because they want to sell you their own music service. Sure, you can use it as a bluetooth speaker, but you don't have voice control over your library, which is rather the point. I'm hoping that Apple will release their product, as it should talk to a local iTunes server, which just might push the others into adding local support.
What I really want is to be able to write a local skill that would interact with my own home computer. For example, it would be very convenient to ask her how much time is left on the current TV show, and have it query the MythTV and get the answer (knowing how much time is left on the kid's show when cooking is very helpful). I'm sure if I had this ability, I would find all sorts of things that would be nice to have.
What we (as consumers) really need is compulsory licensing for video. Let the various streaming services compete based on their new material, but require that after some time (say three years from the the first streaming or ten years if it was never streamed), all video must be licensed for streaming on a per-minute basis. I might set the rate at $10/month divided by the average number of hours a typical household streams, with the rate decreasing based on the age of the video.
So say the average household streams 100 hours/month, so the base rate is $0.10/hour (measured in full minutes). A Netflix original show would be available at that rate on Amazon after three years. Every year the rate would drop by $0.002/hour, so five years later it's $0.09/hour.
Consumers would be able to subscribe to only one service and have access to every video ever made, excluding new releases. You might choose to subscribe to a premium service with awesome new shows, or you might choose to subscribe to a discount service that only has older shows. You might subscribe to a service where you prepay for a number of hours of TV instead of an all-you-can-watch model.
This is the first launch of the Falcon Heavy. They're not getting a paying customer until they can prove that the rocket works. That means they don't have any important payload, so why not pull a stunt like this?
Well, they will have to do some work to make sure any liquids or gasses in the vehicle don't cause explosions and mess up the test. Obviously they need to remove the valve stems on the tires, but they'll have to look at lots of other fluids and places where air is trapped to be sure it won't be a problem.
Of course, there are other things they could launch. Perhaps they could do a resupply to the ISS--one of the few launches where the cargo isn't as expensive as the launch. They could also stage some supplies for a future Mars mission in Mars orbit. But if doing something like that would delay the launch as they prepare the payload, it might not be worth it.
This indicates to me that they're not really there yet. If you really want to compose something interesting, train the AI in a wide range of music first, then have it focus on a particular artist to mimic, with a goal being to produce songs that sound like they were produced by the same artist. Of course, to be really good, you would need to also handle lyrics, not just the music.
Yup, me too. I had jumped on a deal shortly before that where you could extend your subscription by 100 issues for $100. When they stopped mailing it, I never logged in to read it. I occasionally will find an old article when searching on some topic, and it's almost always a great source of information.
This is the sort of thing you would want to have included with encrypted messaging apps like Signal. Of course, it should be a configurable option, and when it detects other eyes on the screen, it should display an option to override the privacy (perhaps you want to show a message to a friend). But for reading possibly sensitive messages in a public place, this is a great idea.
Though I agree that there are a lot of cases where you don't want this, and it could be used to your disadvantage. That's why I want to see a phone where access to any given hardware can be controlled, with the option to provide simulated hardware in cases where you want the app to think it's using the real camera, GPS, motion sensor, or whatever. And that should include the network (which happens to be down all the time for certain apps, or only up when I'm viewing them).
Do they have an app that I can install to check the apps on my phone? Not that it will do me much good if I still want to run those apps.
What I really want is a fake location service that returns a fake cell phone tower ID and fake GPS, but based on a real location of my choice. Then apps that want location data will get the fake location except for ones that I want to give the real location to (for example, Waze).
Slashdot Mirror
HDTV in the United States uses ATSC, which is a transport stream for MPEG-2. Most cable companies still use MPEG-2, though I believe the satellite companies have switched.
While this only means a $2 reduction in the cost to make a TV, it also means a $2 reduction in the cost of streaming devices capable of playing TV signals. That's significant when you're talking about a Roku stick, which is why they skipped the license fee and don't support it. That means you can't use a Roku as a frontend for MythTV without transcoding your recordings, and you can't use a Roku as a frontend for a HDPrime networked cable card tuner.
All that can change now. I don't know if existing hardware that Roku uses can support MPEG-2, but if it does, then they could add support with just a software update. The same with all the other similar devices that may not have supported MPEG-2 in the past.
Are trading card packs different except for being physical objects? You buy a pack of cards with a chance of getting a rare card. It's the exact same idea.
What about mystery minifig LEGO collector series? While you might be able to feel which figure you're getting, it's designed to be a surprise, so you don't know what you're getting. It's not quite the same thing, but it's close.
Are we going to ban all mystery sales?
Perhaps that's a good idea, but let's think this through.
Or perhaps we treat online sales differently as they cater more to the gambling mentality due to being instantly available at any time. It may not be fair, but it is addressing a practical problem in a practical way.
This allows scientists to study new forms of matter. This means better calibrating the models that predicted this, and a better understanding of exactly what is going on. Whether this particular form of matter is ever useful or not, the improved understanding may lead to forms of matter that are quite useful.
Yup, me too. I run twm with a few patches I wrote.
One thing I find extremely frustrating is apps that are heavily integrated with a desktop environment to the point where you have to install almost the entire environment just to run one app, and good luck if you want to play with its configuration settings.
It would be great if the Gnome and KDE applications were designed to work well with their respective desktops, and also to work reasonably well on their own. This is exactly why we have toolkits like gtk.
This might be a great startup idea. Create a company that provides benefits with several standard packages. Companies could buy into a package for their employees. If an employee leaves, he could continue to pay his own portion of the package (optionally changing to a cheaper or more expensive package), but unlike Cobra, it would be the full benefits and could continue indefinitely. If starting a new job with another company that uses the same benefits company, there would be no changes in benefits.
I could see this mostly being a mix of small businesses and contract employees, but it could also be larger companies and government agencies if the system worked well enough.
The one thing that the Echo and Google Home both fail at is playing the music I already own from my own server. Both want to sell you a subscription to their music service. Sure, I can use them as dumb bluetooth speakers, but then I don't have the voice control, defeating the purpose. I was hoping that Apple would make their Home Pod work with your local iTunes server, which would be a compelling feature for me, but from the page at apple.com, it doesn't indicate that this is allowed. Instead, they're focusing on their music service.
I would, but it's too clunky to have to use the wake word again. If she were automatically listening for a brief time after giving a response, then I would probably do so routinely.
First, the firmware developers are a completely different team from the vehicle designers.
Second, the FM radio has been working for a month now. Tesla has dropped AM radio starting with the Model X because too many people complained about poor reception due to interference from the inverters or motors. We could go on at great length as to whether this is a reasonable decision--there are dozens of threads on the topics on the Tesla discussion boards.
They need to keep their design team working on new things. The design of the Model 3 is done. Sure, their designers will be doing some tweaks, but they need to be doing interesting stuff, or they'll move on to other companies where they can.
You can't run a successful company for the long term by focusing exclusively on the current product, even when the survival of the company depends on the success of the current product. You have to keep the product pipeline running.
It's exactly this in-your-face Christianity that keeps so many people as far away from organized religion as possible.
Obviously our world is full of clocks that can't handle that now, but it did occur to me that it would be cool to just say something like, Sunset is always at 8:00pm in the center of the timezone. Clocks shift at 3am to make that work for the next day. Sure, that means sunrise at 1:30pm in the winter, but at least we can still enjoy our evenings. Who cares if it's dark out when we're at work?
Maybe in a few decades, all our clocks will use NTP, and something like this could really be done (though I don't see people going for it).
Daylight Saving Time is a great idea. Ditching it in the winter is the problem. Just keep it year round and eliminate the stupid changing.
So the idea presented in the summary probably wouldn't be popular enough to work, but there is a similar idea that would potentially work. The key idea in all of this is that transportation costs in electric self-driving cars are low enough to do things that would be crazy now.
So what could work is businesses offering free rides to and from their businesses. You want to shop at Amazon Whole Foods? They'll send you a car. Want groceries from Price Chopper, you'll have to figure out how to get there yourself. This can be another tool for big stores to force the little guys out.
Of course, what they're looking at right now is letting you shop online and then having the merchandise delivered to you, but there's no reason they can't deliver you to the merchandise.
I just tried to do this exact thing on Monday. Try as I might, I couldn't get the songs to upload. All the web-based tutorials showed upload icons on the Amazon Music app, but it simply wasn't there on my system. Even Amazon's help pages still said it should work.
I have an Echo, and I just wanted to add a few CDs to it so that we could listen to them. The 250-song limit was already extremely restrictive.
What I really want is the ability to stream from my own server. This is a feature that Apple is likely to push, since I believe they've always supported in-house iTunes servers (I'm not really in the Apple ecosystem, so I might be mistaken). If Apple does add this feature and make a big push next year, I hope it forces Amazon and Google to follow suit.
They'll own a quarter of Disney. The question is whether they'll sell it, keep it as an investment, or try to influence Disney.
Wireless charging is convenient, and it can extend the life of your phone if you would otherwise run into charging port issues. I switched to wireless charging when my phone complained of a wet charging port, since it bypasses the water detection.
The power loss is minimal for a device like my phone that doesn't really use that much power. You're much better off worrying about other ways of saving power. Turning off a light when you're not in the room can save a ton more power. Switching just a single bulb to LED saves far more power. Consider a smart powerstrip that kills power to auxiliary devices when you turn your TV off (sound bar, DVD player, cable box, Roku stick adapter, etc.).
There are tons of ways to be more efficient. Don't harass someone for ignoring one minor inefficiency in favor of convenience.
Amazon has a special PDF that you print out and set where you want to have your packages delivered, then send them a photo of it. The robot in the delivery vehicle will place the package exactly where the paper was in the photo. It must be within 3 feet of your driveway, but they're working on expanding that for drone-deliverable packages. Soon light-weight packages will be deliverable to your back porch or even a balcony.
[This post brought to you by the years 2019 and 2022. You get the idea--there are plenty of solutions that they can easily implement once they have the self-driving part done.]
It's nice that they've gotten the language support to roll out in additional countries, but I wish they would put a bit more work into improving the device.
The use of skills is very clunky. It feels like I'm coding when I'm talking to it. Skills should be able to register questions that they can answer, so if Alexa gets a question she doesn't handle natively, the first active skill that does can be triggered. So instead of "Alexa, ask ," it would just be "Alexa, ."
The inability to stream music from a local server is really annoying. I have a huge library, and as it is now, I can either pay to upload it to the cloud (they let you do a small portion free), or I can pay for their streaming service. Google Home is no better, again because they want to sell you their own music service. Sure, you can use it as a bluetooth speaker, but you don't have voice control over your library, which is rather the point. I'm hoping that Apple will release their product, as it should talk to a local iTunes server, which just might push the others into adding local support.
What I really want is to be able to write a local skill that would interact with my own home computer. For example, it would be very convenient to ask her how much time is left on the current TV show, and have it query the MythTV and get the answer (knowing how much time is left on the kid's show when cooking is very helpful). I'm sure if I had this ability, I would find all sorts of things that would be nice to have.
What we (as consumers) really need is compulsory licensing for video. Let the various streaming services compete based on their new material, but require that after some time (say three years from the the first streaming or ten years if it was never streamed), all video must be licensed for streaming on a per-minute basis. I might set the rate at $10/month divided by the average number of hours a typical household streams, with the rate decreasing based on the age of the video.
So say the average household streams 100 hours/month, so the base rate is $0.10/hour (measured in full minutes). A Netflix original show would be available at that rate on Amazon after three years. Every year the rate would drop by $0.002/hour, so five years later it's $0.09/hour.
Consumers would be able to subscribe to only one service and have access to every video ever made, excluding new releases. You might choose to subscribe to a premium service with awesome new shows, or you might choose to subscribe to a discount service that only has older shows. You might subscribe to a service where you prepay for a number of hours of TV instead of an all-you-can-watch model.
Someone needs to start sharing a video file of this with sound for those of us that have trouble imagining it.
This is the first launch of the Falcon Heavy. They're not getting a paying customer until they can prove that the rocket works. That means they don't have any important payload, so why not pull a stunt like this?
Well, they will have to do some work to make sure any liquids or gasses in the vehicle don't cause explosions and mess up the test. Obviously they need to remove the valve stems on the tires, but they'll have to look at lots of other fluids and places where air is trapped to be sure it won't be a problem.
Of course, there are other things they could launch. Perhaps they could do a resupply to the ISS--one of the few launches where the cargo isn't as expensive as the launch. They could also stage some supplies for a future Mars mission in Mars orbit. But if doing something like that would delay the launch as they prepare the payload, it might not be worth it.
This indicates to me that they're not really there yet. If you really want to compose something interesting, train the AI in a wide range of music first, then have it focus on a particular artist to mimic, with a goal being to produce songs that sound like they were produced by the same artist. Of course, to be really good, you would need to also handle lyrics, not just the music.
Yup, me too. I had jumped on a deal shortly before that where you could extend your subscription by 100 issues for $100. When they stopped mailing it, I never logged in to read it. I occasionally will find an old article when searching on some topic, and it's almost always a great source of information.
This is the sort of thing you would want to have included with encrypted messaging apps like Signal. Of course, it should be a configurable option, and when it detects other eyes on the screen, it should display an option to override the privacy (perhaps you want to show a message to a friend). But for reading possibly sensitive messages in a public place, this is a great idea.
Though I agree that there are a lot of cases where you don't want this, and it could be used to your disadvantage. That's why I want to see a phone where access to any given hardware can be controlled, with the option to provide simulated hardware in cases where you want the app to think it's using the real camera, GPS, motion sensor, or whatever. And that should include the network (which happens to be down all the time for certain apps, or only up when I'm viewing them).
Do they have an app that I can install to check the apps on my phone? Not that it will do me much good if I still want to run those apps.
What I really want is a fake location service that returns a fake cell phone tower ID and fake GPS, but based on a real location of my choice. Then apps that want location data will get the fake location except for ones that I want to give the real location to (for example, Waze).