Multicasting would be great for that, if it were routed on the internet. As it is, multicasting is still useful for things like routing protocols and internal projects, but out on the internet you're pretty much stuck unicasting.
I use my Tivo with the Fios TV, but I have to use the IR blaster because Verizon was evil and disabled the Anynet serial port on the back of their box for no good reason. IR blasters suck (there was one revision of the Tivo software that was terrible about messing up channel changes), but it gets the job done.
You are probably thinking of the Bandwidth Delay Product, but if that's a problem you can usually tweak your stack get better performance. Typically, fast hosts are also lower latency on the internet, so it's not a huge problem. Hosts with high latency are almost always slow anyway.
The FIOS installation guy said the batteries are rated for 5-10 years. When they fail they are supposed to send a message back to Verizon. Verizon will then apparently mail you a replacement battery and you just replace it. I was an early adopter so I'm not sure that's true anymore though. If the box outside fails I call Verizon and they come out and replace it, just like my old junction box. The reliability has not been an issue with it yet so I can't really add any more to that. The reliability of the box is really Verizon's problem, not mine.
In the DC Area I'm able to get a 30/5 FiOS package for I think $65/month now (it used to be $55, but they jacked the prices up a couple of months ago). Most areas are stuck with 5/2 service though last I heard. The good news is that I get all of that bandwidth as far as I can tell, the bad news is that it still uses PPPoE for some reason.
I think the whole Hot Coffee affair has shown that you can be successfully sued for modifications made to your product by people outside of your control.
Ditto. I still use my SB Live! Value card from way back when they were new. Some day I'll upgrade to a 5.1 or better system, but since I'm still using my speakers from 1995 it doesn't really matter. I figure I'll use it until I can't get a PCI slot anymore (probably only a couple of years off at this point).
According to the TFA yes, there is apparently Live! support in at least one version of his drivers--that may not be available from him anymore, but since this is the internet you can be sure they'll appear elsewhere.
Yeah, $146 in donations is a non-issue. The issue is more likely that Creative either has a business plan that involves making people buy new cards when they go to Vista (cards that don't exist yet mind you) or because they have some sort of contractual obligation to break features like that for DRM purposes on Vista. The court cases have been pretty clear that companies can be sued for third party modifications that are outside of their control (See: Hot Coffee mod). It's entirely possible that if Creative didn't take this route they could be sued indirectly by the MPAA for giving people a method that can theoretically bypass some DRM in Vista.
DooM supported SB16, I don't know about Commander Keen. As I recall Id used a third party sound library for DooM anyway. That sound driver turned out to be a real pain in the rear later on when Carmack decided to release the source to DooM, and they clearly learned their lesson with Quake where they developed their own sound support instead.
Not supporting Soundblaster back in the DooM era would be like releasing a computer game today that refuses to run with an nVidia or ATI graphics card.
I thought they must be under some sort of contract restrictions with Microsoft (who is under restrictions from the media companies) that has harsh legal fines for enabling things like that. That's the only sane reason I can think of that Creative would do something like sue a guy who was pretty much fixing their drivers for free. Likely part of the contract is that they're not allowed to speak publicly about the restrictions in it, nor are they allowed to let third parties bypass them.
Or they are just lawsuit happy jerks. That is a nonzero possibility as well. I thought it was funny that the Creative exec was basically saying "It's our right to release broken drivers if we want to". Clearly Creative knows a lot about broken drivers.
"Shaved off a little cost" is probably not a good way to characterize it if the comparisons between IPS and TN screens I've seen hold true. Apple probably saved quite a bundle on those displays.
Shorter response times aren't pointless on gaming displays. Displays with longer transition times look fuzzy (smudge) when there is motion on the screen. For photo processing this isn't a problem, but for gamers it's very annoying (their world becomes fuzzy as they move around, only becoming crisp again when they stop).
No, that would be useful. That's not what CS proofs entail. It's more like proving rigorously that function x will always be larger than function y for all positive integers. Or that there is a solution for f(x) for all possible real values of x. Validating inputs has nothing to do with it, even though it kinda sounds similar on the surface.
Heh, I know you're exaggerating for effect, but it seems to me that a great many CS programs are in fact training kids to be CS professors (I guess professors in general tend to teach what they know) instead of instilling lots of job skills that would be useful in the real world. I spent half of my senior year in college learning different ways to prove algorithms correct. In my job, I have never been asked to make a single inductive proof or any kind of proof. I doubt many people do in the real world (it's wildly difficult to do for non-trivial problems and doesn't really mean much of anything most of the time). A lot of the skills I learned are great for writing an academic paper, but pretty much useless for architecting a large project.
I thought Java was designed to be run on set top boxes and other such environments. It wasn't until later that it was released as a general purpose language.
I've thought that the Red Ring of Death has turned out to be a fairly effective way of discouraging people from installing modchips. If you know you're going to have to send your console back to Microsoft at some point for repair, it's suddenly a lot more expensive to install a warentee voiding modchip.
I also don't see why it's so evil to have Google sell its appliance to Government customers. As for needing a special "government guy", anybody who works in the industry will tell you that no matter what it is, the Government does it differently. Hiring a guy (or team of people) who know how to handle the Government is practically a necessity if you want to make sales like this.
No, but it requires a high power receiver. GPS signals are some of the weakest ones you can actually use with consumer gear and it takes a lot of work (battery power) to get them.
Worse, because GPS signals require so much work to read, receivers typically require several minutes to achieve a usable result from a cold start, so the option of leaving it off for the 99% of the time you're not using it is less appealing because staring at a busy cursor on your phone for 5 minutes sucks when you just want some quick directions.
That said, cell tower location approximation systems are pretty lame. I tried using one on my phone and in some areas (dense urban areas) it would do ok, mostly, but once you got out into the burbs your error bars start expanding rapidly. It's not completely useless (you can find the street name you're on and only have to look in the circle on your phone most likely), but compared to a real live GPS system it's rather unsatisfying.
Actually, ailerons were a French invention (hence the French word) that predated the Wright flyer by several years. The Wrights however did not use ailerons (which were a poor choice on the flimsy wire and cloth designs used in the day anyway, as the wing would tend to flex in the opposite direction when the ailerons were used). The Wrights used a wing warping system instead. The Wrights weren't the first to get up in the air with a heavier than air craft, but they were the first to understand that control was the most important aspect of the whole thing. The Wright flyer was considered the first modern aircraft because it was the first that could fly without crashing (a vast improvement over all of the guys before them). Their aircraft had plenty of other problems (poor yaw control at low speed because the elevators were in front of the engine for one, not enough power to take off without catapult assistance or a headwind), but they got it right where it mattered, in keeping the plane controllable in the air and able to be landed safely.
There is an anecdote of the Wrights taking a ship over to France to show off their invention to the French aeronautical society. They set the flyer up, took off, make one perfect circle around the field, and then landed again. The head of the French society wrote "Gentlemen, we have been beaten", but this inspired the members of the club to try even harder to get their designs working.
Hunt and peck typing doesn't need tactile feedback because you're looking at the keys anyway. The downside is that hunt and peck is slow (I don't need to hear about that one guy in the office who hunts and pecks at 130 wpm, he's an exception, not the rule).
Apparently in the future the idea of tactile feedback is dead and everybody just types on glass screens like in the movies. Presumably these laptop designers have not actually tried that themselves to see just how much people actually like typing on a piece of glass with no cues at to where the keys are.
Talking about audio fidelity in a car stereo is mostly pointless though, all of the small details you get from a high quality home audio system would be totally lost in a car with the road/wind/other vehicle noise around you. The noise floor is just too high in a car.
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Anyway, I only have 2 complaints with FiOS:
Multicasting would be great for that, if it were routed on the internet. As it is, multicasting is still useful for things like routing protocols and internal projects, but out on the internet you're pretty much stuck unicasting.
I use my Tivo with the Fios TV, but I have to use the IR blaster because Verizon was evil and disabled the Anynet serial port on the back of their box for no good reason. IR blasters suck (there was one revision of the Tivo software that was terrible about messing up channel changes), but it gets the job done.
You are probably thinking of the Bandwidth Delay Product, but if that's a problem you can usually tweak your stack get better performance. Typically, fast hosts are also lower latency on the internet, so it's not a huge problem. Hosts with high latency are almost always slow anyway.
The FIOS installation guy said the batteries are rated for 5-10 years. When they fail they are supposed to send a message back to Verizon. Verizon will then apparently mail you a replacement battery and you just replace it. I was an early adopter so I'm not sure that's true anymore though. If the box outside fails I call Verizon and they come out and replace it, just like my old junction box. The reliability has not been an issue with it yet so I can't really add any more to that. The reliability of the box is really Verizon's problem, not mine.
In the DC Area I'm able to get a 30/5 FiOS package for I think $65/month now (it used to be $55, but they jacked the prices up a couple of months ago). Most areas are stuck with 5/2 service though last I heard. The good news is that I get all of that bandwidth as far as I can tell, the bad news is that it still uses PPPoE for some reason.
I think the whole Hot Coffee affair has shown that you can be successfully sued for modifications made to your product by people outside of your control.
Ditto. I still use my SB Live! Value card from way back when they were new. Some day I'll upgrade to a 5.1 or better system, but since I'm still using my speakers from 1995 it doesn't really matter. I figure I'll use it until I can't get a PCI slot anymore (probably only a couple of years off at this point).
According to the TFA yes, there is apparently Live! support in at least one version of his drivers--that may not be available from him anymore, but since this is the internet you can be sure they'll appear elsewhere.
Yeah, $146 in donations is a non-issue. The issue is more likely that Creative either has a business plan that involves making people buy new cards when they go to Vista (cards that don't exist yet mind you) or because they have some sort of contractual obligation to break features like that for DRM purposes on Vista. The court cases have been pretty clear that companies can be sued for third party modifications that are outside of their control (See: Hot Coffee mod). It's entirely possible that if Creative didn't take this route they could be sued indirectly by the MPAA for giving people a method that can theoretically bypass some DRM in Vista.
DooM supported SB16, I don't know about Commander Keen. As I recall Id used a third party sound library for DooM anyway. That sound driver turned out to be a real pain in the rear later on when Carmack decided to release the source to DooM, and they clearly learned their lesson with Quake where they developed their own sound support instead.
Not supporting Soundblaster back in the DooM era would be like releasing a computer game today that refuses to run with an nVidia or ATI graphics card.
I thought they must be under some sort of contract restrictions with Microsoft (who is under restrictions from the media companies) that has harsh legal fines for enabling things like that. That's the only sane reason I can think of that Creative would do something like sue a guy who was pretty much fixing their drivers for free. Likely part of the contract is that they're not allowed to speak publicly about the restrictions in it, nor are they allowed to let third parties bypass them.
Or they are just lawsuit happy jerks. That is a nonzero possibility as well. I thought it was funny that the Creative exec was basically saying "It's our right to release broken drivers if we want to". Clearly Creative knows a lot about broken drivers.
"Shaved off a little cost" is probably not a good way to characterize it if the comparisons between IPS and TN screens I've seen hold true. Apple probably saved quite a bundle on those displays.
Uh, what? I know you're saying that a 9 pin RS-232 is not serial, but what the hell is it then?
You aren't perchance talking about a HD15 connector (15 pins!) that used to be used frequently for monitors before DVI took over?
Shorter response times aren't pointless on gaming displays. Displays with longer transition times look fuzzy (smudge) when there is motion on the screen. For photo processing this isn't a problem, but for gamers it's very annoying (their world becomes fuzzy as they move around, only becoming crisp again when they stop).
No, that would be useful. That's not what CS proofs entail. It's more like proving rigorously that function x will always be larger than function y for all positive integers. Or that there is a solution for f(x) for all possible real values of x. Validating inputs has nothing to do with it, even though it kinda sounds similar on the surface.
Heh, I know you're exaggerating for effect, but it seems to me that a great many CS programs are in fact training kids to be CS professors (I guess professors in general tend to teach what they know) instead of instilling lots of job skills that would be useful in the real world. I spent half of my senior year in college learning different ways to prove algorithms correct. In my job, I have never been asked to make a single inductive proof or any kind of proof. I doubt many people do in the real world (it's wildly difficult to do for non-trivial problems and doesn't really mean much of anything most of the time). A lot of the skills I learned are great for writing an academic paper, but pretty much useless for architecting a large project.
I thought Java was designed to be run on set top boxes and other such environments. It wasn't until later that it was released as a general purpose language.
I've thought that the Red Ring of Death has turned out to be a fairly effective way of discouraging people from installing modchips. If you know you're going to have to send your console back to Microsoft at some point for repair, it's suddenly a lot more expensive to install a warentee voiding modchip.
I also don't see why it's so evil to have Google sell its appliance to Government customers. As for needing a special "government guy", anybody who works in the industry will tell you that no matter what it is, the Government does it differently. Hiring a guy (or team of people) who know how to handle the Government is practically a necessity if you want to make sales like this.
No, but it requires a high power receiver. GPS signals are some of the weakest ones you can actually use with consumer gear and it takes a lot of work (battery power) to get them.
Worse, because GPS signals require so much work to read, receivers typically require several minutes to achieve a usable result from a cold start, so the option of leaving it off for the 99% of the time you're not using it is less appealing because staring at a busy cursor on your phone for 5 minutes sucks when you just want some quick directions.
That said, cell tower location approximation systems are pretty lame. I tried using one on my phone and in some areas (dense urban areas) it would do ok, mostly, but once you got out into the burbs your error bars start expanding rapidly. It's not completely useless (you can find the street name you're on and only have to look in the circle on your phone most likely), but compared to a real live GPS system it's rather unsatisfying.
Actually, ailerons were a French invention (hence the French word) that predated the Wright flyer by several years. The Wrights however did not use ailerons (which were a poor choice on the flimsy wire and cloth designs used in the day anyway, as the wing would tend to flex in the opposite direction when the ailerons were used). The Wrights used a wing warping system instead. The Wrights weren't the first to get up in the air with a heavier than air craft, but they were the first to understand that control was the most important aspect of the whole thing. The Wright flyer was considered the first modern aircraft because it was the first that could fly without crashing (a vast improvement over all of the guys before them). Their aircraft had plenty of other problems (poor yaw control at low speed because the elevators were in front of the engine for one, not enough power to take off without catapult assistance or a headwind), but they got it right where it mattered, in keeping the plane controllable in the air and able to be landed safely.
There is an anecdote of the Wrights taking a ship over to France to show off their invention to the French aeronautical society. They set the flyer up, took off, make one perfect circle around the field, and then landed again. The head of the French society wrote "Gentlemen, we have been beaten", but this inspired the members of the club to try even harder to get their designs working.
You touch type on your iPhone?!?
Hunt and peck typing doesn't need tactile feedback because you're looking at the keys anyway. The downside is that hunt and peck is slow (I don't need to hear about that one guy in the office who hunts and pecks at 130 wpm, he's an exception, not the rule).
Apparently in the future the idea of tactile feedback is dead and everybody just types on glass screens like in the movies. Presumably these laptop designers have not actually tried that themselves to see just how much people actually like typing on a piece of glass with no cues at to where the keys are.
Talking about audio fidelity in a car stereo is mostly pointless though, all of the small details you get from a high quality home audio system would be totally lost in a car with the road/wind/other vehicle noise around you. The noise floor is just too high in a car.