But if I order 25Kgs of potatoes, people realise that I'm accidentally making it a plural (25 kilos) and not asking someone to stream mashed potato to me
I'm guessing it was a simple slip of the fingers to indicate a plural, but it's always fun to get to play "Captain Pedantic"[1] for a day, isn't it (bigger grin!)
[1] There is no such character as Captain Pedantic, to the best of my knowledge, but I could be wrong! - General Comment, DFC and (cash) bar.
... no, my cell phone isn't sending multi-gigabytes, neither is the camera, so I've no idea what relevance that comment has. Bluetooth is fairly (very!) low bandwidth, but still an order of magnitude more than my cell phone can handle at the moment out to the network. UMTS/3G will change this, and perhaps there will be a Bluetooth2 by then (just like USB2.0 etc.)
Certainly putting 802.11[x] into my mobile phone and camera will let them talk to each other faster, but since that's not the bottle neck, and is HIGHER power consumption (and more likely to end up proprietary) I can wait for newer/better technology.
I think my digicam suggests using a/c power because serial comms cables require a fair bit of power which will provide a continual lower drain on alkaline batteries, not good for them. Some battery technologies are better for high current/short duration, others for low current/long duration.
"High Power" - my cell phone works fine with bluetooth, the guy sitting opposite me at work surfs the web with his Palm, bluetooth card and bluetooth cellphone, I'd suggest that any activity that can be done for several hours on small rechargeable batteries does not really come under the heading "High Power Consumption":-)
You can pick up a cheap *video* camera from x10.com, including a battery pack and a wireless transmitter, and a receiver that connects to your PC and sends the images in via USB, for far less than this Sony will cost, and you can add multiple cameras for not *that* much extra.
It even has the software to take still images and post them on the web!
And just looking at any X10 ad, they do their best to not actively say "set this up in your/someone else's bedroom" but the images they show and the words they do use certain suggest it to pervs like/m/e/ you!
I always found the writing speed of the old Mavicas (even the quad speed) make the saving time of pictures too slow, and the fact (I believe) that the maximum compressed size of an image was 1.44Mb (and usually stored much lower than that) limits the resolution. Of course my 1.3Mp camera saves SHQ at about 170Kb/pic so that would mean I could get around 8 pictures on a floppy, but if I went up to 4Mp, then we're looking at changing discs every two or three pictures... and even my old 1.3Mp camera will take 9 shots in a row and then write them to smart media. It would be nice if it could turn them into a GIF animation for the HTML though...... trying to remember the last time I used a floppy except to build a rescue disk... ummm, sometime last year I think. LANs, FTP, cable modems, CD burners and USB harddisks have replaced floppies for most things for me.
that would indeed be cool. The equivalent of beaming business cards between palm computers.
At plokta.con (another SF convention, but in the UK) we had a laptop hooked up to a projector with a multiformat digital card reader, and we each dropped whatever pictures we wanted to share on the laptop and after the closing ceremony (during the dead dog party) there was a continuous slide show of pictures from the convention...
Damn, you mean the mobile phone I have in my pocket with bluetooth on it needs to have unlimited power? I don't think so...... the point of bluetooth is low power consumption (and that's why it's short range). Yes it will use more battery, but my olympus digital camera already says in the instructions to use the mains adapter when using the serial lead to tranfer images... bluetooth at least is designed to work on batteries.
For some reason no matter how small I chop up the flash card, it won't transmit through my mobile phone...... I'm not getting at you, but there are so many people on here that think because _they_ don't have a use for bluetooth it must be useless for everyone... well, I have a bluetooth phone, and a camera that can talk to the phone would be great... and if I get a Palm or PocketPC with bluetooth (which is available) then I can take a dozen pictures and put the camera safely in my pocket/bag, pull out the palm, grab the pictures I want off the camera (no cables, no need for a flash reader on the palm), whip up a few webpages and then upload them using the T68i in my other pocket, all without cables. Sounds like a wonderful thing *for me*, your mileage will definitely vary.
It is a cable replacement for device to device connectivity, not a replacement for IP based comms.
It uses less power, spread spectrum technology and bluetooth devices include the software to "find" each other and to do the various transfers required. A NIC just sits there and requires compatible software on each end to use the ethernet link.
It is a replacement for the IR and serial cables on your PDA, the wired headsets for your mobile phone etc.
For large amounts of data transferred quickly, then just having a removeable microdrive will allow you to transfer 1Gig as fast as you can walk across the room!
If they put a wireless NIC in a mobile (and could get the power consumption to a sensible level) then we'd still need to get every NIC enabled device (PC etc.) to have the right software installed. With Bluetooth the right software is part of the spec.
The large ferris wheel in London doesn't stop, but it is only going at slow walking pace and there are people to assist wheelchair bound should they require it, but many "handicapped" people would push you under the train rather than accept that they "need your help".
Many airports have travelling walkways and I've seen all sorts of "uncoordinated" people on them (I've even bumped into a couple of them, which makes me wonder who is the more uncoordinated!)
Might as well say that blind people can't travel on the existing system... of course they can, you just have to make sure it is designed so that everyone (or as near as damn it) can travel safely and don't leave big gaps between cars for blind people to walk into etc. Flexible material to cover those gaps is used in many countries, but not in the UK...
Trevor Bayliss, the inventor of the FreePlay radio and thence of this invention, has been showing the shoe charging piezo stuff for several years now, but no one has actually marketed it yet... he has something that fits on the back of a shoe, you walk, it charges a battery that can be used for cellphones and laptops... he sees it as very useful for developing countries... like the original radio
... not directly on a public network in most cases, but inside a firewall or whatever.
A connected house has advantages... I get busy, I put the kettle on, in the old days it had a whistle to let me know it was boiling, nowadays it just shuts off and when I remember and come back it has cooled down again (tea must have freshly boiling water, really!) By having a home network, I can be watching TV or debugging an opensource app and a window will pop up to say "kettle boiling" or "your toast is burning" or "your back door just opened and here's a picture of the man in the black hood entering your den". I want to be able to program my VCR/PVR from my mobile phone/PDA on the drive home... I want to be able to switch on the heating 30 minutes before I get home no matter how late I work... I want to be able to go to bed and think "did I switch off the stove?" and be able to check it without going downstairs..... so there's no advantage in putting your toaster directly on the public internet, but having many devices accessible through some sort of firewall I would buy... and why the toaster? Well, if you're going to have it monitor for burnt toast and send an alert, might as well use a standard (tcp/ip) over wifi or whatever rather than another proprietary protocol (like Sony always loved, I have several bits of old Sony hifi, all with "control" sockets and all incompatible)
Yes, very annoying, however my strategy now is to buy the first disc when it comes out and enjoy it to the full, inviting friends around to watch it etc. and then as soon as the Special Edition comes out, I buy it, make sure it actually is a better edition, and then sell my old one second hand (like the people on amazon.com selling their original Princess Brides for 11.49-13.99), I'm sure I got my copy cheaper than that in Circuit City so getting 12 bucks back towards the cost of the new one means that it's basically cost me nothing to have a year or more of the first version, woo-hoo! And even if I lost 5-10 bucks on it, then that's the cost of how many movie tickets? And I've watched the movie how many times? If you sell on the old versions then getting to continually upgrade to better and better releases actually works well for me, your mileage may vary...
If you're using an external Midi keyboard, you've only got a 32Kbps serial link anyway, so USB is seriously overspec'd for sending/receiving Midi. If the soft synth is on the PC then it will be receiving MIDI (as it would from any other soundcard or MIDI interface) and outputing some sort of digitised audio (24bit/96Khz?) which USB seems well able to carry back to the external soundcard... and if the "soft synth" is playing soundfonts or similar in the sound card then again it is only sending "note on/note off" type messages, so much less data... of course SoundBlaster stuff has never been aimed at the professional musician but more at gamers and enthusiastic home users (which they freely admit) so I'm not expecting the quality of, say, Gina or an MOTU unit...
This may be a little difficult to explain, but let's give it a go
1) when you start you have a 1/3rd chance of being right (no problem there)
2) when you start two of the doors (at random) are losers (also no problem there)
3) once you pick a door, then at least one of the other two is definitely a loser (possibly both)
Initial probability
A:1/3rd B:1/3rd C:1/3rd
So at this point you have a 1/3rd chance of winning and a 2/3rds chance of losing, *and* one of the other doors is a definite loser but you don't know which one. So the actual odds at this point are (if you picked A)
A:1/3rd B&C:2/3rds
but at least one of B and C is a guaranteed loser... so the actual odds are
A:1/3rd B:0/3rds C:2/3rds
or
A:1/3rd B:2/3rds C:0/3rds
But you don't know which...
The bit that isn't intuitive to most of us is that the host's choice isn't random but depends on him/her knowing the winner isn't behind the door he opens.
So
state 1
A:1/3rd B:1/3rd C:1/3rd
pick one, leaves the odds of it being behind either of the other two doors as *2/3rds* (important point). At least one of the two doors in the 2/3rds is a loser, guaranteed, 100%, but you don't know which one, however the host does. This means that you've got a 1/3rd chance door (say door A), and the host has two doors, one of 0/3rds and one of 2/3rds. He shows you the 0/3rds door, this means he still has the 2/3rds and you still have the 1/3rds...
... or to put it another way, imaging a three-card monty set up (one queen, two aces, you have to find the queen). The person shuffles them and you put your money on one card, that's a 1-in-three chance, leaving a 2-in-three to the dealer. The dealer has two cards, at least one of which is definitely an ace. I know he's got an ace, you know he's got an ace, you don't know whether he's got two aces and you've won, but it's still a 1-in-three chance at this moment whether you've won or not, even knowing he's got an ace (he must have an ace, he's got two cards and there's only one queen). I think you'll agree that you've got a 1/3rd chance of winning at this point. The dealer now shows you that one of his cards is an ace, this does not change the odds at all since you picked 1-in-three for the queen and always knew he'd have at least one ace. If you were to pick randomly out of the two remaining cards it would seem to be 50/50 but that's throwing away the history... you know that when you started you had a 1/3rd chance and he had 2/3rds that a single card in his hand would be the queen. By throwing away the ace, he's concentrated that 2/3rds into a single card, so you've got a 1/3rd chance (what you started with) and he's got a 2/3rds chance, so you switch cards!
Think about the betting on that. You pick a card out of the three and you bet that you've got the right card, you'd want to get 3 dollars back for your one dollar stake to break even over enough games. You know that he's got at least one loser in his hand at this point. He shows you that loser, do you now feel that your initial choice has somehow become more likely? I don't, I always knew that one of his two cards was a definite loser and him showing it to me hasn't changed that, what I don't know is if I picked the right card to start with (1/3rd chance) or if the remaining card in his hand is the winner
Slashdot Mirror
But if I order 25Kgs of potatoes, people realise that I'm accidentally making it a plural (25 kilos) and not asking someone to stream mashed potato to me
I'm guessing it was a simple slip of the fingers to indicate a plural, but it's always fun to get to play "Captain Pedantic"[1] for a day, isn't it (bigger grin!)
[1] There is no such character as Captain Pedantic, to the best of my knowledge, but I could be wrong! - General Comment, DFC and (cash) bar.
... no, my cell phone isn't sending multi-gigabytes, neither is the camera, so I've no idea what relevance that comment has. Bluetooth is fairly (very!) low bandwidth, but still an order of magnitude more than my cell phone can handle at the moment out to the network. UMTS/3G will change this, and perhaps there will be a Bluetooth2 by then (just like USB2.0 etc.)
:-)
Certainly putting 802.11[x] into my mobile phone and camera will let them talk to each other faster, but since that's not the bottle neck, and is HIGHER power consumption (and more likely to end up proprietary) I can wait for newer/better technology.
I think my digicam suggests using a/c power because serial comms cables require a fair bit of power which will provide a continual lower drain on alkaline batteries, not good for them. Some battery technologies are better for high current/short duration, others for low current/long duration.
"High Power" - my cell phone works fine with bluetooth, the guy sitting opposite me at work surfs the web with his Palm, bluetooth card and bluetooth cellphone, I'd suggest that any activity that can be done for several hours on small rechargeable batteries does not really come under the heading "High Power Consumption"
You can pick up a cheap *video* camera from x10.com, including a battery pack and a wireless transmitter, and a receiver that connects to your PC and sends the images in via USB, for far less than this Sony will cost, and you can add multiple cameras for not *that* much extra.
/m/e/ you!
It even has the software to take still images and post them on the web!
And just looking at any X10 ad, they do their best to not actively say "set this up in your/someone else's bedroom" but the images they show and the words they do use certain suggest it to pervs like
I always found the writing speed of the old Mavicas (even the quad speed) make the saving time of pictures too slow, and the fact (I believe) that the maximum compressed size of an image was 1.44Mb (and usually stored much lower than that) limits the resolution. Of course my 1.3Mp camera saves SHQ at about 170Kb/pic so that would mean I could get around 8 pictures on a floppy, but if I went up to 4Mp, then we're looking at changing discs every two or three pictures ... and even my old 1.3Mp camera will take 9 shots in a row and then write them to smart media. It would be nice if it could turn them into a GIF animation for the HTML though ... ... trying to remember the last time I used a floppy except to build a rescue disk ... ummm, sometime last year I think. LANs, FTP, cable modems, CD burners and USB harddisks have replaced floppies for most things for me.
that would indeed be cool. The equivalent of beaming business cards between palm computers.
...
At plokta.con (another SF convention, but in the UK) we had a laptop hooked up to a projector with a multiformat digital card reader, and we each dropped whatever pictures we wanted to share on the laptop and after the closing ceremony (during the dead dog party) there was a continuous slide show of pictures from the convention
Damn, you mean the mobile phone I have in my pocket with bluetooth on it needs to have unlimited power? I don't think so ... ... the point of bluetooth is low power consumption (and that's why it's short range). Yes it will use more battery, but my olympus digital camera already says in the instructions to use the mains adapter when using the serial lead to tranfer images ... bluetooth at least is designed to work on batteries.
For some reason no matter how small I chop up the flash card, it won't transmit through my mobile phone ... ... I'm not getting at you, but there are so many people on here that think because _they_ don't have a use for bluetooth it must be useless for everyone ... well, I have a bluetooth phone, and a camera that can talk to the phone would be great ... and if I get a Palm or PocketPC with bluetooth (which is available) then I can take a dozen pictures and put the camera safely in my pocket/bag, pull out the palm, grab the pictures I want off the camera (no cables, no need for a flash reader on the palm), whip up a few webpages and then upload them using the T68i in my other pocket, all without cables. Sounds like a wonderful thing *for me*, your mileage will definitely vary.
It is a cable replacement for device to device connectivity, not a replacement for IP based comms.
It uses less power, spread spectrum technology and bluetooth devices include the software to "find" each other and to do the various transfers required. A NIC just sits there and requires compatible software on each end to use the ethernet link.
It is a replacement for the IR and serial cables on your PDA, the wired headsets for your mobile phone etc.
For large amounts of data transferred quickly, then just having a removeable microdrive will allow you to transfer 1Gig as fast as you can walk across the room!
If they put a wireless NIC in a mobile (and could get the power consumption to a sensible level) then we'd still need to get every NIC enabled device (PC etc.) to have the right software installed. With Bluetooth the right software is part of the spec.
I already have a T68i, the cameras cost something like one hundred GBP (150 dollars) ... getting the camera for free would be great!
... it's a tough life!
Now I have to go hang around bars and wait to find a model/actress playing games
The large ferris wheel in London doesn't stop, but it is only going at slow walking pace and there are people to assist wheelchair bound should they require it, but many "handicapped" people would push you under the train rather than accept that they "need your help".
... of course they can, you just have to make sure it is designed so that everyone (or as near as damn it) can travel safely and don't leave big gaps between cars for blind people to walk into etc. Flexible material to cover those gaps is used in many countries, but not in the UK ...
Many airports have travelling walkways and I've seen all sorts of "uncoordinated" people on them (I've even bumped into a couple of them, which makes me wonder who is the more uncoordinated!)
Might as well say that blind people can't travel on the existing system
Trevor Bayliss, the inventor of the FreePlay radio and thence of this invention, has been showing the shoe charging piezo stuff for several years now, but no one has actually marketed it yet ... he has something that fits on the back of a shoe, you walk, it charges a battery that can be used for cellphones and laptops ... he sees it as very useful for developing countries ... like the original radio
... not directly on a public network in most cases, but inside a firewall or whatever.
... I get busy, I put the kettle on, in the old days it had a whistle to let me know it was boiling, nowadays it just shuts off and when I remember and come back it has cooled down again (tea must have freshly boiling water, really!) By having a home network, I can be watching TV or debugging an opensource app and a window will pop up to say "kettle boiling" or "your toast is burning" or "your back door just opened and here's a picture of the man in the black hood entering your den". I want to be able to program my VCR/PVR from my mobile phone/PDA on the drive home ... I want to be able to switch on the heating 30 minutes before I get home no matter how late I work ... I want to be able to go to bed and think "did I switch off the stove?" and be able to check it without going downstairs .. ... so there's no advantage in putting your toaster directly on the public internet, but having many devices accessible through some sort of firewall I would buy ... and why the toaster? Well, if you're going to have it monitor for burnt toast and send an alert, might as well use a standard (tcp/ip) over wifi or whatever rather than another proprietary protocol (like Sony always loved, I have several bits of old Sony hifi, all with "control" sockets and all incompatible)
A connected house has advantages
Yes, very annoying, however my strategy now is to buy the first disc when it comes out and enjoy it to the full, inviting friends around to watch it etc. and then as soon as the Special Edition comes out, I buy it, make sure it actually is a better edition, and then sell my old one second hand (like the people on amazon.com selling their original Princess Brides for 11.49-13.99), I'm sure I got my copy cheaper than that in Circuit City so getting 12 bucks back towards the cost of the new one means that it's basically cost me nothing to have a year or more of the first version, woo-hoo! And even if I lost 5-10 bucks on it, then that's the cost of how many movie tickets? And I've watched the movie how many times? If you sell on the old versions then getting to continually upgrade to better and better releases actually works well for me, your mileage may vary...
If you're using an external Midi keyboard, you've only got a 32Kbps serial link anyway, so USB is seriously overspec'd for sending/receiving Midi. If the soft synth is on the PC then it will be receiving MIDI (as it would from any other soundcard or MIDI interface) and outputing some sort of digitised audio (24bit/96Khz?) which USB seems well able to carry back to the external soundcard ... and if the "soft synth" is playing soundfonts or similar in the sound card then again it is only sending "note on/note off" type messages, so much less data ... of course SoundBlaster stuff has never been aimed at the professional musician but more at gamers and enthusiastic home users (which they freely admit) so I'm not expecting the quality of, say, Gina or an MOTU unit ...
This may be a little difficult to explain, but let's give it a go
... so the actual odds are
...
...
... you know that when you started you had a 1/3rd chance and he had 2/3rds that a single card in his hand would be the queen. By throwing away the ace, he's concentrated that 2/3rds into a single card, so you've got a 1/3rd chance (what you started with) and he's got a 2/3rds chance, so you switch cards!
1) when you start you have a 1/3rd chance of being right (no problem there)
2) when you start two of the doors (at random) are losers (also no problem there)
3) once you pick a door, then at least one of the other two is definitely a loser (possibly both)
Initial probability
A:1/3rd B:1/3rd C:1/3rd
So at this point you have a 1/3rd chance of winning and a 2/3rds chance of losing, *and* one of the other doors is a definite loser but you don't know which one. So the actual odds at this point are (if you picked A)
A:1/3rd B&C:2/3rds
but at least one of B and C is a guaranteed loser
A:1/3rd B:0/3rds C:2/3rds
or
A:1/3rd B:2/3rds C:0/3rds
But you don't know which
The bit that isn't intuitive to most of us is that the host's choice isn't random but depends on him/her knowing the winner isn't behind the door he opens.
So
state 1
A:1/3rd B:1/3rd C:1/3rd
pick one, leaves the odds of it being behind either of the other two doors as *2/3rds* (important point). At least one of the two doors in the 2/3rds is a loser, guaranteed, 100%, but you don't know which one, however the host does. This means that you've got a 1/3rd chance door (say door A), and the host has two doors, one of 0/3rds and one of 2/3rds. He shows you the 0/3rds door, this means he still has the 2/3rds and you still have the 1/3rds
... or to put it another way, imaging a three-card monty set up (one queen, two aces, you have to find the queen). The person shuffles them and you put your money on one card, that's a 1-in-three chance, leaving a 2-in-three to the dealer. The dealer has two cards, at least one of which is definitely an ace. I know he's got an ace, you know he's got an ace, you don't know whether he's got two aces and you've won, but it's still a 1-in-three chance at this moment whether you've won or not, even knowing he's got an ace (he must have an ace, he's got two cards and there's only one queen). I think you'll agree that you've got a 1/3rd chance of winning at this point. The dealer now shows you that one of his cards is an ace, this does not change the odds at all since you picked 1-in-three for the queen and always knew he'd have at least one ace. If you were to pick randomly out of the two remaining cards it would seem to be 50/50 but that's throwing away the history
Think about the betting on that. You pick a card out of the three and you bet that you've got the right card, you'd want to get 3 dollars back for your one dollar stake to break even over enough games. You know that he's got at least one loser in his hand at this point. He shows you that loser, do you now feel that your initial choice has somehow become more likely? I don't, I always knew that one of his two cards was a definite loser and him showing it to me hasn't changed that, what I don't know is if I picked the right card to start with (1/3rd chance) or if the remaining card in his hand is the winner
Did that help?