Basically, we're left with model numbers now. The numbers slapped on by marketing will now have nothing to do with the actual content of the chip by any known benchmark.
Processor makers have made their living by speeding up their chips at a Moore's Law pace with faith that the latest Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Word, Photoshop and 3d shoot-em-up game will find a use for the newfound power.
But really, I think the processor market is about to hit a wall where faster really doesn't speed things up much. Afterall, you need hardly any proc power to browse the WWW, read e-mail, or do IM chat. Sure, some people want "desktop replacement" laptops, but others want their laptop to just do some simple things.
I think the next killer app processors are a generation that use less power and run cooler. The only problem is that consumers have been trained to only ask "How many MegaHertz does it have?" when shopping for processors. Therefore, there's going to be quite a bit of marketing work that needs to be done before such chips become viable.
Would this project scare away SCO-monsters, or possibly create one by calling them and asking if they realized that their forefather company contributed code to Linux years ago....
Are they the only scientific project on the "unhabited island"? If there's more than one crew taking measurements, it wouldn't be too far out to mess with a rivial team's camera this way.
I'm not quite sure it's a legal obligation as much as one from the people who pay the bills. Afterall, what good to the University is an e-mail system that takes 5 days to process e-mail that's coming in from the outside?
I'd take it that they'd start having problems with governement funding programs who'd no longer want to do business with them when they're that slow in responding.
I don't think e-mail is dead, but e-mail as we know it, specificially the SMTP protocol, is long overdue for a retirement party.
Afterall, the "from" field is a total free-response section in SMTP with no need to authenticate that you're really associated with the address you claim to be. That and other weaknesses are why spam is so hard to kill in the first place.
We'd be in a much better place if our e-mail system at least had a trustworthy traceback facility so that we affirmatively know who sent the message by default.
Singer Dido went from zero-to-somebody when the entire an entire verse of her song "Thank You" was sampled in Eminem's song "Stan".
Initally, she wasn't aware of what he had done with it. However, eventually all of the needed sign-offs happened, and the result was a hit song not just for Eminem, but also something that generated interest in her as well. She did some appearances with him to perform her part of the song live, and it eventually launched her as a standalone artist.
That seems to be the threshhold when a sample moves from unwanted to wanted... when it ends up propelling a nobody artist already signed into a somebody.
Nick and Jessica from the MTV reality show wanted to do an album of duets together. The problem is they're on different labels and she's a much bigger star than he is at the moment. His people would let him do it, but her label won't let her appear in such a joint release right now. No profit in it for them, so no collaberation among the married couple allowed.
It's interesting that Woodstock is claimed as a highlight moment in music history... when it actually was one of the greatest failures of attempted music commercialization. It was never meant to be a free concert. They just couldn't handle the number of gate crashers they ended up with and the rest, as they say, was history.
Most forms of art are covered by the "Information wants to be free" principle. That's not to say information should always have zero value, but just that the natural tendancy of people who have infromation is to want to express it. When you try to extract value from infromation, you're swimming against human nature and if you ever allow your package to leak, all the contents will spill out.
Cellphones are tech devices and must be considered cool. Pop music is automatically uncool. When the two are blended... slashdot doesn't know what to mod it.
It would seem like artists would want their latest songs being played as a ringtone as often as possible, as it basically turns into a free public promotion for the full song...
You can't fault the RIAA for trying to soak the maximum value out of everything they do, that's just plain the nature of greed and we all have it to some degree.
Still, we just have to be organized enough to realize when they're asking us to repay for a song when we can just do the format shifts on our own.
Actually, there are now real-sounding ringtones which T-Mobile call "Megatones" and Cingular call "Super Tones" that are actually not MIDI-based files but real audio/voice recordings. Effectively, they're just media files suitably edited to fit the small timeslot they get for ringing.
We're beyond the MIDI stage... but still, selecting the 10 second hook of an MP3/OGG/WAV/Whatever file is something a consumer can do with very little software help.
The record industry just did a lot of work to set up information toll booths, just to discover that there's a very easy and legal way to work around them.
It's just plain stupidity that they didn't see a program like this coming.
The fear is that people will make ringtones out of pirated songs, thus compounding the file-sharing problem while robbing the music industry of a new source of revenue.
That's not the real fear. The real fear is that people will make ringtones out of the CDs they already have. That process is nothing more than format shifting, trimming, and then playback when a particular event happens to the phone. Uhm... there's no laws against that process.
The record industry is a bit worried because this had appeared to be a new business model for them... but if the software to make a good enough ringtone is easy enough for the average consumer to do on their own, then consumers don't need to pay to re-buy a track they already have if they want it as a ringtone.
Sorry, this business model was dead on arrival. Please try again.
Infrared light does not strictly need a line of sight to work... it can't go through walls, but it most certainly can bounce off of them. Okay, purists might point out that's still a line of sight, but it's an indirect one.
High speed data connections like PDAs or laptops have might get annoyed with that kind of "multipath" signal, but for your average TV remote signal just doesn't care. The only limitation here is how bright the light can be because the power is restricted by how many batteries and how often you wanna change them.
However, that assumes the "other" broadcast is only using part of the available bandwidth on the band. If the jamming is wide enough to cover the whole band, spreading the signal over the band still isn't going to get you anywhere.
So, jamming does become harder, but not impossible.
If it is true that advances in technology allow radio signals to more intelligently distinguish and filter out different signals from different sources, perhaps instead of licensing the entire spectrum (or letting a lot of the spectrum go to waste), they should simply mandate that devices have the technology to "intelligently" distinguish and filter signals.
The logic that the FCC usually uses is that the first group of users allowed to use a given band are declared the "primary users" and have the right to expect that their service will not be interfered with by any future services. Any additional "secondary users" must respect the primary service's ability to operate, and they're the ones who end up with 100% of the burden to protect the primary service. That is to say, if you want the primary service's devices to be smart enough to filter your secondary service's signal out... you're on the hook for providing the filters.
Actually, Part 15 of the FCC Rules outlines legal use of nearly every band in low-power situations.
They're very loose when you consider what we're talking about. You can broadcast on the 88-108MHz FM band so long as you keep yourself to a whisper. In fact, a "pirate" AM radio station on a college campus that manages to confine all of its signal to the campus area isn't breaking the law at all...
I don't see how spread spectrum would help. If they're transmitting random noise on every frequency cycle they're not using, no spread spectrum signal would ever be decernable from the noise.
There's got to be regulation somewhere, or it really would be chaos.
Nobody can speak acoustically and reach a million people. We've reserved specific sections of frequencies for specific uses, including such that a select few who we as the public trust get the right to broadcast on the broadcast channels.
If we don't like what our broadcasters are doing with the frequencies that they're licensing from the government, we should let the FCC know. Afterall, without complaints, how would they know what to take action on?
Everybody has the right to transmit on the FM radio band!
What, you don't believe me? Just go to your local Best Buy or Circuit City location and look at the iPod accessories. You'll see several models of battery powered FM transmitters. Yep, you can plug those into to your iPod and go, no FCC license required, but batteries are not included.
Of course, the catch is that it has to comply with some pretty low power limits but that's the point. You're only allowed to affect the radios in your immediate area, not to set up a major broadcaster that'd interfere with the already licensed stations.
See, everybody else has the right to hear what the licenced transmitters are putting out, and your right to broadcast falls when it comes into contact with their right to recieve.
If the 2.4GHz frequency band didn't have a power limit regulation on it, then it'd simply turn into a game of "biggest transmitter wins". Mega companies could just soak your house in 2.4GHz signals and therefore all of today's WiFi devices would get blown out of the water.
Slashdot Mirror
Basically, we're left with model numbers now. The numbers slapped on by marketing will now have nothing to do with the actual content of the chip by any known benchmark.
Processor makers have made their living by speeding up their chips at a Moore's Law pace with faith that the latest Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Word, Photoshop and 3d shoot-em-up game will find a use for the newfound power.
But really, I think the processor market is about to hit a wall where faster really doesn't speed things up much. Afterall, you need hardly any proc power to browse the WWW, read e-mail, or do IM chat. Sure, some people want "desktop replacement" laptops, but others want their laptop to just do some simple things.
I think the next killer app processors are a generation that use less power and run cooler. The only problem is that consumers have been trained to only ask "How many MegaHertz does it have?" when shopping for processors. Therefore, there's going to be quite a bit of marketing work that needs to be done before such chips become viable.
Would this project scare away SCO-monsters, or possibly create one by calling them and asking if they realized that their forefather company contributed code to Linux years ago....
Are they the only scientific project on the "unhabited island"? If there's more than one crew taking measurements, it wouldn't be too far out to mess with a rivial team's camera this way.
I'm a little surpised the news article and Slashdot are just using the term "pink dinosaur"... is it that hard to recognize Dino from The Flintstones?
I'm not quite sure it's a legal obligation as much as one from the people who pay the bills. Afterall, what good to the University is an e-mail system that takes 5 days to process e-mail that's coming in from the outside?
I'd take it that they'd start having problems with governement funding programs who'd no longer want to do business with them when they're that slow in responding.
I don't think e-mail is dead, but e-mail as we know it, specificially the SMTP protocol, is long overdue for a retirement party.
Afterall, the "from" field is a total free-response section in SMTP with no need to authenticate that you're really associated with the address you claim to be. That and other weaknesses are why spam is so hard to kill in the first place.
We'd be in a much better place if our e-mail system at least had a trustworthy traceback facility so that we affirmatively know who sent the message by default.
Yes. iTunes Music Store music is only portable if you have an iPod. Meanwhile, every other music player in existance seems to be adopting WMA.
Singer Dido went from zero-to-somebody when the entire an entire verse of her song "Thank You" was sampled in Eminem's song "Stan".
Initally, she wasn't aware of what he had done with it. However, eventually all of the needed sign-offs happened, and the result was a hit song not just for Eminem, but also something that generated interest in her as well. She did some appearances with him to perform her part of the song live, and it eventually launched her as a standalone artist.
That seems to be the threshhold when a sample moves from unwanted to wanted... when it ends up propelling a nobody artist already signed into a somebody.
Nick and Jessica from the MTV reality show wanted to do an album of duets together. The problem is they're on different labels and she's a much bigger star than he is at the moment. His people would let him do it, but her label won't let her appear in such a joint release right now. No profit in it for them, so no collaberation among the married couple allowed.
It's interesting that Woodstock is claimed as a highlight moment in music history... when it actually was one of the greatest failures of attempted music commercialization. It was never meant to be a free concert. They just couldn't handle the number of gate crashers they ended up with and the rest, as they say, was history.
Most forms of art are covered by the "Information wants to be free" principle. That's not to say information should always have zero value, but just that the natural tendancy of people who have infromation is to want to express it. When you try to extract value from infromation, you're swimming against human nature and if you ever allow your package to leak, all the contents will spill out.
Cellphones are tech devices and must be considered cool. Pop music is automatically uncool. When the two are blended... slashdot doesn't know what to mod it.
It would seem like artists would want their latest songs being played as a ringtone as often as possible, as it basically turns into a free public promotion for the full song...
You can't fault the RIAA for trying to soak the maximum value out of everything they do, that's just plain the nature of greed and we all have it to some degree.
Still, we just have to be organized enough to realize when they're asking us to repay for a song when we can just do the format shifts on our own.
Actually, there are now real-sounding ringtones which T-Mobile call "Megatones" and Cingular call "Super Tones" that are actually not MIDI-based files but real audio/voice recordings. Effectively, they're just media files suitably edited to fit the small timeslot they get for ringing.
We're beyond the MIDI stage... but still, selecting the 10 second hook of an MP3/OGG/WAV/Whatever file is something a consumer can do with very little software help.
The record industry just did a lot of work to set up information toll booths, just to discover that there's a very easy and legal way to work around them.
It's just plain stupidity that they didn't see a program like this coming.
The fear is that people will make ringtones out of pirated songs, thus compounding the file-sharing problem while robbing the music industry of a new source of revenue.
That's not the real fear. The real fear is that people will make ringtones out of the CDs they already have. That process is nothing more than format shifting, trimming, and then playback when a particular event happens to the phone. Uhm... there's no laws against that process.
The record industry is a bit worried because this had appeared to be a new business model for them... but if the software to make a good enough ringtone is easy enough for the average consumer to do on their own, then consumers don't need to pay to re-buy a track they already have if they want it as a ringtone.
Sorry, this business model was dead on arrival. Please try again.
Infrared light does not strictly need a line of sight to work... it can't go through walls, but it most certainly can bounce off of them. Okay, purists might point out that's still a line of sight, but it's an indirect one.
High speed data connections like PDAs or laptops have might get annoyed with that kind of "multipath" signal, but for your average TV remote signal just doesn't care. The only limitation here is how bright the light can be because the power is restricted by how many batteries and how often you wanna change them.
Are there any translator utilities that can convert your typical videogame control-pad style "joystick" into being treaded as a mouse?
However, that assumes the "other" broadcast is only using part of the available bandwidth on the band. If the jamming is wide enough to cover the whole band, spreading the signal over the band still isn't going to get you anywhere.
So, jamming does become harder, but not impossible.
If it is true that advances in technology allow radio signals to more intelligently distinguish and filter out different signals from different sources, perhaps instead of licensing the entire spectrum (or letting a lot of the spectrum go to waste), they should simply mandate that devices have the technology to "intelligently" distinguish and filter signals.
The logic that the FCC usually uses is that the first group of users allowed to use a given band are declared the "primary users" and have the right to expect that their service will not be interfered with by any future services. Any additional "secondary users" must respect the primary service's ability to operate, and they're the ones who end up with 100% of the burden to protect the primary service. That is to say, if you want the primary service's devices to be smart enough to filter your secondary service's signal out... you're on the hook for providing the filters.
Actually, Part 15 of the FCC Rules outlines legal use of nearly every band in low-power situations.
They're very loose when you consider what we're talking about. You can broadcast on the 88-108MHz FM band so long as you keep yourself to a whisper. In fact, a "pirate" AM radio station on a college campus that manages to confine all of its signal to the campus area isn't breaking the law at all...
I don't see how spread spectrum would help. If they're transmitting random noise on every frequency cycle they're not using, no spread spectrum signal would ever be decernable from the noise. There's got to be regulation somewhere, or it really would be chaos.
It's all a matter of scale.
Nobody can speak acoustically and reach a million people. We've reserved specific sections of frequencies for specific uses, including such that a select few who we as the public trust get the right to broadcast on the broadcast channels.
If we don't like what our broadcasters are doing with the frequencies that they're licensing from the government, we should let the FCC know. Afterall, without complaints, how would they know what to take action on?
Everybody has the right to transmit on the FM radio band!
What, you don't believe me? Just go to your local Best Buy or Circuit City location and look at the iPod accessories. You'll see several models of battery powered FM transmitters. Yep, you can plug those into to your iPod and go, no FCC license required, but batteries are not included.
Of course, the catch is that it has to comply with some pretty low power limits but that's the point. You're only allowed to affect the radios in your immediate area, not to set up a major broadcaster that'd interfere with the already licensed stations.
See, everybody else has the right to hear what the licenced transmitters are putting out, and your right to broadcast falls when it comes into contact with their right to recieve.
If the 2.4GHz frequency band didn't have a power limit regulation on it, then it'd simply turn into a game of "biggest transmitter wins". Mega companies could just soak your house in 2.4GHz signals and therefore all of today's WiFi devices would get blown out of the water.