One correction: Windows Media Center was also in Windows 7. You could get it as a $15 upgrade to Windows 8 (supposedly a fee for the codecs and DVD playback license) but only from Windows 8 Pro rather than Home, effectively killing it since the target market would have had to spend $114 to get Media Center ($99 for the upgrade to Pro plus $15 for WMC). It wasn't until Windows 10 that it was completely dead.
The Xbox One S will probably enjoy a bit of popularity as an Ultra Blu-Ray player, for the minority that still cares about discs. But Microsoft killed the proposed Xbox DVR capability which would have been a successor to WMC. My suspicion is that they couldn't overcome the licensing and DRM issues that the content producers wanted to impose; there were no major technical barriers.
It would, if it weren't for the problem that the German streaming service probably only has the rights to offer its services in Germany. That's no help to somebody in the US who would like to watch German movies.
His point is a good one. Some people want self driving cars to reach the point of absolute safety. That's an impossible goal; there will always be things that the vehicle cannot predict, like a pedestrian who appears to be walking on a sidewalk suddenly darting into the street.
But once self driving cars reach the point of being able to drive more safely than human drivers, a point that they may have already reached, publicity that discourages people from using self driving cars is dangerous. It might lead people to making the more dangerous choice of driving the car manually, even if they are tired or under the influence of alcohol, rather than letting the car drive itself.
The objection that people often have to upgrades that are purely software is that the hardware (which they are already paying for) is the expensive part and the software should come along for free. That may have once been true, but nowadays a lot of the expense is in software development. Self driving cars are not easy.
But in this case, I suspect the main expense is neither hardware nor software. It's funding for the legal defense pool.
One problem that Tesla faces: if an autonomous vehicle gets into an accident, it is currently likely that the maker and designer of the vehicle will be sued. Here in the US, they're likely to get sued for a LOT of money. And that legal risk is higher if the car is being used commercially. By taking control of where their vehicles can be used as autonomous cars for revenue purposes, they're taking some control over their legal exposure; they will probably only make the Tesla Network available in places where the risks are acceptable.
So far as I know, this only affects using a Tesla in autonomous mode. If you want to DRIVE your Tesla for Uber or Lyft you're still free to do that, even if the car has autonomous capability.
Why should this be out of bounds? The tagline of Slashdot used to be "News for nerds. Stuff that matters." I don't see anything in that mission that limits the site to discussion of purely technological subjects. The social impact of technology, which is what this story is about, is definitely fair game.
That statistic doesn't necessarily mean that they spend 12x as much time watching Netflix. Suppose they watch Netflix every day and Amazon or Hulu every other day; that might mean only a 2x discrepancy in actual viewing. The 12x number says something about people's dedication to the site, but I'd also like to see numbers for viewing time.
There is some truth to that. Recent laptop development has prioritized battery life rather than CPU performance. Even if you buy something with an i7 CPU, it's probably an ultra low voltage part that only has two cores and is no faster than the CPU in your seven year old laptop. On the bright side, the new system is two pounds lighter and runs twice as long on batteries (three times as long if you stream video because the new one does video decoding in hardware), and once you're up over $700 it probably has at least a 1080p screen and maybe better; laptops with 3200x1800 and 2160p displays exist. It also came with a decent size SSD, rather than making you buy one as an upgrade.
Disclosure: my new laptop falls firmly in that realm. It's an Inspiron 13 7000 2-in-1 with a ULV i7 (6500U, last year's version, discounted because the new one is on the way). It's fast enough for what I do but won't rival a good desktop. And the 12GB RAM and 512GB SSD are nice.
There is still one sub-genre of the laptop market that is putting the emphasis on performance: gaming laptops. But some of those don't really qualify as laptops in any conventional sense, and most of them aren't cheap. The boundary case is the liquid cooled ASUS "laptop" that weighs 23 pounds when connected to the optional liquid cooling dock. (It can also be used without the dock at reduced performance, and will even run for a short time on batteries.)
I don't care who Adams endorses. I've been displeased by his politics in the past so I don't take his political positions seriously. Doesn't stop me from enjoying his comics.
If Garry Trudeau were to endorse Johnson I might pay attention. But it's not going to happen.
The books are free as in beer. They are also free in that they are not encumbered by DRM. They are not free/libre in the sense of a free license; they are copyrighted works. O'Reilly has published some books that have free licenses (GNU Free Documentation License or Creative Commons) but these are not among them.
So far as I know, Stairway to Heaven does not quote the Bible. But if there is ever a second volume of the Book of SubGenius it will probably reference Stairway to Heaven.
There are songs that do quote the Bible. Pete Seeger's song Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is A Season) - best known from the cover version by The Byrds - is probably the best known example; aside from the words Turn Turn Turn, it's lifted pretty directly from Ecclesiastes 3:1-4. Lists with many more songs that contain Bible references are online; here is one: http://www.christiantoday.com/...
(You probably know all of this already, PopeRatzo. But maybe somebody reading the thread does not.)
The Netflix comment isn't about the tentpole movies. The current system is doing OK for them. No-budget indies are doing as well as they ever have, or perhaps even better because some of them get picked up by Netflix or Amazon in lieu of a theatrical release.
The films that are struggling are the midlist. Films with budgets in the $5 to $50 million range. Those are the ones that would benefit from changes to the current system, and they're the ones that Netflix is talking about.
There is one problem with that plan that is not the fault of the theaters. If a movie is released to some other distribution channel before it is shown in theaters, it is not eligible for any of the major movie awards. That especially hurts for documentaries, because winning a documentary Oscar is one of the few hopes that most documentaries have of ever making money.
The 18+ movie theaters I have visited don't have toilets that remotely resemble that comment. And they have a bigger screen and a better sound system than I do at home.
Not the Bible at all, though related ideas pop up repeatedly in the Old Testament. It's from the song Fire, by The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
As so many replies have pointed out, nobody is doing much development on CPUs that operate at 5v any more. Going to lower voltages gives us higher speeds (as a side effect of the smaller geometries that the lower voltages enable) and lower overall power consumption.
The downside is the increased difficulty of interfacing with the outside world. Once you move down to 3.3v operation you can no longer drive some colors of LED directly; you have to use some method of getting a higher voltage to reach the threshold voltage of the LED such as a charge pump. You can't drive all sorts of legacy peripherals directly. Your noise margins get worse, so simple interfaces like just sending signals directly out from logic pins to off-board things no longer work well. If you go down to even lower voltages like 1.8v it gets worse.
5 volt CPUs have another related advantage: the outputs can source a lot more current. (That also comes directly from the technology: the larger transistors in those older designs can handle more.) Again, that means that a 5v CPU can directly drive something, but a lower voltage part will require a buffer transistor or IC.
There are a few possible solutions. You can stick with an older 5V CPU if you don't need speed. You can use a CPU that has built-in level shifting such as the Cypress PSoC series. (The ARM CPU on the PSoC 4 and PSoC 5LP actually operate at 1.8v, but the inputs are all 5v capable and there are built-in level shifters for all digital inputs and outputs. The output voltage is whatever you supply on the appropriate supply pin, the input threshold is half of the voltage on that pin, and there are separate output voltage pins for each I/O port.) You can design or buy a board with level shifting for some or all inputs and outputs. You can design a system that uses an old 5v CPU for some external interface tasks and a lower voltage part to do the actual computing. (Arduino HATs for the Raspberry Pi are an example of a product that is intended to facilitate this kind of system design.)
Maybe, maybe not. They may really be throwing in basic TV with the super-fast service. They want to keep the number of potential TV viewers up because it's good for the advertising revenue on all the TV channels they own. The free premium channel is probably a limited time offer, though.
The NFL is now available as a streaming service, sort of. If you can't subscribe to DirecTV (either because you live in a multi-unit building and can't put up an antenna, or your address has been verified as one where you can't receive the satellite signal) you can sign up for a streaming version of NFL Sunday Ticket. That includes live viewing of all the Sunday afternoon games except the ones on your local broadcast channels (you're expected to watch those over-the-air), as well as after-the-game on-demand streaming of every game including your local ones, and the Thursday, Sunday, and Monday night games. (This season it presumably also includes the Saturday afternoon games on Christmas Eve; the NFL has moved most of its schedule to that day rather than Christmas Day.) If you can get DirecTV you're not eligible for the streaming-only package, you have to get a dish instead. (But you can still stream the games so you can watch away from home.)
Comcast owns NBC and all the cable channels with "NBC" in their names, Spanish-language Telemundo and its sister channel NBC Universo (which was formerly known by the much more clever name mun2, which was pronounced just like the "mundo" in Telemundo with an S added to the end), as well as Chiller, Cloo, Syfy, USA Network, Bravo, E!, Esquire Network (joint venture with Hearst, the publisher of the magazine), Oxygen, Sprout, and Universal HD.
What is the bar for what they consider new content? Things like near-real-time updates of sports box scores could inflate the count without much routine work once the scripts are in place to make them happen.
In part it depends on what package you have. Some cable providers offer a minimal TV tier that doesn't add much to your monthly bill, but only includes local channels and a small selection of cable channels - plus all the home shopping and religious channels you can stomach because those channels PAY the cable company to carry them. It's likely to be called something like "basic" cable, and you often have to search for it. They'd really rather sell you at least what they call "standard" cable (which includes all the usual things like sports channels) and then perhaps upsell you on additional channel packages or some premium channels like HBO, but at least if you have basic they're getting SOMETHING from you and they also have the opportunity to try to sell you pay-per-view programming or premium channels since you have the equipment to get it.
I'll go ahead and date myself... the first hard drive I saw held 2 million BCD digits of data. It was used with an IBM 1620, which was a decimal computer rather than binary. It was nearly the size of a washing machine. Next up was the cartridge drive used with the IBM 1130, which held 512K 16 bit words - in other words, a megabyte. That's right; both of those hard disks had less capacity than a high density floppy.
The first hard drive I ever personally owned was a 40 megabyte drive connected to an AT clone. The 20 megabyte ST-225 was still very popular at the time but I scraped up the extra money for the larger and faster drive, helped by the discount I got because I was working at a computer store.
Slashdot Mirror
One correction: Windows Media Center was also in Windows 7. You could get it as a $15 upgrade to Windows 8 (supposedly a fee for the codecs and DVD playback license) but only from Windows 8 Pro rather than Home, effectively killing it since the target market would have had to spend $114 to get Media Center ($99 for the upgrade to Pro plus $15 for WMC). It wasn't until Windows 10 that it was completely dead.
The Xbox One S will probably enjoy a bit of popularity as an Ultra Blu-Ray player, for the minority that still cares about discs. But Microsoft killed the proposed Xbox DVR capability which would have been a successor to WMC. My suspicion is that they couldn't overcome the licensing and DRM issues that the content producers wanted to impose; there were no major technical barriers.
Funny but improbable. RMS is not the body slamming type.
It would, if it weren't for the problem that the German streaming service probably only has the rights to offer its services in Germany. That's no help to somebody in the US who would like to watch German movies.
His point is a good one. Some people want self driving cars to reach the point of absolute safety. That's an impossible goal; there will always be things that the vehicle cannot predict, like a pedestrian who appears to be walking on a sidewalk suddenly darting into the street.
But once self driving cars reach the point of being able to drive more safely than human drivers, a point that they may have already reached, publicity that discourages people from using self driving cars is dangerous. It might lead people to making the more dangerous choice of driving the car manually, even if they are tired or under the influence of alcohol, rather than letting the car drive itself.
The objection that people often have to upgrades that are purely software is that the hardware (which they are already paying for) is the expensive part and the software should come along for free. That may have once been true, but nowadays a lot of the expense is in software development. Self driving cars are not easy.
But in this case, I suspect the main expense is neither hardware nor software. It's funding for the legal defense pool.
One problem that Tesla faces: if an autonomous vehicle gets into an accident, it is currently likely that the maker and designer of the vehicle will be sued. Here in the US, they're likely to get sued for a LOT of money. And that legal risk is higher if the car is being used commercially. By taking control of where their vehicles can be used as autonomous cars for revenue purposes, they're taking some control over their legal exposure; they will probably only make the Tesla Network available in places where the risks are acceptable.
So far as I know, this only affects using a Tesla in autonomous mode. If you want to DRIVE your Tesla for Uber or Lyft you're still free to do that, even if the car has autonomous capability.
Why should this be out of bounds? The tagline of Slashdot used to be "News for nerds. Stuff that matters." I don't see anything in that mission that limits the site to discussion of purely technological subjects. The social impact of technology, which is what this story is about, is definitely fair game.
That statistic doesn't necessarily mean that they spend 12x as much time watching Netflix. Suppose they watch Netflix every day and Amazon or Hulu every other day; that might mean only a 2x discrepancy in actual viewing. The 12x number says something about people's dedication to the site, but I'd also like to see numbers for viewing time.
There is some truth to that. Recent laptop development has prioritized battery life rather than CPU performance. Even if you buy something with an i7 CPU, it's probably an ultra low voltage part that only has two cores and is no faster than the CPU in your seven year old laptop. On the bright side, the new system is two pounds lighter and runs twice as long on batteries (three times as long if you stream video because the new one does video decoding in hardware), and once you're up over $700 it probably has at least a 1080p screen and maybe better; laptops with 3200x1800 and 2160p displays exist. It also came with a decent size SSD, rather than making you buy one as an upgrade.
Disclosure: my new laptop falls firmly in that realm. It's an Inspiron 13 7000 2-in-1 with a ULV i7 (6500U, last year's version, discounted because the new one is on the way). It's fast enough for what I do but won't rival a good desktop. And the 12GB RAM and 512GB SSD are nice.
There is still one sub-genre of the laptop market that is putting the emphasis on performance: gaming laptops. But some of those don't really qualify as laptops in any conventional sense, and most of them aren't cheap. The boundary case is the liquid cooled ASUS "laptop" that weighs 23 pounds when connected to the optional liquid cooling dock. (It can also be used without the dock at reduced performance, and will even run for a short time on batteries.)
I don't care who Adams endorses. I've been displeased by his politics in the past so I don't take his political positions seriously. Doesn't stop me from enjoying his comics.
If Garry Trudeau were to endorse Johnson I might pay attention. But it's not going to happen.
The books are free as in beer. They are also free in that they are not encumbered by DRM. They are not free/libre in the sense of a free license; they are copyrighted works. O'Reilly has published some books that have free licenses (GNU Free Documentation License or Creative Commons) but these are not among them.
And Australia. They also have lousy internet service. Both countries have relatively poor service for the same reason: low population density.
So far as I know, Stairway to Heaven does not quote the Bible. But if there is ever a second volume of the Book of SubGenius it will probably reference Stairway to Heaven.
There are songs that do quote the Bible. Pete Seeger's song Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is A Season) - best known from the cover version by The Byrds - is probably the best known example; aside from the words Turn Turn Turn, it's lifted pretty directly from Ecclesiastes 3:1-4. Lists with many more songs that contain Bible references are online; here is one: http://www.christiantoday.com/...
(You probably know all of this already, PopeRatzo. But maybe somebody reading the thread does not.)
The Netflix comment isn't about the tentpole movies. The current system is doing OK for them. No-budget indies are doing as well as they ever have, or perhaps even better because some of them get picked up by Netflix or Amazon in lieu of a theatrical release.
The films that are struggling are the midlist. Films with budgets in the $5 to $50 million range. Those are the ones that would benefit from changes to the current system, and they're the ones that Netflix is talking about.
There is one problem with that plan that is not the fault of the theaters. If a movie is released to some other distribution channel before it is shown in theaters, it is not eligible for any of the major movie awards. That especially hurts for documentaries, because winning a documentary Oscar is one of the few hopes that most documentaries have of ever making money.
The 18+ movie theaters I have visited don't have toilets that remotely resemble that comment. And they have a bigger screen and a better sound system than I do at home.
Not the Bible at all, though related ideas pop up repeatedly in the Old Testament. It's from the song Fire, by The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
As so many replies have pointed out, nobody is doing much development on CPUs that operate at 5v any more. Going to lower voltages gives us higher speeds (as a side effect of the smaller geometries that the lower voltages enable) and lower overall power consumption.
The downside is the increased difficulty of interfacing with the outside world. Once you move down to 3.3v operation you can no longer drive some colors of LED directly; you have to use some method of getting a higher voltage to reach the threshold voltage of the LED such as a charge pump. You can't drive all sorts of legacy peripherals directly. Your noise margins get worse, so simple interfaces like just sending signals directly out from logic pins to off-board things no longer work well. If you go down to even lower voltages like 1.8v it gets worse.
5 volt CPUs have another related advantage: the outputs can source a lot more current. (That also comes directly from the technology: the larger transistors in those older designs can handle more.) Again, that means that a 5v CPU can directly drive something, but a lower voltage part will require a buffer transistor or IC.
There are a few possible solutions. You can stick with an older 5V CPU if you don't need speed. You can use a CPU that has built-in level shifting such as the Cypress PSoC series. (The ARM CPU on the PSoC 4 and PSoC 5LP actually operate at 1.8v, but the inputs are all 5v capable and there are built-in level shifters for all digital inputs and outputs. The output voltage is whatever you supply on the appropriate supply pin, the input threshold is half of the voltage on that pin, and there are separate output voltage pins for each I/O port.) You can design or buy a board with level shifting for some or all inputs and outputs. You can design a system that uses an old 5v CPU for some external interface tasks and a lower voltage part to do the actual computing. (Arduino HATs for the Raspberry Pi are an example of a product that is intended to facilitate this kind of system design.)
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The price difference is so large that it usually works out better to buy the cheap clones and make donations to Arduino to support development.
Maybe, maybe not. They may really be throwing in basic TV with the super-fast service. They want to keep the number of potential TV viewers up because it's good for the advertising revenue on all the TV channels they own. The free premium channel is probably a limited time offer, though.
The NFL is now available as a streaming service, sort of. If you can't subscribe to DirecTV (either because you live in a multi-unit building and can't put up an antenna, or your address has been verified as one where you can't receive the satellite signal) you can sign up for a streaming version of NFL Sunday Ticket. That includes live viewing of all the Sunday afternoon games except the ones on your local broadcast channels (you're expected to watch those over-the-air), as well as after-the-game on-demand streaming of every game including your local ones, and the Thursday, Sunday, and Monday night games. (This season it presumably also includes the Saturday afternoon games on Christmas Eve; the NFL has moved most of its schedule to that day rather than Christmas Day.) If you can get DirecTV you're not eligible for the streaming-only package, you have to get a dish instead. (But you can still stream the games so you can watch away from home.)
Comcast owns NBC and all the cable channels with "NBC" in their names, Spanish-language Telemundo and its sister channel NBC Universo (which was formerly known by the much more clever name mun2, which was pronounced just like the "mundo" in Telemundo with an S added to the end), as well as Chiller, Cloo, Syfy, USA Network, Bravo, E!, Esquire Network (joint venture with Hearst, the publisher of the magazine), Oxygen, Sprout, and Universal HD.
What is the bar for what they consider new content? Things like near-real-time updates of sports box scores could inflate the count without much routine work once the scripts are in place to make them happen.
In part it depends on what package you have. Some cable providers offer a minimal TV tier that doesn't add much to your monthly bill, but only includes local channels and a small selection of cable channels - plus all the home shopping and religious channels you can stomach because those channels PAY the cable company to carry them. It's likely to be called something like "basic" cable, and you often have to search for it. They'd really rather sell you at least what they call "standard" cable (which includes all the usual things like sports channels) and then perhaps upsell you on additional channel packages or some premium channels like HBO, but at least if you have basic they're getting SOMETHING from you and they also have the opportunity to try to sell you pay-per-view programming or premium channels since you have the equipment to get it.
I'll go ahead and date myself... the first hard drive I saw held 2 million BCD digits of data. It was used with an IBM 1620, which was a decimal computer rather than binary. It was nearly the size of a washing machine. Next up was the cartridge drive used with the IBM 1130, which held 512K 16 bit words - in other words, a megabyte. That's right; both of those hard disks had less capacity than a high density floppy.
The first hard drive I ever personally owned was a 40 megabyte drive connected to an AT clone. The 20 megabyte ST-225 was still very popular at the time but I scraped up the extra money for the larger and faster drive, helped by the discount I got because I was working at a computer store.