Hmmm, now I'm intrigued... did the CoCo have the same wacky way of addressing pixels (1 bit per 7 pixels to select red+ blue or green+ purple, then 7 bits to select one or the other, or white if two adjacent pixels were set, and the Venetian-blind ram addressing)?
Also... what did an Apple II do if you had two adjacent bytes... one with the msb set, one with the msb clear, and set the rightmost pixel/bit of the first byte, and the leftmost pixel/bit (bit 6) of the second byte? Did it make white, because you had two adjacent on pixels, or did the fact that one was a blue or red pixel, and one was a green or purple pixel, make a difference?
Actually, I vaguely remember that even the TI-99/4A had some kind of DRM that prevented most thirdparty software from running on it. I've never fully understood why, but I think it was something like this:
* The CPU could only directly access 256 bytes of RAM. The remaining RAM technically belonged to the graphics subsystem.
* The CPU could only execute code from a ROM cartridge after the graphics subsystem authorized it. I think it was protected by a combination of aggressively-defended patents and some technical means that was ultimately cracked years later.
* TI BASIC, unlike Commodore, Atari, and Apple BASIC, had no way for users to poke an assembly-language program into ram & begin executing it (with something like "SYS 49152")
It's sad, because the TI-99/4A was a seriously hot mess. It was technically one of the most powerful computers on the market at the time, but TI arbitrarily crippled its usage so badly that it just withered on the vine while more open platforms (the 3 mentioned, plus probably ZX Spectrum in Europe) flourished. Most people have NO IDEA that the TI-99/4A actually had the same graphics & sound chips as a Colecovision, a faster CPU, and probably more total RAM (though RAM beyond the 256 bytes of SRAM hardwired to the CPU had to be read and written a byte at a time, kind of like copying data to a VGA card's ram). Weirdly enough, the Radio Shack COLOR COMPUTER actually had the same graphics chip, too... though it provides a great example of how a bad design can ruin an otherwise good graphics chip (to cut costs, Tandy eliminated the ram that was supposed to be used for defining background colors of individual characters, and instead hardwired the chip so it always just used green as the background color in any character-based graphics mode).
It's even older than NES. The **ATARI 7800** had DRM used to lock out unauthorized cartridges, and it was technically released around 1984 (though 99% of the 7800s sat in warehouses until the early 90s before Tramiel finally dumped them on the market).
You can download the generic drivers for a mobile Quadro, but you'll have to lie to Nvidia's website and say your video card was bought by you (instead of furnished by the manufacturer). I'm not sure whether you can do that if your laptop has integrated graphics (my Dell Precision m4800 has a discrete Quadro m2100 video card... from what I've read, other cards are probably electronically compatible, but it's anybody's guess whether other cards will physically fit and have screw holes in the right place. I believe Dell & Alienware laptops use the same dimensions for their discrete laptop video cards, though.
Maybe, but there's a HUGE amount of functionality that lies between "no autonomous driving capability at all" and "able to drive your kids to school, then bring the car home and park it in the garage for you".
The fact is, we had the technology to make semi-autonomous cars capable of lanekeeping and collision-avoidance more than TWENTY YEARS AGO. The catch is, it would have:
* doubled or tripled the cost of an average car
* required the construction of thousands of miles of new freeway lanes for the exclusive use of cars with autonomous driving capabilities... at staggering cost, for the benefit of what would have then been a very, very small subset of drivers. And we're talking about adding 4 new lanes to roads that probably had only 4 or 6 lanes to begin with circa 1990. Those lanes would have needed embedded signal wires for steering guidance, sensors to maintain distance, telemetry to identify cars and handshake with the centralized control system, etc.
In other words, do-able, and in fact actively DEMONSTRATED by GM at EPCOT... but totally impractical given the cost of the road improvements it would have required to work with 1990s technology.
What changed? Cars can now deal with driving autonomously on "normal" roads (under specific constraints), and deal with random acts of stupidity by other drivers. THAT would have been within the realm of science fiction 20 years ago.
10 years from now, when you say your new car has "advanced cruise control", it'll go without saying that it can stay in the lane and avoid collisions when driving on a limited-access highway in good weather conditions, and can follow the car in front of you as it crawls through urban gridlock (probably leaving it up to YOU to obey things like traffic lights, stop signs, etc).
I'm surprised Hollywood hasn't started making AAA movies filmed with two different casts... one with Mandarin-speaking actors, and one English-speaking actors (but otherwise sharing plot, CGI, sets, costume design, etc). Kind of like how American studios license and remake popular shows from Britain, but doing it right from the start so that both variants of the movie can share in the other's economies of scale and production costs.
Why? Because dubbing sucks, and subtitles suck even more. Just because people have historically tolerated them doesn't mean they actually LIKE them.
That said, 99% of my objection (as an American) to dubbing is the fact that they always seem to pick implausible voice actors to DO the dubbing. If I'm watching a movie that was clearly filmed in France, with French actors, and action that occurs in France, I fully EXPECT the English dub to have a "Hollywood French Accent". Ditto for movies set in Germany, Japan, etc. Logically, it MAKES SENSE that foreigners who are nevertheless speaking English would have an accent from wherever they're seemingly from. Dubbing them with voice actors who sound like they're from California or Ohio breaks the illusion and ruins it.
Nintendo is fucking AWFUL at handling asymmetric demand & semi-intentionally uses it as a way to create artificial scarcity.
True story: I was ready to buy a Wii on release day. Except they sold out nationwide in about 5 minutes. The same thing happened about a month later when the next shipment arrived. The buzz wore off. Fast forward 6 months... upcoming holiday with plenty of time to play with my new toy... except they were sold out. Again. The last straw was when they were sold out... AGAIN... the next time I had a long weekend coming up... almost TWO GODDAMN YEARS after the Wii's release. I finally ended up buying one last year for a pittance at a garage sale, but by that point the magic was gone & I think I might have actually used it for a total of two hours over the next month before getting bored of it.
When the Wii-U came out, I was so soured by my Wii purchasing experience, I mentally wrote it off because I wasn't about to subject myself to the same cycle of anticipation and disappointment all over again. A month or so later, it was obvious that the Wii-U wasn't selling out anywhere anytime soon, but by THEN its truly underwhelming specs (and price that was made pointlessly and stupidly high by the damn tablet controller with mediocre touchscreen it needed) just kind of made it seem like a sick joke.
The point is, I can understand them being sold out on release day. I can even stomach them being sold out after a month. But the fact that the Wii was STILL having routine shortages more than a goddamn year after release made them lose me as a first sale, and the memory of it made them lose me as a Wii-U first sale, too. Yeah, I'll probably buy a Wii-U at a garage sale for $99 eventually, but Nintendo won't make any money off of it because I'll basically be rescuing somebody's old console from a landfill.
I wish to ${deity} that non-Nintendo platforms had games like Pikmin and Chibi Robo, instead of just seemingly-endless dystopian urban-warfare FPS games.
The Wii's longevity is downright AMAZING when you realize it was basically a GameCube with a higher-clocked CPU, slightly more RAM, a normal-sized dvd drive (that STILL couldn't officially play DVDs), and controllers that could have easily been ported to GCN with little more than a receiver hanging from a controller port. Graphically, the Wii literally WAS a GameCube, with EXACTLY the same GPU.
It's a shame that "Nintendo-type" games are still almost nonexistent on other platforms. If you want to play yet another depressing "if it moves, shoot it!" FPS, or deep simulation or adventure game that fully expects you to dedicate the next 5 months of your life to its mastery, xbox and ps have you abundantly well covered. If you want a game like Pikmin or Chibi Robo... you're almost out of luck. The other platforms have hardware that stomps Nintendo's into the ground, but almost no games I'd ever really want to play. Meanwhile, Nintendo's games are kind of fun, but the low resolution and lack of good anisotropic filtering makes my eyes bleed, and Wii U doesn't offer enough added value to be worth its high price relative to other systems.
The thing is, even if he were barricaded-in and holed up, he'd EVENTUALLY have to either:
a) Try to get out, or
b) Starve to death, if he didn't die from dehydration first... probably, sitting on a small mountain of his own slimy poop.
All the police HAD to do was secure the area, put in some telepresence robots, roll in a cage with self-locking door, and tell the shooter that when he's ready to surrender peacefully, he can strip nude, enter the cage, and call them on the cell phone they've conveniently left inside for him to use.
Is it a tragedy that the shooter was killed by the police? Individually, no. He was almost certainly guilty as sin, and would have been convicted & sentenced to death anyway... but it still sets a broader disturbing precedent of allowing law enforcement to BE the judge, jury, and executioner (usually, under the kind of circumstances when a police officer who's normally calm & logical might be pushed into dangerous territory). His demise merits no tears, but SHOULD start a hard debate about the legitimate limits of lethal force by police.
Do the police deserve to be killed? Absolutely not. But it's time for the law enforcement profession to man up and accept the fact that if they're doing their job right and doing what the public THINKS they should be doing (hint: protecting and serving), officers WILL occasionally get hurt or killed. The current logic that no use lethal force is unjustified if an officer "feels threatened" will ultimately just lead to the public starting to view LEOs as a greater existential threat than the criminals they're allegedly supposed to be protecting us from.
By virtue of being empowered to use lethal force under limited circumstances, law enforcement officers SHOULD be held to a higher standard of accountability than random members of the public.
Arguments that "he might have had a bomb" are specious. If he had bombs, and/or the means to detonate them, he would have done it LONG before the bomb-carrying robot got anywhere CLOSE to him. This was basically a case of impatient cops determined to bring the crisis to a speedy end for the news media by whatever means necessary.
Detroit as lots of problems, but poverty isn't actually the worst or most intractable of them.
* Detroit is fairly small in terms of land area compared to cities like Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and Atlanta... and a HUGE portion of its land area was polluted decades ago in ways that would probably shock people in CHINA.
* If sufficiently-bad environmental pollution is discovered on a tract of land, the current owners are legally on the hook for 100% of the clean-up costs... regardless of whether those costs exceed the value of the land, and regardless of whether the current owners actually had anything at all to DO with the pollution. During the early 20th century, American factories did some really awful things that would never pass muster today... and Detroit was Ground Zero for American Industry. As a result, no sane company will DARE to take ownership of land in Detroit that's likely to be polluted. Not even if the city/county/state/feds gave it to them for FREE. Because that cheap/free plot of land could end up costing them literally unlimited amounts of money for clean-up costs. And the city can't even indemnify purchasers, because the city ITSELF is insolvent & the feds could still turn around and force the new owner to eat 100% of the costs itself.
* Pollution aside, most of Detroit is what's called a "lienfield" (pun on "minefield"). Many of the properties in Detroit have old city liens whose amounts far exceed any conceivable value of the property. In theory, the city could write the old, uncollectable liens off in order to get the property back into productive use again... but in reality, it can't afford to. The value of those old liens might be a polite fiction that exists only on paper... but it's a polite fiction that's propped up what's left of Detroit's credit rating. If Detroit started writing off old liens, its credit rating would plunge.
If America wants to save Detroit (the literal city of Detroit... the larger metro area is doing just fine), the best place to start would be to change the laws for environmental liability so that someone who buys a property there in good faith, then discovers an environmental nightmare below the surface that they literally had nothing whatsoever to do with, could at least wash their hands of the loss and walk away without being on the hook for more than what they paid for the property.
Note that this problem isn't unique to Detroit... cities all across the "Rust Belt" have problems with abandoned factories rendered untouchable by legal liability. Detroit just happens to have a lot MORE of them relative to its total land area. THIS is the #1 reason why when a factory closes, the land it sat on sits abandoned more or less "forever", and new factories only get built on virgin land (usually, far away from those same factories).
This is also part of the reason why some have advocated having the City demolish entire blocks that have been abandoned by their owners... individually, those derelict properties are worth less than nothing... but as a vacant lot that's a square block in size, they might start to become interesting to investors. Especially if those same investors can buy SEVERAL adjacent square blocks & get the City to agree to vacate the streets & infrastructure dividing them so the property can be redeveloped as a single huge structure. And more importantly, with residents gone from the area, the former neighborhood can become the site of a new factory (that would NEVER be allowed to get built next to a residential area, no matter HOW poor it is).
Because it has fewer fatalities per driven-mile than the statistical norm for HUMAN-driven cars, perhaps?
The driver's main judgment error was using autopilot on a road that wasn't a freeway & had cars crossing the road.
Realistically, we're already at the point where it's safe to have autopilot driving on a limited-access road in reasonable weather conditions. The problem is, automakers' lawyers won't allow them to openly say, "autopilot is safe under these specific conditions...". They pretend that safe situations are no more or less hazardous than genuinely dangerous ones, and as a result people don't recognize the truly dangerous ones. When every valid warning is buried under a half-dozen bullshit warnings, they ALL end up getting ignored.
You're right, but the proliferation of things like Spring have SERIOUSLY blurred the lines between compiled languages and interpreted languages. When you're using a framework that builds objects dynamically at runtime from definitions in config files via introspection and custom classloaders instead of compiling them from Java sourcecode, you're giving up most of the safeguards a compiler has traditionally furnished for you.
The big, huge problem with Tomcat is that it doesn't scale well beyond a single instance running on a single server (unless something MAJOR has changed within the past year or two). Mostly, because it takes an eternity to start up after redeploying a new webapp, and starts responding to http requests with 502 errors (instead of just silently ignoring the connection requests) a minute or more before it's REALLY ready to handle them. And frameworks like Spring just make matters even worse.
Actually, Sun's OFFICIAL beef with J# was the fact that it made it easy to directly use things like DirectX and MSIE. They were afraid that if Microsoft got its way, Java would rapidly cease to be platform-independent... or at least, writing Java apps that could only build & run under Windows would have been enormously easier than writing platform-agnostic apps.
The catch is, most of the things Sun was pissed at Microsoft for allowing J# developers to do were things that "pure Java" couldn't do AT ALL, because Sun couldn't be arsed to even TRY to give developers a comparable -- let alone superior -- alternative to platform-dependent features (though apparently, Apple deserves a hefty chunk of the blame, too).
Three specific examples:
* Embedding a browser in a Window. J# made it absurdly easy. The last time I checked, it's STILL a royal pain to do this with Java (and AFAIK, the only way is with Firefox and JNI).
* Using DirectX. OpenGL ultimately won the battle for the hearts & minds of developers (mostly because Microsoft tried to use DirectX as a tool to bully Windows 7 gamers into instaling Windows 8, and it backfired when users revolted and developers were forced to switch to OpenGL to remain competitive), but back in the J# era, DirectX was ENORMOUSLY nicer to develop with compared to OpenGL.
* Using Microsoft-specific APIs to do things like monitor directories for changed files, interact with the system tray & taskbar, etc... things that Java didn't really have any good way to do natively until sometime around JDK6 or JDK7 (taskbar might have been JDK5, but I'm pretty sure monitoring filesystem paths for changes didn't exist until JDK7's NIO2)
Not really, when you consider the reality that someone who's paying more attention to their phone than the road while driving a car with autopilot probably would have been paying a lot of attention to his phone ANYWAY, autopilot or not. Distracted drivers with autopilot are a NET IMPROVEMENT over the current status quo of distracted drivers without it.
The opportunity cost of restricting autopilot use by distracted drivers is increased accidents involving drivers who are almost as distracted.
They're required to re-negotiate if the sink device changes, or a sink is added or removed, but at the other end of the chain, a source is a device, not a service provided by the device. It's 100% legitimate for a source device (like a cable box) to negotiate the key exchange with all sink devices (like TVs, home theater receivers, etc), authorize the channels allowed for a customer, then switch between channels without fully re-negotiating the HDCP link from scratch. They just do it because it's easier to code and cheaper to develop & get certified, and they're unlikely to actually lose a single actual sale over it (because their customers are TV service providers & NOT end users)... so they just do it, end users be damned.
THAT is one of the things the FCC is specifically trying to prevent... companies steamrolling over consumers and subjecting them to shitty hardware and policies just because they CAN. This is a worthwhile effort by the FCC, even if it doesn't ultimately save consumers a cent. Or even if it ultimately adds to the cost of the hardware. The experience of using something matters at least as much as the cost of using it.
They could probably flash a pattern of infrared light that cameras would be required to respect and shut down, but THEN it would be just a matter of time until law enforcement officers started flashing the SAME infrared light pattern to prevent bystanders from filming them. And venues like Disney started flashing it everywhere so they could make you pay them for photos instead of allowing customers to take their own photos for free. And stores like Best Buy & Walmart started flashing it to keep you from scanning barcodes and seeing how much something costs online. Right now, if a company or entity tries to ban cameras, they're likely to encounter at least a certain degree of resistance. Sometimes it won't matter, sometimes it will make them reconsider their desire to ban cameras. But if it becomes trivially easy to prevent photography and video recordings, within a matter of months every corporation in America will decide that it's a "best practice" to do it, just because their lawyers will tell them that to do otherwise would expose the company to a potential lawsuit or prosecution someday.
I really don't understand why movie theaters can't be built with a single-occupant unisex toilet and soundproof door (to keep the noise from being audible to the rest of the theater), a speaker inside simulcasting the audio track from the movie (if not one or more LCD TVs showing the movie itself, since it's all digital now anyway), and a queue area from which the screen can be viewed while waiting in line. They'd sell more mega-sized drinks, because people wouldn't have to be afraid of spending half the movie either desperately having to pee or missing 5-10 minutes running to the restroom after drinking a half-gallon of Diet Coke.
Let's not forget other stupid things, like boxes that insist upon doing HDCP re-negotiation every goddamn time you change the channel and add a minimum of 3-5 seconds to the time it takes. It's 100% sloppy programming and design. HDCP's rules don't even require that they go that far... they just can't be arsed to bother optimizing channel-changing speed for boxes that have a captive market anyway.
IMHO, it should take AT MOST about 500ms to change channels (assuming that at the moment of change, you missed the I-Frame & had to wait for the GOP's end 15 frames later, then wanted to pre-buffer a full GOP to avoid artifacts from network hiccups and interference). And if the DVRs were REALLY smart, they'd put unused tuners to use watching the adjacent channels, so they'd be ready to switch to them in a literal instant instead of having to slog through the whole thing all over again. With a 4-tuner DVR that has one tuner recording a show, you could have the other 3 tuning the channel being watched and the one above & below it. Once the user starts changing channels, both of the spare tuners could be temporarily re-allocated to the next 2 channels in the same direction.
If it weren't for HDCP and DRM, we'd already have stuff like this, because people would be able to make their own tuners using FPGA dev kits if products like that didn't exist commercially. HDCP has made it almost completely impossible for small, nimble companies to design cool niche home theater stuff anymore, because the HDCP people won't give the keys to their castle out to anyone who works for a company smaller than Samsung, Sony, Phillips, or Huawei.
Um... you might want to Google "SlingTV", "Playstation VUE", and/or "Southern Fibernet". The first two are available now, the third is in beta.
I pay $14/month (with T-mobile customer discount) to get SlingTV's multi-stream service (including CNN, FX, Comedy Central, AdultSwim, History, NatGeo, and HGTV). The only thing that sucks about it is the lack of DVR functionality, which means that CNN is one of the only channels I actually watch on it (the other channels do have some/all of the current season's episodes of popular shows available on demand, which partially makes up for it).
If Vue would allow me to subscribe to the packages they offer to cities WITHOUT local channels (I have a perfectly good antenna and Windows Media Center DVR, thank you), I'd probably switch... but I refuse to pay for local channels I can get perfectly well on my own for free.
SFN looks interesting, and DirecTV/Uverse is planning to launch a streaming service of their own later this year. There's also "USTVnow.com", which is supposedly for overseas Americans, but will reportedly allow anybody with a valid credit card to subscribe.
My predictions: two years from now, every rural and Mom & Pop cable company in America will be jumping into the nationwide OTT streaming market.
Actually, you probably WOULDN'T be able to live off the literal interest. You'd be lucky to get 0.15% interest... and no, that isn't "fifteen percent" -- it's fifteen hundredths of a percent. If you had 3 million dollars earning 0.15% per year, your interest income would be a whopping $4,500/year. Don't spend it all in one place...
> Issue isn't safety - airplanes would be making the trip anyway.
Not necessarily. If a non-wealthy pilot who'd normally be constrained by the cost of taking the plane up in the air can suddenly afford to fly it more often because he can easily find people to share the cost with, there WILL be more such flights.
Or, rephrased in terms of "freedom and liberty" -- the right of others to fly a deathtrap jalopy ends at my roof. The FAA has a duty to protect my rights as a non-passenger on the ground at least as vigorously as it protects the rights of someone to fly an inherently dangerous aircraft above it. If the FAA allows something to increase the number of such flights, it has a duty to mitigate the risk posed by those additional flights by making them individually less-likely to fall from the sky into my house.
Small (especially single-engine) planes are SEVERAL ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE more likely to crash than large jets, and pilot experience has very little to do with it.
Don't believe me? OK, search Google for the last single-engine plane crash within 100 miles of your home. Chances are, unless you live in the middle of nowhere, there's been at least one within the past 2-3 years. Now... when's the last time a commercial jet crashed within 100 miles of your home (9/11 doesn't count)?
I live in South Florida. We've had exactly THREE nearby commercial jet crashes within the past 50 years... ValuJet flight 592 in 1996, Fine Air flight 101 in 1997, and Eastern Airlines flight 401 in 1972. One was the result of criminal corporate malfeasance, one was the result of breathtaking stupidity (an overweight cargo jet whose contents shifted during takeoff), and one was the result of pilot error that modern flight control systems make nearly impossible. Both MIA and FLL average at least one jet taking off or landing per minute, for approximately 18 hours per day, every day. Literally millions of people fly to and from South Florida on commercial flights every day, with a 50-year fatality rate that averages out to almost zero.
Now, contrast that with crashes of single-engine private planes. FXE (Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport) has had at least 3 crashes since 2009. I used to work at an office adjacent to one of its runways, and LITERALLY heard a plane crash about a quarter mile away while sitting at my desk. Another plane ran off the runway and ended up in a nearby parking lot. Another crashed into a residential neighborhood a mile away. And that's just one airport in Broward County. I think both of Miami's general-aviation airports (Opa-Locka and Miami Executive) have had at least 3 crashes apiece in the past 5 years, too. And I'm not even counting the planes that fall into the Caribbean between South Florida and the Bahamas.
Compared to commercial jets, single-engine private planes are deathtraps, and the FAA knows it. It doesn't have the political capital to ban them outright, but it's not going to allow several times as many people to put themselves (and others) at risk by allowing an Uber-like service to encourage more private flights with more passengers on board. It's either going to rigidly enforce its ban on commercializing private planes, or increase the regulatory requirements ON private planes to compensate... and if it encountered too much resistance over maintenance and equipment regulations, it would move to severely restrict the operation of private single-engine planes in urban airspace.
The biggest problem with ISA-era expansion cards wasn't their lack of plug & play support... it was the fact that they all needed at least one IRQ of their own, and VERY FEW of them could actually use any IRQ besides 2, 3, 4, 5, or 7... and most of THOSE could only use 4 of them because the manufacturers were too cheap to put more than 2 jumpers on the board.
Then, Windows went completely batshit crazy around the XP era, went totally overboard in the opposite direction, and started doing stupid things like attempting to use a single IRQ for literally every single device in the system... right around the same time Intel increased the IRQ limit up to ~24 and eliminated any need to actually DO it.
Remember, there were basically two kinds of "Winmodems":
* The cheap shit "Host Signal Processing" ones that were basically glorified soundcards with a phone jack & used the CPU for literally EVERYTHING.
* The premium ones that had a proper DSP to do the heavy lifting (like Lucent's), and only used the host driver to implement things like parity and +++AT commands.
The DSP-type Winmodems, on a fast computer, often had slightly BETTER performance than non-Winmodems. Why? Most non-Winmodems had underpowered microcontrollers... their embedded CPU was sometimes a performance-limiting factor. In contrast, DSP-type Winmodems could take full advantage of a powerful CPU to do things almost instantly that took substantially longer to do on most non-Winmodems.
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Hmmm, now I'm intrigued... did the CoCo have the same wacky way of addressing pixels (1 bit per 7 pixels to select red+ blue or green+ purple, then 7 bits to select one or the other, or white if two adjacent pixels were set, and the Venetian-blind ram addressing)?
Also... what did an Apple II do if you had two adjacent bytes... one with the msb set, one with the msb clear, and set the rightmost pixel/bit of the first byte, and the leftmost pixel/bit (bit 6) of the second byte? Did it make white, because you had two adjacent on pixels, or did the fact that one was a blue or red pixel, and one was a green or purple pixel, make a difference?
Actually, I vaguely remember that even the TI-99/4A had some kind of DRM that prevented most thirdparty software from running on it. I've never fully understood why, but I think it was something like this:
* The CPU could only directly access 256 bytes of RAM. The remaining RAM technically belonged to the graphics subsystem.
* The CPU could only execute code from a ROM cartridge after the graphics subsystem authorized it. I think it was protected by a combination of aggressively-defended patents and some technical means that was ultimately cracked years later.
* TI BASIC, unlike Commodore, Atari, and Apple BASIC, had no way for users to poke an assembly-language program into ram & begin executing it (with something like "SYS 49152")
It's sad, because the TI-99/4A was a seriously hot mess. It was technically one of the most powerful computers on the market at the time, but TI arbitrarily crippled its usage so badly that it just withered on the vine while more open platforms (the 3 mentioned, plus probably ZX Spectrum in Europe) flourished. Most people have NO IDEA that the TI-99/4A actually had the same graphics & sound chips as a Colecovision, a faster CPU, and probably more total RAM (though RAM beyond the 256 bytes of SRAM hardwired to the CPU had to be read and written a byte at a time, kind of like copying data to a VGA card's ram). Weirdly enough, the Radio Shack COLOR COMPUTER actually had the same graphics chip, too... though it provides a great example of how a bad design can ruin an otherwise good graphics chip (to cut costs, Tandy eliminated the ram that was supposed to be used for defining background colors of individual characters, and instead hardwired the chip so it always just used green as the background color in any character-based graphics mode).
It's even older than NES. The **ATARI 7800** had DRM used to lock out unauthorized cartridges, and it was technically released around 1984 (though 99% of the 7800s sat in warehouses until the early 90s before Tramiel finally dumped them on the market).
You can download the generic drivers for a mobile Quadro, but you'll have to lie to Nvidia's website and say your video card was bought by you (instead of furnished by the manufacturer). I'm not sure whether you can do that if your laptop has integrated graphics (my Dell Precision m4800 has a discrete Quadro m2100 video card... from what I've read, other cards are probably electronically compatible, but it's anybody's guess whether other cards will physically fit and have screw holes in the right place. I believe Dell & Alienware laptops use the same dimensions for their discrete laptop video cards, though.
Maybe, but there's a HUGE amount of functionality that lies between "no autonomous driving capability at all" and "able to drive your kids to school, then bring the car home and park it in the garage for you".
The fact is, we had the technology to make semi-autonomous cars capable of lanekeeping and collision-avoidance more than TWENTY YEARS AGO. The catch is, it would have:
* doubled or tripled the cost of an average car
* required the construction of thousands of miles of new freeway lanes for the exclusive use of cars with autonomous driving capabilities... at staggering cost, for the benefit of what would have then been a very, very small subset of drivers. And we're talking about adding 4 new lanes to roads that probably had only 4 or 6 lanes to begin with circa 1990. Those lanes would have needed embedded signal wires for steering guidance, sensors to maintain distance, telemetry to identify cars and handshake with the centralized control system, etc.
In other words, do-able, and in fact actively DEMONSTRATED by GM at EPCOT... but totally impractical given the cost of the road improvements it would have required to work with 1990s technology.
What changed? Cars can now deal with driving autonomously on "normal" roads (under specific constraints), and deal with random acts of stupidity by other drivers. THAT would have been within the realm of science fiction 20 years ago.
10 years from now, when you say your new car has "advanced cruise control", it'll go without saying that it can stay in the lane and avoid collisions when driving on a limited-access highway in good weather conditions, and can follow the car in front of you as it crawls through urban gridlock (probably leaving it up to YOU to obey things like traffic lights, stop signs, etc).
I'm surprised Hollywood hasn't started making AAA movies filmed with two different casts... one with Mandarin-speaking actors, and one English-speaking actors (but otherwise sharing plot, CGI, sets, costume design, etc). Kind of like how American studios license and remake popular shows from Britain, but doing it right from the start so that both variants of the movie can share in the other's economies of scale and production costs.
Why? Because dubbing sucks, and subtitles suck even more. Just because people have historically tolerated them doesn't mean they actually LIKE them.
That said, 99% of my objection (as an American) to dubbing is the fact that they always seem to pick implausible voice actors to DO the dubbing. If I'm watching a movie that was clearly filmed in France, with French actors, and action that occurs in France, I fully EXPECT the English dub to have a "Hollywood French Accent". Ditto for movies set in Germany, Japan, etc. Logically, it MAKES SENSE that foreigners who are nevertheless speaking English would have an accent from wherever they're seemingly from. Dubbing them with voice actors who sound like they're from California or Ohio breaks the illusion and ruins it.
Nintendo is fucking AWFUL at handling asymmetric demand & semi-intentionally uses it as a way to create artificial scarcity.
True story: I was ready to buy a Wii on release day. Except they sold out nationwide in about 5 minutes. The same thing happened about a month later when the next shipment arrived. The buzz wore off. Fast forward 6 months... upcoming holiday with plenty of time to play with my new toy... except they were sold out. Again. The last straw was when they were sold out... AGAIN... the next time I had a long weekend coming up... almost TWO GODDAMN YEARS after the Wii's release. I finally ended up buying one last year for a pittance at a garage sale, but by that point the magic was gone & I think I might have actually used it for a total of two hours over the next month before getting bored of it.
When the Wii-U came out, I was so soured by my Wii purchasing experience, I mentally wrote it off because I wasn't about to subject myself to the same cycle of anticipation and disappointment all over again. A month or so later, it was obvious that the Wii-U wasn't selling out anywhere anytime soon, but by THEN its truly underwhelming specs (and price that was made pointlessly and stupidly high by the damn tablet controller with mediocre touchscreen it needed) just kind of made it seem like a sick joke.
The point is, I can understand them being sold out on release day. I can even stomach them being sold out after a month. But the fact that the Wii was STILL having routine shortages more than a goddamn year after release made them lose me as a first sale, and the memory of it made them lose me as a Wii-U first sale, too. Yeah, I'll probably buy a Wii-U at a garage sale for $99 eventually, but Nintendo won't make any money off of it because I'll basically be rescuing somebody's old console from a landfill.
I wish to ${deity} that non-Nintendo platforms had games like Pikmin and Chibi Robo, instead of just seemingly-endless dystopian urban-warfare FPS games.
The Wii's longevity is downright AMAZING when you realize it was basically a GameCube with a higher-clocked CPU, slightly more RAM, a normal-sized dvd drive (that STILL couldn't officially play DVDs), and controllers that could have easily been ported to GCN with little more than a receiver hanging from a controller port. Graphically, the Wii literally WAS a GameCube, with EXACTLY the same GPU.
It's a shame that "Nintendo-type" games are still almost nonexistent on other platforms. If you want to play yet another depressing "if it moves, shoot it!" FPS, or deep simulation or adventure game that fully expects you to dedicate the next 5 months of your life to its mastery, xbox and ps have you abundantly well covered. If you want a game like Pikmin or Chibi Robo... you're almost out of luck. The other platforms have hardware that stomps Nintendo's into the ground, but almost no games I'd ever really want to play. Meanwhile, Nintendo's games are kind of fun, but the low resolution and lack of good anisotropic filtering makes my eyes bleed, and Wii U doesn't offer enough added value to be worth its high price relative to other systems.
The thing is, even if he were barricaded-in and holed up, he'd EVENTUALLY have to either:
a) Try to get out, or
b) Starve to death, if he didn't die from dehydration first... probably, sitting on a small mountain of his own slimy poop.
All the police HAD to do was secure the area, put in some telepresence robots, roll in a cage with self-locking door, and tell the shooter that when he's ready to surrender peacefully, he can strip nude, enter the cage, and call them on the cell phone they've conveniently left inside for him to use.
Is it a tragedy that the shooter was killed by the police? Individually, no. He was almost certainly guilty as sin, and would have been convicted & sentenced to death anyway... but it still sets a broader disturbing precedent of allowing law enforcement to BE the judge, jury, and executioner (usually, under the kind of circumstances when a police officer who's normally calm & logical might be pushed into dangerous territory). His demise merits no tears, but SHOULD start a hard debate about the legitimate limits of lethal force by police.
Do the police deserve to be killed? Absolutely not. But it's time for the law enforcement profession to man up and accept the fact that if they're doing their job right and doing what the public THINKS they should be doing (hint: protecting and serving), officers WILL occasionally get hurt or killed. The current logic that no use lethal force is unjustified if an officer "feels threatened" will ultimately just lead to the public starting to view LEOs as a greater existential threat than the criminals they're allegedly supposed to be protecting us from.
By virtue of being empowered to use lethal force under limited circumstances, law enforcement officers SHOULD be held to a higher standard of accountability than random members of the public.
Arguments that "he might have had a bomb" are specious. If he had bombs, and/or the means to detonate them, he would have done it LONG before the bomb-carrying robot got anywhere CLOSE to him. This was basically a case of impatient cops determined to bring the crisis to a speedy end for the news media by whatever means necessary.
Detroit as lots of problems, but poverty isn't actually the worst or most intractable of them.
* Detroit is fairly small in terms of land area compared to cities like Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and Atlanta... and a HUGE portion of its land area was polluted decades ago in ways that would probably shock people in CHINA.
* If sufficiently-bad environmental pollution is discovered on a tract of land, the current owners are legally on the hook for 100% of the clean-up costs... regardless of whether those costs exceed the value of the land, and regardless of whether the current owners actually had anything at all to DO with the pollution. During the early 20th century, American factories did some really awful things that would never pass muster today... and Detroit was Ground Zero for American Industry. As a result, no sane company will DARE to take ownership of land in Detroit that's likely to be polluted. Not even if the city/county/state/feds gave it to them for FREE. Because that cheap/free plot of land could end up costing them literally unlimited amounts of money for clean-up costs. And the city can't even indemnify purchasers, because the city ITSELF is insolvent & the feds could still turn around and force the new owner to eat 100% of the costs itself.
* Pollution aside, most of Detroit is what's called a "lienfield" (pun on "minefield"). Many of the properties in Detroit have old city liens whose amounts far exceed any conceivable value of the property. In theory, the city could write the old, uncollectable liens off in order to get the property back into productive use again... but in reality, it can't afford to. The value of those old liens might be a polite fiction that exists only on paper... but it's a polite fiction that's propped up what's left of Detroit's credit rating. If Detroit started writing off old liens, its credit rating would plunge.
If America wants to save Detroit (the literal city of Detroit... the larger metro area is doing just fine), the best place to start would be to change the laws for environmental liability so that someone who buys a property there in good faith, then discovers an environmental nightmare below the surface that they literally had nothing whatsoever to do with, could at least wash their hands of the loss and walk away without being on the hook for more than what they paid for the property.
Note that this problem isn't unique to Detroit... cities all across the "Rust Belt" have problems with abandoned factories rendered untouchable by legal liability. Detroit just happens to have a lot MORE of them relative to its total land area. THIS is the #1 reason why when a factory closes, the land it sat on sits abandoned more or less "forever", and new factories only get built on virgin land (usually, far away from those same factories).
This is also part of the reason why some have advocated having the City demolish entire blocks that have been abandoned by their owners... individually, those derelict properties are worth less than nothing... but as a vacant lot that's a square block in size, they might start to become interesting to investors. Especially if those same investors can buy SEVERAL adjacent square blocks & get the City to agree to vacate the streets & infrastructure dividing them so the property can be redeveloped as a single huge structure. And more importantly, with residents gone from the area, the former neighborhood can become the site of a new factory (that would NEVER be allowed to get built next to a residential area, no matter HOW poor it is).
Because it has fewer fatalities per driven-mile than the statistical norm for HUMAN-driven cars, perhaps?
The driver's main judgment error was using autopilot on a road that wasn't a freeway & had cars crossing the road.
Realistically, we're already at the point where it's safe to have autopilot driving on a limited-access road in reasonable weather conditions. The problem is, automakers' lawyers won't allow them to openly say, "autopilot is safe under these specific conditions...". They pretend that safe situations are no more or less hazardous than genuinely dangerous ones, and as a result people don't recognize the truly dangerous ones. When every valid warning is buried under a half-dozen bullshit warnings, they ALL end up getting ignored.
You're right, but the proliferation of things like Spring have SERIOUSLY blurred the lines between compiled languages and interpreted languages. When you're using a framework that builds objects dynamically at runtime from definitions in config files via introspection and custom classloaders instead of compiling them from Java sourcecode, you're giving up most of the safeguards a compiler has traditionally furnished for you.
The big, huge problem with Tomcat is that it doesn't scale well beyond a single instance running on a single server (unless something MAJOR has changed within the past year or two). Mostly, because it takes an eternity to start up after redeploying a new webapp, and starts responding to http requests with 502 errors (instead of just silently ignoring the connection requests) a minute or more before it's REALLY ready to handle them. And frameworks like Spring just make matters even worse.
Actually, Sun's OFFICIAL beef with J# was the fact that it made it easy to directly use things like DirectX and MSIE. They were afraid that if Microsoft got its way, Java would rapidly cease to be platform-independent... or at least, writing Java apps that could only build & run under Windows would have been enormously easier than writing platform-agnostic apps.
The catch is, most of the things Sun was pissed at Microsoft for allowing J# developers to do were things that "pure Java" couldn't do AT ALL, because Sun couldn't be arsed to even TRY to give developers a comparable -- let alone superior -- alternative to platform-dependent features (though apparently, Apple deserves a hefty chunk of the blame, too).
Three specific examples:
* Embedding a browser in a Window. J# made it absurdly easy. The last time I checked, it's STILL a royal pain to do this with Java (and AFAIK, the only way is with Firefox and JNI).
* Using DirectX. OpenGL ultimately won the battle for the hearts & minds of developers (mostly because Microsoft tried to use DirectX as a tool to bully Windows 7 gamers into instaling Windows 8, and it backfired when users revolted and developers were forced to switch to OpenGL to remain competitive), but back in the J# era, DirectX was ENORMOUSLY nicer to develop with compared to OpenGL.
* Using Microsoft-specific APIs to do things like monitor directories for changed files, interact with the system tray & taskbar, etc... things that Java didn't really have any good way to do natively until sometime around JDK6 or JDK7 (taskbar might have been JDK5, but I'm pretty sure monitoring filesystem paths for changes didn't exist until JDK7's NIO2)
Not really, when you consider the reality that someone who's paying more attention to their phone than the road while driving a car with autopilot probably would have been paying a lot of attention to his phone ANYWAY, autopilot or not. Distracted drivers with autopilot are a NET IMPROVEMENT over the current status quo of distracted drivers without it.
The opportunity cost of restricting autopilot use by distracted drivers is increased accidents involving drivers who are almost as distracted.
They're required to re-negotiate if the sink device changes, or a sink is added or removed, but at the other end of the chain, a source is a device, not a service provided by the device. It's 100% legitimate for a source device (like a cable box) to negotiate the key exchange with all sink devices (like TVs, home theater receivers, etc), authorize the channels allowed for a customer, then switch between channels without fully re-negotiating the HDCP link from scratch. They just do it because it's easier to code and cheaper to develop & get certified, and they're unlikely to actually lose a single actual sale over it (because their customers are TV service providers & NOT end users)... so they just do it, end users be damned.
THAT is one of the things the FCC is specifically trying to prevent... companies steamrolling over consumers and subjecting them to shitty hardware and policies just because they CAN. This is a worthwhile effort by the FCC, even if it doesn't ultimately save consumers a cent. Or even if it ultimately adds to the cost of the hardware. The experience of using something matters at least as much as the cost of using it.
They could probably flash a pattern of infrared light that cameras would be required to respect and shut down, but THEN it would be just a matter of time until law enforcement officers started flashing the SAME infrared light pattern to prevent bystanders from filming them. And venues like Disney started flashing it everywhere so they could make you pay them for photos instead of allowing customers to take their own photos for free. And stores like Best Buy & Walmart started flashing it to keep you from scanning barcodes and seeing how much something costs online. Right now, if a company or entity tries to ban cameras, they're likely to encounter at least a certain degree of resistance. Sometimes it won't matter, sometimes it will make them reconsider their desire to ban cameras. But if it becomes trivially easy to prevent photography and video recordings, within a matter of months every corporation in America will decide that it's a "best practice" to do it, just because their lawyers will tell them that to do otherwise would expose the company to a potential lawsuit or prosecution someday.
I really don't understand why movie theaters can't be built with a single-occupant unisex toilet and soundproof door (to keep the noise from being audible to the rest of the theater), a speaker inside simulcasting the audio track from the movie (if not one or more LCD TVs showing the movie itself, since it's all digital now anyway), and a queue area from which the screen can be viewed while waiting in line. They'd sell more mega-sized drinks, because people wouldn't have to be afraid of spending half the movie either desperately having to pee or missing 5-10 minutes running to the restroom after drinking a half-gallon of Diet Coke.
Let's not forget other stupid things, like boxes that insist upon doing HDCP re-negotiation every goddamn time you change the channel and add a minimum of 3-5 seconds to the time it takes. It's 100% sloppy programming and design. HDCP's rules don't even require that they go that far... they just can't be arsed to bother optimizing channel-changing speed for boxes that have a captive market anyway.
IMHO, it should take AT MOST about 500ms to change channels (assuming that at the moment of change, you missed the I-Frame & had to wait for the GOP's end 15 frames later, then wanted to pre-buffer a full GOP to avoid artifacts from network hiccups and interference). And if the DVRs were REALLY smart, they'd put unused tuners to use watching the adjacent channels, so they'd be ready to switch to them in a literal instant instead of having to slog through the whole thing all over again. With a 4-tuner DVR that has one tuner recording a show, you could have the other 3 tuning the channel being watched and the one above & below it. Once the user starts changing channels, both of the spare tuners could be temporarily re-allocated to the next 2 channels in the same direction.
If it weren't for HDCP and DRM, we'd already have stuff like this, because people would be able to make their own tuners using FPGA dev kits if products like that didn't exist commercially. HDCP has made it almost completely impossible for small, nimble companies to design cool niche home theater stuff anymore, because the HDCP people won't give the keys to their castle out to anyone who works for a company smaller than Samsung, Sony, Phillips, or Huawei.
Um... you might want to Google "SlingTV", "Playstation VUE", and/or "Southern Fibernet". The first two are available now, the third is in beta.
I pay $14/month (with T-mobile customer discount) to get SlingTV's multi-stream service (including CNN, FX, Comedy Central, AdultSwim, History, NatGeo, and HGTV). The only thing that sucks about it is the lack of DVR functionality, which means that CNN is one of the only channels I actually watch on it (the other channels do have some/all of the current season's episodes of popular shows available on demand, which partially makes up for it).
If Vue would allow me to subscribe to the packages they offer to cities WITHOUT local channels (I have a perfectly good antenna and Windows Media Center DVR, thank you), I'd probably switch... but I refuse to pay for local channels I can get perfectly well on my own for free.
SFN looks interesting, and DirecTV/Uverse is planning to launch a streaming service of their own later this year. There's also "USTVnow.com", which is supposedly for overseas Americans, but will reportedly allow anybody with a valid credit card to subscribe.
My predictions: two years from now, every rural and Mom & Pop cable company in America will be jumping into the nationwide OTT streaming market.
Actually, you probably WOULDN'T be able to live off the literal interest. You'd be lucky to get 0.15% interest... and no, that isn't "fifteen percent" -- it's fifteen hundredths of a percent. If you had 3 million dollars earning 0.15% per year, your interest income would be a whopping $4,500/year. Don't spend it all in one place...
> Issue isn't safety - airplanes would be making the trip anyway.
Not necessarily. If a non-wealthy pilot who'd normally be constrained by the cost of taking the plane up in the air can suddenly afford to fly it more often because he can easily find people to share the cost with, there WILL be more such flights.
Or, rephrased in terms of "freedom and liberty" -- the right of others to fly a deathtrap jalopy ends at my roof. The FAA has a duty to protect my rights as a non-passenger on the ground at least as vigorously as it protects the rights of someone to fly an inherently dangerous aircraft above it. If the FAA allows something to increase the number of such flights, it has a duty to mitigate the risk posed by those additional flights by making them individually less-likely to fall from the sky into my house.
Small (especially single-engine) planes are SEVERAL ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE more likely to crash than large jets, and pilot experience has very little to do with it.
Don't believe me? OK, search Google for the last single-engine plane crash within 100 miles of your home. Chances are, unless you live in the middle of nowhere, there's been at least one within the past 2-3 years. Now... when's the last time a commercial jet crashed within 100 miles of your home (9/11 doesn't count)?
I live in South Florida. We've had exactly THREE nearby commercial jet crashes within the past 50 years... ValuJet flight 592 in 1996, Fine Air flight 101 in 1997, and Eastern Airlines flight 401 in 1972. One was the result of criminal corporate malfeasance, one was the result of breathtaking stupidity (an overweight cargo jet whose contents shifted during takeoff), and one was the result of pilot error that modern flight control systems make nearly impossible. Both MIA and FLL average at least one jet taking off or landing per minute, for approximately 18 hours per day, every day. Literally millions of people fly to and from South Florida on commercial flights every day, with a 50-year fatality rate that averages out to almost zero.
Now, contrast that with crashes of single-engine private planes. FXE (Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport) has had at least 3 crashes since 2009. I used to work at an office adjacent to one of its runways, and LITERALLY heard a plane crash about a quarter mile away while sitting at my desk. Another plane ran off the runway and ended up in a nearby parking lot. Another crashed into a residential neighborhood a mile away. And that's just one airport in Broward County. I think both of Miami's general-aviation airports (Opa-Locka and Miami Executive) have had at least 3 crashes apiece in the past 5 years, too. And I'm not even counting the planes that fall into the Caribbean between South Florida and the Bahamas.
Compared to commercial jets, single-engine private planes are deathtraps, and the FAA knows it. It doesn't have the political capital to ban them outright, but it's not going to allow several times as many people to put themselves (and others) at risk by allowing an Uber-like service to encourage more private flights with more passengers on board. It's either going to rigidly enforce its ban on commercializing private planes, or increase the regulatory requirements ON private planes to compensate... and if it encountered too much resistance over maintenance and equipment regulations, it would move to severely restrict the operation of private single-engine planes in urban airspace.
The biggest problem with ISA-era expansion cards wasn't their lack of plug & play support... it was the fact that they all needed at least one IRQ of their own, and VERY FEW of them could actually use any IRQ besides 2, 3, 4, 5, or 7... and most of THOSE could only use 4 of them because the manufacturers were too cheap to put more than 2 jumpers on the board.
Then, Windows went completely batshit crazy around the XP era, went totally overboard in the opposite direction, and started doing stupid things like attempting to use a single IRQ for literally every single device in the system... right around the same time Intel increased the IRQ limit up to ~24 and eliminated any need to actually DO it.
Remember, there were basically two kinds of "Winmodems":
* The cheap shit "Host Signal Processing" ones that were basically glorified soundcards with a phone jack & used the CPU for literally EVERYTHING.
* The premium ones that had a proper DSP to do the heavy lifting (like Lucent's), and only used the host driver to implement things like parity and +++AT commands.
The DSP-type Winmodems, on a fast computer, often had slightly BETTER performance than non-Winmodems. Why? Most non-Winmodems had underpowered microcontrollers... their embedded CPU was sometimes a performance-limiting factor. In contrast, DSP-type Winmodems could take full advantage of a powerful CPU to do things almost instantly that took substantially longer to do on most non-Winmodems.