Trolltech screwed up BIGTIME by going with the cheap controller that supports only GPRS instead of using the chip's big brother that supports EDGE (and possibly 3G) as well. Let's be real -- this phone's only real market consists of developers who want a cool phone they can play with and write extensions to show off to their friends. NOBODY, and I mean *NOBODY* in that market is going to buy a phone that only does GPRS. ISDN-like EDGE isn't really fast... but it's fast enough to be useful and generally tolerable. 19-38kbit GPRS is cruel and unusual punishment.
In reality, any phone targeted to this market MUST support EDGE *and* 3G. EDGE for the American market (where 1900/2100 UMTS will likely never exist, and 1700/2100 UMTS is still years away from widespread availability), and 3G for the European market (where apparently EDGE was NOT deployed in parallel in places where 3G was deployed early, like Scandinavia).
As for the onerous EULA, I suspect it's because -- like wireless LAN cards -- many of the phone's parameters are software-defined, and it was mainly a regulatory issue. The last time I checked, the phone "officially" supports only 900, 1800, and 1900Mhz. "Officially", as in, "Trolltech paid the relevant regulatory bodies to get it certified for those frequencies". HOWEVER, the chipset inside the phone happens to support 850MHz, and I suspect hacking it to enable 850MHz operation is likely to be fairly easy. A thoroughly illegal act in FCC-land, but not a particularly hard one to pull off that will make life a lot easier for users in the 2/3 or so of America where 1900MHz GSM coverage is still sparse or nonexistent (a coworker of mine has a 1900-only phone that generally works fine in Miami and other big cities, but is largely useless when he travels, with HUGE coverage gaps in between big cities).
I do agree, though, that it's a design mistake for a phone like this to have a unified phone + UI architecture. Even if it cost more to use a blackbox-type GSM phone module like the GSM 862 phone module w/GPS sold by Sparkfun.com (http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php ?products_id=7917) with completely open UI (display, input buttons, joystick, GPS, bluetooth, etc that worked similarly to the original Handspring GSM module, it would likely make the phone's purchasers happier. And let's be honest -- this is an expensive niche product. Another $50 really isn't going to matter much to the buy/no-buy decision. Plus, by abstracting out the phone module, it might even be possible to get Sprint to tolerate a CDMA model (Verizon would be hopeless since they still cripple bluetooth and WiFi, but Sprint seems to have slowly realized that with unlimited data plans and nearly-unlimited voice plans as the norm, use of WiFi by customers is a GOOD thing... even if they ARE complete Nazis when it comes to allowing non-Sprint hardware to be used on their network).
In Florida, 511 is a free cell phone call (well, besides airtime, but most people have airtime to burn so it's basically free anyway) to get freeway traffic reports. It REALLY came in handy driving home to Miami from Fort Lauderdale on Superbowl Sunday: "Accident, I-95, southbound, 79th Street. Two-mile backup." Needless to say, I jumped over to the Palmetto at Golden Glades instead of taking 95 to 836, and avoided it:-)
It seems the ideal way for a company's employees to cloak potentially-harmful email would be to include references to h3rb@1 V1a6ra, p3n15 en1ar6em3nt, and fr33 pr0n in the subject lines and bodies. That way, when the plaintiffs are searching for mail during discovery, it'll get filtered out by their own filters used to separate the "interesting" email from the gigabytes of spam otherwise burying it.
In some cases, parts one or two generations old are superior to what's currently available. PC manufacturers have enthusiastically embraced Intel's fetish of using the CPU as a general-purpose DSP for everything... the main reason why a 5 year old 500-750MHz Athlon or Pentium-III based system with a gig or two of ram and discrete videocard (with its own onboard ram) and PCI network card can still hold its own against a brand new $400 PC with a CPU allegedly equivalent to a hypothetical 1.6-2.4GHz PIII. The old high-end system has dedicated chips to handle the MPEG-2 decoding (or at least accelerate the DCT/IDCT computations) on its videocard, likely has a real DSP on its discrete soundcard, and the ethernet card only interrupts the CPU to notify it that a new datagram has arrived and has been added to its buffer. New PCs burden the CPU with all the above.
The fastest and most efficient way to make a brand new $500 CPU feel like the old one it replaced is to bog it down with grunt work a sub-$12 DSP could do better and faster. It's the same reason why current WM5 pocket PC phones usually feel more sluggish than an old 50MHz Palm phone -- on the older Palm device, the phone was totally separate, and the only connection between it and the phone subsystem was a serial data link. The WM5 device, by contrast, is basically a cellular winmodem that squanders at least half the processor's cycles just participating in the phone network. And the PDA phone manufacturers STILL aren't happy... they want to migrate from dual-core processors to single-core ones to cut costs. Happy happy, joy joy...
I paid $99 for Fastload the day it came out, and it was worth every penny... that program absolutely saved my sanity.
Re:Does Vista have anything we need?
on
Is Vista a Trap?
·
· Score: 1
>how about a game on a bootable DVD
Long, long ago, in an Amiga universe far, far away, I used to bitch daily about Eurogames that couldn't run from my hard drive and HAD to be booted from floppies. I looked forward to the day I could launch everything from the hard drive.
~15 years later, the idea of booting games from discs (or better yet, booting the DVD in a VM whose hypervisor *I* can "trust" to keep the booted OS from reading or writing to anything besides a virtual filesystem sandboxed on one of my hard drives) actually looks good by comparison, thanks in no small part to companies whose games introduce kernel-level malware in the holy name of copy protection that'll still be around, causing problems, long after the original game on whose behalf it was installed is pitched aside and forgotten about (*cough* SafeDisc *cough*)
Not really. Palm unfortunately did a perfectly good job of snagging defeat from the jaws of victory on their own. As much as I'd love to see Palm rise from the ashes with its Zen mostly intact (but finally able to walk & chew gum at the same time, particularly with respect to network data transfer), I've pretty much written it off as a pipe dream.
Even if Access pulls off a small miracle with ALP, Sprint and Verizon's petty insistence on exclusivity will ensure that at least half of the developers & enthusiasts who'd otherwise buy one, sight unseen, the day they hit the market will be chained & shackled to the wrong carrier, and by the time it appears for their carrier its warts and shortcomings will be well known, which will put off a lot of them (and keep a big chunk of casual developers out of the loop in the meantime).
IMHO, the ONLY way Access can save PalmOS->ALP is if they can dig a tunnel under the wall around Sprint & Verizon's hardware gardens by porting ALP1.0's SDK to a phone platform common to both (PPC6700 already has nearly total penetration among former Palm enthusiasts), so people who own one can reflash it to ALP without having to play silly games with Sprint & Verizon (handling the proprietary phone network firmware part the way Linux handles Win32 WLAN drivers via NDISwrapper, so Sprint & Verizon's own networks would never know the difference between a 6700 running WM5 and a 6700 reflashed to ALP). It would make ALP basically zero money initially, but would achieve something WAY more important at this stage of the game -- it would re-establish the Palm/ALP developer ecosystem, so that when the first-gen REAL ALP phones arrive, there will still be a market for them.
If it were a matter of combining the channels of both services, I wouldn't mind as much. The problem is, Sirius wants XM's spectrum for exactly one reason: to squander on "seatback video". As if they have a snowball's chance in hell of successfully competing against the two companies getting ready to launch nationwide 700MHz DVB-H mobile video services with more spectrum than both SDARS licenses combined.
Sirius wasting bandwidth on lame low-res video makes about as much sense as Busch Gardens in Tampa bulldozing their brewery to add another quarter-acre or so to their animal park to try and compete with Disney's Animal Kingdom. They gave up their one real competitive advantage against Disney (Disney will never, ever have a brewery or free beer), and did it to improve something (the animal park) that doesn't have any chance of competing against a better-equipped competitor (Disney) anyway. The problem is, "seatback video" is a magic buzzword that makes Wall Street happy, regardless of how much sense (or lack thereof) it really makes given the resources at hand.
The best thing we, as Sirius and XM subscribers, can do to safeguard our respective services is to vigorously lobby Congress and the FCC to 1) absolutely refuse to allow one company to own both SDARS licenses, and 2) categorically prohibit the use of SDARS spectrum for anything remotely resembling video content (particularly if they decide to let them merge).
You're partly right... for someone whose main/only interest is Stern, talk radio, and/or sports, the Sirius-vs-XM music debate ranks up there with the Debian/FSF -vs- Linspire/JustMakeTheDamnThingWork holy war. But for dance and rock, at least, Sirius and XM are *very* different, even with regard to channels that nominally have the same theme.
Illustrative difference using a single currently-popular group:
Yesterday, Sirius 21 played "Famous Last Words" by My Chemical Romance approximately once every 4 hours on channel 21 (Alternative Nation). In fact, it's the only MCR song they played on that channel. Meanwhile, on channel 1, they played MCR's previous single ("Welcome to the Black Parade") 8 times... approximately once every 3 hours.
In contrast, XM played exactly one MCR song the whole day: Welcome to the Black Parade, on u POP at 6:39pm. On February 18th, they played another MCR song exactly once the whole day: "Helena" on ethel at 10:52pm. In all fairness, they HAVE played 8 MCR songs today (including "Welcome to the Black Parade" 5 times on 5 different channels), but it looks like a one-shot event, and in any case they haven't repeated it on the same channel.
So... someone who likes the rock end of the pop spectrum is probably a happy Sirius listener, because they played the two biggest songs of one of the currently most-popular bands all day. On the other hand, someone who's hardcore indie and hates anyone who "sells out" and becomes commercially successful would hate Sirius, and probably bitched online at XM for playing the few MCR songs they did.
That, more than anything, underscores the big difference between Sirius and XM's music. If you want to hear songs that are familiar and you already like (or will, within a day or two of hearing them every 3 hours), you'll love Sirius. If you get pissed off by hearing two songs from the same artist on the same day, and don't want to even HEAR anything that's in a top-20 list right now, you'll love XM. There's nothing inherently wrong with either group... but it shows why all hell is going to break loose if a merged company tried to consolidate music channels. You'd have an easier time trying to "merge" a Palestinean village and Israeli settlement in the Golan Heights or Gaza Strip (or a swinger's resort and bible camp in North Carolina)
The majority of content is NOT duplicated. Sirius and XM sound NOTHING alike. Sirius channels sound like normal radio stations, but without commercials. XM channels sound like somebody took a random pile of CDs, shoved them in a changer, and hit the "shuffle" button.
They're about as equivalent as Tylenol, Ibuprofen, and Naproxen sodium. Yeah, they're technically all painkillers and reduce fever, but anyone who's ever had a headache or fever knows that they're definitely NOT all the same. Tylenol utterly sucks compared to the other two, but some people are forced to use it because they can't tolerate them. Ibuprofen rocks for headaches, but sucks for fevers (unless you enjoy having your fever come back every 4-6 hours). Naproxen sodium is a godsend for fevers (breaks once, stays that way), but a complete waste of time for headaches. The same is true of Sirius and XM. Both have slightly different audiences with different expectations -- all of whom are going to be FURIOUS if their network mutates into the other. Even slightly.
Talk to anyone who subscribes to either service. I guarantee that 99% of them will react to the news of a merger with absolute horror at the thought that ${their_network} will get turned into ${other_network}. I *guarantee* that if a merger happens and the music channels from one or the other get dropped to "streamline" and "eliminate redundancy", AT LEAST half of the losing service's carriers will leave in disgust. At the same time, the "winner" network will probably lose at least a quarter of its customers if it changes even slightly to be more like the loser's format was. Ultimately, we'll be stuck with one mediocre provider whose financial position is only slightly better than before, and now has hundreds of thousands of angry and pissed off former customers saying bad things about it and discouraging their friends from subscribing.
This is horrible news for the customers of BOTH services. I expect to see an outpouring of anger from customers of BOTH Sirius AND XM demanding that the FCC NOT allow a merged company to own both frequency bands in a desperate effort to derail the whole merger.
* They have to be removed prior to a MRI. Otherwise, some Very Bad Things(tm) will happen to both the implant and the tissue surrounding it.
* If they're implanted into an extremity (like a finger) to minimize MRI problems, you create problem #2: thieves using gruesomely low-tech means to obtain those implants and use them before you can have them deactivated. Think: mugger with bolt cutters and gun who wants your index finger RIGHT NOW.
* Current ID-broadcasting implants could EASILY be spoofed by organized crime with minimal resources in the near future (if not today). So within a few years (I'd say 5, 10 max) current chips will become totally useless for cash-free transactions (subway fares, vending machines, etc). And if they implement two-factor authentication (like implant + PIN), you've just negated most of the convenience the implant is supposed to provide. Challenge-response is a possibility, but that throws a monkey wrench into the whole idea of an open standard anyone can use because THEN you need to involve a third-party both you and the seller trust to perform the authentication... and collect a few cents from you while they're at it.
Here's a better idea: get 3M to spin off a line of NexCare bandages with embedded RFID chips. Or embed it in your wedding ring or watch. Or superglue it to a toenail (or fingernail, if you want to make a geeky fashion statement).
The point is, having something embedded that's almost guaranteed to be technologically obsolete within a decade anyway -- and can cause random grief with things like MRIs in the meantime -- is just silly. You can achieve 99% of the convenience with bandages, superglue, or clothing accessories.
True in most places, but not in the US. Here, most people pay nothing for cell phone voice calls at night and all weekend, and have so many hundred or (with multi-phone pooled family plans) thousand peak minutes of airtime to burn that they might as well be unlimited. In contrast, text messages tend to cost 10-25 cents apiece (beyond the first 25-100, which might be included with some data plans) unless the user spends the extra $5-15/month for unlimited text messages, too.
In fact, I'm working on a project right now to metaphorically staple an IVR front end onto a European SMS app so it can be used in America. When it was originally rolled out here in SMS-only form, nobody would use it. When asked "why?" the nearly-unanimous response was, "Voice calls are free. Text messages cost money."
And if you're a Sprint or Verizon customer, you can't use a phone not purchased directly from the carrier, period. Well, ok... there are whispered rumors among the technorati elite that Verizon occasionally can be persuaded to look the other way if you manage to rip the firmware from a Verizon phone and reflash a Sprint phone that's an identical hardware twin... but Sprint won't ever allow it.
Which really, REALLY sucks if you want a first-gen Alp (a.k.a. Access Linux for Palm) phone, or a WM5 phone with both a touchscreen for Graf^h^h^h^h block input AND a hard keypad (common in Asia, utterly unheard of in the US).
I can definitely appreciate the "Single Source" issue... for Christmas, I built a string of RGB Christmas lights. I bought 128 Tiny25s from DigiKey, and basically wiped them out. As of early December, I probably had more Tiny25s in my possession than any other end-user in the world (every light consisted of an RGB LED driven by its own Tiny25);-)
I would have liked to have bought a smaller number first to test my design, but I was scared to death that if I didn't buy them all up front, someone else might buy too many and leave me SOL before Christmas. Sadly, I only managed to get about 32 of the light modules to work by Christmas, and the whole network scheme I came up with that worked flawlessly with 3 modules on a breadboard fell flat on its face once I made the modules and wired them up into a single string, so all the lights were able to do on the tree was change colors. In a few months, when I'm no longer burned out of the project (I had no life for most of December), I'll pull out the hot air rework tool and salvage the chips from the nonworking boards and try again (I still have about 200 spare circuit boards) with a different serial scheme (the one I tried was edge-driven. In retrospect, there was probably too much electrical noise on the tree. Next year, I'll just do plain old-fashioned oversampling.)
I'd recommend Atmel AVRs without a moment's hesitation.
The PIC and 8051 grew from architectures that were considered spartan and stripped to the bone a generation ago, and got a foothold only because (compared the "real" CPUs) they were somewhat affordable. They've matured, of course... but people who start on PICs almost inevitably get saddled with all the legacy baggage. In contrast, people whose first exposure is to Atmel or Motorola take one look at the PIC's legacy stuff, say "eeeewwww!", skip the first 20 chapters of the book, and go right to the good (modern) stuff.
The Motorola/Freescale MCUs are powerful, but they're NOT for newbies.
The nice thing about AVRs is that they're fairly robust and hard to permanently kill. I've abused AVRs pretty badly, and I've NEVER had one permanently die on me. There were a few I'd thought were dead, but ultimately they were all resurrected via high-voltage programming or by supplying an external clock signal to them. I've grossly exceeded the i/o pins' current-draw capabilities, connected power backwards, created pin-to-pin shorts, and still lived to tell about it. From what I've read, other platforms aren't quite as forgiving and wantonly abusable as AVRs. I know people who've driven 5v-relays straight from AVR i/o pins.
AVRs also have a great resource -- avrfreaks.net
AVR development tools are fairly cheap. An ISP-only programmer costs around $30-35. The Dragon costs $50, but adds support for high-voltage programming (handy for fixing messed up fusebits and reviving chips that otherwise appear to be dead) and Debugwire (think of it as single-wire JTAG for debugging). Unless you actually care about compatibility with Atmel's old chips, I'd recommend a Dragon over the STK500, if only for the Dragon's Debugwire capabilities.
AVR Studio is a free IDE (Windows only, though... but I think there's a Linux alternative) that natively supports assembly, but also integrates seamlessly with WinAVR for C/C99/C++ (of the 3, C99 is the one I find the most useful... it basically gives you the linguistic niceties of C++, like parametric polymorphism, without the huge libraries and resource requirements normally required for full-blown C++).
One major tip: if you want to use C (or eventually C99 or C++), buy John Pardue's book ("C Programming for Microcontrollers) and a Butterfly. He sells it directly from his website (smileymicros.com) for less than it costs from Amazon, and you can pick up the relevant hardware from him for less than you'd spend buying it all from Digikey. No, it's not the greatest book on C programming ever written... but it's the single best book you can get for learning C as it applies to AVR microcontrollers. Remember, 99% of C is learning how to use its libraries. Let's just say that time spent learning to use stdio in a generic C programming book isn't going to do much for your AVR programming skills...
Architecturally, AVRs are fairly well-behaved. The biggest problem I've had is the fact that they're SO well-behaved, it's easy to get a false sense of security and overlook details that are different between them. Unfortunately, Atmel's datasheets seem to have the same general editorial philosophy as the first O'Reilly books (say it once, never repeat anything, and bury important details in the middle of otherwise nondescript paragraphs on page 183, without so much as a gray box or sidebar to call attention to it). However, everyone at avrfreaks.net is painfully aware of those documentation shortcomings, and when somebody gets snared by one of them, someone else usually notices within 5 minutes, sighs, yawns, and politely points them in the right direction. It's exceptionally rare for anyone to get flamed.
As far as robots go, AVRs definitely seem to be just about everyone's favorite 8-bit processor. 6809s are popular with some more advanced users (though many of them freely admit that they aren't quite sure why they used a 6809 instead of an AVR), and the 68332 is a longtime favorite at the high en
Yep. I expect the Chinese DVD player makers to do this on their own by summer, with or without the DVD Forum's blessing. Normal DVD players have become commodities, and mfrs. are desperate for anything that can differentiate them from the pack. As it stands, an upsampling progressive-scan DVD player already has 95% of the hardware needed to play HD... all it needs is a 2X or 2.4X drive, and a chip that can decode MP@HL MPEG-2 in addition to MP@ML ("normal" DVD).
Or, going a step further, making what would basically be HD-DVD players with 2.4X red-laser drives. HD-DVD (but NOT Blu-Ray, as far as I know) already allows playback of HD-DVD encoded discs from red-laser media (as long as the final ISO is smaller than 9 or 5 gigabytes). With aggressive offline compression (not lower-quality, but rather compression by doing things that are impossible or impractical for live broadcasts, but perfectly do-able for things that can be compressed in advance -- like aggressive forward-encoding, where you take advantage of scenes with minimal frame-to-frame change to pre-load data for the next big scene change), you can easily put a 2-hour 720p24 movie with DVD-quality 224kbit audio on a 9-gig disc, or a little more than an hour or so of 720p60 (ie, pr0n).
I'll even go out on a limb and predict this guerrilla format's name -- "DVD+HD"
By summer, there won't be three formats... there will be four. And IMHO, Blu-Ray will be the casualty, because it's the one format that won't play nicely with the others (any HD-DVD player will be able to handle both DVD and HD-DVD... a DVD+HD player will handle DVD and DVD+HD... a Blu-Ray player will handle neither). In the short run, "HD-DVD" might fall by the wayside in favor of "DVD+HD"... but as long as making triple-layer discs with a 15-gig HD-DVD layer and pair of 4.5-gig layers for DVD+HD is a small step up from straight dual-layer DVDs, HD-DVD's place at the table will be delayed, but more or less assured.
The mythical "bridge" format already exists. With HD-DVD, you can master a HD-DVD disc and burn it to DVD+/-R(W)[-DL] if the final ISO is small enough to fit.
I give the Chinese manufacturers 12 months, max, before the high-end upsampling progressive DVD players selling for $79-139 right now morph into a guerrilla format called "DVD+HD" -- basically, the same players, but with a 2.4X drive and next-gen codec that knows how to handle MP@HL (and probably VC-1 and MPEG-4 as well).
It's not a big secret -- encoding film-originated content at 720p24 (the rez most new DLP and LCD TVs run at natively) with 224kBit AC-3 or MP3 audio and getting it to fit in 9 gigs isn't rocket science. You can't just dump it through a broadcast-optimized codec (they only support 60fps interlaced video with minimal forward-compression), but give even an above-average desktop PC with the right software and a 300-gig m2v file compressed with something like HuffyUV a few days to chew on it and recursively explore different compression strategies, and you'll end up with video half the size of realtime-compressed output that looks twice as good. Just a few years ago, I did it all the time to burn ripped DVDs to XVCDs. It tied up my computer for days at a time, but the final video quality was almost indistinguishable from the original DVD (about 50-65 minutes of video per CD). Do it on an industrial scale, and 60-minute 720p60 porn and 2-hour 720p24 movies will be everywhere.
Now for the trump card -- 3-layer hybrid discs with one 15-gig HD-DVD layer and a pair of "DVD" layers with 9 gigs. Encode the 9-gig layer pair with MP@HL, drop the disc in a renegade "DVD+HD" player, and you've got the magic format that almost precisely matches the output capabilities of most current HDTVs.
DVD+HD. Coming Summer 2007 to a Wal-Mart near you. Bet on it.
> XM sounds tinny as hell, and seems to play only b-sides and unknown artists,
OK, I won't disagree too much there:-)
> and sirius sounds better but seems to be half commercials
HUH? What channels were you listening to? I've never, EVER heard a commercial on 36, 33, 20, or 23.
> neither sat service can give you relevant local info.
No, but they most certainly CAN keep you sane during the 3 weeks after a devastating hurricane like Wilma hits, and the ONLY thing you can hear from local radio stations for the next month are the same, never-ending post-hurricane "xxx is open, yyy is closed, zzz is totally fscked, don't touch live power lines, and keep your kids safe from rattlesnakes & rabies" reports. After Wilma, Sirius was a priceless little island of sanity and normalcy amidst (seemingly endless) chaos and misery.
> Seriously. Wake me up when I can get streaming audio via WiMax in my car. > What do you need a satellite for?
Obviously you've never spent 3 days driving through hardcore-Jesusland, with nothing but country music and angry preachers to hear on the radio. Or lived somewhere like Miami, where the local media market is catastrophically fractured between English and Spanish, and most of the stations are owned by the same two or three companies, all fighting for the same adult-contemporary middle ground in both language markets.
> It's not like they can prevent competitors from launching satellites, > or buying bandwidth on someone else's satellite
Actually, it is. What's unique about the spectrum owned by both Sirius and XM is the fact that it's exclusively theirs nationwide. The little 18" dishes used by DBS operators aren't there to capture a weak signal whispered by a tiny transmitter on a distant satellite (like they were in the old days)... they're there to capture overwhelming amounts of relatively strong signal from one specific satellite so that broadcasts from neighboring satellites using the same frequencies can be attenuated out. That's the REAL reason why Sirius and XM don't need dishes for reception. If a single company were allowed to own the spectrum of both Sirius and XM, it would be just about impossible for anyone to launch a competing service that used similar technology unless the FCC managed to find another block of spectrum available for continent-wide use to sell them.
People who subscribe to neither Sirius nor XM don't seem to be aware that the differences between Sirius and XM go far beyond Stern vs Oprah, and NFL vs Baseball.
Sirius's music channels are generally programmed like "normal" radio stations, but without the commercials. They have DJs, Top XX countdowns, and playlists. Sirius generally appeals to people who hate the endless commercials or have musical tastes that vary from the local market norm (ie, someone into garage alternative or trance forced to live in some horrible small town or rural area where half the local stations are country, and the other half are religious), but are perfectly happy once they discover Sirius and get to enjoy the kind of radio that used to be available only to people in places like New York and Los Angeles.
XM's music channels are mostly jockless (no DJ) and have significantly deeper playlists. XM's subscribers call it "non-repetitive variety without intrusive, annoying chatter" and view it as a huge advantage over Sirius. On the other hand, most Sirius subscribers feel like they're listening to a CD player where someone put in a stack of CDs and hit the 'randomize' button when listening to XM. Different strokes for different folks.
The fact is, if XM took over Sirius, or Sirius took over XM, and the victor used the additional bandwidth to improve audio fidelity or add video services, and pretty much wiped out the other network's channels and format altogether, I *guarantee* at least half the losing service's customers would be gone within 3 months. Probably a third would be gone the moment their current month ended. Of course, many would dribble back in over the next few years, but it would unleash a lot of bad blood and bitterness.
I read somewhere that Microsoft actually has an internal version of SourceSafe that does, in fact, attempt to treat VB.net and C# as two different presentation layers of the same underlying code, and allows you to work on a file using whichever of the two languages you prefer. In other words, two developers can check out the "same" code from the repository -- one, as VB.net, the other, as C#. If #1 commits changes, VSS semi-compiles it to intermediate code and treats the VB.net code as nothing more than a presentation layer. When #2 updates his copy, it decompiles the code on the server to C# and updates HIS copy.
Unfortunately, Microsoft discovered that it's a lot easier to describe on paper than do in real-life, because the devil's in the details. Apparently, the system had to make changes to code at commit time (officially, things like formatting), and those changes botched things up *just* enough to destroy its users' confidence in the system (in reality, it unnerved developers 99% of the time, and really screwed something up about.1%, but the combo was lethal anyway). That, and the fact that VSS is kind of brittle to begin with & likely to be replaced by something else as soon as Microsoft can figure out what to replace it with...
Exactly the same thing happened in Miami. The cab companies threatened to go on strike and quit serving the airport if Metrorail ran there. The local government caved in (instead of opening the market to newcomers, delighted to inherit an incredibly profitable market vacated by the established companies), and Metrorail missed the airport by several miles. Fortunately, sanity eventually prevailed, and work is now underway to extend it to the airport. In theory, at least... I'll believe it when the first tangible concrete column goes up...
The Sprint & Verizon 6700 probably comes the closest to a semi-open platform (no you can't hack the OS, but just about everything Sprint or Verizon tries to lock down can be trivially unlocked). It's probably the single best PDA phone available today. It also happens to be one of the only PDA phones with a real, honest-to-god joystick. Unfortunately, it's fairly dysfunctional as a phone (read: frustrating and awkward at moments when it really shouldn't be), and only marginally better at being a PDA. I have one at work and to play with on trips... but my real phone is still my ancient Samsung SPH-i500 (sigh, if only they could do the same phone, but with higher-res screen, microSD, and a real joystick... oh wait... they did, and Sprint ditched it at the last moment, and now people pay upwards of $1,000+ for a rare-but-existing Sprint-Samsung SPH-i550 with Sprint-recognized ESN on eBay when a prototype shows up there every few months).
In principle, I love the TrollTech Green Phone. In principle. In reality, they ruined it by going with a GPRS-only chipset instead of the EDGE-capable one to shave a buck or two off the manufacturing costs. Now, ~140-200kbit/sec EDGE isn't exactly fast... but it's mostly tolerable. Sub-38kbit/sec GPRS is intolerably slow for just about anything more intense than running a credit card transaction at a flea market.
What's sad is that with the exception of the GreenPhone, the so-called "Linux" phones are among the most tightly locked-down phone platforms you can buy. I'm trying to be optimistic about ALP and Palm's future, but it's hard. I'm a known, longtime Palm developer who works for one of the biggest telcos in the world, and every time I've tried to get in touch with someone at Alp about getting a SDK, they take my contact info and I never hear from them again. Frankly, it saddens me, because I see the platform I've loved and helped to nurture for the past 10 years slowly withering on the vine like the Amiga did in the early 90s, with stagnant & stale hardware designs that would have been impressive 5 years ago, but increasingly look pretty sad compared to even the low-end competition.
Sigh. If only I could become god long enough to make Alp release ALP1.0 as a SDK whose only hardware was a cable to reflash an existing Sprint/Verizon 6700, in addition to one or two GSM phones. Why? Market and developer mindshare. Alp can't afford to waste another year while Sprint, Verizon, Cingular, and T-Mobile all piss around, fighting for exclusive deals. No single carrier's customer base is big enough. Taking care of Cingular & T-Mobile is easy... they're GSM and can't stop anyone willing to pay full price for a phone from ripping the SIM chip out of their current phones and sticking it in a shiny new imported ALP one. But with Sprint & Verizon, it's impossible to use a phone not purchased from them... which locks out about half the potential customer and developer base until ALP sells its soul to the devil and signs an exclusive deal with one of them. HOWEVER... the 6700 CAN be reflashed by end users. Both carriers deny it, but it's true. Remember the 6700 I have in my desk at the office? (big grin). Linux somewhat limps along on it (but without access to the hardware's documentation, real progress is nearly impossible). If ALP launched with a GSM phone or two, and a (cough, cough) "eval kit" for Sprint/Verizon 6700 owners to reflash their phones with, they'd instantly gain accessibility to nearly every cellular network in America. And Sprint/Verizon couldn't do a thing to stop users, as long as the reflash left the "phone" portion of the original firmware sufficiently intact to keep the network thinking it's a nice, obedient WM5 phone:-D
>Do you think that 200 "unarmed" people could take down 5 people armed with box cutters? >If so, then why didn't they?
Because up until September 11, everyone in America knew that the best strategy for surviving an aircraft hijacking was to fully cooperate with the hijackers. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, you'd end up taking a 2-3 day detour and eventually get free food and souveneirs from the airport in the capital of some godforsaken thirdworld country you'd never even heard of before. The moment the first jet crashed into the WTC, the rules changed forever. Americans on a hijacked plane will now automatically assume that they're as good as dead anyway unless they fight back... and so they will. Boxcutters can probably kill one or two passengers, but in a fight between five or six boxcutter-wielding terrorists and 200 terrified, nihlistic and angry passengers convinced they're going to die anyway... the terrorists will lose, and lose badly. When the plane finally lands, the authorities will need Q-tips to swab for DNA to identify the terrorists, because they'll have been torn to shreds by the passengers.
Slashdot Mirror
Trolltech screwed up BIGTIME by going with the cheap controller that supports only GPRS instead of using the chip's big brother that supports EDGE (and possibly 3G) as well. Let's be real -- this phone's only real market consists of developers who want a cool phone they can play with and write extensions to show off to their friends. NOBODY, and I mean *NOBODY* in that market is going to buy a phone that only does GPRS. ISDN-like EDGE isn't really fast... but it's fast enough to be useful and generally tolerable. 19-38kbit GPRS is cruel and unusual punishment.
p ?products_id=7917) with completely open UI (display, input buttons, joystick, GPS, bluetooth, etc that worked similarly to the original Handspring GSM module, it would likely make the phone's purchasers happier. And let's be honest -- this is an expensive niche product. Another $50 really isn't going to matter much to the buy/no-buy decision. Plus, by abstracting out the phone module, it might even be possible to get Sprint to tolerate a CDMA model (Verizon would be hopeless since they still cripple bluetooth and WiFi, but Sprint seems to have slowly realized that with unlimited data plans and nearly-unlimited voice plans as the norm, use of WiFi by customers is a GOOD thing... even if they ARE complete Nazis when it comes to allowing non-Sprint hardware to be used on their network).
In reality, any phone targeted to this market MUST support EDGE *and* 3G. EDGE for the American market (where 1900/2100 UMTS will likely never exist, and 1700/2100 UMTS is still years away from widespread availability), and 3G for the European market (where apparently EDGE was NOT deployed in parallel in places where 3G was deployed early, like Scandinavia).
As for the onerous EULA, I suspect it's because -- like wireless LAN cards -- many of the phone's parameters are software-defined, and it was mainly a regulatory issue. The last time I checked, the phone "officially" supports only 900, 1800, and 1900Mhz. "Officially", as in, "Trolltech paid the relevant regulatory bodies to get it certified for those frequencies". HOWEVER, the chipset inside the phone happens to support 850MHz, and I suspect hacking it to enable 850MHz operation is likely to be fairly easy. A thoroughly illegal act in FCC-land, but not a particularly hard one to pull off that will make life a lot easier for users in the 2/3 or so of America where 1900MHz GSM coverage is still sparse or nonexistent (a coworker of mine has a 1900-only phone that generally works fine in Miami and other big cities, but is largely useless when he travels, with HUGE coverage gaps in between big cities).
I do agree, though, that it's a design mistake for a phone like this to have a unified phone + UI architecture. Even if it cost more to use a blackbox-type GSM phone module like the GSM 862 phone module w/GPS sold by Sparkfun.com (http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.ph
In Florida, 511 is a free cell phone call (well, besides airtime, but most people have airtime to burn so it's basically free anyway) to get freeway traffic reports. It REALLY came in handy driving home to Miami from Fort Lauderdale on Superbowl Sunday: "Accident, I-95, southbound, 79th Street. Two-mile backup." Needless to say, I jumped over to the Palmetto at Golden Glades instead of taking 95 to 836, and avoided it :-)
It seems the ideal way for a company's employees to cloak potentially-harmful email would be to include references to h3rb@1 V1a6ra, p3n15 en1ar6em3nt, and fr33 pr0n in the subject lines and bodies. That way, when the plaintiffs are searching for mail during discovery, it'll get filtered out by their own filters used to separate the "interesting" email from the gigabytes of spam otherwise burying it.
In some cases, parts one or two generations old are superior to what's currently available. PC manufacturers have enthusiastically embraced Intel's fetish of using the CPU as a general-purpose DSP for everything... the main reason why a 5 year old 500-750MHz Athlon or Pentium-III based system with a gig or two of ram and discrete videocard (with its own onboard ram) and PCI network card can still hold its own against a brand new $400 PC with a CPU allegedly equivalent to a hypothetical 1.6-2.4GHz PIII. The old high-end system has dedicated chips to handle the MPEG-2 decoding (or at least accelerate the DCT/IDCT computations) on its videocard, likely has a real DSP on its discrete soundcard, and the ethernet card only interrupts the CPU to notify it that a new datagram has arrived and has been added to its buffer. New PCs burden the CPU with all the above.
The fastest and most efficient way to make a brand new $500 CPU feel like the old one it replaced is to bog it down with grunt work a sub-$12 DSP could do better and faster. It's the same reason why current WM5 pocket PC phones usually feel more sluggish than an old 50MHz Palm phone -- on the older Palm device, the phone was totally separate, and the only connection between it and the phone subsystem was a serial data link. The WM5 device, by contrast, is basically a cellular winmodem that squanders at least half the processor's cycles just participating in the phone network. And the PDA phone manufacturers STILL aren't happy... they want to migrate from dual-core processors to single-core ones to cut costs. Happy happy, joy joy...
No, you'd press C= + RUNSTOP :-)
I paid $99 for Fastload the day it came out, and it was worth every penny... that program absolutely saved my sanity.
>how about a game on a bootable DVD
Long, long ago, in an Amiga universe far, far away, I used to bitch daily about Eurogames that couldn't run from my hard drive and HAD to be booted from floppies. I looked forward to the day I could launch everything from the hard drive.
~15 years later, the idea of booting games from discs (or better yet, booting the DVD in a VM whose hypervisor *I* can "trust" to keep the booted OS from reading or writing to anything besides a virtual filesystem sandboxed on one of my hard drives) actually looks good by comparison, thanks in no small part to companies whose games introduce kernel-level malware in the holy name of copy protection that'll still be around, causing problems, long after the original game on whose behalf it was installed is pitched aside and forgotten about (*cough* SafeDisc *cough*)
> Example 1: WinCE vs. PalmOS
Not really. Palm unfortunately did a perfectly good job of snagging defeat from the jaws of victory on their own. As much as I'd love to see Palm rise from the ashes with its Zen mostly intact (but finally able to walk & chew gum at the same time, particularly with respect to network data transfer), I've pretty much written it off as a pipe dream.
Even if Access pulls off a small miracle with ALP, Sprint and Verizon's petty insistence on exclusivity will ensure that at least half of the developers & enthusiasts who'd otherwise buy one, sight unseen, the day they hit the market will be chained & shackled to the wrong carrier, and by the time it appears for their carrier its warts and shortcomings will be well known, which will put off a lot of them (and keep a big chunk of casual developers out of the loop in the meantime).
IMHO, the ONLY way Access can save PalmOS->ALP is if they can dig a tunnel under the wall around Sprint & Verizon's hardware gardens by porting ALP1.0's SDK to a phone platform common to both (PPC6700 already has nearly total penetration among former Palm enthusiasts), so people who own one can reflash it to ALP without having to play silly games with Sprint & Verizon (handling the proprietary phone network firmware part the way Linux handles Win32 WLAN drivers via NDISwrapper, so Sprint & Verizon's own networks would never know the difference between a 6700 running WM5 and a 6700 reflashed to ALP). It would make ALP basically zero money initially, but would achieve something WAY more important at this stage of the game -- it would re-establish the Palm/ALP developer ecosystem, so that when the first-gen REAL ALP phones arrive, there will still be a market for them.
If it were a matter of combining the channels of both services, I wouldn't mind as much. The problem is, Sirius wants XM's spectrum for exactly one reason: to squander on "seatback video". As if they have a snowball's chance in hell of successfully competing against the two companies getting ready to launch nationwide 700MHz DVB-H mobile video services with more spectrum than both SDARS licenses combined.
Sirius wasting bandwidth on lame low-res video makes about as much sense as Busch Gardens in Tampa bulldozing their brewery to add another quarter-acre or so to their animal park to try and compete with Disney's Animal Kingdom. They gave up their one real competitive advantage against Disney (Disney will never, ever have a brewery or free beer), and did it to improve something (the animal park) that doesn't have any chance of competing against a better-equipped competitor (Disney) anyway. The problem is, "seatback video" is a magic buzzword that makes Wall Street happy, regardless of how much sense (or lack thereof) it really makes given the resources at hand.
The best thing we, as Sirius and XM subscribers, can do to safeguard our respective services is to vigorously lobby Congress and the FCC to 1) absolutely refuse to allow one company to own both SDARS licenses, and 2) categorically prohibit the use of SDARS spectrum for anything remotely resembling video content (particularly if they decide to let them merge).
You're partly right... for someone whose main/only interest is Stern, talk radio, and/or sports, the Sirius-vs-XM music debate ranks up there with the Debian/FSF -vs- Linspire/JustMakeTheDamnThingWork holy war. But for dance and rock, at least, Sirius and XM are *very* different, even with regard to channels that nominally have the same theme.
Illustrative difference using a single currently-popular group:
Yesterday, Sirius 21 played "Famous Last Words" by My Chemical Romance approximately once every 4 hours on channel 21 (Alternative Nation). In fact, it's the only MCR song they played on that channel. Meanwhile, on channel 1, they played MCR's previous single ("Welcome to the Black Parade") 8 times... approximately once every 3 hours.
In contrast, XM played exactly one MCR song the whole day: Welcome to the Black Parade, on u POP at 6:39pm. On February 18th, they played another MCR song exactly once the whole day: "Helena" on ethel at 10:52pm. In all fairness, they HAVE played 8 MCR songs today (including "Welcome to the Black Parade" 5 times on 5 different channels), but it looks like a one-shot event, and in any case they haven't repeated it on the same channel.
So... someone who likes the rock end of the pop spectrum is probably a happy Sirius listener, because they played the two biggest songs of one of the currently most-popular bands all day. On the other hand, someone who's hardcore indie and hates anyone who "sells out" and becomes commercially successful would hate Sirius, and probably bitched online at XM for playing the few MCR songs they did.
That, more than anything, underscores the big difference between Sirius and XM's music. If you want to hear songs that are familiar and you already like (or will, within a day or two of hearing them every 3 hours), you'll love Sirius. If you get pissed off by hearing two songs from the same artist on the same day, and don't want to even HEAR anything that's in a top-20 list right now, you'll love XM. There's nothing inherently wrong with either group... but it shows why all hell is going to break loose if a merged company tried to consolidate music channels. You'd have an easier time trying to "merge" a Palestinean village and Israeli settlement in the Golan Heights or Gaza Strip (or a swinger's resort and bible camp in North Carolina)
The majority of content is NOT duplicated. Sirius and XM sound NOTHING alike. Sirius channels sound like normal radio stations, but without commercials. XM channels sound like somebody took a random pile of CDs, shoved them in a changer, and hit the "shuffle" button.
They're about as equivalent as Tylenol, Ibuprofen, and Naproxen sodium. Yeah, they're technically all painkillers and reduce fever, but anyone who's ever had a headache or fever knows that they're definitely NOT all the same. Tylenol utterly sucks compared to the other two, but some people are forced to use it because they can't tolerate them. Ibuprofen rocks for headaches, but sucks for fevers (unless you enjoy having your fever come back every 4-6 hours). Naproxen sodium is a godsend for fevers (breaks once, stays that way), but a complete waste of time for headaches. The same is true of Sirius and XM. Both have slightly different audiences with different expectations -- all of whom are going to be FURIOUS if their network mutates into the other. Even slightly.
Talk to anyone who subscribes to either service. I guarantee that 99% of them will react to the news of a merger with absolute horror at the thought that ${their_network} will get turned into ${other_network}. I *guarantee* that if a merger happens and the music channels from one or the other get dropped to "streamline" and "eliminate redundancy", AT LEAST half of the losing service's carriers will leave in disgust. At the same time, the "winner" network will probably lose at least a quarter of its customers if it changes even slightly to be more like the loser's format was. Ultimately, we'll be stuck with one mediocre provider whose financial position is only slightly better than before, and now has hundreds of thousands of angry and pissed off former customers saying bad things about it and discouraging their friends from subscribing.
This is horrible news for the customers of BOTH services. I expect to see an outpouring of anger from customers of BOTH Sirius AND XM demanding that the FCC NOT allow a merged company to own both frequency bands in a desperate effort to derail the whole merger.
A few problems with implanted IDs:
* They have to be removed prior to a MRI. Otherwise, some Very Bad Things(tm) will happen to both the implant and the tissue surrounding it.
* If they're implanted into an extremity (like a finger) to minimize MRI problems, you create problem #2: thieves using gruesomely low-tech means to obtain those implants and use them before you can have them deactivated. Think: mugger with bolt cutters and gun who wants your index finger RIGHT NOW.
* Current ID-broadcasting implants could EASILY be spoofed by organized crime with minimal resources in the near future (if not today). So within a few years (I'd say 5, 10 max) current chips will become totally useless for cash-free transactions (subway fares, vending machines, etc). And if they implement two-factor authentication (like implant + PIN), you've just negated most of the convenience the implant is supposed to provide. Challenge-response is a possibility, but that throws a monkey wrench into the whole idea of an open standard anyone can use because THEN you need to involve a third-party both you and the seller trust to perform the authentication... and collect a few cents from you while they're at it.
Here's a better idea: get 3M to spin off a line of NexCare bandages with embedded RFID chips. Or embed it in your wedding ring or watch. Or superglue it to a toenail (or fingernail, if you want to make a geeky fashion statement).
The point is, having something embedded that's almost guaranteed to be technologically obsolete within a decade anyway -- and can cause random grief with things like MRIs in the meantime -- is just silly. You can achieve 99% of the convenience with bandages, superglue, or clothing accessories.
> Because it's usually more expensive.
True in most places, but not in the US. Here, most people pay nothing for cell phone voice calls at night and all weekend, and have so many hundred or (with multi-phone pooled family plans) thousand peak minutes of airtime to burn that they might as well be unlimited. In contrast, text messages tend to cost 10-25 cents apiece (beyond the first 25-100, which might be included with some data plans) unless the user spends the extra $5-15/month for unlimited text messages, too.
In fact, I'm working on a project right now to metaphorically staple an IVR front end onto a European SMS app so it can be used in America. When it was originally rolled out here in SMS-only form, nobody would use it. When asked "why?" the nearly-unanimous response was, "Voice calls are free. Text messages cost money."
And if you're a Sprint or Verizon customer, you can't use a phone not purchased directly from the carrier, period. Well, ok... there are whispered rumors among the technorati elite that Verizon occasionally can be persuaded to look the other way if you manage to rip the firmware from a Verizon phone and reflash a Sprint phone that's an identical hardware twin... but Sprint won't ever allow it.
Which really, REALLY sucks if you want a first-gen Alp (a.k.a. Access Linux for Palm) phone, or a WM5 phone with both a touchscreen for Graf^h^h^h^h block input AND a hard keypad (common in Asia, utterly unheard of in the US).
I can definitely appreciate the "Single Source" issue... for Christmas, I built a string of RGB Christmas lights. I bought 128 Tiny25s from DigiKey, and basically wiped them out. As of early December, I probably had more Tiny25s in my possession than any other end-user in the world (every light consisted of an RGB LED driven by its own Tiny25) ;-)
f ile=viewtopic&t=35933&postdays=0&postorder=asc&sta rt=295
I would have liked to have bought a smaller number first to test my design, but I was scared to death that if I didn't buy them all up front, someone else might buy too many and leave me SOL before Christmas. Sadly, I only managed to get about 32 of the light modules to work by Christmas, and the whole network scheme I came up with that worked flawlessly with 3 modules on a breadboard fell flat on its face once I made the modules and wired them up into a single string, so all the lights were able to do on the tree was change colors. In a few months, when I'm no longer burned out of the project (I had no life for most of December), I'll pull out the hot air rework tool and salvage the chips from the nonworking boards and try again (I still have about 200 spare circuit boards) with a different serial scheme (the one I tried was edge-driven. In retrospect, there was probably too much electrical noise on the tree. Next year, I'll just do plain old-fashioned oversampling.)
For pics, check out http://www.avrfreaks.net/index.php?name=PNphpBB2&
I'd recommend Atmel AVRs without a moment's hesitation.
The PIC and 8051 grew from architectures that were considered spartan and stripped to the bone a generation ago, and got a foothold only because (compared the "real" CPUs) they were somewhat affordable. They've matured, of course... but people who start on PICs almost inevitably get saddled with all the legacy baggage. In contrast, people whose first exposure is to Atmel or Motorola take one look at the PIC's legacy stuff, say "eeeewwww!", skip the first 20 chapters of the book, and go right to the good (modern) stuff.
The Motorola/Freescale MCUs are powerful, but they're NOT for newbies.
The nice thing about AVRs is that they're fairly robust and hard to permanently kill. I've abused AVRs pretty badly, and I've NEVER had one permanently die on me. There were a few I'd thought were dead, but ultimately they were all resurrected via high-voltage programming or by supplying an external clock signal to them. I've grossly exceeded the i/o pins' current-draw capabilities, connected power backwards, created pin-to-pin shorts, and still lived to tell about it. From what I've read, other platforms aren't quite as forgiving and wantonly abusable as AVRs. I know people who've driven 5v-relays straight from AVR i/o pins.
AVRs also have a great resource -- avrfreaks.net
AVR development tools are fairly cheap. An ISP-only programmer costs around $30-35. The Dragon costs $50, but adds support for high-voltage programming (handy for fixing messed up fusebits and reviving chips that otherwise appear to be dead) and Debugwire (think of it as single-wire JTAG for debugging). Unless you actually care about compatibility with Atmel's old chips, I'd recommend a Dragon over the STK500, if only for the Dragon's Debugwire capabilities.
AVR Studio is a free IDE (Windows only, though... but I think there's a Linux alternative) that natively supports assembly, but also integrates seamlessly with WinAVR for C/C99/C++ (of the 3, C99 is the one I find the most useful... it basically gives you the linguistic niceties of C++, like parametric polymorphism, without the huge libraries and resource requirements normally required for full-blown C++).
One major tip: if you want to use C (or eventually C99 or C++), buy John Pardue's book ("C Programming for Microcontrollers) and a Butterfly. He sells it directly from his website (smileymicros.com) for less than it costs from Amazon, and you can pick up the relevant hardware from him for less than you'd spend buying it all from Digikey. No, it's not the greatest book on C programming ever written... but it's the single best book you can get for learning C as it applies to AVR microcontrollers. Remember, 99% of C is learning how to use its libraries. Let's just say that time spent learning to use stdio in a generic C programming book isn't going to do much for your AVR programming skills...
Architecturally, AVRs are fairly well-behaved. The biggest problem I've had is the fact that they're SO well-behaved, it's easy to get a false sense of security and overlook details that are different between them. Unfortunately, Atmel's datasheets seem to have the same general editorial philosophy as the first O'Reilly books (say it once, never repeat anything, and bury important details in the middle of otherwise nondescript paragraphs on page 183, without so much as a gray box or sidebar to call attention to it). However, everyone at avrfreaks.net is painfully aware of those documentation shortcomings, and when somebody gets snared by one of them, someone else usually notices within 5 minutes, sighs, yawns, and politely points them in the right direction. It's exceptionally rare for anyone to get flamed.
As far as robots go, AVRs definitely seem to be just about everyone's favorite 8-bit processor. 6809s are popular with some more advanced users (though many of them freely admit that they aren't quite sure why they used a 6809 instead of an AVR), and the 68332 is a longtime favorite at the high en
Yep. I expect the Chinese DVD player makers to do this on their own by summer, with or without the DVD Forum's blessing. Normal DVD players have become commodities, and mfrs. are desperate for anything that can differentiate them from the pack. As it stands, an upsampling progressive-scan DVD player already has 95% of the hardware needed to play HD... all it needs is a 2X or 2.4X drive, and a chip that can decode MP@HL MPEG-2 in addition to MP@ML ("normal" DVD).
Or, going a step further, making what would basically be HD-DVD players with 2.4X red-laser drives. HD-DVD (but NOT Blu-Ray, as far as I know) already allows playback of HD-DVD encoded discs from red-laser media (as long as the final ISO is smaller than 9 or 5 gigabytes). With aggressive offline compression (not lower-quality, but rather compression by doing things that are impossible or impractical for live broadcasts, but perfectly do-able for things that can be compressed in advance -- like aggressive forward-encoding, where you take advantage of scenes with minimal frame-to-frame change to pre-load data for the next big scene change), you can easily put a 2-hour 720p24 movie with DVD-quality 224kbit audio on a 9-gig disc, or a little more than an hour or so of 720p60 (ie, pr0n).
I'll even go out on a limb and predict this guerrilla format's name -- "DVD+HD"
By summer, there won't be three formats... there will be four. And IMHO, Blu-Ray will be the casualty, because it's the one format that won't play nicely with the others (any HD-DVD player will be able to handle both DVD and HD-DVD... a DVD+HD player will handle DVD and DVD+HD... a Blu-Ray player will handle neither). In the short run, "HD-DVD" might fall by the wayside in favor of "DVD+HD"... but as long as making triple-layer discs with a 15-gig HD-DVD layer and pair of 4.5-gig layers for DVD+HD is a small step up from straight dual-layer DVDs, HD-DVD's place at the table will be delayed, but more or less assured.
The mythical "bridge" format already exists. With HD-DVD, you can master a HD-DVD disc and burn it to DVD+/-R(W)[-DL] if the final ISO is small enough to fit.
I give the Chinese manufacturers 12 months, max, before the high-end upsampling progressive DVD players selling for $79-139 right now morph into a guerrilla format called "DVD+HD" -- basically, the same players, but with a 2.4X drive and next-gen codec that knows how to handle MP@HL (and probably VC-1 and MPEG-4 as well).
It's not a big secret -- encoding film-originated content at 720p24 (the rez most new DLP and LCD TVs run at natively) with 224kBit AC-3 or MP3 audio and getting it to fit in 9 gigs isn't rocket science. You can't just dump it through a broadcast-optimized codec (they only support 60fps interlaced video with minimal forward-compression), but give even an above-average desktop PC with the right software and a 300-gig m2v file compressed with something like HuffyUV a few days to chew on it and recursively explore different compression strategies, and you'll end up with video half the size of realtime-compressed output that looks twice as good. Just a few years ago, I did it all the time to burn ripped DVDs to XVCDs. It tied up my computer for days at a time, but the final video quality was almost indistinguishable from the original DVD (about 50-65 minutes of video per CD). Do it on an industrial scale, and 60-minute 720p60 porn and 2-hour 720p24 movies will be everywhere.
Now for the trump card -- 3-layer hybrid discs with one 15-gig HD-DVD layer and a pair of "DVD" layers with 9 gigs. Encode the 9-gig layer pair with MP@HL, drop the disc in a renegade "DVD+HD" player, and you've got the magic format that almost precisely matches the output capabilities of most current HDTVs.
DVD+HD. Coming Summer 2007 to a Wal-Mart near you. Bet on it.
> XM sounds tinny as hell, and seems to play only b-sides and unknown artists,
:-)
OK, I won't disagree too much there
> and sirius sounds better but seems to be half commercials
HUH? What channels were you listening to? I've never, EVER heard a commercial on 36, 33, 20, or 23.
> neither sat service can give you relevant local info.
No, but they most certainly CAN keep you sane during the 3 weeks after a devastating hurricane like Wilma hits, and the ONLY thing you can hear from local radio stations for the next month are the same, never-ending post-hurricane "xxx is open, yyy is closed, zzz is totally fscked, don't touch live power lines, and keep your kids safe from rattlesnakes & rabies" reports. After Wilma, Sirius was a priceless little island of sanity and normalcy amidst (seemingly endless) chaos and misery.
> Seriously. Wake me up when I can get streaming audio via WiMax in my car.
> What do you need a satellite for?
Obviously you've never spent 3 days driving through hardcore-Jesusland, with nothing but country music and angry preachers to hear on the radio. Or lived somewhere like Miami, where the local media market is catastrophically fractured between English and Spanish, and most of the stations are owned by the same two or three companies, all fighting for the same adult-contemporary middle ground in both language markets.
Satellite radio is a gift from God.
> It's not like they can prevent competitors from launching satellites,
> or buying bandwidth on someone else's satellite
Actually, it is. What's unique about the spectrum owned by both Sirius and XM is the fact that it's exclusively theirs nationwide. The little 18" dishes used by DBS operators aren't there to capture a weak signal whispered by a tiny transmitter on a distant satellite (like they were in the old days)... they're there to capture overwhelming amounts of relatively strong signal from one specific satellite so that broadcasts from neighboring satellites using the same frequencies can be attenuated out. That's the REAL reason why Sirius and XM don't need dishes for reception. If a single company were allowed to own the spectrum of both Sirius and XM, it would be just about impossible for anyone to launch a competing service that used similar technology unless the FCC managed to find another block of spectrum available for continent-wide use to sell them.
People who subscribe to neither Sirius nor XM don't seem to be aware that the differences between Sirius and XM go far beyond Stern vs Oprah, and NFL vs Baseball.
Sirius's music channels are generally programmed like "normal" radio stations, but without the commercials. They have DJs, Top XX countdowns, and playlists. Sirius generally appeals to people who hate the endless commercials or have musical tastes that vary from the local market norm (ie, someone into garage alternative or trance forced to live in some horrible small town or rural area where half the local stations are country, and the other half are religious), but are perfectly happy once they discover Sirius and get to enjoy the kind of radio that used to be available only to people in places like New York and Los Angeles.
XM's music channels are mostly jockless (no DJ) and have significantly deeper playlists. XM's subscribers call it "non-repetitive variety without intrusive, annoying chatter" and view it as a huge advantage over Sirius. On the other hand, most Sirius subscribers feel like they're listening to a CD player where someone put in a stack of CDs and hit the 'randomize' button when listening to XM. Different strokes for different folks.
The fact is, if XM took over Sirius, or Sirius took over XM, and the victor used the additional bandwidth to improve audio fidelity or add video services, and pretty much wiped out the other network's channels and format altogether, I *guarantee* at least half the losing service's customers would be gone within 3 months. Probably a third would be gone the moment their current month ended. Of course, many would dribble back in over the next few years, but it would unleash a lot of bad blood and bitterness.
I read somewhere that Microsoft actually has an internal version of SourceSafe that does, in fact, attempt to treat VB.net and C# as two different presentation layers of the same underlying code, and allows you to work on a file using whichever of the two languages you prefer. In other words, two developers can check out the "same" code from the repository -- one, as VB.net, the other, as C#. If #1 commits changes, VSS semi-compiles it to intermediate code and treats the VB.net code as nothing more than a presentation layer. When #2 updates his copy, it decompiles the code on the server to C# and updates HIS copy.
.1%, but the combo was lethal anyway). That, and the fact that VSS is kind of brittle to begin with & likely to be replaced by something else as soon as Microsoft can figure out what to replace it with...
Unfortunately, Microsoft discovered that it's a lot easier to describe on paper than do in real-life, because the devil's in the details. Apparently, the system had to make changes to code at commit time (officially, things like formatting), and those changes botched things up *just* enough to destroy its users' confidence in the system (in reality, it unnerved developers 99% of the time, and really screwed something up about
Exactly the same thing happened in Miami. The cab companies threatened to go on strike and quit serving the airport if Metrorail ran there. The local government caved in (instead of opening the market to newcomers, delighted to inherit an incredibly profitable market vacated by the established companies), and Metrorail missed the airport by several miles. Fortunately, sanity eventually prevailed, and work is now underway to extend it to the airport. In theory, at least... I'll believe it when the first tangible concrete column goes up...
The Sprint & Verizon 6700 probably comes the closest to a semi-open platform (no you can't hack the OS, but just about everything Sprint or Verizon tries to lock down can be trivially unlocked). It's probably the single best PDA phone available today. It also happens to be one of the only PDA phones with a real, honest-to-god joystick. Unfortunately, it's fairly dysfunctional as a phone (read: frustrating and awkward at moments when it really shouldn't be), and only marginally better at being a PDA. I have one at work and to play with on trips... but my real phone is still my ancient Samsung SPH-i500 (sigh, if only they could do the same phone, but with higher-res screen, microSD, and a real joystick... oh wait... they did, and Sprint ditched it at the last moment, and now people pay upwards of $1,000+ for a rare-but-existing Sprint-Samsung SPH-i550 with Sprint-recognized ESN on eBay when a prototype shows up there every few months).
:-D
In principle, I love the TrollTech Green Phone. In principle. In reality, they ruined it by going with a GPRS-only chipset instead of the EDGE-capable one to shave a buck or two off the manufacturing costs. Now, ~140-200kbit/sec EDGE isn't exactly fast... but it's mostly tolerable. Sub-38kbit/sec GPRS is intolerably slow for just about anything more intense than running a credit card transaction at a flea market.
What's sad is that with the exception of the GreenPhone, the so-called "Linux" phones are among the most tightly locked-down phone platforms you can buy. I'm trying to be optimistic about ALP and Palm's future, but it's hard. I'm a known, longtime Palm developer who works for one of the biggest telcos in the world, and every time I've tried to get in touch with someone at Alp about getting a SDK, they take my contact info and I never hear from them again. Frankly, it saddens me, because I see the platform I've loved and helped to nurture for the past 10 years slowly withering on the vine like the Amiga did in the early 90s, with stagnant & stale hardware designs that would have been impressive 5 years ago, but increasingly look pretty sad compared to even the low-end competition.
Sigh. If only I could become god long enough to make Alp release ALP1.0 as a SDK whose only hardware was a cable to reflash an existing Sprint/Verizon 6700, in addition to one or two GSM phones. Why? Market and developer mindshare. Alp can't afford to waste another year while Sprint, Verizon, Cingular, and T-Mobile all piss around, fighting for exclusive deals. No single carrier's customer base is big enough. Taking care of Cingular & T-Mobile is easy... they're GSM and can't stop anyone willing to pay full price for a phone from ripping the SIM chip out of their current phones and sticking it in a shiny new imported ALP one. But with Sprint & Verizon, it's impossible to use a phone not purchased from them... which locks out about half the potential customer and developer base until ALP sells its soul to the devil and signs an exclusive deal with one of them. HOWEVER... the 6700 CAN be reflashed by end users. Both carriers deny it, but it's true. Remember the 6700 I have in my desk at the office? (big grin). Linux somewhat limps along on it (but without access to the hardware's documentation, real progress is nearly impossible). If ALP launched with a GSM phone or two, and a (cough, cough) "eval kit" for Sprint/Verizon 6700 owners to reflash their phones with, they'd instantly gain accessibility to nearly every cellular network in America. And Sprint/Verizon couldn't do a thing to stop users, as long as the reflash left the "phone" portion of the original firmware sufficiently intact to keep the network thinking it's a nice, obedient WM5 phone
>Do you think that 200 "unarmed" people could take down 5 people armed with box cutters?
>If so, then why didn't they?
Because up until September 11, everyone in America knew that the best strategy for surviving an aircraft hijacking was to fully cooperate with the hijackers. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, you'd end up taking a 2-3 day detour and eventually get free food and souveneirs from the airport in the capital of some godforsaken thirdworld country you'd never even heard of before. The moment the first jet crashed into the WTC, the rules changed forever. Americans on a hijacked plane will now automatically assume that they're as good as dead anyway unless they fight back... and so they will. Boxcutters can probably kill one or two passengers, but in a fight between five or six boxcutter-wielding terrorists and 200 terrified, nihlistic and angry passengers convinced they're going to die anyway... the terrorists will lose, and lose badly. When the plane finally lands, the authorities will need Q-tips to swab for DNA to identify the terrorists, because they'll have been torn to shreds by the passengers.