I don't think it will be that hard for people to switch. As you say, the main obstacle is implementation in a majority of browsers. Once that's achieved, switching would be a no-brainer. If and only if "implementation" includes support for the same decent (with decent defined as a good quality/bitrate ratio) video format with a decent quality decoder accross all those browsers.
At one point the HTML5 guys were planning to mandate ogg vorbis/theora but they seem to have backed out from doing that. IIRC someone (I think it may have been nokia) complained about the risk of submarine patents hitting vorbis/theora.
I imagine it wouldn't take too much tinkering to lop off the AC power supply http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS2356496718.html gives us a picture, it seems the PSU is a seperate part (under a metal cover) connected via a 4 pin connector.
Unfortunatley the bill of materials ( http://www.plugcomputer.org/data/docs/sch/SHEEVA_V6.0_BOM.xls ) does not give us a part number but i'm pretty sure it's a type i've seen before and I could probablly find it in a parts catalog if I had the connector in front of me and the inclination to find it. Alternatively you could just cut the wires.
and wire it to run off 12V DC. BTW if using electronics in a vehicle make sure you use a power supply designed for vehicle use. While vehicle power is nominally 12V it has a wide voltage range and is often very dirty.
You get cards specifically designed to interface VOIP systems to analog lines (IIRC they are called FXO cards). Looks like some winmodems can also be modified to do it ( http://www.voipuser.org/forum_topic_806.html ).
There are also providers that let you access POTs over the internet (for a price ofc but those prices are often pretty competitive especially for international calls).
At full HD 60Hz 1920*1080*60*24=2985984000 bits per second. Even at the lower framerate used by movies we have 1920*1080*24*24=1194393600 bits per second.
In other words USB is just too slow to carry decompressed full HD video.
on't really see the revolution here - it's a small headless server. A bit like an NSLU2 only a lot faster Faster and a lot more ram. Also this device is being explicitly sold as a "devkit" which means you get console and JTAG access (via a USB to dual UART/FIFO chip) out of the box rather than having to hack them on.
On the downside you only get one host-side USB port while the slug had two.
That is an irritation with the NSLU2, though there was an always-on hardmod. You don't even techically have to mod the NSLU2, you can just make up a cable that will do when is required externally.
Well debian currently has two arm ports, "arm" (old ABI) and "armel" (EABI). arm's last release was lenny, armel's first release was lenny.
Debian decided a long time ago (for reasons I do not know but that probablly made sense at the time) to build debian arm for the traditional arm FPU. The trouble is few current chips have that FPU and the kernel emulation is extremely slow (due to the overhead of trapping the illegal instructions).
Trouble was the old arm ABI didn't allow you to mix code compiled with different FPU options so it wasn't possible to simply switch compiler defaults to softfloat.
EABI doesn't suffer from this problem and the debian arm porters have proposed building versions of important packages with optimisations for particular FPUs but afaict they have not actually modified any of thier source packages to do this yet.
In other words right now you either use a custom built set of binaries for your hardware (that are likely to get abandoned as your hardware gets older) or you get poor (armel) or terrible (arm) floating point performance.
One thing that some games have is periods of lower intesity, GTA (disclaimer, my GTA experiance is with GTA3, GTA liberty city stories and GTA vice city stories) is a good example of this, sometimes you are in a firefight or working to a tight time limit or trying to keep car damage to an absoloute minimum or trying to get away from the cops.
Other times though you are just driving (or even walking) from place to place and can relax a bit.
Meanwhile, I don't see people lining up to download a new JRE release. If you install any reasonablly recent JRE release and accept the defaults then you will get notified in the system tray that you should be updating it.
Of course some people will ignore it or turn it off but I bet a lot of them do update.
"Java applets and Javaâ Web Start applications are automatically run with a SecurityManager installed. However, local applications executed via the java command are by default not run with a SecurityManager installed. In order to run local applications with a SecurityManager, either the application itself must programmatically set one via the setSecurityManager method (in the java.lang.System class), or java must be invoked with a -Djava.security.manager argument on the commandline."
and 240 km/h (~150mph) in Europe. IIRC at least in europe thats not actually a legal requirement just an agreement among a number of bigger car manufacturers and you can remove the limiter or buy from a smaller manufacturer that doesn't do such things.
A combination of vistas bad PR and MS looking like they are on track to release 7 in a timely manner will probablly mean it will be 7 slowly replacing XP rather than vista.
In the not too distant future we will probablly see the end of OEMs offering systems pre-downgraded to XP meaning for the less technical XP will no longer be an option. In a couple of years IT departments are likely to get worried by the end of security updates for XP. As theese happen I suspect we will see driver support fade out too.
Some may migrate to linux but I think it's pretty safe to say that users will have more apps that don't work on linux than apps that don't work on windows 7. Some may use a XP vm on linux but still for security reasons it will probablly need to be as isolated as possible from networks which will complicate matters.
IMO they are more likely to make it a requirement for new cars but leave existing ones alone. That is what happened with front seatbelts, rear seatbelts, airbags and a whole host of anti-polloution measures (at least here in the UK and afaict in most other places too).
What I find really surprising is not that MS did this but that they pubilcally admitted to doing it (without being pressured into doing so afaict)
If they hadn't admitted it most likely noone would have noticed, slowdowns with no obvious explanation are common enough on the web as it is. Now they've gone and told everyone that they will degrade the user experiance to gather information for use in internal politics.
To extend your restraunt analogy would you keep going to a restraunt if you discovered they had been deliberately delaying your order for research or worse to try and extract more money from you?
Note: be carefull when comparing milage figures from different countries. The test methods can be different and more significantly the size of a gallon is different.
According to google
28 (miles per Imperial gallon) = 23.3148675 miles per US gallon
When we grow plants and eat or burn them the carbon comes out of the atmosphere, into the plant then when the plant is eaten or burned the carbon is (mostly, a bit will end up forming body structures, even this is likely to be released eventually though) returned to the atmosphere. Very little affect on net CO2 levels.
OTOH when we mine/drill coal/oil/gas we are taking carbon that has been sequestered for a very long time (IIRC it's at least millions of years but don't quote me on that) and releasing it into the atmosphere.
And if you want the process to be effective over the long term either choose a location which naturally sequesters carbon or periodically cut trees down and store them in a way that doesn't let them rot or burn.
This is offset by immigration, but you must remember that every immigrant in one place is an emigrant elsewhere. The net population stays the same when somebody moves from a developing country to a developed one. Yeah but IIRC at least for now the world population is still above replacement levels.
Locks on the outside of bedrooms are warranted sometimes. If it's absoloutely essential to lock someone in for thier own or other peoples safety I'd preffer a simple bolt that can be undone without looking for a key. Or better still an electromagnet that automatically releases when the fire alarm goes off (and can also be manually released in a fail-safe manner)
My parents locked my sister in at night when she was little since she would get up in the middle of the night and bake. A lockout on the cooker would seem a much safer way of getting arround that problem.
BTW for anyone wondering the bunker in question was declassified and is now a tourist attraction but for whatever reason they still use "secret" in the name.
Slashdot Mirror
But it's probablly also what makes it cheap, connectors are relatively expensive parts.
Someone else mentioned above that they have a more expensive kit that has a lot more ports, a little too expensive for many hobby projects though IMO http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1242199&cid=28055837
I don't think it will be that hard for people to switch. As you say, the main obstacle is implementation in a majority of browsers. Once that's achieved, switching would be a no-brainer.
If and only if "implementation" includes support for the same decent (with decent defined as a good quality/bitrate ratio) video format with a decent quality decoder accross all those browsers.
At one point the HTML5 guys were planning to mandate ogg vorbis/theora but they seem to have backed out from doing that. IIRC someone (I think it may have been nokia) complained about the risk of submarine patents hitting vorbis/theora.
Afaict PXE is a standard for booting PC architecture machines over the network so not relevent here.
This thing can boot a kernel over TFTP if you tell it to though (not sure if it can be set to do so automatically on every boot but I expect it can)
RTFT (then re-read it more carefully, apparently a lot of americans misread it)
I imagine it wouldn't take too much tinkering to lop off the AC power supply
http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS2356496718.html gives us a picture, it seems the PSU is a seperate part (under a metal cover) connected via a 4 pin connector.
The schematic ( http://www.plugcomputer.org/data/docs/sch/Sheeva-final%20Schematic.pdf page 5 ) tells us the connectors pinout, that it is a 5V, 3A supply, and that it's designator is J3.
Unfortunatley the bill of materials ( http://www.plugcomputer.org/data/docs/sch/SHEEVA_V6.0_BOM.xls ) does not give us a part number but i'm pretty sure it's a type i've seen before and I could probablly find it in a parts catalog if I had the connector in front of me and the inclination to find it. Alternatively you could just cut the wires.
and wire it to run off 12V DC.
BTW if using electronics in a vehicle make sure you use a power supply designed for vehicle use. While vehicle power is nominally 12V it has a wide voltage range and is often very dirty.
You get cards specifically designed to interface VOIP systems to analog lines (IIRC they are called FXO cards). Looks like some winmodems can also be modified to do it ( http://www.voipuser.org/forum_topic_806.html ).
There are also providers that let you access POTs over the internet (for a price ofc but those prices are often pretty competitive especially for international calls).
At full HD 60Hz 1920*1080*60*24=2985984000 bits per second. Even at the lower framerate used by movies we have 1920*1080*24*24=1194393600 bits per second.
In other words USB is just too slow to carry decompressed full HD video.
on't really see the revolution here - it's a small headless server. A bit like an NSLU2 only a lot faster
Faster and a lot more ram. Also this device is being explicitly sold as a "devkit" which means you get console and JTAG access (via a USB to dual UART/FIFO chip) out of the box rather than having to hack them on.
On the downside you only get one host-side USB port while the slug had two.
That is an irritation with the NSLU2, though there was an always-on hardmod.
You don't even techically have to mod the NSLU2, you can just make up a cable that will do when is required externally.
http://www.nslu2-linux.org/wiki/HowTo/ForcePowerAlwaysOn#method8 (I would do the wiring slightly less hackishly but the principle of what needs to be connected is what matters).
Well debian currently has two arm ports, "arm" (old ABI) and "armel" (EABI). arm's last release was lenny, armel's first release was lenny.
Debian decided a long time ago (for reasons I do not know but that probablly made sense at the time) to build debian arm for the traditional arm FPU. The trouble is few current chips have that FPU and the kernel emulation is extremely slow (due to the overhead of trapping the illegal instructions).
Trouble was the old arm ABI didn't allow you to mix code compiled with different FPU options so it wasn't possible to simply switch compiler defaults to softfloat.
EABI doesn't suffer from this problem and the debian arm porters have proposed building versions of important packages with optimisations for particular FPUs but afaict they have not actually modified any of thier source packages to do this yet.
In other words right now you either use a custom built set of binaries for your hardware (that are likely to get abandoned as your hardware gets older) or you get poor (armel) or terrible (arm) floating point performance.
http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/p-22-sheevaplug-dev-kit.aspx
It's horriblly backordered though.
One thing that some games have is periods of lower intesity, GTA (disclaimer, my GTA experiance is with GTA3, GTA liberty city stories and GTA vice city stories) is a good example of this, sometimes you are in a firefight or working to a tight time limit or trying to keep car damage to an absoloute minimum or trying to get away from the cops.
Other times though you are just driving (or even walking) from place to place and can relax a bit.
Meanwhile, I don't see people lining up to download a new JRE release.
If you install any reasonablly recent JRE release and accept the defaults then you will get notified in the system tray that you should be updating it.
Of course some people will ignore it or turn it off but I bet a lot of them do update.
All Java code runs under a security manager.
Wrong: see http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/technotes/guides/security/overview/jsoverview.html
"Java applets and Javaâ Web Start applications are automatically run with a SecurityManager installed. However, local applications executed via the java command are by default not run with a SecurityManager installed. In order to run local applications with a SecurityManager, either the application itself must programmatically set one via the setSecurityManager method (in the java.lang.System class), or java must be invoked with a -Djava.security.manager argument on the commandline."
and 240 km/h (~150mph) in Europe.
IIRC at least in europe thats not actually a legal requirement just an agreement among a number of bigger car manufacturers and you can remove the limiter or buy from a smaller manufacturer that doesn't do such things.
A combination of vistas bad PR and MS looking like they are on track to release 7 in a timely manner will probablly mean it will be 7 slowly replacing XP rather than vista.
In the not too distant future we will probablly see the end of OEMs offering systems pre-downgraded to XP meaning for the less technical XP will no longer be an option. In a couple of years IT departments are likely to get worried by the end of security updates for XP. As theese happen I suspect we will see driver support fade out too.
Some may migrate to linux but I think it's pretty safe to say that users will have more apps that don't work on linux than apps that don't work on windows 7. Some may use a XP vm on linux but still for security reasons it will probablly need to be as isolated as possible from networks which will complicate matters.
IMO they are more likely to make it a requirement for new cars but leave existing ones alone. That is what happened with front seatbelts, rear seatbelts, airbags and a whole host of anti-polloution measures (at least here in the UK and afaict in most other places too).
I wonder how many people simply don't use any bog roll or wash thier hands?
What I find really surprising is not that MS did this but that they pubilcally admitted to doing it (without being pressured into doing so afaict)
If they hadn't admitted it most likely noone would have noticed, slowdowns with no obvious explanation are common enough on the web as it is. Now they've gone and told everyone that they will degrade the user experiance to gather information for use in internal politics.
To extend your restraunt analogy would you keep going to a restraunt if you discovered they had been deliberately delaying your order for research or worse to try and extract more money from you?
Note: be carefull when comparing milage figures from different countries. The test methods can be different and more significantly the size of a gallon is different.
According to google
28 (miles per Imperial gallon) = 23.3148675 miles per US gallon
When we grow plants and eat or burn them the carbon comes out of the atmosphere, into the plant then when the plant is eaten or burned the carbon is (mostly, a bit will end up forming body structures, even this is likely to be released eventually though) returned to the atmosphere. Very little affect on net CO2 levels.
OTOH when we mine/drill coal/oil/gas we are taking carbon that has been sequestered for a very long time (IIRC it's at least millions of years but don't quote me on that) and releasing it into the atmosphere.
And if you want the process to be effective over the long term either choose a location which naturally sequesters carbon or periodically cut trees down and store them in a way that doesn't let them rot or burn.
This is offset by immigration, but you must remember that every immigrant in one place is an emigrant elsewhere. The net population stays the same when somebody moves from a developing country to a developed one.
Yeah but IIRC at least for now the world population is still above replacement levels.
Locks on the outside of bedrooms are warranted sometimes.
If it's absoloutely essential to lock someone in for thier own or other peoples safety I'd preffer a simple bolt that can be undone without looking for a key. Or better still an electromagnet that automatically releases when the fire alarm goes off (and can also be manually released in a fail-safe manner)
My parents locked my sister in at night when she was little since she would get up in the middle of the night and bake.
A lockout on the cooker would seem a much safer way of getting arround that problem.
BTW for anyone wondering the bunker in question was declassified and is now a tourist attraction but for whatever reason they still use "secret" in the name.
http://www.hackgreen.co.uk/Opening_Times/opening_times.htm