I don't see how a Linux wristwatch could possibly have any real-world uses. It's WAY too small to type with any accuracy, not to mention it's strapped to one of your hands, forcing you to use only one for input. The screen is too small to place a large amount of text on, and I would assume that video would be out of the question. Perhaps, a cheap portable MP3 player, but Casio has had a wristwatch MP3 player for over a year.
No, the only thing this would be good for is bragging rights, and showing off to friends. I'm a big fan of PDA's and such, but this is just TOO small to be useful.
That's a very ignorant thing to say. Sure, assembly doesn't scale across architectures and isn't portable to the web, but even in this day of multi-platform, web based programming, there are some tasks that assembler excells at where other languages fall behind.
I'm an experienced programmer, who writes mainly Visual Basic and Java, but I use assembler occasionally for operations where speed and efficency are crucial.
For instance, if you're writing software to encode DivX;), you will most likely want to drop all the object oriented crap for assembler. Even if it only saves two or three processor cycles for each cycle through the loop, you're going to notice that difference signifigantly for repetitive, processor intensive tasks such as this.
How can they break even if they reported an "adjusted net loss of $600,000"?
Regardless, this is a huge financial step for RedHat. If they can keep up this forward momentum, it's only a matter of time before they can turn a profit.
Humans have evolved into what we are over hundreds of millennia, and artificially tampering evolution could have potentially catastrophic consequences.
I know it's a worst case scenerio, but imagine a future where normal, unmodified humans are considered to be an inferior waste product of the technological revolution. Imagine a world where the richest members of society are genetically modified with superior DNA and circuitry, while those of us who choose to keep our existing god-given bodies are reviled and treated as second class citizens. Adolph Hitler experimented with similar body modifications in his quest for racial purity and superiority, and we all know the results of that little endeavor.
I think that technology is wonderful for the advancement of humanity, but it needs to be kept seperate from biology. We need to keep our bodies the way God and nature intended them to be, and cease this senseless quest for an Arian race. If we do not, the consequences could be catastrophic.
You can laugh, but I know a lot of people that actually make money from that sort of thing. While I personally hate ad banners, and will stop at nothing to prevent them, my mother-in-law's daughter told me about a service that does pay users to view banner ads.
Sites like AllAdvantage (no referral ID in link) as well as a few others, place targeted ad banners on the top of your screen while you're connected to the internet, and pay users per hour that they have the program running. Most of these companies only pay $0.40 - $0.50/hr for the service, but for college students and others who might not have that much money, an extra $20-$50 bucks a month can be quite helpful. You can buy a lot of ramen noodles with that.
That may be true, but the opposite is also the case. How many traditional retailers have to deal with renting warehouse and office space, pickers/packers/shippers to fulfill orders, servers, programmers, fraud prevention staff or bandwidth. Shoplifting, while not in the traditional sense, still occurs on-line. Often e-tailers are forced to eat the cost of transactions that occured as a result of hackers/fraudlent credit card purchases, and bugs in code that allow people to adjust prices at will (there was a story on/. about this recently). What about the costs of search engine result placement and banner advertising as well.
I would argue that e-tailers face similar operational costs as their brick-and-mortar counterparts.
I believe it is going to be calculated based upon the customer's location.
This brings up several other questions, though. What if the customer's billing and shipping locations are different? Would the shipping address or billing address be the taxable location?
How would the taxes collected be distributed to each locality. Would the taxes be payable to the federal government, who would in turn distribute monies to the appropriate localities, or would the web merchant be responsible for mailing out tax revenue to hundreds of different local governments?
How would this system be integrated into existing e-commerce solutions? How much time and money would it cost to upgrade current order processing software to automatically charge and allocate local sales tax for each order?
How would the government propose to enforce that sales tax is actually being collected and paid out? What measures are in place to ensure that vendors abide by these regulations?
How would orders placed on international websites for delivery in the US be affected?
The idea is feasible, but it seems like there are quite a few questions that need be answered prior to implementation.
I am well aware of the fact that Wal-Mart only sells censored CD's. Disappointed, but aware. My point was that if people would take care of their children like responsible parents should, and supervise their children's purchases, there would be no need for Wal-Mart to censor art.
You're absolutely right. It's not the government's job to protect our kids, it's the parents'. When I was in high school, I used to work at McDonald's (don't laugh, ya gotta make end's meet) and I remember being constantly apalled at the amount of parents who thought the playland in the back was some kind of automated babysitting service. I vowed to myself that I would never treat my own children with such an apathetic attitude.
Today's parent's need to wake up and accept the fact that they have MADE A CONSCIOUS CHOICE to have children, and therefore must accept the responsibility that comes with parenting. I'm sick of MY rights being violated to protect some illiterate yokel's kids. I should be the one who decides if my child should purchase an uncensored CD at Wal-Mart, not the government or some corporate drone.
That's why, as a parent, I've taken matters into my own hands in rearing my children. I'd much rather make conscious, informed decisions regarding the upbringing of my children, than have the government decide what is and is not appropriate for them. I home school my children, in order to remove them from the iminent threats of public schools, and to allow them to learn in a sheltered, nurturing environment. Not only do they learn english, math, and the sciences, but I can instill in them the words of the Holy Bible, and the Christian faith as well. Some day, my kids will grow up to be adults and experience the harsh realities of the real world, but until then, I am going to be the one who decides what is or is not appropriate. I can only wish other parents would take the same steps as myself.
I'm afraid I must respectfully disagree with your opinion Mr. qpt.
Software and business methods are nothing more than ideas and thoughts transcribed into digital or written form. There is nothing to patent. Do your propose that patents be issued on the paper or digital media that the ideas are stored upon? You see, that's precisely the problem. You're talking about an intangible object that spurred as a result of someone's synapses firing in a certain sequence to produce a thought. By your argument, one could propose that anyone else whose synapses fired in that same order, and thus, independantly achieved the same idea, is breaking the law. This is absolutely ludicrous.
Using your proposed method, I think I'm going to patent the process of transcribing a sequence of 1's and 0's to a digital medium for the purposes of data archival and processing. I will then proceed to sue every software and hardware manufacturer in the world for violation of my patent.
My point being, where is the line to be drawn? How can an intangible resource such as a thought or business model be "owned" by a single entity or group. This would exclude any other individual or business from "thinking" the same way. The mere idea is absurd. I think the Linux business model and the GPL is the future of software and intellectual property as we know it. Everything will eventually be make made freely available for non-commercial use, and companies will become profitable by providing support and services, not the software itself.
While it may be a good idea to render individual locks of hair for a close-up sequence, you can't possibly expect to do this for 1000 people. Are you actually trying to tell me that if you're standing among a crowd of 1000 people, you're going to be able to distinguish among individual strands of hair for all 1000 people?
My point being that human perception, and not raw processing horsepower, is quickly becoming the limiting factor in video graphics presentations. Another example would be a tree. It makes sense to render individual brances and leaves on a tree, but that would be pointless if you're rendering a whole forest because the human eye can only distinguish the difference in the nearest few trees.
We're rapidly approaching the point where additional processing power is going to be wasted in consumer devices. Flashy polygons and real-time CG effects are nice, but pretty soon, the technology is going to reach a limit. The limit won't be how fast we can clock a processor, but a point where our senses cannot tell the difference between really fast, and really, really fast.
Modern GPU's can do photo-realistic rendering at over 30 fps, and anything more than that is going to be completely wasted. Most consumers aren't going to be serving enterprise class DB's or cracking crypto, and today's generation of GPU's is all we'll ever need for video gaming. I'd like to see more R&D effort focused on improving playability of games, rather than fancy, yet unnecessary hardware.
Does anyone else find it ironic that California requires a certain number of new cars to be powered by electricity, and yet they can't provide enough electricity to people's homes and businesses?
Google is not a portal. It's a search engine. It has one purpose: To search. Yahoo never was intended to be a search engine. It's a web directory. Yahoo, along with several other portals are designed to provide most information the average web surfer would want on a single site.
While Google may be better for most geeks who are looking for a specialised search engine, Joe AOL will probably be happy with Yahoo and the likes. If most users are looking for tidbits of news, stock quotes, and the ability to play 'checkers' with other Joe AOLers, Yahoo will be all they need. That's precisely why Yahoo will continue to thrive. The 'average user' spends a lot of time Yahoo's features, and in turn, Yahoo gets a lot of banner impressions from each user.
A lot of the difference depends upon the equipment on which you're playing the music. If you're listening through regular $10 PC speakers, it probably won't make that much of a difference either way, but on a nice high end receiver with some decent speakers connected, the difference is *quite obvious*, and severely hinders my ability to listen to the song.
Here's an example: Take a CD you own, convert it to MP3, and burn it as an audio CD. Put both discs in your CD player and turn on Dolby Pro Logic surround. The difference is astounding.
From the article: "The new format uses CD-like discs about the size of a quarter that hold up to five hours of CD-quality music plus extras, up to 500 megabytes of data."
How exactly is the music going to be CD quality if you can store 5 hours on 500 megs. What type of compression is being used on the discs. I can't stand MP3's simply because of their lossy compression and will not support any other format that uses similar compression.
Doesn't matter anyway, because I'd end up losing the discs between the cushions on my couch. I think I'll stick with CD's until DVD-audio becomes a reality.
Sorry, one more thought. I just read the CNN article, and the screen on that thing looks pretty big. If I recall, the battery life on the Sega Game Gear was abyssmal. Almost to the point of making the Game Gear not worth playing without access to AC power. Something along the lines of 2-3 hours on 6 AA batteries. Does anyone know what has Nintendo done to improve upon battery life? What kind of batterys does the GB Advance use?
Due to the graphical limitations of the hardware, the only way it'll survive is by the strength of it's games. Hopefully, designers will once again be forced to design for playability instead of just trying to cram the flashiest graphics possible into a cart. This may be just what we need to bring back a revival of old-school quality games and get rid of those crappy first-person-shooters.
I just hope Nintendo realizes that a large portion of gamers today are adults, and leaves the Pokemon crap off of this system.
I found the story to be a bit pessimistic about the future of PC's and electronics in general. In fact, I believe quite the opposite will hold true. Instead of seeing PC's being broken into several different devices based upon function, I forsee a future where the PC is combined with several other devices to form an entire home entertainment hub.
Look at the evidence that already exists. 10 years ago, people were using PC's for text editing, programming and a few simple games. Now, just look at what MP3 and DVD have done to the PC world. Not only can I download and store hundreds of hours of high quality music on my machine, but I can watch full-length movies right on my desktop. As HDTV is further developed, and bandwidth going into the homes increases in the future, I think we'll begin to see the convergance of even more audio and video into the PC market.
My machine at home has an S-video output connected to my 36 inch TV, a Soundblaster Live, with a SP/DIF output going to my receiver, and a wireless keyboard/mouse combo. Anything I need to do on the PC, I can do sitting on the couch.
Now that one member of congress has taken a risk and stood up against the DMCA, we need to pledge our support and rally behind Rep. Boucher in order to encourage others to follow his lead. People here have good intentions, but posting your opinion on Slashdot will not make a difference, we need to contact our representatives directly and let them know that we are behind them completely. I urge everyone who reads this to send Mr. Boucher a congratulatory note to him here.
As a Virginia resident, I'm happy to see our elected officials are doing their job and working for the people instead of pandering to corporate pressure. In addition to his stance against the DMCA, Rep. Boucher has also pledged himself to protecting all rights of Americans, and is an active supporter of the NRA and prayer in school. This man will certainly be getting my vote next election!
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No, the only thing this would be good for is bragging rights, and showing off to friends. I'm a big fan of PDA's and such, but this is just TOO small to be useful.
I'm an experienced programmer, who writes mainly Visual Basic and Java, but I use assembler occasionally for operations where speed and efficency are crucial.
For instance, if you're writing software to encode DivX;), you will most likely want to drop all the object oriented crap for assembler. Even if it only saves two or three processor cycles for each cycle through the loop, you're going to notice that difference signifigantly for repetitive, processor intensive tasks such as this.
Assembler is STILL useful and necessary.
Regardless, this is a huge financial step for RedHat. If they can keep up this forward momentum, it's only a matter of time before they can turn a profit.
Please explain to me how a person can "wake up dead".
Humans have evolved into what we are over hundreds of millennia, and artificially tampering evolution could have potentially catastrophic consequences.
I know it's a worst case scenerio, but imagine a future where normal, unmodified humans are considered to be an inferior waste product of the technological revolution. Imagine a world where the richest members of society are genetically modified with superior DNA and circuitry, while those of us who choose to keep our existing god-given bodies are reviled and treated as second class citizens. Adolph Hitler experimented with similar body modifications in his quest for racial purity and superiority, and we all know the results of that little endeavor.
I think that technology is wonderful for the advancement of humanity, but it needs to be kept seperate from biology. We need to keep our bodies the way God and nature intended them to be, and cease this senseless quest for an Arian race. If we do not, the consequences could be catastrophic.
And you would buy a computer from the shopping channel because?...
Sites like AllAdvantage (no referral ID in link) as well as a few others, place targeted ad banners on the top of your screen while you're connected to the internet, and pay users per hour that they have the program running. Most of these companies only pay $0.40 - $0.50/hr for the service, but for college students and others who might not have that much money, an extra $20-$50 bucks a month can be quite helpful. You can buy a lot of ramen noodles with that.
So if I download a Divx:-0 movie and burn it to a CD, it'll play on my DIVX player without paying for it. That's cool. Where can I find some movies.
I would argue that e-tailers face similar operational costs as their brick-and-mortar counterparts.
This brings up several other questions, though. What if the customer's billing and shipping locations are different? Would the shipping address or billing address be the taxable location?
How would the taxes collected be distributed to each locality. Would the taxes be payable to the federal government, who would in turn distribute monies to the appropriate localities, or would the web merchant be responsible for mailing out tax revenue to hundreds of different local governments?
How would this system be integrated into existing e-commerce solutions? How much time and money would it cost to upgrade current order processing software to automatically charge and allocate local sales tax for each order?
How would the government propose to enforce that sales tax is actually being collected and paid out? What measures are in place to ensure that vendors abide by these regulations?
How would orders placed on international websites for delivery in the US be affected?
The idea is feasible, but it seems like there are quite a few questions that need be answered prior to implementation.
I am well aware of the fact that Wal-Mart only sells censored CD's. Disappointed, but aware. My point was that if people would take care of their children like responsible parents should, and supervise their children's purchases, there would be no need for Wal-Mart to censor art.
Today's parent's need to wake up and accept the fact that they have MADE A CONSCIOUS CHOICE to have children, and therefore must accept the responsibility that comes with parenting. I'm sick of MY rights being violated to protect some illiterate yokel's kids. I should be the one who decides if my child should purchase an uncensored CD at Wal-Mart, not the government or some corporate drone.
That's why, as a parent, I've taken matters into my own hands in rearing my children. I'd much rather make conscious, informed decisions regarding the upbringing of my children, than have the government decide what is and is not appropriate for them. I home school my children, in order to remove them from the iminent threats of public schools, and to allow them to learn in a sheltered, nurturing environment. Not only do they learn english, math, and the sciences, but I can instill in them the words of the Holy Bible, and the Christian faith as well. Some day, my kids will grow up to be adults and experience the harsh realities of the real world, but until then, I am going to be the one who decides what is or is not appropriate. I can only wish other parents would take the same steps as myself.
Software and business methods are nothing more than ideas and thoughts transcribed into digital or written form. There is nothing to patent. Do your propose that patents be issued on the paper or digital media that the ideas are stored upon? You see, that's precisely the problem. You're talking about an intangible object that spurred as a result of someone's synapses firing in a certain sequence to produce a thought. By your argument, one could propose that anyone else whose synapses fired in that same order, and thus, independantly achieved the same idea, is breaking the law. This is absolutely ludicrous.
Using your proposed method, I think I'm going to patent the process of transcribing a sequence of 1's and 0's to a digital medium for the purposes of data archival and processing. I will then proceed to sue every software and hardware manufacturer in the world for violation of my patent.
My point being, where is the line to be drawn? How can an intangible resource such as a thought or business model be "owned" by a single entity or group. This would exclude any other individual or business from "thinking" the same way. The mere idea is absurd. I think the Linux business model and the GPL is the future of software and intellectual property as we know it. Everything will eventually be make made freely available for non-commercial use, and companies will become profitable by providing support and services, not the software itself.
My point being that human perception, and not raw processing horsepower, is quickly becoming the limiting factor in video graphics presentations. Another example would be a tree. It makes sense to render individual brances and leaves on a tree, but that would be pointless if you're rendering a whole forest because the human eye can only distinguish the difference in the nearest few trees.
Modern GPU's can do photo-realistic rendering at over 30 fps, and anything more than that is going to be completely wasted. Most consumers aren't going to be serving enterprise class DB's or cracking crypto, and today's generation of GPU's is all we'll ever need for video gaming. I'd like to see more R&D effort focused on improving playability of games, rather than fancy, yet unnecessary hardware.
Does anyone else find it ironic that California requires a certain number of new cars to be powered by electricity, and yet they can't provide enough electricity to people's homes and businesses?
While Google may be better for most geeks who are looking for a specialised search engine, Joe AOL will probably be happy with Yahoo and the likes. If most users are looking for tidbits of news, stock quotes, and the ability to play 'checkers' with other Joe AOLers, Yahoo will be all they need. That's precisely why Yahoo will continue to thrive. The 'average user' spends a lot of time Yahoo's features, and in turn, Yahoo gets a lot of banner impressions from each user.
Next weekend you should work on helping me remember where I parked.
Here's an example: Take a CD you own, convert it to MP3, and burn it as an audio CD. Put both discs in your CD player and turn on Dolby Pro Logic surround. The difference is astounding.
How exactly is the music going to be CD quality if you can store 5 hours on 500 megs. What type of compression is being used on the discs. I can't stand MP3's simply because of their lossy compression and will not support any other format that uses similar compression.
Doesn't matter anyway, because I'd end up losing the discs between the cushions on my couch. I think I'll stick with CD's until DVD-audio becomes a reality.
Sorry, one more thought. I just read the CNN article, and the screen on that thing looks pretty big. If I recall, the battery life on the Sega Game Gear was abyssmal. Almost to the point of making the Game Gear not worth playing without access to AC power. Something along the lines of 2-3 hours on 6 AA batteries. Does anyone know what has Nintendo done to improve upon battery life? What kind of batterys does the GB Advance use?
I just hope Nintendo realizes that a large portion of gamers today are adults, and leaves the Pokemon crap off of this system.
Look at the evidence that already exists. 10 years ago, people were using PC's for text editing, programming and a few simple games. Now, just look at what MP3 and DVD have done to the PC world. Not only can I download and store hundreds of hours of high quality music on my machine, but I can watch full-length movies right on my desktop. As HDTV is further developed, and bandwidth going into the homes increases in the future, I think we'll begin to see the convergance of even more audio and video into the PC market.
My machine at home has an S-video output connected to my 36 inch TV, a Soundblaster Live, with a SP/DIF output going to my receiver, and a wireless keyboard/mouse combo. Anything I need to do on the PC, I can do sitting on the couch.
As a Virginia resident, I'm happy to see our elected officials are doing their job and working for the people instead of pandering to corporate pressure. In addition to his stance against the DMCA, Rep. Boucher has also pledged himself to protecting all rights of Americans, and is an active supporter of the NRA and prayer in school. This man will certainly be getting my vote next election!
That sounds like you're selling cars.