I've wondered since shortly after the mini was released if it wasn't a PVR in disguise. Virtually every plasma and LCD television sold today features a DVI connector... just like the Mac Mini. Combine that with Apple's excellent streaming technology and the established ITMS distribution channel, and Jobs might be on to something (again).
With a big external firewire drive the mini could make Apple the first serious contender to mass-market full-length HDTV content over IP.
There was an old saying, which I repeat knowing it is going to get me modded down, to the effect that more people in the United States have died in Ted Kennedy's car than have died as an result of American nuclear power plants. For those on the left, substitute Iraq for Teddy's car and don't be offended.
It points out a perception problem: people simply fear the idea of a controlled nuclear reaction, despite empirical evidence that it is safer and less environmentally damaging than conventional sources of power. The probability of a mushroom cloud blossoming over the power station or a Chernobyl-style vessel breach is very low in a western reactor today, yet people feat this much more than they fear the thousands of invisible lung cancer, asthma, and contamination injuries and deaths caused by the fossil fuel plants.
Unfortunately, the factoring of probabilities is not something societies tend to do well. In America, fear of anthrax attack, fear of SARS, fear of the flu shot shortage are all excellent examples of this phenomena.
In France, an effort by the government to educate people about the real dangers to health means nuclear power is seen more favorably, especially by the left. Although EU pressure threatens to change this.
Apple has a product (the iPod), upon which it makes a lot of money. Apple creates a system (iTunes and the iTunes store), whereby it can drive more sales of its product.
Now, I am supposed to be upset with Apple because it doesn't make money providing the media service, and it cooperates with the RIAA's licensing demands to do so.
Furthermore, I am supposed to prefer the idea of a 1-cent tax on my blank CD, or an addition to the income tax.
The mind boggles. Who should administer the income tax disbursements? How should the money be allocated? By volume? To promote a social musical agenda? Why should my CD carry a surcharge if I only want to burn a Linux distro, or back up my stuff onto it?
DRM is a big problem, sure, but this offers no answers. Apple is trying to build a dominant brand in the digital media distribution business, and doing well at it. For now, to offer the digital media that people want, Apple must deal with the gatekeeper to those media. That gatekeeper is the RIAA. Perhaps that will change someday and Apple or somebody else will be able to make money. For now, it seems reasonable enough to me that Apple is providing a service in the only manner in which the service can be realistically provided, and positioning the traffic and customer base to equate digital media with iTunes for the future.
First, the movie industry will not like this at all, because virtually every movie will fit onto a single recordable DVD at full bitrate.
Second, the Philips technical paper does say (as expected) that a new drive is required, with an objective lens that can focus into the two recording planes on a disc.
My new DVD+R/W drive has just made reservations for the basement suite next to the 2X CDROM drive.
These look nice and have nice spec/feature sheets, but have had some trouble with reliability. The Best Buy computer guy told me that genuine failure returns are running around 10%. They run _very_ hot, even for a laptop, to the point where I think it would be uncomfortable to have it on your lap for an extended period of time.
All 295 pages, every day? Wow... the only way this would be true for me is if I forgot how to count all the way up to 295 and had to make use of the page numbering.
Seriously, will somebody reset the hyperbole detector? Mine keeps going off.
I happen to write software for a few Navy platforms, and this article is not quite on target.
For starters, the idea is to reduce emissions and radar signatures, not enhance it. Since a $200 parabolic antenna can pick up WiFi at 20 miles, and get enough of a signal to make use of it, 802.11b has a problem here. Of course, on a subsurface plaform this is not an issue.
Second, huge sections of Navy ships are RF quarantined, with no emissions allowed. Sometimes it's for security, sometimes it's because they don't want RF signals popping up around weapons with very sensitive electronics. Even the captain has to follow these rules. I said the first paragraph wasn't an issue for submarines, but this paragraph is, in a big way.
Third, 802.11b enabling the captain to "run the ship" from anywhere presupposes that the captain can "run the ship" whenever he or she has a network connection and... what, a PDA or PC? Again, nope. The captain has a staff, external communications, and a ton of sensor data. About the best the captain can do with a PDA is to see what's for dinner and check email.
Jammers can be defeated or made substantially less useful using beamforming. I would be stunned to find out that military users are not doing so.
If a beamforming receiver gets its position and orientation (yaw, pitch, roll), at any point in time, it can steer the sensitivity vectors of its antenna pattern to minimize the effect of jammers from then on. More sophisticated systems will probably also steer nulls right at the jammers.
Does anybody remember the OS/2 Warp (3.0) system web browser? I vaguely remember a really nifty tree display for page history that would show everywhere you were at one time and everywhere you went from there.
Can a bunch of PhDs who are all supposed to know quite a bit about what they are doing, including Purdue EE professors, a researcher or two from IBM TJ Watson, and some almost-PhD graduate students, come up with something as mighty as what Id Software can invent?
Id is great and everything, but gee, I hope the answer is yes, they probably can.
Well great, so a practice that appears questionable at best is coming to a close.
Here's my problem with the universe of class action lawsuits: out of this $300 million, the lawyers are going to take 30% or so. This is a tidy little sum. The people who were gouged are going to end up with not-so-much relative to the amounts they were "overbilled". Probably less than the inflation-adjusted price of a Princess telephone.
The article even mentions that some of the settlement money comes in the form of calling cards donated to charity. This doesn't remediate the damage to the class in any way whatsoever, but it does help to pump the total value of the settlement (and hence the total value of 30% of the settlement.)
The class-action phenomena is great for lawyers who can come up with new and innovative reasons to sue companies for large sums of money.
Where it's abused, they cost all of us (the end users) a little bit of money, earn the litigators a lot of money, and often accomplish nothing more than what could be accomplished with a press conference or two to bring pressure on the company to stop.
It's interesting to think about how future colonists will view Earth, especially the first generation of humans not born on the home planet.
My guess is that many of the same tensions that pushed the 13 Colonies against England in 1776, as well as countless similar political situations before and since will come to bear again. The issue of sovereignty over space will be more or less moot to Earthbound nations. They will go into space, eventually find something they like, gain self-sufficiency, and eventually lose interest in restrictive relationships with Earth.
This is not what differential GPS is.
Differential GPS relies on a GPS receiver at a known, precisely surveyed location (Lat/Long/Elevation) and a link to a relatively nearby mobile GPS unit. GPS position errors in the era of Selective Availability were highly correlated, so the error vector of the GPS reading at the surveyed location was approximately the same as the error vector of the relatively nearby mobile unit. Towit, you could dramatically improve accuracy using DGPS correction by incorporating the error vector.
Not sure if it really matters much in the era of no-more SA. WAAS is a new technology that does improve GPS accuracy.
Turning on a receiver and letting it sit in one place for a long time will improve accuracy. I don't know what you mean about putting them in different locations and "averaging locations". Put one in Minneapolis, one in Dallas, and conclude you're in Omaha?
...in an effort to slow piracy within single households, Microsoft has introduced...
Ooohh, I hate all those pirates in single households. I wonder what Microsoft has in mind to stop the pirates in married households.
But, "unreasonable" search and seizure is the target of the 4th amendment.
Consider this:
Airport security is not unreasonable search and seizure.
Metal detectors at football stadiums, White House tours, and concerts are not unreasonable search and seizure.
Checking your receipt against your stuff at Fry's, Best Buy, and Target before you leave is not unreasonable search and seizure. (Even though I hate it.)
When I say "is not", I mean that it legal, therefore constitutional until challenged and defeated. There have been 4th amendment challenges to stores checking receipts and to the airlines. They failed.
Point being - which will be made over and over here undoubtably - it's their building, their service, and your privilege to make use of them. You don't have to be there if you don't want to.
If you don't like it, quit your job or work to change the law.
This would be great. Right now, I can barely see my pixels. If I could blow them up really huge, I might take the time to get to know each one. Soothe them when they're red, give 'em a hug and a smile when they're blue. Sometimes, just drop by to talk.
Given similar power and antenna size, 802.11a range is about the same at 802.11b.
Seems to me that this is going to do for the price of existing 802.11b hardware what 100Mbps hardware did to the price of existing 10Mbps hardware.
This is great, because 802.11b is easily fast enough for most home broadband. The $19.99 802.11b card was already on the way, this will make it show up faster.
The technology proposed in RFC 1149 should easily handle this kind of range. Latency is going to be a problem, as is rank odor. However, you should be able to scale up to whatever bandwidth is required.
I don't know about this... the point is made over and over again that buying media for $25-50 a disk(depends on double-sided or not, RDSL capable or not) to bootleg a $20 DVD doesn't make much sense. When the media price comes down, sure.
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I've wondered since shortly after the mini was released if it wasn't a PVR in disguise. Virtually every plasma and LCD television sold today features a DVI connector... just like the Mac Mini. Combine that with Apple's excellent streaming technology and the established ITMS distribution channel, and Jobs might be on to something (again).
With a big external firewire drive the mini could make Apple the first serious contender to mass-market full-length HDTV content over IP.
There was an old saying, which I repeat knowing it is going to get me modded down, to the effect that more people in the United States have died in Ted Kennedy's car than have died as an result of American nuclear power plants. For those on the left, substitute Iraq for Teddy's car and don't be offended.
It points out a perception problem: people simply fear the idea of a controlled nuclear reaction, despite empirical evidence that it is safer and less environmentally damaging than conventional sources of power. The probability of a mushroom cloud blossoming over the power station or a Chernobyl-style vessel breach is very low in a western reactor today, yet people feat this much more than they fear the thousands of invisible lung cancer, asthma, and contamination injuries and deaths caused by the fossil fuel plants.
Unfortunately, the factoring of probabilities is not something societies tend to do well. In America, fear of anthrax attack, fear of SARS, fear of the flu shot shortage are all excellent examples of this phenomena.
In France, an effort by the government to educate people about the real dangers to health means nuclear power is seen more favorably, especially by the left. Although EU pressure threatens to change this.
What an absurd article.
Apple has a product (the iPod), upon which it makes a lot of money. Apple creates a system (iTunes and the iTunes store), whereby it can drive more sales of its product.
Now, I am supposed to be upset with Apple because it doesn't make money providing the media service, and it cooperates with the RIAA's licensing demands to do so.
Furthermore, I am supposed to prefer the idea of a 1-cent tax on my blank CD, or an addition to the income tax.
The mind boggles. Who should administer the income tax disbursements? How should the money be allocated? By volume? To promote a social musical agenda? Why should my CD carry a surcharge if I only want to burn a Linux distro, or back up my stuff onto it?
DRM is a big problem, sure, but this offers no answers. Apple is trying to build a dominant brand in the digital media distribution business, and doing well at it. For now, to offer the digital media that people want, Apple must deal with the gatekeeper to those media. That gatekeeper is the RIAA. Perhaps that will change someday and Apple or somebody else will be able to make money. For now, it seems reasonable enough to me that Apple is providing a service in the only manner in which the service can be realistically provided, and positioning the traffic and customer base to equate digital media with iTunes for the future.
First, the movie industry will not like this at all, because virtually every movie will fit onto a single recordable DVD at full bitrate.
Second, the Philips technical paper does say (as expected) that a new drive is required, with an objective lens that can focus into the two recording planes on a disc.
My new DVD+R/W drive has just made reservations for the basement suite next to the 2X CDROM drive.
These look nice and have nice spec/feature sheets, but have had some trouble with reliability. The Best Buy computer guy told me that genuine failure returns are running around 10%. They run _very_ hot, even for a laptop, to the point where I think it would be uncomfortable to have it on your lap for an extended period of time.
All 295 pages, every day? Wow... the only way this would be true for me is if I forgot how to count all the way up to 295 and had to make use of the page numbering.
Seriously, will somebody reset the hyperbole detector? Mine keeps going off.
I happen to write software for a few Navy platforms, and this article is not quite on target.
For starters, the idea is to reduce emissions and radar signatures, not enhance it. Since a $200 parabolic antenna can pick up WiFi at 20 miles, and get enough of a signal to make use of it, 802.11b has a problem here. Of course, on a subsurface plaform this is not an issue.
Second, huge sections of Navy ships are RF quarantined, with no emissions allowed. Sometimes it's for security, sometimes it's because they don't want RF signals popping up around weapons with very sensitive electronics. Even the captain has to follow these rules. I said the first paragraph wasn't an issue for submarines, but this paragraph is, in a big way.
Third, 802.11b enabling the captain to "run the ship" from anywhere presupposes that the captain can "run the ship" whenever he or she has a network connection and... what, a PDA or PC? Again, nope. The captain has a staff, external communications, and a ton of sensor data. About the best the captain can do with a PDA is to see what's for dinner and check email.
I used to think JWZ was cool. Lucid EMACS, the whole RMS techno-tension thing, his general sense of mightiness.
Now I think he mostly likes to complain about stuff and run his nightclub.
It's probably fun to make lists of things that suck all day long, but why not use some of that talent and nervous energy to join in and help?
Jammers can be defeated or made substantially less useful using beamforming. I would be stunned to find out that military users are not doing so.
If a beamforming receiver gets its position and orientation (yaw, pitch, roll), at any point in time, it can steer the sensitivity vectors of its antenna pattern to minimize the effect of jammers from then on. More sophisticated systems will probably also steer nulls right at the jammers.
Does anybody remember the OS/2 Warp (3.0) system web browser? I vaguely remember a really nifty tree display for page history that would show everywhere you were at one time and everywhere you went from there.
Can a bunch of PhDs who are all supposed to know quite a bit about what they are doing, including Purdue EE professors, a researcher or two from IBM TJ Watson, and some almost-PhD graduate students, come up with something as mighty as what Id Software can invent?
Id is great and everything, but gee, I hope the answer is yes, they probably can.
Well great, so a practice that appears questionable at best is coming to a close.
Here's my problem with the universe of class action lawsuits: out of this $300 million, the lawyers are going to take 30% or so. This is a tidy little sum. The people who were gouged are going to end up with not-so-much relative to the amounts they were "overbilled". Probably less than the inflation-adjusted price of a Princess telephone.
The article even mentions that some of the settlement money comes in the form of calling cards donated to charity. This doesn't remediate the damage to the class in any way whatsoever, but it does help to pump the total value of the settlement (and hence the total value of 30% of the settlement.)
The class-action phenomena is great for lawyers who can come up with new and innovative reasons to sue companies for large sums of money.
Where it's abused, they cost all of us (the end users) a little bit of money, earn the litigators a lot of money, and often accomplish nothing more than what could be accomplished with a press conference or two to bring pressure on the company to stop.
Perhaps I am just growing cynical.
It's interesting to think about how future colonists will view Earth, especially the first generation of humans not born on the home planet.
My guess is that many of the same tensions that pushed the 13 Colonies against England in 1776, as well as countless similar political situations before and since will come to bear again. The issue of sovereignty over space will be more or less moot to Earthbound nations. They will go into space, eventually find something they like, gain self-sufficiency, and eventually lose interest in restrictive relationships with Earth.
It was bad enough that he stopped making great movies. Now he wants to go back and make the great movies worse.
At least it levels the playing field somewhat.
Hold on to those only-slightly-enhanced VHS trilogy releases.
OK, this is the how-many-eth article about how 802.11b networks are poorly administered?
We've had
I think everyone gets the point. No need to keep hunting for Yet Another Angle.
The only thing this story adds is the amusing reference to childen and car-seats in PCI-card terms (insert and remove the children from their seats).
This is not what differential GPS is. Differential GPS relies on a GPS receiver at a known, precisely surveyed location (Lat/Long/Elevation) and a link to a relatively nearby mobile GPS unit. GPS position errors in the era of Selective Availability were highly correlated, so the error vector of the GPS reading at the surveyed location was approximately the same as the error vector of the relatively nearby mobile unit. Towit, you could dramatically improve accuracy using DGPS correction by incorporating the error vector. Not sure if it really matters much in the era of no-more SA. WAAS is a new technology that does improve GPS accuracy. Turning on a receiver and letting it sit in one place for a long time will improve accuracy. I don't know what you mean about putting them in different locations and "averaging locations". Put one in Minneapolis, one in Dallas, and conclude you're in Omaha?
...in an effort to slow piracy within single households, Microsoft has introduced... Ooohh, I hate all those pirates in single households. I wonder what Microsoft has in mind to stop the pirates in married households.
Hmmm...a wireless monitor?
At 24bpp and a 1600x1200 display, that's 3 bytes x about 2E6 pixels per frame, times (very nominally) 60 frames per second, or ~360MBytes per second.
If they could do that cheaply, they wouldn't be using it just for sending digital video to monitors.
DVI is Digital Video Interface. It's neat (no more ghosting and shadowing), but not wireless.
Obviously, IANAL.
But, "unreasonable" search and seizure is the target of the 4th amendment.
Consider this:
Airport security is not unreasonable search and seizure.
Metal detectors at football stadiums, White House tours, and concerts are not unreasonable search and seizure.
Checking your receipt against your stuff at Fry's, Best Buy, and Target before you leave is not unreasonable search and seizure. (Even though I hate it.)
When I say "is not", I mean that it legal, therefore constitutional until challenged and defeated. There have been 4th amendment challenges to stores checking receipts and to the airlines. They failed.
Point being - which will be made over and over here undoubtably - it's their building, their service, and your privilege to make use of them. You don't have to be there if you don't want to.
If you don't like it, quit your job or work to change the law.
This would be great. Right now, I can barely see my pixels. If I could blow them up really huge, I might take the time to get to know each one. Soothe them when they're red, give 'em a hug and a smile when they're blue. Sometimes, just drop by to talk.
Given similar power and antenna size, 802.11a range is about the same at 802.11b.
Seems to me that this is going to do for the price of existing 802.11b hardware what 100Mbps hardware did to the price of existing 10Mbps hardware.
This is great, because 802.11b is easily fast enough for most home broadband. The $19.99 802.11b card was already on the way, this will make it show up faster.
The technology proposed in RFC 1149 should easily handle this kind of range. Latency is going to be a problem, as is rank odor. However, you should be able to scale up to whatever bandwidth is required.
http://www.interbug.com/pigeon/humor/rfc1149/rf
I don't know about this... the point is made over and over again that buying media for $25-50 a disk(depends on double-sided or not, RDSL capable or not) to bootleg a $20 DVD doesn't make much sense. When the media price comes down, sure.