You are wrong. This move allows them to increase the box capabilities. TiVO is working on trickle download with netflix. You rent a movie, download it with high speed internet. Watch it, remove it from your box. You are not allowed to copy it. If you screw it up you can download it again from netflix.
Downloads will take about 6-8 hours.
Similar features are planned for renting movies from other sources.
None of this is possible without content protection. And it will not be possible on other PVRs that lack content protection.
Do you think being able to rent movies via trickle download is worth the content protection? I use netflix now and love it, it would be worth 3-4 times more to me with trickle download.
Yep, TiVo programmers are working on a trickle download that would use Netflix as the movie source and operate over Comcast's pipes, store the movie on the TiVo box for viewing. Something like - order the movie, receive it in about 8 hours, watch as often as you like, delete for downloading next movie.
Let's face it, with a Mac you get Unix AND a great GUI.
You get a really crappy Unix compared to linux. Just plain slow and kludgy. Still much nicer than Windows, but not at all comparable to the rip roaring monster linux kernel has become.
However, you get a professional desktop with the Mac. I need to use Word and Excel at work, sometimes, when I cannot avoid it. I know the linux kernel is much nicer than the Darwin kernel, but I need the Mac for its Office support.
Schizophrenia was named for the apparent split between the emotional state, or affect, of the patient and the patient's surroundings. I think its a bit misleading to say the schizophrenic lives in a world in which the real and unreal are not differentiable. Its more the case that thought processes are poorly controlled, and delusional, disordered, psychotic, thinking cannot be controlled. A runaway mind seeking its own solutions.
Re:'Clicky' keyswitches -- for Macs
on
Blank Keyboard
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
This keyboard uses mechanical keyswitchs instead of those cloddy membrane keyswitches in the Das Keyboard. In addition, it is a split keyboard with bigger keys for your pinky fingers, and the columns of keys are fanned out from your fingers instead of in parrallel rows.
Totally rocks. Mine is about 7 years old, nearly toast, but I can't find a decent other mechanical keyswitch keyboard to replace it with.
These pods are a little under 500 feet long. That means they will be selective for some period of waves energy, with a peak in the 13-14 second wave period band (see wavelength chart at http://www.blakestah.com/surf/oldprediction.html). It will also have limited response at fundamentals - longer wavelengths - because these sausages are linked.
There's a problem in this. First of all, the little crappy windchop that surfers hate is in the short period bands, 5-8 seconds or so. And these pods will not suck off any of that energy - the chop will go right on through. Whereas the surfable energy - the long period stuff, will be knocked down substantially. Not good. Also, the bulk of the ocean's wave energy is in this chop. So they are throwing out the baby to drink the bathwater.
They need to redesign it to not have any selectivity for periods over 10 seconds - or wavelengths over 100 meters. Take the bulk of the energy, sap it out, and make the oceans smooth and glassy while the long period waves cruise on through and generate stoke for surfers worldwide.
The pod design is really cool. There are a few things they could do to gear it up also - like load the bulk of the weight and volume at the links to maximize leverage, and broaden the aspect ratio closer to 0.5...I'm envisioning links 10m long and 5m wide with never more than 5 connected serially. That saps the oceans of the wind chop, while leaving the longer period surf (which is more rare anyway) alone. Smaller, easier to deploy (and replace) units, which a physical design using more leverage. And surfing would actually benefit from such a change.
If you go to their website and check out the graphics it's kind of depressing really. To me this is really low tech stuff.
I went to college and grad school with the President and CEO of Second Sight, and have spoken with him many times about his company and products. I currently work in implantable technology fields as well, although not eye-related work.
Their approach is good and appropriate. To a man with no sight, even one electrode that works well is a godsend. Until you have the devices implanted and undergo beta-testing, you don't really know what will and will not work. People say you need a million sources of light because there are a million photoreceptors in each eye - but that isn't necessarily true. You have about 30,000 inner hair cells in each cochlea, but you can understand speech with only 8 electrodes. I'd be really surprised if it took more than 16 for rudimentary fundamental vision.
In addition, I also know a group working on brain stimulation (instead of retinal), and there is another group working on retinal stimulation. Its an engineering challenge because of the cornea barrier and pain associated with scratches, but it will be solved by one or more of these groups. There are currently 3 independently developed cochlear implants, there look to be about three visual prosthetics on the market in another 5 to 10 years....
Which is the weakest of these? Linux. I think that rigorous development methods and QC/QA are FAR more important in developing a good code. For that you need professional programmers and professional methods. Open or closed source are irrelevant. Picking a company that didn't properly maintain their code is disingenious.
Did you file a formal bug report with DEC?
I'd prefer, by an enormous margin, to program on an open system. Because when it is broken, AND THEY ARE ALL BROKEN IN ONE WAY OR ANOTHER, I can see where the open system is broken, I can contact the open system code maintainer DIRECTLY, and if inclined I can also fix it.
With a closed system I have to reverse engineer the broken library call just to program around it. That's like a night and day difference.
Add to that the speed of response of open library maintainers compared to HP or Solaris or IBM, and its a no brainer.
Note: I am not saying which system I would prefer to deploy for different applications, except when I am developing. Then I prefer open.
You shoulda heard the response when I asked Dec to see the libc5 code to see why glob was failing...the laughter through the phone was deafening.
I get people to use Firefox. It is usually faster and always more secure than what they use by default.
I encourage people to use something other than Outlook for the same reason.
For the rest, its less consistent. I got my cubicle neighbor doing documents in laTeX when Word kept choking over and over and over. Curiously, that's when I started using TeX as well.
For the OS kernel, I don't encourage people to change. However, I think it is self-evident that a much better kernel comes from open source development. I enter in as evidence Windows, linux kernel, and Mac's Darwin kernel. The open source kernels just catch more bugs and are easier to develop over. Here's an example.
I was developing a text editor (customizing, really) on linux. I also used DEC workstations, so I ported it to work there too. There was a problem with the POSIX function glob. It worked fine under linux. I downloaded the glibc code to look at it. Very straightforward. Then on Digital Unix it failed. I asked Dec for help. I sent them the code, explained it failed. No feedback. They coulda cared less if glob worked or not.
It was actually trickier. I later discovered glob calls ksh to execute under Digital Unix. It actually forks a process to do a glob. Ksh would either work on not depending on whether it thought it was calling glob from an interactive process.
So I talked to Dec again. Again, they coulda cared less. And, without having the underlying source code, I couldn't send them a patch - stuck with a broken system. So, I re-wrote the function glob so it would work under Digital Unix instead of using the POSIX library call.
You know, this happens all the time programming to closed systems. Little intricacies about what makes the system functions work or not are locked up, and the company could care less about your needs as a programmer. You learn to simply program around those OS and library bugs.
In an open source system, you learn to report them to the code owner and/or fix them.
I prefer the latter enormously, and it is my main reason for preferring open source systems for programming.
Linux has had a large number of innovations over the years. The best appreciation comes from open testing of the benchmarks compared to other OSs. Linux is fast clean and stable. Interestingly enough Microsoft pays people to find anywhere that Windows specs faster, and then it gets published. Six months later linux is fixed, but Windows is not. At this point there is not much left.
The thing that really gets me on Mac instead of Windows is the stability of the kernel. No uncomfortable pauses, lockups, etc, and all the office tools to achieve the interoperability I need.
If this is happening to your Windows machine, it is broken. Get it fixed.
Linux, the kernel, is extremely innovative, providing a superior reverse engineered substitute for the UNIX specifications. And then some.
But the more general point. Businesses regularly copy each other, and barring IP complications, they will continue to do this. Innovating in a non-IP protected space is a good way for a business to waste money. Which is why linux does so well.
The Mac platform has always paid more attention to user-friendliness and consistency across the platform. This requires large-scale quality control, something virtually impossible for OSS to achieve.
The thing that really gets me on Mac instead of Windows is the stability of the kernel. No uncomfortable pauses, lockups, etc, and all the office tools to achieve the interoperability I need.
The more salient point is that all of this PRESUMES the document can be considered a derived work , in the copyright sense, of the font. If the document cannot be considered a derived work, the GPL status of the font is irrelevant.
Personally I would be hard pressed to think that in general a document would be considered a derived work of the font...
One step at a time...the capabilities of the front-end need to be explored first. We know a consistent signal can be gotten for months, but how stable is it over time? How do you effectively couple it as an external control system?
With respect to having it control prosthetics, the robot arm is the easy part. The hard part is feedback. This is already well-known from prosthetic arms controlled with other signals. The arm input signal isn't so hard, but humans lose a lot of capability without feedback, and prostheses use really crude strategies in order to utilize normal muscle feedback instead of using much better couplings to robot arms.
There's a lot of work to be done, but there are several groups of very skilled people moving fast...it'll get a lot better over the next 10 years.
The sub-vocalization stuff is kinda cool, but it is a technology looking for an application right now. They wanted to sell it to cell phone companies, got blown off, and convinced DoD to fund research on its applications. Kind of a smart move, actually, but I'm a little dubious it will compete with brain implants as a conduit from CNS to the outside world.
I have a kid, wanted to get out of the box educational games (Reader Rabbit style). Can't run any of that under linux.
The pros....all the X apps run. I do lots of TeX/postscript/perl work. Seamless. I also get a Firefox with Shockwave that works, Office X for the annoying forms I get sent regularly at work, etc. The best of all worlds. Never crashes.
At home I still use linux as my PPPOE server, caching nameserver, and router/firewall for my local home network. Don't know don't care about OS X for that. But for my desktop, it gives me all the tools and stability of linux, and all the interoperability I need for work. The downside is it is clearly a little less efficient than linux. But, a little slowness doesn't bother me any as long as it doesn't crash the OS and I can always pop to a console and kill the offending process.
Obviously if you are into it to spend time as a hobbyist you'll probably not switch. But if you need to use linux/unix AND Windows/Mac tools, and want a stable virus free OS, Mac OS is pretty dern good for me.
I thought LaTeX has has "replaced" Knuth's Tex, and I considered LatTex as based on Tex not Tex itself. And I really think Knuth thinks that way, too
In the sense that more and more people typeset with LaTeX than TeX, yes.
But LaTeX is a fairly small set of macros for TeX. In a conceptual sense, not really something different at all, just a group of subroutines that make tech easier for simpletons that can't be bothered to learn TeX like a true mathematician would.
TeX is already long in the tooth, and will become obsolete soon.
You may misunderstand. TeX was made for writing manuscripts and books, especially for mathematics. It has completely dominated and monopolized that field, to the complete exclusion of any other non-TeX software. Long in the tooth? Doubt it. TeX will outlive Knuth and all of us.
Like, isn't it pretty obvious. Sony is still on top, as is AOL, MSN and X-box are far behind and losing money right and left. Microsoft can't even buy its way into the market.
It kinda loses a little impact when you gotta explain the sarcasm. Microsoft is hemorrhaging money right and left trying to beat AOL and Sony, and having their butts handed to them. MSN's search function will be no different.
In addition, Google got a big wad o cash in their IPO, and are using it to branch out in a gazillion ways. They are hiring smart people. This battle they've already won.
Slashdot Mirror
You are wrong. This move allows them to increase the box capabilities. TiVO is working on trickle download with netflix. You rent a movie, download it with high speed internet. Watch it, remove it from your box. You are not allowed to copy it. If you screw it up you can download it again from netflix.
Downloads will take about 6-8 hours.
Similar features are planned for renting movies from other sources.
None of this is possible without content protection. And it will not be possible on other PVRs that lack content protection.
Do you think being able to rent movies via trickle download is worth the content protection? I use netflix now and love it, it would be worth 3-4 times more to me with trickle download.
Yep, TiVo programmers are working on a trickle download that would use Netflix as the movie source and operate over Comcast's pipes, store the movie on the TiVo box for viewing. Something like - order the movie, receive it in about 8 hours, watch as often as you like, delete for downloading next movie.
It's gonna be beeg.
Let's face it, with a Mac you get Unix AND a great GUI.
You get a really crappy Unix compared to linux. Just plain slow and kludgy. Still much nicer than Windows, but not at all comparable to the rip roaring monster linux kernel has become.
However, you get a professional desktop with the Mac. I need to use Word and Excel at work, sometimes, when I cannot avoid it. I know the linux kernel is much nicer than the Darwin kernel, but I need the Mac for its Office support.
iTunes is pretty nice, too.
Schizophrenia was named for the apparent split between the emotional state, or affect, of the patient and the patient's surroundings. I think its a bit misleading to say the schizophrenic lives in a world in which the real and unreal are not differentiable. Its more the case that thought processes are poorly controlled, and delusional, disordered, psychotic, thinking cannot be controlled. A runaway mind seeking its own solutions.
This keyboard uses mechanical keyswitchs instead of those cloddy membrane keyswitches in the Das Keyboard. In addition, it is a split keyboard with bigger keys for your pinky fingers, and the columns of keys are fanned out from your fingers instead of in parrallel rows.
Totally rocks. Mine is about 7 years old, nearly toast, but I can't find a decent other mechanical keyswitch keyboard to replace it with.
Mac compatible.
http://www.sforh.com/keyboards/smartboard.html
These pods are a little under 500 feet long. That means they will be selective for some period of waves energy, with a peak in the 13-14 second wave period band (see wavelength chart at http://www.blakestah.com/surf/oldprediction.html). It will also have limited response at fundamentals - longer wavelengths - because these sausages are linked.
There's a problem in this. First of all, the little crappy windchop that surfers hate is in the short period bands, 5-8 seconds or so. And these pods will not suck off any of that energy - the chop will go right on through. Whereas the surfable energy - the long period stuff, will be knocked down substantially. Not good. Also, the bulk of the ocean's wave energy is in this chop. So they are throwing out the baby to drink the bathwater.
They need to redesign it to not have any selectivity for periods over 10 seconds - or wavelengths over 100 meters. Take the bulk of the energy, sap it out, and make the oceans smooth and glassy while the long period waves cruise on through and generate stoke for surfers worldwide.
The pod design is really cool. There are a few things they could do to gear it up also - like load the bulk of the weight and volume at the links to maximize leverage, and broaden the aspect ratio closer to 0.5...I'm envisioning links 10m long and 5m wide with never more than 5 connected serially. That saps the oceans of the wind chop, while leaving the longer period surf (which is more rare anyway) alone. Smaller, easier to deploy (and replace) units, which a physical design using more leverage. And surfing would actually benefit from such a change.
film gimp became
CINEPAINT
http://cinepaint.sourceforge.net/
If you go to their website and check out the graphics it's kind of depressing really. To me this is really low tech stuff.
I went to college and grad school with the President and CEO of Second Sight, and have spoken with him many times about his company and products. I currently work in implantable technology fields as well, although not eye-related work.
Their approach is good and appropriate. To a man with no sight, even one electrode that works well is a godsend. Until you have the devices implanted and undergo beta-testing, you don't really know what will and will not work. People say you need a million sources of light because there are a million photoreceptors in each eye - but that isn't necessarily true. You have about 30,000 inner hair cells in each cochlea, but you can understand speech with only 8 electrodes. I'd be really surprised if it took more than 16 for rudimentary fundamental vision.
In addition, I also know a group working on brain stimulation (instead of retinal), and there is another group working on retinal stimulation. Its an engineering challenge because of the cornea barrier and pain associated with scratches, but it will be solved by one or more of these groups. There are currently 3 independently developed cochlear implants, there look to be about three visual prosthetics on the market in another 5 to 10 years....
And the blind shall see.
Really I was just a bit rushed in an effort to get a first post.
Its failure to take off prolly has nothing to do with the ubiquitious support for Flash...
HP-UX.
Solaris.
AIX.
Linux.
Which is the weakest of these? Linux. I think that rigorous development methods and QC/QA are FAR more important in developing a good code. For that you need professional programmers and professional methods. Open or closed source are irrelevant. Picking a company that didn't properly maintain their code is disingenious.
Did you file a formal bug report with DEC?
I'd prefer, by an enormous margin, to program on an open system. Because when it is broken, AND THEY ARE ALL BROKEN IN ONE WAY OR ANOTHER, I can see where the open system is broken, I can contact the open system code maintainer DIRECTLY, and if inclined I can also fix it.
With a closed system I have to reverse engineer the broken library call just to program around it. That's like a night and day difference.
Add to that the speed of response of open library maintainers compared to HP or Solaris or IBM, and its a no brainer.
Note: I am not saying which system I would prefer to deploy for different applications, except when I am developing. Then I prefer open.
You shoulda heard the response when I asked Dec to see the libc5 code to see why glob was failing...the laughter through the phone was deafening.
Unparalleled filesystem support.
Unparalleled response latency under load (2.6+)
Unparalleled fine-grained spinlocking for unparalleled SMP speed for a small number of processor (up to 8).
NUMA support.
Real-time kernel available as well.
World's fastest in-kernel flat page web server.
Beowolf platform...
I get people to use Firefox. It is usually faster and always more secure than what they use by default.
I encourage people to use something other than Outlook for the same reason.
For the rest, its less consistent. I got my cubicle neighbor doing documents in laTeX when Word kept choking over and over and over. Curiously, that's when I started using TeX as well.
For the OS kernel, I don't encourage people to change. However, I think it is self-evident that a much better kernel comes from open source development. I enter in as evidence Windows, linux kernel, and Mac's Darwin kernel. The open source kernels just catch more bugs and are easier to develop over. Here's an example.
I was developing a text editor (customizing, really) on linux. I also used DEC workstations, so I ported it to work there too. There was a problem with the POSIX function glob. It worked fine under linux. I downloaded the glibc code to look at it. Very straightforward. Then on Digital Unix it failed. I asked Dec for help. I sent them the code, explained it failed. No feedback. They coulda cared less if glob worked or not.
It was actually trickier. I later discovered glob calls ksh to execute under Digital Unix. It actually forks a process to do a glob. Ksh would either work on not depending on whether it thought it was calling glob from an interactive process.
So I talked to Dec again. Again, they coulda cared less. And, without having the underlying source code, I couldn't send them a patch - stuck with a broken system. So, I re-wrote the function glob so it would work under Digital Unix instead of using the POSIX library call.
You know, this happens all the time programming to closed systems. Little intricacies about what makes the system functions work or not are locked up, and the company could care less about your needs as a programmer. You learn to simply program around those OS and library bugs.
In an open source system, you learn to report them to the code owner and/or fix them.
I prefer the latter enormously, and it is my main reason for preferring open source systems for programming.
Linux has had a large number of innovations over the years. The best appreciation comes from open testing of the benchmarks compared to other OSs. Linux is fast clean and stable. Interestingly enough Microsoft pays people to find anywhere that Windows specs faster, and then it gets published. Six months later linux is fixed, but Windows is not. At this point there is not much left.
The thing that really gets me on Mac instead of Windows is the stability of the kernel. No uncomfortable pauses, lockups, etc, and all the office tools to achieve the interoperability I need.
If this is happening to your Windows machine, it is broken. Get it fixed.
Every Windows machine I've ever had is broken.
Linux, the kernel, is extremely innovative, providing a superior reverse engineered substitute for the UNIX specifications. And then some.
But the more general point. Businesses regularly copy each other, and barring IP complications, they will continue to do this. Innovating in a non-IP protected space is a good way for a business to waste money. Which is why linux does so well.
The Mac platform has always paid more attention to user-friendliness and consistency across the platform. This requires large-scale quality control, something virtually impossible for OSS to achieve.
The thing that really gets me on Mac instead of Windows is the stability of the kernel. No uncomfortable pauses, lockups, etc, and all the office tools to achieve the interoperability I need.
The more salient point is that all of this PRESUMES the document can be considered a derived work , in the copyright sense, of the font. If the document cannot be considered a derived work, the GPL status of the font is irrelevant.
Personally I would be hard pressed to think that in general a document would be considered a derived work of the font...
One step at a time...the capabilities of the front-end need to be explored first. We know a consistent signal can be gotten for months, but how stable is it over time? How do you effectively couple it as an external control system?
With respect to having it control prosthetics, the robot arm is the easy part. The hard part is feedback. This is already well-known from prosthetic arms controlled with other signals. The arm input signal isn't so hard, but humans lose a lot of capability without feedback, and prostheses use really crude strategies in order to utilize normal muscle feedback instead of using much better couplings to robot arms.
There's a lot of work to be done, but there are several groups of very skilled people moving fast...it'll get a lot better over the next 10 years.
The sub-vocalization stuff is kinda cool, but it is a technology looking for an application right now. They wanted to sell it to cell phone companies, got blown off, and convinced DoD to fund research on its applications. Kind of a smart move, actually, but I'm a little dubious it will compete with brain implants as a conduit from CNS to the outside world.
I switched. Why, you might ask?
I have a kid, wanted to get out of the box educational games (Reader Rabbit style). Can't run any of that under linux.
The pros....all the X apps run. I do lots of TeX/postscript/perl work. Seamless. I also get a Firefox with Shockwave that works, Office X for the annoying forms I get sent regularly at work, etc. The best of all worlds. Never crashes.
At home I still use linux as my PPPOE server, caching nameserver, and router/firewall for my local home network. Don't know don't care about OS X for that. But for my desktop, it gives me all the tools and stability of linux, and all the interoperability I need for work. The downside is it is clearly a little less efficient than linux. But, a little slowness doesn't bother me any as long as it doesn't crash the OS and I can always pop to a console and kill the offending process.
Obviously if you are into it to spend time as a hobbyist you'll probably not switch. But if you need to use linux/unix AND Windows/Mac tools, and want a stable virus free OS, Mac OS is pretty dern good for me.
I thought LaTeX has has "replaced" Knuth's Tex, and I considered LatTex as based on Tex not Tex itself. And I really think Knuth thinks that way, too
In the sense that more and more people typeset with LaTeX than TeX, yes.
But LaTeX is a fairly small set of macros for TeX. In a conceptual sense, not really something different at all, just a group of subroutines that make tech easier for simpletons that can't be bothered to learn TeX like a true mathematician would.
TeX is already long in the tooth, and will become obsolete soon.
You may misunderstand. TeX was made for writing manuscripts and books, especially for mathematics. It has completely dominated and monopolized that field, to the complete exclusion of any other non-TeX software. Long in the tooth? Doubt it. TeX will outlive Knuth and all of us.
Yeah, just shows the moderators didn't actually see the trailer. It says the movie will be out in May. That's about all it says.
Give up.
That was perhaps the worst, trailer, ever.
Think?!?!?
Like, isn't it pretty obvious. Sony is still on top, as is AOL, MSN and X-box are far behind and losing money right and left. Microsoft can't even buy its way into the market.
It kinda loses a little impact when you gotta explain the sarcasm. Microsoft is hemorrhaging money right and left trying to beat AOL and Sony, and having their butts handed to them. MSN's search function will be no different.
In addition, Google got a big wad o cash in their IPO, and are using it to branch out in a gazillion ways. They are hiring smart people. This battle they've already won.