It is not just about software in Iran. Books have the same situation. Unlicensed copies of the books can be bought in the bookstores with amazingly low prices. Basically, you just pay the price of the paper and the ink!
The reason is that in Iran the copyright rules are very weak and in practice there is no copyright, patent,... etc barrier to hold anyone to copy anything! No matter it is Microsoft Windows, a Cell Counter lab equipment, a F-14 simulator or a telephone switch box, all are being copied over and over.
System level programming in Iran can bring back lots of profit. You can download latest file system SDK for windows (very expensive!) for free, get the latest version of the NuMega's DriverStudio again for free and write a device driver and then sell it! Profit without any restrictions to pay for the development software and licensing.
Then again, not all Iranian programmers know assembly or even C. The most popular programming languages in Iran are Delphi, VB and FoxPro! Well, yes, C and C++ are also have their share.
Well in Iran nobody, even in the government, knows exactly which site and why it is filtered. Acutally, sometimes ISPs start to filter sites outside of what goverment asks for. On the other hand, there is also no rule about it and parlement in a period actively opposed filtering (though again passed no laws) so nobody can be persecuted just because of accessing the "banned" sites.
It would be silly to go after anyone who just seraches for something on any type of search facility. Is it against the law to just to search for Microsoft Source Code? If it is a crime, what would happen if I search for Weapons of Mass destruction ?;)
There is a market for such CF cards in pro digital photography. Take "Kodak Pro Digital Back for Hasselblad 645 Format" as an example. It is a 16M-pixel digital back that needs 96MB for each single picture. Fuji has a 20M-pixel digital back and there are rumors for a 40M-pixel digital back for this year!
Well actually for a Pro grade camera, TIFF means 16 bit per channel or 6 bytes per pixel! So that will be only 125 pictures! Amazaing, not?
But in reality, a Pro do not take TIFF, but RAW pictures where almost all Pro cameras store it with a lossless compression and has usually 12 or 14 bits per channel. A state of the art camera like Canon 1Ds would only need round 12MB for each RAW picture that means more than 650 picture for a 8G card.
But what about a 41.4 mega-pixel meidum format digital backs? If it would take TIFF photos, you could only store round 30 pics in that memory card....
I've heard this is a new yet suspecious effort to stop the/. effect! By distributing the traffic over 10 links instead of just one... or would it turn back and we'll effectively slash-dot 10 times more?
Well, yeah, all this with a tiny little assumption that somebody actually is going to read the articles;)
I have one of those 2MBit/s DOCSIS (Cable) connections at home. Totally impressive:
- 2Mbit/s Download
- 400Kbit/s Upload
up to 4 dynamic IPs (that means bt using a $20 switch, you can connect 4 PCs to a single Modem)
- 75 Swiss Francs (round $60) per month
- ping time to yahoo.com round 100ms
It is wonderful! hmmmm, now for robocup 2050 we have the running robots, shooting robots, keeper robots.... I think it will work! I mean by 2050 the robocup match against human team would eventually work! All I need now I guess is more funds in researching robotics cheerleaders...;)
This new PDA is 8.8oz! Compare it with HP's H2210 (that happens to come WITH bluetooth) that is only 5.1oz or H4150 (with bluetooth AND 802.11b) which is 4.7oz or H4350 (with bluetooth AND 802.11b AND keyboard) which is 5.8oz...
Although Microsoft did not produce key components of the PC, yet it had a very active participation in designing the standards ruling the PC world. From 1184 paralell port to ISA Plug&Play, from ACPI to DirectX 9.0 it was Microsoft who decided how the hardware should interface to the OS and in cases like DirectX 9.0 it acutally dictated lots of the arcithecture of the hardware. So it's not a surprise that it get goes one step forward for a product that is going to carry it's own name on the box...
Bear with me that your FPGA example is not that easy that it sounds when you need to connect more than two chips... Differential lines on the PCB are very difficult things if you don't have specialized CAD tools to automate their routing and design. In the past the most advanced tool you'd buy would be simple autorouter to do your PCB but now to design a 200Hz motherboard you need to have an autorouter plus 100+ highspeed design rules, then pass it to a EMC tool to analyze the noise, crosstalk, reflections, emissions... 200MHz?!! We're talking about serious RF here not an audio circuit!
It's just ONE transistor, not a 100+ million transistor VSLI chip. Well, we'll eventually get there but not next year so don't worry much about Mr. Moore:)
When I started designing hardware circuits, the world was much more beautiful. You could understand everything that your small micro-processor based system did, downto the function of the BJTs in the TTL devices down there...
Then Intel started the 1GHz race and I had to learn a great deal of RF techniques to just design my next PCB. And now 500GHz?!!! At this rate, a few years later I'll have to learn more about RF and then eventually optics than next hot FSM synthesis algorithm! I guess I'd better change my job, start something more calm and steady, like paiting or...
Try to upgrade the firmware for your 6310i to version 5.5 or above and all the bugs get fixed. btw, ever tried to use your 6310i with your laptop via bluetooh as a fax machine? That's cool;)
I use bluetooth to connect my PDA to my mobile phone while I'm on the move to read my emails, check my account, take a look at the train schedules.... Quite often I use my PDA and bluetooth GPS for navigation, hiking.... I like my bluetooth headset verymuch and I always synch my mobile phone and PDA to my computer at home or at work using bluetooth. Now, let alone that part of my job is to develope kinematic sensors to monitor the physical activities of patients and no surprise that these sensors talk to each other and a host PDA using bluetooth!
This is something that the linux based PDAs should wait for a long time to have. While Microsoft maybe a bully in the marketing, it's bringing such technologies like subject-independant hand-written recognition and speach recognition to PDAs is a very strong move. How long would it take that the open-source community can bring such technologies to the scene? For anyone involved in signal-processing, it is clear that such things, though yet far from being complete, are only possible with huge R&D budgets. Maybe we yet need big companies and big moneys....
For us in the scientific community, until equations are imported with a higher accuracy I would have to put the interoperability more at 50% then in the 90 percentile range.
I work as researcher in a university. I use Word with EndNote and MathType. In Excel I write lots of VBA scripts and I embed all these in PowerPoint presentations as objects. In all these three cases I can almost never successfully import such files to Star/OpenOffice. Maybe it works fine for simpler documents but when you start to make more complex documents, the open solutions simply are not matured yet.
Besides scientific applications, there are other areas that Microsoft Office is yet much better. My mother language is Persian and I create lots of documents mixing Persian and English (Persian is written from right to left). Eventhough recent versions of Star/OpenOffice have started to support Unicode, yet when you have LTR (left to right) and RTL (right to left) languges in the same paragraph things do not go very smooth. And what about outlining, creating table of contents, indexes... in a RTL language?
Xbox is not just Windows + Graphics card. What nVidia also produced was the chipset that amongst all things was also the sound subsystem of Xbox. nVidia has been very successful these years with nForce/2/3 in the gaming world and ATI has not yet shown anything comparable to these chipsets. Consider that these units are already integrated in nForce family: Direct Sound 3D hardware, Dual bank memory controller, 10/100Mbit Ethernet controller, IDE controller. And all these units are amongst the best ones available in the industry.
I must've spent the entire weekend one week, no sleep, playing that damn thing. Nothing today can compare.
Or maybe it's that now you're 10 years older and have playes so many different games in the past 10 years but back then, in 1991 you were new to the gaming world, you were young and could spend much more time playing with one single game for a log period? I Often find myself in the same situation regarding the gaming experience I had in past, but then I realize that now that I'm 31, I should not expect to have the same feeling about the games today that I had 10 years ago...
RS232 is not equal to serial port! All micro-controllers that I know and most of DSP chips have at least one serial port. Now, it maybe a SPI interface, classical UART or USART or any other form but besides the wiring and hardware protocol, they are all serial ports! And from software point of view usually they are similar. RS232 was never used on the system board (who level shifts the TTL to RS232 and then after 2 centimeters again shifts it back to TTL?!). Bluetooth chipsets actually don't support RS232, but usually they have a SPI connection. Yet, isn't it all a bit going too much into detials?
I don't think so. Those mentioned protocols address different needs than Bluetooth. For example, Zigbee is targeted to those sensory applications that need to transfer data with a very low duty cycle. WirelessUSB tries to do what it's name suggests, replacing the cables in a USB connection. On the other hand, Bluetooth supports multiple transfer profiles. For many applications, it's serial profile excells as many developers are quite familiar with it and have used serial ports in PC or micros for years. Using it does not need you to write a complex software protocol stack like that of USB. You just get a sigle chip bluetooth solution, connect it to your micro's serial port and that's it!
Slashdot Mirror
It is not just about software in Iran. Books have the same situation. Unlicensed copies of the books can be bought in the bookstores with amazingly low prices. Basically, you just pay the price of the paper and the ink! The reason is that in Iran the copyright rules are very weak and in practice there is no copyright, patent, ... etc barrier to hold anyone to copy anything! No matter it is Microsoft Windows, a Cell Counter lab equipment, a F-14 simulator or a telephone switch box, all are being copied over and over.
System level programming in Iran can bring back lots of profit. You can download latest file system SDK for windows (very expensive!) for free, get the latest version of the NuMega's DriverStudio again for free and write a device driver and then sell it! Profit without any restrictions to pay for the development software and licensing. Then again, not all Iranian programmers know assembly or even C. The most popular programming languages in Iran are Delphi, VB and FoxPro! Well, yes, C and C++ are also have their share.
Well in Iran nobody, even in the government, knows exactly which site and why it is filtered. Acutally, sometimes ISPs start to filter sites outside of what goverment asks for. On the other hand, there is also no rule about it and parlement in a period actively opposed filtering (though again passed no laws) so nobody can be persecuted just because of accessing the "banned" sites.
It would be silly to go after anyone who just seraches for something on any type of search facility. Is it against the law to just to search for Microsoft Source Code? If it is a crime, what would happen if I search for Weapons of Mass destruction ? ;)
There is a market for such CF cards in pro digital photography. Take "Kodak Pro Digital Back for Hasselblad 645 Format" as an example. It is a 16M-pixel digital back that needs 96MB for each single picture. Fuji has a 20M-pixel digital back and there are rumors for a 40M-pixel digital back for this year!
Well actually for a Pro grade camera, TIFF means 16 bit per channel or 6 bytes per pixel! So that will be only 125 pictures! Amazaing, not? But in reality, a Pro do not take TIFF, but RAW pictures where almost all Pro cameras store it with a lossless compression and has usually 12 or 14 bits per channel. A state of the art camera like Canon 1Ds would only need round 12MB for each RAW picture that means more than 650 picture for a 8G card. But what about a 41.4 mega-pixel meidum format digital backs? If it would take TIFF photos, you could only store round 30 pics in that memory card....
Or even better: just insert a previousely scanned photo of your signature. Or maybe it is not completely legal to not to actually use a real pen? ;)
I have one of those 2MBit/s DOCSIS (Cable) connections at home. Totally impressive: - 2Mbit/s Download - 400Kbit/s Upload up to 4 dynamic IPs (that means bt using a $20 switch, you can connect 4 PCs to a single Modem) - 75 Swiss Francs (round $60) per month - ping time to yahoo.com round 100ms
It is wonderful! hmmmm, now for robocup 2050 we have the running robots, shooting robots, keeper robots.... I think it will work! I mean by 2050 the robocup match against human team would eventually work! All I need now I guess is more funds in researching robotics cheerleaders... ;)
This new PDA is 8.8oz! Compare it with HP's H2210 (that happens to come WITH bluetooth) that is only 5.1oz or H4150 (with bluetooth AND 802.11b) which is 4.7oz or H4350 (with bluetooth AND 802.11b AND keyboard) which is 5.8oz...
Probably because the software is already avilable on one of the P2P networks! Even better, with a brand new keygen! ;)
Although Microsoft did not produce key components of the PC, yet it had a very active participation in designing the standards ruling the PC world. From 1184 paralell port to ISA Plug&Play, from ACPI to DirectX 9.0 it was Microsoft who decided how the hardware should interface to the OS and in cases like DirectX 9.0 it acutally dictated lots of the arcithecture of the hardware. So it's not a surprise that it get goes one step forward for a product that is going to carry it's own name on the box...
Bear with me that your FPGA example is not that easy that it sounds when you need to connect more than two chips... Differential lines on the PCB are very difficult things if you don't have specialized CAD tools to automate their routing and design. In the past the most advanced tool you'd buy would be simple autorouter to do your PCB but now to design a 200Hz motherboard you need to have an autorouter plus 100+ highspeed design rules, then pass it to a EMC tool to analyze the noise, crosstalk, reflections, emissions... 200MHz?!! We're talking about serious RF here not an audio circuit!
It's just ONE transistor, not a 100+ million transistor VSLI chip. Well, we'll eventually get there but not next year so don't worry much about Mr. Moore :)
When I started designing hardware circuits, the world was much more beautiful. You could understand everything that your small micro-processor based system did, downto the function of the BJTs in the TTL devices down there... Then Intel started the 1GHz race and I had to learn a great deal of RF techniques to just design my next PCB. And now 500GHz?!!! At this rate, a few years later I'll have to learn more about RF and then eventually optics than next hot FSM synthesis algorithm! I guess I'd better change my job, start something more calm and steady, like paiting or ...
Try to upgrade the firmware for your 6310i to version 5.5 or above and all the bugs get fixed. btw, ever tried to use your 6310i with your laptop via bluetooh as a fax machine? That's cool ;)
I use bluetooth to connect my PDA to my mobile phone while I'm on the move to read my emails, check my account, take a look at the train schedules.... Quite often I use my PDA and bluetooth GPS for navigation, hiking .... I like my bluetooth headset verymuch and I always synch my mobile phone and PDA to my computer at home or at work using bluetooth. Now, let alone that part of my job is to develope kinematic sensors to monitor the physical activities of patients and no surprise that these sensors talk to each other and a host PDA using bluetooth!
This is something that the linux based PDAs should wait for a long time to have. While Microsoft maybe a bully in the marketing, it's bringing such technologies like subject-independant hand-written recognition and speach recognition to PDAs is a very strong move. How long would it take that the open-source community can bring such technologies to the scene? For anyone involved in signal-processing, it is clear that such things, though yet far from being complete, are only possible with huge R&D budgets. Maybe we yet need big companies and big moneys....
Xbox is not just Windows + Graphics card. What nVidia also produced was the chipset that amongst all things was also the sound subsystem of Xbox. nVidia has been very successful these years with nForce/2/3 in the gaming world and ATI has not yet shown anything comparable to these chipsets. Consider that these units are already integrated in nForce family: Direct Sound 3D hardware, Dual bank memory controller, 10/100Mbit Ethernet controller, IDE controller. And all these units are amongst the best ones available in the industry.
RS232 is not equal to serial port! All micro-controllers that I know and most of DSP chips have at least one serial port. Now, it maybe a SPI interface, classical UART or USART or any other form but besides the wiring and hardware protocol, they are all serial ports! And from software point of view usually they are similar. RS232 was never used on the system board (who level shifts the TTL to RS232 and then after 2 centimeters again shifts it back to TTL?!). Bluetooth chipsets actually don't support RS232, but usually they have a SPI connection. Yet, isn't it all a bit going too much into detials?
I don't think so. Those mentioned protocols address different needs than Bluetooth. For example, Zigbee is targeted to those sensory applications that need to transfer data with a very low duty cycle. WirelessUSB tries to do what it's name suggests, replacing the cables in a USB connection. On the other hand, Bluetooth supports multiple transfer profiles. For many applications, it's serial profile excells as many developers are quite familiar with it and have used serial ports in PC or micros for years. Using it does not need you to write a complex software protocol stack like that of USB. You just get a sigle chip bluetooth solution, connect it to your micro's serial port and that's it!
Just out of cuirsity: how comes that your grandma has an active broadband connection at home but no computer?