From what I've read, it seems like they're really just looking for people who use up tons of data per month, on the suspicion that they're tethering. I've already heard a few stories of people calling them up, saying "I stream Pandora all day so why am I being charged extra for that?" and being let off the hook.
Depending on the program, roughly 1/3 of airtime is taken up by ads. A 60-minute show is usually somewhere between 40 and 45 minutes of actual content. It is indeed highly irritating, and that's why people are embracing DVRs so much, because it's gotten to the point that we simply don't tolerate it anymore.
Also what is the ratio of dropped calls to calls made? 10,000 out of 10,000 would be an alarming rate but what about 10,000 out of 1,000,000.
10,000 out of 1,000,000 is still a 1% dropped call rate. When I interned at an ISP that also served as a VOIP telecom (not Verizon), anything less than 99.999% availability was investigated and usually reported to the FCC due to legal obligations. A single missed 911 call is a very big deal and I would hope Verizon treats it as such.
Anonymous isn't a defined group of people. That's kinda the point. It's very possible that some of them, or even a single person, has severe enough of a problem with the WBC to try to attempt such a stunt. I suspect however that the vast majority have the good sense not to get involved with something so senseless.
Similarly, Anonymous can't "issue a statement" that represents the entire group. This AnonNews website, whoever they are, have no more say in the doings and actions of Anonymous than any other member of the group. Can the SlashDot staff make claims on behalf of every nerd who happens to visit the site for technology-related news, especially on things in which the SlashDot community is deeply divided? Of course not. Same thing here.
This whole thing is freaking ridiculous. You've got two groups of trolls trying to figure out who's attempting to troll whom, and if said trolling is a threat to their own trolling efforts. Why exactly this is considered news is beyond me.
Depends on the page, but I can visibly watch my available RAM go down from its starting point of 140 MB down to 20 if I've got lots of pages open (I'm jailbroken and have the free RAM count display in my status bar at all times). Let's just say that the iPhone's 8-tab limit really is a best-case scenario.
You wouldn't want to use SSD as swap due to the limited number of reads and writes it can handle, though for basic cache (like saving the webpage for offline use) I don't really know why it isn't implemented.
The pages reload themselves because the iPad has run out of RAM and has cleared out the background pages from memory so it can better show you the page you're currently on. Unfortunate that Apple didn't stick another 256 MB in there to prevent that sort of thing.
That said, I browse pages the same way, and it's for that very reason that I love VanillaSurf for the iPhone/iTouch - it lets you open a link in a new background tab without switching to it immediately. It's got some other features (downloads, bookmark syncing, fullscreen browsing, stuff like that) but honestly it's the tab handling that makes me use it more than Safari when possible. No clue if there's an iPad version or not, but it's definitely worth a look.
Agreed. I've got a jailbroken iPhone but when I got it, the various retro emulators were USELESS because of the control scheme. I can't enjoy a game if I'm constantly looking away from it to make sure my fingers are over the right buttons.
The day they made a homebrew Bluetooth stack and started added Wiimote support to the emulators was the day retro games (other than RPGs) became playable.
GSM works through what's called "time-division multiplexing" over various fixed frequencies. What this means is that a set carrier frequency (let's just make up a number and say 403.123 MHz) can carry a certain number of callers at once, let's say 16. This means it splits time into 16 chunks, and then for a split second customer 1 can transmit and recieve whatever it wants, then the next split second customer 2 can transmit and receive whatever it wants, and so on until all 16 have gotten their split second of time, and this is repeated thousands of times per second. Once all 16 time slots are full, another carrier frequency is selected for more customers, and these frequencies are as finely split as can be without causing too much interference.
The point is that you've only got so many slots per frequency, and only so many distinct frequencies available in your FCC-allotted bandwidth. It makes perfect sense for a large gathering of people to use up all available slots, even if signal strength is excellent.
For comparison, CDMA works in such a way that everyone transmits and receives all the time, and your phone sees everyone else's signals as pure noise. Thus, the more phones connected at once, the more noise everyone has to contend with, and so the tower will artificially limit the number of phones connected to it at any given time to avoid this.
If you're really concerned with typing efficiency on an iPhone, look into BTstack which is a homebrew Bluetooth stack available to jailbroken users. BTstack is just the stack itself, though other applications have added support for it in other ways, the most relevant here being "BTstack keyboard" which is available for $5 from the Cydia store. Connect any Bluetooth keyboard and you're good to go. Oh, and it works in any app on the phone, not just a single app that you'd have to copy and paste text out of.
Now granted, the mental image of arriving to a meeting with *just* a keyboard and your phone is rather amusing, but the point is that it's possible. This stack is also used in another program that connects Bluetooth mice (using a mouse cursor library), and various game emulators have begun adding support for Bluetooth connetivity with the Wii remote.
Personally I find that the standard iPhone keyboard is actually fairly efficient once you get the hang of it, though part of it is the copious amount of autocorrect that the system applies. If I had to manually correct every error I made, I would be cursing the lack of physical buttons to the end of time.
I think the option you want is Events - Tab Opening - "Open other tabs next to current one" and leaving "change opening order" unchecked. Try restarting Firefox if nothing changes. Note that I haven't tried it in the very latest version that this article is about, so I'm not positive if it works correctly there.
That's how I've always had my tabs open, directly to the right of the current tab. Tab Mix Plus is an excellent addon for managing this exact sort of thing.
My apartment roommates and I just set up a Wii in our common living area 2 days ago, and I was the one to shell out the $10 to buy the browser (leaving us with 500 points left we don't really plan to use at the moment). Had I waited a few more days, we could have gotten it for free. Curses.
Meh, at least there's a slight compensation =/
Regarding Youtube, we tried watching some videos but I found the framerate to be very laggy, especially in the full-screen mode. I didn't do extensive testing of YoutubeXL vs standard Youtube site, so I don't know the full extent of this issue, but I'm hoping it improves with this upgrade.
The point is that it's overkill, and it's the wrong solution to the problem. If people aren't involved in their community, throwing a virtual world at them isn't going to help. Or in Slashdot terms, repainting the exterior and changing the tires isn't going to help when the problem is with the engine.
Though you're right in that my "nobody" comment was pure hyperbole. It was supposed to be a subtle reference to the SNL skit in which the big 3 automaker CEOs claimed that "nobody watches C-SPAN" but I kinda failed on that front.
Possible features of the proposed Virtual Decatur might include:
Opportunities to gather citizen input on policies, topics of interest, city services, and happenings
A Virtual City Hall Tour with multimedia capabilities.
Opportunities to earn coupons for use in real stores/retail establishments.
Streaming video of public meetings, ideally with a chat room feature that allows viewers to comment.
Access to visitors information (store hours, directions, weather, etc.)
This all assumes that the citizens in the community are anxiously and zealously awaiting the chance to partake in this experiment. From my perspective, most of the people who actually concern themselves with community matters are the ones who will view this project as a mere gimmick to be avoided. I understand the idea is to encourage more community involvement by appealing to the more tech-savvy generation, but I truly do not believe this will be the stunning success that the article seems to imply they want it to be.
Coupons can be obtained from a plethora of other sources (newspaper anyone?). Visitor's information would be best served on a standard web page. And streaming video? Nobody watches C-SPAN, and that's nation-wide. How many viewers are they expecting from a town of 20,000?
Through the use of DSReader and some tinkering around with the font settings until I found one I liked (white text on black background, dark strength subpixel anti-aliasing, size 10 Arial), I was able to comfortably read an entire novel totaling ~200,000 words. Not as good as an actual book of course, but it wasn't nearly as bad as one might imagine.
There are also a couple of homebrew ebook readers that let you turn the DS on its side and read that way. Personally I would find that a bit distracting, but the option is out there for those who are interested.
Perhaps they merely do not wish to anger potential customers now that it's been discovered and publicized. This isn't the first time it's happened or anything. For example, look at Zelda Ocarina of Time: original versions of the cartridge contained Muslim chanting in the background of the fire temple music, which was taken out of later copies. Later re-releases of the game on the Gamecube also changed some symbols in-game that resembled the crescent moon. No real reason to remove these things other than to prevent conflicts among the audience.
1. The DS does not have an MMU (memory management unit) so it can't really use the SD card as swap space. It does have standard I/O though through libfat and DLDI, so you're right in that external resources can be used.
2. The Opera RAM pack is 8 MB.
From what I can tell (and this is mostly an uneducated guess here), the RAM pack is mostly used for storing downloaded images before they are rendered to the page.
At my high school last year you could login to anybody's account if you wanted, as the formula for the username was well-known (last name + first name, up to 10 characters total) and the password was the user's birthday. Not quite as easy-to-access as in your instance of course, but still not the smartest decision the school could have made.
Absolutely true. I'm a senior in high school, and at the beginning of the year I was on the fence as to whether I wanted to pursue CS or not. As I had very little prior programming experience, I took AP Computer Science A to familiarize myself with the subject, this being the first year the class was offered at our school for several years. I'll be honest, the beginning of the year was fun, and I was filled with pride after getting my first "Hello, World!" program to compile, but in the past couple of months, the fun has died out. I no longer enjoy doing even the most basic tasks, and it's become more of a chore than anything. I'm very glad I took the course though, as I was able to determine from it that I did not want to go for a CS major upon entering college in the fall.
At the same time, I also enrolled in a preliminary engineering class, again to familiarize myself with the subject. I loved it, and it helped me make my final decision of an Electrical Engineering major. Of course, I know even that is likely to change within the next few years, but at least I've got a decent sense of direction now.
What do you think they are converting you lamebrain? They kept the originals, so no upsampling needed (doesn't really work anyway), they just RE-encode the original. Read this part again:
How about allowing people to upload decent quality videos in the first place?? I'm pretty sure he was referring to the fact that Youtube limits you to 100 MB or 10 minutes per video. If your source video is high quality, this forces you to upload a "crappy resolution compressed/downsized video" by re-encoding it prior to uploading it to Youtube. Sure you could split it into parts, but it's still inconvenient.
The DS could actually be quite a capable "smart-device" if Nintendo wanted to market it that way. After all, it already has wi-fi built in, plus chat, mail, etc. I don't know if they have it or not, but if the DS includes an address book and a few other things (calendar, graphing calculator, memo pad), it would actually make a killer replacement for a PDA.
Many of those PDA-like functions can be accomplished through the use of DS homebrew. There's NDSMail for email (though the lack of SSL limits its usability), DSOrganize for many PDA-type apps (scribble pad, scientific calculator, text editor, music player, Internet radio streamer, day planner, calendar, to-do list, and address book, plus an IRC client and web browser), and there's a TI-83 emulator for the GBA made by Dwedit that's currently being ported to the DS for graphing calculator functionality. DSLinux also helps turn the DS into a miniature computer with file management capabilities and two web browsers of its own.
Sure, homebrew is not officially endorsed by Nintendo, but it makes the DS a much more usable device to me.
Indeed, this is the major reason we stayed with Canon once our old printer bit the dust. We got a "free" Lexmark printer with the family computer, which I then used for a brief period myself with my own computer, but we found it too expensive to continue using. The cartridges dried out very quickly, rendering the entire tanks useless, and even when we did use them regularly to prevent this, the software refused to allow us to continue printing once the ink level reached the "low" mark, which we could not verify due to the solid color tanks.
Now we all just use the Canon via our home network. Much more convenient and cost-effective. Another benefit of having separate color tanks is that you can replace a single color if it runs out, as opposed to replacing the entire "color" cartridge. My dad prints many emails, and since his company logo consists of mostly black and blue, the blue runs out fairly quickly, while yellow and magenta sit mostly unused. Replacing just the blue cartridge when needed gives us the most printing ability for the money.
Slashdot Mirror
How do they detect if the users are tethering??
From what I've read, it seems like they're really just looking for people who use up tons of data per month, on the suspicion that they're tethering. I've already heard a few stories of people calling them up, saying "I stream Pandora all day so why am I being charged extra for that?" and being let off the hook.
Depending on the program, roughly 1/3 of airtime is taken up by ads. A 60-minute show is usually somewhere between 40 and 45 minutes of actual content. It is indeed highly irritating, and that's why people are embracing DVRs so much, because it's gotten to the point that we simply don't tolerate it anymore.
Also what is the ratio of dropped calls to calls made? 10,000 out of 10,000 would be an alarming rate but what about 10,000 out of 1,000,000.
10,000 out of 1,000,000 is still a 1% dropped call rate. When I interned at an ISP that also served as a VOIP telecom (not Verizon), anything less than 99.999% availability was investigated and usually reported to the FCC due to legal obligations. A single missed 911 call is a very big deal and I would hope Verizon treats it as such.
Anonymous isn't a defined group of people. That's kinda the point. It's very possible that some of them, or even a single person, has severe enough of a problem with the WBC to try to attempt such a stunt. I suspect however that the vast majority have the good sense not to get involved with something so senseless.
Similarly, Anonymous can't "issue a statement" that represents the entire group. This AnonNews website, whoever they are, have no more say in the doings and actions of Anonymous than any other member of the group. Can the SlashDot staff make claims on behalf of every nerd who happens to visit the site for technology-related news, especially on things in which the SlashDot community is deeply divided? Of course not. Same thing here.
This whole thing is freaking ridiculous. You've got two groups of trolls trying to figure out who's attempting to troll whom, and if said trolling is a threat to their own trolling efforts. Why exactly this is considered news is beyond me.
Depends on the page, but I can visibly watch my available RAM go down from its starting point of 140 MB down to 20 if I've got lots of pages open (I'm jailbroken and have the free RAM count display in my status bar at all times). Let's just say that the iPhone's 8-tab limit really is a best-case scenario.
You wouldn't want to use SSD as swap due to the limited number of reads and writes it can handle, though for basic cache (like saving the webpage for offline use) I don't really know why it isn't implemented.
The pages reload themselves because the iPad has run out of RAM and has cleared out the background pages from memory so it can better show you the page you're currently on. Unfortunate that Apple didn't stick another 256 MB in there to prevent that sort of thing.
That said, I browse pages the same way, and it's for that very reason that I love VanillaSurf for the iPhone/iTouch - it lets you open a link in a new background tab without switching to it immediately. It's got some other features (downloads, bookmark syncing, fullscreen browsing, stuff like that) but honestly it's the tab handling that makes me use it more than Safari when possible. No clue if there's an iPad version or not, but it's definitely worth a look.
Agreed. I've got a jailbroken iPhone but when I got it, the various retro emulators were USELESS because of the control scheme. I can't enjoy a game if I'm constantly looking away from it to make sure my fingers are over the right buttons.
The day they made a homebrew Bluetooth stack and started added Wiimote support to the emulators was the day retro games (other than RPGs) became playable.
"Goofing off? Of course not boss, I was just checking my email!"
GSM works through what's called "time-division multiplexing" over various fixed frequencies. What this means is that a set carrier frequency (let's just make up a number and say 403.123 MHz) can carry a certain number of callers at once, let's say 16. This means it splits time into 16 chunks, and then for a split second customer 1 can transmit and recieve whatever it wants, then the next split second customer 2 can transmit and receive whatever it wants, and so on until all 16 have gotten their split second of time, and this is repeated thousands of times per second. Once all 16 time slots are full, another carrier frequency is selected for more customers, and these frequencies are as finely split as can be without causing too much interference.
The point is that you've only got so many slots per frequency, and only so many distinct frequencies available in your FCC-allotted bandwidth. It makes perfect sense for a large gathering of people to use up all available slots, even if signal strength is excellent.
For comparison, CDMA works in such a way that everyone transmits and receives all the time, and your phone sees everyone else's signals as pure noise. Thus, the more phones connected at once, the more noise everyone has to contend with, and so the tower will artificially limit the number of phones connected to it at any given time to avoid this.
If you're really concerned with typing efficiency on an iPhone, look into BTstack which is a homebrew Bluetooth stack available to jailbroken users. BTstack is just the stack itself, though other applications have added support for it in other ways, the most relevant here being "BTstack keyboard" which is available for $5 from the Cydia store. Connect any Bluetooth keyboard and you're good to go. Oh, and it works in any app on the phone, not just a single app that you'd have to copy and paste text out of.
Now granted, the mental image of arriving to a meeting with *just* a keyboard and your phone is rather amusing, but the point is that it's possible. This stack is also used in another program that connects Bluetooth mice (using a mouse cursor library), and various game emulators have begun adding support for Bluetooth connetivity with the Wii remote.
Personally I find that the standard iPhone keyboard is actually fairly efficient once you get the hang of it, though part of it is the copious amount of autocorrect that the system applies. If I had to manually correct every error I made, I would be cursing the lack of physical buttons to the end of time.
I think the option you want is Events - Tab Opening - "Open other tabs next to current one" and leaving "change opening order" unchecked. Try restarting Firefox if nothing changes. Note that I haven't tried it in the very latest version that this article is about, so I'm not positive if it works correctly there.
That's how I've always had my tabs open, directly to the right of the current tab. Tab Mix Plus is an excellent addon for managing this exact sort of thing.
My apartment roommates and I just set up a Wii in our common living area 2 days ago, and I was the one to shell out the $10 to buy the browser (leaving us with 500 points left we don't really plan to use at the moment). Had I waited a few more days, we could have gotten it for free. Curses.
Meh, at least there's a slight compensation =/
Regarding Youtube, we tried watching some videos but I found the framerate to be very laggy, especially in the full-screen mode. I didn't do extensive testing of YoutubeXL vs standard Youtube site, so I don't know the full extent of this issue, but I'm hoping it improves with this upgrade.
The point is that it's overkill, and it's the wrong solution to the problem. If people aren't involved in their community, throwing a virtual world at them isn't going to help. Or in Slashdot terms, repainting the exterior and changing the tires isn't going to help when the problem is with the engine.
Though you're right in that my "nobody" comment was pure hyperbole. It was supposed to be a subtle reference to the SNL skit in which the big 3 automaker CEOs claimed that "nobody watches C-SPAN" but I kinda failed on that front.
This all assumes that the citizens in the community are anxiously and zealously awaiting the chance to partake in this experiment. From my perspective, most of the people who actually concern themselves with community matters are the ones who will view this project as a mere gimmick to be avoided. I understand the idea is to encourage more community involvement by appealing to the more tech-savvy generation, but I truly do not believe this will be the stunning success that the article seems to imply they want it to be.
Coupons can be obtained from a plethora of other sources (newspaper anyone?). Visitor's information would be best served on a standard web page. And streaming video? Nobody watches C-SPAN, and that's nation-wide. How many viewers are they expecting from a town of 20,000?
Through the use of DSReader and some tinkering around with the font settings until I found one I liked (white text on black background, dark strength subpixel anti-aliasing, size 10 Arial), I was able to comfortably read an entire novel totaling ~200,000 words. Not as good as an actual book of course, but it wasn't nearly as bad as one might imagine.
There are also a couple of homebrew ebook readers that let you turn the DS on its side and read that way. Personally I would find that a bit distracting, but the option is out there for those who are interested.
I think I speak for everyone when I say: "...what?"
So what if it has that there?
Perhaps they merely do not wish to anger potential customers now that it's been discovered and publicized. This isn't the first time it's happened or anything. For example, look at Zelda Ocarina of Time: original versions of the cartridge contained Muslim chanting in the background of the fire temple music, which was taken out of later copies. Later re-releases of the game on the Gamecube also changed some symbols in-game that resembled the crescent moon. No real reason to remove these things other than to prevent conflicts among the audience.
Some minor nitpicking here:
1. The DS does not have an MMU (memory management unit) so it can't really use the SD card as swap space. It does have standard I/O though through libfat and DLDI, so you're right in that external resources can be used.
2. The Opera RAM pack is 8 MB.
From what I can tell (and this is mostly an uneducated guess here), the RAM pack is mostly used for storing downloaded images before they are rendered to the page.
At my high school last year you could login to anybody's account if you wanted, as the formula for the username was well-known (last name + first name, up to 10 characters total) and the password was the user's birthday. Not quite as easy-to-access as in your instance of course, but still not the smartest decision the school could have made.
Absolutely true. I'm a senior in high school, and at the beginning of the year I was on the fence as to whether I wanted to pursue CS or not. As I had very little prior programming experience, I took AP Computer Science A to familiarize myself with the subject, this being the first year the class was offered at our school for several years. I'll be honest, the beginning of the year was fun, and I was filled with pride after getting my first "Hello, World!" program to compile, but in the past couple of months, the fun has died out. I no longer enjoy doing even the most basic tasks, and it's become more of a chore than anything. I'm very glad I took the course though, as I was able to determine from it that I did not want to go for a CS major upon entering college in the fall.
At the same time, I also enrolled in a preliminary engineering class, again to familiarize myself with the subject. I loved it, and it helped me make my final decision of an Electrical Engineering major. Of course, I know even that is likely to change within the next few years, but at least I've got a decent sense of direction now.
Sure, homebrew is not officially endorsed by Nintendo, but it makes the DS a much more usable device to me.
Sound a lot like Tribbles to me.
Indeed, this is the major reason we stayed with Canon once our old printer bit the dust. We got a "free" Lexmark printer with the family computer, which I then used for a brief period myself with my own computer, but we found it too expensive to continue using. The cartridges dried out very quickly, rendering the entire tanks useless, and even when we did use them regularly to prevent this, the software refused to allow us to continue printing once the ink level reached the "low" mark, which we could not verify due to the solid color tanks.
Now we all just use the Canon via our home network. Much more convenient and cost-effective. Another benefit of having separate color tanks is that you can replace a single color if it runs out, as opposed to replacing the entire "color" cartridge. My dad prints many emails, and since his company logo consists of mostly black and blue, the blue runs out fairly quickly, while yellow and magenta sit mostly unused. Replacing just the blue cartridge when needed gives us the most printing ability for the money.