The only reason I can think of for having an open-source camera OS is so someone could port MAME to it.
Seriously, the newer cameras have decent screens and long battery lives. They have four-way controllers. Why not drop donkey kong, pac-man, or galaga on them and have something that would effectively be a mutant gameboy advance?
This would make a Nice Project for someone with Too Much Free Time.
The program guide is really great, and the interface is incredibly easy to use.
The problem seems to be TiVo spends a lot of its money on the boxes. Hardware costs for the TiVo boxes totalled $68,056,000 for the last nine months of the last fiscal year. That's a lot of hardware.
They're also selling that hardware at a loss. HW Revenues were $60,823,000, with $29,508,000 in rebates. Ouch.
There's not a lot that TiVo can do, financially.
The TiVo service only cost $25,069,000 to run for those 9 months, while TiVo pulled in $81,311,000 in revenue. That means if they stopped selling TiVo boxes, they'd make money (though it's unclear from the revenue numbers if the tech revenues include partner hardware).
That won't expand their customer base, though.
Maybe they could spin off their guide business and license it to other box manufacturers? I'm sure TV Guide would love to buy it from them. It would free the guide to provide services to all the manufacturers, though they obviously have someone doing it already (who knows?).
Maybe they could contract to get the hardware built more cheaply?
The hardware is really killing them. Sure, they can't do a Microsoft (not at less than $1/subscriber/month for licensees). But they don't have to have high-end hardware either.
What can a bunch of geeks do with a lot of fiber, a lot of money, and disruptive technology?
Google + WiMAX + VoIP = enough technology and brains to stomp any RBOC or cable company.
The only problem with this is that the WiMAX timeline is far away, and it's unclear how much the end-user antennas will go for. Will users want to install another dish?
Even if they don't go this route, that dark fiber could be a useful asset down the road. If they can price it well enough, they'll be on the "buy" side of a make-or-buy decision.
* verbosity. Those tags take up space, and for small amounts of data the tag volume is larger than the actual data. The verbosity also causes problems on smaller devices with less available memory and bandwidth.
* parsing. String parsing is expensive compared to binary parsing. It's easier to parse through a TIFF file than it is to parse through a small XML document.
The human-readable aspect is nice, but with a good editor you don't need human-readable tags. You need well-defined tags.
For well-defined DTDs why use text at all? Substitute binary for the tags, and provide a binary->text mapping. Suddenly editors will appear that automatically display text tags, but save as binary tags.
Human readability is nice, but as someone else has asked, how often do you really read XML? When I sniff packets, my sniffer decodes everything for me. I could decode the packet headers myself, but why*? That tedious stuff is what software is for.
BinaryXML as an alternate representation of XML would be welcome. It'd complicate matters for existing parsers, though.
You could also unofficially do it by sticking a textXML->binaryXML translator on the end of both of your pipe. That would take care of the small device problem, sort of.
* note: I tend to end up decoding the packet payload anyway, but that's because I'm too lazy to write a plugin to decode it for me.
Well, object all you want, but the word is a pretty good one. It's a lot better than eCasting, iCasting, or netCasting, which is what it would have been called during the Good Old Days.
From a pure cost perspective is public transit in the US really cheaper?
You're thinking "cheaper" because your fare might be only a dollar or two. You're ignoring the substantial infrastructure costs associated with building out a public transit system.
For the older systems the infracstructure maintenance costs are relatively large, but because the costs are spread out in the form of taxes the cost is less visible.
It'd be interesting to see how much a new transit system (like in Dallas or Austin) would be relative to the cost of giving each rider a new (or used) car. Project the cost out by 10 years, and the car will most likely be cheaper (just from the taxes from gas purchases).
Tim Burton is on a remake roll. It's not enough that he overwhelms the plot and story with is over the top visuals and cheezy, pretentious, and gratuitous weirdness.
Maybe in this Burton remake Willy'll get it on (subtextually, of course) with his oompa loompas on his new streaming WonkaVision(tm) internet pr0n site.
The great thing about the old movie was Wonka was totally bonkers, but in a restrained and vaguely aggressive way. With Tim Burton directing, he'll be obviously crazy, and all the children will be one dimensional cartoon characters. Plus any and every moral lesson will be applied with a mallet.
From the trailer, it looks like it's going to be "Beetlejuice in CandyLand."
Well, RSS was simple, and everything you're talking about (caching, push-based update, etc) are application-level issues. Even though that stuff is defined in HTTP 1.1, it took years for HTTP 1.1 to come out.
If the web started with HTTP 1.1, it would never have gone anywhere because it's too complicated. There are parts of 1.0 that probably aren't implemented very well.
If you want to improve things, adopt an RSS reader project and add those features.
I just read an interview with Michael Crichton about the chicken little behaviors. it was a promo for his book, State of Fear.
The article started off with an ominous warning about climate change from the 1970s about...global cooling. The article title was "Let's stop scaring ourselves."
The link below doesn't work yet.
http://archive.parade.com/2004/1205/1205_stop_sc ar ing.html
Another amusing article by him is "Aliens Cause Global Warming"
http://www.ccfassociation.org/crichton2.htm
I'm sure scientists today have learned lots of lessons from the mistakes of scientists of yesteryear. Right.
He's 58 years old, and learned how to use it in about 5 minutes.
Figuring out how to plug the usb cable in took another minute. The cable signage is bad, so you can't tell which orientation is right until you try.
Well actually, Apple wasn't blazing a trail in disk-based mp3 players either. It wasn't blazing a trail in the 4gb market, and it won't be blazing a trail in the flash market.
Well, it depends on which mass market you're talking about. The iPod is hardly a niche, given that it basically owns its category. The iPod mini is hardly a niche, given that also owns its category.
In fact, Apple owns the market. What kind of niche are you talking about?
What you probably mean is "Apple needs to drop the price down even lower to broaden the iPod market."
Value depends on what the consumer is looking for. My father-in-law values size more than capacity. He doesn't have a lot of music to begin with, so the mini was fine.
You're making the classic mistake of thinking that consumers are like you in their value judgements. They aren't. Consumers buy for all sorts of reasons, and a lot of those reasons don't appear rational to disinterested observers.
It not only dispenses only happy news articles about China, it also makes sure that you only see articles that are appropriate.
If you are found searching for inappropriate terms, you will be visited by a reeducation specialist who will diagnose your condition and recommend appropriate treatment.
This is for your own protection. Only people that are ill would be interested in things that are not good for them. Thus, by tracking people with this illness and fixing them, we are making a better China!
IBM doesn't have to buy Apple to sell Apple products.
Why would IBM do this? For one reason: customers are asking for it. Maybe IBM is seeing a lot of customers who want to migrate from Windows. IBM can't sell anything to them because IBM doesn't have a lot of other options. Desktop Linux is a joke (sorry). Nobody wants to wait for it to mature.
If IBM signs on as an Apple reseller, then suddenly there's a viable Windows desktop replacement that IBM can sell.
What does Apple get? Sales, lots more sales. IBM becomes a large business channel partner, and Apple can keep ignoring the business market (which is pretty much what it's doing now). Apple tries to make enterprise plays, but it really doesn't have the infrastructure or mentality needed to succeed in the enterprise space.
What are the problems with this scenario? There are a bunch:
* It's unclear that Apple could meet the increased demand.
Apple has problems getting enough inventory to feed its own demand. This apparently is due to IBM's poor G5 yields.
* Apple doesn't understand the needs of business computer people
There's no on-site service, no guaranteed turnaround time, no dedicated support line for businesses. IBM would take care of this.
* Apple's product designs are created with no input (as far as anyone can tell) from customers.
This is a problem. Business computers have different needs than personal computers. They don't need a monitor,and need management tool integration (ARD is nice, but it needs integration with at least Tivoli, CA, and BMC).
* Apple's product cycles are too fast
The buying cycle for business computers is months. Apple's product cycles are a bit too fast, and they'll pop a new box out before the sales cycle is done, requiring readjustment of the sales contract. It's silly, but this is a logistical problem that needs to be fixed. At a minimum, older product needs to be available for shipment/purchase if newer models are released.
* Apple hasn't successfully run a channel operation before
Well, the edu channel was OK, but got whacked recently. Their dealer channel is competing with the Apple store. And basically, Apple may not be able to run a channel very well, being a consumer company.
Don't get me wrong, the benefits to Apple would be huge. The benefits to IBM, the business world, and humanity would also be huge. But it's one thing to float an idea, and it's another to make it successful.
In America, there is a general trend in the technical community to distrust authority.
Just because someone is an intellectual/scientist/researcher doesn't mean that they aren't wrong. Just because there are lots of them saying the same thing doesn't mean they're right.
It can be argued that Europeans are much more submissive to authority figures than Americans, due to their culture/history.
In the US, it's hard to take environmentalist warnings seriously due to their somewhat erratic prediction rate (nuclear winter, the coming ice age, resource depletion, population bombs, etc) and their somewhat obvious bias against industrial activities (cars).
It's incredibly hard to test enterprise-level hardware and software, because its utility (or flaws) only show up when you try and scale it out.
I know. I used to be an SE working in enterprise environments.
There were really only three measures in the enterprise environment that mattered:
* does it work in our environment? That means interoperating well with other hardware and software platforms. It can be managed using existing tools, or with add-ons to the existing tools. It works on/with the platforms used in-house, with the restrictions our infrastructure teams have.
* does it scale? There's no point in deploying a software distribution system that only works across 2,000 hosts if you need it to work across 75,000 hosts...unless 2,000 hosts are all you need. Scalability also includes "how do we get it installed, and how do we manage it?" It's related to the above, because, well, they'll use their existing tools to push your software out.
On the hardware side, I guess this would be "does it really support as many users/connections/whatever as they say?" 20,000 connections from one box is different than 1 connection from 20,000 boxes. People test the former, but in real life it's the latter.
Show how the hardware device degrades, given the load. For example, some OSs will slow down under load, but will keep working (solaris), while some OSs will just barf and refuse to do any more work (HP-UX). Neither one is right for all environments.
* are the positives outweighed by the negatives?
Every product has plusses and minuses. If it doesn't interoperate, is its lack of interoperability made up by some feature that the staff just can't live without? Will it save money, but add maintenance to the environment? Is it too complicated? Is the vendor too small? What about support?
Note that cost isn't as much as a factor as you'd think. Aggravation, at the enterprise level, is a much bigger factor than cost. Windows isn't being replaced because of costs (although it is a factor). It's being replaced because of aggravation.
Just like DEC back in the day: the brain is dead, but the body lives on.
Dumping MIPS and hitching a ride on the Itanium was the dumbest thing SGI did. SGI is basically dead. HP did that with its PA-RISC, and the effects of that will be obvious a few years down the road.
What this poster doesn't understand is that you can survive in your niche, if you're good enough. By moving to commodity hardware and software, well, what is your competitive advantage? Nothing. How can SGI survive on service when there's nothing to service? How can SGI keep selling machines when they're exactly the same as other machines?
Answer: they can't. That's why their stock is in the toilet. They have no future, and probably will be bought out for their customer base and maintenance stream.
Sun doesn't have Wall Street?
on
Sun-isms Debunked
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
"Sun does not have the operating system market on Wall Street -- they're not even close"
Yeah, like the author really knows what he's talking about. Wall Street is Sun's to lose. Everyone likes solaris, it's just slow and the hardware is expensive. Now that Sun's moving downmarket, it's faster and the hardware is cheaper.
Last I was in the space (over a year ago) Sun was losing share in the lower middle market, but the high-end was sticking in a wait-and-see mode. Their share on WS might have collapsed dramatically, but the numbers from IDC (unit shipment) don't bear that out.
So I guess the reporter was exaggerating to make a point? Does he actually have data to back this up?
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but for cameras other than the DC265.
The only reason I can think of for having an open-source camera OS is so someone could port MAME to it.
Seriously, the newer cameras have decent screens and long battery lives. They have four-way controllers. Why not drop donkey kong, pac-man, or galaga on them and have something that would effectively be a mutant gameboy advance?
This would make a Nice Project for someone with Too Much Free Time.
Oops, never mind. /dumb, but had to be done
TiVo really has only two things going for it:
* the program guide
* the interface
The program guide is really great, and the interface is incredibly easy to use.
The problem seems to be TiVo spends a lot of its money on the boxes. Hardware costs for the TiVo boxes totalled $68,056,000 for the last nine months of the last fiscal year. That's a lot of hardware.
They're also selling that hardware at a loss. HW Revenues were $60,823,000, with $29,508,000 in rebates. Ouch.
There's not a lot that TiVo can do, financially.
The TiVo service only cost $25,069,000 to run for those 9 months, while TiVo pulled in $81,311,000 in revenue. That means if they stopped selling TiVo boxes, they'd make money (though it's unclear from the revenue numbers if the tech revenues include partner hardware).
That won't expand their customer base, though.
Maybe they could spin off their guide business and license it to other box manufacturers? I'm sure TV Guide would love to buy it from them. It would free the guide to provide services to all the manufacturers, though they obviously have someone doing it already (who knows?).
Maybe they could contract to get the hardware built more cheaply?
The hardware is really killing them. Sure, they can't do a Microsoft (not at less than $1/subscriber/month for licensees). But they don't have to have high-end hardware either.
What can a bunch of geeks do with a lot of fiber, a lot of money, and disruptive technology?
Google + WiMAX + VoIP = enough technology and brains to stomp any RBOC or cable company.
The only problem with this is that the WiMAX timeline is far away, and it's unclear how much the end-user antennas will go for. Will users want to install another dish?
Even if they don't go this route, that dark fiber could be a useful asset down the road. If they can price it well enough, they'll be on the "buy" side of a make-or-buy decision.
Maybe they'll buy akamai while they're at it.
The main problem with XML is:
* verbosity. Those tags take up space, and for small amounts of data the tag volume is larger than the actual data. The verbosity also causes problems on smaller devices with less available memory and bandwidth.
* parsing. String parsing is expensive compared to binary parsing. It's easier to parse through a TIFF file than it is to parse through a small XML document.
The human-readable aspect is nice, but with a good editor you don't need human-readable tags. You need well-defined tags.
For well-defined DTDs why use text at all? Substitute binary for the tags, and provide a binary->text mapping. Suddenly editors will appear that automatically display text tags, but save as binary tags.
Human readability is nice, but as someone else has asked, how often do you really read XML? When I sniff packets, my sniffer decodes everything for me. I could decode the packet headers myself, but why*? That tedious stuff is what software is for.
BinaryXML as an alternate representation of XML would be welcome. It'd complicate matters for existing parsers, though.
You could also unofficially do it by sticking a textXML->binaryXML translator on the end of both of your pipe. That would take care of the small device problem, sort of.
* note: I tend to end up decoding the packet payload anyway, but that's because I'm too lazy to write a plugin to decode it for me.
Well, isn't everything on Mars something we've never found before? And how much of Mars is left?
It may be a big deal to planetary people, but to the General Public it's just more banality dressed up as something exciting.
Call when something interesting happens, like they figured out how the solar cells got cleaned off somehow and are generating more power.
Well, object all you want, but the word is a pretty good one. It's a lot better than eCasting, iCasting, or netCasting, which is what it would have been called during the Good Old Days.
Broadcasting + iPods = PodCasting.
Wait, I don't get it.
From a pure cost perspective is public transit in the US really cheaper?
You're thinking "cheaper" because your fare might be only a dollar or two. You're ignoring the substantial infrastructure costs associated with building out a public transit system.
For the older systems the infracstructure maintenance costs are relatively large, but because the costs are spread out in the form of taxes the cost is less visible.
It'd be interesting to see how much a new transit system (like in Dallas or Austin) would be relative to the cost of giving each rider a new (or used) car. Project the cost out by 10 years, and the car will most likely be cheaper (just from the taxes from gas purchases).
Don't forget, it doesn't run Linux. That's -5 right there.
Oh wait...
http://www.ipodlinux.org/index.php/Main_Page
Would you rather have more greenhouse gases, or less birds?
Geez, it's a freaking remake.
Tim Burton is on a remake roll. It's not enough that he overwhelms the plot and story with is over the top visuals and cheezy, pretentious, and gratuitous weirdness.
Maybe in this Burton remake Willy'll get it on (subtextually, of course) with his oompa loompas on his new streaming WonkaVision(tm) internet pr0n site.
The great thing about the old movie was Wonka was totally bonkers, but in a restrained and vaguely aggressive way. With Tim Burton directing, he'll be obviously crazy, and all the children will be one dimensional cartoon characters. Plus any and every moral lesson will be applied with a mallet.
From the trailer, it looks like it's going to be "Beetlejuice in CandyLand."
Well, RSS was simple, and everything you're talking about (caching, push-based update, etc) are application-level issues. Even though that stuff is defined in HTTP 1.1, it took years for HTTP 1.1 to come out.
If the web started with HTTP 1.1, it would never have gone anywhere because it's too complicated. There are parts of 1.0 that probably aren't implemented very well.
If you want to improve things, adopt an RSS reader project and add those features.
I just read an interview with Michael Crichton about the chicken little behaviors. it was a promo for his book, State of Fear.
c ar ing.html
The article started off with an ominous warning about climate change from the 1970s about...global cooling. The article title was "Let's stop scaring ourselves."
The link below doesn't work yet.
http://archive.parade.com/2004/1205/1205_stop_s
Another amusing article by him is "Aliens Cause Global Warming"
http://www.ccfassociation.org/crichton2.htm
I'm sure scientists today have learned lots of lessons from the mistakes of scientists of yesteryear. Right.
He's 58 years old, and learned how to use it in about 5 minutes.
Figuring out how to plug the usb cable in took another minute. The cable signage is bad, so you can't tell which orientation is right until you try.
Well actually, Apple wasn't blazing a trail in disk-based mp3 players either. It wasn't blazing a trail in the 4gb market, and it won't be blazing a trail in the flash market.
Well, it depends on which mass market you're talking about. The iPod is hardly a niche, given that it basically owns its category. The iPod mini is hardly a niche, given that also owns its category.
In fact, Apple owns the market. What kind of niche are you talking about?
What you probably mean is "Apple needs to drop the price down even lower to broaden the iPod market."
Value depends on what the consumer is looking for. My father-in-law values size more than capacity. He doesn't have a lot of music to begin with, so the mini was fine.
You're making the classic mistake of thinking that consumers are like you in their value judgements. They aren't. Consumers buy for all sorts of reasons, and a lot of those reasons don't appear rational to disinterested observers.
It not only dispenses only happy news articles about China, it also makes sure that you only see articles that are appropriate.
If you are found searching for inappropriate terms, you will be visited by a reeducation specialist who will diagnose your condition and recommend appropriate treatment.
This is for your own protection. Only people that are ill would be interested in things that are not good for them. Thus, by tracking people with this illness and fixing them, we are making a better China!
Apple sells it, I've known people who have bought, it and it was pretty much was unavailable.
It was for xserve, and "they didn't have the parts in-stock."
Doh!
IBM doesn't have to buy Apple to sell Apple products.
Why would IBM do this? For one reason: customers are asking for it. Maybe IBM is seeing a lot of customers who want to migrate from Windows. IBM can't sell anything to them because IBM doesn't have a lot of other options. Desktop Linux is a joke (sorry). Nobody wants to wait for it to mature.
If IBM signs on as an Apple reseller, then suddenly there's a viable Windows desktop replacement that IBM can sell.
What does Apple get? Sales, lots more sales. IBM becomes a large business channel partner, and Apple can keep ignoring the business market (which is pretty much what it's doing now). Apple tries to make enterprise plays, but it really doesn't have the infrastructure or mentality needed to succeed in the enterprise space.
What are the problems with this scenario? There are a bunch:
* It's unclear that Apple could meet the increased demand.
Apple has problems getting enough inventory to feed its own demand. This apparently is due to IBM's poor G5 yields.
* Apple doesn't understand the needs of business computer people
There's no on-site service, no guaranteed turnaround time, no dedicated support line for businesses. IBM would take care of this.
* Apple's product designs are created with no input (as far as anyone can tell) from customers.
This is a problem. Business computers have different needs than personal computers. They don't need a monitor,and need management tool integration (ARD is nice, but it needs integration with at least Tivoli, CA, and BMC).
* Apple's product cycles are too fast
The buying cycle for business computers is months. Apple's product cycles are a bit too fast, and they'll pop a new box out before the sales cycle is done, requiring readjustment of the sales contract. It's silly, but this is a logistical problem that needs to be fixed. At a minimum, older product needs to be available for shipment/purchase if newer models are released.
* Apple hasn't successfully run a channel operation before
Well, the edu channel was OK, but got whacked recently. Their dealer channel is competing with the Apple store. And basically, Apple may not be able to run a channel very well, being a consumer company.
Don't get me wrong, the benefits to Apple would be huge. The benefits to IBM, the business world, and humanity would also be huge. But it's one thing to float an idea, and it's another to make it successful.
In America, there is a general trend in the technical community to distrust authority.
Just because someone is an intellectual/scientist/researcher doesn't mean that they aren't wrong. Just because there are lots of them saying the same thing doesn't mean they're right.
It can be argued that Europeans are much more submissive to authority figures than Americans, due to their culture/history.
In the US, it's hard to take environmentalist warnings seriously due to their somewhat erratic prediction rate (nuclear winter, the coming ice age, resource depletion, population bombs, etc) and their somewhat obvious bias against industrial activities (cars).
It's incredibly hard to test enterprise-level hardware and software, because its utility (or flaws) only show up when you try and scale it out.
I know. I used to be an SE working in enterprise environments.
There were really only three measures in the enterprise environment that mattered:
* does it work in our environment? That means interoperating well with other hardware and software platforms. It can be managed using existing tools, or with add-ons to the existing tools. It works on/with the platforms used in-house, with the restrictions our infrastructure teams have.
* does it scale? There's no point in deploying a software distribution system that only works across 2,000 hosts if you need it to work across 75,000 hosts...unless 2,000 hosts are all you need. Scalability also includes "how do we get it installed, and how do we manage it?" It's related to the above, because, well, they'll use their existing tools to push your software out.
On the hardware side, I guess this would be "does it really support as many users/connections/whatever as they say?" 20,000 connections from one box is different than 1 connection from 20,000 boxes. People test the former, but in real life it's the latter.
Show how the hardware device degrades, given the load. For example, some OSs will slow down under load, but will keep working (solaris), while some OSs will just barf and refuse to do any more work (HP-UX). Neither one is right for all environments.
* are the positives outweighed by the negatives?
Every product has plusses and minuses. If it doesn't interoperate, is its lack of interoperability made up by some feature that the staff just can't live without? Will it save money, but add maintenance to the environment? Is it too complicated? Is the vendor too small? What about support?
Note that cost isn't as much as a factor as you'd think. Aggravation, at the enterprise level, is a much bigger factor than cost. Windows isn't being replaced because of costs (although it is a factor). It's being replaced because of aggravation.
"Hello, this is [some corp]. How may I help you?"
"Where are you located, India?"
"No sir, we are at L5"
"When the statistics and reality disagree, trust the statistics."
If you substitute "priests," "scientists," "referee" for the word "statistics", you'll see how ridiculous those statisticians really are.
Just like DEC back in the day: the brain is dead, but the body lives on.
Dumping MIPS and hitching a ride on the Itanium was the dumbest thing SGI did. SGI is basically dead. HP did that with its PA-RISC, and the effects of that will be obvious a few years down the road.
What this poster doesn't understand is that you can survive in your niche, if you're good enough. By moving to commodity hardware and software, well, what is your competitive advantage? Nothing. How can SGI survive on service when there's nothing to service? How can SGI keep selling machines when they're exactly the same as other machines?
Answer: they can't. That's why their stock is in the toilet. They have no future, and probably will be bought out for their customer base and maintenance stream.
"Sun does not have the operating system market on Wall Street -- they're not even close"
Yeah, like the author really knows what he's talking about. Wall Street is Sun's to lose. Everyone likes solaris, it's just slow and the hardware is expensive. Now that Sun's moving downmarket, it's faster and the hardware is cheaper.
Last I was in the space (over a year ago) Sun was losing share in the lower middle market, but the high-end was sticking in a wait-and-see mode. Their share on WS might have collapsed dramatically, but the numbers from IDC (unit shipment) don't bear that out.
So I guess the reporter was exaggerating to make a point? Does he actually have data to back this up?