I like the looks of the NX technology. It looks like someone finally took the X protocol for what it should be: a base to build cool stuff on. I've seen a lot of software projects that either use X-like ideas but loose the benfits of it, or try to add all kinds of wonky things to X itself to get some new piece of functionality out of it. To my mind, X is a framework that stuff can be built on. The fact that it doesn't add things like persistent sessions and compression/encryption have seemed like a good thing to me. I like the idea of being able to swap out one comperssion technology for another without recoding the X-standard, or have an app that can display on multiple X-servers without having to hack at the architecture.
From what I've read so far (this is the first I've heard of this tech) it looks like we've got someone thinking about X in a useful way, they are a company which makes a good product, and they are linux and OSS friendly. Is there a loss here? I sure don't see it. I'm just sad I hadn't heard of all this until now!
OK, I'm not a HAM but I'm at least familiar with it. If I'm off on what I say, hopefully someone who IS a HAM will step in and coorect me.
From what I understand, once this goes out in mass, THAT'S when the problem will show, and THAT'S when it will be impossible to pull back. Once a good chuck of the powerlines are using this stuff, the damage is done. Even if there's a disaster that takes out power for a large part of the US, the interference is already floating out there in the areas that aren't out. The concerns I've heard is that the interference hit large areas due to cummulative affects.
Unless a power outage takes out ALL power then we still have the problem. And, that just for our country. If we use it, you know either other countries will use it or find some way of dealing with the leakage that is just as harmful. The concerns being brought up are for long term and for wide area problems which could be caused by this tech. The studies and counter-arguments are not covering this at all. They are all basing it on short term and simple one-installation tests that don't answer the other conerns. THAT'S the frustration. At least that's the impression I've gotten...
Everyone is commenting on how this will not work due to the screen being too limited and framerates being too hard. The way it will happenn is with true 3D displays! That's what will happen: the phone will project a 3D image instead of using a screen. And, the frame rate will be solved becasue a 3D display doesn't use acceration the way a screen does. No heavy math, no backface culling, no transforms. Just plot the points. See, it can happen. no problem.
I'd rather all the different devices work together instead of building all my devices into one. Let me put my phone call into my car speakers....let me take the picture on my PC and put it up on my TV....let me share a photo from my camera on the screen of the the guy next to me with a laptop...
I know you can do all these things now, but not without a bunch of proprietary, unpredictable fiddling even if the right devices are involved. I want the ability to be common, not a rare combination. If converagnce means all my gadgets have the computing power to speak the same language, then Let's do it!
I like the sound of airports getting wifi, and I can think of a way to visualize how to make it work. How about think of it like the terminals themselves. They build the terminal, then invite bussiness in to make money in it (the shops and food places). Use a wifi network the same way: have companies setup services on the network. It doesn't have to connect to the internet...let that be one of the services that companies can provide. Maybe someone offers map services to cities that you happen to be in. Maybe some other company sets up simple game servers. The main thing that would work for airports is make sur the same WAN covers all the airports. That would allow p2p type connections between all different airports if you wanted, and (most importantly) make sure when you buy a service in one airport, it FOLLOWS YOU IN ALL OF THEM. The main problem I see with wifi is having to sign up for 200 different services to get coverage. Doing that in airports might eb a way to get companies to quit thinking of the wifi itself as a way of making money, and try to use it as infrastructure to making money. And, maybe the same thinking will drift out of the airports into the streets....
Um...that's what these proposals are for: tele-robotic repair, not automated. These are RC beasts (one of which is already built, just needs adapted to space). it's pretty clear in all the articles I read.
check out this: PAN or Personal Area Network. using this stuff (like build into a watch or something) you could do what you want with no wires. cool stuff.
This is not the golden, unifying solution or anything, but there's some ideas in there that could be useful. I saw his thougts in the first section of the paper and took the rest as some quick examples on how it might look. I can think of plenty of directions this could go. The first thing I got out of it is applying the same level of abstraction we try to implement in programs to the act of programming itself. This is happening in all kinds of areas of computers anyway (like abstracting file systems, GUI's, etc.) why not put programming into the mix? It's not about using scripting instead of programming languages, it sounded more like building the same features into our programming tools as we build into the apps we write with 'em.
why all the negative reactions? If its about loosing your editor to write code, you didn't read the article. If it's about too much abtraction to program, then it seems kinda hypocritical considering all the frameworks we use for other people's tools. Or is it just irritation about having to relearn a bit and keep on coding as before? The complaints about XML are odd too. He choose a machine-parseable, human-readable widely used format as a possible way to store programs at a low level.
OK, quake levels of the whole USA! who's with me?!
Seems like this kind of database would be fun for game makers who want to make levels which happen in real world places. A little image processing, and we can have 3D models of any point on the map.
From reading the press releases, it doesn't look like this is related to multiheaded systems. I didn't see any mention of two monitors anywhere in the releases. It looks like something different, although technical details are pretty light. My first thought was maybe a way to switch between multiple video cards without opening the case. But, from reading it, it more seems like it;s a way to use more than one video card to drive a single display. It's kinda like the Vodoo SLI stuff, only this is a generic solution that works for any brand O card. Could be cool. Literally getting the best of ATI and Nvidia at the same time. I like the sound of it!
It seems there's a lot of opinions on how dangerous it is slicing up a hybrid. From the stuff so far, I can't tell which way the average goes, but I still want the Prius:)
Anyway, I DO wonder how new designs/ideas on the road (and in the air one day!) are gonna be dealt with by rescue personel. It looks like as we get more ideas under our belt, this is going to be a trend. Is there going to eb a technical expert on each team who can guess how to slice a car? Is there going to be some standards or patterns that will emerge over time? (i.e. fuel cells look like this and are usually here....) I'd hope that in the future there are all kinds of designs moving us about, but is that going to make it impossible to have a general group of people standing by who can help?
I like my cable modem like crazy, but the same question goes through my mind everytime I here about TV on demand. Why hasn't a cable company used the tech behind broadband to to this? They've got enough room in the wire to do 80 channels analog and still push 8M/min of data back and forth should be able to do some cool things with shows on demand. I know some cable providers offer some stuff on demand, but by combining the two, it seems like a new kind of Cable TV is possible. I'd give them a lot of control due to the more powerful cablebox you'd need, but if they offer a good service, let us decide if we want it. If they offered one version of a show with commercials and a more expensive "version" without, I'd be pretty happy. Just as long as they keep thier hands in the cablebox and keep it away fromt he TV itself, they could do all kinds of fun stuff. Even added features like video conferencing with other people on your cable system would be fun.
Or, how about a community channel that is actaully put up by the community in real time (like bulletin boards or something). Seems liek a lot could be done with the wire currently going into all these houses if you group it all together into a good service.
Even with the setup today, all they'd have to do is switch from thinking of it as a "viewing time" to a "download time" and put some interface on their cable box that hides the details. If I want ot watch the latest Cops, then they can tell me when it will be available to watch. If I want to watch it as soon as it comes out, I can sit there at the right time, if not, I just know that is't been sent to me and I can watch it when I want. I know Tivo's alow this now, but if they did it for us, they'd actually get more customers and less fight all around. They'd screw it up I'm sure, but I'm always curious why they don't try it...
I always wanted to see a game that had a plot layed out and happening, but didn't lock me in. Since I like to explore in games to much, I want my part to be optional. The plot is happening, but I can be elsewhere if I choose. I always thought this would be the ideal way to do the games based on a movie. I don't have to be the lead of the movie, but it would be fun to have that story playing out "over there" where I could go see it if I wanted. For my prefernce, it would be even more fun if I could get in the way...err..."influence" the major plot too.
Then again, do like we did in our college days: hit pause, turn off the TV, go to class, come back and turnt he tv back on and go some more. Works pretty good:) We kept a game of Sinistar going on the TG16 for 3 days that way....
I didn't see the beef in most of the comments, but the one point that stood out to me was "You really could get the CD and run it without ever knowing it had anything GNU/Linuxy in it or that the GPL provides you with guaranteed freedoms that Sun would like you not to know you have."
This kinda disturbs me. In that, I agree with PJ's comment. They are packaging a lot of GPL stuff without letting people know they can take some of the stuff and use it with freedom to do so. That means they can lift the code if they want to and use it. The packaging is not violating anythign, but it IS deceptive, and sure doesn't help OSS much. The packaging makes it look like it's all their product and not just their packaging.
I may not have the whole picture, but I do know that the module licence flags are there for technical reasons, not just "fanaticism". If a crash happens in the kernel and there's a binary module in the kernel, then how can a developer be sure he can trace and fix the problem? As far as I know, that was the main reason for the flags. So, the developers would burn there time and effort on a problem where they could potentially hit a brick wall.
Binary drivers are fine, but don't ask the community to fix 'em. If it's binary, then there's only one place to go: the company.
Record keeping is important for a lot of reasons. the big issue here is that the digial records we are moving towards more and more just don't last. The best type of record is microfilm so far. It lasts longer than just about anything else. There's tons of stuff stored that way now that will be there if someone wants to look it up. we're recording more and more of that kind of stuff digitally along with the push to move other forms to digital. If none of the digital formats last like the older ones, are we just throwing away the records we generate now? No, you don't HAVE to save everythign, but it sure is nice to be able to go into a library and look up newspapers from 60 years ago sometimes...helps us learn....
OK, I felt like I was missing somethign at first, but from the look of a lot of posts at least I'm not alone. From what I can get from this, it's an improvement on typical (optical) data storage because instead of storing one bit per dot (which as far as I know CD's and even Hard drives do) this can store several bits per dot (limited by how many distinct dyes they can put together). Sounds cool. And the mention in the article of using this to store multiple images on the same space is pretty cool. But, where's the secure storage part come in? That image thing gives security cards as a possible use, but useful to printing ID cards != secure storage. Maybe they go into more detail in the first article, but lynx didn't like the PDF there, so I don't know yet...
Is there better info I've missed? Or is the write-up off ?
It's a troll article because the expressed opinion gives only enough of the facts to support his idea, and goes contrary to the experience of long-time linux users, that it's presented in a way that will undermine gettiting more people to try linux, and most importantly (in my opinion anyway) it touches a nerve that a lot of linux users are sensitive to: Getting companies to write drivers or provide information for new hardware has always been a struggle.
So, yeah, this is a troll. It points out an irritation (caused by the Windows market share BTW) and then threatens to make it worse by putting it across as a problem with Linux to boot.
The fun fact I like to remind people of with hardware is that once the community reverse engineers the hardware and writes drivers, it works better and longer than anything associated with Windows.
The article mentioned Satellite base stations using this same frequency, but that the new internet services would have to be considerate (or some such wording). So, is this a minor irritation or a gift with a price attached? I'm not up on the implications myself....
The article sais "...the new battery, which stores power in a special resin,...." that sounds liek the "capicitance gel" mentioned in the movie for the cars to run from. Just like the Arnold going into government, this too comes true!
Also, thinking about some of the posts about the discharge rate and EMP guns, rail guns, etc. That sounds liek some SciFi Ive read too. Something about weapon cells built into clips like bullets today....or maybe we've finally figured out what a "pulse rifle" is powered by (Aliens:)
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I like the looks of the NX technology. It looks like someone finally took the X protocol for what it should be: a base to build cool stuff on. I've seen a lot of software projects that either use X-like ideas but loose the benfits of it, or try to add all kinds of wonky things to X itself to get some new piece of functionality out of it.
To my mind, X is a framework that stuff can be built on. The fact that it doesn't add things like persistent sessions and compression/encryption have seemed like a good thing to me. I like the idea of being able to swap out one comperssion technology for another without recoding the X-standard, or have an app that can display on multiple X-servers without having to hack at the architecture.
From what I've read so far (this is the first I've heard of this tech) it looks like we've got someone thinking about X in a useful way, they are a company which makes a good product, and they are linux and OSS friendly. Is there a loss here? I sure don't see it. I'm just sad I hadn't heard of all this until now!
OK, I'm not a HAM but I'm at least familiar with it. If I'm off on what I say, hopefully someone who IS a HAM will step in and coorect me.
From what I understand, once this goes out in mass, THAT'S when the problem will show, and THAT'S when it will be impossible to pull back. Once a good chuck of the powerlines are using this stuff, the damage is done. Even if there's a disaster that takes out power for a large part of the US, the interference is already floating out there in the areas that aren't out. The concerns I've heard is that the interference hit large areas due to cummulative affects.
Unless a power outage takes out ALL power then we still have the problem. And, that just for our country. If we use it, you know either other countries will use it or find some way of dealing with the leakage that is just as harmful. The concerns being brought up are for long term and for wide area problems which could be caused by this tech. The studies and counter-arguments are not covering this at all. They are all basing it on short term and simple one-installation tests that don't answer the other conerns. THAT'S the frustration. At least that's the impression I've gotten...
Everyone is commenting on how this will not work due to the screen being too limited and framerates being too hard. The way it will happenn is with true 3D displays! That's what will happen: the phone will project a 3D image instead of using a screen. And, the frame rate will be solved becasue a 3D display doesn't use acceration the way a screen does. No heavy math, no backface culling, no transforms. Just plot the points. See, it can happen. no problem.
Next?
I'd rather all the different devices work together instead of building all my devices into one. Let me put my phone call into my car speakers....let me take the picture on my PC and put it up on my TV....let me share a photo from my camera on the screen of the the guy next to me with a laptop...
I know you can do all these things now, but not without a bunch of proprietary, unpredictable fiddling even if the right devices are involved. I want the ability to be common, not a rare combination. If converagnce means all my gadgets have the computing power to speak the same language, then Let's do it!
I like the sound of airports getting wifi, and I can think of a way to visualize how to make it work. How about think of it like the terminals themselves. They build the terminal, then invite bussiness in to make money in it (the shops and food places). Use a wifi network the same way: have companies setup services on the network. It doesn't have to connect to the internet...let that be one of the services that companies can provide. Maybe someone offers map services to cities that you happen to be in. Maybe some other company sets up simple game servers. The main thing that would work for airports is make sur the same WAN covers all the airports. That would allow p2p type connections between all different airports if you wanted, and (most importantly) make sure when you buy a service in one airport, it FOLLOWS YOU IN ALL OF THEM. The main problem I see with wifi is having to sign up for 200 different services to get coverage.
Doing that in airports might eb a way to get companies to quit thinking of the wifi itself as a way of making money, and try to use it as infrastructure to making money.
And, maybe the same thinking will drift out of the airports into the streets....
Um...that's what these proposals are for: tele-robotic repair, not automated. These are RC beasts (one of which is already built, just needs adapted to space). it's pretty clear in all the articles I read.
check out this: PAN or Personal Area Network. using this stuff (like build into a watch or something) you could do what you want with no wires. cool stuff.
This is not the golden, unifying solution or anything, but there's some ideas in there that could be useful.
I saw his thougts in the first section of the paper and took the rest as some quick examples on how it might look.
I can think of plenty of directions this could go. The first thing I got out of it is applying the same level of abstraction we try to implement in programs to the act of programming itself. This is happening in all kinds of areas of computers anyway (like abstracting file systems, GUI's, etc.) why not put programming into the mix?
It's not about using scripting instead of programming languages, it sounded more like building the same features into our programming tools as we build into the apps we write with 'em.
why all the negative reactions? If its about loosing your editor to write code, you didn't read the article. If it's about too much abtraction to program, then it seems kinda hypocritical considering all the frameworks we use for other people's tools. Or is it just irritation about having to relearn a bit and keep on coding as before? The complaints about XML are odd too. He choose a machine-parseable, human-readable widely used format as a possible way to store programs at a low level.
OK, quake levels of the whole USA! who's with me?!
Seems like this kind of database would be fun for game makers who want to make levels which happen in real world places. A little image processing, and we can have 3D models of any point on the map.
Of course....the internet has more stuff now. It used to fit in 400K, but now it's so big, you need at least 64M to hold it all...
And all the viruses make it worse...I don't know how many times I've had to re-install the internet on my PC...
From reading the press releases, it doesn't look like this is related to multiheaded systems. I didn't see any mention of two monitors anywhere in the releases. It looks like something different, although technical details are pretty light. My first thought was maybe a way to switch between multiple video cards without opening the case. But, from reading it, it more seems like it;s a way to use more than one video card to drive a single display. It's kinda like the Vodoo SLI stuff, only this is a generic solution that works for any brand O card. Could be cool. Literally getting the best of ATI and Nvidia at the same time. I like the sound of it!
But....can you run linux on it?!
No, really, can you?
It seems there's a lot of opinions on how dangerous it is slicing up a hybrid. From the stuff so far, I can't tell which way the average goes, but I still want the Prius :)
Anyway, I DO wonder how new designs/ideas on the road (and in the air one day!) are gonna be dealt with by rescue personel. It looks like as we get more ideas under our belt, this is going to be a trend. Is there going to eb a technical expert on each team who can guess how to slice a car? Is there going to be some standards or patterns that will emerge over time? (i.e. fuel cells look like this and are usually here....) I'd hope that in the future there are all kinds of designs moving us about, but is that going to make it impossible to have a general group of people standing by who can help?
I like my cable modem like crazy, but the same question goes through my mind everytime I here about TV on demand. Why hasn't a cable company used the tech behind broadband to to this? They've got enough room in the wire to do 80 channels analog and still push 8M/min of data back and forth should be able to do some cool things with shows on demand. I know some cable providers offer some stuff on demand, but by combining the two, it seems like a new kind of Cable TV is possible. I'd give them a lot of control due to the more powerful cablebox you'd need, but if they offer a good service, let us decide if we want it. If they offered one version of a show with commercials and a more expensive "version" without, I'd be pretty happy. Just as long as they keep thier hands in the cablebox and keep it away fromt he TV itself, they could do all kinds of fun stuff. Even added features like video conferencing with other people on your cable system would be fun.
Or, how about a community channel that is actaully put up by the community in real time (like bulletin boards or something). Seems liek a lot could be done with the wire currently going into all these houses if you group it all together into a good service.
Even with the setup today, all they'd have to do is switch from thinking of it as a "viewing time" to a "download time" and put some interface on their cable box that hides the details. If I want ot watch the latest Cops, then they can tell me when it will be available to watch. If I want to watch it as soon as it comes out, I can sit there at the right time, if not, I just know that is't been sent to me and I can watch it when I want. I know Tivo's alow this now, but if they did it for us, they'd actually get more customers and less fight all around. They'd screw it up I'm sure, but I'm always curious why they don't try it...
I always wanted to see a game that had a plot layed out and happening, but didn't lock me in. Since I like to explore in games to much, I want my part to be optional. The plot is happening, but I can be elsewhere if I choose. I always thought this would be the ideal way to do the games based on a movie. I don't have to be the lead of the movie, but it would be fun to have that story playing out "over there" where I could go see it if I wanted. For my prefernce, it would be even more fun if I could get in the way...err..."influence" the major plot too.
Are there any games like that?
Then again, do like we did in our college days: hit pause, turn off the TV, go to class, come back and turnt he tv back on and go some more. Works pretty good :) We kept a game of Sinistar going on the TG16 for 3 days that way....
Yeah, here we go again. "Free" doesn't mean "go ahead and take this from me" it means "Go ahead and use my stuff"
I didn't see the beef in most of the comments, but the one point that stood out to me was "You really could get the CD and run it without ever knowing it had anything GNU/Linuxy in it or that the GPL provides you with guaranteed freedoms that Sun would like you not to know you have."
This kinda disturbs me. In that, I agree with PJ's comment. They are packaging a lot of GPL stuff without letting people know they can take some of the stuff and use it with freedom to do so. That means they can lift the code if they want to and use it. The packaging is not violating anythign, but it IS deceptive, and sure doesn't help OSS much. The packaging makes it look like it's all their product and not just their packaging.
I may not have the whole picture, but I do know that the module licence flags are there for technical reasons, not just "fanaticism". If a crash happens in the kernel and there's a binary module in the kernel, then how can a developer be sure he can trace and fix the problem? As far as I know, that was the main reason for the flags. So, the developers would burn there time and effort on a problem where they could potentially hit a brick wall.
Binary drivers are fine, but don't ask the community to fix 'em. If it's binary, then there's only one place to go: the company.
Record keeping is important for a lot of reasons. the big issue here is that the digial records we are moving towards more and more just don't last. The best type of record is microfilm so far. It lasts longer than just about anything else. There's tons of stuff stored that way now that will be there if someone wants to look it up. we're recording more and more of that kind of stuff digitally along with the push to move other forms to digital. If none of the digital formats last like the older ones, are we just throwing away the records we generate now? No, you don't HAVE to save everythign, but it sure is nice to be able to go into a library and look up newspapers from 60 years ago sometimes...helps us learn....
OK, I felt like I was missing somethign at first, but from the look of a lot of posts at least I'm not alone. From what I can get from this, it's an improvement on typical (optical) data storage because instead of storing one bit per dot (which as far as I know CD's and even Hard drives do) this can store several bits per dot (limited by how many distinct dyes they can put together). Sounds cool. And the mention in the article of using this to store multiple images on the same space is pretty cool. But, where's the secure storage part come in? That image thing gives security cards as a possible use, but useful to printing ID cards != secure storage. Maybe they go into more detail in the first article, but lynx didn't like the PDF there, so I don't know yet...
Is there better info I've missed? Or is the write-up off ?
It's a troll article because the expressed opinion gives only enough of the facts to support his idea, and goes contrary to the experience of long-time linux users, that it's presented in a way that will undermine gettiting more people to try linux, and most importantly (in my opinion anyway) it touches a nerve that a lot of linux users are sensitive to: Getting companies to write drivers or provide information for new hardware has always been a struggle.
So, yeah, this is a troll. It points out an irritation (caused by the Windows market share BTW) and then threatens to make it worse by putting it across as a problem with Linux to boot.
The fun fact I like to remind people of with hardware is that once the community reverse engineers the hardware and writes drivers, it works better and longer than anything associated with Windows.
The article mentioned Satellite base stations using this same frequency, but that the new internet services would have to be considerate (or some such wording). So, is this a minor irritation or a gift with a price attached? I'm not up on the implications myself....
Wrong book. You're thinking "Integral Trees" or maybe "smoke rings" (not sure if either title is right) But I remember the story you talk about.
The article sais "...the new battery, which stores power in a special resin,...." that sounds liek the "capicitance gel" mentioned in the movie for the cars to run from. Just like the Arnold going into government, this too comes true!
:)
Also, thinking about some of the posts about the discharge rate and EMP guns, rail guns, etc. That sounds liek some SciFi Ive read too. Something about weapon cells built into clips like bullets today....or maybe we've finally figured out what a "pulse rifle" is powered by (Aliens