The interface defaults are a bit counter intuitive. I wanted to click on the letters but I have to kind of let them "sail" by. I gave up whilst trying to type "people say the strangest things" which I could have done easily with T9 on my Nokia phone, or with a regular AZERTY or QWERTY keyboard.
This looks like a good idea, but perhaps for the disabled who can only use pointing devices, rather than for those of use who have full dexterity. Even on a PDA, I think Graffiti or typing on a keyboard template would be easier, because this interface is clearly going to take over the entire screen...
I suppose if I got used to it a bit more it could be better, but when I first saw T9 I "got it" straight away, but this just frustrated me.
There are a number of issues in Africa, not least that telecoms companies want traditional telephone revenues (the great cash cow in the sky) and want to limit IP telephony. Telephony revenue is indirect taxation. Taxes cannot be levied in third world countries, but telephone bills can, 'cause you get cut off it you don't pay.
The infrastructures won't be improved if telephony works OK, because the telco doesn't care. You're still talking low percentage penetration of the market for Internet. I'm in Morocco, a relatively advanced nation in North Africa, and yet things move very slowly indeed. Add a bit of corruption (recently it was discovered the CNSS, which is the social security equivalent, had been pilfered by its management for thirty years and billions of dollars).
Wireless is often also controlled by the state. Each country has it's own advantages and disadvantages. I've seen good things in Tunisia, Haiti, Malawi, Rwanda and Eritrea, but as many bad things like crappy copper links to know that there is a long long way to go. Don't forget how political Internet is, censorship and government fear of radicals means they can't embrace Internet with open arms. Information is what is most important, you can't have people criticising the incumbent powers that be on a medium funded by US, Japanese and European budgets!
So all those of you in the US who've never left Uncle Sam, come by here and see what it's like before you cry into your Starbucks when your internet is ONLY at 100kbps today.
After more than 30 years of research and development, a desktop holographic storage system (HDSS) is close at hand. There is still some fine tuning that must be done before such a high-density storage device can be marketed, but IBM researchers have suggested that they will have a small HDSS device ready as early as 2003. These early holographic data storage devices will have capacities of 125 GB and transfer rates of about 40 MB per second.
From http://www.howstuffworks.com/holographic-memory2.h tm
I think I have more chance of being fellated by Madonna, the Queen, or your wife...
What was your favourite search engine before Google was launched? Which other search methods do you use other than your own site? Do you remember Yahoo! when it looked like this?
I have seen a lot of people talking about losing these mini blu-ray CDs and all that, but what they are really for is for PDAs and cameras. The 5" form factor of current optical discs (CD and DVD) is perfect. Much smaller and they would be a lot harder to handle. Remember CD singles on 3" discs? They stopped that pretty fast and went back to 5" discs with 3" of nothing. Wish I still had some of my CD-singles though, bet they'll be worth a bit soon.
The credit card form factor is better for rescue CDs, in your wallet for those times when the server won't boot at a client's place. These are just for PDAs and cameras and maybe walkman jukeboxes, once they are burnable for cheap of course.
It would seem that a lot of you missed the point that the form factor is just "cool" so they're mentioning it, but of course this will scale up to high capacity optical 5" discs, each fitting the contents of the British Library AND the library of congress...
Or how about using these discs inside old 3.5" disc cases? That would make them easy to handle and should they be RW it would be a bonus.
Please remember that not all of us live in the US, and sometimes cannot believe how connected, wired, and techno-hungry you are.
I, for example, am in Morocco. I think I'm ahead of the game with digital satellite TV, PC with TV in/out, and 3 phone points. Still, I don't see why you'd need more elsewhere. It's just consumer overkill in my eyes.
My first house was a simple tract home that did not even have phone lines in two of the three bedrooms.
Woah! I guess he means extensions, rather than different phone numbers for each room, right? Even if he does mean extensions, come one guys, you really need a phone in every bedroom and all that too? Sounds like those people who want RJ45 sockets in their bathrooms.
Clearly, the wording had to go. They were setting themselves up for all sorts of trouble by trying to make the PC look like it was running some kind of "Free Windows"
What I'd love to see is some kind of mass market push for a Linux system that is actually better than Windows for the users. The issue is really compatibility, as many newbie Mac users know when they get files from their Windows chums which won't launch on their machines.
The moves are already there anyway. Having too high a %age of one OS is always going to be bad for cross platform compatible programs, since everyone is just *expected* to run Windows, as many of my clients gasp when I tell them I can't open their email because I run Linux on my desktop. People have cussed me for this, but until people like you and me take a stand then it's no good moaning that Linux doesn't support x, y or z. I can get good documents to clients, I can use open standards, and I will continue to do so. Linux doesn't need to be Windows binary compatible, and it has many advantages over Windows in terms of networking tools. I get all my software for free, learn way more, and have only about 5% time overhead for cross-platform tasks, whereas I save time with software like mutt, Opera, Apache and GIMP because I don't need the additional functionality of IE, Photoshop and Outlook. I'm not even going to gripe about Office suites. I do fine with Star Office and HTML as basic tools.
Double-blind listening tests show that there are no audible differences between cheap audio amps (a $200 pioneer receiver, years ago) and very expensive audio amps (a pair of $10,000 each Conrad Johnson monoblocks) as long as the amps aren't driven to clipping.
Well this tends to vitiate my point that speakers would be more important. But then, the previous poster insisted that crap speakers sounded better on a good amp. This is clearly a religious war type issue and I don't want to get any further into it. IN any case, I don't have the money for real HiFi - my amp is 30 years old but sounds great (it's an old JVC tuner amp which was one of the first to have 5-band "sea" equaliser) and has DIN + RCA for tape machines, an AUX input, and linear (rather than rotary) pots for volume, balance and the EQs.
Example - I have ok speakers anda crappy amp/tuner. replace amp/tuner with a good one and WOW, the OK speakers sound good now!
Yes, but of course they will. Now, take a good amp/tuner on crappy speakers and good speakers. The crappy speakers are a waste of time. Whatever happens.
in fact I have seen radio shack drivers placed in Bose 301's make the bose 301's sound better!
That amazes me.
ok mr snake oil... you try and believe what you want.. but the amp and source are more important than speakers.
Well really, you are right. But shite speakers are shite speakers no matter how good your amp is.
If you have $9800.00 each legacy audio studio monitors they will sound like crap if you have a crappy amp and crappy source. speakers are the 3rd most important.
No, speakers are the most important. A great source and great amp will never sound any good on shitty speakers. Good speakers will sound OK with average amp/source. You have to get every link the best, but I always thought it was best to spend more on speakers than on the amp... but I may be wrong of course?
So their journalists get to express their views openly.
Yeah right. Reverse psychology, hello. They put a little nugget in from time to time to make you think it's "free" press, and then they can gain your trust. What was the next tech story they talked about?
Only a few weeks ago, a senior figure in China's Communist government expressed concern about the amount of time young people are spending surfing the internet and called for tighter regulation of cyber cafes.
It would appear the consensus so far is that Internet is a good thing and therefore all access should be free and open. I would tend to agree, although what is clear is this: any government saying something is illegal, or immoral, or expressing concern about the effect it might have on young people, tends to stigmatise it, but also to make it more attractive. Internet will not be seen as a learning tool if the government suggest that young people should not be spending a lot of time with it. Just like parents years ago bemoaned computer games and too much time in front of those things, but at least then (before the Sega Megadrive and Nintendo Entertainment System, at least) most home machines had a keyboard and taught people like me the basic skills to then get into REAL computing.
Internet should not be discouraged. It is a basic skill that the younger generation will need to progress in the increasingly digital economy. I don't mean computer programming, I mean basic business management and productivity increases by leveraging the power of IT. China (or any other régime for that matter) is making a mistake by making Internet taboo. Late night surfing, on these kid's own free time, should be encouraged. Making porn or whatever illegal usually does not help. I always remember that during prohibition in the US, alcohol consumption rose, and I think now of the UK where tough drug laws are doing nothing to stop alarming increases in heroin addiction.
Still, China has a long long way to go. So do many developing nations. Until the incumbent powers that be have embraced Internet themselves, they are onto a loser. Sad, because it is because of reasons like this that the younger generations are not getting enough time in front of the Internet to start noticing the finer netiquette of things, since they are effectively involved in illegal activity just by surfing in those places, and are therefore unlikely to be good netizens...
It's still 3D (three dimensions) but clearly with only two viewpoints you cannot judge height as accurately at longer distances (problem of resolution decreasing), but the computer will be better at discerning perspective than the human, who subconsciously changes what he/she sees....
Forget security, we all know it'll be used by the porn industry first!
If I have understood correctly, this is for tracking/sensing movements accurately in 3 dimensions and being able to record them in binary, not for reproduction of images in 3D onto a screen with viewing glasses and all that stuff. Indeed, pretty good 3D technology is available but the pr0n industry relies on the cheapest technology available to make the most money - at least as a general rule this is the case. The current massive pr0n market has been enabled by Internet and digital media, but they ain't going to poney up loads of cash for this kind of technology.
Pr0n is not necessarily for the discerning film critic after all, known rather for hand relief and titilation of couples who like a bit of that. Not for amazing technology and three dimensional shots. Would you pay more for 3D DVD quality pr0n??? DVD works for the pr0n industry due to form factor and ease of quality pausing of the frames, at least that's what I reckon;-)
In the MIDI specification, it's a 7 bit number, which means 0-127 in decimal, which controls the volume. Hardly infinite. I doubt they're using anything other than MIDI (with Yamaha DiskClavier enhancements, maybe). Some controls like pedalling are 1 bit (on or off) which is nothing like what you can do with real pedals (kinda mostly on but damping a little, etc)... pedalling is a key nuance for most performances.
The whole point is nuance. The piano player will actually react to the nuance of the piano he is playing. If he feels the upper octaves are quieter, he will adjust the strength he hits the keys. The harmonics generated by the strings will change based on those that are vibrating, but also by other external factors (a very very small nuance).
In the case of the other piano, elsewhere in the world, there will be subtle differences in the instrument itself. Even if you can (and this is arguable) reproduce 99% of the nuance of the actual key velocity, you're not taking into account the fact that the musician is feeling and reacting to a separate instrument with a key action which must be different, affecting his touch, and with possible harmonic and amplitude differences across the piano keyboard range even given the same key velocity.
But first and foremost this is most certainly NOT live music. It's reproduced mechanically, and that is no different from playing a CD (reproduced optically). Just because it's a real piano you're hearing, it's not the same piano the artist was playing. And he/she's not even there.
In being attacked frequently by pedants, I have become one myself. Shit.
However, I would have to say that jokes about the Slashdot effect, StarWars characters giving their end of the story, or Beowulf clusters are worn and boring, no? That's what brought out the pedant in me.
Except that the SlashDot effect is not so much a bandwidth issue, as an inability to serve multiple connections at the same time all at varying speeds. That's what really screws servers, not the available bandwidth.
Putting QoS in place just costs more money. You're right about bandwidth speculation for business customers, but I'm talking about LOW COST ( $50 / month for speeds measured in mbps not kbps). Do a load of QoS and all that, and a flatrate lowcost unlimited highspeed connection is NOT possible.
By lowcost I meant the kind of offers you get now, less than $50 a month for unlimited high speed.
Of course there will be a time when bandwidth really is cheap, but I don't expect that to happen soon. People will want (and need) higher speeds anyway. A Pentium 133MHz is cheap now, but everyone wants 2Ghz...
Flatrate will always have a place. But there is no way that everyone can have super high speed at home without heavy users paying more. Businesses already have separate deals for bandwidth that have nothing to do with home DSL.
The bottom line in any case is that home users could be limited in their eating of national/international bandwidth but be allowed to get local content for free. The problem with P2P is that the music you are looking for is usually outside your timezone, and thus costs too much to get. No-one is going to set up local caching for illegal content, after all.
Slashdot Mirror
This looks like a good idea, but perhaps for the disabled who can only use pointing devices, rather than for those of use who have full dexterity. Even on a PDA, I think Graffiti or typing on a keyboard template would be easier, because this interface is clearly going to take over the entire screen...
I suppose if I got used to it a bit more it could be better, but when I first saw T9 I "got it" straight away, but this just frustrated me.
The infrastructures won't be improved if telephony works OK, because the telco doesn't care. You're still talking low percentage penetration of the market for Internet. I'm in Morocco, a relatively advanced nation in North Africa, and yet things move very slowly indeed. Add a bit of corruption (recently it was discovered the CNSS, which is the social security equivalent, had been pilfered by its management for thirty years and billions of dollars).
Wireless is often also controlled by the state. Each country has it's own advantages and disadvantages. I've seen good things in Tunisia, Haiti, Malawi, Rwanda and Eritrea, but as many bad things like crappy copper links to know that there is a long long way to go. Don't forget how political Internet is, censorship and government fear of radicals means they can't embrace Internet with open arms. Information is what is most important, you can't have people criticising the incumbent powers that be on a medium funded by US, Japanese and European budgets!
So all those of you in the US who've never left Uncle Sam, come by here and see what it's like before you cry into your Starbucks when your internet is ONLY at 100kbps today.
From http://www.howstuffworks.com/holographic-memory2.h tm
I think I have more chance of being fellated by Madonna, the Queen, or your wife...
I have been called out
I don't even get overtime for callouts, and rarely thankyous... some people just don't appreciate that you're stopping your PERSONAL life for them.
What was your favourite search engine before Google was launched? Which other search methods do you use other than your own site? Do you remember Yahoo! when it looked like this?
The credit card form factor is better for rescue CDs, in your wallet for those times when the server won't boot at a client's place. These are just for PDAs and cameras and maybe walkman jukeboxes, once they are burnable for cheap of course.
It would seem that a lot of you missed the point that the form factor is just "cool" so they're mentioning it, but of course this will scale up to high capacity optical 5" discs, each fitting the contents of the British Library AND the library of congress...
Or how about using these discs inside old 3.5" disc cases? That would make them easy to handle and should they be RW it would be a bonus.
Moderation totals: +2 Funny, -2 Overrated
I, for example, am in Morocco. I think I'm ahead of the game with digital satellite TV, PC with TV in/out, and 3 phone points. Still, I don't see why you'd need more elsewhere. It's just consumer overkill in my eyes.
Woah! I guess he means extensions, rather than different phone numbers for each room, right? Even if he does mean extensions, come one guys, you really need a phone in every bedroom and all that too? Sounds like those people who want RJ45 sockets in their bathrooms.
Get a cordless.
What I'd love to see is some kind of mass market push for a Linux system that is actually better than Windows for the users. The issue is really compatibility, as many newbie Mac users know when they get files from their Windows chums which won't launch on their machines.
The moves are already there anyway. Having too high a %age of one OS is always going to be bad for cross platform compatible programs, since everyone is just *expected* to run Windows, as many of my clients gasp when I tell them I can't open their email because I run Linux on my desktop. People have cussed me for this, but until people like you and me take a stand then it's no good moaning that Linux doesn't support x, y or z. I can get good documents to clients, I can use open standards, and I will continue to do so. Linux doesn't need to be Windows binary compatible, and it has many advantages over Windows in terms of networking tools. I get all my software for free, learn way more, and have only about 5% time overhead for cross-platform tasks, whereas I save time with software like mutt, Opera, Apache and GIMP because I don't need the additional functionality of IE, Photoshop and Outlook. I'm not even going to gripe about Office suites. I do fine with Star Office and HTML as basic tools.
Well this tends to vitiate my point that speakers would be more important. But then, the previous poster insisted that crap speakers sounded better on a good amp. This is clearly a religious war type issue and I don't want to get any further into it. IN any case, I don't have the money for real HiFi - my amp is 30 years old but sounds great (it's an old JVC tuner amp which was one of the first to have 5-band "sea" equaliser) and has DIN + RCA for tape machines, an AUX input, and linear (rather than rotary) pots for volume, balance and the EQs.
Not right now ;-)
Example - I have ok speakers anda crappy amp/tuner. replace amp/tuner with a good one and WOW, the OK speakers sound good now!
Yes, but of course they will. Now, take a good amp/tuner on crappy speakers and good speakers. The crappy speakers are a waste of time. Whatever happens.
in fact I have seen radio shack drivers placed in Bose 301's make the bose 301's sound better!
That amazes me.
ok mr snake oil... you try and believe what you want.. but the amp and source are more important than speakers.
Well really, you are right. But shite speakers are shite speakers no matter how good your amp is.
No, speakers are the most important. A great source and great amp will never sound any good on shitty speakers. Good speakers will sound OK with average amp/source. You have to get every link the best, but I always thought it was best to spend more on speakers than on the amp... but I may be wrong of course?
I could care less about the sig limit, I can't be bothered to keep changing it ;-)
Yeah right. Reverse psychology, hello. They put a little nugget in from time to time to make you think it's "free" press, and then they can gain your trust. What was the next tech story they talked about?
Which leaves me to flame your spelling of the word grammar.
It would appear the consensus so far is that Internet is a good thing and therefore all access should be free and open. I would tend to agree, although what is clear is this: any government saying something is illegal, or immoral, or expressing concern about the effect it might have on young people, tends to stigmatise it, but also to make it more attractive. Internet will not be seen as a learning tool if the government suggest that young people should not be spending a lot of time with it. Just like parents years ago bemoaned computer games and too much time in front of those things, but at least then (before the Sega Megadrive and Nintendo Entertainment System, at least) most home machines had a keyboard and taught people like me the basic skills to then get into REAL computing.
Internet should not be discouraged. It is a basic skill that the younger generation will need to progress in the increasingly digital economy. I don't mean computer programming, I mean basic business management and productivity increases by leveraging the power of IT. China (or any other régime for that matter) is making a mistake by making Internet taboo. Late night surfing, on these kid's own free time, should be encouraged. Making porn or whatever illegal usually does not help. I always remember that during prohibition in the US, alcohol consumption rose, and I think now of the UK where tough drug laws are doing nothing to stop alarming increases in heroin addiction.
Still, China has a long long way to go. So do many developing nations. Until the incumbent powers that be have embraced Internet themselves, they are onto a loser. Sad, because it is because of reasons like this that the younger generations are not getting enough time in front of the Internet to start noticing the finer netiquette of things, since they are effectively involved in illegal activity just by surfing in those places, and are therefore unlikely to be good netizens...
It's still 3D (three dimensions) but clearly with only two viewpoints you cannot judge height as accurately at longer distances (problem of resolution decreasing), but the computer will be better at discerning perspective than the human, who subconsciously changes what he/she sees....
If I have understood correctly, this is for tracking/sensing movements accurately in 3 dimensions and being able to record them in binary, not for reproduction of images in 3D onto a screen with viewing glasses and all that stuff. Indeed, pretty good 3D technology is available but the pr0n industry relies on the cheapest technology available to make the most money - at least as a general rule this is the case. The current massive pr0n market has been enabled by Internet and digital media, but they ain't going to poney up loads of cash for this kind of technology.
Pr0n is not necessarily for the discerning film critic after all, known rather for hand relief and titilation of couples who like a bit of that. Not for amazing technology and three dimensional shots. Would you pay more for 3D DVD quality pr0n??? DVD works for the pr0n industry due to form factor and ease of quality pausing of the frames, at least that's what I reckon ;-)
In the MIDI specification, it's a 7 bit number, which means 0-127 in decimal, which controls the volume. Hardly infinite. I doubt they're using anything other than MIDI (with Yamaha DiskClavier enhancements, maybe). Some controls like pedalling are 1 bit (on or off) which is nothing like what you can do with real pedals (kinda mostly on but damping a little, etc)... pedalling is a key nuance for most performances.
In the case of the other piano, elsewhere in the world, there will be subtle differences in the instrument itself. Even if you can (and this is arguable) reproduce 99% of the nuance of the actual key velocity, you're not taking into account the fact that the musician is feeling and reacting to a separate instrument with a key action which must be different, affecting his touch, and with possible harmonic and amplitude differences across the piano keyboard range even given the same key velocity.
But first and foremost this is most certainly NOT live music. It's reproduced mechanically, and that is no different from playing a CD (reproduced optically). Just because it's a real piano you're hearing, it's not the same piano the artist was playing. And he/she's not even there.
However, I would have to say that jokes about the Slashdot effect, StarWars characters giving their end of the story, or Beowulf clusters are worn and boring, no? That's what brought out the pedant in me.
Except that the SlashDot effect is not so much a bandwidth issue, as an inability to serve multiple connections at the same time all at varying speeds. That's what really screws servers, not the available bandwidth.
Putting QoS in place just costs more money. You're right about bandwidth speculation for business customers, but I'm talking about LOW COST ( $50 / month for speeds measured in mbps not kbps). Do a load of QoS and all that, and a flatrate lowcost unlimited highspeed connection is NOT possible.
Of course there will be a time when bandwidth really is cheap, but I don't expect that to happen soon. People will want (and need) higher speeds anyway. A Pentium 133MHz is cheap now, but everyone wants 2Ghz...
Flatrate will always have a place. But there is no way that everyone can have super high speed at home without heavy users paying more. Businesses already have separate deals for bandwidth that have nothing to do with home DSL.
The bottom line in any case is that home users could be limited in their eating of national/international bandwidth but be allowed to get local content for free. The problem with P2P is that the music you are looking for is usually outside your timezone, and thus costs too much to get. No-one is going to set up local caching for illegal content, after all.