there are pros and cons of offering cables vs wireless. wireless would be fine for a bit of email and web-browsing especially if traffic shaping were used. cabling allows isolation of each switch port (and firewall off passengers from each other), and control of bandwidth would be relatively easy compared to wireless.
if they use power over ethernet then they can make the in-seat entertainment system a thin client and use at least *some* off-the-shelf hardware (remember that aircraft electronics, even in entertainment, have to withstands many years of use, far longer than any consumer electronics have to).
it also means they could use SIP phones for providing in-flight telephony and put them on their own vlans, likewise have vlans for security cameras and remote controlled devices.
in the UK, the gov't have indicated that they are thinking about making pension funds prop each other up, so if one fails (there was a case a few years ago), even if the gov't are partly to blame, then the others must compensate.... this could lead to a domino effect of collapse.
no wonder the UK property marker has gone through such a boom, it's become almost the only "safe" investment there is (at least in terms of the gov't not being able to take it away). You might gain or lose in value, but it's still yours!
if you ran your own private business the way govts run countries, you'd be in jail for fraud and racketeering within months.
as another reply says, a lot of gov't finance is like a ponzi scheme, signup and pay now for future gains, but the gains are only paid for by future signups... e.g. pensions:
the USA is hitting the wall at the moment, as are many other countries, in that there's no bit pot of invested money, tax received today pay's other people's pensions, so if the population shrinks it places a big burden on the current working citizens. Worse, the gov't often promised generous pensions to many public sector workers in lieue of good pay at present, and this is compounding the issue.
some countries are now making private pension schemes obligatory. the snag is that people are still having to pay quite high taxes, and for decreasing services! They are realising the money is going to pay pensions of retired public sector workers rather than actually buying service. In the UK, local "council tax" rises a lot each year and yet each year we're threatened with service cuts - as civil servants retire and live longer, the pension "black hole" gets bigger.
sadly, there's little you can do except off-shore as much money as possible to avoid paying tax.
agree, there's the ownership payback time... and then there's the environmental impact on making the things in the first place and disposing of them (hopefully recycling them). I can imagine the process of making photovoltaic cells is particularly environmentally destructive, and simple water solar panels use a variety of metals including copper and the mining of those is notorious for pollution too.
I didn't realise the PS2 was still such a big seller... but even so, I didn't mention the PS2. If Sony had got it right, the PS2 sales would be in the minority, and the PS3 would be killing the xbox360. Personally, I am happy with my original xbox, chipped, with (and this discussion reminded me to update it) the latest xbox media centre. Until the whole hd-dvd and blubetamaxray chaos settles down, along with the hdmi/hdcp crap, I'm not upgrading anything!
many of the image spams are also animated gif (tho' it's not hard to use perl-imagemagick and use this to add spammy-ness to a plugin in spam-assassin) which makes OCR harder. Worse, they change the data in the image sufficiently frequently to defeat a simple MD5 hash signature which could be used to look up the attachment size + md5 in a DB and declare it to be spam.
sadly, the spammers have gotten smart. tho' not so smart as to be able to dodge a bullet.
I thought MS had released patches for Vista to talk to Zune? However, dropping Plays4Sure will seriously annoy previously happy MS fanboys. The wifi could have made Zune great, but now it's just a focus of derision.
What are the odds of Microsoft getting majority market share in the next 5 years? Give odds and justification.
People laughed at the xbox, and said how will they beat Sony and its PS2? The xbox360 is now wiping the floor with the PS3. However, this is as much due to Sony's failures as MS's successes - to repeat this trick with Zune and Zune-v2, MS need Apple to really f*$%-up badly!
does the FM radio in the Zune support (radio data system) RDS properly which is pretty much the defacto standard, giving you station name, type, details, time code etc?
Even better, could Microsoft please put in a (digital audio broadcasting) DAB radio module and allow you to record digital radio (like the Pure PocketDAB2000, of which I have one, whose only downside is that it takes SD cards for mass storage with a maximum size of 2GB). Noone's sued Pure, unlike the makers of XM radios in the USA, so it's now accepted as a perfectly reasonable thing to do?
Shame the linux-on-zune announcement seems to have been a hoax, the zune hardware is quite sweet, if a tad bulky.
this is true... a little over 12 months ago the news services in the UK were reporting how good vodafone was, when everyone who knew ANYTHING about cellular/mobile comms knew they'd blown huge amounts of money on their 3G licenses. A year on and voda announce their valuable "asset" of a 3G license wasn't so valuable.. share plummets, profits warning, potential job cuts.
the only time I've jumped on the TV's hype I got burned, bought shares in Marconi, they became worthless.
Note! I am not saying I think this is a good thing, merely stating what Trolltech make u agree to if you download their tools. Personally, I think it'd be a perfectly reasonable thing to be able to start a GPL project, buy a license and then fork your own project. However, TT *do* allow you to download a commercial eval with a time limited expiry on the license, so I guess they consider that to be a fair deal; moreover, I would imagine they would cut a deal on extending the eval or letting you buy the license if you're a startup.
Anyone whose every written a gui toolkit backend knows that you can achieve quite a lot in a short period of time, but it starts getting complex very quickly, and as soon as you want a general purpose cross-platform toolkit it can get quite messy without a lot of careful thought and design. Making it all polished, supportable, maintainable and providing help is of course Trolltech's "bread and butter". In my humble experience when I was a commercial s/w developer, the cost of TT's toolkit would actually be considered very reasonable especially since you get to look at the source, the best documentation there is!
What makes you think this thing will be running a Debian based system?
because I've actually read stuff about it, because many in the openmoko team are from OpenEmbedded and thus OpenZaurus, and OZ is debian based. have you RTFA'd?
if you read the terms and conditions on Trolltech's website you'll see that it is very clear that you can't start a GPL project and then later buy the SDK. It took me about 2 minutes to find the URL, so I suggest you never really looked!
I quote...
Please note that it is necessary to choose either the Open Source or Commercial license at the outset of development. Trolltech's commercial license terms do not allow you to start developing proprietary software using the Open Source edition.
hopefully this will be the first of a sequence of open phones. if you are seriously interested in being a developer, then you'd need at least two of them, so buy this new "starter" one to get practising so as not to "miss the boat" for unstable/alpha testing, and when the new one comes out you can use it for the beta/release candidate unit. don't kill the device from apathy!
anyway, as I understand it, EDGE is a matter of firmware, not hardware, so I would hope GPRS + HSCD + EDGE will all be featured at some point.
the biggest missing feature as I see it is wifi & 3G, but that is definitely for the next generation.
trolltech have a dual licensing approach; some people are irritated by the idea, perhaps by the fact it is so polarised into basically
* GPL forever: at the moment you download you choose the GPL path, you can't later decide to make your project non-GPL and pay the license fee to trolltech and go commercial; this would be a PITA to any bedroom startup; however, I wouldn't be surprised if a few stealth startuos *did* bend this rule
* payware: cough up a license fee for the SDK and support
if you don't like trolltech's licensing, go write your own gui toolkit! there are other gpl choices, such as opie2, gpe
the only way to get the functionality and openness of openmoko is to use a linux device like a laptop or nokia tablet or sharp zaurus and use a GSM modem adaptor (eg an audiovox or enfora CF modem and cf-pcmcia adaptor). the end result is quite a lot bigger than the 'moko.
there were hopes for the iPhone to be somewhat more open and for a full SDK to be available, but Steve Jobs nixed that one.
apart from reasonable success with the HTC Universal smartphone and other devices to which linux is being ported (usually without any help from the hw vendors), there's NOTHING competing in this space.
imagine the scene...
quick, ring the police. hold on whilst I just run "apt-get install policedb ; X=`gpsget location`; gsmsms send $LOCALPOLICE $X"
30s in total from scanning the subject, possibly reading the first line or two of the body, hitting delete and letting the email client go to the next one. if you're using webmail, it might be slower.
excellent point... so, neuter spammers and hope that the spamming gene is removed from the gene pool. if they have kids, well, sorry kids, you guys ain't going to have any! Neutering could probably be achieved using an overdose of viagra coupled with penis patches, although the resulting explosion might be a bit messy:-@
basically yes. the example images are crap, they're a long way before they can produce something that'll compete with a 50$ digicam!
I would like to refer/. crowd to the fact that telescopes use mirrors and not lenses for good reasons, so perhaps a DLP mirror array with one sensor could make sense under certain circumstances... this might be an advantage is IF the image sensor had very peculiar characteristics that were very hard to reproduce in a large 2D array like a CCD or MOS sensor. Off the top of my head, that might be a very wide spectrum sensor (infrared to ultraviolet) (rather than an RGB detector) say.
Slashdot Mirror
if they use power over ethernet then they can make the in-seat entertainment system a thin client and use at least *some* off-the-shelf hardware (remember that aircraft electronics, even in entertainment, have to withstands many years of use, far longer than any consumer electronics have to).
it also means they could use SIP phones for providing in-flight telephony and put them on their own vlans, likewise have vlans for security cameras and remote controlled devices.
has anyone tried any of the HP emulators that are around, and are they any good?
in the UK, the gov't have indicated that they are thinking about making pension funds prop each other up, so if one fails (there was a case a few years ago), even if the gov't are partly to blame, then the others must compensate.... this could lead to a domino effect of collapse.
no wonder the UK property marker has gone through such a boom, it's become almost the only "safe" investment there is (at least in terms of the gov't not being able to take it away). You might gain or lose in value, but it's still yours!
if you ran your own private business the way govts run countries, you'd be in jail for fraud and racketeering within months.
as another reply says, a lot of gov't finance is like a ponzi scheme, signup and pay now for future gains, but the gains are only paid for by future signups... e.g. pensions:
the USA is hitting the wall at the moment, as are many other countries, in that there's no bit pot of invested money, tax received today pay's other people's pensions, so if the population shrinks it places a big burden on the current working citizens. Worse, the gov't often promised generous pensions to many public sector workers in lieue of good pay at present, and this is compounding the issue.
some countries are now making private pension schemes obligatory. the snag is that people are still having to pay quite high taxes, and for decreasing services! They are realising the money is going to pay pensions of retired public sector workers rather than actually buying service. In the UK, local "council tax" rises a lot each year and yet each year we're threatened with service cuts - as civil servants retire and live longer, the pension "black hole" gets bigger.
sadly, there's little you can do except off-shore as much money as possible to avoid paying tax.
agree, there's the ownership payback time... and then there's the environmental impact on making the things in the first place and disposing of them (hopefully recycling them). I can imagine the process of making photovoltaic cells is particularly environmentally destructive, and simple water solar panels use a variety of metals including copper and the mining of those is notorious for pollution too.
a license for the patent is well over $100 per device. Microsoft already loses money on the Zune hardware...
:-)
shame about the DAB feature... not such a shame about losing money on zune device, almost makes me want to buy one
I didn't realise the PS2 was still such a big seller... but even so, I didn't mention the PS2. If Sony had got it right, the PS2 sales would be in the minority, and the PS3 would be killing the xbox360. Personally, I am happy with my original xbox, chipped, with (and this discussion reminded me to update it) the latest xbox media centre. Until the whole hd-dvd and blubetamaxray chaos settles down, along with the hdmi/hdcp crap, I'm not upgrading anything!
many of the image spams are also animated gif (tho' it's not hard to use perl-imagemagick and use this to add spammy-ness to a plugin in spam-assassin) which makes OCR harder. Worse, they change the data in the image sufficiently frequently to defeat a simple MD5 hash signature which could be used to look up the attachment size + md5 in a DB and declare it to be spam.
sadly, the spammers have gotten smart. tho' not so smart as to be able to dodge a bullet.
I thought MS had released patches for Vista to talk to Zune? However, dropping Plays4Sure will seriously annoy previously happy MS fanboys. The wifi could have made Zune great, but now it's just a focus of derision.
What are the odds of Microsoft getting majority market share in the next 5 years? Give odds and justification.
People laughed at the xbox, and said how will they beat Sony and its PS2? The xbox360 is now wiping the floor with the PS3. However, this is as much due to Sony's failures as MS's successes - to repeat this trick with Zune and Zune-v2, MS need Apple to really f*$%-up badly!
does the FM radio in the Zune support (radio data system) RDS properly which is pretty much the defacto standard, giving you station name, type, details, time code etc?
Even better, could Microsoft please put in a (digital audio broadcasting) DAB radio module and allow you to record digital radio (like the Pure PocketDAB2000, of which I have one, whose only downside is that it takes SD cards for mass storage with a maximum size of 2GB). Noone's sued Pure, unlike the makers of XM radios in the USA, so it's now accepted as a perfectly reasonable thing to do?
Shame the linux-on-zune announcement seems to have been a hoax, the zune hardware is quite sweet, if a tad bulky.
this is true... a little over 12 months ago the news services in the UK were reporting how good vodafone was, when everyone who knew ANYTHING about cellular/mobile comms knew they'd blown huge amounts of money on their 3G licenses. A year on and voda announce their valuable "asset" of a 3G license wasn't so valuable.. share plummets, profits warning, potential job cuts.
the only time I've jumped on the TV's hype I got burned, bought shares in Marconi, they became worthless.
see my reply to the previous person who queried what I said!
o ld=1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&pid=17697084#176977 16
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=217930&thresh
Note! I am not saying I think this is a good thing, merely stating what Trolltech make u agree to if you download their tools. Personally, I think it'd be a perfectly reasonable thing to be able to start a GPL project, buy a license and then fork your own project. However, TT *do* allow you to download a commercial eval with a time limited expiry on the license, so I guess they consider that to be a fair deal; moreover, I would imagine they would cut a deal on extending the eval or letting you buy the license if you're a startup.
Anyone whose every written a gui toolkit backend knows that you can achieve quite a lot in a short period of time, but it starts getting complex very quickly, and as soon as you want a general purpose cross-platform toolkit it can get quite messy without a lot of careful thought and design. Making it all polished, supportable, maintainable and providing help is of course Trolltech's "bread and butter". In my humble experience when I was a commercial s/w developer, the cost of TT's toolkit would actually be considered very reasonable especially since you get to look at the source, the best documentation there is!
What makes you think this thing will be running a Debian based system?
because I've actually read stuff about it, because many in the openmoko team are from OpenEmbedded and thus OpenZaurus, and OZ is debian based. have you RTFA'd?
i don't think openmoko is qt based, it's a bit like gpe (gtk+)
even so, and if you don't like qt, use sdl, or write your own gui toolkit on top of framebuffer (see some of the opentom projects for example)
if you read the terms and conditions on Trolltech's website you'll see that it is very clear that you can't start a GPL project and then later buy the SDK. It took me about 2 minutes to find the URL, so I suggest you never really looked!
d el
http://www.trolltech.com/company/about/businessmo
I quote... Please note that it is necessary to choose either the Open Source or Commercial license at the outset of development. Trolltech's commercial license terms do not allow you to start developing proprietary software using the Open Source edition.
hopefully this will be the first of a sequence of open phones. if you are seriously interested in being a developer, then you'd need at least two of them, so buy this new "starter" one to get practising so as not to "miss the boat" for unstable/alpha testing, and when the new one comes out you can use it for the beta/release candidate unit. don't kill the device from apathy!
anyway, as I understand it, EDGE is a matter of firmware, not hardware, so I would hope GPRS + HSCD + EDGE will all be featured at some point.
the biggest missing feature as I see it is wifi & 3G, but that is definitely for the next generation.
trolltech have a dual licensing approach; some people are irritated by the idea, perhaps by the fact it is so polarised into basically
* GPL forever: at the moment you download you choose the GPL path, you can't later decide to make your project non-GPL and pay the license fee to trolltech and go commercial; this would be a PITA to any bedroom startup; however, I wouldn't be surprised if a few stealth startuos *did* bend this rule
* payware: cough up a license fee for the SDK and support
if you don't like trolltech's licensing, go write your own gui toolkit! there are other gpl choices, such as opie2, gpe
the only way to get the functionality and openness of openmoko is to use a linux device like a laptop or nokia tablet or sharp zaurus and use a GSM modem adaptor (eg an audiovox or enfora CF modem and cf-pcmcia adaptor). the end result is quite a lot bigger than the 'moko.
there were hopes for the iPhone to be somewhat more open and for a full SDK to be available, but Steve Jobs nixed that one.
apart from reasonable success with the HTC Universal smartphone and other devices to which linux is being ported (usually without any help from the hw vendors), there's NOTHING competing in this space.
imagine the scene...
quick, ring the police. hold on whilst I just run "apt-get install policedb ; X=`gpsget location`; gsmsms send $LOCALPOLICE $X"
30s in total from scanning the subject, possibly reading the first line or two of the body, hitting delete and letting the email client go to the next one. if you're using webmail, it might be slower.
excellent point... so, neuter spammers and hope that the spamming gene is removed from the gene pool. if they have kids, well, sorry kids, you guys ain't going to have any! Neutering could probably be achieved using an overdose of viagra coupled with penis patches, although the resulting explosion might be a bit messy :-@
this is /. so I figured brevity to keep attention span was more important than a detailed technical explanation :-)
no, a beowulf cluster of 1 bit processor core CPUs.
basically yes. the example images are crap, they're a long way before they can produce something that'll compete with a 50$ digicam!
/. crowd to the fact that telescopes use mirrors and not lenses for good reasons, so perhaps a DLP mirror array with one sensor could make sense under certain circumstances... this might be an advantage is IF the image sensor had very peculiar characteristics that were very hard to reproduce in a large 2D array like a CCD or MOS sensor. Off the top of my head, that might be a very wide spectrum sensor (infrared to ultraviolet) (rather than an RGB detector) say.
I would like to refer
this just in, 1000 telephone sanitizers landed at Kennedy Space Port.