Re:I think OP was confusing DGPS with WAAS sortof
on
Forget GPS, Hello WPS
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· Score: 1
Actually, WAAS is DGPS. Differential corrections can come from a different sources, or a single reference station. If from a single station then the corrections are only valid for the local area. In WAAS, or various networked base stations, the corrections from a larger number of reference stations are combined. The corrections you use are only what's appropriate for your particular location.
Either way, WAAS or DGPS is pretty useless for car navigation. Virtually every other error source is larger than the one that the corrections account for. When SA was dialed up, it could make a big difference. Now it's just a marketing gimmick for some applications. For GIS applications it can make a difference, but a car traveling 50mph down the road it doesn't.
Nope: Re:FWIW, there ARE stationary GPS satellites
on
Forget GPS, Hello WPS
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· Score: 1
WAAS is not "stationary satellites". There is such a thing, called a pseudolite, but that's not WAAS.
The ground stations generate the corrections, but these are sent to stationary satellites in geosynchronous orbit. A WAAS capable GPS receiver can receive those signals in addition to the GPS signals with a compatible GPS receiver. This information is in the linked article.
It's actually pretty useless for car navigation systems, but good for marketing. Since SA was turned down, the WAAS signals only are correcting for atmospheric or small timing errors in the GPS signals. These errors are fairly small. In a car doing down a highway the error is very tiny when compared to the "error" you get when a vehicle has moved 25 meters in the time between position updates. Additionally, WAAS corrected positions do not correct for errors that are local to the moving receiver, that is relections or multipath errors seen by the receiver but not by the reference stations. Those errors can easily be an order of magnitude larger than the errors WAAS might have corrected.
So for walking around a field looking for a rubbermaid containter filled with chotchkes, it might be handy, but for car navigation it's just so marketing can list it as another feature.
As for cable networks switching to OTA, not very likely. Give the relatively short range of OTA broadcasts, not to mention all the licensing issues, they're much better off selling "wholesale" to cable and satellite providers and let them deal with the end users. Especially if at the moment OTA only gets you 10% of the users. The demographics of people who won't pay for TV is likely to overlap somewhat with people who won't pay for useless crap the advertisers want to see either.
If you believe the 90% number for cable/satellite homes, then only 10% get their TV over the air. I get mine via DirecTV, so a switch in the local stations won't affect my home TVs at all, just the little Sony LCD one I have. Cable TV doesn't have to switch over then either.
So of the 10% getting their television over the air, I'd sure guess that a large percentage who aren't interested in cable or satellite also aren't buying new fancy TVs every couple of years. Their choices are probably going to be buy a new TV or switch to satellite or cable and continue to use their old TV.
So is it only a portion of the 10% that would be affected when the big switch happens?
My primary machine became a laptop 7-8 years ago. I used to use one while traveling and a desktop while at home/work, but syncing things up between the two was a pain in the butt. Too many times I didn't have what I'd worked on with the other machine available on the machine I was on. While laptops still lag in speed, they hit "good enough" for most applications a while ago. The biggest lag now is really in disk size, you have to go external for serious space. But "most" people can live with a measly 100GB in the laptop and hook up an external or network drive for the other times. Even if you never flip up the screen at home and use external keyboard/monitor/mouse, you bring your entire work environment with you when on the road.
And if you only use them on your work desk or home desk, the battery is handy as a built-in UPS.
I'd like to see how the software the analyzes the music would compare to a piano roll or Disklavier recording. Have a musician play a selection on a Disklavier and record it. At the same time, record the audio and use the s/w to try to replicated it. Play both the MIDI recorded version back as well as the reverse engineered MIDI version and compare both to the original recording.
I bought the "Gershwin Plays Gershwin" http://www.keyboardwizards.com/billboar.htm CD a few years back and really enjoyed it. Copious liner notes told how they restored the rolls, fed them into a 1911 Pianola that "played" the Disklavier which was recored as a MIDI file. Other rolls were scanned, then converted to MIDI files. You can buy these MIDI files and play them back on your own Disklavier if you want. One track on the CD was a contemporary audio recording, letting you see that for the time, piano rolls really were the way to go for quality. Like MP3s today or cassettes a while back, cheap and easily distrubuted beat out quality for wide distribution.
The most surprising thing in the notes was the history of creating the piano rolls. Initially they were created on special pianos that cut the rolls as the selection was played. These were played by an actual piano player. But rolls were also created by piano roll cutters who basically took an exacto knife to the roll. Besides being cheaper to employ, these cutters also didn't accidently hit a wrong note in the middle of a peformance. It was also possible to create rolls that could not be played by a normal human with 10 fingers ( Shades of Gattaca here ). So in the early 1900s technicians were doing essentially the same thing as someone typing out MIDI code and then feeding it into a Disklavier today.
Where's the video?
on
Exploding Toads
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I was hoping one of news services would have video. It would be best if there was one illustrating the suicide maneuver, startling a crow diving in for attack.
I like the theory of suicide, with one generation protecting the the future generations as all crows will from now on be scared off.
What we're really going to find is kids have been feeding them PopRocks at night.
Atlas Shrugged. That was the first thing in my mind when I saw the posting. Someone's too successful so others try to get the government to do something to force them into giving everyone else a taste.
While there can be arguements about what Ayn Rand thought about the way things ought to be, she wasn't far off the mark in describing the way things happen.
I used one of these years ago on a GridCase 1550sx. Police agencies used them at the time for installing inside cop cars. Heavy as hell, the cast magnesium cases appeared "bulletproof"
At the time your other options for a laptop were a roller ball "side car" or a separate mouse, so something integrated with the keyboard footprint was handy.
I thought this was an odd article, my thinking that an "astronaut" who's never been to space would be an "astronaut wannabe", "astronaut in training" or the more pejorative: "space cadet". According to Websters just being "trained" makes you an astronaut.
" a person who travels beyond the earth's atmosphere; also : a trainee for spaceflight"
Gotta suck when you tell people you're an astronaut and people's first question is "When did you go up?". They probably have the Websters definition loophole printed on the back of their business cards.
That's what Nanode must have thought when they first saw the new Mac. http://www.mini-itx.com/news/nanode/ These pics, based on a box using a nano-ITX board are from a year ago.
Yes, they aren't out yet. There may ultimately be critisisms of it's size, features, what not. But with the specs and pics announced 9 months before the Mac Mini, you can't call it the copy
"Platinum" isn't a club, it's a level of the frequent flyer program.
To reach Platinum you have to have flown 50,000 miles in the previous ( or current ) year. Unless you have used cash for all these flights they already have LOTS of information on you, where you go, how long you stay. If you use a credit card they know where your bills go, maybe even where the tickets are sent.
It's very reasonable that they wouldn't ask you as many questions if they already knew most of the answers. For the majority of Platinum level flyers they already know lots about you.
This doesn't mean it's resonable to ask all the questions they do from everyone else, just that it makes sense they'd back off for platinum card holders.
You don't tell it you're dead, you tell it you're alive.
If you don't tell it you're alive after a pre-set interval, it runs, deleting email, un-subscribing you from mailing lists and such.
The Home Kit would be a good seller...
on
VOIP Meets Cell Phones
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I agree that this will likely have a short shelf life. The extreme # of minutes on their cell phones will stand out like a flashing beacon to the cell carriers.
But, a "home version" would be interesting. Two phones with the minimal accounts for unlimited mobile to mobile would still be cheaper than one of the mega minute plans. A kit to connect your "home" cell phone to your Vonage box would do the trick. The cell carriers wouldn't see the insane #'s of minutes on a service providers accounts but just you calling your other phone often. A slick trick would be to allow bi-directional calling with this kit.
In early days of PacBell GSM here in CA they had 1st incoming minute free. I had my SIM in a box with a GPS receiver attached. I could call from a land line every minute, poll for position, hang up under a minute. One month I made 1800 sub-minute calls to my mobile to track my cars location.
They later ammended the plan to not include data calls and then scrapped the 1st minute plan all together, but I got a lot of testing in before they did.
At the moment I have 5 phone numbers (not counting work ). Two are cellular, two are VOIP, one is a tradtional landline.
I use Vonage for my primary home phone service, no 911 tax there. I have 2 numbers since I still keep my old AZ number for a while since I've moved. I'm sure both AZ and CA would love to tax me on both numbers.
My two cellular numbers do have the 911 tax. I only use one at time there.
My landline has the 911 tax. It's a cheap under $10 a month line for my Tivo ( having that line plus Vonage is still cheaper having a "real" landline ).
So the states would have me pay 5x the 911 taxes? I really do use just one phone at a time. With the proliferation of phone lines for modems, fax, cellular the states have been getting a ramp up in fees without an increase in population. What a gravy train.
I guess all this rebate crap really is a government conspiricy.
Hardly any of us bother to send in any product registration crap. If you have the receipt you've covered for warranty issues.
But, entice you with a bogus $50 rebate ( which you may or may not get 6-8 weeks later ) and many will gladly give their home address, email address, phone number. Cash the rebate check and you give up your banking info too ( all that stuff they print on the back of the check when you deposit it.)
If you plan on doing naughty things with your laser printer you'll have to pay cash (not at Costco ) and blow off the rebate.
Didn't they ID the first World Trade Center bombers when they tried to get the deposit back on the van? Doesnt pay to be greedy.
Maybe not a direct comparison, but for quite a while Sony's digital music players supported ATRAC in lieu of MP3. They got tired of falling way behind the iPod. People were unwilling to have to convert their existing tunes to ATRAC and to not have their ATRAC files be swappable with others.
It was nice example of the market moving a big company away from a proprietary format. It probably won't happen with MS as more things out there keep adding support for WMA, but it at least shows it can happen.
Enough people shied away from Divx to kill that format as well in lieu of real DVDs.
Sounds like FUD put out by Kodak, or maybe Epson, and not "news".
Photos, slides and negatives don't last forever, just one look at the slides my Dad had in his house in Hawaii will illustrate that. But moving them to a new form of media is a lot more cumbersome moving 5 CD-Rs to a single DVD.
"Printing" is a bad way to save a picture, inkjet printouts degrade faster than true photos. You'd need to output to a real photo to get the same lifespan as a photo. Oh, and if you do, keep the digital copy, it's going to be better than a scan of the photo that's been sitting on the mantel.
Are there many consumers out there with more than 120GB of family digital photos? A spare hard drive is cheap these days as an additional place to store a copy.
Want to have your photos at home as well as somewhere safe in case of fire? It would be pricy to made dupes of all your slides or photos, but a second set of CDs pretty cheap.
There might be people who saved digital photos on floppys ( like those who got the cheesy Sony floppy cam ), but that media is not opsolete yet and for $20 you can have a USB floppy drive to let you move them to a CD.
Old media meant that the cost of the dupe was pretty much the same cost of the original. This doesn't lend itself to redundant copies at multiple locations for most people. Digital lends itself to duplication, just ask any movie pirate.
There are films from the 20's that are lost forever. Thanks to DVD pirates, we have enough redundant copies of Star Wars that it will never be gone.
Use MyPrivacy.ca. They give you a free email address that will forward to your existing address. They only allow email from legit domain hosts to get through unchallenged. If from just anyone, they have to go through a challenge/response system.
Works great, I've yet to get any Spam in the last few years that I've been using them.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's the link5 3&tid=215
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/03/19492
Actually, WAAS is DGPS. Differential corrections can come from a different sources, or a single reference station. If from a single station then the corrections are only valid for the local area. In WAAS, or various networked base stations, the corrections from a larger number of reference stations are combined. The corrections you use are only what's appropriate for your particular location.
Either way, WAAS or DGPS is pretty useless for car navigation. Virtually every other error source is larger than the one that the corrections account for. When SA was dialed up, it could make a big difference. Now it's just a marketing gimmick for some applications. For GIS applications it can make a difference, but a car traveling 50mph down the road it doesn't.
WAAS is not "stationary satellites". There is such a thing, called a pseudolite, but that's not WAAS.
The ground stations generate the corrections, but these are sent to stationary satellites in geosynchronous orbit. A WAAS capable GPS receiver can receive those signals in addition to the GPS signals with a compatible GPS receiver. This information is in the linked article.
It's actually pretty useless for car navigation systems, but good for marketing. Since SA was turned down, the WAAS signals only are correcting for atmospheric or small timing errors in the GPS signals. These errors are fairly small. In a car doing down a highway the error is very tiny when compared to the "error" you get when a vehicle has moved 25 meters in the time between position updates. Additionally, WAAS corrected positions do not correct for errors that are local to the moving receiver, that is relections or multipath errors seen by the receiver but not by the reference stations. Those errors can easily be an order of magnitude larger than the errors WAAS might have corrected.
So for walking around a field looking for a rubbermaid containter filled with chotchkes, it might be handy, but for car navigation it's just so marketing can list it as another feature.
Could very well be horseshit, hence my "if you believe the 90%" comment. But a variety of sources point to a number pretty close to that:
3 /converge_mg.htm 6 i gital_america/video/satellite_tv.asp
In 2003, this site showed 87%: http://www.parksassociates.com/press/articles/200
This site shows cable alone at 66.8% as of Feb 2005: http://www.ncta.com/Docs/PageContent.cfm?pageID=8
This site shows satellite TV over 22% in 2003 http://www.ce.org/publications/books_references/d
As for cable networks switching to OTA, not very likely. Give the relatively short range of OTA broadcasts, not to mention all the licensing issues, they're much better off selling "wholesale" to cable and satellite providers and let them deal with the end users. Especially if at the moment OTA only gets you 10% of the users. The demographics of people who won't pay for TV is likely to overlap somewhat with people who won't pay for useless crap the advertisers want to see either.
If you believe the 90% number for cable/satellite homes, then only 10% get their TV over the air. I get mine via DirecTV, so a switch in the local stations won't affect my home TVs at all, just the little Sony LCD one I have. Cable TV doesn't have to switch over then either.
So of the 10% getting their television over the air, I'd sure guess that a large percentage who aren't interested in cable or satellite also aren't buying new fancy TVs every couple of years. Their choices are probably going to be buy a new TV or switch to satellite or cable and continue to use their old TV.
So is it only a portion of the 10% that would be affected when the big switch happens?
My primary machine became a laptop 7-8 years ago. I used to use one while traveling and a desktop while at home/work, but syncing things up between the two was a pain in the butt. Too many times I didn't have what I'd worked on with the other machine available on the machine I was on.
While laptops still lag in speed, they hit "good enough" for most applications a while ago. The biggest lag now is really in disk size, you have to go external for serious space. But "most" people can live with a measly 100GB in the laptop and hook up an external or network drive for the other times.
Even if you never flip up the screen at home and use external keyboard/monitor/mouse, you bring your entire work environment with you when on the road.
And if you only use them on your work desk or home desk, the battery is handy as a built-in UPS.
I'd like to see how the software the analyzes the music would compare to a piano roll or Disklavier recording. Have a musician play a selection on a Disklavier and record it. At the same time, record the audio and use the s/w to try to replicated it. Play both the MIDI recorded version back as well as the reverse engineered MIDI version and compare both to the original recording.
I bought the "Gershwin Plays Gershwin" http://www.keyboardwizards.com/billboar.htm CD a few years back and really enjoyed it. Copious liner notes told how they restored the rolls, fed them into a 1911 Pianola that "played" the Disklavier which was recored as a MIDI file. Other rolls were scanned, then converted to MIDI files. You can buy these MIDI files and play them back on your own Disklavier if you want.
One track on the CD was a contemporary audio recording, letting you see that for the time, piano rolls really were the way to go for quality. Like MP3s today or cassettes a while back, cheap and easily distrubuted beat out quality for wide distribution.
The most surprising thing in the notes was the history of creating the piano rolls. Initially they were created on special pianos that cut the rolls as the selection was played. These were played by an actual piano player. But rolls were also created by piano roll cutters who basically took an exacto knife to the roll. Besides being cheaper to employ, these cutters also didn't accidently hit a wrong note in the middle of a peformance. It was also possible to create rolls that could not be played by a normal human with 10 fingers ( Shades of Gattaca here ). So in the early 1900s technicians were doing essentially the same thing as someone typing out MIDI code and then feeding it into a Disklavier today.
I was hoping one of news services would have video. It would be best if there was one illustrating the suicide maneuver, startling a crow diving in for attack.
I like the theory of suicide, with one generation protecting the the future generations as all crows will from now on be scared off.
What we're really going to find is kids have been feeding them PopRocks at night.
Atlas Shrugged. That was the first thing in my mind when I saw the posting. Someone's too successful so others try to get the government to do something to force them into giving everyone else a taste.
While there can be arguements about what Ayn Rand thought about the way things ought to be, she wasn't far off the mark in describing the way things happen.
While it has legs, it's really a stretch to call this walking.
Now this is a walker: http://www.plustech.fi/Walking1.html
Video: http://www.plustech.fi/WalkingVideo.html
Yes, it has more than 2 legs, but at least they come off the ground and wouldn't be stopped dead in it's tracks by a speed bump.
The walker reference probably came from it's gait, it looks like an old man in slippers while pushing a walker in front of him.
I'd have to say that Apple has demontrated a sense of humor.
When Carl Sagan objected to an *internal* product codename of "Carl Sagan", they renamed it "BHA" ( short for Butt Head Astronomer)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_sagan/
I used one of these years ago on a GridCase 1550sx. Police agencies used them at the time for installing inside cop cars. Heavy as hell, the cast magnesium cases appeared "bulletproof"
At the time your other options for a laptop were a roller ball "side car" or a separate mouse, so something integrated with the keyboard footprint was handy.
Pics here: http://pc-museum.com/officewing.htm
Me, I'm happiest on a laptop with the Thinkpad style happy button.
I thought this was an odd article, my thinking that an "astronaut" who's never been to space would be an "astronaut wannabe", "astronaut in training" or the more pejorative: "space cadet". According to Websters just being "trained" makes you an astronaut.
" a person who travels beyond the earth's atmosphere; also : a trainee for spaceflight"
Gotta suck when you tell people you're an astronaut and people's first question is "When did you go up?". They probably have the Websters definition loophole printed on the back of their business cards.
The Smithsonian already has Voyager, if they end up with SS1 and GlobalFlyer then Burt Rutan is on his way to his own room at the place.
That's what Nanode must have thought when they first saw the new Mac.
http://www.mini-itx.com/news/nanode/ These pics, based on a box using a nano-ITX board are from a year ago.
Yes, they aren't out yet. There may ultimately be critisisms of it's size, features, what not. But with the specs and pics announced 9 months before the Mac Mini, you can't call it the copy
"Platinum" isn't a club, it's a level of the frequent flyer program.
To reach Platinum you have to have flown 50,000 miles in the previous ( or current ) year. Unless you have used cash for all these flights they already have LOTS of information on you, where you go, how long you stay. If you use a credit card they know where your bills go, maybe even where the tickets are sent.
It's very reasonable that they wouldn't ask you as many questions if they already knew most of the answers. For the majority of Platinum level flyers they already know lots about you.
This doesn't mean it's resonable to ask all the questions they do from everyone else, just that it makes sense they'd back off for platinum card holders.
You don't tell it you're dead, you tell it you're alive.
If you don't tell it you're alive after a pre-set interval, it runs, deleting email, un-subscribing you from mailing lists and such.
I agree that this will likely have a short shelf life. The extreme # of minutes on their cell phones will stand out like a flashing beacon to the cell carriers.
But, a "home version" would be interesting. Two phones with the minimal accounts for unlimited mobile to mobile would still be cheaper than one of the mega minute plans. A kit to connect your "home" cell phone to your Vonage box would do the trick. The cell carriers wouldn't see the insane #'s of minutes on a service providers accounts but just you calling your other phone often. A slick trick would be to allow bi-directional calling with this kit.
In early days of PacBell GSM here in CA they had 1st incoming minute free. I had my SIM in a box with a GPS receiver attached. I could call from a land line every minute, poll for position, hang up under a minute. One month I made 1800 sub-minute calls to my mobile to track my cars location.
They later ammended the plan to not include data calls and then scrapped the 1st minute plan all together, but I got a lot of testing in before they did.
The other reason TBS did this was to get a unique listing in the TV Guide.
Rather than being lumped in with the other shows at 7PM, they'd have a separate section at 7:05 just to themselves.
At the moment I have 5 phone numbers (not counting work ). Two are cellular, two are VOIP, one is a tradtional landline.
I use Vonage for my primary home phone service, no 911 tax there. I have 2 numbers since I still keep my old AZ number for a while since I've moved. I'm sure both AZ and CA would love to tax me on both numbers.
My two cellular numbers do have the 911 tax. I only use one at time there.
My landline has the 911 tax. It's a cheap under $10 a month line for my Tivo ( having that line plus Vonage is still cheaper having a "real" landline ).
So the states would have me pay 5x the 911 taxes? I really do use just one phone at a time. With the proliferation of phone lines for modems, fax, cellular the states have been getting a ramp up in fees without an increase in population. What a gravy train.
I guess all this rebate crap really is a government conspiricy.
Hardly any of us bother to send in any product registration crap. If you have the receipt you've covered for warranty issues.
But, entice you with a bogus $50 rebate ( which you may or may not get 6-8 weeks later ) and many will gladly give their home address, email address, phone number. Cash the rebate check and you give up your banking info too ( all that stuff they print on the back of the check when you deposit it.)
If you plan on doing naughty things with your laser printer you'll have to pay cash (not at Costco ) and blow off the rebate.
Didn't they ID the first World Trade Center bombers when they tried to get the deposit back on the van? Doesnt pay to be greedy.
Maybe not a direct comparison, but for quite a while Sony's digital music players supported ATRAC in lieu of MP3. They got tired of falling way behind the iPod. People were unwilling to have to convert their existing tunes to ATRAC and to not have their ATRAC files be swappable with others.
It was nice example of the market moving a big company away from a proprietary format. It probably won't happen with MS as more things out there keep adding support for WMA, but it at least shows it can happen.
Enough people shied away from Divx to kill that format as well in lieu of real DVDs.
So for the moment, I'll have a little faith.
Sounds like FUD put out by Kodak, or maybe Epson, and not "news".
Photos, slides and negatives don't last forever, just one look at the slides my Dad had in his house in Hawaii will illustrate that. But moving them to a new form of media is a lot more cumbersome moving 5 CD-Rs to a single DVD.
"Printing" is a bad way to save a picture, inkjet printouts degrade faster than true photos. You'd need to output to a real photo to get the same lifespan as a photo. Oh, and if you do, keep the digital copy, it's going to be better than a scan of the photo that's been sitting on the mantel.
Are there many consumers out there with more than 120GB of family digital photos? A spare hard drive is cheap these days as an additional place to store a copy.
Want to have your photos at home as well as somewhere safe in case of fire? It would be pricy to made dupes of all your slides or photos, but a second set of CDs pretty cheap.
There might be people who saved digital photos on floppys ( like those who got the cheesy Sony floppy cam ), but that media is not opsolete yet and for $20 you can have a USB floppy drive to let you move them to a CD.
Old media meant that the cost of the dupe was pretty much the same cost of the original. This doesn't lend itself to redundant copies at multiple locations for most people. Digital lends itself to duplication, just ask any movie pirate.
There are films from the 20's that are lost forever. Thanks to DVD pirates, we have enough redundant copies of Star Wars that it will never be gone.
I was thinking that too, but realized that "Sky Captain" had the CGI sets , but actually filmed the actors and any props they held.
"Polar Express" seems to go this one step further, animating the actors as well.
Use MyPrivacy.ca. They give you a free email address that will forward to your existing address. They only allow email from legit domain hosts to get through unchallenged. If from just anyone, they have to go through a challenge/response system.
Works great, I've yet to get any Spam in the last few years that I've been using them.
http://www.myprivacy.ca/