Top dollar? I'm a Select Developer ($500/yr) and we received the new MacOS X seed last week via fedex. If you consider that we get seeded with all the latest software, the $500/yr is a bargain.
My guess is that RSA did this to avoid someone else re-patenting a twist on the RSA algorithm. It's much safer in the public-domain than it is as an expired patent.
In any case, my guess is that RSA has patented *around* the original patent, covering such twists as public key encryption over e-mail, etc. and those patents will most likely extend for the next couple of years.
I've taken my Olympus 400Z down to 120' in the North Carolina waters with its polycarbonate housing. Works like a champ and got some great wreck photos and shark shots. No floods yet and the 400/450 is cheap enough that even if it does flood, I'm only 25% of the cost down to a used Nikonos.
So do the shuttles still have iron core memory? I remember that this choice was 1) made in the 1970s and 2) core memory is remarkably resistant to EM radiation, gamma rays, etc.
I also remember that the shuttle was apparently running on Z80 clones. Forget WinCE, they're still on CPM.... (which is more advanced that what runs under Win98).
Oh really? I have a Rio 500 as well and it lasts forever. What type of batteries are you using? I use both NiMH and alkaline, I get over ten hours on each.
I wish MPs on the memory card were stored in DOS format, like my digital camera. That way, it'd be much easier for me to exchange files with it and my Power Mac.
One of the main problems is that Apple isn't infinitely rich like some companies (M$), so they can't develop for all platforms. So they're strategic. The only reason there is a free Windows QT player is that unless there wasn't, the only streaming/multimedia available would be Windows format. And if M$ controls the streaming protocols, then they'll control the production equipment software, and that's the piece of the (apple) pie that Apple wants to control.
Remember that M$ offered a huge piece of the pie to Apple if it would just get rid of QuickTime, that's how valuable MS realizes it is in blocking their domination of the multimedia environment.
Now why wouldn't Apple open source QT? Why should they? There's already a Linux based QT streamer engine, so there's no motivation there. QT is full of all sorts of neat programming tricks, so there's no reason why Apple should make it easier for the next version of Windows Media Player to leap frog them.
Just come up with a valid money-making reason for Apple to do this. Remember, Windows is the enemy but just because Mac and Linux share enemies doesn't mean they are allies. People running Linux are still not running MacOS.
OK, I'm a geek. I have at least ten GPS units (see www.gpsy.com for the reason why) but one thing I'd love is a programmable altimeter/barometer and temperature gauge.
Think of all the fun geeky things you could do! Stick it in your pocket and get your ski run total altitude. Or match it with GPS for accurate elevation data. Stick your GPS unit in a FedEx package and look at time/elevation/temperature to see if they send them in pressurized or unpressurized airplanes. Just how cold do those unpressurized baggage holds get anyway?
Well, it is possible to flash the screen in certain color/timing sequences to cause epiletic-like fits in the population. Witness the Pokemon (TV show) episode in Japan two years ago when a particularly flashy show caused scores of schoolkids to get sick, fall unconscious, etc.
Myself, I get sick from Pokemon just by watching its absolute inanity. Come on America! Will you buy ANYTHING?
Anyway, your comment reminded me of the hack on Commodore PETs and 64s where a certain PEEK command could set the monitor flyback into self-destruction mode.
Was this true or urban legend?
Karen
Net hoaxes and urban legends
on
Hoax-a-go-go!
·
· Score: 4
It seems that net hoaxes are now reaching the level of urban legends -- you know, the "my brother's friend told me this true story.... that KFC chicken has chemicals that sterilize black men", etc.
An excellent book to read if you're interested in urban legends is I Heard It through the Grapevine by Patricia Turner, a folklore sociologist. Even if you don't read the book, read the blurb on Amazon.
Another interesting web site to visit is AFU Urban Legends.com. They have pretty much every one listed.
The interesting thing about net hoaxes is that the chain mail ones are semi-participatory. That is, action taken actually (is supposed to) results in something happening, i.e. getting a free PC or cargo pants or whatever.
I wonder how soon it'll be before someone invents an intelligent filter that removes these from mailboxes as well as SPAM. This to me would be one of the really useful uses of AI technology. I have so many clueless relatives and "friends".....
If you read carefully, I meant that GSM hasn't caught on in the U.S. due to the general stupidity of Americans to accept standards that weren't invented there.
GSM is of course big in Europe and Asia, which is why it would have been *so* nice if I could get national GSM coverage in the U.S. and in Japan with a single phone. But it doesn't seem likely to happen for short term future.
At the very least, GSM would have to get national coverage in the US before I could consider it useful. Even my lowly SprintPCS (which is CDMA not GSM) has coverage in most major metropolitan areas.
Japan is just as bad as the U.S. in not accepting the standard GSM frequencies, which is why there aren't any GSM phones in the U.S. that work in both Europe and Japan. I heard that you could buy them in Japan, but I looked and came up short. Anyone know of any model names?
One thing that I'd really like to see built into console APIs is scalability. That is, in the over half decade the original PS has been out, there have been numerous advances in CPU and graphics technology. If the API had been written opaquely enough, we could have had Playstation 1.5s that run games a little smoother and with better texture mappings.
I hope the PS2's APIs are written so that if in 3-4 years, we need a speed/power upgrade, we can achieve that relatively painlessly with both forward and backward compatibility.
That's one of the beauty of Mac/PC APIs, you can play Quake on a 350mhz G3 machine as well as a 500mhz G4 with different quality video cards.
What irks me even more than the failure of Iridium (they shot themselves in the foot with their pricing structure, so no tears from me) is the failure of GSM to catch on in a meaningful way.
My PCS phone died an ignomious death a few months ago, so I looked into alternative replacements. I had really wanted to get a GSM phone, but America hasn't gotten on the GSM bandwagon. There are only a few carriers (Omnipoint being the main one), and those are mostly located on the East coast. No one has good national coverage.
That was a pain. Then, although you can get tri-band GSM phones that work in the U.S., Europe, or most of Asia with just a change of SIM card; these GSM phones don't work in Japan!
Seems the brilliant bureacrats in Japan pulled off an American Not-Invented-Here trick with the frequencies, so even tri-bands don't work. Argh!
I just want a phone I can use anywhere in the world. GSM is so, so close. But until more poles are erected in the U.S. and Japan gets with the program (or phones emerge that can handle the Japanese frequencies), it looks like I'm SOL.:(
So I bought another Sprint PCS dual band phone.:(
Karen
ps. for the person bit by the snake in the middle of Congoland, there's still INMARSAT. Prices are cheaper than Iridium, although you do have to lug a suitcase rather than a portable phone. Does make you look considerably more geeky and james bondy though!
pps. I heard one of the problems with Iridium is that unlike Inmarsat, which looks like a satellite phone with the briefcase and dish antenna that you have to point in the right direction, Iridium phones looked like cell phones (albeit with big antennas).
But that gave people the idea that if they looked like cell phones, surely they must work like cell phones. So they tried to use them in conditions they weren't designed for: namely indoors and in moving vehicles. Their performance expectations (of cell-phone like stability, whatever that is) weren't lived up to and Iridium got bad press. This was especially true in the Bosnian conflict, when a lot of Iridium phones were seeded to the press. Many of them abandoned Iridium and used their GSM phones instead.
One of the interesting sidenotes is that IEEE1394 (aka, Firewire, aka, iLink) now has SCMS (serial copy management system) built into the protocols. This is to allow it to be used in a home theatre system (ie, DVD to digital TV) but not for digital dubbing.
One of the other posts mentioned encryption, but I don't believe this is the case. I think it uses a simple bit flag that the downstream receivers are compelled (now by law) to honor.
Of course, in the Akihabara section of Tokyo, you can get little black boxes that remove SCMS from digital/optical audio. Once we start seeing DVD-R player/recorders on the market, it'll only be a few weeks before we see SCMS-removing kits in Japan.
The kits are illegal in the U.S. due to that nasty law.:( This is unfortunate.
One legitimate use of backups is for parents with kids. DVDs are nice because your kids can watch "The Little Mermaid" 300 times without wearing out the tape, but DVD discs themselves are rather fragile and get scratched. It'd be nice if we were allowed to make DVD-R backups for our kids to beat up on.
The same argument can be made for PlayStation games....
The cash register systems at Radio Shack are still Windows based, although I think RS is transitioning their back-office systems. Let's hope these open source cash register systems hit it big, since once the cash registers are on linux, more and more of the back-office systems will be driven to open standard systems, something that Microsoft hasn't been good at retaining control over.
The real coup is if some Linux providers work on some sort of embedded Linux. The efforts made to port Linux to micro-systems like PalmOS should help in this arena. But the idea would be if we could flash Linux entirely to ROM. This would take some market share away from folks like OS9 (not MacOS9!), QNX, etc.
1. If you've ever been stuck in a Golden Week traffic jam (over 100km long to the resorts or back to Tokyo), then you'd realize why even drivers need DVD players.
2. I'm not so excited about MD used as a recording medium. It only stores about 140MB and you need special DataMDs that are hard to find. If they free up the specs so you can use cheap $2 music MDs, then they're great.
3. PlayStation 2: in regards to all the bugs in the first revision, perhaps its good we're getting them a bit behind the times. Although the $169 Apex DVD player does take the edge off of buying a PS2 just to watch DVDs in my bedroom.
4. The color LCD cell phones are a toy. Only 256 colors and a tiny screen. They are also harder to read than normal ones. But they're rev 1, so we should hope to see better ones in the future. The great thing about them is that they're so small (half the size of american cell phones) and cheap.
5. Digital fish tanks are tres cool. They have some at subway stations in Tokyo. They also sell some great fishtank software for Macs. I've wanted to get one, but they're expensive (about $90 + more for the fish). But they'd look great on my LCD display. Fish are certainly more calming than looking for aliens!
I bought the 14hr TiVo when it first came out. I have to say that I absolutely love it. With cable now about $60/mo, TiVo lets me extract the most of it. It catches all the bizarro shows that I like late at night, and I can watch them in any order, unlike a VCR.
If I was rich, I would have gotten the 30hr TiVo. I have my 14hr set at medium quality, which only gets me 8hrs of video that's a little better than VHS. I use medium quality because the sports shows I watch end up in a flurry of MPEG mosaics at low quality.
My TiVo is a little buggy. It never dials up by itself, I have to always manually dial-up. I called TiVo tech support and while they were nice enough, they never resolved the issue. It's not too much of a pain so I never bothered to get it fixed. Maybe 1.3 will solve it.
One of the things I wish I had was another remote for TiVo. I use a 2.4ghz NTSC in-home broadcaster to beam my TiVo's living room signals to my bedroom. A pair of infrared signal senders sends the remote's commands back, but my bedroom TV is different from my living rooms. Yeah yeah, I should get a multi-remote, but none of them are preprogrammed for TiVo. So I end up carrying my TiVo remote to my bedroom when I want to watch at night.
I also noticed I'm not getting shows in stereo. Not sure if this is TiVo or my cable service, have to look into that. I just got a new home theater system, so it's annoying that everything is in mono.
Anyway, I hope someone figures out how to hack TiVo so that you can put in any large HD you want. CircuitCity has 30 gig hard drives + UltraDMA66 interface cards for $199 right now (w/ rebates). Tempting, tempting. My TiVo is almost out of warrantee anyway, so I'd love to rip its guts open to put in a larger drive.
While a third hand would undoubtedly be useful, I can imagine it getting in the way and I'd have to get new shirts and jackets.
I'd much rather have a prehensile tail. It'd be great! It could hold the soldering iron while my hands hold the piece work.
Other benefits of a tail: - It would balance me while I ski / mountain bike - It could turn on my scuba air valve when I jump off the dive boat without remembering to check it (duh!). - Scratch my back in all the really itchy places
Yeah! A tail is the way to go! I can't wait until genetic engineering makes it a possibility!
I went to my public library (New Haven Free Public) the other day to find some books on skiing. I tried to use the public access terminals to get to the online catalog (Bibliomation).
SurfWatch has blocked this site.
Incredible. The library's own catalogue is blocked for having smut. No doubt all those books on homosexuality, birth control, and breast cancer....
I complained to the reference librarian, who just sighed and looked like she just had a hell of a day, so I didn't make a big deal of it.
It's a well-known non-secret in the industry that Sony, Sega, and Nintendo sell their consoles for well beneath the cost it makes to sell and distribute them. They lose money on every unit sold.
Fortunately, for them, they make it back since they license (for a fee) the libraries you need to develop and distribute a game, as well as the cost of burning the black CD-Rs or manufacturing the cartridges.
With hypothetical figures, even if they lose $50 on each consoles, if they made $10 in licensing fees on each game bought, they break even at 5 games.
Microsoft is going to find itself in a bind. In order to compete with the other consoles, it's going to have to price them below cost. Folks who have run the figures realize this. But unless they can develop an alternative revenue stream, this is going to be a black hole for them.
Is Microsoft going to be able to convince their developers to pay to distribute their software? They never had to before. But since this unit will most probably boot off of the CD-ROMs, they'll need a small embedded DOS or Windows-CE/95 kernel, so they most probably will have to pay for that.
It'll be interesting once some enterprising developer figures out how to make their own boot disks using DR-DOS or linux. Then what will MS do? Second, Microsoft doesn't have any distribution tentacles in the toy market, so it'll be fun to see them market to 'Toys-R-Us' and so forth. Karen
Seems we were just speculating on the announcement of the DragonBall VZ chips with color LCD support and here comes the new pilots.
Color LCDs have really come to age. They are now using super-reflective backgrounds and many of them are able to rechannel ambient light towards the screen. Look at some of the newer DV and digital cameras (from Casio among others) for examples.
What's annoying about this release is though it's Caldera 2.3; the actual kernel version is 2.2.10.
I actually liked how Caldera 2.2 had a kernel of 2.2.x; there was a synchrony. What will Caldera do when kernel 2.3 goes final? Will they then be Caldera 2.4? Confusion city.
For now, I'm running the base Caldera 2.2 with linux kernel 2.2.12 patches. That way, don't have to bother with reinstalling the whole system. I'll most probably upgrade that way to kernel 2.3; no reason to send Caldera any more money then necessary.
Slashdot Mirror
Top dollar? I'm a Select Developer ($500/yr) and we received the new MacOS X seed last week via fedex. If you consider that we get seeded with all the latest software, the $500/yr is a bargain.
Karen
My guess is that RSA did this to avoid someone else re-patenting a twist on the RSA algorithm. It's much safer in the public-domain than it is as an expired patent.
In any case, my guess is that RSA has patented *around* the original patent, covering such twists as public key encryption over e-mail, etc. and those patents will most likely extend for the next couple of years.
Karen
I've taken my Olympus 400Z down to 120' in the North Carolina waters with its polycarbonate housing. Works like a champ and got some great wreck photos and shark shots. No floods yet and the 400/450 is cheap enough that even if it does flood, I'm only 25% of the cost down to a used Nikonos.
Karen
So do the shuttles still have iron core memory? I remember that this choice was 1) made in the 1970s and 2) core memory is remarkably resistant to EM radiation, gamma rays, etc.
I also remember that the shuttle was apparently running on Z80 clones. Forget WinCE, they're still on CPM.... (which is more advanced that what runs under Win98).
Karen
Oh really? I have a Rio 500 as well and it lasts forever. What type of batteries are you using? I use both NiMH and alkaline, I get over ten hours on each.
I wish MPs on the memory card were stored in DOS format, like my digital camera. That way, it'd be much easier for me to exchange files with it and my Power Mac.
Karen
Hi -
One of the main problems is that Apple isn't infinitely rich like some companies (M$), so they can't develop for all platforms. So they're strategic. The only reason there is a free Windows QT player is that unless there wasn't, the only streaming/multimedia available would be Windows format. And if M$ controls the streaming protocols, then they'll control the production equipment software, and that's the piece of the (apple) pie that Apple wants to control.
Remember that M$ offered a huge piece of the pie to Apple if it would just get rid of QuickTime, that's how valuable MS realizes it is in blocking their domination of the multimedia environment.
Now why wouldn't Apple open source QT? Why should they? There's already a Linux based QT streamer engine, so there's no motivation there. QT is full of all sorts of neat programming tricks, so there's no reason why Apple should make it easier for the next version of Windows Media Player to leap frog them.
Just come up with a valid money-making reason for Apple to do this. Remember, Windows is the enemy but just because Mac and Linux share enemies doesn't mean they are allies. People running Linux are still not running MacOS.
Karen
OK, I'm a geek. I have at least ten GPS units (see www.gpsy.com for the reason why) but one thing I'd love is a programmable altimeter/barometer and temperature gauge.
Think of all the fun geeky things you could do! Stick it in your pocket and get your ski run total altitude. Or match it with GPS for accurate elevation data. Stick your GPS unit in a FedEx package and look at time/elevation/temperature to see if they send them in pressurized or unpressurized airplanes. Just how cold do those unpressurized baggage holds get anyway?
Sigh....
Karen the geek girl
Well, it is possible to flash the screen in certain color/timing sequences to cause epiletic-like fits in the population. Witness the Pokemon (TV show) episode in Japan two years ago when a particularly flashy show caused scores of schoolkids to get sick, fall unconscious, etc.
Myself, I get sick from Pokemon just by watching its absolute inanity. Come on America! Will you buy ANYTHING?
Anyway, your comment reminded me of the hack on Commodore PETs and 64s where a certain PEEK command could set the monitor flyback into self-destruction mode.
Was this true or urban legend?
Karen
It seems that net hoaxes are now reaching the level of urban legends -- you know, the "my brother's friend told me this true story.... that KFC chicken has chemicals that sterilize black men", etc.
An excellent book to read if you're interested in urban legends is I Heard It through the Grapevine by Patricia Turner, a folklore sociologist. Even if you don't read the book, read the blurb on Amazon.
Another interesting web site to visit is AFU Urban Legends.com. They have pretty much every one listed.
The interesting thing about net hoaxes is that the chain mail ones are semi-participatory. That is, action taken actually (is supposed to) results in something happening, i.e. getting a free PC or cargo pants or whatever.
I wonder how soon it'll be before someone invents an intelligent filter that removes these from mailboxes as well as SPAM. This to me would be one of the really useful uses of AI technology. I have so many clueless relatives and "friends".....
Karen
If you read carefully, I meant that GSM hasn't caught on in the U.S. due to the general stupidity of Americans to accept standards that weren't invented there.
GSM is of course big in Europe and Asia, which is why it would have been *so* nice if I could get national GSM coverage in the U.S. and in Japan with a single phone. But it doesn't seem likely to happen for short term future.
At the very least, GSM would have to get national coverage in the US before I could consider it useful. Even my lowly SprintPCS (which is CDMA not GSM) has coverage in most major metropolitan areas.
Japan is just as bad as the U.S. in not accepting the standard GSM frequencies, which is why there aren't any GSM phones in the U.S. that work in both Europe and Japan. I heard that you could buy them in Japan, but I looked and came up short. Anyone know of any model names?
Karen
One thing that I'd really like to see built into console APIs is scalability. That is, in the over half decade the original PS has been out, there have been numerous advances in CPU and graphics technology. If the API had been written opaquely enough, we could have had Playstation 1.5s that run games a little smoother and with better texture mappings.
I hope the PS2's APIs are written so that if in 3-4 years, we need a speed/power upgrade, we can achieve that relatively painlessly with both forward and backward compatibility.
That's one of the beauty of Mac/PC APIs, you can play Quake on a 350mhz G3 machine as well as a 500mhz G4 with different quality video cards.
Just a thought.
What irks me even more than the failure of Iridium (they shot themselves in the foot with their pricing structure, so no tears from me) is the failure of GSM to catch on in a meaningful way.
:(
:(
My PCS phone died an ignomious death a few months ago, so I looked into alternative replacements. I had really wanted to get a GSM phone, but America hasn't gotten on the GSM bandwagon. There are only a few carriers (Omnipoint being the main one), and those are mostly located on the East coast. No one has good national coverage.
That was a pain. Then, although you can get tri-band GSM phones that work in the U.S., Europe, or most of Asia with just a change of SIM card; these GSM phones don't work in Japan!
Seems the brilliant bureacrats in Japan pulled off an American Not-Invented-Here trick with the frequencies, so even tri-bands don't work. Argh!
I just want a phone I can use anywhere in the world. GSM is so, so close. But until more poles are erected in the U.S. and Japan gets with the program (or phones emerge that can handle the Japanese frequencies), it looks like I'm SOL.
So I bought another Sprint PCS dual band phone.
Karen
ps. for the person bit by the snake in the middle of Congoland, there's still INMARSAT. Prices are cheaper than Iridium, although you do have to lug a suitcase rather than a portable phone. Does make you look considerably more geeky and james bondy though!
pps. I heard one of the problems with Iridium is that unlike Inmarsat, which looks like a satellite phone with the briefcase and dish antenna that you have to point in the right direction, Iridium phones looked like cell phones (albeit with big antennas).
But that gave people the idea that if they looked like cell phones, surely they must work like cell phones. So they tried to use them in conditions they weren't designed for: namely indoors and in moving vehicles. Their performance expectations (of cell-phone like stability, whatever that is) weren't lived up to and Iridium got bad press. This was especially true in the Bosnian conflict, when a lot of Iridium phones were seeded to the press. Many of them abandoned Iridium and used their GSM phones instead.
One of the interesting sidenotes is that IEEE1394 (aka, Firewire, aka, iLink) now has SCMS (serial copy management system) built into the protocols. This is to allow it to be used in a home theatre system (ie, DVD to digital TV) but not for digital dubbing.
:( This is unfortunate.
One of the other posts mentioned encryption, but I don't believe this is the case. I think it uses a simple bit flag that the downstream receivers are compelled (now by law) to honor.
Of course, in the Akihabara section of Tokyo, you can get little black boxes that remove SCMS from digital/optical audio. Once we start seeing DVD-R player/recorders on the market, it'll only be a few weeks before we see SCMS-removing kits in Japan.
The kits are illegal in the U.S. due to that nasty law.
One legitimate use of backups is for parents with kids. DVDs are nice because your kids can watch "The Little Mermaid" 300 times without wearing out the tape, but DVD discs themselves are rather fragile and get scratched. It'd be nice if we were allowed to make DVD-R backups for our kids to beat up on.
The same argument can be made for PlayStation games....
Karen
The cash register systems at Radio Shack are still Windows based, although I think RS is transitioning their back-office systems. Let's hope these open source cash register systems hit it big, since once the cash registers are on linux, more and more of the back-office systems will be driven to open standard systems, something that Microsoft hasn't been good at retaining control over.
The real coup is if some Linux providers work on some sort of embedded Linux. The efforts made to port Linux to micro-systems like PalmOS should help in this arena. But the idea would be if we could flash Linux entirely to ROM. This would take some market share away from folks like OS9 (not MacOS9!), QNX, etc.
1. If you've ever been stuck in a Golden Week traffic jam (over 100km long to the resorts or back to Tokyo), then you'd realize why even drivers need DVD players.
2. I'm not so excited about MD used as a recording medium. It only stores about 140MB and you need special DataMDs that are hard to find. If they free up the specs so you can use cheap $2 music MDs, then they're great.
3. PlayStation 2: in regards to all the bugs in the first revision, perhaps its good we're getting them a bit behind the times. Although the $169 Apex DVD player does take the edge off of buying a PS2 just to watch DVDs in my bedroom.
4. The color LCD cell phones are a toy. Only 256 colors and a tiny screen. They are also harder to read than normal ones. But they're rev 1, so we should hope to see better ones in the future. The great thing about them is that they're so small (half the size of american cell phones) and cheap.
5. Digital fish tanks are tres cool. They have some at subway stations in Tokyo. They also sell some great fishtank software for Macs. I've wanted to get one, but they're expensive (about $90 + more for the fish). But they'd look great on my LCD display. Fish are certainly more calming than looking for aliens!
Sigh, I wish I were back in Japan. :(
1. Closed Captioning only works on the RCA outs of my TiVo, not on the RF output. This is definitely a bug.
2. Yeah, but they're expensive.... :(
3. I just checked it, you're right! They are flipped. Weird. I wasn't getting any errors, it just wasn't dialling automatically, only manually.
Thanks!
I bought the 14hr TiVo when it first came out. I have to say that I absolutely love it. With cable now about $60/mo, TiVo lets me extract the most of it. It catches all the bizarro shows that I like late at night, and I can watch them in any order, unlike a VCR.
If I was rich, I would have gotten the 30hr TiVo. I have my 14hr set at medium quality, which only gets me 8hrs of video that's a little better than VHS. I use medium quality because the sports shows I watch end up in a flurry of MPEG mosaics at low quality.
TiVo currently has an upgrade program at: http://www.personaltv.philips. com/upgrade/process.html. $299 to upgrade from the 14hr to 30hr, basically the price differential.
My TiVo is a little buggy. It never dials up by itself, I have to always manually dial-up. I called TiVo tech support and while they were nice enough, they never resolved the issue. It's not too much of a pain so I never bothered to get it fixed. Maybe 1.3 will solve it.
One of the things I wish I had was another remote for TiVo. I use a 2.4ghz NTSC in-home broadcaster to beam my TiVo's living room signals to my bedroom. A pair of infrared signal senders sends the remote's commands back, but my bedroom TV is different from my living rooms. Yeah yeah, I should get a multi-remote, but none of them are preprogrammed for TiVo. So I end up carrying my TiVo remote to my bedroom when I want to watch at night.
I also noticed I'm not getting shows in stereo. Not sure if this is TiVo or my cable service, have to look into that. I just got a new home theater system, so it's annoying that everything is in mono.
Anyway, I hope someone figures out how to hack TiVo so that you can put in any large HD you want. CircuitCity has 30 gig hard drives + UltraDMA66 interface cards for $199 right now (w/ rebates). Tempting, tempting. My TiVo is almost out of warrantee anyway, so I'd love to rip its guts open to put in a larger drive.
From one geek gal to all you geek boys...
While a third hand would undoubtedly be useful, I can imagine it getting in the way and I'd have to get new shirts and jackets.
I'd much rather have a prehensile tail. It'd be great! It could hold the soldering iron while my hands hold the piece work.
Other benefits of a tail:
- It would balance me while I ski / mountain bike
- It could turn on my scuba air valve when I jump off the dive boat without remembering to check it (duh!).
- Scratch my back in all the really itchy places
Yeah! A tail is the way to go! I can't wait until genetic engineering makes it a possibility!
Kren
I went to my public library (New Haven Free Public) the other day to find some books on skiing. I tried to use the public access terminals to get to the online catalog (Bibliomation).
SurfWatch has blocked this site.
Incredible. The library's own catalogue is blocked for having smut. No doubt all those books on homosexuality, birth control, and breast cancer....
I complained to the reference librarian, who just sighed and looked like she just had a hell of a day, so I didn't make a big deal of it.
This is too sad to be funny (or vice versa).
Kren
It's a well-known non-secret in the industry that Sony, Sega, and Nintendo sell their consoles for well beneath the cost it makes to sell and distribute them. They lose money on every unit sold.
Fortunately, for them, they make it back since they license (for a fee) the libraries you need to develop and distribute a game, as well as the cost of burning the black CD-Rs or manufacturing the cartridges.
With hypothetical figures, even if they lose $50 on each consoles, if they made $10 in licensing fees on each game bought, they break even at 5 games.
Microsoft is going to find itself in a bind. In order to compete with the other consoles, it's going to have to price them below cost. Folks who have run the figures realize this. But unless they can develop an alternative revenue stream, this is going to be a black hole for them.
Is Microsoft going to be able to convince their developers to pay to distribute their software? They never had to before. But since this unit will most probably boot off of the CD-ROMs, they'll need a small embedded DOS or Windows-CE/95 kernel, so they most probably will have to pay for that.
It'll be interesting once some enterprising developer figures out how to make their own boot disks using DR-DOS or linux. Then what will MS do? Second, Microsoft doesn't have any distribution tentacles in the toy market, so it'll be fun to see them market to 'Toys-R-Us' and so forth.
Karen
Seems we were just speculating on the announcement of the DragonBall VZ chips with color LCD support and here comes the new pilots.
Color LCDs have really come to age. They are now using super-reflective backgrounds and many of them are able to rechannel ambient light towards the screen. Look at some of the newer DV and digital cameras (from Casio among others) for examples.
Darn, I have a HandSpring on order too. Hmm.
What's annoying about this release is though it's Caldera 2.3; the actual kernel version is 2.2.10.
I actually liked how Caldera 2.2 had a kernel of 2.2.x; there was a synchrony. What will Caldera do when kernel 2.3 goes final? Will they then be Caldera 2.4? Confusion city.
For now, I'm running the base Caldera 2.2 with linux kernel 2.2.12 patches. That way, don't have to bother with reinstalling the whole system. I'll most probably upgrade that way to kernel 2.3; no reason to send Caldera any more money then necessary.
Karen
Hmmm.... that's odd.
:)
My Yosemite G3/350 (256MB RAM) with MacOS 8.6 does about 13 hours per work unit.
And the screensaver is quite nice on my Apple Studio LCD display too.
How does the presence of Linux coopt GNU tools in any way? Indeed, the reverse could easily be argued:
* the popularity of Linux has brought a whole new generation of people into the Open Source movement, thus helping grow FSF/GNU in the process
Linux has been nothing but positive for GNU; if only they would get their heads out of the sand, move beyond the stupid name issue, and realize it.
Think how much the open source movement has been validated in the past two years, just with Linux and Apache.
Karen Nakamura
Global Mapping Systems
http://www.gpsy.com
I've posted a Mac mirror of the SETI@home client on our web server:
Karen
Global Mapping Systems - Mac GPS/GIS software
ps. Macs rule.