What happens to the Canadian visiting the states, who picks up and iPod and takes it home? Will that canuck owe some sort of duty on it when he/she crosses the border? If the duty is small enough, then it might be worth it just to visit stateside for your iPod needs...
Actually, it'd be an interesting exercise to set up a relay in a balloon, and "bounce" signals from an AP over obstacles, etc. Of course, you'd have to deal with the UFO factor - any lighter than air device capable of sustaining the weight of a pair of APs (or a bridge) and the motor/battery needed to power the setup would probably be VERY noticable, and likely to attract notice of homeland security types...
It's also interesting how they dangle "the revealing of a new copyright violation suit" against IBM in front of investors via PR releases in order to distract from their other PR release... the one that says that they've delayed their earnings announcement till Dec. 22 (practically up against the holidays.) The news about the judge issuing the ruling against SCO was top news... for two days... on the weekend. By yesterday it had fallen off the headlines (and probably was out of sight of most investors.)
You gotta wonder, what kind of crap are they going to spout next to distract from the earnings announcement on the 22nd? Or is the earnings announcement going to be nothing but a giant BS session?
Speaking to CommsWorld, researcher Dr Gerard Borg said the ANU has now proved BushLAN's ability to support symmetrical data rates of around 250K bps at distances of up to 40km, using a 20W transmitter and favouring off-the-shelf parts.
I wonder how well attended his talks are at converences?
My bayes corpus was working fine (less than 1% false negative, less than.2% false positive, and only on the really spammy ones) until the db got corrupted about a week ago.:( Good news is that getting a large enough spam corpus to retrain the system is easy. Bad news is that getting a large enough non-spam corpus to balance that out will take a while. Lesson of note: before trying to feed 1600+ messages into sa-learn, make sure you backup your.spamassassin directory first! Going to have to write a shell script to handle that for me...
Just for the curious, I think the bayes_db file got corrupted because the training process went on for so long. I had sa-learn on automatically, so there may have been competing processes (learning ham/spam) trying to write to bayes_db, and messing up the lockfiles. Just my wild-assed guess at this point.
You honestly think that they would have voted for this bill if they actually used their e-mail?
Devote your resources to bringing them bad press in their home district. Remember, all politics is local. Getting e-mails that their staffers will just toss won't bother them a bit. Getting embarassing questions during fundraisers about how they legalized spam will. Remember, this is an election year. Make spam an issue, and they'll HAVE to defend (or reverse) their position.
Hmmm. Complexity vs. Cash
on
RSA-576 Factored
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Does anyone know the relative computational difficulty of cracking RC5-72 vs. trying to factor one of the RSA numbers? Given the higher monetary payoff, I'm wondering if I wouldn't be better off implementing and running a prime factor sieve, rather than running the RC5 client (which only runs on my W2k workstation, because the distributed folks never rewrote the older cores that run on my pre-OSX Macs.)
A better programmer with training in software engineering and a snooty, elitist attitude would write very reusable, easily maintainable meta-code and three configuration files that make it fulfill the three specifications, but it would take him at least three times as long and it he'd maybe even do it if no one ever reuses that code.
You're preaching to the choir here. I have a huge, mutated piece of code that, after a year, I'm still rewriting (I inherited this mess from a previous guy who left.) The guy seemed to prefer cutting and pasting to writing a simple function... Code should always be written under the assumption that it will be reused - because 90% of the time, that's what ends up happening, no matter what the specs say. What I objected to was the use of "coder" to describe unskilled programmers. I'd like to be able to use that term when talking about skilled programmers as well:)
Now consider a project manager who has to make sure the software is ready on time and on budget... whom would he hire?
If he was a programmer, he'd hire the guy who would make sure the code was reusable for the future - because costs for a piece of code will extend well into the future, and cutting corners now just increases the amount of time you have to spend on the code in the future. If he was a MBA who was trying to score the quarterly bonus, and who doesn't expect to be in charge of this group after the project... well, this is why it's even possible to talk about shipping stuff overseas. My question is, after they write the inital code, who's going to be responsible for maintaining it?
There's no excuse for writing bad code, no matter what the reason. I've hacked crap together because of time pressure (ie, we need a fix NOW) and have ALWAYS regretted it, because in the end, I'm the one who has to maintain the code. Poorly written code benefits no one, not even the coder who wrote it to begin with.
Even GUI glue benefits from well-planned rewrites, and copious commenting. Unless you plan on writing nothing but GUI glue, and don't mind writing the same thing over and over (in which case, programming is NOT the field for you), you should:
Structure your code to be modular and reusable.
Comment like crazy so after working on a different project for a year or so, and having not written code in this language for a number of years, you can pick things up with a minimum of effort.
Document any assumptions being made while writing the code - these are usually the things that cause code to break when porting to different platforms/languages.
Coders can write good code and bad code. Please don't demonize the word "coder" like the media have done with "hackers." Not every programmer codes, and not every coder programs, but to paint the process of coding like some sort of untrained serf work is an elitist attitude. Good programmers can throw out trash, good coders (without formal CS degrees) can implement well written, easily maintained code. Plus, when you have to optimize assembly, I have to ask, is that a programming discipline, or is that a coder discipline?
(1) Existing law provides that a person admitted to a theater in
which a motion picture is to be or is being exhibited who refuses to
cease the operation of a video recording device upon the request of
the theater owner is guilty of intentionally interfering with and
obstructing the operation of a lawful business, a misdemeanor.
In other words, it's ALREADY illegal to use a camcorder to tape a film, if they tell you to stop (duh.) So what is this new law going to do?
This bill would provide, in addition, that every person who
operates a recording device in a motion picture theater while a
motion picture is being exhibited, for the purpose of recording a
theatrical motion picture and without the express written authority
of the owner of the motion picture theater, is guilty of a public
offense and shall be punished by imprisonment in a county jail not
exceeding one year, by a fine not exceeding $2,500, or by both that
fine and imprisonment.
By creating a new crime, this bill would
impose a state-mandated local program.[italics mine]
[State-mandated local program meaning a law that requires enforcement, the cost of which may or may not be reimbursed by the state - this bill offers no such reimbursement] In this instance, a recording device is defined as:
(1) "Recording device" means a photographic, digital or video
camera, or other audio or video recording device capable of recording
the sounds and images of a motion picture or any portion of a motion
picture.
I think we need a new law protecting the citizens of California from MORE LAWS.
Hmmm. My watch has a record feature. Would my walking into a theater wearing a watch constitute a crime? What about a device that TRANSMITS audio or video? No recorder actually in the theater, just a wireless transmitter pumping data into the ether, for anyone with a reciever to decode and listen/view.
If they ban transmitters then guess what... cellphones are banned as well. We'll have to check our gadgets at the ticket counter... which brings up a whole new can of worms in terms liability for the theater.
Distribution of taped films is already illegal under copyright law, and patrons are already barred from bringing in recording devices by the theater management. To clog our court system with this nonsense, to waste more dead trees printing the paper needed to contain this new law, to take up legislative time drafting and approving this, that's what really should be illegal. Basically, my taxes just paid for them to pass a new law to punish people... for posessing a "recording device", while watching a movie.
Welcome to California. The new state motto: If it's not against the law to do something here... well, there ought to be!
California has open primaries. Your arguments were echoed by opponents of the open primary referendum, but to my knowledge the "intentional sabotage" fear was never borne out - most people still don't vote in primaries, and the party hardliners do a good enough job of electing extremist (and thusly the least palatable) candidates to represent them, without external influences to help.
Actually, I've thought about this problem before. If a computer can redraw districts to make them safe for a specific party, can't a computer also redraw districts to make them as inhomogenious as possible?
Ideally you'd want to draw districts based on a combination of geographic and logical divisions. My thinking is to take a grid, subdivide it, and mandate that you can't have more than 12 sides to any particular region (yes, I'm biased toward squares, and against circles.) If the census is using a grid-type system, use that. Anything that violates the 12 sides rule, or has any orientation that is more than 1.5 times the diameter of the region selected as a circle should be deemed illegal. Finally, each region has to roughly correspond to the ideal population size for that district, give or take 15%.
Last rule, if you travel from the center of mass of the selected region to any outlying portion of that region, and you cross the boundary of the selected region more than 3 times, that also is a no-no. (to prevent amoeba-like formations.) After every census, the computer randomly redraws everything according to these rules. If the politicians don't like it, tough luck.
Take the redistricting process out of the politicians, and give it to the cartographers, statisticians, and machines instead.
Now, a lot of this trouble could be avoided if, instead of drawing districts for EVERY congressional representative, we drew big districts where multiple representatives could be elected...
Hopefully Apple is able to get more distribution rights sewn up. Australia is supposed to get an iTunes music store early next year (does that mean US customers can buy music by Aussie artists?) However, they still have a ways to go even for the US market - I'm still waiting for more of the Capitol Records back catalog to go online. And what's with the lack of soundtracks/game tracks? I'd think that soundtrack CDs would be a natural fit with a digital download service, but I can't find Michael Giacchino's work in the ITMS!
Solar power is completely unreliable and cost ineffective... it just isn't advanced enough.
Funny, they do meter sunbeams - it's called selling power back to the utility. This same system (grid-tie solar) also removes the need for battery banks for cloudy days and for when the sun isn't out in force (ie, after sundown.)
Solar power used in a distributed fashion is quite effective, and can be cost effective over the long run (around $3 per watt initial investment) depending on how expensive local power is.
Of course, it's much cheaper on a dollar for watt basis just to reduce consumption - convert incandescent lights to fluorescent, use a power strip to shut down stereo/tv equipment that draws power on standby, design buildings to use more natural light, with more effective passive cooling/heating to cut down on excessive HVAC plants.
I use IE on my Win2K workstation because it's fast. However, javascript, java, active scripting, are all turned off, and I have every windows scripting extension I can remember remapped from the scripting host to wordpad. Haven't had any problems with popups, or with drive-by malware trying to install itself, but the damn thing does crash every once in a while...
I guess I really should save myself the trouble, and just install Mozilla.
Well, if you really want to deter this kind of behavior, you should't be offering them a bailout (which is nothing more than a reward for screwing everybody over.) You should, instead, threaten them with nationalization - that will really light a fire under their asses. Otherwise, there's every incentive to cut muscle along with fat, in the name of profits during lean times, because you know that the government will step in with cheap loans, debt forgiveness, tax incentives, etc. if you run into trouble.
Some libraries are forbidden to sell retired books (ie, Los Angeles Public Library - or so I was told by a librarian) but they usually put them in "discard" bins for interested patrons. I've picked up books with split spines and damaged covers that way. If you've got the tools, it's not too difficult to repair/rebind them.
Usually it's donated books that get sold - not always from patrons, but sometimes donated from bookstores as part of fundraising for the library.
However, if they start selling on eBay, I'm going to miss being able to buy a bag of paperbacks at the local library sale for 50 cents...
This from a guy who sold several years worth of Macs, from day one, with the mouse included, and the KEYBOARD OPTIONAL. Anyone remember having to BUY a keyboard with their Mac? This was standard practice for years, to basically force users and programmers to embrace the mouse (which was new to personal computing at the time), and abandon the DOS-style 1. Start 2. Run 3. Quit type menus.
What I want is a cheap pad that I can read eBooks on. Websurfing, word processing, drawing, etc. are nice add-ons, but the killer app is being able to have a couple of these slates lying around, with a very long battery life, able to hook into the household wifi network, and deliver any of the ebooks in my library at a moment's notice.
Right now, the market is oriented toward overpriced, notebook replacement devices, with hi-res screens, bright backlighting, extra bulk for the fold-under keyboard, and *shudder* Windows as the OS. I recently got a Sony Clie NX60 off of eBay. It works ok for what I want (need to buy a wifi adapter card though), but ideally it would have a 640x480 screen, the size of a writing tablet (roughly 6"x8".) I would have gotten one of those RCA REB1200 ebooks, but the proprietary OS and lack of programs/wireless was a big downer
I have to add my experience. I've had a ReplayTV for about a year now (upgraded from a 80gb drive to a 120 gb drive, plus I'm running DVArchive on my workstation, so I can archive my favorite shows.)
The biggest change is that I watch TV when I want to watch TV. All that stuff about prime time audiences goes flying out the window when I decide I want to watch the latest episode of SG-1 at 11am in the morning (well, it's syndicated, so it's technically not the latest one.) Similarly, shows that get dead-end time slots like the Animated Mr. Bean (12:30am on Monday mornings) I can watch in the evening when I get back from work, instead of the brain-dead dreck that the networks are running.
DVRs take the control over programming (with the exception of sports programs that overrun regular programming) out of the network execs, and give it to the viewer. If you have cable (or satellite), and you don't have a ReplayTV (or Tivo, or other timeshifting PVR), you're wasting your money and probably your time as well (in my opinion.)
Last comment - commercials will not go away. Instead, commercial breaks will become extremely short (30 sec, to 1 min) and be irregular (ie, you get a commercial after 3 min, then after 7 min, then after 5 min, instead of being regularly spaced during the program.) This will piss off people who watch live TV trying to go use the restroom during half-hour shows, but it will ensure that the beginning of the first ad, and the ending of the last ad get seen by people with PVRs hitting the 30 sec skip on their remotes. Commercial advance (an automatic commercial skipping feature on the ReplayTV) is already dead (it's easy to defeat - just don't blank the screen before and after commercials) so that's not an issue anymore.
It really makes me sick watching some of the older shows in re-runs due to the re-editting in order to squeeze in more commercials.
Amen! There's one "time compression" technology that speeds up the frame rate from 24fps to 30fps in areas where "the viewers won't notice." Won't notice my ass, we're not idiots ya know. When the characters on the screen suddenly look like they've been shot with a home video camera, damnit, we notice!
This is an area where the big telephone companies stand to gain, one way or another. Right now, Qwest and other Baby Bells are pushing to go to VOIP, not because they want to, but because if they don't they're going to get their lunch eaten (much as they were forced to offer DSL to try and kill off their competition.) After all, by offering VOIP, they're cannabalizing local phone service, on which they make TONS of money.
So why the big push? Well, if the Feds do nothing, they'll need to have a foot in this new market to compete, AND they can save all that money in connection costs for long distance. If the Feds regulate, then the Baby Bells are no worse off than they are now, but all the new VOIP startups get hobbled, big time.
Several commentators have basically noted that the established teleco's are playing chicken with the Feds - either regulate and put us back on top of the game, or else we'll take all our local service (and your freebie tax revenues) and put it in this new area.
You know, I think that legislators' salaries should be directly connected to how many bills they pass. The more bills they pass, the smaller their paychecks should be. If they really believe in what they're doing, they shouldn't mind the hit to the wallet. If they raise taxes, they should be prepared to take a proportional percentage out of their personal and office budgets.
We're gonna pay them a yearly salary anyways, no matter what they do. I'd rather they go home at the end of their term, with a full wallet, than run rampant, doing damage by proposing boneheaded legislation like this.
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What happens to the Canadian visiting the states, who picks up and iPod and takes it home? Will that canuck owe some sort of duty on it when he/she crosses the border? If the duty is small enough, then it might be worth it just to visit stateside for your iPod needs...
Actually, it'd be an interesting exercise to set up a relay in a balloon, and "bounce" signals from an AP over obstacles, etc. Of course, you'd have to deal with the UFO factor - any lighter than air device capable of sustaining the weight of a pair of APs (or a bridge) and the motor/battery needed to power the setup would probably be VERY noticable, and likely to attract notice of homeland security types...
It's also interesting how they dangle "the revealing of a new copyright violation suit" against IBM in front of investors via PR releases in order to distract from their other PR release... the one that says that they've delayed their earnings announcement till Dec. 22 (practically up against the holidays.) The news about the judge issuing the ruling against SCO was top news... for two days... on the weekend. By yesterday it had fallen off the headlines (and probably was out of sight of most investors.)
You gotta wonder, what kind of crap are they going to spout next to distract from the earnings announcement on the 22nd? Or is the earnings announcement going to be nothing but a giant BS session?
Speaking to CommsWorld, researcher Dr Gerard Borg said the ANU has now proved BushLAN's ability to support symmetrical data rates of around 250K bps at distances of up to 40km, using a 20W transmitter and favouring off-the-shelf parts.
I wonder how well attended his talks are at converences?
Ok, there goes my karma!
My bayes corpus was working fine (less than 1% false negative, less than .2% false positive, and only on the really spammy ones) until the db got corrupted about a week ago. :( Good news is that getting a large enough spam corpus to retrain the system is easy. Bad news is that getting a large enough non-spam corpus to balance that out will take a while. Lesson of note: before trying to feed 1600+ messages into sa-learn, make sure you backup your .spamassassin directory first! Going to have to write a shell script to handle that for me...
Just for the curious, I think the bayes_db file got corrupted because the training process went on for so long. I had sa-learn on automatically, so there may have been competing processes (learning ham/spam) trying to write to bayes_db, and messing up the lockfiles. Just my wild-assed guess at this point.
You honestly think that they would have voted for this bill if they actually used their e-mail?
Devote your resources to bringing them bad press in their home district. Remember, all politics is local. Getting e-mails that their staffers will just toss won't bother them a bit. Getting embarassing questions during fundraisers about how they legalized spam will. Remember, this is an election year. Make spam an issue, and they'll HAVE to defend (or reverse) their position.
Does anyone know the relative computational difficulty of cracking RC5-72 vs. trying to factor one of the RSA numbers? Given the higher monetary payoff, I'm wondering if I wouldn't be better off implementing and running a prime factor sieve, rather than running the RC5 client (which only runs on my W2k workstation, because the distributed folks never rewrote the older cores that run on my pre-OSX Macs.)
Call them unskilled programmers then.
:)
... whom would he hire?
A better programmer with training in software engineering and a snooty, elitist attitude would write very reusable, easily maintainable meta-code and three configuration files that make it fulfill the three specifications, but it would take him at least three times as long and it he'd maybe even do it if no one ever reuses that code.
You're preaching to the choir here. I have a huge, mutated piece of code that, after a year, I'm still rewriting (I inherited this mess from a previous guy who left.) The guy seemed to prefer cutting and pasting to writing a simple function... Code should always be written under the assumption that it will be reused - because 90% of the time, that's what ends up happening, no matter what the specs say. What I objected to was the use of "coder" to describe unskilled programmers. I'd like to be able to use that term when talking about skilled programmers as well
Now consider a project manager who has to make sure the software is ready on time and on budget
If he was a programmer, he'd hire the guy who would make sure the code was reusable for the future - because costs for a piece of code will extend well into the future, and cutting corners now just increases the amount of time you have to spend on the code in the future. If he was a MBA who was trying to score the quarterly bonus, and who doesn't expect to be in charge of this group after the project... well, this is why it's even possible to talk about shipping stuff overseas. My question is, after they write the inital code, who's going to be responsible for maintaining it?
Even GUI glue benefits from well-planned rewrites, and copious commenting. Unless you plan on writing nothing but GUI glue, and don't mind writing the same thing over and over (in which case, programming is NOT the field for you), you should:
Structure your code to be modular and reusable.
Comment like crazy so after working on a different project for a year or so, and having not written code in this language for a number of years, you can pick things up with a minimum of effort.
Document any assumptions being made while writing the code - these are usually the things that cause code to break when porting to different platforms/languages.
Coders can write good code and bad code. Please don't demonize the word "coder" like the media have done with "hackers." Not every programmer codes, and not every coder programs, but to paint the process of coding like some sort of untrained serf work is an elitist attitude. Good programmers can throw out trash, good coders (without formal CS degrees) can implement well written, easily maintained code. Plus, when you have to optimize assembly, I have to ask, is that a programming discipline, or is that a coder discipline?
3rd generation iPods (recording feature is part of the rom.)
Pretty much every PDA manufactured after 1999.
All cellphones (if you use the transmitter interpretation that I put out above.)
In other words, it's ALREADY illegal to use a camcorder to tape a film, if they tell you to stop (duh.) So what is this new law going to do?Very interesting to note (from the text of the bill):
[State-mandated local program meaning a law that requires enforcement, the cost of which may or may not be reimbursed by the state - this bill offers no such reimbursement] In this instance, a recording device is defined as:
I think we need a new law protecting the citizens of California from MORE LAWS.
Hmmm. My watch has a record feature. Would my walking into a theater wearing a watch constitute a crime? What about a device that TRANSMITS audio or video? No recorder actually in the theater, just a wireless transmitter pumping data into the ether, for anyone with a reciever to decode and listen/view.
If they ban transmitters then guess what... cellphones are banned as well. We'll have to check our gadgets at the ticket counter... which brings up a whole new can of worms in terms liability for the theater.
Distribution of taped films is already illegal under copyright law, and patrons are already barred from bringing in recording devices by the theater management. To clog our court system with this nonsense, to waste more dead trees printing the paper needed to contain this new law, to take up legislative time drafting and approving this, that's what really should be illegal. Basically, my taxes just paid for them to pass a new law to punish people... for posessing a "recording device", while watching a movie.
Welcome to California. The new state motto: If it's not against the law to do something here... well, there ought to be!
California has open primaries. Your arguments were echoed by opponents of the open primary referendum, but to my knowledge the "intentional sabotage" fear was never borne out - most people still don't vote in primaries, and the party hardliners do a good enough job of electing extremist (and thusly the least palatable) candidates to represent them, without external influences to help.
Actually, I've thought about this problem before. If a computer can redraw districts to make them safe for a specific party, can't a computer also redraw districts to make them as inhomogenious as possible?
Ideally you'd want to draw districts based on a combination of geographic and logical divisions. My thinking is to take a grid, subdivide it, and mandate that you can't have more than 12 sides to any particular region (yes, I'm biased toward squares, and against circles.) If the census is using a grid-type system, use that. Anything that violates the 12 sides rule, or has any orientation that is more than 1.5 times the diameter of the region selected as a circle should be deemed illegal. Finally, each region has to roughly correspond to the ideal population size for that district, give or take 15%.
Last rule, if you travel from the center of mass of the selected region to any outlying portion of that region, and you cross the boundary of the selected region more than 3 times, that also is a no-no. (to prevent amoeba-like formations.) After every census, the computer randomly redraws everything according to these rules. If the politicians don't like it, tough luck.
Take the redistricting process out of the politicians, and give it to the cartographers, statisticians, and machines instead.
Now, a lot of this trouble could be avoided if, instead of drawing districts for EVERY congressional representative, we drew big districts where multiple representatives could be elected...
Hopefully Apple is able to get more distribution rights sewn up. Australia is supposed to get an iTunes music store early next year (does that mean US customers can buy music by Aussie artists?) However, they still have a ways to go even for the US market - I'm still waiting for more of the Capitol Records back catalog to go online. And what's with the lack of soundtracks/game tracks? I'd think that soundtrack CDs would be a natural fit with a digital download service, but I can't find Michael Giacchino's work in the ITMS!
Sorry, the indestructible tools and engineering heritage portion of HP got spun off to Agilent. :(
Solar power is completely unreliable and cost ineffective... it just isn't advanced enough.
Funny, they do meter sunbeams - it's called selling power back to the utility. This same system (grid-tie solar) also removes the need for battery banks for cloudy days and for when the sun isn't out in force (ie, after sundown.)
Solar power used in a distributed fashion is quite effective, and can be cost effective over the long run (around $3 per watt initial investment) depending on how expensive local power is.
Of course, it's much cheaper on a dollar for watt basis just to reduce consumption - convert incandescent lights to fluorescent, use a power strip to shut down stereo/tv equipment that draws power on standby, design buildings to use more natural light, with more effective passive cooling/heating to cut down on excessive HVAC plants.
I use IE on my Win2K workstation because it's fast. However, javascript, java, active scripting, are all turned off, and I have every windows scripting extension I can remember remapped from the scripting host to wordpad. Haven't had any problems with popups, or with drive-by malware trying to install itself, but the damn thing does crash every once in a while...
I guess I really should save myself the trouble, and just install Mozilla.
Well, if you really want to deter this kind of behavior, you should't be offering them a bailout (which is nothing more than a reward for screwing everybody over.) You should, instead, threaten them with nationalization - that will really light a fire under their asses. Otherwise, there's every incentive to cut muscle along with fat, in the name of profits during lean times, because you know that the government will step in with cheap loans, debt forgiveness, tax incentives, etc. if you run into trouble.
Some libraries are forbidden to sell retired books (ie, Los Angeles Public Library - or so I was told by a librarian) but they usually put them in "discard" bins for interested patrons. I've picked up books with split spines and damaged covers that way. If you've got the tools, it's not too difficult to repair/rebind them.
Usually it's donated books that get sold - not always from patrons, but sometimes donated from bookstores as part of fundraising for the library.
However, if they start selling on eBay, I'm going to miss being able to buy a bag of paperbacks at the local library sale for 50 cents...
"It turns out people want keyboards."
This from a guy who sold several years worth of Macs, from day one, with the mouse included, and the KEYBOARD OPTIONAL. Anyone remember having to BUY a keyboard with their Mac? This was standard practice for years, to basically force users and programmers to embrace the mouse (which was new to personal computing at the time), and abandon the DOS-style 1. Start 2. Run 3. Quit type menus.
How times have changed...
What I want is a cheap pad that I can read eBooks on. Websurfing, word processing, drawing, etc. are nice add-ons, but the killer app is being able to have a couple of these slates lying around, with a very long battery life, able to hook into the household wifi network, and deliver any of the ebooks in my library at a moment's notice.
Right now, the market is oriented toward overpriced, notebook replacement devices, with hi-res screens, bright backlighting, extra bulk for the fold-under keyboard, and *shudder* Windows as the OS. I recently got a Sony Clie NX60 off of eBay. It works ok for what I want (need to buy a wifi adapter card though), but ideally it would have a 640x480 screen, the size of a writing tablet (roughly 6"x8".) I would have gotten one of those RCA REB1200 ebooks, but the proprietary OS and lack of programs/wireless was a big downer
I have to add my experience. I've had a ReplayTV for about a year now (upgraded from a 80gb drive to a 120 gb drive, plus I'm running DVArchive on my workstation, so I can archive my favorite shows.)
The biggest change is that I watch TV when I want to watch TV. All that stuff about prime time audiences goes flying out the window when I decide I want to watch the latest episode of SG-1 at 11am in the morning (well, it's syndicated, so it's technically not the latest one.) Similarly, shows that get dead-end time slots like the Animated Mr. Bean (12:30am on Monday mornings) I can watch in the evening when I get back from work, instead of the brain-dead dreck that the networks are running.
DVRs take the control over programming (with the exception of sports programs that overrun regular programming) out of the network execs, and give it to the viewer. If you have cable (or satellite), and you don't have a ReplayTV (or Tivo, or other timeshifting PVR), you're wasting your money and probably your time as well (in my opinion.)
Last comment - commercials will not go away. Instead, commercial breaks will become extremely short (30 sec, to 1 min) and be irregular (ie, you get a commercial after 3 min, then after 7 min, then after 5 min, instead of being regularly spaced during the program.) This will piss off people who watch live TV trying to go use the restroom during half-hour shows, but it will ensure that the beginning of the first ad, and the ending of the last ad get seen by people with PVRs hitting the 30 sec skip on their remotes. Commercial advance (an automatic commercial skipping feature on the ReplayTV) is already dead (it's easy to defeat - just don't blank the screen before and after commercials) so that's not an issue anymore.
It really makes me sick watching some of the older shows in re-runs due to the re-editting in order to squeeze in more commercials.
Amen! There's one "time compression" technology that speeds up the frame rate from 24fps to 30fps in areas where "the viewers won't notice." Won't notice my ass, we're not idiots ya know. When the characters on the screen suddenly look like they've been shot with a home video camera, damnit, we notice!
This is an area where the big telephone companies stand to gain, one way or another. Right now, Qwest and other Baby Bells are pushing to go to VOIP, not because they want to, but because if they don't they're going to get their lunch eaten (much as they were forced to offer DSL to try and kill off their competition.) After all, by offering VOIP, they're cannabalizing local phone service, on which they make TONS of money.
So why the big push? Well, if the Feds do nothing, they'll need to have a foot in this new market to compete, AND they can save all that money in connection costs for long distance. If the Feds regulate, then the Baby Bells are no worse off than they are now, but all the new VOIP startups get hobbled, big time.
Several commentators have basically noted that the established teleco's are playing chicken with the Feds - either regulate and put us back on top of the game, or else we'll take all our local service (and your freebie tax revenues) and put it in this new area.
You know, I think that legislators' salaries should be directly connected to how many bills they pass. The more bills they pass, the smaller their paychecks should be. If they really believe in what they're doing, they shouldn't mind the hit to the wallet. If they raise taxes, they should be prepared to take a proportional percentage out of their personal and office budgets.
We're gonna pay them a yearly salary anyways, no matter what they do. I'd rather they go home at the end of their term, with a full wallet, than run rampant, doing damage by proposing boneheaded legislation like this.