Re:The *real* boon in high-capacity CF (etc.) card
on
4Gb CF Card Announced
·
· Score: 1
I already do this with my Sony Clie PDA and the MemoryStick. The new mid-level (SJ33?) that I have plays MP3s and comes with both PC and Clie player software. With one 256MB MemoryStick and a cheap ($10) USB reader for your PC, you can swap in 10-album (or 100-song) sets in less than five minutes. Sure, I don't have all my music, all at once... but I generally know what I want to listen to 100 songs in advance. I agree that when reasonably-priced media gets cheaper, this will kill the dedicated MP3 player market. Which is why I think that the iPod is actually a stealth move toward the personal information device market... Jobs and Co. will come at that functionality from the storage direction, while Palm and others have been coming at it from the application direction. But convergence is happening.
[...] by SF god Neal Stephenson [...] Neal Stephenson is not a god.
Depends on your definition. Mine happens to be, 'one who sees farther and more clearly than other mere mortals'. Stephenson definitely qualifies.
That doesn't mean he's necessarily a great writer -- but as a sad litany from Aristophanes to Hemingway demonstrates, great writers are usually all too human.
This is the third recent posting to Slashdot from the current issue of Wired Magazine: the 'Year the Music Dies' cover piece, the 'Civil War Within Sony' piece, and now this. Sure, they're all interesting, but do we really need the editors to hold our hand and lead us to the biggest and most famous computer/culture magazine? Aren't we geeks? Let me summarize for the slow: READ WIRED!
If you do need guidance in finding cool Wired articles, check out this 1996 gem on hacker tourism and the laying of fiber optic inter-continental cables by SF god Neal Stephenson, Mother Earth, Mother Board
bfree, you're exactly right. Even though the major CE manufacturers don't have a history of open relationships with the hacker community, they are very quickly wising up to the fact that they *have* to make this work, or they're dead. (or commodified, which is worse, because you're the living dead)
Forget MS for a moment -- look at the Apple iPod. It rocks. It's a great consumer music device. Sony got beat to the punch -- by Apple! Why? Because Apple, more than Sony, has a relationship with hacker type communities that allowed them to think outside the box and build it. Sony isn't dumb (and neither is Matsushita) and I can assure you, they won't sit still for more of that.
The next question is -- what can be expected in terms of contributions to OS. There are two obvious examples here. The first is Sony's relationship with Palm and Palmsource. Even before the recent $20m investment in Palm, Sony contributed all the cool multimedia features to PalmOS 4.1. They made it work with memory sticks, with MP3s, with.jpgs, and all sortsa stuff. It's reasonable to think that in the similar Linux case, both high-quality I/O interface code and works-with-multimedia-formats code would come out of this initiative. The second example is IBM with Java, and now Linux. IBM has put thousands of developers on various OS projects -- go look at the Apache home page, and count how many of them work for IBM. Why is IBM doing that? To sell hardware and services, of course. The best way for IBM to make money, is to make OS better. Soon, the best way for Sony and Matsushita to make money will be to make OS better. These people aren't nice, they aren't evil, they're businessmen, and they're going to make OS rock because it's good for them.
As to what range of products -- the PS2 already has a Linux project going. The A/V group at Sony has announced a Linux project (TV, stereo) There are almost certainly going to be Linux projects in the entire range of devices, and I would expect that Matsushita will come out with an equal, competing wide range of stuff.
I know the desire to homebrew this sort of thing is nearly overwhelming for a lot of Slashdot readers, but all you have to do is wait just a little while, and the major Japanese consumer electronics firms are going to make all your dreams come true. Not just programmatic integration of A/V devices, but open integration. Not just open integration, but Linux-based open integration. Check out this story (reg. required) in the Financial Times from about a month ago: Matsushita and Sony in Linux tie-up
Here's the key quote for those who don't want to register:
"Matsushita and Sony have agreed to jointly develop the Linux operating system for digital consumer electronic products, in a highly unusual and cooperative deal between two of the fiercest rivals in the industry... Sony and Matsushita will continue to use the existing operating systems for specific products - such as Windows for Vaio - but expect the newly developed version of Linux to be increasingly used in home electronic devices, such as portable and home AV products."
The reason this trend will go places is quite simple: The much-bandied-about "Microsoft Tax" is real, and the major CE manufacturers don't want to pay it. This combined with the strong likelihood (--> certainty) that MS will attempt to commoditized them ensures that they will fight back. These guys are not only smart, they are bigger than Microsoft (Sony: $60bn revenues) and they are determined to not get cut out of the market, or turned into Compaq/HP style failures. Who benefits? The Linux community is going to get a huge boost, because the single best weapon these firms have against MS is Linux, and they are going to use it with a vengeance.
I think it's an excellent idea to create some sort of structured repository for geophysical data. To draw an analogy, I love Google, but it worries me that Google owns their (increasingly universal) dataset as a private for-profit corporation. Map data about the globe is just about the most 'open' sort of information that a human could need... getting from here to there, and information about here or there, being pretty fundamental to life. There are all sorts of applications -- travel, leisure, commerce, play, whatever.
The OSS community does a great job thinking about the pros and cons of open source *software* but doesn't do nearly so much work on the subject of open *data* with which to use the software. This issue is implicit in Slashdot favorites such as FOIA requests to reign in government, public domain vs. copyright issues, fair use, etc., but no one seems to formally frame the 'Open Data' issue in a way that motivates the same sort of response as does Open Source. We should start a new movement, parallel and complementary to OSS! Any takers? We need bandwidth and storage, just like everyone else... I see from Internic that mapdata.org is available. Someone want to hack out a good MySQL table structure to hold it all? Lemme know when we open the project on SourceForge... etc.
It's impressive that this really is new on the Web -- do a search on Google for 'Waggonauts' and you get zip. Do a search for the alternative spelling 'Wagonauts' and you still get zip. How long exactly has this been "passed between trusted friends"? Years? Information may want to be free... but sometimes it's slow to make up its mind;-)
I heard Craig Venter speak in London a few months ago. He discussed this gene at some length. This gene exists in about 9% of caucasian people, but only.01% of blacks. It provides almost 100% immunity to catching AIDS. It's thus part of the explanation why AIDS is more of a general plague in Africa. (geometric expansion at.999 is ever so much more rapid than geometric expansion at.91)
What's most interesting is that using gene divergence/dating techniques, the emergence of this gene in the caucasian population can be dated to just 700 years ago -- such a recent emergence is necessary to explain such a signficant difference between two groups of humans.
700 years ago was, of course, when the Plague hit Europe circa 1300 and killed off more than half the population; and CCR5, in addition to conferring immunity to AIDS, is highly effective at conferring immunity to the plague. Thus this gene got a big boost in the Caucasian population as people who didn't have it died more frequently, whereas in Africa, without the plague, it remained a minor genetic factor.
"Mathematically, there were two possible reasons for this - either the electric charge of the electrons had increased, or the speed of light had fallen.
Using Stephen Hawking's formula for black hole thermodynamics, Davies, Davis and Lineweaver ruled out the electric charge possibility. By adapting Hawking's formula, they determined that an increase in electric charge would break the second law of thermodynamics, which says energy can only flow from hot spots to cold spots.
"That's illegal. It would be like a cup of coffee sitting on your desk getting hotter," Lineweaver says.
Observation -- but didn't they just prove that something "illegal" -- that the constant speed of light is changing -- is actually happening? Perhaps they should examine their logic on this point, because it seems to me it could be either. Or perhaps I should read the original article, where they probably address this issue.
As I recall, Paul Dirac (Nobel laureate in physics) proved back in the 30s that the gravity 'constant' is decreasing as well.
Robert Heinlein wrote a non-fiction piece on Dirac that mention this, and that piecewas included in the collection 'Expanded Universe' published in the 1970s, so I assume it was still not disproven then.
Anyone know the current status or real story on this?
Strange convergence observation
on
Micro Air Vehicles
·
· Score: 2, Funny
In this article, plus the linked Spy Fly piece from CNN, three different aero geeks from three different universities are shown in three different pictures. These guys could be brothers, or even twins.
Either:
There is some sort of 'aero geek chic' I don't know about
We're witnessing the visual manifestation of genetic selection for an obsession with small flying objects
This happened back in 1996. It went through a development cycle, had a director attached, and there was even some conceptual art generated which garnered a story right here on Slashdot.
At present, it's going nowhere -- but I have no doubt that it will eventually emerge in movie form, just like other long-thought "unfilmable" books like _Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas_.
Read the details here: http://www.corona.bc.ca/films/details/snowc rash.ht ml
The company is run out of a tax haven. A mere three weeks after they get NASD trading approval, up pops an article on Slashdot - complete with vague but reassuring press release from a big [but likely dumb] name, Boeing. Then you go to their site - KewlChips have lots of vague but reassuring information about their governance and pedigree, and look, kids, you can invest now!
I quote from their Investor Relations page:
"Cool Chips plc common shares were cleared for trading in the United States by the National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD) on 24 April 2002. Quotes are available from www.pinksheets.com under the symbol COLCF. The Cool Chips Technology work is managed out of Europe and we are a virtual company based in the European Union. Your Company is a member of the Borealis Family of Companies, and is incorporated in Gibraltar. Gibraltar law is essentially English law and we are governed by that. We have elected to use Gibraltar GAAP as our reporting standards, as these are the standards of our domicile.
In addition to the Investor Information available for our parent company, Borealis Exploration Limited, links to corporate information specific to Cool Chips plc are located at http://www.coolchips.gi/investor/corpinfo.shtml
Stock quotes can be found at: Pink Sheets: BOREF COLCF Bloomberg: BOREF COLCF "
Does that sound like pandering to you? It sure does to me, and my wallet is firmly tucked away.
Just remember... their own statement is that they are a virtual company run out of a tax haven. Caveat emptor. Don't throw your SlashDollars away.
Software exposes the fuzziness of business
on
Do You Like Your Job?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I've worked in a number of different industries, in capacities from grunt to general manager, and my take on this is that *every* business project goes through multiple changes, last-minute "fill the gaps," SWAG, misdirected and incomplete thinking, and all the management problems that software engineers love to hate.
The difference between software and most other types of projects, is that usually there is no empirical test of the outcome of the project vs. its intended outcome, as there almost always is with a piece of code.
Did the marketing project achieve its objectives? Was it functionally complete? Does it have bugs? Does it break under stress? Who the heck knows? It's simply impossible to measure the results of most other business projects, because they don't have the defined inputs/processing/outputs of software.
Consequently, bluffing at the micro- and macro- level is inserted into almost every business project, from prepping for the meeting with the boss, to buying the competitor. And far from this ever being revealed, most people don't even realize they're doing it themselves. It's just human nature.
When you apply that sort of mentality to software, and technical project management in general (does the 777 fly or not?) you almost invariably a) run over time and over budget b) de-scope the project or c) end up with an unholy mess on your hands, because your fuzzy thinking has been exposed by the rigors of the product.
So you blame technology, blame the technologists, and never examine the root of the problem -- the fact that you've been, consciously or unconsciously, half-assing it all your business career, just like everyone else in business.
If business people in general applied to business processes 1/10 the conceptual and practical thinking, constant learning, and focus that software engineers put into their code, the entire enterprise would collapse in a heap of disbelief and self-loathing, and then re-emerge like a phoenix, unrecognizably well-run.
From the splash screen:
"with costumer service agents providing chat assistance."
Let's see, I prepare a press release guaranteed to garner my website tens, if not hundreds of thousands of hits, and I leave an egregious typo as my first impression?
Slashdot Mirror
I already do this with my Sony Clie PDA and the MemoryStick. The new mid-level (SJ33?) that I have plays MP3s and comes with both PC and Clie player software. With one 256MB MemoryStick and a cheap ($10) USB reader for your PC, you can swap in 10-album (or 100-song) sets in less than five minutes. Sure, I don't have all my music, all at once... but I generally know what I want to listen to 100 songs in advance. I agree that when reasonably-priced media gets cheaper, this will kill the dedicated MP3 player market. Which is why I think that the iPod is actually a stealth move toward the personal information device market... Jobs and Co. will come at that functionality from the storage direction, while Palm and others have been coming at it from the application direction. But convergence is happening.
[...] by SF god Neal Stephenson
[...] Neal Stephenson is not a god.
Depends on your definition. Mine happens to be, 'one who sees farther and more clearly than other mere mortals'. Stephenson definitely qualifies.
That doesn't mean he's necessarily a great writer -- but as a sad litany from Aristophanes to Hemingway demonstrates, great writers are usually all too human.
This is the third recent posting to Slashdot from the current issue of Wired Magazine: the 'Year the Music Dies' cover piece, the 'Civil War Within Sony' piece, and now this. Sure, they're all interesting, but do we really need the editors to hold our hand and lead us to the biggest and most famous computer/culture magazine? Aren't we geeks? Let me summarize for the slow: READ WIRED!
If you do need guidance in finding cool Wired articles, check out this 1996 gem on hacker tourism and the laying of fiber optic inter-continental cables by SF god Neal Stephenson, Mother Earth, Mother Board
bfree, you're exactly right. Even though the major CE manufacturers don't have a history of open relationships with the hacker community, they are very quickly wising up to the fact that they *have* to make this work, or they're dead. (or commodified, which is worse, because you're the living dead)
.jpgs, and all sortsa stuff. It's reasonable to think that in the similar Linux case, both high-quality I/O interface code and works-with-multimedia-formats code would come out of this initiative. The second example is IBM with Java, and now Linux. IBM has put thousands of developers on various OS projects -- go look at the Apache home page, and count how many of them work for IBM. Why is IBM doing that? To sell hardware and services, of course. The best way for IBM to make money, is to make OS better. Soon, the best way for Sony and Matsushita to make money will be to make OS better. These people aren't nice, they aren't evil, they're businessmen, and they're going to make OS rock because it's good for them.
Forget MS for a moment -- look at the Apple iPod. It rocks. It's a great consumer music device. Sony got beat to the punch -- by Apple! Why? Because Apple, more than Sony, has a relationship with hacker type communities that allowed them to think outside the box and build it. Sony isn't dumb (and neither is Matsushita) and I can assure you, they won't sit still for more of that.
The next question is -- what can be expected in terms of contributions to OS. There are two obvious examples here. The first is Sony's relationship with Palm and Palmsource. Even before the recent $20m investment in Palm, Sony contributed all the cool multimedia features to PalmOS 4.1. They made it work with memory sticks, with MP3s, with
As to what range of products -- the PS2 already has a Linux project going. The A/V group at Sony has announced a Linux project (TV, stereo) There are almost certainly going to be Linux projects in the entire range of devices, and I would expect that Matsushita will come out with an equal, competing wide range of stuff.
Here's the key quote for those who don't want to register:
"Matsushita and Sony have agreed to jointly develop the Linux operating system for digital consumer electronic products, in a highly unusual and cooperative deal between two of the fiercest rivals in the industry... Sony and Matsushita will continue to use the existing operating systems for specific products - such as Windows for Vaio - but expect the newly developed version of Linux to be increasingly used in home electronic devices, such as portable and home AV products."
The reason this trend will go places is quite simple: The much-bandied-about "Microsoft Tax" is real, and the major CE manufacturers don't want to pay it. This combined with the strong likelihood (--> certainty) that MS will attempt to commoditized them ensures that they will fight back. These guys are not only smart, they are bigger than Microsoft (Sony: $60bn revenues) and they are determined to not get cut out of the market, or turned into Compaq/HP style failures. Who benefits? The Linux community is going to get a huge boost, because the single best weapon these firms have against MS is Linux, and they are going to use it with a vengeance.
I think it's an excellent idea to create some sort of structured repository for geophysical data. To draw an analogy, I love Google, but it worries me that Google owns their (increasingly universal) dataset as a private for-profit corporation. Map data about the globe is just about the most 'open' sort of information that a human could need... getting from here to there, and information about here or there, being pretty fundamental to life. There are all sorts of applications -- travel, leisure, commerce, play, whatever.
The OSS community does a great job thinking about the pros and cons of open source *software* but doesn't do nearly so much work on the subject of open *data* with which to use the software. This issue is implicit in Slashdot favorites such as FOIA requests to reign in government, public domain vs. copyright issues, fair use, etc., but no one seems to formally frame the 'Open Data' issue in a way that motivates the same sort of response as does Open Source. We should start a new movement, parallel and complementary to OSS! Any takers? We need bandwidth and storage, just like everyone else... I see from Internic that mapdata.org is available. Someone want to hack out a good MySQL table structure to hold it all? Lemme know when we open the project on SourceForge... etc.
Be active!
It's impressive that this really is new on the Web -- do a search on Google for 'Waggonauts' and you get zip. Do a search for the alternative spelling 'Wagonauts' and you still get zip. How long exactly has this been "passed between trusted friends"? Years? Information may want to be free... but sometimes it's slow to make up its mind ;-)
I heard Craig Venter speak in London a few months ago. He discussed this gene at some length. This gene exists in about 9% of caucasian people, but only
What's most interesting is that using gene divergence/dating techniques, the emergence of this gene in the caucasian population can be dated to just 700 years ago -- such a recent emergence is necessary to explain such a signficant difference between two groups of humans.
700 years ago was, of course, when the Plague hit Europe circa 1300 and killed off more than half the population; and CCR5, in addition to conferring immunity to AIDS, is highly effective at conferring immunity to the plague. Thus this gene got a big boost in the Caucasian population as people who didn't have it died more frequently, whereas in Africa, without the plague, it remained a minor genetic factor.
Pretty cool, huh?
Article quote:
"Mathematically, there were two possible reasons for this - either the electric charge of the electrons had increased, or the speed of light had fallen.
Using Stephen Hawking's formula for black hole thermodynamics, Davies, Davis and Lineweaver ruled out the electric charge possibility. By adapting Hawking's formula, they determined that an increase in electric charge would break the second law of thermodynamics, which says energy can only flow from hot spots to cold spots.
"That's illegal. It would be like a cup of coffee sitting on your desk getting hotter," Lineweaver says.
Observation -- but didn't they just prove that something "illegal" -- that the constant speed of light is changing -- is actually happening? Perhaps they should examine their logic on this point, because it seems to me it could be either. Or perhaps I should read the original article, where they probably address this issue.
As I recall, Paul Dirac (Nobel laureate in physics) proved back in the 30s that the gravity 'constant' is decreasing as well.
Robert Heinlein wrote a non-fiction piece on Dirac that mention this, and that piecewas included in the collection 'Expanded Universe' published in the 1970s, so I assume it was still not disproven then.
Anyone know the current status or real story on this?
Either:
There is some sort of 'aero geek chic' I don't know about
We're witnessing the visual manifestation of genetic selection for an obsession with small flying objects
This is the early stages of an alien invasion.
c .shtml
Look again: http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/science/07/27/flying microbots.ap/index.html
and: http://www.gainesvillesun.com/articles/2002-07-31
This happened back in 1996. It went through a development cycle, had a director attached, and there was even some conceptual art generated which garnered a story right here on Slashdot.
c rash.ht ml
At present, it's going nowhere -- but I have no doubt that it will eventually emerge in movie form, just like other long-thought "unfilmable" books like _Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas_.
Read the details here:
http://www.corona.bc.ca/films/details/snow
The company is run out of a tax haven. A mere three weeks after they get NASD trading approval, up pops an article on Slashdot - complete with vague but reassuring press release from a big [but likely dumb] name, Boeing. Then you go to their site - KewlChips have lots of vague but reassuring information about their governance and pedigree, and look, kids, you can invest now!
I quote from their Investor Relations page:
"Cool Chips plc common shares were cleared for trading in the United States by the National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD) on 24 April 2002. Quotes are available from www.pinksheets.com under the symbol COLCF. The Cool Chips Technology work is managed out of Europe and we are a virtual company based in the European Union. Your Company is a member of the Borealis Family of Companies, and is incorporated in Gibraltar. Gibraltar law is essentially English law and we are governed by that. We have elected to use Gibraltar GAAP as our reporting standards, as these are the standards of our domicile.
In addition to the Investor Information available for our parent company, Borealis Exploration Limited, links to corporate information specific to Cool Chips plc are located at http://www.coolchips.gi/investor/corpinfo.shtml
Stock quotes can be found at:
Pink Sheets: BOREF COLCF Bloomberg: BOREF COLCF "
Does that sound like pandering to you? It sure does to me, and my wallet is firmly tucked away.
Just remember... their own statement is that they are a virtual company run out of a tax haven. Caveat emptor. Don't throw your SlashDollars away.
I've worked in a number of different industries, in capacities from grunt to general manager, and my take on this is that *every* business project goes through multiple changes, last-minute "fill the gaps," SWAG, misdirected and incomplete thinking, and all the management problems that software engineers love to hate.
The difference between software and most other types of projects, is that usually there is no empirical test of the outcome of the project vs. its intended outcome, as there almost always is with a piece of code.
Did the marketing project achieve its objectives? Was it functionally complete? Does it have bugs? Does it break under stress? Who the heck knows? It's simply impossible to measure the results of most other business projects, because they don't have the defined inputs/processing/outputs of software.
Consequently, bluffing at the micro- and macro- level is inserted into almost every business project, from prepping for the meeting with the boss, to buying the competitor. And far from this ever being revealed, most people don't even realize they're doing it themselves. It's just human nature.
When you apply that sort of mentality to software, and technical project management in general (does the 777 fly or not?) you almost invariably a) run over time and over budget b) de-scope the project or c) end up with an unholy mess on your hands, because your fuzzy thinking has been exposed by the rigors of the product.
So you blame technology, blame the technologists, and never examine the root of the problem -- the fact that you've been, consciously or unconsciously, half-assing it all your business career, just like everyone else in business.
If business people in general applied to business processes 1/10 the conceptual and practical thinking, constant learning, and focus that software engineers put into their code, the entire enterprise would collapse in a heap of disbelief and self-loathing, and then re-emerge like a phoenix, unrecognizably well-run.
Look for it about 2110, at the earliest.
From the splash screen:
"with costumer service agents providing chat assistance."
Let's see, I prepare a press release guaranteed to garner my website tens, if not hundreds of thousands of hits, and I leave an egregious typo as my first impression?
Not!