A dozen actual people please. It doesn't count if your just mixing chromosones from different people to claim you have a complete DNA decoded; there is no gaurantee that mix of dna would be viable. There ought to be a panel of scientists to select 12 people to have their DNA read that are willing to be studied for the rest of their lives. Six men and six women. At least some of which would be siblings. Only then can you actually decode DNA. You'll get 90% of the answers there.
You always go with a base line. Then you read other people and compare and contrast them. Then add in other species. And voila, the genetic black box of subroutines that evolution found most useful that are 99.99999% of the answer. After that your left with mutations and figuring out what, and how, the code sequences do what they do and finally programming new sequences to test theory.
In other words 30 years from now it will finally get interesting.
You really expect these people to read about such boring stuff? The key to actually having an impact is to make learning entertaining. So teach through a passive animated video; just don't exceed people attention spans and make it longer than an hour.
Bits, bytes. Registers, memory, storage. Machine instructions, compiled languages, and interpreted scripts. Concepts of a file system. Kernels, operating systems, and API's. Then virus's, worms, trojans, spyware and rootkit backdoors. Second half hour should be about networking concepts. The basic concepts can be covered easily in an hour. If it goes longer than that then you've gotten too specific. Don't overwhelm, your just out to build a foundation for comprehension. Then in later lessons you would teach it all over again, and again, each time going deeper into specifics.
It would certainly proliferate the technology and get it into the hands of people that can figure out how to use it. They could stick an entry level GPU on the thing to get directx and opengl independently of the cell and which would free up the cell as a co-processor for graphics or specialized computing but still keep it labeled a cell graphics card.
But it should be customers that pay for access, not the service provider. Have it kind of like long distence service. And it should be a choice to use the QOS settings or not, like making a long distence call. The telco's should be required to negotiate and settle prices amongst themselves so that there isn't a bunch of toll road fees. But when a connection is established a provider must be able to contractually gaurantee the conection to stay up and it's quality remain the same at whatever price rate the service provider offers. This would be a major boon for video games which compared to video doesn't use as much bandwidth but needs stable connection. Also I can see internet phone devices and video phones exploding onto the market and in fact POTS would die at least within the united states. Then I'd imagine that the telophone companies would finally replace telephone lines with broadband ethernet or fiber wires.
But again this should be an end user change, it should have nothing to do with service providing web sites although they can choose to pay the cost of the premium conection when they establish it or maybe we can have a protocol equivelent of collect calls. The telco's should have no right to be able to block any provider you choose to establish a connection with.
Simple solution is for marketing to get their act together. Otherwise the only alternative it getting games like the latest in the Tomb Raider series, games that shouldn't have been released.
How about waiting until the games in in post production? Either advertize games in production with unspecified dates or dates so far in the future that you can gaurantee it. Then only as development completes do you reverse the estimete in a conservitive mannor.
Send random data to populate any leftover bandwidth.
Try a remote backing up a system and have it complete within 10 minutes which another similar system is backing up over 100TX and tell them how how much longer this other system will take after your system has finished. QOS it.
Run a system streaming different DVD videos to 10 or so computers using QOS. Whatever would fill up a standard 100TX line. Then tell them how many independent video streams you could serve, which I'd guess would be around 300.
Also have about five free desktops with a broser on screen. This could demonstrate QOS and how they aren't appreciably affected appreciably since the internet itself is so slow. Explain how many people it would take, based on adverage cable modem usage by home users, to saturate your line (not your uplink).
A digitized libary of congress is about 10 terabytes. Tell them how long it would take to transfer it between computers at your speed rates. It obviously won't impress them. If my math is right around 3 hours. Then tell them how long it would take to download at other speeds. 100TX would be around three and a half days.
Roughtly what broadband is to modem, your line is to 100TX.
I'll tell you where they will get the money
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WiFi Free-For-All
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Advertizeing of course. People are spending more time in airports than ever before. Giving them something to do reduces stress and makes everyone happier. But it also gives advertizers a market of financially well of people that can afford airline tickets and laptops. Expect to see advertizing with web url's all the more. And remember sitefiner... The airports can do the same thing. They can also supplant web pages temporarily with their own with click throughs. There are millions of ways they can afford it.
When the case is in front of a judge or jury and the timeline for how quickly code is replaced is presented the judge might just dismiss the case right then and there. Simply put in infringement cases you need to have damages. If all they had to do was release the lines of code they claim are infringing and it's replaced by the end of the week that goes to show how valuble that code really was. The most they could possibly get, if the judge found the code non trivial, is about $10,000 to $20,000 dollars just as a penalty. That's why I think a judge could dismiss the case as SCO couldn't pay their lawyers with that.
But chances are the case is too political and the defence would protest to get the code judged as infringing or not. It's a landmark case as to the methodology to determing what is infringing and what is not when it comes to code.
To me at least it takes a signifigant amout of code, tens of kilobites worth that couldn't be replaced within a month. Damages would have to exceed a quarter million dollars just to judtify taking the case to court. When code can be replaced so easily where is it's value?
Carbo ships would obviously orbit mars. Otherwise the landing spot would be set in stone. Furthermore the ships would stay in orbit while droping payload on specific cooordinents.
It's also likely mars would get it's own gps satelites to spare the expence of the containers carrying more sophisticated navigation equipment.
We can expect the first expedition to mars to be full of married geologists and engineers willing to stay there decades if not most of the rest of their lives. With laborers comming in on subsequent missions.
After they construct their preliminary shelter they first job will be to setup solar setup and then nuclear power since constructing a small city will require a lot more energy than solor can provide. They will setup a small reactor near their base and a much larger on will be setup miles from their base for a refinery.
After construction of alpha base they will start constructing a larger habitat, soil and hydroponics farms from a slow trickle of refined metals being produced. Everything will be very modular and all metal will be recycled. We can expect chicken and fish farms for mean. They will also have pressure and heating units to produce oil from human, animal and plant waste; this will provide the material to produce plastics and a limited amount of fossil fuel for miscilaneous applications such as rocket fuel.
But the main function of the base for years to come would be to produce massive amounts of metal and raw resources for construction of subsequent commercial colonies.
Who knows, decades later maybe a space elevator to make exporting quite profitable.
Mars' greatest strength is as an industrial supercenter to the solar system. We don't likely have to worry about contaminating the ground water there.
I can't believe he just buckled down to the giant. The worst that could happen was he would lose his domain. It might have been something fair to accept if they offered this kindly in the first place but not after their rude behavior. Oh the humiliation he will suffer in the years to come when he tells his story to friends about how he sold his dignity for a few classes and an xbox.
The whole patent system needs to be replaced. What should replace it should be a reward system where technologiest accross various diciplines elect various actually important problems that need to be solved and then rewards those with ingenuity to solve them with patents. The patenty could actully be longer them than they are but a panel could determine the amount and circumstances of patent fees. Also the patent office itself could collect all patent fees and distribute the money accordingly subtracting their operating costs.
For instance instead of more headache drugs that are just inovations on what exists they would only reward the drug companies when they produce a drug for more serious conditions that they dictated to have priority.
I'm almost ashamed my FreeBSD preference now
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BSD For Linux Users
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· Score: 4, Insightful
After reading that I feel almost ashamed. But really the author and all those that think like that should feel shame. I like FreeBSD for it's licence and it's legacy. Maybe FreeBSD now is as the author discribes but there never would have been a FreeBSD without the origional BSD hackers fixing things and sharing patches. Not all the patches and programs origionated at Berkley. What the school did was organize a distribution amist all the chaos. In reality it was the first hacker rebirth of an OS. They took a flakey prototype and make something useful of it.
The only real part the author got right was the anology in comparing BSD/Linux to PC/Unix users. Mainframe verses PC; Client/Server verses decentralized P2P. But there is no reason it has to be that way. And in fact it can't because FreeBSD is just a fragmented in it's pieces as linux, many like him just won't admit it.
I like BSD for it's licence. I dislike Linux for it's licence. There is some truth to FreeBSD being a stronger distribution (which is another reason I like it) but it's still a distribution all the same as any Linux distribution. His statements to the contrary just don't stand up. Both sides pick and patch from what's useful.
FreeBSD is a distribution built around a core set of tools with relatively tight quality control. It is more focused that many Linux Distros. FreeBSD is also controled democraticly among the elite where Linux people have no problems forking code and competing against one another, with users and distributors judging the winners and hence is more democract.
The FreeBSD ruling class may have a bug up their ass about somethings but I'm still free to fork code. But it turns out it's not worth it. If you have good reasoning on your side and enough patience people learn, or else they die while you persist. In gerneral BSD is more about patience, who has it, and who doesn't.
This statement only means they retained a lawyer. And obviously he doesn't understand the technology. The patent is patheticly weak and essentially worthless except when someone else sues them. Having this patent just gives them some balencing room and a buffer to repel other frivelous claim.
The technology itself is the scripts and those are copyright protected. Other companies could come out and do the same thing but they would have to write their own configuration scripts. Who wants to configure 2000 games per hardware configuration? They will make money from this but it will hardly be so lucrative that they will have more than one or two other compeditors. If your a hardware developer, you'll just go to these guys first. It probably comes down to $10 to $25 a console which isn't that much.
What's to be afraid of is if the user has to pay a monthly user fee to play these. Every model and configuration of hardware has to be scripted, what happens when a manufacturer no longer supports the hardware? Will the machine still be able to talk to their servers over the net to download configuration scripts? Or will customers with obsolete hardware have to pay these guys directly a monthly service fee for the privilage of the machines still working? It's a minor issue but it does exist.
For the mostpart this company is going to be quite successful. It will make millions but this is chump change compared to what MS and Sony make off games. Neither Sony or MS would have any reason to make a system like this. Computer and video card venders on the other hard would plenty of reason as it sells their hardware.
Expect to see $1000 and $1500 boxes appear soon. They will have their own VGA connector for connecting to computer monitors and with custom versions of the latest and greatest Geforce or ATI technology. Playable at 1600x1200 with AA. I would expect Athlon 64's to be the processor of choice. I expect more than a few notebook retailers will be desperate to get into this as they already have the engineers and the production lines.
It's a nitche market but it's going to sell a lot of hardware. What really going to push these boxes is the value added Tivo, DVD, DVD-R and jutebox features. It's a killer product.
They are idiots for not including normal color lenses and filters for sterioscopic shots. Is it so hard to believe that real people want to see what it would look like if they were standing there? That's the shot that pays the bills. All fasle color images of any sort should be stamped "false color". On top of that each digital photo should contain color meta data relevent to the photos. This is the reason a expensive manned mission is necessary to keep funds available for such science. An astronaught has the lay intelegence to take an everyday camcorder that records visable light for the touristy pictures that pays the ticket to get him there. Scientists can't get their heads out of their asses long enough to stop looking at numbers and instead use their eyes to appreciate the awe and presence of the world around them. This is why NASA is in the crapshoot and will remain there; they neither the heart nor the childlike lust for adventure and exploration. Let's keep the nerds here and send some some men and women with some cement and a little champagne and some beers that know how to party after they have built a monument for the occasion.
My guess is a tiny java app that when opened connected to a best buy computer. So matter how many email aliases and remailer the guy used the recieving computer revieled the final connection the guy read the email from.
It attempts to be a reasonable proof that the email was read on that computer. It's something clever enough that that might be able to extract a confession if he's an idiot that doesn't know enough to shut his mouth and sit in a cell. But it's still not good enough to thwart a hacker defence.
It would be trivial to prove it's reasonable that a hacker might be clever enough to detect this and use it to frame someone else to elude detection. Anyone smart knows you have to have a backup fall guy.
If that is really the guy he's stupid for doing it within the US. Extortions like this actually occur all the time but mostly from abroad and by organized crime. It happens so much that is why the FBI are involved.
They have got to be joking. I'm an definetly a PC person that does not subscribe the Apple philosophy but I'd buy 10 iPods before I'd throw away money on Microsoft's bastard child. I'll admit I might consider it for $25 but that won't happen for another five years. I an anti-gpl to boot. What I want is a open standards hackable(customizable) product from a company that's not going to drop support like a hot potato leaving me with a useless, and unresellable product 5 to 10 years from now.
It would have been trivial to design a monitor and for digitally controlled cars to control speed with little more than basic cell and pager technology. You install reciever stations, preferably as often as trafic lights or every few miles on highway, then install a black box in every car. Guess what, no more speeding as it would be inposable to go over the speed limit. You also instantly know when vehicles make illegal turn. No illegal parking. No getaway cars. And you can find cars with disabled systems. All of this using 1985 technology. Sure it would be expencive to install the infrastructure at first but you theoretically save money by not having to pay trafic cops and meter maids.
The real reason it did not happen is not because trafic cops would be out of work, they would be actually be transfered and start dealing with real crime which the public I think would gladly fund this system in exchange for. The real reason is that local cities would lose a large portion of their budgets. You see trafic tickets are a big fund raiser for many local cities. With a system as I discribed 99% of people would be incapable of speeding due to modern electronicly control cars, and the other 1% would knew when they are speeding and so would trafic computer that would instantly send you a ticket. There would be no speeding. There would be no illegal parking. There would be no money for many local projects and or saleries for public servents.
First as to the politics of the DVD forum; the DVD forum can give the new formar legitimacy. The BD group recognize that the forum has been split but will not just give up the DVD forum title to the AOD group. The BD group wants a level playing field in the battle for the next DVD format with never group taking the title as the DVD forum.
I must say that I'm a techie and favor the full data desity of the blue ray laser over the compromise data desity of AOD. I'm am comfident that if this technology is a part of the winning formar it will last 25 years before a new format becomes available.
If the AOD faction wins they will only have a temporary victory which might last five years or so before a new blue laser format is finally proposed and accepted. The computer enthusiasts will quickly adopt blue laser recordable technology, movie copying will absolutely explode due to the discs lager capasity over AOD. Hence hollywood will stop producing AOD movies and adopt a new blue ray format.
One of the things I like about the BD group is they plan to bring back caddys, i.e. enclose the disc. Their mistake is not adopting all the new codecs of the AOD faction as well as others to provide even better resolution, and advanced mutichannel audio features which would be a selling point to future proof the format.
Internet connectivity is nice though for downloading aux data such as subtitles but I doubt people would voluntarily l bother to hook it up as it will no dbout be used to spy on people for marketing and copy protection issues. But unfortunetly it might be manditory. The main purpose of this though is so decryption keys and methods can be updated regularly. The reason for this that the movie industry has learned that keys can be discovered and used. With current DVD they can't upgrade current players so they can't change keys or protection methods on newly produced discs. Having an internet connection built in changes this and when a key is discovered they will invalidate it with new content depending on the type of encryption. They can also change their scheme altogether provided the copy protection hardware is powerful and flexable enough. I can even imagine a situation where every time you buy a new movie you have to register it and then the player has to connect with a server to validate you every time you watch it. The lack of broadband wouldn't stop them as they could easily sell modems to ethernet adaptors. Of course this won't stop us technically gifted from fair use but it will the general public and add a whole bunch of inconvience to everyone's lives. While you will still have to set through the FBI notice and watch trailers at least the box will download new trailers for you but you'll still be forced to watch them. The marketing people will love it.
We might also start to see free movie givaways where the dics are programmed to upload user information so that they can track you and download commercials marketed at you which you can't skip. Say goodbye to privacy.
You just gave me an idea and I wonder why it was never done. You could easily achieve almost the same feature as instanst skip if you implement a buffer. A three to five minute buffer would be sufficient. The tape just gets read much faster than it's displayed. It could have been implemented years before the massive hard disks made tivo possible. If this had come out on VCR first I don't think we would have heard as much hoopla about it.
So they can't include a caddy for playing old style DVD's? Or make money selling empty DVD caddys?
They need garbash deflectors up there
on
ISS Fender Bender
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· Score: 1
They really should consider putting up a garbage detection and deflection system and it could be based and controlled from the ISS. Basicly a few radar satelites and a dozen or so robots that move about in ordit with bumber plates to deflect garbage into the atmosphere. Too bad vacume cleaners would work in space.
Plus if there were a dozen or so, if one malfunctioned it could be rescued by another and brought back to the ISS for servicing. They could be both radio isotope and thrust fueled and could be refueled at the ISS. Relativly simple robots and it could lead the way for robotic repair bots for satelite repairs.
They have crossed the line. I am for the most part anti GPL with application software. But most basic hardware based software I think is the exception as exemplified by general BIOS code. Thank god most BIOS are flash based and easily changed though I imagine Phoenix will make it harder, they won't prevent it and most motherboard venders will jump as the chance for better, no cost software.
I'm sure as hell not going to buy one. The heat issue makes me nervous, but electricity costs money. Am I going to have to call up an electriction to install a dedicated 240 volt circuit just to run a computer? I don't think so. I just don't need it that bad.
Do not make the cores any more complicated, just shrink them and run then at a lower voltage. Not put 8 to 16 cores spaced out in one package. Same power consumption, more computational power. And since you don't need to run the chips at higher voltage and frequencies, you get more yield for those extra cores.
And BTW, this is way too soon for 65 nm. I just don't believe it. Maybe by late 2006.
BTW, on your next chip set, please kill the floppy controller and just rely on the BIOS to use a USB floppy drive if someone really needs it. On my next system I'm not even going to bother putting a floppy drive in it and instead rely on flash memory. You might as well kill the serial, parallel, and PS/2 ports in the chipset and similarly rely on them connected through USB. If someone really needs the real deal then they can install a PCI card for such lagacy support. But be sure to include 1394 support just so USB isn't overly relied upon and there is an alternative.
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A dozen actual people please. It doesn't count if your just mixing chromosones from different people to claim you have a complete DNA decoded; there is no gaurantee that mix of dna would be viable. There ought to be a panel of scientists to select 12 people to have their DNA read that are willing to be studied for the rest of their lives. Six men and six women. At least some of which would be siblings. Only then can you actually decode DNA. You'll get 90% of the answers there.
You always go with a base line. Then you read other people and compare and contrast them. Then add in other species. And voila, the genetic black box of subroutines that evolution found most useful that are 99.99999% of the answer. After that your left with mutations and figuring out what, and how, the code sequences do what they do and finally programming new sequences to test theory.
In other words 30 years from now it will finally get interesting.
You really expect these people to read about such boring stuff? The key to actually having an impact is to make learning entertaining. So teach through a passive animated video; just don't exceed people attention spans and make it longer than an hour.
Bits, bytes. Registers, memory, storage. Machine instructions, compiled languages, and interpreted scripts. Concepts of a file system. Kernels, operating systems, and API's. Then virus's, worms, trojans, spyware and rootkit backdoors. Second half hour should be about networking concepts. The basic concepts can be covered easily in an hour. If it goes longer than that then you've gotten too specific. Don't overwhelm, your just out to build a foundation for comprehension. Then in later lessons you would teach it all over again, and again, each time going deeper into specifics.
It would certainly proliferate the technology and get it into the hands of people that can figure out how to use it. They could stick an entry level GPU on the thing to get directx and opengl independently of the cell and which would free up the cell as a co-processor for graphics or specialized computing but still keep it labeled a cell graphics card.
But it should be customers that pay for access, not the service provider. Have it kind of like long distence service. And it should be a choice to use the QOS settings or not, like making a long distence call. The telco's should be required to negotiate and settle prices amongst themselves so that there isn't a bunch of toll road fees. But when a connection is established a provider must be able to contractually gaurantee the conection to stay up and it's quality remain the same at whatever price rate the service provider offers. This would be a major boon for video games which compared to video doesn't use as much bandwidth but needs stable connection. Also I can see internet phone devices and video phones exploding onto the market and in fact POTS would die at least within the united states. Then I'd imagine that the telophone companies would finally replace telephone lines with broadband ethernet or fiber wires.
But again this should be an end user change, it should have nothing to do with service providing web sites although they can choose to pay the cost of the premium conection when they establish it or maybe we can have a protocol equivelent of collect calls. The telco's should have no right to be able to block any provider you choose to establish a connection with.
I do not think the Eolas come up with anything that merits a patent. But all the same I think Bush's cofferes were just lined this time around too.
Simple solution is for marketing to get their act together. Otherwise the only alternative it getting games like the latest in the Tomb Raider series, games that shouldn't have been released.
How about waiting until the games in in post production? Either advertize games in production with unspecified dates or dates so far in the future that you can gaurantee it. Then only as development completes do you reverse the estimete in a conservitive mannor.
Send random data to populate any leftover bandwidth.
Try a remote backing up a system and have it complete within 10 minutes which another similar system is backing up over 100TX and tell them how how much longer this other system will take after your system has finished. QOS it.
Run a system streaming different DVD videos to 10 or so computers using QOS. Whatever would fill up a standard 100TX line. Then tell them how many independent video streams you could serve, which I'd guess would be around 300.
Also have about five free desktops with a broser on screen. This could demonstrate QOS and how they aren't appreciably affected appreciably since the internet itself is so slow. Explain how many people it would take, based on adverage cable modem usage by home users, to saturate your line (not your uplink).
A digitized libary of congress is about 10 terabytes. Tell them how long it would take to transfer it between computers at your speed rates. It obviously won't impress them. If my math is right around 3 hours. Then tell them how long it would take to download at other speeds. 100TX would be around three and a half days.
Roughtly what broadband is to modem, your line is to 100TX.
Advertizeing of course. People are spending more time in airports than ever before. Giving them something to do reduces stress and makes everyone happier. But it also gives advertizers a market of financially well of people that can afford airline tickets and laptops. Expect to see advertizing with web url's all the more. And remember sitefiner... The airports can do the same thing. They can also supplant web pages temporarily with their own with click throughs. There are millions of ways they can afford it.
When the case is in front of a judge or jury and the timeline for how quickly code is replaced is presented the judge might just dismiss the case right then and there. Simply put in infringement cases you need to have damages. If all they had to do was release the lines of code they claim are infringing and it's replaced by the end of the week that goes to show how valuble that code really was. The most they could possibly get, if the judge found the code non trivial, is about $10,000 to $20,000 dollars just as a penalty. That's why I think a judge could dismiss the case as SCO couldn't pay their lawyers with that.
But chances are the case is too political and the defence would protest to get the code judged as infringing or not. It's a landmark case as to the methodology to determing what is infringing and what is not when it comes to code.
To me at least it takes a signifigant amout of code, tens of kilobites worth that couldn't be replaced within a month. Damages would have to exceed a quarter million dollars just to judtify taking the case to court. When code can be replaced so easily where is it's value?
Carbo ships would obviously orbit mars. Otherwise the landing spot would be set in stone. Furthermore the ships would stay in orbit while droping payload on specific cooordinents.
It's also likely mars would get it's own gps satelites to spare the expence of the containers carrying more sophisticated navigation equipment.
We can expect the first expedition to mars to be full of married geologists and engineers willing to stay there decades if not most of the rest of their lives. With laborers comming in on subsequent missions.
After they construct their preliminary shelter they first job will be to setup solar setup and then nuclear power since constructing a small city will require a lot more energy than solor can provide. They will setup a small reactor near their base and a much larger on will be setup miles from their base for a refinery.
After construction of alpha base they will start constructing a larger habitat, soil and hydroponics farms from a slow trickle of refined metals being produced. Everything will be very modular and all metal will be recycled. We can expect chicken and fish farms for mean. They will also have pressure and heating units to produce oil from human, animal and plant waste; this will provide the material to produce plastics and a limited amount of fossil fuel for miscilaneous applications such as rocket fuel.
But the main function of the base for years to come would be to produce massive amounts of metal and raw resources for construction of subsequent commercial colonies.
Who knows, decades later maybe a space elevator to make exporting quite profitable.
Mars' greatest strength is as an industrial supercenter to the solar system. We don't likely have to worry about contaminating the ground water there.
Did they say unlimied TIME. I don't remember them qualifing it at all. So unlimited means in all ways, both time amd bandwidth.
I'd love to be on a jury for a class action case regaurding this.
I can't believe he just buckled down to the giant. The worst that could happen was he would lose his domain. It might have been something fair to accept if they offered this kindly in the first place but not after their rude behavior. Oh the humiliation he will suffer in the years to come when he tells his story to friends about how he sold his dignity for a few classes and an xbox.
The whole patent system needs to be replaced. What should replace it should be a reward system where technologiest accross various diciplines elect various actually important problems that need to be solved and then rewards those with ingenuity to solve them with patents. The patenty could actully be longer them than they are but a panel could determine the amount and circumstances of patent fees. Also the patent office itself could collect all patent fees and distribute the money accordingly subtracting their operating costs.
For instance instead of more headache drugs that are just inovations on what exists they would only reward the drug companies when they produce a drug for more serious conditions that they dictated to have priority.
After reading that I feel almost ashamed. But really the author and all those that think like that should feel shame. I like FreeBSD for it's licence and it's legacy. Maybe FreeBSD now is as the author discribes but there never would have been a FreeBSD without the origional BSD hackers fixing things and sharing patches. Not all the patches and programs origionated at Berkley. What the school did was organize a distribution amist all the chaos. In reality it was the first hacker rebirth of an OS. They took a flakey prototype and make something useful of it.
The only real part the author got right was the anology in comparing BSD/Linux to PC/Unix users. Mainframe verses PC; Client/Server verses decentralized P2P. But there is no reason it has to be that way. And in fact it can't because FreeBSD is just a fragmented in it's pieces as linux, many like him just won't admit it.
I like BSD for it's licence. I dislike Linux for it's licence. There is some truth to FreeBSD being a stronger distribution (which is another reason I like it) but it's still a distribution all the same as any Linux distribution. His statements to the contrary just don't stand up. Both sides pick and patch from what's useful.
FreeBSD is a distribution built around a core set of tools with relatively tight quality control. It is more focused that many Linux Distros. FreeBSD is also controled democraticly among the elite where Linux people have no problems forking code and competing against one another, with users and distributors judging the winners and hence is more democract.
The FreeBSD ruling class may have a bug up their ass about somethings but I'm still free to fork code. But it turns out it's not worth it. If you have good reasoning on your side and enough patience people learn, or else they die while you persist. In gerneral BSD is more about patience, who has it, and who doesn't.
This statement only means they retained a lawyer. And obviously he doesn't understand the technology. The patent is patheticly weak and essentially worthless except when someone else sues them. Having this patent just gives them some balencing room and a buffer to repel other frivelous claim.
The technology itself is the scripts and those are copyright protected. Other companies could come out and do the same thing but they would have to write their own configuration scripts. Who wants to configure 2000 games per hardware configuration? They will make money from this but it will hardly be so lucrative that they will have more than one or two other compeditors. If your a hardware developer, you'll just go to these guys first. It probably comes down to $10 to $25 a console which isn't that much.
What's to be afraid of is if the user has to pay a monthly user fee to play these. Every model and configuration of hardware has to be scripted, what happens when a manufacturer no longer supports the hardware? Will the machine still be able to talk to their servers over the net to download configuration scripts? Or will customers with obsolete hardware have to pay these guys directly a monthly service fee for the privilage of the machines still working? It's a minor issue but it does exist.
For the mostpart this company is going to be quite successful. It will make millions but this is chump change compared to what MS and Sony make off games. Neither Sony or MS would have any reason to make a system like this. Computer and video card venders on the other hard would plenty of reason as it sells their hardware.
Expect to see $1000 and $1500 boxes appear soon. They will have their own VGA connector for connecting to computer monitors and with custom versions of the latest and greatest Geforce or ATI technology. Playable at 1600x1200 with AA. I would expect Athlon 64's to be the processor of choice. I expect more than a few notebook retailers will be desperate to get into this as they already have the engineers and the production lines.
It's a nitche market but it's going to sell a lot of hardware. What really going to push these boxes is the value added Tivo, DVD, DVD-R and jutebox features. It's a killer product.
They are idiots for not including normal color lenses and filters for sterioscopic shots. Is it so hard to believe that real people want to see what it would look like if they were standing there? That's the shot that pays the bills. All fasle color images of any sort should be stamped "false color". On top of that each digital photo should contain color meta data relevent to the photos. This is the reason a expensive manned mission is necessary to keep funds available for such science. An astronaught has the lay intelegence to take an everyday camcorder that records visable light for the touristy pictures that pays the ticket to get him there. Scientists can't get their heads out of their asses long enough to stop looking at numbers and instead use their eyes to appreciate the awe and presence of the world around them. This is why NASA is in the crapshoot and will remain there; they neither the heart nor the childlike lust for adventure and exploration. Let's keep the nerds here and send some some men and women with some cement and a little champagne and some beers that know how to party after they have built a monument for the occasion.
My guess is a tiny java app that when opened connected to a best buy computer. So matter how many email aliases and remailer the guy used the recieving computer revieled the final connection the guy read the email from.
It attempts to be a reasonable proof that the email was read on that computer. It's something clever enough that that might be able to extract a confession if he's an idiot that doesn't know enough to shut his mouth and sit in a cell. But it's still not good enough to thwart a hacker defence.
It would be trivial to prove it's reasonable that a hacker might be clever enough to detect this and use it to frame someone else to elude detection. Anyone smart knows you have to have a backup fall guy.
If that is really the guy he's stupid for doing it within the US. Extortions like this actually occur all the time but mostly from abroad and by organized crime. It happens so much that is why the FBI are involved.
They have got to be joking. I'm an definetly a PC person that does not subscribe the Apple philosophy but I'd buy 10 iPods before I'd throw away money on Microsoft's bastard child. I'll admit I might consider it for $25 but that won't happen for another five years. I an anti-gpl to boot. What I want is a open standards hackable(customizable) product from a company that's not going to drop support like a hot potato leaving me with a useless, and unresellable product 5 to 10 years from now.
It would have been trivial to design a monitor and for digitally controlled cars to control speed with little more than basic cell and pager technology. You install reciever stations, preferably as often as trafic lights or every few miles on highway, then install a black box in every car. Guess what, no more speeding as it would be inposable to go over the speed limit. You also instantly know when vehicles make illegal turn. No illegal parking. No getaway cars. And you can find cars with disabled systems. All of this using 1985 technology. Sure it would be expencive to install the infrastructure at first but you theoretically save money by not having to pay trafic cops and meter maids.
The real reason it did not happen is not because trafic cops would be out of work, they would be actually be transfered and start dealing with real crime which the public I think would gladly fund this system in exchange for. The real reason is that local cities would lose a large portion of their budgets. You see trafic tickets are a big fund raiser for many local cities. With a system as I discribed 99% of people would be incapable of speeding due to modern electronicly control cars, and the other 1% would knew when they are speeding and so would trafic computer that would instantly send you a ticket. There would be no speeding. There would be no illegal parking. There would be no money for many local projects and or saleries for public servents.
First as to the politics of the DVD forum; the DVD forum can give the new formar legitimacy. The BD group recognize that the forum has been split but will not just give up the DVD forum title to the AOD group. The BD group wants a level playing field in the battle for the next DVD format with never group taking the title as the DVD forum.
I must say that I'm a techie and favor the full data desity of the blue ray laser over the compromise data desity of AOD. I'm am comfident that if this technology is a part of the winning formar it will last 25 years before a new format becomes available.
If the AOD faction wins they will only have a temporary victory which might last five years or so before a new blue laser format is finally proposed and accepted. The computer enthusiasts will quickly adopt blue laser recordable technology, movie copying will absolutely explode due to the discs lager capasity over AOD. Hence hollywood will stop producing AOD movies and adopt a new blue ray format.
One of the things I like about the BD group is they plan to bring back caddys, i.e. enclose the disc. Their mistake is not adopting all the new codecs of the AOD faction as well as others to provide even better resolution, and advanced mutichannel audio features which would be a selling point to future proof the format.
Internet connectivity is nice though for downloading aux data such as subtitles but I doubt people would voluntarily l bother to hook it up as it will no dbout be used to spy on people for marketing and copy protection issues. But unfortunetly it might be manditory. The main purpose of this though is so decryption keys and methods can be updated regularly. The reason for this that the movie industry has learned that keys can be discovered and used. With current DVD they can't upgrade current players so they can't change keys or protection methods on newly produced discs. Having an internet connection built in changes this and when a key is discovered they will invalidate it with new content depending on the type of encryption. They can also change their scheme altogether provided the copy protection hardware is powerful and flexable enough. I can even imagine a situation where every time you buy a new movie you have to register it and then the player has to connect with a server to validate you every time you watch it. The lack of broadband wouldn't stop them as they could easily sell modems to ethernet adaptors. Of course this won't stop us technically gifted from fair use but it will the general public and add a whole bunch of inconvience to everyone's lives. While you will still have to set through the FBI notice and watch trailers at least the box will download new trailers for you but you'll still be forced to watch them. The marketing people will love it.
We might also start to see free movie givaways where the dics are programmed to upload user information so that they can track you and download commercials marketed at you which you can't skip. Say goodbye to privacy.
You just gave me an idea and I wonder why it was never done. You could easily achieve almost the same feature as instanst skip if you implement a buffer. A three to five minute buffer would be sufficient. The tape just gets read much faster than it's displayed. It could have been implemented years before the massive hard disks made tivo possible. If this had come out on VCR first I don't think we would have heard as much hoopla about it.
So they can't include a caddy for playing old style DVD's? Or make money selling empty DVD caddys?
They really should consider putting up a garbage detection and deflection system and it could be based and controlled from the ISS. Basicly a few radar satelites and a dozen or so robots that move about in ordit with bumber plates to deflect garbage into the atmosphere. Too bad vacume cleaners would work in space.
Plus if there were a dozen or so, if one malfunctioned it could be rescued by another and brought back to the ISS for servicing. They could be both radio isotope and thrust fueled and could be refueled at the ISS. Relativly simple robots and it could lead the way for robotic repair bots for satelite repairs.
They have crossed the line. I am for the most part anti GPL with application software. But most basic hardware based software I think is the exception as exemplified by general BIOS code. Thank god most BIOS are flash based and easily changed though I imagine Phoenix will make it harder, they won't prevent it and most motherboard venders will jump as the chance for better, no cost software.
I'm sure as hell not going to buy one. The heat issue makes me nervous, but electricity costs money. Am I going to have to call up an electriction to install a dedicated 240 volt circuit just to run a computer? I don't think so. I just don't need it that bad.
Do not make the cores any more complicated, just shrink them and run then at a lower voltage. Not put 8 to 16 cores spaced out in one package. Same power consumption, more computational power. And since you don't need to run the chips at higher voltage and frequencies, you get more yield for those extra cores.
And BTW, this is way too soon for 65 nm. I just don't believe it. Maybe by late 2006.
BTW, on your next chip set, please kill the floppy controller and just rely on the BIOS to use a USB floppy drive if someone really needs it. On my next system I'm not even going to bother putting a floppy drive in it and instead rely on flash memory. You might as well kill the serial, parallel, and PS/2 ports in the chipset and similarly rely on them connected through USB. If someone really needs the real deal then they can install a PCI card for such lagacy support. But be sure to include 1394 support just so USB isn't overly relied upon and there is an alternative.