...Explain the difference between "memory" and "storage".
I can not even count the number of times I have said "your computer does not have enough memory for this" and gotten the reply "but it says I have 15 jig-a-bytes free, isn't that a lot?"
I think this problem is 99.9% the industry's fault for choosing the word "memory" to refer to something stored short-term (should have come up with some new word like 'zoigle'), but anyways...
That was 90% of the meetings last place I worked, and this accounted for probably half the reason I got fed up with the place and quit before Christmas. Maybe I'm just not cut out to work somewhere that has more than a few employees, and I've never claimed to be a people person, but everybody I talked to felt much the same way, so I feel at least somewhat validated.
Indeed, maybe you aren't. But assuming you want to join a successful company that will be around next year, you won't be able to avoid it.
I have gone through a few start-ups and can tell you, the number of and importance of mettings is directly proportional to the number of employees at a company. When you first start out and have 4-6 engineering people working in a small office, you don't need meetings. Everyone is on the same "team", everyone knows what everyone else is doing, if you have a question you just spin your chair around and ask.
Fast forward ahead 6 months to a year, assuming the company is a success, you now have 15-20 engineers. You are no longer within casual talking distance without shouting across the office and disturbing everyone. As well, there are at least two teams with different taksk, each having their own project leader, eahc of which reports to some kind of head-hauncho. Now, said hauncho must also report to the sales guys, the CEO, the board, deal with employee issues, overall project planning, etc. He absolutely does *not* have time to do all this, and also keep tabs on 20 other people, no matter what kind of superman he is. This is why authority is delegated to the team leads, and why there *has* to be a meeting between him and the team leads ot keep him up to speed. There are certian things that just go way faster face-to-face than via email communications, and weekly status updates are one of them, because they involve a lot of back-and-forth questioning.
Now, assuming said company stays successful, in another few years you'll have some 50-100 engineers working on multiple teams, which not only need to report to the boss, but also interact with each other, as their projects likely overlap. Of course there has to be meetings for this as well.
Not arguing anything else, but just as an FYI, if you are running an applet from a local disk or resource, the VM *will normally* allow you to read/write arbitrary files. That is unless you specifically disable that for all security levels.
Hell, I hate waiting in line at the store because some fuckwit has to run his bank card to buy groceries since he's too fucking lazy to hit the ATM and get some actual cash out, but that's his choice whether I like it or not. And so long as *I* have to suck it up, sit tight, and be polite, so do you.
You should go to a different grocery store then, one that has a decent debit machine setup. In a store with a network-connected debit machine (like most Wal-marts for example, but they are not alone), using debit is *much faster* than cash. I can swipe my card and type my pin and be on my way much faster than lil-miss-minimum-wage can count out my 14.26 in change.
Also, I don't know how you could argue that physics is not a "hard" science. As the sciences go, one can argue that physics is the "hardest" science of them all, because at a fundamental level, all the other "hard" sciences (chemistry, biology, geology, etc) derrive from physics in one form or another.
Assuming they *do* have access to Firefox, a clever user could simply install the Sun JRE plugin (if it was not already installed), which would just be a.so in their ~/.mozilla directory somewhere, not an executable. Via the JRE and a simple applet (which is a.class, not an executable), one could compile and execute any Java code they wanted, because you can compile and execute Java code inside Java itself fairly simply.
To get around that you'd have to compile Firefox without plugin support, or restrict user-loaded plugins somehow.
The Sun Java SDK is distributed as a self-extracting EXE installer for Windows. As is Apache Tomcat.
Both are also distributed as zip files which you could unpack anywhere. Sure, for the JDK said zip file would contain java.exe, but as I said above, that would have to have already been approved.
Eclipse is distributed in a ZIP file that contains executables for launching on Windows, namely eclipse.exe
It's also distirbuted in a JAR.
There is no need for any.exe file to do any kind of Java development. Period. Java is Java, it does not compile into native executables (unless you use GCJ or something).
Whether it's a smart Metrocard, or Gascard, or whatever it is... when I'm not using it for it's intended purpose, it should not be readable at all.
I think it would be much easier, and cheaper, to have banket security in this case -- i.e., you need positive approval from me before reading any of my data.
Cheaper maybe, but not easier or faster. The whole freaking point of having a smartpass or metrocard is so that you don't have to take it out of your wallet, you just wave your wallet in front of the reader, which makes everything go faster for you and also the people behind you. If I had to take my RFID access card out of my wallet every time I had to get and out in the door at work I think I'd find a new job.
If you have to take it out to use it you might as well just use a magnetic stripe. Been there, done that. I don't like waiting in line behind joe sixpack while he fumbles around in his wallet trying to yank out his card, then can't even figure out which way to swipe the damn thing. Neither does anyone else.
If there are a small number of "must carry" items that you are forced to have, then wouldn't a far better solution be to only wrap *those* items in foil, or put them in the only foil line dpocket? Then all your other "smart cards" would keep working.
After all, how often do you pull out your drivers license anyway? Maybe once every two months? Even less? Who cares if it is wrapped in foil?
A device that plays DVDs, AND can read files from a SMB (Windows, or Samba) share. Maybe something else. I don't care, as many of the available devices force you to navigate a directory heirarchy anyway. Plays mp3, ogg, mpeg2 and 4, avi (Divx and xvid), qt, etc. Preferably with the ability to update codecs/container formats as required, but even being able to play what was current a year ago today would be nice.
The only executable that would need permission is java.exe, which is not open source software, and is also apparantly the development platform this guy is supposed to be working on, so how could it not be authorized?
So once again, the post makes absolutely no sense.
Your comment is nonsense. You don't even know what platform we're talking about, or what restrictions are placed on users in that environment. Maybe he is running on a locked down Linux box and has no permission to install executables at all.
Locked down how?
As long as he has write access *anywhere*, including his ~/ he can unzip the JDK and start working. Hell, he could unzip it on a USB key.
If his workstation is locked down to a degree where he only has read-only access to all drives, then he isn't going to be doing much development anyway!
First - My guess is he's running on Windows. The port 80 limitation isn't the problem. The problem is writing files to c:\windows without admin access.
You don't need to install any files to any restricted directory to do Java development in any form. Period.
Second - Aspects are, like JBoss and such. Whatever
True. However the GP specifically said the whole debacle started when he needed the sysadmin to install the JDK, which is not Open Source.
Third - That's pretty much standard operation procedure for big corporations
Not where I work
Fourth - Apache and Tomcat are not Eclipse. The corporate lawyers wanted to be assured that Eclipse had not been made by child slaves in Madagascar.
Again, you miss the point. If he has been assigned to develop an application that is going to run on Apache/Tomcat, then someone already approved Apache/Tomcat to be used. So why does it need to go through a re-approval process?
Welcome to Corporate America. You obviously have never read Dilbert.
Not every company is staffed by idiots. We aren't even talking about PHBs here - this sounds like idiots tfrom the top through the whole chain down, including the GP poster. Supposedly a Java developer, yet not even knowing he does not need admin access to install the JDK/Tomcat/Eclipse. Obviously he does not know much about the Java platform.
Either this story is totally fabricated, or the company you work for is staffed by complete morons and will likely go under shortly.
First of all, you don't need a system administrator to install any of those things. Apache, Java, Ant, Eclipse, Tomcat, can all run from your home directory, or anywhere else for that matter. Don't have access to port 80? Run it on some other port for development.
Second of all, Java is not open source in any way, shape, or form.
Third, WTF is your employer doing asking you to write a Java application, but forcing you to jump through hoops to get the software to do it?
Fourth, if this application you are writing is supposed to be deploye don Apache and Tomcat, then obviously the company has already given the go-ahead to use this open source software. So why the hassle?
It sounds like this is either a case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing, or a case of complete incompetance. Neither of which is good for a company.
Moore's law doesn't apply to Bayer CMOS sensors either. And small sensors found in cheap digicams are diffraction-limited. You can't cheaply make a 4x5" sensor!
Not right now, but that doesn't mean anything. You couldn't cheaply make a 42" LCD screen 5 years ago either.
This leads me to believe that there will not be a decent, low-cost replacement for large format film in a LOONNG time.
You are right here, except a "LOONNG time" nowadays is like 5 years.
You seem to be vastly underestimating the speed of modern technology advancements. I am willing to wager your large-format will be made obsolete by a digital model in 3 years or sooner.
Nice try to hop on the bandwagon of an issue you are obviously ignorant to.
ScuttleMonkey didn't post *any* stories, he is an editor, he merely *approved* them. No one gives a rats ass if ScuttleMonkey approves a large number of stories ina day, if they are good then it just means he is doing his job.
The whole issue surrounds **Beatles-Beatles** and how every one of his submissions that are approved seem to go through ScuttleMonkey, and that he always links to a beatles-oriented site, in what is obviously a grab for PageRank. Many feel that there seems to be some kind of back-patting going on between **Beatles-Beatles** and ScuttleMonkey (why is it always ScuttleMOnkeyt hat approves his submissions? Why do so many of his submissions get approved?)
So until you know the *real* issue, go back to sleep. There is nothing wrong with this article.
Do you understand that the slashdot editors are not sysadmins, that they have **ABSOLUTELY NOTHING** to do with running the VA Software servers, and that they don't even live in the same city as those servers? They're just people hand-picked by Malda to do the story selection, just like it has been for years.
Get a clue.
I've mulled this occasionally, but I suspect the late 20th century and early 21st century will become a mini-dark ages (at least for personal or family things)
The thing you are forgetting, and that the original article is forgetting, and every story ever posted on this stupid idea of "archiving data" is forgetting, is that digital != analog.
In the dark ages, all data stored was analong. So, if you have a library full of books, and it burns down, you lose all the books and all the data on them. So why didn't they make backups? Of course because the cost of "backing up" a library was prohibilive (read: impossible).
Nowadays, everything is digital. And not only that, but the techn ology is moving so fast that your old media is totally obsolete every 4 years or so.
The cruz of it? Nobody *needs* drives that last longer than 5 years, because every 5 years you're going to be migrating the data onto a new drive *anyways*.
I have data on my hard drive at home from well before 1998. Does that mean that I stored it on some form of long-term storage? Of course not. Eevery time I upgrade the PC it gets re-copied, and I also have the old drive kicking around as a backup copy.
In 100 years, the only problem historians are going to have is sorting through the terrabytes of duplicated data and junk data. They're not going to be fishng around for 100 year old CDs and 100 year old hard drives, all the important data will have already been copied every 5 years and wil be stored on the global-hyper-mega-net.
but the site ops have much more to do than double check each other
Like...?
I don't know if you are aware, but for almost all of the Slashdot editors, aside from Taco and RobLimo, their *only* job as far as this site goes is approving the story posts and doing occasional product reviews. Its not like they are sysadmins or something, they are all over the place.
If ScuttleMonkey does not know Beatles-Beatles, then why is he almost the only one who has ever posted his stories?
I have seen many, many, many submissions by Beatles-Beatles. I can't remember even one of them being posted by someone other than ScuttleMonkey. If it was simply a matter of Beatles-Beatles submitting a lot of stories, which you seem to infer, then they would be spread out among a number of editors, not all of which would be ScuttleMonkey.
This seems to poke a huge hole in your reply. There is something else going on here.
There are several ways you can combat this. WHy not change it so two edtiors need to approve a story instead of just one? Or, why not only have one external link / day for submitters? Then they wouldn't spam the queue so much.
As for your parent commect - the issue is not soley whether or not the user would enjoy the link. There is an issue of journailistic integrity here. Just because a story is facinating does not always mean a journalist should feel comfortable reporting on it. In the same way, just because a link is good does not mean you should be posting it.
If someone submitted a very interesting story, but their referrer link pointed at a child porn site, would you still post it?
I don't know how big your house is but 3 properly arranged computers with a 30 foot range would blanket my whole house - remember each one covers a sphere with a 30 ft radius.
If they could also get in bed with the media metrics folks, like Nielsen, they'll be able to tie in the demographic information
If Google went into this space, they would almost instantly put Neilsen out of business.
Neilsen familys need to volenterr, and be paid. Google can give *actual real* dmeographic infromatio, because they already know where you live (from the cable company), and what you are interested in (from Google searches), and who you talk to (from GTalk/GMail).
Neilsen can only dream of the kind of demographics Google could extrapolate. Google would mak ethe Neilsen ratings obsolete, because after all, it doesn't necessarily matter if a TV show is being viewed by a lot of people, what matters is if the ads being shown in it key into the demographic enough that the show is profitable. Google can *ensure* that, all Neilsen can do is make educated guesses based on the surveys it sends it families.
The applications with IR would be far more limited, since you're restricted to short-range and line-of-sight. Bluetooth has a longer range and is not line-of-sight - with a good setup and a couple of PCs you could have a robot that could maintain it's uplink through your whole house.
The inclusion of Bluetooth technology also extends possibilities for controlling robots remotely, for example, from a mobile phone or PDA.
If I aam reading this right, it means you will be able to use the Bluetooth controller programmatically.
This opens up a huge range of possibilities, including potentially offloading heafty computations to a bluetooth enabled PC. In combination with the ultrasonic sensor and audio sensor, you could make some *really* sophisticated stuff, in theory!
Slashdot Mirror
...Explain the difference between "memory" and "storage".
I can not even count the number of times I have said "your computer does not have enough memory for this" and gotten the reply "but it says I have 15 jig-a-bytes free, isn't that a lot?"
I think this problem is 99.9% the industry's fault for choosing the word "memory" to refer to something stored short-term (should have come up with some new word like 'zoigle'), but anyways...
That was 90% of the meetings last place I worked, and this accounted for probably half the reason I got fed up with the place and quit before Christmas. Maybe I'm just not cut out to work somewhere that has more than a few employees, and I've never claimed to be a people person, but everybody I talked to felt much the same way, so I feel at least somewhat validated.
Indeed, maybe you aren't. But assuming you want to join a successful company that will be around next year, you won't be able to avoid it.
I have gone through a few start-ups and can tell you, the number of and importance of mettings is directly proportional to the number of employees at a company. When you first start out and have 4-6 engineering people working in a small office, you don't need meetings. Everyone is on the same "team", everyone knows what everyone else is doing, if you have a question you just spin your chair around and ask.
Fast forward ahead 6 months to a year, assuming the company is a success, you now have 15-20 engineers. You are no longer within casual talking distance without shouting across the office and disturbing everyone. As well, there are at least two teams with different taksk, each having their own project leader, eahc of which reports to some kind of head-hauncho. Now, said hauncho must also report to the sales guys, the CEO, the board, deal with employee issues, overall project planning, etc. He absolutely does *not* have time to do all this, and also keep tabs on 20 other people, no matter what kind of superman he is. This is why authority is delegated to the team leads, and why there *has* to be a meeting between him and the team leads ot keep him up to speed. There are certian things that just go way faster face-to-face than via email communications, and weekly status updates are one of them, because they involve a lot of back-and-forth questioning.
Now, assuming said company stays successful, in another few years you'll have some 50-100 engineers working on multiple teams, which not only need to report to the boss, but also interact with each other, as their projects likely overlap. Of course there has to be meetings for this as well.
Not arguing anything else, but just as an FYI, if you are running an applet from a local disk or resource, the VM *will normally* allow you to read/write arbitrary files. That is unless you specifically disable that for all security levels.
Hell, I hate waiting in line at the store because some fuckwit has to run his bank card to buy groceries since he's too fucking lazy to hit the ATM and get some actual cash out, but that's his choice whether I like it or not. And so long as *I* have to suck it up, sit tight, and be polite, so do you.
You should go to a different grocery store then, one that has a decent debit machine setup. In a store with a network-connected debit machine (like most Wal-marts for example, but they are not alone), using debit is *much faster* than cash. I can swipe my card and type my pin and be on my way much faster than lil-miss-minimum-wage can count out my 14.26 in change.
Mathematics is not a science. It is a tool (an important tool, but a tool nonetheless) that is used in science. Science (from Latin scientia - knowledge) refers to a system of acquiring knowledge - based on empiricism, experimentation, and methodological naturalism. Mathematics is not based on experimentation or empiricism, it is based on deduction and logic.
Also, I don't know how you could argue that physics is not a "hard" science. As the sciences go, one can argue that physics is the "hardest" science of them all, because at a fundamental level, all the other "hard" sciences (chemistry, biology, geology, etc) derrive from physics in one form or another.
Assuming they *do* have access to Firefox, a clever user could simply install the Sun JRE plugin (if it was not already installed), which would just be a .so in their ~/.mozilla directory somewhere, not an executable. Via the JRE and a simple applet (which is a .class, not an executable), one could compile and execute any Java code they wanted, because you can compile and execute Java code inside Java itself fairly simply.
To get around that you'd have to compile Firefox without plugin support, or restrict user-loaded plugins somehow.
The Sun Java SDK is distributed as a self-extracting EXE installer for Windows. As is Apache Tomcat.
Both are also distributed as zip files which you could unpack anywhere. Sure, for the JDK said zip file would contain java.exe, but as I said above, that would have to have already been approved.
Eclipse is distributed in a ZIP file that contains executables for launching on Windows, namely eclipse.exe
It's also distirbuted in a JAR.
There is no need for any .exe file to do any kind of Java development. Period. Java is Java, it does not compile into native executables (unless you use GCJ or something).
Whether it's a smart Metrocard, or Gascard, or whatever it is... when I'm not using it for it's intended purpose, it should not be readable at all.
I think it would be much easier, and cheaper, to have banket security in this case -- i.e., you need positive approval from me before reading any of my data.
Cheaper maybe, but not easier or faster. The whole freaking point of having a smartpass or metrocard is so that you don't have to take it out of your wallet, you just wave your wallet in front of the reader, which makes everything go faster for you and also the people behind you. If I had to take my RFID access card out of my wallet every time I had to get and out in the door at work I think I'd find a new job.
If you have to take it out to use it you might as well just use a magnetic stripe. Been there, done that. I don't like waiting in line behind joe sixpack while he fumbles around in his wallet trying to yank out his card, then can't even figure out which way to swipe the damn thing. Neither does anyone else.
If there are a small number of "must carry" items that you are forced to have, then wouldn't a far better solution be to only wrap *those* items in foil, or put them in the only foil line dpocket? Then all your other "smart cards" would keep working.
After all, how often do you pull out your drivers license anyway? Maybe once every two months? Even less? Who cares if it is wrapped in foil?
A device that plays DVDs, AND can read files from a SMB (Windows, or Samba) share. Maybe something else. I don't care, as many of the available devices force you to navigate a directory heirarchy anyway. Plays mp3, ogg, mpeg2 and 4, avi (Divx and xvid), qt, etc. Preferably with the ability to update codecs/container formats as required, but even being able to play what was current a year ago today would be nice.
The only executable that would need permission is java.exe, which is not open source software, and is also apparantly the development platform this guy is supposed to be working on, so how could it not be authorized?
So once again, the post makes absolutely no sense.
Your comment is nonsense. You don't even know what platform we're talking about, or what restrictions are placed on users in that environment. Maybe he is running on a locked down Linux box and has no permission to install executables at all.
Locked down how?
As long as he has write access *anywhere*, including his ~/ he can unzip the JDK and start working. Hell, he could unzip it on a USB key.
If his workstation is locked down to a degree where he only has read-only access to all drives, then he isn't going to be doing much development anyway!
First - My guess is he's running on Windows. The port 80 limitation isn't the problem. The problem is writing files to c:\windows without admin access.
You don't need to install any files to any restricted directory to do Java development in any form. Period.
Second - Aspects are, like JBoss and such. Whatever
True. However the GP specifically said the whole debacle started when he needed the sysadmin to install the JDK, which is not Open Source.
Third - That's pretty much standard operation procedure for big corporations
Not where I work
Fourth - Apache and Tomcat are not Eclipse. The corporate lawyers wanted to be assured that Eclipse had not been made by child slaves in Madagascar.
Again, you miss the point. If he has been assigned to develop an application that is going to run on Apache/Tomcat, then someone already approved Apache/Tomcat to be used. So why does it need to go through a re-approval process?
Welcome to Corporate America. You obviously have never read Dilbert.
Not every company is staffed by idiots. We aren't even talking about PHBs here - this sounds like idiots tfrom the top through the whole chain down, including the GP poster. Supposedly a Java developer, yet not even knowing he does not need admin access to install the JDK/Tomcat/Eclipse. Obviously he does not know much about the Java platform.
Either this story is totally fabricated, or the company you work for is staffed by complete morons and will likely go under shortly.
First of all, you don't need a system administrator to install any of those things. Apache, Java, Ant, Eclipse, Tomcat, can all run from your home directory, or anywhere else for that matter. Don't have access to port 80? Run it on some other port for development.
Second of all, Java is not open source in any way, shape, or form.
Third, WTF is your employer doing asking you to write a Java application, but forcing you to jump through hoops to get the software to do it?
Fourth, if this application you are writing is supposed to be deploye don Apache and Tomcat, then obviously the company has already given the go-ahead to use this open source software. So why the hassle?
It sounds like this is either a case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing, or a case of complete incompetance. Neither of which is good for a company.
Moore's law doesn't apply to Bayer CMOS sensors either. And small sensors found in cheap digicams are diffraction-limited. You can't cheaply make a 4x5" sensor!
Not right now, but that doesn't mean anything. You couldn't cheaply make a 42" LCD screen 5 years ago either.
This leads me to believe that there will not be a decent, low-cost replacement for large format film in a LOONNG time.
You are right here, except a "LOONNG time" nowadays is like 5 years.
You seem to be vastly underestimating the speed of modern technology advancements. I am willing to wager your large-format will be made obsolete by a digital model in 3 years or sooner.
Nice try to hop on the bandwagon of an issue you are obviously ignorant to.
ScuttleMonkey didn't post *any* stories, he is an editor, he merely *approved* them. No one gives a rats ass if ScuttleMonkey approves a large number of stories ina day, if they are good then it just means he is doing his job.
The whole issue surrounds **Beatles-Beatles** and how every one of his submissions that are approved seem to go through ScuttleMonkey, and that he always links to a beatles-oriented site, in what is obviously a grab for PageRank. Many feel that there seems to be some kind of back-patting going on between **Beatles-Beatles** and ScuttleMonkey (why is it always ScuttleMOnkeyt hat approves his submissions? Why do so many of his submissions get approved?)
So until you know the *real* issue, go back to sleep. There is nothing wrong with this article.
Do you understand that the slashdot editors are not sysadmins, that they have **ABSOLUTELY NOTHING** to do with running the VA Software servers, and that they don't even live in the same city as those servers? They're just people hand-picked by Malda to do the story selection, just like it has been for years. Get a clue.
I've mulled this occasionally, but I suspect the late 20th century and early 21st century will become a mini-dark ages (at least for personal or family things)
The thing you are forgetting, and that the original article is forgetting, and every story ever posted on this stupid idea of "archiving data" is forgetting, is that digital != analog.
In the dark ages, all data stored was analong. So, if you have a library full of books, and it burns down, you lose all the books and all the data on them. So why didn't they make backups? Of course because the cost of "backing up" a library was prohibilive (read: impossible).
Nowadays, everything is digital. And not only that, but the techn ology is moving so fast that your old media is totally obsolete every 4 years or so.
The cruz of it? Nobody *needs* drives that last longer than 5 years, because every 5 years you're going to be migrating the data onto a new drive *anyways*.
I have data on my hard drive at home from well before 1998. Does that mean that I stored it on some form of long-term storage? Of course not. Eevery time I upgrade the PC it gets re-copied, and I also have the old drive kicking around as a backup copy.
In 100 years, the only problem historians are going to have is sorting through the terrabytes of duplicated data and junk data. They're not going to be fishng around for 100 year old CDs and 100 year old hard drives, all the important data will have already been copied every 5 years and wil be stored on the global-hyper-mega-net.
but the site ops have much more to do than double check each other
Like...?
I don't know if you are aware, but for almost all of the Slashdot editors, aside from Taco and RobLimo, their *only* job as far as this site goes is approving the story posts and doing occasional product reviews. Its not like they are sysadmins or something, they are all over the place.
If ScuttleMonkey does not know Beatles-Beatles, then why is he almost the only one who has ever posted his stories?
I have seen many, many, many submissions by Beatles-Beatles. I can't remember even one of them being posted by someone other than ScuttleMonkey. If it was simply a matter of Beatles-Beatles submitting a lot of stories, which you seem to infer, then they would be spread out among a number of editors, not all of which would be ScuttleMonkey.
This seems to poke a huge hole in your reply. There is something else going on here.
There are several ways you can combat this. WHy not change it so two edtiors need to approve a story instead of just one? Or, why not only have one external link / day for submitters? Then they wouldn't spam the queue so much.
As for your parent commect - the issue is not soley whether or not the user would enjoy the link. There is an issue of journailistic integrity here. Just because a story is facinating does not always mean a journalist should feel comfortable reporting on it. In the same way, just because a link is good does not mean you should be posting it.
If someone submitted a very interesting story, but their referrer link pointed at a child porn site, would you still post it?
I don't know how big your house is but 3 properly arranged computers with a 30 foot range would blanket my whole house - remember each one covers a sphere with a 30 ft radius.
If they could also get in bed with the media metrics folks, like Nielsen, they'll be able to tie in the demographic information
If Google went into this space, they would almost instantly put Neilsen out of business.
Neilsen familys need to volenterr, and be paid. Google can give *actual real* dmeographic infromatio, because they already know where you live (from the cable company), and what you are interested in (from Google searches), and who you talk to (from GTalk/GMail).
Neilsen can only dream of the kind of demographics Google could extrapolate. Google would mak ethe Neilsen ratings obsolete, because after all, it doesn't necessarily matter if a TV show is being viewed by a lot of people, what matters is if the ads being shown in it key into the demographic enough that the show is profitable. Google can *ensure* that, all Neilsen can do is make educated guesses based on the surveys it sends it families.
The applications with IR would be far more limited, since you're restricted to short-range and line-of-sight. Bluetooth has a longer range and is not line-of-sight - with a good setup and a couple of PCs you could have a robot that could maintain it's uplink through your whole house.
I got a Dell bluetooth adaptor for 20 bucks on ebay - it is installed inside the laptop in a little port. Does not use any PC slots or USB ports.
The inclusion of Bluetooth technology also extends possibilities for controlling robots remotely, for example, from a mobile phone or PDA.
If I aam reading this right, it means you will be able to use the Bluetooth controller programmatically.
This opens up a huge range of possibilities, including potentially offloading heafty computations to a bluetooth enabled PC. In combination with the ultrasonic sensor and audio sensor, you could make some *really* sophisticated stuff, in theory!