Agreed on all fronts (ha!), but I'll also raise the somewhat embarrassing point that on the few times I've actually seen the new style forecast, the frame rate of the display has been apalling, appearing incredibly jerky. That can't possibly have been more than 12 frames per second.
I can't fault the psychological observations on this: immersive vs. passive media is an obvious distinction. But I have sat on enough trains with my iPod, played enough Music Quiz, to know that there are times when having video functionality on an iPod *would* be desirable. Not as a primary function, but as an add-on.
But I'm less sure about the buffer cache issue. Firstly, current iPods may (and they do indeed) have 32MB of buffer RAM. There's no reason future, video-enabled iPods would have to adhere to this restriction. RAM is cheap, and getting cheaper. But even 32Mb wouldn't be too terrible for video playback buffering.
Let's assume that we take your baseline figure of 1Mbit (and I assume the iPod's screens are smaller than the quoted 720x486, so I'll guess half that data rate is actually more realistic. But for the moment, I'll stick with that 1Mbit figure). That 32Mb buffer will hold 256 seconds worth of data, or just over 4 minutes. I've just clocked my iPod and it transfers at a rate of about 14Mbytes/second, so will refill that 32Mb buffer in just over two seconds. After plugging it in, it took about the same amount of time to spin up and stabilise. So, in order to get 1Mbit of video playback, you only need to run the hard drive about 5 seconds every 4 minutes.
To take your "tens of hours" active lifetime quote, that puts the MTBF in the order of "hundreds or thousands" of hours of continuous playback, which is then far beyond the MTBF of the battery (or at least the mean-time-before-unacceptable-performance-degradat ion).
There are technical reasons for not doing video on the iPod, but the hard drive 'aint one of them.
That was precisely my first thought on seeing the picture: A Marble FX without the ball. Sadly, my beloved Marble FX seems to have died. This hoarding idea sounds damn attractive now...
Over on Everything2, we recently had someone lift a lot of content and use it to populate a portal site intended to collect revenue by ads and amazon click-throughs.
When the E2 user population realised what had happened, there began a general forming of lynch mods and baying for blood, and the perpetrator ('Marty')'s personal site was flooded with incredibly nasty messages.
Marty claimed he'd assumed that the content was intended to be more or less freeware, and lifted it wholesale (without any attributions to original authors, of course). When he realised his mistake (at it was a very stupid mistake to make, but at least it seems to have been an honest mistake), Marty withdrew the content and started trying to apologise.
Many of the E2 noders wouldn't hear the apologies, however, and in the end neither camp could claim any sort of moral high ground over their behaviour. Important lessons learned:
Check copyright before you lift things
Make sure your copyright notices are visible
Being civil about a problem might not get the same results as being a dick about it; but the downside is, you're a dick.
Okay, so I must admit that spam pisses me off bigtime. Hence my own spam policy is something more like this:
Reject all incoming mail.
Okay, not quite. By default, all mail is rejected unless it comes from someone I know. If it's from someone I don't know, they get a mail telling them their mail has gone into my spam folder, and also tells them how to get it past the filter.
This works because it needs a human to read the reply email, and the best thing about it is that Apple Mail makes it deliciously easy to implement.
As if this wasn't enough, my web pages also have fake addresses that encode the harvester's IP etc. There's a bona-fide email link too, because real live people have complained at me for not having one. Of course, the email address does not appear in the text of the pages. Instead it's coded in some Javascript that renders a de-mangled mailto: link. The day that they make their harvesters interpret javascript correctly is... well... the day they leave themselves open to LOTS of malicious code on our end;)
RISC OS might seem like a natural fit for the GameBoy since it is already a ROM-based system. Most of RISC OS 2 actually ran from (512K?) ROM, which was part of how it managed to have such a small RAM profile.
I'd have to go reinsert the old RISC OS 2 ROMs in my old A3000 to be sure, but I suspect you might *just* be able to squeeze the runtime data into 288k.
Which is irrelevant anyway, of course, since RISC OS 2 only supports Archimedes hardware, and runs entirely in 26-bit addressing mode, which the core in the GBA does not support. Bugger. I was so looking forward to going back to managing my life with !Alarm...
Excuse me, I must now wallow in nostalgia for a short while....
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Agreed on all fronts (ha!), but I'll also raise the somewhat embarrassing point that on the few times I've actually seen the new style forecast, the frame rate of the display has been apalling, appearing incredibly jerky. That can't possibly have been more than 12 frames per second.
This is _not_ going to be good press for Linux...
I can't fault the psychological observations on this: immersive vs. passive media is an obvious distinction. But I have sat on enough trains with my iPod, played enough Music Quiz, to know that there are times when having video functionality on an iPod *would* be desirable. Not as a primary function, but as an add-on.
t ion).
But I'm less sure about the buffer cache issue. Firstly, current iPods may (and they do indeed) have 32MB of buffer RAM. There's no reason future, video-enabled iPods would have to adhere to this restriction. RAM is cheap, and getting cheaper. But even 32Mb wouldn't be too terrible for video playback buffering.
Let's assume that we take your baseline figure of 1Mbit (and I assume the iPod's screens are smaller than the quoted 720x486, so I'll guess half that data rate is actually more realistic. But for the moment, I'll stick with that 1Mbit figure). That 32Mb buffer will hold 256 seconds worth of data, or just over 4 minutes. I've just clocked my iPod and it transfers at a rate of about 14Mbytes/second, so will refill that 32Mb buffer in just over two seconds. After plugging it in, it took about the same amount of time to spin up and stabilise. So, in order to get 1Mbit of video playback, you only need to run the hard drive about 5 seconds every 4 minutes.
To take your "tens of hours" active lifetime quote, that puts the MTBF in the order of "hundreds or thousands" of hours of continuous playback, which is then far beyond the MTBF of the battery (or at least the mean-time-before-unacceptable-performance-degrada
There are technical reasons for not doing video on the iPod, but the hard drive 'aint one of them.
That was precisely my first thought on seeing the picture: A Marble FX without the ball. Sadly, my beloved Marble FX seems to have died. This hoarding idea sounds damn attractive now...
Over on Everything2, we recently had someone lift a lot of content and use it to populate a portal site intended to collect revenue by ads and amazon click-throughs.
When the E2 user population realised what had happened, there began a general forming of lynch mods and baying for blood, and the perpetrator ('Marty')'s personal site was flooded with incredibly nasty messages.
Marty claimed he'd assumed that the content was intended to be more or less freeware, and lifted it wholesale (without any attributions to original authors, of course). When he realised his mistake (at it was a very stupid mistake to make, but at least it seems to have been an honest mistake), Marty withdrew the content and started trying to apologise.
Many of the E2 noders wouldn't hear the apologies, however, and in the end neither camp could claim any sort of moral high ground over their behaviour. Important lessons learned:
Yeah, I learned that last one myself...
Okay, so I must admit that spam pisses me off bigtime. Hence my own spam policy is something more like this:
Okay, not quite. By default, all mail is rejected unless it comes from someone I know. If it's from someone I don't know, they get a mail telling them their mail has gone into my spam folder, and also tells them how to get it past the filter.
This works because it needs a human to read the reply email, and the best thing about it is that Apple Mail makes it deliciously easy to implement.
As if this wasn't enough, my web pages also have fake addresses that encode the harvester's IP etc. There's a bona-fide email link too, because real live people have complained at me for not having one. Of course, the email address does not appear in the text of the pages. Instead it's coded in some Javascript that renders a de-mangled mailto: link. The day that they make their harvesters interpret javascript correctly is... well... the day they leave themselves open to LOTS of malicious code on our end ;)
RISC OS might seem like a natural fit for the GameBoy since it is already a ROM-based system. Most of RISC OS 2 actually ran from (512K?) ROM, which was part of how it managed to have such a small RAM profile.
I'd have to go reinsert the old RISC OS 2 ROMs in my old A3000 to be sure, but I suspect you might *just* be able to squeeze the runtime data into 288k.
Which is irrelevant anyway, of course, since RISC OS 2 only supports Archimedes hardware, and runs entirely in 26-bit addressing mode, which the core in the GBA does not support. Bugger. I was so looking forward to going back to managing my life with !Alarm...
Excuse me, I must now wallow in nostalgia for a short while....