Well, yes, but that comparison fails because driverless cars are not designed to deliberately kill people. Quite the opposite, in fact.
The concern with this kind of automated killing is that it makes things too easy. If you want to fight a war, your own ass should be on the line too. You shouldn't be able to just press a button and murder people on the other side of the planet.
Yes, the Raspberry Pi could be an awesome streamer. I wonder if it will support HDMI 1.3 for TrueHD/DTS-HD bitstreaming? (There are already open-source implementations for these if the hardware supports it.)
If they included support for decoding all the content types permitted by the Blu-ray standard, this new chip might work very well for a low-power set top streamer. It would be strong enough to take the place of a HTPC, especially if XBMC could be made to run on it.
Silverlight never really got off the ground except for Netflix. However, VB6 was an extremely widely used product, and its discontinuance caused a great deal of trouble for many real-world organizations.
I had no problem reading the data off of my C64 floppies a few years ago. This was done with an original C1541 disk drive connected to a PC using a cable between the drive's serial port and the PC's parallel port. I don't know if this will work with newer versions of Windows, but if nothing else you could always boot into FreeDOS. The disks themselves seem quite resilient.
That argument might have made some sense during the Cold War, but it makes little sense now. Most First World countries today face few serious military threats. To the extent that there are threats from terrorists, this can usually more effectively be dealt with through non-military means such as law enforcement. There is no evidence that the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq have enhanced the security of the US or of the rest of the world.
"Lowest 50% don't pay any income tax, many of those get distribution FROM the tax system"
Hold on a second. You started with the statement that "The US right now has THE MOST progressive tax system in the world" and then proceeded to isolate ONE specific tax, the income tax, which is actually about the only progressive tax we have at all. You're completely forgetting about state and local sales taxes, which are regressive. You're ignoring Social Security payroll taxes, which are also regressive. Everyone who legally works for a living in the United States pays Social Security tax from dollar one of their earnings.
Toslink (optical SPDIF) is very low in bandwidth compared to modern technologies. Most implementations don't go above ~1.5 mbps, which is enough for uncompressed redbook CD audio or DTS (and more than enough for Dolby Digital / AC-3). Just because this can be done cheaply doesn't mean that the same is true of optical connections that need to handle several orders of magnitude more bandwidth.
And Toslink never made much sense in the first place. Coaxial SPDIF transmits exactly the same data, the cables are cheaper, you can make the cables yourself with the proper tooling, and they are far more robust. (You can easily break a Toslink cable just by bending it too tightly - that doesn't happen with coax.)
The Wii only supports standard-definition (480p) video output. Emulators can render it at full HD 1080p. Emulation might be desired for quality reasons in a home theater setup.
Amazing how everyone seems to take iSuppli's $318 bill of materials guess as gospel truth. We have no way of knowing what the true figure is. A great deal of it depends on quantity purchased and how hard a bargain someone can strike with the parts vendors.
In the early days, *nix was a disjointed, proprietary mess dominated by sneering, long-haired elitists
Things are much different now. Today, *nix is a disjointed, open-source mess dominated by sneering, long-haired elitists.
The open-source community needs a different Photoshop substitute that does a better job.
What of GIMP is worth keeping?
Not the stupid and childish name that will keep any reasonably sized professional organization from ever adopting it.
Not the crappy user interface.
Not the back-end code that can't handle 16-bit color/CMYK/Lab/etc.
Time to give this project up for lost, and start from the ground-up building a better free substitute for Photoshop.
Another problem is that there is literally a function for everything. And a corrected version of it, named differently because code out there relies on the old buggy version. Things like urlencode and rawurlencode, mysql_escape_string and mysql_real_escape_string (I'm not making this up!) and htmlspecialchars and htmlentities.
This is hardly limited to PHP. You'll see much the same thing in the Win32 API, or indeed in the C standard library (gets, anyone)? Deprecated functions left in for compatibility reasons are a fact of life.
Adobe has an FTP site. It's where I always download Reader because it's the only way to get a clean installer without the "download manager" plugin or any of the other crap.
Any language with a low barrier to entry will attract a higher-than-usual number of poor developers. This doesn't mean that the language itself is necessarily bad.
2) With Google buying a hardware company, Microsoft is well positioned to say "WP7 is the only OS you can use where the OS designer is not competing with you".
3) Nokia WP7 phones starting to come online soon.
Note that these two points contradict one another.
Vertical integration is nothing new, and it isn't just a buzzword. It has a specific meaning. Basically, if a company owns/controls most or all of the parts of its supply chain, it is considered to be vertically integrated.
Good. Maybe the remainder will be blown out at clearance prices; the hardware is still good, and I'm sure someone will figure out a way to load Android on these things.
The CPUs were standard, but little else was. Sure, the C-64 and Atari 800 both had a 6502-based CPU, but they also had different video chips, different sound chips, different and mutually incompatible disk drive formats and serial communications protocols, etc.
One nice thing was that even though each company used their proprietary chips, they didn't feel the need to hide implementation details from users. If you wanted to know exactly what each register in the VIC-II chip did, it was right there in the manual.
A few months ago, Google bought SageTV, a small but well-regarded manufacturer of media streaming devices and associated software.
With the purchase of Motorola, that previous acquisition now makes a lot more sense. Google is obviously serious about making GoogleTV and associated products a success, and sees Motorola as their way into the cable TV set-top box market.
For Google, the benefit comes in additional advertising revenue. For consumers, the benefit is that finally we may get cable boxes that don't suck. The overall level of competence in the set-top box industry up until now has been horribly low.
Razor-thin margins on PC hardware may be bad for OEMs, but they are good for consumers. And after seeing all the crap that both OEMs and phone carriers load up their systems with, I don't really have much sympathy for them.
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Well, yes, but that comparison fails because driverless cars are not designed to deliberately kill people. Quite the opposite, in fact. The concern with this kind of automated killing is that it makes things too easy. If you want to fight a war, your own ass should be on the line too. You shouldn't be able to just press a button and murder people on the other side of the planet.
Yes, the Raspberry Pi could be an awesome streamer. I wonder if it will support HDMI 1.3 for TrueHD/DTS-HD bitstreaming? (There are already open-source implementations for these if the hardware supports it.)
If they included support for decoding all the content types permitted by the Blu-ray standard, this new chip might work very well for a low-power set top streamer. It would be strong enough to take the place of a HTPC, especially if XBMC could be made to run on it.
Silverlight never really got off the ground except for Netflix. However, VB6 was an extremely widely used product, and its discontinuance caused a great deal of trouble for many real-world organizations.
I had no problem reading the data off of my C64 floppies a few years ago. This was done with an original C1541 disk drive connected to a PC using a cable between the drive's serial port and the PC's parallel port. I don't know if this will work with newer versions of Windows, but if nothing else you could always boot into FreeDOS. The disks themselves seem quite resilient.
That argument might have made some sense during the Cold War, but it makes little sense now. Most First World countries today face few serious military threats. To the extent that there are threats from terrorists, this can usually more effectively be dealt with through non-military means such as law enforcement. There is no evidence that the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq have enhanced the security of the US or of the rest of the world.
"Lowest 50% don't pay any income tax, many of those get distribution FROM the tax system" Hold on a second. You started with the statement that "The US right now has THE MOST progressive tax system in the world" and then proceeded to isolate ONE specific tax, the income tax, which is actually about the only progressive tax we have at all. You're completely forgetting about state and local sales taxes, which are regressive. You're ignoring Social Security payroll taxes, which are also regressive. Everyone who legally works for a living in the United States pays Social Security tax from dollar one of their earnings.
Toslink (optical SPDIF) is very low in bandwidth compared to modern technologies. Most implementations don't go above ~1.5 mbps, which is enough for uncompressed redbook CD audio or DTS (and more than enough for Dolby Digital / AC-3). Just because this can be done cheaply doesn't mean that the same is true of optical connections that need to handle several orders of magnitude more bandwidth. And Toslink never made much sense in the first place. Coaxial SPDIF transmits exactly the same data, the cables are cheaper, you can make the cables yourself with the proper tooling, and they are far more robust. (You can easily break a Toslink cable just by bending it too tightly - that doesn't happen with coax.)
The Wii only supports standard-definition (480p) video output. Emulators can render it at full HD 1080p. Emulation might be desired for quality reasons in a home theater setup.
Amazing how everyone seems to take iSuppli's $318 bill of materials guess as gospel truth. We have no way of knowing what the true figure is. A great deal of it depends on quantity purchased and how hard a bargain someone can strike with the parts vendors.
You seriously want the government to be your ISP? Tell me, who did you vote for in the last election for Comcast CEO?
In the early days, *nix was a disjointed, proprietary mess dominated by sneering, long-haired elitists
Things are much different now. Today, *nix is a disjointed, open-source mess dominated by sneering, long-haired elitists.
The open-source community needs a different Photoshop substitute that does a better job. What of GIMP is worth keeping? Not the stupid and childish name that will keep any reasonably sized professional organization from ever adopting it. Not the crappy user interface. Not the back-end code that can't handle 16-bit color/CMYK/Lab/etc. Time to give this project up for lost, and start from the ground-up building a better free substitute for Photoshop.
The overwhelming majority of users run Windows and don't have multiple monitors. It makes no sense to optimize for the few at the expense of the many.
Another problem is that there is literally a function for everything. And a corrected version of it, named differently because code out there relies on the old buggy version. Things like urlencode and rawurlencode, mysql_escape_string and mysql_real_escape_string (I'm not making this up!) and htmlspecialchars and htmlentities.
This is hardly limited to PHP. You'll see much the same thing in the Win32 API, or indeed in the C standard library (gets, anyone)? Deprecated functions left in for compatibility reasons are a fact of life.
Adobe has an FTP site. It's where I always download Reader because it's the only way to get a clean installer without the "download manager" plugin or any of the other crap.
Any language with a low barrier to entry will attract a higher-than-usual number of poor developers. This doesn't mean that the language itself is necessarily bad.
2) With Google buying a hardware company, Microsoft is well positioned to say "WP7 is the only OS you can use where the OS designer is not competing with you". 3) Nokia WP7 phones starting to come online soon. Note that these two points contradict one another.
You're assuming that no application developer will ever need to use a customized version of zlib.dll.
Vertical integration is nothing new, and it isn't just a buzzword. It has a specific meaning. Basically, if a company owns/controls most or all of the parts of its supply chain, it is considered to be vertically integrated.
If the price dropped to $99 on clearance, it would be better hardware than any other tablet at that price point.
Good. Maybe the remainder will be blown out at clearance prices; the hardware is still good, and I'm sure someone will figure out a way to load Android on these things.
The CPUs were standard, but little else was. Sure, the C-64 and Atari 800 both had a 6502-based CPU, but they also had different video chips, different sound chips, different and mutually incompatible disk drive formats and serial communications protocols, etc. One nice thing was that even though each company used their proprietary chips, they didn't feel the need to hide implementation details from users. If you wanted to know exactly what each register in the VIC-II chip did, it was right there in the manual.
A few months ago, Google bought SageTV, a small but well-regarded manufacturer of media streaming devices and associated software. With the purchase of Motorola, that previous acquisition now makes a lot more sense. Google is obviously serious about making GoogleTV and associated products a success, and sees Motorola as their way into the cable TV set-top box market. For Google, the benefit comes in additional advertising revenue. For consumers, the benefit is that finally we may get cable boxes that don't suck. The overall level of competence in the set-top box industry up until now has been horribly low.
Razor-thin margins on PC hardware may be bad for OEMs, but they are good for consumers. And after seeing all the crap that both OEMs and phone carriers load up their systems with, I don't really have much sympathy for them.