"And just about nobody wants to build their own TV or DVD player!"
It only takes a small team of designers to make a product that sells in telephone-digit numbers. If there is no way for future electronic designers to learn their trade by hacking whatever appliances they can get their hands on when they are kids then you may find that those type of appliances only ever seem to come from overseas companies.
"Unfortunately there isn't a program to stop the user being stupid."
How stupid is stupid? To us clicking on an attachment in Windows is suicide but I know many who are unable to discriminate between what they should or shouldn't click on or say "yes" to because of simple information overload. They are bombarded with pop-ups and adware and all the other crud that has become part of life using (or trying to use) Windows.
A simple solution is for files to have an "executable" flag that isn't set by default on email attachements... oh hang on, it's been done! Just not in Windows.
Unfortunately, they probably have laws to prevent this since a long time ago. But, hey, it would certainly make them think about what they were letting through.
It would also make patents extremely expensive due to the new risks involved for the patent officials and the insurance they would need to take out.
Another approach could be to make the patent holder liable for any losses incurred to other businesses due to the enforcement of wobbly patents.
IMHO patents may have been a good idea once but right now I get the impression they cause far more harm than good and we are really better off without them at all or have them so expensive, with above mentioned liabilities, that no one takes one out unless they have a patent-robust invention and they are serious.
"I think the actual antenna is attached to the top of the tower. It's not the entire tower. Can someone help me out here?"
Long (LF) and medium wave (MF) antennas usually are the entire tower because of the low wavelength. For VHF (e.g. FM radio) and TV the antenna is much shorter so it is at the top of the tower.
One way to tell if it is not obvious is to look at the steel support ropes. If they are broken along their length with insulators then it is probably a long wave or medium wave antenna. The steel rope is broken in this way to prevent the wire being long enough to become a significant and undesireable part of the antenna.
Actually a copy-protect feature has been in place since the 70s to prevent people wanting to record off the radio. It's called "dynamic range compression" and it works by deteriating the sound quality so much, it doesn't matter if it's digital, analogue or sonar, it still sounds awfull. Then there's the phase rotation, equalisation and clipping process as well. I don't know what the situation is in the US but in the UK all this compression is _also_ applied to DAB as well as FM, even though it wasn't supposed to be.
Of course, it also means the radio becomes a pain to listen to also.
So there you have it. Mess up the sound quality and reduce the playlist down to three songs just for good measure. If that doesn't work then also employ talkative DJs who only play half the record and talk over the other half.
Really this broadcast flag is for our protection so we don't download songs that are such poor quality on the P2P networks. That would be worse than that "white noise" trick.
"You can have as many TVs as you like" -not wishing to be pedantic, but what the heck, being pedandic comes naturally to me...
I think the basic license covers up to 3(?) sets then you pay more after that. However, it's at least 12 years since I had a TV so things may have changed since then.
Much as I would like to see more widespread acceptance of Ogg I can see why it doesn't get considered in these sort of situations.
Imagine all the other formats have big organisations backing them. Each will have skilled sales people, glossy presentations showing the features and benefits of their format and resources to plant "incentives" to the right people. Presentation is important.
Contrast and compare with Vorbis. The team have enough resources to code, but what about the money, sales reps, glossy presentations? No chance.
I am sure Vorbis really does sound better than other codecs but I think the final choice is based on a numnber of factors, sound quality only being one of them.
Also there is the question of DRM. That was probably a requirement, not just icing on the cake. That would certainly exclude Ogg Vorbis from the start.
Re:Worst idea since spell checkers
on
Fault Tolerant Shell
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Personlly, I think my spelling has improved due to spell checkers. I allways try to learn from whatever corrections is makes. Maybe other folks do too.
Also, this isn't about covering up mistakes. I am sure good script programmer will _allways_ assume a command can fail. Using the example of the "cd" command in the article, should I really just assume it worked before removing files? Of course not. How ftsh helps is that the necessary error checking code is made more readable and brief. I still have to trap errors whether I use ftsh or bash, the difference is ftsh is easier to understand.
Simply making code less convoluted and more readable is not the same as sloppy programming.
"If they were really smart (like, say, Mac programmers) they'd leave the impossible choices in but gray them out, signifying..."
Greying out menu items is one area open source can actually surpass Mac OSX and Windows. When I try and use a new desktop app I have never used before I am always puzzled why some menu options are greyed out. Everything else I find intuitive. Greyed out items confuse me.
Why is is greyed out? How do I get to it? Why can't I get to it now?
What would be really nifty is some tool-tip text saying something like "This menu item is only available when you are in xyz mode."
Am I the only one who experiences this difficulty?
Uptimes don't necessarily mean the time between crashes.
Kernel updates require a reboot. Any Linux box that has an uptime longer than the time between kernel updates released by Redhat or whoever isn't being maintained. And that's not good.
Also, the one time I installed OpenBSD was on a machine that wasn't doing anything clever, just DNS. No webcasting, Tomcat, conferencing servers etc. All the bleeding edge stuff I install on a Linux server because I know most things were developed on it and compile on it easily.
It means that the majority of drivers are open source and the knowlege of how to write these drivers is in the public domain. If manufacturers all wrote drivers since, say, 1998, then the incentive to reverse engineer, understand, and create GPL drivers would be gone, and we'd all be less wise.
Choosing Windows CE even after a software failure like that still demonstrates an appauling lack of committment to reliability on the part of BMW. It basically says "we don't care about the reliability of our software."
To demonstrate that they were really serious about making sure such a thing didn't happen again they would have made a more mature decision concerning their choice of future platform.
Yes it is unfortunate that the USA has a different standard however the economics are a little different in the US.
In the UK, where DAB is probably most established, you have the BBC and a nationwide network of transmitters which they have the resources to upgrade.
In the US you have lots of local radio stations with their own low-power transmitters which they probably can't affort to rip out and replace. Plus they probably don't want to spend even more $$$ on even more FCC licenses to run two bands at once (FM and one of the DAB allocated bands).
Ibiquity enables them to just add a box to the existing transmitter rack and viola! Instant digital broadcasting.
It is a shame about the quality though. 96kbps is not going to cut it no matter what codec you use. Things aren't much better with DAB at 128kbps (which most stations use, some use more in the UK) because it is a prehistoric MPEG1 layer 2 codec. DAB sounds great for a month or two. Then you hear the artifacts. Then you ONLY hear the artifacts. Then you switch it off. At least that's my experience...
I use an i-Bead MP3/FM/Voice thingy to its full and record a lot of stuff on it (no ogg support yet though). I use it as a revision aid.
For recording voice & FM it would be great to have a decent speech encoder instead of the inefficient ADPCM WAV available. If Vorbis only goes down to 96kbps on this thing then that is not suitable for voice. In fact, Vorbis is just about OK for voice at 8kbps (I tried it) but obviously Speex would be better.
If the i-River had this facility I'd buy definitely buy it. But, as I already have an i-Bead, I'm not sure I can justify the expensive of just Vorbis.
Windows seems to attract spyware and adware like a magnet. It's the way things are done in Windows.
If you were in Linux you could use the Helix Player (hxplay, not helixplay) and have the simplest no-fuss Real Client. It will take you back to the days of Real Player 5, the last useful Windows version they did before they went feature/spyware/adware super-nova trying to compete with Media Player.
Every thing that happens that results in Microsoft's influence increasing is bad because their level of control has already reached a worrying level, and they just keep expanding.
Do you really want to live in a world "locked-down" by Microsoft?
Here is there address in order to ask them if they are: 1) Completely mad 2) In advanced stages of dementia 3) Under severe coercion 4) Have a death wish.
Remember not to sent inflammatory correspondence as this is unlikely to influence them:-)))
T-Engine Forum Secretariat
(In the YRP Ubiquitous Networking Laboratory) The 28th Kowa Building 2-20-1 Nishigotanda Shinagawa Ward Tokyo 141-0031 Japan Tel: +81-3-5437-2270 (Representative) Tel: +81-3-5437-2338 Fax: +81-3-5437-2271
It seems that Wine will forever be in a state of "not quite there" and all the missing pieces of the jigsaw to make it actually work will be proprietry extentions.
Aclerex is not the real competition for Wine. Real competition is when some bright spark codes all the missing pieces as open source.
However, I'm in two minds about this since Codeweaver's product is not really that expensive and it solved a problem for me. I absolutely had to get Windows Media Player to run for someone.
Right now Ogg/Vorbis really needs to be implemented on the standard chip sets out there.
I have an I-bead, the development kit for the chipset it uses costs $12k. As an amature, with no prior DSP experience, I am not about to fork out $12k only to find out that for some reason it is not even possible to implement a Vorbis codec on it.
Any manufacture who is doing this work, at this moment in time, is benefitting Xiph tremendously.
Slashdot Mirror
"And just about nobody wants to build their own TV or DVD player!"
It only takes a small team of designers to make a product that sells in telephone-digit numbers. If there is no way for future electronic designers to learn their trade by hacking whatever appliances they can get their hands on when they are kids then you may find that those type of appliances only ever seem to come from overseas companies.
Some minority interests are worth protecting.
"Unfortunately there isn't a program to stop the user being stupid."
How stupid is stupid? To us clicking on an attachment in Windows is suicide but I know many who are unable to discriminate between what they should or shouldn't click on or say "yes" to because of simple information overload. They are bombarded with pop-ups and adware and all the other crud that has become part of life using (or trying to use) Windows.
A simple solution is for files to have an "executable" flag that isn't set by default on email attachements... oh hang on, it's been done! Just not in Windows.
Unfortunately, they probably have laws to prevent this since a long time ago. But, hey, it would certainly make them think about what they were letting through.
It would also make patents extremely expensive due to the new risks involved for the patent officials and the insurance they would need to take out.
Another approach could be to make the patent holder liable for any losses incurred to other businesses due to the enforcement of wobbly patents.
IMHO patents may have been a good idea once but right now I get the impression they cause far more harm than good and we are really better off without them at all or have them so expensive, with above mentioned liabilities, that no one takes one out unless they have a patent-robust invention and they are serious.
Yes I am dreaming.
"I think the actual antenna is attached to the top of the tower. It's not the entire tower. Can someone help me out here?"
Long (LF) and medium wave (MF) antennas usually are the entire tower because of the low wavelength. For VHF (e.g. FM radio) and TV the antenna is much shorter so it is at the top of the tower.
One way to tell if it is not obvious is to look at the steel support ropes. If they are broken along their length with insulators then it is probably a long wave or medium wave antenna. The steel rope is broken in this way to prevent the wire being long enough to become a significant and undesireable part of the antenna.
Actually a copy-protect feature has been in place since the 70s to prevent people wanting to record off the radio. It's called "dynamic range compression" and it works by deteriating the sound quality so much, it doesn't matter if it's digital, analogue or sonar, it still sounds awfull. Then there's the phase rotation, equalisation and clipping process as well. I don't know what the situation is in the US but in the UK all this compression is _also_ applied to DAB as well as FM, even though it wasn't supposed to be.
Of course, it also means the radio becomes a pain to listen to also.
So there you have it. Mess up the sound quality and reduce the playlist down to three songs just for good measure. If that doesn't work then also employ talkative DJs who only play half the record and talk over the other half.
Really this broadcast flag is for our protection so we don't download songs that are such poor quality on the P2P networks. That would be worse than that "white noise" trick.
"BBC hopes to avoid being left at the mercy of a software giant such as Microsoft"
In that context, what format are they using? Anyone know?
They use Real format right now but aren't they switching to WMA?
"You can have as many TVs as you like"
-not wishing to be pedantic, but what the heck, being pedandic comes naturally to me...
I think the basic license covers up to 3(?) sets then you pay more after that. However, it's at least 12 years since I had a TV so things may have changed since then.
I'm sure cos I'm an audio engineer and I listened to it :-)
Much as I would like to see more widespread acceptance of Ogg I can see why it doesn't get considered in these sort of situations.
Imagine all the other formats have big organisations backing them. Each will have skilled sales people, glossy presentations showing the features and benefits of their format and resources to plant "incentives" to the right people. Presentation is important.
Contrast and compare with Vorbis. The team have enough resources to code, but what about the money, sales reps, glossy presentations? No chance.
I am sure Vorbis really does sound better than other codecs but I think the final choice is based on a numnber of factors, sound quality only being one of them.
Also there is the question of DRM. That was probably a requirement, not just icing on the cake. That would certainly exclude Ogg Vorbis from the start.
Personlly, I think my spelling has improved due to spell checkers. I allways try to learn from whatever corrections is makes. Maybe other folks do too.
Also, this isn't about covering up mistakes. I am sure good script programmer will _allways_ assume a command can fail. Using the example of the "cd" command in the article, should I really just assume it worked before removing files? Of course not. How ftsh helps is that the necessary error checking code is made more readable and brief. I still have to trap errors whether I use ftsh or bash, the difference is ftsh is easier to understand.
Simply making code less convoluted and more readable is not the same as sloppy programming.
Not with that Microsofty in Motorola's IT department I keep seeing adverts for.
:-O
No doubt he will order the destruction of any Linux based development kits as a "security risk"
"If they were really smart (like, say, Mac programmers) they'd leave the impossible choices in but gray them out, signifying..."
Greying out menu items is one area open source can actually surpass Mac OSX and Windows. When I try and use a new desktop app I have never used before I am always puzzled why some menu options are greyed out. Everything else I find intuitive. Greyed out items confuse me.
Why is is greyed out? How do I get to it? Why can't I get to it now?
What would be really nifty is some tool-tip text saying something like "This menu item is only available when you are in xyz mode."
Am I the only one who experiences this difficulty?
Uptimes don't necessarily mean the time between crashes.
Kernel updates require a reboot. Any Linux box that has an uptime longer than the time between kernel updates released by Redhat or whoever isn't being maintained. And that's not good.
Also, the one time I installed OpenBSD was on a machine that wasn't doing anything clever, just DNS. No webcasting, Tomcat, conferencing servers etc. All the bleeding edge stuff I install on a Linux server because I know most things were developed on it and compile on it easily.
Actually, I think this is a good thing.
It means that the majority of drivers are open source and the knowlege of how to write these drivers is in the public domain. If manufacturers all wrote drivers since, say, 1998, then the incentive to reverse engineer, understand, and create GPL drivers would be gone, and we'd all be less wise.
Choosing Windows CE even after a software failure like that still demonstrates an appauling lack of committment to reliability on the part of BMW. It basically says "we don't care about the reliability of our software."
To demonstrate that they were really serious about making sure such a thing didn't happen again they would have made a more mature decision concerning their choice of future platform.
Ha!!!!
Yes it is unfortunate that the USA has a different standard however the economics are a little different in the US.
In the UK, where DAB is probably most established, you have the BBC and a nationwide network of transmitters which they have the resources to upgrade.
In the US you have lots of local radio stations with their own low-power transmitters which they probably can't affort to rip out and replace. Plus they probably don't want to spend even more $$$ on even more FCC licenses to run two bands at once (FM and one of the DAB allocated bands).
Ibiquity enables them to just add a box to the existing transmitter rack and viola! Instant digital broadcasting.
It is a shame about the quality though. 96kbps is not going to cut it no matter what codec you use. Things aren't much better with DAB at 128kbps (which most stations use, some use more in the UK) because it is a prehistoric MPEG1 layer 2 codec. DAB sounds great for a month or two. Then you hear the artifacts. Then you ONLY hear the artifacts. Then you switch it off. At least that's my experience...
I use an i-Bead MP3/FM/Voice thingy to its full and record a lot of stuff on it (no ogg support yet though). I use it as a revision aid.
For recording voice & FM it would be great to have a decent speech encoder instead of the inefficient ADPCM WAV available. If Vorbis only goes down to 96kbps on this thing then that is not suitable for voice. In fact, Vorbis is just about OK for voice at 8kbps (I tried it) but obviously Speex would be better.
If the i-River had this facility I'd buy definitely buy it. But, as I already have an i-Bead, I'm not sure I can justify the expensive of just Vorbis.
No is was a horribly brightly coloured man with two small tufts of hair that starts fires.
You're running Windows aren't you?
Windows seems to attract spyware and adware like a magnet. It's the way things are done in Windows.
If you were in Linux you could use the Helix Player (hxplay, not helixplay) and have the simplest no-fuss Real Client. It will take you back to the days of Real Player 5, the last useful Windows version they did before they went feature/spyware/adware super-nova trying to compete with Media Player.
Every thing that happens that results in Microsoft's influence increasing is bad because their level of control has already reached a worrying level, and they just keep expanding.
Do you really want to live in a world "locked-down" by Microsoft?
I don't.
Here is there address in order to ask them if they are:
:-)))
1) Completely mad
2) In advanced stages of dementia
3) Under severe coercion
4) Have a death wish.
Remember not to sent inflammatory correspondence as this is unlikely to influence them
T-Engine Forum Secretariat
(In the YRP Ubiquitous Networking Laboratory)
The 28th Kowa Building
2-20-1 Nishigotanda
Shinagawa Ward
Tokyo 141-0031
Japan
Tel: +81-3-5437-2270 (Representative)
Tel: +81-3-5437-2338
Fax: +81-3-5437-2271
Email: office@www.t-engine.org
Yes, that hit the nail on the head.
It seems that Wine will forever be in a state of "not quite there" and all the missing pieces of the jigsaw to make it actually work will be proprietry extentions.
Aclerex is not the real competition for Wine. Real competition is when some bright spark codes all the missing pieces as open source. However, I'm in two minds about this since Codeweaver's product is not really that expensive and it solved a problem for me. I absolutely had to get Windows Media Player to run for someone.
I think Mandrake are fully aware that the apps they package need funds too.
When you join Mandrake club you can choose which apps you would like to direct money to. At least you could when I joined.
I notice in the pictures that the lady standing next to the engine on the second page has no head.
An engine that decapitates people is certainly very injurous to health.
Right now Ogg/Vorbis really needs to be implemented on the standard chip sets out there.
I have an I-bead, the development kit for the chipset it uses costs $12k. As an amature, with no prior DSP experience, I am not about to fork out $12k only to find out that for some reason it is not even possible to implement a Vorbis codec on it.
Any manufacture who is doing this work, at this moment in time, is benefitting Xiph tremendously.