The lack of good DVD authoring software for linux is bizarre. Every 6 months I look into it and am surprised it's still not there.
By "good", I mean something which approximates "cp myshow.avi/dev/dvd" and have it compatible with a normal player doing all conversions automatically.
the difference between arrest and kidnapping becomes merely the identity of the person doing the action.
Or political expediency. In the Western media, generally Israel "arrests" while Hezbollah "kidnaps." Without getting into the merits of both sides, you can bet the slant is reversed in other parts of the world.
No synergy? Everything an mp3 player needs, a cellphone already has, except a large flash memory - which is cheap and takes no power when not in use. Plus it makes perfect sense for a phone call to pause music playback (or go straight to voicemail, if you don't want your tunes interrupted).
Last night I had my son's birthday at a "fun center." Inside there were some kids playing video games. But outside, all the preteens were sitting on the curb for what must have been an hour and a half, sitting in a group but looking at and pushing buttons on their cell phones. I have no clue what they were doing for all that time, but they were really into it. And all I hear on slashdot is how phones are too complicated and "people" don't want to have multifunction phones?
To be honest, I don't know what else I want out of an MP3 player, except easier booting of linux on the damn thing, for whatever reason I'd want that..
I think that's Apple's problem right there. MP3 playing, in itself, is practically a free add-on for any device with a bit of storage space and a display. Much simpler than designing a good cell phone, I'd argue. I recently noticed an ad for a GPS device. After describing all the GPS functions, they casually mentioned that it is also an mp3 player. I can't see why every cellphone made in the near future would not have a good mp3 player in it. 1 GB flash retails for $25 now, and the power required to power headphones isn't much.
I think we can all agree that kidnapping someone and keeping them in your basement is bad, but nobody should be surprised when we punish the perpetrator by essentially doing the same thing to him.
One big difference is that the government doesn't just "kidnap" people all the sudden and hide them away without telling anybody where they are, there's due process and the accused can defend themselves against the accusations. Um, I mean, unless the President doesn't feel like it.
Not necessarily. If somebody asked me if I had time for an appointment Wednesday or Thursday, and I said "no" because I was available on both days, that would be wierd.
How is this different than EWR's monorail or other systems?
I don't know about EWR, but this appears to be a point-to-point system, which navigates to where you select instead of having preset routes and switchovers. And it means you ride by yourself (or company of your choosing) instead of 60 anonymous people. Incidentally, eliminating the "mass" from "mass transit" also makes a much smaller target for terrorism.
Not really. Pets.com and that online grocery place had real expenses (and not just their superbowl ads). Youtube is different. Bandwidth is cheap and getting cheaper every day, and other than that the site is mostly automated. Youtube did not start with a huge outlay of VC funding, either... it started small and just took off in popularity with users. I don't think they'll have much trouble supporting it with ads.
I don't know of any current, widely adopted P2P technology that's any good for streaming content. (Although skype *might* count).
Though as a consumer, I hardly care. It's true that providing a service costs money, but those actual costs are only tied to usage fees in such an indirect way that it's hardly relevant to the consumer. You think ebay bases their fees on how much they need to stay alive? No. It's however much they think they can get. In an ideal market those figures would be closely related, but that ain't the real world.
Your comment resonates with Blockbuster: "Netflix is trying to monopolize the online movie-rental industry and stifle competition."
But I ask you, what is the point of a patent at all, if not to create a monopoly and stifle competition? Patents are an open admission that pure supply and demand capitalism is not workable (or at least not equitable). I guess the only question is how high the bar must be for an innovation to be deserving of a government-imposed monopoly. Or at least, how long that monopoly should be upheld.
Yes, seriously. So far this thread is almost 100% jokey-jokes. I, for one, find it very suspect to hand so much influence over public schools to a private company... and Microsoft is not even footing the bill!? From the blurb, the school sounds a lot like most "office of tomorrow" tech demos you find at big companies and universities. You know, the ones that nobody actually uses, which dry up and blow away after a year or two. Dropping a "gleaming white modern facility" straight from a Microsoft drawing-board into the middle of Philadelphia, what could possibly go wrong? Do you think wealthy parents would welcome a big social experiment like this on their kids?
One risk to Wii that people here don't seem very concerned about is that it isn't very fast! As if simply being released at a certain date places a console within this "generation" of consoles. Well, I'm not so sure. A low-cost console with a catalog of low-cost games is a great thing... that's why I recently bought a PS2! I can buy any of thousands of games for $10-$15. For those who want better hardware, there's the XBox 360. With a year head-start over the Wii, will the price difference still be that great? The Wii's controller may be cool, but what's to stop somebody making that for the XBox 360 or even the PS2? Guitar Hero has a novel interface for existing consoles, and was successful.
While I agree with you, there is no way to do this in pure java - it will HAVE to have a DLL or some form of native code and it will be highly dependant on hardware.
Does the linux/proc filesystem provide this sort of info? The format would still be system-dependent, but at least you wouldn't need to link in any native code.
Interesting. Does that mean you can currently plug in and write software to access a large number of sensors? According to your first link, the RS485 hardware could do that, but it isn't supported by the firmware. I also hope there will soon be a java interpreter etc. for NXT. Then again, maybe it would be better just to use the bluetooth to send sensor readings and receive actuator commands, and put all the control logic on a laptop.
Some "designy" people think the simpler the better, but I'm with you... it's frustrating when expected functionality is lacking. I can't stand the more recent link target save as dialogs for firefox... they don't let you type in a path, and in one version you can't even specify a location! It just saves everything to ~/Desktop. But it changes so frequently, I don't know how long it was like that. (Or maybe it adapts to the Gnome / KDE environment?)
Mindstorms are cool, but I was disappointed by the new version because it's still limited to a fixed, relatively small number of sensors and actuators per control module. I was really hoping for a bus-based architecture, where you could daisychain almost an arbitrary number of sensors and actuators, and address them individually in the code.
Not True. x86 was a crappy intruction set before IBM or Microsoft got there.
If it was crappy before, it has gotten much more crappy since. Even memory protection, which seems pretty fundamental, is a bolt-on. Plus floating point, SIMD (i.e. MMX), 64-bit support, and now virtualization.
Of course all of this is assuming the particulars of the instruction set really matter anyways.
Systems with a clean instruction set are apparently unpopular in the real world.
I would put it the other way... when a lot of different people and applications pile on to a technology, it necessarily becomes more complex and loses some of its initial design clarity. This almost always happens to software programs in the end.
I am confused by this. Is it Nvidia's decision for OSX to support a new card, or Apple's? In the past, Apple's high quality control has in part been a result of targeting only selected hardware. The more Mac hardware resembles PC hardware, the more manufacturers will be offering Mac-compatible products. Are they automatically welcome to do so, or can Apple say, "sorry, if you put that in your case it's no longer a Mac"?
While prevarication CAN be a tool in the bag of a social engineer, it's not the only tool. There are numerous times you can tell the entire truth, or say nothing at all, and still elicit the response you desire.
Could you provide an example of telling the whole truth that would be considered social engineering?
"Pretexting" is a new term to me... it seems to be synonymous with what's called "social engineering" in computer security circles. (The colloquial term is "lying".) Is that the case?
If you really think about it, you have to ask how and why tax rates ever increase at all.
Of course people think about that. Answers include the Great Depression, WWII, and the Cold War. I guess you're saying those aren't good enough reasons for government expansion. And probably most people agree that "bloated government" is bad. But what does that really mean? It means slashing Social Security. It means no more deficit spending to "jumpstart" the economy. It means slashing defense spending, and rolling back civil rights legislation. That's where the rubber meets the road.
Slashdot Mirror
By "good", I mean something which approximates "cp myshow.avi /dev/dvd" and have it compatible with a normal player doing all conversions automatically.
Last night I had my son's birthday at a "fun center." Inside there were some kids playing video games. But outside, all the preteens were sitting on the curb for what must have been an hour and a half, sitting in a group but looking at and pushing buttons on their cell phones. I have no clue what they were doing for all that time, but they were really into it. And all I hear on slashdot is how phones are too complicated and "people" don't want to have multifunction phones?
Not necessarily. If somebody asked me if I had time for an appointment Wednesday or Thursday, and I said "no" because I was available on both days, that would be wierd.
Buying up a 1km swath of the city between the two buildings to bury the fiber in might be a tad expensive though.
Wow, you sound just like all those "portal" web sites that google obliterated.
Not really. Pets.com and that online grocery place had real expenses (and not just their superbowl ads). Youtube is different. Bandwidth is cheap and getting cheaper every day, and other than that the site is mostly automated. Youtube did not start with a huge outlay of VC funding, either... it started small and just took off in popularity with users. I don't think they'll have much trouble supporting it with ads.
Though as a consumer, I hardly care. It's true that providing a service costs money, but those actual costs are only tied to usage fees in such an indirect way that it's hardly relevant to the consumer. You think ebay bases their fees on how much they need to stay alive? No. It's however much they think they can get. In an ideal market those figures would be closely related, but that ain't the real world.
But I ask you, what is the point of a patent at all, if not to create a monopoly and stifle competition? Patents are an open admission that pure supply and demand capitalism is not workable (or at least not equitable). I guess the only question is how high the bar must be for an innovation to be deserving of a government-imposed monopoly. Or at least, how long that monopoly should be upheld.
Yes, seriously. So far this thread is almost 100% jokey-jokes. I, for one, find it very suspect to hand so much influence over public schools to a private company... and Microsoft is not even footing the bill!? From the blurb, the school sounds a lot like most "office of tomorrow" tech demos you find at big companies and universities. You know, the ones that nobody actually uses, which dry up and blow away after a year or two. Dropping a "gleaming white modern facility" straight from a Microsoft drawing-board into the middle of Philadelphia, what could possibly go wrong? Do you think wealthy parents would welcome a big social experiment like this on their kids?
One risk to Wii that people here don't seem very concerned about is that it isn't very fast! As if simply being released at a certain date places a console within this "generation" of consoles. Well, I'm not so sure. A low-cost console with a catalog of low-cost games is a great thing... that's why I recently bought a PS2! I can buy any of thousands of games for $10-$15. For those who want better hardware, there's the XBox 360. With a year head-start over the Wii, will the price difference still be that great? The Wii's controller may be cool, but what's to stop somebody making that for the XBox 360 or even the PS2? Guitar Hero has a novel interface for existing consoles, and was successful.
Interesting. Does that mean you can currently plug in and write software to access a large number of sensors? According to your first link, the RS485 hardware could do that, but it isn't supported by the firmware. I also hope there will soon be a java interpreter etc. for NXT. Then again, maybe it would be better just to use the bluetooth to send sensor readings and receive actuator commands, and put all the control logic on a laptop.
Some "designy" people think the simpler the better, but I'm with you... it's frustrating when expected functionality is lacking. I can't stand the more recent link target save as dialogs for firefox... they don't let you type in a path, and in one version you can't even specify a location! It just saves everything to ~/Desktop. But it changes so frequently, I don't know how long it was like that. (Or maybe it adapts to the Gnome / KDE environment?)
Mindstorms are cool, but I was disappointed by the new version because it's still limited to a fixed, relatively small number of sensors and actuators per control module. I was really hoping for a bus-based architecture, where you could daisychain almost an arbitrary number of sensors and actuators, and address them individually in the code.
Of course all of this is assuming the particulars of the instruction set really matter anyways.
I am confused by this. Is it Nvidia's decision for OSX to support a new card, or Apple's? In the past, Apple's high quality control has in part been a result of targeting only selected hardware. The more Mac hardware resembles PC hardware, the more manufacturers will be offering Mac-compatible products. Are they automatically welcome to do so, or can Apple say, "sorry, if you put that in your case it's no longer a Mac"?
"Pretexting" is a new term to me... it seems to be synonymous with what's called "social engineering" in computer security circles. (The colloquial term is "lying".) Is that the case?
Anyways, I hope this provides some good content for loading up on the "one laptop per child" project.