>I'm told Symbian has good feedback into Metroworks and gets their CW specifically tailored for them so maybe it's better than their usual product.
As far as I know Nokia bought the Symbian OS parts of Metrowerks last year. At least it says so here.
I would call that rather complete tailoring. Of course it is a bit worrying for companies using other flavors of Symbian OS than Series 60/80/90 as Nokia will probably focus on those.
"From there, its a tiny step from mailing out a copy of my forms blank (received my 1040A yesterday, I guess they send you whatever you used the previous year) to mailing out a copy of my forms already filled in and waiting for a signature, along with a bill for however much I owe."
Which is approximately what we get here in Finland. If you are not a complicated case, you get a "tax suggestion" in the mail. There is no need to do anything. Just leave it and it will be accepted. Or if you need to make simple corrections, you fill them in to the suggestion form and mail it in. You still need to fill in the full set of forms if you need to make compicated changes though.
As we have well advertised national deadlines for getting your tax suggestion, nobody can really miss it. I assume you also have national deadlines for receiving the federal tax forms.
To my knoweledge such advanced integration of route guidance has not been attemted anywhere yet. We did scetch out such a system as coursework at the Helsinki University of Technology with my friends a few months ago though.
Some cities in Germany do offer real time traffic information and park and ride information on the same web pages. It is also possible to book a park and ride place online.
Gothenburg (Göteborg) in Sweden has experimented with using road signs which show the estimated driving time to the city center as well as the estimated time on public transport from the neares t park and ride station.
It will still take time for the necessary information systems to be created and then to actually make them work together. In Finland the government has helped somewhat by providing a free national architecture for telematics with open XML interface descriptions so that different applications can easily be integrated, but we're such a small market that commercial applications probably won't appear immediately.
I'd still love to see agent type navigation systems which could offer not just alternate routes but also alternate modes of travel on badly congested days. In an optimum situation they could also automatically reserve a park and ride place when the user chooses such a route. It just remains to be seen if any party is willing to pay for such a service.
"I haven't coded anything for Windows in a few years, so things may have changed with.Net and WinForms (?) in the meantime."
Not really. WinForms has a sensible class structure and generally cleaner design than MFC, but basic positioning is still considered more or less absolute.
Where I work we have bought and external toolkit (Syncfusion) which offers layout managers and then we just use gridbadlayout just like most Java developers do. Syncfusion would integrate nicely into the Windows Form designer for drag and drop, but we have chosen to create a simple XML description language and generate the user interfaces from description files (with a preview tool of course).
"On the other hand, I don't know that I could stand paying the carriers so much money for each video, even if I did have one of these phones."
Not a problem. At least in Europe DVB-H is meant to be free as it is broadcast and does not consume mobile bandwidth. The costs will be covered with advertising etc.
3G video on demand which is already available and some people are touting here does cost a lot. It is unicast and uses mobile bandwidth which is expensive. The bet still is that users will want this feature as well for some content and the plan is to deliver subscription content a night at a lower cost. This is being tested at least in Finland.
Of course growing storage on mobiles might make part of on demand video obsolete if time shifting of DVB-H becomes possible. We'll wait and see. Broadcast TV is also already available in at least Japan and Korea either via traditional analog signals or by using their local standard which is mentioned in the article.
The behaviour of pedestrian buttons is usually based on the general scheme used for traffic lights.
When interconnected traffic lights are used to manage flows (green waves), pedestrian crossings must also follow these flows. This is usually the case in the centers of towns and cities where the most optimization is needed to handle all the traffic.
If the different intersections do not have interconnected traffic light control, it is possible to give "immediate" green to pedestrians. Even this is not completely immediate as a maximum delay 30-40 seconds is usually allowed if approaching cars have been detected in order to avaoid unnecessarily stopping individual cars.
Using this type of control is of course optional. Controlling traffic is a complex optimization problem with a lot of factors. Traffic safety, pedestrian accessibility, public transport priorities and other factors can be balanced in a lot of ways and usually the decisions are political. Detailed control is then based on the politically chosen general balance.
Nokia has a way of hiding interesting future information in press releases under phone releases. Check out
this press release from series60.com which is also available directly from Nokia and in some of the press coverage. It basically says that, Series 60 will have higher resolutions, pen and keyboard input and a lot more in the near future.
Also in the press coverage is a neat little snipped about testing the new 3220 Near Field Communications shells as contactless public transport tickets in Germany. That would be a great improvement over the current state of the art which is at least here in Finland is text message single trip tickets, which are handy, but hard to check quickly and probably crackable in the long run.
This technology does have a lot in common with the idea of classical sub pixel rendering. The essential difference is that the actual physical arrangement of the subpixels has been changed to allow much more powerful changes in the way the whole pixels are composed. An added benefit is that less physical pixels means less transistors on the driver chip in addition to less wiring on the panel. This is also a bonus for small devices and of course a cost decrease for all devices.
The essential reason is that growing LCD density means less actual pixel in relation to wiring on the actual panel. This leads to a loss of brighness which makes displays inusable for many situations like mobile phones and PDAs. A notable exception is electronic viewfinders (mentioned in another reply) as they are viewed fron a very short distance with outside light shut out and thus no need for transflective properties which require more pixel area than pure transmissive or reflective displays.
There are several researchers and companies working on different solutions of this type (physical subpixel rearrangement). Many of them have been presented in recent SID conferences. Try creative googling (subpixel, arrangement, lcd) to find some pages.
I'd like to add that with the current progress of storage technology there is really no need to copy CDs to other CDs every five years. Instead you'll probably want to copy CDs to DVDs to HD-DVDs to whatever in order to save physical storage space more often than every five years. Thus refreshing will happen automatically as long as you do not lose the media.
Losing and then finding media is of course the real problem as lost digital recordings do not get refreshed and may be destroyed.
If we ignore the fact that only part of the tracks are electrified, broadband over power does not work over high voltage. It is only designed to work on relatively low power wires from the closest switching station to a house. Even in these conditions the power has to be cleaned of interference as much as possible. Overhead train power is (in this case) 25 000 V AC. It is not particularily clean and the connection from the wire to the pantograph is the absolute opposite of clean. Although the rails are not powered, they are grounded as they are the ground point for the electrification so they are very much a part of the same mess.
There isn't much chance of moving anything along the rails. Train tracking and control uses either a balise (an antenna between the rails) and an antenna under the train or a radio network. The future European Train Control System is designed to use a special version of GSM called GSM-R for communication. It would probably be possible to run an antenna along the side of the rails. This is how they make GSM work in metro systems at least in Helsinki. But this gets as back to the original point of using existing infrastructure.
Mobile phone networks are configured to automatically drop another call if someone wants to make an emergency call and the whole capacity is used. Signalling is on a separate band, so the phone can still negotiate this drop with the tower. Regulated telecom operators make everything expensive because people's lives depend on them. I'd be slightly skeptical about completely unregulated VoIP replacing telephones for the very same reason.
I recently talked with one of the people who designed and maintain the Helsinki region Journey Planner. According to him the problem is that walking route data is not commercially available. They have had to go over all their route data, add piles of paths, remove one way streets (this is automatic) and also interconnect places where roads are only blocked from cars. The only reason they can do this at all is that all that they have separate special markings for the public transport routes that form the rest of the system. Otherwise there would be no way in most current mapping systems to know whether a route is accessible by foor, bicycle, car or a combination of the three.
As most users of mapping systems are planning driving routes, there probably isn't much commercial incentive for walking route data except maybe for some specific large cities.
Other countries have breeder reactors that refine used uranium
Umm..no. Nobody has managed to make breeder reactors work properly for power generating yet. France tried for a long time but even they gave up. North Korea officially has a 15 megawatt breeder in civilian use. Maybe we should ask them..
Apple is not a standards body. If the UNIX trademark exists to uphold a standard, The Open Group should be considered a standards body.
The valid comparison would be to find out what it costs to get your company or product certified against an ISO or equivalent standard. And how much of that money goes to ISO itself? Right.
Methylated spirits is often used as a term referring to ethanol with methanol as a denaturant. Thus it is not generally the same thing as pure methanol. Some people are capable of drinking methylated spirits.
I don't think anyone thinks that's more dangerous than gasoline.
But of course it is. Blinding in very small doses and usually deadly at 1 - 2.5 decilitres (over 30mL is considered potentially lethal). Not that I would recommend drinking gasoline either. Additionally gasoline fumes may be unpleasant and unhealthy, but methanol fumes can also lead to blindness over time.
This of course doesn't mean that methanol can't be used as fuel. Only that it needs to be handled with due care.
At http://www.swissmetro.com. By no means a small undertaking. I personally don't think they'll ever get funding even though the idea is cool. They must have larger infrastructure costs than maglev and even maglev is prohibitively expensive.
The European Union has recently decided (in all its wisdom) that not being able to move your phone number from one operator to another (extensions and all) is unfair obstruction of competition.
Thus the easy way of telling apart different mobile operators is about to go. This will mean that mobile to mobile calls will have to be charged differently. After all you newer know which network you are calling. A reception fee is a possible and even probable solution.
And yes. I hate the idea as much as you do. Who calls land lines anymore if they can avoid it? With mobile penetration (sex in a car?) well over 70% I can avoid for everything except calling some companies.
I've seen two slightly different solutions here in Finland.
The first one is in Tampere and it is built into an old articulated city bus. The front part has the computers and the rear section contains the classroom. It has a homepage which contains an English summary and pictures (click "kuvia"). Connectivity for this bus is handled by WLAN at ten fixed stops or by GSM datalinks anywhere else.
The second bus was built at the Lappeenranta University of Technology. It is based on an old library bus. The page is only available in Finnish, but if you click on the picture with the text "varustelu", you should be able to make out most of the technical specifications. Connectivity is handled by WLAN to a base station Linux computer that has a combo NIC, an ISDN adapter and a modem. The solution allows connections nearly anywhere without having to run cables to the bus.
Umm. Pity most of you missed the webcast...
on
The Assembly In Review
·
· Score: 3, Informative
We did an almost 80 hour television broadcast from Assembly for the second year running. Somehow posting it to Slashdot slipped my mind this year. On the other hand Soneras servers would have been hopelessly Slashdotted:)
Quite a few clips of our material are available for download at www.assemblytv.net and we'll try to get more posted in the next few weeks. Unfortunately there isn't as much material in English as one could hope for.
I was made next years editor-in-chief for demoscene related programs yesterday, so I'll try to get all our scene material done in English for next year if we manage to gather equipment and funding for a third full scale production.
If everything does go well, I'll really really try to post to Slashdot next time;)
As a Finn I often find the US conception of socialism more than slightly odd.
Addmittedly we don't have a Thatcher-Reagan economy and our right-wing parties start to the left of the Democrats. Still socialism is not the right term if you ask me. Such terms as the welfare state or social democracy are more suited.
We do have extensive social security, public education and public health services. Trade unions are also major political organizations instead of mob gangs. This still doesn't mean that the workers control the means of production as our friend Karl Marx put it.
Only a few things like trains and the state alcohol resale monopoly (still exists!) are still mostly or completely owned by the government. Except for the national broadcasting company nearly everything is on the privatization list.
We do have more governmental control in many areas (radio licensing,.fi domans, etc.), but our economy is still a market one. I have no great craving for total economic liberalism as Adam Smiths invisible hand theory has been disproved over and over again.
Has any other country even addressed this issue yet?
I believe Sweden has already started construction of its national broadband plan. They also intend to cover the whole country including Swedish Lapland. In this matter the Swedes seem to be way ahead of everybody else.
Slashdot Mirror
>I'm told Symbian has good feedback into Metroworks and gets their CW specifically tailored for them so maybe it's better than their usual product. As far as I know Nokia bought the Symbian OS parts of Metrowerks last year. At least it says so here. I would call that rather complete tailoring. Of course it is a bit worrying for companies using other flavors of Symbian OS than Series 60/80/90 as Nokia will probably focus on those.
"From there, its a tiny step from mailing out a copy of my forms blank (received my 1040A yesterday, I guess they send you whatever you used the previous year) to mailing out a copy of my forms already filled in and waiting for a signature, along with a bill for however much I owe."
Which is approximately what we get here in Finland. If you are not a complicated case, you get a "tax suggestion" in the mail. There is no need to do anything. Just leave it and it will be accepted. Or if you need to make simple corrections, you fill them in to the suggestion form and mail it in. You still need to fill in the full set of forms if you need to make compicated changes though.
As we have well advertised national deadlines for getting your tax suggestion, nobody can really miss it. I assume you also have national deadlines for receiving the federal tax forms.
To my knoweledge such advanced integration of route guidance has not been attemted anywhere yet. We did scetch out such a system as coursework at the Helsinki University of Technology with my friends a few months ago though.
Some cities in Germany do offer real time traffic information and park and ride information on the same web pages. It is also possible to book a park and ride place online.
Gothenburg (Göteborg) in Sweden has experimented with using road signs which show the estimated driving time to the city center as well as the estimated time on public transport from the neares t park and ride station.
It will still take time for the necessary information systems to be created and then to actually make them work together. In Finland the government has helped somewhat by providing a free national architecture for telematics with open XML interface descriptions so that different applications can easily be integrated, but we're such a small market that commercial applications probably won't appear immediately.
I'd still love to see agent type navigation systems which could offer not just alternate routes but also alternate modes of travel on badly congested days. In an optimum situation they could also automatically reserve a park and ride place when the user chooses such a route. It just remains to be seen if any party is willing to pay for such a service.
"I haven't coded anything for Windows in a few years, so things may have changed with .Net and WinForms (?) in the meantime."
Not really. WinForms has a sensible class structure and generally cleaner design than MFC, but basic positioning is still considered more or less absolute.
Where I work we have bought and external toolkit (Syncfusion) which offers layout managers and then we just use gridbadlayout just like most Java developers do. Syncfusion would integrate nicely into the Windows Form designer for drag and drop, but we have chosen to create a simple XML description language and generate the user interfaces from description files (with a preview tool of course).
"On the other hand, I don't know that I could stand paying the carriers so much money for each video, even if I did have one of these phones."
Not a problem. At least in Europe DVB-H is meant to be free as it is broadcast and does not consume mobile bandwidth. The costs will be covered with advertising etc.
3G video on demand which is already available and some people are touting here does cost a lot. It is unicast and uses mobile bandwidth which is expensive. The bet still is that users will want this feature as well for some content and the plan is to deliver subscription content a night at a lower cost. This is being tested at least in Finland.
Of course growing storage on mobiles might make part of on demand video obsolete if time shifting of DVB-H becomes possible. We'll wait and see. Broadcast TV is also already available in at least Japan and Korea either via traditional analog signals or by using their local standard which is mentioned in the article.
The behaviour of pedestrian buttons is usually based on the general scheme used for traffic lights. When interconnected traffic lights are used to manage flows (green waves), pedestrian crossings must also follow these flows. This is usually the case in the centers of towns and cities where the most optimization is needed to handle all the traffic.
If the different intersections do not have interconnected traffic light control, it is possible to give "immediate" green to pedestrians. Even this is not completely immediate as a maximum delay 30-40 seconds is usually allowed if approaching cars have been detected in order to avaoid unnecessarily stopping individual cars.
Using this type of control is of course optional. Controlling traffic is a complex optimization problem with a lot of factors. Traffic safety, pedestrian accessibility, public transport priorities and other factors can be balanced in a lot of ways and usually the decisions are political. Detailed control is then based on the politically chosen general balance.
Nokia has a way of hiding interesting future information in press releases under phone releases. Check out this press release from series60.com which is also available directly from Nokia and in some of the press coverage. It basically says that, Series 60 will have higher resolutions, pen and keyboard input and a lot more in the near future.
Also in the press coverage is a neat little snipped about testing the new 3220 Near Field Communications shells as contactless public transport tickets in Germany. That would be a great improvement over the current state of the art which is at least here in Finland is text message single trip tickets, which are handy, but hard to check quickly and probably crackable in the long run.
This technology does have a lot in common with the idea of classical sub pixel rendering. The essential difference is that the actual physical arrangement of the subpixels has been changed to allow much more powerful changes in the way the whole pixels are composed. An added benefit is that less physical pixels means less transistors on the driver chip in addition to less wiring on the panel. This is also a bonus for small devices and of course a cost decrease for all devices.
The essential reason is that growing LCD density means less actual pixel in relation to wiring on the actual panel. This leads to a loss of brighness which makes displays inusable for many situations like mobile phones and PDAs. A notable exception is electronic viewfinders (mentioned in another reply) as they are viewed fron a very short distance with outside light shut out and thus no need for transflective properties which require more pixel area than pure transmissive or reflective displays.
There are several researchers and companies working on different solutions of this type (physical subpixel rearrangement). Many of them have been presented in recent SID conferences. Try creative googling (subpixel, arrangement, lcd) to find some pages.
I'd like to add that with the current progress of storage technology there is really no need to copy CDs to other CDs every five years. Instead you'll probably want to copy CDs to DVDs to HD-DVDs to whatever in order to save physical storage space more often than every five years. Thus refreshing will happen automatically as long as you do not lose the media.
Losing and then finding media is of course the real problem as lost digital recordings do not get refreshed and may be destroyed.
If we ignore the fact that only part of the tracks are electrified, broadband over power does not work over high voltage. It is only designed to work on relatively low power wires from the closest switching station to a house. Even in these conditions the power has to be cleaned of interference as much as possible. Overhead train power is (in this case) 25 000 V AC. It is not particularily clean and the connection from the wire to the pantograph is the absolute opposite of clean. Although the rails are not powered, they are grounded as they are the ground point for the electrification so they are very much a part of the same mess.
There isn't much chance of moving anything along the rails. Train tracking and control uses either a balise (an antenna between the rails) and an antenna under the train or a radio network. The future European Train Control System is designed to use a special version of GSM called GSM-R for communication. It would probably be possible to run an antenna along the side of the rails. This is how they make GSM work in metro systems at least in Helsinki. But this gets as back to the original point of using existing infrastructure.
Mobile phone networks are configured to automatically drop another call if someone wants to make an emergency call and the whole capacity is used. Signalling is on a separate band, so the phone can still negotiate this drop with the tower. Regulated telecom operators make everything expensive because people's lives depend on them. I'd be slightly skeptical about completely unregulated VoIP replacing telephones for the very same reason.
I recently talked with one of the people who designed and maintain the Helsinki region Journey Planner. According to him the problem is that walking route data is not commercially available. They have had to go over all their route data, add piles of paths, remove one way streets (this is automatic) and also interconnect places where roads are only blocked from cars. The only reason they can do this at all is that all that they have separate special markings for the public transport routes that form the rest of the system. Otherwise there would be no way in most current mapping systems to know whether a route is accessible by foor, bicycle, car or a combination of the three.
As most users of mapping systems are planning driving routes, there probably isn't much commercial incentive for walking route data except maybe for some specific large cities.
the only supersonic jet in the world that doesn't need an afterburner to go supersonic is the F-22
This is somewhat off-topic, but isn't the Swedish JAS-Gripen also capable of supercruise?
Other countries have breeder reactors that refine used uranium
Umm..no. Nobody has managed to make breeder reactors work properly for power generating yet. France tried for a long time but even they gave up. North Korea officially has a 15 megawatt breeder in civilian use. Maybe we should ask them..
You can access the live webcast from assemblytv.net. You can also watch the event seminars from there.
Apple is not a standards body. If the UNIX trademark exists to uphold a standard, The Open Group should be considered a standards body.
The valid comparison would be to find out what it costs to get your company or product certified against an ISO or equivalent standard. And how much of that money goes to ISO itself? Right.
Or check out Kiasma, the Finnish national Museum of Contemporary Art, for an exhibition. More information at demoskene.katastro.fi.
Methylated spirits is often used as a term referring to ethanol with methanol as a denaturant. Thus it is not generally the same thing as pure methanol. Some people are capable of drinking methylated spirits.
I don't think anyone thinks that's more dangerous than gasoline.But of course it is. Blinding in very small doses and usually deadly at 1 - 2.5 decilitres (over 30mL is considered potentially lethal). Not that I would recommend drinking gasoline either. Additionally gasoline fumes may be unpleasant and unhealthy, but methanol fumes can also lead to blindness over time.
This of course doesn't mean that methanol can't be used as fuel. Only that it needs to be handled with due care.
At http://www.swissmetro.com. By no means a small undertaking. I personally don't think they'll ever get funding even though the idea is cool. They must have larger infrastructure costs than maglev and even maglev is prohibitively expensive.
The European Union has recently decided (in all its wisdom) that not being able to move your phone number from one operator to another (extensions and all) is unfair obstruction of competition.
Thus the easy way of telling apart different mobile operators is about to go. This will mean that mobile to mobile calls will have to be charged differently. After all you newer know which network you are calling. A reception fee is a possible and even probable solution.
And yes. I hate the idea as much as you do. Who calls land lines anymore if they can avoid it? With mobile penetration (sex in a car?) well over 70% I can avoid for everything except calling some companies.
(as an aside, since the Europian Union get's a seat in the UN for each of their states, when will the USA get a seat for each of our 50 states?!?!)
Probably around the time you start paying for them. At the moment you can't seem to handle the membership fees for just one country.
Good thing you've got Ted Turner to pay the for you.
I've seen two slightly different solutions here in Finland.
The first one is in Tampere and it is built into an old articulated city bus. The front part has the computers and the rear section contains the classroom. It has a homepage which contains an English summary and pictures (click "kuvia"). Connectivity for this bus is handled by WLAN at ten fixed stops or by GSM datalinks anywhere else.
The second bus was built at the Lappeenranta University of Technology. It is based on an old library bus. The page is only available in Finnish, but if you click on the picture with the text "varustelu", you should be able to make out most of the technical specifications. Connectivity is handled by WLAN to a base station Linux computer that has a combo NIC, an ISDN adapter and a modem. The solution allows connections nearly anywhere without having to run cables to the bus.
We did an almost 80 hour television broadcast from Assembly for the second year running. Somehow posting it to Slashdot slipped my mind this year. On the other hand Soneras servers would have been hopelessly Slashdotted
Quite a few clips of our material are available for download at www.assemblytv.net and we'll try to get more posted in the next few weeks. Unfortunately there isn't as much material in English as one could hope for.
I was made next years editor-in-chief for demoscene related programs yesterday, so I'll try to get all our scene material done in English for next year if we manage to gather equipment and funding for a third full scale production.
If everything does go well, I'll really really try to post to Slashdot next time
As a Finn I often find the US conception of socialism more than slightly odd.
Addmittedly we don't have a Thatcher-Reagan economy and our right-wing parties start to the left of the Democrats. Still socialism is not the right term if you ask me. Such terms as the welfare state or social democracy are more suited.
We do have extensive social security, public education and public health services. Trade unions are also major political organizations instead of mob gangs. This still doesn't mean that the workers control the means of production as our friend Karl Marx put it.
Only a few things like trains and the state alcohol resale monopoly (still exists!) are still mostly or completely owned by the government. Except for the national broadcasting company nearly everything is on the privatization list.
We do have more governmental control in many areas (radio licensing, .fi domans, etc.), but our economy is still a market one. I have no great craving for total economic liberalism as Adam Smiths invisible hand theory has been disproved over and over again.
Has any other country even addressed this issue yet?
I believe Sweden has already started construction of its national broadband plan. They also intend to cover the whole country including Swedish Lapland. In this matter the Swedes seem to be way ahead of everybody else.