Actually, the new PowerMac dual-cpu machines come standard with _gigabit_ ethernet now. And without any extra cost (the gigabit and the extra cpu have left the box at the same price as always), since the moment a company standardizes something like that across the line then it becomes cheap.
There's no way to do it. The only way to make it actually work is to have the computer derive the actual meaning of whatever piece of content. Can such a thing be done? Yes. Uncle Sam is doing it on a daily basis. But it requires huge supercomputers and is still very "iffy". It will be years before it is practical on an ISP basis (if ever).
Probably the _only_ reason M$ has done as well financially as it has is reusable code. While I love Linux, I find it hard to write commercially for it since nothing you write ever seems to be compatible. Regardless of the toolkit you use (KDE, Gnome, etc.), it's always the wrong one for somebody. Compatibility = show me the money!
There actually was a Unix derivative that did it right, but didn't catch on: NextStep. BSD kernel, with incredible development tools and standard libraries. With it you could throw together a professional application in hours/weeks instead of months/years since it handed you all of the primitive elements you could ever need in a consistent way. Much of Java was actually inspired by Next's tools (to be honest, Objective C is actually superior in some aspects to Java, and yes, it's OS-independent). Whether they admit it or not, all of the modern development tools (KDE, Gnome, M$ Visual Studio, etc.) are using more and more of the ideas inspired/stolen from NextStep.
It will be interesting to see how Apple's move to a NextStep derivative works out. Due to the fact that they're working to maintain backward compatibility, MacOS X is probably an inferior design to the original NextStep, but certainly an improvement over existing MacOS versions.
RIAA will win, whether you like it or not. The moment you are _knowingly_ an accessory to a crime (in this case, bootlegging), you are guilty. Court precedents have already established it in other areas. The mafia was (largely) eliminated due to new laws that made it a felony to be involved with an organization committing the crimes even though you personally didn't pull the trigger. That's how they finally put many of the "kingpins" in jail. Likewise, any commercial service which has no other purpose than to help people break laws (though indirectly) will eventually be shut down. Especially when it's so blatant and vocal about it. Yahoo and the rest are largely exempt from this because their participation is accidental, not intentional.
Mine already was (to some degree). That's why I bought it. The house is fully wired everywhere with Cat5 or better, plus a ridiculous number of studio-grade audio and video feeds, and the master junction point includes state-of-the-art networking, automation, security, and power backup.
Is it worth it? Definitely. Too expensive? No. It's not as pricy as you would have guessed. We rarely go to the movies because our home theaters (3 of them in the house, including one in my bedroom) look and sound so good. Unlike things like a boat, you receive benefits from improvements to your house ever single day.
My guess is that the German government either made some exceptions to the tax rules to convince AMD it's a good idea, or helped front many of the costs of building the fab. Otherwise I can't picture any company considering a factory there.
Seems to me like we could eliminate the entire issue by convincing the official maintainers of Kerberos to give an official use for the byte M$ took over (in the next release). Then the only way M$ would be able to remain compliant with the spec is to remove their proprietary addon.
Despite the many things I learned while studying for my CS degree, nothing was ever the same as when I started working in the "real world." I've had the advantage of finding jobs that involved the entire process of researching the available technologies; doing formal design of the GUI, logic, and data; handling security issues; doing evaluations with potential customers to improve it before it ships; and so on. I learned more that way than I ever learned in school. Few grad research projects have that breadth, and undergrads barely have a glimpse of the big picture. Would you consider doing your online university in a fashion where it is based more on participation in all facets of enterprise-level projects than on typical schoolwork?
Should we buy an HDTV? YES!!! But I'm just talking about the TV, not necessarily the receiver. On the very same day I bought two projector TV's, both around 50-inch, and one of them is HDTV (only $2400; Toshiba is awesome!). The difference between them is night and day. What do I watch on it? DishNetwork, SVHS, and DVD. I don't have an HDTV decoder yet. I _never_ watch local channels, so I probably wouldn't use it if I had it. The TV already looks gorgeous with the programming I have.
The important part to keep in mind is that DishNetwork and others will soon start to broadcast using HDTV (initially pay-per-view, later everything). So a high-end receiver will be able to do it. In fact, for a couple of years I've had their digital version of a vcr, and I will soon be able to not only record digitally right on my satellite receiver but be able to record HDTV right on my receiver (yes, better than DVD!).
Yet another advantage is that some video card makers will soon have units that can handle the resolutions of HDTV, so you could play your favorite games at 720P or 1080I on a bigscreen. Sweet!
I'm constantly worried now in my software projects that I'll need to waste all of the money on a patent to keep companies like Amazon from illegally patenting later what I already invented and shutting me out from use of my own invention. Prior art on Amazon's one-click shopping? Yes, it's called a vending machine, and it's been around for a while. I suppose vending machines are now going to have to add a button for "are you sure?" to keep Amazon away.
With this technique you could build a do-anything chip based on Transmeta's technology which has dozens of cpu cores and an extremely powerful graphics processor. And the chip would still be tiny, ridiculously fast (many gigahertz), cheap, and still under 1 Watt. I need one!
If you shaped them as a 3-point or 4-point star you could have a mini CD that doubles as a martial arts weapon;-) Actually, existing AOL coasters would probably slice well to that same shape (I certainly wasn't going to put one in my machine!).
I've wondered for years why nobody has done LCD's that way. Perhaps because until recently it would have resulted in a product more expensive than a new car;-)
The best part is that it scales beyond 2x2; you could do an entire wall that way (assuming you have the budget for it). The problem then is that it's even beyond HDTV resolution or 35 mm, so you would have trouble finding what to show on it.
These days many have switched to Minidisc (which doesn't skip, doesn't get dirty, doesn't get scratched, and which, despite its compression, sounds the same on the radio as a CD).
The only difference here in the US is that the NSA and other agencies who have reduced us nearly to a police state don't brag about it like in Russia. The NSA intercepts _everything_, including any kind of phone call, Internet traffic, email, etc. I know a university professor whose research provides software which instantaneously extracts and flags "potentially harmful" messages from any transcript it's handed for the government. They could in theory even have hidden microphones all over the place aimed at the windows of our businesses and homes.
Of course the DMCA is even closer to what's happening in Russia, since it's very open about eliminating your rights. It's the Big Brother is Watching system enacted in legislation.
Utah was the first place in the world to make digital signatures legal. Since then I've always wondered if we're on the leading edge of technology or whether we've fallen off a ledge into a mess of false documents (Utah is know for people being ripped off by all kinds of scams; maybe it was time for a new one to be made possible). Digital signatures can be secure in theory, but I bet it only happens in practice less than 10% of the time.
Somewhat related story: all M$ employees are required to have a somewhat large and complex password which must be changed every 3 months. Since the password may be hard to remember, many end up taping it to the face of their monitor, rendering the whole system less secure than before the new security requirements were created. Build a better solution, and better idiots will immediately arrive!
19. Deleting Documents for Dummies 20. Preventing the Government from Intercepting Emails for Dummies 21. Why Bad Hair Cuts Make You Look Innocent in Court 22. Bug = Feature: A Technical Support Manual 23. Alpha = Final Release: Good for Business 24. Which Countries to Buy First 25. Why Inventing Stuff is Harder than "Borrowing" Others' Inventions 26. A Design for a Virus Which Replaces Linux with Windows and Bills for it Automatically
It seems like the best solution of all would be if Be would donate their threading source to Linux. Most of the reason Be is so fast is that it has such a good thread scheduler (they probably have several patents on their techniques, in fact).
Of course they need to make a living too. The trick would be to figure out how they could donate the code yet still have a way to come out ahead (they've invested many millions in development). I honestly can't think of a good solution. Ideas?
I think the big problem is the fact that on the web we make it far too easy to be rude (obscene, in fact) and get away with it. I've always thought that/. would be _much_ better if there were no such thing as an anonymous post. _Nothing_ worth posting has any reason to be anonymous. In daily life you can't get away with saying much of what is posted on/. without getting at a minimum decked, or in some cases sued into poverty or jailed for defamation, slander, etc. Why should the net cater to the people who everywhere else are considered criminal? What's wrong is wrong, and it doesn't matter where it happens!
Only the idiots guilty of what I said will moderate me down (mostly losers who will probably still live in their parents' basement when they hit 50; they have no skills beyond playing Quake well), while anyone intelligent enough to see the damage the others cause will moderate me up.
I'm near Salt Lake City, and we've already got it. Cable went digital here a while back, and all of the local broadcasters (but one, I believe) teamed up to build a common HDTV broadcast center they all send their signal from, drastically reducing their costs and speeding adoption. Since they're broadcasting from a common location, it will also be a lot easier to receive, since you point the antenna at one peak to receive all the stations. I already have my HDTV (they're sweet, as long as the feed is S-video, progressive, or 1080i!), and will soon have my receiver (as soon as Toshiba sells the one to match my TV). Normally I avoid local channels, but it's hard to pass them up when they all go digital simultaneously.
Please check your facts! I would have someone who works for a "research" company to know how to research. I specifically asked Sorenson about a Linux port, and they said they're all for it, but that _APPLE_ hadn't bothered to port the code.
Does anybody know whether Phase5 (www.phase5.de) is really going to build their new equivalents of the Amiga? They've been bragging about such a product for _years_ now, regularly changing the name and extending the introduction date.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, the new PowerMac dual-cpu machines come standard with _gigabit_ ethernet now. And without any extra cost (the gigabit and the extra cpu have left the box at the same price as always), since the moment a company standardizes something like that across the line then it becomes cheap.
There's no way to do it. The only way to make it actually work is to have the computer derive the actual meaning of whatever piece of content. Can such a thing be done? Yes. Uncle Sam is doing it on a daily basis. But it requires huge supercomputers and is still very "iffy". It will be years before it is practical on an ISP basis (if ever).
Probably the _only_ reason M$ has done as well financially as it has is reusable code. While I love Linux, I find it hard to write commercially for it since nothing you write ever seems to be compatible. Regardless of the toolkit you use (KDE, Gnome, etc.), it's always the wrong one for somebody. Compatibility = show me the money!
There actually was a Unix derivative that did it right, but didn't catch on: NextStep. BSD kernel, with incredible development tools and standard libraries. With it you could throw together a professional application in hours/weeks instead of months/years since it handed you all of the primitive elements you could ever need in a consistent way. Much of Java was actually inspired by Next's tools (to be honest, Objective C is actually superior in some aspects to Java, and yes, it's OS-independent). Whether they admit it or not, all of the modern development tools (KDE, Gnome, M$ Visual Studio, etc.) are using more and more of the ideas inspired/stolen from NextStep.
It will be interesting to see how Apple's move to a NextStep derivative works out. Due to the fact that they're working to maintain backward compatibility, MacOS X is probably an inferior design to the original NextStep, but certainly an improvement over existing MacOS versions.
RIAA will win, whether you like it or not. The moment you are _knowingly_ an accessory to a crime (in this case, bootlegging), you are guilty. Court precedents have already established it in other areas. The mafia was (largely) eliminated due to new laws that made it a felony to be involved with an organization committing the crimes even though you personally didn't pull the trigger. That's how they finally put many of the "kingpins" in jail. Likewise, any commercial service which has no other purpose than to help people break laws (though indirectly) will eventually be shut down. Especially when it's so blatant and vocal about it. Yahoo and the rest are largely exempt from this because their participation is accidental, not intentional.
Thus spake Zarathustra.
Vancouver is a really pricy city. Prices are probably higher there than in Seattle. No shortage of nice houses, if you can afford them.
Mine already was (to some degree). That's why I bought it. The house is fully wired everywhere with Cat5 or better, plus a ridiculous number of studio-grade audio and video feeds, and the master junction point includes state-of-the-art networking, automation, security, and power backup.
Is it worth it? Definitely. Too expensive? No. It's not as pricy as you would have guessed. We rarely go to the movies because our home theaters (3 of them in the house, including one in my bedroom) look and sound so good. Unlike things like a boat, you receive benefits from improvements to your house ever single day.
My guess is that the German government either made some exceptions to the tax rules to convince AMD it's a good idea, or helped front many of the costs of building the fab. Otherwise I can't picture any company considering a factory there.
Seems to me like we could eliminate the entire issue by convincing the official maintainers of Kerberos to give an official use for the byte M$ took over (in the next release). Then the only way M$ would be able to remain compliant with the spec is to remove their proprietary addon.
Despite the many things I learned while studying for my CS degree, nothing was ever the same as when I started working in the "real world." I've had the advantage of finding jobs that involved the entire process of researching the available technologies; doing formal design of the GUI, logic, and data; handling security issues; doing evaluations with potential customers to improve it before it ships; and so on. I learned more that way than I ever learned in school. Few grad research projects have that breadth, and undergrads barely have a glimpse of the big picture.
Would you consider doing your online university in a fashion where it is based more on participation in all facets of enterprise-level projects than on typical schoolwork?
Should we buy an HDTV? YES!!! But I'm just talking about the TV, not necessarily the receiver. On the very same day I bought two projector TV's, both around 50-inch, and one of them is HDTV (only $2400; Toshiba is awesome!). The difference between them is night and day. What do I watch on it? DishNetwork, SVHS, and DVD. I don't have an HDTV decoder yet. I _never_ watch local channels, so I probably wouldn't use it if I had it. The TV already looks gorgeous with the programming I have.
The important part to keep in mind is that DishNetwork and others will soon start to broadcast using HDTV (initially pay-per-view, later everything). So a high-end receiver will be able to do it. In fact, for a couple of years I've had their digital version of a vcr, and I will soon be able to not only record digitally right on my satellite receiver but be able to record HDTV right on my receiver (yes, better than DVD!).
Yet another advantage is that some video card makers will soon have units that can handle the resolutions of HDTV, so you could play your favorite games at 720P or 1080I on a bigscreen. Sweet!
I'm constantly worried now in my software projects that I'll need to waste all of the money on a patent to keep companies like Amazon from illegally patenting later what I already invented and shutting me out from use of my own invention. Prior art on Amazon's one-click shopping? Yes, it's called a vending machine, and it's been around for a while. I suppose vending machines are now going to have to add a button for "are you sure?" to keep Amazon away.
With this technique you could build a do-anything chip based on Transmeta's technology which has dozens of cpu cores and an extremely powerful graphics processor. And the chip would still be tiny, ridiculously fast (many gigahertz), cheap, and still under 1 Watt. I need one!
If you shaped them as a 3-point or 4-point star you could have a mini CD that doubles as a martial arts weapon ;-) Actually, existing AOL coasters would probably slice well to that same shape (I certainly wasn't going to put one in my machine!).
I've wondered for years why nobody has done LCD's that way. Perhaps because until recently it would have resulted in a product more expensive than a new car ;-)
The best part is that it scales beyond 2x2; you could do an entire wall that way (assuming you have the budget for it). The problem then is that it's even beyond HDTV resolution or 35 mm, so you would have trouble finding what to show on it.
These days many have switched to Minidisc (which doesn't skip, doesn't get dirty, doesn't get scratched, and which, despite its compression, sounds the same on the radio as a CD).
We could see the new models of cars before they're tested on the open road, and could spy on the filming of the next Star Wars movie.
The only difference here in the US is that the NSA and other agencies who have reduced us nearly to a police state don't brag about it like in Russia. The NSA intercepts _everything_, including any kind of phone call, Internet traffic, email, etc. I know a university professor whose research provides software which instantaneously extracts and flags "potentially harmful" messages from any transcript it's handed for the government. They could in theory even have hidden microphones all over the place aimed at the windows of our businesses and homes.
Of course the DMCA is even closer to what's happening in Russia, since it's very open about eliminating your rights. It's the Big Brother is Watching system enacted in legislation.
Utah was the first place in the world to make digital signatures legal. Since then I've always wondered if we're on the leading edge of technology or whether we've fallen off a ledge into a mess of false documents (Utah is know for people being ripped off by all kinds of scams; maybe it was time for a new one to be made possible). Digital signatures can be secure in theory, but I bet it only happens in practice less than 10% of the time.
Somewhat related story: all M$ employees are required to have a somewhat large and complex password which must be changed every 3 months. Since the password may be hard to remember, many end up taping it to the face of their monitor, rendering the whole system less secure than before the new security requirements were created. Build a better solution, and better idiots will immediately arrive!
19. Deleting Documents for Dummies
20. Preventing the Government from Intercepting Emails for Dummies
21. Why Bad Hair Cuts Make You Look Innocent in Court
22. Bug = Feature: A Technical Support Manual
23. Alpha = Final Release: Good for Business
24. Which Countries to Buy First
25. Why Inventing Stuff is Harder than "Borrowing" Others' Inventions
26. A Design for a Virus Which Replaces Linux with Windows and Bills for it Automatically
Isn't it sad to think that within a couple years we might ignore M$ because there will be _really_ bad monopolies out there that we need to split up.
It seems like the best solution of all would be if Be would donate their threading source to Linux. Most of the reason Be is so fast is that it has such a good thread scheduler (they probably have several patents on their techniques, in fact).
Of course they need to make a living too. The trick would be to figure out how they could donate the code yet still have a way to come out ahead (they've invested many millions in development). I honestly can't think of a good solution. Ideas?
I think the big problem is the fact that on the web we make it far too easy to be rude (obscene, in fact) and get away with it. I've always thought that /. would be _much_ better if there were no such thing as an anonymous post. _Nothing_ worth posting has any reason to be anonymous. In daily life you can't get away with saying much of what is posted on /. without getting at a minimum decked, or in some cases sued into poverty or jailed for defamation, slander, etc. Why should the net cater to the people who everywhere else are considered criminal? What's wrong is wrong, and it doesn't matter where it happens!
Only the idiots guilty of what I said will moderate me down (mostly losers who will probably still live in their parents' basement when they hit 50; they have no skills beyond playing Quake well), while anyone intelligent enough to see the damage the others cause will moderate me up.
I'm near Salt Lake City, and we've already got it. Cable went digital here a while back, and all of the local broadcasters (but one, I believe) teamed up to build a common HDTV broadcast center they all send their signal from, drastically reducing their costs and speeding adoption. Since they're broadcasting from a common location, it will also be a lot easier to receive, since you point the antenna at one peak to receive all the stations. I already have my HDTV (they're sweet, as long as the feed is S-video, progressive, or 1080i!), and will soon have my receiver (as soon as Toshiba sells the one to match my TV). Normally I avoid local channels, but it's hard to pass them up when they all go digital simultaneously.
Please check your facts! I would have someone who works for a "research" company to know how to research. I specifically asked Sorenson about a Linux port, and they said they're all for it, but that _APPLE_ hadn't bothered to port the code.
Does anybody know whether Phase5 (www.phase5.de) is really going to build their new equivalents of the Amiga? They've been bragging about such a product for _years_ now, regularly changing the name and extending the introduction date.