If you were wealthy enough to afford 16 megs (somewhere around $750 circa 1993, from what I vaguely remember), OS/2 was definitely a step up from Windows 3.11. It did a better job of multitasking Windows 3.11 apps than Windows 3.11 itself did. IF you had the RAM.
That said, Windows 95 was a real-world step up from OS/2 Warp in every meaningful way. I remember that my soundcard (Gravis Ultrasound) NEVER, EVER worked reliably under OS/2. From what I recall, it could only do 1024x768 in 16-color mode without hardware acceleration on my first-generation S3 '911 video card, and crashed constantly with the Tseng ET4000/w32 card I bought to replace it (on rumors that it worked better under OS/2). And I'm pretty sure I had to do a scorched-earth total reinstallation OF OS/2 Warp to change to that new video card after I bought it.
Windows 95 wasn't perfect... but it was literally the first time I'd ever had an OS that fully and effortlessly supported every single piece of hardware I owned.
In retrospect, OS/2 Warp's most valuable legacy was its partition and boot manager, which I continued to use long after I'd ceased using OS/2 itself. It was absolutely without equal until Partition Manager finally came out.
Just wait until Microsoft fucks up the desktop Windows UI enough to make people install KDE for Windows & for apps like Photoshop to be ported to use it.
I'm pretty sure that in the worst-case, ATSC MPEG-2 frames have at least one I-frame per 15 frames, so the total latency should still be well under a half-second per channel EVEN IF you had to wait 1/4 second for an I-frame, then spend another 1/60th of a second analyzing it and another 1/60th of a second outputting it to the display. If switching between a 720p60 and 1080i60 channel, maybe add another 1/15th of a second of delay (assuming the box can't transmit the resolution/framerate metadata with each frame, so the TV could get started with switching output modes even while the box was still waiting for the next I-frame).
Insofar as encryption is concerned, there's no reason why the box shouldn't already have a copy of every channel's current encryption key pre-negotiated and ready to go. It's not like RAM is actually expensive anymore, and 2GHz+ quadcore ARM processors are now almost free. Worst-case, maybe add another dollar or two for a second DSP to constantly walk through the channels, update its metadata, and renegotiate encryption keys as necessary in the background.
I really wish I knew why American HDTVs are so completely "dumb" in their operation. On paper, at least, there's NO REASON why a broadcaster shouldn't be able to seamlessly transition from a 720p60 newscast to a 1080i commercial, then transition to a 720p50 imported TV show and follow it up with a 1080p24 movie (all with more 720p60 and 1080i60 commercials seamlessly inserted along the way). I'd love to know where in the transmission chain the whole thing breaks down and makes mode-changing such a big deal. IMHO, changing from 1080i60 to 720p50 (for example) should AT WORST cause 1/60th to 2/24ths of a second of blackness before resuming video display in the new mode.
By the same token... it drives me nuts that 1080p60 wasn't one of the official ATSC modes. Yes, I know that realtime compression of 1080p60 back in the 90s would have been almost impossible (at least, at an acceptable quality and keeping the bitrate below ~19mbps). HOWEVER, I also have a pile of old VCDs I made from ripped DVDs using TMPGEnc that got near-DVD quality out of 2.7mbps burned to a CD-R, so I know what's possible when you can let the encoder take its time to chew on the file and re-analyze the video at its leisure... especially when variable bitrate and long GOPs are available options. With the exception of sports, news, and award shows, almost NOTHING gets literally encoded in realtime anymore. And even news & awards shows now get delayed by 15-30 seconds so they can prevent the transmission of anything obscene or shocking (like someone blowing his head off on a live news feed, or flashing a boob at the superbowl). For any other content, there's plenty of time to aggressively cross-reference frames & use motion-estimation to shave the 1080p60 bitrate down to something you could send at high quality with just 18mbps.
There's an easy way to fix this: a free trade agreement that stipulates that anyone with the rights to license content in one country within the zone automatically shares the rights to distribute that content to viewers in ANY country within the zone... maybe throwing in a statutory formula to allocate a chunk of the profits to the official licensing entity for a given country while denying their ability to block or prevent it. And prohibiting licensors in the zone from attempting to limit distribution by country in their contracts (in other words, by law, any contract that gives you the right to distribute content in the US would automatically give you the right to distribute it in Canada and Britain, regardless of any other wording in the contract).
Example: suppose MusicCorpUS owns the rights to ThemeSong. In Britain, MusicCorpUK owns the rights. In Canada, SomeOtherMusicCorp owns the rights. Now, Fox makes a TV show using ThemeSong, and wants to show it in all three markets. However, SomeOtherMusicCorp decides to throw a monkey wrench into their plans and use the show's expected popularity as a rent-seeking opportunity to wring more cash than Fox is willing to pay. Under current law, the show wouldn't get shown in Canada. Under my proposed treaty, Fox would could just give SomeOtherMusicCorp the finger, recursively inherit the rights from MusicCorpUS, and write the royalty check to them... leaving it up to MusicCorpUS to figure out the statutory royalties they owe to MusicCorpUK and SomeOtherMusicCorp for the show's Canadian & British viewers. And in fact, if either MusicCorpUK or SomeOtherMusicCorp were willing to undercut MusicCorpUS, Fox could license global rights to use the music from THEM instead.
This is why, for example, MTV (US) never, ever, EVER shows the European Music Awards as anything more than a scattered collection of 3-second clips... and why shows like EuroVision never get shown in the US. The production costs would be close to zero since the video already exists, but the licensing costs for literally dozens of pop songs would make it more expensive than producing an episode of a show like Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D or Grimm.... especially since any one of the individual licensors could hold out and demand more. Putting them all into competition with each other, and prohibiting licensing deals that limit distribution by country, would solve most of the problem.
In the worst case (one big multinational corp buys up the nominally-independent distributors in the various countries), it would still have the benefit of reducing the transaction costs by massively simplifying the distribution agreements. At the end of the day, BigMultinationalCorp still needs to license its works to make money... and the TV shows that would today require an army of lawyers in each country to negotiate royalties could pay a single legal team who'd (by law) be negotiating a contract good for everywhere within the trade zone. It would become impossible for one rent-seeking licensor in a significant market to get in the way.
Pffft. I remember what Dish Network was like back in 2000... With their crap gear, changing channels took upwards of 5-15 seconds. It was LITERALLY impossible to channel-surf in any meaningful way.
Voom (circa 2003) was a million times better... High-quality high-end hardware that, if anything, was somewhat over-engineered (I think they were planning to make any box DVR-capable by plugging a hard drive into it, but shut down before they got around to it). Going from Voom to Comcast and their Motorola boxes was downright painful... Not quite as bad as Dish, but nowhere near as responsive and snappy as Voom. In 2008, my DirecTV HR-20(21?) was almost as good as Voom's boxes... until they changed the firmware around 2010, and almost overnight the box became glacially slow.
In retrospect, I think the fastest cable boxes I ever had were there Scientific Atlanta boxes from the late 80s/early 90s... Literally instant channel-changes. You could hold the channel up or down button, and let it rip through at least 2 or 3 channels per second. Sigh... Two steps forward, 1.97 steps back...
Call me underwhelmed & disappointed. I was hoping this was going to announce sled-like cases with a built-in flash drive that looks (to the phone) just like a USB flash drive hanging from an OTG cable.
If I had a 3D printer & knew somebody with a Voltera circuit-board prototyping machine & a decent 3D scanner, I'd design something like this myself....
Therefore, when root deletes files, it's never a mistake, and the files should be immediately destroyed forever without question.
(*) Unlike those heathen Windows systems, where there can be multiple gods, some of whom are more equal than others... and not necessarily in ways that are obvious to casual observers...;-)
They might allow you to register (intentionally-provocative domain name notwithstanding), but you'd probably have to comply with a laundry list of additional regulatory requirements if you did... like requiring validated government-issued IDs from any user who's allowed to post public content (possibly including users who weren't even Chinese or in China), and removing "objectionable" (to Chinese censors) content on demand (think DMCA, but a hundred times worse). And you'd probably have to pay some Akamai-like Chinese CDN to shepherd your site's content through the Great Firewall regardless.
And if you WERE willing to meet China's regulatory requirements for the sake of market share, you'd probably have to block access to most users in Europe, because the very things you'd have to do to officially get your site's content into China would probably get you fined by the EU for violating its privacy laws.
Most of DCA's demand has been driven BY its direct connectivity to the Metro. It'll probably always be the preferred airport for Metro users, but once the Metro runs directly to Dulles, it won't be a matter of "fly into Dulles to save $100 on airfare... then burn most of the savings on a cab" and more a matter of "Fly into Dulles to save $95 on airfare, and spend an extra half hour on the Metro".
Is it actually possible to run something like KDE, Gnome, or Cinnamon, as well as apps written to use them, on a remote X server? I last tried a few years ago, and got the impression that you could (very, very tediously) configure some specific apps to run over networked X, but even if you managed to get the desktop environment itself to display over it, none of them can natively launch arbitrary programs with remote X (including the file explorers themselves, so forget about opening a drive window by double-clicking its icon, let alone double-clicking an executable or trying to launch it from the DE's launcher). And if by some miracle you got it to work, you'd lose things like hardware-accelerated dropshadows & window-translucency (because they are all hardwired to run from kernel code for performance reasons).
Likewise, I found a commercial app that made Linux theoretically support RDP, but it was really just wrapping VNC to make it look like RDP to the remote computer, but didn't support any of the acceleration that makes Windows work reasonably well over RDP.
I've heard there are now proprietary apps based on VNC that support acceleration of things like window drawing & font rendering, but they aren't just non-free... they're prohibitively expensive for anyone smaller than large enterprises (as in, no prices displayed on their web site... and if you have to ask, you probably can't afford it), and they only use acceleration under specific, limited circumstances (ie running a DE custom-compiled by them to hardwire their extensions into it).
What would *really* be cool is if someone made an image printer with wifi, Bluetooth, microSD, and usb connectivity, a lithium battery, and a touchscreen that exposed Polaroid-type film for instant prints anywhere from digital cameras.
I think I remember seeing a primitive product like this about 20 years ago, but I think it was limited to 640x480 and had insurmountable compatibility problems with just about everything (including Windows NT). Apparently, Polaroid & Kodak were both so freaked out by digital cameras, neither one wanted to legitimize them further by making a product that would have combined the best of both (shoot lots of free pictures to flash, then print the best ones after some quick & dirty editing and cropping), so instead they released a half-assed product almost *designed* to fail.
Locked-down radio firmware is basically inevitable (the FCC won't approve software-defined radios lacking "robust" protection against unauthorized modifications by end users who aren't ham radio operators), and Nvidia & Qualcomm will probably be binary-blob assholes forever, but it would still be nice if someone finally made a Nexus-like phone whose official ROM was AOSP-derived and could be built from source into a ROM image identical to the "official" one with all required source, binary blobs, and build scripts neatly downloadable from the manufacturer.
I had great hopes for the Oppo Find 7 and OnePlus One, but both phones dropped the ball and let down users by (sort of) supporting a proprietary build of Cyanogenmod that couldn't actually be built or modified by end users. Sure, you could still use the Cyanogen source to build a generic ROM for it, but then you had to give up features that Oppo & OnePlus's official ROMs supported.
Android: the nominally-open operating system that runs on some of the most locked-down and opaque hardware ever made, and is practically unusable as a viable phone if Google's proprietary apps and services are missing. For all intents and purposes, Android 6 isn't much easier for end users to customize in unblessed ways than Windows Mobile used to be. Five years ago, there was enormous optimism at XDA-Developers that we were just months away from having phones where we could download the source and build our own ROMs that worked exactly the way we wanted them to work. Most of that optimism has been replaced by cynicism (in large part because every new kernel catastrophically breaks all the binary blobs from the previous version... often, the only binary blobs that are available at all...) and the sad tragedy that most current android customization consists of doing the same thing we used to do under Windows Mobile... copy binaries ripped from newer phones onto older ones in the hope that they'll halfway work.
> you know what day Nokia fell off from the cliff?
No, it was when they decided to write off the American GSM market by refusing to make phones capable of EDGE, or using WCDMA/HSPA/EDGE on 850MHz and 1900MHz. At the time Nokia quit supporting EDGE, T-Mobile had no HSPA/WCDMA/UMTS to speak of (in fact, I think it had none whatsoever), and AT&T had it in *maybe* a dozen markets... but AT&T' used 850MHz or 1900MHz, and used the same band for uplink and downlink. Nokia's crippled phones could only do HSPA/WCDMA/UMTS on specific 1900 + 2100MHz pairs of uplink & downlink frequencies.
This decision also destroyed Nokia's web presence and mindshare, because at the time, the majority of influential web sites and bloggers were Americans. When Nokia phones became irrelevant data paperweights in America (capable only of 19.2kbps GPRS) and disappeared, they also disappeared from those review sites, and Nokia's mindshare vanished.
True story: sometime around 2006, Nokia had a store in Miami at Dadeland Mall that existed solely to market their phones to visitors from Latin America. The employees all had PalmOS and WinMo phones, and sheepishly admitted it was because none of Nokia's phones could do meaningful data on T-Mobile or AT&T.
Can they handle 5ghz 802.11ac with MIMO yet? Last time I looked into open router firmware, they were all still pretty dysfunctional with their handling of the advanced 5ghz wifi modes & basically said, "use the open firmware for nat/routing, and get a separate 802.11ac access point for wifi."
Ummmm.... anything involving a motor? A 6-axis accelerometer + gyro? Any off the shelf infrared distance sensor module (like Sharp's)?
Most really interesting robotics projects ultimately require some degree of computer vision. As luck would have it, CV is one of the few things directly relevant to robotics that can BE effectively learned using only a PC (with cheap webcam).
If the headphone jack state can be read by UEFI, one sensible option would be to require that an Android or iPhone-type 4-lead stereo headset be plugged in and the headset's "action" button (which shorts two lines together) pressed to trigger or enable actions that could be destructive (or allow recovery from them).
Example: rm -rf / borks UEFI. Plug in the headset & power up while pressing the action button to get to a menu that allows you to restore UEFI from an immutable ROM image that can then be updated to a newer one, flash a newer UEFI image, or wipe the nvram and restore it to default values from the current bootloader.
Or they could license FTDI's IP and embed a JTAG programmer in the USB controller, so you could them do a hardware reflash from another computer (or even an Android phone with USB-OTG cable).
For security (and prevent drive-by attacks by rogue USB peripherals), they could add a jumper & disable JTAG-via-USB unless explicitly jumpered. To keep people from LEAVING it jumpered, the system could refuse to continue past the bootloader until the jumper gets removed.
You could, but it would be largely pointless. In the real world, unless you're an entity like NASA (with resources to match), hardware almost never behaves exactly the way it's officially supposed to. Electronics can be simulated perfectly. Mechanical devices? Not so much. Your simulated stepper motor makes certain assumptions about torque, inertia, etc. that are mostly guaranteed to be invalid once you try it in a real device with worn bearings operating running across a shag carpet or wet floor.
The sad fact is, robotics isn't a hobby for poor people. The electronics part is cheap thanks to Arduino and RasPi (and Edison, and...), but once it's time to start adding hardware, all bets are off. Sure, you can make a sub-$100 robot that can follow lines and avoid running into walls, but the moment you get bored and want to add real sensors & stuff, prepare to fork out some SERIOUS cash.
Just to give one example: Crustcrawler.com's AX12-AHW robotic arm kit. It's $399... not counting the 7 Robotis AX-12A digital servos you'll have to buy for around $45 apiece, and the power supply, and the controller, unless you already have them. Now, this is an awesome, kick-ass robotic arm. It's well-designed, and can probably be used to do useful things. But damn, it's expensive.
All kidding aside, the iRobot Create is one of the best platforms to get started with... it's under $100 at Amazon, and gives you not only the ability to detect walls and collisions, but also gives you the ability to avoid running down stairs & furnishes data about its actual, measured motion.
If you really want to do something meaningful without a real robot, get a cheap webcam for your PC and learn how to use OpenCV. If you ever get to work on a real robot someday, OpenCV programming knowledge will be very useful... especially since RasPi-based robot controllers can use the same cheap webcams as desktop PCs (assuming they support Linux & have open-source drivers you can build for the Pi).
Big tip to programmers who want to get into robotics: if you anticipate needing hardware that can't be purchased off-the-shelf, become friends with a mechanical engineer. They understand things like drivetrains the same way you understand things like recursion & objects... and he (or she) probably finds programming to be about as frustrating and alien as you find trying to bolt things together (dropping screws & nuts into the carpet, gouging your finger with the screwdriver, etc). There's a tiny bit of overlap between the electronic and mechanical realms, but most people who develop robots are teams of two (or more) with complementary skill sets.
The big difference is that if an American, European, or Japanese company makes a good-faith effort to source quality components and produce high-quality stuff, there's a very good chance it will ultimately be of high quality.
In China, it's almost impossible to guarantee quality because supply-chain integrity can't be objectively guaranteed.
In the US, Boeing can read the laser-etched serial number from a screw or bolt and literally audit it backwards to every step from mine to factory to delivery. In China, you'd be laughed at if you even tried to do that, because auditing only works when the auditors themselves are trustworthy. When you have to start recursively checking and cross-checking literally everyone down to the office cleaning lady and employees at the truck stop where the truck driver ate dinner, the task becomes completely hopeless.
Blame American business schools that all seemingly decided about 25 years ago that Sun-Tzu's Art of War was an aspirational ideal instead of a sociopath's ramblings.
That was briefly true for a short time in the 90s (the ESS switching protocol exposed functionality whose security assumed it was under the control of a responsible phone company, but could be abused by malicious clients), but not any more. The vulnerability was fixed, and the FCC made it clear that any charges for fraudulently redirected calls HAD to be refunded to consumers. That's part of the reason why mobile phone carriers block calls to those numbers outright... they aren't required by law to participate, and they don't want to be bothered by the customer service nightmare (and financial losses) every time some incident occurs.
Unless it has a hard food disposer. Then, you can load up dishes that have literal chunks of food on them.
IMHO, two non-negotiable features any dishwasher I buy has to have:
* hard food disposer
* heated dry. I don't give a fuck if unheated drying modes get the non-plastic dishes mostly dry. I want my goddamn dishes sterilized, baked, and bone-dry when they come out.
#2 was the entire reason why I didn't buy a Samsung DW80J3020US last month. It's a damn shame, too... Samsung has nice dishwashers that just happen to be gimped by the omission of heated drying.
Except nimble competitors who outsource everything will NEVER be able to compete long-term against massive vertically-integrated companies like IKEA, if only because their vertically-integrated competitors will always be able to under-bid them to get the Walmart purchase, and will be the only ones with the means to shave that last fraction of a cent that means the difference between eventual bankruptcy and ongoing profitability.
Nimble companies that outsource everything are good at driving innovation and bringing revolutionary new products to market, but in the long run the best they can hope for is to get purchased before they get bankrupted by a slower-moving vertically-integrated competitor who'll sell products that are kind of good for a fraction of the price and ultimately wring 100% of the economies of scale from the process.
Case in point: General Motors. Say what you like about its cars and bloat. They don't just build cars... they literally own their own bank, and can effectively print money by making loans. If you can't get approved by a bank for an auto loan, and only GM will finance your purchase, the value and quality of GM's competitors is meaningless. That gives them a staggering market advantage over companies like Tesla. Back when Tesla started selling cars, you'd have been laughed at if you walked into your bank and asked them to approve a loan for 100% of the purchase price, but the same bank would have rubber-stamped the approval for a zero-down loan to buy a regular car at twice the price.
For the most part, all x86-IA32/AMD64-based PC architecture hardware (except for anything involving 3D graphics, HDCP, the decryption and playback of protected media content, hard drive controllers, and pretty much anything involving the firmware of a radio chip intended for use by anyone who isn't a licensed ham radio operator) is Open Hardware.
Not really. Most of South Florida was ORIGINALLY low-lying, but AFAIK, it hasn't been legal to build a new structure whose main living floor isn't at least several feet above sea level since at least 1926. Our roads don't flood because of rising sea levels, they flood because our county government is criminally incompetent and doesn't maintain storm drains properly.
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If you were wealthy enough to afford 16 megs (somewhere around $750 circa 1993, from what I vaguely remember), OS/2 was definitely a step up from Windows 3.11. It did a better job of multitasking Windows 3.11 apps than Windows 3.11 itself did. IF you had the RAM.
That said, Windows 95 was a real-world step up from OS/2 Warp in every meaningful way. I remember that my soundcard (Gravis Ultrasound) NEVER, EVER worked reliably under OS/2. From what I recall, it could only do 1024x768 in 16-color mode without hardware acceleration on my first-generation S3 '911 video card, and crashed constantly with the Tseng ET4000/w32 card I bought to replace it (on rumors that it worked better under OS/2). And I'm pretty sure I had to do a scorched-earth total reinstallation OF OS/2 Warp to change to that new video card after I bought it.
Windows 95 wasn't perfect... but it was literally the first time I'd ever had an OS that fully and effortlessly supported every single piece of hardware I owned.
In retrospect, OS/2 Warp's most valuable legacy was its partition and boot manager, which I continued to use long after I'd ceased using OS/2 itself. It was absolutely without equal until Partition Manager finally came out.
Just wait until Microsoft fucks up the desktop Windows UI enough to make people install KDE for Windows & for apps like Photoshop to be ported to use it.
I'm pretty sure that in the worst-case, ATSC MPEG-2 frames have at least one I-frame per 15 frames, so the total latency should still be well under a half-second per channel EVEN IF you had to wait 1/4 second for an I-frame, then spend another 1/60th of a second analyzing it and another 1/60th of a second outputting it to the display. If switching between a 720p60 and 1080i60 channel, maybe add another 1/15th of a second of delay (assuming the box can't transmit the resolution/framerate metadata with each frame, so the TV could get started with switching output modes even while the box was still waiting for the next I-frame).
Insofar as encryption is concerned, there's no reason why the box shouldn't already have a copy of every channel's current encryption key pre-negotiated and ready to go. It's not like RAM is actually expensive anymore, and 2GHz+ quadcore ARM processors are now almost free. Worst-case, maybe add another dollar or two for a second DSP to constantly walk through the channels, update its metadata, and renegotiate encryption keys as necessary in the background.
I really wish I knew why American HDTVs are so completely "dumb" in their operation. On paper, at least, there's NO REASON why a broadcaster shouldn't be able to seamlessly transition from a 720p60 newscast to a 1080i commercial, then transition to a 720p50 imported TV show and follow it up with a 1080p24 movie (all with more 720p60 and 1080i60 commercials seamlessly inserted along the way). I'd love to know where in the transmission chain the whole thing breaks down and makes mode-changing such a big deal. IMHO, changing from 1080i60 to 720p50 (for example) should AT WORST cause 1/60th to 2/24ths of a second of blackness before resuming video display in the new mode.
By the same token... it drives me nuts that 1080p60 wasn't one of the official ATSC modes. Yes, I know that realtime compression of 1080p60 back in the 90s would have been almost impossible (at least, at an acceptable quality and keeping the bitrate below ~19mbps). HOWEVER, I also have a pile of old VCDs I made from ripped DVDs using TMPGEnc that got near-DVD quality out of 2.7mbps burned to a CD-R, so I know what's possible when you can let the encoder take its time to chew on the file and re-analyze the video at its leisure... especially when variable bitrate and long GOPs are available options. With the exception of sports, news, and award shows, almost NOTHING gets literally encoded in realtime anymore. And even news & awards shows now get delayed by 15-30 seconds so they can prevent the transmission of anything obscene or shocking (like someone blowing his head off on a live news feed, or flashing a boob at the superbowl). For any other content, there's plenty of time to aggressively cross-reference frames & use motion-estimation to shave the 1080p60 bitrate down to something you could send at high quality with just 18mbps.
There's an easy way to fix this: a free trade agreement that stipulates that anyone with the rights to license content in one country within the zone automatically shares the rights to distribute that content to viewers in ANY country within the zone... maybe throwing in a statutory formula to allocate a chunk of the profits to the official licensing entity for a given country while denying their ability to block or prevent it. And prohibiting licensors in the zone from attempting to limit distribution by country in their contracts (in other words, by law, any contract that gives you the right to distribute content in the US would automatically give you the right to distribute it in Canada and Britain, regardless of any other wording in the contract).
Example: suppose MusicCorpUS owns the rights to ThemeSong. In Britain, MusicCorpUK owns the rights. In Canada, SomeOtherMusicCorp owns the rights. Now, Fox makes a TV show using ThemeSong, and wants to show it in all three markets. However, SomeOtherMusicCorp decides to throw a monkey wrench into their plans and use the show's expected popularity as a rent-seeking opportunity to wring more cash than Fox is willing to pay. Under current law, the show wouldn't get shown in Canada. Under my proposed treaty, Fox would could just give SomeOtherMusicCorp the finger, recursively inherit the rights from MusicCorpUS, and write the royalty check to them... leaving it up to MusicCorpUS to figure out the statutory royalties they owe to MusicCorpUK and SomeOtherMusicCorp for the show's Canadian & British viewers. And in fact, if either MusicCorpUK or SomeOtherMusicCorp were willing to undercut MusicCorpUS, Fox could license global rights to use the music from THEM instead.
This is why, for example, MTV (US) never, ever, EVER shows the European Music Awards as anything more than a scattered collection of 3-second clips... and why shows like EuroVision never get shown in the US. The production costs would be close to zero since the video already exists, but the licensing costs for literally dozens of pop songs would make it more expensive than producing an episode of a show like Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D or Grimm.... especially since any one of the individual licensors could hold out and demand more. Putting them all into competition with each other, and prohibiting licensing deals that limit distribution by country, would solve most of the problem.
In the worst case (one big multinational corp buys up the nominally-independent distributors in the various countries), it would still have the benefit of reducing the transaction costs by massively simplifying the distribution agreements. At the end of the day, BigMultinationalCorp still needs to license its works to make money... and the TV shows that would today require an army of lawyers in each country to negotiate royalties could pay a single legal team who'd (by law) be negotiating a contract good for everywhere within the trade zone. It would become impossible for one rent-seeking licensor in a significant market to get in the way.
Pffft. I remember what Dish Network was like back in 2000... With their crap gear, changing channels took upwards of 5-15 seconds. It was LITERALLY impossible to channel-surf in any meaningful way.
Voom (circa 2003) was a million times better... High-quality high-end hardware that, if anything, was somewhat over-engineered (I think they were planning to make any box DVR-capable by plugging a hard drive into it, but shut down before they got around to it). Going from Voom to Comcast and their Motorola boxes was downright painful... Not quite as bad as Dish, but nowhere near as responsive and snappy as Voom. In 2008, my DirecTV HR-20(21?) was almost as good as Voom's boxes... until they changed the firmware around 2010, and almost overnight the box became glacially slow.
In retrospect, I think the fastest cable boxes I ever had were there Scientific Atlanta boxes from the late 80s/early 90s... Literally instant channel-changes. You could hold the channel up or down button, and let it rip through at least 2 or 3 channels per second. Sigh... Two steps forward, 1.97 steps back...
Call me underwhelmed & disappointed. I was hoping this was going to announce sled-like cases with a built-in flash drive that looks (to the phone) just like a USB flash drive hanging from an OTG cable.
If I had a 3D printer & knew somebody with a Voltera circuit-board prototyping machine & a decent 3D scanner, I'd design something like this myself....
On a Linux system, root is God(*)
God is omniscient, omnipresent, and infallible.
Therefore, when root deletes files, it's never a mistake, and the files should be immediately destroyed forever without question.
(*) Unlike those heathen Windows systems, where there can be multiple gods, some of whom are more equal than others... and not necessarily in ways that are obvious to casual observers... ;-)
They might allow you to register (intentionally-provocative domain name notwithstanding), but you'd probably have to comply with a laundry list of additional regulatory requirements if you did... like requiring validated government-issued IDs from any user who's allowed to post public content (possibly including users who weren't even Chinese or in China), and removing "objectionable" (to Chinese censors) content on demand (think DMCA, but a hundred times worse). And you'd probably have to pay some Akamai-like Chinese CDN to shepherd your site's content through the Great Firewall regardless.
And if you WERE willing to meet China's regulatory requirements for the sake of market share, you'd probably have to block access to most users in Europe, because the very things you'd have to do to officially get your site's content into China would probably get you fined by the EU for violating its privacy laws.
Most of DCA's demand has been driven BY its direct connectivity to the Metro. It'll probably always be the preferred airport for Metro users, but once the Metro runs directly to Dulles, it won't be a matter of "fly into Dulles to save $100 on airfare... then burn most of the savings on a cab" and more a matter of "Fly into Dulles to save $95 on airfare, and spend an extra half hour on the Metro".
Is it actually possible to run something like KDE, Gnome, or Cinnamon, as well as apps written to use them, on a remote X server? I last tried a few years ago, and got the impression that you could (very, very tediously) configure some specific apps to run over networked X, but even if you managed to get the desktop environment itself to display over it, none of them can natively launch arbitrary programs with remote X (including the file explorers themselves, so forget about opening a drive window by double-clicking its icon, let alone double-clicking an executable or trying to launch it from the DE's launcher). And if by some miracle you got it to work, you'd lose things like hardware-accelerated dropshadows & window-translucency (because they are all hardwired to run from kernel code for performance reasons).
Likewise, I found a commercial app that made Linux theoretically support RDP, but it was really just wrapping VNC to make it look like RDP to the remote computer, but didn't support any of the acceleration that makes Windows work reasonably well over RDP.
I've heard there are now proprietary apps based on VNC that support acceleration of things like window drawing & font rendering, but they aren't just non-free... they're prohibitively expensive for anyone smaller than large enterprises (as in, no prices displayed on their web site... and if you have to ask, you probably can't afford it), and they only use acceleration under specific, limited circumstances (ie running a DE custom-compiled by them to hardwire their extensions into it).
What would *really* be cool is if someone made an image printer with wifi, Bluetooth, microSD, and usb connectivity, a lithium battery, and a touchscreen that exposed Polaroid-type film for instant prints anywhere from digital cameras.
I think I remember seeing a primitive product like this about 20 years ago, but I think it was limited to 640x480 and had insurmountable compatibility problems with just about everything (including Windows NT). Apparently, Polaroid & Kodak were both so freaked out by digital cameras, neither one wanted to legitimize them further by making a product that would have combined the best of both (shoot lots of free pictures to flash, then print the best ones after some quick & dirty editing and cropping), so instead they released a half-assed product almost *designed* to fail.
Locked-down radio firmware is basically inevitable (the FCC won't approve software-defined radios lacking "robust" protection against unauthorized modifications by end users who aren't ham radio operators), and Nvidia & Qualcomm will probably be binary-blob assholes forever, but it would still be nice if someone finally made a Nexus-like phone whose official ROM was AOSP-derived and could be built from source into a ROM image identical to the "official" one with all required source, binary blobs, and build scripts neatly downloadable from the manufacturer.
I had great hopes for the Oppo Find 7 and OnePlus One, but both phones dropped the ball and let down users by (sort of) supporting a proprietary build of Cyanogenmod that couldn't actually be built or modified by end users. Sure, you could still use the Cyanogen source to build a generic ROM for it, but then you had to give up features that Oppo & OnePlus's official ROMs supported.
Android: the nominally-open operating system that runs on some of the most locked-down and opaque hardware ever made, and is practically unusable as a viable phone if Google's proprietary apps and services are missing. For all intents and purposes, Android 6 isn't much easier for end users to customize in unblessed ways than Windows Mobile used to be. Five years ago, there was enormous optimism at XDA-Developers that we were just months away from having phones where we could download the source and build our own ROMs that worked exactly the way we wanted them to work. Most of that optimism has been replaced by cynicism (in large part because every new kernel catastrophically breaks all the binary blobs from the previous version... often, the only binary blobs that are available at all...) and the sad tragedy that most current android customization consists of doing the same thing we used to do under Windows Mobile... copy binaries ripped from newer phones onto older ones in the hope that they'll halfway work.
> you know what day Nokia fell off from the cliff?
No, it was when they decided to write off the American GSM market by refusing to make phones capable of EDGE, or using WCDMA/HSPA/EDGE on 850MHz and 1900MHz. At the time Nokia quit supporting EDGE, T-Mobile had no HSPA/WCDMA/UMTS to speak of (in fact, I think it had none whatsoever), and AT&T had it in *maybe* a dozen markets... but AT&T' used 850MHz or 1900MHz, and used the same band for uplink and downlink. Nokia's crippled phones could only do HSPA/WCDMA/UMTS on specific 1900 + 2100MHz pairs of uplink & downlink frequencies.
This decision also destroyed Nokia's web presence and mindshare, because at the time, the majority of influential web sites and bloggers were Americans. When Nokia phones became irrelevant data paperweights in America (capable only of 19.2kbps GPRS) and disappeared, they also disappeared from those review sites, and Nokia's mindshare vanished.
True story: sometime around 2006, Nokia had a store in Miami at Dadeland Mall that existed solely to market their phones to visitors from Latin America. The employees all had PalmOS and WinMo phones, and sheepishly admitted it was because none of Nokia's phones could do meaningful data on T-Mobile or AT&T.
Can they handle 5ghz 802.11ac with MIMO yet? Last time I looked into open router firmware, they were all still pretty dysfunctional with their handling of the advanced 5ghz wifi modes & basically said, "use the open firmware for nat/routing, and get a separate 802.11ac access point for wifi."
Ummmm.... anything involving a motor? A 6-axis accelerometer + gyro? Any off the shelf infrared distance sensor module (like Sharp's)?
Most really interesting robotics projects ultimately require some degree of computer vision. As luck would have it, CV is one of the few things directly relevant to robotics that can BE effectively learned using only a PC (with cheap webcam).
If the headphone jack state can be read by UEFI, one sensible option would be to require that an Android or iPhone-type 4-lead stereo headset be plugged in and the headset's "action" button (which shorts two lines together) pressed to trigger or enable actions that could be destructive (or allow recovery from them).
Example: rm -rf / borks UEFI. Plug in the headset & power up while pressing the action button to get to a menu that allows you to restore UEFI from an immutable ROM image that can then be updated to a newer one, flash a newer UEFI image, or wipe the nvram and restore it to default values from the current bootloader.
Or they could license FTDI's IP and embed a JTAG programmer in the USB controller, so you could them do a hardware reflash from another computer (or even an Android phone with USB-OTG cable).
For security (and prevent drive-by attacks by rogue USB peripherals), they could add a jumper & disable JTAG-via-USB unless explicitly jumpered. To keep people from LEAVING it jumpered, the system could refuse to continue past the bootloader until the jumper gets removed.
You could, but it would be largely pointless. In the real world, unless you're an entity like NASA (with resources to match), hardware almost never behaves exactly the way it's officially supposed to. Electronics can be simulated perfectly. Mechanical devices? Not so much. Your simulated stepper motor makes certain assumptions about torque, inertia, etc. that are mostly guaranteed to be invalid once you try it in a real device with worn bearings operating running across a shag carpet or wet floor.
The sad fact is, robotics isn't a hobby for poor people. The electronics part is cheap thanks to Arduino and RasPi (and Edison, and ...), but once it's time to start adding hardware, all bets are off. Sure, you can make a sub-$100 robot that can follow lines and avoid running into walls, but the moment you get bored and want to add real sensors & stuff, prepare to fork out some SERIOUS cash.
Just to give one example: Crustcrawler.com's AX12-AHW robotic arm kit. It's $399... not counting the 7 Robotis AX-12A digital servos you'll have to buy for around $45 apiece, and the power supply, and the controller, unless you already have them. Now, this is an awesome, kick-ass robotic arm. It's well-designed, and can probably be used to do useful things. But damn, it's expensive.
All kidding aside, the iRobot Create is one of the best platforms to get started with... it's under $100 at Amazon, and gives you not only the ability to detect walls and collisions, but also gives you the ability to avoid running down stairs & furnishes data about its actual, measured motion.
If you really want to do something meaningful without a real robot, get a cheap webcam for your PC and learn how to use OpenCV. If you ever get to work on a real robot someday, OpenCV programming knowledge will be very useful... especially since RasPi-based robot controllers can use the same cheap webcams as desktop PCs (assuming they support Linux & have open-source drivers you can build for the Pi).
Big tip to programmers who want to get into robotics: if you anticipate needing hardware that can't be purchased off-the-shelf, become friends with a mechanical engineer. They understand things like drivetrains the same way you understand things like recursion & objects... and he (or she) probably finds programming to be about as frustrating and alien as you find trying to bolt things together (dropping screws & nuts into the carpet, gouging your finger with the screwdriver, etc). There's a tiny bit of overlap between the electronic and mechanical realms, but most people who develop robots are teams of two (or more) with complementary skill sets.
The big difference is that if an American, European, or Japanese company makes a good-faith effort to source quality components and produce high-quality stuff, there's a very good chance it will ultimately be of high quality.
In China, it's almost impossible to guarantee quality because supply-chain integrity can't be objectively guaranteed.
In the US, Boeing can read the laser-etched serial number from a screw or bolt and literally audit it backwards to every step from mine to factory to delivery. In China, you'd be laughed at if you even tried to do that, because auditing only works when the auditors themselves are trustworthy. When you have to start recursively checking and cross-checking literally everyone down to the office cleaning lady and employees at the truck stop where the truck driver ate dinner, the task becomes completely hopeless.
Blame American business schools that all seemingly decided about 25 years ago that Sun-Tzu's Art of War was an aspirational ideal instead of a sociopath's ramblings.
That was briefly true for a short time in the 90s (the ESS switching protocol exposed functionality whose security assumed it was under the control of a responsible phone company, but could be abused by malicious clients), but not any more. The vulnerability was fixed, and the FCC made it clear that any charges for fraudulently redirected calls HAD to be refunded to consumers. That's part of the reason why mobile phone carriers block calls to those numbers outright... they aren't required by law to participate, and they don't want to be bothered by the customer service nightmare (and financial losses) every time some incident occurs.
there *is* one possible valid complaint they might have: Apple's refusal to allow reverting or reinstalling old versions after they quit issuing keys.
Unless it has a hard food disposer. Then, you can load up dishes that have literal chunks of food on them.
IMHO, two non-negotiable features any dishwasher I buy has to have:
* hard food disposer
* heated dry. I don't give a fuck if unheated drying modes get the non-plastic dishes mostly dry. I want my goddamn dishes sterilized, baked, and bone-dry when they come out.
#2 was the entire reason why I didn't buy a Samsung DW80J3020US last month. It's a damn shame, too... Samsung has nice dishwashers that just happen to be gimped by the omission of heated drying.
Except nimble competitors who outsource everything will NEVER be able to compete long-term against massive vertically-integrated companies like IKEA, if only because their vertically-integrated competitors will always be able to under-bid them to get the Walmart purchase, and will be the only ones with the means to shave that last fraction of a cent that means the difference between eventual bankruptcy and ongoing profitability.
Nimble companies that outsource everything are good at driving innovation and bringing revolutionary new products to market, but in the long run the best they can hope for is to get purchased before they get bankrupted by a slower-moving vertically-integrated competitor who'll sell products that are kind of good for a fraction of the price and ultimately wring 100% of the economies of scale from the process.
Case in point: General Motors. Say what you like about its cars and bloat. They don't just build cars... they literally own their own bank, and can effectively print money by making loans. If you can't get approved by a bank for an auto loan, and only GM will finance your purchase, the value and quality of GM's competitors is meaningless. That gives them a staggering market advantage over companies like Tesla. Back when Tesla started selling cars, you'd have been laughed at if you walked into your bank and asked them to approve a loan for 100% of the purchase price, but the same bank would have rubber-stamped the approval for a zero-down loan to buy a regular car at twice the price.
For the most part, all x86-IA32/AMD64-based PC architecture hardware (except for anything involving 3D graphics, HDCP, the decryption and playback of protected media content, hard drive controllers, and pretty much anything involving the firmware of a radio chip intended for use by anyone who isn't a licensed ham radio operator) is Open Hardware.
There. Fixed it for you.
Not really. Most of South Florida was ORIGINALLY low-lying, but AFAIK, it hasn't been legal to build a new structure whose main living floor isn't at least several feet above sea level since at least 1926. Our roads don't flood because of rising sea levels, they flood because our county government is criminally incompetent and doesn't maintain storm drains properly.