Politics. In China for example, saying the wrong thing about the government can get you killed. I have no doubt that the same thing could happen in the U.S. or any country for that matter given the whims of politicians. With the constitution of the U.S. being mangled as it is, the only guarantees of rights you have are those you can provide yourself. Thus, encryption: a simple tool to protect your first ammendment right.
unlikely. Have you any idea how complex sports licenesing is for video? There would be so many restrictions on this it would be very difficult to implement. Besides, not as many people want to watch a recorded football/baseball game.
I'm still upset that Activision does this for their "M" rated games on their website. Are they out of their mind? Do they really believe that your credit card number is something you'll freely give to any website for age verification? Or could the problem be that parents are letting their kids use computers completely unsupervised?
See that's the thing. They are not using their imagination. They are not innovating. The transistors are there, with the latest DSP technology they have GHz of parallel processesing at their disposal. And what do they give us? Oh a few more channels, with some reverb effects or some nonsense. Yes, they perfected the analog side of things over a decade ago, but it's time for more than that.
only if you want to send basic text messages. I don't know how many times I've been annoyed at Gaim because it has super flacky file transfer support, font support, etc. Oh not to mention it uses 16.6Mb of memory on my windows machine.
But... at least it's better than seeing those stupid ads on MSN messenger.
Does this device have end to end strong encryption to prevent anyone from easdropping on your conversation? If not, than who cares? Why can't we get something so simple to implement on products like this?
Utilizes voice encryption for high security This is only good if it's encrypted from one phone directly to another and only if you trust the fingerprint of the call coming in.
Look at that giant screenshot in the article. It's a small little integrated circuit. It doesn't even have a heatsink! I think creative is happy just producing the same product year after year with minimal feature improvements. If they really wanted to sell something that gamers would be interested in, they would pour research money into full sound physics processing such as what Aureal did back in the day. I tell you, I have yet to hear anything as amazing as Aureal for suround sound.
Until innovation occurs, as a gamer, you're just as well off using motherboard sound than anything.
I believe I got similar results with my Epson printer. About $0.50 to $1.00 a print. The problem I have is that I use it so infrequently that the ink dries up. I then have to go through the tedious processes of cleaning the cartridge after which point I use up more ink.
Color printers are a such a scam. There is no reason other than profit that they can't allow the cartridges to hold more ink.
Three dimensional scanners. They do exist, but they are very expensive. You can then re-create the figures with a 3D plotter. Not sure if they except clay as a plotting media though.
Because if it wasn't for Sony we would have '4 in 1' memory card readers. In fact, if you forget about Smartmedia which is obsolete, you really should only need SD/MM and Compact Flash. Seeing an expansion bay in my computer with 6 different slots in it as a result of companies arguing to eachother over standards is just sad.
Don't you remember what life was like with parallel ports, serial ports, PS/2 ports, etc.... they have all been replaced by USB and life is good now. Why can't we do the same thing for memory?
Can someone please explain how bad the noise of a sonic boom really is? I mean, if you already have jets flying over your home 24 hours a day, cars honking their horns outside, and other annoyances, how bad is said sonic boom in comparison? And why would we want to limit such an advanced technical achievement just because it may annoy people once and awhile? It's not like they will have flights like this in every city of the U.S.
Integrated amplifiers greatly reduce customizing, additional ADCs and DACs reduce resolution, increase the noise floor and change the sound.
If most people are using this to say listen to audio CD's (or ever worse, 128kbps mp3's) then there really shouldn't be a problem. I'm not sure how these speakers work, but if they are IP based, in theory you should be able to have the stream perfectly digital until they reach the speakers. At which point, you only have a single DAC, which in theory should reduce noise since no analog signal is traveling accross hundreds of feet of cable.
My assumption is speakers like this will be great for home music systems where you can put speakers in multiple rooms and just use the same IP network as the restof your house. This could save lots of money not having to have a bunch of home runs of audio cables.
Think ping times! If your local LAN has latencies greater than 5ms, there is something very wrong with your network switch. Heck, I can get ping times of less than 10ms for servers located on the internet.
Yeah, apple.com/trailers is the same way. Why the heck to they care if people download movie trailers? It's utterly ridiculus. My only guess is that the movie studies love to have the control to pull a trailer they deam "inappropriate" at some later date.
The challenge is making the design maintainable. There isn't a program that can't be written as a state machine; but most programs expressed this way are difficult to understand and maintain.
Wow, I know this one from first hand experience. We use a "graphical" programming language called LabVIEW where I work and I was tasked with the maintanance of a software program that was one giant state machine. Let me tell you, it was almost impossible to tell where the program was and where it was going half the time because it passed around a state list like a stack from one state to another and sometimes just deleted the entire list and replaced it with a new order!
There is rarely a need for a statemachine unless you are trying to optimize something really low level in hardware. I can't really think of a good paradigm to justify it's use in say Java.
It's probably impossible to re-write the same piece of data everytime. Flash memory is usually designed to rotate through the available empty space, thus if you erase/delete the same part of the file over and over, it's actually erasing block a, and writing to the next free block a+1, until it hits the end of the memory. Only after it's cycled through all available free space will it write to the same block again.
I doubt that. There isn't enough bandwidth on the USB port to write the ammount of data that would kill the flash memory. It's more likely to be mechanical failure of components.
I have a co-worker who has one of these. It's absolutely amazing. No dead pixels on his model. I'm thinking of requesting one for myself at work, and maybe buying one at home. If the price gets down to $900 or less I might seriously consider it.
Well, Microsoft did extend their JVM with some extra ties into windows and classes that specifically made it easier to write Windows applications that were run under Java (but not write once, run anywhere). However, this was back at Java version 1.0. Microsoft totally didn't bother upgrading their JVM to support features in Java 1.2, and above. Thus, most computers were shipped with a crippled, outdated version of Java.
The problem is, that most web java apps were based on this crippled version of Java. Since that's the case, if you're a web developer you're not going to force people to upgrade your version, so you just stay with what comes standard on Windows. In this way, Microsoft prevented Sun's Java from gaining a significant foothold on Windows.
Ha, you don't understand Microsoft very well. My guess is that the PDF support will be severly crippled. In which case, they will make the PDF format over time look less desirable than their own competing format. I mean, didn't they do the same thing with Java, releasing their own crippled JVM included in every copy of windows? Microsoft eventually replaced it with.NET.
What better way to defeat the competition than by releasing a crippled version of their format that's automatically bundeled with your system, and then coming out with a better "solution".
Here's a version of this type of program I made. It renders a 3D tree that represents your file structure. It's difficult to setup, and it's pretty buggy, but it's kind of a neat effect. I never found it very intuitive though to browse files this way, so I abandond the project. I haven't updated it in a long time.
Isn't it amazing that everytime a new technology that provides a convience to the average consumer is immediately labeled as a device for theft and mischief. Let's be honest, is someone really going to sit in a book store and start scanning a 300 page novel? Or even a 50 page magazine. Of course not. Regardless, I'm betting they'll embed some sort of DRM system into this. I mean, they put it in printer cartridges, might as well do that here too.
Okay, a couple of replies: Dump CRLF newlines, convert entirely to LF, Unless you are a diehard fan of notepad.exe this really isn't related to Microsoft. I've never had any problems with transfer text files between Windows and Linux and editing them in emacs.
The file's type becomes true metadata, and is not embedded in the filename, Okay, this is a nice thought and everything, but it's a really bad idea. Having a file extension on a file is the only cross platform compatible way of designating that file type without actually opening up the file. The last thing we want is Microsoft creating their own metadata specification that is tied into the file system (and not transferrable to external media). I don't know how many times I've botched file transfer from old Mac OS 9 machines because I could'nt figure out what type of file I was transfering because the file type didn't transfer.
I would actually take this thought a little more seriously. Microsoft may well work with hardware vendors to offer rebates on high end hardware, just to get their operating system installed on your system.
Slashdot Mirror
I just just imagine Ballmer jumping up and down on his office chair screaming:
"Developers, developers DEVELOPERS!"
Politics. In China for example, saying the wrong thing about the government can get you killed. I have no doubt that the same thing could happen in the U.S. or any country for that matter given the whims of politicians. With the constitution of the U.S. being mangled as it is, the only guarantees of rights you have are those you can provide yourself. Thus, encryption: a simple tool to protect your first ammendment right.
unlikely. Have you any idea how complex sports licenesing is for video? There would be so many restrictions on this it would be very difficult to implement. Besides, not as many people want to watch a recorded football/baseball game.
I'm still upset that Activision does this for their "M" rated games on their website. Are they out of their mind? Do they really believe that your credit card number is something you'll freely give to any website for age verification? Or could the problem be that parents are letting their kids use computers completely unsupervised?
See that's the thing. They are not using their imagination. They are not innovating. The transistors are there, with the latest DSP technology they have GHz of parallel processesing at their disposal. And what do they give us? Oh a few more channels, with some reverb effects or some nonsense. Yes, they perfected the analog side of things over a decade ago, but it's time for more than that.
only if you want to send basic text messages. I don't know how many times I've been annoyed at Gaim because it has super flacky file transfer support, font support, etc. Oh not to mention it uses 16.6Mb of memory on my windows machine.
But... at least it's better than seeing those stupid ads on MSN messenger.
Does this device have end to end strong encryption to prevent anyone from easdropping on your conversation? If not, than who cares? Why can't we get something so simple to implement on products like this?
Utilizes voice encryption for high security
This is only good if it's encrypted from one phone directly to another and only if you trust the fingerprint of the call coming in.
Look at that giant screenshot in the article. It's a small little integrated circuit. It doesn't even have a heatsink! I think creative is happy just producing the same product year after year with minimal feature improvements. If they really wanted to sell something that gamers would be interested in, they would pour research money into full sound physics processing such as what Aureal did back in the day. I tell you, I have yet to hear anything as amazing as Aureal for suround sound.
Until innovation occurs, as a gamer, you're just as well off using motherboard sound than anything.
I believe I got similar results with my Epson printer. About $0.50 to $1.00 a print. The problem I have is that I use it so infrequently that the ink dries up. I then have to go through the tedious processes of cleaning the cartridge after which point I use up more ink.
Color printers are a such a scam. There is no reason other than profit that they can't allow the cartridges to hold more ink.
Three dimensional scanners. They do exist, but they are very expensive. You can then re-create the figures with a 3D plotter. Not sure if they except clay as a plotting media though.
Because if it wasn't for Sony we would have '4 in 1' memory card readers. In fact, if you forget about Smartmedia which is obsolete, you really should only need SD/MM and Compact Flash. Seeing an expansion bay in my computer with 6 different slots in it as a result of companies arguing to eachother over standards is just sad.
Don't you remember what life was like with parallel ports, serial ports, PS/2 ports, etc.... they have all been replaced by USB and life is good now. Why can't we do the same thing for memory?
Can someone please explain how bad the noise of a sonic boom really is? I mean, if you already have jets flying over your home 24 hours a day, cars honking their horns outside, and other annoyances, how bad is said sonic boom in comparison? And why would we want to limit such an advanced technical achievement just because it may annoy people once and awhile? It's not like they will have flights like this in every city of the U.S.
Integrated amplifiers greatly reduce customizing, additional ADCs and DACs reduce resolution, increase the noise floor and change the sound.
If most people are using this to say listen to audio CD's (or ever worse, 128kbps mp3's) then there really shouldn't be a problem. I'm not sure how these speakers work, but if they are IP based, in theory you should be able to have the stream perfectly digital until they reach the speakers. At which point, you only have a single DAC, which in theory should reduce noise since no analog signal is traveling accross hundreds of feet of cable.
My assumption is speakers like this will be great for home music systems where you can put speakers in multiple rooms and just use the same IP network as the restof your house. This could save lots of money not having to have a bunch of home runs of audio cables.
Think ping times!
If your local LAN has latencies greater than 5ms, there is something very wrong with your network switch. Heck, I can get ping times of less than 10ms for servers located on the internet.
Yeah, apple.com/trailers is the same way. Why the heck to they care if people download movie trailers? It's utterly ridiculus. My only guess is that the movie studies love to have the control to pull a trailer they deam "inappropriate" at some later date.
The challenge is making the design maintainable. There isn't a program that can't be written as a state machine; but most programs expressed this way are difficult to understand and maintain.
Wow, I know this one from first hand experience. We use a "graphical" programming language called LabVIEW where I work and I was tasked with the maintanance of a software program that was one giant state machine. Let me tell you, it was almost impossible to tell where the program was and where it was going half the time because it passed around a state list like a stack from one state to another and sometimes just deleted the entire list and replaced it with a new order!
There is rarely a need for a statemachine unless you are trying to optimize something really low level in hardware. I can't really think of a good paradigm to justify it's use in say Java.
It's probably impossible to re-write the same piece of data everytime. Flash memory is usually designed to rotate through the available empty space, thus if you erase/delete the same part of the file over and over, it's actually erasing block a, and writing to the next free block a+1, until it hits the end of the memory. Only after it's cycled through all available free space will it write to the same block again.
I doubt that. There isn't enough bandwidth on the USB port to write the ammount of data that would kill the flash memory. It's more likely to be mechanical failure of components.
By crippled, I mean by the time Java 1.2 was out, Microsoft's JVM was never updated with the new classes. So it had less functionality.
I have a co-worker who has one of these. It's absolutely amazing. No dead pixels on his model. I'm thinking of requesting one for myself at work, and maybe buying one at home. If the price gets down to $900 or less I might seriously consider it.
Well, Microsoft did extend their JVM with some extra ties into windows and classes that specifically made it easier to write Windows applications that were run under Java (but not write once, run anywhere). However, this was back at Java version 1.0. Microsoft totally didn't bother upgrading their JVM to support features in Java 1.2, and above. Thus, most computers were shipped with a crippled, outdated version of Java.
The problem is, that most web java apps were based on this crippled version of Java. Since that's the case, if you're a web developer you're not going to force people to upgrade your version, so you just stay with what comes standard on Windows. In this way, Microsoft prevented Sun's Java from gaining a significant foothold on Windows.
Ha, you don't understand Microsoft very well. My guess is that the PDF support will be severly crippled. In which case, they will make the PDF format over time look less desirable than their own competing format. I mean, didn't they do the same thing with Java, releasing their own crippled JVM included in every copy of windows? Microsoft eventually replaced it with .NET.
What better way to defeat the competition than by releasing a crippled version of their format that's automatically bundeled with your system, and then coming out with a better "solution".
Just a theory.
Here's a version of this type of program I made. It renders a 3D tree that represents your file structure. It's difficult to setup, and it's pretty buggy, but it's kind of a neat effect. I never found it very intuitive though to browse files this way, so I abandond the project. I haven't updated it in a long time.
Isn't it amazing that everytime a new technology that provides a convience to the average consumer is immediately labeled as a device for theft and mischief. Let's be honest, is someone really going to sit in a book store and start scanning a 300 page novel? Or even a 50 page magazine. Of course not. Regardless, I'm betting they'll embed some sort of DRM system into this. I mean, they put it in printer cartridges, might as well do that here too.
Okay, a couple of replies:
Dump CRLF newlines, convert entirely to LF,
Unless you are a diehard fan of notepad.exe this really isn't related to Microsoft. I've never had any problems with transfer text files between Windows and Linux and editing them in emacs.
The file's type becomes true metadata, and is not embedded in the filename,
Okay, this is a nice thought and everything, but it's a really bad idea. Having a file extension on a file is the only cross platform compatible way of designating that file type without actually opening up the file. The last thing we want is Microsoft creating their own metadata specification that is tied into the file system (and not transferrable to external media). I don't know how many times I've botched file transfer from old Mac OS 9 machines because I could'nt figure out what type of file I was transfering because the file type didn't transfer.
I would actually take this thought a little more seriously. Microsoft may well work with hardware vendors to offer rebates on high end hardware, just to get their operating system installed on your system.