You might be right if these boys were specialist IT analysts, but they aren't they are financial analysts making a series of pretty big assumptions that don't match reality.
This is perhaps partly true, however I skimmed the PDF and one bit that did stick out which I thought was pretty insightful was this:
The die, at 235 square millimeters initially, is large, and Sony plans to manufacture it on a leading-edge 90nm process. Add to that the fact that the die is mostly logic, not memory arrays that can easily be repaired, and you've got a part that looks like it will be difficult and expensive to manufacture.
From a silicon prespective the die has what 7 processing units on it? If IBM had put say 8 units on the die, disabling one if it had a defect then they might be able to mitigate the yield impact (much like memory manufacturers), however I don't think they do that. So in that regard I think the analyst is right, with 235sqmm of dense 90nm logic I think IBM will have a headache getting the yield under control (and they will undoubtedly pass those costs on to Sony).
Those are 10 reasons to buy vista IF you are currently running XP.
Even those are 10 mediocre reasons. How about some actually USEFUL reasons for once. I can think of a simple one right off the top of my head:
How about separating the OS from the applications? so everytime the OS has a meltdown from spyware, bad DLL, disk corruption or whatever you don't have to reinstall every freaking application from scratch to rebuild the machine. I mean Unix/Linux/BSD has had a/usr/local tree for what, decades?
But no, eye candy and parental controls, yeah thats what people really need...
Why not ask why camera manufacturers force you to use JPEG. Or TIFF. Why not use PNG? While you're at it, why not complain that most pro cameras use Compact Flash rather than SD cards. Or that the lens mounts aren't interchangeable. The camera is yours, right? Why should you be forced to use an adapter to put a Nikon lens on a Canon body? They should be forced to use what YOU want! Nikon encodes the white balance in their camera RAW format. That's their option. Don't like it? Don't use the format or don't use Nikon.
I would agree with your solution to the "problem", however I think the original posters point is that its a completely unnecessary and artificial problem to begin with.
Most of the things you mention have to do with legacy. They used JPEG because back whenever digital cameras started to appear most all imaging programs supported JPEG, but they did not necessarily support PNG. CF versus SD, no idea there (however I personally like CF because the contacts are not exposed). Nikon ships nikon mounts on their cameras because they have a had their own mount and lots of lenses for a long time now.
The encrypted white balance on the other hand has no legacy behind it (there aren't old imaging programs which only work with encrypted white balance info for instance), and apparently it exists ONLY to control which future programs will work fully with raw data. It takes intent and work to encrypt the white balance info, its not as if it comes out of a sensor that way, so they went out of their way to create this "problem".
One of the topics listed in the book is the raw file format. Why do camera manufacturer encrypt our pictures? Our pictures belong to us. We are the copyright holders of our pictures, not the manufacturers of cameras. There is probably no acceptable answer.
I followed your link, and I think your right, there is no acceptable answer to that from a user standpoint. Looking at the information from your link this sounds like a rather lame attempt at locking the camera to the raw processing software.
Its odd in that the image itself isn't encrypted but the white balance information is. It obviously takes additional work to encrypt the white balance, so why not the whole image? Probably its Nikon walking the line between irritating the software developer enough to drop support entirely, yet still keeping them from accessing the full potential of the raw file (locking out the open-source community - good job there Nikon...)
Another case of the corporate mentality to maintain complete control over what you can do with the stuff you buy.
SGI's heyday was when most people thought of them as The Purple Computer Company; the Jurassic Park Era. And yes, their lack of a brand identity and strategy was part of their undoing.
I don't think they had a lack of brand identity, I think thats all they had. I've only minimal exposure to SGI workstations, but I view them much like Sun or HPUX machines. Very expensive and very proprietary (and at one time very high performance). Perhaps a distorted view now - I haven't followed their Linux offerings.
In any event, proprietary and expensive may have worked back when that was all the choice you had, but they are gone now. Vendor lock-in? Who the hell wants that these days. If a company can't capitalize on the commodity software and hardware around they are going to disappear. I think this will eventually catch up to Sun also, but who knows when...
Re:Sounds good, but maybe not?
on
Wireless USB hubs
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I know it by simple logic. It's a high bandwidth, short hop device, point to point technology, which alone ensures low latency.
This is not true, I know having designed ICs in this area that the other posters are correct in that high bandwidth is not equal to low latency. In fact this is a real design challenge in things such as wireless controllers for game consoles, where latency is everything. You are correct that many USB devices can tolerate latency (printers and such), but not keyboards and mice.
Personally one thing I always liked about USB - and I think this is its best feature - is the 5V supply line. Designing USB peripherals is nice when you can just tap power off of it. Unfortunately wireless breaks that, so all those devices will need either wall plugs or batteries...
The nice thing here is that as a service provider, I don't need to pay BellSouth anything because I am not under contract with them. If they lock me out, then I can probably sue for extortion or, more likely, anti-competitive practices. BellSouth's cusomters can also sue when service providers stop working because BellSouth is advertising that they sell an "Internet Connection". Not part of the Internet, but the entire thing. Cutting some sites/services off is about as close to "false advertising" as I've seen a large corporation do in some time.
These are all great points. In that context it almost sounds like a protection racket - "cough up some money or your packets might not get there". I wonder if they will try to extort the government too, which could be amusing - "hey NSA we heard you have a website... uhh what, you wiretapped our CEO? uhh nothing... umm, hey look over there" ~runs away~
Unless, there's major resolution in that small space (say 1280x1024), that's unworkable today. I fired up an old P233 notebook, had a 14 inch screen, but had the same problem - the resolution was too small 800x600.
I don't know, at one point the world seemed to operate fine at 640x480 for quite a while. I seem to remember a number of games running at 320x200 (wasn't the original doom running at 320x200?) Sure many apps these days are geared toward large screens, but not everything requires it.
As far as the poor of the world not wanting one, I doubt that also. Its like saying poor people don't want bicycles (you have to crank those too), they want cars. Well of course they want cars, but when your in the position of having neither a car nor a bicycle, you'll take a bicycle if its offered.
Personally I wouldn't mind a crank if I could read a ebook on a 14hr trans-pacific flight (even on my PDA, the battery is gone in 4hrs).
don't you think Apple (one of the, if not *the* biggest Unix distro)
Heh, ok I almost laughed at that. If you seriously think Apple is the biggest Unix distro, you have a seriously myopic view of the Unix world. Of course perhaps you were referring to *BSD (encompassing all derivatives) instead of "Apple".
Sure it might be theoretically possible in some lab setting, but the simple fact of the matter is that the Unix distribution I use every day doesn't, and so it can't be nearly as simple to accomplish as you seem to assume it is.
I'm not a kernel programmer (I have written drivers however), but I imagine it all has to do with the modularity of the kernel and subsystems. On the HPUX and Linux boxes I use daily, and also the Sun boxes I used to use, restarting core services - NFS, automount, etc. never required a reboot. Shutdown and restart the process and your good to go. Adding applications and libraries on said systems hasn't required rebooting either. I've installed major application suites (Cadence, Mentor Graphics), X, major libraries (perl, java, etc), cups print services, and so on - none of which required a reboot. Even something as invasive as swapping the video drivers can be done without a reboot. Exit X (or init 3), adjust startup script, restart X - all done.
On the flip side however is Windows, where when I installed my HP "plug-and-play" printer, it required rebooting -halfway- through the driver installation, and then again(!) after the drivers were fully installed. As near as I can tell everytime some stupid little app or game tries to install a dll it requires a reboot. The drivers for my digital camera and scanner were the same way. Why the heck do you have to reboot the whole machine to install a usb driver is beyond me. Perhaps its the peripheral manufacturer writing bad drivers, mabye its Windows, heck if I know, but thats the way it is.
This is about fixing a long-standing user complaint. Why must there always be a comparison?
Probably because "long-standing" doesn't really do it justice. The problem has existed in all Windows versions up to and including the ones that exist today. The comparison is because Unix and variants overcame the problem what, years? decades? ago. Imagine them saying that Vista is going to patch a 20year hole in IE, most people would compare to alternatives and say wtf took them so long...
The funny thing is, mostly is fat people complaining about bad knee's. I'm willing to be the majority of them have bad knee's because they never get off their butt and that extra weight is definitely putting a strain on your knee's!
Just a small point here, but I remember talking to a body builder once who complained of bad knees (had surgery on it also). They said that in talking to their doctor, he said that as far as knees go it doesn't matter if you have a pound of fat or a pound of muscle, a pound is a pound, and your knees carry it wherever you go.
But as far as workouts, a swimming pool can provide a decent workout with no impact to the knees.
I'm suprised that these are actually seriously targeted as HTPCs. When I think of home theatre I think of movies and TV. What I saw in the article were 4 big cases with no soundproofing and lots of fans. Apparently we all need more HD and fan noise in our home theatres. These manufacturers have completely missed the point IMO, they need to make cases which look nice, are unobtrusive, and make -no- noise...
And it's equally sad when somebody continues to put forth that there is some ravenous horde of atheistic scientists who get no end of satisfaction from belittling other peoples' religious beliefs.
The fact is, this is simply not true. Of course there are some. Any field always has nuts and jerks. But I have found that most scientists quite accepting of other peoples beliefs. Maybe they don't agree, but they hardly belittle.
It would be sad if it weren't true, but in fact it is (in this I disagree with you). I've found that not only do such people belittle others religious beliefs, but they in fact DO get ravenous when anyone throws back at them the fact that their theories are just that - theories. Media and schools have taught the -theories- of evolution, the big bang, and modern physics (newtonian, relativity, quantum, and all that jazz) for so long that people have accepted them as fact, and the aforementioned people go nuts when anyone even questions it (such as how the GGP post belittled the GGGP post calling him "dumb" despite the fact that the GGGP post is in fact exactly correct - see, you didn't have to look far to find such a nutjob). If this were a previous point in time the GGP poster probably would have called the GGGP poster dumb for calling the world round, because all known scientific observations clearly indicated the world was flat.
I would hardly call galactic rotation "simple". It's really quite complex, but given our current understanding, we can make predictions on how it should behave.
But it IS a simple problem, its simply a problem of gravity. Obviously there is something wrong in the mix - enter dark matter. But what is dark matter? Its this ambiguous nebulous correction factor that is placed arbitrarily where its needed and eliminated from where it is not. I just find it very hypocritical that some people belittle others for their beliefs or for questioning the above theories-held-as-fact (some of which are clearly wrong given they don't answer the simple aforementioned problem), while at the same time postulating Nth dimensional space and mysterious physics.
There's a majority of dumb and uneducated people who need to mock science they never understood (or learned), and generally try to drag everyone back into the muck of mediocrity.
And then there is the majority of self-righteous "scientists" around who decry the foundations of their physical observations while at the same time hand waving about 10th dimensional space. Its truly laughable when you see these people putting down others for having religious faith, while at the same time trying to make people have "faith" in their string theory universe.
These would be the same people who spout everything they observe is true and fact, while being unable to explain something as simple as galactic rotation without throwing in mysterious unobservable physics. Yeah, you go on telling yourself that you know everything - you'll fit into that self-righteous majority of hypocrites perfectly.
But the last one brings to mind a stupid question: How is it that one repressive, corrupt government that jails its citizens for speaking out is a favored trade nation of the U.S., while another (to pick from a long list) is not?
Because the US govt, a large percentage of the population, and pretty much all US coporations are completely blinded by the prospect of chinese money (note, thats not actual money, just the future prospect of money). China has money, Cuba does not, there is your answer.
Its truly sad that a corporation here will trade 10 years of someone's life for some future unrealized profit potential. And for what? For passing along a note that could hardly be considered "state secrets". Yahoo's employees enjoy a basic set of human rights that the guy they helped jail was denied. Perhaps Yahoo should be exported to China where they can enjoy the full benefits of their Chinese counterparts (including censorship, lack of basic human rights - but hey at least they will have their profit).
Isn't this the logical conclusion of the Patriot Act?
On the road the US is on now, almost certainly so. In the founding days when the US had just acquired its freedoms from an oppressive monarchy I'm sure the constitution was held in a much higher regard than it is today. These days you have increasing restrictions on free speech, and corporations who have the ability to take land away from you that you own (backed by the supreme court of all insults!). I wonder how watered down the constitution will get before people take notice of their diminished rights. Eventually I imagine the logical conclusion would be that corporations (or govt) will be able to jail anyone they want for any infraction no matter how trivial (even perhaps ranting about it on slashdot).
And how would I characterize the job market in the area (S CA)? Actually, I would say that it is pretty healthy. Healthiest that I've seen since 2001. - I was at Unix users group meeting the other night and five people had job announcements. - One of our competitors has been offering 10K and 15K signing bonuses to our employees. - We can't fill two entry level positions! - A recruiter called me out of the blue two weeks ago.
I can second that. I find I can usually get an idea of the job market by the headhunter activity. Recently they have been on the prowl, some leaving messages at the office, some at the home. This is in the Texas area. It was also much like that back in the dot-com era.
Given the drastically reduced supply of computer science graduates, the always depressingly low number of US MS and PHD students in CS...
This is not just in CS, and this is something else I noticed. At least in EE, headhunters are always looking for sharp MS and PhD individuals.
Also, if there is any bubble around, it is called 'outsourcing', which has been a very hit and miss ordeal for many companies. Everyone knows that companies are reluctant to report a security breach. They're just as reluctant to report an outsourcing failure, if not more so.
I've seen this also in a couple companies - the scaling back of overseas operations. A couple years ago the outsourcing seemed like a great way to generate cheap headcount, but the results coming back from remote sites was less than stellar. Experience is everything, but those newly formed sites were composed of educated people (MS, PhD) who had very little experience. It just didn't work out, and I doubt the companies had the stamina to wait a decade for the experience to build up.
When you say "the government has been shipping money and expertise overseas at an unreal rate", I would like to invite you to share your sources.
Sources? I live this stuff first hand. I develop ICs for a living. When we shut down a design center here in the US and ship our schematics, layouts, processing equipment, lithography equipment (the high end stuff mind you, not the 20year old crap) off to China, we are indeed exporting our technical expertise along with our jobs. I see this stuff happening all around me, all the time. CEOs shut down design centers here and outsource them to save a few bucks on employment costs, ignoring the fact that they just shipped the family jewels off to their future competitor.
If your government is as dyed-in-wool as you make it out to be, then would you care to explain why it took them a week to respond to the biggest natural calamity...within your own country?
An offtopic comment, but thats the point, our government is not as "dyed-in-wool" as it should be. I think the US govt should be a bit more patriotic to its own people, and put its own people first just like every other country on the planet does.
You quote umemployment deficits, I quote trade-quotes, the double-standards of free trade (in the name of protecting local interests), and the politics of economic sanctions
I don't know why you think the US govt should not protect its own local interests, ahead of the global economy. Not only should it protect its own interests, it should be aggressive in its policies about doing so. Right now we export jobs and technical skill, while letting China manipulate its currency to insure large trade defecits. Who exactly is this benefitting? Its sacrificing the long term outlook of our country for the short term corporate gain.
And while your lamenting and crying out loud about the loss of jobs to the "skilled" workers, do you want to ever present the facts or just jump the bandwagon because someone told you outsourcing is a bad thing?
Do I need a government survey to tell me what things I see first hand are a bad thing? Why don't you stop jumping on the CNN bandwagon of CEOs spewing drivel that outsourcing is a "good" thing, because its not. Its sacrificing long term outlook for short term gain. CEOs don't outsource jobs because the result they get back is "better", they outsource it because its cheaper. They don't care what kind of worthless nonsense an overseas project team generates, as long as the bottom line looks like its done cheaper. Another example of a myopic viewpoint, making the balance sheet look good now while having no products developed to sell later.
You are happy that you can get the cheapest, use-and-throw products at your Walmart, god forbid if you have to pay two dollars extra for the bread from the local bakery, because, heck thats not your "skilled" job of course
What a meandering bunch of nonsense that comment is, it contradicts the rest of your post. If outsourcing was such a good thing it only increases the amount of cheap "use-and-throw" products.
What you need to wake up to...
...is that your comment crossed from ontopic, to offtopic, to nonsense.
Complaining about outsourcing and how it will steal our jobs isn't going to change the fact that right now the people overseas are likely doing their job cheaper, faster, and in many cases better than the 'equivalent' US worker. Instead, get off your ass, find opportunities...
Actually having worked with some of those overseas people I can tell you they are not doing the job cheaper, faster, or better. What they usually do is make the job take three times as long as it should, consistently foul up the most simple tasks, and hop jobs to a better "overseas" position in the middle of the project. But thats not the point I want to make.
While the US is collectively sitting on its "ass" as you say, the government has been shipping money and expertise overseas at an unreal rate. Consider when you run enormous trade defecits, increase the unemployment level of your "skilled" workers, and in the process ship all your technical expertise over to a country which in the near future will likely be your competitor rather than your cheap slave labor, it paints a very bad long term picture. In the end, you will end up being the 3rd world country, while your technically skilled overseas counterparts will be reaping the profits of your giveaways.
On top of that, while your sitting here in the US surrounded by hoards of unemployed workers who sat on their collective ass during the whole thing, those workers are no longer contributing to the tax base, in fact they are all on welfare - so who exactly is going to be paying for the roads your driving on, and the schools your kids go to? The small fraction of elite workers left here who still have jobs certainly aren't going to support it all.
Isn't it interesting that we are not exporting our CEO jobs overseas? After all, by your logic those overseas CEOs should be doing the job cheaper, faster, and better, right? Or do you mean only lowly semi-skilled overseas workers do things cheaper, faster, and better?
In any event, the US government needs to be more proactive in protecting its interests in this area. Companies run on the work done by their entire lower rank - the grunt jobs. And I would bet most such jobs have some amount of technical expertise, and more importantly experience. For many jobs if you gave me a choice of choosing someone with a PhD and little experience, versus someone with 20years experience I would tend to choose the experienced one rather than the PhD. But at the rate we are exporting our technical expertise we won't have anyone left here with long term experience (the ones with the most will retire, and no one will replace them).
But to be honest with you, Texas Instruments has done absolutely NOTHING to upgrade the hardware to something modern. Oh yes, they think people will just keep buying their 1995 dated technology.
HP is the same way. I've been using my HP48SX since I bought it back in 1994, and I still use it daily at work. A couple years ago I had a sudden panic as I realized that if my SX died I wouldn't have a replacement, so I went off to Frys to get a "new" HP calc. Well I ended up getting a 48GX, which apparently hasn't been upgraded in a decade or so. The calc is literally 1995 technology. (On the good side, its slow processor makes the batteries last a year or more at a time)
Back then it seemed like new powerful calculators were coming out all the time, TI vs HP. Then they both gave up, and nothing new has come out since... (Well the HP49 has come out since, but I've heard bad things of it)
I will avoid the nVidia cards like the plague. ... An equivalent ATI card *just works*. Period.
I've had the opposite experience. The worst problem I've had with an Nvidia card has been trouble configuring the DVI display settings on a Linux machine. Eventually thanks to user forums I figured out the magic settings (and they released a driver update with those settings a few days later).
On the other hand, I've been burned by ATI twice on graphics cards. In fact on one of the cards (a card supporting TV in) they never even made functional Windows drivers, much less Linux. Even called ATI tech support on that one and they put me on hold on their charge-per-minute support line - yeah great support there. Funny thing is years after the fact some 3rd party wrote a generic driver for the chipset under Linux which made it work. (So in total ATI "official" Windows drivers never worked, and generic 3rd party unofficial Linux drivers did work)
So now I don't even bother to look at ATI specs. They could make whatever uber-card they want that outperforms Nvidia ten times over, and I still won't ever touch the thing. Twice burned is enough for me.
We know of no method to make the multi-kilometer long nanotubes necessary for the space elevator. We are not even close--we need a multi-order of magnitude breakthrough to make this happen.
According to the article they can manufacture very long cables of insufficent strength, or very short sections of sufficient strength. Its only a matter of time before the two come together. I'm sure this kind of daunting task was similar to that when the idea of a trans-oceanic communication cable was first proposed. Now they have very long fiberoptic cables crossing the oceans all over (I saw a documentary on this, its not a trivial task either).
How the hell do we know that industrial prodution of mega-nanotubes will be environmentally friendly?
I doubt production of trans-oceanic fiberoptic cables is particularly green, but we do it anyway because in use they are certainly a better way of communicating than many alternatives. Instead of emailing someone across the ocean, we could always go the paper-only way, packaging all the handwritten mail and ship/flying it over, which I think is very easy to argue is a much less "green" way to do it (need trees for the paper to write on, need fuel for the transport, etc).
The elevator as argued in the above article is ground powered so it doesn't need to carry or burn its own fuel on the way to orbit. This has got to be more green than the conventional rocket way of doing it.
You can't build the space elevator from the Earth up. You have to start at geosynchronous orbit. This means that we will need conventional rockets to move the entire mass of the elevator into orbit.
Not exactly, again according to the article, they send up a "minimalist" version of the elevator first (one only sufficent to lift a very small crawler). After that crawlers start from the ground and head up, adding mass/strength to the elevator ribbon as they go.
In other words, we need a conventional green launch platform before we can build an envionmentally green elevator.
I don't think one depends on the other. I doubt if conventional launch platforms can ever be "green", as their very conventional nature requires burning a big pile of not green fuel. I would think they are more concerned with energy to weight ratios and such rather than how clean it all is.
I agree with some other threads in this topic that the launching of rockets is merely roundoff error, if that, in the amount of pollution generated via more ordinary means. Just think of how much jet fuel is burned each day, or how much coal ash is created each day.
Personally I'm astonished that trans-atlantic and trans-pacific fiberoptic cables exist, but in fact they do exist and are all over. If someone can build and make a working space elevator, I say all the more power to them.
which is that right-clicking is essentially a kludge to the simplicity of the API and UI a user is dealing with
Just like command-clicking is essentially a kludge to produce the same effect as right-clicking.
I have children who were quite young when I got my first (freebie) iMac. They preferred the hockey puck to my Intellimouse and a later two-button trackball I had.
And possibly other adults who have children sized hands preferred the hockey puck - but for most adults in the world the design was clearly function following form, as that design was all about form and nothing else.
Way to quote the marketing people for this new product to put words in the mouths of all those designers over all those years.
Uh, parent didn't "put words in the mouths of all those designers", Apple did. You can go to their website and see for yourself. And what exactly is "multi-button charm"?? Oh I know, its Apple missing the point again, since multi-button should have more to do with function than charm.
Slashdot Mirror
You might be right if these boys were specialist IT analysts, but they aren't they are financial analysts making a series of pretty big assumptions that don't match reality.
This is perhaps partly true, however I skimmed the PDF and one bit that did stick out which I thought was pretty insightful was this:
From a silicon prespective the die has what 7 processing units on it? If IBM had put say 8 units on the die, disabling one if it had a defect then they might be able to mitigate the yield impact (much like memory manufacturers), however I don't think they do that. So in that regard I think the analyst is right, with 235sqmm of dense 90nm logic I think IBM will have a headache getting the yield under control (and they will undoubtedly pass those costs on to Sony).
A tough decision, mabye a breakdown will help:
Pros:
+1 its a playstation
+1 got the cell processor
Cons:
-5 its from Sony
-10 blueray
-20 $900
Hmm, I think the cons are winning
Those are 10 reasons to buy vista IF you are currently running XP.
Even those are 10 mediocre reasons. How about some actually USEFUL reasons for once. I can think of a simple one right off the top of my head:
How about separating the OS from the applications? so everytime the OS has a meltdown from spyware, bad DLL, disk corruption or whatever you don't have to reinstall every freaking application from scratch to rebuild the machine. I mean Unix/Linux/BSD has had a /usr/local tree for what, decades?
But no, eye candy and parental controls, yeah thats what people really need...
Why not ask why camera manufacturers force you to use JPEG. Or TIFF. Why not use PNG? While you're at it, why not complain that most pro cameras use Compact Flash rather than SD cards. Or that the lens mounts aren't interchangeable. The camera is yours, right? Why should you be forced to use an adapter to put a Nikon lens on a Canon body? They should be forced to use what YOU want!
Nikon encodes the white balance in their camera RAW format. That's their option. Don't like it? Don't use the format or don't use Nikon.
I would agree with your solution to the "problem", however I think the original posters point is that its a completely unnecessary and artificial problem to begin with.
Most of the things you mention have to do with legacy. They used JPEG because back whenever digital cameras started to appear most all imaging programs supported JPEG, but they did not necessarily support PNG. CF versus SD, no idea there (however I personally like CF because the contacts are not exposed). Nikon ships nikon mounts on their cameras because they have a had their own mount and lots of lenses for a long time now.
The encrypted white balance on the other hand has no legacy behind it (there aren't old imaging programs which only work with encrypted white balance info for instance), and apparently it exists ONLY to control which future programs will work fully with raw data. It takes intent and work to encrypt the white balance info, its not as if it comes out of a sensor that way, so they went out of their way to create this "problem".
One of the topics listed in the book is the raw file format. Why do camera manufacturer encrypt our pictures? Our pictures belong to us. We are the copyright holders of our pictures, not the manufacturers of cameras. There is probably no acceptable answer.
I followed your link, and I think your right, there is no acceptable answer to that from a user standpoint. Looking at the information from your link this sounds like a rather lame attempt at locking the camera to the raw processing software.
Its odd in that the image itself isn't encrypted but the white balance information is. It obviously takes additional work to encrypt the white balance, so why not the whole image? Probably its Nikon walking the line between irritating the software developer enough to drop support entirely, yet still keeping them from accessing the full potential of the raw file (locking out the open-source community - good job there Nikon...)
Another case of the corporate mentality to maintain complete control over what you can do with the stuff you buy.
My head exploded reading your analogy. Could you mabye explain the rail/road system using a networking analogy? Thanks.
SGI's heyday was when most people thought of them as The Purple Computer Company; the Jurassic Park Era. And yes, their lack of a brand identity and strategy was part of their undoing.
I don't think they had a lack of brand identity, I think thats all they had. I've only minimal exposure to SGI workstations, but I view them much like Sun or HPUX machines. Very expensive and very proprietary (and at one time very high performance). Perhaps a distorted view now - I haven't followed their Linux offerings.
In any event, proprietary and expensive may have worked back when that was all the choice you had, but they are gone now. Vendor lock-in? Who the hell wants that these days. If a company can't capitalize on the commodity software and hardware around they are going to disappear. I think this will eventually catch up to Sun also, but who knows when...
I know it by simple logic. It's a high bandwidth, short hop device, point to point technology, which alone ensures low latency.
This is not true, I know having designed ICs in this area that the other posters are correct in that high bandwidth is not equal to low latency. In fact this is a real design challenge in things such as wireless controllers for game consoles, where latency is everything. You are correct that many USB devices can tolerate latency (printers and such), but not keyboards and mice.
Personally one thing I always liked about USB - and I think this is its best feature - is the 5V supply line. Designing USB peripherals is nice when you can just tap power off of it. Unfortunately wireless breaks that, so all those devices will need either wall plugs or batteries...
The nice thing here is that as a service provider, I don't need to pay BellSouth anything because I am not under contract with them. If they lock me out, then I can probably sue for extortion or, more likely, anti-competitive practices. BellSouth's cusomters can also sue when service providers stop working because BellSouth is advertising that they sell an "Internet Connection". Not part of the Internet, but the entire thing. Cutting some sites/services off is about as close to "false advertising" as I've seen a large corporation do in some time.
These are all great points. In that context it almost sounds like a protection racket - "cough up some money or your packets might not get there". I wonder if they will try to extort the government too, which could be amusing - "hey NSA we heard you have a website... uhh what, you wiretapped our CEO? uhh nothing... umm, hey look over there" ~runs away~
Are you F#%!@&g deaf?
We the small businesses and individuals of the EC do not want your F#%!@&g patents.
What's next? we must sow your mouth shut?
How about getting the guy fired? Aren't such people accountable to the public in some way or other?
Unless, there's major resolution in that small space (say 1280x1024), that's unworkable today. I fired up an old P233 notebook, had a 14 inch screen, but had the same problem - the resolution was too small 800x600.
I don't know, at one point the world seemed to operate fine at 640x480 for quite a while. I seem to remember a number of games running at 320x200 (wasn't the original doom running at 320x200?) Sure many apps these days are geared toward large screens, but not everything requires it.
As far as the poor of the world not wanting one, I doubt that also. Its like saying poor people don't want bicycles (you have to crank those too), they want cars. Well of course they want cars, but when your in the position of having neither a car nor a bicycle, you'll take a bicycle if its offered.
Personally I wouldn't mind a crank if I could read a ebook on a 14hr trans-pacific flight (even on my PDA, the battery is gone in 4hrs).
don't you think Apple (one of the, if not *the* biggest Unix distro)
Heh, ok I almost laughed at that. If you seriously think Apple is the biggest Unix distro, you have a seriously myopic view of the Unix world. Of course perhaps you were referring to *BSD (encompassing all derivatives) instead of "Apple".
Sure it might be theoretically possible in some lab setting, but the simple fact of the matter is that the Unix distribution I use every day doesn't, and so it can't be nearly as simple to accomplish as you seem to assume it is.
I'm not a kernel programmer (I have written drivers however), but I imagine it all has to do with the modularity of the kernel and subsystems. On the HPUX and Linux boxes I use daily, and also the Sun boxes I used to use, restarting core services - NFS, automount, etc. never required a reboot. Shutdown and restart the process and your good to go. Adding applications and libraries on said systems hasn't required rebooting either. I've installed major application suites (Cadence, Mentor Graphics), X, major libraries (perl, java, etc), cups print services, and so on - none of which required a reboot. Even something as invasive as swapping the video drivers can be done without a reboot. Exit X (or init 3), adjust startup script, restart X - all done.
On the flip side however is Windows, where when I installed my HP "plug-and-play" printer, it required rebooting -halfway- through the driver installation, and then again(!) after the drivers were fully installed. As near as I can tell everytime some stupid little app or game tries to install a dll it requires a reboot. The drivers for my digital camera and scanner were the same way. Why the heck do you have to reboot the whole machine to install a usb driver is beyond me. Perhaps its the peripheral manufacturer writing bad drivers, mabye its Windows, heck if I know, but thats the way it is.
This is about fixing a long-standing user complaint. Why must there always be a comparison?
Probably because "long-standing" doesn't really do it justice. The problem has existed in all Windows versions up to and including the ones that exist today. The comparison is because Unix and variants overcame the problem what, years? decades? ago. Imagine them saying that Vista is going to patch a 20year hole in IE, most people would compare to alternatives and say wtf took them so long...
The funny thing is, mostly is fat people complaining about bad knee's. I'm willing to be the majority of them have bad knee's because they never get off their butt and that extra weight is definitely putting a strain on your knee's!
Just a small point here, but I remember talking to a body builder once who complained of bad knees (had surgery on it also). They said that in talking to their doctor, he said that as far as knees go it doesn't matter if you have a pound of fat or a pound of muscle, a pound is a pound, and your knees carry it wherever you go.
But as far as workouts, a swimming pool can provide a decent workout with no impact to the knees.
I'm suprised that these are actually seriously targeted as HTPCs. When I think of home theatre I think of movies and TV. What I saw in the article were 4 big cases with no soundproofing and lots of fans. Apparently we all need more HD and fan noise in our home theatres. These manufacturers have completely missed the point IMO, they need to make cases which look nice, are unobtrusive, and make -no- noise...
And it's equally sad when somebody continues to put forth that there is some ravenous horde of atheistic scientists who get no end of satisfaction from belittling other peoples' religious beliefs.
The fact is, this is simply not true. Of course there are some. Any field always has nuts and jerks. But I have found that most scientists quite accepting of other peoples beliefs. Maybe they don't agree, but they hardly belittle.
It would be sad if it weren't true, but in fact it is (in this I disagree with you). I've found that not only do such people belittle others religious beliefs, but they in fact DO get ravenous when anyone throws back at them the fact that their theories are just that - theories. Media and schools have taught the -theories- of evolution, the big bang, and modern physics (newtonian, relativity, quantum, and all that jazz) for so long that people have accepted them as fact, and the aforementioned people go nuts when anyone even questions it (such as how the GGP post belittled the GGGP post calling him "dumb" despite the fact that the GGGP post is in fact exactly correct - see, you didn't have to look far to find such a nutjob). If this were a previous point in time the GGP poster probably would have called the GGGP poster dumb for calling the world round, because all known scientific observations clearly indicated the world was flat.
I would hardly call galactic rotation "simple". It's really quite complex, but given our current understanding, we can make predictions on how it should behave.
But it IS a simple problem, its simply a problem of gravity. Obviously there is something wrong in the mix - enter dark matter. But what is dark matter? Its this ambiguous nebulous correction factor that is placed arbitrarily where its needed and eliminated from where it is not. I just find it very hypocritical that some people belittle others for their beliefs or for questioning the above theories-held-as-fact (some of which are clearly wrong given they don't answer the simple aforementioned problem), while at the same time postulating Nth dimensional space and mysterious physics.
There's a majority of dumb and uneducated people who need to mock science they never understood (or learned), and generally try to drag everyone back into the muck of mediocrity.
And then there is the majority of self-righteous "scientists" around who decry the foundations of their physical observations while at the same time hand waving about 10th dimensional space. Its truly laughable when you see these people putting down others for having religious faith, while at the same time trying to make people have "faith" in their string theory universe.
These would be the same people who spout everything they observe is true and fact, while being unable to explain something as simple as galactic rotation without throwing in mysterious unobservable physics. Yeah, you go on telling yourself that you know everything - you'll fit into that self-righteous majority of hypocrites perfectly.
But the last one brings to mind a stupid question: How is it that one repressive, corrupt government that jails its citizens for speaking out is a favored trade nation of the U.S., while another (to pick from a long list) is not?
Because the US govt, a large percentage of the population, and pretty much all US coporations are completely blinded by the prospect of chinese money (note, thats not actual money, just the future prospect of money). China has money, Cuba does not, there is your answer.
Its truly sad that a corporation here will trade 10 years of someone's life for some future unrealized profit potential. And for what? For passing along a note that could hardly be considered "state secrets". Yahoo's employees enjoy a basic set of human rights that the guy they helped jail was denied. Perhaps Yahoo should be exported to China where they can enjoy the full benefits of their Chinese counterparts (including censorship, lack of basic human rights - but hey at least they will have their profit).
Isn't this the logical conclusion of the Patriot Act?
On the road the US is on now, almost certainly so. In the founding days when the US had just acquired its freedoms from an oppressive monarchy I'm sure the constitution was held in a much higher regard than it is today. These days you have increasing restrictions on free speech, and corporations who have the ability to take land away from you that you own (backed by the supreme court of all insults!). I wonder how watered down the constitution will get before people take notice of their diminished rights. Eventually I imagine the logical conclusion would be that corporations (or govt) will be able to jail anyone they want for any infraction no matter how trivial (even perhaps ranting about it on slashdot).
And how would I characterize the job market in the area (S CA)? Actually, I would say that it is pretty healthy. Healthiest that I've seen since 2001.
- I was at Unix users group meeting the other night and five people had job announcements.
- One of our competitors has been offering 10K and 15K signing bonuses to our employees.
- We can't fill two entry level positions!
- A recruiter called me out of the blue two weeks ago.
I can second that. I find I can usually get an idea of the job market by the headhunter activity. Recently they have been on the prowl, some leaving messages at the office, some at the home. This is in the Texas area. It was also much like that back in the dot-com era.
Given the drastically reduced supply of computer science graduates, the always depressingly low number of US MS and PHD students in CS...
This is not just in CS, and this is something else I noticed. At least in EE, headhunters are always looking for sharp MS and PhD individuals.
Also, if there is any bubble around, it is called 'outsourcing', which has been a very hit and miss ordeal for many companies. Everyone knows that companies are reluctant to report a security breach. They're just as reluctant to report an outsourcing failure, if not more so.
I've seen this also in a couple companies - the scaling back of overseas operations. A couple years ago the outsourcing seemed like a great way to generate cheap headcount, but the results coming back from remote sites was less than stellar. Experience is everything, but those newly formed sites were composed of educated people (MS, PhD) who had very little experience. It just didn't work out, and I doubt the companies had the stamina to wait a decade for the experience to build up.
When you say "the government has been shipping money and expertise overseas at an unreal rate", I would like to invite you to share your sources.
Sources? I live this stuff first hand. I develop ICs for a living. When we shut down a design center here in the US and ship our schematics, layouts, processing equipment, lithography equipment (the high end stuff mind you, not the 20year old crap) off to China, we are indeed exporting our technical expertise along with our jobs. I see this stuff happening all around me, all the time. CEOs shut down design centers here and outsource them to save a few bucks on employment costs, ignoring the fact that they just shipped the family jewels off to their future competitor.
If your government is as dyed-in-wool as you make it out to be, then would you care to explain why it took them a week to respond to the biggest natural calamity...within your own country?
An offtopic comment, but thats the point, our government is not as "dyed-in-wool" as it should be. I think the US govt should be a bit more patriotic to its own people, and put its own people first just like every other country on the planet does.
You quote umemployment deficits, I quote trade-quotes, the double-standards of free trade (in the name of protecting local interests), and the politics of economic sanctions
I don't know why you think the US govt should not protect its own local interests, ahead of the global economy. Not only should it protect its own interests, it should be aggressive in its policies about doing so. Right now we export jobs and technical skill, while letting China manipulate its currency to insure large trade defecits. Who exactly is this benefitting? Its sacrificing the long term outlook of our country for the short term corporate gain.
And while your lamenting and crying out loud about the loss of jobs to the "skilled" workers, do you want to ever present the facts or just jump the bandwagon because someone told you outsourcing is a bad thing?
Do I need a government survey to tell me what things I see first hand are a bad thing? Why don't you stop jumping on the CNN bandwagon of CEOs spewing drivel that outsourcing is a "good" thing, because its not. Its sacrificing long term outlook for short term gain. CEOs don't outsource jobs because the result they get back is "better", they outsource it because its cheaper. They don't care what kind of worthless nonsense an overseas project team generates, as long as the bottom line looks like its done cheaper. Another example of a myopic viewpoint, making the balance sheet look good now while having no products developed to sell later.
You are happy that you can get the cheapest, use-and-throw products at your Walmart, god forbid if you have to pay two dollars extra for the bread from the local bakery, because, heck thats not your "skilled" job of course
What a meandering bunch of nonsense that comment is, it contradicts the rest of your post. If outsourcing was such a good thing it only increases the amount of cheap "use-and-throw" products.
What you need to wake up to...
...is that your comment crossed from ontopic, to offtopic, to nonsense.
Complaining about outsourcing and how it will steal our jobs isn't going to change the fact that right now the people overseas are likely doing their job cheaper, faster, and in many cases better than the 'equivalent' US worker. Instead, get off your ass, find opportunities...
Actually having worked with some of those overseas people I can tell you they are not doing the job cheaper, faster, or better. What they usually do is make the job take three times as long as it should, consistently foul up the most simple tasks, and hop jobs to a better "overseas" position in the middle of the project. But thats not the point I want to make.
While the US is collectively sitting on its "ass" as you say, the government has been shipping money and expertise overseas at an unreal rate. Consider when you run enormous trade defecits, increase the unemployment level of your "skilled" workers, and in the process ship all your technical expertise over to a country which in the near future will likely be your competitor rather than your cheap slave labor, it paints a very bad long term picture. In the end, you will end up being the 3rd world country, while your technically skilled overseas counterparts will be reaping the profits of your giveaways.
On top of that, while your sitting here in the US surrounded by hoards of unemployed workers who sat on their collective ass during the whole thing, those workers are no longer contributing to the tax base, in fact they are all on welfare - so who exactly is going to be paying for the roads your driving on, and the schools your kids go to? The small fraction of elite workers left here who still have jobs certainly aren't going to support it all.
Isn't it interesting that we are not exporting our CEO jobs overseas? After all, by your logic those overseas CEOs should be doing the job cheaper, faster, and better, right? Or do you mean only lowly semi-skilled overseas workers do things cheaper, faster, and better?
In any event, the US government needs to be more proactive in protecting its interests in this area. Companies run on the work done by their entire lower rank - the grunt jobs. And I would bet most such jobs have some amount of technical expertise, and more importantly experience. For many jobs if you gave me a choice of choosing someone with a PhD and little experience, versus someone with 20years experience I would tend to choose the experienced one rather than the PhD. But at the rate we are exporting our technical expertise we won't have anyone left here with long term experience (the ones with the most will retire, and no one will replace them).
But to be honest with you, Texas Instruments has done absolutely NOTHING to upgrade the hardware to something modern. Oh yes, they think people will just keep buying their 1995 dated technology.
HP is the same way. I've been using my HP48SX since I bought it back in 1994, and I still use it daily at work. A couple years ago I had a sudden panic as I realized that if my SX died I wouldn't have a replacement, so I went off to Frys to get a "new" HP calc. Well I ended up getting a 48GX, which apparently hasn't been upgraded in a decade or so. The calc is literally 1995 technology. (On the good side, its slow processor makes the batteries last a year or more at a time)
Back then it seemed like new powerful calculators were coming out all the time, TI vs HP. Then they both gave up, and nothing new has come out since... (Well the HP49 has come out since, but I've heard bad things of it)
An equivalent ATI card *just works*. Period.
I've had the opposite experience. The worst problem I've had with an Nvidia card has been trouble configuring the DVI display settings on a Linux machine. Eventually thanks to user forums I figured out the magic settings (and they released a driver update with those settings a few days later).
On the other hand, I've been burned by ATI twice on graphics cards. In fact on one of the cards (a card supporting TV in) they never even made functional Windows drivers, much less Linux. Even called ATI tech support on that one and they put me on hold on their charge-per-minute support line - yeah great support there. Funny thing is years after the fact some 3rd party wrote a generic driver for the chipset under Linux which made it work. (So in total ATI "official" Windows drivers never worked, and generic 3rd party unofficial Linux drivers did work)
So now I don't even bother to look at ATI specs. They could make whatever uber-card they want that outperforms Nvidia ten times over, and I still won't ever touch the thing. Twice burned is enough for me.
Funny this topic came up, I just read an article talking about it in Spectrum - A Hoist to the Heavens.
We know of no method to make the multi-kilometer long nanotubes necessary for the space elevator. We are not even close--we need a multi-order of magnitude breakthrough to make this happen.
According to the article they can manufacture very long cables of insufficent strength, or very short sections of sufficient strength. Its only a matter of time before the two come together. I'm sure this kind of daunting task was similar to that when the idea of a trans-oceanic communication cable was first proposed. Now they have very long fiberoptic cables crossing the oceans all over (I saw a documentary on this, its not a trivial task either).
How the hell do we know that industrial prodution of mega-nanotubes will be environmentally friendly?
I doubt production of trans-oceanic fiberoptic cables is particularly green, but we do it anyway because in use they are certainly a better way of communicating than many alternatives. Instead of emailing someone across the ocean, we could always go the paper-only way, packaging all the handwritten mail and ship/flying it over, which I think is very easy to argue is a much less "green" way to do it (need trees for the paper to write on, need fuel for the transport, etc).
The elevator as argued in the above article is ground powered so it doesn't need to carry or burn its own fuel on the way to orbit. This has got to be more green than the conventional rocket way of doing it.
You can't build the space elevator from the Earth up. You have to start at geosynchronous orbit. This means that we will need conventional rockets to move the entire mass of the elevator into orbit.
Not exactly, again according to the article, they send up a "minimalist" version of the elevator first (one only sufficent to lift a very small crawler). After that crawlers start from the ground and head up, adding mass/strength to the elevator ribbon as they go.
In other words, we need a conventional green launch platform before we can build an envionmentally green elevator.
I don't think one depends on the other. I doubt if conventional launch platforms can ever be "green", as their very conventional nature requires burning a big pile of not green fuel. I would think they are more concerned with energy to weight ratios and such rather than how clean it all is.
I agree with some other threads in this topic that the launching of rockets is merely roundoff error, if that, in the amount of pollution generated via more ordinary means. Just think of how much jet fuel is burned each day, or how much coal ash is created each day.
Personally I'm astonished that trans-atlantic and trans-pacific fiberoptic cables exist, but in fact they do exist and are all over. If someone can build and make a working space elevator, I say all the more power to them.
which is that right-clicking is essentially a kludge to the simplicity of the API and UI a user is dealing with
Just like command-clicking is essentially a kludge to produce the same effect as right-clicking.
I have children who were quite young when I got my first (freebie) iMac. They preferred the hockey puck to my Intellimouse and a later two-button trackball I had.
And possibly other adults who have children sized hands preferred the hockey puck - but for most adults in the world the design was clearly function following form, as that design was all about form and nothing else.
Way to quote the marketing people for this new product to put words in the mouths of all those designers over all those years.
Uh, parent didn't "put words in the mouths of all those designers", Apple did. You can go to their website and see for yourself. And what exactly is "multi-button charm"?? Oh I know, its Apple missing the point again, since multi-button should have more to do with function than charm.