I think there should be a new patent rule... if you can't demonstrate what you wish to patent, then you should not be granted the patent...
Otherwise I can sit here and patent the next 400 gigahertz chip, and when Intel/AMD make it there, can claim that I hold a patent on a silicon chip running at that speed, so pay up... How does this work???
And I just spent $650 on my Geforce 3 two weeks ago... Who can afford to buy these cards??? This is almost like the windows ME of the video card market... I'm waiting for the Geforce 4 to come out before I upgrade again...
I rather have voice recognition than hand gesture recognition... Its such a pain to gesture to a computer... Remember the 'Black and white' (game) gesturing thing... it took so long to get it to actually recognize the gestures... and there were only a few and they were only 2D... a human uses hundreds if not thousands of gestures that are very similiar... I really wouldn't want to be the person designing the software to interpret the gestures...
Anyone out there do this sort of programming? How hard is it to get a computer to understand complex gestures???
Most companies that I know of, don't see much of a market for commercially developed drivers for Linux, especially those companies, like the one I work for, that write drivers for 3rd party hardware developers who don't do it inhouse themselves. Sure Nvidia writes linux drivers, but they also create the hardware inhouse...
I don't see too many companies wanting to pay for someone to develop a driver for their hardware, when it's enough to release the specs out on the web, and some programmers are gonna do it for free on their own time anyway...
Interestingly enough though, we are starting to run non-microsoft OS's on more and more developer machines at work... We just can't take Visual Studio crashes twice a day and taking a source file with it...
A while back I read somewhere (Slashdot I think) that the military was not releasing the frequencies that were originally allocated for 3G phones... Does this mean the Japanese will have 3G all to themselves while we suffer from 2.5G for the next 10 years??? Anyone out there know??? Is GPRS still gonna happen??
And how do you expect to keep accurate time precise enough to measure within, oh say 1 kilometre of the cell, on any modern cell phone, or wireless device for that matter? The granularity of time is to small to work with wireless, battery driven devices...
Any technical documents out there that can back this up in the real world, cause theory is nice 'n all but it rarely works in the real world, especially with respect to wireless stuff...
No matter what kind of techno-babble they use to describe the process, triangulating the signal will only give an approximate location, and in a large city, with tons of buildings interfering with the signal, it just won't be good enough, unless 'somewhere on the southside' is good enough.
Having worked at a wireless company (RIM), on this exact problem, I know first hand that it sounds simple, but once you factor in the real world, and the inherant flaws with wireless communication, you very quickly find out that it is next to impossible to implement in a major urban environment.
In an ideal situation, lets say that the phone is latched onto cell A, with 90% signal strength, Cell B is at 40%, and cell C is at 30%. Clearly using simple mathematics and a geographical map of the area you can figure out where the phone is. But add a building in between Cell A and the phone, and the location is still the same, but the signal strength may be down to only 60%... Move over 2 feet, get a clear veiw of Cell A again, and your back to 90% (and now imagine this with hundreds of buildings all over the place)... It would be way too difficult to map out every area of every possible position in just the urban centers of the US to make this work. I don't buy this companies claims...
How the hell does the US, or any government for that matter, determine the age of majority??? at 20 years and 364 days old (in some states anyway), you are considered a minor, and can't drink, smoke, or watch porn. Yet the very next day, you can do everything perfectly legally...
How is this age determined? Why is it so precise? Why isn't there some discresion involved in determining this 'age'?
And why is there even a debate over computer generated images... the US has laws to keep free speech uncensored. With Child porn, there is harm being done to children... with CG, no harm is being done to anyone... and although I think child porn has got to be one of the sickest things out there, that doesn't mean that CG child porn should be censored... If it is, then where will the censorship stop? Very fine line we walk...
Bah... everything I know I taught myself... I have no university education, and yet am a successful software developer... No university material I have ever seen comes close to cover the topics that I learned myself...(but to their credit, my physics skills are lacking... though I've yet to use 'physics knowledge' at my job, EVER!)
University now a days seems to be an extension of public schools... 'You don't know what you wanna be when you grow up, so here's a little from column A,B,C,etc.'... For crying out loud, your in your early 20's... Figure out what you wanna do and focus on just that one topic... I had to deal with way too many University graduates that can't code worth sh*t, but they have a degree... How bloody nice... Why didn't they teach you to code???
Not once was a linux computer used throughout the entire movie... Readers of slashdot unite! Boycott this film, until they re-re-digitally remaster it and add in some computer with linux... If they can do it for the WTC towers, why not for the sake of open source???
Who gives a damn about layoffs??? If it happens to you, or people you know, then of course it sucks, but I don't know anyone at any of the places that have recently been hit by layoffs, and I really don't think it's worthy of front page news for the geek world...
Suck it up son, and find another job... don't sit here and try to use slashdot to get sympathy... Those who care, can't do much, and those like myself, who couldn't care less, are simply annoyed by this sort of crap, and thus the little sympathy you would have had just went down the drain...
They say that it is not to prevent the hacker from ripping the CD, and most users don't want to rip it anyway... So what exactly is this doing? It prevents users (whom the guy in the article is quoted as saying don't pirate) from pirating, but hackers (aka people with half a clue) can circumvent this crap, and make a copy...
So what the hell is the point of this copy protection? It's too simple to be effective against someone determined, and the only people it would really stop from pirating would be people who don't even know how to run a computer... WTF??? What kind of a messed up concept is this?
Clearly all the NT admins out there are tired of being blamed for this... it's stupid home users who pirate WIN2k Advanced that don't install the patches... Most admins have gotten it through their heads to install the patches...
But on a more serious note... What about the Macs??? Microsoft, can we get a version of IIS for Macs... All my friends running Macs are feeling sooo left out... Microsoft, can you help???
Ya, less chance of being hit by space junk... but if it does get hit, it's garunteed to be a catastophic failure... With the big satellites, at least there is a chance it can survive a collision, but with these smaller sats, I doubt anything would work after an impact with even a 5 mm peice of space junk at orbital speeds...
Hmm... That reminds me... I read somewhere that Macintosh viruses are WAY DOWN!!! Perhaps some of those a**holes that are wreeking havoc on the Windows platform, could concentrate on the MACs... We don't want to have them feel left out now do we?
Microsoft may be secure, but when everyone is trying to crack YOUR software, it don't matter if your competition is half as secure as you... You are the target, and you will be breached...
When will they get that through their thick skulls???
Yes, since the CRTC wants every n'th song to be by a Canadian artist (As if the US stations would agree to this), and will thus ban its sale here in Canada.
I'm already making room for it beside my DTV dish....:)
What you want would require two way communication... VERY EXPENSIVE if it is satellite based... You would need a transmitter, and the satelitte in orbit would need multiple 'channels' listening to not only you but every other American with this service... It just isn't feasible...
If you wanted it for detour info, etc... a cell based solution is/should be available soon... but the bandwidth isn't there to stream anything... not for at least the next 5 years...
Are you crazy? Streaming audio over the web to a WAP cell phone??? It'd be easier to buy an extra DTV dish and hook it up to the roof of your car... WAP is CRAP!
And streaming data from Cell technology won't work... If everyone started streaming data from a Cell, it's capacity would fall to about 50 devices... The whole idea behind modern digital cells is that they transmit data in bursts, overlapping the spectrum they use with other devices connected to that cell, and throw in some fancy timeshifting... and you now have 500 people on the same cell... The cell phone companies won't agree to allowing you to stream audio to yourself over their network...
So who else thinks this will be the next big thing to hack??? I mean satellite TV has been done, and it supposedly used the best enryption available... Audio should be even easier... with this, you are in a car, and you don't have an 18 inch dish on your roof... It should make it a lot harder to track you down... for legal action...
Anyone care to wager how many actual paying customers there will be after the first 6 months??? Are they taking a loss on the actual receiver and hoping to recoup the costs with monthly service charges??? HA! That don't work too well... Just ask DTV... $89 a receiver for DTV is not how much it costs to make... I doubt $300 is the actual cost of this new satellite radio receiver...
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I think there should be a new patent rule... if you can't demonstrate what you wish to patent, then you should not be granted the patent...
Otherwise I can sit here and patent the next 400 gigahertz chip, and when Intel/AMD make it there, can claim that I hold a patent on a silicon chip running at that speed, so pay up... How does this work???
And I just spent $650 on my Geforce 3 two weeks ago... Who can afford to buy these cards??? This is almost like the windows ME of the video card market... I'm waiting for the Geforce 4 to come out before I upgrade again...
"...a 15-inch screen with a resolution of 1400 by 1050 pixels..."
When will these types of screens be available in standard laptops??? I'm not interested in the finger print technology, I just want that display!!!
I rather have voice recognition than hand gesture recognition... Its such a pain to gesture to a computer... Remember the 'Black and white' (game) gesturing thing... it took so long to get it to actually recognize the gestures... and there were only a few and they were only 2D... a human uses hundreds if not thousands of gestures that are very similiar... I really wouldn't want to be the person designing the software to interpret the gestures...
Anyone out there do this sort of programming? How hard is it to get a computer to understand complex gestures???
Most companies that I know of, don't see much of a market for commercially developed drivers for Linux, especially those companies, like the one I work for, that write drivers for 3rd party hardware developers who don't do it inhouse themselves. Sure Nvidia writes linux drivers, but they also create the hardware inhouse...
I don't see too many companies wanting to pay for someone to develop a driver for their hardware, when it's enough to release the specs out on the web, and some programmers are gonna do it for free on their own time anyway...
Interestingly enough though, we are starting to run non-microsoft OS's on more and more developer machines at work... We just can't take Visual Studio crashes twice a day and taking a source file with it...
A while back I read somewhere (Slashdot I think) that the military was not releasing the frequencies that were originally allocated for 3G phones... Does this mean the Japanese will have 3G all to themselves while we suffer from 2.5G for the next 10 years??? Anyone out there know??? Is GPRS still gonna happen??
And how do you expect to keep accurate time precise enough to measure within, oh say 1 kilometre of the cell, on any modern cell phone, or wireless device for that matter? The granularity of time is to small to work with wireless, battery driven devices...
Any technical documents out there that can back this up in the real world, cause theory is nice 'n all but it rarely works in the real world, especially with respect to wireless stuff...
Hey, show me how to make a living developing drivers for linux and I'd be all over it...
4... out of 27 computers... pittiful... but we develop drivers for Windows... so I guess it's ok...
An explanation of why not can be found in a previous post. http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=22134&cid=2372 347
No matter what kind of techno-babble they use to describe the process, triangulating the signal will only give an approximate location, and in a large city, with tons of buildings interfering with the signal, it just won't be good enough, unless 'somewhere on the southside' is good enough.
Having worked at a wireless company (RIM), on this exact problem, I know first hand that it sounds simple, but once you factor in the real world, and the inherant flaws with wireless communication, you very quickly find out that it is next to impossible to implement in a major urban environment.
In an ideal situation, lets say that the phone is latched onto cell A, with 90% signal strength, Cell B is at 40%, and cell C is at 30%. Clearly using simple mathematics and a geographical map of the area you can figure out where the phone is. But add a building in between Cell A and the phone, and the location is still the same, but the signal strength may be down to only 60%... Move over 2 feet, get a clear veiw of Cell A again, and your back to 90% (and now imagine this with hundreds of buildings all over the place)... It would be way too difficult to map out every area of every possible position in just the urban centers of the US to make this work. I don't buy this companies claims...
How the hell does the US, or any government for that matter, determine the age of majority??? at 20 years and 364 days old (in some states anyway), you are considered a minor, and can't drink, smoke, or watch porn. Yet the very next day, you can do everything perfectly legally...
How is this age determined? Why is it so precise? Why isn't there some discresion involved in determining this 'age'?
And why is there even a debate over computer generated images... the US has laws to keep free speech uncensored. With Child porn, there is harm being done to children... with CG, no harm is being done to anyone... and although I think child porn has got to be one of the sickest things out there, that doesn't mean that CG child porn should be censored... If it is, then where will the censorship stop? Very fine line we walk...
Well, if the rest of the internet is built and maintained by compaines like @Home, there wouldn't be much change in the next 10 years...
Bah... everything I know I taught myself... I have no university education, and yet am a successful software developer... No university material I have ever seen comes close to cover the topics that I learned myself...(but to their credit, my physics skills are lacking... though I've yet to use 'physics knowledge' at my job, EVER!)
University now a days seems to be an extension of public schools... 'You don't know what you wanna be when you grow up, so here's a little from column A,B,C,etc.'... For crying out loud, your in your early 20's... Figure out what you wanna do and focus on just that one topic... I had to deal with way too many University graduates that can't code worth sh*t, but they have a degree... How bloody nice... Why didn't they teach you to code???
Not once was a linux computer used throughout the entire movie... Readers of slashdot unite! Boycott this film, until they re-re-digitally remaster it and add in some computer with linux... If they can do it for the WTC towers, why not for the sake of open source???
Who gives a damn about layoffs??? If it happens to you, or people you know, then of course it sucks, but I don't know anyone at any of the places that have recently been hit by layoffs, and I really don't think it's worthy of front page news for the geek world...
Suck it up son, and find another job... don't sit here and try to use slashdot to get sympathy... Those who care, can't do much, and those like myself, who couldn't care less, are simply annoyed by this sort of crap, and thus the little sympathy you would have had just went down the drain...
BAH!!!
They say that it is not to prevent the hacker from ripping the CD, and most users don't want to rip it anyway... So what exactly is this doing? It prevents users (whom the guy in the article is quoted as saying don't pirate) from pirating, but hackers (aka people with half a clue) can circumvent this crap, and make a copy...
So what the hell is the point of this copy protection? It's too simple to be effective against someone determined, and the only people it would really stop from pirating would be people who don't even know how to run a computer... WTF??? What kind of a messed up concept is this?
Clearly all the NT admins out there are tired of being blamed for this... it's stupid home users who pirate WIN2k Advanced that don't install the patches... Most admins have gotten it through their heads to install the patches...
But on a more serious note... What about the Macs??? Microsoft, can we get a version of IIS for Macs... All my friends running Macs are feeling sooo left out... Microsoft, can you help???
Ya, less chance of being hit by space junk... but if it does get hit, it's garunteed to be a catastophic failure... With the big satellites, at least there is a chance it can survive a collision, but with these smaller sats, I doubt anything would work after an impact with even a 5 mm peice of space junk at orbital speeds...
Hmm... That reminds me... I read somewhere that Macintosh viruses are WAY DOWN!!! Perhaps some of those a**holes that are wreeking havoc on the Windows platform, could concentrate on the MACs... We don't want to have them feel left out now do we?
Microsoft may be secure, but when everyone is trying to crack YOUR software, it don't matter if your competition is half as secure as you... You are the target, and you will be breached...
When will they get that through their thick skulls???
Yes, since the CRTC wants every n'th song to be by a Canadian artist (As if the US stations would agree to this), and will thus ban its sale here in Canada.
:)
I'm already making room for it beside my DTV dish....
What you want would require two way communication... VERY EXPENSIVE if it is satellite based... You would need a transmitter, and the satelitte in orbit would need multiple 'channels' listening to not only you but every other American with this service... It just isn't feasible...
If you wanted it for detour info, etc... a cell based solution is/should be available soon... but the bandwidth isn't there to stream anything... not for at least the next 5 years...
Are you crazy? Streaming audio over the web to a WAP cell phone??? It'd be easier to buy an extra DTV dish and hook it up to the roof of your car... WAP is CRAP!
And streaming data from Cell technology won't work... If everyone started streaming data from a Cell, it's capacity would fall to about 50 devices... The whole idea behind modern digital cells is that they transmit data in bursts, overlapping the spectrum they use with other devices connected to that cell, and throw in some fancy timeshifting... and you now have 500 people on the same cell... The cell phone companies won't agree to allowing you to stream audio to yourself over their network...
So who else thinks this will be the next big thing to hack??? I mean satellite TV has been done, and it supposedly used the best enryption available... Audio should be even easier... with this, you are in a car, and you don't have an 18 inch dish on your roof... It should make it a lot harder to track you down... for legal action...
Anyone care to wager how many actual paying customers there will be after the first 6 months??? Are they taking a loss on the actual receiver and hoping to recoup the costs with monthly service charges??? HA! That don't work too well... Just ask DTV... $89 a receiver for DTV is not how much it costs to make... I doubt $300 is the actual cost of this new satellite radio receiver...