well of course MS could do this... personally I take this to be IBM looking hard across the table at MS and then reaching out and poking them in the eye.... it's something that MS probably didn't expect and doesn't have a clue how to respond to and the comment they were about to say "let's sue some OS person for patent violation" sort of dies on their lips
Re:Apps launching from USB
on
CES Tidbits
·
· Score: 1
yup - another wonderfull virus medium.... (and already here) I had a friend's camera try and infect my machine the other day.... he'd stopped at an internet cafe to upload his photos to his travel blog and gotten it infected...
Wooo - Cell phone TV - wave of the future ....
on
CES Tidbits
·
· Score: 1
I was in Chennai (aka Madras) India 3 months ago and the local cell company was rolling this out with lots of splash at the time... maybe Verizon offshored it..... seriously though they do seem a bit behind the times globally.
Still seems like a hokey idea to me - I understand that cell towers work a lot like cable qams so multicasting to people in unused bandwidth makes a lot of sense (I don't know if it really works this way - just guessing) - but I honestly think that the market for this is tiny (maybe just the guy at sports events with the portable LCD TVs keeping track of other games)
On a slightly different topic India seems to take phone competition to wonderfull - I want to see the billboards offering 1c cellphone calls here!! Every little village seems to have an I-net cafe/ISP (a router and a couple of PCs) offering really cheap access - I bet there are more ISPs in India than all the US and Europe combined at this point - plus cheap overseas calls to anywhere in the world for pennies (isn;t VOIP wonderfull...)
the cable card interface is an open standard (forced on the cable companies by an anti-trust suit) - theoretically anyone who want's to can make/buy/lease a settop - however it ain't easy to implement
I don't think they're saying they don't wear out - most tires (my Explorer's exploding ones aside) simply wear the tread down due tho things like friction and braking and have to be replaced - these would too - they just wouldn't go blow out at speed on the freeway - which is a good thing - thet might certainly be engineered to last longer (different tradeoffs might be available due to different shapes, less flexing due to inflation, different safety concernsetc) but in the end when bthe tread wears off it will stop being as good at holding you to the road
More importantly - they're being made by a tire company... who's bottom line wont be improved by selling 1/3 the numbers of tires a year... but might be by selling/making a larger part of the wheel itself (and holding the patents the other guys have to pay for to get at the technology..)
I think you're wrong (and a tad rude) - it does matter, a lot - in fact I'd be suprised if people like Al Quaeda don't already have their own (encrypted) PBXs... and almost certainly not located in the US... mind you I don't particularly want the US govt bugging my (dinky little/. gateway) PBX - also not located in the US.
The sad thing about this is that the 'bad guys' are smart enough to avoid the stuff the US can go after but they do anyway like a bull in a china shop with no finesse and the result is that the rest of us lose our freedoms
Here in NZ local long distance is soooo expensive I've found that calling NZ from the Vonage account I kept when I moved back from the US is about 1/3 the cost of local long distance.... only downside is that while VOIP connections are never switched thru satellites (with that tacky lag) the return path can be
I certainly don't think that college was a waste of time for me (just didn't teach me to do chip design) and would certainly encourage any and everyoen to go - I was mostly just protesting the AC's assertion that there was no way someone could be a self taught vlsi designer.
On the other hand one thing in my (now long 30 year career) in this biz that's kept me going is that I can keep learning and change what I do - doing new interesting stuff is what I like about my job - to just do the same thing day to day every day for ever would be terrible
I think it depends on the project in both cases - if you're pushing timing and the technology it's hard in both cases - in general it's been my impression that FPGA timing tools are just not as accurate as the ones we use for VLSI (or maybe have to leave a lot more slack because the long wire delays are so variable). I think this sort of stuff makes doing agressive FPGA designs as hard as VLSI to make reliable timing on - I'm not talking about student designs here - I mean trying to squeeze down to the cheapest package, getting the fastest clock you can for a particular generation of parts, multiple clock domains etc etc these are hard problem no matter what the underlying technology is (I watch the analog designers here at work working at GHz with awe)... I do think you're pretty much at the mercy of your tools and how much experience you've had using them
I built hardware as a ham at school (back when micros were still becominbg available) - I did do a CS degree that inclued exactly 0 hardware/electronics (but I'd been programming for years before I hit college anyway). I worked doing OS stuff (porting unix) thru the 80s and hacking hardware (pals and the like) in my own time - from which I fell into doing architectural design of 2d graphics hardware (pulling apart people graphics libraries and figuring out how to make hardware to do the same things - specing datapaths and state machines for others to build and making C level models of how it should work - that chip grossed $120M) eventually it became easier for me to code in verilog rather than C and cut out the middle man, around the same time I started running Synopsis on my own designs and a while later driving a router and back end timing on them too and doing the occasional hand edit to polygons to fix timing problems.
You get the idea - it is possible to be self taught - you just have to be smart and work hard - certainly coming in from the architecture side has really helped me - I understand stuff about the software side the hardware guys don't (and vice-versa) I get to sit on both sides of the fence - more recently I've made a deliberate decision to move back to the software side of the biz - for me at least there's more day to day creative work to do on the software side of the house (vlsi tends to be one month of creative design and 11 months of grind making it work - not as much fun as coding up something new every day)
bull crap - I'm a self taught chip designer done about a dozen from 30k gate gate arrays by myself up to SOC custom/semi custom designs done with groups - and FPGA design (which I haven't done but have watched others struggle over) is not always trivial
that's all very well if it really is available to you, living in an English speaking country in DVD region 4 means that most of the dvds pressed for my region are in languages I don't speak - so yes I order it, even own it - but not view it.
While I don't download movies I can't help wondering if the MPAA might be slightly better off if they dumped the whole region coding mess in favor of free trade instead - after all not everyone has the luxury I have of occasionally visiting the US and picking up a $25 region 1 player at Frys (as I did yesterday)
actually it's more likely it's the delay through the HD scalers - they need 2-3 frames of data to crunch on to do a good job, esp a good one - so you get this 2-3 frame video delay. (esp. for interlaced signals and/or displays)
BTW the same is true of some (good) LCD display controllers - unlike CRTs LCDs are much more tied to a particular pixel resolution and to look good in other resolutions (higher or lower) they need scalers - usually not interlaced ones though - my suggestion to the original poster is to make sure his screen resolution is set to be the same as the native resolution of his LCD
err wasn't that what the instructions that came with the box said to do in the first place?
seriously though it does make a difference - my big complaint is that it wouldn' play nicely with my static IP (NATing out the backend was not a lot of help to my web server)
they're still used all the time by track crews today - usually a pickup truck... I'm not sure what rand has to do with it other than trying to date it in the past
is what happens over time - what will happen 40 years from now? obviously it got approved by the FDA.... but how do they know it's going to be OK long term? worst case we end up with a million extra blind people....
I also worry about the chicken pox vaccine.. you get a neutered virus... how do they know it wont cause shingles in later life like the real virus?
Before you shoot me down for just being a luddite I'm a big fan of vaccination, don't believe in the occasional current hysteria (made sure my kids were vaccinated)....
a good reason for a counter suit or two... you can't buy a company out of bankruptcy without the creditor's OK.... in this case that might be IBM/Redhat....
I'm in the process of moving between countries.... and we've moved our (US) home phone number to a Vonnage account - it's a great deal ~$16 a month for local calling anywhere in the Bay Area - we can keep in touch with froends and relatives so easily.... and to add to the strangeness Vonnage's international calling from the US to our new home is about a third the price of internal long distance peak time rates there (someone is making a bundle somewhere)...
The downside is the telemarketters... we've been on the do-not-call list from the start.... but they keep on coming.... even though we haven't finished our move yet I've already started the spiel.... "why are you calling me in another country?.... do you have any idea what the time is?" etc etc
On the other hand I don't care much about 911 service....
Slashdot Mirror
yup - another wonderfull virus medium .... (and already here) I had a friend's camera try and infect my machine the other day .... he'd stopped at an internet cafe to upload his photos to his travel blog and gotten it infected ...
Still seems like a hokey idea to me - I understand that cell towers work a lot like cable qams so multicasting to people in unused bandwidth makes a lot of sense (I don't know if it really works this way - just guessing) - but I honestly think that the market for this is tiny (maybe just the guy at sports events with the portable LCD TVs keeping track of other games)
On a slightly different topic India seems to take phone competition to wonderfull - I want to see the billboards offering 1c cellphone calls here!! Every little village seems to have an I-net cafe/ISP (a router and a couple of PCs) offering really cheap access - I bet there are more ISPs in India than all the US and Europe combined at this point - plus cheap overseas calls to anywhere in the world for pennies (isn;t VOIP wonderfull ...)
the cable card interface is an open standard (forced on the cable companies by an anti-trust suit) - theoretically anyone who want's to can make/buy/lease a settop - however it ain't easy to implement
More importantly - they're being made by a tire company ... who's bottom line wont be improved by selling 1/3 the numbers of tires a year ... but might be by selling/making a larger part of the wheel itself (and holding the patents the other guys have to pay for to get at the technology ..)
The sad thing about this is that the 'bad guys' are smart enough to avoid the stuff the US can go after but they do anyway like a bull in a china shop with no finesse and the result is that the rest of us lose our freedoms
Here in NZ local long distance is soooo expensive I've found that calling NZ from the Vonage account I kept when I moved back from the US is about 1/3 the cost of local long distance .... only downside is that while VOIP connections are never switched thru satellites (with that tacky lag) the return path can be
On the other hand one thing in my (now long 30 year career) in this biz that's kept me going is that I can keep learning and change what I do - doing new interesting stuff is what I like about my job - to just do the same thing day to day every day for ever would be terrible
I think it depends on the project in both cases - if you're pushing timing and the technology it's hard in both cases - in general it's been my impression that FPGA timing tools are just not as accurate as the ones we use for VLSI (or maybe have to leave a lot more slack because the long wire delays are so variable). I think this sort of stuff makes doing agressive FPGA designs as hard as VLSI to make reliable timing on - I'm not talking about student designs here - I mean trying to squeeze down to the cheapest package, getting the fastest clock you can for a particular generation of parts, multiple clock domains etc etc these are hard problem no matter what the underlying technology is (I watch the analog designers here at work working at GHz with awe) ... I do think you're pretty much at the mercy of your tools and how much experience you've had using them
You get the idea - it is possible to be self taught - you just have to be smart and work hard - certainly coming in from the architecture side has really helped me - I understand stuff about the software side the hardware guys don't (and vice-versa) I get to sit on both sides of the fence - more recently I've made a deliberate decision to move back to the software side of the biz - for me at least there's more day to day creative work to do on the software side of the house (vlsi tends to be one month of creative design and 11 months of grind making it work - not as much fun as coding up something new every day)
bull crap - I'm a self taught chip designer done about a dozen from 30k gate gate arrays by myself up to SOC custom/semi custom designs done with groups - and FPGA design (which I haven't done but have watched others struggle over) is not always trivial
While I don't download movies I can't help wondering if the MPAA might be slightly better off if they dumped the whole region coding mess in favor of free trade instead - after all not everyone has the luxury I have of occasionally visiting the US and picking up a $25 region 1 player at Frys (as I did yesterday)
citizen? don't forget every legal immigrant under 25 ... not all those 'americans' who died in Vietnam actually were
court decision
we want a picture of the disco ball ... after all if it's covered with MEMs mirror chips maybe it doesn't spin, maybe it's not even a ball ....
BTW the same is true of some (good) LCD display controllers - unlike CRTs LCDs are much more tied to a particular pixel resolution and to look good in other resolutions (higher or lower) they need scalers - usually not interlaced ones though - my suggestion to the original poster is to make sure his screen resolution is set to be the same as the native resolution of his LCD
seriously though it does make a difference - my big complaint is that it wouldn' play nicely with my static IP (NATing out the backend was not a lot of help to my web server)
for PIP you'll need 2 tuners/qam demods .... unless the 2 channels just happen to be on the same qam
Discovered a copyright string that was also executeable 68k code .... and included it in my main initialization routines
I believe CA courts have largely ruled non-compete clauses illegal
it's 'belts' .... just a leather fetish thing ....
they're still used all the time by track crews today - usually a pickup truck ... I'm not sure what rand has to do with it other than trying to date it in the past
I also worry about the chicken pox vaccine .. you get a neutered virus ... how do they know it wont cause shingles in later life like the real virus?
Before you shoot me down for just being a luddite I'm a big fan of vaccination, don't believe in the occasional current hysteria (made sure my kids were vaccinated) ....
a good reason for a counter suit or two ... you can't buy a company out of bankruptcy without the creditor's OK .... in this case that might be IBM/Redhat ....
The downside is the telemarketters ... we've been on the do-not-call list from the start .... but they keep on coming .... even though we haven't finished our move yet I've already started the spiel .... "why are you calling me in another country? .... do you have any idea what the time is?" etc etc
On the other hand I don't care much about 911 service ....