At work I have an NEC XtraView. This NEC model, which is much pricier than the "regular" NEC models of the same size, has a different electrode structure that results in much better off-axis performance. Color values, brightness and contrast are the same from top to bottom. It also appears to have a full eight bits of resolution for each of R, G, and B -- something that is not true for many less expensive displays. If you get far enough off to the side the image is dimmer, but this is going to be true for any light-valve technology.
Personally, I would rather have this display than a CRT with the same viewable area.
If the producer can no longer use the "compact disk" trademark to describe their disks, do we hear commercials that sound like "Available on cassette and round silver disks that might play in your CD player"?
I had piano lessons before I learned to type, and the UCLA thing sounds a lot like the posture things the piano teacher harped on-- sit up straight, not too far from the keyboard, let your fingers hang down to the keys, move your arms rather than twisting your wrist to reach farther-- which is pretty much the style of typing that I find most comfortable.
Is CTS a common problem for people who play the piano a lot?
When I first read a story with "slow glass" in it, I thought "That might be cool." Then I thought about how much energy was somehow stored internally if I left a sheet lying in the desert in direct sunlight for ten years. Then I thought about what would happen if all that energy were discharged at once when the crystal structure (or whatever) was damaged by, say, the neighborhood brat throwing a brick through it. And decided that I wouldn't want any of that stuff in my house!
Re:Microsoft following on the dot bombs?
on
Xbox Sequel Rumors
·
· Score: 2
The fact is that joe six pack WILL NOT wait to download a movie to their TV set.
With the rapidly increasing capacity of hard disk drives, it becomes feasible to download the current hot titles in advance. The "service" would then consist of playback from local disk. With a closed box (ie, Joe can't install unauthorized software), there's at least a fighting chance to restrict copying, a selling point that I'm sure MS would emphasize to the big movie studios. If you can keep 20 new-release titles on the disk, particularly if you make some intelligent decisions about viewer habits (eg, no chick flicks at Joe's house), such a service might be competitive with Blockbuster's outside wall and cable's pay-per-view. It might even be profitable, if you can get Joe to pay for the box, pay for the broadband connection, and the studios don't get too big of a cut.
Dang -- never have moderator points when I want them...
I particularly like this as an example of the expressive power that an OO language can provide. A straightforward "equivalent" in C (not necessarily a good equivalent) might look like
And there are lots of problems with trying to maintain or extend this code. For one thing, the code that deals with ROUND pipes is scattered all over the place in each of the functions that applies to the generic pipe concept. If different pipe types require different numbers of parameters for flow_rate, you have to get into varargs stuff and lose a lot of type-checking that the compiler might do for you.
I'm sorry (maybe), but the mental images conjured up by this line
a member or members of Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda network, posing as computer programmers, were able to gain employment at Microsoft
of a terrorist non-programmer attempting to bluff his way through a code review are hilarious. I would love to see what the Monty Python crew could do with this as the basis for a skit...
Speaking unofficially from inside the cable company...
Marketing would dearly love to know what you watch and what buttons you click to get there and when you change channels and all of that. For at least the large majority of subscribers, they certainly don't know it now. Cable network ratings come from the same Nielson household monitoring service that over-the-air ratings do.
As noted, if you hook the coax straight into the TV, or if you have a typical analog cable box, there is no return path for usage data, even if the devices were collecting it, which they are not.
If you have a current generation digital box there is a return path, but none of (a) the software in the box, (b) the bandwidth available in the return path or (c) the systems receiving data from the STB is geared to handle the volume of data that channel changes and viewing patterns would require be transmitted.
Advanced STBs with built-in cable modems may be capable of recording and transmitting such data in the future. At least some of us technology folks at the cable company are worried about the privacy concerns of doing so.
You've written a lot about the sad state of copyrights, but what about the other government-granted monopoly: patents? Now that the MPEG folks are suing Compaq, it seems likely that cease-and-desist lawsuits against the developers or distributors of the variety of free MPEG software can't be too far away. The GPL and software/algorithm patents would seem to be completely incompatible. How do you see the proliferation of such patents affecting software and the Internet?
Early in October the subject of hydrogen-powered airliners was discussed. The primary problem pointed out was not explosion, but the low energy density of even liquified hydrogen. I believe someone worked it out and that a New York to LA flight required filling the entire interior of the plane -- cargo space, passenger cabin, etc -- with liquid hydrogen to have enough fuel for the flight. Assuming fuel cells to produce electricity to drive efficient motors to drive big props are twice as efficient as just burning the hydrogen in a jet, low energy density is still a serious problem.
As others have suggested, if I could just invent a fuel cell that dealt handily with carbon- and nitrogen-rich fuels, I could help the environment and get rich.
IANAL, and it's been a long time since I sat through the corporate "intro to patents" seminar, but two of the things I think I remember:
Under some circumstances you can lose your patent rights if you don't defend them in a timely fashion. Presumably that's why BT is making a big deal over recently "discovering" that they hold this patent (due to an acquisition?).
It's definitely not necessary to sue all infringers at once, so long as the patent holder shows "diligence" in defending their patent. If you sue companyA all the way through, then sue companyB, that counts as "diligence." If you win the first case, the second one goes a lot faster. If you win two, companies fall all over themselves to settle out of court.
At least that's the way the corporate lawyers explained it...
Unfortunately, you can want everything, it's just that very few us of can have it. I'm hoping I can help my teenaged children learn the difference before they go off to college and the campus credit card reps try to convince them that they can have everything they want... at 21% annual interest.
When the patent is granted for an algorithm, the public patent documents will reveal the algorithm in some form, maybe source code. That's the deal with patents. The inventor reveals their "secrets" in exchange for a limited-term government-granted monopoly. You can't infringe on the patent unless you apply the algorithm. In fact, if you can figure out a way to apply the algorithm to solve a problem not covered in the original patent, you can get your own patent for that new application.
The California appeals court ruled that source code is protected free speech in much the same spirit. Source code is protected speech for purposes of discussing the algorithm. Is it efficient? Does it have weaknesses? They did not rule that it is legal to compile the source and execute it to (in the DeCSS case) decrypt a DVD VOB.
My household has four people, each with their own computer, sharing the cable modem through the local Ethernet and household server (Linux box doing NAT, as well as sharing the printer, scanner, etc). The server's connection out used to be dial-on-demand with a 56K modem, and with more than one user it became intolerably slow. We would probably drop the second phone line, cable TV, and trips to BlockBuster before we dropped the cable modem.
Not to be discouraging, but what Motorola has in mind is that the first party is Motorola, the second party is a cable company (the purchasers of the vast majority of the digital boxes) and the third party is a commercial software company like Liberate or TV Guide. Said third party buys a development license from Motorola, at which point they get actual API documentation, and they write software that they hope to sell to the cable operators for serious amounts of money. Terms of the Motorola license will be onerous; for example, revealing the API information to anyone else will carry heavy financial penalties.
Most cable company digital boxes are programmed at a very low level to accept new software only over the cable itself. The downloads are heavily encrypted, and must pass other authorization checks. I'm not saying that you can't work around all of this and load your software into the box, just that it's going to be difficult and/or expensive. Also, unless your software conforms to your local cable company's box authorization scheme, the box with your software running may no longer be able to decrypt digital channels.
Cable companies are anal about controlling the software on their boxes for a couple of reasons. First, customer care in the case of messed-up boxes is expensive: people to answer the phones (no jokes, please), sending a tech to the house, inventory and handling expenses on box exchanges. New software releases from those third parties is tested very heavily before it is deployed to the field. Second, content contracts require the cable company to go to extremes to "protect" copyrighted material. This includes not only content such as Hollywood films, but other data such as program listings and plot synopses that go into the online program guide.
Fairly recently a couple of companies have begun producing "middleware" that runs on the DCT2000 boxes. In terms of capabilities like Java, these middleware are quite restrictive. For the reasons given above, applets written for such environments are unlikely to be able to access either the tuner or the program guide data. At best, such access would be severely limited.
All of the broadband access services face one similar problem -- building the local distribution network requires billions of dollars in investment. Then you have to sign up enough subscribers (at least hundreds of thousands) fast enough to generate revenue to meet both the ongoing business expenses and the "cost" of all that money.
The various pieces that have been assembled into AT&T Broadband began making that investment and deploying cable modems more than five years ago. Currently we have about 1.5 million subs paying for high-speed data (through the @Home and RoadRunner services). If you look through some of the detailed financial information that has been released as part of the proposals to split Broadband off from the rest of AT&T, you find that high-speed data became cash-flow positive -- that is, the revenue is now sufficient to pay for current operations, new installs, and the cost of the incurred debt -- just this year.
Neither the wireless services, nor the DSL resellers, were signing customers up fast enough to reach that point for at least several years, if ever. For a long time, broadband service is going to come from very large companies, probably with existing networks (originally built for other purposes) who can afford to wait several years for the service to become profitable.
More and more standards are incorporating proprietary technology, which sometimes requires development groups to pay a bunch of up-front money. For example, some of the H.323 codecs are proprietary and require substantial (but non-discriminatory) licensing fees. This certainly handicaps open-source (especially GPL) implementations in a variety of areas for a couple of reasons: (1) small informal development groups will not have the funds for up-front licensing, and (2) per-unit licensing requires control of distribution of the software.
And don't forget the number of times that a piece of code has been patched (often badly) over its life. Most developers who do maintenance can easily come up with an example of a function that started out accepting three parameters and doing something straightforward with them. Now it accepts seven, and is so full of nested if-else stuff to handle all of the special cases that it's almost impossible to figure out what's really happening.
I had a friend who used to say that one problem for software developers is that, unlike hardware, the "white wires" where software has been patched don't show. Continuing his analogy, no company would ship a circuit board that had a dozen cut traces, two dozen white wires, ICs with half the pins cut off and three daughter cards soldered on in odd places. Software with the equivalent level of kruft ships all the time.
The main reason is not the money but Germans fear that there are hidden backdors in US commercial software.
Does this fear extend to productivity software and other applications, or just to the operating system? Would Office for Linux, similar in spirit to Office for Mac, be acceptable? Would MS be interested in half a loaf, rather than losing it all?
Twenty-plus years ago, when it was still one Bell System, one of the occasional topics of discussion within the local switching systems engineering organization at Bell Labs concerned how many critical pieces of the phone network could be taken out by a few people with a few trucks full of high-nitrogen fertilizer and diesel fuel (like the bomb used in Oklahoma City). The switching centers in lower Manhatten were always high on the list of sites you would go after...
I prefer the version that I heard many, many years ago: "audiophiles are people who listen to the noise, not the music."
I've spent too much time looking at various video compression schemes over the years, and find that I now have a tendency to look at the artifacts rather than the images...
At least as of today, this simply isn't true. AT&T Broadband (where I work) owns the head end equipment, and in some cases the cable modems. The backbone was owned and operated by @Home until recently, when they sold it to another part of AT&T (not Broadband), who leases capacity back to @Home. Key servers (DHCP, DNS, mail) and routers are still all owned and operated by @Home.
This arrangement, with @Home controlling the IP service, made some degree of sense when it was originally set up. Much of the friction between @Home and its cable-television shareholders (AT&T Broadband, Comcast, Cox, etc) that has been reported recently is due to the cables wanting to provide services to IP devices other than PCs, and @Home dragging their feet about supporting them.
Don't forget that the Appeals Court upheld the lower court ruling that "code mingling" between the OS and apps, and making MS apps non-removable, is illegal. Any meaningful remedy must address this, so that OEMs like Dell and HP, as well as end users, have the freedom to remove MS apps completely and put others in their place.
I think that this is the real heart-and-soul of the case-- that there be a clean seperation of OS and apps.
While I would applaud MS making the Office file formats open (in the sense that they be completely documented and that there are no restrictions on others' use of that documentation), I think it's a big stretch to get from any of the activities that have been ruled illegal to forcing MS to open the application formats.
Long ago (just knowing this says something about my age) telephone crossbar switching systems were controlled by relay logic. I met several central office craft people who could identify that something was wrong with a ten-foot rack full of relays by listening to the rhythm of clicks as a call was processed...
A couple of people per year die of plague here in Colorado. The disease is fairly common in the prairie dog population, and fleas can transmit it either directly to people, or to pet cats and dogs who then pass it along. In one recent case a man contracted the disease after being bit by a sick cat. It is not uncommon to find signs around prairie dog colonies in urban areas, posted by state health officials, warning of plague.
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Personally, I would rather have this display than a CRT with the same viewable area.
If the producer can no longer use the "compact disk" trademark to describe their disks, do we hear commercials that sound like "Available on cassette and round silver disks that might play in your CD player"?
Is CTS a common problem for people who play the piano a lot?
When I first read a story with "slow glass" in it, I thought "That might be cool." Then I thought about how much energy was somehow stored internally if I left a sheet lying in the desert in direct sunlight for ten years. Then I thought about what would happen if all that energy were discharged at once when the crystal structure (or whatever) was damaged by, say, the neighborhood brat throwing a brick through it. And decided that I wouldn't want any of that stuff in my house!
With the rapidly increasing capacity of hard disk drives, it becomes feasible to download the current hot titles in advance. The "service" would then consist of playback from local disk. With a closed box (ie, Joe can't install unauthorized software), there's at least a fighting chance to restrict copying, a selling point that I'm sure MS would emphasize to the big movie studios. If you can keep 20 new-release titles on the disk, particularly if you make some intelligent decisions about viewer habits (eg, no chick flicks at Joe's house), such a service might be competitive with Blockbuster's outside wall and cable's pay-per-view. It might even be profitable, if you can get Joe to pay for the box, pay for the broadband connection, and the studios don't get too big of a cut.
I particularly like this as an example of the expressive power that an OO language can provide. A straightforward "equivalent" in C (not necessarily a good equivalent) might look like
#define PIPE struct Pipe
#define ROUND 1
#define RECTANGULAR 2
PIPE {
.
.
int type;
float diameter;
float width;
float height;
}
float
flow_rate(pipe, x, y)
PIPE *pipe;
float x, y;
{
float result;
switch (pipe->type) {
case ROUND:
result = stuff;
break;
case RECTANGULAR:
result = stuff;
break;
default: // Assume real flows are positive
.
.
result = -1;
break;
}
return result;
}
PIPE *round, *rect;
.
.
round = (PIPE *)malloc(sizeof(PIPE));
round->type = ROUND;
round->diameter = 30.0;
result = flow_rate(round, 12.0, 9.0);
rect = (PIPE *)malloc(sizeof(PIPE));
rect->type = RECTANGULAR;
rect->height = 4.0;
rect->width = 40.0;
result = flow_rate(rect, 12.0, 9.0);
And there are lots of problems with trying to maintain or extend this code. For one thing, the code that deals with ROUND pipes is scattered all over the place in each of the functions that applies to the generic pipe concept. If different pipe types require different numbers of parameters for flow_rate, you have to get into varargs stuff and lose a lot of type-checking that the compiler might do for you.
I'm sorry (maybe), but the mental images conjured up by this line
of a terrorist non-programmer attempting to bluff his way through a code review are hilarious. I would love to see what the Monty Python crew could do with this as the basis for a skit...Marketing would dearly love to know what you watch and what buttons you click to get there and when you change channels and all of that. For at least the large majority of subscribers, they certainly don't know it now. Cable network ratings come from the same Nielson household monitoring service that over-the-air ratings do.
As noted, if you hook the coax straight into the TV, or if you have a typical analog cable box, there is no return path for usage data, even if the devices were collecting it, which they are not.
If you have a current generation digital box there is a return path, but none of (a) the software in the box, (b) the bandwidth available in the return path or (c) the systems receiving data from the STB is geared to handle the volume of data that channel changes and viewing patterns would require be transmitted.
Advanced STBs with built-in cable modems may be capable of recording and transmitting such data in the future. At least some of us technology folks at the cable company are worried about the privacy concerns of doing so.
You've written a lot about the sad state of copyrights, but what about the other government-granted monopoly: patents? Now that the MPEG folks are suing Compaq, it seems likely that cease-and-desist lawsuits against the developers or distributors of the variety of free MPEG software can't be too far away. The GPL and software/algorithm patents would seem to be completely incompatible. How do you see the proliferation of such patents affecting software and the Internet?
As others have suggested, if I could just invent a fuel cell that dealt handily with carbon- and nitrogen-rich fuels, I could help the environment and get rich.
IANAL, and it's been a long time since I sat through the corporate "intro to patents" seminar, but two of the things I think I remember:
At least that's the way the corporate lawyers explained it...
Unfortunately, you can want everything, it's just that very few us of can have it. I'm hoping I can help my teenaged children learn the difference before they go off to college and the campus credit card reps try to convince them that they can have everything they want... at 21% annual interest.
Two points here, both similar:
When the patent is granted for an algorithm, the public patent documents will reveal the algorithm in some form, maybe source code. That's the deal with patents. The inventor reveals their "secrets" in exchange for a limited-term government-granted monopoly. You can't infringe on the patent unless you apply the algorithm. In fact, if you can figure out a way to apply the algorithm to solve a problem not covered in the original patent, you can get your own patent for that new application.
The California appeals court ruled that source code is protected free speech in much the same spirit. Source code is protected speech for purposes of discussing the algorithm. Is it efficient? Does it have weaknesses? They did not rule that it is legal to compile the source and execute it to (in the DeCSS case) decrypt a DVD VOB.
My household has four people, each with their own computer, sharing the cable modem through the local Ethernet and household server (Linux box doing NAT, as well as sharing the printer, scanner, etc). The server's connection out used to be dial-on-demand with a 56K modem, and with more than one user it became intolerably slow. We would probably drop the second phone line, cable TV, and trips to BlockBuster before we dropped the cable modem.
But we're probably not real typical...
Not to be discouraging, but what Motorola has in mind is that the first party is Motorola, the second party is a cable company (the purchasers of the vast majority of the digital boxes) and the third party is a commercial software company like Liberate or TV Guide. Said third party buys a development license from Motorola, at which point they get actual API documentation, and they write software that they hope to sell to the cable operators for serious amounts of money. Terms of the Motorola license will be onerous; for example, revealing the API information to anyone else will carry heavy financial penalties.
Most cable company digital boxes are programmed at a very low level to accept new software only over the cable itself. The downloads are heavily encrypted, and must pass other authorization checks. I'm not saying that you can't work around all of this and load your software into the box, just that it's going to be difficult and/or expensive. Also, unless your software conforms to your local cable company's box authorization scheme, the box with your software running may no longer be able to decrypt digital channels.
Cable companies are anal about controlling the software on their boxes for a couple of reasons. First, customer care in the case of messed-up boxes is expensive: people to answer the phones (no jokes, please), sending a tech to the house, inventory and handling expenses on box exchanges. New software releases from those third parties is tested very heavily before it is deployed to the field. Second, content contracts require the cable company to go to extremes to "protect" copyrighted material. This includes not only content such as Hollywood films, but other data such as program listings and plot synopses that go into the online program guide.
Fairly recently a couple of companies have begun producing "middleware" that runs on the DCT2000 boxes. In terms of capabilities like Java, these middleware are quite restrictive. For the reasons given above, applets written for such environments are unlikely to be able to access either the tuner or the program guide data. At best, such access would be severely limited.
The various pieces that have been assembled into AT&T Broadband began making that investment and deploying cable modems more than five years ago. Currently we have about 1.5 million subs paying for high-speed data (through the @Home and RoadRunner services). If you look through some of the detailed financial information that has been released as part of the proposals to split Broadband off from the rest of AT&T, you find that high-speed data became cash-flow positive -- that is, the revenue is now sufficient to pay for current operations, new installs, and the cost of the incurred debt -- just this year.
Neither the wireless services, nor the DSL resellers, were signing customers up fast enough to reach that point for at least several years, if ever. For a long time, broadband service is going to come from very large companies, probably with existing networks (originally built for other purposes) who can afford to wait several years for the service to become profitable.
More and more standards are incorporating proprietary technology, which sometimes requires development groups to pay a bunch of up-front money. For example, some of the H.323 codecs are proprietary and require substantial (but non-discriminatory) licensing fees. This certainly handicaps open-source (especially GPL) implementations in a variety of areas for a couple of reasons: (1) small informal development groups will not have the funds for up-front licensing, and (2) per-unit licensing requires control of distribution of the software.
I had a friend who used to say that one problem for software developers is that, unlike hardware, the "white wires" where software has been patched don't show. Continuing his analogy, no company would ship a circuit board that had a dozen cut traces, two dozen white wires, ICs with half the pins cut off and three daughter cards soldered on in odd places. Software with the equivalent level of kruft ships all the time.
Twenty-plus years ago, when it was still one Bell System, one of the occasional topics of discussion within the local switching systems engineering organization at Bell Labs concerned how many critical pieces of the phone network could be taken out by a few people with a few trucks full of high-nitrogen fertilizer and diesel fuel (like the bomb used in Oklahoma City). The switching centers in lower Manhatten were always high on the list of sites you would go after...
I've spent too much time looking at various video compression schemes over the years, and find that I now have a tendency to look at the artifacts rather than the images...
This arrangement, with @Home controlling the IP service, made some degree of sense when it was originally set up. Much of the friction between @Home and its cable-television shareholders (AT&T Broadband, Comcast, Cox, etc) that has been reported recently is due to the cables wanting to provide services to IP devices other than PCs, and @Home dragging their feet about supporting them.
While I would applaud MS making the Office file formats open (in the sense that they be completely documented and that there are no restrictions on others' use of that documentation), I think it's a big stretch to get from any of the activities that have been ruled illegal to forcing MS to open the application formats.
Long ago (just knowing this says something about my age) telephone crossbar switching systems were controlled by relay logic. I met several central office craft people who could identify that something was wrong with a ten-foot rack full of relays by listening to the rhythm of clicks as a call was processed...
A couple of people per year die of plague here in Colorado. The disease is fairly common in the prairie dog population, and fleas can transmit it either directly to people, or to pet cats and dogs who then pass it along. In one recent case a man contracted the disease after being bit by a sick cat. It is not uncommon to find signs around prairie dog colonies in urban areas, posted by state health officials, warning of plague.