"The average cost per disc will remain around $10 in retail outlets, despite production costs of around $5 per disc"
Of course, the higher the price of media, the less likely people will make backups of their HD movies. At $10 a crack, it's not too much more to buy another copy of the movie. I'm sure that benefit to copyright holders is factored into the cost of the media to some degree. The story makes mention of an accreditation process, which the studios undoubtedly have influence over (they had a say in developing the standard itself). Thus if the media isn't sold at the price the industry wants, the manufacturer could suddenly have problems maintaining their accreditation.
The Ripley's Aquarium in Gatlinburg, TN has a really nice aquarium with a tunnel. They have a program called Sleeping with the Sharks that schools and other groups can participate in, allowing them to sleep in the tunnel underneath the sharks.
According to the credits at the end of the video, it contains excepts from the following Disney Films:
Aladdin Alice in Wonderland Atlantis: The Lost Empire Bambi Beauty and the Beast Dumbo The Emperor's New Grove Finding Nemo Hercules The Hunchback of Notre Dame The Incredibles Jungle Book Lilo and Stitch The Lion King The Little Mermaid Monsters, Inc Mulan 101 Dalmatians Peter Pan Pinocchio Sleeping Beauty Snow white and the Seven Dwarves Tarzan Tarzan II Toy Story Toy Story 2 Treasure Planet
Not to belittle the effort that went into this, but it would actually be extremely simple to locate the words you want. The Closed Captioned text of all those movies and TV shows is available, thus you just search those documents to find the words you want (like "seventeen"), and then you watch the actual source material at that timestamp to see if it will work.
So not as much effort went into this as the story poster intoned. It's not like someone manually scanned through these movies and TV shows to watch and listen for the needed words.
"When wallet PCs have become ubiquitous, we can eliminate the bottlenecks that plague airport terminals, theaters and other places where people queue up to show their identification or a ticket."
He really missed this prediction in multiple ways.
For ticketing, the internet allows people to pre-purchase tickets for just about anything, allowing a very quick scan of a printed-at-home ticket for entrance.
For identification, RFID is revolutionizing that arena, and it does not require an actual computing device ("wallet PC") on the end user.
These "wallet PCs" turned out to be PDAs, and although latecomer Microsoft currently dominates this area with their mobile OS, the real revolutionary and cutting edge advances were made by other companies, like Palm.
The queues we see today are not because of the reasons he suggests, but due to the security required to prevent mass murder.
The ironic thing with his predictions is that his company actually has the resources to make a lot of them come true. I just wonder why other companies are the ones bringing us the gee-whiz technology and software. Internet search, iPhone's slick touch-based PDA interface, input devices like the Wii's. These are all arenas Microsoft compete in directly, yet others take the lead. Why can't MS make these kinds of things happen?
This is interesting, because I've been working on finger touch based UIs of late. I've come to a few conclusions:
The touchscreen for many devices is physically designed for use with a stylus. They require quite a bit of force to register, and it is difficult to apply that much pressure with a finger because of the amount of surface area contacted. The DELL Axim touchscreens work particularly well with finger touch, while others, like the Asus a716, do not.
GUI Design is critical. Microsoft's history with mobile devices has been to make them as much like Windows 95 (and up) as possible. Windows CE 1.0 was exactly like Windows 95. Although with Pocket PC (CE 3.0) they tried to follow Palm's dominant (at that time) lead, and simplify the GUI, it is still most conducive to mouse / stylus input. The iPhone is a perfect example of how to design a GUI for finger based input. The multi-touch hardware capability is not even an issue at this point - pure software design is responsible for the bulk of the usability.
Along those lines, Microsoft prefers static dialogs that show as much information at once as possible, requiring small, desktop-like controls that demand precision stylus input. The iPhone is dynamic, scrolling in new options as the user make selections. Thus they have room for large, finger-sized buttons, because the display changes constantly. Many controls, like scrollbars, are unnecessary because entire display areas (like lists) can simply be dragged and tossed, which is the most natural behavior in the first place. The scrollbar then becomes only a visual indicator, which can even be hidden when the user is not interacting with the screen.
I've put together some code that behaves like the iPhone's drag interface, both in 2D for rectangular regions, and 1D for lists. It works really well on the Axim, again, because its touchscreen is nice and sensitive, even when retrofitted to existing Windows List controls. So it obviously is not a matter of hardware, but GUI design, that Windows Mobile isn't conducive to touch input.
So basically, this article is not stating the real problem, which is that MS is completely missing the mark with the fundamentals of their mobile GUI. But instead it offers a clumsy hack to work around an improperly designed UI. The ironic thing is Shift's Offset Cursor doesn't work at the bottom of the screen. That area is the most important for user interaction, because controls are strategically placed their so the user's fingers (hand / stylus) conceal as little extraneous area of the display as possible. That is why onscreen keyboards are always at the bottom, which makes them inaccessible to this Shift hack. The article fails to mention that little detail too.
More information can be found here. Of course, if they had some idea of when the event was going to happen, they could also schedule an alarm for the latest time they want the device to detonate. So they detonate manually if possible, and it falls back on the alarm if the signal is blocked. The article I referenced discusses many factors, such as timers, jamming, the lithium ion battery itself being part of the ignition source, and why law enforcement doesn't have access to jamming equipment (including the FCC sections prohibiting jamming).
They typically wire the detonator in place of the vibrator motor in the phone. The motor is (relatively) large, the leads are fairly easy to access, the power source is continuous DC (unlike speakers, which is an analog signal), and it almost certainly is provided the most amperage of any other component in the phone. They then set the phone on vibrate, attach the explosives, and call the phone when they want it to detonate.
Obviously the digital communication required to uniquely address the ESN of the phone, do the proper handshaking, and inform the phone that there is an incoming call is quite complex. The odds of a jamming signal being mistaken for the exact trunk-side communication required to indicate a call is infinitesimally small.
Why do so many people think cruise control conserves fuel? Certainly it would achieve better MPG than many drivers, but you can achieve substantially better MPG manually if you want. When going up hills, cruise control will expend as much fuel as necessary to maintain the set speed. Manually you can sacrifice just a few MPH on the hill and save a great deal of fuel. On the flip side, going downhill you can spend a very small extra amount of fuel and see substantial gains in MPH and thus MPG. If you allow yourself 3-4 MPH less than posted at the the top of a hill, and 5-7 more at the bottom, you will easily beat cruise control's MPG.
Owning a vehicle with a computer that reports real-time MPG is the most useful thing. Now that I have one I find myself treating the gas pedal differently - as if it is dispensing raw money and not just maintaining my speed.
Why do most schools have Debate Teams? Some people enjoy debating topics, even if they are supporting a side they personally don't agree with. I think there is quite a bit of that going on at Slashdot.
Going back a couple generations, the original GB sucked because of the display update rate. When the GB was released platformers like Super Mario Brothers and Castelvania were the rage on the NES. Ironically the display refresh rate clashed horribly with that genre, in which the entire display had to scroll. Thus the crisp, high-contrast (relatively) display turned into a total blur as soon as you moved your character. Tetris, which Nintendo wisely shipped with the GB, was the perfect game for the hardware, as nothing (not even the falling pieces) required pixel-level scrolling.
My father told me about how they played with liquid mercury at school in a science class (early 70's), and how gold jewelry turned silver when exposed to the mercury. His parents had to pay a decent amount to have a jeweler treat his class ring to remove the mercury.
At one point I did some extensive searching to find an application / driver that would allow even partial multiuser control over Windows. We have a multimedia PC with two video outputs, one of which is dedicated to projection. Due to the physical layout of our control room, there are two keyboards and mice attached to the computer. All I wanted was a utility that gave each mouse its own pointer, so that two people could interact with my two custom programs at once. I never could find anything providing even that simple functionality, and it wasn't necessary enough for me to implement it myself.
So, an Microsoft OS is most likely out of the question for what you want to do.
I have a hunch that their definition of "off the shelf equipment" varies significantly from that of the average slashdotter.
There are plenty of extremely simple radio transmission that would be even easier to hack. One that comes to mind are the (rather dated) tones broadcast locally to set off EMS / Fire pagers. Another would be the National Weather Service alerts.
True. A large printhead means more nozzles, which would significantly increase the likelihood of a clog. Just think, one or two clogged nozzles and you've got lines running the length of the paper. OTOH, the only moving part (besides something to cover the print head) is the paper feeding mechanism, which should pretty much last forever.
Basically we've got a significant paradigm shift here in printing, and HP is going to leverage it however they can to maximize profit.
Message tagging has existed for a long, long time in Thunderbird. You could already hit numeric keys to tag emails, which would change the color of the text in the list. This version formalizes tagging, by adding a toolbar button and assigning actual (user-configurable) names to various colors. I'll continue to use the numeric keys, because as usual keyboard shortcuts are so much faster than mouse-based UI. Still, it's nice to see Thunderbird's features continue to mature.
Buy a projector for $1000 and be done with it. The display controller is part of the motherboard, so you would need the entire laptop, not just the display. Thus the power consumption would quickly increase since you're powering entire laptops. Also, the lead length between the panel and the onboard controller must be very short - just a couple inches. So the bulk of the laptop will have to be mounted right with the panel. The displays will look significantly different - particularly with respect to white (some will have a yellow tint, others a blue tint), If you sit down and add up the bandwidth - full motion video at say 1024x768, times however many laptops you're driving, equals a crapload of bandwidth. We're talking gigabit requirements. If these are old salvaged laptops then you'll be lucky if they even have 100Base-T.
As I said, buy a projector for $600, plug it in and enjoy.
This could be rather ironic. There are, um, certain things I've googled for in the past where the most effective results were obtained with site:*.ru. Looks like we might be returning the favor to the Russians soon.
The same happens with government medical related data. Take the ICD9 database for example. It is distributed in a database format not conducive to programmatic access. For example, there are hundreds of codes with the description of "Other". Its description only makes sense in the context of all its parent levels, which then produces an extremely large, redundant description. Companies will simply reformat the data, take copyright and profit.
Slashdot Mirror
"The average cost per disc will remain around $10 in retail outlets, despite production costs of around $5 per disc"
Of course, the higher the price of media, the less likely people will make backups of their HD movies. At $10 a crack, it's not too much more to buy another copy of the movie. I'm sure that benefit to copyright holders is factored into the cost of the media to some degree. The story makes mention of an accreditation process, which the studios undoubtedly have influence over (they had a say in developing the standard itself). Thus if the media isn't sold at the price the industry wants, the manufacturer could suddenly have problems maintaining their accreditation.
Dan East
The Ripley's Aquarium in Gatlinburg, TN has a really nice aquarium with a tunnel. They have a program called Sleeping with the Sharks that schools and other groups can participate in, allowing them to sleep in the tunnel underneath the sharks.
Dan East
According to the credits at the end of the video, it contains excepts from the following Disney Films:
Aladdin
Alice in Wonderland
Atlantis: The Lost Empire
Bambi
Beauty and the Beast
Dumbo
The Emperor's New Grove
Finding Nemo
Hercules
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
The Incredibles
Jungle Book
Lilo and Stitch
The Lion King
The Little Mermaid
Monsters, Inc
Mulan
101 Dalmatians
Peter Pan
Pinocchio
Sleeping Beauty
Snow white and the Seven Dwarves
Tarzan
Tarzan II
Toy Story
Toy Story 2
Treasure Planet
Dan East
Not to belittle the effort that went into this, but it would actually be extremely simple to locate the words you want. The Closed Captioned text of all those movies and TV shows is available, thus you just search those documents to find the words you want (like "seventeen"), and then you watch the actual source material at that timestamp to see if it will work.
So not as much effort went into this as the story poster intoned. It's not like someone manually scanned through these movies and TV shows to watch and listen for the needed words.
Dan East
"When wallet PCs have become ubiquitous, we can eliminate the bottlenecks that plague airport terminals, theaters and other places where people queue up to show their identification or a ticket."
He really missed this prediction in multiple ways.
For ticketing, the internet allows people to pre-purchase tickets for just about anything, allowing a very quick scan of a printed-at-home ticket for entrance.
For identification, RFID is revolutionizing that arena, and it does not require an actual computing device ("wallet PC") on the end user.
These "wallet PCs" turned out to be PDAs, and although latecomer Microsoft currently dominates this area with their mobile OS, the real revolutionary and cutting edge advances were made by other companies, like Palm.
The queues we see today are not because of the reasons he suggests, but due to the security required to prevent mass murder.
The ironic thing with his predictions is that his company actually has the resources to make a lot of them come true. I just wonder why other companies are the ones bringing us the gee-whiz technology and software. Internet search, iPhone's slick touch-based PDA interface, input devices like the Wii's. These are all arenas Microsoft compete in directly, yet others take the lead. Why can't MS make these kinds of things happen?
Dan East
This is interesting, because I've been working on finger touch based UIs of late. I've come to a few conclusions:
The touchscreen for many devices is physically designed for use with a stylus. They require quite a bit of force to register, and it is difficult to apply that much pressure with a finger because of the amount of surface area contacted. The DELL Axim touchscreens work particularly well with finger touch, while others, like the Asus a716, do not.
GUI Design is critical. Microsoft's history with mobile devices has been to make them as much like Windows 95 (and up) as possible. Windows CE 1.0 was exactly like Windows 95. Although with Pocket PC (CE 3.0) they tried to follow Palm's dominant (at that time) lead, and simplify the GUI, it is still most conducive to mouse / stylus input. The iPhone is a perfect example of how to design a GUI for finger based input. The multi-touch hardware capability is not even an issue at this point - pure software design is responsible for the bulk of the usability.
Along those lines, Microsoft prefers static dialogs that show as much information at once as possible, requiring small, desktop-like controls that demand precision stylus input. The iPhone is dynamic, scrolling in new options as the user make selections. Thus they have room for large, finger-sized buttons, because the display changes constantly. Many controls, like scrollbars, are unnecessary because entire display areas (like lists) can simply be dragged and tossed, which is the most natural behavior in the first place. The scrollbar then becomes only a visual indicator, which can even be hidden when the user is not interacting with the screen.
I've put together some code that behaves like the iPhone's drag interface, both in 2D for rectangular regions, and 1D for lists. It works really well on the Axim, again, because its touchscreen is nice and sensitive, even when retrofitted to existing Windows List controls. So it obviously is not a matter of hardware, but GUI design, that Windows Mobile isn't conducive to touch input.
So basically, this article is not stating the real problem, which is that MS is completely missing the mark with the fundamentals of their mobile GUI. But instead it offers a clumsy hack to work around an improperly designed UI. The ironic thing is Shift's Offset Cursor doesn't work at the bottom of the screen. That area is the most important for user interaction, because controls are strategically placed their so the user's fingers (hand / stylus) conceal as little extraneous area of the display as possible. That is why onscreen keyboards are always at the bottom, which makes them inaccessible to this Shift hack. The article fails to mention that little detail too.
Dan East
More information can be found here. Of course, if they had some idea of when the event was going to happen, they could also schedule an alarm for the latest time they want the device to detonate. So they detonate manually if possible, and it falls back on the alarm if the signal is blocked. The article I referenced discusses many factors, such as timers, jamming, the lithium ion battery itself being part of the ignition source, and why law enforcement doesn't have access to jamming equipment (including the FCC sections prohibiting jamming).
Dan East
They typically wire the detonator in place of the vibrator motor in the phone. The motor is (relatively) large, the leads are fairly easy to access, the power source is continuous DC (unlike speakers, which is an analog signal), and it almost certainly is provided the most amperage of any other component in the phone. They then set the phone on vibrate, attach the explosives, and call the phone when they want it to detonate.
Obviously the digital communication required to uniquely address the ESN of the phone, do the proper handshaking, and inform the phone that there is an incoming call is quite complex. The odds of a jamming signal being mistaken for the exact trunk-side communication required to indicate a call is infinitesimally small.
Dan East
Why do so many people think cruise control conserves fuel? Certainly it would achieve better MPG than many drivers, but you can achieve substantially better MPG manually if you want. When going up hills, cruise control will expend as much fuel as necessary to maintain the set speed. Manually you can sacrifice just a few MPH on the hill and save a great deal of fuel. On the flip side, going downhill you can spend a very small extra amount of fuel and see substantial gains in MPH and thus MPG. If you allow yourself 3-4 MPH less than posted at the the top of a hill, and 5-7 more at the bottom, you will easily beat cruise control's MPG.
Owning a vehicle with a computer that reports real-time MPG is the most useful thing. Now that I have one I find myself treating the gas pedal differently - as if it is dispensing raw money and not just maintaining my speed.
Dan East
Why do most schools have Debate Teams? Some people enjoy debating topics, even if they are supporting a side they personally don't agree with. I think there is quite a bit of that going on at Slashdot.
Dan East
You're probably being being facetious, but I'll be a stick in the mud anyway: that's an urban legend.
Dan East
Going back a couple generations, the original GB sucked because of the display update rate. When the GB was released platformers like Super Mario Brothers and Castelvania were the rage on the NES. Ironically the display refresh rate clashed horribly with that genre, in which the entire display had to scroll. Thus the crisp, high-contrast (relatively) display turned into a total blur as soon as you moved your character. Tetris, which Nintendo wisely shipped with the GB, was the perfect game for the hardware, as nothing (not even the falling pieces) required pixel-level scrolling.
Dan East
My father told me about how they played with liquid mercury at school in a science class (early 70's), and how gold jewelry turned silver when exposed to the mercury. His parents had to pay a decent amount to have a jeweler treat his class ring to remove the mercury.
Dan East
I thought lasers made inefficient weapons because they cauterize the wounds they create.
Dan East
At one point I did some extensive searching to find an application / driver that would allow even partial multiuser control over Windows. We have a multimedia PC with two video outputs, one of which is dedicated to projection. Due to the physical layout of our control room, there are two keyboards and mice attached to the computer. All I wanted was a utility that gave each mouse its own pointer, so that two people could interact with my two custom programs at once. I never could find anything providing even that simple functionality, and it wasn't necessary enough for me to implement it myself.
So, an Microsoft OS is most likely out of the question for what you want to do.
Dan East
This was brought to light the first time around.
Dan East
I have a hunch that their definition of "off the shelf equipment" varies significantly from that of the average slashdotter.
There are plenty of extremely simple radio transmission that would be even easier to hack. One that comes to mind are the (rather dated) tones broadcast locally to set off EMS / Fire pagers. Another would be the National Weather Service alerts.
Dan East
What I'm looking forward to is a web-based version of Firefox.
Dan East
True. A large printhead means more nozzles, which would significantly increase the likelihood of a clog. Just think, one or two clogged nozzles and you've got lines running the length of the paper. OTOH, the only moving part (besides something to cover the print head) is the paper feeding mechanism, which should pretty much last forever.
Basically we've got a significant paradigm shift here in printing, and HP is going to leverage it however they can to maximize profit.
Dan East
Message tagging has existed for a long, long time in Thunderbird. You could already hit numeric keys to tag emails, which would change the color of the text in the list. This version formalizes tagging, by adding a toolbar button and assigning actual (user-configurable) names to various colors. I'll continue to use the numeric keys, because as usual keyboard shortcuts are so much faster than mouse-based UI. Still, it's nice to see Thunderbird's features continue to mature.
Dan East
A single point of failure can bring down the entire network? Not very reassuring, especially considering Blackberry is predominately a business tool.
Dan East
Buy a projector for $1000 and be done with it. The display controller is part of the motherboard, so you would need the entire laptop, not just the display. Thus the power consumption would quickly increase since you're powering entire laptops. Also, the lead length between the panel and the onboard controller must be very short - just a couple inches. So the bulk of the laptop will have to be mounted right with the panel. The displays will look significantly different - particularly with respect to white (some will have a yellow tint, others a blue tint), If you sit down and add up the bandwidth - full motion video at say 1024x768, times however many laptops you're driving, equals a crapload of bandwidth. We're talking gigabit requirements. If these are old salvaged laptops then you'll be lucky if they even have 100Base-T.
As I said, buy a projector for $600, plug it in and enjoy.
Dan East
This could be rather ironic. There are, um, certain things I've googled for in the past where the most effective results were obtained with site:*.ru. Looks like we might be returning the favor to the Russians soon.
Dan East
The same happens with government medical related data. Take the ICD9 database for example. It is distributed in a database format not conducive to programmatic access. For example, there are hundreds of codes with the description of "Other". Its description only makes sense in the context of all its parent levels, which then produces an extremely large, redundant description. Companies will simply reformat the data, take copyright and profit.
Dan East
Spanking is definitely the way to go.
Dan East