Now, if you drive some cheap P.O.S. rattletrap with a crappy stereo, you won't notice the difference.
But if you actually drive a quality car, with a good stereo, good sound deadening, and a reasonable powerplant, you most certainly can hear the difference.
Neither FM transmitters nor cassette adapters are a good solution - both greatly reduce the quality of the signal provided to the stereo.
I have an MP3 player in my car, and was using a cassette adapter to interface to it until I could get the head-end adapter (that fooled the stereo into thinking it had a CD jukebox attached) for the car. The difference between the two was not merely night and day - it was night and nova. The cassette adapter had no bass, no treble, and poor stereo seperation.
FM transmitters are just as bad - the maximum frequency is limited to 15 kHz, and the stereo seperation is poor due to the multiplexing of the L-R signal onto the 38kHz pilot tone.
If his stereo has a CDR MP3 player function, it likely has support for a CD jukebox - go to Precision Interface Electronics and order the appropriate adapter, it will be much better.
The updated law makes saving seeds for next year's harvest, practiced by 97% of Iraqi farmers in 2002, the standard farming practice for thousands of years across human civilizations, newly illegal.
Only if the farmers are using GM seeds. If they use normal seeds, then there is no problem with holding back seed for next year.
Typical bias.
Be it software or grain, the rules are the same - if you don't like the license, don't use the product - use a competing product with a license you can accept.
It's ok, though, because Microsoft has indemnified everybody (except embedded Windows users), so just be happy this didn't happen in some terrible operating system without a big, strong, virile company like Micorsoft backing it...
It has to be better than savings bonds or GICs, so we're talking at least 6-8%. How is a privately held company supposed to increase its stock price continually by 8% annually? Answer: By continually increasing profits.
Or the company can simply pay dividends of 6-8% each year, which only requires making a consistent profit.
This is the problem with the way the stock market is portrayed now-a-days - that the only way to make money is for the stock price to go up. Companies try every trick in the book to avoid paying the dividends they should be paying, in order to keep the profits for themselves.
I emailed Hemos about Flash ads showing up. According to him, they are only supposed to show up to IE. However, it would seem that logic is broken. Hemos said it needed to be fixed - presumably they are working on it.
The drivers are a bit rocky - unfortunately they are not in the mainline kernel, and if you are running a newer kernel getting the patches to apply is a bit tricky.
Also, the version of xine they have modified to support tuning and selecting the video streams on a multi-stream HD transmission is OLD - 0.7. Again, they have not moved the support into the main line Xine.
Alsa (sic), under 2.6.x and ALSA sound you cannot get audio for normal TV as the modified video driver claims the resources the ALSA sound driver needs. Yes, the primary focus of the card is HDTV not NTSC, but still, IMHO they should fix that.
Lastly, you had DAMN WELL have a meaty machine if you plan on watching 1080i streams - my Athlon-xp 3000 with an ATI 7500 AIW, with everything tweaked in as much as I can, needs about 120% CPU to watch a 1080I stream. IF you have an nVidia card, IF you have the modified version of Xine with XvMC support THEN you can lower the bar a bit, but otherwise, no.
I'd like to see them make the effort to get all the software into the main line codebases - I believe the hold-up is the issue of possibly supporting the Linux DVB API rather than bodging the ATSC support into V4L2.
I can see this being really nice for "bursty" loads, like highway emergency lights, SCADA monitoring systems for pipelines, and anything where the demand is in short bursts for high current - you could eliminate quite a bit of extra stuff.
However, I wonder what the hold-up time and leakage currents look like - if this thing charges, then is deprived of light for a while, does the charge leak off? One of the problems with standard solar cells is that you have to disconnect them from the battery when the light levels drop, or they will discharge the battery - if this design avoids that it will really reduce the complexity of charging circuits.
When you do filtering, summation, scaling, etc., you frequently find yourself adding multiple values together, then later dividing by some number - for example a filter algorithm would involve adding 256 samples together, then dividing by 256 (roughly speaking...)
When you do something like that, you need at least 8 bits of headroom in the processing stages or else you either overflow (nasty) or have to drop least significant bits (noisy).
Running a 32 bit processing channel, even though the final result doesn't need more than 20 bits of resolution allows you to process filters with up to 4096 taps without overflow.
Sure, you can go to a floating point system, but that adds quite a bit of complexity to the system.
I work with 24 bit DSPs all the time (Motorola 56301), and frequently have to use the 48 bit long-long format in the core of my routines to prevent overflow. If they were 32 bit DSPs, that would greatly simplify my life.
OK, so they are not looking to port the big apps over to Linux. So what are they looking at?
An improved Acroread.
The only thing I use Acroread for is to view and fill in my tax forms once a year. Other than that, I'd far rather use GGV to view a PDF file - it is a cleaner, better app. If GGV allowed me to fill in the blanks on the 1040 forms I'd drop Acroread in a heartbeat.
So, how is Adobe going to improve acroread enough that I care about it?
Other than that, what other little apps do they have - Distiller? Nope, don't need that, I can already tell the system to make a PDF from a print job.
Seriously - other than the big apps, what does Adobe bring to the table?
Something I've wondered - how big is the software devel group there? And are the bulk of the apps writting in VC++ or VB?
And something to consider - perhaps as others have said, making the program itself FOSS but making the dataset a licensed item (with a severely limited dataset made available as FOSS) might work - the old "give away the razor, sell the blades" model might work.
Hell, even identifying why the programs don't work with Wine and feeding that back to Winedev would be enough - I used to be able to run MNG6 under Wine, but with the latest versions all I get is the dreaded "Cannot create empty document" messages.
I'd buy the latest copies of Street Atlas to replace my old SA5/AAA6, but only if I had a reasonable chance of them running under Wine.
It is unlikely that AAA would make the map software available for use on a local computer, as they had done something similar and stopped.
Delorme used to have a program called AAA MapNGo, which was Delorme's map data of streets combined with AAA's attractions database. When the contract with AAA came up for renewal, AAA refused.
Look at it from AAA's perspective - one of the draws to being a AAA member is the trip planning function of the AAA website. If you can buy a program that does this, you can now plan your own trips forever. Yes, eventually the data on your copy of the program will be out of date, but realisticly this does not happen for several years. Thus, selling such a program costs them memberships.
They were not going to allow posts from the public, as does Groklaw - their site was to be nothing but their voice, with no comments from the peanut gallery. As such, the concern for trolling/astroturfing/conflicting opinions was non-existant.
The more likely explaination was that, in the absense of such posts, the only thing their site could have would be either court documents a la Groklaw (which would do them no good), or statements from SCO, which would find their way into the courts, and as such would have to be true or they would expose SCO to (more) problems in court. When SCO legal informed them of this, SCO probably realised that there was no benefit in doing this.
This Slashdot story discussed the same issue - specifically the possibility of getting Delorme to port their trip planning software to Linux.
In this comment I asked people to write to Delorme and request this, and to respond to this Journal Entry telling me they had done so. In the past I have contacted Delorme about this, and they keep telling me "Oh, we've never had any requests for this" - demonstrably false after my first request, so I wanted to have the evidence to point to in order to bring more pressure to bear upon Delorme.
And as I commented in this journal entry the result was a big, fat zero. There were no replies to my journal entry, and as far as I can tell, no replies to Delorme.
Now, what does this tell us? When a story like that hits the front page of Slashdot, and fails to engender enough support to even generate one response, then the only thing one can conclude is that there is not enough demand for this product to make it worth anybody's time to do. Hell, I do software design for a living - and were I working for Delorme I would not recommend spending any effort to do a port precisely for this reason. The opportunity cost is too high - even if the cost of a port is only a few man-weeks, the money you can make spending those man-weeks on improving the Windows product is FAR greater than the money you would make on the Linux port.
Furthermore, I would assert that a program like this is very difficult to do in a Free Software environment, due to the dependance upon a large, detailed, and accurate database. One lone hacker can create a vector map display widget, one lone hacker can create a route planning routine, but one lone hacker cannot create a detailed database of roads (including road type, speed limit, any one-way restrictions, etc.) attractions, exit services, hotels, etc. The only way I could see to do this would be to allow submissions by the public to a database, with some sort of reputation system and approval system (think Wikipedia. Or more realistically, think Slashdot. Do you really want your trip planning software trying to route to on 69 Goatse Rd. to the Portman Museum of Grits in Frist Prost, AR?)
I shall say it again: IF this is something that matters to you, write a polite letter to: sales@delorme.com
or better still, write (on paper, with proper spelling) to
DeLorme Two DeLorme Drive P.O. Box 298 Yarmouth, ME 04096 USA
The head of Delorme's name is David Delorme, perhaps you could address your letters to "Sales Manager" and CC David Delorme.
And again, if you do so, please drop me a line as a response to this post.
Prior art, from the standpoint of a patent, only counts if it is published. Writing something up, and keeping it in your safe deposit box will not serve as prior art, even if you fully describe the idea.
Now, if you are to write your idea up in a letter to some company, and have a notorized copy of the letter, you might then be able to use that letter to prove that you discussed the idea with that company in the event that the company shafts you.
However, let us go to the more fundemental question - are you REALLY sure your idea is that great? Perhaps the reason nobody else has acted upon this really simple idea is that everybody else who as had it has found out that it has had problems.
Slashdot Mirror
Boy, you sure don't ask for much, do you?
Yes, actually, the difference was enourmous.
Now, if you drive some cheap P.O.S. rattletrap with a crappy stereo, you won't notice the difference.
But if you actually drive a quality car, with a good stereo, good sound deadening, and a reasonable powerplant, you most certainly can hear the difference.
Neither FM transmitters nor cassette adapters are a good solution - both greatly reduce the quality of the signal provided to the stereo.
I have an MP3 player in my car, and was using a cassette adapter to interface to it until I could get the head-end adapter (that fooled the stereo into thinking it had a CD jukebox attached) for the car. The difference between the two was not merely night and day - it was night and nova. The cassette adapter had no bass, no treble, and poor stereo seperation.
FM transmitters are just as bad - the maximum frequency is limited to 15 kHz, and the stereo seperation is poor due to the multiplexing of the L-R signal onto the 38kHz pilot tone.
If his stereo has a CDR MP3 player function, it likely has support for a CD jukebox - go to Precision Interface Electronics and order the appropriate adapter, it will be much better.
Only if the farmers are using GM seeds. If they use normal seeds, then there is no problem with holding back seed for next year.
Typical bias.
Be it software or grain, the rules are the same - if you don't like the license, don't use the product - use a competing product with a license you can accept.
It's ok, though, because Microsoft has indemnified everybody (except embedded Windows users), so just be happy this didn't happen in some terrible operating system without a big, strong, virile company like Micorsoft backing it...
My idea of a good sentence for spamming is 15 minutes.
Of course, that 15 minutes is spent in front of a webcam having the shit caned out of you, but, still , only 15 minutes.
Slashdot:
Or the company can simply pay dividends of 6-8% each year, which only requires making a consistent profit.
This is the problem with the way the stock market is portrayed now-a-days - that the only way to make money is for the stock price to go up. Companies try every trick in the book to avoid paying the dividends they should be paying, in order to keep the profits for themselves.
How recent is "recent" - I've tried with Xorg 6.8.1 and had big problems, as the fglrx driver didn't like the version # returned by Xorg.
In Soviet Russia, blogs see no Journalism in CBS.
(gads. Did I just submit an "In Soviet Russia" joke? Somebody shoot me.)
No problem - hope I saved you some grief.
And of course, if you are running a 64 bit system you are equally out of luck.
And if there is not - for example, recent Fedora Core installs which use Xorg rather than XFree86, then you are SOL.
If you want a well supported video card under Linux, do not expect anything from a recent ATI video card - go nVidia.
While ATI says they are going to support us, Real Soon Now, - actions talk, bullshit walks.
I emailed Hemos about Flash ads showing up. According to him, they are only supposed to show up to IE. However, it would seem that logic is broken. Hemos said it needed to be fixed - presumably they are working on it.
The drivers are a bit rocky - unfortunately they are not in the mainline kernel, and if you are running a newer kernel getting the patches to apply is a bit tricky.
Also, the version of xine they have modified to support tuning and selecting the video streams on a multi-stream HD transmission is OLD - 0.7. Again, they have not moved the support into the main line Xine.
Alsa (sic), under 2.6.x and ALSA sound you cannot get audio for normal TV as the modified video driver claims the resources the ALSA sound driver needs. Yes, the primary focus of the card is HDTV not NTSC, but still, IMHO they should fix that.
Lastly, you had DAMN WELL have a meaty machine if you plan on watching 1080i streams - my Athlon-xp 3000 with an ATI 7500 AIW, with everything tweaked in as much as I can, needs about 120% CPU to watch a 1080I stream. IF you have an nVidia card, IF you have the modified version of Xine with XvMC support THEN you can lower the bar a bit, but otherwise, no.
I'd like to see them make the effort to get all the software into the main line codebases - I believe the hold-up is the issue of possibly supporting the Linux DVB API rather than bodging the ATSC support into V4L2.
I can see this being really nice for "bursty" loads, like highway emergency lights, SCADA monitoring systems for pipelines, and anything where the demand is in short bursts for high current - you could eliminate quite a bit of extra stuff.
However, I wonder what the hold-up time and leakage currents look like - if this thing charges, then is deprived of light for a while, does the charge leak off? One of the problems with standard solar cells is that you have to disconnect them from the battery when the light levels drop, or they will discharge the battery - if this design avoids that it will really reduce the complexity of charging circuits.
I will have to disagree with you on this.
When you do filtering, summation, scaling, etc., you frequently find yourself adding multiple values together, then later dividing by some number - for example a filter algorithm would involve adding 256 samples together, then dividing by 256 (roughly speaking...)
When you do something like that, you need at least 8 bits of headroom in the processing stages or else you either overflow (nasty) or have to drop least significant bits (noisy).
Running a 32 bit processing channel, even though the final result doesn't need more than 20 bits of resolution allows you to process filters with up to 4096 taps without overflow.
Sure, you can go to a floating point system, but that adds quite a bit of complexity to the system.
I work with 24 bit DSPs all the time (Motorola 56301), and frequently have to use the 48 bit long-long format in the core of my routines to prevent overflow. If they were 32 bit DSPs, that would greatly simplify my life.
OK, so they are not looking to port the big apps over to Linux. So what are they looking at?
An improved Acroread.
The only thing I use Acroread for is to view and fill in my tax forms once a year. Other than that, I'd far rather use GGV to view a PDF file - it is a cleaner, better app. If GGV allowed me to fill in the blanks on the 1040 forms I'd drop Acroread in a heartbeat.
So, how is Adobe going to improve acroread enough that I care about it?
Other than that, what other little apps do they have - Distiller? Nope, don't need that, I can already tell the system to make a PDF from a print job.
Seriously - other than the big apps, what does Adobe bring to the table?
Something I've wondered - how big is the software devel group there? And are the bulk of the apps writting in VC++ or VB?
And something to consider - perhaps as others have said, making the program itself FOSS but making the dataset a licensed item (with a severely limited dataset made available as FOSS) might work - the old "give away the razor, sell the blades" model might work.
Hell, even identifying why the programs don't work with Wine and feeding that back to Winedev would be enough - I used to be able to run MNG6 under Wine, but with the latest versions all I get is the dreaded "Cannot create empty document" messages.
I'd buy the latest copies of Street Atlas to replace my old SA5/AAA6, but only if I had a reasonable chance of them running under Wine.
It is unlikely that AAA would make the map software available for use on a local computer, as they had done something similar and stopped.
Delorme used to have a program called AAA MapNGo, which was Delorme's map data of streets combined with AAA's attractions database. When the contract with AAA came up for renewal, AAA refused.
Look at it from AAA's perspective - one of the draws to being a AAA member is the trip planning function of the AAA website. If you can buy a program that does this, you can now plan your own trips forever. Yes, eventually the data on your copy of the program will be out of date, but realisticly this does not happen for several years. Thus, selling such a program costs them memberships.
They were not going to allow posts from the public, as does Groklaw - their site was to be nothing but their voice, with no comments from the peanut gallery. As such, the concern for trolling/astroturfing/conflicting opinions was non-existant.
The more likely explaination was that, in the absense of such posts, the only thing their site could have would be either court documents a la Groklaw (which would do them no good), or statements from SCO, which would find their way into the courts, and as such would have to be true or they would expose SCO to (more) problems in court. When SCO legal informed them of this, SCO probably realised that there was no benefit in doing this.
In this comment I asked people to write to Delorme and request this, and to respond to this Journal Entry telling me they had done so. In the past I have contacted Delorme about this, and they keep telling me "Oh, we've never had any requests for this" - demonstrably false after my first request, so I wanted to have the evidence to point to in order to bring more pressure to bear upon Delorme.
And as I commented in this journal entry the result was a big, fat zero. There were no replies to my journal entry, and as far as I can tell, no replies to Delorme.
Now, what does this tell us? When a story like that hits the front page of Slashdot, and fails to engender enough support to even generate one response, then the only thing one can conclude is that there is not enough demand for this product to make it worth anybody's time to do. Hell, I do software design for a living - and were I working for Delorme I would not recommend spending any effort to do a port precisely for this reason. The opportunity cost is too high - even if the cost of a port is only a few man-weeks, the money you can make spending those man-weeks on improving the Windows product is FAR greater than the money you would make on the Linux port.
Furthermore, I would assert that a program like this is very difficult to do in a Free Software environment, due to the dependance upon a large, detailed, and accurate database. One lone hacker can create a vector map display widget, one lone hacker can create a route planning routine, but one lone hacker cannot create a detailed database of roads (including road type, speed limit, any one-way restrictions, etc.) attractions, exit services, hotels, etc. The only way I could see to do this would be to allow submissions by the public to a database, with some sort of reputation system and approval system (think Wikipedia. Or more realistically, think Slashdot. Do you really want your trip planning software trying to route to on 69 Goatse Rd. to the Portman Museum of Grits in Frist Prost, AR?)
I shall say it again: IF this is something that matters to you, write a polite letter to:
sales@delorme.com
or better still, write (on paper, with proper spelling) to
The head of Delorme's name is David Delorme, perhaps you could address your letters to "Sales Manager" and CC David Delorme.
And again, if you do so, please drop me a line as a response to this post.
Prior art, from the standpoint of a patent, only counts if it is published. Writing something up, and keeping it in your safe deposit box will not serve as prior art, even if you fully describe the idea.
Now, if you are to write your idea up in a letter to some company, and have a notorized copy of the letter, you might then be able to use that letter to prove that you discussed the idea with that company in the event that the company shafts you.
However, let us go to the more fundemental question - are you REALLY sure your idea is that great? Perhaps the reason nobody else has acted upon this really simple idea is that everybody else who as had it has found out that it has had problems.
Give out Buzz Bites Chocolates, Black Black Gum/Candy, and Pixie Stixs with ground up Penguin Mints inside, then sit back and laugh at all the parents who will have to deal with the results.
A Billg mask is not scary.
Billg, himself, is scary, but a Billg mask is not scary.
Now a Steve Ballmer mask, THAT'S SCARY.
Especially if you throw in the Monkeyboy dance - "Developers! Developers! Developers!"
(Of course, one might conjecture that the original dance may have had something to do with too much sugar and caffeine.)