Oh, but note the drop in revenue from I to II. To me, ~$120M is a lot of money.
My take is that everyone went to see Ep-I, a lot of people though it sucked and didn't see Ep-II. I wonder if we'll see another drop for Ep-III because EP-II sucked so hard? And will the resulting drop be enough to make Lucas stop the madness?
In my world, there is nothing but A New Hope, Empire, and Jedi. Everything else is crap, including those nasty little Clone Wars cartoons. C'mon, I love Samurai Jack, but those little vignettes were icky.
I take issue with your 500MHz limit. Gnome 2.0 runs like a pig in cement on my K6-III/500. Sure, we could have done all sorts of things on an Amiga, but the integration and features in newer desktop environments are slick. Take CD burning integrated into Nautilus (and Win Explorer on XP). I think that totally rules the school.
OTOH, my firewall is a PentiumMMX/200 and it does just fine, thankyouverymuch.
HDs, CD-ROMs, and memory are modularized because they're bought from outside sources. That's really not the issue, rather the rest of the wacky display drivers, CCFLs, and all the little daughter cards connected by low mating cycle printed ribbon cable. Those are delicate and really shouldn't be disturbed.
You're an uber-geek with a screwdriver, but you're far from the average user which they really want to protect. We've all read the stories about ham fisted average guys plugging their modem card backwards in the AGP slot. Can you imagine if they got inside your Toshiba?
Laptops aren't meant to be serviceable. They're meant to be sealed up like a Pharoah's tomb and left alone for eternity, because everything inside is laid out just so, and all those printed wire ribbons are fairly delicate. It's hard to get replacement parts without going through an authorized repair depot. The manufacturer does not have the money to put in a system for ordering parts piecemeal.
If you buy through authorized dealers, you get this thing called a warranty and a service contract. They're pretty good for getting your laptop fixed. I broke the LCD on my Sony Vaio, and they fixed it and the noisy fan which I didn't even ask about. Same with a co-worker and his Dell, he broke the hinge and Dell fixed it.
My best solution for you is to find another dead one on Ebay and scavenge the corpse. The other solution is to make friends with someone at a repair depot so they can backdoor you a piece here and there.
Both of those would probably make pretty good plugins. Well, I'm not sure about the cropping, but straighten image would be a great addition to a plugin group for digital photo editing.
RPG notation? Cool. My GX only has RPN. I did have FPS (Doom) for a bit, but I found that the demons didn't really have a good handle on matrix transforms.
How about QoS? It's hard enough to keep a 64kbps stream going realtime across an IP link as it is. 64k is good enough for voice; what do you want to do, practice with your string quartet over cyberspace?
I saw an advertisment for their new TMS320DRI250 DSP with HD radio and MP3 decoding. I wondered who was going to use it. Now I know. It was going for about $30 in quantities, IIRC. The coolest thing I saw in the slick sheet was the possibility of TiVo-like rewind and timeshift features done in software, which I think would be great for talk radio or if you like certain radio shows.
Hm, seems to me, the people that may fork out the ca$h for a HD-FM tuner would also drive things like M-B, BMW, and Jaguar cars, which are cathedral-like and make pretty decent listening environments, all things considered. It's still a car, not a studio, but the road noise is all but gone in a luxo-ride.
I find it surprising how much you miss when you attenuate at 16kHz. I think it's more to do with harmonic distortion than actually listening to 16kHz+ tones.
Of course, for the other 95% of us that drive noisier cars, you're probably right. I listen to my engine a lot lately, because I love the sound of a flat-4 and a turbo spooling up (Subaru WRX).
They're cheap, but they certainly aren't crap. My wife drives the begeezus out of her Tiburon, and it's very reliable. Not particularly powerful, but it will scoot when prodded. We're looking at another car, and so far Hyundai is giving the best fit, finish, and size for the dollar, IMO.
Hm, I just looked at the list of movies that Miramax has released, and I really enjoyed a lot of them (Amelie, Clerks, Heavenly Creatures, etc). OK, it isn't that they're cranking out junk movies, although I really can't endorse or forgive Bridget Jones' Diary. I attribute the late release of Hero and Shaolin Soccer to laziness instead. Get on the stick, Miramax!
Miramax isn't late, they're just busy releasing the other crap that marketing thinks middle America will like. Really good movies get the shaft with alarming regularity.
The studios ignore the mass pirates because it's sexier and easier to go after file sharers with a big marketing campaign. To combat the pirates in China, Russia, etc, they'd need actual guns and stuff, because there are real pirates out there that will kill you if you raid their CD duplication factories.
There may be recently release software, because it's pretty recent that everyone got let go. It was in mid-September. I know for a fact that the Neuros with USB 2.0 is not being produced, though, because I was selling them the USB chip and no orders have been placed. They are looking for an investor to take the whole thing and build it on his dime, since their investing group pulled the plug on the project and went back to just making CD scratch removers under the Digital Innovations name. I think you can still buy the original Neuros, because they had quite a bit of stock on those. They might have a software guy or two for support, but hardware design is pretty much gone.
The Neuros as we know it is indeed toast. They laid off all of the engineers on the project just a couple of weeks before the new player was finished. It has USB 2.0 and a couple other improvements, but unless some benefactor comes along and buys all that IP, it will never be built.
Name a product on which Iomega hasn't screwed the pooch. I have a Zip100 and a DittoMAX tape drive. I was lucky and the Zip didn't develop a click of death, but that stupid DittoMAX has been crap from day one. I barely worked under NT; required a second rev of the interface card to work properly. Getting it to work under FTape was a complete pain in the butt, and really brittle. I got it working under the 2.0 kernels, but it hasn't played nice since. I should've gotten a Travan or Seagate tape drive, but I was in college and poor at the time.
Iomega can rot in Hell for all I care. Shitty hardware and ridiculous price schemes.
Preach on, brother. I hate our cellular networks with a passion I used to reserve for used car salesmen. The providers tried to lock us in by using completely different networks, now we're heavily screwed.
All of the marketers and product engineers are complete morons here in the US. Web surfing on a tiny screen is worthless; integration to existing technology should have been priority one. Now I've got so much crap on my belt, Batman would blush. Why can't I have a phone/pager/pda/remote control in one device, and why can't any of this stuff interface with my PC without some bullshit $60 cable and some weird, Windows-only software that doesn't even fucking work?
Gaah! Standards, people! They're there for a reason!
Re:Idiocy - bluetooth just taking off
on
Is Bluetooth Dead?
·
· Score: 1
We don't have that in the US. Our cell phone providers are stuck in the eighties, and just give us basic services. Sure, they spoon feed text messaging, but we have less than half of the cool stuff available in Europe. Our phones are crap, GSM is just started to be deployed, and we still have three different types of cell networks out here (CDMA, TDMA, Sprint PCS, and now GSM). It's a real mess.
The only commercial product I've seen was a bluetooth headset, and there's like one phone available here with bluetooth. For supposedly being such a technology leader, the US really sucks in a lot of respects. Our providers play to the lowest common denominator, which is pretty damn low.
Yes, it's dying, but not for his reasons
on
Is Bluetooth Dead?
·
· Score: 1
The author says the application stack was the best part, but the PHY was bad. I say exactly the opposite. The 2.4GHz phy work that was done was actually quite good for a personal area network. It's deployable anywhere in the world (2.4GHz is a worldwide ISM band) and low power. However, the application stack got so big that the processing power required killed the node cost. This was supposed to be less than $5US per node, but ended up over $10US.
Anyway, it's pretty much dead. Too big for it's britches. Let's learn from this and keep those beautiful RF front ends that came out of the bluetooth experiment.
An F-16 handles combat just fine, thanks to the measures taken by our fine engineers. A nick in a piece of stressed metal will be the first place it fails, all things being equal. If you've ever been around engines, even car engines, you'd see a lot of measures taken to avoid stress and potential failure points. I.E., special screw thread shapes to avoid a sharp trough angle, which will be a point of failure should it be over stressed. Most connecting rod bearing bolts are built this way now (that's for I.C. engines, a jet doesn't have such a thing).
For the record, I don't know that an F-16 uses nuts from a padded case in the turbine. My point was that unless the right parts are used, and kept in good shape, there will be big problems. Witness the maintenance schedule on a Blackhawk helicopter; they need to completely inspect and rebuild the main rotor blades every few hundred operational hours. Those costs add up pretty quickly.
It costs a lot to have the best prepared and most advanced military force in the world. The alternative is to let ourselves be invaded by Canada, eh?
I really take issue with the perception of military spending, and I'm not even in the military or even involved in it in any significant way. There are good reasons for the seemingly high-dollar items in a bill of materials.
For your padded nuts, when you make a fighter jet capable of Mach 1+, things are really different than assembling a set of bookcases. If those nuts get a nick in them, you create a stress point. Subject that nut to the varying loads and temperature changes that a jet does, just idling there, and that thing may crack and let go. Then your turbine engine gets a nut fragment in the blades, the engine explodes, and people die. All because some snippy little civilian bitched about padded nuts.
Guess what? A military-grade 486, which is still used in volume, costs close to $500. It is radiation hardened and hermetically sealed, because when you get way up high like we often do, alpha particles start bombarding your plane, causing Single-Event Upsets, which is a bit flip. Suddenly your nav system thinks you're in the southern hemisphere and the jet flips over. Thus, rad-hard and multiple redundant systems, just to deal with those pesky particles that get shot at us constantly from space.
The money spent on developing AA was peanuts compared to the cost of one F-16. The military has hundreds of F-16s. Lay off.
Had you bothered to research it, you'd see that the plastic is irrelevant, that it does run PocketPC, and that reference designs make the world go 'round.
The Alchemy/AMD design group is completely separate from the x86 group. The design motivations are completely different. Move away from your PC and realize that hundreds of times more embedded processors are sold every year than PC processors. AMD still ships 186 processors by the millions, while the retail boxes sit on store shelves.
The sneaky thing is that it will run WinCE as well. That just doesn't get mentioned because this is Slashdot after all.
AMD wants to make chips, not finished consumer hardware. This is a reference design for an ODM or OEM to pick up and run away with. It's basically a "Here you go, market this and build it yourself, then buy the processor and the flash memory from us. Love ya, AMD."
So, basically, if someone in Korea took the hardware design and optimized it for a small form factor, you'd get what you want. Don't be looking to AMD for it, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, but note the drop in revenue from I to II. To me, ~$120M is a lot of money.
My take is that everyone went to see Ep-I, a lot of people though it sucked and didn't see Ep-II. I wonder if we'll see another drop for Ep-III because EP-II sucked so hard? And will the resulting drop be enough to make Lucas stop the madness?
In my world, there is nothing but A New Hope, Empire, and Jedi. Everything else is crap, including those nasty little Clone Wars cartoons. C'mon, I love Samurai Jack, but those little vignettes were icky.
Yes, that really makes sense when you think about it. I'll expect to see your project on Sourceforge.
Get to work.
I take issue with your 500MHz limit. Gnome 2.0 runs like a pig in cement on my K6-III/500. Sure, we could have done all sorts of things on an Amiga, but the integration and features in newer desktop environments are slick. Take CD burning integrated into Nautilus (and Win Explorer on XP). I think that totally rules the school.
OTOH, my firewall is a PentiumMMX/200 and it does just fine, thankyouverymuch.
HDs, CD-ROMs, and memory are modularized because they're bought from outside sources. That's really not the issue, rather the rest of the wacky display drivers, CCFLs, and all the little daughter cards connected by low mating cycle printed ribbon cable. Those are delicate and really shouldn't be disturbed.
You're an uber-geek with a screwdriver, but you're far from the average user which they really want to protect. We've all read the stories about ham fisted average guys plugging their modem card backwards in the AGP slot. Can you imagine if they got inside your Toshiba?
Laptops aren't meant to be serviceable. They're meant to be sealed up like a Pharoah's tomb and left alone for eternity, because everything inside is laid out just so, and all those printed wire ribbons are fairly delicate. It's hard to get replacement parts without going through an authorized repair depot. The manufacturer does not have the money to put in a system for ordering parts piecemeal.
If you buy through authorized dealers, you get this thing called a warranty and a service contract. They're pretty good for getting your laptop fixed. I broke the LCD on my Sony Vaio, and they fixed it and the noisy fan which I didn't even ask about. Same with a co-worker and his Dell, he broke the hinge and Dell fixed it.
My best solution for you is to find another dead one on Ebay and scavenge the corpse. The other solution is to make friends with someone at a repair depot so they can backdoor you a piece here and there.
Both of those would probably make pretty good plugins. Well, I'm not sure about the cropping, but straighten image would be a great addition to a plugin group for digital photo editing.
RPG notation? Cool. My GX only has RPN. I did have FPS (Doom) for a bit, but I found that the demons didn't really have a good handle on matrix transforms.
How about QoS? It's hard enough to keep a 64kbps stream going realtime across an IP link as it is. 64k is good enough for voice; what do you want to do, practice with your string quartet over cyberspace?
OK, so that might be cool. Carry on!
I saw an advertisment for their new TMS320DRI250 DSP with HD radio and MP3 decoding. I wondered who was going to use it. Now I know. It was going for about $30 in quantities, IIRC. The coolest thing I saw in the slick sheet was the possibility of TiVo-like rewind and timeshift features done in software, which I think would be great for talk radio or if you like certain radio shows.
I, for one, welcome our HD-FM overlords.
Hm, seems to me, the people that may fork out the ca$h for a HD-FM tuner would also drive things like M-B, BMW, and Jaguar cars, which are cathedral-like and make pretty decent listening environments, all things considered. It's still a car, not a studio, but the road noise is all but gone in a luxo-ride.
I find it surprising how much you miss when you attenuate at 16kHz. I think it's more to do with harmonic distortion than actually listening to 16kHz+ tones.
Of course, for the other 95% of us that drive noisier cars, you're probably right. I listen to my engine a lot lately, because I love the sound of a flat-4 and a turbo spooling up (Subaru WRX).
They're cheap, but they certainly aren't crap. My wife drives the begeezus out of her Tiburon, and it's very reliable. Not particularly powerful, but it will scoot when prodded. We're looking at another car, and so far Hyundai is giving the best fit, finish, and size for the dollar, IMO.
Hm, I just looked at the list of movies that Miramax has released, and I really enjoyed a lot of them (Amelie, Clerks, Heavenly Creatures, etc). OK, it isn't that they're cranking out junk movies, although I really can't endorse or forgive Bridget Jones' Diary. I attribute the late release of Hero and Shaolin Soccer to laziness instead. Get on the stick, Miramax!
I'm feeling cranky today, can you tell?
Miramax isn't late, they're just busy releasing the other crap that marketing thinks middle America will like. Really good movies get the shaft with alarming regularity.
The studios ignore the mass pirates because it's sexier and easier to go after file sharers with a big marketing campaign. To combat the pirates in China, Russia, etc, they'd need actual guns and stuff, because there are real pirates out there that will kill you if you raid their CD duplication factories.
I've heard it differently.
Give a man a fish, and he owes you one fish.
Teach a man to fish, and you give up your monopoly.
That seems to fit better here.
There may be recently release software, because it's pretty recent that everyone got let go. It was in mid-September. I know for a fact that the Neuros with USB 2.0 is not being produced, though, because I was selling them the USB chip and no orders have been placed. They are looking for an investor to take the whole thing and build it on his dime, since their investing group pulled the plug on the project and went back to just making CD scratch removers under the Digital Innovations name. I think you can still buy the original Neuros, because they had quite a bit of stock on those. They might have a software guy or two for support, but hardware design is pretty much gone.
The Neuros as we know it is indeed toast. They laid off all of the engineers on the project just a couple of weeks before the new player was finished. It has USB 2.0 and a couple other improvements, but unless some benefactor comes along and buys all that IP, it will never be built.
Oddly enough, Diebold also makes ATMs. I wonder why the same accountability standards weren't used for the voting machines?
This just gets murkier the more I think about it.
Name a product on which Iomega hasn't screwed the pooch. I have a Zip100 and a DittoMAX tape drive. I was lucky and the Zip didn't develop a click of death, but that stupid DittoMAX has been crap from day one. I barely worked under NT; required a second rev of the interface card to work properly. Getting it to work under FTape was a complete pain in the butt, and really brittle. I got it working under the 2.0 kernels, but it hasn't played nice since. I should've gotten a Travan or Seagate tape drive, but I was in college and poor at the time.
Iomega can rot in Hell for all I care. Shitty hardware and ridiculous price schemes.
Preach on, brother. I hate our cellular networks with a passion I used to reserve for used car salesmen. The providers tried to lock us in by using completely different networks, now we're heavily screwed.
All of the marketers and product engineers are complete morons here in the US. Web surfing on a tiny screen is worthless; integration to existing technology should have been priority one. Now I've got so much crap on my belt, Batman would blush. Why can't I have a phone/pager/pda/remote control in one device, and why can't any of this stuff interface with my PC without some bullshit $60 cable and some weird, Windows-only software that doesn't even fucking work?
Gaah! Standards, people! They're there for a reason!
We don't have that in the US. Our cell phone providers are stuck in the eighties, and just give us basic services. Sure, they spoon feed text messaging, but we have less than half of the cool stuff available in Europe. Our phones are crap, GSM is just started to be deployed, and we still have three different types of cell networks out here (CDMA, TDMA, Sprint PCS, and now GSM). It's a real mess.
The only commercial product I've seen was a bluetooth headset, and there's like one phone available here with bluetooth. For supposedly being such a technology leader, the US really sucks in a lot of respects. Our providers play to the lowest common denominator, which is pretty damn low.
The author says the application stack was the best part, but the PHY was bad. I say exactly the opposite. The 2.4GHz phy work that was done was actually quite good for a personal area network. It's deployable anywhere in the world (2.4GHz is a worldwide ISM band) and low power. However, the application stack got so big that the processing power required killed the node cost. This was supposed to be less than $5US per node, but ended up over $10US.
Anyway, it's pretty much dead. Too big for it's britches. Let's learn from this and keep those beautiful RF front ends that came out of the bluetooth experiment.
An F-16 handles combat just fine, thanks to the measures taken by our fine engineers. A nick in a piece of stressed metal will be the first place it fails, all things being equal. If you've ever been around engines, even car engines, you'd see a lot of measures taken to avoid stress and potential failure points. I.E., special screw thread shapes to avoid a sharp trough angle, which will be a point of failure should it be over stressed. Most connecting rod bearing bolts are built this way now (that's for I.C. engines, a jet doesn't have such a thing).
For the record, I don't know that an F-16 uses nuts from a padded case in the turbine. My point was that unless the right parts are used, and kept in good shape, there will be big problems. Witness the maintenance schedule on a Blackhawk helicopter; they need to completely inspect and rebuild the main rotor blades every few hundred operational hours. Those costs add up pretty quickly.
It costs a lot to have the best prepared and most advanced military force in the world. The alternative is to let ourselves be invaded by Canada, eh?
I really take issue with the perception of military spending, and I'm not even in the military or even involved in it in any significant way. There are good reasons for the seemingly high-dollar items in a bill of materials.
For your padded nuts, when you make a fighter jet capable of Mach 1+, things are really different than assembling a set of bookcases. If those nuts get a nick in them, you create a stress point. Subject that nut to the varying loads and temperature changes that a jet does, just idling there, and that thing may crack and let go. Then your turbine engine gets a nut fragment in the blades, the engine explodes, and people die. All because some snippy little civilian bitched about padded nuts.
Guess what? A military-grade 486, which is still used in volume, costs close to $500. It is radiation hardened and hermetically sealed, because when you get way up high like we often do, alpha particles start bombarding your plane, causing Single-Event Upsets, which is a bit flip. Suddenly your nav system thinks you're in the southern hemisphere and the jet flips over. Thus, rad-hard and multiple redundant systems, just to deal with those pesky particles that get shot at us constantly from space.
The money spent on developing AA was peanuts compared to the cost of one F-16. The military has hundreds of F-16s. Lay off.
Had you bothered to research it, you'd see that the plastic is irrelevant, that it does run PocketPC, and that reference designs make the world go 'round.
The Alchemy/AMD design group is completely separate from the x86 group. The design motivations are completely different. Move away from your PC and realize that hundreds of times more embedded processors are sold every year than PC processors. AMD still ships 186 processors by the millions, while the retail boxes sit on store shelves.
The sneaky thing is that it will run WinCE as well. That just doesn't get mentioned because this is Slashdot after all.
AMD wants to make chips, not finished consumer hardware. This is a reference design for an ODM or OEM to pick up and run away with. It's basically a "Here you go, market this and build it yourself, then buy the processor and the flash memory from us. Love ya, AMD."
So, basically, if someone in Korea took the hardware design and optimized it for a small form factor, you'd get what you want. Don't be looking to AMD for it, though.