It seems convenient that MS would lose on an important issue that could hurt OS much more than MS.
While I love a conspiracy theory as much as anyone else on Slashdot, I seriously doubt Microsoft is making much of a calculated decision here against Open Software.
If the ruling is allowed to stand it will indeed hurt Open Software, but it will hurt Microsoft and hundreds of companies that rely on embedded media on their web sites a 1000 times more than any Open Source projects. Some companies such as WebEx may see their business model evaporate overnight if browsers can't display embedded mixed media content.
In the end, if Microsoft does acquiesce, the descision will be made on legal and financial grounds, not because they want to stick-it to Open Software. At least not in this case because even Microsoft will lose, and lose big.
The other night on The History Channel there was a show on the early history of Mission Control through the Apollo program. At one point they had a group of retired flight directors reflecting on the Apollo 1 accident and you could still see the impact the accident has on these men even today. Gene Kranz summarized how everyone at the time had "Go Fever". Despite clearly obvious problems with the capsule, crew training, safety issues, and a host of other nagging issues, nobody in management said time out -- let's slow down and make sure we are doing this right. There was enormous pressure to keep things on track for getting on the moon.
I'm not sure that what happened to Columbia could be traced back to "Go Fever" such as with Apollo 1. Instead, there seems to have been a pervasive attitude of not doing anything that would rock the boat and jeopardize future missions or schedules -- much of it being driven by the need to stay within extremely tight budgets. Something like a "We Can't Afford To Stop Fever".
With 20/20 hindsight, it seems clear that NASA should have done more to investigate impact damage to the wing as soon as it was first suspected. However, doing so would have involved an unplanned and potentially dangerous EVA that would have jeopardized the rest of the mission to look for damage that was only suspected. Then if the damage was confirmed, there would have been the arduous and budget breaking task of quickly launching a rescue shuttle before Columbia ran out of power, water and oxygen (I'm not sure how long consumables could have been stretched, but it would have been a repeat of the Apollo 13 ordeal). Finally, Columbia would have been abandoned in orbit until another expensive mission could be launched to repair the wing and resupply the shuttle with consumables -- if that was even possible. More likely, the abandoned Columbia would have been ditched in the ocean or an attempt made to bring it down remotely with the damaged wing -- either of which would have been a complete loss of the $3B shuttle.
I'm sure that had the astronauts been able to look out the window and see a gaping hole in the wing the rescue of Columbia would have been one of NASA's finest hours. However, given the don't rock the boat mentality, it was sadly easier to pretend nothing was wrong than to really look and live with the consequences of what would have been found.
Sadly, I have to agree with you. Since 1999 my company has gone through a succession of four different providers offering basic (not discount) DSL and/or T1 Internet connectivity to our offices. Each one either went out of business or withdrew from the market forcing us to find a new broadband provider.
In general, I would rate the services provided by these companies as extremely poor compared to the voice services provided by our local telco, PacBell/SBC, which keep our phone systems running reliably 24/7.
I would love to see more competition, but I'm growing weary of broadband companies that sucker customers to sign up for their service, but end up causing more hassle than their worth.
In instances where a company is offering Internet based services that both compete and replace traditional services, it makes sense that such a service would be subject to the same regulatory control as the competition. In this specific case, if you replace your residential phone service with Vonage VoIP service, it seems both reasonable and a matter of public safety that a call made to 911 from your residential phone connect you to local emergency services. As a valuable community service, 911 is funded by fees charged to local phone companies. It seems unreasonable for Vonage to escape paying 911 and related fees that it's regulated competitors can't avoid paying.
Minnesota's Public Utilities Commission does not seem to be overreaching in this case.
Where things get tricky are services that don't outright replace residential or business phone services, but offer a quasi-phone service such as the voice services now being offered as part of some instant message services. At what point do these unregulated services cross the line where they become subject to local public utility commission regulations.
I wish India the best of luck in reaching the moon with an unmanned vehicle in 2008. Very ambitious.
With more countries demonstrating prowess in space technology, perhaps it will finally motivate the U.S. to get off our asses, reinvigorate our space ambitions and do something more meaningful than driving a bus three times a year into low Earth orbit to a bloated and finicky station that doesn't seem to be doing much more than Skylab did 30 years ago.
I must be in a grumpy mood...
Re:Multi-Channel motion control
on
Mirror, Mirror
·
· Score: 1
And of course, 900 chrome-plated balls, which I'm not sure where to find.
I'm thinking chrome Christmas ornaments which are really cheap the week after Christmas. They come in other colors as well such as gold, green, blue and red.
I believe the fundamental question is not either Hubble or JWST, but rather can we do both? The JWST will observe infrared objects. Keeping a orbiting telescope capable of visible light observations is important because it could be another 30 or 40 years before a replacement is built and launched.
Also, the JWST itself a gamble. We will not have any ability to repair it should something go wrong nearly a million miles away at the Second Lagrange Point. Ditching the Hubble and putting all our eggs in one basket seems risky.
As for relatively inexpensive, I mean something that will cost less than two shuttle missions at cost of roughly $500M each -- assuming the shuttle is even flying.
Building a tele-operated robot for say, $200M to replace an astronaut and two expendable ferry missions for say $100M each to deliver upgraded equipment would be a relative bargain. The technology could even be applied to the JWST if something were to go wrong.
If the Hubble is going to be written off and dumped into the ocean anyway, it seems like this is an opportunity for some high-risk, but high-payoff gamble.
For instance, it could be used to justify the development of an orbital tele-operated robot that would extend the senses and limbs of a repair technician on Earth into low orbit.
Imagine a fairly light, solar powered, tele-operated robot launched into a parking orbit near the Hubble. New equipment and booster rockets could then be launched to the Hubble aboard a fairly low cost ferry rocket. The tele-operated robot would be activated by a remote operator to unpack the equipment from the supply ferry and re-supply the Hubble. Old equipment could be packed back into the ferry and dumped in the ocean. Aftewards, the tele-operated robot would return to it's parking orbit or if small enough simply cling to the side of the Hubble to wait for the next supply mission.
It would be an amazing feat of technology to remotely service a device as complex as the Hubble without actual human presence. This would eliminate the huge overhead incurred by minimizing risk to human life on such missions and conceivably dramatically drive down the cost for maintenance and repair. It would also set precedence for even more complex construction and repair projects using such robots in space close enough where radio propagation delays don't impede operation.
Coming up with a reasonably inexpensive way to keep the Hubble working for another 30 years would be a huge gift to Science, mankind and our children.
IBM planned on running a variant of CPM by Digital Research on their new 8088 based PC, but through a dramatic serious of screw-ups by the executives at Digital Research, IBM ended up choosing a CPM clone from Microsoft. The fact there was a functioning operating system and a stable of software (Wordstar, DBase, Supercalc, etc.) easily ported to the 8088 from the existing 8080/Z80 based CPM OS probably had more to do with the selection of the 8088 than anything else.
Ridiculous? Simply fscking amazing!!! I live in the San Francisco Bay Area and know how screwed up the California courts are at the local, state and federal level, but this takes the cake. Sheesh.
Unfortunately, we probably have to go through a lot more straw before breaking the back of the insanity caused by software patents.
Also, other makers of browsers and plug-ins may find themselves involved in litigation with Eolas very soon!
This is exactly what I'm afraid of. If Microsoft's fortunes in this matter don't change it may be a little embarassing and a bit painful to pay damages and license fees to Eolas, but it will surely be fatal to any other unfortunate victim caught in this sinister patent trap.
Also, if Microsoft does ultimately lose the appeal, one can be certain Microsoft will do everything in their power to be sure the heads of other infringers are served on a silver platter to Eolas with garnish on the side.
What's really sad is by losing the infringement case, Microsoft still wins big time. All other current and future browser competitors would be instantly eliminated as viable alternatives. Furthermore, the vast majority of the public wouldn't even notice or care thanks to the Microsoft monopoly on browsers.
"We believe the evidence will ultimately show that there was no infringement of any kind, and that the accused feature in our browser technology was developed by our own engineers based on preexisting Microsoft technology."
I'm not a big fan of Microsoft, but I think they have plenty of room to wiggle out of this one on appeal.
Microsoft's ActiveX plug-in technology, or whatever it's called today, is pretty much a direct descendent of OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) which allowed applications to be embedded within Word, Excel and any other GUI application that cared to implement the correct APIs. I'm fairly certain OLE and the enabling COM technology predates 1993 in some form or another. Embedding mini-applications within the context of a web browser hypertext document seems a pretty straightforward and obvious extension of embedding mini-applications within the context of other GUI based applications such as Word and Excel.
Within the actual patent there seem to be descriptions about the embedded application within the browser viewing data created by a remote server with computational power exceeding what is available to the browser or media terminal. Perhaps this is what differentiates browser plug-ins from standard application plug-ins, but even this seems like a direct and obvious extension of thin-client/server computing reaching back to the days of X Window terminals or before.
What amazes me are the legal hacks that Microsoft must have hired to royally botch this case. I can only imagine they were arrogant SOBs the jury couldn't wait to stick-it to when it came time for deliberation.
Perhaps I'm a little too trusting that the information would indeed be routed to NASA rather than the NSA. Besides, collecting information such as temperature, humidity, sunlight, CO2 concentrations, etc. is a bit diferent than snapping a hi-res photgraph every 5 minutes. Isn't it?
Re:Interesting technology
on
NASA's Sensor Web
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Sensor webs are not used so much for predicting weather as they are for inexpensively recording a fairly wide range of environmental conditions at a resolution (temporal, geographic, etc.) far greater than can be achieved by satellite monitoring.
For instance, a sensor web could be spread over a 100 square mile area around a waste dump to help determine the regional impact of high carbon dioxide concentrations and other gasses leaching into the surrounding environment on a seasonal basis.
Or, another type of sensor web could be setup in a metropolitan area to measure the impact of environmental pollution laws and programs before and after they are implemented. For instance, in the San Francisco Bay Area, does a "spare the air" marketing campaign have a material impact on air quality within a few hours of being broadcast? Or, would other types of campaigns to achieve the same goals be more effective. It seems that an appropriately configured sensor web could provide firm data to answer such difficult questions.
Predicting rain next week is a very small aspect to the overall benefit of developing low-cost, commodity sensors that can be deployed in the manner described in the article. The exciting part is the technology is standardized, inexpensive, redundant, and easy to configure to continuously measure the specific aspects of an environment at whatever resolution is required.
sensorweb@home anybody?
on
NASA's Sensor Web
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
This is pretty neat stuff. Perhaps NASA could sponsor a type of sensorweb@home project where these pods could be purchased at a fairly low cost by tech geeks around the world and deployed wherever -- like dandelion seeds spread into the wind. If it had an 802.11b transceiver and wasn't too expensive I would be willing to put such a pod on a post in my backyard, record it's location and let it communicate it's data over my wireless network to a central data repository on the Internet. Most pods would tend to be concentrated in populated areas, but surely many would find their ways into remote locations as well.
If such a sensorweb@home program were successful with 10,000's of pods deployed, a vast quantity of environmental data could be collected on a global scale at a relatively low cost. Such a global network could provide greater context for data captured by planned regional sensor webs or the data could be filtered to create virtual sensor webs for testing hypothesis without the effort and expense of deploying an actual sensor web.
Do others think that people would participate in such a project that would provide any direct benefit to the participants? Downloading and installing seti@home is one thing, actually purchasing and installing a sensor pod is another.
And who would want the damn thing to order another beer when you've had enough?
Well, this begs for a another invention of a belt that would measure the contents of your bladder (ultrasound?) to counteract the order for more beer. Therefore, when your glass is empty and your bladder is full, the waiter is no longer summoned to bring more beers.
I also agree. Life may of handed this kid a lemon, but he had the perfect opportunity to turn it into lemonade. Instead, he seems to be blowing it big time. He may feel embarassed for what he feels other people did to him by placing the video on the Internet, but he will feel much worse the day he realizes what he is doing to himself and the opportunity he is throwing away.
Unfortunately, I think the Firewire (i.Link) interface on this DVD is only for audio only, not video. It doesn't seem that this DVD player conforms to HAVI standards which would allow it to connect to a Mitsubishi Firewire enabled projection television for digital-to-digital transfer for the MPEG stream from the DVD player to the television.
I have a Firewire/HAVI enabled Mitsubishi rear projection television and would love to find a HAVI compliant DVD player. Unfortunately, I don't know of one yet -- not even from Mitsubishi.
I could be mistaken, but to pay by PayPal I believe that you just need the email of the person or business entity you want to send money to -- assuming they have a PayPal account.
It seems this device simply needs to collect the cash and credit the desired PayPal account with the cash collected. Therefore, with an email address and a transaction id as a comment, this device can convert PayPal into a cash transaction. Not too much punching in of information considering the convenience.
Trouble is it will stick in the mind of some people as being a cheap OS.
Just like in the early '70's when it got stuck in the mind of some people that Toyota, Datsun and Honda made cheap cars. Linux has to start somewhere and I being the cheap alternative isn't all that bad.
Thanks for providing additional information, but I still don't buy it. It just doesn't make sense that some USTR bureaucrat making a dumb mistake (particularly one that was so obvious and quickly rectified) could squash all efforts at developing a desktop version of TRON for the Japanese education market.
If this is indeed the true reason for TRON not succeeding as a desktop OS, it is a severe indictment of the Japanese being spineless in trade negotiations and having no confidence in homegrown software technology, rather than a valid criticism of American bullying. This flies in the face of the history of Japanese being very aggressive when it comes to trade negotiations. Particularly in the '80s when Japan seemed invincible as an technologic and economic power.
The second link you provided is indeed interesting. It may contain more of the truth regarding the failure of TRON as a desktop OS where it discusses the internal cultural barriers and prejudices TRON faced in Japan.
In any case, thanks for providing the information.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems convenient that MS would lose on an important issue that could hurt OS much more than MS.
While I love a conspiracy theory as much as anyone else on Slashdot, I seriously doubt Microsoft is making much of a calculated decision here against Open Software.
If the ruling is allowed to stand it will indeed hurt Open Software, but it will hurt Microsoft and hundreds of companies that rely on embedded media on their web sites a 1000 times more than any Open Source projects. Some companies such as WebEx may see their business model evaporate overnight if browsers can't display embedded mixed media content.
In the end, if Microsoft does acquiesce, the descision will be made on legal and financial grounds, not because they want to stick-it to Open Software. At least not in this case because even Microsoft will lose, and lose big.
The other night on The History Channel there was a show on the early history of Mission Control through the Apollo program. At one point they had a group of retired flight directors reflecting on the Apollo 1 accident and you could still see the impact the accident has on these men even today. Gene Kranz summarized how everyone at the time had "Go Fever". Despite clearly obvious problems with the capsule, crew training, safety issues, and a host of other nagging issues, nobody in management said time out -- let's slow down and make sure we are doing this right. There was enormous pressure to keep things on track for getting on the moon.
I'm not sure that what happened to Columbia could be traced back to "Go Fever" such as with Apollo 1. Instead, there seems to have been a pervasive attitude of not doing anything that would rock the boat and jeopardize future missions or schedules -- much of it being driven by the need to stay within extremely tight budgets. Something like a "We Can't Afford To Stop Fever".
With 20/20 hindsight, it seems clear that NASA should have done more to investigate impact damage to the wing as soon as it was first suspected. However, doing so would have involved an unplanned and potentially dangerous EVA that would have jeopardized the rest of the mission to look for damage that was only suspected. Then if the damage was confirmed, there would have been the arduous and budget breaking task of quickly launching a rescue shuttle before Columbia ran out of power, water and oxygen (I'm not sure how long consumables could have been stretched, but it would have been a repeat of the Apollo 13 ordeal). Finally, Columbia would have been abandoned in orbit until another expensive mission could be launched to repair the wing and resupply the shuttle with consumables -- if that was even possible. More likely, the abandoned Columbia would have been ditched in the ocean or an attempt made to bring it down remotely with the damaged wing -- either of which would have been a complete loss of the $3B shuttle.
I'm sure that had the astronauts been able to look out the window and see a gaping hole in the wing the rescue of Columbia would have been one of NASA's finest hours. However, given the don't rock the boat mentality, it was sadly easier to pretend nothing was wrong than to really look and live with the consequences of what would have been found.
Sadly, I have to agree with you. Since 1999 my company has gone through a succession of four different providers offering basic (not discount) DSL and/or T1 Internet connectivity to our offices. Each one either went out of business or withdrew from the market forcing us to find a new broadband provider.
In general, I would rate the services provided by these companies as extremely poor compared to the voice services provided by our local telco, PacBell/SBC, which keep our phone systems running reliably 24/7.
I would love to see more competition, but I'm growing weary of broadband companies that sucker customers to sign up for their service, but end up causing more hassle than their worth.
From the Vonage web site "Vonage is proud to offer 911 dialing. When you dial 911, your call is routed from the Vonage Digital Voice network to your local emergency service dispatcher."
In instances where a company is offering Internet based services that both compete and replace traditional services, it makes sense that such a service would be subject to the same regulatory control as the competition. In this specific case, if you replace your residential phone service with Vonage VoIP service, it seems both reasonable and a matter of public safety that a call made to 911 from your residential phone connect you to local emergency services. As a valuable community service, 911 is funded by fees charged to local phone companies. It seems unreasonable for Vonage to escape paying 911 and related fees that it's regulated competitors can't avoid paying.
Minnesota's Public Utilities Commission does not seem to be overreaching in this case.
Where things get tricky are services that don't outright replace residential or business phone services, but offer a quasi-phone service such as the voice services now being offered as part of some instant message services. At what point do these unregulated services cross the line where they become subject to local public utility commission regulations.
I wish India the best of luck in reaching the moon with an unmanned vehicle in 2008. Very ambitious.
With more countries demonstrating prowess in space technology, perhaps it will finally motivate the U.S. to get off our asses, reinvigorate our space ambitions and do something more meaningful than driving a bus three times a year into low Earth orbit to a bloated and finicky station that doesn't seem to be doing much more than Skylab did 30 years ago.
I must be in a grumpy mood...
And of course, 900 chrome-plated balls, which I'm not sure where to find.
I'm thinking chrome Christmas ornaments which are really cheap the week after Christmas. They come in other colors as well such as gold, green, blue and red.
I believe the fundamental question is not either Hubble or JWST, but rather can we do both? The JWST will observe infrared objects. Keeping a orbiting telescope capable of visible light observations is important because it could be another 30 or 40 years before a replacement is built and launched.
Also, the JWST itself a gamble. We will not have any ability to repair it should something go wrong nearly a million miles away at the Second Lagrange Point. Ditching the Hubble and putting all our eggs in one basket seems risky.
As for relatively inexpensive, I mean something that will cost less than two shuttle missions at cost of roughly $500M each -- assuming the shuttle is even flying.
Building a tele-operated robot for say, $200M to replace an astronaut and two expendable ferry missions for say $100M each to deliver upgraded equipment would be a relative bargain. The technology could even be applied to the JWST if something were to go wrong.
If the Hubble is going to be written off and dumped into the ocean anyway, it seems like this is an opportunity for some high-risk, but high-payoff gamble.
For instance, it could be used to justify the development of an orbital tele-operated robot that would extend the senses and limbs of a repair technician on Earth into low orbit.
Imagine a fairly light, solar powered, tele-operated robot launched into a parking orbit near the Hubble. New equipment and booster rockets could then be launched to the Hubble aboard a fairly low cost ferry rocket. The tele-operated robot would be activated by a remote operator to unpack the equipment from the supply ferry and re-supply the Hubble. Old equipment could be packed back into the ferry and dumped in the ocean. Aftewards, the tele-operated robot would return to it's parking orbit or if small enough simply cling to the side of the Hubble to wait for the next supply mission.
It would be an amazing feat of technology to remotely service a device as complex as the Hubble without actual human presence. This would eliminate the huge overhead incurred by minimizing risk to human life on such missions and conceivably dramatically drive down the cost for maintenance and repair. It would also set precedence for even more complex construction and repair projects using such robots in space close enough where radio propagation delays don't impede operation.
Coming up with a reasonably inexpensive way to keep the Hubble working for another 30 years would be a huge gift to Science, mankind and our children.
IBM planned on running a variant of CPM by Digital Research on their new 8088 based PC, but through a dramatic serious of screw-ups by the executives at Digital Research, IBM ended up choosing a CPM clone from Microsoft. The fact there was a functioning operating system and a stable of software (Wordstar, DBase, Supercalc, etc.) easily ported to the 8088 from the existing 8080/Z80 based CPM OS probably had more to do with the selection of the 8088 than anything else.
Screw the Roomba and RoboSweep, now here is the ultimate geek robot vacuum.
Ridiculous? Simply fscking amazing!!! I live in the San Francisco Bay Area and know how screwed up the California courts are at the local, state and federal level, but this takes the cake. Sheesh.
Unfortunately, we probably have to go through a lot more straw before breaking the back of the insanity caused by software patents.
Also, other makers of browsers and plug-ins may find themselves involved in litigation with Eolas very soon!
This is exactly what I'm afraid of. If Microsoft's fortunes in this matter don't change it may be a little embarassing and a bit painful to pay damages and license fees to Eolas, but it will surely be fatal to any other unfortunate victim caught in this sinister patent trap.
Also, if Microsoft does ultimately lose the appeal, one can be certain Microsoft will do everything in their power to be sure the heads of other infringers are served on a silver platter to Eolas with garnish on the side.
What's really sad is by losing the infringement case, Microsoft still wins big time. All other current and future browser competitors would be instantly eliminated as viable alternatives. Furthermore, the vast majority of the public wouldn't even notice or care thanks to the Microsoft monopoly on browsers.
!false == true
Huh? Perhaps more like...
false * 2 != true
"We believe the evidence will ultimately show that there was no infringement of any kind, and that the accused feature in our browser technology was developed by our own engineers based on preexisting Microsoft technology."
I'm not a big fan of Microsoft, but I think they have plenty of room to wiggle out of this one on appeal.
Microsoft's ActiveX plug-in technology, or whatever it's called today, is pretty much a direct descendent of OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) which allowed applications to be embedded within Word, Excel and any other GUI application that cared to implement the correct APIs. I'm fairly certain OLE and the enabling COM technology predates 1993 in some form or another. Embedding mini-applications within the context of a web browser hypertext document seems a pretty straightforward and obvious extension of embedding mini-applications within the context of other GUI based applications such as Word and Excel.
Within the actual patent there seem to be descriptions about the embedded application within the browser viewing data created by a remote server with computational power exceeding what is available to the browser or media terminal. Perhaps this is what differentiates browser plug-ins from standard application plug-ins, but even this seems like a direct and obvious extension of thin-client/server computing reaching back to the days of X Window terminals or before.
What amazes me are the legal hacks that Microsoft must have hired to royally botch this case. I can only imagine they were arrogant SOBs the jury couldn't wait to stick-it to when it came time for deliberation.
Microsoft = bad
Patents = bad
So is this good?
I forget where, but it has been said that two wrongs don't make a right, just even.
Perhaps I'm a little too trusting that the information would indeed be routed to NASA rather than the NSA. Besides, collecting information such as temperature, humidity, sunlight, CO2 concentrations, etc. is a bit diferent than snapping a hi-res photgraph every 5 minutes. Isn't it?
Sensor webs are not used so much for predicting weather as they are for inexpensively recording a fairly wide range of environmental conditions at a resolution (temporal, geographic, etc.) far greater than can be achieved by satellite monitoring.
For instance, a sensor web could be spread over a 100 square mile area around a waste dump to help determine the regional impact of high carbon dioxide concentrations and other gasses leaching into the surrounding environment on a seasonal basis.
Or, another type of sensor web could be setup in a metropolitan area to measure the impact of environmental pollution laws and programs before and after they are implemented. For instance, in the San Francisco Bay Area, does a "spare the air" marketing campaign have a material impact on air quality within a few hours of being broadcast? Or, would other types of campaigns to achieve the same goals be more effective. It seems that an appropriately configured sensor web could provide firm data to answer such difficult questions.
Predicting rain next week is a very small aspect to the overall benefit of developing low-cost, commodity sensors that can be deployed in the manner described in the article. The exciting part is the technology is standardized, inexpensive, redundant, and easy to configure to continuously measure the specific aspects of an environment at whatever resolution is required.
This is pretty neat stuff. Perhaps NASA could sponsor a type of sensorweb@home project where these pods could be purchased at a fairly low cost by tech geeks around the world and deployed wherever -- like dandelion seeds spread into the wind. If it had an 802.11b transceiver and wasn't too expensive I would be willing to put such a pod on a post in my backyard, record it's location and let it communicate it's data over my wireless network to a central data repository on the Internet. Most pods would tend to be concentrated in populated areas, but surely many would find their ways into remote locations as well.
If such a sensorweb@home program were successful with 10,000's of pods deployed, a vast quantity of environmental data could be collected on a global scale at a relatively low cost. Such a global network could provide greater context for data captured by planned regional sensor webs or the data could be filtered to create virtual sensor webs for testing hypothesis without the effort and expense of deploying an actual sensor web.
Do others think that people would participate in such a project that would provide any direct benefit to the participants? Downloading and installing seti@home is one thing, actually purchasing and installing a sensor pod is another.
And who would want the damn thing to order another beer when you've had enough?
Well, this begs for a another invention of a belt that would measure the contents of your bladder (ultrasound?) to counteract the order for more beer. Therefore, when your glass is empty and your bladder is full, the waiter is no longer summoned to bring more beers.
I also agree. Life may of handed this kid a lemon, but he had the perfect opportunity to turn it into lemonade. Instead, he seems to be blowing it big time. He may feel embarassed for what he feels other people did to him by placing the video on the Internet, but he will feel much worse the day he realizes what he is doing to himself and the opportunity he is throwing away.
Unfortunately, I think the Firewire (i.Link) interface on this DVD is only for audio only, not video. It doesn't seem that this DVD player conforms to HAVI standards which would allow it to connect to a Mitsubishi Firewire enabled projection television for digital-to-digital transfer for the MPEG stream from the DVD player to the television.
I have a Firewire/HAVI enabled Mitsubishi rear projection television and would love to find a HAVI compliant DVD player. Unfortunately, I don't know of one yet -- not even from Mitsubishi.
I could be mistaken, but to pay by PayPal I believe that you just need the email of the person or business entity you want to send money to -- assuming they have a PayPal account.
It seems this device simply needs to collect the cash and credit the desired PayPal account with the cash collected. Therefore, with an email address and a transaction id as a comment, this device can convert PayPal into a cash transaction. Not too much punching in of information considering the convenience.
Trouble is it will stick in the mind of some people as being a cheap OS.
Just like in the early '70's when it got stuck in the mind of some people that Toyota, Datsun and Honda made cheap cars. Linux has to start somewhere and I being the cheap alternative isn't all that bad.
Thanks for providing additional information, but I still don't buy it. It just doesn't make sense that some USTR bureaucrat making a dumb mistake (particularly one that was so obvious and quickly rectified) could squash all efforts at developing a desktop version of TRON for the Japanese education market.
If this is indeed the true reason for TRON not succeeding as a desktop OS, it is a severe indictment of the Japanese being spineless in trade negotiations and having no confidence in homegrown software technology, rather than a valid criticism of American bullying. This flies in the face of the history of Japanese being very aggressive when it comes to trade negotiations. Particularly in the '80s when Japan seemed invincible as an technologic and economic power.
The second link you provided is indeed interesting. It may contain more of the truth regarding the failure of TRON as a desktop OS where it discusses the internal cultural barriers and prejudices TRON faced in Japan.
In any case, thanks for providing the information.
Sounds dangerous, if safety is let slip. Could give commercial space flight a bad name.
Umm, are you talking about NASA or the X-Prize competition?