The picture in the article shows a novel idea in the field of creating a PC with integrated monitor... just take a stock LCD and mount it to a stock metal case.:)
It's been done before... but not so well.
on
Disney Enters PC Market
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· Score: 4, Informative
However, parents who paid $699 for the units just before Christmas Y2K got seriously burned when Patriot Computers went bankrupt. Nearly 1100 customers ended up out their money and getting only a $100 coupon for Matel products. For families that only had $700 to spend on toys for the kids, this was a fiasco.
You can't encrypt envelope information. They'll still know a call between you and your wife took place and how long it lasted.
If they want to know what was said... all they have to do is pull you and your wife aside at the same time and ask you each what was said over the call. If you match, then it's likely that you're both telling the truth. If you don't, then you've just attracted their interest further because one of you must be lying.
Sure, the terrorists could have agreed cover stories... but eventually those will crack by some slip.
This keeps coming up here on/. whenever the FCC talks about "VoIP". They're not talking about all computer-to-computer peer-to-peer realtime audio connects, they're talking about VoIP services that result in a network of people you can "dial" that more or less resemble a phone network. It's those that they're regulating and basically putting on the same playing field as existing phone services.
That's good enough for the spooks. See, even if you encrypt the content of your e-mail, you can't encrypt the headers. Sure, "subject" can be filled with nonsense, but the address is good enough to draw a line that says "X said something to Y at this date/time" which is still useful info in an intel puzzle...
The day that we have an auto-ticketing system that charges everybody who goes 66 MPH in a 65 MPH zone is a day that the highways will become impossibly hard to drive on.
There's already proof that when a red-light violation camera is installed and people know about it, that intersection is actually going to have an increase in accidents... people who would have and perhaps should have gone through on the yellow light instead brake suddenly and they're hit by the car behind them.
You can just imagine what'll happen if people look down at their speedometer and decide they have to slow down immediately on the highway...
Auto-driving systems need good measurements of what's happening right now, but they don't exactly depend on the black box because they don't particularly care about what's happened in the past... they only need data on what the present state is and what future actions have been announced by others.
Black boxes, by definition, record what has happened over a given interval and keep that data on non-volitile memory so that the infomation can survive a crash.
In short, one system wants to keep track of where we've been, the other only needs it to determine where we're going. Both systems might need the same data measurement devices, but that's all they'll have in common.
So... how does this black box prevent deaths and maiming?
If a drunk driver is caught and convicted after their first incident, we're pretty sure they won't have a second one for at least a few years.
If the accident reconstructionist can say that the impact happened at 45 MPH in a 30 MPH zone, that's one kind of speeding... however if the black box tattles to say that in order to get to 45 MPH at the impact point, the driver was breaking hard to get down from a speed of 75 MPH in that 30 MPH zone, that's a much more serious offense.
Most likely in the same place that Microsoft left everybody who bought anything from their line of network products... with the warrenty still valid and support from phone operators in India still available, but no more left to buy in the marketplace.
The article points out that there's only a $60 difference between the Linux-equiped laptop and the comparable model from HP running Windows. Am I the only one who thinks that's exactly what HP is paying for their OEM licenses since they buy it bulk? (A Foogle search reveals that there are many web outlets who will gladly sell you an OEM Windows XP Home copy for about $80-$100, provided you also buy a piece of hardware at the same time to keep the transaction within Microsoft's rules.)
This particular display also includes a computer, which runs an algorithm that gets rid of overlapping regions between adjacent projections, eliminating the seams in the process.
There you go. Take four projectors and let them overlap a little. Then, you pixel-row by row eliminate the overlaps by not moving the projectors, but simply feeding the projector black lines in the places where you don't want it to do any work. When you've assured that there's no point on the screen being served by two projectors, you've also lowered the seam area to less than the width of a pixel on the screen.
This tech is only being billed for a national security use because that's where the government wasteful spending is these days. If everybody was concerned about hurricanes for some strange reason, then this tech would be sold for its weather uses.
This monitor can only display a super-high-res security camera image if a super-high-res camera was installed too... and that resolution on a map would be wasted if they don't have a different datapoint for each pixel. I'm putting this one under "cool tech without any real use".
It's a projection screen. You could always make those as big as you want based on pure optics.
However, that's not the tech advance anyway. What they're really showing off is the way to get multiple projectors to work together so that you end up with four times the projection area and also four times the resolution while using relatively off-the-shelf projectors, and avoiding the seam effect that would happen if you tried to do this yourself.
Sony wouldn't be able to read the cluestick even if was passed to them, it's incompatible with the Memorystick technology that they're so in love with...
Sony is rarely about putting out good technology, they're more about putting out technology that consumers will buy despite a higher-than-usual profit margin on the price. Sure, every consumer electronics company has to make a profit or it won't exist, but Sony products are always higher-priced than technically equal models from other brands. Basically, Sony's profits come only from people too stupid to notice there's a better choice on most items.
2.4 GHz is 2.4 GHz... the radio waves don't really know or care which protocol's being used. I'd be very surprised if Bluetooth can do anything WiFi can't or vice versa given the same power and directional constraints.
The article implies that the ICE system will somehow be getting either real-time or post-broadcast metadata that current DVRs do not... basically allowing the units to compensate for things like sports runovers and news preemptions that cause a network to not follow its pre-broadcast schedule, and therefore getting the accurate start time and end time of the shows, not accidently recording program A under program B's heading, in addition to knowing which timecodes to jump past to avoid the commericals...
Of course, Austrailia has many fewer total over the air TV stations than the USA does thanks in part to its smaller geographic size, so this service is much more practical there than it is here.
The addition of volume-leveling and ad-skipping features seems to imply that this service is going to be closer to the original ReplayTV units rather than TiVo units... ReplayTV of course at one point in time was a sister company of the Rio brand of MP3 players and always has had a reputation of being the "screw the system" DVR as opposed to TiVo who co-operates with advertisers and broadcasters.
I wonder what would happen to an MMORPG that balanced its risk/reward scheme perfectly such that playing for short periods of time could reflect a profit or loss whatever units of status the game has, but over the long term would balance out to be perfectly zero sum... think of it as gambling in a universe of play money with no need for there to be a rake for the house factored in.
My guess it would be the fairest game out there, but it'd be a financial flop because people who attained a high score would quit out of fear of losing it... but would there be some who'd keep playing in an effort to be "king of the hill" and stay there as long as possible?
One interesting thing that I notice in most sports games is that since the beginning of time, a "game clock" in a sports game has always ticked faster than real time, sometimes blazingly faster.
That's always bothered me a bit. I've got a pretty good feeling for how long a second and minute are, and it desturbs me to see 10 minutes just flash off a video game clock in a blink of an eye. I guess it's out of nessessity... a to-scale simulation of pro sports would take 3 hours on average to play, and overtime could take it longer. I guess nobody has that attention span.
Still, I wish a game with hyped-up offense to get realistic scores and a faster-than-normal clock would at least have a cheat code so that the clock shows 5 minutes "real time" instead of 15 minutes of "game time"...
Marketers for a long time have defined mega- and giga- to mean 1000x instead of 1024x, and since most dictionaries only list the 1000x definition it's the one that's more often going to be considered to be "right" by non-geek people.
There's a bit of an interesting situation here... the publishers are trying to assert themselves into what presently is a very murky space in copyright land.
Using a broadcast radio station as the hold music on a phone system actually requires a copyright license from the station from which the artists/publishers should be seeking their payment. Of course, since it'd take a lot of work to observe all of the places this is going on, it's one of those bits of copyright law that more or less has been nullified by simple non-enforcement, and therefore slipped into that consumer-friendly category known as "fair use".
Case law has more or less said in the past that if a radio station is being pumped through an amplifier system throughout a building, then whomever is doing that needs to pay because they're redistributing the station. However, if they set up a standalone radio in every room and tune them all to the same frequency, they get the same effective sounds throught the building but don't have to pay because they're not redistributing, but just letting the boom boxes do their thing. But again, that often ends up unnoticed and unenforced.
Major sports venues have to pay for copyright licenses... but your local high school football venue likely uses the same music without paying for it.
Seems like this is an RIAA crackdown just waiting to happen...
But wouldn't that basically just be a fork of the project, having an "expert mode" and a "beginner mode" for everything? Maybe it's better that they just stick to being the expert's version of Linux, and leave the newbies to other distributions.
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The picture in the article shows a novel idea in the field of creating a PC with integrated monitor... just take a stock LCD and mount it to a stock metal case. :)
Mattel has tried this trick before by licensing their Barbie and Hot Wheels brands to a small PC maker known as Patriot Computers back in 1999.
However, parents who paid $699 for the units just before Christmas Y2K got seriously burned when Patriot Computers went bankrupt. Nearly 1100 customers ended up out their money and getting only a $100 coupon for Matel products. For families that only had $700 to spend on toys for the kids, this was a fiasco.
Just what we need, a computer from a Mickey Mouse operation...
You can't encrypt envelope information. They'll still know a call between you and your wife took place and how long it lasted.
If they want to know what was said... all they have to do is pull you and your wife aside at the same time and ask you each what was said over the call. If you match, then it's likely that you're both telling the truth. If you don't, then you've just attracted their interest further because one of you must be lying.
Sure, the terrorists could have agreed cover stories... but eventually those will crack by some slip.
This keeps coming up here on /. whenever the FCC talks about "VoIP". They're not talking about all computer-to-computer peer-to-peer realtime audio connects, they're talking about VoIP services that result in a network of people you can "dial" that more or less resemble a phone network. It's those that they're regulating and basically putting on the same playing field as existing phone services.
That's good enough for the spooks. See, even if you encrypt the content of your e-mail, you can't encrypt the headers. Sure, "subject" can be filled with nonsense, but the address is good enough to draw a line that says "X said something to Y at this date/time" which is still useful info in an intel puzzle...
The day that we have an auto-ticketing system that charges everybody who goes 66 MPH in a 65 MPH zone is a day that the highways will become impossibly hard to drive on.
There's already proof that when a red-light violation camera is installed and people know about it, that intersection is actually going to have an increase in accidents... people who would have and perhaps should have gone through on the yellow light instead brake suddenly and they're hit by the car behind them.
You can just imagine what'll happen if people look down at their speedometer and decide they have to slow down immediately on the highway...
Actually, there's a bit of a difference here...
Auto-driving systems need good measurements of what's happening right now, but they don't exactly depend on the black box because they don't particularly care about what's happened in the past... they only need data on what the present state is and what future actions have been announced by others.
Black boxes, by definition, record what has happened over a given interval and keep that data on non-volitile memory so that the infomation can survive a crash.
In short, one system wants to keep track of where we've been, the other only needs it to determine where we're going. Both systems might need the same data measurement devices, but that's all they'll have in common.
So... how does this black box prevent deaths and maiming?
If a drunk driver is caught and convicted after their first incident, we're pretty sure they won't have a second one for at least a few years.
If the accident reconstructionist can say that the impact happened at 45 MPH in a 30 MPH zone, that's one kind of speeding... however if the black box tattles to say that in order to get to 45 MPH at the impact point, the driver was breaking hard to get down from a speed of 75 MPH in that 30 MPH zone, that's a much more serious offense.
Most likely in the same place that Microsoft left everybody who bought anything from their line of network products... with the warrenty still valid and support from phone operators in India still available, but no more left to buy in the marketplace.
The article points out that there's only a $60 difference between the Linux-equiped laptop and the comparable model from HP running Windows. Am I the only one who thinks that's exactly what HP is paying for their OEM licenses since they buy it bulk? (A Foogle search reveals that there are many web outlets who will gladly sell you an OEM Windows XP Home copy for about $80-$100, provided you also buy a piece of hardware at the same time to keep the transaction within Microsoft's rules.)
This particular display also includes a computer, which runs an algorithm that gets rid of overlapping regions between adjacent projections, eliminating the seams in the process.
There you go. Take four projectors and let them overlap a little. Then, you pixel-row by row eliminate the overlaps by not moving the projectors, but simply feeding the projector black lines in the places where you don't want it to do any work. When you've assured that there's no point on the screen being served by two projectors, you've also lowered the seam area to less than the width of a pixel on the screen.
This tech is only being billed for a national security use because that's where the government wasteful spending is these days. If everybody was concerned about hurricanes for some strange reason, then this tech would be sold for its weather uses.
This monitor can only display a super-high-res security camera image if a super-high-res camera was installed too... and that resolution on a map would be wasted if they don't have a different datapoint for each pixel. I'm putting this one under "cool tech without any real use".
It's a projection screen. You could always make those as big as you want based on pure optics.
However, that's not the tech advance anyway. What they're really showing off is the way to get multiple projectors to work together so that you end up with four times the projection area and also four times the resolution while using relatively off-the-shelf projectors, and avoiding the seam effect that would happen if you tried to do this yourself.
Sony wouldn't be able to read the cluestick even if was passed to them, it's incompatible with the Memorystick technology that they're so in love with...
Sony is rarely about putting out good technology, they're more about putting out technology that consumers will buy despite a higher-than-usual profit margin on the price. Sure, every consumer electronics company has to make a profit or it won't exist, but Sony products are always higher-priced than technically equal models from other brands. Basically, Sony's profits come only from people too stupid to notice there's a better choice on most items.
2.4 GHz is 2.4 GHz... the radio waves don't really know or care which protocol's being used. I'd be very surprised if Bluetooth can do anything WiFi can't or vice versa given the same power and directional constraints.
9 Network is a division of News Corp... so in terms of corperate relationships, they are your Fox.
The article implies that the ICE system will somehow be getting either real-time or post-broadcast metadata that current DVRs do not... basically allowing the units to compensate for things like sports runovers and news preemptions that cause a network to not follow its pre-broadcast schedule, and therefore getting the accurate start time and end time of the shows, not accidently recording program A under program B's heading, in addition to knowing which timecodes to jump past to avoid the commericals...
Of course, Austrailia has many fewer total over the air TV stations than the USA does thanks in part to its smaller geographic size, so this service is much more practical there than it is here.
The addition of volume-leveling and ad-skipping features seems to imply that this service is going to be closer to the original ReplayTV units rather than TiVo units... ReplayTV of course at one point in time was a sister company of the Rio brand of MP3 players and always has had a reputation of being the "screw the system" DVR as opposed to TiVo who co-operates with advertisers and broadcasters.
I wonder what would happen to an MMORPG that balanced its risk/reward scheme perfectly such that playing for short periods of time could reflect a profit or loss whatever units of status the game has, but over the long term would balance out to be perfectly zero sum... think of it as gambling in a universe of play money with no need for there to be a rake for the house factored in.
My guess it would be the fairest game out there, but it'd be a financial flop because people who attained a high score would quit out of fear of losing it... but would there be some who'd keep playing in an effort to be "king of the hill" and stay there as long as possible?
One interesting thing that I notice in most sports games is that since the beginning of time, a "game clock" in a sports game has always ticked faster than real time, sometimes blazingly faster.
That's always bothered me a bit. I've got a pretty good feeling for how long a second and minute are, and it desturbs me to see 10 minutes just flash off a video game clock in a blink of an eye. I guess it's out of nessessity... a to-scale simulation of pro sports would take 3 hours on average to play, and overtime could take it longer. I guess nobody has that attention span.
Still, I wish a game with hyped-up offense to get realistic scores and a faster-than-normal clock would at least have a cheat code so that the clock shows 5 minutes "real time" instead of 15 minutes of "game time"...
Marketers for a long time have defined mega- and giga- to mean 1000x instead of 1024x, and since most dictionaries only list the 1000x definition it's the one that's more often going to be considered to be "right" by non-geek people.
Muzak's been in that business for years.
There's a bit of an interesting situation here... the publishers are trying to assert themselves into what presently is a very murky space in copyright land.
Using a broadcast radio station as the hold music on a phone system actually requires a copyright license from the station from which the artists/publishers should be seeking their payment. Of course, since it'd take a lot of work to observe all of the places this is going on, it's one of those bits of copyright law that more or less has been nullified by simple non-enforcement, and therefore slipped into that consumer-friendly category known as "fair use".
Case law has more or less said in the past that if a radio station is being pumped through an amplifier system throughout a building, then whomever is doing that needs to pay because they're redistributing the station. However, if they set up a standalone radio in every room and tune them all to the same frequency, they get the same effective sounds throught the building but don't have to pay because they're not redistributing, but just letting the boom boxes do their thing. But again, that often ends up unnoticed and unenforced.
Major sports venues have to pay for copyright licenses... but your local high school football venue likely uses the same music without paying for it.
Seems like this is an RIAA crackdown just waiting to happen...
But wouldn't that basically just be a fork of the project, having an "expert mode" and a "beginner mode" for everything? Maybe it's better that they just stick to being the expert's version of Linux, and leave the newbies to other distributions.