While I usually look down at "how did this get posted?" comments, this time I gotta stop.
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?! How the hell did this get posted? What standards are being excercised to push this story to the front page? Slashdot is the grand-pappy of the tech/nerd webblogs, but some days, it's kinda like listening to grand pappy talk about the amazing things he did in "the war" while trying to avoid looking at the slowly spreading wetspot on the front of his stained sweat pants.
If this is news for nerds that matters, then I've got the next story: "Title: Chairboy is freakin' cool" with a summary of "Three out of four doctors prefer Chairboy's presence to that of their dentist. Visit his website to see all the cool things he does, ps, he's inviting submissions to his neat new Star Trek Slash-zine where the cast members are all furries and the author is the main character".
The next logical step (as the algorithms improve, hardware gets faster, and demand grows) will be to do the same with video. See http://www.bigfootencounters.com/files/mk_davis_pg f.gif to see a cursory example of how motion picture data can be used to build a persistent environment.
Another poster earlier in the thread speculated that a real estate agent could photo a house to make a virtual tour. Even better, maybe, would be to just carry a high def video camera of some sort through the house, waving it around to get at least a little bit of footage of everything. With that data, an intelligent program could composite a 3D representation with even fewer blackout spots. Combine this with an accelerometer/gyro field that gives a non-software correlation to the video stream, and it's essentially bulletproof.
In the form demonstrated, this is a fantastic heavy duty software solution, but physical tracking data would both make this job easier and improve the quality.
I suspect that in the near future we will see the following technologies made ubiquitous in cameras: 1. GPS 2. Tilt/Compass 3. Accelerometer/motion tracking for video.
Items 1 and 2 would enable any camera to provide very accurate geo-located data. #3 with video gives you tracking where GPS fails plus the super accurate tracking data needed to take this to the next level.
"But Chairboy, you tool, why would the camera companies go to the expense?"
The features listed have become incredibly cheap (both in cost and power consumption) over the past few years. Within a couple years, it'll probably be hard to NOT have them in one of the shared chipsets the camera manufacturers use, and at that point, why fight it?
I worked at a company that rolled out increasingly stringent password policies. It got to a point where the passwords required upper and lower case characters, numbers, non-alpha numeric characters, and (this is the kicker) were required to be changed every few weeks.
I asked around, and gradually discovered that most of the people I worked with had ended up (after months of dilligently trying to adhere to this policy properly) had begun writing their passwords down at their desks.
Writing. Their. Passwords. Down.
It's like this well intentioned security policy had short-circuited itself and put the company in a position far worse than it had been before the reforms. None of the people involved were bad, in fact, I worked with a fine bunch of people who really cared about security and individually had great ideas for making the company safer, but when they were all implemented simultaneously: Ka-BLAM.
A security policy cannot be a list of best practices, it has to be a designed holistic plan that takes into consideration the very human nature of the people it is protecting.
I'd like to see schedule templates for helping me organize my busy life. I suggest the following pre-made ones for typical Firefox users:
The Leveller 7:45AM-8:50AM - Worlds of Warcraft 8:50AM-8:53AM - Ninja fast shower, gotta get to work! 8:53AM-9:05AM - Drive to work, clock in late 9:05AM-11:30AM - Read and post to WoW forums from work computer 11:30AM-12:30PM - Lunch! Just enough time to get home and mob, try to get Enchanted Axe of Althar or something. 12:30PM-5:30PM - Do enough work to keep that ass boss off your back, sell some WoW gold on eBay. 5:30PM-6:00PM - Drive home, resolve to buy some groceries and make a real dinner 6:00PM-6:10PM - Realize that Jack in the Box is faster, just get something there. 6:10PM-1:00AM - Worlds of Warcraft 1:00AM-7:45AM - Fitful sleep, plagued by dreams where nobody can read your chat messages in game.
The GPLion 9:30AM - Wake up, play some TuxRacer. 9:32AM - Check for updates to KDE, hit slashdot. 9:50AM - Finish writing screed defending Stalman while untarring a new nightly build in the background. 9:55AM - Start a new kernel compiling, then head off to CS class. 10:00AM - Listen to stupid Microsoft-loving professor tell me about stuff I'll never need. What do I care about 'big-endian' crap, this is COMPUTER SCIENCE, not freakin' Gulliver's Travels. 11:15AM - Get out of class, eat the macaroni & cheese I brought in tupperware. 12:00PM-2:45PM - Various classes about stuff I'll never use. Why do I need an english class? I _SPEAK_ english! 3:00PM - 4:00PM - Spent telling the TA who runs the computer lab why their PSP is inferior to my Samsung phone that runs linux, demo java TuxRacer. 4:00PM-6:00PM - Kernel has finished compiling at home, spend time trying to get computer working again. 6:15PM - Post comment to blog about how easy it was to get the new kernel going, and how you don't understand the problems other people are having. 7:00PM-10:00PM - Xena marathon! Watch on my MythTV setup. With this transparent weather overlay over the screen, I can totally tell what the weather is like outside, even if the audio is out of sync, it's STILL better than a goddamned tivo. 10:00PM-11:00PM - Porn.
The Hipster 7:00AM - Wake up with gentle alarm clock 7:15AM - Bagel and LOX down at the coffee house. 8:00AM - Bicycle to work while listening to all my podcasts on my Apple iPod(tm) 9:00AM - Start work, be sure to check all my RSS feeds. 12:00PM - Lunch. Did someone say sushi? 1:00PM - Back to work, adjust my square DKNY glasses and buckle down for at least an hour of email, then back to websites. 2:00PM - Boba/Bubble tea break! 5:00PM - Outta work, begin bicycling home. 6:30PM - Get home. 7:00PM - Dinner time, zagats sez to try that place on 14th. 9:00PM - Start watching all my Tivo'd shows, all PBS of course. I don't keep the idiot box for anything but PBS. Oh, and maybe Lost, and the Simpsons, but don't tell.
The utility of having this much space on your phone isn't just storing MP3s, videos, and whatnot. The real potential is in what this means you can create.
I'd like to have my phone be a constant or voice activated recorder. I have my phone on me at all times, it has a microphone, why not have it provide me a 'cockpit voice recorder' of sorts for life? No more guessing exactly what my wife told me to do, or having to write down phone numbers.
Generation 1, your phone just records MP3s of life as it happens to you. If anything interesting happens during the day, you save the file on your computer.
Generation 2, it meta overlays GPS data and is automatically stored as part of your 'diary'. You store it in an encrypted location so it can't be used against you unless you choose to release it, and you have a perfect alibi showing what you said and where you were.
Generation 3, combine voice processing to index everything spoken around you into a searchable form, recognize phone numbers, voices, etc, and create a full digital assistant. At some point around here, it can also store a digital video feed from any cameras you or your personal equipment might have that's synchronized with everything.
Generation 4, it hunts down Sarah Conner.
Everytime someone puts a bunch of storage into something, someone else says "what's the use?" And human nature being what it is, some other asshole decides to invent something cool to use that storage/capabillity for just so they can give the finger to the first person.
People learn the skills appropriate for their lives. Do I know how to castrate a bull or build a replacement wooden wheel for my Conestoga wagon? No, because I'm not a settler living in the early 1800's.
Why not an article that asks the same questions about medical technology? Does the fact that we have made advancements in heart repair, diagnostics, medicines and more somehow indicate that people today are weaker or dumber than those of ten years ago?
Correlation != Causation, yet that seems to be what this article is obliquely suggesting.
If you buy their premise, then go ask some pirates about global warming, they have strong opinions regarding its affect on their trade.
I, personally, love slashvertisements. As a nerd on the run, I rarely have time for news that doesn't matter, and that counts DOUBLY for advertisements.
And not only is this an advertisement, but it's an ad for a product that hasn't even been released yet! Fantastic! When my private DC-10 next touches down a year from now after months of writing code and making executive network decisions from the air, I'll be able to pop into some store and pick one up! Maybe!
For the good old fashioned slashvertisements, I sure wish Slashdot would just put a 'Buy it now' button in the story so that I can do as I'm told (BUY BUY BUY) without having to puzzle out confusing websites or being forced to interact with humans on the other end of a telephone call.
I'M a conventional resistance-based electric element, you insensitive clod!
BTW, the article 'summary' contains wholesale copy/pasting from the article linked to, which itself is just a press release that offers no additional data.
Has anyone considered putting together a submission etiquette guide for the editors to use when greenlighting stuff? Something that includes a dupe check, a Ron P. filter, and perhaps a 'marketfluff' detector? Such a device would come in handy for things like this, "articles" that make Popular Science read like the freakin' Encyclopedia Brittanica in comparison.
> Is the mainstream market not yet ready for portable video?
With respect, this is disingenuos. Succesful products never wait until the mainstream market is 'ready' for any new product, if they did, then another company taking a risk would be the ones who get the marketshare. The key item here is 'disruptive technology'.
An example of disruptive technology is the 8" hard drive. The 14" hard drives were fast and stored a lot of data, but few of the disk companies bothered to make 8" drives when they came out because they were slower and didn't store as much data. Not only that, but they cost more per megabyte. But the market for Minicomputers demanded lower cost (even if it was higher cost per meg) overall drives, so they started improving. Only one or two hard drive companies from the 14" market survived the switch to 8" drives because they didn't see the benefit, and their customers didn't either, until it was too late.
The same thing happened again when the 5.25" HDs came out. Only a couple manufacturers of 8" drives stayed in business, and only because they spent money on the 5.25" drives well before they were good enough to sell, or profitable.
Finally, look at the excavating market: Up until the 1940s, steam shovels were all cable activated. They used cables to lift the arms and control the scoop, not hydraulics. When the first hydraulic dirt movers came out, they couldn't move anywhere near as much dirt and they cost more to operate, but eventually they became more powerful, safer, and cheaper to own and operate then cable operated stuff. NONE of the steam shovel companies that were in business in the 1940s survived past the 1950s because they didn't see the benefit of selling what they saw as inferior technology, which hydraulics definately were in the beginning.
This created opportunities for the startups to dominate the small hydraulics market unopposed until they were able to grow into and take over the domain of the cable operated steam shovel.
Cell phone video sucks right now, and doesn't _sound_ smart to the mainstream market. After all, it's not as high quality as DVD now, and it has lots of deficiencies, but they know that eventually, the market for digital downloads of video may grow to compete with and even replace physical media sales. That's not what customers want right now, but the market and technologies change, so 5-10 years from now, customers will demand this, and whoever is in the business first will have lots of advantages.
Remember, what the customer wants is not always best, and if you spend your life following the customers requests only, you'll eventually go out of business when a disruptive technology appears. It happened to the 14" drive manufacturers who listened to their customers (who weren't interested in slower, lower capacity drives), and it could happen to the media industry that doesn't take a risk with this stuff. I'm not saying it's a slam dunk, but whoever takes the risk stands to reap the rewards, while everyone else has to play catch up, IF the technology takes off.
I'm looking for an optical processor that can do math at point 5 lightspeed. I expect this will be of particular assistance in my thesis project of calculating how fast a certain type of falcon can run. In the past, when trying to figure this out, I've had to hold the bird with a pair of grippers that would keep slipping out of my hands, and by the time I'd be done, I would have gone through maybe nine or ten pairs.
With a faster processor, I hope to do the Kestrel run in less than 12 forceps.
True, DMHO vapor has been intimately associated with the "greenhouse effect". Not to mention, high levels of DMHO are found in the bodies of cancer victims. Is this really the stuff we want to be making more of? It's corrosive, for pete's sake!
"Oooooh, ahhh... that's how it always starts. Then later, there's running, and screaming, and standing on top of a stool in the middle of your kitchen waving a broom at Chucky Cheese the 'lone' mouse there. You think a single rat won't cause problems? My friend, if chaos theory has taught me anything... it's that nature will find a way..."
To raise the funding, they ask that everyone send in a couple bucks each to help seed the system. As they receive cash, the money will be invested, and a map of generous investors will be created. The more money you contribute, the higher rate of return you'll see, and so on.
The investment will continue until they hit the $8.75 million mark, then they'll keep the fund the same size and just feed the profits back into the investment group as other people join and leave.
A constant threat will be a type of invester known as a 'leech' who makes minimal contributions but attempts to collect large returns and-...
Gosh... I'm really trying hard to make this a funny bittorrent joke, but I find that I've just described actual commerce. How depressing.
Breaking news: Some of the other emergency supplies you purchase (food, medicine, batteries) may also become unusable sometime in the future because of a limited shelflife.
Because of this, I recommend holding off on purchases of emergency supplies until a few days before the emergency happens, that way freshness and technological protocol compliance can be assured. Alternately, don't schedule any emergencies until after a digital television compliant emergency radio is available for purchase.
I expect the SSME on the second stage of the manned launcher will be replaced with a J-20S.
The reason: Restarting.
The SSME has never been restarted in flight, and there's a big cost associated with adding/certifying this capabillity. The J-2, on the other hand, was used by the Saturn V's third stage, and this restart is needed for trans lunar injection.
There are advantages to living in the cracks sometimes. Harry Harrison once wrote that every society has rats, and even an incredibly advanced one would have the equivalent, even if it's a 'stainless steel' rat. By owning a ReplayTV instead of a Tivo, I feel like I'm living in that crawlspace, away from all the media attention that a company like Tivo gets.
Replay got sued for the automatic commercial skip, but once that PVR had been thoroughly surpassed in numbers by Tivo, attention shifted elsewhere and now the only people who know about Replay are the owners.
1. I can pull my shows off my Replay over the network, no broadcast flag. 2. My 5060 (w/ the requisite hard drive upgrade, of course) still automatically skips commercials. They aren't taking away features I bought, and I appreciate it. 3. There's no pop-up advertisements like Tivo has. There just isn't the money in doing stuff like that because the user base is so small (but the development effort doesn't get cheaper as a result).
You can see some of the same stuff happening with Apple. The Macintosh has, lately, demonstrated less enthusiasm about adopting the various DRM flavor of the month technologies that the Windows PC has. This is in part because there isn't the same level of scrutiny, and also because the development effort of adding that stuff doesn't amortize across the user base as well. I'm sure there are other 'do no evil' type considerations and whatnot, but money is the real motive power to be reckoned with.
I sometimes wonder what the implications are for the rest of society. Do I, the middle class anonymous guy have more freedom than the popular, rich people? Probably. There's no media scrutiny of my every move, if I had a T-mobile Sidekick, nobody would bother trying to break into it, I can post diatribes to slashdot without apologizing via a press release, and so on.
Just a thought on the trade offs between being comfortable and caged in the living room above versus being a bit cramped, but living the freedom that only the unknown can claim...
Slashdot Mirror
While I usually look down at "how did this get posted?" comments, this time I gotta stop.
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?! How the hell did this get posted? What standards are being excercised to push this story to the front page? Slashdot is the grand-pappy of the tech/nerd webblogs, but some days, it's kinda like listening to grand pappy talk about the amazing things he did in "the war" while trying to avoid looking at the slowly spreading wetspot on the front of his stained sweat pants.
If this is news for nerds that matters, then I've got the next story: "Title: Chairboy is freakin' cool" with a summary of "Three out of four doctors prefer Chairboy's presence to that of their dentist. Visit his website to see all the cool things he does, ps, he's inviting submissions to his neat new Star Trek Slash-zine where the cast members are all furries and the author is the main character".
The next logical step (as the algorithms improve, hardware gets faster, and demand grows) will be to do the same with video. See http://www.bigfootencounters.com/files/mk_davis_pg f.gif to see a cursory example of how motion picture data can be used to build a persistent environment.
Another poster earlier in the thread speculated that a real estate agent could photo a house to make a virtual tour. Even better, maybe, would be to just carry a high def video camera of some sort through the house, waving it around to get at least a little bit of footage of everything. With that data, an intelligent program could composite a 3D representation with even fewer blackout spots. Combine this with an accelerometer/gyro field that gives a non-software correlation to the video stream, and it's essentially bulletproof.
In the form demonstrated, this is a fantastic heavy duty software solution, but physical tracking data would both make this job easier and improve the quality.
I suspect that in the near future we will see the following technologies made ubiquitous in cameras:
1. GPS
2. Tilt/Compass
3. Accelerometer/motion tracking for video.
Items 1 and 2 would enable any camera to provide very accurate geo-located data. #3 with video gives you tracking where GPS fails plus the super accurate tracking data needed to take this to the next level.
"But Chairboy, you tool, why would the camera companies go to the expense?"
The features listed have become incredibly cheap (both in cost and power consumption) over the past few years. Within a couple years, it'll probably be hard to NOT have them in one of the shared chipsets the camera manufacturers use, and at that point, why fight it?
I worked at a company that rolled out increasingly stringent password policies. It got to a point where the passwords required upper and lower case characters, numbers, non-alpha numeric characters, and (this is the kicker) were required to be changed every few weeks.
I asked around, and gradually discovered that most of the people I worked with had ended up (after months of dilligently trying to adhere to this policy properly) had begun writing their passwords down at their desks.
Writing. Their. Passwords. Down.
It's like this well intentioned security policy had short-circuited itself and put the company in a position far worse than it had been before the reforms. None of the people involved were bad, in fact, I worked with a fine bunch of people who really cared about security and individually had great ideas for making the company safer, but when they were all implemented simultaneously: Ka-BLAM.
A security policy cannot be a list of best practices, it has to be a designed holistic plan that takes into consideration the very human nature of the people it is protecting.
"First, they ignore you.
Then they laugh at you.
Then they fight you.
Then you win."
It appears that we are currently transitioning from 2 to 3.
I'd like to see schedule templates for helping me organize my busy life. I suggest the following pre-made ones for typical Firefox users:
The Leveller
7:45AM-8:50AM - Worlds of Warcraft
8:50AM-8:53AM - Ninja fast shower, gotta get to work!
8:53AM-9:05AM - Drive to work, clock in late
9:05AM-11:30AM - Read and post to WoW forums from work computer
11:30AM-12:30PM - Lunch! Just enough time to get home and mob, try to get Enchanted Axe of Althar or something.
12:30PM-5:30PM - Do enough work to keep that ass boss off your back, sell some WoW gold on eBay.
5:30PM-6:00PM - Drive home, resolve to buy some groceries and make a real dinner
6:00PM-6:10PM - Realize that Jack in the Box is faster, just get something there.
6:10PM-1:00AM - Worlds of Warcraft
1:00AM-7:45AM - Fitful sleep, plagued by dreams where nobody can read your chat messages in game.
The GPLion
9:30AM - Wake up, play some TuxRacer.
9:32AM - Check for updates to KDE, hit slashdot.
9:50AM - Finish writing screed defending Stalman while untarring a new nightly build in the background.
9:55AM - Start a new kernel compiling, then head off to CS class.
10:00AM - Listen to stupid Microsoft-loving professor tell me about stuff I'll never need. What do I care about 'big-endian' crap, this is COMPUTER SCIENCE, not freakin' Gulliver's Travels.
11:15AM - Get out of class, eat the macaroni & cheese I brought in tupperware.
12:00PM-2:45PM - Various classes about stuff I'll never use. Why do I need an english class? I _SPEAK_ english!
3:00PM - 4:00PM - Spent telling the TA who runs the computer lab why their PSP is inferior to my Samsung phone that runs linux, demo java TuxRacer.
4:00PM-6:00PM - Kernel has finished compiling at home, spend time trying to get computer working again.
6:15PM - Post comment to blog about how easy it was to get the new kernel going, and how you don't understand the problems other people are having.
7:00PM-10:00PM - Xena marathon! Watch on my MythTV setup. With this transparent weather overlay over the screen, I can totally tell what the weather is like outside, even if the audio is out of sync, it's STILL better than a goddamned tivo.
10:00PM-11:00PM - Porn.
The Hipster
7:00AM - Wake up with gentle alarm clock
7:15AM - Bagel and LOX down at the coffee house.
8:00AM - Bicycle to work while listening to all my podcasts on my Apple iPod(tm)
9:00AM - Start work, be sure to check all my RSS feeds.
12:00PM - Lunch. Did someone say sushi?
1:00PM - Back to work, adjust my square DKNY glasses and buckle down for at least an hour of email, then back to websites.
2:00PM - Boba/Bubble tea break!
5:00PM - Outta work, begin bicycling home.
6:30PM - Get home.
7:00PM - Dinner time, zagats sez to try that place on 14th.
9:00PM - Start watching all my Tivo'd shows, all PBS of course. I don't keep the idiot box for anything but PBS. Oh, and maybe Lost, and the Simpsons, but don't tell.
The utility of having this much space on your phone isn't just storing MP3s, videos, and whatnot. The real potential is in what this means you can create.
I'd like to have my phone be a constant or voice activated recorder. I have my phone on me at all times, it has a microphone, why not have it provide me a 'cockpit voice recorder' of sorts for life? No more guessing exactly what my wife told me to do, or having to write down phone numbers.
Generation 1, your phone just records MP3s of life as it happens to you. If anything interesting happens during the day, you save the file on your computer.
Generation 2, it meta overlays GPS data and is automatically stored as part of your 'diary'. You store it in an encrypted location so it can't be used against you unless you choose to release it, and you have a perfect alibi showing what you said and where you were.
Generation 3, combine voice processing to index everything spoken around you into a searchable form, recognize phone numbers, voices, etc, and create a full digital assistant. At some point around here, it can also store a digital video feed from any cameras you or your personal equipment might have that's synchronized with everything.
Generation 4, it hunts down Sarah Conner.
Everytime someone puts a bunch of storage into something, someone else says "what's the use?" And human nature being what it is, some other asshole decides to invent something cool to use that storage/capabillity for just so they can give the finger to the first person.
People learn the skills appropriate for their lives. Do I know how to castrate a bull or build a replacement wooden wheel for my Conestoga wagon? No, because I'm not a settler living in the early 1800's.
Why not an article that asks the same questions about medical technology? Does the fact that we have made advancements in heart repair, diagnostics, medicines and more somehow indicate that people today are weaker or dumber than those of ten years ago?
Correlation != Causation, yet that seems to be what this article is obliquely suggesting.
If you buy their premise, then go ask some pirates about global warming, they have strong opinions regarding its affect on their trade.
I, personally, love slashvertisements. As a nerd on the run, I rarely have time for news that doesn't matter, and that counts DOUBLY for advertisements.
And not only is this an advertisement, but it's an ad for a product that hasn't even been released yet! Fantastic! When my private DC-10 next touches down a year from now after months of writing code and making executive network decisions from the air, I'll be able to pop into some store and pick one up! Maybe!
For the good old fashioned slashvertisements, I sure wish Slashdot would just put a 'Buy it now' button in the story so that I can do as I'm told (BUY BUY BUY) without having to puzzle out confusing websites or being forced to interact with humans on the other end of a telephone call.
That would be... fantastic.
> The CN Tower is 553 meters. Taipei 101 is a feeble 509 meters.
Sure, but that's like what, 474 meters US?
I'M a conventional resistance-based electric element, you insensitive clod!
BTW, the article 'summary' contains wholesale copy/pasting from the article linked to, which itself is just a press release that offers no additional data.
Has anyone considered putting together a submission etiquette guide for the editors to use when greenlighting stuff? Something that includes a dupe check, a Ron P. filter, and perhaps a 'marketfluff' detector? Such a device would come in handy for things like this, "articles" that make Popular Science read like the freakin' Encyclopedia Brittanica in comparison.
> Is the mainstream market not yet ready for portable video?
With respect, this is disingenuos. Succesful products never wait until the mainstream market is 'ready' for any new product, if they did, then another company taking a risk would be the ones who get the marketshare. The key item here is 'disruptive technology'.
An example of disruptive technology is the 8" hard drive. The 14" hard drives were fast and stored a lot of data, but few of the disk companies bothered to make 8" drives when they came out because they were slower and didn't store as much data. Not only that, but they cost more per megabyte. But the market for Minicomputers demanded lower cost (even if it was higher cost per meg) overall drives, so they started improving. Only one or two hard drive companies from the 14" market survived the switch to 8" drives because they didn't see the benefit, and their customers didn't either, until it was too late.
The same thing happened again when the 5.25" HDs came out. Only a couple manufacturers of 8" drives stayed in business, and only because they spent money on the 5.25" drives well before they were good enough to sell, or profitable.
Finally, look at the excavating market: Up until the 1940s, steam shovels were all cable activated. They used cables to lift the arms and control the scoop, not hydraulics. When the first hydraulic dirt movers came out, they couldn't move anywhere near as much dirt and they cost more to operate, but eventually they became more powerful, safer, and cheaper to own and operate then cable operated stuff. NONE of the steam shovel companies that were in business in the 1940s survived past the 1950s because they didn't see the benefit of selling what they saw as inferior technology, which hydraulics definately were in the beginning.
This created opportunities for the startups to dominate the small hydraulics market unopposed until they were able to grow into and take over the domain of the cable operated steam shovel.
Cell phone video sucks right now, and doesn't _sound_ smart to the mainstream market. After all, it's not as high quality as DVD now, and it has lots of deficiencies, but they know that eventually, the market for digital downloads of video may grow to compete with and even replace physical media sales. That's not what customers want right now, but the market and technologies change, so 5-10 years from now, customers will demand this, and whoever is in the business first will have lots of advantages.
Remember, what the customer wants is not always best, and if you spend your life following the customers requests only, you'll eventually go out of business when a disruptive technology appears. It happened to the 14" drive manufacturers who listened to their customers (who weren't interested in slower, lower capacity drives), and it could happen to the media industry that doesn't take a risk with this stuff. I'm not saying it's a slam dunk, but whoever takes the risk stands to reap the rewards, while everyone else has to play catch up, IF the technology takes off.
Just something to think about...
I'm looking for an optical processor that can do math at point 5 lightspeed. I expect this will be of particular assistance in my thesis project of calculating how fast a certain type of falcon can run. In the past, when trying to figure this out, I've had to hold the bird with a pair of grippers that would keep slipping out of my hands, and by the time I'd be done, I would have gone through maybe nine or ten pairs.
With a faster processor, I hope to do the Kestrel run in less than 12 forceps.
As you can see, it also causes dyslexia. I'm referring to DHMO, of course, not DMHO. 100% of all dyslexics have DHMO in their diets!
True, DMHO vapor has been intimately associated with the "greenhouse effect". Not to mention, high levels of DMHO are found in the bodies of cancer victims. Is this really the stuff we want to be making more of? It's corrosive, for pete's sake!
Won't somebody please think of the children?
No, I counted them, they're all there.
-- pause for laughter --
BTW, the square root of 16,777,217 is 4,096. What does that tell you about screen resolutions needed to see all 16m colors at once?
Best regards,
7th grade math.
In the comics and movies, the cyborgs had super strength, could run fast, maybe shoot lasers out of their frickin' eyes, and so on.
Science fiction has failed us yet again. It's clear that the real cyborgs will simply have great skill at predicting the weather.
Go figure.
Somewhere in the world, Jeff Goldblum weeps...
"Oooooh, ahhh... that's how it always starts. Then later, there's running, and screaming, and standing on top of a stool in the middle of your kitchen waving a broom at Chucky Cheese the 'lone' mouse there. You think a single rat won't cause problems? My friend, if chaos theory has taught me anything... it's that nature will find a way..."
> there's a much funnier joke in there somewhere...
Yet you skillfully navigated directly past them. Astonishing precision.
For example, you could have expressed surprise that everyone was surprised when all he did was 'rocket jump'.
I've replicated the same feat at home using a device I call a "lens cap", except I can significantly beat the 100x reduction of star brightness.
I'll entertain all bids on this technology...
To raise the funding, they ask that everyone send in a couple bucks each to help seed the system. As they receive cash, the money will be invested, and a map of generous investors will be created. The more money you contribute, the higher rate of return you'll see, and so on.
...
The investment will continue until they hit the $8.75 million mark, then they'll keep the fund the same size and just feed the profits back into the investment group as other people join and leave.
A constant threat will be a type of invester known as a 'leech' who makes minimal contributions but attempts to collect large returns and-
Gosh... I'm really trying hard to make this a funny bittorrent joke, but I find that I've just described actual commerce. How depressing.
Breaking news: Some of the other emergency supplies you purchase (food, medicine, batteries) may also become unusable sometime in the future because of a limited shelflife.
Because of this, I recommend holding off on purchases of emergency supplies until a few days before the emergency happens, that way freshness and technological protocol compliance can be assured. Alternately, don't schedule any emergencies until after a digital television compliant emergency radio is available for purchase.
(PS, the radio also picks up... radio.)
I expect the SSME on the second stage of the manned launcher will be replaced with a J-20S.
The reason: Restarting.
The SSME has never been restarted in flight, and there's a big cost associated with adding/certifying this capabillity. The J-2, on the other hand, was used by the Saturn V's third stage, and this restart is needed for trans lunar injection.
I think the real question here is, did he receive positive or negative feedback once the transaction was complete?
McDonalds security is no laughing matter.
Consider, for example, the international fugitive known as the "Hamburglar".
There are advantages to living in the cracks sometimes. Harry Harrison once wrote that every society has rats, and even an incredibly advanced one would have the equivalent, even if it's a 'stainless steel' rat. By owning a ReplayTV instead of a Tivo, I feel like I'm living in that crawlspace, away from all the media attention that a company like Tivo gets.
Replay got sued for the automatic commercial skip, but once that PVR had been thoroughly surpassed in numbers by Tivo, attention shifted elsewhere and now the only people who know about Replay are the owners.
1. I can pull my shows off my Replay over the network, no broadcast flag.
2. My 5060 (w/ the requisite hard drive upgrade, of course) still automatically skips commercials. They aren't taking away features I bought, and I appreciate it.
3. There's no pop-up advertisements like Tivo has. There just isn't the money in doing stuff like that because the user base is so small (but the development effort doesn't get cheaper as a result).
You can see some of the same stuff happening with Apple. The Macintosh has, lately, demonstrated less enthusiasm about adopting the various DRM flavor of the month technologies that the Windows PC has. This is in part because there isn't the same level of scrutiny, and also because the development effort of adding that stuff doesn't amortize across the user base as well. I'm sure there are other 'do no evil' type considerations and whatnot, but money is the real motive power to be reckoned with.
I sometimes wonder what the implications are for the rest of society. Do I, the middle class anonymous guy have more freedom than the popular, rich people? Probably. There's no media scrutiny of my every move, if I had a T-mobile Sidekick, nobody would bother trying to break into it, I can post diatribes to slashdot without apologizing via a press release, and so on.
Just a thought on the trade offs between being comfortable and caged in the living room above versus being a bit cramped, but living the freedom that only the unknown can claim...