"...and the box sounds like a jet-engine taking off..."
Have a look at Quiet PC - they have a huge range of components and fans specifically aimed at reducing noise. I have just invested in some case fans myself after (not?) hearing them in action in a friends recording studio.
Look at it a different way; Microsoft is a billions of dollars a year company that wants to try out something new. They have the clout and (some might argue this) the expertise to try it.
New markets, new areas like this will have a lot of problems that need to be solved, and although we love to hate them, MS's millions being injected into this will be a good thing, make other people sit up and take notice and - most importantly - improve on it.
It appears that pressure does play a part. There's some good information here which also points out that pressure has had the effect of super-saturating the water with oxygen.
I remember reading a while back (I think it was in Wired?) that they had problems boring through the ice as the pressure closed the hole. The initial plan was to pump the hole full of oil to keep it open, although this plan was scrapped because of the environmental implications. Last I heard, they were toying with the idea of sealing a remote rover in the base of the hole, then having it break though into the lake. As long as the rover's sterilised, the integrity of the ecosystem - in theory - should be preserved.
The Walkman quite possibly defined audio in the 1980s, but Sony seem to have forgotten that this wonderful device that made them tonnes of cash was built around a format invented by someone else; Philip's audio cassette tape.
You would really have expected Sony to have capitalised on both a) the popularity of MP3s and b) the popularity of their brand. But no - we're stuck with ATRAC - and unfortunately, it looks like they accidentally took a leaf from the Betamax manual. When are they going to learn?
You're wrong on only one point - It was Psion who gave the world the PDA in 1984. Sold as an 'Organiser', it didn't come with PDA functions, but within a year, software was available for managing contacts, calendars and to do lists.
I find Apple's take on 'non-conformist' quite interesting, as they have moved towards many industry standards over the last few years that a decade ago they would have shunned. Gone is their ADB, bus structure, and in comes PCI, AGP, USB.This brings it all down to what a Apple machine actually is nowadays; essentially, the only bits that make an Apple machine special are the CPU, OS and case. Apart from that, the guts of it are all industry standard and not worth writing home about, yet the machine itself is more than the sum of its parts - simply because Apple focus on what makes it different; it's G5, case pics and 'lickable' OS all the way with their ads, whereas PC stuff is hooked up on GHz, GB, MB and other mundane specs.
Another irony from the Open Source perspective is that somebody we all love to hate was a non-conformist - Bill Gates. His mantra from the mid-70's regarding selling software has shaped the computer industry as we know it today. Interesting stuff...
...that they have made only the beta versions of the Express products free. There's no mention of whether the final version's pricing. Personally, I expect them to replace the 'Standard' editions of the languages as they stand currently.
Interesting to see SQL Server Express 2005. As it's based on the Yukon engine, that it something I'll be downloading and playing with. I have no idea what edition of SQL Server this would replace, possibly Developer in the long run? It's mentioned that it's installed in a full VS 2005 install...
Okay, I see what your saying - and agree with you (read on), but from first iTMS(UK) experience with The BB album, I was beginning to wonder...
Initially when I bought it, I created a play list and could not burn it at all. I kept receiving the error message The license for this track does not allow burning to CD. You can interpret that however you see fit, but it doesn't give you much leaway from coming to the conclusion that DRM in iTunes is editable on a per track basis does it?
That said, after being modded as Troll for posting my own experiences, and reading your replies, I thought I'd give it a go again and see if I can finally get it to burn correctly. An uninstall and reinstall of iTunes sorted the problem out after reimporting my library.
Anyhows, thanks for a constructive reply and setting me straight on a few iTunes issues.:o)
"Uh, if you are buying the album and you're going to rip it to iTunes why not just buy it from the iTunes Music Store in the first place? Then you only need to buy it once."
I bought it from the iTunes store, only to find that I can't burn it to CD to listen to it anywhere else, so it's stuck in iTunes or my iPod. Now while I can see the point here, I was under the impression that you could burn a CD x times using iTunes. Not true.
Hence I now see that I'm in a worse position buying from iTunes than I am if I bought the CD.
I will be buying the CD in future, unless the iTunes Music Store makes it clearer as to the limitations of each album. Personally, I think that a license to listen to the music should be cross-format. The license should be attached to me listening to the tracks, not my iPod or my PC/Mac, or any other format.
Think tanks have turned innovation, insight and thinking into a source of income, and they're seeking to commoditise it.
Put simply, free-thinking outside of a think tank is seen as a threat to their own jobs. In their opinion, open source development should be best left to companies that develop software, in the same way that opinions and insight should come from them, and them only.
Their biggest threat here isn't open source software, it's open source thinking.
We're talking about motherboard chipsets here, not CPUs. While looking at CPU architecture, clock speeds, etc. etc. to get a gist of how a PC will perform, it's still important to remember that speed of a PC is about the sum of its parts.
So think of these changes as an incremental speed increase across the Intel platform. Sure, they're a heck of a lot more boring than seat-of-pants GHz updates, but I welcome decent integration of a whole new set of bus technologies (SATA and PCI Express) which we've heard a lot of, but not seen much action on. Remember that PCI has been around for 10 years or so now and is getting a little long in the tooth stuck at a 33MHz bus speed.
In any case, it'll be interesting to see how these architecture updates are carried across to the Intel mobile platform.
"Why has nobody managed (or tried) to take the last step?"
Your answer lies in your question. People do take the last step, using the range of technologies that you've mentioned. While Flash is mainly used for eye candy, I've seen it used for some nice realtime graphing and Gantt charts, Java still makes its way onto web pages from time to time, especially in web applications. In part, the reason that all web page interfaces aren't much good is because people have the choice, and most settle for good old HTML, with its limited form elements and markup.
There will always be a limit to what the browser will be able to do though. Part of that comes from the page's stateless approach, which ironically is a browsers main advantage over a traditional client-server system. IMO, the browser needs a revisit and a serious overhaul, otherwise its duties will be replaced by a family of other applications such as RSS readers and application equivalents (I believe Macromedia recently released a framework for Flash aplications, but I forget what it was called).
The problem is that there's no SDK for the.NET CF 1.0, meaning you have to develop for it in Visual Studio 2003.
However, the reason is that they ran out of time, evidently a whole different kettle of fish from 'heavy licensing requirements' that's touted in the story. That's basically FUD.
So without an SDK, the only licensing requirement you have to satisfy to develop for it is a Visual Studio.NET 2003 license, there is no licensing attached to the runtimes. However, an SDK is pencilled in for the.NET CF 2.0 release.
I may be wrong here, but last time I looked, the only 'heavily licensed' part of developing for the.NET Compact Framework I could find was that I had to buy Visual Studio.NET 2003 in order to use it. There are no licenses per se for developing/deploying with the.NET CF, so what exactly does Pocket C# exist for?
Now, as far as I know, no SDK exists for Compact Framework 1.0, but one is slated for 2.0, as mentioned in this post. It seems an SDK doesn't exist due to time constraints, rather than licensing requirements.
Or at least the plans for the Z1 did. IIRC he tried to get it built, but the engineers thought he was a conman. He eventually got it completed in 1938.
The next model, the Z2 was partly finished before Zuse got conscripted into the army, obviously they were oblivious as to the importance of his developments.
Incidentally, it's important to point out that although the Z3 had government money behind it, it was built and used by Zuse personally at home to solve problems with wing flutter for Heinkel where he worked. It was destroyed by chance when his home was hit in a bombing raid.
Zuse also developed the first multi-purpose computing language 'Plankalkul' too. Quite an impressive achievement for a mathematician who developed a computer simply to enable him to do his wing calculations more effectively.
I see your point, but seeing as they had to sail their ships between the pillars to get to any ocean other than the Mediterranean, it could still be construed as any ocean beyond the pillars of Hercules.
What's interesting to note though is that this pretty much means that Atlantis isn't in the Med.
In ancient times, all oceans were known as the Sea of the Atlanteans, which is where the name Atlantic came from.
As far as they were concerned, standing on the shores of the Eurasian continent and Africa, the ocean surrounded them. To them the Atlantic wasn't what we now know as the Atlantic, it constituted the whole ocean. This puts paid to the argument that Atlant-is is in the modern Atlan-tic. It could be, but there are lots of other ridges and sub-oceanic plateaus in other parts of the ancient 'Atlantic' ocean that would have succumbed at the same time as the mid-Atlantic ridge...
I'm intrigued to find out how they collect their 'reports' of viruses. Namely:
How do they get their information, from human sources, software phoning home or guesswork?
What constitutes a 'virus'? Is it a compromised machine, a hit machine (but not infected) or what?
If it's compromised machines, how do they count machines without AV protection?
I suspect it's probably a mix of all of them, but mostly some statistical massaging. It's also good to note that if you keep your Windows box patched, you wouldn't be susceptible to any of those top ten viruses, although it's only through luck that we haven't had a pre-patch exploit. I hate to think about that to be honest...
What I find funny is that Sophos - in all their infinite wisdom - seem to be struggling to understand that arresting one Sven Jaschan hasn't made a dent in the 959 viruses that appeared. Strange that... when you consider that at most he accounted for 35 or so of them (Sasser and Netsky variants), leaving the other 924 or so for the rest of the world to write...
What I find crazy is that OnMouseDown is an event that's been kicking around in VB and JavaScript for Donkey's years. You can break this patent with some very simple code. Is that really worthy of a patent?
On a lighter note, I found I can replicate the patent by opening lots of applications in Windows, then holding down Alt-Tab. Try it - time based application selection!:o) Is there a Mac equivalent?
Hmmm... I see your point, although I'd consider a hardware button different to a hardware button mounted on a navigation device like a mouse. There again, I'd also consider a stylus/screen combo to be different to a hardware button, but the push and hold context menu on PocketPC 2000 is the only place I've seen Microsoft use anything remotely like this. Bad patent call or deliberate ambiguity? Either way it's a good example of differing interpretation of patents and why the patent model is failing.
At the moment when I press and hold my mouse button, nothing happens. Sure, stuff happens when I release it, but I don't get anything pop up just by holding. That stands true for both left and right buttons.
Now, this first time I did see this happen was on PocketPC 2000 software where a click and hold popped up the context menu. That's a 'hardware limited' device, i.e. it has no second button, just a stylus.
In any case I'd just like to point out that I'm not defending it - it's another silly patent - merely stating that the story has it wrong.
Absolutely, although reading the patent, I was interested to find it titled:
"Time based hardware button for application launch"
Interesting, as it seems to be getting at the idea of launching different applications based on how long you hold down a hardware button, rather than how long you click and hold on the screen. This ties in with the sentence further on which pertains to it being relevant to devices with limited resources, i.e. not very many buttons.
While I can see that this will get people's backs up if it impedes on double clicking, I don't think it does. I think it's aimed more along the lines of Apple's iPod interface controller patent - it's trying to carve out a control method for mobile devices.
I can see how this would be useful on a PDA for instance when the start menu is longer than the screen size (as in PocketPCs), but personally I'd prefer a jog dial...
On a side note, the story does seem to be scaremongering to a degree - this certainly isn't about patenting double clicking.
The reason isn't Windows Media, battery life, drive space or unit size, it's something much more simple.
Sunlight.
I don't particularly think that screen technology is up to the standard required to watch a 3-4" TV screen outside on a bright, sunny day. Sure, transflective goes some way towards solving the problem, and might be tolerable on a PDA, but on a $400 device that's being sold as a viewer? If you're envisaging using this while sat on the bus, in the park or outside Starbucks think again - you aren't going to be able to see the screen very well if they're using current technology.
Slashdot Mirror
"...and the box sounds like a jet-engine taking off..."
Have a look at Quiet PC - they have a huge range of components and fans specifically aimed at reducing noise. I have just invested in some case fans myself after (not?) hearing them in action in a friends recording studio.
Look at it a different way; Microsoft is a billions of dollars a year company that wants to try out something new. They have the clout and (some might argue this) the expertise to try it.
New markets, new areas like this will have a lot of problems that need to be solved, and although we love to hate them, MS's millions being injected into this will be a good thing, make other people sit up and take notice and - most importantly - improve on it.
It appears that pressure does play a part. There's some good information here which also points out that pressure has had the effect of super-saturating the water with oxygen.
I remember reading a while back (I think it was in Wired?) that they had problems boring through the ice as the pressure closed the hole. The initial plan was to pump the hole full of oil to keep it open, although this plan was scrapped because of the environmental implications. Last I heard, they were toying with the idea of sealing a remote rover in the base of the hole, then having it break though into the lake. As long as the rover's sterilised, the integrity of the ecosystem - in theory - should be preserved.
The Walkman quite possibly defined audio in the 1980s, but Sony seem to have forgotten that this wonderful device that made them tonnes of cash was built around a format invented by someone else; Philip's audio cassette tape.
You would really have expected Sony to have capitalised on both a) the popularity of MP3s and b) the popularity of their brand. But no - we're stuck with ATRAC - and unfortunately, it looks like they accidentally took a leaf from the Betamax manual. When are they going to learn?
You're wrong on only one point - It was Psion who gave the world the PDA in 1984. Sold as an 'Organiser', it didn't come with PDA functions, but within a year, software was available for managing contacts, calendars and to do lists.
I find Apple's take on 'non-conformist' quite interesting, as they have moved towards many industry standards over the last few years that a decade ago they would have shunned. Gone is their ADB, bus structure, and in comes PCI, AGP, USB.This brings it all down to what a Apple machine actually is nowadays; essentially, the only bits that make an Apple machine special are the CPU, OS and case. Apart from that, the guts of it are all industry standard and not worth writing home about, yet the machine itself is more than the sum of its parts - simply because Apple focus on what makes it different; it's G5, case pics and 'lickable' OS all the way with their ads, whereas PC stuff is hooked up on GHz, GB, MB and other mundane specs.
Another irony from the Open Source perspective is that somebody we all love to hate was a non-conformist - Bill Gates. His mantra from the mid-70's regarding selling software has shaped the computer industry as we know it today. Interesting stuff...
...that they have made only the beta versions of the Express products free. There's no mention of whether the final version's pricing. Personally, I expect them to replace the 'Standard' editions of the languages as they stand currently.
Interesting to see SQL Server Express 2005. As it's based on the Yukon engine, that it something I'll be downloading and playing with. I have no idea what edition of SQL Server this would replace, possibly Developer in the long run? It's mentioned that it's installed in a full VS 2005 install...
Okay, I see what your saying - and agree with you (read on), but from first iTMS(UK) experience with The BB album, I was beginning to wonder...
:o)
Initially when I bought it, I created a play list and could not burn it at all. I kept receiving the error message The license for this track does not allow burning to CD. You can interpret that however you see fit, but it doesn't give you much leaway from coming to the conclusion that DRM in iTunes is editable on a per track basis does it?
That said, after being modded as Troll for posting my own experiences, and reading your replies, I thought I'd give it a go again and see if I can finally get it to burn correctly. An uninstall and reinstall of iTunes sorted the problem out after reimporting my library.
Anyhows, thanks for a constructive reply and setting me straight on a few iTunes issues.
"Uh, if you are buying the album and you're going to rip it to iTunes why not just buy it from the iTunes Music Store in the first place? Then you only need to buy it once."
I bought it from the iTunes store, only to find that I can't burn it to CD to listen to it anywhere else, so it's stuck in iTunes or my iPod. Now while I can see the point here, I was under the impression that you could burn a CD x times using iTunes. Not true.
Hence I now see that I'm in a worse position buying from iTunes than I am if I bought the CD.
I will be buying the CD in future, unless the iTunes Music Store makes it clearer as to the limitations of each album. Personally, I think that a license to listen to the music should be cross-format. The license should be attached to me listening to the tracks, not my iPod or my PC/Mac, or any other format.
Think tanks have turned innovation, insight and thinking into a source of income, and they're seeking to commoditise it.
Put simply, free-thinking outside of a think tank is seen as a threat to their own jobs. In their opinion, open source development should be best left to companies that develop software, in the same way that opinions and insight should come from them, and them only.
Their biggest threat here isn't open source software, it's open source thinking.
here's a couple of pictures.
For a more comprehensive overview of the whole BTX, DDR2, Socket 775 and PCI Express malarkey, I'd recommend having a look here. Interesting stuff.
We're talking about motherboard chipsets here, not CPUs. While looking at CPU architecture, clock speeds, etc. etc. to get a gist of how a PC will perform, it's still important to remember that speed of a PC is about the sum of its parts.
So think of these changes as an incremental speed increase across the Intel platform. Sure, they're a heck of a lot more boring than seat-of-pants GHz updates, but I welcome decent integration of a whole new set of bus technologies (SATA and PCI Express) which we've heard a lot of, but not seen much action on. Remember that PCI has been around for 10 years or so now and is getting a little long in the tooth stuck at a 33MHz bus speed.
In any case, it'll be interesting to see how these architecture updates are carried across to the Intel mobile platform.
"Why has nobody managed (or tried) to take the last step?"
Your answer lies in your question. People do take the last step, using the range of technologies that you've mentioned. While Flash is mainly used for eye candy, I've seen it used for some nice realtime graphing and Gantt charts, Java still makes its way onto web pages from time to time, especially in web applications. In part, the reason that all web page interfaces aren't much good is because people have the choice, and most settle for good old HTML, with its limited form elements and markup.
There will always be a limit to what the browser will be able to do though. Part of that comes from the page's stateless approach, which ironically is a browsers main advantage over a traditional client-server system. IMO, the browser needs a revisit and a serious overhaul, otherwise its duties will be replaced by a family of other applications such as RSS readers and application equivalents (I believe Macromedia recently released a framework for Flash aplications, but I forget what it was called).
The problem is that there's no SDK for the .NET CF 1.0, meaning you have to develop for it in Visual Studio 2003.
.NET CF 2.0 release.
However, the reason is that they ran out of time, evidently a whole different kettle of fish from 'heavy licensing requirements' that's touted in the story. That's basically FUD.
So without an SDK, the only licensing requirement you have to satisfy to develop for it is a Visual Studio.NET 2003 license, there is no licensing attached to the runtimes. However, an SDK is pencilled in for the
I may be wrong here, but last time I looked, the only 'heavily licensed' part of developing for the .NET Compact Framework I could find was that I had to buy Visual Studio.NET 2003 in order to use it. There are no licenses per se for developing/deploying with the .NET CF, so what exactly does Pocket C# exist for?
Now, as far as I know, no SDK exists for Compact Framework 1.0, but one is slated for 2.0, as mentioned in this post. It seems an SDK doesn't exist due to time constraints, rather than licensing requirements.
Or at least the plans for the Z1 did. IIRC he tried to get it built, but the engineers thought he was a conman. He eventually got it completed in 1938.
The next model, the Z2 was partly finished before Zuse got conscripted into the army, obviously they were oblivious as to the importance of his developments.
Incidentally, it's important to point out that although the Z3 had government money behind it, it was built and used by Zuse personally at home to solve problems with wing flutter for Heinkel where he worked. It was destroyed by chance when his home was hit in a bombing raid.
Zuse also developed the first multi-purpose computing language 'Plankalkul' too. Quite an impressive achievement for a mathematician who developed a computer simply to enable him to do his wing calculations more effectively.
I see your point, but seeing as they had to sail their ships between the pillars to get to any ocean other than the Mediterranean, it could still be construed as any ocean beyond the pillars of Hercules.
What's interesting to note though is that this pretty much means that Atlantis isn't in the Med.
Possibly true but you're forgetting one thing.
In ancient times, all oceans were known as the Sea of the Atlanteans, which is where the name Atlantic came from.
As far as they were concerned, standing on the shores of the Eurasian continent and Africa, the ocean surrounded them. To them the Atlantic wasn't what we now know as the Atlantic, it constituted the whole ocean. This puts paid to the argument that Atlant-is is in the modern Atlan-tic. It could be, but there are lots of other ridges and sub-oceanic plateaus in other parts of the ancient 'Atlantic' ocean that would have succumbed at the same time as the mid-Atlantic ridge...
here
- How do they get their information, from human sources, software phoning home or guesswork?
- What constitutes a 'virus'? Is it a compromised machine, a hit machine (but not infected) or what?
- If it's compromised machines, how do they count machines without AV protection?
I suspect it's probably a mix of all of them, but mostly some statistical massaging. It's also good to note that if you keep your Windows box patched, you wouldn't be susceptible to any of those top ten viruses, although it's only through luck that we haven't had a pre-patch exploit. I hate to think about that to be honest...What I find funny is that Sophos - in all their infinite wisdom - seem to be struggling to understand that arresting one Sven Jaschan hasn't made a dent in the 959 viruses that appeared. Strange that... when you consider that at most he accounted for 35 or so of them (Sasser and Netsky variants), leaving the other 924 or so for the rest of the world to write...
What I find crazy is that OnMouseDown is an event that's been kicking around in VB and JavaScript for Donkey's years. You can break this patent with some very simple code. Is that really worthy of a patent?
:o) Is there a Mac equivalent?
On a lighter note, I found I can replicate the patent by opening lots of applications in Windows, then holding down Alt-Tab. Try it - time based application selection!
Hmmm... I see your point, although I'd consider a hardware button different to a hardware button mounted on a navigation device like a mouse. There again, I'd also consider a stylus/screen combo to be different to a hardware button, but the push and hold context menu on PocketPC 2000 is the only place I've seen Microsoft use anything remotely like this. Bad patent call or deliberate ambiguity? Either way it's a good example of differing interpretation of patents and why the patent model is failing.
At the moment when I press and hold my mouse button, nothing happens. Sure, stuff happens when I release it, but I don't get anything pop up just by holding. That stands true for both left and right buttons.
Now, this first time I did see this happen was on PocketPC 2000 software where a click and hold popped up the context menu. That's a 'hardware limited' device, i.e. it has no second button, just a stylus.
In any case I'd just like to point out that I'm not defending it - it's another silly patent - merely stating that the story has it wrong.
Absolutely, although reading the patent, I was interested to find it titled:
"Time based hardware button for application launch"
Interesting, as it seems to be getting at the idea of launching different applications based on how long you hold down a hardware button, rather than how long you click and hold on the screen. This ties in with the sentence further on which pertains to it being relevant to devices with limited resources, i.e. not very many buttons.
While I can see that this will get people's backs up if it impedes on double clicking, I don't think it does. I think it's aimed more along the lines of Apple's iPod interface controller patent - it's trying to carve out a control method for mobile devices.
I can see how this would be useful on a PDA for instance when the start menu is longer than the screen size (as in PocketPCs), but personally I'd prefer a jog dial...
On a side note, the story does seem to be scaremongering to a degree - this certainly isn't about patenting double clicking.
The reason isn't Windows Media, battery life, drive space or unit size, it's something much more simple.
Sunlight.
I don't particularly think that screen technology is up to the standard required to watch a 3-4" TV screen outside on a bright, sunny day. Sure, transflective goes some way towards solving the problem, and might be tolerable on a PDA, but on a $400 device that's being sold as a viewer? If you're envisaging using this while sat on the bus, in the park or outside Starbucks think again - you aren't going to be able to see the screen very well if they're using current technology.