Guess who's going to run most of the WiMax networks.
I hope not. The mobile companies should all be locked out of it via some anti-monopoly laws.
It seems to me that sticking a few mobile phone masts around a city is a lot cheaper than digging a whole city up so that cable can be laid. Why therefore do we have to pay so much for mobile phone services?
At the moment we depend on our workstations to access the Internet, so the company we work for has total control. They can spy on you, restrict you etc etc. But a few years from now, Wimax, or something like it will allow cheap Internet access from anywhere at any time. You wont even need to used your workstation for doing anything personal. You will be able to use your Wimax enabled PDA, which will probably double as a phone using some VOIP client like Skype. You will have totally private Internet access at any time wherever you are.
(Technically speaking we can do some of this now with our mobiles, but Internet access is still way to expensive)
I agree. They always look awful in the shop and I have two relatives who have splashed out on Plasma's and they don't look particularly good either (that goes for the relatives too:) ). If you want a big screen, just move your eye closer to a small screen. It works really well and it's cheap.
That said, I'm keeping my eye on http://www.lightblueoptics.co.uk/ . They have developed a small laser diffraction projector which should be pretty cheap, since they are aiming the technology at mobile gadgets.
I just use a free (and open source) product called AutoHotKey (http://www.autohotkey.com/)
It lets you remap keys to whatever you want. I just remapped CapsLock to be another shift key.
It does a lot more than just remapping keys though. I've set it up so that if I hold down "Alt Gr" and press f, it will turn the currently active window into a floating window which is always on top, which can be useful.
I have a friend who's a sound engineer and he says he always hears library sounds on news reports. e.g. A report from Iraq may have some standard AK47 shots dubbed on to make it sound more interesting.
If you want to watch video on the move, you can't do much better than the Archos AV500. I've had the 60GB version for many months and it's been superb. You get a nice big 4" screen and a lot of storage space. I've also heard good things about the COWON A2. It's supposed to support more video formats than the Archos, but it does look a bit uglier. Initially I had a PSP, which has a great screen (a bit bigger than the Archos, better colour (I think) but poor viewing in sunlight) but unfortunately no hard drive, which is a shame. Still, a 1GB stick can hold a couple of films, but you will have to transcode (re-encode into a PSP compatible format) your videos.
High resolution is pretty pointless on a small screen. Until there are some cheap video goggles that give you a cinema-sized screen, I wouldn't bother.
If you think walking along listening to music is dangerous, I have perfected the art of walking along watching videos. I just hope I don't cross the road at the same time a driver who has perfected the art of watching TV and driving, comes along.
8 cores doesn't just mean you can handle 8 programs at once. One program could happily gobble all 8 cores up. For example, a video encoding program could have each core doing a DivX encoding of an 8th of a film, rather than doing the whole film on one core.
I think the trend towards multiple cores is going to generate a lot of new work in business software. For example, at some point the company I work for will have to rewrite everything multithreaded with parallel processing in mind. It won't be easy but we will be forced to do it because we cannot allow our competition to get ahead. There are going to be a lot of complete rewrites in the industry.
I want to know why human CG characters still look fake. We are missing something. I don't think it's about polygon count any more, it's something more subtle. I can't quite figure out what it is. The eyes seems like a good candidate. Obviously the human mind is very scrutinising when it comes to faces. At some point though, we will have characters indistinguishable from real ones. When that day comes, voice artists will be A-List stars.
Propaganda isn't necessarily bad or about spreading lies. It got those connotations during WWII when the NAZIS used it. Prior to the war, companies and governments were happy to use the word propaganda to describe what they were doing. I mean, you wouldn't think of a poster describing the dangers of unprotected sex as being propaganda would you? but it is.
These kind of animations/videos can spread around very quickly with little cost to the producers. If you can make your animation cool enough and funny enough you can deliver your propaganda payload to a large audience. Propaganda isn't wrong or evil, but the message can be.
What I would like to see though is the creators of these films to cite references (or provide relevant links) and to encourage viewers to find things out for themselves. Perhaps that would make it a little less propagandistic.
Big business routinely makes use of differing laws around the world to maximize profits. e.g. The labour laws in third world countries may be hell for the workers, but they keep manufacturing costs down for multi-nationals. So it's a bit hypocritcal to cry foul when members of the public engage in the same geographical law shopping. If they do not like the effects of globalisation, they can join the ranks of protesters at the next G8 Summit. And who knows, a few Executives might even be shot by overzealous riot police.
I assume you are talking about VB.NET since VB6 has been discontinued. I work for a company that still has a big VB6 product with tonnes of different VB6 DLL plugins that customers can pick and choose as extra features. We have neither the time nor money to rewrite it all in another language. This is a real problem that I suspect many companies are facing. (Don't tell me about interop, we've visited that nightmare)
A few months back I was saying that going with VB6 all those years ago was a massive mistake (due to its discontinuation) and that we should have gone with Delphi instead. Now Borland is selling off the Development tools division, Delphi's longevity is suspect. I now view proprietary languages with a great deal of suspicion. If I had my own company, I would try to avoid proprietary languages as much as possible since they can be a very big risk. You never know when that big company is going to turn around and tell you they are discontinuing it, leaving you completely stuffed. If you really have to use a proprietary language, try to pick one that is as open as possible.
e.g. Java
C# is supposed to be an open standard ( I don't know about VB.NET) but you will most likely find that the open source implementations do not have all the features you are making use of in Visual Studio. They will always be playing catch up with Microsoft. And you never know if and when Microsoft will turn around and start eliminating the open source implementations of C# in the courts.
As for the virtues of VB.NET as a language, it has all the modern features you would expect from an object oriented language. I personally think C# is a better choice to go with since Microsoft seem more interested in it (and are perhaps less likely to dump it), and also because its syntax is similar to lots of other languages such as Java and C++.
Welcome to the Business Software Alliance UK website. We are here to help businesses avoid software licensing problems.
If that is truly their aim, they should be pressing for businesses to use Open Source software. Searching for "Open Source" on their site reveals that the term occurs only once, in one document. They could also point out the dangers of investing your companies future in proprietary solutions. e.g. I work for a company that has invested hundreds of thousands of pounds in Visual Basic (pre.NET) development and this investment has been blown away by Microsoft's decision to discontinue VB (VB.NET is not VB).
We already have a huge Fusion reactor in the sky blasting us with masses of free energy. Spending billions on an experimental Fusion reactor is all well and good but it might just be a good idea to spend similar amounts of money working out ways to cheaply produce highly efficient solar cells.
How does government funding for photovoltaics compare to funding for Fusion research? Does anyone have the figures? I've never heard of any grand government push to make dirt cheap 50% efficient solar cells. Imagine if you could buy a 1m square 50% efficient solar cell for $10. That sort of technology could change the balance of power in the world.
DRM'd music is useless for anyone who is creative. For example, I like to put music tracks over video's I make and that is clearly impossible with DRM. Until they wise up, I'll stick with CD's.
I don't know about you but I am not crying out for higher resolution films and TV. I think DVD quality is just right and a huge and expensive transition over to another format seems pointless. It feels a bit like Microsoft forcing a new and unwanted Windows Version on us.
If people really cared about getting the ultimate quality in their viewing, DivX and Xvid would not be so popular as they further degrade the image quality.
The only benefit I can see in Bluray is as a storage medium. I have lots of stuff I would like to back up, and 25Gig disks would be handy. Then again hard drive capacities move so quickly that to me disks always seem inadequate for backups.
From a business perspective they are just trying to con us into buying our DVD collections all over again, in a format that is highly restrictive and much more difficult to rip. With so many people ripping DVDs so they can watch them on their portable movie player etc, I wonder whether an unrippable format would actually succeed commercially. You could end up with angry consumers going back to the shop and ranting:
"Hey this disk is faulty. I couldn't rip....er um, nothing. I just want my money back. Do you have the film in a DVD version?"
I've been waiting 10 years for the Virtual Retinal Display (VRD) and the only thing you can buy from Microvision is a cheesy looking Robocop-esque visor in 800x600 monochrome red.
It has great potential though, e.g. the ability to change the focus of each pixel.
You might also be interested in www.lightblueoptics.co.uk.
They use laser projection, but in a different way. They are not talking about video goggles yet, but the technology is obviously applicable.
I've been waiting for Virtual Reality Goggles ever since I saw the "Virtual Retinal Display" (VRD) on Tomorrows World in 1997. It's been nearly 10 years and they still haven't hit the high-street. One of the exciting things about the VRD was that they could potentially have a different focus for each pixel so it would be much more natural for your eyes.
However, things seem to be moving a bit more quickly now and I've seen a number of possibilities, of which this is just the latest.
Also relevant is the Scopo by Mistubishi (http://www.engadget.com/2004/10/15/scoping-out-mi tsubishis-scopo-wearable-display/)
And the Z800 by emagin
http://www.3dvisor.com/faqs.php#Features
Particularly interesting is a UK start-up called light blue optics. They do not talk about video glasses, but their laser projection technology could obviously be adapted for that use. They have made a matchbox sized laser projector which works by bouncing a beam off a Fourier transform of the image to be projected. There is no mechanical raster-scanning of the beam as is the case with the Virtual Retinal Display.
With the amount of money flying about in the mobile phone market, I don't think there is any question that there will be affordable video glasses before long. Things that are now impractical to do due to the small size of mobile device screens will suddenly become possible. A portable big screen could open up new revenue possibilities.
Aside from mobile phones, I see more and more people on the train with PSPs, Archos AV500's and various other personal movie players. That seems to be a growing market and high-res large screen video goggles would attract more people to the product.
Another possibility is virtual desktop screens. You could sit at your PC with video googles on and conjure up as many virtual screens as you like, all floating around you (obviously you need some head tracking). When you look at a screen directly it would snap into view to give a perfectly crisp picture.
The BBC is going downhill. For example, their "Have Your Say" forum is nothing of the kind. You can only have your say if they approve of your comments and often perfectly valid and non-offensive points of view are censored.
For example, they had a forum about the Google/China censorship issue and some people started pointing out that the BBC engages in censorship on it's forums. The BBC started removing the posts at breakneck speed but they gave up in the end as those posts were getting a lot of votes.
I used to complain a lot about the censorship on "Have Your Say" until I discovered the BBC Message Boards, which did allow immediate and uncensored posts. Sadly in the last few days the message boards have also been locked down and are now running in the same censorship mode. It's annoying enough that the BBC censors the public but its infuriating that we are actually paying to be censored through our license fee.
There is a UK website which, among other things, keeps an eye on the BBC.
See www.medialens.org
We really need a Slashdot style site for political/current affairs discussion. The forums on www.opendemocracy.net are quite good but they always have server problems.
I am tired of being forced to sit though anti-piracy adverts that I can't skip though when I buy legitimate DVDs. In response I propose that the following (skippable) advert should be added to pirated DVDs.
By purchasing legitimate DVDs, you are unwittingly helping to finance state terrorism through the sales tax (VAT in the UK). The terrible weapons purchased with your money are used to maim and kill thousands of innocent women and children throughout the Middle East in air assaults. Do you really want children to be dismembered and killed by a cluster bomb that you helped to purchase?
Slashdot Mirror
Guess who's going to run most of the WiMax networks.
I hope not. The mobile companies should all be locked out of it via some anti-monopoly laws. It seems to me that sticking a few mobile phone masts around a city is a lot cheaper than digging a whole city up so that cable can be laid. Why therefore do we have to pay so much for mobile phone services?
Just wait till Wimax (or something like it) takes off. You'll be able to bypass the mobile phone companies wherever you are.
At the moment we depend on our workstations to access the Internet, so the company we work for has total control. They can spy on you, restrict you etc etc. But a few years from now, Wimax, or something like it will allow cheap Internet access from anywhere at any time. You wont even need to used your workstation for doing anything personal. You will be able to use your Wimax enabled PDA, which will probably double as a phone using some VOIP client like Skype. You will have totally private Internet access at any time wherever you are. (Technically speaking we can do some of this now with our mobiles, but Internet access is still way to expensive)
I agree. They always look awful in the shop and I have two relatives who have splashed out on Plasma's and they don't look particularly good either (that goes for the relatives too :) ). If you want a big screen, just move your eye closer to a small screen. It works really well and it's cheap.
That said, I'm keeping my eye on http://www.lightblueoptics.co.uk/ . They have developed a small laser diffraction projector which should be pretty cheap, since they are aiming the technology at mobile gadgets.
I just use a free (and open source) product called AutoHotKey (http://www.autohotkey.com/) It lets you remap keys to whatever you want. I just remapped CapsLock to be another shift key. It does a lot more than just remapping keys though. I've set it up so that if I hold down "Alt Gr" and press f, it will turn the currently active window into a floating window which is always on top, which can be useful.
You're not getting confused with the Communist Songwriter "John Lenin" are you?
I've just stopped worrying.
Watch this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKTsJpfC0IQ
I have a friend who's a sound engineer and he says he always hears library sounds on news reports. e.g. A report from Iraq may have some standard AK47 shots dubbed on to make it sound more interesting.
If you want to watch video on the move, you can't do much better than the Archos AV500. I've had the 60GB version for many months and it's been superb. You get a nice big 4" screen and a lot of storage space. I've also heard good things about the COWON A2. It's supposed to support more video formats than the Archos, but it does look a bit uglier. Initially I had a PSP, which has a great screen (a bit bigger than the Archos, better colour (I think) but poor viewing in sunlight) but unfortunately no hard drive, which is a shame. Still, a 1GB stick can hold a couple of films, but you will have to transcode (re-encode into a PSP compatible format) your videos. High resolution is pretty pointless on a small screen. Until there are some cheap video goggles that give you a cinema-sized screen, I wouldn't bother. If you think walking along listening to music is dangerous, I have perfected the art of walking along watching videos. I just hope I don't cross the road at the same time a driver who has perfected the art of watching TV and driving, comes along.
8 cores doesn't just mean you can handle 8 programs at once. One program could happily gobble all 8 cores up. For example, a video encoding program could have each core doing a DivX encoding of an 8th of a film, rather than doing the whole film on one core. I think the trend towards multiple cores is going to generate a lot of new work in business software. For example, at some point the company I work for will have to rewrite everything multithreaded with parallel processing in mind. It won't be easy but we will be forced to do it because we cannot allow our competition to get ahead. There are going to be a lot of complete rewrites in the industry.
I want to know why human CG characters still look fake. We are missing something. I don't think it's about polygon count any more, it's something more subtle. I can't quite figure out what it is. The eyes seems like a good candidate. Obviously the human mind is very scrutinising when it comes to faces. At some point though, we will have characters indistinguishable from real ones. When that day comes, voice artists will be A-List stars.
Propaganda isn't necessarily bad or about spreading lies. It got those connotations during WWII when the NAZIS used it. Prior to the war, companies and governments were happy to use the word propaganda to describe what they were doing. I mean, you wouldn't think of a poster describing the dangers of unprotected sex as being propaganda would you? but it is. These kind of animations/videos can spread around very quickly with little cost to the producers. If you can make your animation cool enough and funny enough you can deliver your propaganda payload to a large audience. Propaganda isn't wrong or evil, but the message can be. What I would like to see though is the creators of these films to cite references (or provide relevant links) and to encourage viewers to find things out for themselves. Perhaps that would make it a little less propagandistic.
Big business routinely makes use of differing laws around the world to maximize profits. e.g. The labour laws in third world countries may be hell for the workers, but they keep manufacturing costs down for multi-nationals. So it's a bit hypocritcal to cry foul when members of the public engage in the same geographical law shopping. If they do not like the effects of globalisation, they can join the ranks of protesters at the next G8 Summit. And who knows, a few Executives might even be shot by overzealous riot police.
And once you've cracked the encryption, the course is free!
I assume you are talking about VB.NET since VB6 has been discontinued. I work for a company that still has a big VB6 product with tonnes of different VB6 DLL plugins that customers can pick and choose as extra features. We have neither the time nor money to rewrite it all in another language. This is a real problem that I suspect many companies are facing. (Don't tell me about interop, we've visited that nightmare)
A few months back I was saying that going with VB6 all those years ago was a massive mistake (due to its discontinuation) and that we should have gone with Delphi instead. Now Borland is selling off the Development tools division, Delphi's longevity is suspect. I now view proprietary languages with a great deal of suspicion. If I had my own company, I would try to avoid proprietary languages as much as possible since they can be a very big risk. You never know when that big company is going to turn around and tell you they are discontinuing it, leaving you completely stuffed. If you really have to use a proprietary language, try to pick one that is as open as possible.
e.g. Java
C# is supposed to be an open standard ( I don't know about VB.NET) but you will most likely find that the open source implementations do not have all the features you are making use of in Visual Studio. They will always be playing catch up with Microsoft. And you never know if and when Microsoft will turn around and start eliminating the open source implementations of C# in the courts.
As for the virtues of VB.NET as a language, it has all the modern features you would expect from an object oriented language. I personally think C# is a better choice to go with since Microsoft seem more interested in it (and are perhaps less likely to dump it), and also because its syntax is similar to lots of other languages such as Java and C++.
On the UK BSA website it says...
.NET) development and this investment has been blown away by Microsoft's decision to discontinue VB (VB.NET is not VB).
Welcome to the Business Software Alliance UK website. We are here to help businesses avoid software licensing problems.
If that is truly their aim, they should be pressing for businesses to use Open Source software. Searching for "Open Source" on their site reveals that the term occurs only once, in one document. They could also point out the dangers of investing your companies future in proprietary solutions. e.g. I work for a company that has invested hundreds of thousands of pounds in Visual Basic (pre
We already have a huge Fusion reactor in the sky blasting us with masses of free energy. Spending billions on an experimental Fusion reactor is all well and good but it might just be a good idea to spend similar amounts of money working out ways to cheaply produce highly efficient solar cells.
How does government funding for photovoltaics compare to funding for Fusion research? Does anyone have the figures? I've never heard of any grand government push to make dirt cheap 50% efficient solar cells. Imagine if you could buy a 1m square 50% efficient solar cell for $10. That sort of technology could change the balance of power in the world.
No disassemble, no disassemble! Sorry, I couldn't resist that.
DRM'd music is useless for anyone who is creative. For example, I like to put music tracks over video's I make and that is clearly impossible with DRM. Until they wise up, I'll stick with CD's.
I don't know about you but I am not crying out for higher resolution films and TV. I think DVD quality is just right and a huge and expensive transition over to another format seems pointless. It feels a bit like Microsoft forcing a new and unwanted Windows Version on us.
If people really cared about getting the ultimate quality in their viewing, DivX and Xvid would not be so popular as they further degrade the image quality.
The only benefit I can see in Bluray is as a storage medium. I have lots of stuff I would like to back up, and 25Gig disks would be handy. Then again hard drive capacities move so quickly that to me disks always seem inadequate for backups.
From a business perspective they are just trying to con us into buying our DVD collections all over again, in a format that is highly restrictive and much more difficult to rip. With so many people ripping DVDs so they can watch them on their portable movie player etc, I wonder whether an unrippable format would actually succeed commercially. You could end up with angry consumers going back to the shop and ranting:
"Hey this disk is faulty. I couldn't rip....er um, nothing. I just want my money back. Do you have the film in a DVD version?"
I've been waiting 10 years for the Virtual Retinal Display (VRD) and the only thing you can buy from Microvision is a cheesy looking Robocop-esque visor in 800x600 monochrome red.
It has great potential though, e.g. the ability to change the focus of each pixel.
You might also be interested in www.lightblueoptics.co.uk.
They use laser projection, but in a different way. They are not talking about video goggles yet, but the technology is obviously applicable.
I've been waiting for Virtual Reality Goggles ever since I saw the "Virtual Retinal Display" (VRD) on Tomorrows World in 1997. It's been nearly 10 years and they still haven't hit the high-street. One of the exciting things about the VRD was that they could potentially have a different focus for each pixel so it would be much more natural for your eyes.
i tsubishis-scopo-wearable-display/)
However, things seem to be moving a bit more quickly now and I've seen a number of possibilities, of which this is just the latest.
Also relevant is the Scopo by Mistubishi (http://www.engadget.com/2004/10/15/scoping-out-m
And the Z800 by emagin http://www.3dvisor.com/faqs.php#Features
Particularly interesting is a UK start-up called light blue optics. They do not talk about video glasses, but their laser projection technology could obviously be adapted for that use. They have made a matchbox sized laser projector which works by bouncing a beam off a Fourier transform of the image to be projected. There is no mechanical raster-scanning of the beam as is the case with the Virtual Retinal Display.
With the amount of money flying about in the mobile phone market, I don't think there is any question that there will be affordable video glasses before long. Things that are now impractical to do due to the small size of mobile device screens will suddenly become possible. A portable big screen could open up new revenue possibilities.
Aside from mobile phones, I see more and more people on the train with PSPs, Archos AV500's and various other personal movie players. That seems to be a growing market and high-res large screen video goggles would attract more people to the product.
Another possibility is virtual desktop screens. You could sit at your PC with video googles on and conjure up as many virtual screens as you like, all floating around you (obviously you need some head tracking). When you look at a screen directly it would snap into view to give a perfectly crisp picture.
The BBC is going downhill. For example, their "Have Your Say" forum is nothing of the kind. You can only have your say if they approve of your comments and often perfectly valid and non-offensive points of view are censored.
y =2&threadID=824&edition=2&ttl=20060501133750&#pagi nator
For example, they had a forum about the Google/China censorship issue and some people started pointing out that the BBC engages in censorship on it's forums. The BBC started removing the posts at breakneck speed but they gave up in the end as those posts were getting a lot of votes.
Take a look at the top scoring posts! http://newsforums.bbc.co.uk/nol/thread.jspa?sortB
I used to complain a lot about the censorship on "Have Your Say" until I discovered the BBC Message Boards, which did allow immediate and uncensored posts. Sadly in the last few days the message boards have also been locked down and are now running in the same censorship mode. It's annoying enough that the BBC censors the public but its infuriating that we are actually paying to be censored through our license fee.
There is a UK website which, among other things, keeps an eye on the BBC. See www.medialens.org
We really need a Slashdot style site for political/current affairs discussion. The forums on www.opendemocracy.net are quite good but they always have server problems.
Ok, I see. I'm from the UK and here it's a national tax. 17.5%
I am tired of being forced to sit though anti-piracy adverts that I can't skip though when I buy legitimate DVDs. In response I propose that the following (skippable) advert should be added to pirated DVDs.
By purchasing legitimate DVDs, you are unwittingly helping to finance state terrorism through the sales tax (VAT in the UK). The terrible weapons purchased with your money are used to maim and kill thousands of innocent women and children throughout the Middle East in air assaults. Do you really want children to be dismembered and killed by a cluster bomb that you helped to purchase?
Think before you buy. State Terrorism is a Crime!