Dolby makes their money developing a new tech (Note that it's actually something innovative when they do, not some lame attempt to grab patents) and then licensing it.
And it's probably a mostly justifiable software patent at the core of this. Dolby did spend a lot of time making AC3 sound good, so they probably are entitled to some money if you are making money off of it.
Which most likely means that, since FreeBSD isn't exactly making money, that they'll have to sign a few pieces of paper and be done with it.
Or we'll have a downloadable DVD player on a site in a country that doesn't have the DMCA (Also known as the "We shoot the messenger and are damn proud of it law") or Software Patents in their lawbook. And hardcore whacko geeks will replace their flashy Dolby Digital amplifiers with relics left over from the 70s.;)
All of the loans get converted to a penny-on-the-dollar payment and stocks. Covad has plenty of stock right now because nobody wants to buy it.
It's a fair deal for the bondholders because, instead of loosing a good chunk of their money, they get some of it back right now, the rest in stock, and if Covad returns to profitability, they'll make quite a bit.
It's a better bet than Covad declaring Chapter 11 the normal way, where you are not assured any money at all.
I hope that some combination of Covad/Rythms/etc. manages to do some CLEC-level competition with the phone company. At the very least, I hope that Speakeasy stays up, because they are consistently rated well on the reviews and explicitly let you run servers and have multiple IP addresses.
Be sure that you know Unix as well as your sysadmin canidate.
I don't sysadmin, but I also know that most sysadmins type chmod 666 blah.file , whereas I type chmod a+rw blah.file. I saw a sysadmin canidate get bombed on that one, once.
You also can learn a lot about any canidate by asking them about:
1) Their personal projects
2) Their past work experience
If they are to be a sysadmin and they run a little network at home or have run one well in the past at an employer, they probably know what they are doing.
Also, ask them about a technology that they are likely to hate. If you are the boss and they are the sysadmin, you want them to be able to consider other options and not just dismiss them because it's Microsoft, VMS, AS/400, etc. You want to make sure that there is rational thinking behind their recomendations, so that they don't replace all of your Sun boxes with HP boxes simply because they like HP more.
Actually, I have found that palmtops are slowly making their way from the techno-geek community to the real world. Mostly because non-geeks are being introduced to them by their geek friends.
However, you have already hit most of the other issues on the head.;)
My argument, which has been repeated often here, is that an 8.5x11 PDA-like computer would be really nice and useful. Especially if it was more like $50 so you could have several of them, like pads of paper, and not wory as much if they got broken.
This technology, of course, is not quite there yet and probably won't be for a while. While circutry follows Moore's law, displays and batteries, which is the main thing holding prices up and battery life down, are not subject to Moore's law.
Actually, I have found that the battery life of my palmtop is not noticeable. It will go for about a week between charges. I can use either a rechargable battery or 2 AA batteries. Usually I pack the charger in my bag when I travel, although when I went to Europe I elected to use AA batteries instead of finding out the hard way if the power converter I picked up doesn't work or was misconfigured. I have found that a computing device can have as low of a battery life as about 16 hours and not be especially annoying if the battery is rechargable and there is a portable charging adapter.
Granted, you never see the people in Trek charging those PADDs and such. I've always wondered if there is a good way to power a device remotely so that it wouldn't need to be charged. Without nuking anybody, wasting insane amounts of power, etc.
I guess the rest of your post depends on what you want. I'm pretty happy with the functionality of my palmtop (It's a Nino, BTW) except that I wish I had wireless internet access in it and a lot more RAM on occasion.
My experience is actually the linear opposite of yours. I was disorganized and I went to use the paper systems first. My main basis for comparison is a Franklin planner. I found that, because of the cooperation between the calendar and task list on a modern organizer system is a marked improvement on paper. Either way, I won't be going back to paper ever.
I dono if I agree with the conclusions of the article. Especially when they mentioned that the iPAQ has Pocket Excel and then said that there isn't any good spreadsheet packages.
There are a whole bunch of reasons why a PDA will never replace a laptop. I wouldn't mind replacing my Cellphone with a PDA, actually, assuming that I could just use a headset.
But a PDA, by nature, has to fit in your pocket. How often do you use a non-electronic information source that doesn't fit in your pocket? Most everybody does a large chunk of their actual work on a 8.5x11 pad, not a notepad.
By my opinion, we won't be seeing truly useful personal computing devices until they make them for $20-30/item (So that you can buy several, spread them out over a desk, and not be too worried if you loose them/somebody accidentally borrows them/break them/etc.) And you won't see a single one-size-fits-all device unless you have a completely different and probably currently unatainable wearable computer.
The reason why the palmtop market is a growth industry right now is because everybody is cashing in their franklin planner or other non-computing orginizational device and getting a palm. They are easy to use. The iPAQ is nice because it's flashy. Both the iPAQ and Palm have finally reached the required usability qualities, form factor, cost, and sophistication necessary to become useful. There's not much bang-for-the-buck left in buying a new PC or even a laptop; everybody who has one wants one and likes it.
And, yes, Palm is in trouble. The framework that PalmOS was constructed on is getting limited. WinCE's problem has always been that it was more like Windows. Now that we are putting more powerful capabilities, the comprimizes and simplifications made with the Palm will result in some necessity for design changes.
Now, I agree with the assertion that wireless LAN/Internet access is important. It still won't replace your desktop or even your laptop for most of the things you use your laptop for.
But if you are talking about replacing your desktop, remember that laptops haven't even replaced desktops yet. The best bet for a true desktop replacements is a stack of PDA-like machines in the same form factor as a sheet of paper with good battery life, wireless, etc. Like I said above, it should be very cheap so you can have several. You still will have something that fits in your pocket, just like a palm or iPAQ. These are two different markets, it's just that nobody's made a non-laptop computer in a full-page form factor that people have latched onto.
Pretty much, people have known this concept since the late 80s, at Xerox PARC of all places. But the technology is just not there yet. Trying to replace your PC with a palmtop is just a dead end that is distracting people from developing a PC replacement in the right form factor.
Actually, the resolution for HDTV is either 1920x1080, 1280x720, or a few DVD-quality tv resolutions. 1024x1024 doesn't appear anywhere in the ATSC standards.
Also note that these are generally big fscking widescreen displays. Generally the only thing that comes close on the PC end is a standard 21" or a 24" widescreen display. When the prices for a HDTV set go down until you can get a real one (i.e. not just a normal sized projection screen that downconverts an HTDV feed) in a size equivelent to your average 25" or so TV, you should be able to buy one at an excessive premium instead of an insane premium.
If you have ever seen the display, it's damn nice. Of course, unless you absolutely love new toys and k3w3l 31337 TV, it's not worth it yet.
It is signifigantly cheaper to have one copper pair that answers to 3 different numbers than 3 copper pairs. It can also be difficult to run an extra line, etc.
So there is some benefit to what the poster asks.
I would suggest that the best course of action is to pick a non-winmodem modem and ask the manufacturer how to use the distinctive ring. I browsed through the docs for the Omni 56k series and they support things. They have a very nice manual that tells you everything you could possibly want to know about using all of the different modes. The distinctive ring is pretty straightfoward. You tell it which rings you want it to answer. If you pick only one, it will answer just that ring. If you pick more than one, it will answer with ring numbers.
So it might take a short hack or two, but it doesn't look that annoying.
The situation for 3D is messy. Just leave it at that.
VRML tried to be the end-all, be-all 3D file format. Which it isn't, BTW, as advances in computer graphics have made VRML not very useful for the kinds of things I want. It is just too general purpose.
The new Web 3D formats are trying to capture a discrete market. People want to see a product in 3D before they purchase it. Of all of them, I rate Macromedia as the most likely to grab the market, given that the Flash plugin is one of the few plugins you can count on having. But they have a little better likelyhood of some success, but only if they latch onto an existing technology, IMHO.
The reason why mollecular modeling is all OpenGL based is pretty simple. OpenGL is a pretty nice library for getting 3D geometry to the graphics card for rendering. It works under any decent OS (Solaris, HP/UX, AIX, WinNT, Win2k, IRIX, etc) that you would want to do that sort of thing on. Programmers have mollecular modeling code that is many years old, probably first designed to work on some sort of early SGI machine, that they have just been linearly porting over to newer platforms without rewriting it.
To make a VRML-based platform, they would have to rewrite things. Sure they might provide an output format for VRML so that you could put it up in a web-based query format. But anything more would require you to rewrite things massively, which isn't a good idea, especially when you can still get p1mp OpenGL cards from Sun, HP, and a few others.
AtheOS is what I've been griping for...
on
AtheOS Interview
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· Score: 3
AtheOS is what I've been wanting.
Simply put, it's an open source project that isn't just a clone of an existing product. Open Source works great when everybody has a pretty set model of how it should work. Linux was easy because they just had to make it work like the existing assortment of Unicies.
But AtheOS is good because they are investigating how things should be done, instead of how they are usually done. Granted, BeOS already did a lot of that thinking, but they still are going off in their own directions.
It'll be interesting to see how this works out. Is it possible for an open source project to create something new and truly innovative?
Forget about putting 16 slave-driving hours in at work. Instead try to get between 7 and 9 of your best hours in at work. This way, you don't have the problem of cutting out sleep-deprived code the next time you are awake. And most of the time, when people work more than 9 hours, they are likely to spend a lot of time trying to get first posts to slashdot, making cubicle art, etc. Do your unwinding at night. This does really work. I made it my goal to graduate without having pulled any all-nighters, and I didn't, even as everybody else pulled an allnighter. This goes counter to employer thinking. But there are the rare companies who elect not to burn their employees out. In any case, you should have some time at night to relax, eat, work on your hobbies, etc.
Get enough sleep on a regular basis. You can't catch-up for lost sleep over the weekend. And the medical community is worried about a whole host of chronic problems like Diabetes as our sleepless generation starts to age, so you do need to get sleep.
Melatonin isn't the great solution that some people think it is. Legit doctors think it's probably not a good idea. Just because it's "Natural" doesn't mean that it's safe or healthy. Hemlock is natural and it is kinda what the Greeks used for the death penalty, eh?
Alchahol interferes with sleep patterns. It's not a solution to getting more sleep.
Proper diet and exercise can help out quite a bit. I found that I sleep the best if I've had a tiring day. I slept like a baby every night last summer at SigGraph.
Instead of doing a lot of steps, do one at a time.
The first one is to ensure that, for any sensitive information, you do callbacks. If somebody is hesitant about giving a number, screw them. Once you have a callback response ingrained, then you can try more detailed measures, but you have to get people thinking about security first.
Now Rambus is going to have to *gasp* actually make a product instead of just go after other companies.
Of course, imagine how the other memory companies are looking right now, now that Infineon is royalty-free for the time being. One wonders if other companies are going to now announce that they are going to discontinue sending rambus royalty checks.;)
I dono if anybody else has noticed this, but they have been touting different ways to better manufacture LCD screens for years. I remember reading in the paper version of Byte at least 4 years ago (but probably more) about a technique that they were using to do this.
Does anybody know what happened to all of the other attempts to better manufacture LCD screens? I thought that they had already moved past the velvet-rub method of LCD production.
If you watch SGI's strategy, they seem to be moving towards that direction. They are keeping Irix around primarily because Linux isn't ready and there aren't any good 64-bit processors out that fit with their business model other than a MIPS, right now.
I mean, think about it. Why bother writing all of the kernels and utilities when you can have the hackers of the world pick up the slack? SGI can't put as many developers on Irix as MS can put on Windoze. So they are developing Irix only for the MIPS machines and keeping Linux for their Intel machines.
And the strategy is pretty evident. They have been very supportive of good OpenGL under Linux. They have XFS, clustering software, etc. All of the Irix advantages are getting ported over.
The problem is that they haven't been able to move over to the Intel platform properly. Their first attempt was a fiasco. The Onyx 3000 series was designed to be a transitional system. It can work with either a MIPS processor or an Itanium. But the Itanium delays are making that hard. And, unlike the desktop workstations, you can't stuff a Pentium 4 in a Onyx because you need 64 bit addressing to make their NUMA architecture work -- each processor gets a piece of the address space. With a 512 processor Onyx 3000, that makes 8 megs of RAM per processor. So Intel is holding up SGI's full migration to Linux.
Now, as far as the stability of SGI, I'm not entirely sure. They are still bleeding money, and at a faster rate than last year, too. Given the downturn in the tech economy, they are going to be hit with it, too. It's very shakey.
I don't think that really matters that the FCC held back cell phones yere. Do you realize how fcsking HUGE those older cell phones were? If you apply moore's law, you will see that the mobile phone of 20 years earlier would have either been really fscking huge, signifigantly less capable, or both. The earliest research ones were the sort of thing that was perminantly wired into one's van.
We missed the boat by a few years, tops. Not the 20 years that the article says.
I mean, part of technological adoption is doing things at the right time. Cell phones came at the right time, with the right form factor and set of features, etc.
It depends, of course, on how long it has been since your last backup and weather there is money in your budget for replacement drives.;)
I mean, if there's a lot of vibration transmitted through the building structure, you are going to have a lot more to wory about than just the drives having a headcrash.
True, but it's probably better to say that it'll extend their lives by 30 days and then be pleasantly surprised when it works for x years, instead of saying that it will extend their life for x years and then have it work 60 days. For miracle medical products, it's the safest solution.
I think that the current best solution is probably not to have extra-long video cables to the basement.
Try getting a PC/104 or other sort of single-board computer from a place like EMJ Embedded. You should be able to find one that's small enough to fit in a small box, inexpensive, and beefy enough to run Linux. And then put a nice LCD screen and whatever perepherals you want with it.
The people at OpenHardware have some stuff in the works that would be cheaper than any of the single-board computers -- Like the EZ328LCD Terminal, except that you'd end up building it yourself.
This will be more light switch box sized and cheaper than the flat panel computers from ZF Micro Devices, which is also an option already mentioned.
In any case, you can then just string power and ethernet and run things remotely. This works especially well if there is a X server that will work with your display.
I'd suggest that your best option for future expandability over a 40-100 year house lifespan is not any particular type of cabling, it's probably conduits with strings inside. That way, you can change the cabling later on.
My parents used some X10 wiring in the house. You don't need the little boxes; we replaced the switches in the switchboxes with X10 switches. I think that X10 sucks, but it's pretty much the only game in town.
My personal idea is to replace the switchboxes in a house with either a custom motorolla dragonball or a PC/104 board and an LCD panel with a relay controller attached. You could then have your computer read off the news, the buzzers, etc.
Also consider the benefits of motion sensors and a security system for household control. You can turn on lights if somebody's stumbling down the hall at night to get a glass of water.
Homes need LAN closets now.
Also consider getting a household surge supressor. They are a few hundered dollars, but it might save your ass in a thunderstorm.
Also consider, in lieu of a dedicated AC unit, a dedicated fan. I was having heating problems in my computer room so I just put a el cheapo fan in the door and it cooled off quite nicely. Since that's annoying to have a fan in the door, you could put some fan ductwork in the ceiling to distribute the hot air out to the rest of your building. This has the added benefit that a large building AC unit is going to work much better than a small portable AC unit.
It is true that a space accident doesn't have to leave that much in the way of a body. However, in all of the major space disasters -- Apollo 1, Soyuz 1, Soyuz 11, Challenger -- there were bodies. Of course, in the Challenger they were hardpressed to figure out if asphyxiation, shock, drowning, etc. was what actually the cause of death, but that's another matter.
I was more speaking figuratively. If three astronauts were killed, why is it that none of their spouses, friends, mistresses, drinking buddies, hairdressers, etc. haven't whispered about that to their press? At this point, it would be a great benefit to the memory of the astronaut to have them recognized as a pioneer.
Of course, the Russians did loose a few cosmonauts in training accidents. Most notably in a pure-oxygen cabin accident that would have probably resulted in NASA not using a pure-oxygen cabin for Apollo-1.
The other thing I realized was that the launch site that was mentioned -- Kapustin Yar -- didn't have a booster that was powerful enough to launch humans until at least 1961. At that point, Gagarin was already launched.
So they would have to kill all of the friends, destroy the launch pad, destroy the drawings, all records, etc. Likely isn't true.
Slashdot Mirror
Not quite as bad as DeCSS.
;)
Dolby makes their money developing a new tech (Note that it's actually something innovative when they do, not some lame attempt to grab patents) and then licensing it.
And it's probably a mostly justifiable software patent at the core of this. Dolby did spend a lot of time making AC3 sound good, so they probably are entitled to some money if you are making money off of it.
Which most likely means that, since FreeBSD isn't exactly making money, that they'll have to sign a few pieces of paper and be done with it.
Or we'll have a downloadable DVD player on a site in a country that doesn't have the DMCA (Also known as the "We shoot the messenger and are damn proud of it law") or Software Patents in their lawbook. And hardcore whacko geeks will replace their flashy Dolby Digital amplifiers with relics left over from the 70s.
Actually, for the investors, it makes sense.
All of the loans get converted to a penny-on-the-dollar payment and stocks. Covad has plenty of stock right now because nobody wants to buy it.
It's a fair deal for the bondholders because, instead of loosing a good chunk of their money, they get some of it back right now, the rest in stock, and if Covad returns to profitability, they'll make quite a bit.
It's a better bet than Covad declaring Chapter 11 the normal way, where you are not assured any money at all.
I hope that some combination of Covad/Rythms/etc. manages to do some CLEC-level competition with the phone company. At the very least, I hope that Speakeasy stays up, because they are consistently rated well on the reviews and explicitly let you run servers and have multiple IP addresses.
Be sure that you know Unix as well as your sysadmin canidate.
I don't sysadmin, but I also know that most sysadmins type chmod 666 blah.file , whereas I type chmod a+rw blah.file. I saw a sysadmin canidate get bombed on that one, once.
You also can learn a lot about any canidate by asking them about:
1) Their personal projects
2) Their past work experience
If they are to be a sysadmin and they run a little network at home or have run one well in the past at an employer, they probably know what they are doing.
Also, ask them about a technology that they are likely to hate. If you are the boss and they are the sysadmin, you want them to be able to consider other options and not just dismiss them because it's Microsoft, VMS, AS/400, etc. You want to make sure that there is rational thinking behind their recomendations, so that they don't replace all of your Sun boxes with HP boxes simply because they like HP more.
Actually, I have found that palmtops are slowly making their way from the techno-geek community to the real world. Mostly because non-geeks are being introduced to them by their geek friends.
;)
However, you have already hit most of the other issues on the head.
My argument, which has been repeated often here, is that an 8.5x11 PDA-like computer would be really nice and useful. Especially if it was more like $50 so you could have several of them, like pads of paper, and not wory as much if they got broken.
This technology, of course, is not quite there yet and probably won't be for a while. While circutry follows Moore's law, displays and batteries, which is the main thing holding prices up and battery life down, are not subject to Moore's law.
Actually, I have found that the battery life of my palmtop is not noticeable. It will go for about a week between charges. I can use either a rechargable battery or 2 AA batteries. Usually I pack the charger in my bag when I travel, although when I went to Europe I elected to use AA batteries instead of finding out the hard way if the power converter I picked up doesn't work or was misconfigured. I have found that a computing device can have as low of a battery life as about 16 hours and not be especially annoying if the battery is rechargable and there is a portable charging adapter.
Granted, you never see the people in Trek charging those PADDs and such. I've always wondered if there is a good way to power a device remotely so that it wouldn't need to be charged. Without nuking anybody, wasting insane amounts of power, etc.
I guess the rest of your post depends on what you want. I'm pretty happy with the functionality of my palmtop (It's a Nino, BTW) except that I wish I had wireless internet access in it and a lot more RAM on occasion.
My experience is actually the linear opposite of yours. I was disorganized and I went to use the paper systems first. My main basis for comparison is a Franklin planner. I found that, because of the cooperation between the calendar and task list on a modern organizer system is a marked improvement on paper. Either way, I won't be going back to paper ever.
I dono if I agree with the conclusions of the article. Especially when they mentioned that the iPAQ has Pocket Excel and then said that there isn't any good spreadsheet packages.
There are a whole bunch of reasons why a PDA will never replace a laptop. I wouldn't mind replacing my Cellphone with a PDA, actually, assuming that I could just use a headset.
But a PDA, by nature, has to fit in your pocket. How often do you use a non-electronic information source that doesn't fit in your pocket? Most everybody does a large chunk of their actual work on a 8.5x11 pad, not a notepad.
By my opinion, we won't be seeing truly useful personal computing devices until they make them for $20-30/item (So that you can buy several, spread them out over a desk, and not be too worried if you loose them/somebody accidentally borrows them/break them/etc.) And you won't see a single one-size-fits-all device unless you have a completely different and probably currently unatainable wearable computer.
The reason why the palmtop market is a growth industry right now is because everybody is cashing in their franklin planner or other non-computing orginizational device and getting a palm. They are easy to use. The iPAQ is nice because it's flashy. Both the iPAQ and Palm have finally reached the required usability qualities, form factor, cost, and sophistication necessary to become useful. There's not much bang-for-the-buck left in buying a new PC or even a laptop; everybody who has one wants one and likes it.
And, yes, Palm is in trouble. The framework that PalmOS was constructed on is getting limited. WinCE's problem has always been that it was more like Windows. Now that we are putting more powerful capabilities, the comprimizes and simplifications made with the Palm will result in some necessity for design changes.
Now, I agree with the assertion that wireless LAN/Internet access is important. It still won't replace your desktop or even your laptop for most of the things you use your laptop for.
But if you are talking about replacing your desktop, remember that laptops haven't even replaced desktops yet. The best bet for a true desktop replacements is a stack of PDA-like machines in the same form factor as a sheet of paper with good battery life, wireless, etc. Like I said above, it should be very cheap so you can have several. You still will have something that fits in your pocket, just like a palm or iPAQ. These are two different markets, it's just that nobody's made a non-laptop computer in a full-page form factor that people have latched onto.
Pretty much, people have known this concept since the late 80s, at Xerox PARC of all places. But the technology is just not there yet. Trying to replace your PC with a palmtop is just a dead end that is distracting people from developing a PC replacement in the right form factor.
Unfortunately, based on the stories that I've heard, the BSA comes with police escort most of the time.
You don't *have* to do interlace.
You just have to run at 24,25,or 30fps instead of 60fps.
Depends on what you want to do with it. Movies are progressive, but sports should be interlaced because things are fast moving.
They wouldn't have been able to fit it in a 6MHz band if they used 1920x1080x60fps progressive, so they had to cut corners.
Actually, the resolution for HDTV is either 1920x1080, 1280x720, or a few DVD-quality tv resolutions. 1024x1024 doesn't appear anywhere in the ATSC standards.
Also note that these are generally big fscking widescreen displays. Generally the only thing that comes close on the PC end is a standard 21" or a 24" widescreen display. When the prices for a HDTV set go down until you can get a real one (i.e. not just a normal sized projection screen that downconverts an HTDV feed) in a size equivelent to your average 25" or so TV, you should be able to buy one at an excessive premium instead of an insane premium.
If you have ever seen the display, it's damn nice. Of course, unless you absolutely love new toys and k3w3l 31337 TV, it's not worth it yet.
It is signifigantly cheaper to have one copper pair that answers to 3 different numbers than 3 copper pairs. It can also be difficult to run an extra line, etc.
So there is some benefit to what the poster asks.
I would suggest that the best course of action is to pick a non-winmodem modem and ask the manufacturer how to use the distinctive ring. I browsed through the docs for the Omni 56k series and they support things. They have a very nice manual that tells you everything you could possibly want to know about using all of the different modes. The distinctive ring is pretty straightfoward. You tell it which rings you want it to answer. If you pick only one, it will answer just that ring. If you pick more than one, it will answer with ring numbers.
So it might take a short hack or two, but it doesn't look that annoying.
The situation for 3D is messy. Just leave it at that.
VRML tried to be the end-all, be-all 3D file format. Which it isn't, BTW, as advances in computer graphics have made VRML not very useful for the kinds of things I want. It is just too general purpose.
The new Web 3D formats are trying to capture a discrete market. People want to see a product in 3D before they purchase it. Of all of them, I rate Macromedia as the most likely to grab the market, given that the Flash plugin is one of the few plugins you can count on having. But they have a little better likelyhood of some success, but only if they latch onto an existing technology, IMHO.
The reason why mollecular modeling is all OpenGL based is pretty simple. OpenGL is a pretty nice library for getting 3D geometry to the graphics card for rendering. It works under any decent OS (Solaris, HP/UX, AIX, WinNT, Win2k, IRIX, etc) that you would want to do that sort of thing on. Programmers have mollecular modeling code that is many years old, probably first designed to work on some sort of early SGI machine, that they have just been linearly porting over to newer platforms without rewriting it.
To make a VRML-based platform, they would have to rewrite things. Sure they might provide an output format for VRML so that you could put it up in a web-based query format. But anything more would require you to rewrite things massively, which isn't a good idea, especially when you can still get p1mp OpenGL cards from Sun, HP, and a few others.
AtheOS is what I've been wanting.
Simply put, it's an open source project that isn't just a clone of an existing product. Open Source works great when everybody has a pretty set model of how it should work. Linux was easy because they just had to make it work like the existing assortment of Unicies.
But AtheOS is good because they are investigating how things should be done, instead of how they are usually done. Granted, BeOS already did a lot of that thinking, but they still are going off in their own directions.
It'll be interesting to see how this works out. Is it possible for an open source project to create something new and truly innovative?
I would tattoo the following:
;)
Integral(E^x) = f(u^n)
Which becomes, when you look at it,
Sex = Fun
That would be my suggestion.
Instead of doing a lot of steps, do one at a time.
The first one is to ensure that, for any sensitive information, you do callbacks. If somebody is hesitant about giving a number, screw them. Once you have a callback response ingrained, then you can try more detailed measures, but you have to get people thinking about security first.
This is a great thing!
;)
Now Rambus is going to have to *gasp* actually make a product instead of just go after other companies.
Of course, imagine how the other memory companies are looking right now, now that Infineon is royalty-free for the time being. One wonders if other companies are going to now announce that they are going to discontinue sending rambus royalty checks.
I dono if anybody else has noticed this, but they have been touting different ways to better manufacture LCD screens for years. I remember reading in the paper version of Byte at least 4 years ago (but probably more) about a technique that they were using to do this.
Does anybody know what happened to all of the other attempts to better manufacture LCD screens? I thought that they had already moved past the velvet-rub method of LCD production.
If you watch SGI's strategy, they seem to be moving towards that direction. They are keeping Irix around primarily because Linux isn't ready and there aren't any good 64-bit processors out that fit with their business model other than a MIPS, right now.
I mean, think about it. Why bother writing all of the kernels and utilities when you can have the hackers of the world pick up the slack? SGI can't put as many developers on Irix as MS can put on Windoze. So they are developing Irix only for the MIPS machines and keeping Linux for their Intel machines.
And the strategy is pretty evident. They have been very supportive of good OpenGL under Linux. They have XFS, clustering software, etc. All of the Irix advantages are getting ported over.
The problem is that they haven't been able to move over to the Intel platform properly. Their first attempt was a fiasco. The Onyx 3000 series was designed to be a transitional system. It can work with either a MIPS processor or an Itanium. But the Itanium delays are making that hard. And, unlike the desktop workstations, you can't stuff a Pentium 4 in a Onyx because you need 64 bit addressing to make their NUMA architecture work -- each processor gets a piece of the address space. With a 512 processor Onyx 3000, that makes 8 megs of RAM per processor. So Intel is holding up SGI's full migration to Linux.
Now, as far as the stability of SGI, I'm not entirely sure. They are still bleeding money, and at a faster rate than last year, too. Given the downturn in the tech economy, they are going to be hit with it, too. It's very shakey.
I don't think that really matters that the FCC held back cell phones yere. Do you realize how fcsking HUGE those older cell phones were? If you apply moore's law, you will see that the mobile phone of 20 years earlier would have either been really fscking huge, signifigantly less capable, or both. The earliest research ones were the sort of thing that was perminantly wired into one's van.
We missed the boat by a few years, tops. Not the 20 years that the article says.
I mean, part of technological adoption is doing things at the right time. Cell phones came at the right time, with the right form factor and set of features, etc.
It depends, of course, on how long it has been since your last backup and weather there is money in your budget for replacement drives. ;)
I mean, if there's a lot of vibration transmitted through the building structure, you are going to have a lot more to wory about than just the drives having a headcrash.
Not very optimistic, are they?
True, but it's probably better to say that it'll extend their lives by 30 days and then be pleasantly surprised when it works for x years, instead of saying that it will extend their life for x years and then have it work 60 days. For miracle medical products, it's the safest solution.
I think that the current best solution is probably not to have extra-long video cables to the basement.
Try getting a PC/104 or other sort of single-board computer from a place like EMJ Embedded. You should be able to find one that's small enough to fit in a small box, inexpensive, and beefy enough to run Linux. And then put a nice LCD screen and whatever perepherals you want with it.
The people at OpenHardware have some stuff in the works that would be cheaper than any of the single-board computers -- Like the EZ328LCD Terminal, except that you'd end up building it yourself.
This will be more light switch box sized and cheaper than the flat panel computers from ZF Micro Devices, which is also an option already mentioned.
In any case, you can then just string power and ethernet and run things remotely. This works especially well if there is a X server that will work with your display.
I'd suggest that your best option for future expandability over a 40-100 year house lifespan is not any particular type of cabling, it's probably conduits with strings inside. That way, you can change the cabling later on.
My parents used some X10 wiring in the house. You don't need the little boxes; we replaced the switches in the switchboxes with X10 switches. I think that X10 sucks, but it's pretty much the only game in town.
My personal idea is to replace the switchboxes in a house with either a custom motorolla dragonball or a PC/104 board and an LCD panel with a relay controller attached. You could then have your computer read off the news, the buzzers, etc.
Also consider the benefits of motion sensors and a security system for household control. You can turn on lights if somebody's stumbling down the hall at night to get a glass of water.
Homes need LAN closets now.
Also consider getting a household surge supressor. They are a few hundered dollars, but it might save your ass in a thunderstorm.
Also consider, in lieu of a dedicated AC unit, a dedicated fan. I was having heating problems in my computer room so I just put a el cheapo fan in the door and it cooled off quite nicely. Since that's annoying to have a fan in the door, you could put some fan ductwork in the ceiling to distribute the hot air out to the rest of your building. This has the added benefit that a large building AC unit is going to work much better than a small portable AC unit.
It is true that a space accident doesn't have to leave that much in the way of a body. However, in all of the major space disasters -- Apollo 1, Soyuz 1, Soyuz 11, Challenger -- there were bodies. Of course, in the Challenger they were hardpressed to figure out if asphyxiation, shock, drowning, etc. was what actually the cause of death, but that's another matter.
I was more speaking figuratively. If three astronauts were killed, why is it that none of their spouses, friends, mistresses, drinking buddies, hairdressers, etc. haven't whispered about that to their press? At this point, it would be a great benefit to the memory of the astronaut to have them recognized as a pioneer.
Of course, the Russians did loose a few cosmonauts in training accidents. Most notably in a pure-oxygen cabin accident that would have probably resulted in NASA not using a pure-oxygen cabin for Apollo-1.
The other thing I realized was that the launch site that was mentioned -- Kapustin Yar -- didn't have a booster that was powerful enough to launch humans until at least 1961. At that point, Gagarin was already launched.
So they would have to kill all of the friends, destroy the launch pad, destroy the drawings, all records, etc. Likely isn't true.