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"the low-volume will contain much greater dynamic range and will sound much better."

http://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia_term/0,2542,t=dy namic+range&i=42193,00.asp

Dynamic range, by definition, is the difference between the low volume and high volume.

OK, getting really tired of seeing these iBleedingPhone articles now [1]. Since the overpriced hunk o' junk came out, it's been iPhone this and iPhone that ad nauseum. It's expensive, locks you into a single provider, proprietary, expensive to maintain clunky and only superficially superior (ooooh, shiny!). In short, all the things that /.ers usually rally against. Am I missing some point, or is Apple just darling du jour?

Odd disparity of interest there, Slashdot. I'm trying to understand, I really am, but I really can't see any moral or technical advantages of owning one of these things.

[1] Yes, I can ignore them. Nobody has a gun to my head. I wonder if AdBlock Plus can filter on "shiny gimmick for tossers with more money than sense" or will I then be branded a "thief" for not reading them? It's akin to The Goog being everyone's darling even though they have more information on folks than the NSA. The world's gone mad, I tell you!

We use Connected TLM at my office, and it works pretty well. It helps if you're able to leave your PC/lappy on overnight in terms of hands-free automagic scheduling. PCMag had this review from years ago. Their latest offering is called something like "Data Protector" or something like that. There's a subscription cost, so you'lll have to assess if the money's worth the peace of mind. I've been pretty lucky and have not had a HD failure. Folks around me who have had their disks fail say it was a lifesaver. There are a bunch of other companies that more or less have the same kind of offering. I think Iron Mountain has a pretty good one, too. Hope it helps.

So will Microsoft lobby Verisign to revoke ATI's certificate, and add the ATI driver to Windows Defender's malware list now that this hack to circumvent the DRM on HD video is out there in the wild?

Yep, that's the one. Best quote: 'The new version of Mainline will apparently not be released as an open-source client, as BitTorrent was. "Open-source BitTorrent gives you performance efficiency at the expense of the user experience," Navin said.'

Not to knock Clam but there is something odd about these results (Besides the absurdly low testbed). TFA says Clam won two years ago (which meant Untangle would use it), and again now. However, just last May the results from AV-Test.org (a real trusted legitimate source) against a comprehensive testbed put ClamAV near the bottom of the heap: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2135053,00.as p
I can't help but think that Untangle is trying to justify their own choice, rather than have a real test. With a testbed of only 25-35, it is possible to pick a group of malware that can put any AV on top. Even the user submitted malware is suspect, especially when that testset is also so low. ClamAV is great against virus outbreaks, with one of the fastest signature responses, but it has pretty atrocious trojan and zoo detection, since there is not enough man-power to collect and create signatures for less prevalent and non-replicating malware.

"What's the big security problem with XP? It installed by default with a firewall that denied inbound connections"

Click and install is what ... 'Storm Worm' Sweeps Into U.S.

Okay. You need something to argue about. http://discuss.pcmag.com/forums/thread/1004382426. aspx Macs are better than PCs!! PCs are better than Macs!! And anyone who disagrees is [fill in the f'in blank] --Glenn

pcmag.com

[. . .]Rick Berman, SVP, GM, Graphics Product Group said the technologies [3GHz Phenom + 2900XT] would be available this fall.

While I didn't hear this directly when listening to the Tech Day presentation, PC-Mag claims to have heard this. While it is true that Barcelona will launch at 2GHz, Phenom will be launched a good few months later. Further, Phenom is simpler, it only has one HT link instead of three, and qualification for desktop chips is much more forgiving than for server processors. I wouldn't be surprised to this by years end. It should compete well with the 3.2GHz Penryn Intel is expected to launch in the same timeframe. See this slide for the only halfway decent becnhmark AMD has posted for the K10-based cores:

Slide45

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1870434,00.as p

The white iPod has been a success, so of course it's time to replace it," said Jobs. "Yes, it does video."

Perhaps trying to throw the industry off of Apple's trail, Jobs had previously denied that the company would introduce a video-capable iPod, questioning demand for such a device.

---

In Australia the Flight Centre CEO mislead an interviewer about the timing of private equity bid: http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/business/items/2006 10/s1773714.htm

ALI MOORE: Three weeks ago when we last spoke you didn't rule out taking the company private, but you did say it would depend on how it was valued over the next "year or so". 21 days later, what's changed?

Page 2 has a small part on:
"3. Does your provider give preferential treatment to speed test sites?"

Mb a few slashdot ppl could map this out and post some results?
Be fun to see if the 'test' car/cab/bus/track gets a free lane.

hold 72 minutes of audio, because Beethoven's Ninth Symphony was that long. Philips proposed the 36-kHz standard, because it made a smaller, more compact disc and matched a telecom standard that would make downloading and transferring music easier\x{2014}which I find rather ironic. Sony preferred the 44.1-kHz sampling rate, because it matched the upper reaches of audible sound at 20,000 cycles.

The final decision was made in a meeting in Hawaii, according to Richard Bruno, who was a Philips executive and one of the company's CD project managers. With final arguments running into recreational time, Bjorn Blutgen of Philips and Toshi Doi of Sony took to surfboards still bickering. One of them had the bright idea of challenging the other to a surfing match: Whoever fell off the board first would lose. The Dutchman lost. Hence we have a 44.1-kHz sampling rate on today's CDs. Now you know.

(Resources: from my own memory when ages ago i read this while taking a shit on the john: From John C. Dvorak's Inside Track, PC Magazine http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1573633,00.as p)

And the story is split so that there are 2 paragraphs of text on the first page, and you have to keep clicking through. There is about 3-5x more ads than content on some of the pages.

Therefore I present you with the link to the print page, where you can read the whole article without continually having to click next.

No ads/popups using Firefox with Adblock Plus :)

This isn't a fucking troll... For gods sack people...

Just because the link
http://www.pcmag.com/print_article2/0,1217,a=20978 3,00.asp
is directed to the other page unless coming from the other page, doesn't mean it is a fucking troll!

Normal programming now resuming.

Printer Friendly

http://www.pcmag.com/print_article2/0,1217,a=20978 3,00.asp?hidPrint=true

Idea #6 would be: online articles without numerous page impressions.

http://www.pcmag.com/print_article2/0,1217,a=20978 3,00.asp

1. Offsite backup.
2. Making your data "mobile", by making it available wherever you are.
3. Transfering your data to another machine (local or remote).
4. Distributing data

Should anyone have other ideas, please share them.

That's what Brian Hall, general manager of Windows Live, is calling it in a much better article from PC Magazine. According to that article, the current limited beta is also limited to 50MB per item (so I can't share my WMV HD-encoded home sex video with my friends).

Hall also says "Live Folders" can be private, public, or shared with certain users (e.g. co-workers having edit permissions on an Excel spreadsheet). I'm sure other free "storage" services allow this. E-mail notifications about shared folders can be sent to whoever is sharing the folder.

Hall seems to hint that "Live Folders" will integrate nicely with their other "Live" applications and their upcoming "Windows Live Suite." (A list of current betas, apps, and services here.) Since I don't use any Live apps, I'll wait for online reviews to see if it will be worth checking out. I'm not "camping out" in anticipation.

Like TheRecklessWanderer mentioned.

So if fair use is legislated, then not allowing fair use would violate that law, and make the contract (agreement) or perhaps that one segment of the agreement unenforcable within the courts.

Which means that if the CCA adds a clause to the contract that the Kaleidoscope signs, and that clause forbids something that is considered "Fair Use", then that single clause is null though other clauses remain in force.

But Kaleidoscope has a very strong claim, that this clause has been drafted with the clear intent of attempting to prevent it from carrying on its business, as is pointed out in the article. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2148802,00.as p

Beef.

Er... My Abacus is most certainly programmable. :-)

I think Dvorak was right, although maybe not for the correct reasons or based on solid evidence. That changed yesterday.

Comments that talk about how Safari on Windows is a quality product meant to drive the halo effect or that Apple is hypocritical for pushing their own design standards on Windows completely miss the point. Safari on Windows is not about the browser, it is for driving and course-correcting efforts to bring the Apple development platform to Windows. Why? So they can adopt it if necessary.

Some background first. The recent D5 hosted Jobs-Gates interview had both participants talking about ongoing partnership. Jobs stated repeatedly that Apple is a software company and he described how the software in the user space (e.g., iLife, iWork, Finder) is what people are buying into on the Mac. Value delivered by Apple comes in the form of good design and polish sense, not what kernel their software runs on.

When you look at iTunes and Safari on Windows, what do you see? Apple (not native Windows) font rendering, Core Animation effects (Cover Flow), compositing effects (inline find with Safari 3). There is a lot of infrastructure coming over to Windows from Mac OS X to support these products. (I believe such an assumption is valid because the smartest way to develop cross-platform applications is to minimize differences in the code base, keeping impedance matching in abstraction layers.) Now that Vista is a technical match (and goes beyond in some cases) for OS X with features Apple cares about (e.g., WPF), how long will it be until Apple can deliver a complete platform on both operating systems? As they do this, they increasingly marginalize the significance of what you find under the hood. No mainstream user is going to care if Finder runs on a FreeBSD or NT derivative.

As Microsoft has already done a lot of work bringing Vista on-par with OS X, it makes little sense for Apple to continue investing money in duplicating the effort. Their sobering strategy may be to focus on dealing directly with users and leave the operating system drudgery to another company with resources to burn. If they continue on this path, the remaining technical barriers will be gone. For a long time, it was processor architecture. Now they are chipping away library and framework barriers by introducing what amounts to a Macintosh application runtime environment on Windows. Given enough time and real-world experience porting their frameworks, it could eventually come down to another check-box option for universal binaries.

When they reach that point, Mac OS XI could very easily be NT under the covers.

This article says it's $600 for the NanoBook

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2141806,00.as p

..from "decent" sources, and still the submission with a CoolTechZone review makes it to the front page. CoolTechZone sucks, leave it out of here, even if the occasional Microsoft-bashing does go on there..

According to PCMag,http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2139716 ,00.asp the Google Maps Street View walk through New York City shows only blurry faces, street signs, etc. But San Francisco is a different story. Even so, Lance Ulanoff says Google will not back down. This thing is going to make Google another boatload of money.

Come on - this is new? It looks like beter executions on a five+ year-old product.

Take a look at the IBM z50

And the Toshiba Libretto

And remind me, what is the new product here - faster CPU? Better battery life? Oh wait, it runs LINUX! When can I pre-order it?

You mean like this http://reviews.cnet.com/mp3-players/sandisk-sansa- e260-4gb/4505-6490_7-31684139.html and this http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1960965,00.as p ?

I'll just start telling people to buy Compaq, HP, or like...Alienware or something.

You do realize that Dell owns Alienware right? Alienware = Overpriced Dell
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1941376,00.as p

Just tell them to get a Commodore...you can't really beat two Nvidia 8800GTX cards in SLI mode. :)
http://www.commodoregaming.com/pcshop/Home.aspx

Sadly, he did write that, and no, it doesn't look tongue in cheek at all. Catch: XP Decay.

Genuine quote from the great pundit: "When I hit Ctrl-Alt-Delete, I see that the System Idle Process is hogging all the resources and chewing up 95 percent of the processor's cycles. Doing what? Doing nothing?"

I've read the article again, just in case there might be some subtle sarcasm I've missed before, but it looks as serious as it gets, if anyone asks me.

The whole list is framed between:

- "This week's column is about exploring the commonly observed problems that crop up with each new release. Maybe Microsoft should patch the patches once in a while. Here are a few of my gripes - most of them a result of excessive patching." which doesn't really sound like the start of a joke, and

- "And please, will the characters who "have never had a crash or blip" in 10 years of "heavy use" not contribute. I'm sick of these people. They're full of it." Which, again, would indicate that not only he's not joking, but he thinks that anyone who hasn't had those newbie problems is, in his own words, "full of it."

Speaking of which, the rest of the complaints sound... shall we say, computer illiterate. And that's putting it mildly. He sounds like the average Uncle Osric or Aunt Emma, who are terminally stumped as to why would their computer suddenly be sluggish or takes a while to connect on the network. It must be all those MS patches, really. Not like the kind of expert who fixes such things for fun, and/or knows exactly what worm was hogging the network.

Believe me, I've tried finding some trace of tongue-in-cheek irony there. I've hoped it would be an April 1st article. Nope.

But, hey, judge it for yourself. If you can detect some trace of sarcasm there, please tell me.

All that really says is that the mob is smartest when people are acting independently. There is a reason that economics assumes that people are acting independently with rational self interest. It's also already obvious that most things will end up worse if designed by a committee.

So what's gone wrong? Why is the OS market dominated by a monopoly with a deeply flawed product? Mostly because switching operating systems is much harder than it should be. It is also partly because the alternatives have only become competitive within the last decade. Given the inertia that MS has, it is not surprising that they haven't been dethroned yet by a better product.

I suggest you take a look at this: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2123848,00.as p. Sure, it is Dvorak, but it is pretty good evidence that the fundamental flaws in windows have not gone unnoticed (by users). Microsoft can only get away with this because most of their users have very low expectations. So, in that respect, the users are to blame for paying repeatedly for the same bugs for the past 15-20 years. But all the bugs Dvorak was complaining about are fixable, and have indeed been fixed (or never shown up) in all other operating systems.

Competition is what will drive Microsoft to fix such major flaws. Competition is the only reliable way to get them to do it. Fortunately for us all, the OS market has been seeing a lot more competition lately (but still not enough).

You can't be serious. Do you have a link to that story?

Perhaps the following will explain this tendency:

Serdar Yegulalp:

Serdar Yegulalp is a former Senior Technoloy Editor with Windows Magazine (also Winmag.com), and has been writing about and working with NT and related technologies since its 3.51 release. He writes a weekly newsletter dealing with Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000 and Windows XP issues, entitled "Windows 2000 Power Users", at www.win2kpowerusers.com.

According to Microsoft you can buy OEM versions of Vista just fine. Also without any hardware at all. However, you must comply with the license, which means you are responsible for support for the Vista installations you make.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2087792,00.as p

"Target" and "Reality" are two different things.

The "Target" of the G965 is to raise performance above anything available today.

The "Reality" of the situation is: the drivers are terrible. Vertex shading is still done in-software, just like the G950. As-of March (six months after release), there are still no updates available, and the rumored "beta" drivers are still just that - a rumor.

The Reality of the situation is the X3000 gets trounced in mnay games by the 2-year old GeForce 6150, and to get respectable (> 20fps) framerates in recent games you have to pair it up with a beefy Core 2 Duo.

I dunno about the electric Mullen GT, but PCMAG.COM recently reported that the Tesla Roadster does, in fact, run Linux. Check it:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,2109194,00.as p

How about this link: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1161458,00.as p

It describes a voice adapter for Artisoft LANTastic in 1990. I used to operate a LANtastic network but didn't use the voice adapters. However, it seems to fit the 'prior art(isoft)' requirement ;-)

I've never been happy with Firefox's memory footprint either.

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8.1.3) Gecko/20070309
Firefox/2.0.0.3

%CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TT STAT STARTED TIME COMMAND
72.5 14.6 254748 114524 ?? R 1:34PM 53:30.45 /Applications/Firefox.app

1 Window, 4 tabs open:
http://maps.google.ca/
http://www.google.com/reader/view/
http://slashdot.org/
http://www.pcmag.com/

Web Developer Extension
Javascript Debugger (not open)
Netcraft Toolbar
GrApple Theme

By way of comparison, here are the same numbers for Safari (1.3.2 (v312.6)) with the same 4 tabs opened:

%CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TT STAT STARTED TIME COMMAND
9.0 8.5 209612 66564 ?? S 6:43PM 0:58.24 /Applications/Safari.app/

And for Opera:
Version 9.10
Build 3588
Platform MacOS X
System 10.3.9

Same 4 tabs opened.

%CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TT STAT STARTED TIME COMMAND
3.5 11.9 258548 93216 ?? S 7:02PM 0:47.31 /Applications/Opera.app

Is that enough for you AC? Yeah, I thought so ...

(
By the time I finished testing the other browsers, ps -auxm was reporting - FF keeps my laptop toasty, burning the CPU cycles -- it's the google.

70.8 14.4 256140 113096 ?? R 1:34PM 70:11.16 /Applications/Firefox.app
)

Done:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2059039,00.as p

Except that yours is a minority opinion: CNET and PC Magazine both gave glowing assessments.

I use the new Y! Mail Beta too, and the reviews are right, it IS faster, and the "Web 2.0 cruft" that you disdain has markedly improved the usability of the interface (drag 'n drop messages into folders, yeah, who would want that?!).

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2055708,00.as p

My knee-jerk reaction is to say that Google should win, put I think this case needs to be looked at closer -- this is a good example of the future meeting the past.

On Google's side:

They are complying with the DMCA takedown notices. The problem is, as soon as one takedown is done, another copy goes up under another title or user name. It is like playing whack-a-mole.

Not all of the content is simply copies of content available on the air. I have seen some well done "Music Videos" (i.e. Clips from different movies/TV shows set to various songs) and some interesting stuff like the (fake) Titanic II film promo.

YouTube video is low quality. I would rather watch a full TV show on a real TV set rather than YouTube.

Google is in business to make money.

On Viacom's side:

The material does belong to them. Having to keep issuing takedown notices is a pain in the ass, and takes up a lot of time and money.

From Jim Louderback, also of PC Mag - Jim's Column - Providers such Viacom have agreements with Cable and Satellite providers stating that only x% of their programming can be on line (x is typically 10% or less), so having all of this video online could open them up to breach of contract.

They are in the business to make money.

On My Side:

It is good to have access to content without a lot of restrictions. Like it or not, content put out by Viacom, the RIAA, et. al. becomes part of our culture, and should not be totally locked up. The problem is, where should the line be drawn? I think Viacom should allow clips and derived content, but I can understand wanting to keep some sort of control over it.

I want as much content as possible for as little money as possible (I already pay for Internet and Satellite, so I have access to most of the Viacom channels)

Solutions?

So what is the best solution? There has to be some happy medium where everyone can get at least some of what they want. The RIAA has been fighting p2p for at least seven years now, and has nothing to show for it but declining revenues and increasing hatred by the public. Why would Viacom and/or Google want to end up in the same boat? If Viacom wins, they will look as greedy as the RIAA and the public will find other places to post content. If Google wins, Viacom et. al. will just lobby for changes in the DMCA, which already stinks enough as it is. So what to do --

1. Settle this suit by Google offering Viacom a reasonable payment to cover posting of material. At the resolution that YouTube uses, neither Viacom or the Cable/Satellite industry should suffer. Most people would rather watch shows on a nice TV instead of a small YouTube window.

2. Figure out a way to end the content wars once and for all. This includes the RIAA's ongoing war against p2p and along with the YouTube crap that is going on also. It is time to quit suing and put the Lawyers to work actually doing something constructive for once in their lives -- fixing copyright so that it works in the Internet era. This may involve a small monthly fee along with my DSL bill -- I wouldn't mind paying $5 to $10 per month to allow for legal p2p downloads, YouTube viewing, etc. Forget DRM -- it just penalizes your customers and doesn't stop "piracy" anyway.

The market has changed, and resisting change isn't working. It is time to quit trying to turn back the clock, and time to move forward. The VCR didn't kill the Movie Industry (quite the opposite -- take that Jack V), quit bitching and get to work. Otherwise, Viacom, the RIAA, et. al. will end up committing slow suicide.

Your call guys.

Rant over.

Yup, this is the downside of the whole Media PC thing - someone comes up with a spec, and you know manufacturers are just going to abuse it. Two GB of ram, on a system that can't play games well, and sits in your livingroom? What a waste!

Back when I heard about this spec, I was interested because I thought it might force manufacturers to bundle a decent video chip in the under $1000 range - but then I read the spec, saw nothing about minimum video requirements, and promptly ignored it as the marketing gimmick it was.

So yes, your $1000 PC has a chipset designed for $500 PCs (Fast Ethernet, crappy integrated graphics), and manufacturers are rolling in the dough, because the extra memory is cheaper than a video card. About the only good thing you can say is: it comes with a PCIe 16x slot. But then, so does almost EVERY PC these days, even the $400 ones.

A somewhat related topic, I wanted to mention it:

The only reason the G965 graphics outperforms the 6150 is because of the Core2 Duo processor. Most people don't realize this, but the uber-powerful GMA X3000 is actually running without hardware vertex shaders for the moment. Hardware vertex shader drivers have been promised for the last 6 months, with no end in sight. This is actually the reason for many game compatibility problems with the X3000 (and low performance), because very few games offer a software vertex processing path.

So, this 8-pipe monster only gets slightly better performance than a pathetic 2-pipe IGP from Nvidia, and it only manages that because of the incredible power of the Core 2. People have also seen marked performance increases using Core2 Duos with 850-series IGPs, for the same reason. Of course, this will backfire once game designers start using the second core for AI/physics, so Intel needs to release those drivers eventually.

Sorry for the brief comment... the review is here.

This isn't actually an Extreme Tech article, it's a PC Mag article.

A friend of mine sent this to me recently since I'm somewhat active in environmental circles and also a "tech" guy in some senses to my friends. I'll note here the same thing I noted to them:

You may as well just buy a Mac mini. 66% power usage (110 watts for Mac mini vs. 168 for this guy's setup), no Vista (100% better if you ask me), no time spent buying separate components and assembling them (easy!!), and Apple has a nice trade-in/recycling program, not to mention they're compliant with EU environmental standards.

And these days you can even run Windows on it if you really really have to for some strange reason. No, I'm not a Mac fanboy. I'm just pointing out the obvious. Greenest, easiest PC you can buy? A Mac. Someone please prove me wrong buy pointing to a "greener" PC from Dell, HP, Gateway or some other major manufacturer.

I'd be interested to hear what people think of the new BitTorrent DNA 2.0, which apparently uses QOS to dial itself down in the presence of VOIP, etc. But it also apparently won't be open-sourced, and will be proprietary to the Mainline client.

And I'm not a big fan of all the snarky comments, myself.

This stinks of self-promotion.

Of course it's self-promotion. Why does the guy stick his picture on the front of the article?

Attention geek bloggers: You are not attractive. Stop posting pictures of your dorky looking selves at the top of your blog.

(Note: in case you're wondering how I got so many pictures to prove my point, I simply looked up the fud tag on Slashdot and started clicking away :)

Apple claiming that it's morally wrong to unlock a phone (such people are "bad guys") to run on other networks, is going to do that.

Apple didn't claim that. Glenn Lurie of Cingular did.

From PC Magazine
But in the end, Apple bent to Cingular with a multi-year, exclusive US contract for an entire line of different iPhone models, Glenn Lurie, Cingular's president of national distribution told journalists at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES 2007) today.
...
While "there are bad guys out there that unlock phones," Lurie said, Apple and Cingular are taking unspecified steps to make the phone more difficult to unlock and use on other GSM carriers in the US.

I repeat: go to any cell phone store and ask to see a smartphone; they won't just point you to the $20 phone with a built-in calendar.

Of course not, but I ask you again -- what core functionality does a Blackberry or Treo have that an iPhone does not? Other than the ability to install 3rd party software or to interface with specific software (i.e. Exchange servers) there's nothing.

As for the RAZR: running third party software isn't the only requirement of a smartphone, it's just one of them.

Well, then give me a definition of smartphone that includes a Treo and a Blackberry but not an iPhone or a RAZR that doesn't rely on whatever a salesperson steers you towards. Salespeople are not usually considered the rod to measure a standard by. Furthermore, it's going to be very hard to find a salesperson that going to have the option of steering you towards an iPhone on display for several months, now isn't it?

None of these definitions seem to exclude the iPhone. This definition doesn't seem to conflict. Neither does this one. Nor this one. Not this one either.

In fact, I'd say that if none of the definitions on the first page of a Google search for "smartphone definition" manages to turn up a definition that matches your concept, then I'd say that the common definitions of a smartphone include the iPhone. Admit it; you just have a feature wishlist that the iPhone doesn't meet. That in no way means that it isn't a high-end model that provides more than enough functionality to be considered a smartphone.