IBM dominated the mainframe computer market in the 1970s (by making a superior product to Burroughs, Honeywell, etc.). However, they required their customers to buy IBM disk drives, IBM terminals, IBM printers, etc. This was ruled anti-competitive by the courts, and it was made legal for competitors to reverse engineer IBM's interfaces, spoofing as needed, in order to make "plug compatible" peripherals (and mainframes). The public benefited from the competition.
Apple now dominates the music player market (by making a superior product to Archos, Sandisk, etc.). However, they want to tie the iTunes to the iPod-- this is anti-competitive. Palm is fully within it's rights to reverse engineer and spoof the interface in order to make a plug compatible peripheral -- and the public benefits.
>A hybrid car requires less gas, but it also has a massive >battery which will need to be disposed of safely in a few years.
The prius battery is actually quite small- about the size of a small suitcase. It is composed of 280 D cells (actual consumer D cells were used in the initial Japanese models). In terms of energy, it holds about a HALF A CUP of gasoline. This is all that is needed to smooth out the peaks and valleys of energy demand during stop and go driving, thus allowing a smaller (hence more efficient) gasoline engine.
>What would it be like to manage the disposal of these batteries >if there was suddenly tens of millions of such cars driving >around?
Recycling. The nickel in the NiMH batteries is valuable enough that recycling pays for itself. They can be melted down and used again and again and again... The electrolite is plain old potassium hydroxide; caustic but no more "hazardous" than bleach.
> A natural evolved behavior? You mean like homosexuality? Hmmm... I wonder where that evolved from.
Glad you asked. Homosexuality is probably caused by improper activation or deactivation of gender specific wiring in the brain during fetal development, possibly by interactions with the mother's immune system.
One of the most tantalising clues about male homosexuality is that the probability a male will be homosexual increases 33% with each biological older brother. There is no correlation with number of younger brothers, sisters, adopted brothers, etc. Here's what scientists think is happening. All fetuses start out as female. At different points during development, genes on the Y chromosome activate and produce proteins which act as "switches" to the developing embryo: develop a penis, make a male brain, etc. These "mascularizing" proteins are completely foreign to the mother's immune system. Each time the immune system is exposed to a foreign agent, the immune system "recognises it" and orchestrates a stronger attack for the next time (this is the principle behind immunization).
Each time the mother carries a boy, her immune system may get another wiff of these mascularizing proteins, until with son #3 BAM! the mother's immune system attacks one of the proteins that makes a male brain (one that likes trucks and wants sex with females). What is left is a brain with a portion that is still feminine (likes clothes and wants sex with males).
So while there may be no "genes" for homesexuality, there are genes for a vigilent immune system. If these genes are too weak, the population is vulnerable to disease. If they are too strong, the population will be aflicted with autoimmune diseases (lupus, MS, arthritis, etc) and too many sons end up gay (infertile). So the 2% rate of male homosexuality we observe in the population is reflects a balance in these competing adaptations.
Just as there are many agents that cause a temperature (virus, bacteria, parasites, etc), there are probably multiple agents/pathways that can interfere with gender specific brain development. This is one.
> I have a few hundred cassettes. Some are in fairly bad shape because cassettes are kind of fragile. I'll be damned if I'm going to rebuy all of U2's and the Talking Heads' early work just because the music industry is going to lable me a "pirate" if I don't.
So get off your ass and rip the cassettes onto CD. I copied a bunch of albums onto CD/hard disk this winter, and they sound better than ever, thanks to removing the pops and clicks with Soundstudio.
> The other reason i think it is fine is, I can get car stereos based on WMA.
But these need to compete with the ipod adapters from BMW, Nissan, Volvo, Mercedes Benz, and the aftermarket adapters from Monster Cable, Axxess, ipod2car, Clarion, Alpine,...
There's a whole ipod ecosystem this needs to displaced.
Blue-ray will fail because the disks won't play in the current installed base of DVD players. People now have DVD players in their living rooms, SUVs, cars, laptops, desktops, bedrooms, kitchens, vacation homes-- do you really want to explain to your kid that the new Spiderman3 Blue-ray disk they bought won't play in the minivan?
HD-DVD multilayer disks can be made completely backwards compatible- HD on new layers for the home theater in the basement, conventional resolution on other layers for the car. Stores will only have to stock one disk. This will decide it.
I work in a technical environment (chip design) on linux, and the only reason I use Windows is to work with documents from Microsoft Office. Will Microsoft release a version of Office for linux, and if not, why not? It seems to me a major opportunity for consumer choice was lost when Microsoft was not broken up into independent OS and Applications companies.
The point is that, faced with carrying two devices, one of which (a phone) they want to carry everywhere, they choose that one, and drop the other.
There are two ways (two independant axis, if you will) to increase the usefulness of a device. You can add more and more features/capability/power, or you can increase the probability that you will have the device with you -- by making is smaller, more durable, make the battery last longer, lowering the cost. The last one has been completely overlooked by the PocketPC manufacturers. I'm not going to go snowboarding with a $599 PDA in my pocket, because I don't want to worry about breaking it. But a $70 phone or a $199 Palm I'll take with me.
> image quality degrades when you're a few feet below the level of the screen... Does anyone know if this is liable to be solved in newer models?
Yeah, that's the deal breaker for me too. There is a solution for this on the horizon, but I forgot the vendor's name. Currently, the plastic screen on a microprojection TV (DLP or LCOS) is frosted plastic. A startup is working on an optically directional plastic that will be equivilent to zillions of tiny lightpipes from the back of the screen to the front. At the front will be little domes, for fixing the viewing cone problem. I don't have a timeframe for this, though.
Look, I love my iPod as much as anyone, but I would have thought by the 4th generation they would have added gapless and crossfade playback options. (crossfade playback with beatmatching and auto-pitch adjust can wait for 5th generation...)
Slashdot Mirror
It's not so simple.
IBM dominated the mainframe computer market in the 1970s (by making a superior product to Burroughs, Honeywell, etc.). However, they required their customers to buy IBM disk drives, IBM terminals, IBM printers, etc. This was ruled anti-competitive by the courts, and it was made legal for competitors to reverse engineer IBM's interfaces, spoofing as needed, in order to make "plug compatible" peripherals (and mainframes). The public benefited from the competition.
Apple now dominates the music player market (by making a superior product to Archos, Sandisk, etc.). However, they want to tie the iTunes to the iPod-- this is anti-competitive. Palm is fully within it's rights to reverse engineer and spoof the interface in order to make a plug compatible peripheral -- and the public benefits.
>One neat thing in comparison to Netflix is that it will give a projected star rating for you, rather >than simply saying "Recommended".
The stars that you see *are* the projected star rating for you. If you scoll down in a movie
listing, you can see the projected and average:
Average of people who rate like you: 4.4 stars
Average of 28,372 ratings: 3.2 stars
>A hybrid car requires less gas, but it also has a massive >battery which will need to be disposed of safely in a few years.
P riusFrames.htm
The prius battery is actually quite small- about the size of a small suitcase. It is composed of 280 D cells (actual consumer D cells were used in the initial Japanese models). In terms of energy, it holds about a HALF A CUP of gasoline. This is all that is needed to smooth out the peaks and valleys of energy demand during stop and go driving, thus allowing a smaller (hence more efficient) gasoline engine.
>What would it be like to manage the disposal of these batteries >if there was suddenly tens of millions of such cars driving >around?
Recycling. The nickel in the NiMH batteries is valuable enough that recycling pays for itself. They can be melted down and used again and again and again... The electrolite is plain old
potassium hydroxide; caustic but no more "hazardous" than bleach.
For an outstanding whitepaper on the prius drivetrain (including mathcad models), see:
http://home.earthlink.net/~graham1/MyToyotaPrius/
I love my ipod as much as anyone, but 'cmon - it's about
time they add the ability to crossfade from one track to the next.
> A natural evolved behavior? You mean like homosexuality? Hmmm... I wonder where that evolved from.
Glad you asked. Homosexuality is probably caused by improper activation or deactivation of gender specific wiring in the brain during fetal development, possibly by interactions with the mother's immune system.
One of the most tantalising
clues about male homosexuality is that the probability a male will be homosexual increases 33% with each biological older brother. There is no correlation with number of younger brothers, sisters, adopted brothers, etc. Here's what scientists think is happening. All fetuses start out as female. At different points during development, genes on the Y chromosome activate and produce proteins which act as "switches" to the developing embryo: develop a penis, make a male brain, etc. These "mascularizing" proteins are completely foreign to the mother's immune system. Each time the immune system is exposed to a foreign agent, the immune system "recognises it" and orchestrates a stronger attack for the next time (this is the principle behind immunization).
Each time the mother carries a boy, her immune system may get another wiff of these mascularizing proteins, until with son #3 BAM! the mother's immune system attacks one of the proteins that makes a male brain (one that likes trucks and wants sex with females). What is left is a brain with a portion that is still feminine (likes clothes and wants sex with males).
So while there may be no "genes" for homesexuality, there are genes for a vigilent immune system. If these genes are too weak, the
population is vulnerable to disease. If they are too strong, the population will be aflicted with autoimmune diseases (lupus, MS, arthritis, etc) and too many sons end up gay (infertile). So the 2% rate of male homosexuality we observe in the population is reflects a balance in these competing adaptations.
Just as there are many agents that cause a temperature (virus, bacteria, parasites, etc), there are probably multiple agents/pathways that can interfere with gender specific brain development. This is one.
> Burt Rutan didn't go into orbit, he got up to 100 kms.
And going _up_ is the easy part; it's going sideways fast enough to orbit that is the tricky part. Energy is proportional to V^2.
(orbital_velocity/spaceshipOne_velocity)^2 =
(17,000mph/2,500mph)^2 =
=46x
So to become orbital, spaceShipOne needs *46*
times more energy, and needs to disipate *46* times more energy for re-entry.
So yes, spaceshipOne is cool and all that, but to say NASA is clueless is wrong.
> I have a few hundred cassettes. Some are in fairly bad shape because cassettes are kind of fragile. I'll be damned if I'm going to rebuy all of U2's and the Talking Heads' early work just because the music industry is going to lable me a "pirate" if I don't.
So get off your ass and rip the cassettes onto CD. I copied a bunch of albums onto CD/hard disk this winter, and they sound better than ever, thanks to
removing the pops and clicks with Soundstudio.
> The other reason i think it is fine is, I can get car stereos based on WMA.
...
But these need to compete with the ipod adapters from BMW, Nissan, Volvo, Mercedes Benz, and the aftermarket adapters from Monster Cable, Axxess, ipod2car, Clarion, Alpine,
There's a whole ipod ecosystem this needs to displaced.
> Apple has joined the Blu-ray Disc Association
Blue-ray will fail because the disks won't play in the current installed base of DVD players. People
now have DVD players in their living rooms, SUVs, cars, laptops, desktops, bedrooms, kitchens, vacation homes-- do you
really want to explain to your kid that the new Spiderman3 Blue-ray disk they bought won't play in the minivan?
HD-DVD multilayer disks can be made completely backwards compatible- HD on new layers for the home theater in the basement, conventional resolution on other layers for the car. Stores will only have to stock one disk. This will decide it.
I work in a technical environment (chip design) on
linux, and the only reason I use Windows is to work
with documents from Microsoft Office. Will Microsoft release a version of Office for linux,
and if not, why not? It seems to me a major opportunity for consumer choice was lost when Microsoft was not broken up into independent OS and Applications companies.
There are two ways (two independant axis, if you will) to increase the usefulness of a device. You can add more and more features/capability/power, or you can increase the probability that you will have the device with you -- by making is smaller, more durable, make the battery last longer, lowering the cost. The last one has been completely overlooked by the PocketPC manufacturers. I'm not going to go snowboarding with a $599 PDA in my pocket, because I don't want to worry about breaking it. But a $70 phone or a $199 Palm I'll take with me.
> image quality degrades when you're a few feet below the level of the screen... Does anyone know if this is liable to be solved in newer models?
Yeah, that's the deal breaker for me too. There is a solution for this on the horizon, but I forgot the
vendor's name. Currently, the plastic screen on
a microprojection TV (DLP or LCOS) is frosted plastic. A startup is working on an optically directional plastic that will be equivilent to zillions of tiny lightpipes from the back of the screen to the front. At the front will be little
domes, for fixing the viewing cone problem. I don't have a timeframe for this, though.
Look, I love my iPod as much as anyone, but I
would have thought by the 4th generation they would have added gapless and crossfade playback options.
(crossfade playback with beatmatching and auto-pitch adjust can wait for 5th generation...)