One interesting oddity is that I can now see ultraviolet light — it seems that there are a few people who have photoreceptors sensitive below 400nm into the UV spectrum. I've done some testing with a Black Light and UV filter
1) Purchase a UV source and filter the heck out of it to output purely UV (no purple leakage). Ask a geologist or perhaps a scorpion exterminator, they'll know what to buy...
2) Visit astronomical telescope parties and offer your safety assistance... help walking down the mountain, help reading directions, help stepping off the road curb without tripping, just.. sighted help in general.
What to them is pitch black, to you, could be lit up like a searchlight, at least until your batteries die.
Do I really have to suggest to a bunch of/.ers to try and see thru clothing using UV light? Some clothing is sorta IR transparent, sorta.
My gut level guess is very little clothing is UV transparent, but bleached underclothes might fluoresce brightly beneath regular clothes, maybe.
In a completely unrelated topic, does anyone know of any (long term) UV phosphors? Perhaps the original poster could see glow in the dark "whatever" that most of us couldn't see. I'm not talking about short term florescence, but long term phosphorescence. florescence is that rock that momentarily glows yellow when hit with UV. phosphorescence is that weird kids plastic toys that glow and give off green light for a couple minutes after being charged with light. This is what I'm interested in, is there anything that glows UV for a couple minutes after being flashed momentarily with light?
The article is just another extremely tired "This existed since the 80s, but now that the Arduino supports it, we can act as if it a new invention." And ABSOLUTELY nothing other than the Arduino. "other open source tools"? Not that I saw in the article.
Which is a pity, because I think a DP bus pirate would be way the heck more useful for this kind of work. I used a DP BP to debug the software for a I2C real time clock, but I'm sure it could be used for reverse engineering or nefarious purposes (much like a screwdriver is multi-purpose)
The days of saying it would take the resources of a nation-state to discover or exploit vulnerabilities in a particular piece of hardware in an industrial control system or a healthcare environment are rapidly fading
Was anyone technical ever dumb enough to ever believe that? Anyone? Ever? Marketing P.R. BS doesn't count.
I do like ratpoison on my development box... I need a nice terminal prog to attach to my screen sessions, and a way to toggle to web browser occasionally. Thats about it.
My solution to this conundrum is simply to not go anywhere you must pay to park. This pretty much rules our most big cities, or at least most areas of big cities. This has the nice side effect of keeping me out of high crime areas. If you're going to charge me to park on a public road, funded by tax dollars, some of which came from me, I will not park there. If I don't park there, I of course won't be spending money in the surrounding areas. Their loss not mine, I hate cities.
I've found places that try to nickel and dime me to death also have horrendous traffic, yet another good reason to stay away. And the nickel and dime mentality extends to the retail and service providers in the area, so I get better cheaper service by going somewhere "better"
I would like an app showing where I can park for free...
Of course tv has changed since the PII came out, there was no HD back then.
First commercial ATSC broadcast = July 1996. Mid summer anyway, as I recall. I'm in the telecom biz, trust me on this. First retail sale of a PII = 1997ish, certainly not before 1996
And what are you going to put this in, a PII? That won't help, the bottleneck is the processor (~400 MHz) or some other part of the ancient hardware.
Running VDPAU video card acceleration on a zbox my CPU varies a lot depending on content but it would seem a pentium 75 Might be able to act as a mythtv frontend with this card. I think something in your specified PII era would be far more than enough. Especially since in ye olden days when mythtv was new, a PII was a kinda decent frontend, and its not like TV has changed much since then.
Also, cards like these often have a lot of media playback capabilities that aren't bandwidth-hungry. This could likely, for example, allow an old clunker system to be upgraded to Blu-Ray capabilities fairly cheaply.
GT520 should run VDPAU acceleration pretty well... It takes practically zero CPU power to shovel bits at the video card. This means practically any old box out there is an instant HDMI output mythtv frontend. Obviously I haven't tried it, but it should work fantastic.
If I could get all the sports channels for $20/month, I'd fork it over, even if that is a huge mark up.
LOL can't even pay the capital costs and maintenance costs for the wire into your house for $20/mo. Basic (usually about $10 to $15) is generally speaking a non-profit subsidized service.
While I'm sure I would be paying more than what the cable company pays for each channel (well, no shit - they do have to make money somewhere), it seems highly unlikely that it would cost more to get those five channels than the $60 per month I pay now.
strongly disagree. Can you imagine the byzantine billing system required to select which of the thousands of channels you want? And the staggering cost of customer service as people call in to sign up for, or cancel, channels? Some people are going to demand only 3 channels or perhaps 6 channels, so that complicates the billing system even more, assuming non-linear cost. The people who "need" 6 channels but only pay for 4 and constantly change their lineup burning customer service hours will need some extra signup fees to discourage them.
Its easily possible to make the billing system the most expensive part of providing service. Look what happened in long distance telephone calls...
And so what if a channel doesn't have enough interest to be sustainable in an a la carte market? If that's the case, the channel should fold.
That won't happen. Upstream contracts are done at megacorp to megacorp level, not a la carte channel level. That is the entire point. There are only a handful of big media companies, therefore there can only be a handful of bundles for the end users, because the guys in the middle only sign a couple contracts with the big production companies.
Standard/. car analogy: There exists a custom, a la carte, hand built, individually designed, hot rod market where the buyer gets exactly every little detail how they want. That in no way invalidates the idea that 99% of the population is stuck buying off the lot from the "big three" dealerships (more or less).
Yeah but they haven't got nickel and dime billing down to a science like a telco. Expect to see "1000 channel changes per month free, each after 1000 at only five cents each" deals. Per-minute billing for individual channels... "You can activate the mute button for only 50 cents each push, or $2 per month, or $1 per month on a two year service contract". Every time you hit "FF" on a cableco provided DVR to commercial skip, another line on the detailed bill for 25 cents... That's REAL nickel and dime billing, coming soon to a cable bill near you...
The superbowl is watched by about 100 million Americans, or 1/3 of the population
That would be closer to 1/4 now. Which makes your result 1/8 or about 12.5%. However you're assuming the distribution of SB watchers is both random and uncoordinated with the distribution of cable subscribers, which is probably big time incorrect. I would estimate dramatic overlap.
Doesn't really matter because only a relatively small percentage of those watching the SB consider themselves "sports fans". For many viewers, that might be the only sporting event they watch all year...
"allow all those hundreds of independent and semi-independent channels to stay alive"
The itworld guy doesn't know anything about the business. 99.99% of viewer hours are from around half a dozen big media corporations. Big annual or so contracts at the megacorp to megacorp level, not individual channel negotiation level. You'll have to change literally the entire business relationship structure with the upstreams before the downstreams (individual customers) can go a la carte.
The problem is not the hundreds of independent "local public access" and "local school district" channels.
The other problem is cablecos are not telecoms. A telecom company is a billing system designed to nickle and dime every little activity of each user at enormous cost, with a side effect of providing service; its a billing focused company. A cableco finds billing anything more complicated than $X/month to be kind of difficult for them. Major structural internal changes will have to be made to nickel and dime cable customers; I'm not sure on average that a nickle and dime relationship will save me any money anyway.
If you desperately want to create photo based or audio based content there are plenty of cheap options to do so.
There are plenty of BETTER options to do so. I have an ipod touch with a cam and mic, those are just horrible. I don't want to see the trash that comes from those, not from my i-device, not from anyones i-device.
Its like saying we'll all be content creators like Michelangelo if cell phone providers merely gave out finger paints and crayolas with each phone.
It could run on small insects fed on sugar drops and users wouldn't care - so touting it as an Android-powered device seems to be something Amazon is trying to avoid
Average user off the street, like my android phone using sister in law:
Android = expensive little smart phone = have to sign a two year contract = minimum extra $100/month bill to own a "Android Kindle Amazon thing", right?
Two year contract at over $100 plus a couple hundred to buy means its gonna cost around $2000 to have one of these things before loading anything on to it; is it worth two grand?
Also Android = smart phone = battery only lasts a couple hours = gotta charge it every day. Its enough of a PITA to charge my phone every day, now I gotta charge my e-reader every day too?
I'm really curious why nobody has brought another 9" tablet to the market. AFAIK, Apple is the only name-brand manufacturer to bring out a 9" 1024x768 tablet. Everyone else is pushing 5/6/7" tablets. Surely screen size is something most people consider when comparison shopping? It's not like screens are terribly expensive any more. I read somewhere that the iPad screen is less than $50 in bulk.
Power requirements, need a bigger battery. Then higher res means need a bigger CPU. The CPU requires a bigger battery. Eventually you end up with backyard paver brick statistics.
Wheres the scroll buttons on the side for forward/backward? Don't tell me you have to get the screen you're trying to read all greasy.
The other thing that confuses me is the spam version is $40 less than the spamless version. Seriously? They expect to sell $40 worth of advertising to me on that thing? Some of its probably aspirational, assuming you'll get made fun of by your friends if you're so poor you have to buy the spam version.
The other funny part, is true to form, the amazon web page has the tired and stereotypical "woman reading at the beach" photo. Its hard to predict, but if there's one thing this era will be laughed at for, it MIGHT be the "we're gonna get rich by only selling e-readers to women at the beach".
Lets get ahead of the curve. Last tech bubble resulted in all kinds of jokes. This tech bubble is going to result in jokes about... Or will it be more complaining, like this bubble will be nothing but whining about how facebook sucks, etc?
Congratulations, you know absolutely nothing about cancer or biology in general.
Don't overestimate the physics displayed either... there is a huge difference between slowly moving thru an intense static magnetic field and an electromagnetic wave.
I suppose when anything technological is magic, all you have to guide yourself is fear...
How embarrassing to spend all that time building up a company only to effectively "resign" from the internet and cede your entire company to become just a feature of another company. Facebook is the king of getting people to work for them gratis. Spotify did the heavy lifting with the labels and Facebook eats their lunch.
Maybe its a very public display of affection for FB... they really wanna get purchased...
Either FB is going to purchase spotify or spotify is going to be really embarrassed when FB rejects their advances.
You can only use one or the other? I only use G+ so I donno. I suppose its technically possible for each side to intentionally screw up the other guys cookies and whatever else (keyloggers?)
Sounds like an artificial problem where you "must" only have landline or cell phone, or you "must" only use one of windoze mac or linux.
Slashdot Mirror
One interesting oddity is that I can now see ultraviolet light — it seems that there are a few people who have photoreceptors sensitive below 400nm into the UV spectrum. I've done some testing with a Black Light and UV filter
1) Purchase a UV source and filter the heck out of it to output purely UV (no purple leakage). Ask a geologist or perhaps a scorpion exterminator, they'll know what to buy...
2) Visit astronomical telescope parties and offer your safety assistance... help walking down the mountain, help reading directions, help stepping off the road curb without tripping, just .. sighted help in general.
What to them is pitch black, to you, could be lit up like a searchlight, at least until your batteries die.
Do I really have to suggest to a bunch of /.ers to try and see thru clothing using UV light? Some clothing is sorta IR transparent, sorta.
My gut level guess is very little clothing is UV transparent, but bleached underclothes might fluoresce brightly beneath regular clothes, maybe.
In a completely unrelated topic, does anyone know of any (long term) UV phosphors? Perhaps the original poster could see glow in the dark "whatever" that most of us couldn't see. I'm not talking about short term florescence, but long term phosphorescence. florescence is that rock that momentarily glows yellow when hit with UV. phosphorescence is that weird kids plastic toys that glow and give off green light for a couple minutes after being charged with light. This is what I'm interested in, is there anything that glows UV for a couple minutes after being flashed momentarily with light?
The article is just another extremely tired "This existed since the 80s, but now that the Arduino supports it, we can act as if it a new invention." And ABSOLUTELY nothing other than the Arduino. "other open source tools"? Not that I saw in the article.
Which is a pity, because I think a DP bus pirate would be way the heck more useful for this kind of work. I used a DP BP to debug the software for a I2C real time clock, but I'm sure it could be used for reverse engineering or nefarious purposes (much like a screwdriver is multi-purpose)
http://dangerousprototypes.com/docs/Bus_Pirate
The days of saying it would take the resources of a nation-state to discover or exploit vulnerabilities in a particular piece of hardware in an industrial control system or a healthcare environment are rapidly fading
Was anyone technical ever dumb enough to ever believe that? Anyone? Ever? Marketing P.R. BS doesn't count.
I thought you were gonna say ratpoison or xfce.
I do like ratpoison on my development box... I need a nice terminal prog to attach to my screen sessions, and a way to toggle to web browser occasionally. Thats about it.
Peak G force at impact.
I'm only half way kidding... A network of seismometers could have some scientific value, or at least be a cool hack, or "educational".
My solution to this conundrum is simply to not go anywhere you must pay to park. This pretty much rules our most big cities, or at least most areas of big cities. This has the nice side effect of keeping me out of high crime areas. If you're going to charge me to park on a public road, funded by tax dollars, some of which came from me, I will not park there. If I don't park there, I of course won't be spending money in the surrounding areas. Their loss not mine, I hate cities.
I've found places that try to nickel and dime me to death also have horrendous traffic, yet another good reason to stay away. And the nickel and dime mentality extends to the retail and service providers in the area, so I get better cheaper service by going somewhere "better"
I would like an app showing where I can park for free...
Of course tv has changed since the PII came out, there was no HD back then.
First commercial ATSC broadcast = July 1996. Mid summer anyway, as I recall. I'm in the telecom biz, trust me on this.
First retail sale of a PII = 1997ish, certainly not before 1996
Its quite the horse race there.
Oh yeah, they never did cure Herpes, did they? :(
Too profitable.
Imagine the crushing damage to the medical industry if they ever cured the common cold?
And what are you going to put this in, a PII? That won't help, the bottleneck is the processor (~400 MHz) or some other part of the ancient hardware.
Running VDPAU video card acceleration on a zbox my CPU varies a lot depending on content but it would seem a pentium 75 Might be able to act as a mythtv frontend with this card. I think something in your specified PII era would be far more than enough. Especially since in ye olden days when mythtv was new, a PII was a kinda decent frontend, and its not like TV has changed much since then.
Also, cards like these often have a lot of media playback capabilities that aren't bandwidth-hungry. This could likely, for example, allow an old clunker system to be upgraded to Blu-Ray capabilities fairly cheaply.
GT520 should run VDPAU acceleration pretty well... It takes practically zero CPU power to shovel bits at the video card. This means practically any old box out there is an instant HDMI output mythtv frontend. Obviously I haven't tried it, but it should work fantastic.
If I could get all the sports channels for $20/month, I'd fork it over, even if that is a huge mark up.
LOL can't even pay the capital costs and maintenance costs for the wire into your house for $20/mo. Basic (usually about $10 to $15) is generally speaking a non-profit subsidized service.
While I'm sure I would be paying more than what the cable company pays for each channel (well, no shit - they do have to make money somewhere), it seems highly unlikely that it would cost more to get those five channels than the $60 per month I pay now.
strongly disagree. Can you imagine the byzantine billing system required to select which of the thousands of channels you want? And the staggering cost of customer service as people call in to sign up for, or cancel, channels? Some people are going to demand only 3 channels or perhaps 6 channels, so that complicates the billing system even more, assuming non-linear cost. The people who "need" 6 channels but only pay for 4 and constantly change their lineup burning customer service hours will need some extra signup fees to discourage them.
Its easily possible to make the billing system the most expensive part of providing service. Look what happened in long distance telephone calls...
And so what if a channel doesn't have enough interest to be sustainable in an a la carte market? If that's the case, the channel should fold.
That won't happen. Upstream contracts are done at megacorp to megacorp level, not a la carte channel level. That is the entire point. There are only a handful of big media companies, therefore there can only be a handful of bundles for the end users, because the guys in the middle only sign a couple contracts with the big production companies.
Standard /. car analogy: There exists a custom, a la carte, hand built, individually designed, hot rod market where the buyer gets exactly every little detail how they want. That in no way invalidates the idea that 99% of the population is stuck buying off the lot from the "big three" dealerships (more or less).
Yeah but they haven't got nickel and dime billing down to a science like a telco. Expect to see "1000 channel changes per month free, each after 1000 at only five cents each" deals. Per-minute billing for individual channels... "You can activate the mute button for only 50 cents each push, or $2 per month, or $1 per month on a two year service contract". Every time you hit "FF" on a cableco provided DVR to commercial skip, another line on the detailed bill for 25 cents... That's REAL nickel and dime billing, coming soon to a cable bill near you...
The superbowl is watched by about 100 million Americans, or 1/3 of the population
That would be closer to 1/4 now. Which makes your result 1/8 or about 12.5%. However you're assuming the distribution of SB watchers is both random and uncoordinated with the distribution of cable subscribers, which is probably big time incorrect. I would estimate dramatic overlap.
Doesn't really matter because only a relatively small percentage of those watching the SB consider themselves "sports fans". For many viewers, that might be the only sporting event they watch all year...
"allow all those hundreds of independent and semi-independent channels to stay alive"
The itworld guy doesn't know anything about the business. 99.99% of viewer hours are from around half a dozen big media corporations. Big annual or so contracts at the megacorp to megacorp level, not individual channel negotiation level. You'll have to change literally the entire business relationship structure with the upstreams before the downstreams (individual customers) can go a la carte.
The problem is not the hundreds of independent "local public access" and "local school district" channels.
The other problem is cablecos are not telecoms. A telecom company is a billing system designed to nickle and dime every little activity of each user at enormous cost, with a side effect of providing service; its a billing focused company. A cableco finds billing anything more complicated than $X/month to be kind of difficult for them. Major structural internal changes will have to be made to nickel and dime cable customers; I'm not sure on average that a nickle and dime relationship will save me any money anyway.
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 6000 of me. God help us all!
There's darn near 7000 now; update your sig
If you desperately want to create photo based or audio based content there are plenty of cheap options to do so.
There are plenty of BETTER options to do so. I have an ipod touch with a cam and mic, those are just horrible. I don't want to see the trash that comes from those, not from my i-device, not from anyones i-device.
Its like saying we'll all be content creators like Michelangelo if cell phone providers merely gave out finger paints and crayolas with each phone.
It could run on small insects fed on sugar drops and users wouldn't care - so touting it as an Android-powered device seems to be something Amazon is trying to avoid
Average user off the street, like my android phone using sister in law:
Android = expensive little smart phone = have to sign a two year contract = minimum extra $100/month bill to own a "Android Kindle Amazon thing", right?
Two year contract at over $100 plus a couple hundred to buy means its gonna cost around $2000 to have one of these things before loading anything on to it; is it worth two grand?
Also Android = smart phone = battery only lasts a couple hours = gotta charge it every day. Its enough of a PITA to charge my phone every day, now I gotta charge my e-reader every day too?
I'm really curious why nobody has brought another 9" tablet to the market. AFAIK, Apple is the only name-brand manufacturer to bring out a 9" 1024x768 tablet. Everyone else is pushing 5/6/7" tablets. Surely screen size is something most people consider when comparison shopping? It's not like screens are terribly expensive any more. I read somewhere that the iPad screen is less than $50 in bulk.
Power requirements, need a bigger battery. Then higher res means need a bigger CPU. The CPU requires a bigger battery. Eventually you end up with backyard paver brick statistics.
Wheres the scroll buttons on the side for forward/backward? Don't tell me you have to get the screen you're trying to read all greasy.
The other thing that confuses me is the spam version is $40 less than the spamless version. Seriously? They expect to sell $40 worth of advertising to me on that thing? Some of its probably aspirational, assuming you'll get made fun of by your friends if you're so poor you have to buy the spam version.
The other funny part, is true to form, the amazon web page has the tired and stereotypical "woman reading at the beach" photo. Its hard to predict, but if there's one thing this era will be laughed at for, it MIGHT be the "we're gonna get rich by only selling e-readers to women at the beach".
Lets get ahead of the curve. Last tech bubble resulted in all kinds of jokes. This tech bubble is going to result in jokes about... Or will it be more complaining, like this bubble will be nothing but whining about how facebook sucks, etc?
Congratulations, you know absolutely nothing about cancer or biology in general.
Don't overestimate the physics displayed either... there is a huge difference between slowly moving thru an intense static magnetic field and an electromagnetic wave.
I suppose when anything technological is magic, all you have to guide yourself is fear...
What's a component retailer to do
Sell cables and chargers and adapters and "docks" and bluetooth-everything
How embarrassing to spend all that time building up a company only to effectively "resign" from the internet and cede your entire company to become just a feature of another company. Facebook is the king of getting people to work for them gratis. Spotify did the heavy lifting with the labels and Facebook eats their lunch.
Maybe its a very public display of affection for FB... they really wanna get purchased...
Either FB is going to purchase spotify or spotify is going to be really embarrassed when FB rejects their advances.
You can only use one or the other? I only use G+ so I donno. I suppose its technically possible for each side to intentionally screw up the other guys cookies and whatever else (keyloggers?)
Sounds like an artificial problem where you "must" only have landline or cell phone, or you "must" only use one of windoze mac or linux.