You know, I had the same thought...about a half hour after I posted the message. As far as I know you can only put one adapter in the Dreamcast, at least without voiding the warranty.
Better job for a Dreamcast : DSL/Cable modem Router/Firewall/DHCP server.
Think about it - if they're selling for $99 and you could download an.ISO off the web to do the above over FreeBSD wouldn't you take that over one of those Linksys boxes ? After all, the Linksys devices can't play games for crap!:)
Nope. Ever seen an Iridium phone ? They're HUGE! Well, OK, huge in comparison to modern cell phones....but you wouldn't mix one up with your cell anyways.
A couple of years back I was working on some Bluetooth development (yes, it has taken that long to come to market) and I went to one of the standards group working meetings. There was a lot of discussion about airplanes there, but at that time it was "..we have to be able to disable the radio transmitter or the FAA will ban our devices."
The threat was that if Bluetooth was built in to a laptop or PDA and there wasn't some way to completely power down the BT circuitry while the computer was in use, the FAA would ban BT-enabled devices from being used on board. If that's your starting point it's not hard to see why a non-American airline would do this first.
Funny (slightly off-topic) story :
I'm flying back from Germany a couple of months back. I'm coming out of the restrooms at the very back of the plane (big 747-400) and I pass this guy walking around with his cell-phone, jamming it to his ear and then checking the display. Of course my first thought is "moron, don't use a cell-phone in flight!"...then about 30 seconds later it hits me. We're about mid-way in a flight from Frankfurt to Toronto....there isn't a damned cell tower for hundreds of miles in any direction because we're over the mid-Atlantic.:) I didn't bother to tell him he had no hope of completing his call....I was too busy laughing. luser!
That would be a great combination....the 'GeForce2Go' chips have gotten slagged since their announcement as using too much power, so combine that with a 25 watt 'mobile' Duron and you'll have the first laptop that requires liquid cooling.:)
Note to NVidia fans - if you look at the specs you might think the GeForce2Go only uses a little more power than an equivalent ATI M part....except the M's have integrated VRAM and the GF2G's don't...throw in the external VRAM for the GF2G and it's way out of line.
That's really funny - the person who says "I take the on the public record contribution...anyday"....while posting as Anonymous Coward.:)
Meanwhile, don't even get me started on corporate welfare. The difference between Canada and the US is that our stupid corporate welfare occurs at higher levels, where in the US it's cities and states throwing multi-year tax breaks or outright exemptions to get companies to locate or relocate there. I get pissed off when I see the Canadian government grant money to Nortel or IBM (worse, not really a Canadian company), but I laugh my ass off when I watch US cities build stadiums for some rich guy's collection of overpaid athletes to play in.
What do 3rd/etc parties accomplish ? They keep the small number of larger parties honest! One of the reasons for the groundswell of Nader support (from my vantage point north of the 49th) was in protest of the "Republicanization of the Democrats." The Democrats seem to think that as long as they're marginally to the left of the Republicans then they will get all the "left" votes...since there's no one else to vote for.
If you want an example, take a look at the leader's debates of the US & Canadian elections. In the US Nader was not allowed into the debate, so what you got was a long session of Gore & Bush agreeing with each other on the majority of isues. How much debate did the 'debate' have ? Now the Canadian leaders debate, that was a debate. Since you had a 2-term incumbent and 4 opposition leaders there was some serious ripping and tearing go on. Why is this important ? The Democrats and Republicans are just too damned close to each other. Plus they both get their funding from large companies so any issues that might offend the corporate wallets never surface between them. Having Nader in the race helped, having him on the TV debates would have made them worth watching.
At least that's my opinion, but then I'm Canadian and I think Michael Moore is a freaking genius, so what do I know ?
For the record, we don't have regulated broadband in Canada. What we have is on near-monopoly that controls the phone line into my house and one near-monopoly that controls the cable co-ax into my house and they both seem to be more interested in competing for signing up new users than competing on the basis of quality of service. I haven't had much trouble with my ADSL connection, but when I do (can't connect to the server, etc) I find that they don't even answer the customer support phone #. Likely because they know they have a problem and they're getting too many calls, so they just ignore them. Great, the wonder free-market theory says I should take my business elsewhere...except the only option is the cable company whose reliability is worse and service is equally as bad.
Perhaps this is because the residential broadband market is newer in Canada but other companies have not rushed into the market, perferring to compete for the business market which has better margins. In the mean time the home market is a pooly served duopoly and while it probably won't be regulated in this way, the threat of regulation may be a motivator for the phone/cable guys to get off their duffs and invest in their infrastructure.
As a side note, one of the reaons this has come to a head is because both the phone & cable companies are spending huge amounts of money on TV/radio/print adds to recruit new customers, most of which attack the other guy and state how their speed/service is better...but neither of them seems interested in reliability. The CRTC is just giving them a little tap on the shoulder so they'll mind their knitting a little better.
PS:We're supposedly getting a wireles broadband service in Toronto in 2001 as well, but info. is sketchy right now.
The original post is a little misleading in that home consumer usage is always under C$50, and is generally only widely available from a handfull of customers. Business access is more expensive, but has more competition - there are many more companies willing to offer a small company ADSL access for C$150/month and up, only a handful of ISP's have tried to compete with the phone company to offer home ADSL for C$40 or less.
If you want more and are willing to pay for it, there's someone willing to sell it to you. But in the mean time my home ADSL works pretty well and is C$30/month on a promo for 3 months, then it goes up to C$40. That's about US$20 and US$27 respectively.
The most obvious reason to compare the G400 to the MX is that they both support dual monitors, whereas the GeF2 does not. Plus the MX and the G400 are probably a lot closer in price to each other than to the GeF2...which in adds I've seen costs as much as an entry-level PC.:)
Yes, but there's a simple difference. Napster wants to make money by attracting people to use their service...and turning a blind eye to how they use it. The party they are pissing off is the record companies and they could basically see that coming the day they started the company. The record companies are not their customers.
Sun makes money selling big servers, but would like people to use Solaris on Intel instead of Linux. Their questionable GPL action will not lead to any real revenue increase for them and the party it will piss off are the Linux hordes...many of whom work in IT and would be very important to Sun's efforts to get people to run Solaris on PC servers. Many of the people that Sun would insult by ignoring the GPL are their customers, or at least work for their customers.
So it may seem similar from a legal contortion point of view, but the business view should be much different.
Having said that I can't imagine why anyone would want to use Solaris on Intel anyways. I think it would be funny if we could show the number of people running Linux on Sparc outnumbered the number of people Solaris on Intel.:)
Macrovision doesn't have to affect anything that doesn't want to be affected....as long as you have good vsynch sensitivity. Your TV never has a problem with displaying a program with Macrovision because it was designed with a better ability to pick out weak vsynch signals....your VCR was intentionally not designed this way so that Macrovision would prevent copying. Any device that wants to accept video in can get around Macrovision by simply having a higher signal sensitivity and being able to pick up the weakened vsynch signals...the same as your TV.
When I was hacking my way through university, one of my friends built a circuit board that would detect a weak vsynch signal on a video input and re-insert a stronger vsynch signal on a video output...which otherwise was a pass-through. In otherwords it removed Macrovision from a video signal...and that was an undergrad project almost 10 years ago. I would assume TiVO could do something equivalent if they tried.
What this probably comes down to is analog vs. digital recording technology. With analog VCR's the industry introduced 'Macrovision', which played with the vertical synch on the VCR's output. Thus the VCR could tape TV shows with good quality (for the day) but VCR to VCR dubbing led to fairly crappy looking tapes due to vsynch signals being lost along the way.
The concern of the big media companies is that digital content isn't as easily toyed with as analog. They probably couldn't give a crap about you taping HDTV Buffy with your analog VCR, but the thought of someone taking the HDTV signal, piping it into their PC and putting a hot new pay-per-view movie up on the internet as an MPEG two hours after its first showing probably scares them shitless. So they want some digital version of Macrovision. Being 'content' people and completely nontechnical they don't know what that is, what it means or how to do it...but they'll spend whatever amount of money it takes to get it done...the only problem is the electronics guys are looking at putting TiVO-type tech. into every TV/VCR/blender/whatever (and charging you $200 extra for it) and they don't want their cash cow messed with.
The only reason this is news is because the big 'content' companies and the big 'device' companies can't agree. If someone had found an easy way to do this 6 months ago it would have been signed, sealed & delivered without ever popping up on SlashDot and this time next year all the digital VCRs on the market would have some "MacroVision II" lobotomy built into them that people would be trying to hack their way around.
Welcome to the new world order. Read books instead.
The space shuttle group is almost an extreme case, but they are a great example. They have development methodologies...and they follow them. They design before code...always. They have code reviews...where they actually review the code. They work with the singular purpose of never delivering a defect in their *ever*. Now not everyone gets to have a client like that, but you should at least appreciate their results.
In an interview with the team I remember them making a comment to the effects of "We had a bug once...". That's it, they have had exactly one defect occur in their product in its lifetime, and that's good because lives could depend on it (in this case it was minor, but they were still pretty embarassed about it).
-Aron
My code does not run on the space shuttle...and I'm pretty happy about that.
The Bluetooth specs. allow for overlapping piconets, but none of the products being hyped/introduced right now (as far as I know) actually *do* that. In fact I thought inter-piconet communication was taken out of the feature list for the first generation of Bluetooth. The real problem with BT will be when there are a ton of these things around, because the emphasis on "invisible connectivity" means that most of the devices won't have user interfaces to control network issues - ie everyone in your office has 2-3 BT devices and suddenly you can't get your PDA and your laptop in the same piconet so they won't sync.
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You know, I had the same thought...about a half hour after I posted the message. As far as I know you can only put one adapter in the Dreamcast, at least without voiding the warranty.
Better job for a Dreamcast : DSL/Cable modem Router/Firewall/DHCP server.
.ISO off the web to do the above over FreeBSD wouldn't you take that over one of those Linksys boxes ? After all, the Linksys devices can't play games for crap! :)
Think about it - if they're selling for $99 and you could download an
Nope. Ever seen an Iridium phone ? They're HUGE! Well, OK, huge in comparison to modern cell phones....but you wouldn't mix one up with your cell anyways.
A couple of years back I was working on some Bluetooth development (yes, it has taken that long to come to market) and I went to one of the standards group working meetings. There was a lot of discussion about airplanes there, but at that time it was "..we have to be able to disable the radio transmitter or the FAA will ban our devices."
The threat was that if Bluetooth was built in to a laptop or PDA and there wasn't some way to completely power down the BT circuitry while the computer was in use, the FAA would ban BT-enabled devices from being used on board. If that's your starting point it's not hard to see why a non-American airline would do this first.
Funny (slightly off-topic) story : I'm flying back from Germany a couple of months back. I'm coming out of the restrooms at the very back of the plane (big 747-400) and I pass this guy walking around with his cell-phone, jamming it to his ear and then checking the display. Of course my first thought is "moron, don't use a cell-phone in flight!"...then about 30 seconds later it hits me. We're about mid-way in a flight from Frankfurt to Toronto....there isn't a damned cell tower for hundreds of miles in any direction because we're over the mid-Atlantic. :) I didn't bother to tell him he had no hope of completing his call....I was too busy laughing. luser!
That would be a great combination....the 'GeForce2Go' chips have gotten slagged since their announcement as using too much power, so combine that with a 25 watt 'mobile' Duron and you'll have the first laptop that requires liquid cooling. :)
Note to NVidia fans - if you look at the specs you might think the GeForce2Go only uses a little more power than an equivalent ATI M part....except the M's have integrated VRAM and the GF2G's don't...throw in the external VRAM for the GF2G and it's way out of line.
That's really funny - the person who says "I take the on the public record contribution...anyday"....while posting as Anonymous Coward. :)
Meanwhile, don't even get me started on corporate welfare. The difference between Canada and the US is that our stupid corporate welfare occurs at higher levels, where in the US it's cities and states throwing multi-year tax breaks or outright exemptions to get companies to locate or relocate there. I get pissed off when I see the Canadian government grant money to Nortel or IBM (worse, not really a Canadian company), but I laugh my ass off when I watch US cities build stadiums for some rich guy's collection of overpaid athletes to play in.
What do 3rd/etc parties accomplish ? They keep the small number of larger parties honest! One of the reasons for the groundswell of Nader support (from my vantage point north of the 49th) was in protest of the "Republicanization of the Democrats." The Democrats seem to think that as long as they're marginally to the left of the Republicans then they will get all the "left" votes...since there's no one else to vote for.
If you want an example, take a look at the leader's debates of the US & Canadian elections. In the US Nader was not allowed into the debate, so what you got was a long session of Gore & Bush agreeing with each other on the majority of isues. How much debate did the 'debate' have ? Now the Canadian leaders debate, that was a debate. Since you had a 2-term incumbent and 4 opposition leaders there was some serious ripping and tearing go on.
Why is this important ? The Democrats and Republicans are just too damned close to each other. Plus they both get their funding from large companies so any issues that might offend the corporate wallets never surface between them. Having Nader in the race helped, having him on the TV debates would have made them worth watching.
At least that's my opinion, but then I'm Canadian and I think Michael Moore is a freaking genius, so what do I know ?
For the record, we don't have regulated broadband in Canada. What we have is on near-monopoly that controls the phone line into my house and one near-monopoly that controls the cable co-ax into my house and they both seem to be more interested in competing for signing up new users than competing on the basis of quality of service.
I haven't had much trouble with my ADSL connection, but when I do (can't connect to the server, etc) I find that they don't even answer the customer support phone #. Likely because they know they have a problem and they're getting too many calls, so they just ignore them. Great, the wonder free-market theory says I should take my business elsewhere...except the only option is the cable company whose reliability is worse and service is equally as bad.
Perhaps this is because the residential broadband market is newer in Canada but other companies have not rushed into the market, perferring to compete for the business market which has better margins. In the mean time the home market is a pooly served duopoly and while it probably won't be regulated in this way, the threat of regulation may be a motivator for the phone/cable guys to get off their duffs and invest in their infrastructure.
As a side note, one of the reaons this has come to a head is because both the phone & cable companies are spending huge amounts of money on TV/radio/print adds to recruit new customers, most of which attack the other guy and state how their speed/service is better...but neither of them seems interested in reliability. The CRTC is just giving them a little tap on the shoulder so they'll mind their knitting a little better.
PS:We're supposedly getting a wireles broadband service in Toronto in 2001 as well, but info. is sketchy right now.
The original post is a little misleading in that home consumer usage is always under C$50, and is generally only widely available from a handfull of customers. Business access is more expensive, but has more competition - there are many more companies willing to offer a small company ADSL access for C$150/month and up, only a handful of ISP's have tried to compete with the phone company to offer home ADSL for C$40 or less.
If you want more and are willing to pay for it, there's someone willing to sell it to you. But in the mean time my home ADSL works pretty well and is C$30/month on a promo for 3 months, then it goes up to C$40. That's about US$20 and US$27 respectively.
The most obvious reason to compare the G400 to the MX is that they both support dual monitors, whereas the GeF2 does not. Plus the MX and the G400 are probably a lot closer in price to each other than to the GeF2...which in adds I've seen costs as much as an entry-level PC. :)
Yes, but there's a simple difference. Napster wants to make money by attracting people to use their service...and turning a blind eye to how they use it. The party they are pissing off is the record companies and they could basically see that coming the day they started the company. The record companies are not their customers.
:)
Sun makes money selling big servers, but would like people to use Solaris on Intel instead of Linux. Their questionable GPL action will not lead to any real revenue increase for them and the party it will piss off are the Linux hordes...many of whom work in IT and would be very important to Sun's efforts to get people to run Solaris on PC servers. Many of the people that Sun would insult by ignoring the GPL are their customers, or at least work for their customers.
So it may seem similar from a legal contortion point of view, but the business view should be much different.
Having said that I can't imagine why anyone would want to use Solaris on Intel anyways. I think it would be funny if we could show the number of people running Linux on Sparc outnumbered the number of people Solaris on Intel.
Macrovision doesn't have to affect anything that doesn't want to be affected....as long as you have good vsynch sensitivity. Your TV never has a problem with displaying a program with Macrovision because it was designed with a better ability to pick out weak vsynch signals....your VCR was intentionally not designed this way so that Macrovision would prevent copying. Any device that wants to accept video in can get around Macrovision by simply having a higher signal sensitivity and being able to pick up the weakened vsynch signals...the same as your TV.
When I was hacking my way through university, one of my friends built a circuit board that would detect a weak vsynch signal on a video input and re-insert a stronger vsynch signal on a video output...which otherwise was a pass-through. In otherwords it removed Macrovision from a video signal...and that was an undergrad project almost 10 years ago. I would assume TiVO could do something equivalent if they tried.
What this probably comes down to is analog vs. digital recording technology. With analog VCR's the industry introduced 'Macrovision', which played with the vertical synch on the VCR's output. Thus the VCR could tape TV shows with good quality (for the day) but VCR to VCR dubbing led to fairly crappy looking tapes due to vsynch signals being lost along the way.
The concern of the big media companies is that digital content isn't as easily toyed with as analog. They probably couldn't give a crap about you taping HDTV Buffy with your analog VCR, but the thought of someone taking the HDTV signal, piping it into their PC and putting a hot new pay-per-view movie up on the internet as an MPEG two hours after its first showing probably scares them shitless. So they want some digital version of Macrovision. Being 'content' people and completely nontechnical they don't know what that is, what it means or how to do it...but they'll spend whatever amount of money it takes to get it done...the only problem is the electronics guys are looking at putting TiVO-type tech. into every TV/VCR/blender/whatever (and charging you $200 extra for it) and they don't want their cash cow messed with.
The only reason this is news is because the big 'content' companies and the big 'device' companies can't agree. If someone had found an easy way to do this 6 months ago it would have been signed, sealed & delivered without ever popping up on SlashDot and this time next year all the digital VCRs on the market would have some "MacroVision II" lobotomy built into them that people would be trying to hack their way around.
Welcome to the new world order. Read books instead.
The space shuttle group is almost an extreme case, but they are a great example. They have development methodologies...and they follow them. They design before code...always. They have code reviews...where they actually review the code. They work with the singular purpose of never delivering a defect in their *ever*. Now not everyone gets to have a client like that, but you should at least appreciate their results. In an interview with the team I remember them making a comment to the effects of "We had a bug once...". That's it, they have had exactly one defect occur in their product in its lifetime, and that's good because lives could depend on it (in this case it was minor, but they were still pretty embarassed about it). -Aron My code does not run on the space shuttle...and I'm pretty happy about that.
The Bluetooth specs. allow for overlapping piconets, but none of the products being hyped/introduced right now (as far as I know) actually *do* that. In fact I thought inter-piconet communication was taken out of the feature list for the first generation of Bluetooth. The real problem with BT will be when there are a ton of these things around, because the emphasis on "invisible connectivity" means that most of the devices won't have user interfaces to control network issues - ie everyone in your office has 2-3 BT devices and suddenly you can't get your PDA and your laptop in the same piconet so they won't sync.