Not that the Rio Car was a bad idea or anything (for its time it was pretty darn cool), but a pull-out car-stereo-sized unit you could yank out of your dash and take into the house to hook up to your computer for transferring music is not... elegant.
A radio with a space for your iPod to actually slide into it - or an iPod dock that flips out of it somehow for the iPod to stand on, as long as it's secured well enough to not fall off when you corner like I do - would be pretty user-friendly. Make a couple models - AM/FM/CD/iPod Dock for those who haven't ripped everything they own and shoved it onto their iPod, and AM/FM/iPod Dock for those who have.
I googled, and I haven't seen anything meeting this exact description just yet, but I'm sure it's just a matter of time.
Of course, we also need the trunk-mounted 6-iPod changer, with docks for half-a-dozen iPods...;)
The ending wasn't quite there. What I was going to say was, Apple's basically sitting there making 2 lists.
List 1: Market segments we can own ourselves without overreaching.
List 2: Market segments that are far enough from our core strengths that we'll partner with someone else.
So far, list 1 includes the iTunes music store, the iPod family, iTunes software, and AirPort Express.
List 2 includes an obscene amount of iPod accessories, the forthcoming iTunes-capable phone from Motorola, the mumbled-abount car radios with built-in iPod docks, etc.
If someone is making something that directly competes with the iPod, Apple's not going to license FairPlay DRM to them. If they're making something in a different space - heck, why not?
So, basically, look for more FairPlay licensing to people that create non-iPod devices that get music from iTunes, or things iPods plug into for playback or power, or whatever. Things like the iBoom for example. Maybe someday we'll see a version of that with a CD player thrown in, and the technology necessary to rip a CD and shove it onto the iPod, without even having a computer involved.
Given the already-pointed-out Windows version of iTunes and the forthcoming iTunes-capable phone from Motorola (which is certainly a "device"), I think perhaps we would be best off saying:
Apple licenses FairPlay DRM very selectively.
And, of course:
Apple is not in the habit of licensing its IP to companies that directly compete with it.
That second one seems like a real no-brainer to me. Licensing FairPlay to makers of other portable music players would be a huge risk to iPod sales. Maybe once iPod sales start to flatten out, they'll license it more widely, but I really see Apple's thinking as being something like this, right now:
"Okay, so, which product segments do we not want to touch with a thirty-nine-and-a-half-foot pole? Phones? Yeah, we so do not want to go there. We're not a phone company. So we'll license some IP to someone who does phones, cross-market with them, and everything will be cool. As far as computers and portable music players, well, we can rule that space on our own. Okay, what else don't w
You do know that Caltech isn't entirely privately funded, right? A very quick visit to Google finds that, like many other universities, they get grants from people like the National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, U.S. Air Force, etc.
(And yes, I know about Caltech's rather impressive funding from private foundations, particularly as it relates to the Keck observatory - I've taken tour groups into one of the Keck domes more'n a couple times, and work "across the way" from Keck.)
Earlier this month I canceled my long distance, dropped all the "calling features" from my local line, told the telco to not have any long distance or international long distance company assigned to my line, and signed up for BroadVoice's "Unlimited World" plan.
Background: BroadVoice is a consumer-targeted service from Convergent Networks, which offers VoIP gear/services for businesses. They're based around Boston, maybe the Rt. 128 area, I think.
Anyway, the "Unlimited World" thing costs about $20 a month (roughly what I eliminated in terms of other phone bills) and gives me unlimited calls to landlines in the US, cellphones in the 48 contiguous states, and 19 other countries scattered around the world - a fair chunk of Europe, plus Canada, Chile, China, Taiwan, Singapore, and Australia.
For another $5 a month, I could have had their "Unlimited World Plus" plan which includes another 14 countries, but the per-minute rates to those countries are so low anyway (most are under 25 cents a minute) and I know so few people in them, if any, that I don't think I'll use enough time to make it worth it.
Once I got it set up, I picked up a wire junction (plain old boring el-cheapo kind with screws, not a 66 or 110 block) and got things wired together so that the VoIP service is on line 1 and the POTS service is on line 2 of a couple jacks in the house. There are a couple other jacks that are still POTS-only, and one of the dual-line jacks has a single-line phone so it's effectively VoIP-only for now, but it all works! (I did some diagramming in OmniGraffle before I made the changes, if you want to see.)
Being able to call 20 countries "free" is nice (my wife especially likes calling net friends in England) but another big motivating factor was the idea of being able to talk to a friend in Uganda inexpensively. ATT international long distance charged me 4 or 5 dollars a minute to call Uganda - BroadVoice charges me 14 or 15 cents. That's my kind of pricing.:) And most places in the world are about that cheap or cheaper.
Now I'm considering getting a software client for my laptop, to use when traveling. I recently discovered the horror that is "International Roaming," where I get charged as much as $2.29 a minute extra (pretty sure that's what it was in Hong Kong) for using my phone on someone else's turf. VoIP depends on IP availability, so it's not usable as many places as my mobile phone, but it'd be simpler and quite possibly cheaper than getting a SIM and a prepaid plan for every country I visit - and certainly cheaper than paying to roam internationally.
Heh. Yeah. The university I work for has an Institute for Astronomy and an Institute for Geology and Planetary Science. Planetary Science apparently isn't the same as Astronomy... it's all confusing.:) I've heard that last time the two tried to get together, the Planetary Science folks wanted images of something that moves non-sidereally, but didn't provide the non-sidereal rates. Whoops.
Next month, I get to see what happens when the Planetary Science folks take a hyperspectral imager (infrared thingummy that can image water temperatures, spot land mines, yadda yadda, when slung under an aircraft), turn it upside-down, mount it on the Astronomy folks' telescope as a "spectropolarimeter", and point it at the Moon.
(This, too, I find confusing. But I think it has something to do with analyzing the geology of the Moon's surface by measuring its reflectivity in certain infrared wavelengths.)
I probably shouldn't dignify this with a reply, but:
The moon's orbit is elliptical, and as any Slashdotter who "knows about science" can tell you, that means its gravitational pull on Earth varies.:)
Even if the moon's gravitational pull didn't vary, the interplay between the gravitational pulls of the moon and the sun does vary, with the greatest combined effect occurring at new moon, the second-greatest at full moon, and the least effect at the quarters. (Read a tide table to see what I mean.)
You're correct that the highest tides are expected around New Moon, when both the Sun and Moon are "pulling" on the same side. But they don't "cancel each other out" so much at Full Moon; things just get "stretched" in two directions, resulting in the second-highest high tides of the month (after the New Moon tides).
I eagerly wait for the "more to come" part that explains how 2004-12-26 is the same as 2005-01-01. I'm sure that it's something simple, like the difference between calendars in use at different points in history. Or the 6-day difference between your time-space continuum/multiverse and the one the rest of us live in.
IMO, it's not so much technology that's the solution, as improved practices and policies.
For example, it's generally not the greatest idea to build right by the ocean. This is true just about anywhere - on the eastern coast of North America, beachfront houses get nailed by hurricanes; here in Hawaii we get the occasional tsunami; just about anywhere there are issues of erosion and at times high surf.
If you're somewhere - or across the water from somewhere - with seismic activity that can trigger tsunamis, this is even more true.
We'll see whether the policymakers learn from this. Hilo, where I live, was nailed by a tsunami in 1946. The destroyed area was rebuilt - which turned out to be a bad idea since it got nailed again in 1960. Now it's all parks and memorials. (You can see more at the Pacific Tsunami Museum.)
Of course, this all happening at full moon will probably fuel the people who study whether the gravitational pull of the sun and moon impacts the occurrence of earthquakes like it does tides.
According to the helpful earthquake hazard folks over at USGS, the epicenter coordinates were 3.30 N 95.78 E, with a depth of about 10km. There are quite a lot of other entries in that region since, some or all of which may be aftershocks.
(A friend in Madras mentioned the quake as soon as he felt it; I've since seen the estimates go from 650 dead to 1500, 3000, 4500, 6300, and now 7000.)
13760? Bah, that's comfy. Slightly uphill from UKIRT is the University of Hawaii's 88-inch scope, which is sited at roughly 13770 feet with its dome floor around 13790+. There are others on Mauna Kea with higher dome floors (bigger facilities, more modern) but 88 is the highest-sited scope in the world that's regularly manned every week of the year (and often every day), by day crew for maintenance and/or night operators.
Yes, I work there. No, I don't use oxygen. Below about 15000 feet the TUC (Time of Useful Consciousness) is "indefinite" which means some people can go hang out for 12-14 hours with nothing bad happening. There are some observatories up there that are talking about creating a single pressurized "break room" for staff - not where I work, though.:)
Oh, and the Rockwell HAWAII-2RG 2048x2048 sensors used to build UKIRT's WFCAM (it has 4 of them in a square array) were co-developed by U. of Hawaii, Rockwell Scientific and UMC, and first deployed in November of 2003 in the "ULB" camera on 88. For some time, 88 with ULB was the most powerful infrared setup for astrophotography; since UKIRT is the largest dedicated infrared scope in the world, it will now (with its own 16-megapixel camera) really take some great pictures.:) I was over at UKIRT for their 25th anniversary open house, and it's one BIG instrument.
...of course, Gemini South (8.1-meter) has ordered some HAWAII-2RG chips from Rockwell, I think... and the European folks are mumbling about doing a 4x4 array of them (64 megapixels) for their forthcoming VISTA telescope in Chile, which will be the bigger better successor to UKIRT.
Nor can I think of any president in the last half-century that did much to prosecute white-collar crime.
Kerry may have more money than Bush, but he also had the background in (surprise, surprise!) prosecuting white-collar crime. (q.v. Iran-Contra, BCCI, etc.)
Spammers don't actually speak l33t very well. They're far more prone to have problems with punctuation or "stuck keys," in my experience. Recent messages Gmail has dutifully filed under "spam" include such subject non-words as:
I have more trouble with the russian mail-order-bride spams, since they've started using single large words as subjects. Mail with a subject of "radioastronomy" doesn't look like spam when you work at an observatory...
"See, it'd be a real shame, ya know, if something were, say - now I'm just saying if here, don't get me wrong - if something bad were to happen and your PC wound up with so much spyware on it that it didn't even have enough CPU cycles left over to display the log-in screen for you. Ain't that right, Ape? Ya see, Ape agrees with me. So any-hoo, we was thinkin' you might want to protect your PC against those bad things happening to it... and we have just the service to do it, and I'm sure you'll agree our prices are very reasonable. So, why don'tcha just sign here on the line... or if ya wanna t'ink about it, Ape here would be more than happy to go over the details. He can be very persuasive, right, Ape?"
...didn't the Boston Tea Party consist of tipping some tea into the harbour? I'd like to see the current realistic definition of 'Terrorism' that encompases that, not including legalistic definitions twisted to fit.
The unlawful use or threatened use of force or violence by a person or an organized group against people or property with the intention of intimidating or coercing societies or governments, often for ideological or political reasons."
I would say the Boston Tea Party constituted use of force by an organized group against property (or "proper tea") with the intention of intimidating or coercing a government, for ideological or political reasons.
If the russians invaded america if you fought back would that qualify you to be a "terrorist"
By current standards and definitions (willful destruction of government party, etc), the Boston Tea Party was an act of terrorism, you know. And of course those colonists refused to follow the rules of warfare, as well - hiding behind trees and rock walls instead of marching in ranks! Definitely terrorist guerrilas!
Slashdot Mirror
A radio with a space for your iPod to actually slide into it - or an iPod dock that flips out of it somehow for the iPod to stand on, as long as it's secured well enough to not fall off when you corner like I do - would be pretty user-friendly. Make a couple models - AM/FM/CD/iPod Dock for those who haven't ripped everything they own and shoved it onto their iPod, and AM/FM/iPod Dock for those who have.
I googled, and I haven't seen anything meeting this exact description just yet, but I'm sure it's just a matter of time.
Of course, we also need the trunk-mounted 6-iPod changer, with docks for half-a-dozen iPods... ;)
Oops... premature posting. :)
The ending wasn't quite there. What I was going to say was, Apple's basically sitting there making 2 lists.
List 1: Market segments we can own ourselves without overreaching.
List 2: Market segments that are far enough from our core strengths that we'll partner with someone else.
So far, list 1 includes the iTunes music store, the iPod family, iTunes software, and AirPort Express.
List 2 includes an obscene amount of iPod accessories, the forthcoming iTunes-capable phone from Motorola, the mumbled-abount car radios with built-in iPod docks, etc.
If someone is making something that directly competes with the iPod, Apple's not going to license FairPlay DRM to them. If they're making something in a different space - heck, why not?
So, basically, look for more FairPlay licensing to people that create non-iPod devices that get music from iTunes, or things iPods plug into for playback or power, or whatever. Things like the iBoom for example. Maybe someday we'll see a version of that with a CD player thrown in, and the technology necessary to rip a CD and shove it onto the iPod, without even having a computer involved.
Apple licenses FairPlay DRM very selectively.
And, of course:
Apple is not in the habit of licensing its IP to companies that directly compete with it.
That second one seems like a real no-brainer to me. Licensing FairPlay to makers of other portable music players would be a huge risk to iPod sales. Maybe once iPod sales start to flatten out, they'll license it more widely, but I really see Apple's thinking as being something like this, right now:
"Okay, so, which product segments do we not want to touch with a thirty-nine-and-a-half-foot pole? Phones? Yeah, we so do not want to go there. We're not a phone company. So we'll license some IP to someone who does phones, cross-market with them, and everything will be cool. As far as computers and portable music players, well, we can rule that space on our own. Okay, what else don't w
Correct. He was forced to stop spamming a few years back.
:)
I just wonder what form of cyber-misbehavior he'll try next.
(And yes, I know about Caltech's rather impressive funding from private foundations, particularly as it relates to the Keck observatory - I've taken tour groups into one of the Keck domes more'n a couple times, and work "across the way" from Keck.)
"Your tax dollars at work."
Hmm, no, that doesn't cut it.
"Your tax dollars at play."
"Your tax dollars on parade."
Dunno.
Anyway, it was probably a lot cheaper to build than most things they lob up into space, so I won't fret.
Background: BroadVoice is a consumer-targeted service from Convergent Networks, which offers VoIP gear/services for businesses. They're based around Boston, maybe the Rt. 128 area, I think.
Anyway, the "Unlimited World" thing costs about $20 a month (roughly what I eliminated in terms of other phone bills) and gives me unlimited calls to landlines in the US, cellphones in the 48 contiguous states, and 19 other countries scattered around the world - a fair chunk of Europe, plus Canada, Chile, China, Taiwan, Singapore, and Australia.
For another $5 a month, I could have had their "Unlimited World Plus" plan which includes another 14 countries, but the per-minute rates to those countries are so low anyway (most are under 25 cents a minute) and I know so few people in them, if any, that I don't think I'll use enough time to make it worth it.
Once I got it set up, I picked up a wire junction (plain old boring el-cheapo kind with screws, not a 66 or 110 block) and got things wired together so that the VoIP service is on line 1 and the POTS service is on line 2 of a couple jacks in the house. There are a couple other jacks that are still POTS-only, and one of the dual-line jacks has a single-line phone so it's effectively VoIP-only for now, but it all works! (I did some diagramming in OmniGraffle before I made the changes, if you want to see.)
Being able to call 20 countries "free" is nice (my wife especially likes calling net friends in England) but another big motivating factor was the idea of being able to talk to a friend in Uganda inexpensively. ATT international long distance charged me 4 or 5 dollars a minute to call Uganda - BroadVoice charges me 14 or 15 cents. That's my kind of pricing. :) And most places in the world are about that cheap or cheaper.
Now I'm considering getting a software client for my laptop, to use when traveling. I recently discovered the horror that is "International Roaming," where I get charged as much as $2.29 a minute extra (pretty sure that's what it was in Hong Kong) for using my phone on someone else's turf. VoIP depends on IP availability, so it's not usable as many places as my mobile phone, but it'd be simpler and quite possibly cheaper than getting a SIM and a prepaid plan for every country I visit - and certainly cheaper than paying to roam internationally.
Maybe they could just have "Seven of Nine" come along with the doctor...
Not "human flight" any more than "flying squirrels" are "squirrel flight." Powered altitude gain is more impressive. :)
Next month, I get to see what happens when the Planetary Science folks take a hyperspectral imager (infrared thingummy that can image water temperatures, spot land mines, yadda yadda, when slung under an aircraft), turn it upside-down, mount it on the Astronomy folks' telescope as a "spectropolarimeter", and point it at the Moon.
(This, too, I find confusing. But I think it has something to do with analyzing the geology of the Moon's surface by measuring its reflectivity in certain infrared wavelengths.)
- The moon's orbit is elliptical, and as any Slashdotter who "knows about science" can tell you, that means its gravitational pull on Earth varies.
:)
- Even if the moon's gravitational pull didn't vary, the interplay between the gravitational pulls of the moon and the sun does vary, with the greatest combined effect occurring at new moon, the second-greatest at full moon, and the least effect at the quarters. (Read a tide table to see what I mean.)
Hope this clarifies matters somewhat...You're correct that the highest tides are expected around New Moon, when both the Sun and Moon are "pulling" on the same side. But they don't "cancel each other out" so much at Full Moon; things just get "stretched" in two directions, resulting in the second-highest high tides of the month (after the New Moon tides).
I eagerly wait for the "more to come" part that explains how 2004-12-26 is the same as 2005-01-01. I'm sure that it's something simple, like the difference between calendars in use at different points in history. Or the 6-day difference between your time-space continuum/multiverse and the one the rest of us live in.
For example, it's generally not the greatest idea to build right by the ocean. This is true just about anywhere - on the eastern coast of North America, beachfront houses get nailed by hurricanes; here in Hawaii we get the occasional tsunami; just about anywhere there are issues of erosion and at times high surf.
If you're somewhere - or across the water from somewhere - with seismic activity that can trigger tsunamis, this is even more true.
We'll see whether the policymakers learn from this. Hilo, where I live, was nailed by a tsunami in 1946. The destroyed area was rebuilt - which turned out to be a bad idea since it got nailed again in 1960. Now it's all parks and memorials. (You can see more at the Pacific Tsunami Museum.)
And if that number isn't big enough, they're saying a million people displaced from their homes.
Well, a single natural disaster that manages to affect upward of a half-dozen nations across thousands of miles is pretty darned impressive...
Of course, this all happening at full moon will probably fuel the people who study whether the gravitational pull of the sun and moon impacts the occurrence of earthquakes like it does tides.
(A friend in Madras mentioned the quake as soon as he felt it; I've since seen the estimates go from 650 dead to 1500, 3000, 4500, 6300, and now 7000.)
Oops, you're quite right about VISTA -- I should've remembered that, just read it yesterday.
I didn't know about the distinction between HAWAII-II and HAWAII-IIRG - what's the difference?
Thanks!
Yes, I work there. No, I don't use oxygen. Below about 15000 feet the TUC (Time of Useful Consciousness) is "indefinite" which means some people can go hang out for 12-14 hours with nothing bad happening. There are some observatories up there that are talking about creating a single pressurized "break room" for staff - not where I work, though. :)
Oh, and the Rockwell HAWAII-2RG 2048x2048 sensors used to build UKIRT's WFCAM (it has 4 of them in a square array) were co-developed by U. of Hawaii, Rockwell Scientific and UMC, and first deployed in November of 2003 in the "ULB" camera on 88. For some time, 88 with ULB was the most powerful infrared setup for astrophotography; since UKIRT is the largest dedicated infrared scope in the world, it will now (with its own 16-megapixel camera) really take some great pictures. :) I was over at UKIRT for their 25th anniversary open house, and it's one BIG instrument.
Kerry may have more money than Bush, but he also had the background in (surprise, surprise!) prosecuting white-collar crime. (q.v. Iran-Contra, BCCI, etc.)
Oh well. Live and learn.
Spammers don't actually speak l33t very well. They're far more prone to have problems with punctuation or "stuck keys," in my experience. Recent messages Gmail has dutifully filed under "spam" include such subject non-words as:
i codin' y C'ialis soft''tabs
P*H*A*R*M*A*C*Y
oxxxyyyconntin
scripttt
viii
Ciali's
pppain killllers
weiight
doccctor
P.H.A.R.M.A.C.Y
Bu
ppennnnny st000ckkk
Bleah.
I have more trouble with the russian mail-order-bride spams, since they've started using single large words as subjects. Mail with a subject of "radioastronomy" doesn't look like spam when you work at an observatory...
"See, it'd be a real shame, ya know, if something were, say - now I'm just saying if here, don't get me wrong - if something bad were to happen and your PC wound up with so much spyware on it that it didn't even have enough CPU cycles left over to display the log-in screen for you. Ain't that right, Ape? Ya see, Ape agrees with me. So any-hoo, we was thinkin' you might want to protect your PC against those bad things happening to it... and we have just the service to do it, and I'm sure you'll agree our prices are very reasonable. So, why don'tcha just sign here on the line... or if ya wanna t'ink about it, Ape here would be more than happy to go over the details. He can be very persuasive, right, Ape?"
You may feel differently.
By current standards and definitions (willful destruction of government party, etc), the Boston Tea Party was an act of terrorism, you know. And of course those colonists refused to follow the rules of warfare, as well - hiding behind trees and rock walls instead of marching in ranks! Definitely terrorist guerrilas!