and aren't gay! Well, maybe moderately bi, but still....
But just think about it... violet is all the way up there on the upper end of the visible spectrum, the highest energy and yet just barely visible. Plus, the shade of deep, dark violet I like is often polished to a nice iridescent shine... think in the ballpark of #100010
My old college beater was a 2-door coupe and had the little "flip-out" rear side windows that I always kept open for ventilation. A nice side effect was that I could always hear traffic in my blind spot.
I always head check, but it was pretty invaluable having that kind of information always present. Hopefully the engineers can design it so it works passively using your car's audio speakers. Research with fighter pilots has shown that humans can place an audio signal projected somewhere around them to within 5-10 degrees, so it would make sense to use audio for extra proximity alerts. Sure it might be annoying at times, but that would only encourage people not to linger next to other cars, maintain safe following distance, get out of the way of cars tailgating behind them, etc.
There was a story a few months back (can't find it, though, too many other stories on wi-fi) where a guy covered an entire apartment block with two access points - one on each side of the building. Since Wi-fi works line-of-sight, if the tenants could see the access point from their windows, they can use it. I don't know what's across the street from your place, but you could mount it in a tree, power it from a street lamp or from an adjacent building, and use it as a repeater for one or more trunks you have set up to your internet connection inside.
Of course, this will just give people access... not necessarily good bandwidth since everyone has to share. But I imagine your internet connection is a smaller link than the Wi-fi anyway. This would be a good, cheap start... you wouldn't have to spend much wiring up the building (I don't really see you getting much further with only $7k). You can always spend the rest of the money on upgrades later.
Using a gaming engine for interior design projects adds limitations and extra work that you wouldn't have to deal with using other visualization technologies. I wouldn't start a project using a gaming engine unless I already had experience and knew exactly what I could do and could not do using those tools.
As an engineer, I find it much easier to work with high-level 3D scene definition tools such as VRML and POVray. These let you play with scene definitions using constructive solid geometry (rather than spending your time fine-tuning polygon meshes) and give you much better control over lighting effects, textures, and environments.
Here's one of my forays into architectural design using Moray and POVRay. It took about a half day to do working off of graph paper blueprint sketches. Though it's not interactive, the visual quality (architectural composition aside:P ) is much cleaner than anything currently available in a game. VRML is a lot like the POV format, for the most part, so some tools should be able to convert from one to the other, allowing you to use VRML to make your designs interactive. Search around on Freshmeat and the like for tools that might be able to handle both formats...
Right now Celestia by default only shows most of the stars in our arm of the Milky Way, plus two or three neighboring galaxies. Any reason why it couldn't be loaded up with the results of this survey at some point?
Well, there's still quite a gap between what HLA was intended to do, and what it actually does. And I suppose I really meant HLA+RTI in order to cover the finer details of simulation time synchronization and such. Here's a good pitch (ppt, unfortunately) comparing HLA vs. CORBA
The original HLA spec (up to 1.3) as defined by the DoD was kind of nebulous, so much so that the industry groups had to create their own HLA spec that was actually practical/implementable/useful (IEEE 1516). This page provides a good overview on the differences.
Umbrella terms for this type of tech
on
Sentient Data Access
·
· Score: 5, Informative
It's under development under a couple of different names.
Unfortunately, this kind of thing still starts in the military world. The DoD has been developing requirements for Network Centric Warfare (NCW). Basically turning warfare interfaces into a RTS game like StarCraft, C&C, complete with fog-of-war, semi-autonomous units, comm & data sharing, etc. On the technical side, this is manifesting itself as Command, Control, Communications, Computer, Intelligence, Surveillance and
Reconnaissance (C4ISR) architecture. One of the first actual implementations is being worked in in the form of Future Combat Systems (FCS).
These are complex systems, so the DoD has been maturing development of modeling & simulation interoperability by making contractors adhere to High Level Architecture (HLA) so they can properly analyze these systems before deploying them. HLA basically provides a lot of the same data object registration, distribution, and interfaces that older tech like CORBA does, with extra simulation concepts.
These technologies are being commercialized under the buzzwords "Nework Centric Operations" (NCO) and "Network Enabled Operations" (NEO). Advocates usually point to well networked operations like Wal-mart, UPS, et al. as poster children for what could be done (automatic restocking, package tracking, load balancing & route optimization, etc.) with enough NEO infrastructure. A lot of the interchange standards (including C4ISR) are getting established through bodies like the OMG. Other than the interchange standards, there's not all that much new tech involved... maybe RFIDs and various other networking tech (grid/mesh networks, strong encryption/authentication, mobile IP, etc.). Most if it just involves looking at technology that already exists and figuring out how to piece it together to actually do something worthwhile.
Disclaimer: I work for one of the gov't contractors throwing all these buzzwords around.
Once this technology is proven, this could become a valuable electronic polling tool, not just an e-voting tool. People would be able to vote directly on important issues. Right now, people only elect officials, who look at unofficial news polls to see what the populace thinks, and then tries to act in a way that would get them re-elected. We can do better than this, the technology to accurately determine what every single person in the city/state/nation thinks on important issues just hasn't existed in the past.
Granted, the whole Diebold thing is grossly botched up, and is a major step backwards in terms of voting transparency.
Actually, I admit that I'm not much of a music fan. And if I was, I would be humming/whistling my own tune. Try it out sometime, you might like it.
If you really think you need to have music in year ears everywhere you go, try blowing $50 on an MP3-CD player first before you think about spending serious dough on a music device: Obligatory PA ref
Systems Engineering & Software Engineering
on
Cringley on E-voting
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
As someone who's studied both, it seems very strange how much they borrow from one another, and yet most practicioners I've met from each field has been thoroughly ignorant of the other.
From one side, Systems Engineering is quite an old field, mostly championed by the government itself to attach "best practice" management processes to increase the viability of major complex construction projects (since a lot of civil engineering projects were failing at the time). It's basically the simple process of structured decomposition of a complicated problem into a variety of simple ones: problem analysis, requirements, specifications, functional/structural decomposition, building & assembling components, verifying that your system meets the specifications/requirements, and finally validating whether your system actually solves the problem. As systems get more complex, doing all the bookkeeping to keep track of those handfuls of tasks becomes an information management project in and of itself.
Software engineering came along, and suddenly they were going through major SW projects in 1-2 year cycles, instead of 10-20 year cycles for bridges, dams, buildings, etc. Needless to say, the SW engineers gained experience in full life cycle systems engineering of projects much more quickly than most of the old traditional SE's could build in an entire lifetime. This was both good and bad... As you may well be familiar with, we've raised our SW engineers to enjoy reconstructing things on their own from scratch, and to be somewhat resistant to doing the research on how other related projects / fields have fared in the past. As a result, they've rediscovered many of the SE fundamentals on their own, but at the same time, we're going through the same mistakes that had caused massive project failures in the past to do so.
Well, you're sort of nitpicking, as far as where the bulk of our money goes.
Take a look at these three US Budget plots http://hairball.bumba
Four items far outweigh all of the others combined: SSA, Healthcare, Treasury (interest on national debt), and Defense. Everything else (including those items you mentioned) add up to diddly. SSA and Healthcare also show no signs of slowing down, and the baby boomers are just starting to retire.
I'm kind of surprised the Howard Dean campaign has't harped more on this data (which is from the White House budget & management administration itself). If the #1 & #2 things we spend on are SSA and Healthcare (they're listed separately from the rest of the our taxes on our W2's for chrissake), it seems like a doctor would be the kind a person we need to figure out how to trim them surgically without harming the programs as a whole. Then once those things are under control, we could use a good economist and maybe a general to strategically trim the other two big budget items.
To your credit, the Department of Agriculture is the biggest of the "small fish" budget items.:)
What package(s) do I need to run "make xconfig" for 2.4.x under Debian? It never finds the right qt development files installed, no matter how hard I try:/ . Same goes for "make gconfig". I'm not brave enough to go through "make menuconfig"... I invariably miss a nested menu somewhere with important options. Can't find any docs that tell me what the prereqs are, and they apparently aren't caught by aptitude...
I track testing with the ability to pull from unstable on demand.
I have to admit that I'm not enough of a music fan to consider blowing over $100 on something that just plays music. But it would be cool to have it all with me everywhere I go. So far, I haven't seen any integrated small device that does it all, so I've found it cheapest to build everything around a laptop and lug around all the components in the bag:
$80 tri-band GSM/GPRS phone w/ bluetooth & IrDA. Right now I just use dialup, but eventually I'll add $20 a month for unlimited GPRS service (~120kbps?) from T-Mobile. I figure I'll get much more use out of this than their WiFi access, since I don't spend all that much time in Starbucks & airports.
$150 Quickcam Pro 4000 or whatever for laptops. Haven't bought this yet either, since I already have a normal digital camera ($200), as well as a firewire DV camcorder ($450).
So all this equipment fits in a bag together and pretty much lets me do whatever I need to do when I go somewhere, just about anywhere:
Check email / Slashdot from anywhere around the world with GSM/GPRS/WiFi coverage.
Find out where the hell I am, tell me where I'm going, and how to get to a good restaurant when I'm there
Take pictures & movies of what I'm doing. Haven't worked out video conferencing yet (no one to video conference to) but it's on the list.
oh yeah, play music / movies, both from my entire personal collection, or streaming from the internet
Have all of my Personal Organizer info with me, as well as work
...and if I'm not having enough fun where I am, I can play games.
I'd love it if someone made a small pocket device with all that functionality (PDA, GPS, GSM/GPRS, WiFi, good quality photo & movie camera, music player, & >20GB storage), but I just haven't seen it yet - only in bits and pieces. Until then, I'll likely just continue lugging my backpack around:P
Jamming is a solution, but simply being able to locate and reprimand people with cell phones would probably be better in the long run.
First of all, it's a sociological solution. If people know they can be detected, they would simply concentrate on following the "no cellphone" rule, rather than trying to be discreet or circumventing jamming mechanism (which would lead to a jamming/anti-jamming escalation).
The detector wouldn't have to be so complex (though it would certainly be tres cool to have a tricorder-like 3D spectrum analyzer). It could be as simple as a wand hooked up to an amplified speaker:P . With a little more work, you could probably tune them to the 2Ghz cell phone frequencies to increase their range and do some triangulation to cover a larger room, and put it on a public display so everyone could see who was violating the no cell phone rule, or forgot to turn them off, etc.
Hmm, I kinda miss Tribes II... haven't been able to get it to run without crashing my Linux box hard ever since I upgraded to the GATOS project's XFree86 4.3.0 release on my ATi Radeon 7500 AiW. I should probably bug them about that...
Same here. It seems like the more junk they add to a phone:
1) the heavier & bulkier it gets. They were just about to get to the size of a lapel pin that I could wear on my shoulder like a star trek insignia.
2) the more unstable it gets. There's nothing worse or more embarrassing than losing a call because your phone crashes. This happens even with relatively simple WAP phones, and all the time with the old VisorPhone I had.
3) the less electronics I would buy. If phones and PDAs were separate and cheaper, I'd upgrade one or the other twice as often.
Mobile phones should just be interfaces. My current phone was the cheapest I could find with GPRS, IR, and bluetooth. I can use it with my current Visor Pro & laptop with the IR interface, and I'll be able to use it even more with the bluetooth laptop I'm getting next.
Back when I used the VisorPhone, I was pretty much stuck with the stupid PDA browsers, even when I had a laptop along.
For all of the support for open source software at various state and national governments nowadays, I'm surprised I haven't heard about that many OSS voting systems. I realize some of the requirements are a bit tricky (anonymity vs. auditability), but has no one been able to come up with a strong, secure reference system built from standard OSS components?
I'd even say to go one step beyond and provide a continuously polling system that would enable a more direct "digital democracy". You wouldn't need to vote at a certain blockpoint. You could just log in your preference on the government server, and it would compute your influence on, say, budgeting for education vs. defense vs. infrastructure, or whether to declare war on someone or not. Having an "official" government polling system for these kinds of issues would do away with a lot of the biased media polls that we resort to for some silly reason today.
Just type something that looks like an address into google. At the top of the search results, it'll give you an option to map to that address using both mapquest and yahoo maps. Then you can open both of those links and just choose whichever one looks better for the particular address you're looking at.
Personally, I like mapquest better because it's relatively easy to get directions to/from a previously-mapped address. Also because it also creates Avantgo pages for you relatively easily (which I sync to my Visor from Linux using jpilot's malsync conduit). And also because you can map out long directions turn-by-turn.
Hughes (now owned by Boeing) does this to launch commercial satellites. Sea Launch is a sea-going launch platform that ferries the rocket out to the equator in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
In fact, Hughes / Boeing got into big trouble with the State Department for "exporting" too much technical information to the Chinese the last time they helped them launch a satellite using Sea Launch. Imagine that...
How does this compare to using virtual desktops? I'm a cheapskate, so rather than spend twice as much money for a 10% productivity improvement, can I get an 8% productivity improvement just by having different apps on different screens?
Heh, well, the longer they wait, the more chances that DVD, cable, OTA, and satellite won't need a standard media format anymore. A DVD player / set top box will simply be a programmable CPU w/ video out on some standard architecture. The media can/will be distributed with player code for whatever codec the media uses.
I can't imagine them playing the format upgrade game all that much longer, or they will be replaced by streaming video over the web once broadband gets ubiquitous enough. Which isn't really all that different of a scenario.
Slashdot Mirror
and aren't gay! Well, maybe moderately bi, but still....
But just think about it... violet is all the way up there on the upper end of the visible spectrum, the highest energy and yet just barely visible. Plus, the shade of deep, dark violet I like is often polished to a nice iridescent shine... think in the ballpark of #100010
My old college beater was a 2-door coupe and had the little "flip-out" rear side windows that I always kept open for ventilation. A nice side effect was that I could always hear traffic in my blind spot.
I always head check, but it was pretty invaluable having that kind of information always present. Hopefully the engineers can design it so it works passively using your car's audio speakers. Research with fighter pilots has shown that humans can place an audio signal projected somewhere around them to within 5-10 degrees, so it would make sense to use audio for extra proximity alerts. Sure it might be annoying at times, but that would only encourage people not to linger next to other cars, maintain safe following distance, get out of the way of cars tailgating behind them, etc.
There was a story a few months back (can't find it, though, too many other stories on wi-fi) where a guy covered an entire apartment block with two access points - one on each side of the building. Since Wi-fi works line-of-sight, if the tenants could see the access point from their windows, they can use it. I don't know what's across the street from your place, but you could mount it in a tree, power it from a street lamp or from an adjacent building, and use it as a repeater for one or more trunks you have set up to your internet connection inside.
Of course, this will just give people access... not necessarily good bandwidth since everyone has to share. But I imagine your internet connection is a smaller link than the Wi-fi anyway. This would be a good, cheap start... you wouldn't have to spend much wiring up the building (I don't really see you getting much further with only $7k). You can always spend the rest of the money on upgrades later.
Here's one of my forays into architectural design using Moray and POVRay. It took about a half day to do working off of graph paper blueprint sketches. Though it's not interactive, the visual quality (architectural composition aside :P ) is much cleaner than anything currently available in a game. VRML is a lot like the POV format, for the most part, so some tools should be able to convert from one to the other, allowing you to use VRML to make your designs interactive. Search around on Freshmeat and the like for tools that might be able to handle both formats...
Good luck, and have fun!
Right now Celestia by default only shows most of the stars in our arm of the Milky Way, plus two or three neighboring galaxies. Any reason why it couldn't be loaded up with the results of this survey at some point?
The original HLA spec (up to 1.3) as defined by the DoD was kind of nebulous, so much so that the industry groups had to create their own HLA spec that was actually practical/implementable/useful (IEEE 1516). This page provides a good overview on the differences.
Unfortunately, this kind of thing still starts in the military world. The DoD has been developing requirements for Network Centric Warfare (NCW). Basically turning warfare interfaces into a RTS game like StarCraft, C&C, complete with fog-of-war, semi-autonomous units, comm & data sharing, etc. On the technical side, this is manifesting itself as Command, Control, Communications, Computer, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (C4ISR) architecture. One of the first actual implementations is being worked in in the form of Future Combat Systems (FCS).
These are complex systems, so the DoD has been maturing development of modeling & simulation interoperability by making contractors adhere to High Level Architecture (HLA) so they can properly analyze these systems before deploying them. HLA basically provides a lot of the same data object registration, distribution, and interfaces that older tech like CORBA does, with extra simulation concepts.
These technologies are being commercialized under the buzzwords "Nework Centric Operations" (NCO) and "Network Enabled Operations" (NEO). Advocates usually point to well networked operations like Wal-mart, UPS, et al. as poster children for what could be done (automatic restocking, package tracking, load balancing & route optimization, etc.) with enough NEO infrastructure. A lot of the interchange standards (including C4ISR) are getting established through bodies like the OMG. Other than the interchange standards, there's not all that much new tech involved... maybe RFIDs and various other networking tech (grid/mesh networks, strong encryption/authentication, mobile IP, etc.). Most if it just involves looking at technology that already exists and figuring out how to piece it together to actually do something worthwhile.
Disclaimer: I work for one of the gov't contractors throwing all these buzzwords around.
Once this technology is proven, this could become a valuable electronic polling tool, not just an e-voting tool. People would be able to vote directly on important issues. Right now, people only elect officials, who look at unofficial news polls to see what the populace thinks, and then tries to act in a way that would get them re-elected. We can do better than this, the technology to accurately determine what every single person in the city/state/nation thinks on important issues just hasn't existed in the past.
Granted, the whole Diebold thing is grossly botched up, and is a major step backwards in terms of voting transparency.
"I do not need an iPod"
Actually, I admit that I'm not much of a music fan. And if I was, I would be humming/whistling my own tune. Try it out sometime, you might like it.
If you really think you need to have music in year ears everywhere you go, try blowing $50 on an MP3-CD player first before you think about spending serious dough on a music device:
Obligatory PA ref
As someone who's studied both, it seems very strange how much they borrow from one another, and yet most practicioners I've met from each field has been thoroughly ignorant of the other.
From one side, Systems Engineering is quite an old field, mostly championed by the government itself to attach "best practice" management processes to increase the viability of major complex construction projects (since a lot of civil engineering projects were failing at the time). It's basically the simple process of structured decomposition of a complicated problem into a variety of simple ones: problem analysis, requirements, specifications, functional/structural decomposition, building & assembling components, verifying that your system meets the specifications/requirements, and finally validating whether your system actually solves the problem. As systems get more complex, doing all the bookkeeping to keep track of those handfuls of tasks becomes an information management project in and of itself.
Software engineering came along, and suddenly they were going through major SW projects in 1-2 year cycles, instead of 10-20 year cycles for bridges, dams, buildings, etc. Needless to say, the SW engineers gained experience in full life cycle systems engineering of projects much more quickly than most of the old traditional SE's could build in an entire lifetime. This was both good and bad... As you may well be familiar with, we've raised our SW engineers to enjoy reconstructing things on their own from scratch, and to be somewhat resistant to doing the research on how other related projects / fields have fared in the past. As a result, they've rediscovered many of the SE fundamentals on their own, but at the same time, we're going through the same mistakes that had caused massive project failures in the past to do so.
Take a look at these three US Budget plots http://hairball.bumba
Four items far outweigh all of the others combined: SSA, Healthcare, Treasury (interest on national debt), and Defense. Everything else (including those items you mentioned) add up to diddly. SSA and Healthcare also show no signs of slowing down, and the baby boomers are just starting to retire.
I'm kind of surprised the Howard Dean campaign has't harped more on this data (which is from the White House budget & management administration itself). If the #1 & #2 things we spend on are SSA and Healthcare (they're listed separately from the rest of the our taxes on our W2's for chrissake), it seems like a doctor would be the kind a person we need to figure out how to trim them surgically without harming the programs as a whole. Then once those things are under control, we could use a good economist and maybe a general to strategically trim the other two big budget items.
To your credit, the Department of Agriculture is the biggest of the "small fish" budget items. :)
What package(s) do I need to run "make xconfig" for 2.4.x under Debian? It never finds the right qt development files installed, no matter how hard I try :/ . Same goes for "make gconfig". I'm not brave enough to go through "make menuconfig"... I invariably miss a nested menu somewhere with important options. Can't find any docs that tell me what the prereqs are, and they apparently aren't caught by aptitude...
I track testing with the ability to pull from unstable on demand.
- $1400 Dell laptop w/ NVidia 3D card, WiFi, bluetooth, IrDA, USB2.0, Firewire
- $150 Garmin GPS, plugs into serial port
- $80 tri-band GSM/GPRS phone w/ bluetooth & IrDA. Right now I just use dialup, but eventually I'll add $20 a month for unlimited GPRS service (~120kbps?) from T-Mobile. I figure I'll get much more use out of this than their WiFi access, since I don't spend all that much time in Starbucks & airports.
- $150 Quickcam Pro 4000 or whatever for laptops. Haven't bought this yet either, since I already have a normal digital camera ($200), as well as a firewire DV camcorder ($450).
So all this equipment fits in a bag together and pretty much lets me do whatever I need to do when I go somewhere, just about anywhere:- Check email / Slashdot from anywhere around the world with GSM/GPRS/WiFi coverage.
- Find out where the hell I am, tell me where I'm going, and how to get to a good restaurant when I'm there
- Take pictures & movies of what I'm doing. Haven't worked out video conferencing yet (no one to video conference to) but it's on the list.
- oh yeah, play music / movies, both from my entire personal collection, or streaming from the internet
- Have all of my Personal Organizer info with me, as well as work
- ...and if I'm not having enough fun where I am, I can play games.
I'd love it if someone made a small pocket device with all that functionality (PDA, GPS, GSM/GPRS, WiFi, good quality photo & movie camera, music player, & >20GB storage), but I just haven't seen it yet - only in bits and pieces. Until then, I'll likely just continue lugging my backpack aroundJamming is a solution, but simply being able to locate and reprimand people with cell phones would probably be better in the long run.
:P . With a little more work, you could probably tune them to the 2Ghz cell phone frequencies to increase their range and do some triangulation to cover a larger room, and put it on a public display so everyone could see who was violating the no cell phone rule, or forgot to turn them off, etc.
First of all, it's a sociological solution. If people know they can be detected, they would simply concentrate on following the "no cellphone" rule, rather than trying to be discreet or circumventing jamming mechanism (which would lead to a jamming/anti-jamming escalation).
The detector wouldn't have to be so complex (though it would certainly be tres cool to have a tricorder-like 3D spectrum analyzer). It could be as simple as a wand hooked up to an amplified speaker
a (kinder, gentler) Beowulf cluster of these!
Speaking of which, why hasn't anyone made an OpenMosix cluster-in-a-box yet?
"We need a bombadier!"
Hmm, I kinda miss Tribes II... haven't been able to get it to run without crashing my Linux box hard ever since I upgraded to the GATOS project's XFree86 4.3.0 release on my ATi Radeon 7500 AiW. I should probably bug them about that...
Same here. It seems like the more junk they add to a phone:
1) the heavier & bulkier it gets. They were just about to get to the size of a lapel pin that I could wear on my shoulder like a star trek insignia.
2) the more unstable it gets. There's nothing worse or more embarrassing than losing a call because your phone crashes. This happens even with relatively simple WAP phones, and all the time with the old VisorPhone I had.
3) the less electronics I would buy. If phones and PDAs were separate and cheaper, I'd upgrade one or the other twice as often.
Mobile phones should just be interfaces. My current phone was the cheapest I could find with GPRS, IR, and bluetooth. I can use it with my current Visor Pro & laptop with the IR interface, and I'll be able to use it even more with the bluetooth laptop I'm getting next.
Back when I used the VisorPhone, I was pretty much stuck with the stupid PDA browsers, even when I had a laptop along.
what about all of the airplane downings in the same area? What's that you say? It was only a movie? Oh
Now if only I could get DSL without having to pay Verizon for a full featured phone line :P
For all of the support for open source software at various state and national governments nowadays, I'm surprised I haven't heard about that many OSS voting systems. I realize some of the requirements are a bit tricky (anonymity vs. auditability), but has no one been able to come up with a strong, secure reference system built from standard OSS components?
I'd even say to go one step beyond and provide a continuously polling system that would enable a more direct "digital democracy". You wouldn't need to vote at a certain blockpoint. You could just log in your preference on the government server, and it would compute your influence on, say, budgeting for education vs. defense vs. infrastructure, or whether to declare war on someone or not. Having an "official" government polling system for these kinds of issues would do away with a lot of the biased media polls that we resort to for some silly reason today.
Just type something that looks like an address into google. At the top of the search results, it'll give you an option to map to that address using both mapquest and yahoo maps. Then you can open both of those links and just choose whichever one looks better for the particular address you're looking at.
Personally, I like mapquest better because it's relatively easy to get directions to/from a previously-mapped address. Also because it also creates Avantgo pages for you relatively easily (which I sync to my Visor from Linux using jpilot's malsync conduit). And also because you can map out long directions turn-by-turn.
In fact, Hughes / Boeing got into big trouble with the State Department for "exporting" too much technical information to the Chinese the last time they helped them launch a satellite using Sea Launch. Imagine that...
How does this compare to using virtual desktops? I'm a cheapskate, so rather than spend twice as much money for a 10% productivity improvement, can I get an 8% productivity improvement just by having different apps on different screens?
Heh, well, the longer they wait, the more chances that DVD, cable, OTA, and satellite won't need a standard media format anymore. A DVD player / set top box will simply be a programmable CPU w/ video out on some standard architecture. The media can/will be distributed with player code for whatever codec the media uses.
I can't imagine them playing the format upgrade game all that much longer, or they will be replaced by streaming video over the web once broadband gets ubiquitous enough. Which isn't really all that different of a scenario.