Sega Game Gear had a TV Tuner years ago, and so did the nomad.
As did GameXPress (portable TG16).
There's a tuner for the GBA, and one for GBC, IIRC.
Why is it so difficult or fantastic to add one to a PDA?
It hardly seems worth it to me, unless they can shrink down a DirecTV dish or it comes with a huge spool of coax cable. Free to air TV is slowly being driven out of existence.
HDTV (digital signals) will put the final nail in it's coffin, when the slightly-fuzzy-but-watchable analog channel turns into a skipping jerky unwatchable slideshow. I think we all recognize the difference between a weak analog signal and a weak digital one.
Actually, after the game crash of '83, everyone just assumed that the gaming console was dead and buried.
After all, why would anyone pay for a video game only device, when they could get something like a Commodore 64, play the same games, and do their taxes and write letters?
When the Famicom was introduced to America, it was called the Nintendo Entertainment System. They restyled it to look more high-tech, with its front-loading cartridge slot, and promised keyboard and disk add-ons which never came out (they did in japan, though). They basically marketed it as a home PC system to compete with C-64s and Atari STs and PC Jrs, etc.
It worked, and it brought the console back from the brink of extinction.
We still support dispatching systems that date back to the late 70s. So I guess an HP mainframe doesnt count, but do the dumb terminals that have been replaced with PCs count?
PC Term or minicom or whatever dos based terminal software got shoved on there when the PC came out.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it. I know for a fact that some custom code I wrote in the early 90s is still running. It basically just printed bin labels for an inventory system.
I know it's a shock to geeks, but a commodore 64 can drive a 1200 baud serial printer just as well as a dual Xeon 2.4 with a jigawig of RAM.
I doubt the code in question is so trivial. It's more along the lines of:
Develop a system for inter process communication.
Develop a system for allocating and clearing memory dynamically.
Develop a system for handling out-of-order interrupts on a multitasking operating system.
I have no idea what the specific claims are, that'll come out later, but it's way to early to start saying the lawsuit has no merit. A judge and/or jury will decide that.
"The Linux community would have me publish it now, (so they can have it) laundered by the time we can get to a court hearing"
That they would.
This shows one of the weaknesses of the open-source movement," said Mark Radcliffe, a copyright attorney with Gray Cary. "You're all dependent on trust. Unfortunately, a number of people involved in the process do not have a great degree of respect for intellectual property. It's fine if it's personal, but if you decide to implement that by saying 'I don't give a damn about this intellectual property,' everything that touches it is now screwed."
Seriously, open source software projects are, by and large, copylefted clones of commercial products. Am I the only one who saw something like this happening eventually?
You can point and fuss and cuss at SCO all you want. This is no doubt just the tip of the iceberg.
I'm sure there are hundreds of others who've had their code "liberated" without their consent.
These are pampered rich kids taking a bullshit course called "Gothic Imagination".
I mean, c'mon. There's no benefit to courses like this, only cost.
When daddy pays $60,000 in tuition to send his dopey kid to college, the last thing they want is for him to flunk or drop out. So colleges are filled with bird courses and bogus degrees in silly shit like this. Like the school that has a course on watching the Simpsons.
It pisses me off that I busted my ass for a scholarship, and then to pay back student loans, when the shools give the same degree and preferential treatment to mentally deficient trust fund babies because they're the ones who can donate to the alumni fund down the road.
Bah. Higher learning my ass. What a waste of time and money University was.
Take your free iPod and your PhD in "Dragonball Z cartoons". People like me are too busy busting our humps to keep the world working.
1) A mechanical device that sometimes resembles a human and is capable of performing a variety of often complex human tasks on command or by being programmed in advance.
2) A machine or device that operates automatically or by remote control.
3) A person who works mechanically without original thought, especially one who responds automatically to the commands of others
So which definition of robot makes it into the hall of fame?
By definition 1, many commonplace things qualify, like my PC with printer. It performs the complex task of doing my taxes.
By definition 2, even more things qualify. My toaster automatically makes toast.
By definition 3, this would be full of slashdot editors. Hardly worthy of such an honor, IMO.
I mean, all this "the story stinks", "the levels are the same". This can all be said about any FPS game that comes out. This can be said about Doom 3 even before it comes out.
Same old run around and shoot, all thats new is eye candy.
People keep paying for FPS and then compaining "this one sucks!"
Recently, news.com reported that Microsoft is cozzying up to the leading CD restriction company. This means we're one baby step away from all music CDs ONLY playing on Microsoft Windows XP.
Oh, that's what that means.
Yeah right.
He cant even spell cozying (cosying is acceptable too).
And again he starts with it..
Straight ahead of us is a world where CDs will only play in Microsoft Windows XP computers.
YEAH RIGHT.
I'm absolutely sure the music industry is going to piss away all the customers with car stereos, or portable boomboxes, or actual audio equipment, and expect to turn a profit marketing music for little piezoelectric beepers that come with your Dell.
This guys such a trolling ass-clown. And this is a lame ass "Buy my new Lindows for a hundred bucks a year or else the world will collapse!" pitch.
This uninformed non-technical marketer should go back to the sewer he crawled out of. Fuck him and fuck his continuing efforts to exploit the work of others for profits.
Whether you buy the music online or from Best Buy, so long as the producer makes the same amount of cash, they dont give a shit. Really.
What slashbots keep saying, though, is that the RIAA should "wake up" and invest billions in a new eCommerce infrastructure that they must maintain, because it might be profitable. Why would they? Especially after the.com bust. You can fault them for a lot of things, but not for being pragmatic when it comes to doling out investors cash.
Build it and they will come. Apple built it, and they came to the tune of $100,000. I'm sure setup costs were at least a magnitude of order greater than that, and they're still in the hole. But so long as it's Apples gamble, the RIAA could give a shit. They're out to make money. Whether they make it from online sales or from plastic spinning discs, they dont care.
If you read any musicians mag, you'll see these full page ads for this Perfect Pitch system, which claims to make you be able to identify notes perfectly, and then play by ear and etc etc.
Apparently it works by you repetitively linking a note with a color, until you hear the colors. An A flat is a red, and a C# is a blue, and so on. So you can hear music as a sequence of colors and makes you super crazy talented.
It's probably just a scam. But I guess it's got a pseudo-scientific base to the scam.
Re:Special drives / software for the Mac ...
on
High Density CDs
·
· Score: 1
Sounds like simple hardware compression.
The poster missed a key word; TO.
It allows the drive to burn up TO 1.4GB.
When I read "up to", I think compression, and even then a best-case scenario is me burning all text files, and probably a more optimized filesystem layout.
This isnt overburning, this is burning a special high density disk with a different laser. It has nothing to do with regular CD-Rs, save the form factor.
Like the dreamcasts GD-ROMs (1 gig).
Sony already did this
on
High Density CDs
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Well, sortof, with their DD-CDR or whatever, using new tech to get 1.2 gig per disc.
If the two formats were compatible, it might almost be useful. Of course that's doubtful. So I cant really see the usefulness of this.
I thought maybe for archiving or something, but then the cost of the Sony drive is comparable to a DVD-R, so why would I want 1.2 gigs instead of 4.5?
These little fart in a jar techs will no doubt go the way of the zip drive. A day late and a dollar short - unless the industry works together for a standard thats cross compatible, and makes it ubiquitous.
They'll add the channels whether you want it or not, and charge you that much more for basic service.
Did you ask for QVC or the Golf Channel or WE or Bravo or CMT? Nope. But you get to pay for 'em as part of your basic cable service.
With the digital tech they have, they could let you pick channels, for say 2 bucks a piece. My cable bill would be about 20 bucks a month for the 10 channels I or my family actually watch. But they wont, there's more money in forcing people to pay for crap
I hope this (is it?) is owned by Cartoon Network. So they can take all that shitty anime crap that's meant for japanese 12 year olds out of "adult swim".
I'd much rather watch ATHF or SeaLab 2021 than this Trigun crap. They could air anything in its place... Oblongs, Family Guy, Home Movies, Ripping Friends, even Dexters Lab or Johnny Bravo. Hell, air some old Gi Joe episodes.
This badly dubbed anime crap has to go. It's not "adult".
Could be that they got one end of the transmission to roll over on his buddy and hand out the plain text, this seems most likely. All the tough guy criminals squeal like little piggies when a DA starts talking about jail time.
Could be they got the password to decrypt the wiretaps, or the plain text, through normal policework (like a warrant to search the PC). The fact that guy A is talking to known crime figure B is probably enough for such a warrant, regardless of whether its known what they said.
I mean, if somethings encrypted on the wire, then it was plaintext when it went in, and when it came out. I'd think most detectives would try another angle before they sat around trying to brute force decrypt a transmission.
Slashdot Mirror
Sega Game Gear had a TV Tuner years ago, and so did the nomad.
As did GameXPress (portable TG16).
There's a tuner for the GBA, and one for GBC, IIRC.
Why is it so difficult or fantastic to add one to a PDA?
It hardly seems worth it to me, unless they can shrink down a DirecTV dish or it comes with a huge spool of coax cable. Free to air TV is slowly being driven out of existence.
HDTV (digital signals) will put the final nail in it's coffin, when the slightly-fuzzy-but-watchable analog channel turns into a skipping jerky unwatchable slideshow. I think we all recognize the difference between a weak analog signal and a weak digital one.
The place I used to work at had a 286 printing bills of lading at the shipping desk.
If it hasn't broken (and I doubt it has), I'm sure it's still in use today.
After all, if it aint broke...
Actually, after the game crash of '83, everyone just assumed that the gaming console was dead and buried.
After all, why would anyone pay for a video game only device, when they could get something like a Commodore 64, play the same games, and do their taxes and write letters?
When the Famicom was introduced to America, it was called the Nintendo Entertainment System. They restyled it to look more high-tech, with its front-loading cartridge slot, and promised keyboard and disk add-ons which never came out (they did in japan, though). They basically marketed it as a home PC system to compete with C-64s and Atari STs and PC Jrs, etc.
It worked, and it brought the console back from the brink of extinction.
We still support dispatching systems that date back to the late 70s. So I guess an HP mainframe doesnt count, but do the dumb terminals that have been replaced with PCs count?
PC Term or minicom or whatever dos based terminal software got shoved on there when the PC came out.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it. I know for a fact that some custom code I wrote in the early 90s is still running. It basically just printed bin labels for an inventory system.
I know it's a shock to geeks, but a commodore 64 can drive a 1200 baud serial printer just as well as a dual Xeon 2.4 with a jigawig of RAM.
I doubt the code in question is so trivial. It's more along the lines of:
Develop a system for inter process communication.
Develop a system for allocating and clearing memory dynamically.
Develop a system for handling out-of-order interrupts on a multitasking operating system.
I have no idea what the specific claims are, that'll come out later, but it's way to early to start saying the lawsuit has no merit. A judge and/or jury will decide that.
Because of this, I doubt there is any code in common between those two apps, at least.
But you don't know for sure, do you? One of those contributers could be a disgruntled ex-employee, or a careless contracter.
The only way you'd find out is when you're dragged into court.
"The Linux community would have me publish it now, (so they can have it) laundered by the time we can get to a court hearing"
That they would.
This shows one of the weaknesses of the open-source movement," said Mark Radcliffe, a copyright attorney with Gray Cary. "You're all dependent on trust. Unfortunately, a number of people involved in the process do not have a great degree of respect for intellectual property. It's fine if it's personal, but if you decide to implement that by saying 'I don't give a damn about this intellectual property,' everything that touches it is now screwed."
Seriously, open source software projects are, by and large, copylefted clones of commercial products. Am I the only one who saw something like this happening eventually?
You can point and fuss and cuss at SCO all you want. This is no doubt just the tip of the iceberg.
I'm sure there are hundreds of others who've had their code "liberated" without their consent.
These are pampered rich kids taking a bullshit course called "Gothic Imagination".
I mean, c'mon. There's no benefit to courses like this, only cost.
When daddy pays $60,000 in tuition to send his dopey kid to college, the last thing they want is for him to flunk or drop out. So colleges are filled with bird courses and bogus degrees in silly shit like this. Like the school that has a course on watching the Simpsons.
It pisses me off that I busted my ass for a scholarship, and then to pay back student loans, when the shools give the same degree and preferential treatment to mentally deficient trust fund babies because they're the ones who can donate to the alumni fund down the road.
Bah. Higher learning my ass. What a waste of time and money University was.
Take your free iPod and your PhD in "Dragonball Z cartoons". People like me are too busy busting our humps to keep the world working.
Another liberal arts cash-wasting waste of time.
In a way I pity these students when they enter the real world, but moreso I'm glad I don't have to compete with them for jobs.
All an iPod can teach is the addage of "a fool and his money".
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon
What's the hold up? You sure aren't proofreading it.
From dictionary.com
Robot:
1) A mechanical device that sometimes resembles a human and is capable of performing a variety of often complex human tasks on command or by being programmed in advance.
2) A machine or device that operates automatically or by remote control.
3) A person who works mechanically without original thought, especially one who responds automatically to the commands of others
So which definition of robot makes it into the hall of fame?
By definition 1, many commonplace things qualify, like my PC with printer. It performs the complex task of doing my taxes.
By definition 2, even more things qualify. My toaster automatically makes toast.
By definition 3, this would be full of slashdot editors. Hardly worthy of such an honor, IMO.
That belongs in the Con-Mans Hall of Fame. They'd sell it to rich folks as the latest greatest gizmo, then take the midget with 'em when they left.
People fell for shit like that. I mean people actually bought the brooklyn bridge - it's not just a cliche.
Sigh. I was born a couple centuries too late. I'd have made a great elizabethan grifter.
Be based on the fact that FPS GAMES ARE BORING?
I mean, all this "the story stinks", "the levels are the same". This can all be said about any FPS game that comes out. This can be said about Doom 3 even before it comes out.
Same old run around and shoot, all thats new is eye candy.
People keep paying for FPS and then compaining "this one sucks!"
FPS games just aren't fun. Get over it.
The projectors in sports bars are always blurry and terrible to watch. Now I know why.
This also doesn't bode well for the proliferation of digital movie theatres.
You still have to take the machine offline for all practical purposes. You cant upgrade samba or apache in place, without interrupting service.
So who cares if the downtime is for a reboot or a recompile? From the users point of view the machine is inaccessable.
responsible for 45% of traffic
But spam is responsible for, what was it Taco, 60% of traffic on networks?
I'm at 105% utilization already!
BTW, it's just as costly, if not more, to have to rebuild your linux kernel, SSL, apache webserver, or samba installation when a bug is found there.
Quit pretending that MS has some sort of monopoly on software bugs. "Bad code" is a patentless technique used ubiquitously.
What idiotic fud.
Recently, news.com reported that Microsoft is cozzying up to the leading CD restriction company. This means we're one baby step away from all music CDs ONLY playing on Microsoft Windows XP.
Oh, that's what that means.
Yeah right.
He cant even spell cozying (cosying is acceptable too).
And again he starts with it..
Straight ahead of us is a world where CDs will only play in Microsoft Windows XP computers.
YEAH RIGHT.
I'm absolutely sure the music industry is going to piss away all the customers with car stereos, or portable boomboxes, or actual audio equipment, and expect to turn a profit marketing music for little piezoelectric beepers that come with your Dell.
This guys such a trolling ass-clown. And this is a lame ass "Buy my new Lindows for a hundred bucks a year or else the world will collapse!" pitch.
This uninformed non-technical marketer should go back to the sewer he crawled out of. Fuck him and fuck his continuing efforts to exploit the work of others for profits.
Whether you buy the music online or from Best Buy, so long as the producer makes the same amount of cash, they dont give a shit. Really.
.com bust. You can fault them for a lot of things, but not for being pragmatic when it comes to doling out investors cash.
What slashbots keep saying, though, is that the RIAA should "wake up" and invest billions in a new eCommerce infrastructure that they must maintain, because it might be profitable. Why would they? Especially after the
Build it and they will come. Apple built it, and they came to the tune of $100,000. I'm sure setup costs were at least a magnitude of order greater than that, and they're still in the hole. But so long as it's Apples gamble, the RIAA could give a shit. They're out to make money. Whether they make it from online sales or from plastic spinning discs, they dont care.
Who cares?
No, really.
Why dont you open a "register reviews something" section. You can use goatse.cx as the icon.
If you read any musicians mag, you'll see these full page ads for this Perfect Pitch system, which claims to make you be able to identify notes perfectly, and then play by ear and etc etc.
Apparently it works by you repetitively linking a note with a color, until you hear the colors. An A flat is a red, and a C# is a blue, and so on. So you can hear music as a sequence of colors and makes you super crazy talented.
It's probably just a scam. But I guess it's got a pseudo-scientific base to the scam.
Sounds like simple hardware compression.
The poster missed a key word; TO.
It allows the drive to burn up TO 1.4GB.
When I read "up to", I think compression, and even then a best-case scenario is me burning all text files, and probably a more optimized filesystem layout.
This isnt overburning, this is burning a special high density disk with a different laser. It has nothing to do with regular CD-Rs, save the form factor.
Like the dreamcasts GD-ROMs (1 gig).
Well, sortof, with their DD-CDR or whatever, using new tech to get 1.2 gig per disc.
If the two formats were compatible, it might almost be useful. Of course that's doubtful. So I cant really see the usefulness of this.
I thought maybe for archiving or something, but then the cost of the Sony drive is comparable to a DVD-R, so why would I want 1.2 gigs instead of 4.5?
These little fart in a jar techs will no doubt go the way of the zip drive. A day late and a dollar short - unless the industry works together for a standard thats cross compatible, and makes it ubiquitous.
Fuck it, I'll just burn two cds.
They wont lose anything.
They'll add the channels whether you want it or not, and charge you that much more for basic service.
Did you ask for QVC or the Golf Channel or WE or Bravo or CMT? Nope. But you get to pay for 'em as part of your basic cable service.
With the digital tech they have, they could let you pick channels, for say 2 bucks a piece. My cable bill would be about 20 bucks a month for the 10 channels I or my family actually watch. But they wont, there's more money in forcing people to pay for crap
I hope this (is it?) is owned by Cartoon Network. So they can take all that shitty anime crap that's meant for japanese 12 year olds out of "adult swim".
I'd much rather watch ATHF or SeaLab 2021 than this Trigun crap. They could air anything in its place... Oblongs, Family Guy, Home Movies, Ripping Friends, even Dexters Lab or Johnny Bravo. Hell, air some old Gi Joe episodes.
This badly dubbed anime crap has to go. It's not "adult".
Could be a ton of things.
Could be that they got one end of the transmission to roll over on his buddy and hand out the plain text, this seems most likely. All the tough guy criminals squeal like little piggies when a DA starts talking about jail time.
Could be they got the password to decrypt the wiretaps, or the plain text, through normal policework (like a warrant to search the PC). The fact that guy A is talking to known crime figure B is probably enough for such a warrant, regardless of whether its known what they said.
I mean, if somethings encrypted on the wire, then it was plaintext when it went in, and when it came out. I'd think most detectives would try another angle before they sat around trying to brute force decrypt a transmission.