What TiVo really needs is competition. They have their patent on time-shifting, and sue anyone who comes out with a decent alternative. The lack of competition have kept them from having incentive to innovate. I have a Series3, and while it's better than the cable-company alternative, it's still unimpressive. The subsequent Series4/XL models still have a slow interface and STILL haven't managed to go fully HD. Since there's no competition, they overcharge for remotes, Wifi, and even the boxes themselves. I predict that DVRs will be vastly better starting in 2018 when their main patent expires but by then will there really be a need for anything other than VoD?
TiVo is also, to some extent, hamstrung by the cable industry. TWC sets the copy-protect bit on everything that's not broadcast TV. I can't download any programs aside from the few that came on the local broadcast channels. Also, the annoyance of needing an installer to put in cable cards makes it quite annoying to even go through the initial setup.
My solution to this was to use a generic looking messenger bag that had a padded computer insert, and add an inexpensive camera/lens insert for around $20-25.
That way, I can customize the bag for whatever I need to carry and save weight when needed. Let's say I'm going to a conference for work and sightseeing a few days afterwards. For the trip out, I put both inserts in the bag. When I'm at the conference, I take the camera insert out and keep the computer insert in. When I'm sightseeing, I do the reverse (camera in, computer out).
You could probably do this with a backpack instead of a messenger bag too. Plus, having a non-dedicated bag won't advertise "I have an expensive computer" or "I'm carrying an expensive camera" as much as dedicated bag would.
I have a G1G1 OLPC 1.0 that we bought in a fit of enthusiasm back when they first came out. These days, it sits untouched.
The greatest highlight on the device was the great screen. I certainly hope Pixel Qi finally starts shipping in volume at a reasonable price. The eReader mode looks great, and I'm sure they've improved in the intervening time. The tough, splashproof hardware was nice too.
Unfortunately, lowlights abounded: It was incredibly slow. It took forever to boot and applications starting took way too long to start. The keyboard was atrocious (even kids are better with a full-sized keyboard). The touchpad was wonky. The software only made sense if you were with a whole classroom full of other OLPCs (at the university I work at, we had a couple of get-togethers, and we managed to do a little bit of the "sharing" stuff with it). It was cool when it worked, but hard to get to work. Documentation wasn't great and even with a collaborative effort by 10 or so IT folks, we couldn't get things to work consistently.
Even with the enthusiasm most of us had for the idea, it was hard to get enthusiastic about developing for it as you couldn't do much out of the box and those of us with the expertise to program found it uncomfortable to work on. Yeah, you could plug in a keyboard an mouse, but still, it wasn't a great experience.
I also tried a few of the alternate faster-booting linux variants on it, and those improved the software, but the keyboard/touchpad still made it unpleasant to work on.
I know, I know. This thing is way beyond what a kid in abject poverty in a developing nation would have otherwise, but if people with expertise in computers can't get it to work and find it uncomfortable to work on, how would the expect to get developers to work on it?
Then the later issues with Classmate competition, XP, management, delivery, etc all compounded apon the initial hardware design issues....
I thought it was a great project, but not so much that I actually wanted to use the device after I got one. I tried for a long while...
If you go this route, find a download for the old IBM Java MIDP and install Opera Mini. Blazer is an awful web browser. I used a T|X for a while and now own a PalmOS Treo. Opera Mini improves things greatly.
That said, I also own an iPod Touch and it is leaps and bounds better than either Blazer or Opera Mini.
Even so, when your car is on or you're in traffic, your noise floor is going to be many decibels above what you can have at home. The vast majority of changes are going to be completely hidden by background noise.
I get exactly the same sorts of spams on GMail. I also do my own filtering of the same feed with Bogofilter which has problems with the same emails. I don't think it's just a problem with GMail's filters.
And even then, the James Webb is optimized for IR observations and doesn't completely overlap the observable spectrum available on the Hubble, which include UV. The two compliment each other.
From the James Web Space Telescope site What kind of detectors will JWST have? JWST will have two types of detectors: visible and near-infrared arrays with 2,048 x 2,048 pixels, and mid-infrared arrays with about 1,024 x 1,024 pixels
From The Advanced Camera for Surveys site: It consists of three electronic cameras and a complement of filters and dispersers that detect light from the ultraviolet to the near infrared (1200 - 10,000 angstroms).
Orlando Sentinel: Whats the status of a Hubble [Space Telescope] servicing mission on the shuttle?
Griffin: If the shuttle performs as we expect in May, we will have the data that we need to go forward now with completion of the station. And as Ive said, if all that turns out positively, we will do a Hubble mission.
From my perspective, this is possibly the best news here. Hubble actually generates science whereas the ISS seems to do less interesting things.
GPS Satellite are NOT in LEO. The GPS constellation orbits at 20,200 km. This is between the LEO sats: Iridiums (780km), the Hubble (569 km), the Space Station (351 km); but much lower than geosynchronous communications or weather satellites (35,786 km). They orbit the earth twice/day.
For a really cool visual demonstration, check out J-Track 3D over at the NASA web site. The GPS satellites are just about the only thing you find between the cloud near the earth, and the Clarke Belt.
Do a search on the Rayleigh criterion as it pertains to optical telescopes. Take, for example, the 200" (5.8 m) telescope on Mount Palomar. Under optimal conditions, it has a resolution of about 0.2 arcseconds. Put it up in LEO at, say 200 miles, and that would be an equivalent of about 1.6 inches on the ground. The HST with it's 2.4 m mirror would be about 3 inches.
Unless they're doing some fancy stuff with multiple satellites, the HST's resolution is about the limit of what you can expect with optical telescopes.
No batch delete courses - (we found this out the hard way)
Actually, this is available with the included snapshot tool (we've been experimenting with this feature locally for the past couple of months). However, it doesn't seem to work 100% correctly on our system: content is blown away from the Database, but it remains on the file system.
I've been a PalmOS user for many years, and this is the most appealing device since the Tungsten|T3, and the price is competitive. However, this is what they should have released almost two years ago!
Sony tower speakers for front and rear, and a JBL center channel
It would be much better to "voice match" the front/center speakers than to have them come from different manufacturers. If you don't, you hear weird effects in movies as, e.g. a voice or other sound moves from one speaker to the next. It's even better if you match with the rear surrounds too, but most content doesn't use the rears as much and it won't be an issue most of the time.
We hear this "Beta was better than VHS" myth parrotted over and over again. In addition to the availability of different pre-recorded materials, there were technical advantages to both formats: e.g. Beta had better picture quality but VHS had better running time.
While VHS's market superiority can largely be attributed to social factors, it wasn't a cut and dried "the worse technology won."
GMail now gives the full interface by default to Opera 8.0+ users. They used an unusual interface (XMLHTTPRequest) which most pre-8 versions didn't support. The 8.x betas (and maybe 7.61, IIRC) supported this feature, but GMail didn't recognise them. You could override the check by adding "?nocheckbrowser" to the end of the URI: http://gmail.google.com/gmail?nocheckbrowser
I reverted to using Firefox for a while, but now I'm happily back to using Opera. Been a happy, registered user since 5.0.
>For example, I've got my own wildcard domain -- anything at this domain goes to me.
I used to do this as well. If I needed to give my address out, I'd come up with a company specific one on the spot. However, I abandoned the "forward all" account when someone started spoofing the From: line of their spams with <random text>@alanhoyle.com addresses. I started getting thousands apon thousands of bounced spam messages showing up in my inbox. My choice was either to train my mail filters to catch these bounces as spams, or quit the forward-all account. I still get more than 100/day, but the load is greatly lessened.
In my experience, the vast majority of my spam comes from email addresses posted on either my web site or from WHOIS information. Only one of my company-specific addresses ever seems to have made it onto a spam list.
Until recently, I prefered my tweaked solution with Pine, bogofilter, and a modified version of IMAP Spam BeGone. With an SSH client like PuTTY, I was using the same interface I was used to wherever I went in the world.
However, I've become hooked on GMail as it's so much more convenient to deal with Spam there. Click, click click, poof! it's gone....
Sounds like you're missing good vision. I really like the UXGA 1600x1200 on my 15" Dell. It lets me have the small fonts that I prefer, but with enough resolution to render and antialias them without making them blurry and difficult to read. I also have a 15" SXGA+ 1400x1050 on Thinkpad, and find that I have to increase the font size to avoid the jaggies or making them unreadably blurry. (The thinkpad was bought by my work, so I didn't get a choice of screen resolution.)
Although it looked really bright, he was able to look directly into the beam without pain.
DANGEROUS ADVICE!
The presence of pain isn't a useful check. Eyes don't have pain receptors in the retna. Damage could have occured. This is one of the reasons you're told to never look at a non-total solar eclipse: the sliver of sunlight isn't bright enough to trigger your "look away" instinct and your pupil opens some, but the light is intense enough to burn slivers of your retna away....
Slashdot Mirror
What TiVo really needs is competition. They have their patent on time-shifting, and sue anyone who comes out with a decent alternative. The lack of competition have kept them from having incentive to innovate. I have a Series3, and while it's better than the cable-company alternative, it's still unimpressive. The subsequent Series4/XL models still have a slow interface and STILL haven't managed to go fully HD. Since there's no competition, they overcharge for remotes, Wifi, and even the boxes themselves. I predict that DVRs will be vastly better starting in 2018 when their main patent expires but by then will there really be a need for anything other than VoD?
TiVo is also, to some extent, hamstrung by the cable industry. TWC sets the copy-protect bit on everything that's not broadcast TV. I can't download any programs aside from the few that came on the local broadcast channels. Also, the annoyance of needing an installer to put in cable cards makes it quite annoying to even go through the initial setup.
Don't forget about Y-chromosomal Adam. The odds that he and Eve were contemporaries are vanishingly small.
My solution to this was to use a generic looking messenger bag that had a padded computer insert, and add an inexpensive camera/lens insert for around $20-25.
For example:
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/509016-REG/Tenba_638_251_Pro_Digital_2_0_Photo.html
That way, I can customize the bag for whatever I need to carry and save weight when needed. Let's say I'm going to a conference for work and sightseeing a few days afterwards. For the trip out, I put both inserts in the bag. When I'm at the conference, I take the camera insert out and keep the computer insert in. When I'm sightseeing, I do the reverse (camera in, computer out).
You could probably do this with a backpack instead of a messenger bag too. Plus, having a non-dedicated bag won't advertise "I have an expensive computer" or "I'm carrying an expensive camera" as much as dedicated bag would.
I have a G1G1 OLPC 1.0 that we bought in a fit of enthusiasm back when they first came out. These days, it sits untouched.
The greatest highlight on the device was the great screen. I certainly hope Pixel Qi finally starts shipping in volume at a reasonable price. The eReader mode looks great, and I'm sure they've improved in the intervening time. The tough, splashproof hardware was nice too.
Unfortunately, lowlights abounded: It was incredibly slow. It took forever to boot and applications starting took way too long to start. The keyboard was atrocious (even kids are better with a full-sized keyboard). The touchpad was wonky. The software only made sense if you were with a whole classroom full of other OLPCs (at the university I work at, we had a couple of get-togethers, and we managed to do a little bit of the "sharing" stuff with it). It was cool when it worked, but hard to get to work. Documentation wasn't great and even with a collaborative effort by 10 or so IT folks, we couldn't get things to work consistently.
Even with the enthusiasm most of us had for the idea, it was hard to get enthusiastic about developing for it as you couldn't do much out of the box and those of us with the expertise to program found it uncomfortable to work on. Yeah, you could plug in a keyboard an mouse, but still, it wasn't a great experience.
I also tried a few of the alternate faster-booting linux variants on it, and those improved the software, but the keyboard/touchpad still made it unpleasant to work on.
I know, I know. This thing is way beyond what a kid in abject poverty in a developing nation would have otherwise, but if people with expertise in computers can't get it to work and find it uncomfortable to work on, how would the expect to get developers to work on it?
Then the later issues with Classmate competition, XP, management, delivery, etc all compounded apon the initial hardware design issues....
I thought it was a great project, but not so much that I actually wanted to use the device after I got one. I tried for a long while...
I wouldn't worry about it. The footprints will almost certainly be recreated by the Historical Stickler's Society.
If you go this route, find a download for the old IBM Java MIDP and install Opera Mini. Blazer is an awful web browser. I used a T|X for a while and now own a PalmOS Treo. Opera Mini improves things greatly.
That said, I also own an iPod Touch and it is leaps and bounds better than either Blazer or Opera Mini.
I also have OCal at my site. Did you ever get it to work?
I just want Sega to port Samba de Amigo to a newer console.
Even so, when your car is on or you're in traffic, your noise floor is going to be many decibels above what you can have at home. The vast majority of changes are going to be completely hidden by background noise.
I get exactly the same sorts of spams on GMail. I also do my own filtering of the same feed with Bogofilter which has problems with the same emails. I don't think it's just a problem with GMail's filters.
And even then, the James Webb is optimized for IR observations and doesn't completely overlap the observable spectrum available on the Hubble, which include UV. The two compliment each other.
From the James Web Space Telescope site What kind of detectors will JWST have?
JWST will have two types of detectors: visible and near-infrared arrays with 2,048 x 2,048 pixels, and mid-infrared arrays with about 1,024 x 1,024 pixels
From The Advanced Camera for Surveys site: It consists of three electronic cameras and a complement of filters and dispersers that detect light from the ultraviolet to the near infrared (1200 - 10,000 angstroms).
From my perspective, this is possibly the best news here. Hubble actually generates science whereas the ISS seems to do less interesting things.
GPS Satellite are NOT in LEO. The GPS constellation orbits at 20,200 km. This is between the LEO sats: Iridiums (780km), the Hubble (569 km), the Space Station (351 km); but much lower than geosynchronous communications or weather satellites (35,786 km). They orbit the earth twice/day.
For a really cool visual demonstration, check out J-Track 3D over at the NASA web site. The GPS satellites are just about the only thing you find between the cloud near the earth, and the Clarke Belt.
Do a search on the Rayleigh criterion as it pertains to optical telescopes. Take, for example, the 200" (5.8 m) telescope on Mount Palomar. Under optimal conditions, it has a resolution of about 0.2 arcseconds. Put it up in LEO at, say 200 miles, and that would be an equivalent of about 1.6 inches on the ground. The HST with it's 2.4 m mirror would be about 3 inches.
Unless they're doing some fancy stuff with multiple satellites, the HST's resolution is about the limit of what you can expect with optical telescopes.
Actually, this is available with the included snapshot tool (we've been experimenting with this feature locally for the past couple of months). However, it doesn't seem to work 100% correctly on our system: content is blown away from the Database, but it remains on the file system.
http://www.brighthand.com/article/Sony_Clie_TH55_
For comparison, these have basically the same specs except:
Sony TH-55 advantages:
Palm TX advantages:
I've been a PalmOS user for many years, and this is the most appealing device since the Tungsten|T3, and the price is competitive. However, this is what they should have released almost two years ago!
I have a 512 MB MMC card in my cell phone right now. It came as a deal with a Palm Zire 72.
One would suspect that Sony would make a center to match the towers that would fit in this price range.
It would be much better to "voice match" the front/center speakers than to have them come from different manufacturers. If you don't, you hear weird effects in movies as, e.g. a voice or other sound moves from one speaker to the next. It's even better if you match with the rear surrounds too, but most content doesn't use the rears as much and it won't be an issue most of the time.
Subwoofers don't have the same problems.
While VHS's market superiority can largely be attributed to social factors, it wasn't a cut and dried "the worse technology won."
GMail now gives the full interface by default to Opera 8.0+ users. They used an unusual interface (XMLHTTPRequest) which most pre-8 versions didn't support. The 8.x betas (and maybe 7.61, IIRC) supported this feature, but GMail didn't recognise them. You could override the check by adding "?nocheckbrowser" to the end of the URI: http://gmail.google.com/gmail?nocheckbrowser
I reverted to using Firefox for a while, but now I'm happily back to using Opera. Been a happy, registered user since 5.0.
I used to do this as well. If I needed to give my address out, I'd come up with a company specific one on the spot. However, I abandoned the "forward all" account when someone started spoofing the From: line of their spams with <random text>@alanhoyle.com addresses. I started getting thousands apon thousands of bounced spam messages showing up in my inbox. My choice was either to train my mail filters to catch these bounces as spams, or quit the forward-all account. I still get more than 100/day, but the load is greatly lessened.
In my experience, the vast majority of my spam comes from email addresses posted on either my web site or from WHOIS information. Only one of my company-specific addresses ever seems to have made it onto a spam list.
Until recently, I prefered my tweaked solution with Pine, bogofilter, and a modified version of IMAP Spam BeGone. With an SSH client like PuTTY, I was using the same interface I was used to wherever I went in the world.
However, I've become hooked on GMail as it's so much more convenient to deal with Spam there. Click, click click, poof! it's gone....
Sounds like you're missing good vision. I really like the UXGA 1600x1200 on my 15" Dell. It lets me have the small fonts that I prefer, but with enough resolution to render and antialias them without making them blurry and difficult to read. I also have a 15" SXGA+ 1400x1050 on Thinkpad, and find that I have to increase the font size to avoid the jaggies or making them unreadably blurry. (The thinkpad was bought by my work, so I didn't get a choice of screen resolution.)
DANGEROUS ADVICE!
The presence of pain isn't a useful check. Eyes don't have pain receptors in the retna. Damage could have occured. This is one of the reasons you're told to never look at a non-total solar eclipse: the sliver of sunlight isn't bright enough to trigger your "look away" instinct and your pupil opens some, but the light is intense enough to burn slivers of your retna away....
There are several Bluetooth GPS devices available....