Look at warcraft. The graphics were pretty good when it first came out. Now it's no more than adequate yet the game has two expansions, earns something like 100mil per month and has virtually zero piracy.
Here's irony for you (two-fold even) - my fancy blackberry has a camera built in. To "disable" the click noise all I need is headphones plugged in - they take over all the sound output.
Second, my canon sd1100is is smaller than the blackberry storm* it's sitting next to yet it offers the option to disable all noises. The SD1100is is also not the smallest digicam you can buy, just what I own.
*paragraph one and two seem to conflict, I know. The blackberry storm is not being called fancy - I simply have multiple blackberries.
First - I will *never* advocate hurting children. In fact, hurting adults is kinda messed up too unless they enjoy it.
Second - to take your point one step further. Maybe a 17 year old isn't harmed if photographed nude? How about 16? 15? 10? How about 2 years old? Plenty of parents have pictures of their children playin in the bath tub. Those children were certainly NOT hurt in any way by that even though a more twisted soul would consider those pictures erotic.
I understand wanting to protect children from predators, but (citation needed ofc) the vast majority of underage sex, pornography, and other "bad" or illegal behavior happens with other underage children. I'm going out on a limb to say more 15 year old girls have naked pictures taken by under-18 boyfriends (or self-shot!) than than ones who were made to do so by an adult. A lot more. Pretty sure the average age kids lose their virginity hovers UNDER the legal age to have sex. Our legal system is making the average child the victim of a sex crime... and yet they try to tighten the laws even more to 'protect' them.
Eliminate anon registrations and/or privacy. You're responsible for your account with strong multi-factor authentication. Granted I meant simple to define the solution's goals, not the underlying methods/privacy issues/etc.
It's a fine balance between making something easy for any random, anon user to participate and blocking out malicious use/intent. The funny part is you could probably design a system to validate users legitimacy based on their facebook/myspace/fubar/etc. pages and profiles that would be fairly accurate and much harder to break. Include banking/paypal/other more strictly verified sites for those with a smaller online presence. Between the two (yes, you bend over and spread wide in anticipation of potential privacy violation) it wouldn't be impossible to define rate a person's "real-ness" similar to google page rank.
And if you trust the ranking company, you could still - in theory - maintain your anon status.
And they're still worried about my cell phone that transmits at what, a few 100mW? Even if you went two orders of magnitude higher - 10W it's effectively zero compared to what they're suggesting.
So yeah, fuck you FAA my cell phone isn't going to crash a plane.
To be slightly on topic - there are people who think contrails are tin-foil-hat stuff. When i read this it seemed like a big waste just to shut those people up. Still, I think this IS a big waste regardless.
Actually in a full electric car the heat would be more costly in terms of power.
In an I.C.E. there's *plenty* of waste heat, a small portion of which is used to heat the car. In a EV there is some waste heat but it's much less constant and lower temp (i assume LiION cells would *not* be happy at 100c). You're stuck with resistive heating which is essentially 100% efficient.
OTOH, Modern air conditioners are more than 100% efficient. Check wiki or anywhere for details on EER. Essentially an AC with an EER of 12 will provide 12000 BTU (or approx 3.5KW) of cooling at a cost of 1KW of energy(EER = btu/power. 3.5 / 1 * 100 = 350% efficient.
Hency why people can afford to cool a house with AC but still turn to oil/gas for heating (in most cases)
What would be the most taxing test is your front defroster. AC to dry the air, then heat to warm it up.
I don't rate this as 'zomg the l337 key haxx on my doorz' but for those with evil intent it is a security risk.
People assume a fancy lock and solid door ensure security. People also assume someone with a key to open a door generally belongs there. If I wanted to commit a 'broad daylight' crime this would greatly simplify things.
Heck, if a cop shows up and you've got a working key and a reasonable excuse you're pretty likely to be left alone.
Yes, 10 years ago you could get a 1GB drive. Now you can get a 1TB drive for ~1/4 the price of that 1GB drive.
So SSD is droping in price while growing in capacity except magnetic media is doing the same. It's going to be quite some time before it's cheaper to use digital media than magnetic media for raw storage (we will leave the price/performance ratio out of this since we're talking about backup).
Oh and as density increases you realise the charge stored in "non-volatile" flash ram gets smaller and smaller to the point where you're going to be looking at bit errors in that arena after a year or 5 of unused storage...right?
Except you're talking about a multi-hundered-disc backup set where you need 100% reliability. I'd put good money that if you had 500 CD-Rs from 1994 there would be at least a few bad ones by now. Heck, the burn failure rate is > 1:500 and not every error is detectable unless you do a read-verify on the disc immediately post-burn.
Just to jump in here...you can't read parity data and invent the missing bits. You need to read the n-1 data bits + parity to work out your missing bit.
I do agree though that this is little more than a doomsday article - the techie's version of 'What's in your hand right now that may be killing your children - News at 10!' nonsense. If you really did get 1 unrecoverable error out of every 12TB read we'd have an awful lot more data loss on personal computers.
Have you actually participated in a video conference? How about a business related one...and then how about a telepresence conference?
These prices aren't all that obscene. A telepresence room will run you about 500k (and you need two!). Plus the bandwidth is NOT your average 384K DSL. There's 4 screens running at 1-2MBit each plus audio.
Besides, telepresence is an entirely encapsulated and planned room. There's no echo, there's no bad lighting, there's no spots where you have to yell to be heard. The video is HD quality, the sound is amazing.
No, i'm not a cisco shill. I just have two of these room installed by my department at work.
And no, they're not perfect. Trying bringing in other polycom systems and it's a nightmare. Having their 'white glove' hosting service is 95% pointless if you have demanding executives. But a pure telepresence call? It's amazingly better than any PC webcam/video camera/whatever combo.
Actually it's quite a bit more than that in a car. You'll see a good 3-500 amps and more depending on engine size, age, temperature and other starting conditions.
In fact, batteries are rated in cold-cranking-amps - i.e. the number of amps they can supply to start the car while cold (probably around freezing, not sure of the exact temp measured at). A hefty battery is rated somewhere around 8-900 CCA.
You're right though - the wiring only needs to support that load for ~10 seconds in a worst-case situation so the conductors don't have to be as heavy as they would otherwise.
Which is all fine and good. Except who said blizzard was ENTITLED to that $60 income? Someone found a better/faster way to do something. Shocking.
Bliz doesn't like it - so pick up your ball and go home. Tell the kiddies who break the rules they can't play...but noooooooooo. That means $60 gets cut to $0.
What really irks me here is that they're not going after the individuals who are actually 'ruining' the game. They're going after one person/company instead because there's money to be had. A person/company who - themselves - is not accused of actually running the bot and hurting their income (as far as I know).
This is a dangerous road, are we going to start blaming any company that makes something which another company thinks hurts their revenue stream? I'll avoid the over-used gun analogy... because i'd rather people read this than get modded troll or flamebait;)
Here's my issue with that. Blizzard has this nifty revenue stream. They like it. Something comes along that can bring change to their revenue stream so they make that against THEIR rules. Said thing flaunts or ignores Blizzards rules. Blizzard works to maintain their revenue stream despite the fact that it's THEIR CUSTOMERS who actually cause the disruption. Bliz then starts using the courts to get back their cost of protecting their revenue stream. I'd draw a parallel to the MAFIAA.
Adapt or die. The courts don't exist to enforce your business model and it's rules.
Hey, this guy...uhm...figured out how to count cards once. Then he taught people.
The casinos should sue him.
Seriously though, both sides of this argument have some merit. However I will fall back on blaming those who USE glider. The problem is, Blizzard would have a VERY hard time sueing them and it would have to be all individual cases. They'll go after someone who's apparently made a few million bucks recently.
The larger issue which I think needs to be addressed is the nonsense over EULA and TOS agreements and how they attempt to (and apparently succeed) write, re-write, and override existing law...much less common sense.
Yes, you could gain over the long term from the majority of incidents where it would help...and then in the.1% (avoiding an accident) where cost effectiveness is irrelevant it puts you in danger.
It's a balancing act that people almost always decide in favor of safety >>> cost. Granted this whole idea is based on the inability of people to think for themselves and be responsible for how much gas they use.
Haha, meet my wife sometime. She complains about gas mileage in her van to no end. Then again I won't let her drive with me in the car because it's: accelerate to a bit faster than the guy you're tail-gating, coast till you're falling behind...and repeat. Not only does it make me sea sick (in a minivan!) but it ruins her gas mileage.
The problem is i don't like the rest of her driving habbits either and tell her so...so she no longer listens to me when I have "good" advice...ahhhh the joys of being married.
I've got a meter on my new car and an greatly amused by it...
But mandatory and nearly free? Keep in mind car dealers charge as much as several hundred dollars for floor mats.:)
Why not pass a law requiring SUVs be used only when their actually needed...or better stop asking for and passing silly laws telling people what you think they should do. It's pretty obvious that market factors drive peoples' decisions and the market follows around - look at SUV sales and pricing in the last 6 months as a result of gas prices doubling over the year prior.
Not only that, but the design has to be able to withstand temperature ranges from -10F and below up to +115F and above, humidity from near zero to 100%, supply full power in a fraction of a second and drop back to idle power in the same time. All this while needing minimal maintenance over a multi-thousand hour service life.
Oh, and they don't even get to run at a set RPM where they can be tuned for max efficiency, they need to maintain that over a range of speed.
There's great room for improvement but the opportunity window is limited by the way cars are used. I think the future of cars is going to be an ultra-efficient turbo-diesel driving an ultra-efficient alternator charging a battery/ultra-capacitor array which powers a high-efficiency electric drive train. Granted there's greater cost and complexity for this...and we're not there yet.
Are you kidding? You just demonstrated that you know almost nothing about a modern internal combustion engine.
First, fuel use is NOT measured in CC's - that measurement is the DISPLACEMENT of the engine. Fuel use is only indirectly related to displacement.
Second, motorcycle engines produce more power per given weight of engine but they're designed very differently. For starters, their lighter weight and smaller displacement allows many of them to reach 15,000RPM - which is how they can produce so much power from such a small package. A 15k RPM engine is not practical for a passenger vehicle. Furthermore, a motorcycle is little more than an engine, simple transmission and 2 tires yet costs anywhere from $5K to $15K and more. I can buy a whole car for the same price... so perhaps that difference goes into ultra-high performance parts more akin to a race car than a street car.
Finally, a motorcycle gets better mileage because the average bike weighs around 500LBS. Even big harleys are in the 700-800LB range. What's a small passenger car today? 2500LBS? Your big SUB will tip the scale ar 4, 5, even 6000 pounds. With 1/10th the weight to move of COURSE you get better mileage. *HOWEVER* if you measure fuel in vs. power output I'm pretty sure bike engines are LESS efficient. They're tuned for power and compact size. Fuel efficiency suffers but because the engine is so small and the vehicle so light it's not much of an issue.
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Look at warcraft. The graphics were pretty good when it first came out. Now it's no more than adequate yet the game has two expansions, earns something like 100mil per month and has virtually zero piracy.
Here's irony for you (two-fold even) - my fancy blackberry has a camera built in. To "disable" the click noise all I need is headphones plugged in - they take over all the sound output.
Second, my canon sd1100is is smaller than the blackberry storm* it's sitting next to yet it offers the option to disable all noises. The SD1100is is also not the smallest digicam you can buy, just what I own.
*paragraph one and two seem to conflict, I know. The blackberry storm is not being called fancy - I simply have multiple blackberries.
First - I will *never* advocate hurting children. In fact, hurting adults is kinda messed up too unless they enjoy it.
Second - to take your point one step further. Maybe a 17 year old isn't harmed if photographed nude? How about 16? 15? 10? How about 2 years old? Plenty of parents have pictures of their children playin in the bath tub. Those children were certainly NOT hurt in any way by that even though a more twisted soul would consider those pictures erotic.
I understand wanting to protect children from predators, but (citation needed ofc) the vast majority of underage sex, pornography, and other "bad" or illegal behavior happens with other underage children. I'm going out on a limb to say more 15 year old girls have naked pictures taken by under-18 boyfriends (or self-shot!) than than ones who were made to do so by an adult. A lot more. Pretty sure the average age kids lose their virginity hovers UNDER the legal age to have sex. Our legal system is making the average child the victim of a sex crime ... and yet they try to tighten the laws even more to 'protect' them.
Gah....
It's Simple... :)
Eliminate anon registrations and/or privacy. You're responsible for your account with strong multi-factor authentication. Granted I meant simple to define the solution's goals, not the underlying methods/privacy issues/etc.
It's a fine balance between making something easy for any random, anon user to participate and blocking out malicious use/intent. The funny part is you could probably design a system to validate users legitimacy based on their facebook/myspace/fubar/etc. pages and profiles that would be fairly accurate and much harder to break. Include banking/paypal/other more strictly verified sites for those with a smaller online presence. Between the two (yes, you bend over and spread wide in anticipation of potential privacy violation) it wouldn't be impossible to define rate a person's "real-ness" similar to google page rank.
And if you trust the ranking company, you could still - in theory - maintain your anon status.
So true. And even better, their EVs are actually usable as a real car. Not a tinker-toy one-way commuter.
And they're still worried about my cell phone that transmits at what, a few 100mW? Even if you went two orders of magnitude higher - 10W it's effectively zero compared to what they're suggesting.
So yeah, fuck you FAA my cell phone isn't going to crash a plane.
To be slightly on topic - there are people who think contrails are tin-foil-hat stuff. When i read this it seemed like a big waste just to shut those people up. Still, I think this IS a big waste regardless.
Actually in a full electric car the heat would be more costly in terms of power.
In an I.C.E. there's *plenty* of waste heat, a small portion of which is used to heat the car. In a EV there is some waste heat but it's much less constant and lower temp (i assume LiION cells would *not* be happy at 100c). You're stuck with resistive heating which is essentially 100% efficient.
OTOH, Modern air conditioners are more than 100% efficient. Check wiki or anywhere for details on EER. Essentially an AC with an EER of 12 will provide 12000 BTU (or approx 3.5KW) of cooling at a cost of 1KW of energy(EER = btu/power. 3.5 / 1 * 100 = 350% efficient.
Hency why people can afford to cool a house with AC but still turn to oil/gas for heating (in most cases)
What would be the most taxing test is your front defroster. AC to dry the air, then heat to warm it up.
I don't rate this as 'zomg the l337 key haxx on my doorz' but for those with evil intent it is a security risk.
People assume a fancy lock and solid door ensure security. People also assume someone with a key to open a door generally belongs there. If I wanted to commit a 'broad daylight' crime this would greatly simplify things.
Heck, if a cop shows up and you've got a working key and a reasonable excuse you're pretty likely to be left alone.
Uhm...you're calling it a scam but it's actually just brokering loads. That's legal.
I bid on job X for $ then find someone else to do it for $-n.
I pocket n and pay $-n to the person doing the work.
Repeat.
Sub-contracting 101.
Yes, 10 years ago you could get a 1GB drive. Now you can get a 1TB drive for ~1/4 the price of that 1GB drive.
So SSD is droping in price while growing in capacity except magnetic media is doing the same. It's going to be quite some time before it's cheaper to use digital media than magnetic media for raw storage (we will leave the price/performance ratio out of this since we're talking about backup).
Oh and as density increases you realise the charge stored in "non-volatile" flash ram gets smaller and smaller to the point where you're going to be looking at bit errors in that arena after a year or 5 of unused storage...right?
Except you're talking about a multi-hundered-disc backup set where you need 100% reliability. I'd put good money that if you had 500 CD-Rs from 1994 there would be at least a few bad ones by now. Heck, the burn failure rate is > 1:500 and not every error is detectable unless you do a read-verify on the disc immediately post-burn.
Just to jump in here...you can't read parity data and invent the missing bits. You need to read the n-1 data bits + parity to work out your missing bit.
I do agree though that this is little more than a doomsday article - the techie's version of 'What's in your hand right now that may be killing your children - News at 10!' nonsense. If you really did get 1 unrecoverable error out of every 12TB read we'd have an awful lot more data loss on personal computers.
Standby is good, hibernation generally doesn't work with disk encryption though.
Now, if you could boot the OS from the insta-on and somehow save time or start working while the OS loads that *THAT* would be a neat trick.
Ok, HD camera x 4 ...
Plasma x4
Oh, and you wanted it integrated so it all works together?
Have you actually participated in a video conference? How about a business related one...and then how about a telepresence conference?
These prices aren't all that obscene. A telepresence room will run you about 500k (and you need two!). Plus the bandwidth is NOT your average 384K DSL. There's 4 screens running at 1-2MBit each plus audio.
Besides, telepresence is an entirely encapsulated and planned room. There's no echo, there's no bad lighting, there's no spots where you have to yell to be heard. The video is HD quality, the sound is amazing.
No, i'm not a cisco shill. I just have two of these room installed by my department at work.
And no, they're not perfect. Trying bringing in other polycom systems and it's a nightmare. Having their 'white glove' hosting service is 95% pointless if you have demanding executives. But a pure telepresence call? It's amazingly better than any PC webcam/video camera/whatever combo.
Beg to differ. That's 3 cycles.
Actually it's quite a bit more than that in a car. You'll see a good 3-500 amps and more depending on engine size, age, temperature and other starting conditions.
In fact, batteries are rated in cold-cranking-amps - i.e. the number of amps they can supply to start the car while cold (probably around freezing, not sure of the exact temp measured at). A hefty battery is rated somewhere around 8-900 CCA.
You're right though - the wiring only needs to support that load for ~10 seconds in a worst-case situation so the conductors don't have to be as heavy as they would otherwise.
Which is all fine and good. Except who said blizzard was ENTITLED to that $60 income? Someone found a better/faster way to do something. Shocking.
Bliz doesn't like it - so pick up your ball and go home. Tell the kiddies who break the rules they can't play...but noooooooooo. That means $60 gets cut to $0.
What really irks me here is that they're not going after the individuals who are actually 'ruining' the game. They're going after one person/company instead because there's money to be had. A person/company who - themselves - is not accused of actually running the bot and hurting their income (as far as I know).
This is a dangerous road, are we going to start blaming any company that makes something which another company thinks hurts their revenue stream? I'll avoid the over-used gun analogy ... because i'd rather people read this than get modded troll or flamebait ;)
Well...........
Here's my issue with that. Blizzard has this nifty revenue stream. They like it. Something comes along that can bring change to their revenue stream so they make that against THEIR rules. Said thing flaunts or ignores Blizzards rules. Blizzard works to maintain their revenue stream despite the fact that it's THEIR CUSTOMERS who actually cause the disruption. Bliz then starts using the courts to get back their cost of protecting their revenue stream. I'd draw a parallel to the MAFIAA.
Adapt or die. The courts don't exist to enforce your business model and it's rules.
Hey, this guy...uhm...figured out how to count cards once. Then he taught people.
The casinos should sue him.
Seriously though, both sides of this argument have some merit. However I will fall back on blaming those who USE glider. The problem is, Blizzard would have a VERY hard time sueing them and it would have to be all individual cases. They'll go after someone who's apparently made a few million bucks recently.
The larger issue which I think needs to be addressed is the nonsense over EULA and TOS agreements and how they attempt to (and apparently succeed) write, re-write, and override existing law...much less common sense.
Yes, you could gain over the long term from the majority of incidents where it would help...and then in the .1% (avoiding an accident) where cost effectiveness is irrelevant it puts you in danger.
It's a balancing act that people almost always decide in favor of safety >>> cost. Granted this whole idea is based on the inability of people to think for themselves and be responsible for how much gas they use.
Haha, meet my wife sometime. She complains about gas mileage in her van to no end. Then again I won't let her drive with me in the car because it's: accelerate to a bit faster than the guy you're tail-gating, coast till you're falling behind...and repeat. Not only does it make me sea sick (in a minivan!) but it ruins her gas mileage.
The problem is i don't like the rest of her driving habbits either and tell her so...so she no longer listens to me when I have "good" advice...ahhhh the joys of being married.
I've got a meter on my new car and an greatly amused by it...
But mandatory and nearly free? Keep in mind car dealers charge as much as several hundred dollars for floor mats. :)
Why not pass a law requiring SUVs be used only when their actually needed...or better stop asking for and passing silly laws telling people what you think they should do. It's pretty obvious that market factors drive peoples' decisions and the market follows around - look at SUV sales and pricing in the last 6 months as a result of gas prices doubling over the year prior.
Not only that, but the design has to be able to withstand temperature ranges from -10F and below up to +115F and above, humidity from near zero to 100%, supply full power in a fraction of a second and drop back to idle power in the same time. All this while needing minimal maintenance over a multi-thousand hour service life.
Oh, and they don't even get to run at a set RPM where they can be tuned for max efficiency, they need to maintain that over a range of speed.
There's great room for improvement but the opportunity window is limited by the way cars are used. I think the future of cars is going to be an ultra-efficient turbo-diesel driving an ultra-efficient alternator charging a battery/ultra-capacitor array which powers a high-efficiency electric drive train. Granted there's greater cost and complexity for this...and we're not there yet.
Are you kidding? You just demonstrated that you know almost nothing about a modern internal combustion engine.
First, fuel use is NOT measured in CC's - that measurement is the DISPLACEMENT of the engine. Fuel use is only indirectly related to displacement.
Second, motorcycle engines produce more power per given weight of engine but they're designed very differently. For starters, their lighter weight and smaller displacement allows many of them to reach 15,000RPM - which is how they can produce so much power from such a small package. A 15k RPM engine is not practical for a passenger vehicle. Furthermore, a motorcycle is little more than an engine, simple transmission and 2 tires yet costs anywhere from $5K to $15K and more. I can buy a whole car for the same price ... so perhaps that difference goes into ultra-high performance parts more akin to a race car than a street car.
Finally, a motorcycle gets better mileage because the average bike weighs around 500LBS. Even big harleys are in the 700-800LB range. What's a small passenger car today? 2500LBS? Your big SUB will tip the scale ar 4, 5, even 6000 pounds. With 1/10th the weight to move of COURSE you get better mileage. *HOWEVER* if you measure fuel in vs. power output I'm pretty sure bike engines are LESS efficient. They're tuned for power and compact size. Fuel efficiency suffers but because the engine is so small and the vehicle so light it's not much of an issue.