The difference being, of course, that if Vista were lightning fast and had a perfect UI, us geeks would be proselytizing it rather than damning it.
The fact is, we're tired of the bloat. We look at other OS's (not necessarily XP, mind you) that do more with less, and we ask "really, what is this actually doing for me?".
The truth is, not much. It has gotten to the point where Vista is only really good for web browsing, and the like. Thanks to Vista's poor backwards compatibility, with both hardware and software, in a lot of business cases it just isn't an option.
And if you think the windows empire was built on the backs of home users, you are mistaken. Home users are a pleasant result of businesses requiring business machines, and the users of those business machines brought the PC into the home. It's a side market that has become nearly as large as the main market, but it's still not the main market.
I'm all for the latest and greatest, but lets try making it actually better than what was there before, yeah?
at least in criminal cases. I was recently on a jury for a felony theft case, and there were three basic requirements to prove guilt: 1.) that they actually committed the theft, or were influential in facilitating the crime. 2.) that the value of the item met the minimum for a felony. 3.) that they actually intended to deprive the victim of property.
If you can't prove intent, you can't prove guilt. The two differences here are it's copyright infringement not theft (and they aren't the same), and it's a civil case. That means the burden for proof is pretty low.
To prove the intent bit (and I guarantee it's in there) they only need to prove that it is more likely the defendant intended to distribute than not, since this is civil not criminal.
If it were a criminal case the RIAA/MPAA wouldn't have a prayer in these cases.
Hello, my name is Jeff, I'm a Vista user and I think it sucks.
There, now you know someone who uses Vista but hates it.:)
I'm an IT tech for a very, very large company (the site I service has 4,000 employees and it's small potatoes). Our company HAD a plan to upgrade to Vista, but they canned it, because they have so much proprietary software that does not work in Vista, it would cost hundreds of millions of dollars to fix them all. They are going to use Windows 7, which promises to be more backwards compatible.
Now for my personal experience, I have a laptop that came with Vista, and I've been giving it a good hard fair shake, and honestly it sucks.
It's not so much that it's particularly worse than XP, it's that it is so completely unnecessary. There is nothing revolutionary about the operating system. Some things are kinda cool, like the self-repair features. But other things about those same features make it, in many cases, worse. The stupid OS is nearly impossible to fix. It tried to block IE7 because it was unsafe to let it connect to the net (which I agree with, but that's a different issue). I cannot use MSN Live messenger because that is tied into the Windows Update service, which is broken on my machine due to a bad XML update, which MS has no fix for!! What the hell is that? I do this stuff for a living, and I can't fix it, joe blow is going to have to shell out $200 to probably not get it fixed too.
Error messages like "There was an Error" with no error codes or no way of digging up debugging info, how the hell do you figure out what went wrong?
The pluses are not that big for Vista, and the minuses are dealbreakers.
That's why Vista sucks.
It works great if you just need to browse the web, but if that's all you're doing why not use Linux for free?
Perhaps you should RTFA?
Safari 3 and Internet Explorer 8 could not be benchmarked because they crashed during the test. They tried using Safari 3 (non beta), it crashed so it wasn't included. It looks like the beta even crashed after a short while, but there is enough for a benchmark. It seems the most stable browser for multiple windows, Safari is not.
They tried using IE8 beta also, it crashed so it wasn't included.
You really aren't versed in survey sampling standards, most surveys only involve a couple hundred people, if that.
The way surveys work is you use a small number of people but you statistically balance the people involved based on catagories (they call these demographics). For example, if 40% of kids who play video games are between the ages of 6 and 10, white, and come from middle class families, then 40 out of 100 kids in the study need to be between the ages of 6 and 10, white, and come from middle class families.
Depending on how accurate you wanted to go, if you have accurate demographics to start with you could get decent results using 100 kids in a single town, but that would be very very hard to do, and hard to verify your results.
It's not 1200 that should worry you for accuracy, that's actually a pretty large number; it's the two states part. It seems to me they may not be taking region of the country into account for this, which might be a factor or might not.
"Cyber Bullying" legislation isn't going to solve any problems, at best it will do nothing. At worst it will add incentive for "victimized" teens to harm themselves in order to get back at their bullys.
Bullying is something that needs to be delt with by individuals and parents, not the government. It's not the government's place or duty to be butting in here, and the polititians, while they mean well, are making more pointless laws that will get mucked up in the court system.
I agree with his point about the Treaty of Ghent. I mean, seriously...
I avoided using tags (the gmail alternative to folders) for over a year and was annoyed by the lack of folders as well (you go with what you know, you know?), but then I tried them and realized something: folders are just tags anyway. Basically for folders, an email gets "tagged" as being part of a folder, it is grouped with other emails tagged the same way, and restrictions are placed on it (can only be placed here, can't be associated with other groups, etc). If you make a copy of the email to put in another spot, the program basically duplicates the message and re-tags the new message, wasting space.
If you can wrap your head around folders as tags or tags as folders, the switch isn't too hard and it can really be made to work well.
Plus, if you don't like the gmail web client at all, you can always just use their IMAP functionality and plug it into Outlook or your email program of choice.
Gmail is hands down the best free email you can get, there are no two ways about it. The most options, with the most storage, with the best web-interface I've come accross (yahoo has gotten better, but it's still got severe limitations that I haven't noticed with gmail).
What sold me right off though for the gmail client was the conversations. That's so brilliant and usefull that I can't believe nobody else thought of it first. I've got threads of 6-10+ messages in them that are handily contained in essentially one email. It's awesome, and I hate using other email programs because of it.
I don't think you understand the way licenses work.
For most regular programs like the Adobe suite of software, Microsoft Office, or other stand alone software, licenses are simple. 99% of the time it is a single license for a single machine. Sometimes you can get sitewide licenses for these, sometimes not.
When dealing with servers, however, licenses get hairy.
With server software, you generally need one license per server, one license per machine accessing the server, and often one license for each user accessing the server. Exceptions are webservers, and that's about it, heh.
So, lets take a look at a fairly typical breakdown for a small to medium sized company. Say your company has an MS server to act as a DC (that's domain controller), a dedicated DNS/Cache server, an Exchange server, a server for data storage/server apps, and a webserver.
Say your company has 100 employees, with 100 desktop computers and 15 laptops for travel use.
How many licenses do you need?
Well, you only need one license for the webserver, that one's easy. You need 120 licenses for the DNS server (don't forget the servers! They need licenses too), not too bad there. For the DC, you need 100 for the users, and 120 for the desktops and servers. It's the same for the Exchange server (may need a license for each email account, you'd have to dig through the license agreement, but it's at least 1 per user and 1 per machine for the windows software as well). The data server also needs 100 licenses for the users, and 120 licenses for the machines.
Add it up, that's 781 licenses just in getting your network set up for 100 users. And I combined servers to make things simpler, often the DNS server will be completely seperate from the cache server, and there will often be multiple data servers for redundancy. Any server based applications accessible to users will also require a per-user license to access it. So it's not hard to have an application server with 4 or 5 applications on it that require 700-800 licenses by itself, and that's IN ADDITION to any client software that goes on each individual machine.
It's downright EASY to end up with 15,000+ licenses for different commonly used software for a company with only 100 users.
Keeping track of that is a nightmare, since often these companies don't give you an easy way of keeping track of things.
A lot of these functions can be replaced by FOSS, but if your server guy only knows microsoft, then he's going to have a very hard time setting things up for linux, and you can forget about Unix, because they are very different. But even if you can replace most of this with FOSS, you can't replace all of them. A lot of business software simply has no open source alternative, or if it does it is not equivalent. One example would be PhotoShop, while the free alternative Gimp works for 85% or so of what Photoshop can do, if you need something in that last 15% you can't substitute Gimp for Photoshop. You have to have the Adobe product.
A small company with 15,000+ licenses to keep track of, it's not hard to lose a few, and with a maximum penalty of $90,000 per license infraction, it doesn't take much to put a small company under. (Granted, companies rarely recieve the full fine, that's for people who are blatantly and purposely stealing software, but $3000 for a $200 program really, really hurts).
Basically the subpoenas say "People on your campus are illegally copying music, you need to find out who they are and give us their records so we can sue." They are a little more specific, but not much.
That's a hell of a burden for any university, and is the basis for the "undue burden".
Well, if you had bothered RTFA all the way, you might have noticed the bio at the end and seen this guy is one of the people who developed the CSS standard for W3C.
The fact that he is the CTO for a competing browser should also add to his qualifications in speaking on this specific subject.
As for trustworthiness, if you had RTFA you might have realized that one of the three possibilities he gave is the one that Microsoft themselves have essentially said they are going use (that's the opt-in for web developers to force IE8 to run in truly standards compliant mode). The other two options he gave are pretty much the only two left, that I can think of anyway.
The microsoft article linked to in TFA essentially says they operate around a "don't force web developers to alter current pages" directive, which leaves only the three options, all of which means that IE8 will not be standards compliant EVER, which means it will NEVER pass Acid2 OR Acid3, unless they hard code the url into the browser.
If they do that, then I can almost guarantee the Acid test guys will slightly alter the url for the test, thus forcing IE8 to use defaults, in which case it will fail, because the default for IE8 will be non-standards compliant.
If they use induction, I believe they will recharge anything, LiIon anyway, not sure about NiCad or other types of rechargeables. I'd imagine it would work on those as well though.
If it's some kind of proprietary wireless power transfer tech, they're shooting themselves in the foot with their incompatibility. As far as I know the current models work with anything with a battery, why would they take a step backwards to make it proprietary? Unless they can somehow offer huge gains over the current methods. I don't see anything in that area that would make it only work on certain setups though.
Just putting Open in the title associates it with such good things as OSS, open business practices, etc.
It makes you think that they are being honest and, well, 'Open'. Or that it is Open to all.
Open is a very hot word right now. Value has always been a hot word, and in some specific situations Subscription can be a hot word. Open is the big buzzword in here, and it is there to associate their product with things like Open Source products, which are very hot right now.
It's a common, sneaky, and boarderline dishonest (you can usually find something that could technically be called 'open' in any product). It's there to fool you, like any buzzword.
The key here is that in any sense that makes any difference, it's not 'Open', there's no new 'Value', and it's not really a 'Subscription' service.
In otherwords, it's 100% pure marketing BS to rip people off.
It's called upconverting, and it doesn't extract more info from the image, it ADDS information to the signal. I hope you'll agree that doesn't break the laws of logic, eh?
Here's the deal, when you play a DVD, which operates at 720p, on a 1080i or especially a 1080p TV, LCD's in particular, the resolutions don't match up (obviously). So what you get is a picture that is actually WORSE than a 720p TV would give.
What upconverting does is essentially split the 720p picture up and reformatting it in such a way that it plays very cleanly on a 1080i or 1080p TV. Since your eyes cannot distinguish the difference between the 720p and 1080p outside of about 12 feet for a 50 inch TV, the picture quality is, for all intents and purposes, the same.
Does that help any? Or do I have to actually drag out the specs and tell you every little thing about how upconverting works?
4) Photovoltaic cells perform better (namely: they provide more voltage) in cold weather. Therefore, while Alaska may not have as many hours of sun as southern latitudes, those hours will provide more power. Also, I am not sure of the climate of Alaska, but some areas can have many days of bright blue skies in the middle of winter. These combined can really help the cost-effectiveness of solar power at such latitudes. Though I am still not sure of the eventual cost equation. You've got Alaska backwards, my friend. In WINTER the sun is out for only a few hours per day, even in southern Alaska. Up north, most famously Barrow but anywhere above the Arctic Circle, there can be up to three months (that's Barrow) with NO sun at all. It never breaks the horizon, the best you get is a near-dawn, which goes straight to dusk.
In the SUMMER (you know, the time when it's warmer?) the sun sets for only a few hours a night, even in the southern areas of Alaska. It does still get relatively warm here in the summer. Sure, Anchorage (the "big city") may rarely see above 80 degrees because of the ocean, but Fairbanks further north regularly pushes 90 degrees.
In other words, all the factors pretty well balance themselves out, and while solar would be fairly effective in the few short months of summer, the rest of the year it's either mediocre or piss poor.
And yes, we do get nice, bright, clear sunny days in the winter, but I rarely see them. The sun isn't up yet when I get in to work at around 8am, and it's already set again when I leave at 5pm.
I don't know if you know this, but the Sun is actually what the earth spins around in our trek around the galaxy. This happens because the Sun is soooooo huge it effectively has little hands that reach out and grab the Earth and pulls it in. Or tries to anyway, the Earth is still trying to run away, but it'll never make it. Those little hands are called gravity. The Sun also has bigger, beefier but also shorter hands called collectively a "magnetic field". They may be much shorter than the Sun's gravity, but they still have a long reach.
In other words, it's not that far fetched that the Sun's magnetic field could touch the Earth's, given that the Sun's sister grippy force, gravity, streches out a bagillion miles past the Earth. That's the exact figure by the way, one bagillion miles.;)
No, you are totally wrong. The system measures the ratio of the sender to the spam of the ratio receiver receiver, and establishes a negative false-positive ratio by building a score based on the spam-spam ratio of the sender receiver. By collecting the sum total products of the receiver sender spam ratio dividend, the sales pitch drives the likelihood of three emails through the foobar baz@incompatible.
In summary, I have no idea what I'm talking about because I didn't RTFA. That I am aware of this fact makes me superior to the lot of you who are arguing over the inner workings of this week's spam-filter vaportech -- which was probably written up in an incomprehensible and inconsistent manner such that it will go over the heads of foolish investors, and part them from their money. Should I be worried that I followed his train of thought with no problem?
The DRM boogeyman rears up again, but other than maybe WGA (which is not even related to media) and a checkbox in Windows Media Player, can anyone tell me again where is all this "hated DRM" in Vista? And where's the media that's supposed to take advantage of all this new DRM that didn't exist in XP? And please don't regurgitate that thoroughly debunked dumb Peter Guttman "paper" where he even admits he doesn't even use Vista.
Vista's implimentation of DRM forces video card manufacturers to jump through idiotic hoops in order to play high def content of any kind, as well as not allowing full HD resolutions even when it does let you play the media.
This is not a Windows Media Player issue either, this is a Vista driver issue and is forced by Microsoft upon video card manufacturers.
Actually I was tempted to rant about "financial incentives" myself, so the flamebait tag is fair. It's a political issue that potentially invites a flamewar.
Just because you didn't mean for it to be flamebait doesn't mean it's not flamebait.
Actually I was tempted to go into a rant about "financial incentives" myself, so I think the flamebait tag is fair. It's a political issue.
Just because you didn't mean for it to be flamebait doesn't mean it isn't flamebait.
No, it's not the same because the cable company isn't don't QAM over Fiber, they're doing over... wait for it... CABLE. They may be moving the data around over fiber before it gets to your house, but that fiber optic connection is the fiber equivalent (in terms of modulation techniques) of the old 1 megabit co-ax. In fact, QAM is what allows that crappy co-ax connection that the cable company STILL uses to push video and internet up into the 10 - 20 megabit range.
Apply that same tech to fiber, guess what? those 10 gigabit single-fiber connections suddenly reach terabit range.
Copper technology is nearly maxed out. If it ever hits the 100 megabit range like has been promised by some researchers, it WILL be maxed out. Fiber optics are still in the toddler stage of their developement, and if they can get QAM to work it'd be like jumping into the teenage stage.
You know, wild and rebellious.;)
Drop a hundred bucks on a telecom manual if you really want to know what's going on with all this stuff. As a bonus it's excellent if you're having trouble sleeping. 10 minutes and you'll be out like a light.
So basically the Germans have screwed themselves in regards to people within their own country testing their own security. (i.e. company hires individual to test encryption, etc)
I'm missing where anybody said anything about hacking, can you enlighten me? Everything talks about a contest to crack the code, and how the German used a military programming language (Ada) to crack it.
(He never directly addressed the issue of reproduction. Maybe Asimov anticipated/.) Totally off topic here, but you must not have read enough of Asimov's stuff, because he certainly did address reproduction directly: in-vitro fertilization and the babies raised by the government. Sex was for fun, not reproduction.
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The difference being, of course, that if Vista were lightning fast and had a perfect UI, us geeks would be proselytizing it rather than damning it.
The fact is, we're tired of the bloat. We look at other OS's (not necessarily XP, mind you) that do more with less, and we ask "really, what is this actually doing for me?".
The truth is, not much. It has gotten to the point where Vista is only really good for web browsing, and the like. Thanks to Vista's poor backwards compatibility, with both hardware and software, in a lot of business cases it just isn't an option.
And if you think the windows empire was built on the backs of home users, you are mistaken. Home users are a pleasant result of businesses requiring business machines, and the users of those business machines brought the PC into the home. It's a side market that has become nearly as large as the main market, but it's still not the main market.
I'm all for the latest and greatest, but lets try making it actually better than what was there before, yeah?
at least in criminal cases. I was recently on a jury for a felony theft case, and there were three basic requirements to prove guilt: 1.) that they actually committed the theft, or were influential in facilitating the crime. 2.) that the value of the item met the minimum for a felony. 3.) that they actually intended to deprive the victim of property.
If you can't prove intent, you can't prove guilt. The two differences here are it's copyright infringement not theft (and they aren't the same), and it's a civil case. That means the burden for proof is pretty low.
To prove the intent bit (and I guarantee it's in there) they only need to prove that it is more likely the defendant intended to distribute than not, since this is civil not criminal.
If it were a criminal case the RIAA/MPAA wouldn't have a prayer in these cases.
Hello, my name is Jeff, I'm a Vista user and I think it sucks.
:)
There, now you know someone who uses Vista but hates it.
I'm an IT tech for a very, very large company (the site I service has 4,000 employees and it's small potatoes). Our company HAD a plan to upgrade to Vista, but they canned it, because they have so much proprietary software that does not work in Vista, it would cost hundreds of millions of dollars to fix them all. They are going to use Windows 7, which promises to be more backwards compatible.
Now for my personal experience, I have a laptop that came with Vista, and I've been giving it a good hard fair shake, and honestly it sucks.
It's not so much that it's particularly worse than XP, it's that it is so completely unnecessary. There is nothing revolutionary about the operating system. Some things are kinda cool, like the self-repair features. But other things about those same features make it, in many cases, worse. The stupid OS is nearly impossible to fix. It tried to block IE7 because it was unsafe to let it connect to the net (which I agree with, but that's a different issue). I cannot use MSN Live messenger because that is tied into the Windows Update service, which is broken on my machine due to a bad XML update, which MS has no fix for!! What the hell is that? I do this stuff for a living, and I can't fix it, joe blow is going to have to shell out $200 to probably not get it fixed too.
Error messages like "There was an Error" with no error codes or no way of digging up debugging info, how the hell do you figure out what went wrong?
The pluses are not that big for Vista, and the minuses are dealbreakers.
That's why Vista sucks.
It works great if you just need to browse the web, but if that's all you're doing why not use Linux for free?
They tried using IE8 beta also, it crashed so it wasn't included.
You really aren't versed in survey sampling standards, most surveys only involve a couple hundred people, if that. The way surveys work is you use a small number of people but you statistically balance the people involved based on catagories (they call these demographics). For example, if 40% of kids who play video games are between the ages of 6 and 10, white, and come from middle class families, then 40 out of 100 kids in the study need to be between the ages of 6 and 10, white, and come from middle class families. Depending on how accurate you wanted to go, if you have accurate demographics to start with you could get decent results using 100 kids in a single town, but that would be very very hard to do, and hard to verify your results. It's not 1200 that should worry you for accuracy, that's actually a pretty large number; it's the two states part. It seems to me they may not be taking region of the country into account for this, which might be a factor or might not.
Ummmm... Seemed pretty clear to me.
"Cyber Bullying" legislation isn't going to solve any problems, at best it will do nothing. At worst it will add incentive for "victimized" teens to harm themselves in order to get back at their bullys.
Bullying is something that needs to be delt with by individuals and parents, not the government. It's not the government's place or duty to be butting in here, and the polititians, while they mean well, are making more pointless laws that will get mucked up in the court system.
I agree with his point about the Treaty of Ghent. I mean, seriously...
Uhhh... dude, you realize the RIAA is a group of lawyers representing the various members of the music industry, right?
Glad to see you've been paying attention.
I avoided using tags (the gmail alternative to folders) for over a year and was annoyed by the lack of folders as well (you go with what you know, you know?), but then I tried them and realized something: folders are just tags anyway. Basically for folders, an email gets "tagged" as being part of a folder, it is grouped with other emails tagged the same way, and restrictions are placed on it (can only be placed here, can't be associated with other groups, etc). If you make a copy of the email to put in another spot, the program basically duplicates the message and re-tags the new message, wasting space.
If you can wrap your head around folders as tags or tags as folders, the switch isn't too hard and it can really be made to work well.
Plus, if you don't like the gmail web client at all, you can always just use their IMAP functionality and plug it into Outlook or your email program of choice.
Gmail is hands down the best free email you can get, there are no two ways about it. The most options, with the most storage, with the best web-interface I've come accross (yahoo has gotten better, but it's still got severe limitations that I haven't noticed with gmail).
What sold me right off though for the gmail client was the conversations. That's so brilliant and usefull that I can't believe nobody else thought of it first. I've got threads of 6-10+ messages in them that are handily contained in essentially one email. It's awesome, and I hate using other email programs because of it.
I don't think you understand the way licenses work.
For most regular programs like the Adobe suite of software, Microsoft Office, or other stand alone software, licenses are simple. 99% of the time it is a single license for a single machine. Sometimes you can get sitewide licenses for these, sometimes not.
When dealing with servers, however, licenses get hairy.
With server software, you generally need one license per server, one license per machine accessing the server, and often one license for each user accessing the server. Exceptions are webservers, and that's about it, heh.
So, lets take a look at a fairly typical breakdown for a small to medium sized company.
Say your company has an MS server to act as a DC (that's domain controller), a dedicated DNS/Cache server, an Exchange server, a server for data storage/server apps, and a webserver.
Say your company has 100 employees, with 100 desktop computers and 15 laptops for travel use.
How many licenses do you need?
Well, you only need one license for the webserver, that one's easy. You need 120 licenses for the DNS server (don't forget the servers! They need licenses too), not too bad there. For the DC, you need 100 for the users, and 120 for the desktops and servers. It's the same for the Exchange server (may need a license for each email account, you'd have to dig through the license agreement, but it's at least 1 per user and 1 per machine for the windows software as well). The data server also needs 100 licenses for the users, and 120 licenses for the machines.
Add it up, that's 781 licenses just in getting your network set up for 100 users. And I combined servers to make things simpler, often the DNS server will be completely seperate from the cache server, and there will often be multiple data servers for redundancy. Any server based applications accessible to users will also require a per-user license to access it. So it's not hard to have an application server with 4 or 5 applications on it that require 700-800 licenses by itself, and that's IN ADDITION to any client software that goes on each individual machine.
It's downright EASY to end up with 15,000+ licenses for different commonly used software for a company with only 100 users.
Keeping track of that is a nightmare, since often these companies don't give you an easy way of keeping track of things.
A lot of these functions can be replaced by FOSS, but if your server guy only knows microsoft, then he's going to have a very hard time setting things up for linux, and you can forget about Unix, because they are very different. But even if you can replace most of this with FOSS, you can't replace all of them. A lot of business software simply has no open source alternative, or if it does it is not equivalent. One example would be PhotoShop, while the free alternative Gimp works for 85% or so of what Photoshop can do, if you need something in that last 15% you can't substitute Gimp for Photoshop. You have to have the Adobe product.
A small company with 15,000+ licenses to keep track of, it's not hard to lose a few, and with a maximum penalty of $90,000 per license infraction, it doesn't take much to put a small company under. (Granted, companies rarely recieve the full fine, that's for people who are blatantly and purposely stealing software, but $3000 for a $200 program really, really hurts).
Basically the subpoenas say "People on your campus are illegally copying music, you need to find out who they are and give us their records so we can sue." They are a little more specific, but not much.
That's a hell of a burden for any university, and is the basis for the "undue burden".
Well, if you had bothered RTFA all the way, you might have noticed the bio at the end and seen this guy is one of the people who developed the CSS standard for W3C.
The fact that he is the CTO for a competing browser should also add to his qualifications in speaking on this specific subject.
As for trustworthiness, if you had RTFA you might have realized that one of the three possibilities he gave is the one that Microsoft themselves have essentially said they are going use (that's the opt-in for web developers to force IE8 to run in truly standards compliant mode). The other two options he gave are pretty much the only two left, that I can think of anyway.
The microsoft article linked to in TFA essentially says they operate around a "don't force web developers to alter current pages" directive, which leaves only the three options, all of which means that IE8 will not be standards compliant EVER, which means it will NEVER pass Acid2 OR Acid3, unless they hard code the url into the browser.
If they do that, then I can almost guarantee the Acid test guys will slightly alter the url for the test, thus forcing IE8 to use defaults, in which case it will fail, because the default for IE8 will be non-standards compliant.
Did that help at all?
K thx bye.
If they use induction, I believe they will recharge anything, LiIon anyway, not sure about NiCad or other types of rechargeables. I'd imagine it would work on those as well though.
If it's some kind of proprietary wireless power transfer tech, they're shooting themselves in the foot with their incompatibility. As far as I know the current models work with anything with a battery, why would they take a step backwards to make it proprietary? Unless they can somehow offer huge gains over the current methods. I don't see anything in that area that would make it only work on certain setups though.
But I dunno, and I'm too lazy to find out.
It's what is known as a "Buzzword".
Just putting Open in the title associates it with such good things as OSS, open business practices, etc.
It makes you think that they are being honest and, well, 'Open'. Or that it is Open to all.
Open is a very hot word right now. Value has always been a hot word, and in some specific situations Subscription can be a hot word. Open is the big buzzword in here, and it is there to associate their product with things like Open Source products, which are very hot right now.
It's a common, sneaky, and boarderline dishonest (you can usually find something that could technically be called 'open' in any product). It's there to fool you, like any buzzword.
The key here is that in any sense that makes any difference, it's not 'Open', there's no new 'Value', and it's not really a 'Subscription' service.
In otherwords, it's 100% pure marketing BS to rip people off.
It's called upconverting, and it doesn't extract more info from the image, it ADDS information to the signal. I hope you'll agree that doesn't break the laws of logic, eh? Here's the deal, when you play a DVD, which operates at 720p, on a 1080i or especially a 1080p TV, LCD's in particular, the resolutions don't match up (obviously). So what you get is a picture that is actually WORSE than a 720p TV would give. What upconverting does is essentially split the 720p picture up and reformatting it in such a way that it plays very cleanly on a 1080i or 1080p TV. Since your eyes cannot distinguish the difference between the 720p and 1080p outside of about 12 feet for a 50 inch TV, the picture quality is, for all intents and purposes, the same. Does that help any? Or do I have to actually drag out the specs and tell you every little thing about how upconverting works?
In the SUMMER (you know, the time when it's warmer?) the sun sets for only a few hours a night, even in the southern areas of Alaska. It does still get relatively warm here in the summer. Sure, Anchorage (the "big city") may rarely see above 80 degrees because of the ocean, but Fairbanks further north regularly pushes 90 degrees.
In other words, all the factors pretty well balance themselves out, and while solar would be fairly effective in the few short months of summer, the rest of the year it's either mediocre or piss poor.
And yes, we do get nice, bright, clear sunny days in the winter, but I rarely see them. The sun isn't up yet when I get in to work at around 8am, and it's already set again when I leave at 5pm.
Yeah but... but... but this time it's gonna be the biggerest and meanerest mega-exaflood ever! est!! We need the internet throttlating!!
;P
And my daddy can beat up your daddy!
I don't know if you know this, but the Sun is actually what the earth spins around in our trek around the galaxy. This happens because the Sun is soooooo huge it effectively has little hands that reach out and grab the Earth and pulls it in. Or tries to anyway, the Earth is still trying to run away, but it'll never make it. Those little hands are called gravity. The Sun also has bigger, beefier but also shorter hands called collectively a "magnetic field". They may be much shorter than the Sun's gravity, but they still have a long reach.
;)
In other words, it's not that far fetched that the Sun's magnetic field could touch the Earth's, given that the Sun's sister grippy force, gravity, streches out a bagillion miles past the Earth. That's the exact figure by the way, one bagillion miles.
Just my unknowledgeable, condescending opinion.
In summary, I have no idea what I'm talking about because I didn't RTFA. That I am aware of this fact makes me superior to the lot of you who are arguing over the inner workings of this week's spam-filter vaportech -- which was probably written up in an incomprehensible and inconsistent manner such that it will go over the heads of foolish investors, and part them from their money. Should I be worried that I followed his train of thought with no problem?
Maybe I should be in marketing...
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=DRM+in+vistaGive any of these a read
Vista's implimentation of DRM forces video card manufacturers to jump through idiotic hoops in order to play high def content of any kind, as well as not allowing full HD resolutions even when it does let you play the media.
This is not a Windows Media Player issue either, this is a Vista driver issue and is forced by Microsoft upon video card manufacturers.
Actually I was tempted to rant about "financial incentives" myself, so the flamebait tag is fair. It's a political issue that potentially invites a flamewar.
Just because you didn't mean for it to be flamebait doesn't mean it's not flamebait.
Actually I was tempted to go into a rant about "financial incentives" myself, so I think the flamebait tag is fair. It's a political issue. Just because you didn't mean for it to be flamebait doesn't mean it isn't flamebait.
No, it's not the same because the cable company isn't don't QAM over Fiber, they're doing over... wait for it... CABLE. They may be moving the data around over fiber before it gets to your house, but that fiber optic connection is the fiber equivalent (in terms of modulation techniques) of the old 1 megabit co-ax. In fact, QAM is what allows that crappy co-ax connection that the cable company STILL uses to push video and internet up into the 10 - 20 megabit range.
;)
Apply that same tech to fiber, guess what? those 10 gigabit single-fiber connections suddenly reach terabit range.
Copper technology is nearly maxed out. If it ever hits the 100 megabit range like has been promised by some researchers, it WILL be maxed out. Fiber optics are still in the toddler stage of their developement, and if they can get QAM to work it'd be like jumping into the teenage stage.
You know, wild and rebellious.
Drop a hundred bucks on a telecom manual if you really want to know what's going on with all this stuff. As a bonus it's excellent if you're having trouble sleeping. 10 minutes and you'll be out like a light.
Cheers!
Ahhh, I see now.
:P
So basically the Germans have screwed themselves in regards to people within their own country testing their own security. (i.e. company hires individual to test encryption, etc)
It seems that way anyway.
Nice! Lots of forward thinking here.
I'm missing where anybody said anything about hacking, can you enlighten me? Everything talks about a contest to crack the code, and how the German used a military programming language (Ada) to crack it.
Where's the hacking?
Cheers!